Could I trouble you for an ETA and the knowledge of wether or not it will be a Universal Binary? From what I've seen, I pretty much plan on buying it the first second it's available.
"Did you miss that guy advertising his Democracy game in every second story?"
Actually, I did. Looking into it, I discovered that it's not cross-platform, and doesn't function under emulation, so I can't do much with it.
Anyone who plans on releasing a shareware game should seriously consider the Mac side of things, as we are probably the only group of users who can be counted on to keep a shareware developer solvent.
The glory age of political games has long past, and hardcore fans of the genre such as myself have found ourselves lacking in new titles. You won't find successors to Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, Hidden Agenda and Shadow President made these days. In the past decade, we've seen only a tiny, tiny handful of games in this genre, one of which is the original Tropico - which if you install the expansion pack, is quite a fun game that lets you examine all kinds of political systems by implementing them yourself without restriction.
If you have a Mac, Simbabwe is certainly worth your attention (and it's free!)
"Welcome to Simbabwe, where the property is already owned and the houses built and you compete to burn and dispossess them. Bounce around the map plundering farms, denying grain silos to opposition supporters and robbing the community chest."
Political sims are truly the best ways to combine entertainment and education, and I sincerely hope that some indie developers reading this looks over some of the older games I've linked to and is inspired to develop a cross-platform title, as there isn't much to choose from right now.
When I search my real name on Google, I'm continually amazed at how horribly out of date and esoteric the information is.
Any employers will find that I had an interest in fixing an.fstab file on a LinuxPPC installation 6 years ago, I was vehemently anti-Windows at least as far back as 1999 and I used to watch Babylon 5 rather religiously during its original run. Since then I've stopped using my real name outside of personal communications because I saw that just this sort of thing would become a problem in the years to come.
I'm a firm believer in passive anonymity. I won't go to great lengths to hide who I really am, and have no problem with people I'm conversing with knowing my real name, but I make sure that any comments of mine end up archived under a pseudonym. Considering HR people are looking for applicants with 15 years of experience in Windows XP, I don't really trust them to do the mental math necessary to establish that the questionable rant of mine from 1995 they've taken issue with, was posted by me while I was still in middle school.
With the manner in which patents are granted with regard to medical advances, we are extremely lucky that such..."progress"...in the patent system did not occur any earlier.
Established facts are now restricted property to the point where you often cannot create a test that utilizes your own techniques and methods to check for the presence of a specific gene in a patient's body, because a biotech company has patented that gene and the very knowledge of what that gene does it patentable. I would argue that naturally occurring genetic material is the best example of prior art known to mankind, but the patent office disagrees and permits companies to claim parts of your body as their own, and declare that any knowledge of said material belongs to the company in question. If the biotech company's research establishes that a gene is responsible for a certain condition, using any means to test for that gene is infringement.
Imagine if you will, that years ago someone discovered that iron is hard and patented this exciting concept. We're not talking about a custom alloy or anything of that nature, but just pure iron. Since iron is naturally occurring people all across the globe can get their hands on it with some effort, but using the same broken standard that is currently being applied to patents in the United States today, the patent holder could sue every manufacturer and builder that used iron in any product or structure because they were operating on the belief that iron is a strong material useful for constructing things with, and thus, infringing on their intellectual property.
Where would we be today if such standards were applied in the past, and where will we be if we allow them to remain in force?
I've always preferred that good movies, TV shows, book series and games, etc go out on top, before becoming nothing more than a money factory devoid of any artistic merit.
How many times have we all read that game series X is getting yet another installment with much-hyped additions that render the game just a marginal improvement over the earlier incarnations? How many times have we all purchased the latest game in a series only to discover we've been sold essentially the same game we already own? Sometimes it's good to just let a good thing die if you're not sure you can really take it any further without compromising the quality.
There are plenty of games out there waiting to be made, riding the same franchises year after year, decade after decade usually ends with a group of hardcore fans that will likely lap up whatever you throw their way, while the masses that flocked to your games move on to something better.
"MacDonald is confident that piracy won't be a significant issue for Viiv, as Intel promises to make content easier to buy than it is to pirate."
I think it is safe to say that the iTunes Store halo effect has a lot to do with this assumption. While the iTunes Store hasn't squashed piracy altogether, it has sold over a billion songs and tens of millions of videos that it is safe to say would not have necessarily been purchased if they had not been made available for sale so readily and easily through one mouse click.
People are willing to pay to be honest, they just don't like to feel ripped-off by the transaction - something the record labels have yet to learn with their demands that Apple raise prices across the board and closer to the MSRP of physical CDs. One can claim that the labels can demand whatever the market will bear, but I think the whole point of the matter is that we've seen what the market will bear and the creation of the iTunes Store is partially a response to that. No one wants to pay what the labels have been charging for physical media, and that has been reflected in the sales figures. Their stubbornness when it comes to accepting this fact has a good deal to do with their grim prospects.
DRM on these files is rather pointless as anything Apple sells is already widely available elsewhere, and few who chose to buy something from the iTunes Store do so because they cannot obtain the content for free. Their very choice to purchase the content negates the need for DRM. The very presence of it is - surprise - due to contract stipulations made by the record labels. Steve Jobs has gone on the record that he does not believe it is necessary, but he has no choice.
"Gee, give us a few jets and we'll get right on writing Open Source Software for them..."
And the first time a pilot requests a feature, you guys will sigh heavily, roll your eyes and tell him there is a free terminal running emacs that he can get to work on immediately if it's so important.;)
The problem with a lot of CDs is that very often you get the CD and an often-crap set of liner notes that increasingly doesn't even give you the lyrics to the songs or any other form of added value.
When U2 released their last album, they promoted the hell out of the iTunes version, and released a CD version complete with a snazzy cardboard case, bonus DVD and 48-page hard-bound book. A plain vanilla CD version with just the lyrics was also sent to stores (if you didn't want to pay the reasonable markup on the mini-boxed set). Everyone I know - even fellow iTunes store addicts - ended up hunting down the deluxe version. Even people that don't particularly like the band were transfixed by the whole package when they saw it. (Pics here and here. )
The band went into it knowing people would be tempted to download it for free, but never whined about it. Instead they offered a wide variety of choices and actually did something to make fans want to go out of their way to get the physical product - and the most expensive version of the release, at that.
I can't really see a situation where I would have a need for something like this.
I can't think of more than a tiny handful of times in the past 6 years that I've wanted to rip a CD but haven't had a computer nearby. Furthermore, this thing looks heavy, or at least bulky, so what exactly are we supposed to do? Carry it around in a little pouch just in case someone has a CD we want to rip? You're probably going to need to keep it at home, which further negates the entire point of having one. iTunes - for all of the perplexing, intense rage people have towards it - is incredibly good at doing what this device does and it doesn't charge you a dime for the privilege.
On top of all this, the industrial designer obviously put this together on his lunch break or something as it just looks incredibly shoddy.
"At the moment? The gaming world was playing squaresoft final fantasy series and chrono trigger 13 years ago on the snes and you just described them pefectly. In hindsight I don't know what the hell I was thinking back in those days."
I was trying to wrap the bitterness of truth with a little restraint to make it more palatable and thus avoid charges of trolling and/or racism.
The PS2 and the PS3 simply do not interest me at all due to the fact that their respective game libraries are so heavily populated by $50 cutscene collections masquerading as games. When Japanese developers balked at the Xbox 360's inclusion of a standard DVD drive because it prevented them from including more cutscenes, I really gave up hope that actual gameplay would overtake self-indulgance in the development studios in Japan anytime soon. Playing a Japanese RPG is comparable to being strapped into a ride at an amusement park. You ride along the same familiar track every time, where you are faced with endless examples of the art team trying to impress and thrill you with how cool they are. The ride ends, and you realize that you didn't really have any impact on where you would end up, and the whole thing was pre-planned years ago by people you never met.
The console RPGs coming out of Japan at the moment tend to be incredibly linear and overloaded with cutscenes and really don't come close to the depth, freedom or gameplay style offered by domestic PC RPGs.
While businesses should take reasonable precautions to secure their networks, data and physical assets, I've found that the employer/employee relationship is beginning to evolve into one of suspicion and severe distrust that is fostering resentment, anger and inhibiting productivity. No one wants to work anywhere they are treated as being one step removed from a hardened criminal from the moment they walk in the door on their first day. There is a fine line between taking sensible precautions to prevent opportunistic breaches of security, and indulging in paranoia and broadcasting an implicit belief through actions and words that everyone there is just waiting for the right moment to take the entire company for all they're worth.
Employees are no longer being thought of as possible risks, but confirmed dangers that must be actively confronted every step of the way. Proactive security measures enacted in a passive way that does not interfere with day to day work in an unreasonable fashion, or impact the work environment in a disproportionate manner are giving way to managers that are far more focused on what their employees are deliberately doing wrong, than on the actual work at hand.
By creating this atmosphere of hostility and distrust which cannot be overcome by proving oneself through hard work and carrying out duties in a thoughtful, honest way, managers are encouraging high-turnover, poor communication between workers, poor attitudes towards work and customers, and an atmosphere of little or no respect for the organization which anyone can tell you is the first step towards encouraging workplace crime.
The question you need to ask is: Where is the hype coming from?
Did Apple claim that their press conference would herald fantastically interesting products that would reshape the industry? As I recall, they merely announced a press conference and said they would have some "fun stuff". That's it.
This wasn't Steve walking on stage at MacWorld - which is a hypefest by design, where only the biggest products are released - this was Apple introducing another Intel-based Mac to show its partners and investors that it was committed to, and proceeding with the transition from PPC. The fact they had some other, far less interesting products ready at the same time, and decided to show them off as well seems to be more of a logical exploitation of the press conference. Would it have made sense for Apple to simply make no mention of their other new products while the media's attention was focused squarely on them? I don't think so.
People are so used to Apple throwing them curveballs that they build up entirely unrealistic expectations of the company, and get angry at Apple when they fail to live up to these fantasies. You can criticize Apple for borking the video chipset in the new Minis, but you can't really get mad at them for not releasing a product that may only exist in your mind.
I'm reminded of this this study [nagc.org] estimating that perhaps 18 to 25% of American gifted and talented students drop out of high school.
Hell, I almost became one of them.
I was light-years ahead of the other students in various subjects, but I was unlucky enough to have little aptitude for Math. Now, you have to understand that there is a pervasive belief that a high level of intelligence automatically translates into "Math Genius". If you are brilliant at math, weaknesses in other areas will be tolerated, but to test far above the level of your peers in every subject except math, puts you in a strange place where your strengths are pushed aside and ignored.
So, instead of getting extra help in Math and attending gifted/AP level courses in school, I was dropped into purely remedial classes for most subjects due to my embarrassingly low Math scores. At the same time, I knew students in the gifted and talented programs that were barely literate by the end of 8th grade, but found themselves saved by their skills in calculus and the like.
To make matters worse, I had teachers who consistently reminded me of how smart I was and how much promise I had. When you're sharing a classroom with the violent kids, the developmentally disabled kids, etc you really can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, and just getting through another semester becomes pure hell.
Further study by Y-Crate Heavy Industries indicates that: "...devices like cell phones will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by pissing off the other passengers to the point where in-air rioting occurs."
Amtrak's Quiet Car is a success for a reason. People are increasingly irritated by rude cellphone users to the point where I've seen encounters between passengers on trains prompted by someone refusing to exchange their "cellphone voice" for their "indoor voice". It is also the reason why I, and a lot of people I know, refuse to go to the movies anymore. The rude minority is being catered to, while the rest of us are expected to suck it up because for some reason, management is more afraid of losing the rude cellphone user as a customer, rather then the 10 people ready to smash their phone to bits, demand a refund and never come back.
I don't care how many features there are, or how well-done the interfaces are, if these apps can't provide the imagery, they won't be worth much to me. There are huge, huge swaths of densely populated areas that simply do not have any image data available on Google Maps and all of the bells and whistles can't fix that and won't make me any more interested in firing up the app again anytime soon.
Hats off to KFC and Yum Brands, this is a welcome alternative to the incredibly annoying trend of obvious product placement in film and television. Hopefully they will choose to pursue this on its own, as opposed to in conjunction with whatever placement strategy they may have.
I don't mind when a character happens to pull a name-brand can of soda out of their fridge, or requests a specific kind of drink at a bar, etc. It prevents the awkward scenes in you see in 80s sitcoms where you always see someone drinking a pink can marked "Soda" or the classic situation when a character enters a bar and orders a "Beer". However, product placement has crossed the line into the writing space, where plots are engineered around products and it is always painfully obvious when this occurs, yet it keeps happening because companies feel their traditional means of advertising are drying up.
Thanks for the concern. My right wrist was shattered and has a serious case of arthritis and its mobility is permanently limited, while my left shoulder was dislocated and broken - nasty arthritis there too. The worst part was, it was a hit and run and I have no idea who did it to me. A passer-by held a cellphone up to my face so I could give a description of the vehicle and where it was going, then the witnesses left the scene, and the cop who came to see me in the E.R. walked up to me laughing saying they would never find the guy and they had no leads despite the fact the 911 dispatch center knew where the car was within 30 seconds of the incident. Typical Memphis.
Anyway, I lost my mobility, my job, my apartment and my life savings. Managed to eek out a settlement with my insurance company that paid most of the medical bills and left me with some cash to replace my 4 year old iBook that has a dying screen with an iMac. Some may say I could have spent the money on other things, but after all of that, I figured that I deserved it.
At 23, going on 24, I'm back living with my parents in CT...healed yet jobless, but hey...at least the Shuffle is OK.:)
One problem with iPods is that their quality has led to hype, which has led to people not buying them because they refuse to buy anything that is hyped up to such an extent.
Such people really are missing out. In some circles it is cool to hate the iPod because they are so ubiquitous, but their widespread adoption did not begin with, and is not being sustained by the cool factor alone. The iPod started as an expensive little toy that a lot of people dismissed as being another Mac Cube.
Then something happened, word began to spread that they were actually pretty spiffy. Momentum built, and along with clever marketing, Apple took the industry by storm.
All I own is a 1GB Shuffle, and I have to say, it's cheap, the sound quality is excellent, and the damn thing is indestructible. I've dropped it on concrete countless times, been hit by a car while carrying (but not using) it and the thing holds up.
If you don't like the styling, features and price, that's one thing. Just don't hate the iPod and iTunes because they are so damn commonplace now. They are that way for a very good reason.
"Because we all know there are no real hits on the Xbox360 yet, thus noone is purchasing the console."
From the very article:
"We're working hard to produce as many units as possible. I'm pretty confident we'll catch up with demand in the next few weeks and we'll be able to supply all the demand. Of course we are gratified by the overwhelming demand for Xbox 360 but we would have liked to have sold more units, had they been available. I don't see it as lost sales though, only as a time--shift."
The fears are not overblown since they are based in historical fact. Those that doubt this need to look no further than the Mac clone debacle of 10 years ago.
- Apple cannot afford to produce OS X without selling Mac hardware. This is the case wether anyone wants to admit it or not. Apple brings in an enormous amount of money from their iPod division, and the retail sales of OS X fatten the bottom-line considerably. However, the core of their business remains desktop and portable hardware.
- It would be an incorrect assumption to think that Apple would still sell enough of this hardware if OS X was made available for common x86 hardware.
- OS X sales would increase dramatically with the disassociation of the software from the hardware. Even an extremely optimistic projection would not allow OS X's sales to come close to generating the revenue Apple currently receives from hardware sales at anytime in the first few years after the transition.
- OS X would lose the benefits of tight integration between the hardware and the software that it currently enjoys.
To sum it up, Apple would lose their primary source of income, gain a new source that would be highly unlikely to make up for the shortfall, and OS X would lose many of the benefits that it currently has due to the limited hardware pool it is required to support. The final outcome would be Apple's bankruptcy, and an OS that would exist merely in our memories, going the way of Amiga OS and Atari's TOS. Dreams of it being open-sourced would not be realized, as the multitude of technologies licensed to produce it would prevent that from ever occurring.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, excellent. :)
Could I trouble you for an ETA and the knowledge of wether or not it will be a Universal Binary? From what I've seen, I pretty much plan on buying it the first second it's available.
Anyone who plans on releasing a shareware game should seriously consider the Mac side of things, as we are probably the only group of users who can be counted on to keep a shareware developer solvent.
"Trashlyn will be 37 months next week..."
Maybe it had nothing to do with the pictures at all...maybe her prospective employers just didn't want to hire a Kluttz?
When I search my real name on Google, I'm continually amazed at how horribly out of date and esoteric the information is.
.fstab file on a LinuxPPC installation 6 years ago, I was vehemently anti-Windows at least as far back as 1999 and I used to watch Babylon 5 rather religiously during its original run. Since then I've stopped using my real name outside of personal communications because I saw that just this sort of thing would become a problem in the years to come.
Any employers will find that I had an interest in fixing an
I'm a firm believer in passive anonymity. I won't go to great lengths to hide who I really am, and have no problem with people I'm conversing with knowing my real name, but I make sure that any comments of mine end up archived under a pseudonym. Considering HR people are looking for applicants with 15 years of experience in Windows XP, I don't really trust them to do the mental math necessary to establish that the questionable rant of mine from 1995 they've taken issue with, was posted by me while I was still in middle school.
With the manner in which patents are granted with regard to medical advances, we are extremely lucky that such..."progress"...in the patent system did not occur any earlier.
Established facts are now restricted property to the point where you often cannot create a test that utilizes your own techniques and methods to check for the presence of a specific gene in a patient's body, because a biotech company has patented that gene and the very knowledge of what that gene does it patentable. I would argue that naturally occurring genetic material is the best example of prior art known to mankind, but the patent office disagrees and permits companies to claim parts of your body as their own, and declare that any knowledge of said material belongs to the company in question. If the biotech company's research establishes that a gene is responsible for a certain condition, using any means to test for that gene is infringement.
Imagine if you will, that years ago someone discovered that iron is hard and patented this exciting concept. We're not talking about a custom alloy or anything of that nature, but just pure iron. Since iron is naturally occurring people all across the globe can get their hands on it with some effort, but using the same broken standard that is currently being applied to patents in the United States today, the patent holder could sue every manufacturer and builder that used iron in any product or structure because they were operating on the belief that iron is a strong material useful for constructing things with, and thus, infringing on their intellectual property.
Where would we be today if such standards were applied in the past, and where will we be if we allow them to remain in force?
I've always preferred that good movies, TV shows, book series and games, etc go out on top, before becoming nothing more than a money factory devoid of any artistic merit.
How many times have we all read that game series X is getting yet another installment with much-hyped additions that render the game just a marginal improvement over the earlier incarnations? How many times have we all purchased the latest game in a series only to discover we've been sold essentially the same game we already own? Sometimes it's good to just let a good thing die if you're not sure you can really take it any further without compromising the quality.
There are plenty of games out there waiting to be made, riding the same franchises year after year, decade after decade usually ends with a group of hardcore fans that will likely lap up whatever you throw their way, while the masses that flocked to your games move on to something better.
People are willing to pay to be honest, they just don't like to feel ripped-off by the transaction - something the record labels have yet to learn with their demands that Apple raise prices across the board and closer to the MSRP of physical CDs. One can claim that the labels can demand whatever the market will bear, but I think the whole point of the matter is that we've seen what the market will bear and the creation of the iTunes Store is partially a response to that. No one wants to pay what the labels have been charging for physical media, and that has been reflected in the sales figures. Their stubbornness when it comes to accepting this fact has a good deal to do with their grim prospects.
DRM on these files is rather pointless as anything Apple sells is already widely available elsewhere, and few who chose to buy something from the iTunes Store do so because they cannot obtain the content for free. Their very choice to purchase the content negates the need for DRM. The very presence of it is - surprise - due to contract stipulations made by the record labels. Steve Jobs has gone on the record that he does not believe it is necessary, but he has no choice.
The problem with a lot of CDs is that very often you get the CD and an often-crap set of liner notes that increasingly doesn't even give you the lyrics to the songs or any other form of added value.
When U2 released their last album, they promoted the hell out of the iTunes version, and released a CD version complete with a snazzy cardboard case, bonus DVD and 48-page hard-bound book. A plain vanilla CD version with just the lyrics was also sent to stores (if you didn't want to pay the reasonable markup on the mini-boxed set). Everyone I know - even fellow iTunes store addicts - ended up hunting down the deluxe version. Even people that don't particularly like the band were transfixed by the whole package when they saw it. (Pics here and here. )
The band went into it knowing people would be tempted to download it for free, but never whined about it. Instead they offered a wide variety of choices and actually did something to make fans want to go out of their way to get the physical product - and the most expensive version of the release, at that.
I can't really see a situation where I would have a need for something like this.
I can't think of more than a tiny handful of times in the past 6 years that I've wanted to rip a CD but haven't had a computer nearby. Furthermore, this thing looks heavy, or at least bulky, so what exactly are we supposed to do? Carry it around in a little pouch just in case someone has a CD we want to rip? You're probably going to need to keep it at home, which further negates the entire point of having one. iTunes - for all of the perplexing, intense rage people have towards it - is incredibly good at doing what this device does and it doesn't charge you a dime for the privilege.
On top of all this, the industrial designer obviously put this together on his lunch break or something as it just looks incredibly shoddy.
The PS2 and the PS3 simply do not interest me at all due to the fact that their respective game libraries are so heavily populated by $50 cutscene collections masquerading as games. When Japanese developers balked at the Xbox 360's inclusion of a standard DVD drive because it prevented them from including more cutscenes, I really gave up hope that actual gameplay would overtake self-indulgance in the development studios in Japan anytime soon. Playing a Japanese RPG is comparable to being strapped into a ride at an amusement park. You ride along the same familiar track every time, where you are faced with endless examples of the art team trying to impress and thrill you with how cool they are. The ride ends, and you realize that you didn't really have any impact on where you would end up, and the whole thing was pre-planned years ago by people you never met.
That's where I stopped reading and started laughing hysterically.
The console RPGs coming out of Japan at the moment tend to be incredibly linear and overloaded with cutscenes and really don't come close to the depth, freedom or gameplay style offered by domestic PC RPGs.
While businesses should take reasonable precautions to secure their networks, data and physical assets, I've found that the employer/employee relationship is beginning to evolve into one of suspicion and severe distrust that is fostering resentment, anger and inhibiting productivity. No one wants to work anywhere they are treated as being one step removed from a hardened criminal from the moment they walk in the door on their first day. There is a fine line between taking sensible precautions to prevent opportunistic breaches of security, and indulging in paranoia and broadcasting an implicit belief through actions and words that everyone there is just waiting for the right moment to take the entire company for all they're worth.
Employees are no longer being thought of as possible risks, but confirmed dangers that must be actively confronted every step of the way. Proactive security measures enacted in a passive way that does not interfere with day to day work in an unreasonable fashion, or impact the work environment in a disproportionate manner are giving way to managers that are far more focused on what their employees are deliberately doing wrong, than on the actual work at hand.
By creating this atmosphere of hostility and distrust which cannot be overcome by proving oneself through hard work and carrying out duties in a thoughtful, honest way, managers are encouraging high-turnover, poor communication between workers, poor attitudes towards work and customers, and an atmosphere of little or no respect for the organization which anyone can tell you is the first step towards encouraging workplace crime.
The question you need to ask is: Where is the hype coming from?
Did Apple claim that their press conference would herald fantastically interesting products that would reshape the industry? As I recall, they merely announced a press conference and said they would have some "fun stuff". That's it.
This wasn't Steve walking on stage at MacWorld - which is a hypefest by design, where only the biggest products are released - this was Apple introducing another Intel-based Mac to show its partners and investors that it was committed to, and proceeding with the transition from PPC. The fact they had some other, far less interesting products ready at the same time, and decided to show them off as well seems to be more of a logical exploitation of the press conference. Would it have made sense for Apple to simply make no mention of their other new products while the media's attention was focused squarely on them? I don't think so.
People are so used to Apple throwing them curveballs that they build up entirely unrealistic expectations of the company, and get angry at Apple when they fail to live up to these fantasies. You can criticize Apple for borking the video chipset in the new Minis, but you can't really get mad at them for not releasing a product that may only exist in your mind.
I was light-years ahead of the other students in various subjects, but I was unlucky enough to have little aptitude for Math. Now, you have to understand that there is a pervasive belief that a high level of intelligence automatically translates into "Math Genius". If you are brilliant at math, weaknesses in other areas will be tolerated, but to test far above the level of your peers in every subject except math, puts you in a strange place where your strengths are pushed aside and ignored.
So, instead of getting extra help in Math and attending gifted/AP level courses in school, I was dropped into purely remedial classes for most subjects due to my embarrassingly low Math scores. At the same time, I knew students in the gifted and talented programs that were barely literate by the end of 8th grade, but found themselves saved by their skills in calculus and the like.
To make matters worse, I had teachers who consistently reminded me of how smart I was and how much promise I had. When you're sharing a classroom with the violent kids, the developmentally disabled kids, etc you really can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, and just getting through another semester becomes pure hell.
Further study by Y-Crate Heavy Industries indicates that: "...devices like cell phones will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by pissing off the other passengers to the point where in-air rioting occurs."
Amtrak's Quiet Car is a success for a reason. People are increasingly irritated by rude cellphone users to the point where I've seen encounters between passengers on trains prompted by someone refusing to exchange their "cellphone voice" for their "indoor voice". It is also the reason why I, and a lot of people I know, refuse to go to the movies anymore. The rude minority is being catered to, while the rest of us are expected to suck it up because for some reason, management is more afraid of losing the rude cellphone user as a customer, rather then the 10 people ready to smash their phone to bits, demand a refund and never come back.
I don't care how many features there are, or how well-done the interfaces are, if these apps can't provide the imagery, they won't be worth much to me. There are huge, huge swaths of densely populated areas that simply do not have any image data available on Google Maps and all of the bells and whistles can't fix that and won't make me any more interested in firing up the app again anytime soon.
Hats off to KFC and Yum Brands, this is a welcome alternative to the incredibly annoying trend of obvious product placement in film and television. Hopefully they will choose to pursue this on its own, as opposed to in conjunction with whatever placement strategy they may have.
I don't mind when a character happens to pull a name-brand can of soda out of their fridge, or requests a specific kind of drink at a bar, etc. It prevents the awkward scenes in you see in 80s sitcoms where you always see someone drinking a pink can marked "Soda" or the classic situation when a character enters a bar and orders a "Beer". However, product placement has crossed the line into the writing space, where plots are engineered around products and it is always painfully obvious when this occurs, yet it keeps happening because companies feel their traditional means of advertising are drying up.
Thanks for the concern. My right wrist was shattered and has a serious case of arthritis and its mobility is permanently limited, while my left shoulder was dislocated and broken - nasty arthritis there too. The worst part was, it was a hit and run and I have no idea who did it to me. A passer-by held a cellphone up to my face so I could give a description of the vehicle and where it was going, then the witnesses left the scene, and the cop who came to see me in the E.R. walked up to me laughing saying they would never find the guy and they had no leads despite the fact the 911 dispatch center knew where the car was within 30 seconds of the incident. Typical Memphis.
:)
Anyway, I lost my mobility, my job, my apartment and my life savings. Managed to eek out a settlement with my insurance company that paid most of the medical bills and left me with some cash to replace my 4 year old iBook that has a dying screen with an iMac. Some may say I could have spent the money on other things, but after all of that, I figured that I deserved it.
At 23, going on 24, I'm back living with my parents in CT...healed yet jobless, but hey...at least the Shuffle is OK.
One problem with iPods is that their quality has led to hype, which has led to people not buying them because they refuse to buy anything that is hyped up to such an extent.
Such people really are missing out. In some circles it is cool to hate the iPod because they are so ubiquitous, but their widespread adoption did not begin with, and is not being sustained by the cool factor alone. The iPod started as an expensive little toy that a lot of people dismissed as being another Mac Cube.
Then something happened, word began to spread that they were actually pretty spiffy. Momentum built, and along with clever marketing, Apple took the industry by storm.
All I own is a 1GB Shuffle, and I have to say, it's cheap, the sound quality is excellent, and the damn thing is indestructible. I've dropped it on concrete countless times, been hit by a car while carrying (but not using) it and the thing holds up.
If you don't like the styling, features and price, that's one thing. Just don't hate the iPod and iTunes because they are so damn commonplace now. They are that way for a very good reason.
From the very article:
The fears are not overblown since they are based in historical fact. Those that doubt this need to look no further than the Mac clone debacle of 10 years ago.
- Apple cannot afford to produce OS X without selling Mac hardware. This is the case wether anyone wants to admit it or not. Apple brings in an enormous amount of money from their iPod division, and the retail sales of OS X fatten the bottom-line considerably. However, the core of their business remains desktop and portable hardware.
- It would be an incorrect assumption to think that Apple would still sell enough of this hardware if OS X was made available for common x86 hardware.
- OS X sales would increase dramatically with the disassociation of the software from the hardware. Even an extremely optimistic projection would not allow OS X's sales to come close to generating the revenue Apple currently receives from hardware sales at anytime in the first few years after the transition.
- OS X would lose the benefits of tight integration between the hardware and the software that it currently enjoys.
To sum it up, Apple would lose their primary source of income, gain a new source that would be highly unlikely to make up for the shortfall, and OS X would lose many of the benefits that it currently has due to the limited hardware pool it is required to support. The final outcome would be Apple's bankruptcy, and an OS that would exist merely in our memories, going the way of Amiga OS and Atari's TOS. Dreams of it being open-sourced would not be realized, as the multitude of technologies licensed to produce it would prevent that from ever occurring.