At least in New York most people don't drive. Think about LA, where everyone drives everywhere. That'd be nuts trying to manage that many people in a 30 mile radius.
I've been saying the same thing since I got mine. The only time I don't use the Tivo is when I'm watching an HD program, and I wouldn't benefit from Comcast's HD DVR box because I refuse to pay Comcast for the digital cable service.
I'm with you about VCRs just not being in the same ballpark as the Tivo. Until someone else makes a UI that's as slick as theirs, I'm sold.
They also co-own Cingular with Bellsouth. Before long it'll all just be one big company again, anyway, so I guess it doesn't really make any sense trying to figure them all out anymore.
Hehe, I don't even have the age excuse (I'm 21), but I'm just tired of having to work at making my computer work. I also went to playing all my games on consoles because I got sick of spending half my "gaming" time making my computer work with the game at a good framerate.
X11 is really nice for those of us who work in a unix environment on a regular basis, since we can run apps remotely on the mac and have the best of both worlds. I do this sort of thing fairly regularly for school and work, and the only real downside is that if I'm doing it from home, it runs painfully slowly.
I actually don't, but then I also don't watch any of the OTA TV channels, either. Pay radio may very well end up taking off, but considering how many people just don't ever listen to the radio versus the addiction that is television, I'm not sure that it will ever be as popular as cable or satellite TV. I may be way off base here, but most people I know these days listen to CDs or mp3s in their cars, so they don't ever turn on a radio either.
I base this from people around the college campus, which admittedly is not a great view of the general population, but still. Nearly everyone I know owns a TV, but practically no one even has a radio in their rooms these days. Nearly everyone still has one in the car, but there's just not a big push for people to buy radios like there is for people to watch TV.
The trouble is that XM and Sirius are still monthy fee services, while I can tune in to FM radio stations free over the airwaves. I know a lot of people are into XM radio and all, but personally, I just don't listen to the radio enough to make it worth my while to pay for a service, and I'd say that a lot of other people are like that, as well.
That being said, I can't see how the competition from them can be a bad thing for anyone but ClearChannel. Plus, if XM is not regulated by the FCC (I don't know this for sure, can anyone verify), we can get around all the censorship BS going on right now with our lovely FCC....
Ahh, but then they wouldn't be able to sell you new stuff in a couple of years when the band you're using gets filled up with other junk. I'm sure these companies really like it when we all have to replace our wireless equipment every few years as the bands fill up.
Personally, I find it really obnoxious to use X11 apps while using Aqua apps. The difference in look and feel is rather distracting, so it's honestly not worth it to me to use OOo until that make it native. Granted, part of that is the fact that I get really cheap software by being a student, so I don't have to pay the outrageous prices for Microsoft Office, but still, X11 is fine for people who are used to using some variety of unix, but for anyone who is used to the look and feel of the Mac platform will be disappointed by it.
I said something along those lines (although in a somewhat nicer fashion) to the sysadmins of my university's email server. They kept bouncing messages to me saying that I was sending viruses out from my Powerbook. When I informed them of the fact that the Mac is entirely incapable of getting this virus, they told me that they realize that my computer didn't send it but couldn't do anything about it. For some reason, they didn't seem to think it would be a big deal to set up the server to check the IP addresses of these emails, regardless of the fact that they scared the entire student body (it happened right after everyone moved in, so the clueless were terrified about it) because they were too lazy to bother setting up the server properly.
I did get some semblence of revenge when the emails brought down the smtp server and required 2 days to bring back up.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing necessarily, but this seems to have been the general trend in a lot of forums over the past few years. I would probably guess that over 50% is older than 20, but definitely not over 25. There's a really high readership here by college students (myself included) of whom many are over 20. So from there, many of us will still be posting from the "ivory tower" of academia, which will be further skewing the information received from this poll.
Also, back to the 99.9% free of PhD's statement, there's not just a whole lot of PhD's anywhere, much less on slashdot alone. The whole purpose of a PhD is to specialize yourself to the point of being a leader in your particular niche field and to prepare you to put forth research in that field. Looking at it from that perspective, it makes sense to have relatively few people pursuing one, because there are relatively few positions available which truly need this level of specialization.
I probably come across as an education snob to many, but I do feel like the bachelor's level of education is ideal for many, if not most people. The bachelor's is about much, much more than just learning about a particular subject. If all you ever want to do is to be a programmer, then college might make sense. but even there I'd encourage people to go to college. We all have heard the cliche's (no, that's not misspelled, but I don't know how to make the accent over the e on this machine yet and it looks funny without it) about college being a time to branch out and discover ourselves, but to a certain extent, this really is true. College at the undergraduate level is mainly intended to give a relatively broad overview of a lot of different fields so that one is at least familiar with a wide variety of topics. Sure, many undergrads squander this opportunity by taking joke classes for electives and trying their damnedest to avoid ever learning anything, but this is still the aim. The fact that we learn something about a particular field is also important as an undergrad, but not nearly as important as the broad education provided. Even in technical fields like engineering where more undergrad specialization is required, we are mostly encouraged or required to have a fairly broad base of education before we really specialize in our fields.
Yeah, unfortunately I can't come up with anything better, either. The other trouble with having the public vote on everything is that it becomes extremely difficult to discuss issues before they are voted upon. While representative governments may have their problems, I'm afraid it's about the best we're going to be able to pull off in the near future.
I am perfectly well aware of the fact that we are a constitutional republic or a representational democracy, depending on how you choose to phrase it. It bothers me that many people from outside the US believe that "most Americans" know less about their country than they do.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not specifically say exactly what type of government it is. Even if they did, 200 years of a living language produces many changes in the way words are intrepreted, as evidenced by the fact that our Supreme Court is still making decisions about exactly what the Constitution means.
While we're being pedantic about the word democracy, show me a country anywhere in the world where a democracy has -ever- been practiced, according to the original meaning of the word. Thus has the word come to mean something somewhat different from when it was originally used, and that is why we have come to use the term democracy very often when we truly mean republic, constitutional republic, parlaimentary republic, or any number of labels we might choose. However, they all still derived in some way from -democracy- which is why many people, for the sake of convenience and the fact that language has evolved this way, choose to use the word democracy to refer to all of them.
Well, it's true that unfortunately we don't really provide the minority protections as we ought to. However, even though it took far too long to happen, eventually the civil rights movement did pick up enough supporters to succeed, at least as far as the laws themselves are concerned.
I'm afraid that it seems the laws regarding to the RIAA's punishments have been somewhat slow to develop, but that is because this is the first time it's been this easy to violate their copyrights (which is what's happening legally, regardless of whether or not we feel like it's right). If we give it enough time, something will sort itself out, it's just that a few people may unfortunately get burned in the process.
As an aside, I think it's really unfortunate that the ones who stand to be prosecuted most often are the college students. File sharing for music files has become so popular around the campuses that many of the students, who wouldn't be likely to keep up with this sort of debate online, don't realize that they're playing with fire right now to be sharing music. They aren't usually intentionally trying to screw the music industry out of the supposed billions they lose through piracy, but they are being prosecuted as if they were professional pirates. That's where I think the government ought to step in and provide some protections, but sadly, as you mention, it will require a critical mass before this happens, and as long as it's just a few college students who are being screwed, it isn't likely to reach that level.
Yes, we do have majority rule, but the entire point of a democracy is to allow majority rule while still protecting minority rights. Ever heard of the civil rights acts? Think the majority really felt strongly about that?
Besides, we haven't had a true majority rule in anything other than congress in years. Presidential elections nowadays are rarely won by a true majority. Closer to the truth would be that a plurality rules in America, but even this is stretching it a bit considering that we have a representative form of government, so in reality we have a very small minority making most of our decisions (Congress, the President, etc.). Sure, we elect them, but only once every few years, and even then, no one pays attention to everything their congressmen do, so they're free to give lip service to the big issues and then do whatever they want. Therein lies one of the problems of a representative government.
My experience has been that most games do this. I can remember pushing the resolutions way up on Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament (and UT 2003) and having my fonts suddenly reduced to being so small you couldn't read anything. Granted, in those particular games, you didn't really need to read the text, but it still illustrates the point that computers haven't quite caught on to the concept of high resolutions yet.
Until now, the biggest advantage of high resolutions has been to increase the amount of useable space, but now with 1600x1200 and larger displays being easily available, it seems to me that the next big push in display resolution needs to be in making everything that appears on the screen prettier rather than giving more space. Sure, some people might -need- more space on the desktop than even the current high resolutions can provide, but most of us will be fine with what can be done already.
A good example for me is the current batch of super high resolution 15 inch laptop screens. I'm only in my 20s, but I still have some trouble reading text on a 1600x1200 screen that's only 15 inches. On a 17 inch or larger LCD, I don't have a problem with this, but on those small ones, things get a bit tiny for me. We're already starting to move in the right direction with this, as evidenced by both OS X and Windows XP's ability to scale up the sizes of everything with the resolution, but we aren't there until they can make all the programs get along to the point that it's readable. Oh but when we do, font rendering and the like has the potential to look absolutely incredible. OS X is most of the way there for me in font rendering, at least with font smoothing turned on. Windows XP might be getting there with Cleartype, but I only have a CRT on my XP machine, so I haven't seen it in full swing yet.
That's true in the business world, but IBM does sell a few Thinkpads for personal customers as well, and for them having a real install disk for their operating system could come in handy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the availability of dual booting. They could always save those costs in the corporate world by offering corporate packages that would be designed to allow the user to reimage the machine with the standard corporate install of the OS.
As for keeping it in sync with the hardware; my Powerbook comes with a CD of OS X that will work on any mac. Now granted, I know that Apple keeps a tight control on what's allowed in their machines, so it's a little easier to ensure that drivers work, etc, but couldn't the laptop makers work out something where they include a near standard issue of the OS on a CD? Windows does a pretty good job of installing drivers as it is, so it woudln't require much at all to make this work. I know the last time I bought a Windows machine it shipped this way (to be fair, that's been probably 5 years or so now, since I've been assembling them myself in recent years).
Of course, the added competition between the three will definitely help the overall workstation and high end desktop market. Add this to the fact that Sun has their relatively inexpensive low end Solaris machines and there's suddenly a lot of reasonably priced, high end workstations out there. I'm personally hoping this sparks a wave of competition out of the higher end of the desktop market that will trickle down through the rest of the market in terms of more robust and stable systems for end users.
I'm also hoping this sparks a push for non-x86 processors to trickle down to a higher market share for desktops. I don't really have anything against Intel, but I do think it would be nice if we moved to a market where different architectures could compete without one gaining a total monopoly. Anytime companies compete, the users benefit.
Most of the time it is a user problem, but I can see some reasons why having an image installer could be a pain even when you are familiar with how to dual boot. Suppose you need to format your windows partition, but don't want to lose your linux partition. Now suppose said image based installer automatically deletes your linux partition. That would tend to piss me off, and would have been avoided with a normal install CD.
Since CDs are such a terribly expensive part compared to the cost of a laptop. This seems like a really silly way to cut costs, if you ask me. Sure, most people will never need them, but if they do, it becomes a pain to fix the problem....
Unless your girlfriend is also a geek. Really, it happens, and is usually rather frightening when it does, since geek girls can be even stranger than geek guys sometimes.
Tennessee's sales tax varies from county to county, but generally ranges from 9.25-10%. It is really sad that sales tax here is so high, but it's currently our primary manner of taxation. The trouble is that more and more people are buying their expensive goods on the internet from places that do not charge a Tennessee sales tax (myself included), so our tax revenue is falling every year. This is what's caused most of our annual budget crises and prompted all the cuts in our education system.. Oh the joys of outdated tax systems...
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I'm 22 and did sentence diagramming, though I don't remember exactly when in my education I did them. I went through a public school, as well.
At least in New York most people don't drive. Think about LA, where everyone drives everywhere. That'd be nuts trying to manage that many people in a 30 mile radius.
I've been saying the same thing since I got mine. The only time I don't use the Tivo is when I'm watching an HD program, and I wouldn't benefit from Comcast's HD DVR box because I refuse to pay Comcast for the digital cable service.
I'm with you about VCRs just not being in the same ballpark as the Tivo. Until someone else makes a UI that's as slick as theirs, I'm sold.
They also co-own Cingular with Bellsouth. Before long it'll all just be one big company again, anyway, so I guess it doesn't really make any sense trying to figure them all out anymore.
Hehe, I don't even have the age excuse (I'm 21), but I'm just tired of having to work at making my computer work. I also went to playing all my games on consoles because I got sick of spending half my "gaming" time making my computer work with the game at a good framerate.
X11 is really nice for those of us who work in a unix environment on a regular basis, since we can run apps remotely on the mac and have the best of both worlds. I do this sort of thing fairly regularly for school and work, and the only real downside is that if I'm doing it from home, it runs painfully slowly.
I actually don't, but then I also don't watch any of the OTA TV channels, either. Pay radio may very well end up taking off, but considering how many people just don't ever listen to the radio versus the addiction that is television, I'm not sure that it will ever be as popular as cable or satellite TV. I may be way off base here, but most people I know these days listen to CDs or mp3s in their cars, so they don't ever turn on a radio either.
I base this from people around the college campus, which admittedly is not a great view of the general population, but still. Nearly everyone I know owns a TV, but practically no one even has a radio in their rooms these days. Nearly everyone still has one in the car, but there's just not a big push for people to buy radios like there is for people to watch TV.
The trouble is that XM and Sirius are still monthy fee services, while I can tune in to FM radio stations free over the airwaves. I know a lot of people are into XM radio and all, but personally, I just don't listen to the radio enough to make it worth my while to pay for a service, and I'd say that a lot of other people are like that, as well.
That being said, I can't see how the competition from them can be a bad thing for anyone but ClearChannel. Plus, if XM is not regulated by the FCC (I don't know this for sure, can anyone verify), we can get around all the censorship BS going on right now with our lovely FCC....
Ahh, but then they wouldn't be able to sell you new stuff in a couple of years when the band you're using gets filled up with other junk. I'm sure these companies really like it when we all have to replace our wireless equipment every few years as the bands fill up.
Which jumped back up to 8-9 hours after the firmware fix, hence it has really only lost maybe 10%.
Sensationalistic reporting from Fox News? Never! That wouldn't be Fair and Balanced!
Personally, I find it really obnoxious to use X11 apps while using Aqua apps. The difference in look and feel is rather distracting, so it's honestly not worth it to me to use OOo until that make it native. Granted, part of that is the fact that I get really cheap software by being a student, so I don't have to pay the outrageous prices for Microsoft Office, but still, X11 is fine for people who are used to using some variety of unix, but for anyone who is used to the look and feel of the Mac platform will be disappointed by it.
I said something along those lines (although in a somewhat nicer fashion) to the sysadmins of my university's email server. They kept bouncing messages to me saying that I was sending viruses out from my Powerbook. When I informed them of the fact that the Mac is entirely incapable of getting this virus, they told me that they realize that my computer didn't send it but couldn't do anything about it. For some reason, they didn't seem to think it would be a big deal to set up the server to check the IP addresses of these emails, regardless of the fact that they scared the entire student body (it happened right after everyone moved in, so the clueless were terrified about it) because they were too lazy to bother setting up the server properly.
I did get some semblence of revenge when the emails brought down the smtp server and required 2 days to bring back up.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing necessarily, but this seems to have been the general trend in a lot of forums over the past few years. I would probably guess that over 50% is older than 20, but definitely not over 25. There's a really high readership here by college students (myself included) of whom many are over 20. So from there, many of us will still be posting from the "ivory tower" of academia, which will be further skewing the information received from this poll.
Also, back to the 99.9% free of PhD's statement, there's not just a whole lot of PhD's anywhere, much less on slashdot alone. The whole purpose of a PhD is to specialize yourself to the point of being a leader in your particular niche field and to prepare you to put forth research in that field. Looking at it from that perspective, it makes sense to have relatively few people pursuing one, because there are relatively few positions available which truly need this level of specialization.
I probably come across as an education snob to many, but I do feel like the bachelor's level of education is ideal for many, if not most people. The bachelor's is about much, much more than just learning about a particular subject. If all you ever want to do is to be a programmer, then college might make sense. but even there I'd encourage people to go to college. We all have heard the cliche's (no, that's not misspelled, but I don't know how to make the accent over the e on this machine yet and it looks funny without it) about college being a time to branch out and discover ourselves, but to a certain extent, this really is true. College at the undergraduate level is mainly intended to give a relatively broad overview of a lot of different fields so that one is at least familiar with a wide variety of topics. Sure, many undergrads squander this opportunity by taking joke classes for electives and trying their damnedest to avoid ever learning anything, but this is still the aim. The fact that we learn something about a particular field is also important as an undergrad, but not nearly as important as the broad education provided. Even in technical fields like engineering where more undergrad specialization is required, we are mostly encouraged or required to have a fairly broad base of education before we really specialize in our fields.
Yeah, unfortunately I can't come up with anything better, either. The other trouble with having the public vote on everything is that it becomes extremely difficult to discuss issues before they are voted upon. While representative governments may have their problems, I'm afraid it's about the best we're going to be able to pull off in the near future.
I am perfectly well aware of the fact that we are a constitutional republic or a representational democracy, depending on how you choose to phrase it. It bothers me that many people from outside the US believe that "most Americans" know less about their country than they do.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not specifically say exactly what type of government it is. Even if they did, 200 years of a living language produces many changes in the way words are intrepreted, as evidenced by the fact that our Supreme Court is still making decisions about exactly what the Constitution means.
While we're being pedantic about the word democracy, show me a country anywhere in the world where a democracy has -ever- been practiced, according to the original meaning of the word. Thus has the word come to mean something somewhat different from when it was originally used, and that is why we have come to use the term democracy very often when we truly mean republic, constitutional republic, parlaimentary republic, or any number of labels we might choose. However, they all still derived in some way from -democracy- which is why many people, for the sake of convenience and the fact that language has evolved this way, choose to use the word democracy to refer to all of them.
Well, it's true that unfortunately we don't really provide the minority protections as we ought to. However, even though it took far too long to happen, eventually the civil rights movement did pick up enough supporters to succeed, at least as far as the laws themselves are concerned.
I'm afraid that it seems the laws regarding to the RIAA's punishments have been somewhat slow to develop, but that is because this is the first time it's been this easy to violate their copyrights (which is what's happening legally, regardless of whether or not we feel like it's right). If we give it enough time, something will sort itself out, it's just that a few people may unfortunately get burned in the process.
As an aside, I think it's really unfortunate that the ones who stand to be prosecuted most often are the college students. File sharing for music files has become so popular around the campuses that many of the students, who wouldn't be likely to keep up with this sort of debate online, don't realize that they're playing with fire right now to be sharing music. They aren't usually intentionally trying to screw the music industry out of the supposed billions they lose through piracy, but they are being prosecuted as if they were professional pirates. That's where I think the government ought to step in and provide some protections, but sadly, as you mention, it will require a critical mass before this happens, and as long as it's just a few college students who are being screwed, it isn't likely to reach that level.
Yes, we do have majority rule, but the entire point of a democracy is to allow majority rule while still protecting minority rights. Ever heard of the civil rights acts? Think the majority really felt strongly about that?
Besides, we haven't had a true majority rule in anything other than congress in years. Presidential elections nowadays are rarely won by a true majority. Closer to the truth would be that a plurality rules in America, but even this is stretching it a bit considering that we have a representative form of government, so in reality we have a very small minority making most of our decisions (Congress, the President, etc.). Sure, we elect them, but only once every few years, and even then, no one pays attention to everything their congressmen do, so they're free to give lip service to the big issues and then do whatever they want. Therein lies one of the problems of a representative government.
My experience has been that most games do this. I can remember pushing the resolutions way up on Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament (and UT 2003) and having my fonts suddenly reduced to being so small you couldn't read anything. Granted, in those particular games, you didn't really need to read the text, but it still illustrates the point that computers haven't quite caught on to the concept of high resolutions yet. Until now, the biggest advantage of high resolutions has been to increase the amount of useable space, but now with 1600x1200 and larger displays being easily available, it seems to me that the next big push in display resolution needs to be in making everything that appears on the screen prettier rather than giving more space. Sure, some people might -need- more space on the desktop than even the current high resolutions can provide, but most of us will be fine with what can be done already. A good example for me is the current batch of super high resolution 15 inch laptop screens. I'm only in my 20s, but I still have some trouble reading text on a 1600x1200 screen that's only 15 inches. On a 17 inch or larger LCD, I don't have a problem with this, but on those small ones, things get a bit tiny for me. We're already starting to move in the right direction with this, as evidenced by both OS X and Windows XP's ability to scale up the sizes of everything with the resolution, but we aren't there until they can make all the programs get along to the point that it's readable. Oh but when we do, font rendering and the like has the potential to look absolutely incredible. OS X is most of the way there for me in font rendering, at least with font smoothing turned on. Windows XP might be getting there with Cleartype, but I only have a CRT on my XP machine, so I haven't seen it in full swing yet.
That's true in the business world, but IBM does sell a few Thinkpads for personal customers as well, and for them having a real install disk for their operating system could come in handy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the availability of dual booting. They could always save those costs in the corporate world by offering corporate packages that would be designed to allow the user to reimage the machine with the standard corporate install of the OS.
As for keeping it in sync with the hardware; my Powerbook comes with a CD of OS X that will work on any mac. Now granted, I know that Apple keeps a tight control on what's allowed in their machines, so it's a little easier to ensure that drivers work, etc, but couldn't the laptop makers work out something where they include a near standard issue of the OS on a CD? Windows does a pretty good job of installing drivers as it is, so it woudln't require much at all to make this work. I know the last time I bought a Windows machine it shipped this way (to be fair, that's been probably 5 years or so now, since I've been assembling them myself in recent years).
Of course, the added competition between the three will definitely help the overall workstation and high end desktop market. Add this to the fact that Sun has their relatively inexpensive low end Solaris machines and there's suddenly a lot of reasonably priced, high end workstations out there. I'm personally hoping this sparks a wave of competition out of the higher end of the desktop market that will trickle down through the rest of the market in terms of more robust and stable systems for end users.
I'm also hoping this sparks a push for non-x86 processors to trickle down to a higher market share for desktops. I don't really have anything against Intel, but I do think it would be nice if we moved to a market where different architectures could compete without one gaining a total monopoly. Anytime companies compete, the users benefit.
Most of the time it is a user problem, but I can see some reasons why having an image installer could be a pain even when you are familiar with how to dual boot. Suppose you need to format your windows partition, but don't want to lose your linux partition. Now suppose said image based installer automatically deletes your linux partition. That would tend to piss me off, and would have been avoided with a normal install CD.
Since CDs are such a terribly expensive part compared to the cost of a laptop. This seems like a really silly way to cut costs, if you ask me. Sure, most people will never need them, but if they do, it becomes a pain to fix the problem....
Unless your girlfriend is also a geek. Really, it happens, and is usually rather frightening when it does, since geek girls can be even stranger than geek guys sometimes.
Tennessee's sales tax varies from county to county, but generally ranges from 9.25-10%. It is really sad that sales tax here is so high, but it's currently our primary manner of taxation. The trouble is that more and more people are buying their expensive goods on the internet from places that do not charge a Tennessee sales tax (myself included), so our tax revenue is falling every year. This is what's caused most of our annual budget crises and prompted all the cuts in our education system.. Oh the joys of outdated tax systems...