I would opine that it's because the suits don't want the engineers doing stuff that doesn't directly make themselves money. I've gotten into "trouble" before because of my penchant and ability with computers. Doggone it if I can take 2 hours and develop a tool that will save me 15 minutes a day for the next 5 years, or longer, why shouldn't I?
I've seen it before myself. A lot of bosses are afraid of your tools and scripts and ideas and time-saving, with good reason:
Manager is employed to hire 5 people to do stupid, repetitive work. You start getting too smart and automating stuff. Now, as long as there's a steady supply of work, the department won't go away per se. But if you can do the work of your 4 colleagues, then there's no reason to have them around. In that case, your boss is managing one person, which means they're superfluous. This means that if you went over your boss's head, you could pull a coup d'etat and replace your boss.
This is where it gets ugly. The boss can't openly criticize you for being more efficient, because you would immediately go over their head and say, "Dude, my manager's reprimanding me for making our clients more money." That's when they start cowing, backstabbing, and generally playing manager games. And it's risky for you, too, because even though the higher ups might be clued in to the fact that the job can be performed by one person, you might get branded as "not a team player" and axed too.
My advice is if you're like me and you positively, biologically can't do a job without making the job itself more efficient to perform, A) Start looking for another job, and B) In the mean time, keep quiet about your scripts and do 8 hours of work in 2.
This isn't a flame, I agree with everything that you said, except:
Plus, WoW is really hurting the PC gaming industry. I know a lot of gamers who've just stopped playing any game that isn't WoW.
To the PC Gaming Industry: Cry me a fucking river. Wait, I got a better one. Cry more, noobs.
I fail to see how one company with a track record of making awesome games making their most awesome game yet hurts the industry. Should their be government restrictions in place to prevent them from making a game that awesome? If anything, it should stimulate investors to be more willing to give up their money to capture that lucritive market. And it's not like they're stifling innovation. It's not even like other games in the same genre aren't relatively successful in their own right - I mean, City of Heroes was successful enough to spawn City of Villains, and Guild Wars is looking at getting an expansion pack. I would probably have all three if they had Mac clients.
Otherwise, as far as I can tell it's been a pretty cold year in terms of gaming. I enjoyed Half-Life 2, but not enough to play it more than once. And I appear to be the only person on the face of the Earth who's not interested in World War II shooters. I have no desire to play the next iteration in weak, Lovecraft-inspired horror from id Software. Ah, I've got it: id should sue Blizzard for making a game which makes them look formuliac and unoriginal by comparison! Better yet, I should sue Brad Pitt for being more attractive than me.
Even if you're just a casual player of MMOs, the farmers have a seriously detrimental effect on your gameplay experience (unless 'u want buy gold'). The more gold they pump into the system, the higher prices go. If prices are higher, they can turn around and take more of that gold they just sold away from you in the form of epic items, and sell it back to you the next time you're hurting for cash. And believe me, they push aggressively for higher prices by buying up whole markets of goods. It seriously cramps my gaming experience.
In fact, casual players are the ones who are hurt the most by gold farmers. We will never have access to the raid-only items that hardcore players do.
This is the deal about people in sales: a great salesman is charismatic, funny, kind of slimy, and not too bright. It's true. Normal people find geeks intimidating (duh). At my boss's old company, they had a guy who could move product like no tomorrow, but he had no understanding of how the products he sold worked, was not terribly computer savvy, and probably the least smart person at the company. And he worked at an SSL VPN company.
To his benefit, the company had like 8 Ph.D.s and some seriously talented programmers, so our example salesman is probably of perfectly average intellect or even slightly above average. I don't begrudge them for it. They're doing their job (selling units, not making people happy), and I'm doing mine (making people, i.e. me, happy).
I know how seriously they take that thing about no graven images. I remember in one of my art history classes an extensive lecture about how some sects believed any images of people/things at all were forbidden, so the developed a purely geometrical art style. However, they're really mad about their socioeconomic position in Europe and having equal access to government services and jobs, and being stereotyped as thugs and/or terrorists. This isn't a logical response to somebody ELSE breaking your religion's code of ethics, but it is the general response when people feel oppressed.
That's what all the strife in France was about. That's what this is about. That's what the Watts Riots were about. That's what happens when you have a bunch of poor, uneducated people living in slums with no hope. Some stupid little thing happens, a bunch of people with no jobs or money start talking about it and making each other angrier, then the start breaking shit. Then all of the others figure it's okay because there's a lot of people doing it and it'll give them relative anonymity. By contrast, landowners and white-collar job holders with an investment in the system don't rebel against it.
Technically yeah, but they had two suppliers producing totally different products - laptop chips and desktop chips. Since they're product lines didn't overlap, there was no direct competition. This was probably one of the factors which contributed to the Power line's stagnation (there were many).
And let's face it: the stagnation was a bigger pain than the supply shortages, because the shortages were alleviated eventually. They still don't have a laptop G5, or a really, REALLY fast desktop chip. The 4-5 GHz could turn out to be a pie in the sky just like 3GHz PowerPC chips in 2004.
Intel and AMD's products may have different strengths and weaknesses, but they're still supplying more or less the same products. They license from each other and keep each other on their toes. I'm not too up on AMD's laptop offerings, but they're definitely both racing to pack more cores into a chip.
Neal Stephenson wrote about this in Cryptonomicon, though on a different subject (morphine addiction):
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as 'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine-seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time--even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe." (emphasis added)
Of course, I'm not saying that homosexuality is analogous to a drug addiction. But I think the world would be a little bit more tolerant if we thought of people as people first and regarded such paltry details as what bits they like as somewhere on the bottom of the list. Really, to group somebody into a demographic by their sexuality is a little bit weird to me, because the only people that really concerns are the ones they're having sex with. Unless you're a sex worker, this is a tiny minority of the people you know.
I live near San Francisco, and I've observed that sociocultural identity and actual sexual behavior are often not in alignment. I've seen straight, deeply religious men kiss. I've known plenty of lesbians who flirt with and occasionally hook up with men. My [male] friend's past 4 girlfriends have been lesbians. Almost all of my gay friends have a fascination with the female breast. How about lesbian couples where one person decides they're transgendered - do they become a straight couple then? And most of my straight female friends, and my fiancee, have had crushes on women at one time or another.
Human sexuality is a lot more mutable than people want to give it credit, and useful labels are in garnering civil rights, the labels ultimatley set people apart.
Blizzard's offices are in Irvine, CA, a place so conservative that you can't leave your garage door open for more than 30 minutes without being issued a citation. A friend of mine got a $70 fine for leaving a mop and bucket on his porch for an hour.
Most of the people I hear on Team Speak in WoW are adults with a midwestern accent. Then again, my guildies are all 20-30 and live in Indiana. We tend to be fairly jocular with each other, but just because we know each other.
Now, as for people I don't know, I can be quite short when I'm typing, but on TS I tend to be a lot more diplomatic. This is because a lot of people don't pay attention to the chat frame at all and just kinda do their own thing, but if you're shouting in your ear, they pretty much have no choice but to hear you. I think I just get abusive in the chat in a vain attempt to get people's attention.
We were in a pretty good position to get pushed around. I mean, I don't think calling the PUC occured to anybody here, but I think the idea would've met with resistence because we're short of manpower. There are 5 guys here, plus a part-time employee who's a student at UC Irvine, and our CEO, who's a professor of particle physics at the University of Oregon. The programmers are here to program, not haggle with the PUC, and any extra time that our boss has needs to go to his students, family, or research. And at that time I was splitting my time between writing specs, which I was still learning to do, and playing network admin.
The blame also falls on the little ISP. Their support reps were pretty incompetant - only after talking to five people did we figure out what the problem was, and even every time we called them they stated that it would be ready the next day. If, at any point, we knew that it was going to take a small eternity, we would've been more likely to bitch. But I guess I'll remember this the next time I need DSL.
Even where there is a significant amount of competition, the guys who own the pipes do their best to run the little guys out of business.
I work in a startup company in Oakland, CA, right across the street from the SBC regional offices. Literally. We tried going with some little local provider, and they said they'd have DSL up and running in 3-5 business days. This was acceptable because the office is kind of dilapidated and we had to replace all the old cable with Cat-5e/Cat-6, crimp said cables, get the servers set up, build furniture and other move-in grunt labor (though at a white-collar salary).
SBC blocked the little guys, saying they hadn't done something they were supposed to (probably trumped up). Little guys put in a work order to get it done. SBC technicians weren't in a big hurry to do it. Two weeks go by. We go with SBC, and dump the little guy. Now we can't get service for a week because the previous, bullshit work order is still in the system, though it's not going to get done because it's being dropped. They send a few lackeys out, who are totally clueless and barely skilled. They shrug their shoulders after sitting on their asses for two hours and leave.
The point: not only is it a de-facto monopoly, but SBC punishes people who even think about going with a small provider to make sure they tell their friends not to even try a little company. Don't believe the robber barons: AT&T may have held back innovation, but deregulation of the Baby Bells gives the consumers nothing but higher prices, no effective competition, and richer, unregulated monopolies.
The story has a happy ending, though. I call up my uncle, whose boss is some big shot in charge of setting up subscriber lines at SBC. I place a phone call with this guy and he asks me a few questions, and then says he'll take care of it. DSL is up at 1:00 the next day.
It's also because it's a collector's edition. Which is to say, it's still a ripoff, but at least you get something for the extra $20.
What really stinks is when panderers like EB start selling that same collector's edition for $150 bucks, ala World of Warcraft. That's shameless exploitation, and not a cent more of that money goes to the publisher.
Yeah, he's thinking of evening dramas. Personally, the thing that got me into Alias was Jennifer Garner dressed as a German dominatrix.
But the thing is, it isn't just hornball guys like me who are into Alias. Most of the Alias fans I know are women, and I think part of it has to do with the fact that Jennifer's so good-looking. That's not the only reason to like her, of course: she's strong-willed, tough, and in control of her sexuality, and the show has really good writing on top of that. But it wouldn't be as popular with men or women if she wasn't so pretty. Did you know that women look at themselves and other women far more than the look at men? I mean, I had one friend describe the girl-girl-crush as an intense desire to become the person you idolize. And these are all women who identify themselves as straight.
Of course, what women find attractive about women isn't the same as what men do. For example, my girlfriend picks Claudia Black of Farscape above Jenna Jameson. So, if you were casting for such a show and targeting females 15-35, you'd want to have a reasonable distribution of women, but they would all have to be moderately good looking and the female lead would have to be very attractive in a unique and memorable way.
And what you say about the traditional soap demographic is true. It's a lot of older people. That's why they're on at 12:00.
This was caused by a couple of people acting like idiots.
(This is going to be a blatently classist rant, so you can gloss over it if you're sensitive to that kinda stuff)
Clearly they were spoiled brats if they had unfettered access to their parents' luxury automobiles. I know some upper-middle and middle class people with Mercedes-Benz's, but, uniformly a) their children are not allowed to drive them except in an emergency and b) they buy the kids crappy little Hondas or (in the case of one guy whose mom makes well above 6 figures) a VW Bus. So, logically, since these weren't their personal cars, they weren't born with a silver spoon, but they were the kinds of kids whose parents work long hours and try to buy their children's affections by spoiling them.
Of course, I'm not saying that middle-class and working-class kids don't to stupid shit. But it's apparent to anybody who's visited a how-town that the police do not crack down on rich kids. If you call the cops because somebody's parents are out of town and they've got a few grand worth of coke sitting on the coffee table being snorted by 14 year olds, if they're in a good neighborhood, the police will not respond unless it gets violent or disturbs the neighbors (sadly, rape does not fall under the definition of 'violent' in these cases). Because they're so spoiled, these kids end up with a sense of personal omnipotence above and beyond that of a normal teenager. They have parents that will give them all the money they want, and they have nothing to fear from the law. A lot of people in these little how-towns end up with HIV and hardcore drug addictions before they get out of high school.
Conversely, if you (for example) sit in a car talking with your friend in their ritzy neighborhood, if your car isn't nice enough, the cops will almost certainly harrass you. On two separate occasions I've had to explain to a peace officer, "No, we're not doing a drug deal or having sex. No, we're not out-of-towners. She lives right over there. No, she's not a prostitute or a drug addict. We're just chatting out here because she lives with her mom and I'm allergic to cats. Please go away, and stop shining that fucking light in my eyes, which, as you can see, are not dialated."
These aren't glittering generalities. These are drawn from my experiences and firsthand accounts of my friends. Again, I'm not saying that poor and average people don't do stupid things too, but by and large, they do them out of dispair or because they don't care. And the cops are more than happy to bust poor people with drugs.
Well, now these spoiled brats have committed manslaughter. I really hope this doesn't become a big gaming debacle, because that distracts from the responsibility of the kids and the parents.
Not quite. The downside is these are a on-sided, read only participation of the material, which in my experience isn't quite as good as having it followed by a good old fashion Q & A session.
Different people learn different ways. Some people need visual diagrams, some people need to ask questions, and still others need to get in their with their hands and do. Believe it or not, some people just like to sit there and listen to a really smart person talk. And as valuable as discussion/Q&A is, it's often poisoned by brown-nosing chatterboxes who are in love with the sound of their own voices, and people who aren't prepared for the material.
That's the problem with democracy: short-term thinking.
Of course, I don't think many people realize JUST how short-term that is. Sorry for talking about US politics, but it's the only politics I know.
It's a given that a president who's already been re-elected once has no reason to give a shit about approval ratings, because no matter what, we're stuck with him for another three years: all the pent-up, irrational, masochistic anger of the Repulican Party couldn't dethrone Clinton, and the Democrats don't have the guts to impeach Bush.
However, it also doesn't really matter what the president does in the first three years, because even though Bush I had an 80% approval rating following Desert Storm, he tanked because of the recession. Then, even though Clinton had lead us through years of peace and prosperity, the Dow went down in 2000, and Bush won.
Wait, what am I saying? The president can't influence the economy. Even Bush has failed to get any oil pumping out of Iraq. The most powerful person in the economy is Greenspan, and he's appointed. Even then, he can't really do shit but tweak interest rates. So yeah. It doesn'tmatter what the president does. They have no reason to be accountable for their actions or think about anything other than their petty goals and agendas, because their reelection is a function of economic prosperity, and economic prosperity, by and large, is not a function of their actions.
I'm sorry if this sounds combative, but clearly you're more in love with PowerPC and IBM than IBM is in love with you.
I don't really enjoy being on Steve Job's cheerleading squad here. The transition has a lot of annoyances, not the least of which is the fact that Adobe isn't going to go Universal until late 2006 or early 07. But, judging by the number of people I know with PowerBooks, and the number of people I heard screaming, praying, and crying in their sleep for G5 laptops, if there had been any plans for a low-power, low-heat G5, we would've seen it already.
Download the EFI software from Intel: Or include an copy in the malware.
That's pretty much what you'd have to do. You would have to get somebody to download, install, and run your program in order to do anything.
The scariest malware is the kind which makes your browser or email client a vector for infection. Forgive me if I'm getting rhetorical here for a sec, but exploiting Safari to execute arbitrary code is going to be as hard as exploiting Firefox. Since it's just a normal userspace program that's not cthonically entangled with the other elements of the operating system, you don't have things like ActiveX vulnerabilities and code injection to worry about.
What you're saying sorta makes sense. The Developer transition systems didn't have the same firmware technology - or at least not an identical implementation of it, given that installing Windows was absolutely trivial on a DTK but nto so on my new iMac. In order to be 100% sure, you need a production machine. That's why Blizzard is taking an extra 3 weeks to QA World of Warcraft's Mac/Intel port.
And Rev. A has a few quirks. I've had some problems taking it out of sleep (disk repair seemed to fix that). And more importantly, you REALLY don't want to judge these computers by the Rosetta experience. Corel Painter, after working fine for a week, has mysteriously and inexplicably started trying to malloc memory it's not using. But though I do it for fun, graphic design isn't my job, it's my hobby.
Yes, Apple does need developers. There are a lot of 1) Gamers and 2) Open Source nerds I know buying MacBooks. Even the PA guys are picking them up, ostensibly. There's a killing to be made for small developers porting things like Ventrilo's other codecs, and repackaging Unix apps to work under Carbon instead of X11. I've thought about porting Pan myself, but I've got too much on my plate as it is. It's also a better environment for small developers because Windows users have been conditioned by the Spyware Revolution to not download anything and not install anything unless it comes in a box on a shelf at CompUSA from a company they've heard of.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen it before myself. A lot of bosses are afraid of your tools and scripts and ideas and time-saving, with good reason:
Manager is employed to hire 5 people to do stupid, repetitive work. You start getting too smart and automating stuff. Now, as long as there's a steady supply of work, the department won't go away per se. But if you can do the work of your 4 colleagues, then there's no reason to have them around. In that case, your boss is managing one person, which means they're superfluous. This means that if you went over your boss's head, you could pull a coup d'etat and replace your boss.
This is where it gets ugly. The boss can't openly criticize you for being more efficient, because you would immediately go over their head and say, "Dude, my manager's reprimanding me for making our clients more money." That's when they start cowing, backstabbing, and generally playing manager games. And it's risky for you, too, because even though the higher ups might be clued in to the fact that the job can be performed by one person, you might get branded as "not a team player" and axed too.
My advice is if you're like me and you positively, biologically can't do a job without making the job itself more efficient to perform, A) Start looking for another job, and B) In the mean time, keep quiet about your scripts and do 8 hours of work in 2.
This isn't a flame, I agree with everything that you said, except:
To the PC Gaming Industry: Cry me a fucking river. Wait, I got a better one. Cry more, noobs.
I fail to see how one company with a track record of making awesome games making their most awesome game yet hurts the industry. Should their be government restrictions in place to prevent them from making a game that awesome? If anything, it should stimulate investors to be more willing to give up their money to capture that lucritive market. And it's not like they're stifling innovation. It's not even like other games in the same genre aren't relatively successful in their own right - I mean, City of Heroes was successful enough to spawn City of Villains, and Guild Wars is looking at getting an expansion pack. I would probably have all three if they had Mac clients.
Otherwise, as far as I can tell it's been a pretty cold year in terms of gaming. I enjoyed Half-Life 2, but not enough to play it more than once. And I appear to be the only person on the face of the Earth who's not interested in World War II shooters. I have no desire to play the next iteration in weak, Lovecraft-inspired horror from id Software. Ah, I've got it: id should sue Blizzard for making a game which makes them look formuliac and unoriginal by comparison! Better yet, I should sue Brad Pitt for being more attractive than me.
Even if you're just a casual player of MMOs, the farmers have a seriously detrimental effect on your gameplay experience (unless 'u want buy gold'). The more gold they pump into the system, the higher prices go. If prices are higher, they can turn around and take more of that gold they just sold away from you in the form of epic items, and sell it back to you the next time you're hurting for cash. And believe me, they push aggressively for higher prices by buying up whole markets of goods. It seriously cramps my gaming experience.
In fact, casual players are the ones who are hurt the most by gold farmers. We will never have access to the raid-only items that hardcore players do.
No, you don't understand. Shallow corporate raiders are the RL equivalent ninja-looters.
This is the deal about people in sales: a great salesman is charismatic, funny, kind of slimy, and not too bright. It's true. Normal people find geeks intimidating (duh). At my boss's old company, they had a guy who could move product like no tomorrow, but he had no understanding of how the products he sold worked, was not terribly computer savvy, and probably the least smart person at the company. And he worked at an SSL VPN company.
To his benefit, the company had like 8 Ph.D.s and some seriously talented programmers, so our example salesman is probably of perfectly average intellect or even slightly above average. I don't begrudge them for it. They're doing their job (selling units, not making people happy), and I'm doing mine (making people, i.e. me, happy).
I think that's just an excuse.
I know how seriously they take that thing about no graven images. I remember in one of my art history classes an extensive lecture about how some sects believed any images of people/things at all were forbidden, so the developed a purely geometrical art style. However, they're really mad about their socioeconomic position in Europe and having equal access to government services and jobs, and being stereotyped as thugs and/or terrorists. This isn't a logical response to somebody ELSE breaking your religion's code of ethics, but it is the general response when people feel oppressed.
That's what all the strife in France was about. That's what this is about. That's what the Watts Riots were about. That's what happens when you have a bunch of poor, uneducated people living in slums with no hope. Some stupid little thing happens, a bunch of people with no jobs or money start talking about it and making each other angrier, then the start breaking shit. Then all of the others figure it's okay because there's a lot of people doing it and it'll give them relative anonymity. By contrast, landowners and white-collar job holders with an investment in the system don't rebel against it.
Technically yeah, but they had two suppliers producing totally different products - laptop chips and desktop chips. Since they're product lines didn't overlap, there was no direct competition. This was probably one of the factors which contributed to the Power line's stagnation (there were many).
And let's face it: the stagnation was a bigger pain than the supply shortages, because the shortages were alleviated eventually. They still don't have a laptop G5, or a really, REALLY fast desktop chip. The 4-5 GHz could turn out to be a pie in the sky just like 3GHz PowerPC chips in 2004.
Intel and AMD's products may have different strengths and weaknesses, but they're still supplying more or less the same products. They license from each other and keep each other on their toes. I'm not too up on AMD's laptop offerings, but they're definitely both racing to pack more cores into a chip.
Neal Stephenson wrote about this in Cryptonomicon, though on a different subject (morphine addiction):
Of course, I'm not saying that homosexuality is analogous to a drug addiction. But I think the world would be a little bit more tolerant if we thought of people as people first and regarded such paltry details as what bits they like as somewhere on the bottom of the list. Really, to group somebody into a demographic by their sexuality is a little bit weird to me, because the only people that really concerns are the ones they're having sex with. Unless you're a sex worker, this is a tiny minority of the people you know.
I live near San Francisco, and I've observed that sociocultural identity and actual sexual behavior are often not in alignment. I've seen straight, deeply religious men kiss. I've known plenty of lesbians who flirt with and occasionally hook up with men. My [male] friend's past 4 girlfriends have been lesbians. Almost all of my gay friends have a fascination with the female breast. How about lesbian couples where one person decides they're transgendered - do they become a straight couple then? And most of my straight female friends, and my fiancee, have had crushes on women at one time or another.
Human sexuality is a lot more mutable than people want to give it credit, and useful labels are in garnering civil rights, the labels ultimatley set people apart.
Blizzard's offices are in Irvine, CA, a place so conservative that you can't leave your garage door open for more than 30 minutes without being issued a citation. A friend of mine got a $70 fine for leaving a mop and bucket on his porch for an hour.
Most of the people I hear on Team Speak in WoW are adults with a midwestern accent. Then again, my guildies are all 20-30 and live in Indiana. We tend to be fairly jocular with each other, but just because we know each other.
Now, as for people I don't know, I can be quite short when I'm typing, but on TS I tend to be a lot more diplomatic. This is because a lot of people don't pay attention to the chat frame at all and just kinda do their own thing, but if you're shouting in your ear, they pretty much have no choice but to hear you. I think I just get abusive in the chat in a vain attempt to get people's attention.
We were in a pretty good position to get pushed around. I mean, I don't think calling the PUC occured to anybody here, but I think the idea would've met with resistence because we're short of manpower. There are 5 guys here, plus a part-time employee who's a student at UC Irvine, and our CEO, who's a professor of particle physics at the University of Oregon. The programmers are here to program, not haggle with the PUC, and any extra time that our boss has needs to go to his students, family, or research. And at that time I was splitting my time between writing specs, which I was still learning to do, and playing network admin.
The blame also falls on the little ISP. Their support reps were pretty incompetant - only after talking to five people did we figure out what the problem was, and even every time we called them they stated that it would be ready the next day. If, at any point, we knew that it was going to take a small eternity, we would've been more likely to bitch. But I guess I'll remember this the next time I need DSL.
Even where there is a significant amount of competition, the guys who own the pipes do their best to run the little guys out of business.
I work in a startup company in Oakland, CA, right across the street from the SBC regional offices. Literally. We tried going with some little local provider, and they said they'd have DSL up and running in 3-5 business days. This was acceptable because the office is kind of dilapidated and we had to replace all the old cable with Cat-5e/Cat-6, crimp said cables, get the servers set up, build furniture and other move-in grunt labor (though at a white-collar salary).
SBC blocked the little guys, saying they hadn't done something they were supposed to (probably trumped up). Little guys put in a work order to get it done. SBC technicians weren't in a big hurry to do it. Two weeks go by. We go with SBC, and dump the little guy. Now we can't get service for a week because the previous, bullshit work order is still in the system, though it's not going to get done because it's being dropped. They send a few lackeys out, who are totally clueless and barely skilled. They shrug their shoulders after sitting on their asses for two hours and leave.
The point: not only is it a de-facto monopoly, but SBC punishes people who even think about going with a small provider to make sure they tell their friends not to even try a little company. Don't believe the robber barons: AT&T may have held back innovation, but deregulation of the Baby Bells gives the consumers nothing but higher prices, no effective competition, and richer, unregulated monopolies.
The story has a happy ending, though. I call up my uncle, whose boss is some big shot in charge of setting up subscriber lines at SBC. I place a phone call with this guy and he asks me a few questions, and then says he'll take care of it. DSL is up at 1:00 the next day.
It's also because it's a collector's edition. Which is to say, it's still a ripoff, but at least you get something for the extra $20.
What really stinks is when panderers like EB start selling that same collector's edition for $150 bucks, ala World of Warcraft. That's shameless exploitation, and not a cent more of that money goes to the publisher.
Yeah, he's thinking of evening dramas. Personally, the thing that got me into Alias was Jennifer Garner dressed as a German dominatrix.
But the thing is, it isn't just hornball guys like me who are into Alias. Most of the Alias fans I know are women, and I think part of it has to do with the fact that Jennifer's so good-looking. That's not the only reason to like her, of course: she's strong-willed, tough, and in control of her sexuality, and the show has really good writing on top of that. But it wouldn't be as popular with men or women if she wasn't so pretty. Did you know that women look at themselves and other women far more than the look at men? I mean, I had one friend describe the girl-girl-crush as an intense desire to become the person you idolize. And these are all women who identify themselves as straight.
Of course, what women find attractive about women isn't the same as what men do. For example, my girlfriend picks Claudia Black of Farscape above Jenna Jameson. So, if you were casting for such a show and targeting females 15-35, you'd want to have a reasonable distribution of women, but they would all have to be moderately good looking and the female lead would have to be very attractive in a unique and memorable way.
And what you say about the traditional soap demographic is true. It's a lot of older people. That's why they're on at 12:00.
. . . look at my handle! I think I've been using this for about six or seven years.
(This is going to be a blatently classist rant, so you can gloss over it if you're sensitive to that kinda stuff)
Clearly they were spoiled brats if they had unfettered access to their parents' luxury automobiles. I know some upper-middle and middle class people with Mercedes-Benz's, but, uniformly a) their children are not allowed to drive them except in an emergency and b) they buy the kids crappy little Hondas or (in the case of one guy whose mom makes well above 6 figures) a VW Bus. So, logically, since these weren't their personal cars, they weren't born with a silver spoon, but they were the kinds of kids whose parents work long hours and try to buy their children's affections by spoiling them.
Of course, I'm not saying that middle-class and working-class kids don't to stupid shit. But it's apparent to anybody who's visited a how-town that the police do not crack down on rich kids. If you call the cops because somebody's parents are out of town and they've got a few grand worth of coke sitting on the coffee table being snorted by 14 year olds, if they're in a good neighborhood, the police will not respond unless it gets violent or disturbs the neighbors (sadly, rape does not fall under the definition of 'violent' in these cases). Because they're so spoiled, these kids end up with a sense of personal omnipotence above and beyond that of a normal teenager. They have parents that will give them all the money they want, and they have nothing to fear from the law. A lot of people in these little how-towns end up with HIV and hardcore drug addictions before they get out of high school.
Conversely, if you (for example) sit in a car talking with your friend in their ritzy neighborhood, if your car isn't nice enough, the cops will almost certainly harrass you. On two separate occasions I've had to explain to a peace officer, "No, we're not doing a drug deal or having sex. No, we're not out-of-towners. She lives right over there. No, she's not a prostitute or a drug addict. We're just chatting out here because she lives with her mom and I'm allergic to cats. Please go away, and stop shining that fucking light in my eyes, which, as you can see, are not dialated."
These aren't glittering generalities. These are drawn from my experiences and firsthand accounts of my friends. Again, I'm not saying that poor and average people don't do stupid things too, but by and large, they do them out of dispair or because they don't care. And the cops are more than happy to bust poor people with drugs.
Well, now these spoiled brats have committed manslaughter. I really hope this doesn't become a big gaming debacle, because that distracts from the responsibility of the kids and the parents.
Different people learn different ways. Some people need visual diagrams, some people need to ask questions, and still others need to get in their with their hands and do. Believe it or not, some people just like to sit there and listen to a really smart person talk. And as valuable as discussion/Q&A is, it's often poisoned by brown-nosing chatterboxes who are in love with the sound of their own voices, and people who aren't prepared for the material.
That's the problem with democracy: short-term thinking.
Of course, I don't think many people realize JUST how short-term that is. Sorry for talking about US politics, but it's the only politics I know.
It's a given that a president who's already been re-elected once has no reason to give a shit about approval ratings, because no matter what, we're stuck with him for another three years: all the pent-up, irrational, masochistic anger of the Repulican Party couldn't dethrone Clinton, and the Democrats don't have the guts to impeach Bush.
However, it also doesn't really matter what the president does in the first three years, because even though Bush I had an 80% approval rating following Desert Storm, he tanked because of the recession. Then, even though Clinton had lead us through years of peace and prosperity, the Dow went down in 2000, and Bush won.
Wait, what am I saying? The president can't influence the economy. Even Bush has failed to get any oil pumping out of Iraq. The most powerful person in the economy is Greenspan, and he's appointed. Even then, he can't really do shit but tweak interest rates. So yeah. It doesn'tmatter what the president does. They have no reason to be accountable for their actions or think about anything other than their petty goals and agendas, because their reelection is a function of economic prosperity, and economic prosperity, by and large, is not a function of their actions.
I'm sorry if this sounds combative, but clearly you're more in love with PowerPC and IBM than IBM is in love with you.
I don't really enjoy being on Steve Job's cheerleading squad here. The transition has a lot of annoyances, not the least of which is the fact that Adobe isn't going to go Universal until late 2006 or early 07. But, judging by the number of people I know with PowerBooks, and the number of people I heard screaming, praying, and crying in their sleep for G5 laptops, if there had been any plans for a low-power, low-heat G5, we would've seen it already.
That ain't funny. I'd hate to have to furnish my neighbor with a replacement laptop.
That's pretty much what you'd have to do. You would have to get somebody to download, install, and run your program in order to do anything.
The scariest malware is the kind which makes your browser or email client a vector for infection. Forgive me if I'm getting rhetorical here for a sec, but exploiting Safari to execute arbitrary code is going to be as hard as exploiting Firefox. Since it's just a normal userspace program that's not cthonically entangled with the other elements of the operating system, you don't have things like ActiveX vulnerabilities and code injection to worry about.
Like:
And the one those people who were foolish enough to screw with their computer's firmware are now playing: Doctor.
Er, free memory it hasn't malloced. Dur.
What you're saying sorta makes sense. The Developer transition systems didn't have the same firmware technology - or at least not an identical implementation of it, given that installing Windows was absolutely trivial on a DTK but nto so on my new iMac. In order to be 100% sure, you need a production machine. That's why Blizzard is taking an extra 3 weeks to QA World of Warcraft's Mac/Intel port.
And Rev. A has a few quirks. I've had some problems taking it out of sleep (disk repair seemed to fix that). And more importantly, you REALLY don't want to judge these computers by the Rosetta experience. Corel Painter, after working fine for a week, has mysteriously and inexplicably started trying to malloc memory it's not using. But though I do it for fun, graphic design isn't my job, it's my hobby.
Yes, Apple does need developers. There are a lot of 1) Gamers and 2) Open Source nerds I know buying MacBooks. Even the PA guys are picking them up, ostensibly. There's a killing to be made for small developers porting things like Ventrilo's other codecs, and repackaging Unix apps to work under Carbon instead of X11. I've thought about porting Pan myself, but I've got too much on my plate as it is. It's also a better environment for small developers because Windows users have been conditioned by the Spyware Revolution to not download anything and not install anything unless it comes in a box on a shelf at CompUSA from a company they've heard of.