Do you recall any checkboxes reading something like "Please enroll me in affiliate blah blah program! [x]"? This is usually how this membership crap sneaks through.
Remember, everyone, opt out of everything, always! Never sign up for anything that says "affiliates", cause that's a good recipe for disaster. Just recently, I saw an auto insurance application that said (more or less) "If we can't give you this policy, would you like us to apply your premium towards an affiliate policy, which may be different price than this quote? Yes [] No[]". Geez, language like this is the worst of the worst..."different" can mean "more"...bastards.
each application vendor has found it cheaper to dictate a sole Win server for their app
How nice. I recall a rather elderly Sun SPARCserver 2000 that handled multiple NFS mounts for a whole network using software and hardware RAID (including serving user home directories), was a web server, a license server, an Oracle development server, ran sshd, and some other stuff I can't remember. It had six 60MHz SuperSPARC CPUs. Granted, it wasn't like riding greased lightning, but it got the job done. Oh, and there was that Ultra 1 workstation that scanned and routed every e-mail entering and leaving the network.
30 Windows servers? I'm glad I'm not the guy's supervisor responsible for signing off on so many superfluous purchase orders (boy, he must be dense).
Doesn't it require a broadband connection in the first place?
Well, if it does when it hits the market, then Phantom just might get edged out of the marketplace. If a family is already spending $40 to $80 per month on broadband and they already have things like a cell phone and cable TV (another $60 to $90month), then yet another $30 per month could push them over their threshold of how much of their budget should be going towards entertainment, which also includes movies, vacations, other toys, etc.
It is also cheaper for video games to buy another console and average buying less than one game a month, especially hitting the $20 to $30 games. If the kiddies complain about this, my response would be "go play with your Legos and quit whining."
I think companies who try to charge so much for their products to sustain whatever business model they are pushing are probably delusional about just how much disposable income people really have. There are only so many "early adopters" out there who have enough money to buy all the new crap that comes out every week, meaning any new company in the trust-fund-baby market will fight an uphill battle to stay in business.
At 29.95/month, whether to buy the Phantom will be rationalized as follows for most families:
Broadband internet, cell phone, digital cable/satellite TV, Tivo, other on-line games (XBox Live, misc. PC games, etc.), OnStar, telephone extras (e.g., Caller ID), brand-name groceries, new TV/computer/stereo, new furniture, new lawnmower, etc.
Okay, for this year, pick three or four.
Simply, most families cannot afford to both get new living-room furniture, for example, and get a good cell phone plan and subscribe to the Phantom service all at the same time and stay financially stable with at least some savings. Think about it: $29.95/mo. is $360/year on top of initial costs. I know I spend less than $150/year on PS2 games cause I'm about as cheap as people get; IMO, Phantom is competing with other luxuries like digital cable or broadband internet (yes, middle America, these things are luxuries).
If I have to return another defective rented DVD for store credit one more time, I don't know what to think about DVDs. These aren't defective due to typical retarded-moron thumbprints and scratches, they are visibly defective with wierd amorphous patterns on the disk.
While DVDs are generally awesome...renting DVDs sucks big time (washing every single rented DVD to make it playable is just a big pain in the ass).
The economist Brian Arthur is one of the proponents of the theory of path dependence [bearcave.com].
It sounds like "path dependence" is academic-speak for "_blatantly_obvious_ history of software and management decision-making." Does Brian Arther make good money off of his theories? If so, I think I need a career change!
Performance gains occur at the hardware level. Any tendency to optimize prematurely ought to be avoided, at least until after v1.0 ships.
So, if your app did a lot of 2-D graphics...I guess it is perfectly okay to refresh the whole window and every object in it with every repaint at 60Hz?
Remember, there are still lots of people out there with 4MB PCI graphics cards. Also, lots of Linux users have to run a non-accelerated X server for various reasons.
Also, for non-graphical applications (web servers, databases), there are still oodles of marketing people and "journalists" who will resort to benchmark scores in declaring a "winner" and will be using only v1.0. Benchmarks are a sad state of reality (just look at mostly-baseless CPU flamewars over SPEC this and that).
your claim of a thousand dollars ayear in savings is not holding water.
There are things I left out: payments alone will save a few thousand a year for the term of the loan, SUV tires are more expensive to replace, property insurance will likely be higher, gas savings alone is worth $500/year, SUVs are harder to care for (more likely to pay for professional detailing), SUVs are generally more expensive to repair (bigger everything), and, on average, SUVs have to cost more to insure, at least for the comprehensive part (would the insurance company rather the tree fall on the SUV or the sedan).
Safety will always be a mixed debate (SUVs are huge opaque boxes at intersections and in parking lots). Quite honestly, most SUVs out there are fashion statements and can readily be replaced by sedans, station wagons, and pickup trucks. For a little of everything, there's always Subaru.
Also, there is documented evidence that many SUV are not safer than cars. For example, Consumer Reports wrote up a full two pages on just how much the Mitsubishi Montero was an accident waiting to happen (it actually scared the test driver). There was a huge drawn-out legal battle with Ford over the early Explorers. Also, bigger SUVs fall into different legal categories, where safety standards can actually go down (they are literally utility trucks, not cars, at that point).
And one last thing, in more families than not (where I am) the SUV is replacing more than one vehicle.
Anything that requires more than a station wagon with a modest trailer hitch can easily be handled for under $50 at U-Haul. A person has to do a lot of hauling and towing to make renting a truck for one-off stuff uneconomical.
Proper shopping can save up to a grand or so a year depending on family size.
Yeah, I forgot to mention shopping. Buying meat on sale and finding the good generic products out there can save a bundle (generics are almost always cheaper than brand-name, even with coupons). Also, going to the store mid-day during the week is a lot less stressful than during the after-work and weekend rushes.
use cloth diapering.
I also hear it gets them potty-trained quicker! I've seen kids at four still wearing ultra-comfy "training pants", which is a bit sad.
Why the stratification?
I agree...actually, that's exactly what we did last year. Having liquidity really makes life more comfortable. It covers deductibles, random repairs, and other stuff that can't be predicted. This can actually lead to more savings by allowing higher deductibles on some insurance (over-insurance is almost worse than under-insurance).
Those people spending lots of money on things they "don't need" are the reason the rest of us get jobs.
It's always a balancing act between high rates of consumer bankruptcy and those jobs. Let's hope the economists out there can keep Congress in check.
So here it comes... Dell is going to slowly get into DRM.
So what. Currently, I am not a customer of "AOL, Dell, Disney, Napster and Freescale, a subsidiary of Motorola", and I never have to be. Disney is harder to avoid, but I can pretty much predict that their next twenty movies will be pretty much just like the last twenty, so I couldn't care less about Disney (add to this their views on copyright, and they can go fuck themselves twenty times while their making those twenty movies). I don't need a Motorola telephone or CPU. I don't need AOL (Mozilla is separate, now). I don't need napster, cause I simply never did.
The possibilities that computer HARDWARE will only work with DRM enabled BIOS's is coming.
Again, so what. 1) I don't own a new computer nor do I really need one for a while. 2) I can refuse DRM'd content sent to me by family and friends (and tell them why). 3) What about those millions upon millions of people who bought into Windows 98 and XP and don't have another grand to drop on a fancy new machine?!?
I predict that DRM will be a genuine non-issue for me. I can still get books. DVD and VHS movies will be around for quite a while. I can go out to dinner with my family (god forbid!).
Quite simply, entertainment is a dime-a-dozen and the companies who think they are worth anything will quickly learn just how fragile they are. They're like a house of cards: just because it isn't windy now doesn't mean the house is durable.
Humans are pretty darn versatile, and if we can't get our entertainment from Company XYZ conveniently and affordably, then we'll find someone else (live music, libraries, friends) or make our own. There is simply no way at all to monopolize entertainment.
As far as data goes, I think companies will learn pretty quick that many of their customers and clients won't be very warm to recieving data in a format they have to shell out big money to read. MS Office's success is mostly based on piracy in the first place, and I think Microsoft will hit a big wall trying to make DRM'd data formats ubiquitous if they expect any payment for the software.
The only real success for DRM will be when parties mutually agree in advance to use DRM purely for strategic reasons. There is good reason for three-letter government agencies or corporate R&D offices to want to use DRM internally, but, like trusted systems, is not something Joe and Jane Average will need or want or care about.
That said, I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files.
If the safe is just one of those standard melt-to-seal-with-little-water-vapor-beads fire safes, you'll be disappointed to see your CD backups molten and warped into uselessness after a fire. I'm pretty sure those safes are designed just for paper and other things that don't melt and need a fairly high temperature before burning.
The best policy is to keep backups somewhere else, such as another building separate from the house. If you have outbuildings that are not close to the house, that's one option. Bank boxes are another option for saps in the 'burbs. Just remember physical security, since pathetic teenagers just might walk away with your backups! In other words, put a lock on that barn door.
Fact check: Harvard, MIT, and Yale aren't the only good schools around...not only that, they are overpriced!
The high dropout rate is common in state-supported schools, where there is often low requirements for admission but a high requirement to make it to the second year. Not only that, many state-supported schools are, in fact, very good and don't require ten years of slavery after graduation to pay for them. I have learned the hard way (yes, my school was private and expensive) that "Ivy Leauge" is really a waste, unless a person has a trust fund, wants to be a diplomat or lawyer or brown-nosed businessman, or really wants a specific program only at a particular school (e.g., Princeton has a good graduate math program, I hear).
I feel sick when I see people complaining about how they need two incomes while they are pumping gas for their luxury SUV that they use to drive 30 miles to work because they live on a 5 acre plot in the suburbs.
One other thing that a second job does is breed laziness towards managing expenses (as a part of managing the household).
1) Buying car instead of SUV: saves at least $1000/year on gas, insurance, and maintenance.
2) No kids in daycare: saves thousands of dollars per year.
3) Taking the time to optimize phone plans, weatherproof the home, etc.: an easy several hundred dollars a year.
4) Trimming down all the extra crap like too many cable TV channels, not buying video games at $50/pop, buying Legos instead of Fisher Price: hey, that's another few hundred dollars!
5) Taking the time to reorganize savings into interest-bearing accounts: Bam, another few hundred dollars!
Seriously, how long until the time spent not working adds up to be worth more than a miserable two-worker household? Not only that, the laundry might get done and you can be home to meet the plumber/take car to mechanic/take kid to doctor/etc. without taking vacation!
writing, acting, and animation is up to Pixar's level
You mean hiring (insert popular 1980s stand-up comedian or sit-com actor) and (insert 1980s pop-music star) to add predictable "personality" and "charisma" to a movie designed for mass marketability to average-intelligence children and adults?
Quite simply, Pixar (and Disney) have a very successful (albeit expensive) formula for making a block-buster movie. Looking back at the last fifteen years of what these companies has pushed out does not reveal a whole lot of variety when looking at the personalities of the characters or of the musical scores. They vary somewhat on plot (often re-hashed from the public domain...what, I can't use Steamboat Mickey, you asshats?!?), but plot is irrelevant to success when Robin Williams or Eddie Murphy is on the payroll. This is why most recent CG movies are simply bland and boring (god, why was Shrek so damn popular--if I see another mass of a thousand cliches like Shrek, I'll puke; I know it wasn't Pixar, but it's all the same formula).
In short it looks like algorithm development has lagged sufficiently behind the computational power.
Well, there is one thing we cannot ignore is that computational power has enabled us to do things not before possible. Java, for example, offers much higher abstraction than C, X Windows, and OpenGL, meaning programmers have new ways of structuring programs and writing decent software (even games) without spending huge amounts of time on platform dependencies (an age-old time sink) or fine-grained memory management (another age-old time sink). People who think these higher-level environments are necessarily unusably slow need to rethink how they are writing their software, because they just aren't understanding what even a 300MHz CPU is capable of (with a good JIT, that is).
Mario and Zelda were more-or-less the same ancient princess tale, but they had really really fun characters, great worlds to visit, and great marketing build-ups in Nintendo Power, complete with teaser maps and compelling artwork. Quite honestly, no "ancient princess tale" games before or since has matched what Nintendo did for these games.
Now that I think of it, Nintendo pulled a video-game "Power Rangers" or "Pokemon," which is quite the feat for a relatively expensive toy ($100+ NES + $50 games). What this means, however, is that there is only room for one "Pokemon" at a time (all other "Pokemon"-wannabes are exactly that: un-cool second-tier wannabes). By extension, this means that all the aspiring game developers aiming for this level of success are really building themselves up for coming in second, which is fine but not what people are asking for in this Slashdot discussion.
Re:The problem with HDTV right now...
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I would love to have an HDTV so I could see more detail in the films I watch.
Well, it depends. Certain categories of movies, while they are very very entertaining (and quite uplifting), when they look more real, are actually less appealing (eww, what are those...).
HDTV is so hyped right now but seems that there is barely any deployment.
This has been true for any value of "now" going back to at least the early 1990s, IIRC.
Even better, there was a guy on the evening news last week talking about the FCC's mandate for digital TV, too. Basically, it's also all hype with little reality mixed in. He said that it took decades for even the lowly VCR to gain 85+% household penetration and that it is basically a joke to expect mandatory ubiquitous digital TV by 2006 or whenever.
Regarding HDTV and digital TV: yeah, they're nice, but I'm not holding my breath until I get a good couple grand to spend on a new TV (basically not for another decade!).
Solaris Internals by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall is the one I was thinking of. I'm pretty sure there are others, as well (Amazon shows a couple about performance tuning below the listing of Solaris Internals).
The documentation bundled in the Solaris box set also gives lots of clues about what's under the hood (e.g., tunable parameters, inter-process communication, kernel debugger, virtual memory etc.).
I'd have to say that Solaris is definitely among the most open of the proprietary UNIX systems.
...Linux developers take all the interesting bits from Solaris and port them to the Linux kernel--then you get all the stability etc of Solaris, but with Linux
Linux developers have pretty much always had this opportunity. The Solaris kernel architecture is well-documented in a publicly-available book, and the kernel source code has been made available before. Actually, the only parts of Solaris inaccessible to Linux developers are the parts they could never use anyway due to patents or licening issues. Sun's position doesn't really change either way, IMO.
What would be really fun is for someone in a far-off land immune from lawyers to re-release that leaked Windows code under the GPL and watch the Benny Hill-esque antics begin!
I definitely agree that Sun probably has people on both sides of the issue internally. For example, they provided the source code for Solaris 8 and the Java libraries but not Solaris 9. Also, the Solaris 8 source had some curious omissions, which are probably the parts that have licensing issues (OpenGL, SCO-cruft, etc.).
So, what would be very likely, based on prior behavior, would be for Sun to possibly release _most_ of Solaris under GPL minus the parts their lawyers are still unsure of. This would still be a big win for developers, who can benefit from debugging at nearly all levels. I've already benefited from having the Java source, GPL or no, and fully understand what those developers in the 1980's must have felt like.
Slashdot Mirror
I just booked a flight through Orbitz...
Do you recall any checkboxes reading something like "Please enroll me in affiliate blah blah program! [x]"? This is usually how this membership crap sneaks through.
Remember, everyone, opt out of everything, always! Never sign up for anything that says "affiliates", cause that's a good recipe for disaster. Just recently, I saw an auto insurance application that said (more or less) "If we can't give you this policy, would you like us to apply your premium towards an affiliate policy, which may be different price than this quote? Yes [] No[]". Geez, language like this is the worst of the worst..."different" can mean "more"...bastards.
each application vendor has found it cheaper to dictate a sole Win server for their app
How nice. I recall a rather elderly Sun SPARCserver 2000 that handled multiple NFS mounts for a whole network using software and hardware RAID (including serving user home directories), was a web server, a license server, an Oracle development server, ran sshd, and some other stuff I can't remember. It had six 60MHz SuperSPARC CPUs. Granted, it wasn't like riding greased lightning, but it got the job done. Oh, and there was that Ultra 1 workstation that scanned and routed every e-mail entering and leaving the network.
30 Windows servers? I'm glad I'm not the guy's supervisor responsible for signing off on so many superfluous purchase orders (boy, he must be dense).
Doesn't it require a broadband connection in the first place?
Well, if it does when it hits the market, then Phantom just might get edged out of the marketplace. If a family is already spending $40 to $80 per month on broadband and they already have things like a cell phone and cable TV (another $60 to $90month), then yet another $30 per month could push them over their threshold of how much of their budget should be going towards entertainment, which also includes movies, vacations, other toys, etc.
It is also cheaper for video games to buy another console and average buying less than one game a month, especially hitting the $20 to $30 games. If the kiddies complain about this, my response would be "go play with your Legos and quit whining."
I think companies who try to charge so much for their products to sustain whatever business model they are pushing are probably delusional about just how much disposable income people really have. There are only so many "early adopters" out there who have enough money to buy all the new crap that comes out every week, meaning any new company in the trust-fund-baby market will fight an uphill battle to stay in business.
At 29.95/month, whether to buy the Phantom will be rationalized as follows for most families:
Broadband internet, cell phone, digital cable/satellite TV, Tivo, other on-line games (XBox Live, misc. PC games, etc.), OnStar, telephone extras (e.g., Caller ID), brand-name groceries, new TV/computer/stereo, new furniture, new lawnmower, etc.
Okay, for this year, pick three or four.
Simply, most families cannot afford to both get new living-room furniture, for example, and get a good cell phone plan and subscribe to the Phantom service all at the same time and stay financially stable with at least some savings. Think about it: $29.95/mo. is $360/year on top of initial costs. I know I spend less than $150/year on PS2 games cause I'm about as cheap as people get; IMO, Phantom is competing with other luxuries like digital cable or broadband internet (yes, middle America, these things are luxuries).
Ugh.
If I have to return another defective rented DVD for store credit one more time, I don't know what to think about DVDs. These aren't defective due to typical retarded-moron thumbprints and scratches, they are visibly defective with wierd amorphous patterns on the disk.
While DVDs are generally awesome...renting DVDs sucks big time (washing every single rented DVD to make it playable is just a big pain in the ass).
The economist Brian Arthur is one of the proponents of the theory of path dependence [bearcave.com].
It sounds like "path dependence" is academic-speak for "_blatantly_obvious_ history of software and management decision-making." Does Brian Arther make good money off of his theories? If so, I think I need a career change!
Performance gains occur at the hardware level. Any tendency to optimize prematurely ought to be avoided, at least until after v1.0 ships.
So, if your app did a lot of 2-D graphics...I guess it is perfectly okay to refresh the whole window and every object in it with every repaint at 60Hz?
Remember, there are still lots of people out there with 4MB PCI graphics cards. Also, lots of Linux users have to run a non-accelerated X server for various reasons.
Also, for non-graphical applications (web servers, databases), there are still oodles of marketing people and "journalists" who will resort to benchmark scores in declaring a "winner" and will be using only v1.0. Benchmarks are a sad state of reality (just look at mostly-baseless CPU flamewars over SPEC this and that).
your claim of a thousand dollars ayear in savings is not holding water.
There are things I left out: payments alone will save a few thousand a year for the term of the loan, SUV tires are more expensive to replace, property insurance will likely be higher, gas savings alone is worth $500/year, SUVs are harder to care for (more likely to pay for professional detailing), SUVs are generally more expensive to repair (bigger everything), and, on average, SUVs have to cost more to insure, at least for the comprehensive part (would the insurance company rather the tree fall on the SUV or the sedan).
Safety will always be a mixed debate (SUVs are huge opaque boxes at intersections and in parking lots). Quite honestly, most SUVs out there are fashion statements and can readily be replaced by sedans, station wagons, and pickup trucks. For a little of everything, there's always Subaru.
Also, there is documented evidence that many SUV are not safer than cars. For example, Consumer Reports wrote up a full two pages on just how much the Mitsubishi Montero was an accident waiting to happen (it actually scared the test driver). There was a huge drawn-out legal battle with Ford over the early Explorers. Also, bigger SUVs fall into different legal categories, where safety standards can actually go down (they are literally utility trucks, not cars, at that point).
And one last thing, in more families than not (where I am) the SUV is replacing more than one vehicle.
Anything that requires more than a station wagon with a modest trailer hitch can easily be handled for under $50 at U-Haul. A person has to do a lot of hauling and towing to make renting a truck for one-off stuff uneconomical.
Proper shopping can save up to a grand or so a year depending on family size.
Yeah, I forgot to mention shopping. Buying meat on sale and finding the good generic products out there can save a bundle (generics are almost always cheaper than brand-name, even with coupons). Also, going to the store mid-day during the week is a lot less stressful than during the after-work and weekend rushes.
use cloth diapering.
I also hear it gets them potty-trained quicker! I've seen kids at four still wearing ultra-comfy "training pants", which is a bit sad.
Why the stratification?
I agree...actually, that's exactly what we did last year. Having liquidity really makes life more comfortable. It covers deductibles, random repairs, and other stuff that can't be predicted. This can actually lead to more savings by allowing higher deductibles on some insurance (over-insurance is almost worse than under-insurance).
Those people spending lots of money on things they "don't need" are the reason the rest of us get jobs.
It's always a balancing act between high rates of consumer bankruptcy and those jobs. Let's hope the economists out there can keep Congress in check.
So here it comes... Dell is going to slowly get into DRM.
So what. Currently, I am not a customer of "AOL, Dell, Disney, Napster and Freescale, a subsidiary of Motorola", and I never have to be. Disney is harder to avoid, but I can pretty much predict that their next twenty movies will be pretty much just like the last twenty, so I couldn't care less about Disney (add to this their views on copyright, and they can go fuck themselves twenty times while their making those twenty movies). I don't need a Motorola telephone or CPU. I don't need AOL (Mozilla is separate, now). I don't need napster, cause I simply never did.
The possibilities that computer HARDWARE will only work with DRM enabled BIOS's is coming.
Again, so what. 1) I don't own a new computer nor do I really need one for a while. 2) I can refuse DRM'd content sent to me by family and friends (and tell them why). 3) What about those millions upon millions of people who bought into Windows 98 and XP and don't have another grand to drop on a fancy new machine?!?
I predict that DRM will be a genuine non-issue for me. I can still get books. DVD and VHS movies will be around for quite a while. I can go out to dinner with my family (god forbid!).
Quite simply, entertainment is a dime-a-dozen and the companies who think they are worth anything will quickly learn just how fragile they are. They're like a house of cards: just because it isn't windy now doesn't mean the house is durable.
Humans are pretty darn versatile, and if we can't get our entertainment from Company XYZ conveniently and affordably, then we'll find someone else (live music, libraries, friends) or make our own. There is simply no way at all to monopolize entertainment.
As far as data goes, I think companies will learn pretty quick that many of their customers and clients won't be very warm to recieving data in a format they have to shell out big money to read. MS Office's success is mostly based on piracy in the first place, and I think Microsoft will hit a big wall trying to make DRM'd data formats ubiquitous if they expect any payment for the software.
The only real success for DRM will be when parties mutually agree in advance to use DRM purely for strategic reasons. There is good reason for three-letter government agencies or corporate R&D offices to want to use DRM internally, but, like trusted systems, is not something Joe and Jane Average will need or want or care about.
That said, I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files.
If the safe is just one of those standard melt-to-seal-with-little-water-vapor-beads fire safes, you'll be disappointed to see your CD backups molten and warped into uselessness after a fire. I'm pretty sure those safes are designed just for paper and other things that don't melt and need a fairly high temperature before burning.
The best policy is to keep backups somewhere else, such as another building separate from the house. If you have outbuildings that are not close to the house, that's one option. Bank boxes are another option for saps in the 'burbs. Just remember physical security, since pathetic teenagers just might walk away with your backups! In other words, put a lock on that barn door.
Fact check: Harvard, MIT, and Yale aren't the only good schools around...not only that, they are overpriced!
The high dropout rate is common in state-supported schools, where there is often low requirements for admission but a high requirement to make it to the second year. Not only that, many state-supported schools are, in fact, very good and don't require ten years of slavery after graduation to pay for them. I have learned the hard way (yes, my school was private and expensive) that "Ivy Leauge" is really a waste, unless a person has a trust fund, wants to be a diplomat or lawyer or brown-nosed businessman, or really wants a specific program only at a particular school (e.g., Princeton has a good graduate math program, I hear).
I feel sick when I see people complaining about how they need two incomes while they are pumping gas for their luxury SUV that they use to drive 30 miles to work because they live on a 5 acre plot in the suburbs.
One other thing that a second job does is breed laziness towards managing expenses (as a part of managing the household).
1) Buying car instead of SUV: saves at least $1000/year on gas, insurance, and maintenance.
2) No kids in daycare: saves thousands of dollars per year.
3) Taking the time to optimize phone plans, weatherproof the home, etc.: an easy several hundred dollars a year.
4) Trimming down all the extra crap like too many cable TV channels, not buying video games at $50/pop, buying Legos instead of Fisher Price: hey, that's another few hundred dollars!
5) Taking the time to reorganize savings into interest-bearing accounts: Bam, another few hundred dollars!
Seriously, how long until the time spent not working adds up to be worth more than a miserable two-worker household? Not only that, the laundry might get done and you can be home to meet the plumber/take car to mechanic/take kid to doctor/etc. without taking vacation!
He is now our family doctor.
Are the polyp and hernia checks somewhat awkward...or are they a suprisingly good time?
...it makes sense to model the world properly on hardware. Why not?
Just add some isolinear processors, and we'll have Broccoli muff-diving Troi in no-time flat!
writing, acting, and animation is up to Pixar's level
You mean hiring (insert popular 1980s stand-up comedian or sit-com actor) and (insert 1980s pop-music star) to add predictable "personality" and "charisma" to a movie designed for mass marketability to average-intelligence children and adults?
Quite simply, Pixar (and Disney) have a very successful (albeit expensive) formula for making a block-buster movie. Looking back at the last fifteen years of what these companies has pushed out does not reveal a whole lot of variety when looking at the personalities of the characters or of the musical scores. They vary somewhat on plot (often re-hashed from the public domain...what, I can't use Steamboat Mickey, you asshats?!?), but plot is irrelevant to success when Robin Williams or Eddie Murphy is on the payroll. This is why most recent CG movies are simply bland and boring (god, why was Shrek so damn popular--if I see another mass of a thousand cliches like Shrek, I'll puke; I know it wasn't Pixar, but it's all the same formula).
In short it looks like algorithm development has lagged sufficiently behind the computational power.
Well, there is one thing we cannot ignore is that computational power has enabled us to do things not before possible. Java, for example, offers much higher abstraction than C, X Windows, and OpenGL, meaning programmers have new ways of structuring programs and writing decent software (even games) without spending huge amounts of time on platform dependencies (an age-old time sink) or fine-grained memory management (another age-old time sink). People who think these higher-level environments are necessarily unusably slow need to rethink how they are writing their software, because they just aren't understanding what even a 300MHz CPU is capable of (with a good JIT, that is).
What was the "storyline" fot Mario?
Mario and Zelda were more-or-less the same ancient princess tale, but they had really really fun characters, great worlds to visit, and great marketing build-ups in Nintendo Power, complete with teaser maps and compelling artwork. Quite honestly, no "ancient princess tale" games before or since has matched what Nintendo did for these games.
Now that I think of it, Nintendo pulled a video-game "Power Rangers" or "Pokemon," which is quite the feat for a relatively expensive toy ($100+ NES + $50 games). What this means, however, is that there is only room for one "Pokemon" at a time (all other "Pokemon"-wannabes are exactly that: un-cool second-tier wannabes). By extension, this means that all the aspiring game developers aiming for this level of success are really building themselves up for coming in second, which is fine but not what people are asking for in this Slashdot discussion.
I would love to have an HDTV so I could see more detail in the films I watch.
Well, it depends. Certain categories of movies, while they are very very entertaining (and quite uplifting), when they look more real, are actually less appealing (eww, what are those...).
HDTV is so hyped right now but seems that there is barely any deployment.
This has been true for any value of "now" going back to at least the early 1990s, IIRC.
Even better, there was a guy on the evening news last week talking about the FCC's mandate for digital TV, too. Basically, it's also all hype with little reality mixed in. He said that it took decades for even the lowly VCR to gain 85+% household penetration and that it is basically a joke to expect mandatory ubiquitous digital TV by 2006 or whenever.
Regarding HDTV and digital TV: yeah, they're nice, but I'm not holding my breath until I get a good couple grand to spend on a new TV (basically not for another decade!).
he documentation bundled in the Solaris box set...
I forgot to mention this is more or less the same as docs.sun.com.
Solaris Internals by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall is the one I was thinking of. I'm pretty sure there are others, as well (Amazon shows a couple about performance tuning below the listing of Solaris Internals).
The documentation bundled in the Solaris box set also gives lots of clues about what's under the hood (e.g., tunable parameters, inter-process communication, kernel debugger, virtual memory etc.).
I'd have to say that Solaris is definitely among the most open of the proprietary UNIX systems.
...Linux developers take all the interesting bits from Solaris and port them to the Linux kernel--then you get all the stability etc of Solaris, but with Linux
Linux developers have pretty much always had this opportunity. The Solaris kernel architecture is well-documented in a publicly-available book, and the kernel source code has been made available before. Actually, the only parts of Solaris inaccessible to Linux developers are the parts they could never use anyway due to patents or licening issues. Sun's position doesn't really change either way, IMO.
What would be really fun is for someone in a far-off land immune from lawyers to re-release that leaked Windows code under the GPL and watch the Benny Hill-esque antics begin!
I definitely agree that Sun probably has people on both sides of the issue internally. For example, they provided the source code for Solaris 8 and the Java libraries but not Solaris 9. Also, the Solaris 8 source had some curious omissions, which are probably the parts that have licensing issues (OpenGL, SCO-cruft, etc.).
So, what would be very likely, based on prior behavior, would be for Sun to possibly release _most_ of Solaris under GPL minus the parts their lawyers are still unsure of. This would still be a big win for developers, who can benefit from debugging at nearly all levels. I've already benefited from having the Java source, GPL or no, and fully understand what those developers in the 1980's must have felt like.
7. Add 20% (I'm almost there...)
8. Add 20% (Just another two weeks...)
9. Add 20% (Darn these last minute bugs...)
10. Add 20% (Testing takes time, you know...)
11. Add 20% (They want "web based" now...)
12....