... point to me at some point in the last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of certainty how their tech worked.
Up until the middle '60s, at least, most people in the U.S. knew how the technology they depended on worked. Most males (and a surprising number of females) could understand (and usually fix) a car, a toilet, a light switch, a gun. Most folks who used a typewriter wouldn't take one apart (notice I didn't say couldn't), but they could tell you how they worked, and could clean one. Most technology was large and mechanical enough that you could look at it and see how it worked, or how it had failed.
Some technology was more or less incomprehensible. Many people didn't understand the physics of TV and radio. They could still repair their tube type equipment. Radio Shack used to have tube testers, and stocked repair parts. Ham radio enthusiasts were a larger portion of the general population then, too, I think. Most folks didn't understand electrical generation and electric motors, but they could repair the equipment. Even if you didn't understand the physics behind a motor, you could change the brushes, and maybe rewire it.
The only other technology in common use that you couldn't understand at a glance was the telephone system. You couldn't comprehend it at a glance because most of it was hidden away in the central office. Most folks couldn't fix a telepone, but that was because they never broke.
I don't think that people have gotten much dumber (though they're definitely less educated than my father's generation, on average), but the cheap, throw-away, indistinguishable-from-magic technology does seem to have made a lot of bright, curious kids shy away from trying to understand their world.
It's a duplicate. If you want to discourage dup's, don't come look here and tell us it's a repost; don't click on it at all. If Slashdot gets no traffic from reposts, they'll soon stop wasting front page space on them.
I sort of like reposts, since I usually don't come here often enough to see both the original and the repost. These dup's double the chance that I'll see a story on the front page. Having both on the front page at the same time is a little goofy, I have to admit. Still, if that doesn't hurt either their pride or their revenue stream, why should the slashdot crew care?
I still don't get it.:( I have never seen a geek bite a chicken head off like that. And I am a geek.
Since you still don't get it, maybe this is an honest request for information, rather than an attempt at sarcasm or irony. So, here goes.
A geek was a carnival sideshow freak, whose act was doing disgusting things like eating a live rat or biting the head off a chicken or two (chickens were too big to eat whole, unlike a small rat). Tradition has it that they were usually alcoholics, made to perform by witholding booze until they got the shakes so bad they'd do anything for a drink. Like all end-stage alcoholics, they didn't usually eat much, unless they happened to swallow a rat or a chicken head. The booze was the pay, so they were cheap. They didn't usually live long, but you could always find another in any town big enough to have a town drunk. Every carnival had a geek, and he was the very lowest of the low: the one person that everyone, including the hermaphrodite and the crap-shoveler, could look down on.
What's going to be harder in the future, and can be hard right now, is knowing how to verify and sift through the information you find on the internet.
That little insight is what made Google what it is. Anyone who figures a good way to really automate that is going to get far richer than they did.
Intelligence is so ill-defined that I feel a little foolish talking about it, but it's more or less correlated to lots of good things, like success in school, ability to write page ranking algorithms, and so on, so we do all keep talking about it, whatever it is.
I do think that over-reliance on technology can keep folks from using their brains, and thus keep them from developing their intelligence. Even someone who is reasonably shrewd about finding factual facts won't gain much by it if he can't analyse those facts.
I'd guess that writing did. After all, now you could learn from dead white males (or dead Chinese|et cetera males). That lets you develop more of your natural abilities than you would if you never talked to anyone but the dolts in your village. When you read, you can use you brain.
I'd guess that TV didn't increase intelligence. You can't use your brain while you watch. You have all those pictures flooding your mind, and they come much too fast to sort, consider and file away. You might have facts driven into your head (e.g., Sesame street), but you haven't had a conversation with another mind, and you haven't learned to reason.
I think that the sliderule added a bit to intelligence, for those who mastered it. It requires that you keep track of the decimal point in your head, and gives you an answer to three (or four) significant digits. It encourages estimation and back-of-the-envelope thinking. It really requires that you use your brain.
I think that the graphing calculator has reduced intelligence, for those who have been mastered by it. I've watched students whose TI-83 had aced AP calculus in high school flunk university calculus. They'd wasted years learning which buttons to push, and had never learned problem solving or basic principles. They were not only missing basic principles of calculus, but also basic principles of arithmatic, like 1/2=0.5 (yes, I really saw a student turn on a calculator to solve that!).
You are telling me that you could come up with a unique 14 character password every week and not have to write it down?
I think I could manage it, according to the rules in the GP post. That required 14 characters, with at least 60% (i.e., 9 of 14) not repeated from previous passwords.
So, use a pattern:
Five#abcdefghi
Five#bcdefghia
Five#cdefghiab
Five#defghiabc
and so on
You get nine different passwords, and all you need to remember is the template and the current starting point in the sequence you're rotating through. Odds are good that the system only remembers the last five or six passwords, so that template will probably be good forever.
So, you memorize the template, and if this is a week where the sequence starts with c, you have a big ``C'' on a sticky note on the monitor. I'm looking at a sticky note which says ``C'' right now (and no, that's NOT the template I'm using).
People are dying... from a lack of food and water.
You can live about 2 minutes without air, about 2 to five days without water, and about 2 weeks to 2 months without food.
I'd say that the priorities should be
getting people out of the water right now,
getting them drinking water today,
getting them out of the area entirely real soon now and, finally,
getting them food once all that really important stuff is taken care of.
All of us would hate going without food for three or four days, but most of us would be better off for doing it occasionally.
I think that they've got their priorities pretty straight, and that dropping MREs at random into the mess would just add to the mess and make the cleanup that much harder.
I hope that the various relief agencies are getting soup kitchens set up where the refugees are, but that has nothing to do with air dropping MREs.
>>Bottom line, the world needs something that accually works, and is open-source.
>Wow. If that's true Apple's in deep shit.
Not really. OSX actually works (so they say), and significant portions of it are open source. Not the eyecandy, of course, but the foundations. If the world really needs what he said, Apple may do just fine. Is that really what the world wants? I haven't seen much evidence of demand for either ``actually works'' or ``open source''. I hope I'm wrong about that, but history suggests that the inferior product has a huge advantage.
The market is big enough for lots of players.
I remember before the IBM PC. Back then, when the market was a lot smaller, there really was room for lots of players. There was Vector Graphics, IMSAI, Altair, Altos, Otrona, Kaypro, Osbourne, General Automation, Franklin, Apple, Commodore, Northstar, Tandy, Heathkit (including a kit PDP-11!) and many others, running Xenix, single or multi-user variants of CPM, Pick, and I don't know what-all. I worked on or with them all. I had a diskette with a program which allowed me to read 43 different, proprietary, soft-sectored floppy disk formats. Obviously, that didn't include the 8-inch floppies and the hard-sectored ones like the Vector graphics. There were many manufacturers, and a huge variety of hardware and software.
Then came IBM. Suddenly the market was huge, and there wasn't room for all those many computer makers and their diverse products. Of that list of hardware and software platforms I mentioned above, how many are around today? How many do you even remember?
I'd say the microcomputer market is either way too small for ``lots of players'', or way too big. Right now, it seems to be about right for Wintel (or WinAMD) and a maybe Apple, and Apple's been dying at least as long as BSD.
Because we all know that government's [sic] never do anything beneficial to the community: like roads, education for those who couldn't otherwise afford it, public transportation, water supplies, defense, the police...
We can see what happens when they do all that. We can see all the nifty roads with the nifty potholes, we can see Amtrak, we can see the $400 hammers and $900 toilet seats that are defending our country.
We can't see what would happen if they didn't do that. It's quite possible that we would have a far richer society, with far greater social and economic equality, if they weren't doing all that ``for'' us.
Everything on your list of ``what the government does for us (whether we like it or not)'' has been provided by private enterprise, and could be again. Would we be better or worse off if the government gave up its monopoly on any or all of those things? I don't think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards ``better off''.
A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.
And a knee jerk liberal is a liberal jerk. I'd suggest that you (and everyone who's afflicted with a jerking knee) read Bastiat's ``The Law'' and Henry Hazlet's ``Economics in One Lesson'' to help you avoid making unwarranted assumptions about how much good government is doing us all. There's a lot more to learn, but those two will get you started.
Does it not seem somewhat strange that we are more than happy to rally against measures by certain governments to restrict our internet liberties, yet there is no problem with us blocking whole nations access to western sites because of rogue elements in their borders?
Nope. Nothing strange about that.
For you or me to choose not to get email from Chinese addresses, or not to acknowledge packets from Chinese addresses, is to exercise our liberty. We have the right (among others) to ``freedom of association''. That means that we can choose who we associate with... and who we don't.
This is radically different than a government trying to tell us that we cannot access certian websites (as the Chinese government has been doing with help from Cisco, MS and Google).
Let me try to re-phrase all that in simple terms: If we don't want to play with somebody, that's OK. If the bullies try to stop us from playing with someone, that's not OK.
The fact that you can even compare a beta version of Windows Vista to a final release of Apple's operating systems...
How about comparing a beta version of Windows Vista to an alpha version of Wine (in alpha for 10 years and counting)? Wine runs many Windows programs as well as Windows does, and I don't have to reboot when (never say if, when you're talking about Windows programs) they crash.
The fact that Wine is close enough in functionality and quality to W2kSP2 to actually make a comparison shows that the Winos have truly trumped the hacker shop that is Microsoft.
N.B.: For the humor impared, this post is sarcasm, to show that had the parent post been serious, it would have been wrong.
I wonder how someone gets into that line of work...
Typically, by breastfeeding their own babies successfully. There's no reason that you couldn't be one, if you can manage to breastfeed your own children. Oddly enough, I've never seen nor heard of a male in that line of work.
Back to intuitive interfaces, I've never seen a newborn who didn't need some help with finding and latching onto the nipple the first few times. If the only intuitive interface is a nipple, there is no intuitive interface.
Existing Microsoft Windows customers will pay Dell + Microsoft to run Apple's operating system. Apple gets $0.00, and (in your assertion) Apple doesn't lose any money at all... but they also don't gain any money either.
So, does Dell+MS have to lose for Apple to win? Jobs is crazy, but he's crazy like a fox, so far. I don't think he buys into that sort of self destructive thinking.
The Apple stores in Asia now simply close down, because they're no longer making sales of their hardware running their OS, because someone else can do it for $50.00 and include the computer + the pirated OS.
Interesting idea. I'd never seen an Apple store in the little bit of Asia I've seen. I suppose there are some.
My perception has always been that Apple customers are willing, even eager, to pay up for the Apple experience. They want the whole shooting match, from the reality distortion field to the logo to knowing they're cool to the relatively low hassle daily use. I'd guess that anyone in Asia who's actually using Apple hardware today is doing it for the Apple experience and (this is probably true in Asia far more than in the U.S.) for the conspicuous consumption value. After all, everyone knows that Apple is expensive, and that's what really matters to the nouveau riche.
Is this making any sense to you at all?
Sorry, not much. As I said in the original post, Apple has always gone for that small but profitable niche that doesn't want a cheap clone with a pirated OS and no support.
Many people will install OSX on generic hardware, but none of them will be potential customers for Apple as we know it.
So you think Apple should let you pay Dell and Microsoft to run their OS, all while giving Apple not a single cent?
I think it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who would do this is not, that's N - O - T NOT an Apple customer, and isn't likely to be. Apple has always sold to artsy-craftsy types, who don't know phrases like ``download a hacked OS'', ``wipe Windows from the machine'' and ``image the blank Dell''. They not only don't know what that means, they wouldn't do it if they could! The Apple customers want Apple all the way, and they're willing to pay for it.
Unless Apple is planning to make radical changes in their marketing and manufacturing to accomodate us price sensitive, white-box building, OS installing hackers, it's extremely unlikely that Apple will ever lose a sale to a download. Since making those changes would almost surely involve alienating their current customer base, it's just not going to happen, so, again, it's extremely unlikely that Apple will ever lose a sale to a download.
You think this is what they should allow?
Yes.
As I said above, Apple isn't ever likely to lose a sale to a download. They might gain some mind share among the people clueless newbies look to for computer purchasing advice. With nothing to lose and a chance of gain, sure, why not allow this?
>> If you want to be located when you call 911, maintain a land-line. Where is the goddamn rocket science here, people?
>Because we all know that all situations that necessitate a 911 call happen in a person's home.
Well, if you're not willing to be on your own sometimes, maybe you should stick close to mommy. Or Big Brother.
Some of us would rather not be forced into such a close, constant association with either.
The problem here is not that there will be phones available that report your location, but the fact that only that sort of phone will be available.
Personally I think the "worst kind" of vigilante approach would be getting the spammers home addresses and savagely beating them... or killing them.
Isn't that spelled ``best''?
Seriously, the grandparent post refered to this as a DDOS. If the spammer sends me an email, he's certainly got no right to complain if he gets one back. If he gets enough back to shut down his website, well, he shouldn't have sent so much spam, should he? My understanding is that Blue Frog tries to send an unsubscribe message for every spammed address (their website is slashdotted)? If so, the spammers have already announced their willingness to get that message, and it is obviously legal.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very hot topic today in computer circles because of the interest in modeling behaviors on machines that we find in nature.
Man! I never find any machines in Nature, except the occasional stripped car with the windshield shot out. Where is this guy finding his machines? It must be a great place to go hiking.
Let me see: ``I am the Information Manager of a small (20 person) architecture firm...''. So that's 17 draftsmen and architects, a receptionist, an office manager, and you? Or are you the most CAD-capable of the draftsmen?
That's an important question, because if they've actually hired you to be ``Information Manager'', they're going to have entirely different expectations than if they've hired you to be a draftsman and dumped this extra responsibility on you.
If you're a draftsman with an extra burden, I recommend that you look for the thing(s) which will let you solve a few small problems, give you no new problems, and not waste any of your time on adminstration. Find the price tag, and you have your budget. If the number is too small, new machines all around (or, just for the partners and their favorites, and let their old machines trickle down). You can't afford to neglect the one part of your job they understand (the drafting), so don't let yourself get trapped in system administration!
If you were hired to be a full time IT manager, why are you asking us for advice? Figure out what they need, tell them what it costs and how it will save costs and increase revenues. You do know how to do that, right?
It's that or junk-bond financing. Neither one sounds like a very bright plan to me. As a shareholder in both companies, I am not excited by this whole thing.
I'm not excited by the prospect of seeing my CSCO holdings diluted, and maybe seeing them screw up and go the way of Time-Warner. I'm not excited by the prospect of seeing my NOK shares traded for some diluted CSCO shares. I'm not excited by the prospect of seeing either management team take over from the other. I'm so not excited, in fact, that I'll probably dump both companies if this turns out to be real.
... heaven forbid that guy makes a few bucks from people not intending to donate to his beer-and-porn fund.
Since it doesn't change the price I pay Amazon, I'm afraid that I just can't work up any rightous indignation about it. In fact, since (or maybe if) he's saving folks $10, I'd say it's pretty good if a few quarters land in his beer fund.
1. You can build a transmitter with a handful of primitive components. It's cheap. It's good for the third world.
True. But, unless you're talking about an arc welder (for a real spark-gap transmitter!), where are you going to find those primitive components? Transistors have gotten nearly as hard to find as tubes. Yes, I know that Radio Shack still stocks a few transistors, but if you're stranded on that proverbial desert island, how will you get that ``handful of primitive components'', and how will you power them?
Slashdot Mirror
Up until the middle '60s, at least, most people in the U.S. knew how the technology they depended on worked. Most males (and a surprising number of females) could understand (and usually fix) a car, a toilet, a light switch, a gun. Most folks who used a typewriter wouldn't take one apart (notice I didn't say couldn't), but they could tell you how they worked, and could clean one. Most technology was large and mechanical enough that you could look at it and see how it worked, or how it had failed.
Some technology was more or less incomprehensible. Many people didn't understand the physics of TV and radio. They could still repair their tube type equipment. Radio Shack used to have tube testers, and stocked repair parts. Ham radio enthusiasts were a larger portion of the general population then, too, I think. Most folks didn't understand electrical generation and electric motors, but they could repair the equipment. Even if you didn't understand the physics behind a motor, you could change the brushes, and maybe rewire it.
The only other technology in common use that you couldn't understand at a glance was the telephone system. You couldn't comprehend it at a glance because most of it was hidden away in the central office. Most folks couldn't fix a telepone, but that was because they never broke.
I don't think that people have gotten much dumber (though they're definitely less educated than my father's generation, on average), but the cheap, throw-away, indistinguishable-from-magic technology does seem to have made a lot of bright, curious kids shy away from trying to understand their world.
I sort of like reposts, since I usually don't come here often enough to see both the original and the repost. These dup's double the chance that I'll see a story on the front page. Having both on the front page at the same time is a little goofy, I have to admit. Still, if that doesn't hurt either their pride or their revenue stream, why should the slashdot crew care?
Since you still don't get it, maybe this is an honest request for information, rather than an attempt at sarcasm or irony. So, here goes.
A geek was a carnival sideshow freak, whose act was doing disgusting things like eating a live rat or biting the head off a chicken or two (chickens were too big to eat whole, unlike a small rat). Tradition has it that they were usually alcoholics, made to perform by witholding booze until they got the shakes so bad they'd do anything for a drink. Like all end-stage alcoholics, they didn't usually eat much, unless they happened to swallow a rat or a chicken head. The booze was the pay, so they were cheap. They didn't usually live long, but you could always find another in any town big enough to have a town drunk. Every carnival had a geek, and he was the very lowest of the low: the one person that everyone, including the hermaphrodite and the crap-shoveler, could look down on.
That is why I never refer to myself as a geek.
That little insight is what made Google what it is. Anyone who figures a good way to really automate that is going to get far richer than they did.
Intelligence is so ill-defined that I feel a little foolish talking about it, but it's more or less correlated to lots of good things, like success in school, ability to write page ranking algorithms, and so on, so we do all keep talking about it, whatever it is.
I do think that over-reliance on technology can keep folks from using their brains, and thus keep them from developing their intelligence. Even someone who is reasonably shrewd about finding factual facts won't gain much by it if he can't analyse those facts.
I'd guess that writing did. After all, now you could learn from dead white males (or dead Chinese|et cetera males). That lets you develop more of your natural abilities than you would if you never talked to anyone but the dolts in your village. When you read, you can use you brain.
I'd guess that TV didn't increase intelligence. You can't use your brain while you watch. You have all those pictures flooding your mind, and they come much too fast to sort, consider and file away. You might have facts driven into your head (e.g., Sesame street), but you haven't had a conversation with another mind, and you haven't learned to reason.
I think that the sliderule added a bit to intelligence, for those who mastered it. It requires that you keep track of the decimal point in your head, and gives you an answer to three (or four) significant digits. It encourages estimation and back-of-the-envelope thinking. It really requires that you use your brain.
I think that the graphing calculator has reduced intelligence, for those who have been mastered by it. I've watched students whose TI-83 had aced AP calculus in high school flunk university calculus. They'd wasted years learning which buttons to push, and had never learned problem solving or basic principles. They were not only missing basic principles of calculus, but also basic principles of arithmatic, like 1/2=0.5 (yes, I really saw a student turn on a calculator to solve that!).
Does that tell us something about your intelligence in the internet age?
Seriously (didn't want to be mean, but couldn't help myself), were you maybe thinking of Alfred Whitehead, who said:
How about sunburn? How about fat, old and naked don't go well together?
Ick.
Sue your customers until they love you. It's working for the RIAA, after all!
I think I could manage it, according to the rules in the GP post. That required 14 characters, with at least 60% (i.e., 9 of 14) not repeated from previous passwords.
So, use a pattern:
- Five#abcdefghi
- Five#bcdefghia
- Five#cdefghiab
- Five#defghiabc
-
and so on
You get nine different passwords, and all you need to remember is the template and the current starting point in the sequence you're rotating through. Odds are good that the system only remembers the last five or six passwords, so that template will probably be good forever.So, you memorize the template, and if this is a week where the sequence starts with c, you have a big ``C'' on a sticky note on the monitor. I'm looking at a sticky note which says ``C'' right now (and no, that's NOT the template I'm using).
You can live about 2 minutes without air, about 2 to five days without water, and about 2 weeks to 2 months without food.
I'd say that the priorities should be
- getting people out of the water right now,
- getting them drinking water today,
- getting them out of the area entirely real soon now and, finally,
- getting them food once all that really important stuff is taken care of.
All of us would hate going without food for three or four days, but most of us would be better off for doing it occasionally.I think that they've got their priorities pretty straight, and that dropping MREs at random into the mess would just add to the mess and make the cleanup that much harder.
I hope that the various relief agencies are getting soup kitchens set up where the refugees are, but that has nothing to do with air dropping MREs.
>Wow. If that's true Apple's in deep shit.
Not really. OSX actually works (so they say), and significant portions of it are open source. Not the eyecandy, of course, but the foundations. If the world really needs what he said, Apple may do just fine. Is that really what the world wants? I haven't seen much evidence of demand for either ``actually works'' or ``open source''. I hope I'm wrong about that, but history suggests that the inferior product has a huge advantage.
The market is big enough for lots of players.
I remember before the IBM PC. Back then, when the market was a lot smaller, there really was room for lots of players. There was Vector Graphics, IMSAI, Altair, Altos, Otrona, Kaypro, Osbourne, General Automation, Franklin, Apple, Commodore, Northstar, Tandy, Heathkit (including a kit PDP-11!) and many others, running Xenix, single or multi-user variants of CPM, Pick, and I don't know what-all. I worked on or with them all. I had a diskette with a program which allowed me to read 43 different, proprietary, soft-sectored floppy disk formats. Obviously, that didn't include the 8-inch floppies and the hard-sectored ones like the Vector graphics. There were many manufacturers, and a huge variety of hardware and software.
Then came IBM. Suddenly the market was huge, and there wasn't room for all those many computer makers and their diverse products. Of that list of hardware and software platforms I mentioned above, how many are around today? How many do you even remember?
I'd say the microcomputer market is either way too small for ``lots of players'', or way too big. Right now, it seems to be about right for Wintel (or WinAMD) and a maybe Apple, and Apple's been dying at least as long as BSD.
We can see what happens when they do all that. We can see all the nifty roads with the nifty potholes, we can see Amtrak, we can see the $400 hammers and $900 toilet seats that are defending our country.
We can't see what would happen if they didn't do that. It's quite possible that we would have a far richer society, with far greater social and economic equality, if they weren't doing all that ``for'' us.
Everything on your list of ``what the government does for us (whether we like it or not)'' has been provided by private enterprise, and could be again. Would we be better or worse off if the government gave up its monopoly on any or all of those things? I don't think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards ``better off''.
A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.
And a knee jerk liberal is a liberal jerk. I'd suggest that you (and everyone who's afflicted with a jerking knee) read Bastiat's ``The Law'' and Henry Hazlet's ``Economics in One Lesson'' to help you avoid making unwarranted assumptions about how much good government is doing us all. There's a lot more to learn, but those two will get you started.
Nope. Nothing strange about that.
For you or me to choose not to get email from Chinese addresses, or not to acknowledge packets from Chinese addresses, is to exercise our liberty. We have the right (among others) to ``freedom of association''. That means that we can choose who we associate with ... and who we don't.
This is radically different than a government trying to tell us that we cannot access certian websites (as the Chinese government has been doing with help from Cisco, MS and Google).
Let me try to re-phrase all that in simple terms: If we don't want to play with somebody, that's OK. If the bullies try to stop us from playing with someone, that's not OK.
OK?
An unusual act of wisdom. Wasn't Katrina a Cat 5 [1] hurricane? We don't need no steek'n study: we've got the real thing.
[1] A cat 5 hurricane is a multipair (usually 4 pair) high performance hurricane, capable of carrying data at up to 100Mbps.
How about comparing a beta version of Windows Vista to an alpha version of Wine (in alpha for 10 years and counting)? Wine runs many Windows programs as well as Windows does, and I don't have to reboot when (never say if, when you're talking about Windows programs) they crash.
The fact that Wine is close enough in functionality and quality to W2kSP2 to actually make a comparison shows that the Winos have truly trumped the hacker shop that is Microsoft.
N.B.: For the humor impared, this post is sarcasm, to show that had the parent post been serious, it would have been wrong.
I wonder how someone gets into that line of work...
Typically, by breastfeeding their own babies successfully. There's no reason that you couldn't be one, if you can manage to breastfeed your own children. Oddly enough, I've never seen nor heard of a male in that line of work.
Back to intuitive interfaces, I've never seen a newborn who didn't need some help with finding and latching onto the nipple the first few times. If the only intuitive interface is a nipple, there is no intuitive interface.
So, does Dell+MS have to lose for Apple to win? Jobs is crazy, but he's crazy like a fox, so far. I don't think he buys into that sort of self destructive thinking.
The Apple stores in Asia now simply close down, because they're no longer making sales of their hardware running their OS, because someone else can do it for $50.00 and include the computer + the pirated OS.
Interesting idea. I'd never seen an Apple store in the little bit of Asia I've seen. I suppose there are some.
My perception has always been that Apple customers are willing, even eager, to pay up for the Apple experience. They want the whole shooting match, from the reality distortion field to the logo to knowing they're cool to the relatively low hassle daily use. I'd guess that anyone in Asia who's actually using Apple hardware today is doing it for the Apple experience and (this is probably true in Asia far more than in the U.S.) for the conspicuous consumption value. After all, everyone knows that Apple is expensive, and that's what really matters to the nouveau riche.
Is this making any sense to you at all?
Sorry, not much. As I said in the original post, Apple has always gone for that small but profitable niche that doesn't want a cheap clone with a pirated OS and no support.
Many people will install OSX on generic hardware, but none of them will be potential customers for Apple as we know it.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who would do this is not, that's N - O - T NOT an Apple customer, and isn't likely to be. Apple has always sold to artsy-craftsy types, who don't know phrases like ``download a hacked OS'', ``wipe Windows from the machine'' and ``image the blank Dell''. They not only don't know what that means, they wouldn't do it if they could! The Apple customers want Apple all the way, and they're willing to pay for it.
Unless Apple is planning to make radical changes in their marketing and manufacturing to accomodate us price sensitive, white-box building, OS installing hackers, it's extremely unlikely that Apple will ever lose a sale to a download. Since making those changes would almost surely involve alienating their current customer base, it's just not going to happen, so, again, it's extremely unlikely that Apple will ever lose a sale to a download.
You think this is what they should allow?
Yes.
As I said above, Apple isn't ever likely to lose a sale to a download. They might gain some mind share among the people clueless newbies look to for computer purchasing advice. With nothing to lose and a chance of gain, sure, why not allow this?
>Because we all know that all situations that necessitate a 911 call happen in a person's home.
Well, if you're not willing to be on your own sometimes, maybe you should stick close to mommy. Or Big Brother.
Some of us would rather not be forced into such a close, constant association with either. The problem here is not that there will be phones available that report your location, but the fact that only that sort of phone will be available.
Isn't that spelled ``best''?
Seriously, the grandparent post refered to this as a DDOS. If the spammer sends me an email, he's certainly got no right to complain if he gets one back. If he gets enough back to shut down his website, well, he shouldn't have sent so much spam, should he? My understanding is that Blue Frog tries to send an unsubscribe message for every spammed address (their website is slashdotted)? If so, the spammers have already announced their willingness to get that message, and it is obviously legal.
Man! I never find any machines in Nature, except the occasional stripped car with the windshield shot out. Where is this guy finding his machines? It must be a great place to go hiking.
That's an important question, because if they've actually hired you to be ``Information Manager'', they're going to have entirely different expectations than if they've hired you to be a draftsman and dumped this extra responsibility on you.
If you're a draftsman with an extra burden, I recommend that you look for the thing(s) which will let you solve a few small problems, give you no new problems, and not waste any of your time on adminstration. Find the price tag, and you have your budget. If the number is too small, new machines all around (or, just for the partners and their favorites, and let their old machines trickle down). You can't afford to neglect the one part of your job they understand (the drafting), so don't let yourself get trapped in system administration!
If you were hired to be a full time IT manager, why are you asking us for advice? Figure out what they need, tell them what it costs and how it will save costs and increase revenues. You do know how to do that, right?
It's that or junk-bond financing. Neither one sounds like a very bright plan to me. As a shareholder in both companies, I am not excited by this whole thing.
I'm not excited by the prospect of seeing my CSCO holdings diluted, and maybe seeing them screw up and go the way of Time-Warner. I'm not excited by the prospect of seeing my NOK shares traded for some diluted CSCO shares. I'm not excited by the prospect of seeing either management team take over from the other. I'm so not excited, in fact, that I'll probably dump both companies if this turns out to be real.
Since it doesn't change the price I pay Amazon, I'm afraid that I just can't work up any rightous indignation about it. In fact, since (or maybe if) he's saving folks $10, I'd say it's pretty good if a few quarters land in his beer fund.
True. But, unless you're talking about an arc welder (for a real spark-gap transmitter!), where are you going to find those primitive components? Transistors have gotten nearly as hard to find as tubes. Yes, I know that Radio Shack still stocks a few transistors, but if you're stranded on that proverbial desert island, how will you get that ``handful of primitive components'', and how will you power them?