I agree entirely. Though I am interested in such a device, I took one look at the picture of it and just thought "NO". I don't care how cheap it is or what the internal specification is, it's a horrible design.
I would dearly love to know what causes design people to make this kind of decision... I don't buy Apple products because of the percentage of the price that goes into the design and look of them, but, credit where credit is due, at least there IS a practicality about Apple's design.
But the Boxee is just *AWFUL* full stop - and the look of it is going to turn lots of people away the moment they see it.
Viruses spread because of a high population of similar operating environments and because that operating environment allows high-level access to the system.
Windows can be locked down very tightly such that anything a user does on a system is restricted to just the stuff they are allowed to do - but the problem there is that configuring it is complicated for the average home user, and no home user wants to have to keep messing around with those settings just because they need to temporarily open up permissions to, say, install a new application.
Likewise, corporate IT support people are far too busy and far too few in number to be able to deal with the plethora of support calls from users who need to install something or do something and therefore need some permissions changed temporarily. Consequently, the amount of Windows lockdown that happens in the corporate enterprise is a compromise between security & what your IT team has the capability to support.
Linux has some definite advantages in this area.
In the same way that 90% of PCs run Windows (or whatever the statistic is), if 90% of Linux users ran Ubuntu, then there is a relatively large population of users who are potentially running similar operating environments - however, Linux users are a mixed bunch of people running all manner of different distros with their own ways of doing things and their own list of applications that are installed by default. The chances of finding a single application to exploit amongst all those is minimal.
Additionally, by design, a UNIX-like OS has simpler but stricter permissions by default (which, I agree, are cumbersome if you need to create complicated permissions structures).
If you are a normal user on a system, then pretty much anything you run or do on a system can only ever damage the files that you own. (Yes, sudo and SUID allow for some exceptions of running stuff as another user, or as root, but likewise these are the first things targetted when anyone security audits a UNIX box, they're known security issues and therefore usage of them is minimised as much as possible).
An additional advantage of Linux, which doesn't really happen in Windows by default, is that if there's an app you need to install as a user, then a lot of time you can get away with not installing it (under root permissions) centrally on the server but do your own local install in your home directory. This means the application is run as you and cannot touch any files that aren't owned by you.
So it really comes down to the basic architecture of the OS and what you need to do to secure it. Home users of XP can immediately make themselves administrators on their systems and that means everything they do and run is with that level of permissions - Linux users can do the same if they wish but the first page of any Linux newbie manual or security document will always highly recommend doing as much as you can as a normal user and just change to root permissions when you really need to. (I know Vista and Windows 7 have brought in all this UAC stuff but I don't use either so cannot comment.)
Incidentally, this is not meant to be Linux zealotry. I personally use Linux more than Windows these days, but I do quite like XP and keep a copy handy for some must have apps and games.
Linux does have security dangers, these revolve around systems running daemons (services) that can be accessed and exploited by an external party - so whereas much of the security on Windows is focused around protecting against malware, on a Linux system security revolves around not running any services you don't need to and keeping the ones you do need up to date.
But even then, exploiting a Linux server usually has to be a directed attack by a human being or script against a specific daemon on a specific server; viruses on Windows just spread of their own accord to any available machine.
It looks to me like you are contradicting yourself by evangelising Chrome.
Besides which, who gives a shit? Both browsers are free to use, there are enough add-ons about to sync bookmarks and settings between the two, and hard disks are not small these days. Therefore I personally give both of them a spin and "let nature take its course"; if I end up only using one of them in the future then so be it.
1) You are able to connect to the Internet on your PC (whatever OS it runs) because of open standards - i.e. TCP/IP.
2) You are able to read & post on Slashdot now because of open standards like HTTP.
3) NVIDIA and ATI create Linux graphics drivers which are closed sourced & therefore closed standards. Likewise Adobe with Flash and a few others. In other words, just because someone runs Linux, it does not mean everything run on it is based on open standards.
4) You're deluding yourself if you believe most Linux users give a damn about what you run. Linux exists as an alternative to, and despite of, proprietary Microsoft OSes and most people use it because of its capabilities. An OS is nothing more than a computer toolkit & you choose the what tools you consider to be right for the job.
I find it unusual that someone who clearly supports the ability to run Linux on the PS3, would not also play their audio CDs on a Linux PC in order to negate any Sony rootkits.
I would also hope that someone who is clearly concerned about malware and security has not stopped buying CDs in favour of BitTorrenting their music where, of course, the risk of malware infection is potentially much greater.
It is indeed an oversimplification but there is also *some* truth in it, if you look at it from the perspective of age.
The chances are that someone who is earning that kind of salary is not going to be a graduate in their 20s with a few years work experience but an experienced professional in their 30s and 40s. (Yes, I know there are exceptions but hear me out.)
And as someone in his 40s, I can tell you that I'm far less materialistic than I was in my 20s or 30s, far more discerning in my tastes and don't suffer from peer pressure. Consequently, far fewer (if any) trivial things that used to bug me no longer do so, the net result is I'm far more calm & contented.
The net result is I'm happy whilst earning a reasonable good salary & being middle-aged.
I don't actually have a problem with the current business model, except that I'd like a legal way of previewing a piece of music before I decide to buy it.
I buy lots of CDs, I don't think £10 is an unfair price to pay for an album I may have enjoyed over decades. I'm also quite happy for the music industry to use its huge marketing budgets to advertise at me (within reason) because appropriate adverts in the music magazines I read have lead to find even more great music.
Musicians selling their own music on their own web site will not have those marketing budgets, therefore there's nothing to lead me to them in preference to the thousands of other artists who are doing the same thing.
People who concerns themselves with the operation of the music industry are deluded. All that matters is whether or not the end product is value-for-money or not.
If it's not worth the money, then don't buy it & don't copy it. If enough people do that, the industry cannot blame music pirates for their lack of sales, therefore they have to themselves change their business model.
Just to say that I do actually buy all my music on CD, simply because I don't think £10 for a piece of music that I might enjoy for 30+ years is not an unfair price for it.
But how many film trailers have you seen where the film looked really good - and then rented or bought the actual film whereupon it was crap.
If an album appeals to me that much, I will go out and buy it - but I want to hear most of it first. Likewise, if only half the tracks on it are good, then I want the option of making a note of it and possibly waiting until I can get is used or in a bargain sale for £5.
...how many times in your life have you sat and watched a TV program or movie and come away thinking "I wonder if it would have been any better filmed in 3D"?
Even if you have thought that, I doubt it's a lot less times then you came away thinking "I wonder if it would have been better if":
1. "They had spent more time writing a good plot".
2. "It had been directed by [INSERT FAVOURITE DIRECTOR'S NAME HERE]".
3. "They had not pounded me with expensive advertising trying to convince me it was better than it actually was".
Unfortunately, a turd wrapped in shiny paper with a bow on it is still just a turd.
I am actually a bit of a Radiohead fan and I admire the sentiment behind what they're doing - but frankly, given the choice between a paid-for live concert DVD shot by trained cameramen or a free fan-recorded "shaky-cam" version, I choose the former.
I'm middle-aged and lazy, I'm quite happy to just hand over some money and be entertained without all this interactive "by the fans, for the fans" nonsense.
If you're a musician or band, make a nice-sounding CD for me and I will buy it and enjoy it. I don't want to go through all the hassles of picking odd tracks off of it.
If I like your CD enough, I may come and see you live. You sell me a ticket, I watch you play live, have a beer or two while I'm doing it, then come out the concert venue two hours later with a smile on face having had a good time.
And if it was that good a concert and you had a proper set of cameramen doing a good job of filming it, I may even but the live DVD as a memento of that concert.
Straightforward and simple - I hand over money, you entertain me.
I'm in my 40s, as a kid I grew up watching my dad & other male relatives build furniture out of wood, decorate houses, build brick walls, mend washing machines, etc. etc.
I grew up in a house where I had enough free reign to take stuff apart to see how it worked and try and fix it - yes, sometimes I broke it for good or couldn't get it back together again.
Then when I got into my teens, I built electronic circuits, learnt to program Z80 CPUs in assembly and took bicycles or mower engines apart to clean and fix them - again, sometimes what I did made it worse.
Since then, I've spent 30 years in telecoms, computers and IT and done a good job over those years. Not once have I considered entering management, the closest I've ever got is writing and presenting training courses, along with some technical mentoring as necessary.
It's impossible to be trained as an expert in every piece of hardware, operating system, telecoms principle, etc. that I come across but most of the time I get by using my engineering brain and knowing my limits - so if I need to know something more about something, I ask someone or go read a book. I'm not afraid to tell anyone "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer but give me a day or two and I think I can find one."
In IT especially, there are a lot of people who are afraid to admit their limitations or even believe themselves to always be right - and on some occasions, I've taken great joy in taking them down a step or two.
The point is that logic, intuition and self-motivation are disappearing in business - sorry, but as I'm over here in the UK I blame it entirely on American-style management techniques (although we're not blameless for accepting it so readily) where everything is performance and statistically based, and as long as you achieve your targets, it doesn't matter if you can think outside the box or not.
I know that being a good engineer is not about necessarily having the answer there and then but knowing how to get towards getting the answer in a logical fashion. That is a skill that comes from real-world experience, it cannot be trained into you.
And whilst I lack management skills, I expect that the same is true for a good manager - leadership & motivation skills are not something you can be taught, they're skills you pick up as you progress through life.
I'm a big Open Source advocate & user, I also own an Android phone in preference to anything by Apple, but I'm telling you now that your model will not work - exactly in the same way as it won't work for music.
If you are a struggling self-publicising author or musician, what exactly is going to lead to find and buy your specific book or music that you are trying to sell, especially if there are hundreds of thousands of similar authors & musicians doing the same thing?
I can't say I particularly like publishers or record companies myself but the fact is that both have vast wads of cash to spend on advertising & marketing that is ultimately going to lead consumers like you & me to buy specific products. I hate advertising as much as the next guy but, for example, as a big fan of rock music I buy a monthly magazine here called Classic Rock and have found a lot of good albums to listen to having checked out adverts within its pages - there is both good & bad advertising.
All said & done, with stuff like books & music, I don't consider it my business anyway as to how that product ultimately got to me - all I care about is whether or not it was worth the money I paid for it. I actually like the current business models for books & music anyway because I don't think paying £10 or so for a CD I may have thoroughly enjoyed over & over again over the course of 30 years is particularly bad value for money - the same goes for some books that I own.
Far too many people have too much time on their hands, sticking their noses in where there's no need to do - how much a musician gets for each CD that's sold, or an author for each book that's sold, is irrelevant to me & for them to employ lawyers to go & sort out. I only care about good value for money & being able to find products that I enjoy - whether you or I like it or not, marketing budgets help with that.
I've a Nexus One phone with Froyo 2.2 that I'm very pleased with but my one negative with it (or any other phone for that matter) is storage capacity. It's a great MP3 player but the biggest MicroSD card currently is 32GB and here in the UK they cost something close to £100 each - so I opted for a 16GB one at about £30.
Consequently, I'm now looking for an MP3 player that can hold as much of my (entirely legal CD) music collection as possible. I don't buy digital music (I prefer tangible & plastic) so have no interest in iTunes, but a 160GB iPod Classic seemed the best solution to store and play the majority of my 1000+ CD collection that I've ripped to MP3.
However, having done a little research on the web, I've discovered heaps of complaints regarding the new 8th Generation iPod Classics over here in Europe. Apparently, Apple have implemented a volume limiter in the 8th Gen Classics, supposedly because of EU sound level requirements and lots of people are now complaining about being unable to hear their music if background noise is high.
Okay, I accept this might have been forced onto Apple to a degree, but why then do other manufacturers of portable music devices not have the same volume limiting installed on their devices? Sure, music at loud volume for a sustained period will damage hearing but I would at least like the option of turning it up high when ambient noise levels are also high...
Incidentally, if anyone wants to throw some suggestions my way as to good alternative MP3 players with 100GB+ of storage, then I'm all ears - or, indeed, if there's a workaround for the volume limiter on 8th Gen Classics.
Likewise, I don't use iTunes and I'm mostly Linux user anyway but I understand that applications like GPod in Gnome work okay with with Classics - unless someone can tell me otherwise.
But for the moment, I'm not buying the Classic because there are that many complaints about the volume limiter issue here in Europe.
One thing that does amaze me about this movie is the fact there there doesn't seem to be any real middle-ground.
I neither love or hate the movie but sit somewhere in the middle.
I'm pleased I went to see it on iMax but ultimately it was just a 3D screensaver of eye-candy set pieces. As a sci-fi fan, I enjoyed Moon & District 9 far more, as two movies that were released during the same year.
I keep a copy of XP around for gaming. Despite being mostly Linux user, I quite like XP.
I've no doubt Windows 7 may be better and more stable than XP but having set up a new Windows 7 laptop for a neighbour this past week, the Windows 7 UI is an absolute joke. Microsoft seem to have made changes for changes sake, it's more unusable than the default XP interface - fortunately, you have the Classic view in XP, I didn't have time to check if the same is available in Windows 7.
As to your comments regarding gaming on Linux, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. I have made a number of comparisons between native Linux games and their Windows counterparts (Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake I, II & III, etc.) and there is no real difference in frame-rates between the two when using the same versions of NVIDIA drivers.
My personal opinion is Linux is *BETTER* suited to gaming than Windows due to the amount of customisation you can do both within the kernel and the rest of the OS - not to mention the lack of the Windows registry which means that all the configuration for you apps and games is held in your home directory, if you want to copy those settings to another machine then you just copy them over.
I'm really not a sporty person, I see exercise as a "means to an end", even though my missus happily disappears to the gym for an hour or two on a daily basis. I've never skied because it's never interested me, I can just about swim to save my life but otherwise have no interest whatsoever in water-sports (my one an only attempt at water-skiing in Florida some 10 years ago is still a cause for great hilarity amongst my friends).
I do enjoy walking and a bit of cycling, but if I have to do exercise (which of course I do) then I'd rather stick on an AC/DC album and hum along to it while forgetting I'm on a treadmill or cross trainer in the gym.
As for paintball, yes, I've done it several times and it's much better fun than Counter-strike, although I'm not sure the comparison is particularly valid.
Don't get me wrong, I do envy people like my missus who "enjoy" a good workout but I also find "fanatics" boring - whether it's athletes going on about their sport or some of my friends spending hour after hour discussing what they've done recently in WoW.
In my experience, my best friends are those people I can sit down & enjoy a beer or two with, whilst I've found people who are obsessed with exercise to be generally boring.
You need to get your facts straight - not everyone who likes a beer or two drinks to excess & most bars in most of the Western world are smoke-free zones and have been for some time. (I wonder how long it is since you've actually socialised with friends in a bar, because clearly you're out of touch with the current situation.)
As for exercise, I accept it's something I have to do to retain a certain level of health & fitness but it is not something I particularly enjoy. My approach is to go and sweat in the gym for an hour or so three times a week with some loud rock music blasting in my ears so I focus on the music & switch off thinking about the exercise.
Incidentally, I also play video games occasionally (though nowhere near as much as I used to), am seriously into home cooking & DIY, have a fantastic wife and well-paid job and despite being in my late-40s, I'm enjoying life now more than I ever have.
So please do not assume that being a fitness fanatic automatically means happiness - if anything, anyone who spends their life in a gym probably has as many personality issues (with the addition of vanity) as someone who sits playing WoW for 18 hours a day.
If you look at it the other way, the best kind of digital readout they had at the time they made TOS were probably these.
Yes, they look cool but very retro and wouldn't age a series well - at least we still have mechanical watches and car speed indicators, so we're a bit more accustomed to those.
There are lots & lots of musicians, actors, writers, etc. etc. whose artistic output I greatly enjoy & admire.
But I don't get this idea of celebrity worship or hanging on to ever single thing they say or do, and never have done.
To me, the whole system works because I hand over some money for some interesting entertainment (a book, a CD, a cinema ticket, etc.) and I get some entertainment in return. If it's entertaining enough, I'll probably go back for more of the same at a later stage and hand over some more money.
But what the creator of that entertainment does in between of bouts of entertaining me personally is entirely their own affair, I could not care less as I'm probably too busy paying for someone else to entertain me during that time.
So why people follow celebrities on Twitter is beyond me.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree entirely. Though I am interested in such a device, I took one look at the picture of it and just thought "NO". I don't care how cheap it is or what the internal specification is, it's a horrible design.
I would dearly love to know what causes design people to make this kind of decision... I don't buy Apple products because of the percentage of the price that goes into the design and look of them, but, credit where credit is due, at least there IS a practicality about Apple's design.
But the Boxee is just *AWFUL* full stop - and the look of it is going to turn lots of people away the moment they see it.
...and presumably the only thing they could come up with after all that was to tell Steve Jobs to use the word "magical" in his press conferences.
I agree. This is just a clever marketing ploy to find a way of getting DRM accepted by Joe Public "through the back door".
Viruses spread because of a high population of similar operating environments and because that operating environment allows high-level access to the system.
Windows can be locked down very tightly such that anything a user does on a system is restricted to just the stuff they are allowed to do - but the problem there is that configuring it is complicated for the average home user, and no home user wants to have to keep messing around with those settings just because they need to temporarily open up permissions to, say, install a new application.
Likewise, corporate IT support people are far too busy and far too few in number to be able to deal with the plethora of support calls from users who need to install something or do something and therefore need some permissions changed temporarily. Consequently, the amount of Windows lockdown that happens in the corporate enterprise is a compromise between security & what your IT team has the capability to support.
Linux has some definite advantages in this area.
In the same way that 90% of PCs run Windows (or whatever the statistic is), if 90% of Linux users ran Ubuntu, then there is a relatively large population of users who are potentially running similar operating environments - however, Linux users are a mixed bunch of people running all manner of different distros with their own ways of doing things and their own list of applications that are installed by default. The chances of finding a single application to exploit amongst all those is minimal.
Additionally, by design, a UNIX-like OS has simpler but stricter permissions by default (which, I agree, are cumbersome if you need to create complicated permissions structures).
If you are a normal user on a system, then pretty much anything you run or do on a system can only ever damage the files that you own. (Yes, sudo and SUID allow for some exceptions of running stuff as another user, or as root, but likewise these are the first things targetted when anyone security audits a UNIX box, they're known security issues and therefore usage of them is minimised as much as possible).
An additional advantage of Linux, which doesn't really happen in Windows by default, is that if there's an app you need to install as a user, then a lot of time you can get away with not installing it (under root permissions) centrally on the server but do your own local install in your home directory. This means the application is run as you and cannot touch any files that aren't owned by you.
So it really comes down to the basic architecture of the OS and what you need to do to secure it. Home users of XP can immediately make themselves administrators on their systems and that means everything they do and run is with that level of permissions - Linux users can do the same if they wish but the first page of any Linux newbie manual or security document will always highly recommend doing as much as you can as a normal user and just change to root permissions when you really need to. (I know Vista and Windows 7 have brought in all this UAC stuff but I don't use either so cannot comment.)
Incidentally, this is not meant to be Linux zealotry. I personally use Linux more than Windows these days, but I do quite like XP and keep a copy handy for some must have apps and games.
Linux does have security dangers, these revolve around systems running daemons (services) that can be accessed and exploited by an external party - so whereas much of the security on Windows is focused around protecting against malware, on a Linux system security revolves around not running any services you don't need to and keeping the ones you do need up to date.
But even then, exploiting a Linux server usually has to be a directed attack by a human being or script against a specific daemon on a specific server; viruses on Windows just spread of their own accord to any available machine.
Thirdly but not least, the state of open source games is not good.
So how many Open Source games have you actually played then?
It looks to me like you are contradicting yourself by evangelising Chrome.
Besides which, who gives a shit? Both browsers are free to use, there are enough add-ons about to sync bookmarks and settings between the two, and hard disks are not small these days. Therefore I personally give both of them a spin and "let nature take its course"; if I end up only using one of them in the future then so be it.
A couple of points:
1) You are able to connect to the Internet on your PC (whatever OS it runs) because of open standards - i.e. TCP/IP.
2) You are able to read & post on Slashdot now because of open standards like HTTP.
3) NVIDIA and ATI create Linux graphics drivers which are closed sourced & therefore closed standards. Likewise Adobe with Flash and a few others. In other words, just because someone runs Linux, it does not mean everything run on it is based on open standards.
4) You're deluding yourself if you believe most Linux users give a damn about what you run. Linux exists as an alternative to, and despite of, proprietary Microsoft OSes and most people use it because of its capabilities. An OS is nothing more than a computer toolkit & you choose the what tools you consider to be right for the job.
It was all USENET and CD-ROM.
Ssssh. The first rule of Usenet Club is you do not talk about Usenet Club.
I find it unusual that someone who clearly supports the ability to run Linux on the PS3, would not also play their audio CDs on a Linux PC in order to negate any Sony rootkits.
I would also hope that someone who is clearly concerned about malware and security has not stopped buying CDs in favour of BitTorrenting their music where, of course, the risk of malware infection is potentially much greater.
There's Carly "Fired from HP and Lucent Technologies" Fiornia who wants to offshore your job.
There, corrected that for you.
It is indeed an oversimplification but there is also *some* truth in it, if you look at it from the perspective of age.
The chances are that someone who is earning that kind of salary is not going to be a graduate in their 20s with a few years work experience but an experienced professional in their 30s and 40s. (Yes, I know there are exceptions but hear me out.)
And as someone in his 40s, I can tell you that I'm far less materialistic than I was in my 20s or 30s, far more discerning in my tastes and don't suffer from peer pressure. Consequently, far fewer (if any) trivial things that used to bug me no longer do so, the net result is I'm far more calm & contented.
The net result is I'm happy whilst earning a reasonable good salary & being middle-aged.
I don't actually have a problem with the current business model, except that I'd like a legal way of previewing a piece of music before I decide to buy it.
I buy lots of CDs, I don't think £10 is an unfair price to pay for an album I may have enjoyed over decades. I'm also quite happy for the music industry to use its huge marketing budgets to advertise at me (within reason) because appropriate adverts in the music magazines I read have lead to find even more great music.
Musicians selling their own music on their own web site will not have those marketing budgets, therefore there's nothing to lead me to them in preference to the thousands of other artists who are doing the same thing.
People who concerns themselves with the operation of the music industry are deluded. All that matters is whether or not the end product is value-for-money or not.
If it's not worth the money, then don't buy it & don't copy it. If enough people do that, the industry cannot blame music pirates for their lack of sales, therefore they have to themselves change their business model.
Simple.
Just to say that I do actually buy all my music on CD, simply because I don't think £10 for a piece of music that I might enjoy for 30+ years is not an unfair price for it.
But how many film trailers have you seen where the film looked really good - and then rented or bought the actual film whereupon it was crap.
If an album appeals to me that much, I will go out and buy it - but I want to hear most of it first. Likewise, if only half the tracks on it are good, then I want the option of making a note of it and possibly waiting until I can get is used or in a bargain sale for £5.
...how many times in your life have you sat and watched a TV program or movie and come away thinking "I wonder if it would have been any better filmed in 3D"?
Even if you have thought that, I doubt it's a lot less times then you came away thinking "I wonder if it would have been better if":
1. "They had spent more time writing a good plot".
2. "It had been directed by [INSERT FAVOURITE DIRECTOR'S NAME HERE]".
3. "They had not pounded me with expensive advertising trying to convince me it was better than it actually was".
Unfortunately, a turd wrapped in shiny paper with a bow on it is still just a turd.
... I say leave it to the experts.
I am actually a bit of a Radiohead fan and I admire the sentiment behind what they're doing - but frankly, given the choice between a paid-for live concert DVD shot by trained cameramen or a free fan-recorded "shaky-cam" version, I choose the former.
I'm middle-aged and lazy, I'm quite happy to just hand over some money and be entertained without all this interactive "by the fans, for the fans" nonsense.
If you're a musician or band, make a nice-sounding CD for me and I will buy it and enjoy it. I don't want to go through all the hassles of picking odd tracks off of it.
If I like your CD enough, I may come and see you live. You sell me a ticket, I watch you play live, have a beer or two while I'm doing it, then come out the concert venue two hours later with a smile on face having had a good time.
And if it was that good a concert and you had a proper set of cameramen doing a good job of filming it, I may even but the live DVD as a memento of that concert.
Straightforward and simple - I hand over money, you entertain me.
I'm in my 40s, as a kid I grew up watching my dad & other male relatives build furniture out of wood, decorate houses, build brick walls, mend washing machines, etc. etc.
I grew up in a house where I had enough free reign to take stuff apart to see how it worked and try and fix it - yes, sometimes I broke it for good or couldn't get it back together again.
Then when I got into my teens, I built electronic circuits, learnt to program Z80 CPUs in assembly and took bicycles or mower engines apart to clean and fix them - again, sometimes what I did made it worse.
Since then, I've spent 30 years in telecoms, computers and IT and done a good job over those years. Not once have I considered entering management, the closest I've ever got is writing and presenting training courses, along with some technical mentoring as necessary.
It's impossible to be trained as an expert in every piece of hardware, operating system, telecoms principle, etc. that I come across but most of the time I get by using my engineering brain and knowing my limits - so if I need to know something more about something, I ask someone or go read a book. I'm not afraid to tell anyone "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer but give me a day or two and I think I can find one."
In IT especially, there are a lot of people who are afraid to admit their limitations or even believe themselves to always be right - and on some occasions, I've taken great joy in taking them down a step or two.
The point is that logic, intuition and self-motivation are disappearing in business - sorry, but as I'm over here in the UK I blame it entirely on American-style management techniques (although we're not blameless for accepting it so readily) where everything is performance and statistically based, and as long as you achieve your targets, it doesn't matter if you can think outside the box or not.
I know that being a good engineer is not about necessarily having the answer there and then but knowing how to get towards getting the answer in a logical fashion. That is a skill that comes from real-world experience, it cannot be trained into you.
And whilst I lack management skills, I expect that the same is true for a good manager - leadership & motivation skills are not something you can be taught, they're skills you pick up as you progress through life.
I'm a big Open Source advocate & user, I also own an Android phone in preference to anything by Apple, but I'm telling you now that your model will not work - exactly in the same way as it won't work for music.
If you are a struggling self-publicising author or musician, what exactly is going to lead to find and buy your specific book or music that you are trying to sell, especially if there are hundreds of thousands of similar authors & musicians doing the same thing?
I can't say I particularly like publishers or record companies myself but the fact is that both have vast wads of cash to spend on advertising & marketing that is ultimately going to lead consumers like you & me to buy specific products. I hate advertising as much as the next guy but, for example, as a big fan of rock music I buy a monthly magazine here called Classic Rock and have found a lot of good albums to listen to having checked out adverts within its pages - there is both good & bad advertising.
All said & done, with stuff like books & music, I don't consider it my business anyway as to how that product ultimately got to me - all I care about is whether or not it was worth the money I paid for it. I actually like the current business models for books & music anyway because I don't think paying £10 or so for a CD I may have thoroughly enjoyed over & over again over the course of 30 years is particularly bad value for money - the same goes for some books that I own.
Far too many people have too much time on their hands, sticking their noses in where there's no need to do - how much a musician gets for each CD that's sold, or an author for each book that's sold, is irrelevant to me & for them to employ lawyers to go & sort out. I only care about good value for money & being able to find products that I enjoy - whether you or I like it or not, marketing budgets help with that.
I've a Nexus One phone with Froyo 2.2 that I'm very pleased with but my one negative with it (or any other phone for that matter) is storage capacity. It's a great MP3 player but the biggest MicroSD card currently is 32GB and here in the UK they cost something close to £100 each - so I opted for a 16GB one at about £30.
Consequently, I'm now looking for an MP3 player that can hold as much of my (entirely legal CD) music collection as possible. I don't buy digital music (I prefer tangible & plastic) so have no interest in iTunes, but a 160GB iPod Classic seemed the best solution to store and play the majority of my 1000+ CD collection that I've ripped to MP3.
However, having done a little research on the web, I've discovered heaps of complaints regarding the new 8th Generation iPod Classics over here in Europe. Apparently, Apple have implemented a volume limiter in the 8th Gen Classics, supposedly because of EU sound level requirements and lots of people are now complaining about being unable to hear their music if background noise is high.
Okay, I accept this might have been forced onto Apple to a degree, but why then do other manufacturers of portable music devices not have the same volume limiting installed on their devices? Sure, music at loud volume for a sustained period will damage hearing but I would at least like the option of turning it up high when ambient noise levels are also high...
Incidentally, if anyone wants to throw some suggestions my way as to good alternative MP3 players with 100GB+ of storage, then I'm all ears - or, indeed, if there's a workaround for the volume limiter on 8th Gen Classics.
Likewise, I don't use iTunes and I'm mostly Linux user anyway but I understand that applications like GPod in Gnome work okay with with Classics - unless someone can tell me otherwise.
But for the moment, I'm not buying the Classic because there are that many complaints about the volume limiter issue here in Europe.
One thing that does amaze me about this movie is the fact there there doesn't seem to be any real middle-ground.
I neither love or hate the movie but sit somewhere in the middle.
I'm pleased I went to see it on iMax but ultimately it was just a 3D screensaver of eye-candy set pieces. As a sci-fi fan, I enjoyed Moon & District 9 far more, as two movies that were released during the same year.
I keep a copy of XP around for gaming. Despite being mostly Linux user, I quite like XP.
I've no doubt Windows 7 may be better and more stable than XP but having set up a new Windows 7 laptop for a neighbour this past week, the Windows 7 UI is an absolute joke. Microsoft seem to have made changes for changes sake, it's more unusable than the default XP interface - fortunately, you have the Classic view in XP, I didn't have time to check if the same is available in Windows 7.
As to your comments regarding gaming on Linux, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. I have made a number of comparisons between native Linux games and their Windows counterparts (Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake I, II & III, etc.) and there is no real difference in frame-rates between the two when using the same versions of NVIDIA drivers.
My personal opinion is Linux is *BETTER* suited to gaming than Windows due to the amount of customisation you can do both within the kernel and the rest of the OS - not to mention the lack of the Windows registry which means that all the configuration for you apps and games is held in your home directory, if you want to copy those settings to another machine then you just copy them over.
Please get your facts straight in future.
I'm really not a sporty person, I see exercise as a "means to an end", even though my missus happily disappears to the gym for an hour or two on a daily basis. I've never skied because it's never interested me, I can just about swim to save my life but otherwise have no interest whatsoever in water-sports (my one an only attempt at water-skiing in Florida some 10 years ago is still a cause for great hilarity amongst my friends).
I do enjoy walking and a bit of cycling, but if I have to do exercise (which of course I do) then I'd rather stick on an AC/DC album and hum along to it while forgetting I'm on a treadmill or cross trainer in the gym.
As for paintball, yes, I've done it several times and it's much better fun than Counter-strike, although I'm not sure the comparison is particularly valid.
Don't get me wrong, I do envy people like my missus who "enjoy" a good workout but I also find "fanatics" boring - whether it's athletes going on about their sport or some of my friends spending hour after hour discussing what they've done recently in WoW.
In my experience, my best friends are those people I can sit down & enjoy a beer or two with, whilst I've found people who are obsessed with exercise to be generally boring.
You need to get your facts straight - not everyone who likes a beer or two drinks to excess & most bars in most of the Western world are smoke-free zones and have been for some time. (I wonder how long it is since you've actually socialised with friends in a bar, because clearly you're out of touch with the current situation.)
As for exercise, I accept it's something I have to do to retain a certain level of health & fitness but it is not something I particularly enjoy. My approach is to go and sweat in the gym for an hour or so three times a week with some loud rock music blasting in my ears so I focus on the music & switch off thinking about the exercise.
Incidentally, I also play video games occasionally (though nowhere near as much as I used to), am seriously into home cooking & DIY, have a fantastic wife and well-paid job and despite being in my late-40s, I'm enjoying life now more than I ever have.
So please do not assume that being a fitness fanatic automatically means happiness - if anything, anyone who spends their life in a gym probably has as many personality issues (with the addition of vanity) as someone who sits playing WoW for 18 hours a day.
If you look at it the other way, the best kind of digital readout they had at the time they made TOS were probably these.
Yes, they look cool but very retro and wouldn't age a series well - at least we still have mechanical watches and car speed indicators, so we're a bit more accustomed to those.
There are lots & lots of musicians, actors, writers, etc. etc. whose artistic output I greatly enjoy & admire.
But I don't get this idea of celebrity worship or hanging on to ever single thing they say or do, and never have done.
To me, the whole system works because I hand over some money for some interesting entertainment (a book, a CD, a cinema ticket, etc.) and I get some entertainment in return. If it's entertaining enough, I'll probably go back for more of the same at a later stage and hand over some more money.
But what the creator of that entertainment does in between of bouts of entertaining me personally is entirely their own affair, I could not care less as I'm probably too busy paying for someone else to entertain me during that time.
So why people follow celebrities on Twitter is beyond me.
I apply precisely the same opinion about those buying from iTunes which I consider a questionable source also.