He's surprised because he's been indoctrinated to believe that ANY amount of radioactivity is bad, bad, bad and will kill anything and everything within miles and miles for thousands upon thousands of years.
Heck, I probably get a higher dose going to Aspen for the weekend...
Forget printouts. Punch the results into paper tape! That way you have a continuous, physical, inspectable, machine re-readable recording of the vote! And no more hanging chads!
BTW, you need to watch projections done by "experts" with their own axes to grind and agendas to fulfill.
Example: Back in the '80s and early '90s crime rates were at an all-time high. The "experts" were predicting double-digit increases and that if we didn't DO SOMETHING we'd all be living in inner-city DMZs.
And then... the crime rates in the '90s dropped. Dramatically.
Turns out we'd already done something, nearly twenty years earlier. And which has a bearing on this topic.
The birth rate in industrialized countries is already declining. In some, like Germany, it's already below replacement values.
It's been shown time and again that if you increase the standard of living people will have fewer children, because they no longer need 'em for farmhands and "slave" labor, and because that standard of living increases even more with fewer mouths to feed.
China is going into the 21st century today, and their population too will decline with rising standards of living and access to modern medicine and birth control.
The ZPG guys blew the bugle back in the '60s and '70s, and their dire projections simply failed to occur. We're not going to be wandering around shoulder-to-shoulder with no place to sleep.
"when the weight of humans would equal the weight of the earth"
What kind of idiotic extrapolation did this come from? It's physically impossible.
"Hence the wierd surges in diseases (like diabetes)."
Try sedentary lifestyles coupled with diets rich in processed sugars and saturated fats for a more direct correlation. There's plenty of good food out there, but people consume vast quantities of junk food instead...
If someone were to begin promoting gasoline today as a new fuel alternative I expect many like yourself would rail against its dangers, flammability, and potential for "big" explosions.
But relatively unskilled people seem to handle it safely every day...
For $22.95 a month I get two books of my choice, which are usually current best-sellers in fiction / non-fiction. Work it out, and that's about $11.50 for the current hardback which sells at $27.95, or the iTMS version selling for $25.95, and definitely beats the $30-50 needed to get the complete audio version on CD.
I travel quite a bit, and currently have about a hundred audiobooks on my iPod that I can listen to in a line, on a plane, or where-ever. The selection means I have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of what I can listen to to fit my mood, as opposed to lugging a single hardback or a couple of paperbacks. And let's me watch recorded TV shows and listen to music to boot.
So "players" can afford that kind of flexiblity. But...
The point is also that if they want to speed up the adoption of ebooks then they need to provide incentives for consumers to adopt them... and paying for a dedicated reader so I can buy the same book at the same price as a hardback is NOT an incentive.
Thank you for that marvelous insight. However, to borrow an old saying, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
Or to put it another way, by the time you get to the 99th percentile (or even the 80th, IMHO) you've effectively replaced the technology. Do 99% of the people who use candles in the US buy them at the store or make their own? Do the vast majority of today's consumers listen to MP3s or CDs, 8-track, or vinyl?
Given horses and cars, which one will 99% of the people here in the US ride or drive to work tomorrow. Which one has been effectively replaced for that use?
If I visit a hundred businesses am I more likely to see a telephone or a ticker-tape reader or a telegraph pad? A computer or a typewriter or a Wang word processor? A wax dictaphone or a cassette recorder?
Once you reach a tipping point, one technology effectively replaces another, and the older technology either finds and occupies a new niche, or dies and is relegated to the museum along with all of other other fossils.
"They don't even understand that to use Windows software requires Windows.... The thought probably never even crosses their mind that there are other "operating systems" that their programs won't run on."
Are you that stupid? No? Then stop assuming everyone else in the world is dumber than you.
"People want the interwebs, and maybe some word processing"
And a place to keep and edit and print the photos off their digital camera. And manage their MP3s. And play their games. And office types want to do their spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. And so on.
Yes, there's some people that can't even spell CPU. And there's plenty of people who can. And a ton somewhere in-between.
Stop propagating the "all users are losers" myth just because they can't rebuild a Linux kernel...
They do, however, want to use what everyone else is using. Because it's probably what they're using at work. And because it has the most applications, and games, and utilties. Because most hardware, including cameras and phones, is compatible with it. Because they don't want to replace all of their existing software.
But mostly because it's what they've been using for years, and as much of a pain as it is, they consider it to be LESS of a pain than learning something new from the ground up.
They may not want Windows, the software... but they do want Windows, the platform.
There are LOTS of demanding jobs out there, and plenty where you're "on call". Doctor, lawyer, cop, IT, executive, manager, in fact, practically anything above "Would you like fries with that?"
IT isn't a special case.
In fact, I'd say he needs to be careful in his thesis, because there's a chicken-and-egg issue at play: Does IT cause people to have more problems... or are the types who're attracted to IT less likely to have good social/interpersonal skills, and as such be more prone to issues outside the workplace?
That would really depend on the size of the screen, wouldn't it? I mean, a web browser maximized to fill a "30 screen is going to show acres and acres of empty, wasted space, as a lot of sites still use the 800-wide rule. Conversely, a single line of text that runs all the way across the screen on a site with a flex layout is going to be VERY hard to read.
On my small Dell notebook with a 1024x768 screen it was true that everything was maximized. On my 15" Powerbook at 1440x960, however, only things like Dreamweaver and PS get maxed out. Everything else is sized appropriately.
And on the 17" MBP I was using the other day, even DW was sized down so I could watch a little TV window at the same time...
"...limit the number of computers you can have stream media to it."
I have three Airport Expresses with the audio ports enabled, and I can chose to stream music to any of them.
I can't see why they'd place a limit on the number of iTV devices you can have, although it may be that you'd need to pair a computer with a device, as there might not be enough bandwidth for a single computer to stream multiple movies to multiple devices simultaneously.
"Both deal with the obligations of an individual to respect the interests (if not legally the rights) of the rest of the world."
Since "the rest of the world" includes the individual, group, or organization that created and produced the work in the first place, you'd think people would respect their rights and interests...
Of course, every system configured as such by a "power user" is now a target for infection.
And I'm not "missing the point of hobbyist, enthusiast, and open source development". I understand it. But the type of code we're discussing is done about a fraction of a percent of DEVELOPERS, which in turn is really a very small percentage of the entire Windows user base.
Faced with inconviencing a few people, as opposed to protecting millions of them from viruses and trojans and adware and rootkits... well, I think you really need to choose your priorities. And much as I hate to say it, I think MS chose wisely on this one.
So? MSRP for new DVDs are usually in the $19.95-$25 price range. Some retailers may mark it down and use new cheap DVDs as loss-leaders, but the retailers still take a good hunk of the change. And the disc and packaging for a physical product produced in the quantities needed to get into WalMart or Target is right around a buck, buck and a quarter.
Apple is doing preorders at $12.95 and taking their cut (0.95) from that leaving $12 for Disney. The box stores are paying roughly $13-14 and marking up from there.
So subtract the cost of the disc from what the boxes are paying, and you find that Disney is--surprise--making about the same amount from Apple as from WalMart for the same "costs".
'Course, they did spend about $30-40 MILLION on their last feature...
So? Half the things you mention are also things viruses and trojans do for a living, and unfortunately users tend to approve any message generated by the system, "Are you sure you want to install the game you just downloaded?"
It's easy to shit on an idea, but the core components of a system need to be protected somehow, and while I hear a lot of whinning what I DON'T hear is anyone offering a better solution to the problem.
If someone really wants to build one of the things you mention then they'll pay the frieght. And Vista isn't open source.
Disney said they sold 125,000 movies on iTMS the first week, which works out to be roughly 150,000 GIGABYTES of data transfer. Plus having the servers to process transactions and deliver said content in addition to the TV shows and songs already there.
I'll submit that building and maintaining the infrastructure to deliver that much paid content in a timely and reliable fashion is not cheap.
Check out and read The Wisdom of Crowds. The current system is in place and resists change because it IS inaccurate and because it can be easily manipluated (sweeps).
Fine, you've built a "better" OS. Now where are the applications? The drivers? The games? The utilities? Where's the installed user base? Where's the developer and support base?
And what's he talk about? Real-time, protected, yada yada, which most modern OSs do or emulate enough on today's multi-core machines not to matter to anyone but the hard-core.
He's stuck in the past. Quite spending money reinventing the wheel, and come up with something NEW. Come up with the first "Star Trek" OS that can understand human speech and execute human commands ("See if Bob is free for lunch next Tuesday") and THEN you'll have something to talk about. (pun unintentional)
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And in typical Microsoft fashion, downloading and installing an internet BROWSER requires... what else? That you reboot your computer.
Maybe it IS integrated, after all...
He's surprised because he's been indoctrinated to believe that ANY amount of radioactivity is bad, bad, bad and will kill anything and everything within miles and miles for thousands upon thousands of years.
Heck, I probably get a higher dose going to Aspen for the weekend...
Forget printouts. Punch the results into paper tape! That way you have a continuous, physical, inspectable, machine re-readable recording of the vote! And no more hanging chads!
Ummm.... wait....
Go to: www.I-admit-to-downloading.com and register...
BTW, you need to watch projections done by "experts" with their own axes to grind and agendas to fulfill.
Example: Back in the '80s and early '90s crime rates were at an all-time high. The "experts" were predicting double-digit increases and that if we didn't DO SOMETHING we'd all be living in inner-city DMZs.
And then... the crime rates in the '90s dropped. Dramatically.
Turns out we'd already done something, nearly twenty years earlier. And which has a bearing on this topic.
Roe vs. Wade.
The birth rate in industrialized countries is already declining. In some, like Germany, it's already below replacement values.
It's been shown time and again that if you increase the standard of living people will have fewer children, because they no longer need 'em for farmhands and "slave" labor, and because that standard of living increases even more with fewer mouths to feed.
China is going into the 21st century today, and their population too will decline with rising standards of living and access to modern medicine and birth control.
The ZPG guys blew the bugle back in the '60s and '70s, and their dire projections simply failed to occur. We're not going to be wandering around shoulder-to-shoulder with no place to sleep.
"when the weight of humans would equal the weight of the earth"
What kind of idiotic extrapolation did this come from? It's physically impossible.
"Hence the wierd surges in diseases (like diabetes)."
Try sedentary lifestyles coupled with diets rich in processed sugars and saturated fats for a more direct correlation. There's plenty of good food out there, but people consume vast quantities of junk food instead...
If someone were to begin promoting gasoline today as a new fuel alternative I expect many like yourself would rail against its dangers, flammability, and potential for "big" explosions.
But relatively unskilled people seem to handle it safely every day...
What's missing is the Audible store for ebooks.
For $22.95 a month I get two books of my choice, which are usually current best-sellers in fiction / non-fiction. Work it out, and that's about $11.50 for the current hardback which sells at $27.95, or the iTMS version selling for $25.95, and definitely beats the $30-50 needed to get the complete audio version on CD.
I travel quite a bit, and currently have about a hundred audiobooks on my iPod that I can listen to in a line, on a plane, or where-ever. The selection means I have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of what I can listen to to fit my mood, as opposed to lugging a single hardback or a couple of paperbacks. And let's me watch recorded TV shows and listen to music to boot.
So "players" can afford that kind of flexiblity. But...
The point is also that if they want to speed up the adoption of ebooks then they need to provide incentives for consumers to adopt them... and paying for a dedicated reader so I can buy the same book at the same price as a hardback is NOT an incentive.
"New technology rarely completely replaces old."
Thank you for that marvelous insight. However, to borrow an old saying, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
Or to put it another way, by the time you get to the 99th percentile (or even the 80th, IMHO) you've effectively replaced the technology. Do 99% of the people who use candles in the US buy them at the store or make their own? Do the vast majority of today's consumers listen to MP3s or CDs, 8-track, or vinyl?
Given horses and cars, which one will 99% of the people here in the US ride or drive to work tomorrow. Which one has been effectively replaced for that use?
If I visit a hundred businesses am I more likely to see a telephone or a ticker-tape reader or a telegraph pad? A computer or a typewriter or a Wang word processor? A wax dictaphone or a cassette recorder?
Once you reach a tipping point, one technology effectively replaces another, and the older technology either finds and occupies a new niche, or dies and is relegated to the museum along with all of other other fossils.
"They don't even understand that to use Windows software requires Windows. ... The thought probably never even crosses their mind that there are other "operating systems" that their programs won't run on."
Are you that stupid? No? Then stop assuming everyone else in the world is dumber than you.
"People want the interwebs, and maybe some word processing"
And a place to keep and edit and print the photos off their digital camera. And manage their MP3s. And play their games. And office types want to do their spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. And so on.
Yes, there's some people that can't even spell CPU. And there's plenty of people who can. And a ton somewhere in-between.
Stop propagating the "all users are losers" myth just because they can't rebuild a Linux kernel...
No, they don't "want" Windows.
They do, however, want to use what everyone else is using. Because it's probably what they're using at work. And because it has the most applications, and games, and utilties. Because most hardware, including cameras and phones, is compatible with it. Because they don't want to replace all of their existing software.
But mostly because it's what they've been using for years, and as much of a pain as it is, they consider it to be LESS of a pain than learning something new from the ground up.
They may not want Windows, the software... but they do want Windows, the platform.
Straw man, as that doesn't seem to stop people from downloading the latest song or movie release.
Or to put it another way, how many 70-year-old songs and/or movies have get downloaded?
Those 50 years old? 40? 30? 20?
Go past a year or two, and the number of downloads per day drops dramatically, aka the "long tail" curve.
Precisely.
There are LOTS of demanding jobs out there, and plenty where you're "on call". Doctor, lawyer, cop, IT, executive, manager, in fact, practically anything above "Would you like fries with that?"
IT isn't a special case.
In fact, I'd say he needs to be careful in his thesis, because there's a chicken-and-egg issue at play: Does IT cause people to have more problems... or are the types who're attracted to IT less likely to have good social/interpersonal skills, and as such be more prone to issues outside the workplace?
Uh huh. And the dead expenses incurred and paid by all of those other schools that didn't win the championship?
That would really depend on the size of the screen, wouldn't it? I mean, a web browser maximized to fill a "30 screen is going to show acres and acres of empty, wasted space, as a lot of sites still use the 800-wide rule. Conversely, a single line of text that runs all the way across the screen on a site with a flex layout is going to be VERY hard to read.
On my small Dell notebook with a 1024x768 screen it was true that everything was maximized. On my 15" Powerbook at 1440x960, however, only things like Dreamweaver and PS get maxed out. Everything else is sized appropriately.
And on the 17" MBP I was using the other day, even DW was sized down so I could watch a little TV window at the same time...
"...limit the number of computers you can have stream media to it."
I have three Airport Expresses with the audio ports enabled, and I can chose to stream music to any of them.
I can't see why they'd place a limit on the number of iTV devices you can have, although it may be that you'd need to pair a computer with a device, as there might not be enough bandwidth for a single computer to stream multiple movies to multiple devices simultaneously.
"Both deal with the obligations of an individual to respect the interests (if not legally the rights) of the rest of the world."
Since "the rest of the world" includes the individual, group, or organization that created and produced the work in the first place, you'd think people would respect their rights and interests...
Of course, every system configured as such by a "power user" is now a target for infection.
And I'm not "missing the point of hobbyist, enthusiast, and open source development". I understand it. But the type of code we're discussing is done about a fraction of a percent of DEVELOPERS, which in turn is really a very small percentage of the entire Windows user base.
Faced with inconviencing a few people, as opposed to protecting millions of them from viruses and trojans and adware and rootkits... well, I think you really need to choose your priorities. And much as I hate to say it, I think MS chose wisely on this one.
So? MSRP for new DVDs are usually in the $19.95-$25 price range. Some retailers may mark it down and use new cheap DVDs as loss-leaders, but the retailers still take a good hunk of the change. And the disc and packaging for a physical product produced in the quantities needed to get into WalMart or Target is right around a buck, buck and a quarter.
Apple is doing preorders at $12.95 and taking their cut (0.95) from that leaving $12 for Disney. The box stores are paying roughly $13-14 and marking up from there.
So subtract the cost of the disc from what the boxes are paying, and you find that Disney is--surprise--making about the same amount from Apple as from WalMart for the same "costs".
'Course, they did spend about $30-40 MILLION on their last feature...
So? Half the things you mention are also things viruses and trojans do for a living, and unfortunately users tend to approve any message generated by the system, "Are you sure you want to install the game you just downloaded?"
It's easy to shit on an idea, but the core components of a system need to be protected somehow, and while I hear a lot of whinning what I DON'T hear is anyone offering a better solution to the problem.
If someone really wants to build one of the things you mention then they'll pay the frieght. And Vista isn't open source.
Disney said they sold 125,000 movies on iTMS the first week, which works out to be roughly 150,000 GIGABYTES of data transfer. Plus having the servers to process transactions and deliver said content in addition to the TV shows and songs already there.
I'll submit that building and maintaining the infrastructure to deliver that much paid content in a timely and reliable fashion is not cheap.
And that's just the first week...
Check out and read The Wisdom of Crowds. The current system is in place and resists change because it IS inaccurate and because it can be easily manipluated (sweeps).
Fine, you've built a "better" OS. Now where are the applications? The drivers? The games? The utilities? Where's the installed user base? Where's the developer and support base?
And what's he talk about? Real-time, protected, yada yada, which most modern OSs do or emulate enough on today's multi-core machines not to matter to anyone but the hard-core.
He's stuck in the past. Quite spending money reinventing the wheel, and come up with something NEW. Come up with the first "Star Trek" OS that can understand human speech and execute human commands ("See if Bob is free for lunch next Tuesday") and THEN you'll have something to talk about. (pun unintentional)