If science fiction has taught me anything, after the scientists cannot get the burger to taste right and meet the shareholder's expectations, the secret ingredient will turn out to be people.
I read a novel a very long time ago, where the secret ingredient was some kind of giant spider that was grown and harvested in secret so the population wouldn't know of this "fruit that tasted just like meat". Come to think of it, I never did get the point of the novel. It seemed to be both pro-vegetarianism and anti-vegetarianism at the same time.
Well as an omnivore, if I buy a vegie burger to cook on a barbecue I'm expecting it to taste of caramelized chickpeas and exotic herbs and spices of the Levant.
It would be a disappointment, personally, if it tasted of beef.
Yes, exactly my point. Even speaking as a vegetarian, I figure if you want to taste beef, eat beef.
"Developers" implies testing and experimentation, and it's getting more and more difficult to fly a drone in public anymore. How is that supposed to work?
I've been eating fake meat in various forms since the late seventies. It's mostly a matter of convenience, so I can partake in events like barbecues as a vegetarian. Fake meat patties and cutlets and so forth have various flavors and textures, none of which taste like real meat. (at least, as far as I can remember) But is it necessarily bad that they have their own taste? If the taste and texture are pleasing, (some are, and some are not) does it really matter if it tastes nutty or tofu-y and not meaty? I guess what I'm asking is, what problem are we trying to solve here?
I have a friend who is a vegetarian chef, and she says if you're trying to be vegetarian but only eat products that ape the food you don't eat anymore, what's the point?
Playboy has lost its focus. The appeal of the girl in the centerfold is that there was enough story and enough photos of her living her life (even if sometimes fabricated) for you to imagine her as someone you could actually meet in real life. The "girl next door" used to be a not-very-explicit photo series of someone you would want to get to know. But now Playmates, with the occasional exception, are as generic as blow-up dolls. As generic as --- porn on the internet. With which the magazine can't possibly compete.
It'll be interesting to see where they take this. If "no more nudes" means generic starlet wannabes only a little more covered up, they're not getting it, and readership will suffer further. Because let's face it, the articles are usually not worth reading.
Using mindshare to sell your products means you aren't going to expand your market significantly. MacBooks obviously have qualities that appeal to people, or they wouldn't sell. Apple works on making them nice and easy to use, and many people are willing to pay for that.
But seriously... What's the real functional difference between the Lenovo X series and the Macbook Air? Besides the logo?
It's the netbook argument all over again -- most people's use case for laptops is web and email, and it doesn't really matter what processor or OS the laptop is running as long as it works with most websites and email sends and receives ok. There are assumptions there -- that video and other resources used by websites work correctly -- and there's room for some specialized apps like Netflix, but that's pretty much it.
So Linux on ARM as a laptop? Sure. And it'll almost certainly be more reliable, run faster on equivalent hardware, and meet most people's needs who own laptops. There's no technical reason this couldn't happen.
The reason it won't happen is that there's this ninety billion dollar company and this other one hundred eighty billion dollar company that both have a vested interest in this not happening. And they're really good (at least so far) at making sure it doesn't happen.
Enh. I have a feeling that the MacBook isn't a big seller because it's a better product, it's a big seller because Apple has been, and still is, really brilliant about developing "mindshare" amongst enough people to make a substantial profit. So they don't have to deliver a new product that's substantially better, because their followers will upgrade merely because it's new. Even when that means learning to do without some things they used to have (firewire).
It's *way* too late for Microsoft to build that kind of following. And this leaves them nowhere to go. Microsoft's machine is not a MacBook killer for one simple reason -- it doesn't have the Apple logo on it. And that's enough. They can't do it on specs, because there just isn't enough technical differentiation anymore to really swing people one way or another.
I think what Microsoft may not be understanding, or may be trying to ignore, is that people aren't buying new hardware because their old hardware meets their needs. In the early days, there were two major factors that drove the PC industry -- (1) low saturation. PCs were a relatively new thing, and there were a lot of people who didn't have one yet. (2) PC hardware and software were in relative infancy -- we were on the steep end of the curve -- and resources didn't meet the needs of what people were trying to do. Software drove hardware in that each new release of the OS needed faster hardware and bigger disks to run reasonably. UI was still on the steep end of the curve, with new features coming out that were actually -- you know -- relevant, and not just eye candy.
All of that is long past now. Microsoft doesn't understand that the UI curve has flattened out, as their recent attempts to make the UI Really Different hasn't met with a lot of enthusiasm. About the time PCs routinely sold with quad core processors and terabyte drives dipped under $100, hardware stopped mattering for most people. What people could *do* with these resources started mattering more than the resources themselves. Hell, I do compute intensive work on a motherboard from 2005 sitting in a case from 2000, (running Win7 Pro) and I have no desire to upgrade anything except perhaps disk space. I do vacuum it out once in awhile.
So, Microsoft tries and fails to develop the hipster mindshare of Apple, so they need to try something different, and they see an over-saturated market, with a plethora of hardware overdesigned for most people's needs (given that "most people" do web browsing, facebook and email and other social media, and maybe a game or two, and perhaps a movie, and that's pretty much it), and decides that's the field they need to go into.
So... wow... I mean,... How is it they're still alive?
Someone I know works for Microsoft, and he's really been crowing about Microsoft's new laptop and how it's the greatest thing since, I dunno, Windows for Workgroups. And I look at it, and you know... it's just a laptop.
In summary, "reigniting the PC market" is problematic because the PC market is already saturated and over-built, and has been for years. It's like, when toasters first came out, everyone had to have one, and growth was steep. But now, everyone already has a toaster, and we only replace them when they stop working. Sorry, that's the nature of industry.
You want to create a new market, make apps for content creation on tablets (as opposed to content consumption) and maybe tablets will see a new renaissance. I don't own a tablet precisely because most of what I use a PC for is content creation, and the apps aren't there on tablets even now.
But PCs? They're toasters. Pick a size and a color.
There was a lot that was Apollo 13-ish, but what stood out about the story for me is that Watney does a lot more for himself, with his own wits, and with much less support from the brains at home. They even made a point of it about midway through the movie. (You'll know the spot.) The Martian was more Robinson Caruso-ish, if you can imagine Robinson Caruso's island as being extremely hostile towards life as we know it.
There was a time when my daughter was really into blackberrys, because you could text really fast on the keyboard. She discovered that a local electronic junk store had a stack of various models of blackberry for something like five bucks apiece, so she bought three of them, and would put her sim in different phones depending on whether she felt like carrying a 6000 series or a 7000 series or a Curve.
Anyway, one thing she discovered is that none (0) of them had been wiped, and she had access to documents, baby photos and all kinds of stuff. Nothing pornographic, fortunately. At least, that she told me about.
It boggles the mind, that advertisers haven't figured out yet that intrusive ads are the *reason* that adblockers exist. If ads remained unobtrusive and silent, the number of people using adblockers would be significantly smaller.
If the ads are appropriate, I'm ok with them. Like reasonably sized camera gear on a photography site, small, silent biker gear ads on a motorcycle forum. I may even occasionally click on them. And I kinda like the Roadkill and Snorg ads that have pretty girls. But full page video popovers of some car commercial? Screw that. With a really big screw.
I guess you could say that the more obnoxious sites (are you listening, seattlepi?) are ruining it for everyone else.
Combine this with the current fashion of being offended at the tiniest opportunity, and what do you THINK is going to happen?
Interesting, that you use the current conservative meme. Also, mention these clueless people are trying to protect animals. If you read the actually complaints, they are mostly from conservatives. Conservatives who are offended by even the slightest hint of unmarried sex or the slightest mention of human genitals. These are conservatives who are offended at the tiniest opportunity. Yet, you never hear people bitching about their entitled attitude, because that's not how the brainwashing works.
"being offended at the tiniest opportunity" is not a characteristic solely of the left, as your examples illustrate. My examples used real jokes on the show related specifically to animal cruelty, which was right up there in the damned SUMMARY. Maybe you missed that?
For the record, I'm neither liberal nor conservative, because life is not even close to being that simple. I regularly change my registration from democrat to republican and back, depending on who has the most interesting primary (my state doesn't allow voting in either primary if you're registered independent) and the issues in play at the time. But I think you did help to illustrate my point about "being offended at the tiniest opportunity". Well done.
> A new injection makes male and female mice infertile by tricking their muscles into producing hormone-blocking antibodies [...] control reproduction in feral animal populations [...] similar approach could one day spur the development of long-term birth control options for humans [...]
Not sure how I feel about that. Part of me is going hey cool, technology! Part of me is going, wait, didn't I see that movie in the 1970's? I seem to recall it didn't end well.
I found the humour got very repetative, and the situations were so contrieved (entire episodes centering on people walking in at just the right time and hearing just the right snippet of some conversation) it was painful to watch.
Also something that stuck me early on. For a show about a bunch of hopeless socially inept geeks, they all end up with love interests and gags aside, they seem like reasonably healthy relashionships.
And that's because in real life, even socially inept geeks eventually have love interests and can learn to function in reasonably healthy relationships. Why should we expect otherwise?
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If science fiction has taught me anything, after the scientists cannot get the burger to taste right and meet the shareholder's expectations, the secret ingredient will turn out to be people.
I read a novel a very long time ago, where the secret ingredient was some kind of giant spider that was grown and harvested in secret so the population wouldn't know of this "fruit that tasted just like meat". Come to think of it, I never did get the point of the novel. It seemed to be both pro-vegetarianism and anti-vegetarianism at the same time.
Well as an omnivore, if I buy a vegie burger to cook on a barbecue I'm expecting it to taste of caramelized chickpeas and exotic herbs and spices of the Levant.
It would be a disappointment, personally, if it tasted of beef.
Yes, exactly my point. Even speaking as a vegetarian, I figure if you want to taste beef, eat beef.
I still miss bacon, though.
"Developers" implies testing and experimentation, and it's getting more and more difficult to fly a drone in public anymore. How is that supposed to work?
I've been eating fake meat in various forms since the late seventies. It's mostly a matter of convenience, so I can partake in events like barbecues as a vegetarian. Fake meat patties and cutlets and so forth have various flavors and textures, none of which taste like real meat. (at least, as far as I can remember) But is it necessarily bad that they have their own taste? If the taste and texture are pleasing, (some are, and some are not) does it really matter if it tastes nutty or tofu-y and not meaty? I guess what I'm asking is, what problem are we trying to solve here?
I have a friend who is a vegetarian chef, and she says if you're trying to be vegetarian but only eat products that ape the food you don't eat anymore, what's the point?
Playboy has lost its focus. The appeal of the girl in the centerfold is that there was enough story and enough photos of her living her life (even if sometimes fabricated) for you to imagine her as someone you could actually meet in real life. The "girl next door" used to be a not-very-explicit photo series of someone you would want to get to know. But now Playmates, with the occasional exception, are as generic as blow-up dolls. As generic as --- porn on the internet. With which the magazine can't possibly compete.
It'll be interesting to see where they take this. If "no more nudes" means generic starlet wannabes only a little more covered up, they're not getting it, and readership will suffer further. Because let's face it, the articles are usually not worth reading.
Using mindshare to sell your products means you aren't going to expand your market significantly. MacBooks obviously have qualities that appeal to people, or they wouldn't sell. Apple works on making them nice and easy to use, and many people are willing to pay for that.
But seriously... What's the real functional difference between the Lenovo X series and the Macbook Air? Besides the logo?
It's the netbook argument all over again -- most people's use case for laptops is web and email, and it doesn't really matter what processor or OS the laptop is running as long as it works with most websites and email sends and receives ok. There are assumptions there -- that video and other resources used by websites work correctly -- and there's room for some specialized apps like Netflix, but that's pretty much it.
So Linux on ARM as a laptop? Sure. And it'll almost certainly be more reliable, run faster on equivalent hardware, and meet most people's needs who own laptops. There's no technical reason this couldn't happen.
The reason it won't happen is that there's this ninety billion dollar company and this other one hundred eighty billion dollar company that both have a vested interest in this not happening. And they're really good (at least so far) at making sure it doesn't happen.
Enh. I have a feeling that the MacBook isn't a big seller because it's a better product, it's a big seller because Apple has been, and still is, really brilliant about developing "mindshare" amongst enough people to make a substantial profit. So they don't have to deliver a new product that's substantially better, because their followers will upgrade merely because it's new. Even when that means learning to do without some things they used to have (firewire).
It's *way* too late for Microsoft to build that kind of following. And this leaves them nowhere to go. Microsoft's machine is not a MacBook killer for one simple reason -- it doesn't have the Apple logo on it. And that's enough. They can't do it on specs, because there just isn't enough technical differentiation anymore to really swing people one way or another.
PCs *should* be kinda boring. They're like shoes. It's not what you have, it's what you do with it.
I think what Microsoft may not be understanding, or may be trying to ignore, is that people aren't buying new hardware because their old hardware meets their needs. In the early days, there were two major factors that drove the PC industry -- (1) low saturation. PCs were a relatively new thing, and there were a lot of people who didn't have one yet. (2) PC hardware and software were in relative infancy -- we were on the steep end of the curve -- and resources didn't meet the needs of what people were trying to do. Software drove hardware in that each new release of the OS needed faster hardware and bigger disks to run reasonably. UI was still on the steep end of the curve, with new features coming out that were actually -- you know -- relevant, and not just eye candy.
All of that is long past now. Microsoft doesn't understand that the UI curve has flattened out, as their recent attempts to make the UI Really Different hasn't met with a lot of enthusiasm. About the time PCs routinely sold with quad core processors and terabyte drives dipped under $100, hardware stopped mattering for most people. What people could *do* with these resources started mattering more than the resources themselves. Hell, I do compute intensive work on a motherboard from 2005 sitting in a case from 2000, (running Win7 Pro) and I have no desire to upgrade anything except perhaps disk space. I do vacuum it out once in awhile.
So, Microsoft tries and fails to develop the hipster mindshare of Apple, so they need to try something different, and they see an over-saturated market, with a plethora of hardware overdesigned for most people's needs (given that "most people" do web browsing, facebook and email and other social media, and maybe a game or two, and perhaps a movie, and that's pretty much it), and decides that's the field they need to go into.
So... wow... I mean,... How is it they're still alive?
Someone I know works for Microsoft, and he's really been crowing about Microsoft's new laptop and how it's the greatest thing since, I dunno, Windows for Workgroups. And I look at it, and you know... it's just a laptop.
In summary, "reigniting the PC market" is problematic because the PC market is already saturated and over-built, and has been for years. It's like, when toasters first came out, everyone had to have one, and growth was steep. But now, everyone already has a toaster, and we only replace them when they stop working. Sorry, that's the nature of industry.
You want to create a new market, make apps for content creation on tablets (as opposed to content consumption) and maybe tablets will see a new renaissance. I don't own a tablet precisely because most of what I use a PC for is content creation, and the apps aren't there on tablets even now.
But PCs? They're toasters. Pick a size and a color.
There was a lot that was Apollo 13-ish, but what stood out about the story for me is that Watney does a lot more for himself, with his own wits, and with much less support from the brains at home. They even made a point of it about midway through the movie. (You'll know the spot.) The Martian was more Robinson Caruso-ish, if you can imagine Robinson Caruso's island as being extremely hostile towards life as we know it.
> In fact, he presents evidence that we might actually be worse.
Oh, I think there's ample evidence that we might be much worse.
There was a time when my daughter was really into blackberrys, because you could text really fast on the keyboard. She discovered that a local electronic junk store had a stack of various models of blackberry for something like five bucks apiece, so she bought three of them, and would put her sim in different phones depending on whether she felt like carrying a 6000 series or a 7000 series or a Curve.
Anyway, one thing she discovered is that none (0) of them had been wiped, and she had access to documents, baby photos and all kinds of stuff. Nothing pornographic, fortunately. At least, that she told me about.
It boggles the mind, that advertisers haven't figured out yet that intrusive ads are the *reason* that adblockers exist. If ads remained unobtrusive and silent, the number of people using adblockers would be significantly smaller.
If the ads are appropriate, I'm ok with them. Like reasonably sized camera gear on a photography site, small, silent biker gear ads on a motorcycle forum. I may even occasionally click on them. And I kinda like the Roadkill and Snorg ads that have pretty girls. But full page video popovers of some car commercial? Screw that. With a really big screw.
I guess you could say that the more obnoxious sites (are you listening, seattlepi?) are ruining it for everyone else.
Yeah who knew?
Glad I'm not on Verizon anymore.
Combine this with the current fashion of being offended at the tiniest opportunity, and what do you THINK is going to happen?
Interesting, that you use the current conservative meme. Also, mention these clueless people are trying to protect animals. If you read the actually complaints, they are mostly from conservatives. Conservatives who are offended by even the slightest hint of unmarried sex or the slightest mention of human genitals. These are conservatives who are offended at the tiniest opportunity. Yet, you never hear people bitching about their entitled attitude, because that's not how the brainwashing works.
"being offended at the tiniest opportunity" is not a characteristic solely of the left, as your examples illustrate. My examples used real jokes on the show related specifically to animal cruelty, which was right up there in the damned SUMMARY. Maybe you missed that?
For the record, I'm neither liberal nor conservative, because life is not even close to being that simple. I regularly change my registration from democrat to republican and back, depending on who has the most interesting primary (my state doesn't allow voting in either primary if you're registered independent) and the issues in play at the time. But I think you did help to illustrate my point about "being offended at the tiniest opportunity". Well done.
"Why should we expect otherwise?"
The ghetto walls are enforced from within.
In some cases, yes. Sadly.
I am trying to imagine Kevin Kline as Otto saying "I am endowed like a stallion".
> A new injection makes male and female mice infertile by tricking their muscles into producing hormone-blocking antibodies [...] control reproduction in feral animal populations [...] similar approach could one day spur the development of long-term birth control options for humans [...]
Not sure how I feel about that. Part of me is going hey cool, technology! Part of me is going, wait, didn't I see that movie in the 1970's? I seem to recall it didn't end well.
I found the humour got very repetative, and the situations were so contrieved (entire episodes centering on people walking in at just the right time and hearing just the right snippet of some conversation) it was painful to watch.
Also something that stuck me early on. For a show about a bunch of hopeless socially inept geeks, they all end up with love interests and gags aside, they seem like reasonably healthy relashionships.
And that's because in real life, even socially inept geeks eventually have love interests and can learn to function in reasonably healthy relationships. Why should we expect otherwise?