While I agree the culture of debt and behavior of credit lenders is really awful, I have not experienced the level of aggression and outright cheating you seem to have experienced. Credit cards issued by credit unions and not big credit card companies are often a better way to go, since they don't cross sell services as aggressively.
Also, working in the mortgage industry I can tell you that there is no way that foreclosures are at an all time high. No matter how bad the sub-prime debacle is, the percentage of foreclosures is not much higher than a percent or so. (It really depends on if you are including multifamily properties, or just single family homes.) In the past it has been really really low, so large increases in the percentages of foreclosures are possible without making the actual total percentage very large when viewed against the population of mortgagors. Some delinquency and foreclosure info Mortgage Bankers Assoc. press release
I'm certain (although I can find no easy reliable references) that the foreclosure rates in the Great Depression were far higher than anything we have seen in the recent past.
Well, a game made by a third party that runs on Windows doesn't make MS any money, in of itself. So that wouldn't be a case of Microsoft dominating the game market. But I'll let someone else argue about that.
My point is that you assume Microsoft's goal is to push Xbox. But lets not forget they have to protect Windows dominance itself. How many times do people post here that they use Linux for everything except games. Microsoft may not be blind to this trend (if it can even be called a trend). They may be hoping to slow complete conversion to Linux or Mac by reenergizing the PC gaming industry.
My understanding was that during the three years you mention, ILM was revolutionizing some of the special effects techniques used later by everyone. So comparing it to ESB, isn't just a matter of budget. But perhaps I am wrong and you can convince me by naming some movies during that time that had better effects than SW and bigger budgets. I know Close Encounters came out somewhere soon after SW. That was Douglas Trumbull SFX and lots of lights which is pretty different from the effects in SW. Still it looked good. I just don't remember many SF movies even trying to do effects like SW until after SW came out and was a huge hit.
Plus you say it was "budget constrained", but at the time I thought it was a big budget for an SF film.
He said "conductive" when I think he meant "conducive". Quick! Jump in with the "absurdly basic principles of electronics" jokes. He left himself open for it.
Well, while your numerical analysis is interesting, the argument that no one would need that much space is fallacious. The parent poster never said they wanted to listen to their 200+ GB of music... sequentially. Some days I'm in the mood for blues. So, I want a good selection of my blues albums ready on my player. But I might not listen to any of it on any particular day. Wanting access to a large selection of music for personal use is not a sign that the individual lives plugged in to their player hour after hour. They might have a small amount of time they can actually enjoy their music and want to choose the exact selection they want to hear at the time they want to listen. Just like my Tivo, I want that thing loaded so if I want to watch TV, something good is available.
Still it is interesting to think that it would take that long to listen to that much music sequentially. I have a portable XM player that can record 5 hours of content. It seemed like a lot when I got it, but it is funny how quickly you start to feel like you wish you had more space.
It seems to me that a lot of the posters in this thread are either just slamming it for being lame or posting their own narrow focused wish list as the missing reason it isn't popular. But I mean seriously, no DRM? You know MS wasn't/isn't going to do that. And somebody talked about Linux support and Ogg vorbis support. It might be cool, but how many people are really making their buying decision on that? Not enough, I'm guessing. They needed lots of regular people to be interested in this.
What totally surprised me about the Zune was that it was not significantly cheaper than the iPod. It doesn't matter what demographic you are going after, if there is already a ubiquitous market leader you must beat them on cost. You are already behind the competition. You don't have any significant quantum leap improvements to offer. And you set your price to equal theirs? Dumb. If they wanted this thing to have a chance they had to make the price lower. By at least a good round number like $50 or $100. Otherwise there is no incentive for anyone to try them. Now they can lower it, but they lost their new and cool factor.
I don't have a Wi-Fi capable PDA, but even an older PDA can be nice to have around. Specifically, I have traveled to London and New York and found a Palm with Vindigo synced for that city was a big help at times. Restaurant searching and sometimes bathroom locations. Newer navigation software or devices might exist now that are even better, but I was never terribly worried about losing my PDA since it was not very new or feature rich.
It might be a good balance of packing light, but still having some conveniences. And no, I don't work for Vindigo or anything.
Sure. Actually, previously television drug ads were banned by the government. Then they removed the ban. Since then drug prices have increased dramatically. I am saying replace the ban. And no I don't object to free speech, but health care is an area where free market economics does not serve the public flawlessly. The government needs to involve itself with limited and well thought out interventions to prevent a drive for profits from causing people to die or suffer in large numbers just for the sake of some corporations profit. But it can't eliminate the possibility of profit for innovation either.
I'm not even saying it wasn't worth a try to allow the ads in the first place to see if it would help consumer health knowledge. But the reality of having these ads seems to be that it does nothing for consumers and increases prices. So, in this case I would like a return of the ban in television at least. (I don't recall if the ban was just TV before or larger in scope.)
I'm not crazy about this idea, but I'd much rather have some company's advertising options limited than pay four times more for prescription drugs than consumers in other countries do. Which is I believe the approximate difference we pay for prescription drugs, although I admit I haven't researched that myself.
I would support a ban on them, not because of the detrimental effect of consumers being confused and wasting doctor's time. But because they cost a freakin fortune! And all of that cost is passed on to you when you pay for it. And it may not feel like drugs are a lot more expensive if you have the same $20 or $30 copay you had before the ads. But you are paying more. And your insurance premiums are going sky high since the insurance companies have to pay the majority of the passthrough of the ads expense. So, the drug companies make a drug. Then they spend money figuring out how to market it. Then they fix the price of it to cover those expenses and consider all of the expense "research and development". Even if the scientific work of developing and physical manufacturing cost of the drug was small, the expense of creating the ad with two middle aged folks in matching bathtubs outside looking at the sunset could be millions. No matter, it all comes down on you eventually.
I think that was a Scientific American article on hypnosis and I thought it only happened when the subjects were hypnotized or in a state of deep concentration. Being in that state caused the memories to be recorded in the brain in an indistinguishable way from the way real memories are stored. It made me wonder about that whole day-care satan worship scandal a few years back.
In a related note, it turns out the mugger in the CNET robbery did use a quarterstaff. The CNET employee just never turned around to see that he had the end of a quarterstaff pressed to the back of his head. The iPod was later returned when the suspect was apprehended trying to stop an off duty cop from crossing a log over a stream.
Well, I can see what the guy means. People pay waaay more than that for gaming PCs. But the critical point is that I haven't heard anything that leads me to think this console will be that much better than other cheaper consoles. If it made everything else out there look like a pile of junk from 20 years ago, then sure. But it really has to have some tremendous wow factor for it to work out they way he hopes. Even then, adding a large price increase for some bundled add-ons sounds like a bad idea. People will just figure out how to add them after market. Nobody wants to void a warranty, but if it saves you literally hundreds of dollars, a lot of people might consider it.
Yes, I agree. I have been playing Half-Life mods (no head bob) for a long time without a problem. But I tried to get through Medal of Honor and had to quit on it. The head bob was really making me sick and I couldn't figure out if there was a way to turn it off. I have a correct eyeglass prescription, but I have that Gastro-reflux problem and take the old purple pill for it. I never went so far as to try Dramamine. For seasickness they say the prescription patches work really well, but I doubt you could get it prescribed for video game playing.
By the way, if you do have this problem, stay away from the radio controlled car game Re-Play. Its a great old game, but it gets me sicker than any other.
I've been using 3.6 and I can't get it to word wrap long lines in xml files. It is kind of an annoyance. But I figured it would be fixed in the next version, no big deal. But a colleague is using 4.1 and he couldn't get that to word wrap long lines either? It looks like you can word wrap the output area, but not the code editing workspace.
I'm only using the Windows version, does the linux version have word wrap? Is it buried in an option set somewhere that I haven't caught? If it is not possible and they haven't fixed it in 5.0, I will really wonder what they are thinking. Even simple text editors allow word wrapping.
My view is that their point isn't being published in the tech journals at all. The point for MS or anyone who is trying to tout the results of studies like this is to get the press to report that a study was done and the results published in a real technical journal (thus lending credibility to the results, even if nobody reading the press account even reads the original journal article).
Further, the target isn't actual line working techies but the non-techie management that often makes the spending decisions with or without the techie advice.
So, while grunts like ourselves are scoffing at these things, managers are reading about it in Computer Week and developing biases against suggestions of using competitor alternatives.
At least, that is how I see this working as a strategy. But I'll be the first to admit, I don't know enough to really know if these studies are correct in either their methodology or conclusions. The MS exec who got this study rolling might really believe MS is better and the study might really prove it is. Even if that happened, I'm still going to view the results skeptically since MS paid for it.
So I think the Original poster of this thread has asked a good question.
I agree that is a funny book. That scene where he puts a butcher knife in his belt and walks down the street and determined that the first person who asks him about it is going to die, is one of my favorite bits of dark humor.
But seriously, why would anyone expect a standard like the Asimov circuits to be applied to robots when the reality is that some of the biggest advances in robotics, so far, have been for military applications? These Asimov laws are never going to happen. I bet big software firms programming for roomba-like robots would even fight it, if someone tried to do it. It is far too good an idea for the coordinated protection of people in the world to ever be enacted in a comprehensive way by the various governments or corporate interests. The reality is robots in the future will probably be covered in legal disclaimers from the various lawsuits, but still just as dangerous. Like woodchippers or chainsaws.
Or maybe people will just have to wear the warning labels, "Not for robot consumption."
Perhaps that would work, but then the first time you leave it on and fly over a parking lot that has flickering fluorescent lamps it would trigger the motion sensor and put two shots in every hapless victim who happened to be walking to or from their car.
Of course a person might be able to make it to higher ground and find decent shelter and be much better off than in the low lands. However, if they didn't find shelter those are still some seriously high winds and you could easily be killed by flying debris. I don't believe 30 miles would have reduced the wind enough to make you safe without shelter.
But perhaps the more important point is these folks had to reason this out, before they tried. And they had reason to believe the downside of evacuating on foot could be fatal. So, maybe it seems like a dumb idea in hindsight, but their options didn't look too attractive either way, if you put yourself in their shoes. I mean if you really knew what was going to happen, you would steal a car to get away and throw yourself on the mercy of the court if you got caught. It's better than drowning. But not knowing that ahead of time, I don't think the people who had no transportation were complete fools for staying. The ones who had transportation, well they make a huge mistake.
And seriously, good for you if you can cover that much ground in two days. I'm not being sarcastic there, I mean it because I know I couldn't do it myself. And I imagine there are a bunch of folks that couldn't do that much either.
You might be right about the non-flooding damage in New Orleans. But I think some parts of Mississippi were totally flattened. So, heading out on foot might have been really dangerous where the eye of the storm actually struck.
I don't know how far you can get in a couple of days on foot, but this thing was reported to be 175 miles across. The chances of still being on foot (with no shelter at all) when it hits were fairly high. I think we can say not all of these people were being stupid. It might have just been the least worst option they had available.
And as far as hitchhiking is concerned. I'm not african-american, but if they generally have trouble getting cabs to stop for them in cities, I'm going to guess it is even harder for them to get people to pick them up hitchhiking.
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While I agree the culture of debt and behavior of credit lenders is really awful, I have not experienced the level of aggression and outright cheating you seem to have experienced. Credit cards issued by credit unions and not big credit card companies are often a better way to go, since they don't cross sell services as aggressively.
Also, working in the mortgage industry I can tell you that there is no way that foreclosures are at an all time high. No matter how bad the sub-prime debacle is, the percentage of foreclosures is not much higher than a percent or so. (It really depends on if you are including multifamily properties, or just single family homes.) In the past it has been really really low, so large increases in the percentages of foreclosures are possible without making the actual total percentage very large when viewed against the population of mortgagors. Some delinquency and foreclosure info Mortgage Bankers Assoc. press release
I'm certain (although I can find no easy reliable references) that the foreclosure rates in the Great Depression were far higher than anything we have seen in the recent past.
Well, a game made by a third party that runs on Windows doesn't make MS any money, in of itself. So that wouldn't be a case of Microsoft dominating the game market. But I'll let someone else argue about that.
My point is that you assume Microsoft's goal is to push Xbox. But lets not forget they have to protect Windows dominance itself. How many times do people post here that they use Linux for everything except games. Microsoft may not be blind to this trend (if it can even be called a trend). They may be hoping to slow complete conversion to Linux or Mac by reenergizing the PC gaming industry.
My understanding was that during the three years you mention, ILM was revolutionizing some of the special effects techniques used later by everyone. So comparing it to ESB, isn't just a matter of budget. But perhaps I am wrong and you can convince me by naming some movies during that time that had better effects than SW and bigger budgets. I know Close Encounters came out somewhere soon after SW. That was Douglas Trumbull SFX and lots of lights which is pretty different from the effects in SW. Still it looked good. I just don't remember many SF movies even trying to do effects like SW until after SW came out and was a huge hit.
Plus you say it was "budget constrained", but at the time I thought it was a big budget for an SF film.
"... aren't conductive to good humor."
He said "conductive" when I think he meant "conducive". Quick! Jump in with the "absurdly basic principles of electronics" jokes. He left himself open for it.
Well, while your numerical analysis is interesting, the argument that no one would need that much space is fallacious. The parent poster never said they wanted to listen to their 200+ GB of music... sequentially. Some days I'm in the mood for blues. So, I want a good selection of my blues albums ready on my player. But I might not listen to any of it on any particular day. Wanting access to a large selection of music for personal use is not a sign that the individual lives plugged in to their player hour after hour. They might have a small amount of time they can actually enjoy their music and want to choose the exact selection they want to hear at the time they want to listen. Just like my Tivo, I want that thing loaded so if I want to watch TV, something good is available.
Still it is interesting to think that it would take that long to listen to that much music sequentially. I have a portable XM player that can record 5 hours of content. It seemed like a lot when I got it, but it is funny how quickly you start to feel like you wish you had more space.
It seems to me that a lot of the posters in this thread are either just slamming it for being lame or posting their own narrow focused wish list as the missing reason it isn't popular. But I mean seriously, no DRM? You know MS wasn't/isn't going to do that. And somebody talked about Linux support and Ogg vorbis support. It might be cool, but how many people are really making their buying decision on that? Not enough, I'm guessing. They needed lots of regular people to be interested in this.
What totally surprised me about the Zune was that it was not significantly cheaper than the iPod. It doesn't matter what demographic you are going after, if there is already a ubiquitous market leader you must beat them on cost. You are already behind the competition. You don't have any significant quantum leap improvements to offer. And you set your price to equal theirs? Dumb. If they wanted this thing to have a chance they had to make the price lower. By at least a good round number like $50 or $100. Otherwise there is no incentive for anyone to try them. Now they can lower it, but they lost their new and cool factor.
I don't have a Wi-Fi capable PDA, but even an older PDA can be nice to have around. Specifically, I have traveled to London and New York and found a Palm with Vindigo synced for that city was a big help at times. Restaurant searching and sometimes bathroom locations. Newer navigation software or devices might exist now that are even better, but I was never terribly worried about losing my PDA since it was not very new or feature rich.
It might be a good balance of packing light, but still having some conveniences. And no, I don't work for Vindigo or anything.
I suppose next we will be looking for weapons of "mass distortion"?
Sure. Actually, previously television drug ads were banned by the government. Then they removed the ban. Since then drug prices have increased dramatically. I am saying replace the ban. And no I don't object to free speech, but health care is an area where free market economics does not serve the public flawlessly. The government needs to involve itself with limited and well thought out interventions to prevent a drive for profits from causing people to die or suffer in large numbers just for the sake of some corporations profit. But it can't eliminate the possibility of profit for innovation either.
I'm not even saying it wasn't worth a try to allow the ads in the first place to see if it would help consumer health knowledge. But the reality of having these ads seems to be that it does nothing for consumers and increases prices. So, in this case I would like a return of the ban in television at least. (I don't recall if the ban was just TV before or larger in scope.) I'm not crazy about this idea, but I'd much rather have some company's advertising options limited than pay four times more for prescription drugs than consumers in other countries do. Which is I believe the approximate difference we pay for prescription drugs, although I admit I haven't researched that myself.
I would support a ban on them, not because of the detrimental effect of consumers being confused and wasting doctor's time. But because they cost a freakin fortune! And all of that cost is passed on to you when you pay for it. And it may not feel like drugs are a lot more expensive if you have the same $20 or $30 copay you had before the ads. But you are paying more. And your insurance premiums are going sky high since the insurance companies have to pay the majority of the passthrough of the ads expense.
So, the drug companies make a drug. Then they spend money figuring out how to market it. Then they fix the price of it to cover those expenses and consider all of the expense "research and development". Even if the scientific work of developing and physical manufacturing cost of the drug was small, the expense of creating the ad with two middle aged folks in matching bathtubs outside looking at the sunset could be millions. No matter, it all comes down on you eventually.
The judge in the case David Flanagan wrote Java in a Nutshell for God's sake. How can he lose?
Y'know... I just want one thing. And that is to have white dolphins with freakin laser beams attached to their heads!
I think that was a Scientific American article on hypnosis and I thought it only happened when the subjects were hypnotized or in a state of deep concentration. Being in that state caused the memories to be recorded in the brain in an indistinguishable way from the way real memories are stored. It made me wonder about that whole day-care satan worship scandal a few years back.
Open up and say, "Ra".
In a related note, it turns out the mugger in the CNET robbery did use a quarterstaff. The CNET employee just never turned around to see that he had the end of a quarterstaff pressed to the back of his head. The iPod was later returned when the suspect was apprehended trying to stop an off duty cop from crossing a log over a stream.
Well, I can see what the guy means. People pay waaay more than that for gaming PCs. But the critical point is that I haven't heard anything that leads me to think this console will be that much better than other cheaper consoles. If it made everything else out there look like a pile of junk from 20 years ago, then sure. But it really has to have some tremendous wow factor for it to work out they way he hopes. Even then, adding a large price increase for some bundled add-ons sounds like a bad idea. People will just figure out how to add them after market. Nobody wants to void a warranty, but if it saves you literally hundreds of dollars, a lot of people might consider it.
Doh! Yes, it's Re-Volt. Sorry. I played the PC version and the stunt track level with loops and jumps really made me nauseous.
Yes, I agree. I have been playing Half-Life mods (no head bob) for a long time without a problem. But I tried to get through Medal of Honor and had to quit on it. The head bob was really making me sick and I couldn't figure out if there was a way to turn it off.
I have a correct eyeglass prescription, but I have that Gastro-reflux problem and take the old purple pill for it.
I never went so far as to try Dramamine. For seasickness they say the prescription patches work really well, but I doubt you could get it prescribed for video game playing.
By the way, if you do have this problem, stay away from the radio controlled car game Re-Play. Its a great old game, but it gets me sicker than any other.
I've been using 3.6 and I can't get it to word wrap long lines in xml files. It is kind of an annoyance. But I figured it would be fixed in the next version, no big deal.
But a colleague is using 4.1 and he couldn't get that to word wrap long lines either? It looks like you can word wrap the output area, but not the code editing workspace.
I'm only using the Windows version, does the linux version have word wrap? Is it buried in an option set somewhere that I haven't caught? If it is not possible and they haven't fixed it in 5.0, I will really wonder what they are thinking. Even simple text editors allow word wrapping.
Am I missing something?
Doh! Mr Underbridge beat me to the submit button. Well said, too.
Mod myself down -1: Redundant
My view is that their point isn't being published in the tech journals at all. The point for MS or anyone who is trying to tout the results of studies like this is to get the press to report that a study was done and the results published in a real technical journal (thus lending credibility to the results, even if nobody reading the press account even reads the original journal article).
Further, the target isn't actual line working techies but the non-techie management that often makes the spending decisions with or without the techie advice.
So, while grunts like ourselves are scoffing at these things, managers are reading about it in Computer Week and developing biases against suggestions of using competitor alternatives.
At least, that is how I see this working as a strategy. But I'll be the first to admit, I don't know enough to really know if these studies are correct in either their methodology or conclusions. The MS exec who got this study rolling might really believe MS is better and the study might really prove it is. Even if that happened, I'm still going to view the results skeptically since MS paid for it.
So I think the Original poster of this thread has asked a good question.
I agree that is a funny book. That scene where he puts a butcher knife in his belt and walks down the street and determined that the first person who asks him about it is going to die, is one of my favorite bits of dark humor.
But seriously, why would anyone expect a standard like the Asimov circuits to be applied to robots when the reality is that some of the biggest advances in robotics, so far, have been for military applications? These Asimov laws are never going to happen. I bet big software firms programming for roomba-like robots would even fight it, if someone tried to do it. It is far too good an idea for the coordinated protection of people in the world to ever be enacted in a comprehensive way by the various governments or corporate interests. The reality is robots in the future will probably be covered in legal disclaimers from the various lawsuits, but still just as dangerous. Like woodchippers or chainsaws.
Or maybe people will just have to wear the warning labels, "Not for robot consumption."
Perhaps that would work, but then the first time you leave it on and fly over a parking lot that has flickering fluorescent lamps it would trigger the motion sensor and put two shots in every hapless victim who happened to be walking to or from their car.
Might be tough talking your way out of that one.
Of course a person might be able to make it to higher ground and find decent shelter and be much better off than in the low lands. However, if they didn't find shelter those are still some seriously high winds and you could easily be killed by flying debris. I don't believe 30 miles would have reduced the wind enough to make you safe without shelter.
But perhaps the more important point is these folks had to reason this out, before they tried. And they had reason to believe the downside of evacuating on foot could be fatal. So, maybe it seems like a dumb idea in hindsight, but their options didn't look too attractive either way, if you put yourself in their shoes. I mean if you really knew what was going to happen, you would steal a car to get away and throw yourself on the mercy of the court if you got caught. It's better than drowning. But not knowing that ahead of time, I don't think the people who had no transportation were complete fools for staying. The ones who had transportation, well they make a huge mistake.
And seriously, good for you if you can cover that much ground in two days. I'm not being sarcastic there, I mean it because I know I couldn't do it myself. And I imagine there are a bunch of folks that couldn't do that much either.
You might be right about the non-flooding damage in New Orleans. But I think some parts of Mississippi were totally flattened. So, heading out on foot might have been really dangerous where the eye of the storm actually struck.
I don't know how far you can get in a couple of days on foot, but this thing was reported to be 175 miles across. The chances of still being on foot (with no shelter at all) when it hits were fairly high. I think we can say not all of these people were being stupid. It might have just been the least worst option they had available.
And as far as hitchhiking is concerned. I'm not african-american, but if they generally have trouble getting cabs to stop for them in cities, I'm going to guess it is even harder for them to get people to pick them up hitchhiking.