So, basically, you wouldn't be happy unless they actually went up in an airplane and did the experiment at 500 knots.
I've got a suggestion. Use the show as a starting point for your own reasoning and thought experiments, and get your own airplane. And TV show.
no, i'd like for them to at least say that it's a factor that they can't reproduce rather than saying the myth is busted without even mentioned the force of wind. i mean, a plane did rip apart and suck a flight attendant out of the chassis while en route to hawaii, so it's not like there's no evidence that a small defect can cause catastrophic results when travelling at that speed.
His science is far from "stellar". Often, it's quite poor. One should never watch MythBusters for anything but its entertainment value. More often than not they completely misunderstand and incorrectly describe scientific and engineering concepts that are in reality quite simple.
i'm a fan of the show but i agree that their scientific methods are dubious at best. this, coming from a person who has nearly no scientific education whatsoever (high school physics).
the one that bugged me most recently was the "explosive decompression of an airplane" episode. they were testing the idea that planes will be torn apart by decompression from a bullethole in a window. while they did get some good rushes of wind as a result of the rapid decompression they didn't at all factor in the destructive capabilities of jagged pieces of glass and metal being introduced into an airflow going 500 mph.
as someone who's seen the wrong side of 110 mph in cars and motorcycles, i can attest to the destructive potential of a strong wind. try sitting up on a motorcycle at 130mph. it's not comfortable. then flip your helmet's visor open and say hello to the ground. (not that i was stupid enough to do that).
I'm hardly a Microsoft apologist, but I'm pretty sure that the "certain" files can be shared means that some files can have it turned off. Otherwise, they're all shareable. Some majors are probably still afraid that people will send a whole album, and the receiver will simply plug their Zune into a tape deck or their computer's line-in and dub the whole thing off.
i'm curious why you're sure that all forms of files can be shared. i find it more likely that you'll only be able to share zune-bought music than user-ripped mp3's. it would obviously be easier for them to control the drm of a zune-bought music file than that of an mp3.
Think about it - in order for me to get any use out of an ad-hoc wireless music player so restricted the device needs to really be ubiquitous. I could care less than once every 3 months someone nearby can loan me the new Fergie single.
exactly. i can see the microsoft folks sitting in a conference room wetting themselves over the abilit to share their drm-bought music between the 10 zunes in that room. however, it would takes YEARS for this feature to even be marginally interesting. you're not going to run into too many random people with zune's in any public setting for a long enough period to listen to that music. even if you did, it's socially awkward to glom onto someone's music library that you don't even know.
if it was a friend of mine and we just happen to both have a zune, i'd be more likely to ask the person to borrow their cd or for them to just send me the mp3 files rather than "dj" it to me and have me run home to buy from a zune-store. it's a pretty cool feature on paper, but in reality it's nearly useless. if it costs the player in battery life, then it really doesn't do much good to a zune user.
currently on the ipods with video you can put video files from any source on there. i have stuff that i've converted from my eyetv to ipod format and stuck it on there. seems to work fine. so i don't see them limiting that function in the future. just like they don't limit the ipod to music bought only from the itunes music store.
that twenty years ago people said macintoshes were toy computers and ibm's were serious business machines. now macs use some stonkin intel processors and ibm processors are behind every next generation game console.
yeah, i'm aware of all that msn is. they were not doing well for a long time and people in redmond were very close to pulling the plug on it, mostly because they couldn't decide amongst themselves what msn was supposed to be. for a long time it was a competitor to aol, then that market started to close up and then it was a competitor to yahoo. after that didn't work they wanted to be a competitor to google. the range of services you see there isn't a result of focused development. quite the opposite, they're mostly leftovers from previous attempts at defining msn as a brand and company.
MAYBE it could now. but for many years there was a constant debate in redmond whether or not to even keep msn alive. i know this for a fact because i was peripherally affected by that decision.
plus, microsoft threw a shit-ton of money at msn search; around $100M if i recall correctly. so to say that msn could "stand on its own" isn't exactly accurate because their search technology would never stand a chance to catch google if they didn't have the rest of the company to cover their enormous losses each year. i don't see any other independant search engines who stand on their own spending that much on their search technology.
My major concern with such a system (besides the obvious privacy ones touched on in the article) is what happens when some other user sits at my comptuter uses it for a while. Would the "adaptive engine" or whatever be smart enough to figure out that there was someone else there or would I have to reset my settings and have it relearn everything?
sort of how your tivo starts to think you're gay because you're girlfriend keeps recording oprah?
TFA was completely worthless. besides the whole "big brother" strawman the author sets up, there are so many other issues that are simply not addressed. he uses a silly example of having the computer learn that you don't like to be bothered with emails while working on a video editing project except for "critical emails". well, how does the computer "learn" this behavior? if you don't check your mail when you edit video, you're not likely to find the "critical" email. thus, the computer doesn't understand that an email from "bob my client" is somehow more important than an email from "my nigerian ancestor who is also a prince." if you DO check your email during your video editing session, i suppose the computer would think that you like to be bothered with your emails while you're working on video.
then you have to factor in the complexities of whether or not editing video is in the same importance category as photo retouching. and is that also as important was writing a letter? i think i'd rather my computer let me be the judge of whether or not an email is important to me and when. besides, there's no easy way for the computer to know if i'm doing "entertainment work" (in my case, farking a photo) or "work work" (retouching photographs for publication).
also, as anyone who's used any sort of "learning technology" like voice recognition or hwr, we all know there's a long and frustrating process to getting the software to work even passably well. so i guess the first six months or so of your new system you'll have your computer making all sort of bad assumptions about your workflow and deciding to hide or highlight certain functions in your apps. while working within a tradition WIMP methaphor might not be the theoretically most efficient way to get work done, it's at least generally consistent. which, in turn, probably makes it the most efficient.
if i need a tool, i want it to be where i left it. i don't need my full set of hex keys as often as i need my cordless drill, but i sure don't need any magic gnomes running hiding all my hex keys and replacing them with my drill (which i already have a place for).
I have yet to see anything done on a Mac that I can't do on a Windows machine
okay, how about this. organize a photo slideshow with music and full-motion titles and transitions. then preserve all those transitions, music, image adjustments and motion graphics into a dvd authoring apps and burn a viewable dvd that can be popped into a consumer dvd player and burn it. also, do it in an hour with the software that is bundled with the computer.
this "i can do that on my pc" argument is really tired when nobody factors in the ease of use or quality of the final product. i'd imagine most advanced computer users can accomplish nearly all the same tasks on different platforms but that has nothing to do with the ease-of-use for average computer users. just because you *might* be able to do the same things, you might not be able to do them as quickly, efficiently and as well as they can be done on a mac. just as there are things that pc's excel at, there are things macs excel at. to claim that to be untrue is simply shortsightedness.
I wonder when AMD found out about this from Dell -- I would guess a few months ago. I never remember AMD being very big on advertising, which to me was a good thing because it (hopefully) meant that the kind of money Intel was spending on silly Blue Man Group commercials was instead going towards better chips at AMD (R&D, QA, etc). But just in the last month or two, I've seen AMD ads springing up in NYC and Philadelphia on billboards and bus stops, probably trying to increase brand recognition. I hope it works -- a balanced market share would logically seem to be the best driving force behind quality chip development from both camps.
i actually worked on amd advertising a few years ago when the agency i was working for won the account. i wouldn't say that amd was focusing their money on other aspects of the business. i think they just didn't know how to manage the marketing side of their business. for a long time they really didn't HAVE to advertise because they got enough credibility from the enthusiast market, but they soon found that cutting-edge early adopters wasn't enough of a market to compete against intel. amd did spend quite a bit of money on advertising at their agency previous to ours, but they spent them on misguided and expensive televisions commercials with very expensive directors rather than trying to establish a personality for themselves in the marketplace. having been in san francisco recently and seeing the new amd work in the subway stations, i'd say they're on a better track now than they used to be.
The problem with this sort of animation is that they're generally not fast enough to be unobtrusive. I don't need a 2-second animation of a page turn, I need a half-second one.
i don't think it necessarily has to do with the speed or existence of a "page turn" animation. the only efforts i've seen to simulate a page turn in digital form seem like useless eye candy. the content changing should be enough of a visual clue. the main benefit of physical pages is that you have an immediate reference point for where to start reading again: the upper left corner in english.
reading continuous text on a webpage is confusing whether or not page down is done instantly or with an animation because you generally get just a little bit lost when the page moves. this is especially annoying when the amount of information left below your current position doesn't warrant a whole page, so "page down" really ends up being "5/8 of a page down".
As a Pc user used to listening to Apple groupie comments like the one above
genius, the comment above is simply a fact. being a fan of the company has no bearing on whether or not they've doubled their laptop marketshare from this quarter compared to a year ago.
At $129 for each version, that's about $750 on Mac OS X upgrades since 2001.
Paul's math is... creative. 5 x $129 = $750?
By that standard, it's also "about" $500 on Mac OS upgrades since 2001. I just saved him $250 (or "about" $400).
not to mention it's a stupid argument. not many people have done 5 system upgrades to a machine that shipped with os9. most of them bought a machine pre-loaded with a version of os x within that 5-product cycle.
I do not think it is as much as an issue that Apples Quality Dropped but just the fact their entire Macintosh Product Line is now Generation 1, systems.
the other thing that's not being factored in is that apple's marketshare for laptops has doubled in the last quarter compared to a year ago. so apple is simply selling more computers than ever before. even if the defect rate was exactly the same there would be twice as many people to experience those defects. also, many of those people in that group would also be new to the platform and therefore likely to have higher expectations of their experience than people who are coming from a previous apple computer.
i won't go so far to say that their new computers aren't suffering more problems than previous versions, but the previous versions of these machines were already into their third generation and most of the kinks had been worked out. even as a mac aficianado i wouldn't ever claim them to be perfect.
No, it's more like Chevy selling a car that can take either regular gasoline, or gasoline (that's exactly the same) from special "iGas" stations with have a near-monopoly on the market, which can't be used with any other car.
so in your analogy, the ipod would then need to be able to play drm-encoded aac files AND play non-drm mp3's and aacs? you're right! i sure wish it did that!
hate to say it but this is a pretty bad ad. every aspect of it is really lacking and is definitely not worth the money in its current state. creating an ad to run in the wsj isn't something that should be taken lightly. i've done it a number of times (with other people's money of course) and on such a big stage you'd really want to polish any communications to highest degree, especially for an ad effort that will draw press to itself. this ad will probably do more to hurt the cause than help it. it's so unprofessional-looking the average user will be forced to wonder if they couldn't lay out a better page in microsoft word.
Yeah, but can you retroactively add to the contract? That is, when they signed on (for their scholarships), was that restriction there, or anything remotely resembling it (for example, an NFL contract stating that you can't do dangerous activities, which could be applied to trying to do stupid things on a motorcycle, ala Kellan Winslow Jr.).
i believe free-ride athletic scholarships are renewed every year (if not every semester). agreeing to play for a school and receive a scholarship is not a guarantee of free benefits until graduation. i would guess that student-athletes are required to sign paperwork at regular intervals to renew their scholarships. so they wouldn't need to have their contracts changes retroactively, it would just need to be changed for the next renewal cycle.
It's not a 1337 thing, it's a business thing. When powerful software gets into the hands of the untrained, the trend seems to be that it lowers the value of the services of people who do know what they are doing.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people will get a chance to use Shake (and software like it). But look at the trend in the design world. As the barrier to entry is lowered, so is the quality of work as well as the value of that work (over the entire industry).
i don't agree with you here. i am a designer/art director and i still find plenty of clients that appreciate skill and aesthetic over a cheap price. what the free availability of design tools did was to weed out some people who were already working as designers but not doing such a great job. sure there will be an influx of crappy unskilled "compositors" just as there were "retouchers" and "designers". however, as they say, cream rises to the top. in the end what happened in design is that it forced everyone to push forward because competition got that much more intense.
what i've found more often than bad designers lowering the price of business is bad designers charging as much as good designers for bad work. thereby making clients appreciate good work even more when they pay the same price for it. not too many folks want to make the investment of time and money to learn shake (or photoshop or indesign in my case) in order to make just a little bit more than they currently make. they want to get into those fields because they pay well and, hopefully, they enjoy that type of work.
Em, no. Apple did a better marketing job. The people don't want DRM, they don't want iTunes upgrades removing features. They do want to pay an extra 25% just to have the white headphones and look trendy.
The iPod was not sold on it's technical merits.
em, did you forget that at the time the ipod was the only device to offer that high of a capacity in that small of a form factor? apple went the extra mile in the design and used smaller hard drives while most other manufacturers were cutting corners using laptop hard drives. the original ipod was almost smaller than the other device's hard drives alone. looking at the market now it seemed like a really obvious choice to sacrifice a bit of profit for a much more convenient size, but it wasn't obvious to creative or any other manufacturer at the time. so yes, that was technical merit.
maybe non-mac users don't remember but at the time most people didn't even have the choice to use the ipod since it was mac only. i previously had some crappy flash based player than had 256K and a terrible interface which was hard to navigate, which is amazing when you can only hold around 20 songs on it. the ipod was a revolutionary design but by the time most other users even noticed it (ie. could use it) a lot of the design decisions were already adopted by other media players.
For the life of me, I still do not get America's obsession with small business. Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees, or do not pay for their health insurance, or even both.
you mean like former small businesses that do things like have 2 employees that build computers in a parents garage? (aapl) or a small business of a college kid building commodity pc's in his dorm room? (dell) or a small business of writing some code between harvard classes? (msft)
ictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there.
i'm not so sure about that. digital photography is just about to reach the point of 35mm film obsolescence. but there are larger format cameras out there and digital has a long way to go before it can reach that level. if they can level of resolution in a reasonably-sized body i'm sure they'd be able to sell as many of them as they could make.
If you think most people lose their creative spark by 30, look at the average of art directors and creatives in advertising firms. It's not that different from engineering, it takes time to get good at it.
actually that's not the best example. most creatives in ad agencies are moving into middle or upper management (associate creative directing, creative directing) by their mid-30's if they're worth their salt. the creative director job description is quite different than being an in-the-trenches creative. and a significant percentage of people burn-out of the business before they even hit that age. of my friends probably 1/3 to 1/2 of them had dropped out of the traditional ad agency structure by 32. lots of creatives try to jump into other fields altogether (directing, screenwriting, writing long form) if they're not interested in creative direction or management. only a few of my friends have continued full-force in the ad business at all much less as a day-to-day creative. many of us have gone freelance to have time to pursue other interests or gotten up to acd or cd level so they don't have to bust ass as much as they did when they were younger.
Slashdot Mirror
the one that bugged me most recently was the "explosive decompression of an airplane" episode. they were testing the idea that planes will be torn apart by decompression from a bullethole in a window. while they did get some good rushes of wind as a result of the rapid decompression they didn't at all factor in the destructive capabilities of jagged pieces of glass and metal being introduced into an airflow going 500 mph.
as someone who's seen the wrong side of 110 mph in cars and motorcycles, i can attest to the destructive potential of a strong wind. try sitting up on a motorcycle at 130mph. it's not comfortable. then flip your helmet's visor open and say hello to the ground. (not that i was stupid enough to do that).
if it was a friend of mine and we just happen to both have a zune, i'd be more likely to ask the person to borrow their cd or for them to just send me the mp3 files rather than "dj" it to me and have me run home to buy from a zune-store. it's a pretty cool feature on paper, but in reality it's nearly useless. if it costs the player in battery life, then it really doesn't do much good to a zune user.
haven't many of our technological and medical advancement been made in the quest for military empowerment?
currently on the ipods with video you can put video files from any source on there. i have stuff that i've converted from my eyetv to ipod format and stuck it on there. seems to work fine. so i don't see them limiting that function in the future. just like they don't limit the ipod to music bought only from the itunes music store.
that twenty years ago people said macintoshes were toy computers and ibm's were serious business machines. now macs use some stonkin intel processors and ibm processors are behind every next generation game console.
yeah, i'm aware of all that msn is. they were not doing well for a long time and people in redmond were very close to pulling the plug on it, mostly because they couldn't decide amongst themselves what msn was supposed to be. for a long time it was a competitor to aol, then that market started to close up and then it was a competitor to yahoo. after that didn't work they wanted to be a competitor to google. the range of services you see there isn't a result of focused development. quite the opposite, they're mostly leftovers from previous attempts at defining msn as a brand and company.
plus, microsoft threw a shit-ton of money at msn search; around $100M if i recall correctly. so to say that msn could "stand on its own" isn't exactly accurate because their search technology would never stand a chance to catch google if they didn't have the rest of the company to cover their enormous losses each year. i don't see any other independant search engines who stand on their own spending that much on their search technology.
sort of how your tivo starts to think you're gay because you're girlfriend keeps recording oprah?
TFA was completely worthless. besides the whole "big brother" strawman the author sets up, there are so many other issues that are simply not addressed. he uses a silly example of having the computer learn that you don't like to be bothered with emails while working on a video editing project except for "critical emails". well, how does the computer "learn" this behavior? if you don't check your mail when you edit video, you're not likely to find the "critical" email. thus, the computer doesn't understand that an email from "bob my client" is somehow more important than an email from "my nigerian ancestor who is also a prince." if you DO check your email during your video editing session, i suppose the computer would think that you like to be bothered with your emails while you're working on video.
then you have to factor in the complexities of whether or not editing video is in the same importance category as photo retouching. and is that also as important was writing a letter? i think i'd rather my computer let me be the judge of whether or not an email is important to me and when. besides, there's no easy way for the computer to know if i'm doing "entertainment work" (in my case, farking a photo) or "work work" (retouching photographs for publication).
also, as anyone who's used any sort of "learning technology" like voice recognition or hwr, we all know there's a long and frustrating process to getting the software to work even passably well. so i guess the first six months or so of your new system you'll have your computer making all sort of bad assumptions about your workflow and deciding to hide or highlight certain functions in your apps. while working within a tradition WIMP methaphor might not be the theoretically most efficient way to get work done, it's at least generally consistent. which, in turn, probably makes it the most efficient.
if i need a tool, i want it to be where i left it. i don't need my full set of hex keys as often as i need my cordless drill, but i sure don't need any magic gnomes running hiding all my hex keys and replacing them with my drill (which i already have a place for).
this "i can do that on my pc" argument is really tired when nobody factors in the ease of use or quality of the final product. i'd imagine most advanced computer users can accomplish nearly all the same tasks on different platforms but that has nothing to do with the ease-of-use for average computer users. just because you *might* be able to do the same things, you might not be able to do them as quickly, efficiently and as well as they can be done on a mac. just as there are things that pc's excel at, there are things macs excel at. to claim that to be untrue is simply shortsightedness.
reading continuous text on a webpage is confusing whether or not page down is done instantly or with an animation because you generally get just a little bit lost when the page moves. this is especially annoying when the amount of information left below your current position doesn't warrant a whole page, so "page down" really ends up being "5/8 of a page down".
i won't go so far to say that their new computers aren't suffering more problems than previous versions, but the previous versions of these machines were already into their third generation and most of the kinks had been worked out. even as a mac aficianado i wouldn't ever claim them to be perfect.
hate to say it but this is a pretty bad ad. every aspect of it is really lacking and is definitely not worth the money in its current state. creating an ad to run in the wsj isn't something that should be taken lightly. i've done it a number of times (with other people's money of course) and on such a big stage you'd really want to polish any communications to highest degree, especially for an ad effort that will draw press to itself. this ad will probably do more to hurt the cause than help it. it's so unprofessional-looking the average user will be forced to wonder if they couldn't lay out a better page in microsoft word.
what i've found more often than bad designers lowering the price of business is bad designers charging as much as good designers for bad work. thereby making clients appreciate good work even more when they pay the same price for it. not too many folks want to make the investment of time and money to learn shake (or photoshop or indesign in my case) in order to make just a little bit more than they currently make. they want to get into those fields because they pay well and, hopefully, they enjoy that type of work.
maybe non-mac users don't remember but at the time most people didn't even have the choice to use the ipod since it was mac only. i previously had some crappy flash based player than had 256K and a terrible interface which was hard to navigate, which is amazing when you can only hold around 20 songs on it. the ipod was a revolutionary design but by the time most other users even noticed it (ie. could use it) a lot of the design decisions were already adopted by other media players.