There is a burning theater when the group in power is saying "God doesn't want you killing babies" as they ban embryonic stem cell research on a purely religious basis.
Consider this statement: a cell is not a person. Take a cheek cell for instance, it's not a person although it has the potential to become a person. One day, we'll know enough to convert cells from one type to another as well as manipulate the genetic machinery at will. At this point the entire discussion about embryonic stem cells will enter a whole new dimension as every cell can become a stem cell or full embryo. We've already turned embryos into normal cells. Going the other way is a little more complicated, but nothing that I consider impossible.
To summarize this particular case does adding a few enzymes, protiens and chemicals to a cell "create" a human? (Ignoring the fact that with proper care it may grow into one eventually) If we can convert cells back and forth from this mysterious "it's a human" state to it's merely tissue, a kidney, whatever you might want it to be at will, then what makes a couple of cells so special?
No. They aren't. But people making these kind of analogies, which liken religion to a fire in a theater and religious people to idiots who can't notice fire and smoke around themselves, certainly are:). I see the art of the metaphor is lost on you. The above is one case, others would be things like the theory of evolution being "challenged", the entire "idol" destruction thing (The Taliban among others - who says we need to keep this restricted to christians in the US?) the complete subjugation of women (Several arabian, asian, and african countries) the complete brain-washing of children (take your pick on this one, all fundamentalists practice this to some extent, the most blatant occurring currently in sectors of the US, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, some forcefully such as the Ivory Coast)
Speaking out against these things is good, as it lets people know that there are alternatives. It keeps mob rule in check, by allowing people to step outside the mob, and hopefully contain it. Of course, there are risks in speaking out against something like this, which is why those with qualities commonly associated with fundamentalists are usually the ones to speak out.
Lastly, most everyone that speaks out believes they're right. Except for politicians, you will find few people that go out and strongly expound something that they are unsure of or knowingly wrong about. Note that those speaking out against Intelligent Design/Creationism/etc mostly do not paint the other side as idiots, evil, etc, even if that's the impression you get when they're done. There's not much helping that when your most effective argument is to state that Christian creationism has no more validity than the world on the back of a turtle myth, or Gaea and Uranus creating the world as we know it, or any of the hundreds of other creation myths.
Atheism may not be a religion, but vocal atheists - those who feel the need to tell everyone they're atheists - certainly seem to have an emotional investment in their position, exhabiting many of the signs of fundamentalism: "I'm right and everyone who disagrees is either mad, stupid or evil". What if they get up in a burning theater and keep yelling "fire" to those ignoring the flame and smoke? Would you still say they're exhibiting many of the signs of fundamentalism? Or are these merely qualities, like breathing and sleeping, that they happen to have in common? (Note: this is not saying there aren't insane idiots in both camps, but when you're faced with loudly proclaimed blatant assertions as truth, vocal opposition does need to exist)
There is nothing wrong with being vocal about the truth, no matter how much some people don't want to hear about it.
I was under the impression that 720p and 180p were extensions to ATSC that were added later, but they were part of the original spec. Now I really feel left out in the cold by my Mitsubishi W55509 leaving out ATSC 720p. Lacking 1080p is understandable for a 2001 HDTV, as I don't think I'd even want to think about the cost of that capability.
You're thinking back to about 1988 or before. 1995 I was running a minimum of 800x600x256, and running 1024x768x65K for most everything that wasn't limited. Hitachi made a wonderful 17" monitor, the SuperElite that would run 1600x1200 @ 85Hz for about $990, on sale for $780 (my price somewhere in the beginning of 96). I still have this behemoth of a 17" CRT, although it is on its way out.
S3 did have some decent cards at the time. So did 3dFX, and someone I don't recall. I still have a Stealth64, although I don't have the card I used to run back then, but I'm thinking Matrox.
Heck, in 1984, Hercules made a color card that ran at least 640x480x256 (I had the monochrome in 83, and no cash to upgrade to the color one later and I don't recall the exact specs, sorry)
Let's rephrase it then - there's no good music being publicized out there. It's all crap. I look at the new releases by the major labels and generally wind up groaning every week. Even the indies are dissappointingly down and out.
Granted, there's more likley a problem with the music scene rather than the artists. What I consider good artists seem to have disappeared, while crap is available everywhere and being promoted like today's U2, Pink Floyd, Beatles, Stones or whatever band from yesteryear or yesterdecade you happen to like.
If you happen to be in college or close to a similar tumultous grouping of people, you might get exposed to small bands that are good, but once you're away from it for a while, that disappears. That's unfortunantly the way our society works for most of us.
The primary reason that people stop buying new CDs is because there are no good CDs being produced. I'd have lots of trouble naming 1 great CD that came out in the last 6 months (even though I've bought a couple).
How do you really know what their concern is? I bet it's not the single "perfect" copy. It's being able to copy copies forever perfectly. And, DRM only affects the initial copy, after that, it's non-DRM'd, and copies can be made from copies perfectly.
Since the core issue with audio is to provide as good an audio source as possible, DRM'd or not. With the high quality of audio recording equipment available, even an initial analog recording of a DRM'd work will be very very good, arguably so good that only the most discerning audiophile will be able to tell a difference.
The major loss to audio is from lossy codecs, like MP3, which will be much greater than any losses encountered by performing an analog recording of the original digital source and digitizing it.
ah ok Lets make everything completely generic up front with loads of potential problems later as a variety of people/use cases share the code. That way they can have no idea where the problem is without crazing debugging, that you would mostly have had for free in a static compiler. 1) Java is a statically typed language. 2) You've given an extreme case going way outside my use-case. I didn't say make everything generic, as obviously only utilities can be completely generic like the Collections classes. JDBC, for example, is more restrictive. Those large bits of commonly used code are hidden behind defined interfaces that are weakly typed. Life is much easier in the code-reuse path this way.
I've worked on the everything's strongly typed system that had a framework designed to map objects because each layer has its own types. The mappers are external and generally invoked via reflection or fed via some reflection based system like Spring. When it blows up, the exceptions are completely swallowed because the framework isn't allowed to print stack traces by arbitrary group C, and thus you have a wonderfully easy to debug system.
Weakly typed is not the same as no type. When a collections class has an issue, I know immediately what went wrong and where. Even JDBC and JMS issues are usually pretty easy to dig through. The strongly typed frameworks with their custom exception handling systems are a nightmare to develop and to support. (I'm on project #3 of this nature at the moment, and they've all got the same weaknesses)
Your post is a reason there's so much "bad" java code out there. I'm assuming here that by "strongly typed", you have unique objects designed to do everything, and everything has its own object. This is the torrid hell I've been trying to escape from for years, because many "architects" wouldn't know a good design if it ran over them, backed up, said sorry mate, I needed to turn here, and then peels out on them to make a left in front of oncoming traffic.
For example, what are the most commonly reused bits of code out there in Java?
Collections classes (Lists and Maps)
JDBC (Isn't it nice you don't have to have an OracleJDBCConnection, MySqlJDBCConnection, IbmDb2JDBCConnection, or, even worse, a BeaWeblogic8_0JDBCConnection, BeaWebLogic8_1JDBCConnection, etc set?)
JMS (just pick your nightmare implementation here....;)
Those are the top ones that I'm using today.
Now, for generics, introduced in Java5, yeah, they're ok in some instances. They trade one set of code writing (casting) for another (template specification). But, all things considered, I'd rather do either of these than be involved in a cut-n-paste hell where one logic change requires changing upteen files, because a swarm of 40 code-monkeys worked on the original with no clue that they were copying each other, because no one had the slightest idea what architecture and design were really about and that 800 classes could really have been accomplished by 1 or 2 programmers in the same time frame with only 20 classes with a properly designed architecture. Oh, and testing would have been significantly reduced as well, since the same code would be reused over and over and over....
Your statement is true if and only if that system is truly legacy and never touched.
If there are any changes made to it on anything approaching a regular basis, even simple ones, it is time to seriously look at converting the system now. (And you will be making changes, because SOX/SEC/etc do/will require it)
COBOL is a hopelessly crappy language for large-scale business programs. I've seen a cobbled together COBOL program that is only about 15 years old, and it took a COBOL expert that had worked with the system for years 8 months just to trace the "valid" logic path for payment processing. There were all these dead-end branches and things that no one had ever bothered to clean up, just add another if statement to nullify the branch with no documentation. Fortunately, I only had to interface with the code, not work with it.
Java (or even C#) is much more suited to business programming, and the design patterns brought out since even the early 90s will have a huge positive impact on the company's ability to quickly adapt to the changing needs of the future.
The true wonder is whether putting a computer in every home that is wide open to all sort of crap was a wise idea. For this you can blame MS. After all, for 99% of the home users, a system with the server service turned off is perfectly usable. (BTW, that would prevent 99% of the initial worms that were out on the net.)
So, if MS were to ship a system with only the things that most people would use enabled, and the rest available to be turned on with minor inconveniences, the rest of us would have lived much more convenient lives over the past decade.
They did. It was "resolved" by being disallowed. There is no per machine "MS tax" anymore. That fell victim in teh IBM suit, I believe. (So many suits, so long ago, so many beers.... ahh - that explains it!)
And in radio, there's "no payola". wink wink. Right.
How else do you explain the incredible tripe playing on the radio these days, not to mention that there are several ongoing investigations into this very allegation. Yeah, it's an "allegation", but until they stop playing the same tired 42 songs of the month, promoted by either ClearChannel or Infinity, with a couple of "oldies" thrown in for "variety", you're going to have a mountain the size of Olympus Mons to scale to convince anyone otherwise.
Think about what was said in G..P posts - 10 songs = 1 CD, so if Nelly puts 18 songs on CD, that's 8 free songs. Putting 9 songs each on 2 CDs, that "gyps" the record company out of 2 songs, as well as letting Nelly out of the contract 1 cycle sooner. That's provided all the above information is truly correct, and this being/.....
Considering that it is a JMS multi-tiered app, sure - this is simple to do. That's what decoupling buys you. Try this with EJBs for example, and you're, well, clusterfucked wouldn't begin to describe it.
Disclaimer: Like all good/.ers, I haven't RTFA for this post, just running on the last bit of info I read on eBay and their structure. However, since I just mentioned I didn't RTFA, I guess I'm not a good/.er!:)
Anyone that isn't truly blind can see the amazing difference in clarity, color depth, black reproduction, etc.
Not 100% true. It depends, upon your TV set. If you have an older HD set, you know, one of those before DVI/HDMI came on the scene to offer us much better digital connectivity, you just might have a TV where the only difference is clarity. (These TV's came with high-end upscalers and comb filters, processing everything to 1080i, thus making a good NTSC and a poor ATSC signal appear very similar. I also noticed that as HD cameras came online, that NTSC broadcasts actually started getting better picture quality, perhaps because they were produced from the higher quality HD source? I know that the picture certainly improved.
There's also more to the story than what you have there. The maximum resolution of a standard NTSC (480i) picture is 240 lines of vertical resolution at any one time. There's also horizontal information in that signal. The 240 lines may really be 200 lines, like VHS, or even less (160 or so is pretty common on VHS tapes)
On digital signals, while you may have 480i with 240 vertical lines, you may have 50% horizontal resolution (DISH and probably DirecTV and cable companies do this) sending out signals with pictures of 352X480 resolution instead of 704X480 or 720 X 480 or a WS 840 X 480 or even the DBS 540X480 (all these are corresponding ATSC standards, with the exception of the DBS resolution, which appears to be a quasi standard and the 352X480 which isn't one at all from what I've found). The 352X480 is used (by Dish at least) for Comedy Central, USA, Sci-fi, and a couple of other minor channels, which is why they are obviously worse (blotchy or blocky, generally blurry) when viewed on even smaller 4:3 screens.
But are there any working media for it? I recall very vaguely seeing an article where they tried the DL media and it failed 90% of the time to even write. Just because the burner claims to support something doesn't mean it does.
Well, when congress is controlled by the president (effectively) and still uses executive statements (or whatever they're called) when he signs things into law to create exclusions for the executive branch and himself specifically, yeah, he is responsible for a lot of things.
I think you're missing the point on this. You'll pay for every viewing under that model, if they get their way. This may not be a bad thing for adults (How many times could we possibly watch the Matrix or LOTR trilogies anyways?;) but think of your kid watching The Wiggles shows at least 100 times each.... All of a sudden, the death of (HD)DVD/Blu-Ray seems way overblown.
I do not believe that "lifetime" subscriptions will occur anytime soon. The MPAA/RIAA models are trying to move towards pay per play, or at the very least pay per download while changing the underlying format every 5-10 years. They've been successful so far: 78s, 45s, 33s, EPs, LPs, Reel to Reel, 8-track, casette, SACD, DVD-Audio, VHS, Beta Max, S-VHS, DVD +-R(W)(RAM - still around in new products, couldn't believe my eyes!!!) DVD-DL +-R(W), and now HD-DVD/Blu-Ray with a soon to come -DL designator (I don't believe either of the writables are dual layer yet, although the spec calls for it - I could be wrong though). Then there's the entire analog (take your pick of "standards") to digital to digital compressed encoding to DRM'd digital standards.
I'll predict in 10 years you'll still see MP3/AAC encoded music because Flash memory can only be shrunk so small and a 20-40 fold increase in an Apple Nano's memory size in 10 years while keeping the same or lower price point seems reasonable. You may still see DVDs, only because the masses refuse to upgrade to a $300 player when a $20 player does everything they need. As for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, that one is interesting, they're both DRM'd badly at the moment, and the early adopter crowd that this should be targeted to these days also happens to most likely be the same crowd that is knowledgeable enough about DRM to say "NO". Witness the recent fallout of HDTV sales just being reported, nobody knows if it's a true trend yet but it seems reasonable to expect a large number of people to be unhappy with their HDTV since they will most likely not pickup HD signals out of the box.
Access is the worst POS to ever hit the streets... except for maybe VB. Why are these so bad? Because they by design encourage horrible development. Access by ignoring everything a DB should be and making regular business folks think they're as good as developers and then wondering why their personal system when opened to multiple users blows up and loses data, and VB because where else do you get built-in incompatibilities and virii for free?
I'd have to say it's a toss-up as there are few products that ever did more harm to the computing world than those two.
You do realize that OLE/COM is largely based on DDE, an IBM patented technology? And that IBM told MS that they shouldn't use it, because it was unsuited to task? And that IBM was right, as witnessed by the huge problems they've had with it?
This entire concept existed in its best form to date as SOM/DSOM on OS/2, which actually supported distributed COM objects long before MS ever got COM or DCOM to sort of work correctly.
IOW, OLE/COM is merely yet another stolen/copied subpar tech, brought to you by those ever helpful friendly overlords at MS.
Actually, I prefer the MacBook (Pro) w/ windows combination, especially if you do any dev at all that also runs on Unix. Can't count the number of times that capitalization has caused issues when transferring to a real OS. (That's right, Windows still sucks eggs in that dept.) With OSX and Parallels, you now get a real OS, and can run those few pesky windows apps seamlessly, at least until MS tries to break them again.
And why wouldn't you get a Mac? Price? For similarly robust computers, Macs are now very competitively priced. And the packaged software is pretty darn nice too, and is much more feature rich than the MS set, although not good enough to not require an additional software purchase for the serious user. (e.g., iPhoto is nice, until you get into RAW editing, or thousands of pictures. iMovie is nice, but for full menu creation, you'll need something better)
I'm looking forward to my Macbook Pro, it'll be on order within the week. The Macbook is nice, but I miss the backlit keys.
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Consider this statement: a cell is not a person. Take a cheek cell for instance, it's not a person although it has the potential to become a person. One day, we'll know enough to convert cells from one type to another as well as manipulate the genetic machinery at will. At this point the entire discussion about embryonic stem cells will enter a whole new dimension as every cell can become a stem cell or full embryo. We've already turned embryos into normal cells. Going the other way is a little more complicated, but nothing that I consider impossible.
To summarize this particular case does adding a few enzymes, protiens and chemicals to a cell "create" a human? (Ignoring the fact that with proper care it may grow into one eventually) If we can convert cells back and forth from this mysterious "it's a human" state to it's merely tissue, a kidney, whatever you might want it to be at will, then what makes a couple of cells so special? No. They aren't. But people making these kind of analogies, which liken religion to a fire in a theater and religious people to idiots who can't notice fire and smoke around themselves, certainly are
Speaking out against these things is good, as it lets people know that there are alternatives. It keeps mob rule in check, by allowing people to step outside the mob, and hopefully contain it. Of course, there are risks in speaking out against something like this, which is why those with qualities commonly associated with fundamentalists are usually the ones to speak out.
Lastly, most everyone that speaks out believes they're right. Except for politicians, you will find few people that go out and strongly expound something that they are unsure of or knowingly wrong about. Note that those speaking out against Intelligent Design/Creationism/etc mostly do not paint the other side as idiots, evil, etc, even if that's the impression you get when they're done. There's not much helping that when your most effective argument is to state that Christian creationism has no more validity than the world on the back of a turtle myth, or Gaea and Uranus creating the world as we know it, or any of the hundreds of other creation myths.
There is nothing wrong with being vocal about the truth, no matter how much some people don't want to hear about it.
I was under the impression that 720p and 180p were extensions to ATSC that were added later, but they were part of the original spec. Now I really feel left out in the cold by my Mitsubishi W55509 leaving out ATSC 720p. Lacking 1080p is understandable for a 2001 HDTV, as I don't think I'd even want to think about the cost of that capability.
I can read my email with my PC
You're thinking back to about 1988 or before. 1995 I was running a minimum of 800x600x256, and running 1024x768x65K for most everything that wasn't limited. Hitachi made a wonderful 17" monitor, the SuperElite that would run 1600x1200 @ 85Hz for about $990, on sale for $780 (my price somewhere in the beginning of 96). I still have this behemoth of a 17" CRT, although it is on its way out.
S3 did have some decent cards at the time. So did 3dFX, and someone I don't recall. I still have a Stealth64, although I don't have the card I used to run back then, but I'm thinking Matrox.
Heck, in 1984, Hercules made a color card that ran at least 640x480x256 (I had the monochrome in 83, and no cash to upgrade to the color one later and I don't recall the exact specs, sorry)
Let's rephrase it then - there's no good music being publicized out there. It's all crap. I look at the new releases by the major labels and generally wind up groaning every week. Even the indies are dissappointingly down and out.
Granted, there's more likley a problem with the music scene rather than the artists. What I consider good artists seem to have disappeared, while crap is available everywhere and being promoted like today's U2, Pink Floyd, Beatles, Stones or whatever band from yesteryear or yesterdecade you happen to like.
If you happen to be in college or close to a similar tumultous grouping of people, you might get exposed to small bands that are good, but once you're away from it for a while, that disappears. That's unfortunantly the way our society works for most of us.
That would require them to have "good" artists.
The primary reason that people stop buying new CDs is because there are no good CDs being produced. I'd have lots of trouble naming 1 great CD that came out in the last 6 months (even though I've bought a couple).
How do you really know what their concern is? I bet it's not the single "perfect" copy. It's being able to copy copies forever perfectly. And, DRM only affects the initial copy, after that, it's non-DRM'd, and copies can be made from copies perfectly.
Since the core issue with audio is to provide as good an audio source as possible, DRM'd or not. With the high quality of audio recording equipment available, even an initial analog recording of a DRM'd work will be very very good, arguably so good that only the most discerning audiophile will be able to tell a difference.
The major loss to audio is from lossy codecs, like MP3, which will be much greater than any losses encountered by performing an analog recording of the original digital source and digitizing it.
I've worked on the everything's strongly typed system that had a framework designed to map objects because each layer has its own types. The mappers are external and generally invoked via reflection or fed via some reflection based system like Spring. When it blows up, the exceptions are completely swallowed because the framework isn't allowed to print stack traces by arbitrary group C, and thus you have a wonderfully easy to debug system.
Weakly typed is not the same as no type. When a collections class has an issue, I know immediately what went wrong and where. Even JDBC and JMS issues are usually pretty easy to dig through. The strongly typed frameworks with their custom exception handling systems are a nightmare to develop and to support. (I'm on project #3 of this nature at the moment, and they've all got the same weaknesses)
For example, what are the most commonly reused bits of code out there in Java?
Those are the top ones that I'm using today.
Now, for generics, introduced in Java5, yeah, they're ok in some instances. They trade one set of code writing (casting) for another (template specification). But, all things considered, I'd rather do either of these than be involved in a cut-n-paste hell where one logic change requires changing upteen files, because a swarm of 40 code-monkeys worked on the original with no clue that they were copying each other, because no one had the slightest idea what architecture and design were really about and that 800 classes could really have been accomplished by 1 or 2 programmers in the same time frame with only 20 classes with a properly designed architecture. Oh, and testing would have been significantly reduced as well, since the same code would be reused over and over and over....
Your statement is true if and only if that system is truly legacy and never touched.
If there are any changes made to it on anything approaching a regular basis, even simple ones, it is time to seriously look at converting the system now. (And you will be making changes, because SOX/SEC/etc do/will require it)
COBOL is a hopelessly crappy language for large-scale business programs. I've seen a cobbled together COBOL program that is only about 15 years old, and it took a COBOL expert that had worked with the system for years 8 months just to trace the "valid" logic path for payment processing. There were all these dead-end branches and things that no one had ever bothered to clean up, just add another if statement to nullify the branch with no documentation. Fortunately, I only had to interface with the code, not work with it.
Java (or even C#) is much more suited to business programming, and the design patterns brought out since even the early 90s will have a huge positive impact on the company's ability to quickly adapt to the changing needs of the future.
The true wonder is whether putting a computer in every home that is wide open to all sort of crap was a wise idea. For this you can blame MS. After all, for 99% of the home users, a system with the server service turned off is perfectly usable. (BTW, that would prevent 99% of the initial worms that were out on the net.)
So, if MS were to ship a system with only the things that most people would use enabled, and the rest available to be turned on with minor inconveniences, the rest of us would have lived much more convenient lives over the past decade.
I'll disagree, try any of their servers. Their consumer desktop machines suck eggs anyways.
They did. It was "resolved" by being disallowed. There is no per machine "MS tax" anymore. That fell victim in teh IBM suit, I believe. (So many suits, so long ago, so many beers.... ahh - that explains it!)
How else do you explain the incredible tripe playing on the radio these days, not to mention that there are several ongoing investigations into this very allegation. Yeah, it's an "allegation", but until they stop playing the same tired 42 songs of the month, promoted by either ClearChannel or Infinity, with a couple of "oldies" thrown in for "variety", you're going to have a mountain the size of Olympus Mons to scale to convince anyone otherwise.
Think about what was said in G..P posts - 10 songs = 1 CD, so if Nelly puts 18 songs on CD, that's 8 free songs. Putting 9 songs each on 2 CDs, that "gyps" the record company out of 2 songs, as well as letting Nelly out of the contract 1 cycle sooner. That's provided all the above information is truly correct, and this being /.....
Considering that it is a JMS multi-tiered app, sure - this is simple to do. That's what decoupling buys you. Try this with EJBs for example, and you're, well, clusterfucked wouldn't begin to describe it.
/.ers, I haven't RTFA for this post, just running on the last bit of info I read on eBay and their structure. However, since I just mentioned I didn't RTFA, I guess I'm not a good /.er!:)
Disclaimer: Like all good
Not 100% true. It depends, upon your TV set. If you have an older HD set, you know, one of those before DVI/HDMI came on the scene to offer us much better digital connectivity, you just might have a TV where the only difference is clarity. (These TV's came with high-end upscalers and comb filters, processing everything to 1080i, thus making a good NTSC and a poor ATSC signal appear very similar. I also noticed that as HD cameras came online, that NTSC broadcasts actually started getting better picture quality, perhaps because they were produced from the higher quality HD source? I know that the picture certainly improved.
There's also more to the story than what you have there. The maximum resolution of a standard NTSC (480i) picture is 240 lines of vertical resolution at any one time. There's also horizontal information in that signal. The 240 lines may really be 200 lines, like VHS, or even less (160 or so is pretty common on VHS tapes)
On digital signals, while you may have 480i with 240 vertical lines, you may have 50% horizontal resolution (DISH and probably DirecTV and cable companies do this) sending out signals with pictures of 352X480 resolution instead of 704X480 or 720 X 480 or a WS 840 X 480 or even the DBS 540X480 (all these are corresponding ATSC standards, with the exception of the DBS resolution, which appears to be a quasi standard and the 352X480 which isn't one at all from what I've found). The 352X480 is used (by Dish at least) for Comedy Central, USA, Sci-fi, and a couple of other minor channels, which is why they are obviously worse (blotchy or blocky, generally blurry) when viewed on even smaller 4:3 screens.
But are there any working media for it? I recall very vaguely seeing an article where they tried the DL media and it failed 90% of the time to even write. Just because the burner claims to support something doesn't mean it does.
Well, when congress is controlled by the president (effectively) and still uses executive statements (or whatever they're called) when he signs things into law to create exclusions for the executive branch and himself specifically, yeah, he is responsible for a lot of things.
I think you're missing the point on this. You'll pay for every viewing under that model, if they get their way. This may not be a bad thing for adults (How many times could we possibly watch the Matrix or LOTR trilogies anyways?;) but think of your kid watching The Wiggles shows at least 100 times each.... All of a sudden, the death of (HD)DVD/Blu-Ray seems way overblown.
I do not believe that "lifetime" subscriptions will occur anytime soon. The MPAA/RIAA models are trying to move towards pay per play, or at the very least pay per download while changing the underlying format every 5-10 years. They've been successful so far: 78s, 45s, 33s, EPs, LPs, Reel to Reel, 8-track, casette, SACD, DVD-Audio, VHS, Beta Max, S-VHS, DVD +-R(W)(RAM - still around in new products, couldn't believe my eyes!!!) DVD-DL +-R(W), and now HD-DVD/Blu-Ray with a soon to come -DL designator (I don't believe either of the writables are dual layer yet, although the spec calls for it - I could be wrong though). Then there's the entire analog (take your pick of "standards") to digital to digital compressed encoding to DRM'd digital standards.
I'll predict in 10 years you'll still see MP3/AAC encoded music because Flash memory can only be shrunk so small and a 20-40 fold increase in an Apple Nano's memory size in 10 years while keeping the same or lower price point seems reasonable. You may still see DVDs, only because the masses refuse to upgrade to a $300 player when a $20 player does everything they need. As for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, that one is interesting, they're both DRM'd badly at the moment, and the early adopter crowd that this should be targeted to these days also happens to most likely be the same crowd that is knowledgeable enough about DRM to say "NO". Witness the recent fallout of HDTV sales just being reported, nobody knows if it's a true trend yet but it seems reasonable to expect a large number of people to be unhappy with their HDTV since they will most likely not pickup HD signals out of the box.
Access is the worst POS to ever hit the streets... except for maybe VB. Why are these so bad? Because they by design encourage horrible development. Access by ignoring everything a DB should be and making regular business folks think they're as good as developers and then wondering why their personal system when opened to multiple users blows up and loses data, and VB because where else do you get built-in incompatibilities and virii for free?
I'd have to say it's a toss-up as there are few products that ever did more harm to the computing world than those two.
You do realize that OLE/COM is largely based on DDE, an IBM patented technology? And that IBM told MS that they shouldn't use it, because it was unsuited to task? And that IBM was right, as witnessed by the huge problems they've had with it?
This entire concept existed in its best form to date as SOM/DSOM on OS/2, which actually supported distributed COM objects long before MS ever got COM or DCOM to sort of work correctly.
IOW, OLE/COM is merely yet another stolen/copied subpar tech, brought to you by those ever helpful friendly overlords at MS.
Another reason to get the MBP is dual head support. That seals it for me.
Actually, I prefer the MacBook (Pro) w/ windows combination, especially if you do any dev at all that also runs on Unix. Can't count the number of times that capitalization has caused issues when transferring to a real OS. (That's right, Windows still sucks eggs in that dept.) With OSX and Parallels, you now get a real OS, and can run those few pesky windows apps seamlessly, at least until MS tries to break them again.
And why wouldn't you get a Mac? Price? For similarly robust computers, Macs are now very competitively priced. And the packaged software is pretty darn nice too, and is much more feature rich than the MS set, although not good enough to not require an additional software purchase for the serious user. (e.g., iPhoto is nice, until you get into RAW editing, or thousands of pictures. iMovie is nice, but for full menu creation, you'll need something better)
I'm looking forward to my Macbook Pro, it'll be on order within the week. The Macbook is nice, but I miss the backlit keys.