but the things won't stay together unless you use glue!
Well duh!, the things arent supposed to stay together!
I'm going to agree with the majority (especially after scanning the previous story about MS spending $314M in adverts to create $300M in losses to their dialup division). Lego wants to model themselves as the FAO Schwartz of building block toys. Too bad they haven't been paying attention to FAO's recent balance sheets and current demise. I'm 37 and I *still* want Legos for my kids, but you gotta spend a crapload of money before you can build anything decent. I do think they were LOTS cheaper when I was a kid, and quite comparable to the other toy options I had like Tonka's and Matchbox sets. Why can't they see the idiocy of being priced on the HIGH side of a Gamecube+"Soul Calibur"?
When companies with carpet-bombing advertising campaigns wail about losing money, I just shake my head in amazement.
Management with a clue (tm) would have realized about a decade ago it was time to produce the 'Lego Value Line' with probably 5-10 very generic and interchangable pieces that can serve as the base of some other larger more specialized constructions. Zero advertising needed (who doesn't know what Lego is?), just make sure Walmart, Target and Toy's R Us place them in their circulars at strategic times of the year (i.e. *not* Christmas when you're counting on granny, clueless godparents or absentee-parents to buy the overpriced, high margin specialty sets)
*because nobody with any real artistic talent would take the Sears job for $8/hour.
*sigh*
And if there's nobody left to *pay* for these uber quality prints, who are your customers? You gonna outsource them, too?
And speaking from experience, trying to start a company in a high-tech company dense area like NYC or San Francisco is even harder.
"What about D.C.?" asks a guy who is planning to move there next year and thinks constantly about what type of career he wants to build there...
Re:Let the conspiracy theories begin...
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You can sometimes make money supporting open source software
This remindes me about that PostgreSQL consulting company from a couple of years back. All they did was DB consulting; they just did it with pg so their clients had no licensing fees. Yet they failed. That failure has been held up as an example of how OS business models don't work, yet they were in fact just a consulting company that happened to use pg. I wish I could remember their name; perhaps I could look up the reasons to their failure. While closing down, they did cite a failure to secure additional funding, tho I thought a consulting biz usually had extremely low startup costs. Perhaps the postage from all those pg cd's they mailed out emptied all the partners' savings faster than they'd anticipated.
I think that if US animation studios took they're shows more seriouly like Hollywood does for it's movies, Japanese animation would never have gotten it's foot in the door here. I've met TV producers of animated shows here and they simply feel that it's best to make the shows as cheap as possible so as to make a quick buck rather than try to make something good.
Are you kidding me? Have you seen some of the drivel that comes out of Japanese animation studios? Sure, Studio Ghibli produces stuff like an art-house Xanadu, but have you seen "Bey Blade" (think 'GI Joe' cartoon, exists only to move merc), "Pokemon" (ditto), "Yugi Oh" (double-ditto) or "Hamtaro" (tho at least they do employ decent writers)?
I think anime gets lauded because there are so many hundreds of animated shows produced every year that some Cowboy Bebops, Patlabors and Tenchi's (and not just the movies) come out from the herd and outshine the dogs I mentioned above.
Okay, how 'bout,
"The year 2024, and the remaining 3 million humans on earth who weren't killed in the Common Cold Virus Mutation epidemic of 2004 eek out an existance...."
Geekbot sez "Michigan just finally ditched a lame laptop program by the governor. She felt that giving laptops to every 6th grader in the state would be a good idea since that is when they lose interest in school on average"
Actually it was the legislature *before she was elected* that decided on this program. But I digress...
I teach in Michigan, and I spend many a weekend hour helping the relatives and friends use their computers. It appears to me that the general use computers we have now are completely wrong for classroom (and general home user) use. I spent 90 mins on Sunday trying to help my father, over the phone, try to send me an attachment. If there was an 'email' icon and a 'docs' folder on his computer from which he could drag-n-drop the attached document he'd have been done in 5 mins. Same thing with computers; why does the operating system in my room have to be capable of running flash, directX, and the latest version of Half Life? Why, like the popup problem, does MS decide that the only way to turn off all these damnable FEATURES in their software is to purchase ADDITIONAL software (popup killers, antivirus wares, classroom management, etc) that turns them off? It's almost frustrating enough to want to go back to greenscreen (tho I know they'd just find an old version of nettrek with which to waste time).
I think a simplified desktop is the way to go. Unfortunately, I know this isn't fully a technical problem. I have met with enough resistance just trying to replace MS Office with Open Office or trying to sell Linux as the 'virus resistant' alternative to Win. Academia has a very strange belief that the skills we give our students directly translate into their future employability. It's hard to separate the knowledge of a task (i.e. want to bold? look for the 'bold' feature) from a particular implementation of that task (in Word, the sequence to bold text is....).
Loathe as I'm to say this, I wish MS would incorporate 'education mode' into their future OS so a very simple interface was available out of the box for getting the tasks of education done (and help my poor dad, too). Maybe that could be the real option the open source movement could have to break the MS monoculture; build a Ximian product (ala GEM, remember that?) that could sit on Linux or Win or whatever and simply provide a user folder with right-click 'New File' options, an email folder, a trash bin and a VERY basic browser. Like a basic textbook, this basic interface would go a long way to making this device more useful in the classroom and beyond.
Wandering around MS's site looing for something else I found this article on coding CE for cars.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnceauto/html/WinCAuto_UserRoles.as p
What else? Are you kiddin' me? Think Fed-Ex trucks that stop at the end of a block, a door slides open, and eight laden-'bots dart out in five different directions heading for the lobby of a bunch of high-rises...
schuh-weeet!
Slashdot Mirror
but the things won't stay together unless you use glue!
Well duh!, the things arent supposed to stay together!
I'm going to agree with the majority (especially after scanning the previous story about MS spending $314M in adverts to create $300M in losses to their dialup division). Lego wants to model themselves as the FAO Schwartz of building block toys. Too bad they haven't been paying attention to FAO's recent balance sheets and current demise. I'm 37 and I *still* want Legos for my kids, but you gotta spend a crapload of money before you can build anything decent. I do think they were LOTS cheaper when I was a kid, and quite comparable to the other toy options I had like Tonka's and Matchbox sets. Why can't they see the idiocy of being priced on the HIGH side of a Gamecube+"Soul Calibur"?
When companies with carpet-bombing advertising campaigns wail about losing money, I just shake my head in amazement.
Management with a clue (tm) would have realized about a decade ago it was time to produce the 'Lego Value Line' with probably 5-10 very generic and interchangable pieces that can serve as the base of some other larger more specialized constructions. Zero advertising needed (who doesn't know what Lego is?), just make sure Walmart, Target and Toy's R Us place them in their circulars at strategic times of the year (i.e. *not* Christmas when you're counting on granny, clueless godparents or absentee-parents to buy the overpriced, high margin specialty sets)
*because nobody with any real artistic talent would take the Sears job for $8/hour. *sigh* And if there's nobody left to *pay* for these uber quality prints, who are your customers? You gonna outsource them, too?
Whilst win32 is a joke to advanced users, you generally plug in supported hardware, and it just works
Haw, say that while installing a Shuttle 801 motherboard.....
"Yessiree, that board needs the SIS 630 drivers!" said Win2K
"No," Knoppix says, "its SIS650"
"Oh, ah, thanks" grumbles Win2K
And speaking from experience, trying to start a company in a high-tech company dense area like NYC or San Francisco is even harder.
"What about D.C.?" asks a guy who is planning to move there next year and thinks constantly about what type of career he wants to build there...
You can sometimes make money supporting open source software
This remindes me about that PostgreSQL consulting company from a couple of years back. All they did was DB consulting; they just did it with pg so their clients had no licensing fees. Yet they failed. That failure has been held up as an example of how OS business models don't work, yet they were in fact just a consulting company that happened to use pg. I wish I could remember their name; perhaps I could look up the reasons to their failure. While closing down, they did cite a failure to secure additional funding, tho I thought a consulting biz usually had extremely low startup costs. Perhaps the postage from all those pg cd's they mailed out emptied all the partners' savings faster than they'd anticipated.
I think that if US animation studios took they're shows more seriouly like Hollywood does for it's movies, Japanese animation would never have gotten it's foot in the door here. I've met TV producers of animated shows here and they simply feel that it's best to make the shows as cheap as possible so as to make a quick buck rather than try to make something good. Are you kidding me? Have you seen some of the drivel that comes out of Japanese animation studios? Sure, Studio Ghibli produces stuff like an art-house Xanadu, but have you seen "Bey Blade" (think 'GI Joe' cartoon, exists only to move merc), "Pokemon" (ditto), "Yugi Oh" (double-ditto) or "Hamtaro" (tho at least they do employ decent writers)? I think anime gets lauded because there are so many hundreds of animated shows produced every year that some Cowboy Bebops, Patlabors and Tenchi's (and not just the movies) come out from the herd and outshine the dogs I mentioned above.
Okay, how 'bout, "The year 2024, and the remaining 3 million humans on earth who weren't killed in the Common Cold Virus Mutation epidemic of 2004 eek out an existance ...."
Geekbot sez "Michigan just finally ditched a lame laptop program by the governor. She felt that giving laptops to every 6th grader in the state would be a good idea since that is when they lose interest in school on average" Actually it was the legislature *before she was elected* that decided on this program. But I digress... I teach in Michigan, and I spend many a weekend hour helping the relatives and friends use their computers. It appears to me that the general use computers we have now are completely wrong for classroom (and general home user) use. I spent 90 mins on Sunday trying to help my father, over the phone, try to send me an attachment. If there was an 'email' icon and a 'docs' folder on his computer from which he could drag-n-drop the attached document he'd have been done in 5 mins. Same thing with computers; why does the operating system in my room have to be capable of running flash, directX, and the latest version of Half Life? Why, like the popup problem, does MS decide that the only way to turn off all these damnable FEATURES in their software is to purchase ADDITIONAL software (popup killers, antivirus wares, classroom management, etc) that turns them off? It's almost frustrating enough to want to go back to greenscreen (tho I know they'd just find an old version of nettrek with which to waste time). I think a simplified desktop is the way to go. Unfortunately, I know this isn't fully a technical problem. I have met with enough resistance just trying to replace MS Office with Open Office or trying to sell Linux as the 'virus resistant' alternative to Win. Academia has a very strange belief that the skills we give our students directly translate into their future employability. It's hard to separate the knowledge of a task (i.e. want to bold? look for the 'bold' feature) from a particular implementation of that task (in Word, the sequence to bold text is ....).
Loathe as I'm to say this, I wish MS would incorporate 'education mode' into their future OS so a very simple interface was available out of the box for getting the tasks of education done (and help my poor dad, too). Maybe that could be the real option the open source movement could have to break the MS monoculture; build a Ximian product (ala GEM, remember that?) that could sit on Linux or Win or whatever and simply provide a user folder with right-click 'New File' options, an email folder, a trash bin and a VERY basic browser. Like a basic textbook, this basic interface would go a long way to making this device more useful in the classroom and beyond.
Wandering around MS's site looing for something else I found this article on coding CE for cars. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnceauto/html/WinCAuto_UserRoles.as p
What else? Are you kiddin' me? Think Fed-Ex trucks that stop at the end of a block, a door slides open, and eight laden-'bots dart out in five different directions heading for the lobby of a bunch of high-rises... schuh-weeet!
Oh, nevermind, I just checked some interesting comments farther down. So, Cmdr Taco, a bit behind on those patches are we?
Man, there are some very disturbed folks in Redmond....