Theoretically, I feel the same way. But I've got stacks of movie/TV season DVDs that I paid more than $1/episode for and have only watched once. Only a couple of early Simpsons seasons have gotten more than a few watches each among the TV shows. Among the movies, Pulp Fiction's gotten its fair share of watchings, but others probably would have been a better deal if I'd rented.
Because I don't get AMC, I buy Mad Men and Breaking Bad through iTunes, and since they're not Avatar, I get the non-HD versions and save a few bucks. I end up paying over $1/an episode, and rarely watch an episode twice. The exception is the Mad Men episode, "The Wheel", where Draper gives one of the best business pitches I've ever seen. I watched that scene 10 times when I was preparing a presentation for a conference, and I'm sure it helped me get the promotion I received a few weeks later. For that, I would have paid $10 for the multiple viewings.
Heck, we pay $10 to see a movie in a crowded theater where the guy on your left stinks, the guy on your right won't stop talking, and the guy behind you clearly has TB based on the blood splattering out with each cough. Why not $1 for an hour's entertainment? Sure, $0.50 would be better, as would $0.25, but $1 is not out of line with a lot of other things most people spend their money on.
Well, that and the fact that the iPhone is the flagship product these days. I personally want an iPod touch with GPS, compass, gyro, retina display, forward and rear facing cameras and 3G data but no voice so I can use it (via Google Voice + Skype) as a phone without the phone service for $15 or $25/mo.
That'd be awesome. But I'm not surprised they're not offering. Yes, Apple makes great products, but they don't do it just for their health. They want to drive as much profit as they can.
So either I'll convince my employer to ditch their blackberry contract and get me an iPhone, or when (if ever) it becomes important enough to me, I'll pony up and buy one myself. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for my non-phone-phone.
It would be cool though... especially if it had provider-agnostic (or at least provider-promiscuous) data radios. And while I'm at it, I'll suggest that they offer a meta-service, so that I pay one fee to Apple, and that allows me to hop on whatever 3G/4G/WiMax network is available (or fastest!) wherever I happen to be.
Most people are idiots about email. Two of my favorite people in the world are brilliant in so many ways, but they're idiots about email.
One of these people doesn't know how to use an address book or type in an email address unless absolutely necessary, so all emails she sends are responses to old emails. So if I want to find an email that she sent last week, it might be in a thread that started in 2006. Or 2008. She's not consistent about which ones she responds to.
The other one always puts "Hey Ben" in the subject. Doesn't matter what it's about; the subject is always, "Hey Ben". even when I change the subject line on response, he'll change it right back to "Hey Ben" when it's his turn.
I've tried to explain the benefits of good subjects to both of them, but they give me that 10,000 mile stare like I'm speaking Klingon or something.
My list: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lie to Me. That's three hours a week. MM and BB I buy through iTunes so that they're waiting for me to watch at a convenient time (I don't get AMC) and I watch Lie to Me on Fox.com for free. I'd probably do the same with BB and MM if they offered high quality streaming versions, but last I checked, they don't. My total is about $40/year with zero broadcast TV beyond the occasional news show or sporting event.
When I have some spare time, I've been known to watch Daily Show/Colbert, but the streaming versions are fine for me. All said and done, I think I spend no more than 4 hours a week on a bad week in front of any form of TV entertainment, usually more like two. Two hours a day? Forget about $120/mo; my time is worth more to me.
Aren't there a lot of "bad things* in computers and monitors? Isn't it bad enough the ones on our desktops turn over every few years? Can you imagine if hundreds of thousands of these ended up in the landfill every month? Forgive me if I sound like a kneejerk hippy, but this just doesn't seem at all green.
Woah. There was no reason to mangle that metaphor so badly. The engineers could have been the pitchers throwing wild. The customers could be the batters watching, bemused, as the balls flew over their heads. And the Google marketing staff could be the catchers, haplessly trying to make it look as if the crazy throws were intentional.
And we, the slashdot commentators, of course, are the umpires. No. We're the sportscasters. No. We're the annoying weather person who tries to say something pithy after the sports guy has wrapped up the daily events. Yes, that's it. Fixed that for you.
* And yes, I've heard all the FUD about how Apple's practices are going to tempt other manufacturers into doing the same thing they are. Give me a break.
No no, it's true. I just bought a microwave, and it only allows me to run the software that's built in. Bastards. And I can tell where they got the idea from, because there's a dedicated button for--yup, you guessed it--baked apples!
Seriously. And I think of all of the history with things like PlaysForSure, WMA, AVI files and more which for many years couldn't be used on a Mac because Microsoft controlled the specifications. The decision to push HTML5 and H.264 for multimedia over Flash is just another of millions of corporate decisions that have affected everyone who has ever purchased a computing device, ever, in one way or another. People are free to agree or disagree with it, but to call the choices made for the iPad a 'willfull de-evolution' instead of what they are--design decisions for a new product--is disingenuous at best.
Hell, I think back to the Atari 800 vs. Apple IIe vs. C64 vs IBM PC days where people would croon that their computer was better for this versus that versus the other thing. In this guy's world, the Atari owner's claim that they had 10 times as many games would have been impossible because we're all hippy flower children and our computers all run the same software. Woo hoo!
If I remember correctly, the Apple IIe owners' claim was that their system was better because it showed they were rich. IBM PCs were, of course, better for business. And the Commodore 64 commercials, if nothing else, told us that the computer would make the user (the purchaser's children, of course) much smarter.
Heheh. V.92. I remember when we were dealing with all those old dialup protocols. Wasn't the marketing name for V.92 'V.Fast'?
I'm on Comcast now, and I have a feeling that one day I'll look back on today and think, 'Man, I didn't know what fast was.' V.Fast certainly wasn't that. I remember waiting hours for a postage-stamp-sized movie trailer to download.
I'll tell you why the cell phone manufacturers don't offer it: their customers don't want it. No, I don't mean consumers like me and you; the wireless service providers don't want it because a cell phone with a radio means that consumers could conceivably be using their phones for hours and hours of music and news consumption, and they would get nothing for it.
As much as I agree with the 'horse-buggy' description of the music/radio industry, there's no lack of cynicism in the comment. What the cell phone guy was saying, in effect, was, you radio broadcasters should put everything on a an Internet stream so that I can bill my customers for every minute they listen.
Serious. With a combination of Blippy and FourSquare, you don't even need geotagged pictures. I mean, anyone following your Twitter stream could take advantage of this sequence of events:
- So-and-so checked into their house at 123 Main Street, Hometown USA! So-and-so is now the mayor of their house!
- So-and-so bought a new MacBook Pro for $3297 using Blippy at the Apple Store in Winston Niles Rumfoord Shopping Center!
- So-and-so checked into the Relax'em Spa.
- So-and-so bought a 1 hour massage and a 2 hours sauna using Blippy for $225.
No, times do not change with respect to military strategies
Apparently, they do. The barbarians are at the gate; Wikileaks is to government secrets as Napster was to music. Napster wasn't killed by better DRM or lawsuits, it was killed by corporations embracing the fact that music is in a new era, by easy-access a la carte downloads from places like iTunes.
Even if they kill Wikileaks or the folks who run it, it's clear now that no secret is entirely safe.
Maybe what this will mean is that governments, knowing that surprise is not an option any longer, will simply launch fewer military campaigns. Remember: Afghanistan is arguable, but we didn't need to go into Iraq. Skip a war, and that's thousands of secrets you never have to bury.
Slashdot Mirror
Theoretically, I feel the same way. But I've got stacks of movie/TV season DVDs that I paid more than $1/episode for and have only watched once. Only a couple of early Simpsons seasons have gotten more than a few watches each among the TV shows. Among the movies, Pulp Fiction's gotten its fair share of watchings, but others probably would have been a better deal if I'd rented.
Because I don't get AMC, I buy Mad Men and Breaking Bad through iTunes, and since they're not Avatar, I get the non-HD versions and save a few bucks. I end up paying over $1/an episode, and rarely watch an episode twice. The exception is the Mad Men episode, "The Wheel", where Draper gives one of the best business pitches I've ever seen. I watched that scene 10 times when I was preparing a presentation for a conference, and I'm sure it helped me get the promotion I received a few weeks later. For that, I would have paid $10 for the multiple viewings.
Heck, we pay $10 to see a movie in a crowded theater where the guy on your left stinks, the guy on your right won't stop talking, and the guy behind you clearly has TB based on the blood splattering out with each cough. Why not $1 for an hour's entertainment? Sure, $0.50 would be better, as would $0.25, but $1 is not out of line with a lot of other things most people spend their money on.
Well, that and the fact that the iPhone is the flagship product these days. I personally want an iPod touch with GPS, compass, gyro, retina display, forward and rear facing cameras and 3G data but no voice so I can use it (via Google Voice + Skype) as a phone without the phone service for $15 or $25/mo.
That'd be awesome. But I'm not surprised they're not offering. Yes, Apple makes great products, but they don't do it just for their health. They want to drive as much profit as they can.
So either I'll convince my employer to ditch their blackberry contract and get me an iPhone, or when (if ever) it becomes important enough to me, I'll pony up and buy one myself. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for my non-phone-phone.
It would be cool though... especially if it had provider-agnostic (or at least provider-promiscuous) data radios. And while I'm at it, I'll suggest that they offer a meta-service, so that I pay one fee to Apple, and that allows me to hop on whatever 3G/4G/WiMax network is available (or fastest!) wherever I happen to be.
And there'd be ponies! No... UNICORNS!
And believe it or not, I'm sure Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. would like to punch you.
LOL. I'll even wave my arms around like the Robinsons' robot did.
Even "server" would be great, assuming the email is about a server. But no, it's always, "Hey, Ben".
I even try to make it clear what I'm doing, i.e. "Subject: MyGoodBuddysBusiness.com Server (was: Hey, Ben)", but even that doesn't cut it.
sigh.
Most people are idiots about email. Two of my favorite people in the world are brilliant in so many ways, but they're idiots about email.
One of these people doesn't know how to use an address book or type in an email address unless absolutely necessary, so all emails she sends are responses to old emails. So if I want to find an email that she sent last week, it might be in a thread that started in 2006. Or 2008. She's not consistent about which ones she responds to.
The other one always puts "Hey Ben" in the subject. Doesn't matter what it's about; the subject is always, "Hey Ben". even when I change the subject line on response, he'll change it right back to "Hey Ben" when it's his turn.
I've tried to explain the benefits of good subjects to both of them, but they give me that 10,000 mile stare like I'm speaking Klingon or something.
You watch too much TV.
My list: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lie to Me. That's three hours a week. MM and BB I buy through iTunes so that they're waiting for me to watch at a convenient time (I don't get AMC) and I watch Lie to Me on Fox.com for free. I'd probably do the same with BB and MM if they offered high quality streaming versions, but last I checked, they don't. My total is about $40/year with zero broadcast TV beyond the occasional news show or sporting event.
When I have some spare time, I've been known to watch Daily Show/Colbert, but the streaming versions are fine for me. All said and done, I think I spend no more than 4 hours a week on a bad week in front of any form of TV entertainment, usually more like two. Two hours a day? Forget about $120/mo; my time is worth more to me.
It doesn't deserve insightful. Maybe interesting. Insightful implies that I'm right. For all I know, this ad system is made of cotton and corn.
Aren't there a lot of "bad things* in computers and monitors? Isn't it bad enough the ones on our desktops turn over every few years? Can you imagine if hundreds of thousands of these ended up in the landfill every month? Forgive me if I sound like a kneejerk hippy, but this just doesn't seem at all green.
Actually, sighted, blind and deaf people can connect bluetooth keyboards to their iPhones now. Only dumb ones can't.
Well, what everyone missed is that it was also a particle .
Woah. There was no reason to mangle that metaphor so badly. The engineers could have been the pitchers throwing wild. The customers could be the batters watching, bemused, as the balls flew over their heads. And the Google marketing staff could be the catchers, haplessly trying to make it look as if the crazy throws were intentional.
And we, the slashdot commentators, of course, are the umpires. No. We're the sportscasters. No. We're the annoying weather person who tries to say something pithy after the sports guy has wrapped up the daily events. Yes, that's it. Fixed that for you.
* And yes, I've heard all the FUD about how Apple's practices are going to tempt other manufacturers into doing the same thing they are. Give me a break.
No no, it's true. I just bought a microwave, and it only allows me to run the software that's built in. Bastards. And I can tell where they got the idea from, because there's a dedicated button for--yup, you guessed it--baked apples!
Seriously. And I think of all of the history with things like PlaysForSure, WMA, AVI files and more which for many years couldn't be used on a Mac because Microsoft controlled the specifications. The decision to push HTML5 and H.264 for multimedia over Flash is just another of millions of corporate decisions that have affected everyone who has ever purchased a computing device, ever, in one way or another. People are free to agree or disagree with it, but to call the choices made for the iPad a 'willfull de-evolution' instead of what they are--design decisions for a new product--is disingenuous at best.
Hell, I think back to the Atari 800 vs. Apple IIe vs. C64 vs IBM PC days where people would croon that their computer was better for this versus that versus the other thing. In this guy's world, the Atari owner's claim that they had 10 times as many games would have been impossible because we're all hippy flower children and our computers all run the same software. Woo hoo!
If I remember correctly, the Apple IIe owners' claim was that their system was better because it showed they were rich. IBM PCs were, of course, better for business. And the Commodore 64 commercials, if nothing else, told us that the computer would make the user (the purchaser's children, of course) much smarter.
As you can all tell, my folks got me the C64.
Don't forget about other social network posts.:
Twitter: @so-and-so Is so through with room mates; it's great to live alone now!
Facebook: So-and-so's relationship status changed to "single".
Dogbook: So-and-so's pitbull, Gracie, is now frolicking in a huge field in doggie heaven.
What does it mean if the test taker hurls the rock at the doctor who originally diagnosed them with autism?
Forget about hamsters. Min's a capybara!
Heheh. V.92. I remember when we were dealing with all those old dialup protocols. Wasn't the marketing name for V.92 'V.Fast'?
I'm on Comcast now, and I have a feeling that one day I'll look back on today and think, 'Man, I didn't know what fast was.' V.Fast certainly wasn't that. I remember waiting hours for a postage-stamp-sized movie trailer to download.
I'll tell you why the cell phone manufacturers don't offer it: their customers don't want it. No, I don't mean consumers like me and you; the wireless service providers don't want it because a cell phone with a radio means that consumers could conceivably be using their phones for hours and hours of music and news consumption, and they would get nothing for it.
As much as I agree with the 'horse-buggy' description of the music/radio industry, there's no lack of cynicism in the comment. What the cell phone guy was saying, in effect, was, you radio broadcasters should put everything on a an Internet stream so that I can bill my customers for every minute they listen.
Serious. With a combination of Blippy and FourSquare, you don't even need geotagged pictures. I mean, anyone following your Twitter stream could take advantage of this sequence of events:
- So-and-so checked into their house at 123 Main Street, Hometown USA! So-and-so is now the mayor of their house!
- So-and-so bought a new MacBook Pro for $3297 using Blippy at the Apple Store in Winston Niles Rumfoord Shopping Center!
- So-and-so checked into the Relax'em Spa.
- So-and-so bought a 1 hour massage and a 2 hours sauna using Blippy for $225.
That's what I was going to say. Thanks for the rebuttal!
It's better than some places, where they kill their students.
Oh, I wasn't trying to make a statement. Just trying to speak in the local parlance.
No, times do not change with respect to military strategies
Apparently, they do. The barbarians are at the gate; Wikileaks is to government secrets as Napster was to music. Napster wasn't killed by better DRM or lawsuits, it was killed by corporations embracing the fact that music is in a new era, by easy-access a la carte downloads from places like iTunes.
Even if they kill Wikileaks or the folks who run it, it's clear now that no secret is entirely safe.
Maybe what this will mean is that governments, knowing that surprise is not an option any longer, will simply launch fewer military campaigns. Remember: Afghanistan is arguable, but we didn't need to go into Iraq. Skip a war, and that's thousands of secrets you never have to bury.
Too bad that in your 1/10,000th of a second, the rest of the world aged 1,000 years, so nobody you knew was around to brag to.