Sony's bent towards the proverbial proprietary turd will ensure that whatever they sell, you'll need three special interfaces (all Sony) to view / hear / experience whatever media you have. Universality to Sony just means that they think the universe revolves around them.
nothing to see here - just the obligatory redundant announcement of a redundant article amidst a sea of redundant "ah-ha, I caught you" posts...all over again.
From someone who graduated college a decade ago with no computer training, I can tell you that online degrees are still okay if they are paired with communications skills. A good college degree from an acredited institution really only means you are trainable. Aside from the ability to write and communicate well, I'm using none of the information I was degreed in now that I'm in the business world. I am taking continuing professional education courses (single day cert classes) on various topics centering on multimedia work, web design, and flash. There is a certain point where companies look on this as good additional training and they will actually pay for it. Bottom line: I'm not the least bit afraid of how unconventional education looks on my resume - it's better to have it than not. However, none of it is worth squat if you cannot communicate with all levels of an organization effectively and efficiently with the spoken and written word. Become a good speaker, thinker, and writer and that becomes your skillset...the rest is just something handy that you bring to the table.
Not only will I have to spend another king's ransom on a 1st generation "Better than HDTV-Ready" tv, they'll ask me to shell out $500 for a set-top box to decode the signal that won't be mandated by the FCC until my 1 gen TV is well out of warranty and totally fried. I'm guessing sometime around when my firstborn is in college, this technology will be relevant to the rest of us and we can all celebrate by burning our HDTV sets, our blue-ray dvd players, our ipod videos and our fossil fuel burning cars...why can't the industry just sit tight for a few years and let us get bored so that there is a more real demand? Why can't stuff get cheaper? Why do they keep bollocksing up my plans to have a disposable income? Upgrading now just means keeping up with the minimum rather than stepping up into a better model.
At what frequency does infrasound become a problem? I'd hate to get my groove on, only to find that my organs had shut down, that I was sporting feelings of dread, fear, anxiety, anger, and depression, and that my bowels were releasing (brown note).
Google is out to get the sheep. AOL is the most costly ISP out there. It is mass marketing that sucks in people who aren't smart enough to shop around for better technology and better deals. AOL is like the anti-market economy (in much the same way that Sony is with all of it's bass ackwards proprietary stuff that bucks the industry and screws consumers - minidisks and memory stick duo pros. This is a battle for extremes. Do you court the programmers and linux guys or do you court the dumb masses? Ultimately, they are capitalists, so we should probably brace ourselves for some stupid cartoon that represents Google and a few commercials from the guy in the Capital One bits...
Though I'm not interested in arguing or debating the point (I'm not an apocalyptic fear monger or anything), I did find it interesting that Revelation refers to the mark of the beast as a mark on a person's hand or head that will be required for transactional purposes in the world economy. Whether this is the case or not with fingerprint transactions has yet to be seen. For those with no connection to Christianity at all, it doesn't much matter. For those who do practice the Christian faith, it's things like this that I get less and less comfortable blowing off as just another "advance" in technology. To be sure, if my relationship with God is in tact, it doesn't much matter what happens to me on this earth so long as I'm following Him.
I'm a technology geek through and through. Sometimes it's difficult to reconcile what I believe in my core with the life that is being handed to me in regards to politics, technology, culture, etc... Can't serve two masters, so it becomes difficult at times, I guess, to operate in a world where you are really just a stranger. You want to be a regular person and not so heavenly focused that you of no earthly good, while at the same time trying not to be luke-warm about your faith.
Bottom line: what happens if I refuse to be I.D.'d by my fingerprint for religious reasons?
What do they do with amputees and quad/parapalegics?
There's the magic. The same tools on this website who slam microsoft for being a monopoly are the ones who are drinking the koolaid with the ipod no questions asked. "Don't sell your soul to MS..." touts the geek chick crowd - all the while allowing a non-video pmp to stunt the world's acceptance of technology that puts pictures to sounds because "everybody else is doing it".
Freely expressing your opinion is one thing. I do it every day and enjoy the freedom. Searching someone out to defame them, to slander them, and to verbally assault them is quite different...do it in your workplace and you should expect to be fired. Do it to your friends and you should expect to be lonely. Do it to the police and you should expect to be maced if you get out of line. Protesters often make the most critical errors in failing to place themselves in anyone else's shoes and in so doing, begin to take "liberties" with other peoples' rights to go about their business and not be acosted - verbally or otherwise. Match protesters up with Paparazzi for a day and see how the antagonistic "exercise of freedom" plays out.
In all fairness, the nerd mantra of "High School is Hell" is nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell anyone something from a semi-engaging source and they will believe it. The only thing worse than being marginalized is letting someone tell you that you are marginalized and believing them...not only believing them, but assuming that as your identity. If you don't want to be labeled, adapt. The one thing we know of kids is that nothing is lasting with them - don't like their identity? Not to worry, it will change in another month or two. Don't like their current dress? Not to worry, fashion for all groups is about to lap itself for the third time. You can't even diagnose personality disorders until kids have reached 18 because their personalities are too maleable. Adapt if you don't like your situation... Adapt, adapt, adapt. Let's face it, when excentric kids explore their self-expression, being told that they are wierd or whatever is a badge of honor, not a marginalization. Culture has taught us to form a huge callus under the old sticks and stones ideology.
My $0.02 - people go out of their way to be defined by someone else and they usually get exactly what they asked for. I want you to affirm me as who I am projecting myself to be. Sometimes that affirmation seems harsh, inaccurate or whatever, but the truth of the matter is that as long as people continue to buy into an artifically created drama and continue to take themselves so seriously, there is no doubt that the drama itself will be a self-fulfilling archetype that has no basis and no lasting significance...heck, most of you didn't give Columbine or the "trench coat maphia" a second thought until today when you read/.
So when does the R2-D2 interface come out? I want to see that little pocket rocket spinning around on the head of a droid-shaped pedastal throwing little pictures of Princess L. and schematics of the Death Star on my walls like a disco ball with parkinsons! Fill the R2 unit with a hard drive, some speakers, a mini satelite dish, a digital cable card and XP and store up a bunch of movies so he can follow me around and give me movies on demand. I would settle for a little bigger in R2's barrel so that he could double as a kegerator! Game on baby - Babylon has arrived and it's just SVGA!
We can't disparage the telco's control too much. Though tyranical at times, there is a financial backbone that we don't want to break. We're pushing for a Marxian revolt on the telco's to go Robin Hood on internet bandwidth, but we're griping at an alarming rate about IT jobs going overseas and jobs being lost in the IT sector. We want the technology, but we don't want to pay for it...people want what you make at your job for free too.
This is the same entitlement scenario that was looked at with MP3s and the iPod years back. Internet bandwidth was funded by someone. Music was created by someone. We think we're entitled to anything that can possibly be accessed for free just on the principle of the matter. To conceptualize - on the day you can give away your own job services for free, start demanding free internet and music.
Believe it! What we can count on is that if the bandwidth isn't being used, it is in jeapardy of being taken, or in this case, sold to the highest bidder. Nothing like whoring out your hobby just because you can't replenish your numbers quickly enough. This is: 1)a wakeup call to amateurs to get active using the bandwidth they have and recruiting new HAMS to the hobby to do the same, and 2)a wakeup call to radio manufacturers to get their pricing competitive, get their technology out of the vaccuum tube days (I know it's digital, but there is more technology in a PDA than in any radio - how difficult would it be to add flash memory and a basic OS to an HT...honestly) and pursue technology that interacts with today's world.
Otherwise, we will end up reading about ourselves in history books and crying on each others' shoulders in Denny's because we can no longer freely talk about complete nonsense between storm nets. - W9BSH
It's interesting that the title of this article, in combination with the recent history of voting debaucle in Florida makes us think that the whole show messed up already. The truth could be that a 5 year old tripped over a cord and shut down 3 machines. The report we get is that the Florida voting system is crippled and riddled with incident. The knee jerk reaction of the reader is that Florida is causing democracy to fail and that we need to call in the national guard. Not that I believe everything I read...but seeds of information quickly grow into journalistic weeds...
This is an interesting article in that it shows a growing trend of control addiction. New parents rush into the doctor's office asking questions about baby food and solid food - what should I get? How early is too early for baby food? Is this going to make my baby ADHD? The fact of the matter remains - baby food hasn't been around nearly as long as babies have, but our historically newfound dependence on what society tells us we need makes us wonder how we ever got by without it.
The same is true of baby monitors. Concern is healthy - no denying that. Love and a desire for connection is natural - no problems yet. However, the always dreaded "when I was a kid" shows us that growing up in our own nerdery, the technology was maybe limited to a nightlight and a few windup toys (I was a baby in the mid to late 70's, born in 1974). Don't get me wrong, I'll probably have a full X-10 system in my house when young whomever-my-proginy-shall-be comes, but I'll also have an ulcer from all the unnecessary worry. Bottom line - save the money on the spy cams, audio monitoring, infrared devices, laser grids, thumbprint locks and retinal scans and invest a little in the kid's education and the rest in therapy.
Hey, that's funny. Your wit is only surpassed by your myopic understanding of the big picture. The next time you are using your microwave, your TV remote, your cell phone, your cordless phone, listening to the emergency sirens ring before a tornado wipes your trailer off the face of the earth or in the worse case - when you find yourself staring in the face of another God forsaken event like 9/11, take a moment to reconsider your smug response to a group of people who volunteer their time and energies so that you can have things that you didn't work for. Reading your response is like hearing someone speak disparagingly about the military in times of war. I would urge you to reconsider your stance, or at the very least to educate it. A major portion of the American Red Cross's response to trajic events is through Ham radio. I don't see many federal disaster aid dollars going to AOL, Sprint, or your XBox. Maybe you don't see the worth of amateur radio. That's fine. Just don't take shots at something blindly - it's a waste of words for you and discouraging to us. We don't expect you to understand the big picture, but you could be helpful by supporting those who try to do good with their spare time.
Thanks,
thecarpe
Slashdot Mirror
Sony's bent towards the proverbial proprietary turd will ensure that whatever they sell, you'll need three special interfaces (all Sony) to view / hear / experience whatever media you have. Universality to Sony just means that they think the universe revolves around them.
nothing to see here - just the obligatory redundant announcement of a redundant article amidst a sea of redundant "ah-ha, I caught you" posts...all over again.
This is the third time this article has been presented in as many months. Yes, I can hear you now.
Funny enough, the word/image that I had to type in to get my article posted was "unneeded".
From someone who graduated college a decade ago with no computer training, I can tell you that online degrees are still okay if they are paired with communications skills. A good college degree from an acredited institution really only means you are trainable. Aside from the ability to write and communicate well, I'm using none of the information I was degreed in now that I'm in the business world. I am taking continuing professional education courses (single day cert classes) on various topics centering on multimedia work, web design, and flash. There is a certain point where companies look on this as good additional training and they will actually pay for it. Bottom line: I'm not the least bit afraid of how unconventional education looks on my resume - it's better to have it than not. However, none of it is worth squat if you cannot communicate with all levels of an organization effectively and efficiently with the spoken and written word. Become a good speaker, thinker, and writer and that becomes your skillset...the rest is just something handy that you bring to the table.
Not only will I have to spend another king's ransom on a 1st generation "Better than HDTV-Ready" tv, they'll ask me to shell out $500 for a set-top box to decode the signal that won't be mandated by the FCC until my 1 gen TV is well out of warranty and totally fried. I'm guessing sometime around when my firstborn is in college, this technology will be relevant to the rest of us and we can all celebrate by burning our HDTV sets, our blue-ray dvd players, our ipod videos and our fossil fuel burning cars...why can't the industry just sit tight for a few years and let us get bored so that there is a more real demand? Why can't stuff get cheaper? Why do they keep bollocksing up my plans to have a disposable income? Upgrading now just means keeping up with the minimum rather than stepping up into a better model.
At what frequency does infrasound become a problem? I'd hate to get my groove on, only to find that my organs had shut down, that I was sporting feelings of dread, fear, anxiety, anger, and depression, and that my bowels were releasing (brown note).
Google is out to get the sheep. AOL is the most costly ISP out there. It is mass marketing that sucks in people who aren't smart enough to shop around for better technology and better deals. AOL is like the anti-market economy (in much the same way that Sony is with all of it's bass ackwards proprietary stuff that bucks the industry and screws consumers - minidisks and memory stick duo pros. This is a battle for extremes. Do you court the programmers and linux guys or do you court the dumb masses? Ultimately, they are capitalists, so we should probably brace ourselves for some stupid cartoon that represents Google and a few commercials from the guy in the Capital One bits...
Though I'm not interested in arguing or debating the point (I'm not an apocalyptic fear monger or anything), I did find it interesting that Revelation refers to the mark of the beast as a mark on a person's hand or head that will be required for transactional purposes in the world economy. Whether this is the case or not with fingerprint transactions has yet to be seen. For those with no connection to Christianity at all, it doesn't much matter. For those who do practice the Christian faith, it's things like this that I get less and less comfortable blowing off as just another "advance" in technology. To be sure, if my relationship with God is in tact, it doesn't much matter what happens to me on this earth so long as I'm following Him. I'm a technology geek through and through. Sometimes it's difficult to reconcile what I believe in my core with the life that is being handed to me in regards to politics, technology, culture, etc... Can't serve two masters, so it becomes difficult at times, I guess, to operate in a world where you are really just a stranger. You want to be a regular person and not so heavenly focused that you of no earthly good, while at the same time trying not to be luke-warm about your faith. Bottom line: what happens if I refuse to be I.D.'d by my fingerprint for religious reasons? What do they do with amputees and quad/parapalegics?
There's the magic. The same tools on this website who slam microsoft for being a monopoly are the ones who are drinking the koolaid with the ipod no questions asked. "Don't sell your soul to MS..." touts the geek chick crowd - all the while allowing a non-video pmp to stunt the world's acceptance of technology that puts pictures to sounds because "everybody else is doing it".
Freely expressing your opinion is one thing. I do it every day and enjoy the freedom. Searching someone out to defame them, to slander them, and to verbally assault them is quite different...do it in your workplace and you should expect to be fired. Do it to your friends and you should expect to be lonely. Do it to the police and you should expect to be maced if you get out of line. Protesters often make the most critical errors in failing to place themselves in anyone else's shoes and in so doing, begin to take "liberties" with other peoples' rights to go about their business and not be acosted - verbally or otherwise. Match protesters up with Paparazzi for a day and see how the antagonistic "exercise of freedom" plays out.
No wait...that was Hedley Lamar.
Oh, a wed wose...how owdinawy.
Give the Governor harumpf!
In all fairness, the nerd mantra of "High School is Hell" is nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell anyone something from a semi-engaging source and they will believe it. The only thing worse than being marginalized is letting someone tell you that you are marginalized and believing them...not only believing them, but assuming that as your identity. If you don't want to be labeled, adapt. The one thing we know of kids is that nothing is lasting with them - don't like their identity? Not to worry, it will change in another month or two. Don't like their current dress? Not to worry, fashion for all groups is about to lap itself for the third time. You can't even diagnose personality disorders until kids have reached 18 because their personalities are too maleable. Adapt if you don't like your situation... Adapt, adapt, adapt. Let's face it, when excentric kids explore their self-expression, being told that they are wierd or whatever is a badge of honor, not a marginalization. Culture has taught us to form a huge callus under the old sticks and stones ideology.
/.
My $0.02 - people go out of their way to be defined by someone else and they usually get exactly what they asked for. I want you to affirm me as who I am projecting myself to be. Sometimes that affirmation seems harsh, inaccurate or whatever, but the truth of the matter is that as long as people continue to buy into an artifically created drama and continue to take themselves so seriously, there is no doubt that the drama itself will be a self-fulfilling archetype that has no basis and no lasting significance...heck, most of you didn't give Columbine or the "trench coat maphia" a second thought until today when you read
nerd.
So when does the R2-D2 interface come out? I want to see that little pocket rocket spinning around on the head of a droid-shaped pedastal throwing little pictures of Princess L. and schematics of the Death Star on my walls like a disco ball with parkinsons! Fill the R2 unit with a hard drive, some speakers, a mini satelite dish, a digital cable card and XP and store up a bunch of movies so he can follow me around and give me movies on demand. I would settle for a little bigger in R2's barrel so that he could double as a kegerator! Game on baby - Babylon has arrived and it's just SVGA!
We can't disparage the telco's control too much. Though tyranical at times, there is a financial backbone that we don't want to break. We're pushing for a Marxian revolt on the telco's to go Robin Hood on internet bandwidth, but we're griping at an alarming rate about IT jobs going overseas and jobs being lost in the IT sector. We want the technology, but we don't want to pay for it...people want what you make at your job for free too.
This is the same entitlement scenario that was looked at with MP3s and the iPod years back. Internet bandwidth was funded by someone. Music was created by someone. We think we're entitled to anything that can possibly be accessed for free just on the principle of the matter. To conceptualize - on the day you can give away your own job services for free, start demanding free internet and music.
Believe it! What we can count on is that if the bandwidth isn't being used, it is in jeapardy of being taken, or in this case, sold to the highest bidder. Nothing like whoring out your hobby just because you can't replenish your numbers quickly enough. This is:
1)a wakeup call to amateurs to get active using the bandwidth they have and recruiting new HAMS to the hobby to do the same, and
2)a wakeup call to radio manufacturers to get their pricing competitive, get their technology out of the vaccuum tube days (I know it's digital, but there is more technology in a PDA than in any radio - how difficult would it be to add flash memory and a basic OS to an HT...honestly) and pursue technology that interacts with today's world.
Otherwise, we will end up reading about ourselves in history books and crying on each others' shoulders in Denny's because we can no longer freely talk about complete nonsense between storm nets. - W9BSH
Show me...offend me...do your worst!
It's interesting that the title of this article, in combination with the recent history of voting debaucle in Florida makes us think that the whole show messed up already. The truth could be that a 5 year old tripped over a cord and shut down 3 machines. The report we get is that the Florida voting system is crippled and riddled with incident. The knee jerk reaction of the reader is that Florida is causing democracy to fail and that we need to call in the national guard. Not that I believe everything I read...but seeds of information quickly grow into journalistic weeds...
This is an interesting article in that it shows a growing trend of control addiction. New parents rush into the doctor's office asking questions about baby food and solid food - what should I get? How early is too early for baby food? Is this going to make my baby ADHD? The fact of the matter remains - baby food hasn't been around nearly as long as babies have, but our historically newfound dependence on what society tells us we need makes us wonder how we ever got by without it. The same is true of baby monitors. Concern is healthy - no denying that. Love and a desire for connection is natural - no problems yet. However, the always dreaded "when I was a kid" shows us that growing up in our own nerdery, the technology was maybe limited to a nightlight and a few windup toys (I was a baby in the mid to late 70's, born in 1974). Don't get me wrong, I'll probably have a full X-10 system in my house when young whomever-my-proginy-shall-be comes, but I'll also have an ulcer from all the unnecessary worry. Bottom line - save the money on the spy cams, audio monitoring, infrared devices, laser grids, thumbprint locks and retinal scans and invest a little in the kid's education and the rest in therapy.
Hey, that's funny. Your wit is only surpassed by your myopic understanding of the big picture. The next time you are using your microwave, your TV remote, your cell phone, your cordless phone, listening to the emergency sirens ring before a tornado wipes your trailer off the face of the earth or in the worse case - when you find yourself staring in the face of another God forsaken event like 9/11, take a moment to reconsider your smug response to a group of people who volunteer their time and energies so that you can have things that you didn't work for. Reading your response is like hearing someone speak disparagingly about the military in times of war. I would urge you to reconsider your stance, or at the very least to educate it. A major portion of the American Red Cross's response to trajic events is through Ham radio. I don't see many federal disaster aid dollars going to AOL, Sprint, or your XBox. Maybe you don't see the worth of amateur radio. That's fine. Just don't take shots at something blindly - it's a waste of words for you and discouraging to us. We don't expect you to understand the big picture, but you could be helpful by supporting those who try to do good with their spare time. Thanks, thecarpe