I ran into this a few months ago. I had bought my player back when most models had all the outputs. In the past few years, though... almost all of them got rid of the analog ports.
I was shopping for a Blu-ray player with someone who had a decent CRT TV with no HDMI port. We went into various big box stores: Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Sears, local home theater stores, etc. and among those, there was only one model of Blu-ray player offered among all of those stores that had more than an HDMI port - and it was out of stock all over the place. It was coincidentally one of the most expensive models. They are available but they are hard to get.
The funny thing about the story is that this person has an SDTV and only needs or gets 3G cell phone data service for their Internet usage, rents from Blockbuster and Redbox all the time, and needed a BD player because the DVD selection is shrinking as the BD collection grows at Blockbuster and Redbox. It's gotten difficult to find DVDs to rent or buy but the BD selection is really great. So there are cases out there, you know?
Oh man, I had to deal with ZIPs... Those things were horrible. You never knew when it would just stop working. CLICK CLICK CLICK... there goes that copy of my work.
Look at any motherboard manufacturer and you'll probably find an expensive motherboard that comes equipped with Thunderbolt.
I did. There's usually one model which is the top end of their offerings, for which you pay a premium, but isn't the best you can get. It's positioned in a strange place. It's not enthusiast gear for anyone other than a Thunderbolt enthusiast, since the other models have better features. It's too expensive for mainstream use. So it's basically a niche product and they know it, but they offer it to basically say they offer it. System builders other than Apple aren't going "hey, buy Thunderbolt!" because the products just aren't there to be marketed for Windows or Linux or whatever. You've gotta have a whole ecosystem (of sorts) built to push it and Apple makes their own. Nobody else. Not Sony, not Samsung, nobody that you'd imagine would have consumer credibility with higher-end stuff. The middle of the line like Dell and Lenovo aren't doing it either. Down at the bottom, it's not offered because it's expensive to license.
Thunderbolt is almost exclusively a 2012 Apple thing. Even people who HAVE Thunderbolt ports wind up wishing they had an extra USB port instead. I know I do and that's the sense I get from plenty of other people. (I have not polled a statistically significant audience.)
USB caught on because it was supported by a zillion cheapo devices and was first with the whole Plug n Play thing. I mean, I know of people who called USB "Plug and Play" when talking about the port. It was that ubiquitous. USB 2 kept the momentum going because USB had brand recognition at that point. USB 3 is still just "USB" as far as consumers know and it tends to work wherever you find a USB port. Including on Apple, which has USB ports next to the Thunderbolt. And now that they can combine USB3 and ESATA ports... why do you need something else for external disks, which was one of the things Thunderbolt was supposed to be good at?
Thunderbolt is only available on expensive devices and there was a lot of licensing kerfuffle in its infancy while USB 3 was being developed. So USB 3 stole its thunder. So, it got stuck in the Apple premium price corner, only people with that kind of money are buying it, and the USB 2/3 alternatives of the same products (and their less-expensive lower end brethren) are available in large supply to satisfy a larger market than just Apple. And you usually have a USB port right there next to your Thunderbolt port, reminding you that you don't have to spend the premium ordering a Thunderbolt device when you can just walk into a bricks-and-mortar store and buy the USB version.
I see the problem... It's a great idea, but they're really trying to make something stick that doesn't have what it takes to stick in a very competitive market - should have gone with USB 3.0, or made Thunderbolt much more accessible to manufacturers early on. If they had played their cards differently, it would have been a very different story today. To disrupt a market you have to create something everyone in that market can get their hands on.
It was very surprising to find them for that price. The "professional" model, versus the "premium" model, lacks a bunch of the chrome and costs about $100 less. Here's a plain search for DT990 with no referral codes. http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=dt990
I have heard that the 600-ohm Premium version, which is almost $400, is even better. Is it really $250 better, though?? The distortion is already so low on the 250 ohm Pro version.
It's not for everyone though. You and I have specialized headphone amplifiers in one form or another on our rigs, most people don't... you get disappointing volume levels plugging a 250 ohm set into a cell phone, definitely would be even quieter on the 600 ohm version.
Those are some respectable headphones. Hope you still use them for other things! I have some ~$150 Sony MDRs from 2000 as well and I just recently retired them after someone else blew them out at a gig when I wasn't at the board. Until then, they were still good enough for live mixing.
You're totally right, good reproduction shows poorly produced audio for what it is. That's why we need monitor headphones in the studio, so we can make sure we don't produce audio that sounds like garbage on good hi-fi systems. Back in the 90s, it was much too expensive for your average game developer to do much audio editing. Only the biggest developers had the budget for it. Maxis, Sierra, those guys.
The art continues to move forward, though, and a lot of great games have equally great sound production now. I bet you would be pleasantly surprised if you gave them another try on today's popular games. I have heard some stellar audio coming from games lately.
Old timers' note... Back in the day, we all got our friends together and laughed at those hilarious 160x120 RealPlayer clips from sites like Break and Milkandcookies playing full-screen on our 13" SVGA CRT monitors and thought "Hey, cool, we have video on the Internet." Now we see a video in 240 resolution (four times the resolution of those old clips!) on YouTube and make snarky comments about upgrading to a newer potato for the next recording. How about that transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to the new 4k formats... it's amazing how far digital content has come!
A good pair of headphones can easily run you $500 (that's considered mid-tier).
You can easily spend that much if you don't find the less-known options while doing your research, that's very true. Stay away from the marked-up versions that are easily accessible and order yourself something for professionals instead. Especially look out for the brands like Sony, which may have innovated with their high end MDRs in the 1980s, but can't really justify the price tag today when everyone else is using the same drivers for much less money. You don't have to spend that kind of money.
I am a sound engineer, live and in the studio. I have to have accurate, reliable cans that I can use for hours every day and I can find them for far less than $500. You can get Etymotic in-ears for vocalists, drummers, etc onstage for $200-250. You can buy a nice pair of professional 250-ohm DT990 over-the-ears for $160 (new on Amazon no less) that you can wear all day. They stand up very well to a pair of $1500 electrostatic headphones and blow everything under $1500 away. Haven't heard them? Don't believe me? Try them out, A/B test with any more expensive pair through a few different audio clips, and you'll see exactly what I mean if your ears aren't shot. I acknowledge that some people have blown out their ears with concerts and construction equipment, or old age has taken its unfair toll on the ears. To them, there will be no difference and you just want comfort and construction quality at that point. But for those of us who somehow retained good hearing despite the odds... Talk to studio professionals to find out how to get a good pair of headphones, not gamers or people listening to their iPod on the bus. Good involves accurate sound, wearability all day, and replaceable parts that you can still order 10 years down the road. If you're spending that kind of money, you want it to be good.
To gamers: I guess that at the end of the day though, if you really want that unnatural jaw-vibrating bass boost for your explosions and dubstep soundtracks (and who wouldn't want that for their entertainment!!) you will probably want to start with good headphones that reach down very low and boost that bass with active electronics like an EQ or old DFX box. There's no substitute. Otherwise you'll have to buy the gimmicky crap like those battery-powered Beats / Monster headphones, but you know you're getting ripped off the whole time you do it. Get something that makes you happy but shop around for goodness' sake, you can be happy for a lot less than $500.
Helpful link to check out objective qualities of headphone sound: http://www.headphone.com/buildAGraph.php - and if you only shop by frequency response curves... you're missing the point. Look at the harmonic distortion curves as well.
Don't worry, you will be able to boot to a text-mode console and fiddle endlessly with X server dependency hell trying to get a graphical environment going.
Very thought-provoking! I believe you're assuming something that forms an unsteady platform for your argument. That is, with income distributed like that, the purchasing power of those dollar figures would remain the same. That doesn't really sync with the way a capitalistic (or any human) economy works. Who is to say that the price of goods wouldn't skyrocket once people had more money, so that the classes become separated once again by their status symbols and lust for the things that richer people have? Even looking at the basic supply-vs-demand curve, demand would rise for things whose supplies are constricted by the volume of product the company can move. So prices on luxury goods would go up, and up, and up. I don't know that essentials would change in price much except due to waste... until the producers of those essentials inevitably decide they want more luxury goods and raise their prices to get them. That's how it already works, isn't it?
Let's not think too highly of ourselves. People are gonna be people, after all, and we're all looking out for our own interests at least some of the time. Greed is greed and no matter how you try to reset its effects, people will find a way to take from other people to enrich themselves. Desperation to have "more that what I have now" drives people to go all-in and make or break their financial futures.
It seems to me that it's more like walking around saying that Yellow Pages Inc. (or whatever, your favorite phone book) allows the immoral John Doe to list himself in their book.
They are not providing the website, the content, the hosting, or any of that. Domain registrars point numbers to names.
The registrar isn't there to decide morality. The hosting company is responsible for the content in their datacenters, not the domain registrar. I say they should take it to ICANN and watch the request be officially denied. Can't do anything there.
I'm just saying, use the appropriate channels to shut down content, rather than forcing the phone book to shut its doors over one person in the book.
Genesis 5:3-4. "When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters."
It would be great if they would mention stability features on the box, or at least in the marketing material. But they don't. It always looks like this: MEMORY! It's quiet! SATA-II maximum bandwidth of 3.0 Gbps! Speed up your desktop! Look at the rebate! Millions of hours MTBF! Low power usage!
Exactly. Some activities need to stay hidden. For example:
* I don't want someone's Christmas gift to be spoiled for them.
* My neighbors don't need to know how much my electric bill was, or what tier of service I have hooked up to that wireless router.
* I have a very dedicated stalker, whose information is limited because that person can't dig into my email or other accounts to find out what I'm up to.
* If I post on a forum for people who own a particular product, I don't need people to be able to find my house so they can steal it.
* A friend who's hurting after a disastrous breakup might email me something in confidence. That should stay confidential.
* Employment and tax documents, with pay grade information and SSNs and all kinds of other PII.
* Online banking, anyone?
* I may compose some music that isn't ready for release yet, and that needs to stay private until it's been polished.
* Medical records about who has what rash on their what now?
There's just some information that doesn't need to be free. No nefarious intent, just things that shouldn't be public.
Back in my day, we'd go swimming there on summer days. The local families will miss that. You know, where the water is unnaturally warm because it cooled the reactor. Even in the shade it was like bathwater.
Hundreds of miles isn't a huge amount of lifetime travel for something that spends all day moving in the water for a few years.
We're probably talking about that whole side of Japan, since the various fish and critters will spread out north and south along the coast. They get contaminated either through eating kelp that absorbed it, or direct exposure. Then there are the fish and critters that eat them and go even further away to be eaten by other fish and critters, and so on. Don't forget about ocean currents carrying contaminated water, debris, seeds and animals, or the water which evaporates, forms clouds, and rains on the western side of North America. It spreads slowly but surely through a much larger and less well-mapped ecosystem and slowly raises the overall contamination over a large area. How large the area could get has not been and probably cannot be firmly established, and nobody knows what the maximum level of contamination could be.
For fun, let's imagine a theoretical worst-case scenario, however unlikely it is. The leaks could continue, all the wildlife there could die of radiation poisoning, and it could cause a dead area like the one at the mouth of the Mississippi river. (That was caused by fertilizer runoff though, not radioactivity.) Imagine how contaminated any wildlife that goes anywhere near that will be, possibly becoming hazardous even to handle on a fishing boat. Fishing nets don't discriminate based upon health, they discriminate based upon size. Or what if it destroys breeding grounds for some species, and causes some particular edible wildlife to become endangered?
Neither does "heirloom", but there is a craze in home gardens to buy those seeds.
"Weed killer resistant" does not necessarily equate to "less nutritious". It might be totally unrelated, a different axis on the chart. I think. Haven't really seen anything to suggest otherwise.
I beta tested and used the released version of most of those. ME was waaaay worse than Vista from start to finish, in my experience... it was far less stable. Vista was unstable on a lot of hardware predating its release, but it didn't hard-crash nearly as often as ME did.
Have you heard of Windows Server Core? It's almost console mode, since it boots you to a command prompt window with available GUI for applications like Notepad. I guess they accepted the fact that all the commonly-available monitors are at least SVGA-compatible by now, and built it accordingly.
Well, not every direction away from Windows is productive.
For example... Unity. Departing from Windows in that direction was harmful. It's really hard to get used to it, and it isn't exactly self-explanatory. You have to become a power user to have more than half a clue of what you're doing and get it to stop being in your way. That's no good for office workers. It might work just fine for people who just want to surf the Web though.
Having something that works for a majority of people - both the home user world AND the office drone world - is what we need. Not something to scratch the itch of the UNIX guru 1%, because that part of the beast lives under the hood anyway. It has to be compatible with a huge variety of ways of thinking, and Windows has entrenched itself so deeply within the psyche of computer users that anything new absolutely needs to be similar and Just Work without loads of configuration.
Apple did the Just Work thing right. As much as I don't enjoy using their products, which seem to be designed to prevent you from doing anything that wasn't in their somewhat specific list of use cases, they got that right - it just works for their use cases. That, and they got the marketing right. Everyone was used to things being one way and they made something different look sexy to the general public. A particular Linux distribution could possibly be marketed well and succeed, but that would require dreadful amounts of money that FOSS just doesn't produce.
What's it gonna be? Something that only we enlightened Slashdot readers can really learn how to use? That's where we're at. Or will it be something that the common user will be able to be productive with?
Just watch, Android will emerge as a desktop OS someday, and it'll make waves...
Stop tripling the size of your code for use-cases that no one has asked for, people!
Yeah, just let it throw a bugcheck when something happens outside of the design parameters and let the user sort it out with your support department./sarcasm
Security risks. Data corruption. Performance edge cases. Productivity loss. Unexpected bluescreens. Actual damage to physical hardware controlled by the software. You know all that bad stuff could have been easily prevented if the programmer anticipated those situations, and the people hiring that programmer probably expected the software to be well-made... It's much less expensive to do it ahead of time than to fix it when it breaks. Change in development = cheap, change in production = expensive.
You know... you actually have a point, now that I think about it that way... But it's always been like that.
Back in Win 3 Program Manager days, I'd make groups for each type of application, and move the icons appropriately. Sometimes I'd do folders on the desktop in Win95, but I gave up on that entirely in Win98 days and you're totally right - it got crapped up really bad by WinXP days. Then they ruined All Programs even more in Vista onwards by fixing the size and not letting it breathe horizontally at all, so the exercise of finding a program was even more painful. You might have several products by Super Longname Company Software Products, and you'd never know which one was Foobar 1.2 without hunting through all of them...
It's interesting that what's old is sorta new again. Remember, Program Manager was based on providing a tiled grid of icons with one level of folders. Android and iOS are doing EXACTLY THAT, and it's only a matter of time in my opinion before the Start Screen lets you do folders.
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I ran into this a few months ago. I had bought my player back when most models had all the outputs. In the past few years, though... almost all of them got rid of the analog ports.
I was shopping for a Blu-ray player with someone who had a decent CRT TV with no HDMI port. We went into various big box stores: Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Sears, local home theater stores, etc. and among those, there was only one model of Blu-ray player offered among all of those stores that had more than an HDMI port - and it was out of stock all over the place. It was coincidentally one of the most expensive models. They are available but they are hard to get.
The funny thing about the story is that this person has an SDTV and only needs or gets 3G cell phone data service for their Internet usage, rents from Blockbuster and Redbox all the time, and needed a BD player because the DVD selection is shrinking as the BD collection grows at Blockbuster and Redbox. It's gotten difficult to find DVDs to rent or buy but the BD selection is really great. So there are cases out there, you know?
Oh man, I had to deal with ZIPs... Those things were horrible. You never knew when it would just stop working. CLICK CLICK CLICK... there goes that copy of my work.
Look at any motherboard manufacturer and you'll probably find an expensive motherboard that comes equipped with Thunderbolt.
I did. There's usually one model which is the top end of their offerings, for which you pay a premium, but isn't the best you can get. It's positioned in a strange place. It's not enthusiast gear for anyone other than a Thunderbolt enthusiast, since the other models have better features. It's too expensive for mainstream use. So it's basically a niche product and they know it, but they offer it to basically say they offer it. System builders other than Apple aren't going "hey, buy Thunderbolt!" because the products just aren't there to be marketed for Windows or Linux or whatever. You've gotta have a whole ecosystem (of sorts) built to push it and Apple makes their own. Nobody else. Not Sony, not Samsung, nobody that you'd imagine would have consumer credibility with higher-end stuff. The middle of the line like Dell and Lenovo aren't doing it either. Down at the bottom, it's not offered because it's expensive to license.
Thunderbolt is almost exclusively a 2012 Apple thing. Even people who HAVE Thunderbolt ports wind up wishing they had an extra USB port instead. I know I do and that's the sense I get from plenty of other people. (I have not polled a statistically significant audience.)
USB caught on because it was supported by a zillion cheapo devices and was first with the whole Plug n Play thing. I mean, I know of people who called USB "Plug and Play" when talking about the port. It was that ubiquitous. USB 2 kept the momentum going because USB had brand recognition at that point. USB 3 is still just "USB" as far as consumers know and it tends to work wherever you find a USB port. Including on Apple, which has USB ports next to the Thunderbolt. And now that they can combine USB3 and ESATA ports... why do you need something else for external disks, which was one of the things Thunderbolt was supposed to be good at?
Thunderbolt is only available on expensive devices and there was a lot of licensing kerfuffle in its infancy while USB 3 was being developed. So USB 3 stole its thunder. So, it got stuck in the Apple premium price corner, only people with that kind of money are buying it, and the USB 2/3 alternatives of the same products (and their less-expensive lower end brethren) are available in large supply to satisfy a larger market than just Apple. And you usually have a USB port right there next to your Thunderbolt port, reminding you that you don't have to spend the premium ordering a Thunderbolt device when you can just walk into a bricks-and-mortar store and buy the USB version.
I see the problem... It's a great idea, but they're really trying to make something stick that doesn't have what it takes to stick in a very competitive market - should have gone with USB 3.0, or made Thunderbolt much more accessible to manufacturers early on. If they had played their cards differently, it would have been a very different story today. To disrupt a market you have to create something everyone in that market can get their hands on.
It was very surprising to find them for that price. The "professional" model, versus the "premium" model, lacks a bunch of the chrome and costs about $100 less. Here's a plain search for DT990 with no referral codes. http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=dt990
I have heard that the 600-ohm Premium version, which is almost $400, is even better. Is it really $250 better, though?? The distortion is already so low on the 250 ohm Pro version.
It's not for everyone though. You and I have specialized headphone amplifiers in one form or another on our rigs, most people don't... you get disappointing volume levels plugging a 250 ohm set into a cell phone, definitely would be even quieter on the 600 ohm version.
DVD-Audio... sigh. The format that should have been.
Where do you get them now? I used to buy them at Media Play, but they went under a long time ago.
Yup, buy the kit and do it yourself. They made them for drummers, originally: http://www.musiciansfriend.com/search.jsp?sB=r&Ntt=buttkicker
There are now commercial "gaming chairs" with built-in subwoofers too, but I bet you the Buttkickers work better: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/game-room-bar-furniture/gaming-chairs/abcat0106021.c?id=abcat0106021
Yes, Oracle Unbreakable Linux is repackaged Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Those are some respectable headphones. Hope you still use them for other things! I have some ~$150 Sony MDRs from 2000 as well and I just recently retired them after someone else blew them out at a gig when I wasn't at the board. Until then, they were still good enough for live mixing.
You're totally right, good reproduction shows poorly produced audio for what it is. That's why we need monitor headphones in the studio, so we can make sure we don't produce audio that sounds like garbage on good hi-fi systems. Back in the 90s, it was much too expensive for your average game developer to do much audio editing. Only the biggest developers had the budget for it. Maxis, Sierra, those guys.
The art continues to move forward, though, and a lot of great games have equally great sound production now. I bet you would be pleasantly surprised if you gave them another try on today's popular games. I have heard some stellar audio coming from games lately.
Old timers' note... Back in the day, we all got our friends together and laughed at those hilarious 160x120 RealPlayer clips from sites like Break and Milkandcookies playing full-screen on our 13" SVGA CRT monitors and thought "Hey, cool, we have video on the Internet." Now we see a video in 240 resolution (four times the resolution of those old clips!) on YouTube and make snarky comments about upgrading to a newer potato for the next recording. How about that transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to the new 4k formats... it's amazing how far digital content has come!
A good pair of headphones can easily run you $500 (that's considered mid-tier).
You can easily spend that much if you don't find the less-known options while doing your research, that's very true. Stay away from the marked-up versions that are easily accessible and order yourself something for professionals instead. Especially look out for the brands like Sony, which may have innovated with their high end MDRs in the 1980s, but can't really justify the price tag today when everyone else is using the same drivers for much less money. You don't have to spend that kind of money.
I am a sound engineer, live and in the studio. I have to have accurate, reliable cans that I can use for hours every day and I can find them for far less than $500. You can get Etymotic in-ears for vocalists, drummers, etc onstage for $200-250. You can buy a nice pair of professional 250-ohm DT990 over-the-ears for $160 (new on Amazon no less) that you can wear all day. They stand up very well to a pair of $1500 electrostatic headphones and blow everything under $1500 away. Haven't heard them? Don't believe me? Try them out, A/B test with any more expensive pair through a few different audio clips, and you'll see exactly what I mean if your ears aren't shot. I acknowledge that some people have blown out their ears with concerts and construction equipment, or old age has taken its unfair toll on the ears. To them, there will be no difference and you just want comfort and construction quality at that point. But for those of us who somehow retained good hearing despite the odds... Talk to studio professionals to find out how to get a good pair of headphones, not gamers or people listening to their iPod on the bus. Good involves accurate sound, wearability all day, and replaceable parts that you can still order 10 years down the road. If you're spending that kind of money, you want it to be good.
To gamers: I guess that at the end of the day though, if you really want that unnatural jaw-vibrating bass boost for your explosions and dubstep soundtracks (and who wouldn't want that for their entertainment!!) you will probably want to start with good headphones that reach down very low and boost that bass with active electronics like an EQ or old DFX box. There's no substitute. Otherwise you'll have to buy the gimmicky crap like those battery-powered Beats / Monster headphones, but you know you're getting ripped off the whole time you do it. Get something that makes you happy but shop around for goodness' sake, you can be happy for a lot less than $500.
Helpful link to check out objective qualities of headphone sound: http://www.headphone.com/buildAGraph.php - and if you only shop by frequency response curves... you're missing the point. Look at the harmonic distortion curves as well.
Up... time? That would imply DOWNTIME!
Why, it's so good that I toggled the bits with a magnetized needle before I ever installed the hard drive!
Just you wait, someday MUDs will make a comeback and we'll see who laughs!
(Many jokes are present in this thread. Look a little closer.)
Don't worry, you will be able to boot to a text-mode console and fiddle endlessly with X server dependency hell trying to get a graphical environment going.
Very thought-provoking! I believe you're assuming something that forms an unsteady platform for your argument. That is, with income distributed like that, the purchasing power of those dollar figures would remain the same. That doesn't really sync with the way a capitalistic (or any human) economy works. Who is to say that the price of goods wouldn't skyrocket once people had more money, so that the classes become separated once again by their status symbols and lust for the things that richer people have? Even looking at the basic supply-vs-demand curve, demand would rise for things whose supplies are constricted by the volume of product the company can move. So prices on luxury goods would go up, and up, and up. I don't know that essentials would change in price much except due to waste... until the producers of those essentials inevitably decide they want more luxury goods and raise their prices to get them. That's how it already works, isn't it?
Let's not think too highly of ourselves. People are gonna be people, after all, and we're all looking out for our own interests at least some of the time. Greed is greed and no matter how you try to reset its effects, people will find a way to take from other people to enrich themselves. Desperation to have "more that what I have now" drives people to go all-in and make or break their financial futures.
It seems to me that it's more like walking around saying that Yellow Pages Inc. (or whatever, your favorite phone book) allows the immoral John Doe to list himself in their book.
They are not providing the website, the content, the hosting, or any of that. Domain registrars point numbers to names.
The registrar isn't there to decide morality. The hosting company is responsible for the content in their datacenters, not the domain registrar. I say they should take it to ICANN and watch the request be officially denied. Can't do anything there.
I'm just saying, use the appropriate channels to shut down content, rather than forcing the phone book to shut its doors over one person in the book.
You were so close to the answer.
Genesis 5:3-4. "When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters."
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+5%3A3-4&version=NIV
HTH.
It would be great if they would mention stability features on the box, or at least in the marketing material. But they don't. It always looks like this: MEMORY! It's quiet! SATA-II maximum bandwidth of 3.0 Gbps! Speed up your desktop! Look at the rebate! Millions of hours MTBF! Low power usage!
Exactly. Some activities need to stay hidden. For example:
* I don't want someone's Christmas gift to be spoiled for them.
* My neighbors don't need to know how much my electric bill was, or what tier of service I have hooked up to that wireless router.
* I have a very dedicated stalker, whose information is limited because that person can't dig into my email or other accounts to find out what I'm up to.
* If I post on a forum for people who own a particular product, I don't need people to be able to find my house so they can steal it.
* A friend who's hurting after a disastrous breakup might email me something in confidence. That should stay confidential.
* Employment and tax documents, with pay grade information and SSNs and all kinds of other PII.
* Online banking, anyone?
* I may compose some music that isn't ready for release yet, and that needs to stay private until it's been polished.
* Medical records about who has what rash on their what now?
There's just some information that doesn't need to be free. No nefarious intent, just things that shouldn't be public.
Back in my day, we'd go swimming there on summer days. The local families will miss that. You know, where the water is unnaturally warm because it cooled the reactor. Even in the shade it was like bathwater.
There are some really big clams in there.
I turned out just fine.
Just got this extra leg...
Hundreds of miles isn't a huge amount of lifetime travel for something that spends all day moving in the water for a few years.
We're probably talking about that whole side of Japan, since the various fish and critters will spread out north and south along the coast. They get contaminated either through eating kelp that absorbed it, or direct exposure. Then there are the fish and critters that eat them and go even further away to be eaten by other fish and critters, and so on. Don't forget about ocean currents carrying contaminated water, debris, seeds and animals, or the water which evaporates, forms clouds, and rains on the western side of North America. It spreads slowly but surely through a much larger and less well-mapped ecosystem and slowly raises the overall contamination over a large area. How large the area could get has not been and probably cannot be firmly established, and nobody knows what the maximum level of contamination could be.
For fun, let's imagine a theoretical worst-case scenario, however unlikely it is. The leaks could continue, all the wildlife there could die of radiation poisoning, and it could cause a dead area like the one at the mouth of the Mississippi river. (That was caused by fertilizer runoff though, not radioactivity.) Imagine how contaminated any wildlife that goes anywhere near that will be, possibly becoming hazardous even to handle on a fishing boat. Fishing nets don't discriminate based upon health, they discriminate based upon size. Or what if it destroys breeding grounds for some species, and causes some particular edible wildlife to become endangered?
Does that help illustrate the issue?
Neither does "heirloom", but there is a craze in home gardens to buy those seeds.
"Weed killer resistant" does not necessarily equate to "less nutritious". It might be totally unrelated, a different axis on the chart. I think. Haven't really seen anything to suggest otherwise.
I beta tested and used the released version of most of those. ME was waaaay worse than Vista from start to finish, in my experience... it was far less stable. Vista was unstable on a lot of hardware predating its release, but it didn't hard-crash nearly as often as ME did.
Have you heard of Windows Server Core? It's almost console mode, since it boots you to a command prompt window with available GUI for applications like Notepad. I guess they accepted the fact that all the commonly-available monitors are at least SVGA-compatible by now, and built it accordingly.
Well, not every direction away from Windows is productive.
For example... Unity. Departing from Windows in that direction was harmful. It's really hard to get used to it, and it isn't exactly self-explanatory. You have to become a power user to have more than half a clue of what you're doing and get it to stop being in your way. That's no good for office workers. It might work just fine for people who just want to surf the Web though.
Having something that works for a majority of people - both the home user world AND the office drone world - is what we need. Not something to scratch the itch of the UNIX guru 1%, because that part of the beast lives under the hood anyway. It has to be compatible with a huge variety of ways of thinking, and Windows has entrenched itself so deeply within the psyche of computer users that anything new absolutely needs to be similar and Just Work without loads of configuration.
Apple did the Just Work thing right. As much as I don't enjoy using their products, which seem to be designed to prevent you from doing anything that wasn't in their somewhat specific list of use cases, they got that right - it just works for their use cases. That, and they got the marketing right. Everyone was used to things being one way and they made something different look sexy to the general public. A particular Linux distribution could possibly be marketed well and succeed, but that would require dreadful amounts of money that FOSS just doesn't produce.
What's it gonna be? Something that only we enlightened Slashdot readers can really learn how to use? That's where we're at. Or will it be something that the common user will be able to be productive with?
Just watch, Android will emerge as a desktop OS someday, and it'll make waves...
Last time we tried that, we got Australia.
To seek out wi-fi and new civilizations
Stop tripling the size of your code for use-cases that no one has asked for, people!
Yeah, just let it throw a bugcheck when something happens outside of the design parameters and let the user sort it out with your support department. /sarcasm
Security risks. Data corruption. Performance edge cases. Productivity loss. Unexpected bluescreens. Actual damage to physical hardware controlled by the software. You know all that bad stuff could have been easily prevented if the programmer anticipated those situations, and the people hiring that programmer probably expected the software to be well-made... It's much less expensive to do it ahead of time than to fix it when it breaks. Change in development = cheap, change in production = expensive.
You know... you actually have a point, now that I think about it that way... But it's always been like that.
Back in Win 3 Program Manager days, I'd make groups for each type of application, and move the icons appropriately. Sometimes I'd do folders on the desktop in Win95, but I gave up on that entirely in Win98 days and you're totally right - it got crapped up really bad by WinXP days. Then they ruined All Programs even more in Vista onwards by fixing the size and not letting it breathe horizontally at all, so the exercise of finding a program was even more painful. You might have several products by Super Longname Company Software Products, and you'd never know which one was Foobar 1.2 without hunting through all of them...
It's interesting that what's old is sorta new again. Remember, Program Manager was based on providing a tiled grid of icons with one level of folders. Android and iOS are doing EXACTLY THAT, and it's only a matter of time in my opinion before the Start Screen lets you do folders.