I have to completely disagree with you. I had a PowerBook G3 (Lombard) that I slipped down the steps and broke the screen on. I called Apple, they overnighed me a box, shipped it to Texas. It was in Texas for less than 24 hours, was overnighted back to me. A couple of days later the screen quit working, no video displayed. I called Apple, no questions asked a box arrived the next day. The PowerBook spent just over 24 hours in Texas and was in my hot little hands the next day. Optimally the screen wouldn't have malfunctioned after the first replacement. However, I was able to get my computer back in perfect condition in less than a week.
Contrast this to my friend's Dell repair experience. She bought a top-of-the-line laptop. A couple of months later the motherboard went wonk out, of course that was only determined after three trips to service where the replaced the video card, then the hard drive, and then the processor. When they finally determined it was the motherboard they decided to replace her whole machine. They replaced the machine with a refurb! She was furious, she didn't pay for a machine someone else had used, she payed for a new one. After much wrangling Dell gave her a new machine. So, whereas my support experience with Apple took less than a week and everything went smoothly, hers took two months and her computer was barely useable most of that time.
Although I heard rumors that Hollywood Video might also be looking at starting an online movie rental business.
What would be the point of partnering with someone as inexperienced as you are? The only one is to spread financial risk, and Hollywood Video can't afford a lot of risk at this point.
A simple solution would be to have non-mechanical keyboards. There are keyboards out there that have pressure sensors like a track pad rather than keys that depress. Since these have a flat surface and no crevices to worry about, sterilization should be simple. Many users complain of trouble using them at first, particularly slower typing speeds. Once you get used to the new feel though, you should have a higher theoretical maximum typing speed.
Now, if only the rest of the world generated as much revenue for Google. Not to mention, that, I don't know, Google might wait to get the bugs worked out before enlarging the dataset.
First, it appears that at least the pictures of Boston were taken in very early spring or late fall, as the Boston Common and Garden is brown. Secondly, it is interesting that the higgest resolution is only available for urban areas. I looked up my hometown (Waterloo, IA) when I noticed that the outskirts of the city were blurry. Then I drug down and it said "We're sorry, we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region." While this is a practical approach, since the level of interest here would be lower, it seems like Google would serve this up anyway. This begs the question, is the data simply not available yet? If it is available, why is Google not serving it up? Server load is not a good answer, obviously server capacity is not a problem for Google.
Telco's, utilties, etc have what is called a natural monopoly. These are services with little or no differentiation(1), high barriers to entry(2), and a market winner determined solely based on number of customers (due to high fixed costs)(3). Take electric utilities as an example. (1)Electricity is pretty much the same, there's not a way to sell Enchanced Electricity(TM). (2)The cost of every company that wanted to provide electricity building power lines would be ridiculous, there is no way that an new comer could displace an incumbent. (3)Due to the fixed cost nature of a network infrastructure, the guy with the most customers has the highest margins. The problem then is that even vastly inefficient incumbents will continue to be the only players in the market. Forcing companies to allow competitors to their distribution infrastructure allows competition and lower costs.
However, setting the rent the competitor pays to the distribution network's owner is hard. What is this access really worth? In most questions of price "the market" determines the price, but in this case there is no market, since your customer is your competitor and therefore you would charge prices sufficient to drive your competitor/customer out of business. Therefore gov't has to set these prices and gov't sucks at this. People in general suck at setting prices, but without "the market" its what you have to do.
Yet it remains the most consumer-friendly DRM around. Let's also remember that Apple itself could probably care less what you do with your music, but it has to reach some common ground with the record companies.
Education is one of the places where computers don't really belong. A computer cannot answer questions, tell memorable stories that make information stick in your head, or deal with the oddball questions that only a living flesh-and-blood teacher can field.
I really have to disagree. Computers can bring a new dimension to teaching. As an example, while teaching about volcanoes a short clip of a volcano erupting could be a great addition. Sure you could always do this before with an old-style projector and ectera, but accessing the clip from a CD-ROM encyclopedia or a central server with teaching materials can be a lot easier. Students then really get to see what you're talking about, very important for visual learners. Computers are best used as an enhancement ot teaching, not a replacement for.
Computers are a tool. Too many educators have and continue to view the computer as some sort of magic bullet. Some educators seem to think if they just get a bunch of computers the kids will learn better. I imagine this conception is because kids like using computers, but this doesn't necessarily mean they're paying any more attention to absorbing information from it than they were from the teacher. There are also lots of studies where computers have been shown to increase test scores. For example, at an elementary school where I worked, we employed a reading program that used computerized testing. Reading ability and comprehension improved markedly. Computers can making teaching more effective, but they can't make it just happen, that's what teachers are for.
Generally I don't think hard drives care what angle they are operating at. The disk platters and heads have no more chance of contact when operating tilted then "right side up". The motion has to be pretty jarring to cause a head crash.
There are ways they could reduce the server load and make it a bit more secure though - eg. blanket encrypt/drm everything on the server and have the client rip that off and apply the personalised drm. Then you'd have to go fishing around in the client for keys etc.
I don't see how they could "pre-encrypt" the files. If you did someone could just break this blanket encryption and then use this program to get the "pre-encypted" files and decode them. Adding a handshake is better, you could have iTunes present a certificate file as validation and then initiate transfer of an unencrypted file over a secure connection. However, this can be broken too. The only real solution is to custom-encrypt each file server-side. Not a fun solution if you're trying to keep costs down.
A neat little feature of Mac OS X I'd like to point out is spellcheck everywhere, or rather the potential to have it. With Mac OS X text container you can get most of the features of TextEdit (RTF compatible editor) using the built-in frameworks (NSSpellChecker). OmniWeb did (and probably still does) use this for all text input boxes, so boxes like the one I'm using for this had spellcheck-as-you-type, underlining misspelled words in red. Sadly neither Camino or Firefox has adopted this. For the curious running Mac OS X you can see the spell check process running by using the top command line program. Its called "AppleSpell".
Anecdotally I can tell you that OS X runs much better on a G4 or better than a similarly clocked G3. For example I have an iBook G3 500Mhz and a first generation, G4 400Mhz. The G4 runs noticeably faster. My previous experience pre-OS X was that G3's and G4's performed pretty much on par. It wasn't until the release of OS X that Apple really started putting AltiVec optimizations into the OS.
Having recently gotten my hands on a Windows XP box with a P4 that supported the NX bit I thought I'd turn it on, good idea right? yeah, great idea if you don't want to use half your applications. The NX bit stayed used for about five minutes. I wonder how many of Microsoft's apps will actually work with this protection turned on.
All ratings of this type tend to be biased towards the present. I think this is because how good a thing is roughly equates to someone considering how their life was prior to invention of product and how their life was after invention. In the case of the abacus, we can only speculate at the effect the device had on the lives of people when it was invented. With things that are more recent, we do not need to speculate, we know. Additionally newer things tend to have more funcitonality than previous items, and therefore are more useful in an absolute sense (I can only do math with my abacus, but with my PowerBook 100, I can play solitaire).
One of the reasons that MCI/Worldcom ended up mostly bankrupt was the wave of aquisitions that they indulged in.
Its a fair amount more complex than that. I would say that poor judgement in making the acquisitions, not the act of acquiring itself, was the problem. Further the pace of acquisition was too fast for one company. Finally, partially because of the previous reason, adequate integration of the acquired assets didn't happen, resulting in cost savings not being realized. The consolidation we're looking at now is going industry wide, not just at a company or two and I think is proceeding at a reasonable pace.
The Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism are intimately related. Without a more or less capitalist system the Industrial Revolution would not have happened or at the very least its effects would have been far less profound. Without the Industrial Revolution capitalism's power would not have been fulled revealed. Capitalism is ideally suited to mass production and industries that require large initial investment such as those that require factories.
It's called capitalism, and there's no time for that. Say what you will about capitalism, but it is almost the sole reason that the standard of living has risen so much in many countries over the last three centuries or so. This wave on consolidation has long been predicted, and its probably a good thing. Otherwise the telecom industry would end up fragmented and mostly bankrupty, much like today's airline industry.
All in the name of screwing the consumer over, I'd bet.
All in the name of surviving is more like it. These acquisitions should produce one or more of two things. 1) Lower costs for the companies involved, resulting in higher profits and better returns for the companies owners (largely public shareholders). 2) Lower costs or better services for their customers. It is likely to be a combination of the two. This assumes, of course, that Verizon does the merger well, and that they did their due diligence to make sure this was a good idea in the first place. At the end of the day, remember that you can choose not to be a customer of any company, except, perhaps, those that are monopolies.
However, people who use AppleScript tend to use it a lot. Once you discover how much you can do with it, you start to see all sorts of places that its useful.
Is it Sun or Sun's geeks? Would they work for Sun, and would other technical companies work with Sun, if they didn't release free/open software?
Its both. I would work for Sun under almost any conditions they set forth as long as I was paid a decent salary. From what I hear and know of Sun culture, its awesome. A company really run by geeks, which hasn't belped them in the marketing department, but has allowed them to do so kickin' work.
Is Sun's passive aggressive behavior, or other companies open pushing of free/open software better for the trend of free/open software?
Perhaps Sun doesn't feel the need to toot its own horn. After all, if anyone is going to look behind marketing glitz to see what's really going on, you would think it would be geeks. Geeks, who tend to be a little more suspicious and prone to fears of conspiracy and manipulation than the general populace, but such things tend to happen with greater intelligence.
Do people have free will and corporations are trying to ride that, or are we all pawns of corporations?
What a ridiculous question. When I woke up this morning I was free to choose any number of things. You have the choice to do anything. If you've been brainwashed by commercials and media, you have no one to blame except yourself (principally) and perhaps your parents.
Perhaps most striking is that this figure is 0.2% of GDP. Assuming that this money is lost production, then we could boost GDP by 0.2% a year by solving the spam problem. This is a big boost! Of course its really not that simple, but you get my point.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to completely disagree with you. I had a PowerBook G3 (Lombard) that I slipped down the steps and broke the screen on. I called Apple, they overnighed me a box, shipped it to Texas. It was in Texas for less than 24 hours, was overnighted back to me. A couple of days later the screen quit working, no video displayed. I called Apple, no questions asked a box arrived the next day. The PowerBook spent just over 24 hours in Texas and was in my hot little hands the next day. Optimally the screen wouldn't have malfunctioned after the first replacement. However, I was able to get my computer back in perfect condition in less than a week.
Contrast this to my friend's Dell repair experience. She bought a top-of-the-line laptop. A couple of months later the motherboard went wonk out, of course that was only determined after three trips to service where the replaced the video card, then the hard drive, and then the processor. When they finally determined it was the motherboard they decided to replace her whole machine. They replaced the machine with a refurb! She was furious, she didn't pay for a machine someone else had used, she payed for a new one. After much wrangling Dell gave her a new machine. So, whereas my support experience with Apple took less than a week and everything went smoothly, hers took two months and her computer was barely useable most of that time.
Although I heard rumors that Hollywood Video might also be looking at starting an online movie rental business.
What would be the point of partnering with someone as inexperienced as you are? The only one is to spread financial risk, and Hollywood Video can't afford a lot of risk at this point.
A simple solution would be to have non-mechanical keyboards. There are keyboards out there that have pressure sensors like a track pad rather than keys that depress. Since these have a flat surface and no crevices to worry about, sterilization should be simple. Many users complain of trouble using them at first, particularly slower typing speeds. Once you get used to the new feel though, you should have a higher theoretical maximum typing speed.
Now, if only the rest of the world generated as much revenue for Google. Not to mention, that, I don't know, Google might wait to get the bugs worked out before enlarging the dataset.
First, it appears that at least the pictures of Boston were taken in very early spring or late fall, as the Boston Common and Garden is brown. Secondly, it is interesting that the higgest resolution is only available for urban areas. I looked up my hometown (Waterloo, IA) when I noticed that the outskirts of the city were blurry. Then I drug down and it said "We're sorry, we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region." While this is a practical approach, since the level of interest here would be lower, it seems like Google would serve this up anyway. This begs the question, is the data simply not available yet? If it is available, why is Google not serving it up? Server load is not a good answer, obviously server capacity is not a problem for Google.
Telco's, utilties, etc have what is called a natural monopoly. These are services with little or no differentiation(1), high barriers to entry(2), and a market winner determined solely based on number of customers (due to high fixed costs)(3). Take electric utilities as an example.
(1)Electricity is pretty much the same, there's not a way to sell Enchanced Electricity(TM).
(2)The cost of every company that wanted to provide electricity building power lines would be ridiculous, there is no way that an new comer could displace an incumbent.
(3)Due to the fixed cost nature of a network infrastructure, the guy with the most customers has the highest margins. The problem then is that even vastly inefficient incumbents will continue to be the only players in the market. Forcing companies to allow competitors to their distribution infrastructure allows competition and lower costs.
However, setting the rent the competitor pays to the distribution network's owner is hard. What is this access really worth? In most questions of price "the market" determines the price, but in this case there is no market, since your customer is your competitor and therefore you would charge prices sufficient to drive your competitor/customer out of business. Therefore gov't has to set these prices and gov't sucks at this. People in general suck at setting prices, but without "the market" its what you have to do.
While that is a short-term solution, I'd rather have a long-term solution that has the potential to eliminate the problem entirely.
Yet it remains the most consumer-friendly DRM around. Let's also remember that Apple itself could probably care less what you do with your music, but it has to reach some common ground with the record companies.
Education is one of the places where computers don't really belong. A computer cannot answer questions, tell memorable stories that make information stick in your head, or deal with the oddball questions that only a living flesh-and-blood teacher can field.
I really have to disagree. Computers can bring a new dimension to teaching. As an example, while teaching about volcanoes a short clip of a volcano erupting could be a great addition. Sure you could always do this before with an old-style projector and ectera, but accessing the clip from a CD-ROM encyclopedia or a central server with teaching materials can be a lot easier. Students then really get to see what you're talking about, very important for visual learners. Computers are best used as an enhancement ot teaching, not a replacement for.
Computers are a tool. Too many educators have and continue to view the computer as some sort of magic bullet. Some educators seem to think if they just get a bunch of computers the kids will learn better. I imagine this conception is because kids like using computers, but this doesn't necessarily mean they're paying any more attention to absorbing information from it than they were from the teacher. There are also lots of studies where computers have been shown to increase test scores. For example, at an elementary school where I worked, we employed a reading program that used computerized testing. Reading ability and comprehension improved markedly. Computers can making teaching more effective, but they can't make it just happen, that's what teachers are for.
Generally I don't think hard drives care what angle they are operating at. The disk platters and heads have no more chance of contact when operating tilted then "right side up". The motion has to be pretty jarring to cause a head crash.
And the second result from Ask Jeeves is to a page that no longer exists.
There are ways they could reduce the server load and make it a bit more secure though - eg. blanket encrypt/drm everything on the server and have the client rip that off and apply the personalised drm. Then you'd have to go fishing around in the client for keys etc.
I don't see how they could "pre-encrypt" the files. If you did someone could just break this blanket encryption and then use this program to get the "pre-encypted" files and decode them. Adding a handshake is better, you could have iTunes present a certificate file as validation and then initiate transfer of an unencrypted file over a secure connection. However, this can be broken too. The only real solution is to custom-encrypt each file server-side. Not a fun solution if you're trying to keep costs down.
About five minutes after Debian drops support for the other architectures, someone will start "New Debian" and fork off and keep supporting them.
A neat little feature of Mac OS X I'd like to point out is spellcheck everywhere, or rather the potential to have it. With Mac OS X text container you can get most of the features of TextEdit (RTF compatible editor) using the built-in frameworks (NSSpellChecker). OmniWeb did (and probably still does) use this for all text input boxes, so boxes like the one I'm using for this had spellcheck-as-you-type, underlining misspelled words in red. Sadly neither Camino or Firefox has adopted this. For the curious running Mac OS X you can see the spell check process running by using the top command line program. Its called "AppleSpell".
Anecdotally I can tell you that OS X runs much better on a G4 or better than a similarly clocked G3. For example I have an iBook G3 500Mhz and a first generation, G4 400Mhz. The G4 runs noticeably faster. My previous experience pre-OS X was that G3's and G4's performed pretty much on par. It wasn't until the release of OS X that Apple really started putting AltiVec optimizations into the OS.
Having recently gotten my hands on a Windows XP box with a P4 that supported the NX bit I thought I'd turn it on, good idea right? yeah, great idea if you don't want to use half your applications. The NX bit stayed used for about five minutes. I wonder how many of Microsoft's apps will actually work with this protection turned on.
RTFA
All ratings of this type tend to be biased towards the present. I think this is because how good a thing is roughly equates to someone considering how their life was prior to invention of product and how their life was after invention. In the case of the abacus, we can only speculate at the effect the device had on the lives of people when it was invented. With things that are more recent, we do not need to speculate, we know. Additionally newer things tend to have more funcitonality than previous items, and therefore are more useful in an absolute sense (I can only do math with my abacus, but with my PowerBook 100, I can play solitaire).
One of the reasons that MCI/Worldcom ended up mostly bankrupt was the wave of aquisitions that they indulged in.
Its a fair amount more complex than that. I would say that poor judgement in making the acquisitions, not the act of acquiring itself, was the problem. Further the pace of acquisition was too fast for one company. Finally, partially because of the previous reason, adequate integration of the acquired assets didn't happen, resulting in cost savings not being realized. The consolidation we're looking at now is going industry wide, not just at a company or two and I think is proceeding at a reasonable pace.
The Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism are intimately related. Without a more or less capitalist system the Industrial Revolution would not have happened or at the very least its effects would have been far less profound. Without the Industrial Revolution capitalism's power would not have been fulled revealed. Capitalism is ideally suited to mass production and industries that require large initial investment such as those that require factories.
Take a freakin' breather already.
It's called capitalism, and there's no time for that. Say what you will about capitalism, but it is almost the sole reason that the standard of living has risen so much in many countries over the last three centuries or so. This wave on consolidation has long been predicted, and its probably a good thing. Otherwise the telecom industry would end up fragmented and mostly bankrupty, much like today's airline industry.
All in the name of screwing the consumer over, I'd bet.
All in the name of surviving is more like it. These acquisitions should produce one or more of two things.
1) Lower costs for the companies involved, resulting in higher profits and better returns for the companies owners (largely public shareholders).
2) Lower costs or better services for their customers.
It is likely to be a combination of the two. This assumes, of course, that Verizon does the merger well, and that they did their due diligence to make sure this was a good idea in the first place. At the end of the day, remember that you can choose not to be a customer of any company, except, perhaps, those that are monopolies.
However, people who use AppleScript tend to use it a lot. Once you discover how much you can do with it, you start to see all sorts of places that its useful.
Is it Sun or Sun's geeks? Would they work for Sun, and would other technical companies work with Sun, if they didn't release free/open software?
Its both. I would work for Sun under almost any conditions they set forth as long as I was paid a decent salary. From what I hear and know of Sun culture, its awesome. A company really run by geeks, which hasn't belped them in the marketing department, but has allowed them to do so kickin' work.
Is Sun's passive aggressive behavior, or other companies open pushing of free/open software better for the trend of free/open software?
Perhaps Sun doesn't feel the need to toot its own horn. After all, if anyone is going to look behind marketing glitz to see what's really going on, you would think it would be geeks. Geeks, who tend to be a little more suspicious and prone to fears of conspiracy and manipulation than the general populace, but such things tend to happen with greater intelligence.
Do people have free will and corporations are trying to ride that, or are we all pawns of corporations?
What a ridiculous question. When I woke up this morning I was free to choose any number of things. You have the choice to do anything. If you've been brainwashed by commercials and media, you have no one to blame except yourself (principally) and perhaps your parents.
Perhaps most striking is that this figure is 0.2% of GDP. Assuming that this money is lost production, then we could boost GDP by 0.2% a year by solving the spam problem. This is a big boost! Of course its really not that simple, but you get my point.