This is going to sound really cynical, but I feel inclined to say: No wonder current tech is not forward-thinking and is only innovating at a "comfortable" pace. You know, the kind of pace that enables companies to really milk as much as they can out of products without having to do very much R&D to improve the tech.
This is why we are still using countless seperate devices for our various everyday communication/information needs that can't communicate with each other, and why the concept of "integration" of the technological extensions of ourselves is largely overlooked. Oh, it's also why we pay $50+mo for, frankly, the most basic of cell phone and internet connectivity, for example. Companies that have the funds to do amazing R&D and amazing advances in the "human" aspects of technology aren't bothering, because they're rich as hell one way or another - they can crawl along at a comfortable pace with no problem (especially because "everyone else is doing it too").
Yeah, a bit of a tangent there, but I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. You know, we 100% have the means for technology to be so much more, but it's as though no one cares.
"Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard?"
Oh yeah, we have. But have fun configuring that to seamlessly & automatically & wirelessly back up with all of your Mac and Windows machines. Yeah, see you in a few weeks+.
"The AppleTV/Movie Rental Service. Exciting, if the XBox360 hasn't been serving this capacity for over TWO YEARS"
Sure, except those videos on your 360 don't load onto your other computers, and your cell phone and iPhone.
"Multitouch pad? Give it a month, they'll be on all the MacBooks."
Yup I agree on that, not that it takes away from the opportunity to have it immediately on the Air.
As for the size/form-factor? I'd love to see any manufacturer match this machine. Even 6+ months from now, it's not going to be matched, especially when intel had to custom-design/fabricate this CPU exclusively for the Air. As for the "breaks easily" aspect, I'm not buying that argument. Car wheels are made with aluminum alloy (in fact my car has aluminum alloy wheels). It's probably stronger than the magnesium alloy shells of the MacBooks, but I don't know -it would be interesting to see some docs on this...
No kidding, I couldn't guess how many times I've written on Slashdot about how people used to upload trojan-horse programs to my server all the time and try to get me to run it. You know, malicious AppleScripts with a different application icon so it looks like something legit like a text doc or whatever. Except these days, Mac OS is designed with way more attention to these kind of possible "hacks", fortunately.
Yeah the difference is, you can't get spyware installed on a Mac by clicking a banner ad in a browser. The software doesn't even have permission to do software installation, so it would be asking for a password (unless some unknown vulnerability is exploited). Frankly if you're entering your password for your computer when some arbitrary website asks for it, you've already got have way worse problems than spyware on your Mac.
Hey man, at some point during our teenage years, don't we ALL go "I should make up a religion, or start a cult! It'll be hilarious! People believe in all this crazy shit as it is, and pray to some fictional entities all the time anyways!"
Problem is, someone actually took that guy's fantastical creation too seriously (or maybe he himself is the one who took it too seriously)...
Pretty much sums up the whole fucking "religion" right there.:)
Oh. I don't think a firewire audio interface would have been very useful for Apple. I seem to recall hearing about that and hoping Apple wouldn't bother. Most people don't really need/want it, even far less so than Apple TV. There's only a pretty select market for a firewire audio interface, and it's already pretty well served by M-Audio, MOTU, Edirol and others.
Although, reading that the Asteroid/Q97 device was supposedly being worked on by former Emagic employees makes me think it actually could have been a worthy addition to Apple's hardware lineup. I just still feel it might have been quite a niche kind of thing when most of the new Macs already have audio I/O ports of quite reasonable quality anyways (with even the Mac Mini having digital I/O for that matter)...
"As it stands now, the "leaked" project that started this whole mess has been to most peoples knowledge, canned."
Are you sure you're talking about the right project? According to this article, the "leaked project" that provoked Apple's lawsuit was the Mac Mini, which was presented two weeks later at MacWorld Expo, and needless to say, has most definitely not been canned...
"I would imagine they did it to protect themselves from jail rather than a altruistic attempt to withhold your IP address from the MPAA"
Sure, or maybe they mainly took into account their own preservation, but also concerned themselves with the well being of the community as well (and/or perhaps not wanting the MAFIAA to net a "win" of any kind against the community). Of course most people lean far towards the most fully-self-preserving choice, but a lot of people still tend to consider a variety of issues, not just limited to selfish motivations, in such a situation as this...
No, the point is that the ISP previously offered OpenOffice on their servers which would not count towards users' monthly download limits. Now, they've removed it from the "free area" and users will have to take a 120+mb hit to their monthly bandwidth limit to download the software.
Frankly the whole concept of "unmetered free download areas" reeks of AOL and CompuServe, to me, but I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit.
Actually, I have to comment again and say your post is badly worded and is giving the wrong impression about statistics. You say "reoffending rates" but the PDF is about re-conviction rates, which are two very very very different things... Like I already said in my previous comment, sexual abuse between family members can go on for years and years with no conviction ever occuring.
Hmmm... so this report says that 95% of sex offenders only commit an act of offense ONCE? Frankly, I call complete bullshit. I don't think I even need to begin to substantiate the claim that 95% is an EXTREME exagerration, absolutely impossible. Not to mention that trying to accurately quantify the percentage of repeat offenders is nearly impossible...
Also, this report only contains information about re-conviction, not re-offense, which are very different things. I'm sure we can all imagine the creepy uncle that engages in some kind of sexual offense on a regular basis, but is NEVER reported nor convicted.
Yeah, taking a leak in the bush like humans have done for fucking thousands of years is ILLEGAL and WRONG, you crazy bastards! How dare you reveal yourself in the general overall midst of our precious innocent perfect children who would never even DARE to pee on a tree in the forest! You people are essentially barbarians! We don't want that kind of horrible example given to our children!
*sigh*... How excessive do laws have to get? Is there any end to the sheer fucking idiocy of people? I don't live in fear at all, I live in fucking anger and frustration because of all this BULLSHIT I hear about every day.
Oh, sweet, I can't wait for the cost of SSL Certificates to skyrocket as a result. Then we'll start to see the spam for fake SSL Cert sites that sell "S.S_L C3r.ts for the lowE$t p.r1c es!"...
Oh I agree, going and calling up and talking to an actual person will have the most effect. But I am not cool with politicians knowing what party I am "officially registered" as having affiliation with. Frankly it is none of their business.
Of course, political involvement is great, I think a lot of people don't think about it, or avoid the topic too much. I understand though that it's just not something a lot of peoeple have interest in worrying about. Of course, then they don't really realize that there are people who will gladly take that position FOR them, and really abuse the position.
Conservative membership? What the hell? I was raised to consider that a person's political affiliation was a somewhat personal thing. Seems like most people I've known are like that... but then there are people all over the place "registering" as having a certain political affiliation? That seems pretty messed up to me. Way to make things just that much easier for your private rights as a citizen to be even more quickly eroded.
Yup, I buy CDs at bands' shows, and hand cash to them (or their merch person) personally. I'm not cool with supporting exploitation of artists especially being one myself. Frankly big record companies can go fuck themselves (which is about all they'll have left to do, as, increasingly, bands have less and less need for them).
Funny that you say that. When my girlfriend was calling stores to try and find any available Wii systems last year, she called the HMV in downtown Vancouver here, and was told, "no, we don't have any". After she was saying "ok thanks anyway" and was going to say bye, the guy said he is selling some systems himself, and she could buy one from him. It was pretty obvious the employees were getting first dibs on the systems and then reselling them (which is exactly why I just mentioned what store she had called). I wonder whether that was an accepted store policy or if the employee was breaking rules by doing so.
Well, yeah, the Warcraft lore is pretty huge, overall. They could write a pretty major movie based on Warcraft, and it would be majorly successful, regardless of the Warcraft series' success, just because of the kickass compelling story. Have you played the games? The games in themselves are very very story-driven as it is (if you pay attention to the dialogue and read the manuals that have a bunch of history/story in them). [side note... No wonder I started to feel like newer games sucked - very few games can live up to those high expectations I got as a result of Warcraft 1 being one of the first games I bought - along with the Marathon series and the LucasArts adventure game Loom - all extremely story-driven games!]
Anyway, I agree with your point that some hollywood writers would turn the movie into inane crap. I cringe to imagine what the result would be of some of these mediocre tards working on video game stuff. Then again, a lot of current video games piss me off in just the same way crappy movies do. It's nothing new, I guess. When I think about it, it's no surprise either, since a big market like movies or video games are not going to do much in the way of risk-taking and innovation....
"Skip the RAID. RAID is for availability-- you don't need high availability at home."
Ohh, yeah, where do you see "availability" in "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"? RAID isn't just about "availablity" - it's about not losing your hundreds of GB worth of data if your drive dies, because there's three other drives storing the same data (or parity data so as to reconstruct any lost data).
Slashdot Mirror
This is going to sound really cynical, but I feel inclined to say: No wonder current tech is not forward-thinking and is only innovating at a "comfortable" pace. You know, the kind of pace that enables companies to really milk as much as they can out of products without having to do very much R&D to improve the tech.
This is why we are still using countless seperate devices for our various everyday communication/information needs that can't communicate with each other, and why the concept of "integration" of the technological extensions of ourselves is largely overlooked. Oh, it's also why we pay $50+mo for, frankly, the most basic of cell phone and internet connectivity, for example. Companies that have the funds to do amazing R&D and amazing advances in the "human" aspects of technology aren't bothering, because they're rich as hell one way or another - they can crawl along at a comfortable pace with no problem (especially because "everyone else is doing it too").
Yeah, a bit of a tangent there, but I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. You know, we 100% have the means for technology to be so much more, but it's as though no one cares.
It specifically said "Don't put this in your fucking Mac"
Haha holy shit, you're joking right???
sorry, meant "cell phone and iPod" on that second point.
"Haven't we had wireless NAS's since 802.11 became a standard?"
Oh yeah, we have. But have fun configuring that to seamlessly & automatically & wirelessly back up with all of your Mac and Windows machines. Yeah, see you in a few weeks+.
"The AppleTV/Movie Rental Service. Exciting, if the XBox360 hasn't been serving this capacity for over TWO YEARS"
Sure, except those videos on your 360 don't load onto your other computers, and your cell phone and iPhone.
"Multitouch pad? Give it a month, they'll be on all the MacBooks."
Yup I agree on that, not that it takes away from the opportunity to have it immediately on the Air.
As for the size/form-factor? I'd love to see any manufacturer match this machine. Even 6+ months from now, it's not going to be matched, especially when intel had to custom-design/fabricate this CPU exclusively for the Air. As for the "breaks easily" aspect, I'm not buying that argument. Car wheels are made with aluminum alloy (in fact my car has aluminum alloy wheels). It's probably stronger than the magnesium alloy shells of the MacBooks, but I don't know -it would be interesting to see some docs on this...
No kidding, I couldn't guess how many times I've written on Slashdot about how people used to upload trojan-horse programs to my server all the time and try to get me to run it. You know, malicious AppleScripts with a different application icon so it looks like something legit like a text doc or whatever. Except these days, Mac OS is designed with way more attention to these kind of possible "hacks", fortunately.
Yeah the difference is, you can't get spyware installed on a Mac by clicking a banner ad in a browser. The software doesn't even have permission to do software installation, so it would be asking for a password (unless some unknown vulnerability is exploited). Frankly if you're entering your password for your computer when some arbitrary website asks for it, you've already got have way worse problems than spyware on your Mac.
Hey man, at some point during our teenage years, don't we ALL go "I should make up a religion, or start a cult! It'll be hilarious! People believe in all this crazy shit as it is, and pray to some fictional entities all the time anyways!"
:)
Problem is, someone actually took that guy's fantastical creation too seriously (or maybe he himself is the one who took it too seriously)...
Pretty much sums up the whole fucking "religion" right there.
Oh. I don't think a firewire audio interface would have been very useful for Apple. I seem to recall hearing about that and hoping Apple wouldn't bother. Most people don't really need/want it, even far less so than Apple TV. There's only a pretty select market for a firewire audio interface, and it's already pretty well served by M-Audio, MOTU, Edirol and others.
Although, reading that the Asteroid/Q97 device was supposedly being worked on by former Emagic employees makes me think it actually could have been a worthy addition to Apple's hardware lineup. I just still feel it might have been quite a niche kind of thing when most of the new Macs already have audio I/O ports of quite reasonable quality anyways (with even the Mac Mini having digital I/O for that matter)...
"As it stands now, the "leaked" project that started this whole mess has been to most peoples knowledge, canned."
Are you sure you're talking about the right project? According to this article, the "leaked project" that provoked Apple's lawsuit was the Mac Mini, which was presented two weeks later at MacWorld Expo, and needless to say, has most definitely not been canned...
"I would imagine they did it to protect themselves from jail rather than a altruistic attempt to withhold your IP address from the MPAA"
Sure, or maybe they mainly took into account their own preservation, but also concerned themselves with the well being of the community as well (and/or perhaps not wanting the MAFIAA to net a "win" of any kind against the community). Of course most people lean far towards the most fully-self-preserving choice, but a lot of people still tend to consider a variety of issues, not just limited to selfish motivations, in such a situation as this...
"Because it's so difficult to type http://www.openoffice.org/ into your browser."
No, the point is that the ISP previously offered OpenOffice on their servers which would not count towards users' monthly download limits. Now, they've removed it from the "free area" and users will have to take a 120+mb hit to their monthly bandwidth limit to download the software.
Frankly the whole concept of "unmetered free download areas" reeks of AOL and CompuServe, to me, but I guess it's beneficial for users with a really low and strictly-enforced monthly download limit.
Sure, but I'll have trouble voting for the next US president, being a Canadian citizen... heh! ;)
Actually, I have to comment again and say your post is badly worded and is giving the wrong impression about statistics. You say "reoffending rates" but the PDF is about re-conviction rates, which are two very very very different things... Like I already said in my previous comment, sexual abuse between family members can go on for years and years with no conviction ever occuring.
Hmmm... so this report says that 95% of sex offenders only commit an act of offense ONCE? Frankly, I call complete bullshit. I don't think I even need to begin to substantiate the claim that 95% is an EXTREME exagerration, absolutely impossible. Not to mention that trying to accurately quantify the percentage of repeat offenders is nearly impossible...
Also, this report only contains information about re-conviction, not re-offense, which are very different things. I'm sure we can all imagine the creepy uncle that engages in some kind of sexual offense on a regular basis, but is NEVER reported nor convicted.
Yeah, taking a leak in the bush like humans have done for fucking thousands of years is ILLEGAL and WRONG, you crazy bastards! How dare you reveal yourself in the general overall midst of our precious innocent perfect children who would never even DARE to pee on a tree in the forest! You people are essentially barbarians! We don't want that kind of horrible example given to our children!
... How excessive do laws have to get? Is there any end to the sheer fucking idiocy of people? I don't live in fear at all, I live in fucking anger and frustration because of all this BULLSHIT I hear about every day.
*sigh*
What is this, Wikipedia? Hey, you forgot the square brackets around your "citation needed" tags.
Oh, sweet, I can't wait for the cost of SSL Certificates to skyrocket as a result. Then we'll start to see the spam for fake SSL Cert sites that sell "S.S_L C3r.ts for the lowE$t p.r1c es!"...
Oh I agree, going and calling up and talking to an actual person will have the most effect. But I am not cool with politicians knowing what party I am "officially registered" as having affiliation with. Frankly it is none of their business.
Of course, political involvement is great, I think a lot of people don't think about it, or avoid the topic too much. I understand though that it's just not something a lot of peoeple have interest in worrying about. Of course, then they don't really realize that there are people who will gladly take that position FOR them, and really abuse the position.
Sorry gotta run, can't write more...
Conservative membership? What the hell? I was raised to consider that a person's political affiliation was a somewhat personal thing. Seems like most people I've known are like that... but then there are people all over the place "registering" as having a certain political affiliation? That seems pretty messed up to me. Way to make things just that much easier for your private rights as a citizen to be even more quickly eroded.
Yup, I buy CDs at bands' shows, and hand cash to them (or their merch person) personally. I'm not cool with supporting exploitation of artists especially being one myself. Frankly big record companies can go fuck themselves (which is about all they'll have left to do, as, increasingly, bands have less and less need for them).
Funny that you say that. When my girlfriend was calling stores to try and find any available Wii systems last year, she called the HMV in downtown Vancouver here, and was told, "no, we don't have any". After she was saying "ok thanks anyway" and was going to say bye, the guy said he is selling some systems himself, and she could buy one from him. It was pretty obvious the employees were getting first dibs on the systems and then reselling them (which is exactly why I just mentioned what store she had called). I wonder whether that was an accepted store policy or if the employee was breaking rules by doing so.
Well, yeah, the Warcraft lore is pretty huge, overall. They could write a pretty major movie based on Warcraft, and it would be majorly successful, regardless of the Warcraft series' success, just because of the kickass compelling story. Have you played the games? The games in themselves are very very story-driven as it is (if you pay attention to the dialogue and read the manuals that have a bunch of history/story in them). [side note... No wonder I started to feel like newer games sucked - very few games can live up to those high expectations I got as a result of Warcraft 1 being one of the first games I bought - along with the Marathon series and the LucasArts adventure game Loom - all extremely story-driven games!]
Anyway, I agree with your point that some hollywood writers would turn the movie into inane crap. I cringe to imagine what the result would be of some of these mediocre tards working on video game stuff. Then again, a lot of current video games piss me off in just the same way crappy movies do. It's nothing new, I guess. When I think about it, it's no surprise either, since a big market like movies or video games are not going to do much in the way of risk-taking and innovation....
"Skip the RAID. RAID is for availability-- you don't need high availability at home."
Ohh, yeah, where do you see "availability" in "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"? RAID isn't just about "availablity" - it's about not losing your hundreds of GB worth of data if your drive dies, because there's three other drives storing the same data (or parity data so as to reconstruct any lost data).
"i guess. /.ers have know that TOR exit notes where being sniffed for a while now and hackers certainly much longer than that."
/.ers and hackers are mutually exclusive.. ;)
Haha, you imply that
Yeah either that or they're worried about having their personal videos found... heheh