And, also, entertainment value is subjective. There is literally no difference between someone believing that something has better entertainment value for them and it actually having better entertainment value for them.
Well that was sort of my point, that the perception of an "improved experience" need not correlate to any actual improvement. The enjoyment can essentially be a placebo effect. In that sense, enjoyment is increased, but not because of any objective improvements.
What's more, no one said the universe was "random", at least not in the sense of having no rules or structure. There's just a gap between, "having rules, structure, and rationality" and "being consciously designed by a loving creator."
And then even beyond that, I don't know anyone who claimed that this universe was "probable". Maybe this universe, with all its symmetry, is highly improbable. Even highly improbable things might happen once.
Also, a good SA will know when "I wonder what happens if I do this...." is safe to try or not.
Oh, sure, I agree. But I was saying that it's often not a great learning environment specifically in that you shouldn't just poke around and say, "I wonder what happens if I do this..." I mean, if I were introducing someone with little or no sysadmin experience into a team, one of the first rules I would set is, "At least for the time being, don't poke around in any production systems unless you and I both know what you're doing."
Thats what test labs are for.
Yeah, but is that what we're talking about? Students poking around on test labs in development machines? Schools can always set up test labs for students to screw around with, but I was under the impression we were talking about students supporting live (and important) servers. In that case, one of the most important lessons that I think you can learn from real-life experience is, "This stuff is important and needs to be kept running without downtime. Don't experiment with these machines. Don't 'try things out' on this machine. This is the machine where, most of the time, you're only making changes that are well-controlled, planned, and necessary."
Maybe. Or maybe a commercially-significant number of people only believe that 3D will add to the entertainment value.
Just as an example, I remember when HDTVs started coming down in price, my parents got a cheap 720p TV and hooked it up to their low-def cable box. My dad kept talking about how wonderful and sharp the HD picture was, and how worthwhile his purchase of a new TV was. In that case, the idea of HDTV added to his enjoyment even without actually watching HD.
That's not too strange a story. Now my point isn't to say that HD isn't a better picture or that people can't tell the difference. I'm just saying sometimes, even when people are convinced they're appreciating a higher quality product, some of that appreciation comes from the idea that the product is improved. Similarly, there was a study that showed people enjoyed wine more when they believed the wine was expensive.
Some of that will probably happen with 3D too. People will like the idea of 3D so much that it won't matter if it *actually* improves the experience. If people are convinced it will improve the experience, then they'll probably perceive it as an improved experience.
Right. Actually, real-world situations of system administration often aren't very good learning environments. If you're hosting real-world stuff, the best advice is often "Don't touch this, and don't mess around with that." Not messing around with things is often how you achieve stability.
Not to say that SAs don't mess around with things, but it's often not a really experimental situation when you're administering live servers. You're being careful and doing as little as possible. I suppose that, too, is a helpful skill that has to be learned.
Good point. It's like TV manufacturers are getting so good at driving the price down that their products are becoming actually cheap, so they have to find a way to bump the price back up. One of the things that I've noticed starting to creep in is Internet connections directly on your TV. I can see the value if your TV had built-in Netflix streaming, but I get the sense that they're moving more towards something like, "You'll be able to see eBay ads directly on your TV!"
I often look at this stuff and think, "Who wants these features?" But I guess it's a marketing thing. They make you buy the super-high-end 60" TV to get the 5-day weather forecast on your TV, but then they also force you to accept the 5-day weather forecast if you want a big TV with good black levels. Yeah, I know, you can ignore the weather forecast, but it still makes the menu systems and remotes needlessly complicated. It's hard to find something that has the right balance of features.
I have seen a couple imax movies in 3D and I think I tend to mentally flatten the images- except for the parts where the snake jumps out at you, which is just distracting and cheesy.
See I have had a similar experience when watching 3D movies, but I don't think it's because you're "mentally flattening" the image. It's because when you're looking at a 2D image, you're "mentally 3D-ifying" it. (I'm sure there's an actual term for this, but since I don't know one, I'm going to use "3D-ify".) For example, look around the room you're sitting it. Now cover 1 eye and look around the room again. Did you suddenly get the idea that you're looking at a flat world? No, because your brain uses various other visual cues to figure out a fair amount of the 3D information.
So my experience with watching 3D movies so far is that, once I get into the movie, either I don't notice the difference or I do. If I do notice the difference, it's because the 3D effect isn't working very well and the whole thing is unsettling. Like I sit there and think, "Oh, weird, I feel like I should be seeing this from a different angle. That looks weird and artificially 3D." Or if I'm not thrown off, then I just perceive it as pretty much equally 3D as if I were watching it normally, since when I'm watching it normally, I'm extrapolating a third dimension anyway.
Later on Apple copied the Treo format (phone + PDA) Palm made popular and merged it with a virtual keyboard.
Well supposedly part of the reason Jobs killed the Newton is that he thought PDAs wouldn't become truly useful to the mainstream until they were built into phones. Apple had been working on various phone models for years, but it wasn't until a few years ago that they were happy with the results, hence the iPhone.
I'm just saying, it's not quite as though Apple just failed to create a good PDA until Palm showed them how to do it properly.
But a fair number of your examples are from the time of Jobs' absence. It was practically a different company then.
What are the odds that Apple's 1G tablet will have a USB port that works in host mode, or a non-proprietary accessories connector?
It doesn't necessarily need USB ports to enable keyboard use. It would just need some kind of docking system that provided USB ports. That docking system could be proprietary without the actual interfaces being proprietary.
Or bluetooth. Apple sells bluetooth keyboards and mice, and even the iPhone has a bluetooth receiver built in.
Yeah, at the same time, I'd question how much you really need that 3 week battery life. Sure, I'd like a 5 year battery life if I could get it, but I get by with much less.
People complain about the fact that you have to charge the iPhone "every day". (I've heard this claim a bunch of times, even though I can usually go a couple days without charging mine.) Even if you have to charge a device every day (or close to it), the truth is, I go home almost every day, and drop my iPhone into my dock. I don't do this to charge so much as I do this to sync. Still, it sits in the dock all night charging, and is fully charged by the time I pull it out the next morning. If I suspect I'm going to be away from home for more than 1 night, I make sure to bring a charger with me. I've never really run into problems.
And that's my phone. That's the device where, if I run out of power, I might end up stranded. My laptop, on the other hand, can only run a couple of hours without recharging, and it's not a deal-breaker.
So yes, I think a the rumored tablet should (if it exists) be designed to have a reasonably long battery life. However, I don't think failing to run 3 weeks on one charge will spell its doom.
It might be hard to say what WB is putting out. Sometimes big companies like that have subsidiaries with different names. You know, like you might not think of Phillip Morris (the cigarette company) as putting out a lot of food products, but you'd be wrong.
Agreed. I know that lots of people around here are probably keeping up on all the latest and greatest sources for pirated movies and TV shows, but for most people, it's simply too much of a hassle. I sincerely think that movie studios and TV networks need to learn that ultimately most people aren't really willing to pay for "content". Rather, people are willing to pay for convenient, easy, and reliable access to that content. If they make it as more of a hassle to get the content legally as it is to get it illegally, and too expensive to boot, then they'll lose out on that revenue. I don't say this as someone who approves of pirating, but sometimes it doesn't do you much good to disapprove of reality.
But anyway, I'm just not sure it matters. I don't even know when DVDs are released most of the time. I only know when Netflix tells me that the DVDs will be available. Move that date forward a month, and I probably won't notice.
A lot more work gets done at a company where salaried people are willing to work on something, just to make sure the company makes a sales goal, as opposed to people just wanting to "do their eight and out the gate."
Reminds me of this quote:
my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
A lot of companies seem to take the view that their only responsibility to their employees is to sign the paycheck. If that's true, then the only responsibility the employees have to their company is to "work just hard enough not to get fired." Value your employees, and they might value you.
Beyond my lack of comprehension for how he could possibly cover the payments on a startup salary, he apparently didn't consider the risks very carefully, and as it would happen, the startup went belly up.
My reaction is mixed. First reaction: A guy living in a $1.6 million house shouldn't be asking for a handout. If you can afford a $1.6 million house, then you should have been able to make substantial savings. If you can't afford the house, you shouldn't have bought it.
On the other hand, he's probably been caught in the same set of traps that a fair number of people have. Even a couple of years ago, everyone was recklessly optimistic about the housing market. All of this guy's friends and family, the people on TV, and probably even the people at the bank were probably encouraging him to borrow as much as he could and buy the most expensive house possible. Now he's been laid off twice, can't get health care, is trying to support his kids and his pregnant wife, and is being kicked out of his house. So ok, he has my sympathy.
Still, there are loads of poor people out there who I'm sure have had to deal with worse, even in boom times. If some inner-city minority guy put up a website complaining that he'd lost his job and he and his family were taking donations because they were about to get evicted from their tiny apartment, how much money do you think they'd get?
Of course, it would be good if the legislation also protected our data from the Department of Homeland Security
Of course, the real question with the government is, what happens when they don't follow the law? If all they have to do is say, "... but we're protecting you from terrorists," and people accept that as an excuse for the government breaking its own laws, then now law can protect us.
Sure. My home Internet stinks so I can't easily run my own mail server. Once I'm using a hosted solution, Gmail is about as good a solution as any. What's the problem?
Data on a hard drive in your house can be as accessible over the Internet as data in the cloud, assuming that the hard drive is hooked up to a computer that's connected to the Internet. The only difference is, "'Data is now sitting on servers outside of your control". That has nothing to do with "the cloud". Any hosted service has the same weakness.
Yes, sure, if you store all your data on a single company's server, then that means people only need to get access to that company's servers in order to get all of your data. Maybe people don't understand that, but it shouldn't be news to anyone here.
Finally, yes, Google is in a scary position right now. Not only might they have access to your search results, but if you use Gmail then they have your email and if you use Google Docs then they have your documents. Right now, Google has a lot of access to a lot of data, which is exactly why people think their "don't be evil" mantra is so important. If Google chooses to abuse their position, they could cause a lot of problems.
So ultimately, this isn't an issue of "the cloud". It's an issue of how companies (or particular companies) are allowed to use personal data, and whether they're providing sufficient privacy protection to their customers. Warning people is fine, but I kind of have to wonder what the law says. Is the law protecting us as well as it should? If not, if citizens aren't protected well enough, then maybe we should be looking into that instead of just warning people.
Well honestly, I would question how much bluray video disks would benefit from this anyway. I guess it would mean that you could squeeze more episodes per disc for TV shows, but that doesn't seem like a huge deal. The real benefit would most likely be to people who are using bluray as a data storage medium. I assume that there are some people out there doing this, using bluray as an archival format?
It's a good point, but it's worth keeping in mind that there are plenty of smart people at Microsoft. There just seem to be some really dumb ones that foul things up. The Xbox 360 is a pretty good little machine, assuming you're willing to overlook the loud fans and the RRoD. I played with a recent Zune model about a month ago, and was pleasantly surprised. I'm not giving up my iPhone, but it seemed pretty ok.
Given the amount of smart people they have and the amount of money they can throw at a problem, I don't think you can write Microsoft off. Even so, I'm hesitant to buy into any Microsoft products-- not because of their supposed inability to produce good products, but because of their history of vendor lock-in. I don't want to buy some kind of Microsoft e-reader today and find in a couple years that, for as long as I want to read those books, I have to stay on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill for all of their related products.
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And, also, entertainment value is subjective. There is literally no difference between someone believing that something has better entertainment value for them and it actually having better entertainment value for them.
Well that was sort of my point, that the perception of an "improved experience" need not correlate to any actual improvement. The enjoyment can essentially be a placebo effect. In that sense, enjoyment is increased, but not because of any objective improvements.
What's more, no one said the universe was "random", at least not in the sense of having no rules or structure. There's just a gap between, "having rules, structure, and rationality" and "being consciously designed by a loving creator."
And then even beyond that, I don't know anyone who claimed that this universe was "probable". Maybe this universe, with all its symmetry, is highly improbable. Even highly improbable things might happen once.
Also, a good SA will know when "I wonder what happens if I do this...." is safe to try or not.
Oh, sure, I agree. But I was saying that it's often not a great learning environment specifically in that you shouldn't just poke around and say, "I wonder what happens if I do this..." I mean, if I were introducing someone with little or no sysadmin experience into a team, one of the first rules I would set is, "At least for the time being, don't poke around in any production systems unless you and I both know what you're doing."
Thats what test labs are for.
Yeah, but is that what we're talking about? Students poking around on test labs in development machines? Schools can always set up test labs for students to screw around with, but I was under the impression we were talking about students supporting live (and important) servers. In that case, one of the most important lessons that I think you can learn from real-life experience is, "This stuff is important and needs to be kept running without downtime. Don't experiment with these machines. Don't 'try things out' on this machine. This is the machine where, most of the time, you're only making changes that are well-controlled, planned, and necessary."
Maybe. Or maybe a commercially-significant number of people only believe that 3D will add to the entertainment value.
Just as an example, I remember when HDTVs started coming down in price, my parents got a cheap 720p TV and hooked it up to their low-def cable box. My dad kept talking about how wonderful and sharp the HD picture was, and how worthwhile his purchase of a new TV was. In that case, the idea of HDTV added to his enjoyment even without actually watching HD.
That's not too strange a story. Now my point isn't to say that HD isn't a better picture or that people can't tell the difference. I'm just saying sometimes, even when people are convinced they're appreciating a higher quality product, some of that appreciation comes from the idea that the product is improved. Similarly, there was a study that showed people enjoyed wine more when they believed the wine was expensive.
Some of that will probably happen with 3D too. People will like the idea of 3D so much that it won't matter if it *actually* improves the experience. If people are convinced it will improve the experience, then they'll probably perceive it as an improved experience.
Planned upgrades are one thing. "I wonder what happens if I do this..." is another.
Right. Actually, real-world situations of system administration often aren't very good learning environments. If you're hosting real-world stuff, the best advice is often "Don't touch this, and don't mess around with that." Not messing around with things is often how you achieve stability.
Not to say that SAs don't mess around with things, but it's often not a really experimental situation when you're administering live servers. You're being careful and doing as little as possible. I suppose that, too, is a helpful skill that has to be learned.
Good point. It's like TV manufacturers are getting so good at driving the price down that their products are becoming actually cheap, so they have to find a way to bump the price back up. One of the things that I've noticed starting to creep in is Internet connections directly on your TV. I can see the value if your TV had built-in Netflix streaming, but I get the sense that they're moving more towards something like, "You'll be able to see eBay ads directly on your TV!"
I often look at this stuff and think, "Who wants these features?" But I guess it's a marketing thing. They make you buy the super-high-end 60" TV to get the 5-day weather forecast on your TV, but then they also force you to accept the 5-day weather forecast if you want a big TV with good black levels. Yeah, I know, you can ignore the weather forecast, but it still makes the menu systems and remotes needlessly complicated. It's hard to find something that has the right balance of features.
I have seen a couple imax movies in 3D and I think I tend to mentally flatten the images- except for the parts where the snake jumps out at you, which is just distracting and cheesy.
See I have had a similar experience when watching 3D movies, but I don't think it's because you're "mentally flattening" the image. It's because when you're looking at a 2D image, you're "mentally 3D-ifying" it. (I'm sure there's an actual term for this, but since I don't know one, I'm going to use "3D-ify".) For example, look around the room you're sitting it. Now cover 1 eye and look around the room again. Did you suddenly get the idea that you're looking at a flat world? No, because your brain uses various other visual cues to figure out a fair amount of the 3D information.
So my experience with watching 3D movies so far is that, once I get into the movie, either I don't notice the difference or I do. If I do notice the difference, it's because the 3D effect isn't working very well and the whole thing is unsettling. Like I sit there and think, "Oh, weird, I feel like I should be seeing this from a different angle. That looks weird and artificially 3D." Or if I'm not thrown off, then I just perceive it as pretty much equally 3D as if I were watching it normally, since when I'm watching it normally, I'm extrapolating a third dimension anyway.
Later on Apple copied the Treo format (phone + PDA) Palm made popular and merged it with a virtual keyboard.
Well supposedly part of the reason Jobs killed the Newton is that he thought PDAs wouldn't become truly useful to the mainstream until they were built into phones. Apple had been working on various phone models for years, but it wasn't until a few years ago that they were happy with the results, hence the iPhone.
I'm just saying, it's not quite as though Apple just failed to create a good PDA until Palm showed them how to do it properly.
But a fair number of your examples are from the time of Jobs' absence. It was practically a different company then.
What are the odds that Apple's 1G tablet will have a USB port that works in host mode, or a non-proprietary accessories connector?
It doesn't necessarily need USB ports to enable keyboard use. It would just need some kind of docking system that provided USB ports. That docking system could be proprietary without the actual interfaces being proprietary.
Or bluetooth. Apple sells bluetooth keyboards and mice, and even the iPhone has a bluetooth receiver built in.
Yeah, at the same time, I'd question how much you really need that 3 week battery life. Sure, I'd like a 5 year battery life if I could get it, but I get by with much less.
People complain about the fact that you have to charge the iPhone "every day". (I've heard this claim a bunch of times, even though I can usually go a couple days without charging mine.) Even if you have to charge a device every day (or close to it), the truth is, I go home almost every day, and drop my iPhone into my dock. I don't do this to charge so much as I do this to sync. Still, it sits in the dock all night charging, and is fully charged by the time I pull it out the next morning. If I suspect I'm going to be away from home for more than 1 night, I make sure to bring a charger with me. I've never really run into problems.
And that's my phone. That's the device where, if I run out of power, I might end up stranded. My laptop, on the other hand, can only run a couple of hours without recharging, and it's not a deal-breaker.
So yes, I think a the rumored tablet should (if it exists) be designed to have a reasonably long battery life. However, I don't think failing to run 3 weeks on one charge will spell its doom.
3) Let's be clear, if it's not e-ink or similar, this is in no way competition for the Kindle/Nook/Sony eReader
Rumor is they might be using something like this technology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ZErQ5Kl6w
That's progress. Some business models stop making money and become obsolete. New business opportunities become available.
It might be hard to say what WB is putting out. Sometimes big companies like that have subsidiaries with different names. You know, like you might not think of Phillip Morris (the cigarette company) as putting out a lot of food products, but you'd be wrong.
Agreed. I know that lots of people around here are probably keeping up on all the latest and greatest sources for pirated movies and TV shows, but for most people, it's simply too much of a hassle. I sincerely think that movie studios and TV networks need to learn that ultimately most people aren't really willing to pay for "content". Rather, people are willing to pay for convenient, easy, and reliable access to that content. If they make it as more of a hassle to get the content legally as it is to get it illegally, and too expensive to boot, then they'll lose out on that revenue. I don't say this as someone who approves of pirating, but sometimes it doesn't do you much good to disapprove of reality.
But anyway, I'm just not sure it matters. I don't even know when DVDs are released most of the time. I only know when Netflix tells me that the DVDs will be available. Move that date forward a month, and I probably won't notice.
"The viral DNA that isn't conducive to death before reproductive age probably stayed in." -- fixed further?
But can we all get jobs in the Netherlands?
A lot more work gets done at a company where salaried people are willing to work on something, just to make sure the company makes a sales goal, as opposed to people just wanting to "do their eight and out the gate."
Reminds me of this quote:
my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
A lot of companies seem to take the view that their only responsibility to their employees is to sign the paycheck. If that's true, then the only responsibility the employees have to their company is to "work just hard enough not to get fired." Value your employees, and they might value you.
Beyond my lack of comprehension for how he could possibly cover the payments on a startup salary, he apparently didn't consider the risks very carefully, and as it would happen, the startup went belly up.
My reaction is mixed. First reaction: A guy living in a $1.6 million house shouldn't be asking for a handout. If you can afford a $1.6 million house, then you should have been able to make substantial savings. If you can't afford the house, you shouldn't have bought it.
On the other hand, he's probably been caught in the same set of traps that a fair number of people have. Even a couple of years ago, everyone was recklessly optimistic about the housing market. All of this guy's friends and family, the people on TV, and probably even the people at the bank were probably encouraging him to borrow as much as he could and buy the most expensive house possible. Now he's been laid off twice, can't get health care, is trying to support his kids and his pregnant wife, and is being kicked out of his house. So ok, he has my sympathy.
Still, there are loads of poor people out there who I'm sure have had to deal with worse, even in boom times. If some inner-city minority guy put up a website complaining that he'd lost his job and he and his family were taking donations because they were about to get evicted from their tiny apartment, how much money do you think they'd get?
I didn't say I was having trouble setting up a server. My Internet stinks.
Of course, it would be good if the legislation also protected our data from the Department of Homeland Security
Of course, the real question with the government is, what happens when they don't follow the law? If all they have to do is say, "... but we're protecting you from terrorists," and people accept that as an excuse for the government breaking its own laws, then now law can protect us.
Sure. My home Internet stinks so I can't easily run my own mail server. Once I'm using a hosted solution, Gmail is about as good a solution as any. What's the problem?
Data on a hard drive in your house can be as accessible over the Internet as data in the cloud, assuming that the hard drive is hooked up to a computer that's connected to the Internet. The only difference is, "'Data is now sitting on servers outside of your control". That has nothing to do with "the cloud". Any hosted service has the same weakness.
Yes, sure, if you store all your data on a single company's server, then that means people only need to get access to that company's servers in order to get all of your data. Maybe people don't understand that, but it shouldn't be news to anyone here.
Finally, yes, Google is in a scary position right now. Not only might they have access to your search results, but if you use Gmail then they have your email and if you use Google Docs then they have your documents. Right now, Google has a lot of access to a lot of data, which is exactly why people think their "don't be evil" mantra is so important. If Google chooses to abuse their position, they could cause a lot of problems.
So ultimately, this isn't an issue of "the cloud". It's an issue of how companies (or particular companies) are allowed to use personal data, and whether they're providing sufficient privacy protection to their customers. Warning people is fine, but I kind of have to wonder what the law says. Is the law protecting us as well as it should? If not, if citizens aren't protected well enough, then maybe we should be looking into that instead of just warning people.
Well honestly, I would question how much bluray video disks would benefit from this anyway. I guess it would mean that you could squeeze more episodes per disc for TV shows, but that doesn't seem like a huge deal. The real benefit would most likely be to people who are using bluray as a data storage medium. I assume that there are some people out there doing this, using bluray as an archival format?
It's a good point, but it's worth keeping in mind that there are plenty of smart people at Microsoft. There just seem to be some really dumb ones that foul things up. The Xbox 360 is a pretty good little machine, assuming you're willing to overlook the loud fans and the RRoD. I played with a recent Zune model about a month ago, and was pleasantly surprised. I'm not giving up my iPhone, but it seemed pretty ok.
Given the amount of smart people they have and the amount of money they can throw at a problem, I don't think you can write Microsoft off. Even so, I'm hesitant to buy into any Microsoft products-- not because of their supposed inability to produce good products, but because of their history of vendor lock-in. I don't want to buy some kind of Microsoft e-reader today and find in a couple years that, for as long as I want to read those books, I have to stay on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill for all of their related products.