Well, IIRC, didn't Lucas want Yoda to be a 7 foot tall warrior? Wasn't it that some problem popped up, basically that they couldn't pull off the beast Lucas had in mind, that forced him to reconsider and create the tiny muppet that actually appeared in the film? Imagine if Lucas had access to CGI back then.
Ok, I can't find any backup for that, but that's my recollection from an interview with Lucas. Even if this isn't exactly true, we can look at this as a hypothetical example of what I mean about limitations. Being stuck and unable to impliment your first idea often forces you to go with another. You get creative.
Also, there are some things a medium can show you, and some things it can't. Film, for example, can show subtle facial features in a way that a play can't, and a book requires lengthy discription to express the same expression. On the other hand, film doesn't allow you access to a character's thoughts the way a book does. One of the worst things a movie can do is live in denial of its limitation by having extensive voice-overs or having every character tell you exactly what's going on in their head. Doing that shows you don't understand the medium.
What it can do very subtly is show you a dissonance between what you see and what's said. It can provide a whole lot of information all at once. The camera can force viewers to a single point of focus. The expression can completely contradict what's being said. Sometimes what you don't see, what's out of frame, can be as important as what you do see. Great filmmakers are the ones who know how to exploit that.
Now, I'll admit, I think Lucas cleaning up the picture quality a bit isn't much of a crime, but how many times did I watch Jedi when I was a kid? Tons. Probably more than twenty. How many times did I worry about the compositing being a little off? I think I noticed it once or twice. I didn't really care or pay much attention.
Our best 0.001% of anything never need changes. The rest is dust in the wind. Take an imperfect story, product or relationship and keep redoing it unitil it is perfect for the parties involved. Future generations should do the same.
Sure, fine, redo it. As in, start from scratch again and *redo* it. Don't take the same movie and keep reediting it for the new sensibilities. Don't make the old one unavailable because your new one is "better". Who decides what's better? Who decides what is in the 0.001%?
We always learn in the context of the past. If you have a bad relationship, sure, drop it and find a new one. The past will inform your new attempts. The worst thing you can do if you want to avoid making the same mistakes, is to go into denial about what happened.
And that's what this reediting does. It pretends that we never made these movies. If they want to restore them to their original form, great. If they want to recut them, ok, but keep the old cut around. But you want to destroy the old artwork for the sake of pretending that we were always following our current politically correct attitudes? That's going to be harmful in the long run.
It's just not possible to get a movie -- or any artistic work, whether we're talking serious art or pop culture -- to the state where it's absolutely, 100% perfect. There's always some fine tuning, some tweaking, and at some point you have to say "That's it, we're done." It's not completely bug-free, but you've fixed all the big problems and you've gotta ship it sometime.
Movies aren't (or at least shouldn't be) the same as commercial software. There aren't "bugs". Movies should be considered artwork, and artwork isn't supposed to be "perfect". It is what it is.
Those "flaws"? Those are artifacts of the creation of art. They're context. They inform the viewer as to what the creation is, how it was made, why it was made, and what it all means. Cleaning up the "lousy compositing" in the Rancor pit could be thought to be similar to removing the visible brush strokes from a Monet. It might seem more realistic or something, but you're destroying what the work was.
Sure, Lucas might like it, and you'd be right to say, "he's the artist, it's his call". However, I think it shows a way in which he's a bad artist. A good artist knows when to back away, say the thing is done, and let it stand on its own. Let it be what it is. If you aren't happy with the results, then move on and make something new and better.
No great artists continually go over the same work refiniting it forever. If they do, they aren't really producing, and, in fact, they're destroying the first feeling of the work. Lucas was working within limitations? Fine. All artists are. You work within the limitations of the medium. You use the limitations. It's the guidence of those limitations that allow greatness in the first place.
Right. I had that same sort of question, and I suppose the answer is no. I have yet to see a camera phone that delivers a picture as nice as my 1.3 megapixel Elph from several years ago. Then I look at how small other things are getting:
The RAZR is thin, in spite of being pretty feature-rich
The iPod nano is tiny, has 4GB of storage, color screen, etc.
The PSP isn't too huge, considering it has all the power of a PS2
There are new tiny 5-7 megapixel cameras from most major digital camera companies (like the new Elphs and the Sony DSC-T? line)
And, stupid as I might be, I can't help but wonder, why can't someone make a good mp3/camera/phone that isn't too enormously huge? Like, just the phone parts of the RAZR, with no mp3/game/camera stuff, and how much space could that take up? How small and light of a phone can we make, if it's just a phone?
Now, most of the parts are replicated for each device. The LCD screen, the memory, casing, battery, etc. So take those out of the equation. How small could Canon or Sony make a camera (even, lets say, a 1.3 megapixel), ignoring the LCD, casing, battery, or memory? If you took those parts, and integrated them into the just-phone-parts of the RAZR, how much space would that really take up? Now find a way to squeeze in enough parts to replicate the functionality of the nano, but again ignoring the casing, battery, duplicate functions, etc.
Ok, so maybe it stil wouldn't be the tiniest device ever, but given how these various companies can make single-function devices that are really tiny and most of the space is taken up by elements that are common to all of these devices, I'm consistantly disappointed by the attempts to make an all-in-one device. Even the expensive ones are horrible.
Can't someone make a decent camera-phone with mp3 functionality and 4GB of memory built in, and put it in a reasonable-sized package? Where's the culprit in preventing this? Bad engineering? Cell-phone carriers? Sony not wanting to damage their digital camera business?
I kind of liked the fact that you built up skills. Like, as you progressed in the game, you could take sharper turns on your motorcycle without falling off. It made sense, and it worked out ok. The better skills came in right about the time when the missions got hard enough that you needed the better skills.
But the eating really annoyed me. As a way to replenish your health, I thought it was fine. Hearing your stomach growl while cruising through the countryside, or, worse yet, while running from the police, just seemed stupid.
The only thing I thought went too far was how you had to maintain your character in SA. I mean, he has to eat? You have to keep working out to keep your muscular build?
I guess that makes sense, but why not force him to take bathroom breaks in the middle of car chases? "Uh oh, CJ has a zit. You didn't wash his face often enough." Maybe you have to make him go to college and pass his exams to get a real job. "Keep pressing X to make him study harder!"
Some time ago (and please don't ask me to find the source) someone at rockstar made an obscure comment in the press that implied that they were building up to an MMORPG. It was couched in statements that it would be hard, so it'd take a while, but that they were building to it. Said something about, maybe GTA4.
The implication here was that if you look at the ability to own property added in Vice City and the ability build a character which appears in SA, they're working on some of the gameplay elements for a MMORPG in their single player games. They're already allowing you to take on other roles, even. You can play as a taxi driver, or a police officer, fireman, pimp, getaway driver, mugger, mob boss, etc. A lot of the elements they want area already there.
What they (apparently) are trying to get to is a whole city filled with players. Maybe a lot of the people would be NPCs, but then one would turn around and shoot you and try to steal your money. Oops, you just ran across another player. Maybe you'd spend lots of time, building a character, emassing property, becomming the boss. You'd hire other players to be your bodygaurd and hitman. Suddenly your employees, being other players, get bored and decide they don't want to work for you. They kill you, take over your empire, and you go back to the bottom of the heap to work your way back up.
From what I read in this interview, it sounds like that's the sort of level they hope to reach with this stuff. I don't know if they hope to meld the MMORPG with their single-player game in some inventive way (because the stories/missions are really helpful) or if they mean to build a separate online game. Or, for all I know, that might not quite be what they're working towards anymore. This statement came out just before VC, IIRC.
MS Office also had support for WordPerfect files. If you want to have the leading Office software you must have support for your competition. OpenOffice has support for Word documents so it comes as no suprise that MS would do the same.
There's a small problem with this idea: It's true that, if you want your office suite to be the dominant office suite, it helps to support other formats. However, if you're already the dominant office suite, and you want to maintain your monopoly, you might not.
Everyone supporting loads of formats is good for the consumer, because it makes your data more portable and encourages competition among software vendors. It's particularly good for the underdog, because it's hard to steal customers from your competition if you can't interoperate with the dominant software on the market. However, it's dangerous for the guy making the dominant software because it makes it easier for someone to switch to something else. Suddenly, your dominant position isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, and you have to compete with improved products and better features.
So, yes, especially given Microsofts anti-competitive history, it would be surprising that they'd support ODF. The only reason that it isn't surprising is that the lack of ODF support means that Massachusets has effectively banned Microsoft Office from being used by government agencies.
Everyone is picking up on how it's not quite right to anthropomorphize Win98, but:
Software, being designed by people, is more validly anthropomorphized than, say, rocks. Yes, we anthropomorphize rocks, too, and it has its purposes, among them, poetic. Software, on the other hand, is interactive in a way the most of the world isn't, and programmers really are trying to put as much of their own intelligence into them. You issue a command, and the computer responds. How it responds was determined by a person, based on what that person imagines to be a good response. Unreliable software tends to come from unreliable developers. It is, in fact, the developer's personality showing through his creation.
As you note, we tend anthropomorphize things interactions which we don't understand. People are also complex machines we don't understand, but no one complains when we anthropomorphize them. I'd submit that it's actually the most natural way to understand the world, to metaphorically attribute desire and understanding to things. A rock somehow wants to go down, and knows to do so. It knows to wait, however, until someone removes the solid object on which it rests. Nature abhors a vacuum. My computer is uncooperative and hates me. These are all said in the same sense.
Many AI experts believe that it is impossible to create anything like real intelligence without also creating something like "emotion" and "personality".
I believe it was probably a light-hearted joke to claim that Win98 is "neurotic" anyway.
Usabilty testing by non programmers. I like vi about as much as the average person. That is, not very. compared to the MS-DOS edit.exe, vi is pretty weak. Or rather, it's very strong, but it makes what should be a 100% intuitive task for anyone familiar with a computer into a series of random button-pushing and man-reading sessions.
Often, there are tools available that are more suited for non-programmers. For you're example, of vi, I'd respond with nano. It's much easier to get a handle on, IMHO. Sure, distros need to include it, and users need to know to use it, but a lot of times, there is a satisfying alternative.
I once saw about the most frustrating post I could possibly imagine along these lines. I had been working on setting up a web server (and I'll admit, I'm no huge expert, but I can set up Apache), and I wanted to find a way that I could let people log in remotely for file transfers, with encrypted passwords, but not have access to the whole file system. FTP would have been fine, but I didn't want plain-text passwords. SFTP would be fine, but I didn't want them browsing my/etc.
After searching the internet for a while, I came across a post that was posted on some OpenBSD focussed site, and I was in luck. Someone had posted almost the exact question I was looking for. The exchange went something like this:
Guy1: How can you jail someone in ssh?
Guy2 (who was apparently a recognized OpenBSD developer): You can't.
Guy1: What do you mean? Can't I chroot someone?
Guy2: No.
Guy1: Well, I just want a way to keep people from browsing my file system. Is there a way to do that?
Guy2: No. You should be using FTP.
Guy1: Ok, but I don't want plain-text passwords. What do you recommend? SSL?
Guy2: No. That's too hard to set up. Don't bother trying.
Guy1: Well, what do you recommend then?
Guy2: Look, you obviously don't understand security.
And it pretty much ended there. Now, maybe there is some security theory that I'm ignorant of here, but the whole thing just seemed... absurd. The site seemed to be set up for the sake of discussions on OpenBSD and such, the guy asking the questions was polite, and the guy answering was supposed to be an expert. I'm not an uber-geek, but I'm not exactly computer-illiterate either, and it seemed like, even if it's a dumb question, it's not so dumb that it doesn't warrant addressing.
Ok, so I guess I'm not adding anything to the discussion, except to say that I know what you mean. There are lots of good, helpful folk out there. Gentoo forums come to mind as a place where I've looked for problems, even on a non-Gentoo machine, and just thought, "god, this is a lifesaver". But sometimes, it's just hard to find answers, even when you know the answers are out there. I've secure shelled into servers that've jailed me before, and yet I've never gotten an answer to this question that actually made sense and worked.
Criminy, are we doing an Ubuntu/Gentoo flame war now? Aw crap. Ok. Here goes:
ninetimes [in a dull, disinterested tone] : gentoo is teh suxxors...
(In reality, I really like gentoo, but you do need a bit of time and expertise to do the initial setup. I tend to use Ubuntu, though, but the only reason is that I can then get a system up and running, fully updated, within an hour.)
Allowing conservative, liberal or whatever groups in a single country to determine the availability of domain names, is nothing but expanding corporate lobbying into scopes way beyond the U.S. government.
After all, this is one of the reasons why we have the United Nations. Right?
We have the UN in order to expand corporate lobbying into scopes way beyond the U.S. government? Now that you say it, I guess it makes lots of sense.
Since these systems have no advantage whatsoever over non-anonymous systems like Bittorrent except when being used to distribute material illegally, it will be easy to get such a change to the law made.
And the freedom of speech? Why would we need that stipulated in the constitution? There's no reason to need freedom of speech except when you want to say something that people don't like anyway. Right?
And why, do you think, that people believed making movies widescreen would be an advantage over 4:3? I mean, if they were made wider to be an advantage over TV, why would it be an advantage?
GP: "If you're going to come to me with a problem, make sure to bring a solution, too."
P: I'm sorry. That's something I hear quite regularly and it's BS.
I've never heard this before, and I'm kind of surprised by it. Frankly, if you come to me with a problem and a solution, in most cases, I'm going to say, why the hell are you coming to me? You have a solution. Go ahead. Solve the problem.
Now, don't come to me with no problem, no solution, but just a lot of whining and bitching. Don't come to me with a problem that you can't solve and then try to disallow me from solving it. There may be other reasons why I don't want to hear about your problems, but if you're coming to me with a problem, I'm assuming that you don't have a satisfactory solution.
The samsung model in the article summary seems to have a full-sized keyboard. More importantly, it has a detachable monitor, which solves the real problem with using a laptop as your desktop replacement: needing to stay hunched over the keyboard in order to see the screen.
The worst part is, all the good new laptops are being made with widescreen because little Jane going off to college wants to watch DVDs.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but that's not the only reason why screens have been moving to widescreen. First of all, vertical scrolling is generally considered easier than horizontal. But also, ask yourself, why are movies widescreen?
Think about the position of your eyes. Your field of vision is wider than tall. Really, screens should have always been wide. I assume that the main reason they haven't been is that it's harder to engineer CRTs that don't have roughly a square screen, but even "normal" screens are a little wide (when you're talking about 4:3, 4 is the width).
Now that we have LCDs and are free to make our screens whatever shape we want, it makes sense to me that we'd be looking for screens that more closely represent our natural field of vision.
Sure, but is it disposable? If I threw away your pendrive, but saved the data on it, would you be mad? Because if you threw away one of my DVDRs, and I still had the data, I'd be out around 50 cents.
Sure optical media is going the way of the dodo...
I'm not sure it is. I find it hard to believe that throw-away and WORM media will ever become obsolete. There will be times when I need something that I can just give to someone in the real world, and not worry about getting it back. We'll need backups and archives. Even if media distribution (movies, music) goes completely on-line, without any physical media whatsoever, I don't think that it means disposable high-capacity removable media will be obsolete in computing terms.
Ok, so you said "optical media". Maybe optical media will die sooner or later, but I'm not aware yet as to what it would be replaced with. Either way, I think the internet won't quite manage to obsolete removable media, even if it has greatly reduced the importance of it.
But a company that doesn't "get it" isn't going to "get it" by organizing some CIO appointed task force.
I have the same sort of skepticism at this. Who knows, maybe this will work, but a lot of the problem with these things tend to be the Dilbertian business tactics and managerial strategies, and a "task force" seems in line with the sort of attitudes and actions that cause these problems.
How about treating your IT people like people? Talk to them. Do something nice now and then. Appreciate the work they do, and show your appreciation. And no, I don't mean come up with a business strategy for fake-showing your appreciation. Don't get "thank you" cards that say, "We appreciate you".
Give them raises when they deserve it. Show some loyalty to employees who've done a good job. Give them extra perks when you can. Let them cut loose every now and then. Trust their judgement sometimes. Sometimes, it's as easy as saying, "Ok, because you say so, we'll do it that way." or "Good job."
The problem is, management (in most places) don't see their employees as people, they see them as tools. They're numbers on a spreadsheet. They *want* to view their employees as resources to be exploited as far as possible, with the greatest return/cost ratio, because that's their understanding of "good business". It's usually pretty transparent.
"Inspiring employee loyalty" is just another tactic they've studied while getting their MBAs, but very often, employees know it's just a tactic, and the condescending manipulation just goes that much farther towards thwarting any sense of employee loyalty. As long as employers are just looking for a better deal, with no loyalty to their employees, they shouldn't be surprised that employees are just looking for a better deal, with no loyalty to their employers.
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Ok, I can't find any backup for that, but that's my recollection from an interview with Lucas. Even if this isn't exactly true, we can look at this as a hypothetical example of what I mean about limitations. Being stuck and unable to impliment your first idea often forces you to go with another. You get creative.
Also, there are some things a medium can show you, and some things it can't. Film, for example, can show subtle facial features in a way that a play can't, and a book requires lengthy discription to express the same expression. On the other hand, film doesn't allow you access to a character's thoughts the way a book does. One of the worst things a movie can do is live in denial of its limitation by having extensive voice-overs or having every character tell you exactly what's going on in their head. Doing that shows you don't understand the medium.
What it can do very subtly is show you a dissonance between what you see and what's said. It can provide a whole lot of information all at once. The camera can force viewers to a single point of focus. The expression can completely contradict what's being said. Sometimes what you don't see, what's out of frame, can be as important as what you do see. Great filmmakers are the ones who know how to exploit that.
Now, I'll admit, I think Lucas cleaning up the picture quality a bit isn't much of a crime, but how many times did I watch Jedi when I was a kid? Tons. Probably more than twenty. How many times did I worry about the compositing being a little off? I think I noticed it once or twice. I didn't really care or pay much attention.
Sure, fine, redo it. As in, start from scratch again and *redo* it. Don't take the same movie and keep reediting it for the new sensibilities. Don't make the old one unavailable because your new one is "better". Who decides what's better? Who decides what is in the 0.001%?
We always learn in the context of the past. If you have a bad relationship, sure, drop it and find a new one. The past will inform your new attempts. The worst thing you can do if you want to avoid making the same mistakes, is to go into denial about what happened.
And that's what this reediting does. It pretends that we never made these movies. If they want to restore them to their original form, great. If they want to recut them, ok, but keep the old cut around. But you want to destroy the old artwork for the sake of pretending that we were always following our current politically correct attitudes? That's going to be harmful in the long run.
Movies aren't (or at least shouldn't be) the same as commercial software. There aren't "bugs". Movies should be considered artwork, and artwork isn't supposed to be "perfect". It is what it is.
Those "flaws"? Those are artifacts of the creation of art. They're context. They inform the viewer as to what the creation is, how it was made, why it was made, and what it all means. Cleaning up the "lousy compositing" in the Rancor pit could be thought to be similar to removing the visible brush strokes from a Monet. It might seem more realistic or something, but you're destroying what the work was.
Sure, Lucas might like it, and you'd be right to say, "he's the artist, it's his call". However, I think it shows a way in which he's a bad artist. A good artist knows when to back away, say the thing is done, and let it stand on its own. Let it be what it is. If you aren't happy with the results, then move on and make something new and better.
No great artists continually go over the same work refiniting it forever. If they do, they aren't really producing, and, in fact, they're destroying the first feeling of the work. Lucas was working within limitations? Fine. All artists are. You work within the limitations of the medium. You use the limitations. It's the guidence of those limitations that allow greatness in the first place.
And, stupid as I might be, I can't help but wonder, why can't someone make a good mp3/camera/phone that isn't too enormously huge? Like, just the phone parts of the RAZR, with no mp3/game/camera stuff, and how much space could that take up? How small and light of a phone can we make, if it's just a phone?
Now, most of the parts are replicated for each device. The LCD screen, the memory, casing, battery, etc. So take those out of the equation. How small could Canon or Sony make a camera (even, lets say, a 1.3 megapixel), ignoring the LCD, casing, battery, or memory? If you took those parts, and integrated them into the just-phone-parts of the RAZR, how much space would that really take up? Now find a way to squeeze in enough parts to replicate the functionality of the nano, but again ignoring the casing, battery, duplicate functions, etc.
Ok, so maybe it stil wouldn't be the tiniest device ever, but given how these various companies can make single-function devices that are really tiny and most of the space is taken up by elements that are common to all of these devices, I'm consistantly disappointed by the attempts to make an all-in-one device. Even the expensive ones are horrible.
Can't someone make a decent camera-phone with mp3 functionality and 4GB of memory built in, and put it in a reasonable-sized package? Where's the culprit in preventing this? Bad engineering? Cell-phone carriers? Sony not wanting to damage their digital camera business?
But the eating really annoyed me. As a way to replenish your health, I thought it was fine. Hearing your stomach growl while cruising through the countryside, or, worse yet, while running from the police, just seemed stupid.
I guess that makes sense, but why not force him to take bathroom breaks in the middle of car chases? "Uh oh, CJ has a zit. You didn't wash his face often enough." Maybe you have to make him go to college and pass his exams to get a real job. "Keep pressing X to make him study harder!"
Sometimes more realism isn't so good.
The implication here was that if you look at the ability to own property added in Vice City and the ability build a character which appears in SA, they're working on some of the gameplay elements for a MMORPG in their single player games. They're already allowing you to take on other roles, even. You can play as a taxi driver, or a police officer, fireman, pimp, getaway driver, mugger, mob boss, etc. A lot of the elements they want area already there.
What they (apparently) are trying to get to is a whole city filled with players. Maybe a lot of the people would be NPCs, but then one would turn around and shoot you and try to steal your money. Oops, you just ran across another player. Maybe you'd spend lots of time, building a character, emassing property, becomming the boss. You'd hire other players to be your bodygaurd and hitman. Suddenly your employees, being other players, get bored and decide they don't want to work for you. They kill you, take over your empire, and you go back to the bottom of the heap to work your way back up.
From what I read in this interview, it sounds like that's the sort of level they hope to reach with this stuff. I don't know if they hope to meld the MMORPG with their single-player game in some inventive way (because the stories/missions are really helpful) or if they mean to build a separate online game. Or, for all I know, that might not quite be what they're working towards anymore. This statement came out just before VC, IIRC.
There's a small problem with this idea: It's true that, if you want your office suite to be the dominant office suite, it helps to support other formats. However, if you're already the dominant office suite, and you want to maintain your monopoly, you might not.
Everyone supporting loads of formats is good for the consumer, because it makes your data more portable and encourages competition among software vendors. It's particularly good for the underdog, because it's hard to steal customers from your competition if you can't interoperate with the dominant software on the market. However, it's dangerous for the guy making the dominant software because it makes it easier for someone to switch to something else. Suddenly, your dominant position isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, and you have to compete with improved products and better features.
So, yes, especially given Microsofts anti-competitive history, it would be surprising that they'd support ODF. The only reason that it isn't surprising is that the lack of ODF support means that Massachusets has effectively banned Microsoft Office from being used by government agencies.
Except, um.. you have Linux, BSD, and soon enough, you'll also have OSX. Intel actually supports Linux quite a bit, soooo...
Often, there are tools available that are more suited for non-programmers. For you're example, of vi, I'd respond with nano. It's much easier to get a handle on, IMHO. Sure, distros need to include it, and users need to know to use it, but a lot of times, there is a satisfying alternative.
After searching the internet for a while, I came across a post that was posted on some OpenBSD focussed site, and I was in luck. Someone had posted almost the exact question I was looking for. The exchange went something like this:
And it pretty much ended there. Now, maybe there is some security theory that I'm ignorant of here, but the whole thing just seemed... absurd. The site seemed to be set up for the sake of discussions on OpenBSD and such, the guy asking the questions was polite, and the guy answering was supposed to be an expert. I'm not an uber-geek, but I'm not exactly computer-illiterate either, and it seemed like, even if it's a dumb question, it's not so dumb that it doesn't warrant addressing.Ok, so I guess I'm not adding anything to the discussion, except to say that I know what you mean. There are lots of good, helpful folk out there. Gentoo forums come to mind as a place where I've looked for problems, even on a non-Gentoo machine, and just thought, "god, this is a lifesaver". But sometimes, it's just hard to find answers, even when you know the answers are out there. I've secure shelled into servers that've jailed me before, and yet I've never gotten an answer to this question that actually made sense and worked.
ninetimes [in a dull, disinterested tone] : gentoo is teh suxxors...
(In reality, I really like gentoo, but you do need a bit of time and expertise to do the initial setup. I tend to use Ubuntu, though, but the only reason is that I can then get a system up and running, fully updated, within an hour.)
After all, this is one of the reasons why we have the United Nations. Right?
We have the UN in order to expand corporate lobbying into scopes way beyond the U.S. government? Now that you say it, I guess it makes lots of sense.
And the freedom of speech? Why would we need that stipulated in the constitution? There's no reason to need freedom of speech except when you want to say something that people don't like anyway. Right?
And why, do you think, that people believed making movies widescreen would be an advantage over 4:3? I mean, if they were made wider to be an advantage over TV, why would it be an advantage?
P: I'm sorry. That's something I hear quite regularly and it's BS.
I've never heard this before, and I'm kind of surprised by it. Frankly, if you come to me with a problem and a solution, in most cases, I'm going to say, why the hell are you coming to me? You have a solution. Go ahead. Solve the problem.
Now, don't come to me with no problem, no solution, but just a lot of whining and bitching. Don't come to me with a problem that you can't solve and then try to disallow me from solving it. There may be other reasons why I don't want to hear about your problems, but if you're coming to me with a problem, I'm assuming that you don't have a satisfactory solution.
The samsung model in the article summary seems to have a full-sized keyboard. More importantly, it has a detachable monitor, which solves the real problem with using a laptop as your desktop replacement: needing to stay hunched over the keyboard in order to see the screen.
I think the poster is right, though. This is a desktop computer, just a portable all-in-one model with a battery backup.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but that's not the only reason why screens have been moving to widescreen. First of all, vertical scrolling is generally considered easier than horizontal. But also, ask yourself, why are movies widescreen?
Think about the position of your eyes. Your field of vision is wider than tall. Really, screens should have always been wide. I assume that the main reason they haven't been is that it's harder to engineer CRTs that don't have roughly a square screen, but even "normal" screens are a little wide (when you're talking about 4:3, 4 is the width).
Now that we have LCDs and are free to make our screens whatever shape we want, it makes sense to me that we'd be looking for screens that more closely represent our natural field of vision.
So... he's saying, "The shell is where you type things to make your computer do stuff"? Gee. Thanks.
Sure, but is it disposable? If I threw away your pendrive, but saved the data on it, would you be mad? Because if you threw away one of my DVDRs, and I still had the data, I'd be out around 50 cents.
I'm not sure it is. I find it hard to believe that throw-away and WORM media will ever become obsolete. There will be times when I need something that I can just give to someone in the real world, and not worry about getting it back. We'll need backups and archives. Even if media distribution (movies, music) goes completely on-line, without any physical media whatsoever, I don't think that it means disposable high-capacity removable media will be obsolete in computing terms.
Ok, so you said "optical media". Maybe optical media will die sooner or later, but I'm not aware yet as to what it would be replaced with. Either way, I think the internet won't quite manage to obsolete removable media, even if it has greatly reduced the importance of it.
On the other hand, if Bill Gates is saying, "Uh uh, even I won't screw consumers over that badly!" then we may have grounds for concern.
I have the same sort of skepticism at this. Who knows, maybe this will work, but a lot of the problem with these things tend to be the Dilbertian business tactics and managerial strategies, and a "task force" seems in line with the sort of attitudes and actions that cause these problems.
How about treating your IT people like people? Talk to them. Do something nice now and then. Appreciate the work they do, and show your appreciation. And no, I don't mean come up with a business strategy for fake-showing your appreciation. Don't get "thank you" cards that say, "We appreciate you".
Give them raises when they deserve it. Show some loyalty to employees who've done a good job. Give them extra perks when you can. Let them cut loose every now and then. Trust their judgement sometimes. Sometimes, it's as easy as saying, "Ok, because you say so, we'll do it that way." or "Good job."
The problem is, management (in most places) don't see their employees as people, they see them as tools. They're numbers on a spreadsheet. They *want* to view their employees as resources to be exploited as far as possible, with the greatest return/cost ratio, because that's their understanding of "good business". It's usually pretty transparent.
"Inspiring employee loyalty" is just another tactic they've studied while getting their MBAs, but very often, employees know it's just a tactic, and the condescending manipulation just goes that much farther towards thwarting any sense of employee loyalty. As long as employers are just looking for a better deal, with no loyalty to their employees, they shouldn't be surprised that employees are just looking for a better deal, with no loyalty to their employers.