The reality is, we don't want breeds of anti-social children who don't interact and sit at a computer all day- they'll have enough of their work-life to do that.
School is an opportunity to get the kids out of the house, into a LEARNING ENVIRONMENT sorounded by success (hanging people's work on the walls of elementry schools promotes doing well), with other children trying to achieve. They can not get this from home.
Maybe you could take a day off of school or something, but the trip to the building has a serious mental impact.
FYI: Schools can buy deisel for 50-60% of what consumers buy it at due to the volume of the fleet and arrangements with fuel companies.
No- this is a wakeup call not in the medium, but in their own employees. The MPAA doesn't get it, nor do does the BBC it seems. There is nothing wrong with the ability to distribute video.
HOWEVER, the fact that it was leaked early says something about BBC. Somebody took the Dr Who episode and encoded it to video and distributed it. Or someone took it home and lent it to a friend who did that.
This continues to happen with Hollywood movies with 'screeners' sent to newspapers, critics, and so on. The problem is not sending out movies to these people. The problem is that they're not keeping tabs on these movies and ensuring that those who get them are under more strict orders. The problem is that they let people take a copy home and don't realize who has it and what they might do with it.
Unless video gets stolen, any pre-release is the fault of the STUDIO or BROADCASTER who leaked it.
I know people who couldn't reproduce their signature if they tried 100 times, no two would look alike. With the right tools, a signature could be used to find style/patterns- fine.
I'll have you know, I sign at least 50% of my Visa slips 'Daffy Duck' 'Bugs Bunny' 'root' 'whoami' and so on. The first two being the most amusing. Nobody checks it. The 15 year old operating the cash at the movie theatre throws it right into a drawer. The 17 year old at the clothing stores I shop at do the same. Nobody looks at it. At restaurants, you leave it on the table and walk away. Sometimes my friends will sign their own name on my slips when I run to go get something. So what if my credit card slip says 'Tracey':)
The only time that will get checked is if I charge something back, and they ask the merchant for a copy of the Visa slip. Nobody stares at the signature- they look that there _IS_ a signature there.
Most of this is MERCHANTS not protecting themselves by checking the back of the card, but that's not my problem.
Around here they're only starting to bring them in, and it's mostly in localized trial areas. Credit cards still have no authentication beyond a signature and reconcilliation when you get your statement.
DEBIT cards (pulling money straight from your bank account) has a PIN. It sounds like that's what you're tlaking about.
Since when do credit cards need PIN numbers? Credit Cards to activate make you confirm key details like birthdate, phone number, and credit limit. The PINs are in the bank cards.
So as opposed to getting a credit card number (using your example), buying something, and ridding yourself of the card, you're going to hang on to the number and make purchases over the course of time and hope nobody notices stores they don't normally shop at on the list?
In general it sounds like we're talking about really dumb criminals who know how to use photoshop.
Opening or intercepting mail (at least in the US and Canada) not addressed to you is a criminal offense. So we're already talking criminals who have to commit an offense here in order to do so. At that point, why not open it? You're already stealing mail, you're about to steal a PIN number and hence some money from a bank where you'll be on video camera, who not just open the damn message- the person won't know for a few days that it's not arrived yet.
When did a criminal get this sudden hit of "oh my- what am I doing- I can't _OPEN_ this letter! I'll just scan it and see what i can find". This is someone who already intercepted mail and is about to commit fraud. Just open the envelope and call it a day.
FYI: From the Canada Post Corporation Act
Every person commits an offence who, except where expressly authorized by or under this Act, the Customs Act or the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, knowingly opens, keeps, secretes, delays or detains, or permits to be opened, kept, secreted, delayed or detained, any mail bag or mail or any receptacle or device authorized by the Corporation for the posting of mail.
Every person commits an offence who unlawfully and knowingly abandons, misdirects, obstructs, delays or detains the progress of any mail or mail conveyance.
Buy him a certification program for his birthday or christmas or something... A-plus may be a good one, otherwise M$ offers a series of them... sign him up TO LEARN.
It's not direct, but if you've put together some company money to send him to a 3-day course, he's bound to pick up something.
-M
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat
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Intel and Laptop RAID?
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· Score: 1
you might jsut get the same laptop with the same weight and power but with raid.. i don't see the reason you wouldn't want that
Because the alternate is fixing a problem users have hated for some time in portable computing- weight and power. What's the point in reducing the power if you're going to use it up again? The whole point of this excercise is to extend battery life and decrease weight so we cary our laptops more, use them longer, and don't need to be attached by a power cord to the wall (as many do now).
I want a laptop that doesn't outweigh my briefcase or notebook.
I want a laptop that is actually wireless and free of a power cord (WLAN is neat and all, but when you have 2-3h battery life from most modern notebooks with a 15" screen and all, you need to plug it in anyway unless you're just having a 30min cup of coffee)- like wireless during an entire meeting, presentation, or day at the cottage, trip out to the middle of the lake, etc.
So we can:
a. increase battery life, reduce size, and weight by ?25%?
-or-
b. give you a second hard drive, taking up 2.5"x0.5" of space in the case, making noise and heat, using the battery life you know you have, and adding more strain on your shoulder.
I'd rather have the first, and I think most people would agree. Devices are getting smaller, faster, and lighter! A family member just got a MP3 player that's a 1/2inch cubed and has a 15h rechargable battery built in. Digital cameras are tiny nowdays. Why should my notebook be any heavier or bigger than the human interface device (keyboard and screen)!
-M
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat
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Intel and Laptop RAID?
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· Score: 1
Hrm- maybe I should check out some newer controllers- RAID-1 doesn't offer nearly enough 'bang for the buck' so we end up with SCSI RAID-5 or other combination RAID sets.
Well this is exactly it though- it's going in laptops that have all come down significantly in price, battery requirements, and more. I don't see them putting high end RAID hardware in there.
Take your latest and greatest RAID controllers- I'm talking the nice Adaptec SCSI controllers... or if you want to go IDE/ATA, some Promise, Highpoint, etc controllers. Of course onboard memory is pretty important here, but it's more servers.
If I had to guess, this is going to be an 'additional instruction set' that has some highly optimized parity in there that the drivers can use to offload parity checks from the CPU.
In time solid state will take over.. At present it's the slowest, loudest part of the computer (other than a FDD).
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat
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Intel and Laptop RAID?
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· Score: 1
This seems fairly simple, seeing as how they already do the same thing for RAID0. The only difference should be in how the write command is issued. Am I missing something?
Not quite. RAID-0 in most cases just adds the two drives together, but doesn't interleave them. You end up with 0-40GB of disc 1 and 40-80GB of disc 2. It maintains an index of the range of the drives. I assume it's possible a controller has that, but not that I've seen. Never seen them interleave.
So RAID-0 just offers additional Space. RAID-1 offers 2x the writes (but they happen at the same time), and unless it has some really nice request queueing, odds are it reads from only one drive. Maybe controllers have become better over the years... who knows.
Windows XP updates itself, installs updates, and reboots on its own if you don't click in a minutes notice. It also takes over the 'shut down' button and makes it 'shut down and install updates', doing it only at the times where you just need to bolt (there's a bypass option but habit takes over sometimes).
Backups should be scheduled on all corporate laptops for example. Plug them into the Internet and they check if the speed is worthy (broadband) and starts backing up if it hasn't been done in >2 days for example. Process probably takes a matter of minutes to back up just the changes in user data, filing it onto a NAS box for later backup to external storage.
Why is this so complicated? What the user doesn't know about or have to do won't hurt them and will instead help them.
-M
I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid state?
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Intel and Laptop RAID?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First off, RAID-1 (I imagine they won't have >2 drives in a notebook) will not increase speed, as it's just a mirror- a write takes the same time, writing to both drives equally. A read generally only pulls from one drive at a time. If they have >2 drives, you could get some increased speed from the drive to the controller.
Second, won't this be bad for battery life having a second 4200RPM drive in your notebook? Not to mention weight?
Third, any money says it'll use the onboard memory for its RAID controller or maybe even software RAID, meaning it, like onboard video will slow your computer down.
For an argument for it, lets turn to my former partner:
Any video card must keep the monitor refreshed. That means reading the entire video buffer at whatever the refresh frequency is.
Let's say you're running 1024x768, 16bpp, 75Hz. This is quite conservative, obviously. Bandwidth consumption? Well the video buffer is 1024x768x2 bytes = 1.5MB. Read it 75 times per second and you are eating 112.5MB/s of your main memory bandwidth. You just lost 14MHz of your RAM clock speed.
Picking some more realistic numbers: 1280x1024, 32bpp, 85Hz. This is a much more typical configuration. Bandwidth consumption here... video buffer is 5.0MB, read 85 times per second == 425MB/s. You've now lost about 53MHz of your RAM clock speed.
These numbers assume that the video card is doing nothing but refreshing the screen. Obviously that's not realistic. If you're just typing a document then you're likely pushing about 10MB/s thru the video card. But as soon as you start scrolling the screen, running Flash applications or anything with any animation to it (and we know WinXP is FULL of CPU-hogging animations) the memory bandwidth loss skyrockets.
This doesn't seem to make much sense. In an age of GBe and 10GBe ethernet, wi-max, storage of files across corporate networks over the Internet, why is RAID in a laptop useful?
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
Points 1-3 I very rarely have a problem with. I think I've heard one person talk on a phone ever in the cinema. Still annoying...
4 I'm not sure about - I would say it was shorter, but it depends on the cinema and I've not measured it. It certainly doesn't feel like 30 minutes. I'd go for 15 minutes perhaps.
It seems to happen more and more. I live in suburbia, and now with every 8-18 year old having their very own cell phone, it's quite annoying. These are the same people who talk throughout the movie and just don't care. They're kids that think they're cool, but you know are going to be sweeping your floors later on in life unless Daddy gets them into a nice cozy job. (see- now I sound miserable... but seriously). It's annoying when it happens and it seems to be happening more and more as cell phones continue to be in everyone's pocket and the people who carry them get younger and younger.
4. Generally speaking 25-30 minutes around here. Maybe 4 commercials at 2+ minutes a piece and then 5 trailers at 3+ minutes a piece... that works out to 23 minutes, so it's about right. I usually look at my watch and see 25-30 minutes range by the time the 'feature presentation' comes on. It of course depends on what's coming out and if there are movies that fit the target audience.
Even stranger though, the ONLY commercials I see (excluding the slide-show while you're getting your seats) are for either birth control or hair colouring party (anyone up for a hair streaking party?). Maybe I'm just not the target market of these commercials. Doesn't anyone else want to advertise to movie-goers? Aren't there products out there that older people or... uhh... men... might enjoy too?
I'd agree though- I enjoy the trailers for sure, but maybe that makes me a consumer-whore.
I can summarize this, and a lot of other situations with one statement. This is the generation of non-parenting. Really it is. It's the no-supervision, leave-your-kids-at-home-with-a-shoot-em-up-game, tv-will-babysit, generation. The same teens I'm referring to that don't have the basic decency to care about those around them. See- I somehow bring this all to a society reference, but it's true! There's nothing wrong with using a cell phone, but it's more the respect to those around you.
So what's wrong with movies. In every one of the past 10 movies I've gone to:
1. It seems punk kids get up in the middle of the movie, disappear for about 20 minutes, and then come back with their friends. They then all go out again and do the same with more friends. Sometimes they don't even come back? Meanwhile this is distracting as anything. Stay for the whole thing or leave.
2. At least 10-20 people pull out their cell phones and either a. fiddle with them with the backlight on, or b. talk to whoever called them, often yelling at their (assumed) parents that they're in a movie and can't be picked up. Go outside!
3. There are at least 5-10 people who do a combination of a. talk throughout the whole movie, b. get up and shake their fist in an ?Arsino? Hall type fashion at something funny being said during the movie.
4. Generally 30 minutes from the start of the commercials to the 'Feature Presentation'.
5. Movies are predictable, uninteresting, and generally awful. Maybe 5% of them are actually worth seeing.
6. Movies are now $10CDN at the 'big' theatres (as low as $4 at the little ones), but they were once 13.95CDN. Not to mention popcorn and a drink will run you another 10-12$ CDN.
7. Lack of promotion- the last movie I saw with good promotion was MONTHS of Dukes of Hazzard hype and links to music television networks. You don't have the same hype you once saw for movies like The Matrix, or even movies like Toy Story. You need to get people excited for your crappy warez.
8. It's antisocial. In a day in which people sit inside at an office all day, why would I want to go sit in a smelly theatre with punk kids for two hours? This is a part of the atmosphere. Making it more of an activity rather than staring forward for 2h would be an interesting feat, but you have to do so without destorying the movie... think about it.
Now I'm as much of a movie fan as anyone else- I watch movie after movie on TMN, but the quality is way downhill. It's all been done for some time now. The effects are to the point of becoming overdone. Face it- Hollywood just doesn't offer the same humour, action and advenure once seen. there will never be a reproduction of 'Office Space' or 'Way Downtown'.
PS: Oh- and that set designer that says he makes movies and how pirates steal his living.
Increased wages, is increased spending. If someone is making 30k they are penny pinching. If they make 60k, you can bet they spend "more" than twice as much a year past the minimums. So the economy is good when the salaries are up and busines profits are break even.
Errr not quite. Using your example:
- salary of 30k -> 60k
- conservative 25% tax rate brings us to: 22.5k
- marginal propensity to save of 20% brings us to 18k.
- sales tax depends on location, but lets say 10% (if you don't pay it in sales tax, you'll pay more in income tax): 16.2k
So we're injecting 16.2k into the economy (you could argue taxes are still into the economy, but I'd say it's more to support the economy) despite a 30k increase in wages.
Now you're assuming that that employee generates 30k more revenue as well, which is unrealistic when you consider taxes and the portion of saving which we all do, tying up the money supply.
When corporate spending is up, there is more money that consumers have to buy the company's goods. You are indeed right about that, but it's not as simple. What goods are being bought? Well that depends on where the consumer is in the income scale as well.
"# 9: A woman placed her laptop on top of her car while she got in. She forgot about the laptop, which slid off the back of her car, and she then reversed straight over it and reported hearing a 'crunch'."
This actually happened to me some time ago with my IBM Thinkpad 385XD (P-233). Put my laptop on top of the roof and then ran back inside to get something. The person driving the car (ES300) decided to move out of the way of another car and ended up having it drop corner first to the pavement and drive over it with the rear wheel.
Fortunately, the laptop worked perfectly, so it didn't need recovery. In fact, I gave it to a family member who is using it to this day for basic word processing! The only flaw was one of hte clips that holds the screen down cracked (not worth fixing- it has two), but the laptop works perfectly. Not a scratch.
Just proves those Thinkpads used to be spectacular for their money... Better than today's Dells that break just sitting on a desk.
I can see the excitement now. The suspense. THe music pumping through the crowd of geeks in a huge outdoor arena. The ushers directing you to your seats. The skantily clad women handing out deoderant (geeks... get it?) and sunscreen.
Giant projectors displaying 400ft screens, each with a progress bar from the testsuite going from 0% to 100%... slowly moving... getting closer [four hours later] almost there...
Please- this doesn't sound like a venue I'd really want to attend. I imagine the press would be just as bored as well. Good marketing effort though.
How many of those users only have hotmail addresses because they use MSN? The joy of the M$ passport (yes I know you can use any e-mail but for the longest time you couldn't, and in many ways it's non-obvious how to use your real e-mail address now). How many of those Hotmail accounts are abandoned? Hotmail has been around for so long that many have accounts for legacy reasons.
MSN has:
- reliability issues where it will go down for whole days or mornings at times- happening maybe every couple months for year. Google could use their high-availability knowledge to keep this lifeline alive
- integration to PSTN. If Google IM is always open, it's an easy transition to call family all around the world cheaply without the need to switch home phones and get a separate service (Skype for example).
- Fewer ads. Google would make its money on PSTN services, video conferences, features like '3-way calling' and 'conference calling' that need the network to merge several streams together or manage them. Google could make the ads smaller and less intrusive
- Fewer full-screen emoti-blips *hehe*
- file sharing, music sharing, resource sharing.
There is tons of untapped potential that M$ isn't doing. M$ is instead adding in full-screen emiti-blips (if I wanted a program to take over my whole screen when I'm working on something else, I would run a game.. It's happened before... typing in my credit card number and a MSN window takes focus... good thing I don't look at the keyboard when I type).
IM isn't just IM anymore. IM is about communication, information sharing, etc. All of Google's services are INFORMATION (search, maps, etc) or COMMUNICATION (gmail, talk) based- they're just adding more to the mix.
Jabber has server modules that connect you to most major networks. That's the real push for Jabber is that it bridges the gap. Until M$ blocks Google's IPs (heh), Google could technically put a bridge in there and make connections to Microsoft's servers for every user.
They grabbed a lot of hotmail users at the time when they launched gmail. How is this any different? Microsoft grabbed tons of MSN Messenger users making ICQ's market share take a HUGE dive at that point (almost everyone I know switched over for example).
Why would they have nothing to gain and why would it be difficult? They offer something better (faster connections, less intrusive ads [since it would be supported by premium VoIP services], easier than remembering a number, more video features, more voice features, linking with cell phones, VoIP, more games, etc) and people will move to it. Better yet, support other messenger services (a-la Trillian... they can do this with Jabber for example) and why would anyone use MSN? There isn't really a barrier to entry. One geek will drag over their friends, and repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality is, we don't want breeds of anti-social children who don't interact and sit at a computer all day- they'll have enough of their work-life to do that.
School is an opportunity to get the kids out of the house, into a LEARNING ENVIRONMENT sorounded by success (hanging people's work on the walls of elementry schools promotes doing well), with other children trying to achieve. They can not get this from home.
Maybe you could take a day off of school or something, but the trip to the building has a serious mental impact.
FYI: Schools can buy deisel for 50-60% of what consumers buy it at due to the volume of the fleet and arrangements with fuel companies.
-M
No- this is a wakeup call not in the medium, but in their own employees. The MPAA doesn't get it, nor do does the BBC it seems. There is nothing wrong with the ability to distribute video.
HOWEVER, the fact that it was leaked early says something about BBC. Somebody took the Dr Who episode and encoded it to video and distributed it. Or someone took it home and lent it to a friend who did that.
This continues to happen with Hollywood movies with 'screeners' sent to newspapers, critics, and so on. The problem is not sending out movies to these people. The problem is that they're not keeping tabs on these movies and ensuring that those who get them are under more strict orders. The problem is that they let people take a copy home and don't realize who has it and what they might do with it.
Unless video gets stolen, any pre-release is the fault of the STUDIO or BROADCASTER who leaked it.
-M
I know people who couldn't reproduce their signature if they tried 100 times, no two would look alike. With the right tools, a signature could be used to find style/patterns- fine.
:)
I'll have you know, I sign at least 50% of my Visa slips 'Daffy Duck' 'Bugs Bunny' 'root' 'whoami' and so on. The first two being the most amusing. Nobody checks it. The 15 year old operating the cash at the movie theatre throws it right into a drawer. The 17 year old at the clothing stores I shop at do the same. Nobody looks at it. At restaurants, you leave it on the table and walk away. Sometimes my friends will sign their own name on my slips when I run to go get something. So what if my credit card slip says 'Tracey'
The only time that will get checked is if I charge something back, and they ask the merchant for a copy of the Visa slip. Nobody stares at the signature- they look that there _IS_ a signature there.
Most of this is MERCHANTS not protecting themselves by checking the back of the card, but that's not my problem.
-M
Around here they're only starting to bring them in, and it's mostly in localized trial areas. Credit cards still have no authentication beyond a signature and reconcilliation when you get your statement.
DEBIT cards (pulling money straight from your bank account) has a PIN. It sounds like that's what you're tlaking about.
Since when do credit cards need PIN numbers? Credit Cards to activate make you confirm key details like birthdate, phone number, and credit limit. The PINs are in the bank cards.
So as opposed to getting a credit card number (using your example), buying something, and ridding yourself of the card, you're going to hang on to the number and make purchases over the course of time and hope nobody notices stores they don't normally shop at on the list?
In general it sounds like we're talking about really dumb criminals who know how to use photoshop.
-M
When did a criminal get this sudden hit of "oh my- what am I doing- I can't _OPEN_ this letter! I'll just scan it and see what i can find". This is someone who already intercepted mail and is about to commit fraud. Just open the envelope and call it a day.
FYI: From the Canada Post Corporation Act
Suprnova if I understand was distributed amoung many mirrors... I'd imagine these weren't kept and merged nicely.
-M
He said it was a family business... I don't think that'll go over well.
-M
Buy him a certification program for his birthday or christmas or something... A-plus may be a good one, otherwise M$ offers a series of them... sign him up TO LEARN.
It's not direct, but if you've put together some company money to send him to a 3-day course, he's bound to pick up something.
-M
Because the alternate is fixing a problem users have hated for some time in portable computing- weight and power. What's the point in reducing the power if you're going to use it up again? The whole point of this excercise is to extend battery life and decrease weight so we cary our laptops more, use them longer, and don't need to be attached by a power cord to the wall (as many do now).
I want a laptop that doesn't outweigh my briefcase or notebook.
I want a laptop that is actually wireless and free of a power cord (WLAN is neat and all, but when you have 2-3h battery life from most modern notebooks with a 15" screen and all, you need to plug it in anyway unless you're just having a 30min cup of coffee)- like wireless during an entire meeting, presentation, or day at the cottage, trip out to the middle of the lake, etc.
So we can:
a. increase battery life, reduce size, and weight by ?25%?
-or-
b. give you a second hard drive, taking up 2.5"x0.5" of space in the case, making noise and heat, using the battery life you know you have, and adding more strain on your shoulder.
I'd rather have the first, and I think most people would agree. Devices are getting smaller, faster, and lighter! A family member just got a MP3 player that's a 1/2inch cubed and has a 15h rechargable battery built in. Digital cameras are tiny nowdays. Why should my notebook be any heavier or bigger than the human interface device (keyboard and screen)!
-M
Hrm- maybe I should check out some newer controllers- RAID-1 doesn't offer nearly enough 'bang for the buck' so we end up with SCSI RAID-5 or other combination RAID sets.
Well this is exactly it though- it's going in laptops that have all come down significantly in price, battery requirements, and more. I don't see them putting high end RAID hardware in there.
Take your latest and greatest RAID controllers- I'm talking the nice Adaptec SCSI controllers... or if you want to go IDE/ATA, some Promise, Highpoint, etc controllers. Of course onboard memory is pretty important here, but it's more servers.
If I had to guess, this is going to be an 'additional instruction set' that has some highly optimized parity in there that the drivers can use to offload parity checks from the CPU.
In time solid state will take over.. At present it's the slowest, loudest part of the computer (other than a FDD).
Not quite. RAID-0 in most cases just adds the two drives together, but doesn't interleave them. You end up with 0-40GB of disc 1 and 40-80GB of disc 2. It maintains an index of the range of the drives. I assume it's possible a controller has that, but not that I've seen. Never seen them interleave.
So RAID-0 just offers additional Space.
RAID-1 offers 2x the writes (but they happen at the same time), and unless it has some really nice request queueing, odds are it reads from only one drive. Maybe controllers have become better over the years... who knows.
-M
Welcome to the trend towards automation!
Windows XP updates itself, installs updates, and reboots on its own if you don't click in a minutes notice. It also takes over the 'shut down' button and makes it 'shut down and install updates', doing it only at the times where you just need to bolt (there's a bypass option but habit takes over sometimes).
Backups should be scheduled on all corporate laptops for example. Plug them into the Internet and they check if the speed is worthy (broadband) and starts backing up if it hasn't been done in >2 days for example. Process probably takes a matter of minutes to back up just the changes in user data, filing it onto a NAS box for later backup to external storage.
Why is this so complicated? What the user doesn't know about or have to do won't hurt them and will instead help them.
-M
Second, won't this be bad for battery life having a second 4200RPM drive in your notebook? Not to mention weight?
Third, any money says it'll use the onboard memory for its RAID controller or maybe even software RAID, meaning it, like onboard video will slow your computer down.
For an argument for it, lets turn to my former partner:
This doesn't seem to make much sense. In an age of GBe and 10GBe ethernet, wi-max, storage of files across corporate networks over the Internet, why is RAID in a laptop useful?
Personally, I'd like to see more money put into developing SOLID STATE hard drives that use less power, produce less heat, and have no moving parts- such as a flash drive, only bigger
-M
It seems to happen more and more. I live in suburbia, and now with every 8-18 year old having their very own cell phone, it's quite annoying. These are the same people who talk throughout the movie and just don't care. They're kids that think they're cool, but you know are going to be sweeping your floors later on in life unless Daddy gets them into a nice cozy job. (see- now I sound miserable... but seriously). It's annoying when it happens and it seems to be happening more and more as cell phones continue to be in everyone's pocket and the people who carry them get younger and younger.
4. Generally speaking 25-30 minutes around here. Maybe 4 commercials at 2+ minutes a piece and then 5 trailers at 3+ minutes a piece... that works out to 23 minutes, so it's about right. I usually look at my watch and see 25-30 minutes range by the time the 'feature presentation' comes on. It of course depends on what's coming out and if there are movies that fit the target audience.
Even stranger though, the ONLY commercials I see (excluding the slide-show while you're getting your seats) are for either birth control or hair colouring party (anyone up for a hair streaking party?). Maybe I'm just not the target market of these commercials. Doesn't anyone else want to advertise to movie-goers? Aren't there products out there that older people or... uhh... men... might enjoy too?
I'd agree though- I enjoy the trailers for sure, but maybe that makes me a consumer-whore.
I can summarize this, and a lot of other situations with one statement. This is the generation of non-parenting. Really it is. It's the no-supervision, leave-your-kids-at-home-with-a-shoot-em-up-game, tv-will-babysit, generation. The same teens I'm referring to that don't have the basic decency to care about those around them. See- I somehow bring this all to a society reference, but it's true! There's nothing wrong with using a cell phone, but it's more the respect to those around you.
-M
So what's wrong with movies. In every one of the past 10 movies I've gone to:
1. It seems punk kids get up in the middle of the movie, disappear for about 20 minutes, and then come back with their friends. They then all go out again and do the same with more friends. Sometimes they don't even come back? Meanwhile this is distracting as anything. Stay for the whole thing or leave.
2. At least 10-20 people pull out their cell phones and either a. fiddle with them with the backlight on, or b. talk to whoever called them, often yelling at their (assumed) parents that they're in a movie and can't be picked up. Go outside!
3. There are at least 5-10 people who do a combination of a. talk throughout the whole movie, b. get up and shake their fist in an ?Arsino? Hall type fashion at something funny being said during the movie.
4. Generally 30 minutes from the start of the commercials to the 'Feature Presentation'.
5. Movies are predictable, uninteresting, and generally awful. Maybe 5% of them are actually worth seeing.
6. Movies are now $10CDN at the 'big' theatres (as low as $4 at the little ones), but they were once 13.95CDN. Not to mention popcorn and a drink will run you another 10-12$ CDN.
7. Lack of promotion- the last movie I saw with good promotion was MONTHS of Dukes of Hazzard hype and links to music television networks. You don't have the same hype you once saw for movies like The Matrix, or even movies like Toy Story. You need to get people excited for your crappy warez.
8. It's antisocial. In a day in which people sit inside at an office all day, why would I want to go sit in a smelly theatre with punk kids for two hours? This is a part of the atmosphere. Making it more of an activity rather than staring forward for 2h would be an interesting feat, but you have to do so without destorying the movie... think about it.
Now I'm as much of a movie fan as anyone else- I watch movie after movie on TMN, but the quality is way downhill. It's all been done for some time now. The effects are to the point of becoming overdone. Face it- Hollywood just doesn't offer the same humour, action and advenure once seen. there will never be a reproduction of 'Office Space' or 'Way Downtown'.
PS: Oh- and that set designer that says he makes movies and how pirates steal his living.
-M
Errr not quite. Using your example:
- salary of 30k -> 60k
- conservative 25% tax rate brings us to: 22.5k
- marginal propensity to save of 20% brings us to 18k.
- sales tax depends on location, but lets say 10% (if you don't pay it in sales tax, you'll pay more in income tax): 16.2k
So we're injecting 16.2k into the economy (you could argue taxes are still into the economy, but I'd say it's more to support the economy) despite a 30k increase in wages.
Now you're assuming that that employee generates 30k more revenue as well, which is unrealistic when you consider taxes and the portion of saving which we all do, tying up the money supply.
When corporate spending is up, there is more money that consumers have to buy the company's goods. You are indeed right about that, but it's not as simple. What goods are being bought? Well that depends on where the consumer is in the income scale as well.
-M
The most secure computers are not plugged in... Steal the power cord...
-M
Increased salaries is bad for business and the number of employ hired, but you can't quote a 25-50% hike in salaries as a bad thing... c'mon!
-M
This actually happened to me some time ago with my IBM Thinkpad 385XD (P-233). Put my laptop on top of the roof and then ran back inside to get something. The person driving the car (ES300) decided to move out of the way of another car and ended up having it drop corner first to the pavement and drive over it with the rear wheel.
Fortunately, the laptop worked perfectly, so it didn't need recovery. In fact, I gave it to a family member who is using it to this day for basic word processing! The only flaw was one of hte clips that holds the screen down cracked (not worth fixing- it has two), but the laptop works perfectly. Not a scratch.
Just proves those Thinkpads used to be spectacular for their money... Better than today's Dells that break just sitting on a desk.
-M
I can see the excitement now. The suspense. THe music pumping through the crowd of geeks in a huge outdoor arena. The ushers directing you to your seats. The skantily clad women handing out deoderant (geeks... get it?) and sunscreen.
Giant projectors displaying 400ft screens, each with a progress bar from the testsuite going from 0% to 100%... slowly moving... getting closer [four hours later] almost there...
Please- this doesn't sound like a venue I'd really want to attend. I imagine the press would be just as bored as well. Good marketing effort though.
-M
How many of those users only have hotmail addresses because they use MSN? The joy of the M$ passport (yes I know you can use any e-mail but for the longest time you couldn't, and in many ways it's non-obvious how to use your real e-mail address now). How many of those Hotmail accounts are abandoned? Hotmail has been around for so long that many have accounts for legacy reasons.
-M
MSN has:
- reliability issues where it will go down for whole days or mornings at times- happening maybe every couple months for year. Google could use their high-availability knowledge to keep this lifeline alive
- integration to PSTN. If Google IM is always open, it's an easy transition to call family all around the world cheaply without the need to switch home phones and get a separate service (Skype for example).
- Fewer ads. Google would make its money on PSTN services, video conferences, features like '3-way calling' and 'conference calling' that need the network to merge several streams together or manage them. Google could make the ads smaller and less intrusive
- Fewer full-screen emoti-blips *hehe*
- file sharing, music sharing, resource sharing.
There is tons of untapped potential that M$ isn't doing. M$ is instead adding in full-screen emiti-blips (if I wanted a program to take over my whole screen when I'm working on something else, I would run a game.. It's happened before... typing in my credit card number and a MSN window takes focus... good thing I don't look at the keyboard when I type).
IM isn't just IM anymore. IM is about communication, information sharing, etc. All of Google's services are INFORMATION (search, maps, etc) or COMMUNICATION (gmail, talk) based- they're just adding more to the mix.
-M
Jabber has server modules that connect you to most major networks. That's the real push for Jabber is that it bridges the gap. Until M$ blocks Google's IPs (heh), Google could technically put a bridge in there and make connections to Microsoft's servers for every user.
-M
They grabbed a lot of hotmail users at the time when they launched gmail. How is this any different? Microsoft grabbed tons of MSN Messenger users making ICQ's market share take a HUGE dive at that point (almost everyone I know switched over for example).
Why would they have nothing to gain and why would it be difficult? They offer something better (faster connections, less intrusive ads [since it would be supported by premium VoIP services], easier than remembering a number, more video features, more voice features, linking with cell phones, VoIP, more games, etc) and people will move to it. Better yet, support other messenger services (a-la Trillian... they can do this with Jabber for example) and why would anyone use MSN? There isn't really a barrier to entry. One geek will drag over their friends, and repeat.
-M