There is no way that the average user is ready for the command line. I work for a major hardware manufacturer (the one with the flame issues) and deal with ordinary users all day long. Their capacity for ignorance is astounding and even with a GUI they manage to reach new levels of idiocy every day, let alone with a command prompt. Most confuse the monitor with the tower. Most have never seen their Add/Remove Programs list. Most have no idea who makes their antivirus software. Most cannot tell me if they have a router or a modem for their Internet service or who makes it (find the black box with the flashing lights). Many cannot even tell me what version of Windows they are running.
There is no way these kinds of people could even move around the file system using the CLI, let alone manipulate files effectively to actually use the computer.
That's not necessarily true. Several news stations have admitted 'amending' their exit poll results after the fact so as to better match the final tallies they were receiving from polling stations. I watched CNN's results from start to finish and there was a point at 12:30am EST that the numbers abruptly flipped, taking what looked to be a Kerry win to a Bush win. Either exit pollsters were terrible at their jobs this past election (on a world scale, they tend to be pretty accurate) or something fishy went on.
I don't need RFK to tell me the election was rigged. UCLA did a study of the results, comparing all the counties where a discrepancy between the actual results and exit polls occurred and almost every last one across the nation swung in favour of Bush and swung that way very, very late on election day. It was such a late swing that some media outlets reported Kerry as the winner based on the exit polls and had to retract the next day. Statistically speaking, the study determined that there was 1 chance in over 100 000 that this happened due to random occurrence. Guess which machines were in use in almost all the counties showing discrepancies - Diebold. You may not want to admit it, but something stinks to high heaven and seeing as Bush just got his wish and removed the Habeus Corpus rights that you've had since 1215 AD, I have no illusions as to how far his administration will go to get what they want.
The issue is actually pretty complicated. Up here in Canada, the CRTC has regulated providers (satellite and cable both) into producing 'bundles' for their customers to enhance value. This regulation won't end until 2012 unless there is a fundamental change in the CRTC, so there will be a core set of channels that will be bundled for a long, long time yet. Any new channels can be sold a la carte, of course, and currently are with most providers. My local provider, for example, allows me to order single channels from their digital range (50-60 channels so far), but have left the bundled channels in analog for the time being (they have to be bundled, so why move them yet and piss of analog customers).
Muddying up the issue is that broadcasters with more than one channel in the offing tend to naturally bundle their channels together. To get popular channels, providers generally are forced to buy a bunch of poor sellers they don't much want. Until that practice ends, I can't see how any provider could afford to go a la carte completely.
I hope you don't live in Alberta. In the misnamed "Fair Trade Act" they reversed a lot of the common-sense law that had been on the books for telecommunications contracts. As per that act, they no longer:
Need a signature to make an enforceable contract
Need to outline terms, conditions and break penalties in advance
Have any restrictions on the level of the penalties
Need to have a specific "I agree" and can have a rudimentary "yes" begin the contract.
Have to have the service in the home for the contract to begin.
So, in the case of Telus, I've run across people moving into new homes that are paying for service that isn't in their home yet and won't be for some months. In the intervening period, they get the bill, call Telus to find out what the issue is, and are informed they are in a contract... merely because they called to get some rates prior to moving in. That's the price Albertans pay for being led by a "business friendly" government.
The clerk in my grocery store remembered my name, twice, and flirted with me every time I went in. I took the plunge and asked her out and it turned into quite the summer romance while she was in town. Try that with some self-checkout and you'll be arrested within the minute.
Here in Canada, they have gone a third way: limited time monopoly, but when that ends the lines open up to third party resellers who buy the telco or cableco's service wholesale and resell it to customers as their own. It means that you have a half dozen iterations of 'cable internet', all with vaguely similar pricing and with identical AUP policies, seeing as the Internet access is ultimately all coming from one source, but with at least a portion of your monthly fee going to someone other than the incumbent. In my location, a reseller sells 5 Mb/s High Speed @ 29.95 CAD (no add ons) while the incumbent sells identical service @ 38.95 CAD (plus free service calls and free security software), for example.
Re:This is so Not good for Apple and OSX...
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
I think this will be great. How many customers are going to load Windows, connect to the Internet, and watch their beloved Mac turn into a virus infestation in the first 15 minutes? A good portion of these unfortunates are going to rebuild their machines with OSX only because they will hold Windows responsible for the demise of the machine. Anyone with some skills can secure Windows pretty well, but Mac users are all about it 'just working' and when it doesn't 'just work' that first day, they aren't going to be happy.
"This is a primary factor behind the outsourcing that people wring their hands over."
You are 100% correct. Many US companies, eager to leave behind those onerous regulations and fines, relocated to the Maquiladoras just across the Mexican border to where regulations were considerably laxer if they existed at all. Now the people living there have some of the highest cancer rates in the world, see significantly more stillborn babies and birth defects, etc. I've seen video of companies dumping effluent right into the ditches.
These regulations exist because every time polluters get the choice between profit or pollution, they choose profit every single time, the move to the Maquiladoras being just the most recent example. This is the side of the 'free market' that free market advocates don't want anyone to see.
I know I am. From the original Everquest to WoW to NWN online, I've tried playing in groups and I'm constantly irritated by the juvenile actions of the people I play with. I either play solo, or don't play at all any more.
Statistically speaking, if you remove deaths due to work accidents, vehicle accidents and war from the death statistics, then men live with a half a year of women. Those three factors combined pretty much account for the seven year difference.
I hope you understand the difference between these, but apparently you don't. What homosexuals do is not illegal and they consent to enter into the relationship. Hate crimes and pedophilia are illegal and have victims who do not consent to be targeted for the behaviour.
It would have to be an ad hoc network. Most of the cable companies and telcos have been trying to buy up broadcast spectrum (3.5 GHz, 5.8 GHz) so that some bright, young mind doesn't pop up with a WiMax network and cut them out of the loop. Another alternative could be to buy up fibre lying dormant throughout your city and to tie that off with a tier 1 provider that runs the 'net into the city. A non-profit, funded by the citizens and the city, could easily build a fibre infrastructure a neighbourhood at a time and bring fibre right to the door. It would be slow, but cutting the gatekeepers out of the loop sounds like it might be the only way to keep them in their place.
Pricing cartels have been illegal for a long time, at least since the railroad barons tried to fix freight rates on their lines ever so long ago when the west was opening up. We don't have to just sit and watch the two competing parties fight it out, though. We are a stakeholder in Internet neutrality and can exert pressure through the political process. Write your Congressmen/Senators and make your voice heard.
Company A - People in the office downloading music, chat programs, games, etc. to the HDDs of their workstations and causing general havoc. All PCs running Win98 on archaic machines even though the company was a 'tech company' and the PCs were over five years out of date. No patches applied automatically - applied when PC is 'sick'. Several multiple day issues with virii requiring re-imaging of desktops to fix.
Company B - XP Pro locked down so tightly that we can do browsing, email and that's it. No virii in 2 years that I've seen or known about. Patches done to all workstations in a two week window.
The staff in company B are more productive, less distracted and have significantly more uptime, so I think the heightened security is a good thing.
1. Neighbourhood ISP - tier 1 providers will sell bandwidth to anyone, so put fibre into your home at the lowest possible plan a local tier 1 provider will offer. Set up a WiFi antenna in the unregulated 2.4 GHz band and boost it to the maximum allowable wattage to increase your range. Buy customer CPE units from a company like Radionet that will connect a home connection to the WiFi network and then sell them to individual homes in the neighbourhood. Advertise it as a neighbourhood ISP that has shared bandwidth and charge slightly more than an exact share of what it costs you to buy the bandwidth (more customers, lower costs for everyone). Make sure your first few customers are really happy so that word of mouth spreads around the neighbourhood and just add bandwidth as the customers come in.
2. Facilitator - consult on how to set up 1. above, creating an "ISP in a box" with a local tier 1 provider, equipment provider, etc. to make it extremely easy for anyone to create their own local ISP. Have Open Source software running webmail, preconfigured servers, etc.
You mean the mom and pop who buy bandwidth from the telco and resell it? Sure... that will work. They have to get service to your house, somehow, and that somehow is the telephone or cable network already in the ground.
Here's the rub. In any given area you have one cable company and one telco. There are dozens of resellers, LD providers, etc., but all of them pay the licence fee to use the lines for either the cable company or the telco. It really does boil down to those two entities. As such, it doesn't matter who you go to in a given area, they are all going to be governed by the 'rules of the game' as laid down by those two providers, and if both providers are talking up service fees that you pay to avoid crippled service, then people are effectively screwed.
So, what to do? Here in Canada, the only viable competetion to the incumbents is through some version of wireless. Of course, the government auctioned off the first of the WiMax frequencies last year and the bulk of the licences were bought up by - you guessed it - the telcos and the cable companies. Running it as an auction instead of first come, first served, meant that only the deepest pockets got the licences. Don't you just love when the government is in bed with big business?
Food production has gone up pretty much every year since people started taking records, but what I think the previous poster is noting is that those increases have started getting smaller each year. This is due to three factors:
Food production has increased linearly so far. Population increases logarithmically - you do the math.
There is only so much arable land to be tilled and we are approaching that limit on a planetary scale. WHO estimates that we have ploughed under about 97% of what can actually produce food on a global scale.
Even with modern farming techniques, soil is slowly but surely getting exhausted. The massive increases in production/acre that were seen in the 70's are now much smaller and the linear food production is starting to slowly level off.
Population has actually gone DOWN by a dangerous extent.
That isn't true. The US population has increased from 250 million to 330 million in just the past twenty years since I started paying attention. What is true is that the birth rate in the US no longer outstrips the death rate, so if there was zero immigration, the US population would level off and slowly decline as people died. All Westernized nations are seeing this difference between birth rate and death rate, but all are also bringing in immigrants to offset the lack of growth in the existing population. Most western nations believe in a general 'growth is good' motif, even if that growth is counterproductive, so immigration is used to stem the decline for now.
If you take as roughly correct the estimates of some environmental scientists, then the North American landmass should be able to support 200 million people in a sustainable fashion. Add the populations of Canada, Mexico and the US together, though, and you are at at least twice that figure. My question is this: why are all three nations firmly fixed on increasing their population, then? Every increase is another person that cannot be sustainably supported and further hastens the decline in living conditions for everyone in North America. All three should be allowing their populations to decline through that difference in birth and death rates to the point of sustainability.
Apple's advertising clearly paints.Mac as the 'ad-free' alternative, so you can definitely see that they are trying to play off of the other portals that require ads to subsidize the costs.
As for the cost... the cost/benefit decision is made by the individual consumer and depends upon which of the.Mac services the consumer uses. I use the sync feature to back up my links and settings, use the iDisk as a sort of ever changing 'application library' to use when fixing other people's Macs and use the IMAP email as my personal email. I've used virtually all the free software that you can download with your.Mac subscription (Backup, free games, etc.), too. With the new web-based features, I might actually start a blog or a podcast, so if you factor in what *I* use.Mac for, it is a bargain.
It is doubly a bargain when you factor in that I utterly hate advertising. Everywhere I turn, I've got an ad in my face, right down to taking a piss in public bathrooms. I am so utterly sick of ads that coming home to my Mac with its clean, un-cluttered interface where I know that I won't be bombarded with virtual fingers trying to nab my wallet that I rest easy knowing my money is well spent.
Breast implants help mastectomy patients recover a sense of femininity... and turn porn stars into fugly freaks of nature. The Internet helps unite the world in a way never before seen... and it allows pedophiles a great way to keep in touch with one another. Planes help destroy boundaries between countries... and help smuggle drugs into those countries.
Every technology gets turned around by the public into something that researchers never really envision in advance, so the question is: what will this be turned into? We are one fad and a whackload of rich people away from having designer neon dogs and cats for people like Paris Hilton. I'd be happy to take the benefits without any of the drawbacks, but so far in human history, that hasn't happened. *Every* technology gets misused eventually.
The consumer portables and the mac Mini will likely be single core chips, IMO. That is what I would do if I was trying to differentiate consumer from pro material with the current Intel chip lineup.
Battles, battles, battles. This industry is so combative that they are introducing a new technology before even a minority of the population has adopted the *old* technology. The gap between what the average citizen has in their home and what is considered 'cutting edge' is getting wider and wider and wider and eventually no one will be able to keep up.
Ever seen the back of a receiver? Take a long look at those analog RCA jacks because that was the last time the industry ever got everyone on the same page at the same time. When was that? 1970 something. Since then, Sony and Toshiba fought it out over Toslink and SPDIF and the CD format. Dolby and DTS fought it over the new surround sound... both of which were obsolete a few years later with 6.1 and 7.1 coming fast and furious. Component barely started to become a standard before it was supplanted by DVI, which lasted on a year or so before HDMI came along to replace it. Every day I deal with pissed off and frustrated consumers who can't get their DVDs, cable terminals, satellite receivers and TVs all working together because of incompatible technologies.
My computer is my entertainment center for a reason.
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There is no way that the average user is ready for the command line. I work for a major hardware manufacturer (the one with the flame issues) and deal with ordinary users all day long. Their capacity for ignorance is astounding and even with a GUI they manage to reach new levels of idiocy every day, let alone with a command prompt. Most confuse the monitor with the tower. Most have never seen their Add/Remove Programs list. Most have no idea who makes their antivirus software. Most cannot tell me if they have a router or a modem for their Internet service or who makes it (find the black box with the flashing lights). Many cannot even tell me what version of Windows they are running.
There is no way these kinds of people could even move around the file system using the CLI, let alone manipulate files effectively to actually use the computer.
That's not necessarily true. Several news stations have admitted 'amending' their exit poll results after the fact so as to better match the final tallies they were receiving from polling stations. I watched CNN's results from start to finish and there was a point at 12:30am EST that the numbers abruptly flipped, taking what looked to be a Kerry win to a Bush win. Either exit pollsters were terrible at their jobs this past election (on a world scale, they tend to be pretty accurate) or something fishy went on.
I don't need RFK to tell me the election was rigged. UCLA did a study of the results, comparing all the counties where a discrepancy between the actual results and exit polls occurred and almost every last one across the nation swung in favour of Bush and swung that way very, very late on election day. It was such a late swing that some media outlets reported Kerry as the winner based on the exit polls and had to retract the next day. Statistically speaking, the study determined that there was 1 chance in over 100 000 that this happened due to random occurrence. Guess which machines were in use in almost all the counties showing discrepancies - Diebold. You may not want to admit it, but something stinks to high heaven and seeing as Bush just got his wish and removed the Habeus Corpus rights that you've had since 1215 AD, I have no illusions as to how far his administration will go to get what they want.
The issue is actually pretty complicated. Up here in Canada, the CRTC has regulated providers (satellite and cable both) into producing 'bundles' for their customers to enhance value. This regulation won't end until 2012 unless there is a fundamental change in the CRTC, so there will be a core set of channels that will be bundled for a long, long time yet. Any new channels can be sold a la carte, of course, and currently are with most providers. My local provider, for example, allows me to order single channels from their digital range (50-60 channels so far), but have left the bundled channels in analog for the time being (they have to be bundled, so why move them yet and piss of analog customers).
Muddying up the issue is that broadcasters with more than one channel in the offing tend to naturally bundle their channels together. To get popular channels, providers generally are forced to buy a bunch of poor sellers they don't much want. Until that practice ends, I can't see how any provider could afford to go a la carte completely.
- Need a signature to make an enforceable contract
- Need to outline terms, conditions and break penalties in advance
- Have any restrictions on the level of the penalties
- Need to have a specific "I agree" and can have a rudimentary "yes" begin the contract.
- Have to have the service in the home for the contract to begin.
So, in the case of Telus, I've run across people moving into new homes that are paying for service that isn't in their home yet and won't be for some months. In the intervening period, they get the bill, call Telus to find out what the issue is, and are informed they are in a contractThe clerk in my grocery store remembered my name, twice, and flirted with me every time I went in. I took the plunge and asked her out and it turned into quite the summer romance while she was in town. Try that with some self-checkout and you'll be arrested within the minute.
Here in Canada, they have gone a third way: limited time monopoly, but when that ends the lines open up to third party resellers who buy the telco or cableco's service wholesale and resell it to customers as their own. It means that you have a half dozen iterations of 'cable internet', all with vaguely similar pricing and with identical AUP policies, seeing as the Internet access is ultimately all coming from one source, but with at least a portion of your monthly fee going to someone other than the incumbent. In my location, a reseller sells 5 Mb/s High Speed @ 29.95 CAD (no add ons) while the incumbent sells identical service @ 38.95 CAD (plus free service calls and free security software), for example.
I think this will be great. How many customers are going to load Windows, connect to the Internet, and watch their beloved Mac turn into a virus infestation in the first 15 minutes? A good portion of these unfortunates are going to rebuild their machines with OSX only because they will hold Windows responsible for the demise of the machine. Anyone with some skills can secure Windows pretty well, but Mac users are all about it 'just working' and when it doesn't 'just work' that first day, they aren't going to be happy.
You are 100% correct. Many US companies, eager to leave behind those onerous regulations and fines, relocated to the Maquiladoras just across the Mexican border to where regulations were considerably laxer if they existed at all. Now the people living there have some of the highest cancer rates in the world, see significantly more stillborn babies and birth defects, etc. I've seen video of companies dumping effluent right into the ditches.
These regulations exist because every time polluters get the choice between profit or pollution, they choose profit every single time, the move to the Maquiladoras being just the most recent example. This is the side of the 'free market' that free market advocates don't want anyone to see.
but it also shows what computer-savvy males think of 'what women are all about'. Yikes.
I know I am. From the original Everquest to WoW to NWN online, I've tried playing in groups and I'm constantly irritated by the juvenile actions of the people I play with. I either play solo, or don't play at all any more.
Statistically speaking, if you remove deaths due to work accidents, vehicle accidents and war from the death statistics, then men live with a half a year of women. Those three factors combined pretty much account for the seven year difference.
I hope you understand the difference between these, but apparently you don't. What homosexuals do is not illegal and they consent to enter into the relationship. Hate crimes and pedophilia are illegal and have victims who do not consent to be targeted for the behaviour.
It would have to be an ad hoc network. Most of the cable companies and telcos have been trying to buy up broadcast spectrum (3.5 GHz, 5.8 GHz) so that some bright, young mind doesn't pop up with a WiMax network and cut them out of the loop. Another alternative could be to buy up fibre lying dormant throughout your city and to tie that off with a tier 1 provider that runs the 'net into the city. A non-profit, funded by the citizens and the city, could easily build a fibre infrastructure a neighbourhood at a time and bring fibre right to the door. It would be slow, but cutting the gatekeepers out of the loop sounds like it might be the only way to keep them in their place.
Pricing cartels have been illegal for a long time, at least since the railroad barons tried to fix freight rates on their lines ever so long ago when the west was opening up. We don't have to just sit and watch the two competing parties fight it out, though. We are a stakeholder in Internet neutrality and can exert pressure through the political process. Write your Congressmen/Senators and make your voice heard.
Company B - XP Pro locked down so tightly that we can do browsing, email and that's it. No virii in 2 years that I've seen or known about. Patches done to all workstations in a two week window.
The staff in company B are more productive, less distracted and have significantly more uptime, so I think the heightened security is a good thing.
1. Neighbourhood ISP - tier 1 providers will sell bandwidth to anyone, so put fibre into your home at the lowest possible plan a local tier 1 provider will offer. Set up a WiFi antenna in the unregulated 2.4 GHz band and boost it to the maximum allowable wattage to increase your range. Buy customer CPE units from a company like Radionet that will connect a home connection to the WiFi network and then sell them to individual homes in the neighbourhood. Advertise it as a neighbourhood ISP that has shared bandwidth and charge slightly more than an exact share of what it costs you to buy the bandwidth (more customers, lower costs for everyone). Make sure your first few customers are really happy so that word of mouth spreads around the neighbourhood and just add bandwidth as the customers come in. 2. Facilitator - consult on how to set up 1. above, creating an "ISP in a box" with a local tier 1 provider, equipment provider, etc. to make it extremely easy for anyone to create their own local ISP. Have Open Source software running webmail, preconfigured servers, etc.
You mean the mom and pop who buy bandwidth from the telco and resell it? Sure ... that will work. They have to get service to your house, somehow, and that somehow is the telephone or cable network already in the ground.
So, what to do? Here in Canada, the only viable competetion to the incumbents is through some version of wireless. Of course, the government auctioned off the first of the WiMax frequencies last year and the bulk of the licences were bought up by - you guessed it - the telcos and the cable companies. Running it as an auction instead of first come, first served, meant that only the deepest pockets got the licences. Don't you just love when the government is in bed with big business?
If you take as roughly correct the estimates of some environmental scientists, then the North American landmass should be able to support 200 million people in a sustainable fashion. Add the populations of Canada, Mexico and the US together, though, and you are at at least twice that figure. My question is this: why are all three nations firmly fixed on increasing their population, then? Every increase is another person that cannot be sustainably supported and further hastens the decline in living conditions for everyone in North America. All three should be allowing their populations to decline through that difference in birth and death rates to the point of sustainability.
As for the cost ... the cost/benefit decision is made by the individual consumer and depends upon which of the .Mac services the consumer uses. I use the sync feature to back up my links and settings, use the iDisk as a sort of ever changing 'application library' to use when fixing other people's Macs and use the IMAP email as my personal email. I've used virtually all the free software that you can download with your .Mac subscription (Backup, free games, etc.), too. With the new web-based features, I might actually start a blog or a podcast, so if you factor in what *I* use .Mac for, it is a bargain.
It is doubly a bargain when you factor in that I utterly hate advertising. Everywhere I turn, I've got an ad in my face, right down to taking a piss in public bathrooms. I am so utterly sick of ads that coming home to my Mac with its clean, un-cluttered interface where I know that I won't be bombarded with virtual fingers trying to nab my wallet that I rest easy knowing my money is well spent.
Every technology gets turned around by the public into something that researchers never really envision in advance, so the question is: what will this be turned into? We are one fad and a whackload of rich people away from having designer neon dogs and cats for people like Paris Hilton. I'd be happy to take the benefits without any of the drawbacks, but so far in human history, that hasn't happened. *Every* technology gets misused eventually.
The consumer portables and the mac Mini will likely be single core chips, IMO. That is what I would do if I was trying to differentiate consumer from pro material with the current Intel chip lineup.
Ever seen the back of a receiver? Take a long look at those analog RCA jacks because that was the last time the industry ever got everyone on the same page at the same time. When was that? 1970 something. Since then, Sony and Toshiba fought it out over Toslink and SPDIF and the CD format. Dolby and DTS fought it over the new surround sound ... both of which were obsolete a few years later with 6.1 and 7.1 coming fast and furious. Component barely started to become a standard before it was supplanted by DVI, which lasted on a year or so before HDMI came along to replace it. Every day I deal with pissed off and frustrated consumers who can't get their DVDs, cable terminals, satellite receivers and TVs all working together because of incompatible technologies.
My computer is my entertainment center for a reason.