Fester Ballmer's idiotic pronouncements are starting to get even more idiotic than Scott McNealy's. Any idiot can figure out that the root cause of software piracy in developing nations is the extreme poverty. Does he really think that those poor workers making a few bucks a day to press and pack Windows XP discs or Xboxes are going to choose a legit copy of Windows over having some vegetables to mix in with the rice they eat three times a day?
Maybe if all of the big western companies that buy off politicians in developing nations to keep the work force oppressed and labor prices low would start paying a decent wage and providing some western-style health care benefits to workers in developing nations those people could afford legit software. But as long as they have a hard time affording food, software is going to get pirated left and right.
I can believe this. One of the reasons I left IT is that I got sick of the sysadmin being relegated to some shitty windowless office regardless of where I worked. There's nothing to make a man grumpy or groggy like having to go without fresh air or sunlight all damned day, especially when you're working all day and into the night during crunch times. The only exception was a dotcom I worked at that left the flourescents off, bought everyone halogen lights, and used short cubes so that what light did come in was spread around. Good luck getting an employer to do that now.
I remember reading that MSFT built the Redmond HQ offices in an X shape to create more window offices. The only other exception I can think of was Sallie Mae's Virginia HQ where they put executive offices and conference rooms in the middle of each floor and gave all of the window area to the cube dwellers, but they shipped IT to Indiana to save money.
Now I'm going into art & design. I have a home office with four big Windows, and a home art studio with six windows, four of which run floor-to-cieling. It's pretty fucking sweet.
"...which, according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!"
So if I combine two overclocked nVidia boards with an overclocked Athlon and two fast SATA drives, the system will pay for itself over the winter as I can just stick it on the first floor of the house and let the heat travel upward. Bloody nifty!
Most of the informercials run during times on channels with very specific demographics, when the channels regular viewers are not watching. G4TV, for example, runs them very early in the morning. Channels with a daytime audience (The ones targeting housewives) often start doing informercials in the early evening, and channels with a big focus on prime-time run them late at night, in the morning, and during the day.
I have to agree. If Apple is going to sell a single-CPU G5 box for $1499 with no monitor, how about selling it with the fastest G5 available instead of the slowest? Of course, then they wouldn't be able to sell many dual systems since even a lot of professionals really don't need the tiny speed boost one gets from using a dual CPU machine if a fast single CPU machine is available.
I see no use for a PDA, because there always seem to be better ways to get the same functionality:
Calendaring - People like me who really need the calendaring feature are often so disorganized that they forget to charge the PDA, or forget to take it out of the charger. In either case, a little paper one is a better option.
Contact information - I keep it all in my phone. Due to shitty US cellular companies locking out any phone feature that they don't charge by the minute for, I am unable to sync my phone with, well, anything, and since I use the phone to contact people, it wins over a PDA.
Games - With the exception of Bewjewled, PDA games are shit, mostly because games are hard to play with a stylus. Even cellular phone games are better.
Productivity apps - If I want to do general purpose computing on the go, I'll just take my laptop along.
The only PDA I have ever seen that really does it all well (Excluding games) is the Blackberry. Unfortunately I was burned out on the whole PDA concept by the time Blackberries hit reasonable price points. I traded my last PDA for a nice digicam on via Craigslist, and everything is better now.
And what makes you think that it hasn't? If you really think about it, the people with the money, means, and need for sentient computers are the same people who wouldn't ever breathe a work about it to anyone.
I buy PPC systems for one reason only: that's what OS X runs on. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay three times for a PPC CPU what an x86 CPU of equivalent speed costs and then run an OS that runs on x86 on it.
Of course, if someone started selling PPC CPUs for less than x86, AND PPC mainboards were not selling for more than comparable x86 mainboards, AND if the commercial software I use were available (We all know that any useful OSS gets ported to everything anyway...), then I might consider it.
Maybe so, but Red Hat's nasty little distros fell into disfavor with me back in the 5.2 era. When I stated that I had abandoned Linux, I wasn't kidding-it just isn't worth the effort compared to what I get out of running OS X. If I were actively coding free software and actually needed access to the entire OS source or something like that I might care, but as it is now, Linux has nothing to offer me that I want.
That's the thing with Linux -- it's a hobbyists OS for those of us who aren't working on the server side of things. And having walked away from IT, I don't have to mess with the bloody servers anymore, and I haven't the time for hobbies like Linux.
That's exactly why I gave up on Linux. Default installs are crammed so full of cruft that many programs are made dependent on the cruft, meaning that to get a good setup I was compiling everything myself rather than using the Gnome/KDE dependent packages that were put together for everything with a GUI. At that point it made more sense to jump ship to OS X so I can at least have a really, really pretty OS to compile on.
Rather than rely on technology, it's much easier to just rely on the old fashioned method: get a nanny. If you can't afford a nanny, get an au-pair. As an added bonus, au-pairs are notorious for sleeping with the fathers of the kids they're taking care of.
Actually it wasn't, and I have a seven-year-old Sun machine right next to me to prove it.
Apple can't even claim to be the first company that was selling low-cost 64 bit desktops as many people claim, because Sun started selling sub-$1000 64-bit desktops way back in 2001!
I love Apple, but when it comes to marketing, the company is 60% bullshit, 40% hype, and utterly incapable of telling the truth: that they rarely do anything original, that their systems are far slower than x86 machines, and that their products really serve little purpose for people outside the music and visual arts fields.
Maybe you don't, but the thousands if not millions of Americans who have invested in software, book, music, movie, and television companies do.
You remind me of a lot of my neighbors who get pissed off at the police every time one of their family members is dealing drugs -- they're happy to live in and take advantage of civilization, but they get pissed off when their criminal accquaintances get busted for harming other members of society.
Given that most kids probably aren't going to be able to figure out the concept of verifying who they're talking to online, what's the point of this thing? To make it easier for Michael Jackson to be sure that he's not chatting it up with DA's office?
Does anyone else remember the period in 2002-2003 when Sanjay Kumar's face was on the cover of just about every IT and business magazine out there for being some sort of great saint showing the world how IT can be saved? And just look at where he is now. The world's techies still knew that CA was a crap company selling crap products, but to anyone following the mainstream media, CA was a godsend to customers, potential customers, and shareholders.
This is more proof that the tech industry is still generally full of shit (Not that plenty of others aren't) and that not only can they not be trusted, but the media cannot be trusted to do some decent research and present a clear picture of what these companies are really up to.
Actually, I totally agree with Lucas on this one, because I bought my bootleg Star Wars: Special Edition Episodes IV-VI DVDs on ebay for $35 before Lucas ever announced that he would be selling copies. I have no plans to buy Lucas's updated versions, and I just wish I could find a bootlegger selling laserdisc-rips of the original theatrical releases.
It seems funny to me that Sony keeps trying to push online gaming for the PS2 and cannot understand why the push keeps failing. Has it occured to anyone at Sony that the majority of PS2 owners bought a PS2 BEFORE the network adapter was being given away, and are still not willing to pay $50 for a $5 piece of hardware? The only way to get online gaming to succeed on the PS2 is for Sony to stop attempting to gouge millions existing PS2 owners for the network adapter and start selling it at a reasonable price, something in the neighborhood of $10.
I honestly doubt that this was the motivation behind A9. I say this because there are a ton of assholes who make money as amazon affiliates endlessly spamming google to make their worthless pages appear as legitmate search results. If pointing to affiliates is all Amazon is trying to do, it would be far less expensive to just publish a free e-book on google spamming and update it on a regular basis.
I agree wholeheartedly. Movies like this abandon plots and character development in favor of a big ol' light show. For those of us who have seen plenty of this stuff over the years, watching such movies is like sitting through a ninety-minute demo reel that forgoes a shitty techno soundtrack for shitty dialogue.
Summary- wipe everything down with alcohol, trash anything painted along with the PSUs.
I once let a friend borrow a system for several months-what I did not know what this his roomates were smokers and slobs, and the computer came back covered in a layer of brownish goo. I carefully cleaned off everything that I could with alcohol on q-tips and toothbrushes, washed the case with lysol, and let it all dry.
Most of the parts ended up well-cleaned and generally stink free. Unfortunately, the power supply was uncleanable without a total dissasembly that would have rendered it unusable, and the while the case appeared clean, once it warmed up it stank just as bad as before; as far as I can tell it was just some weird feature of the paint that kept me from getting the stink out.
Since I couldn't fit an Antec server case in the dishwasher, I wrote it off as a loss, tossed it out, put the parts in a new case, and donated it to my college-student sister.
I have to admit, with the translucency and the nice shadows, that's the best looking desktop I've ever seen. And I'm writing this on OS X. Kudos to X.org, I'll have to give it a whirl....
Endorfun was a psychedelic puzzle game designed to stimulate endorphin production in humans. I don't know if it actually worked, but at least they tried.
Coming soon by helicopter...
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Fester Ballmer's idiotic pronouncements are starting to get even more idiotic than Scott McNealy's. Any idiot can figure out that the root cause of software piracy in developing nations is the extreme poverty. Does he really think that those poor workers making a few bucks a day to press and pack Windows XP discs or Xboxes are going to choose a legit copy of Windows over having some vegetables to mix in with the rice they eat three times a day?
Maybe if all of the big western companies that buy off politicians in developing nations to keep the work force oppressed and labor prices low would start paying a decent wage and providing some western-style health care benefits to workers in developing nations those people could afford legit software. But as long as they have a hard time affording food, software is going to get pirated left and right.
I can believe this. One of the reasons I left IT is that I got sick of the sysadmin being relegated to some shitty windowless office regardless of where I worked. There's nothing to make a man grumpy or groggy like having to go without fresh air or sunlight all damned day, especially when you're working all day and into the night during crunch times. The only exception was a dotcom I worked at that left the flourescents off, bought everyone halogen lights, and used short cubes so that what light did come in was spread around. Good luck getting an employer to do that now.
I remember reading that MSFT built the Redmond HQ offices in an X shape to create more window offices. The only other exception I can think of was Sallie Mae's Virginia HQ where they put executive offices and conference rooms in the middle of each floor and gave all of the window area to the cube dwellers, but they shipped IT to Indiana to save money.
Now I'm going into art & design. I have a home office with four big Windows, and a home art studio with six windows, four of which run floor-to-cieling. It's pretty fucking sweet.
"...which, according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!"
So if I combine two overclocked nVidia boards with an overclocked Athlon and two fast SATA drives, the system will pay for itself over the winter as I can just stick it on the first floor of the house and let the heat travel upward. Bloody nifty!
Most of the informercials run during times on channels with very specific demographics, when the channels regular viewers are not watching. G4TV, for example, runs them very early in the morning. Channels with a daytime audience (The ones targeting housewives) often start doing informercials in the early evening, and channels with a big focus on prime-time run them late at night, in the morning, and during the day.
I have to agree. If Apple is going to sell a single-CPU G5 box for $1499 with no monitor, how about selling it with the fastest G5 available instead of the slowest? Of course, then they wouldn't be able to sell many dual systems since even a lot of professionals really don't need the tiny speed boost one gets from using a dual CPU machine if a fast single CPU machine is available.
I see no use for a PDA, because there always seem to be better ways to get the same functionality:
Calendaring - People like me who really need the calendaring feature are often so disorganized that they forget to charge the PDA, or forget to take it out of the charger. In either case, a little paper one is a better option.
Contact information - I keep it all in my phone. Due to shitty US cellular companies locking out any phone feature that they don't charge by the minute for, I am unable to sync my phone with, well, anything, and since I use the phone to contact people, it wins over a PDA.
Games - With the exception of Bewjewled, PDA games are shit, mostly because games are hard to play with a stylus. Even cellular phone games are better.
Productivity apps - If I want to do general purpose computing on the go, I'll just take my laptop along.
The only PDA I have ever seen that really does it all well (Excluding games) is the Blackberry. Unfortunately I was burned out on the whole PDA concept by the time Blackberries hit reasonable price points. I traded my last PDA for a nice digicam on via Craigslist, and everything is better now.
Technically, 100 pounds is more than $100.
And what makes you think that it hasn't? If you really think about it, the people with the money, means, and need for sentient computers are the same people who wouldn't ever breathe a work about it to anyone.
I buy PPC systems for one reason only: that's what OS X runs on. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay three times for a PPC CPU what an x86 CPU of equivalent speed costs and then run an OS that runs on x86 on it.
Of course, if someone started selling PPC CPUs for less than x86, AND PPC mainboards were not selling for more than comparable x86 mainboards, AND if the commercial software I use were available (We all know that any useful OSS gets ported to everything anyway...), then I might consider it.
In other words, NO.
Does this remind anyone of Microsoft's nonsenical Freedom-to-Innovate campaign?
Maybe so, but Red Hat's nasty little distros fell into disfavor with me back in the 5.2 era. When I stated that I had abandoned Linux, I wasn't kidding-it just isn't worth the effort compared to what I get out of running OS X. If I were actively coding free software and actually needed access to the entire OS source or something like that I might care, but as it is now, Linux has nothing to offer me that I want.
That's the thing with Linux -- it's a hobbyists OS for those of us who aren't working on the server side of things. And having walked away from IT, I don't have to mess with the bloody servers anymore, and I haven't the time for hobbies like Linux.
That's exactly why I gave up on Linux. Default installs are crammed so full of cruft that many programs are made dependent on the cruft, meaning that to get a good setup I was compiling everything myself rather than using the Gnome/KDE dependent packages that were put together for everything with a GUI. At that point it made more sense to jump ship to OS X so I can at least have a really, really pretty OS to compile on.
Rather than rely on technology, it's much easier to just rely on the old fashioned method: get a nanny. If you can't afford a nanny, get an au-pair. As an added bonus, au-pairs are notorious for sleeping with the fathers of the kids they're taking care of.
Actually it wasn't, and I have a seven-year-old Sun machine right next to me to prove it.
Apple can't even claim to be the first company that was selling low-cost 64 bit desktops as many people claim, because Sun started selling sub-$1000 64-bit desktops way back in 2001!
I love Apple, but when it comes to marketing, the company is 60% bullshit, 40% hype, and utterly incapable of telling the truth: that they rarely do anything original, that their systems are far slower than x86 machines, and that their products really serve little purpose for people outside the music and visual arts fields.
Maybe you don't, but the thousands if not millions of Americans who have invested in software, book, music, movie, and television companies do.
You remind me of a lot of my neighbors who get pissed off at the police every time one of their family members is dealing drugs -- they're happy to live in and take advantage of civilization, but they get pissed off when their criminal accquaintances get busted for harming other members of society.
Given that most kids probably aren't going to be able to figure out the concept of verifying who they're talking to online, what's the point of this thing? To make it easier for Michael Jackson to be sure that he's not chatting it up with DA's office?
Does anyone else remember the period in 2002-2003 when Sanjay Kumar's face was on the cover of just about every IT and business magazine out there for being some sort of great saint showing the world how IT can be saved? And just look at where he is now. The world's techies still knew that CA was a crap company selling crap products, but to anyone following the mainstream media, CA was a godsend to customers, potential customers, and shareholders.
This is more proof that the tech industry is still generally full of shit (Not that plenty of others aren't) and that not only can they not be trusted, but the media cannot be trusted to do some decent research and present a clear picture of what these companies are really up to.
Actually, I totally agree with Lucas on this one, because I bought my bootleg Star Wars: Special Edition Episodes IV-VI DVDs on ebay for $35 before Lucas ever announced that he would be selling copies. I have no plans to buy Lucas's updated versions, and I just wish I could find a bootlegger selling laserdisc-rips of the original theatrical releases.
It seems funny to me that Sony keeps trying to push online gaming for the PS2 and cannot understand why the push keeps failing. Has it occured to anyone at Sony that the majority of PS2 owners bought a PS2 BEFORE the network adapter was being given away, and are still not willing to pay $50 for a $5 piece of hardware? The only way to get online gaming to succeed on the PS2 is for Sony to stop attempting to gouge millions existing PS2 owners for the network adapter and start selling it at a reasonable price, something in the neighborhood of $10.
I honestly doubt that this was the motivation behind A9. I say this because there are a ton of assholes who make money as amazon affiliates endlessly spamming google to make their worthless pages appear as legitmate search results. If pointing to affiliates is all Amazon is trying to do, it would be far less expensive to just publish a free e-book on google spamming and update it on a regular basis.
I agree wholeheartedly. Movies like this abandon plots and character development in favor of a big ol' light show. For those of us who have seen plenty of this stuff over the years, watching such movies is like sitting through a ninety-minute demo reel that forgoes a shitty techno soundtrack for shitty dialogue.
Summary- wipe everything down with alcohol, trash anything painted along with the PSUs. I once let a friend borrow a system for several months-what I did not know what this his roomates were smokers and slobs, and the computer came back covered in a layer of brownish goo. I carefully cleaned off everything that I could with alcohol on q-tips and toothbrushes, washed the case with lysol, and let it all dry.
Most of the parts ended up well-cleaned and generally stink free. Unfortunately, the power supply was uncleanable without a total dissasembly that would have rendered it unusable, and the while the case appeared clean, once it warmed up it stank just as bad as before; as far as I can tell it was just some weird feature of the paint that kept me from getting the stink out.
Since I couldn't fit an Antec server case in the dishwasher, I wrote it off as a loss, tossed it out, put the parts in a new case, and donated it to my college-student sister.
I have to admit, with the translucency and the nice shadows, that's the best looking desktop I've ever seen. And I'm writing this on OS X. Kudos to X.org, I'll have to give it a whirl....
"...computer games, the next designer drug."
Endorfun was a psychedelic puzzle game designed to stimulate endorphin production in humans. I don't know if it actually worked, but at least they tried.
Tiny Dragon nuclear power plants!