I have as many complaints as the next guy with MS and their product decisions... but "autorun" really isn't one of them.
Apple has been doing the same thing for YEARS, yet it hasn't really been an issue for MacOS users.
The fact is, a user inserts a piece of media because he/she intends to view or run the content on it. Otherwise, he/she wouldn't have inserted it in the first place.
The fact that it autoruns is irrelevant. That just saves them a couple clicks of a mouse, or a bit of typing. Either way, if it's infected, they're going to have problems as soon as they try to use the content on the disc.
Re:Just a tad over the top?
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DDR3 RAM Explained
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Whether or not the author was really serious, I think about the only really worthwhile comments of his might have been related to the "uncertain economy".
Right now, all too many people I know are finding themselves out of jobs, with no good-paying alternatives in sight. I just attended my girlfriend's college graduation ceremony yesterday afternoon, and the guy sitting behind us was a 40-something year old who decided to go back to school last semester, because he couldn't make it anymore in the construction business. He said he worked in construction for 18 years, and until 3 years ago, it was a good career for him. But in the last few years, things have gotten so bad, many people are resorting to selling off the trucks and equipment they used in their trade, just to keep the bills paid and to stay afloat. They're seeing their work dwindle to the point where they can do it as a side job, but can't guarantee they're always busy. Therefore, he finally decided to go back to school and start a new career path.
My g/f is in a similar dilemma. Here is she. fresh out of school with a degree in psychology, and really can't do a thing with it except continue on to earn a Masters' in psych. After that, she could open her own practice (MORE $'s on top of huge student loan debt!), or possibly partner with someone else - with results varying depending on what part of the country you decide to live in. She's thinking about going for a double major, with the 2nd. one in business.... because at least the internships for MBAs seem plentiful and promising right now.
Anyway... my point is, most people just aren't going to be as "free" with their spending money as they were when they were sure their good-paying job was there for them. Playing with stuff like DDR3 vs. DDR2 amounts to "unnecessary entertainment" for the computer hobbyist, really. You can get a plenty fast PC running regular old DDR2 memory that will do whatever you need done. Buying into anything else, just for the sake of "overclocking" amounts to tinkering and computer hot-rodding for the fun of benchmarking and seeing how high a number you can get. It's not a practical activity when finances are uncertain or possibly very limited.
One of my friends works for the U.S. Army as an engineer. He used to work at a base here in town, until they decommissioned that facility and offered their employees jobs at one in another state.
Anyway, I remember years ago, him telling me about all the extra/unused computer equipment they had sitting in storage, on-site. There was a lot of "office politics" going on all the time, where somebody in charge would "mandate" that the whole division use a specific operating system version, or specific version of an application. Then, many of the users, finding that very inefficient and unreasonable, would find ways around the order. Sometimes, you'd have such things as an old Novell Netware LAN that a group used exclusively, despite an order it be replaced with a Windows Server and Win2K workstations (or whatever). They'd just run BOTH setups in tandem, so they could get "business as usual" done without disruption, but show they met the "requirements" if anyone checked on them.
It sounded like a lot of the "surplus" equipment resulted from these "orders from above" and changes in command. (EG. Some of the old, duplicate equipment in use might finally be "retired" when new people took charge of a dept. and forced everyone to change and ditch the old configuration.)
Anyway, because of all of this, I think a lot of equipment wound up not having documentation on who it belonged to, or who was responsible for it. (Again, if you were going against the command of a superior officer and hanging onto hardware and/or software they said you needed to stop using - you weren't likely to want your name attached to it when it suddenly showed up in storage, 1 or 2 years after the orders were to "upgrade" all of that stuff, right?)
As a rule of thumb, I take any "extreme" environmental "issue" with a large serving of salt.
EG. Your example of the "energy-efficient bulbs". It's an extreme over-reaction to claim you might need HAZMAT to visit your house because you broke one! In reality, the amount of mercury contained in one is VERY small. Previous generations absorbed FAR more mercury into their bodies doing things like handling/playing with little balls of the stuff in science classes! Playing the "game" of trying to tally up "environmental damage" caused by obtaining the raw materials used in the product is bogus, too. Why? Because you can string those arguments out as far as you'd like to, in any direction, to argue your point. (Do you happen to have all the financial details on overall environmental impact for locating and refining tungsten filaments for traditional incandescent bulbs, or for the power used to generate the near-vacuums required for each and every bulb produced?)
"Green" businesses amount to little more than "feel good" marketing.... (I think we may pretty much agree on that point.) But all I'm saying is, consumers will ALWAYS be best served if they concern themselves with what the best overall VALUE is for their dollar, on each item they purchase. The idea of spending more to be a "good environmental citizen" is foolish - since in the vast majority of cases, we can't really show that a mass purchase of the "green" item really accomplishes that goal.
I'm going to say something in response, that's actually difficult to articulate without coming across like a total jerk.
I was married and have a kid, yet I totally disagree with you.
To me, what matters most is a sense of purpose and accomplishment in life. "Family" is just one of many things that can bring that to a person.
I realize that although my kid thinks the world revolves around me right now, when she gets a little older, "dad" is going to be a far less popular guy. (They call them "mean-agers" for a reason, you know.) Already, I'm not exactly much of a beacon of popularity with my ex-wife.
Most of the time, the feeling of "accomplishment" is fleeting. It's something you have to repeatedly get a "fix" of, because today's "big deal" is often forgotten tomorrow.
Therefore, FRIENDS tend to bring the "accomplishment" and "sense of purpose" feelings around more regularly than anything else I can think of. If you work in a good enough job, you'll achieve this there too - but again, I venture to say one's co-workers are the key ingredient more than the work itself.
The big stumbling block I think most UI developers hit is the fallacy that elements of the interface need to mimic something "popular" or "familiar" (typically a Windows UI, given their market-share).
Doing that amounts to a short-cut, where you're settling for pleasing people who "already struggled to learn a previously designed interface" - at the expense of winning over a crowd that never mastered that one in the first place.
I'd say usability testing like what was done in this article is the ONLY way to succeed, if you're going to proceed with a true goal of "ease of use". Anyone savvy enough to help build an OS is FAR too removed from comprehending all the points of confusion the "average user" might run across.
(And again, this is why a developer typically thinks so "inside the box" when it comes to concepts like "open file" dialogs, "save" and "export" options on menus, or assumptions about which plug-ins and "extras" a typical user will need.)
Personally, I think "file extensions" are a pretty evil concept, the way most operating systems today handle them. I'm not saying they're "pointless". Rather, they're too technical in nature for the casual user. I think Apple was on the right track when they decided, years ago, to let the OS decide what application a file belonged to via hidden "resource fork" data, instead of the 3 character extension on the end of the file defining it. The problem is, Apple tried to do this when it went "against the grain" of what every other OS was doing, and it created too many headaches for moving data between platforms.
In addition, it used to create a lot of problems where an app would "marry itself" to a certain file-type, and that wasn't always the most desirable behavior. I think they need to brand "metadata" onto files so apps can check there to know what a file is, but provisions are made to allow *several* apps to become preferred options for working with a given filetype. (EG. When a user double-clicks a document, a dialog opens asking if they'd like to open this with "MS Word, CoolJoe Writer, or Starview? Or click here to modify your selection of preferred programs used to work with this type of document.")
Most MythTV distributions include a MAME emulator, as well as a SNES emulator, and support for several others you can optionally download, install and configure in their menus.
The nice thing about this is, it gives you a good excuse to dedicate an entire PC to your TV set, since it works as a very capable DVR, gives you a set-top web browser, and other goodies.
The downside? At least from all the knoppmyth distros I've used, I've always had some hassle getting MAME working well with it. (EG. You can purchase wireless gamepad type controllers from Logitech that use USB dongles and are detected just fine in Linux. But you'll have to do some creative stuff with the xmame config file so you have all their buttons assigned in a sensible manner. If you don't assign one to simulate dropping coins in, for example, you'll never be able to get a new game to start from your controller.)
I was watching some TV news show 2 or 3 weeks ago, about the idea of businesses becoming "Big Brother". (May have been a Dateline episode or some such thing... I only caught the middle of it.)
But anyway, it went into the ways the big ISPs and search engine sites are co-operating with govt. and law enforcement, happily turning over considerable amounts of information. It told a story, for example, of a guy who was convicted of murdering his wife on the beach, despite his initial alibi holding up. Apparently, he claimed shots were fired from across the road, in the brush someplace, and his wife was struck by them. The only thing that really got him convicted was the fact that law enforcement demanded Google turn over his complete history of searches he'd done from his computer's IP address, going back YEARS. Google did so, and they found out he'd done a number of searches, about a year earlier, on such things as how to murder someone and get away with it, info on bullet projectiles, etc. etc.
Google admitted that they do store EVERY SINGLE SEARCH anyone ever does, and can go all the way back to when their operation first started.
My more cynical side wonders if this is *really* the reason Google stock is valued so highly? As this TV show touched on, Google is in position to be the most comprehensive and powerful data-provider on the planet for people paying for someone's personal information. Depending on how many free services a person has availed themselves of, Google would be able to cough up photos of a person's friends, family, relatives, pets, home and car, and who knows what else. If they use Google Checkout, they'd have info on income they received from Internet sales. If they use their free online Office applications, they could even provide copies of any Excel spreadsheets or Word documents they worked on through it. They've got a complete archive of any email correspondence they did via Gmail (and other mail accounts too, if someone forwards their email to Gmail so they can check it all with just one account). And obviously, they have a pretty good profile of the individual based on all the searches they've ever done while online. Don't forget, if they watch videos on YouTube, that ALSO gives some info on the person and their interests.
This totally eclipses what traditional credit agencies and "data miners" are able to sell their customers, and means they're positioned to generate FAR more revenue than from things like ad banners and "placement"!
Perhaps it's largely due to what the critics claim; that "The company, looking to safeguard its film, television and music holdings, has been an aggressive champion of copyright protection, at the cost of technological innovation."
But whatever the case, I think Sony missed a few opportunities to make the PS3 a better suited system for video on demand and the like.
1. Why only wireless "g" support in them, and not "n"? Wireless "n" support actually makes video streaming possible without drop-outs and pauses.
2. The bluetooth remote control is a $20 option that probably should have just been bundled with the PS3, or better yet - sold as a "higher-end" option, vs. a bundled standard IR remote control. You can't use a "universal remote" with a PS3 at all the way it is now, since universal remotes aren't going to do bluetooth. That also means a PS3 can't accept "change channel" type commands from another PVR type box (a la MythTV or Tivo), potentially further limiting its usefulness. How much would it *really* cost to add an I.R. sensor to the front of a PS3?
3. Hard drive capacity is really insufficient, especially on the cheaper PS3 models. With all the games copying over gigabytes of data when first played, plus people wanting to store their photos and music collections and downloaded demos, trailers, etc. - how much room can be safely assumed to be available for movie buffering purposes? (And what about selling movies to download and keep? That might go over like a lead balloon, even with people otherwise ok with having no easy backup for the PS3 drive, if it eats all that free disk space.)
Oh, those menus in Vista were moved for a perfectly good reason. It's called *training*. Do you realize how big an industry the whole MCSE certification thing is? And additionally, how many people have employment as certified Microsoft trainers?
I'm completely convinced MS juggles around things in each major new OS and application release on purpose, to ensure you have to spend thousands on re-certification to keep up with the current systems.
I think we'll need a little more proof of SP3 being "just fine" than it working well on YOUR particular PC.
I recently had a customer of mine ask me to replace a dead hard drive in her HP Pavilion P4 notebook computer. After I did that, I did a fresh Windows XP Pro re-install, followed immediately by the latest beta of SP3. (I figured, hey, it might be beta - but it HAS to be better than trying to download 80+ patches after applying SP2. I just want to get her a reasonably secure, working system without spending all day working on the thing!) Well, turned out that was a bad decision. After updating it to SP3, I wasn't able to get the audio or software modem drivers to work at all. I wound up having to reformat and go back to XP with SP2 before the sound would install properly.
Years ago, I remember the "Radius" monitors that were sold as higher-end displays for Apple Macs. They easily rotated the 4:3 aspect screen between a "portrait" and a "landscape" mode, and as I recall, the computer received a signal that it was rotated (mercury tilt sensor in the display, I guess?), so it would automatically flip the video signal to match it.
Seems like that whole thing never really caught on though, and I don't see why not? I'd love to have a wide-screen notebook that would allow you to pull up on the display to extend it a few inches from the notebook, and then let the user rotate it to portrait mode to read full PDF pages at a time and so on.
If that's too much to ask, at least I'd like to see more desktop LCDs supporting rotation. My Samsung Syncmaster 213T did this nicely, except you still had to tell the computer you rotated it afterwards. (Is it THAT much to ask to integrate some sort of rotation support with modern video cards, so a display being turned can tell the ATI or nVidia board you need to rotate the video display 90 degrees?)
The most interesting things I've seen coming from Ben Stein were his editorials on finance.
It honestly took me by total surprise that he made this movie, taking up the evolution/creationism issues. He wrote some rather interesting pieces for Forbes, including one denouncing people's willingness to forgive stock market scandals (like the Steve Jobs and Apple stock back-dating situation that came up last year). Given the sagging economy and so much distress over America's financial future in the "world marketplace", it would be a great time for him to release a film discussing these topics.
The Internet actually HAS served as an "alternate" TV network of sorts, ever since people first realized it was possible to stream video formats or do animation in a web browser window.
While it's still a "playground" in many ways, sometimes, serving content that's meant to be passively enjoyed is part of the "fun". Not everybody gets (or even WANTS) the job of creating an animated series that runs on commercial television. But far more people DO get a kick out of creating animations and using the net as an inexpensive way to broadcast them. (What's the point in creating art of any kind, if nobody else is there to enjoy it afterwards?)
By the same token, as technology advances, it only makes sense to consolidate things. Why run and maintain a whole mess of coaxial cable for cable TV, if you can just serve the content over the same connection that handles the regular Internet broadband? This is the future, and the only part that *doesn't* make much sense about it is all the artificial content restrictions the mass media still demands.
(One of the BIGGEST advantages of consolidating network television as IP traffic on the net SHOULD be the flexibility in handling the traffic with whatever computer and software the end-user likes. No more need for dedicated hardware that's just a sub-set of what's in their desktop PC already, to do the decoding, display, and recording of programs.)
Considering the plan for eBay to start REQUIRING PayPal as the only form of payment for auctions, PayPal's notorious habits of freezing people's accounts unfairly and improperly, and now, their intentions of banning popular web browsers just because they don't include dubious "anti-phishing" technologies in them... I'd say the INTELLIGENT thing to do is give PayPal the boot!
I did... Google Checkout works fine for me as an alternate way to accept credit card payments from people, and seems to cost a little less too.
I think it's great to have knowledge and awareness of HOW to make web pages more accessible to the disabled. As people have already pointed out here, some of the "stumbling blocks" are very simple to remove, often by doing things that make a site cleaner and easier to navigate for EVERYONE. (EG. Take out the unnecessary pop-ups or extra screens telling you that your requested file transfer is "about to begin". We KNOW that, since we clicked the download link already!)
But LEGISLATING more "accessibility" is a big shove down the slippery slope of government interference. I think, perhaps, *government* web sites should have certain accessibility standards, depending on their audience. If the blind are still among those who have to deal with the IRS, for example, then I'd expect the IRS web site to accommodate their needs.
On the other hand, if I'm a business selling hi-def televisions, I doubt I have a whole lot of blind customers interested in my product offerings. A blanket law FORCING me to obey rules to make my page friendly to visually impaired customers would be pointless, at best.
One big concern I have with Craigslist is, eBay apparently invested heavily in them already. I used to wonder why they'd possibly see any benefit to dumping a bunch of money into what's essentially a free version of newspaper classifieds. (I mean, Craigslist has pretty much NO mechanism to collect money, and no rating or "feedback" functionality on the site, seemingly making it useless to something like the eBay business model.)
But now I'm wondering if this was a "plan B" for them all along? If eBay goes "sour", they could leverage Craigslist as an alternative? They probably bet, all along, that most of the people who'd defect from eBay over issues like "mandatory PayPal usage" would wind up on Craigslist. They could institute policies of charging monthly subscription fees to post on Craigslist or something - and keep on taking money, even from the people who thought they were dodging them.
I suspect we'll see the economy get a boost whenever the next person is elected President in the U.S. Traditionally, that's been the case, again due to perception much more than reality. (We like to have a scapegoat for our problems. When they're economic in nature, the President tends to be that scapegoat. The fact he's shown the door and someone new comes in is enough to make people believe things "can get better now", even if nothing has really changed yet.)
The "trend" I've observed in the last couple years is one of businesses trying to be more efficient with the employees they keep. Instead of 3 people, they're always asking, "Can we get by with one higher-paid worker who can then be asked to do the work of those 3?" If not, then they ask "Can we do things differently so we don't need to hire a replacement for employee X who is leaving?"
The statistics I saw published a few weeks ago bore that out. Despite the 5.9% unemployment rate shown, it also indicated average pay was UP over last quarter.
I thought it was pretty blatantly obvious by now that George Lucas is out to milk the Star Wars franchise for every dollar he can squeeze from it. This sort of thing would be par for the course, coming from him.
To an extent, that's not even necessarily a "bad thing". One of the moves Lucas made in the beginning which he's often admired/noted for was his shrewdness in securing the rights to royalties on all the toys and products (which Hollywood thought was worthless).
I think the information we're lacking here is the legal contract made between him and the set designer.... If it's clear that Lucas didn't allow the guy to go off and make money duplicating Stormtrooper outfits, then Lucas is in the right to sue him. Otherwise, I'd say he deserves to lose this case.
The thing is, music has ALWAYS been based off mathematical formulas at its core. The "art" really lies in the musician picking and choosing options that work well together to create something pleasing to the ear. (Well, that plus the skill of being proficient in playing an instrument of choice, and/or talent in singing the vocals well.)
I've played with software in the past that promised to build backing tracks "automatically". There's a pretty neat one called "The Jammer Pro", for example, or the more rudimentary "Band in a Box" software.
The thing is, you still have to make musical decisions as to which portions of what they generate you'd like to keep, which you'd like to delete, and which give you some good ideas, but need "tweaking" to make the best use of them.
The Jammer Pro, for example, would let you drag and drop in a "session rock guitarist" for example, and would write electric guitar solos to go along with the chord changes and tempo you specified as the "core" of your song. Some of these were really good! But you had to audition everything it made, and hit "redo" a lot to discard ones that weren't so good, before it came up with something that was a "keeper".
I really don't envision a computer creating perfect "backing tracks" in real-time to any vocals sung into it. It's more like, it'll sometimes/often make "passable" ones, fun for karaoke or practicing -- but not worthy of recording.
I don't know the answer to those questions either. "Does having a gun make me safer, or is it more likely to get me or someone I love killed?" But I'd argue that it doesn't matter, really. What I *do* know is that I wish to live in a nation where I'm legally allowed to make these types of choices for myself.
If you don't feel that it's wise to keep a gun around in your home, then by all means, don't do it!
Regardless, some people out there do some REALLY stupid things. We just had some idiot around here make the national news because he decided it'd be a good idea to use his shotgun in place of a drill to put a hole in his house to run the cabling for his new satellite dish. He wound up shooting and killing his wife in the process.
I have to think people like that will eventually do something equally stupid, even without the gun in the equation.... That's a horrible reason to outlaw guns for everybody.
Where are my mod points when I need them? This is *exactly* right!
The biggest barrier to getting everyone to use encryption, though, is the relative difficulty in configuring it. For example, I'm on a Mac running OS X right now. This is generally regarded as an "easy to use" OS, and one often recommended for people's parents, relatives, etc. Nonetheless, if I want to encrypt my outgoing email using the Mail.app included with the OS, what are my options? So far, the best I can do for my OS X Leopard 10.5 version is a very buggy beta of a freeware hack that adds PGP support using a GNU PGP add-on. I tried this out the other day, and discovered it crashes or fails to properly decrypt any email containing attachments, and requires the PGP key be generated with ANOTHER GNU program I have to download and run - and it, too is a little buggy. (It added a preference pane to my control panel which promptly told me was "non functional" in my version of OS X. Nice.)
If you want things like this to *really* get used by the masses, the support needs to be included with the core applications, and generation of the public and private keys needs to be done through a "wizard" that pops up at first program launch.
I've been playing with encryption programs for at least 10 or 15 years now on computers, and STILL, it seems to be little more than an afterthought for most popular software. Why isn't this made more of a priority by developers??
Recent surveys indicate Microsoft's overall regard by college and university students has dropped over 40 points in relation to other, similar businesses since last year. Meanwhile, Apple was ranked #1 as having the most desirable image.
Today's college and university students are tomorrow's tech. consumers, so it actually IS important to maintain a good image with them.
Yes, paid corporate blogging and much of this other "Web 2.0" stuff is ultimately going to be shown to be more "fluff" than worthwhile pursuit. Still, sites like MySpace and Facebook are part of this "next generation of web apps", and by all counts, they DO succeed in keeping the attention of the younger computer-using audience. (History repeats itself, folks. Despite the nay-sayers who were USUALLY quite correct about all the stupid e-commerce ideas springing up all over during the.COM/.BOMB fiasco - survivors included Amazon and eBay. Both of those sites didn't do so bad for themselves, did they?)
Microsoft just doesn't want to miss out again, if they ignore the wrong trend and it balloons into something huge....
Right now, their image is really tarnished on many fronts, including the "red ring of death" issues with XBox 360's AND the choice of backing the wrong HD technology for DVDs, the whole Vista fiasco, and an overall perception that the latest updates to their products don't offer very much for the money. (I just don't see nearly the level of "excitement" over the Office 2007 release that I remember people having when, say, Office 2000 came out. Most people using it just seem to be doing so because it was bundled with a new computer system purchase, or they needed to buy it to be legal on a new PC that didn't come bundled with it. Many of these people are students who got a huge price break through their school.)
Honestly, I think as much as people liked to bash Microsoft in the past, they often had a love/hate thing going on. It was difficult not to admire Bill Gates for his success, and/or for his willingness to donate to charities. People were really interested to see documentaries showing the inside of his mansion and so on. He generated a certain amount of "buzz" whenever he gave a speech to discuss his views on technology and ideas for the future. But now, Gates has pretty much retired and people like Steve Balmer are the new "figureheads". Who thinks of Balmer and thinks of anything positive?? He's often referred to as "monkey boy" and is best known for throwing chairs.
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I have as many complaints as the next guy with MS and their product decisions... but "autorun" really isn't one of them.
Apple has been doing the same thing for YEARS, yet it hasn't really been an issue for MacOS users.
The fact is, a user inserts a piece of media because he/she intends to view or run the content on it. Otherwise, he/she wouldn't have inserted it in the first place.
The fact that it autoruns is irrelevant. That just saves them a couple clicks of a mouse, or a bit of typing. Either way, if it's infected, they're going to have problems as soon as they try to use the content on the disc.
Whether or not the author was really serious, I think about the only really worthwhile comments of his might have been related to the "uncertain economy".
.... because at least the internships for MBAs seem plentiful and promising right now.
... my point is, most people just aren't going to be as "free" with their spending money as they were when they were sure their good-paying job was there for them. Playing with stuff like DDR3 vs. DDR2 amounts to "unnecessary entertainment" for the computer hobbyist, really. You can get a plenty fast PC running regular old DDR2 memory that will do whatever you need done. Buying into anything else, just for the sake of "overclocking" amounts to tinkering and computer hot-rodding for the fun of benchmarking and seeing how high a number you can get. It's not a practical activity when finances are uncertain or possibly very limited.
Right now, all too many people I know are finding themselves out of jobs, with no good-paying alternatives in sight. I just attended my girlfriend's college graduation ceremony yesterday afternoon, and the guy sitting behind us was a 40-something year old who decided to go back to school last semester, because he couldn't make it anymore in the construction business. He said he worked in construction for 18 years, and until 3 years ago, it was a good career for him. But in the last few years, things have gotten so bad, many people are resorting to selling off the trucks and equipment they used in their trade, just to keep the bills paid and to stay afloat. They're seeing their work dwindle to the point where they can do it as a side job, but can't guarantee they're always busy. Therefore, he finally decided to go back to school and start a new career path.
My g/f is in a similar dilemma. Here is she. fresh out of school with a degree in psychology, and really can't do a thing with it except continue on to earn a Masters' in psych. After that, she could open her own practice (MORE $'s on top of huge student loan debt!), or possibly partner with someone else - with results varying depending on what part of the country you decide to live in. She's thinking about going for a double major, with the 2nd. one in business
Anyway
One of my friends works for the U.S. Army as an engineer. He used to work at a base here in town, until they decommissioned that facility and offered their employees jobs at one in another state.
Anyway, I remember years ago, him telling me about all the extra/unused computer equipment they had sitting in storage, on-site. There was a lot of "office politics" going on all the time, where somebody in charge would "mandate" that the whole division use a specific operating system version, or specific version of an application. Then, many of the users, finding that very inefficient and unreasonable, would find ways around the order. Sometimes, you'd have such things as an old Novell Netware LAN that a group used exclusively, despite an order it be replaced with a Windows Server and Win2K workstations (or whatever). They'd just run BOTH setups in tandem, so they could get "business as usual" done without disruption, but show they met the "requirements" if anyone checked on them.
It sounded like a lot of the "surplus" equipment resulted from these "orders from above" and changes in command. (EG. Some of the old, duplicate equipment in use might finally be "retired" when new people took charge of a dept. and forced everyone to change and ditch the old configuration.)
Anyway, because of all of this, I think a lot of equipment wound up not having documentation on who it belonged to, or who was responsible for it. (Again, if you were going against the command of a superior officer and hanging onto hardware and/or software they said you needed to stop using - you weren't likely to want your name attached to it when it suddenly showed up in storage, 1 or 2 years after the orders were to "upgrade" all of that stuff, right?)
As a rule of thumb, I take any "extreme" environmental "issue" with a large serving of salt.
EG. Your example of the "energy-efficient bulbs". It's an extreme over-reaction to claim you might need HAZMAT to visit your house because you broke one! In reality, the amount of mercury contained in one is VERY small. Previous generations absorbed FAR more mercury into their bodies doing things like handling/playing with little balls of the stuff in science classes! Playing the "game" of trying to tally up "environmental damage" caused by obtaining the raw materials used in the product is bogus, too. Why? Because you can string those arguments out as far as you'd like to, in any direction, to argue your point. (Do you happen to have all the financial details on overall environmental impact for locating and refining tungsten filaments for traditional incandescent bulbs, or for the power used to generate the near-vacuums required for each and every bulb produced?)
"Green" businesses amount to little more than "feel good" marketing.... (I think we may pretty much agree on that point.) But all I'm saying is, consumers will ALWAYS be best served if they concern themselves with what the best overall VALUE is for their dollar, on each item they purchase. The idea of spending more to be a "good environmental citizen" is foolish - since in the vast majority of cases, we can't really show that a mass purchase of the "green" item really accomplishes that goal.
I'm going to say something in response, that's actually difficult to articulate without coming across like a total jerk.
I was married and have a kid, yet I totally disagree with you.
To me, what matters most is a sense of purpose and accomplishment in life. "Family" is just one of many things that can bring that to a person.
I realize that although my kid thinks the world revolves around me right now, when she gets a little older, "dad" is going to be a far less popular guy. (They call them "mean-agers" for a reason, you know.) Already, I'm not exactly much of a beacon of popularity with my ex-wife.
Most of the time, the feeling of "accomplishment" is fleeting. It's something you have to repeatedly get a "fix" of, because today's "big deal" is often forgotten tomorrow.
Therefore, FRIENDS tend to bring the "accomplishment" and "sense of purpose" feelings around more regularly than anything else I can think of. If you work in a good enough job, you'll achieve this there too - but again, I venture to say one's co-workers are the key ingredient more than the work itself.
The big stumbling block I think most UI developers hit is the fallacy that elements of the interface need to mimic something "popular" or "familiar" (typically a Windows UI, given their market-share).
Doing that amounts to a short-cut, where you're settling for pleasing people who "already struggled to learn a previously designed interface" - at the expense of winning over a crowd that never mastered that one in the first place.
I'd say usability testing like what was done in this article is the ONLY way to succeed, if you're going to proceed with a true goal of "ease of use". Anyone savvy enough to help build an OS is FAR too removed from comprehending all the points of confusion the "average user" might run across.
(And again, this is why a developer typically thinks so "inside the box" when it comes to concepts like "open file" dialogs, "save" and "export" options on menus, or assumptions about which plug-ins and "extras" a typical user will need.)
Personally, I think "file extensions" are a pretty evil concept, the way most operating systems today handle them. I'm not saying they're "pointless". Rather, they're too technical in nature for the casual user. I think Apple was on the right track when they decided, years ago, to let the OS decide what application a file belonged to via hidden "resource fork" data, instead of the 3 character extension on the end of the file defining it. The problem is, Apple tried to do this when it went "against the grain" of what every other OS was doing, and it created too many headaches for moving data between platforms.
In addition, it used to create a lot of problems where an app would "marry itself" to a certain file-type, and that wasn't always the most desirable behavior. I think they need to brand "metadata" onto files so apps can check there to know what a file is, but provisions are made to allow *several* apps to become preferred options for working with a given filetype. (EG. When a user double-clicks a document, a dialog opens asking if they'd like to open this with "MS Word, CoolJoe Writer, or Starview? Or click here to modify your selection of preferred programs used to work with this type of document.")
Most MythTV distributions include a MAME emulator, as well as a SNES emulator, and support for several others you can optionally download, install and configure in their menus.
The nice thing about this is, it gives you a good excuse to dedicate an entire PC to your TV set, since it works as a very capable DVR, gives you a set-top web browser, and other goodies.
The downside? At least from all the knoppmyth distros I've used, I've always had some hassle getting MAME working well with it. (EG. You can purchase wireless gamepad type controllers from Logitech that use USB dongles and are detected just fine in Linux. But you'll have to do some creative stuff with the xmame config file so you have all their buttons assigned in a sensible manner. If you don't assign one to simulate dropping coins in, for example, you'll never be able to get a new game to start from your controller.)
I was watching some TV news show 2 or 3 weeks ago, about the idea of businesses becoming "Big Brother". (May have been a Dateline episode or some such thing... I only caught the middle of it.)
But anyway, it went into the ways the big ISPs and search engine sites are co-operating with govt. and law enforcement, happily turning over considerable amounts of information. It told a story, for example, of a guy who was convicted of murdering his wife on the beach, despite his initial alibi holding up. Apparently, he claimed shots were fired from across the road, in the brush someplace, and his wife was struck by them. The only thing that really got him convicted was the fact that law enforcement demanded Google turn over his complete history of searches he'd done from his computer's IP address, going back YEARS. Google did so, and they found out he'd done a number of searches, about a year earlier, on such things as how to murder someone and get away with it, info on bullet projectiles, etc. etc.
Google admitted that they do store EVERY SINGLE SEARCH anyone ever does, and can go all the way back to when their operation first started.
My more cynical side wonders if this is *really* the reason Google stock is valued so highly? As this TV show touched on, Google is in position to be the most comprehensive and powerful data-provider on the planet for people paying for someone's personal information. Depending on how many free services a person has availed themselves of, Google would be able to cough up photos of a person's friends, family, relatives, pets, home and car, and who knows what else. If they use Google Checkout, they'd have info on income they received from Internet sales. If they use their free online Office applications, they could even provide copies of any Excel spreadsheets or Word documents they worked on through it. They've got a complete archive of any email correspondence they did via Gmail (and other mail accounts too, if someone forwards their email to Gmail so they can check it all with just one account). And obviously, they have a pretty good profile of the individual based on all the searches they've ever done while online. Don't forget, if they watch videos on YouTube, that ALSO gives some info on the person and their interests.
This totally eclipses what traditional credit agencies and "data miners" are able to sell their customers, and means they're positioned to generate FAR more revenue than from things like ad banners and "placement"!
Perhaps it's largely due to what the critics claim; that "The company, looking to safeguard its film, television and music holdings, has been an aggressive champion of copyright protection, at the cost of technological innovation."
But whatever the case, I think Sony missed a few opportunities to make the PS3 a better suited system for video on demand and the like.
1. Why only wireless "g" support in them, and not "n"? Wireless "n" support actually makes video streaming possible without drop-outs and pauses.
2. The bluetooth remote control is a $20 option that probably should have just been bundled with the PS3, or better yet - sold as a "higher-end" option, vs. a bundled standard IR remote control. You can't use a "universal remote" with a PS3 at all the way it is now, since universal remotes aren't going to do bluetooth. That also means a PS3 can't accept "change channel" type commands from another PVR type box (a la MythTV or Tivo), potentially further limiting its usefulness. How much would it *really* cost to add an I.R. sensor to the front of a PS3?
3. Hard drive capacity is really insufficient, especially on the cheaper PS3 models. With all the games copying over gigabytes of data when first played, plus people wanting to store their photos and music collections and downloaded demos, trailers, etc. - how much room can be safely assumed to be available for movie buffering purposes? (And what about selling movies to download and keep? That might go over like a lead balloon, even with people otherwise ok with having no easy backup for the PS3 drive, if it eats all that free disk space.)
Oh, those menus in Vista were moved for a perfectly good reason. It's called *training*. Do you realize how big an industry the whole MCSE certification thing is? And additionally, how many people have employment as certified Microsoft trainers?
I'm completely convinced MS juggles around things in each major new OS and application release on purpose, to ensure you have to spend thousands on re-certification to keep up with the current systems.
I think we'll need a little more proof of SP3 being "just fine" than it working well on YOUR particular PC.
I recently had a customer of mine ask me to replace a dead hard drive in her HP Pavilion P4 notebook computer. After I did that, I did a fresh Windows XP Pro re-install, followed immediately by the latest beta of SP3. (I figured, hey, it might be beta - but it HAS to be better than trying to download 80+ patches after applying SP2. I just want to get her a reasonably secure, working system without spending all day working on the thing!) Well, turned out that was a bad decision. After updating it to SP3, I wasn't able to get the audio or software modem drivers to work at all. I wound up having to reformat and go back to XP with SP2 before the sound would install properly.
Years ago, I remember the "Radius" monitors that were sold as higher-end displays for Apple Macs. They easily rotated the 4:3 aspect screen between a "portrait" and a "landscape" mode, and as I recall, the computer received a signal that it was rotated (mercury tilt sensor in the display, I guess?), so it would automatically flip the video signal to match it.
Seems like that whole thing never really caught on though, and I don't see why not? I'd love to have a wide-screen notebook that would allow you to pull up on the display to extend it a few inches from the notebook, and then let the user rotate it to portrait mode to read full PDF pages at a time and so on.
If that's too much to ask, at least I'd like to see more desktop LCDs supporting rotation. My Samsung Syncmaster 213T did this nicely, except you still had to tell the computer you rotated it afterwards. (Is it THAT much to ask to integrate some sort of rotation support with modern video cards, so a display being turned can tell the ATI or nVidia board you need to rotate the video display 90 degrees?)
The most interesting things I've seen coming from Ben Stein were his editorials on finance.
It honestly took me by total surprise that he made this movie, taking up the evolution/creationism issues. He wrote some rather interesting pieces for Forbes, including one denouncing people's willingness to forgive stock market scandals (like the Steve Jobs and Apple stock back-dating situation that came up last year). Given the sagging economy and so much distress over America's financial future in the "world marketplace", it would be a great time for him to release a film discussing these topics.
I was about to say the exact same thing!
Any journalist who would delete one his/her paragraphs just because of pressure from some activist group doesn't deserve to have the job.
Since when is news reporting supposed to be about changing the facts to please special interest groups?
The Internet actually HAS served as an "alternate" TV network of sorts, ever since people first realized it was possible to stream video formats or do animation in a web browser window.
While it's still a "playground" in many ways, sometimes, serving content that's meant to be passively enjoyed is part of the "fun". Not everybody gets (or even WANTS) the job of creating an animated series that runs on commercial television. But far more people DO get a kick out of creating animations and using the net as an inexpensive way to broadcast them. (What's the point in creating art of any kind, if nobody else is there to enjoy it afterwards?)
By the same token, as technology advances, it only makes sense to consolidate things. Why run and maintain a whole mess of coaxial cable for cable TV, if you can just serve the content over the same connection that handles the regular Internet broadband? This is the future, and the only part that *doesn't* make much sense about it is all the artificial content restrictions the mass media still demands.
(One of the BIGGEST advantages of consolidating network television as IP traffic on the net SHOULD be the flexibility in handling the traffic with whatever computer and software the end-user likes. No more need for dedicated hardware that's just a sub-set of what's in their desktop PC already, to do the decoding, display, and recording of programs.)
Considering the plan for eBay to start REQUIRING PayPal as the only form of payment for auctions, PayPal's notorious habits of freezing people's accounts unfairly and improperly, and now, their intentions of banning popular web browsers just because they don't include dubious "anti-phishing" technologies in them ... I'd say the INTELLIGENT thing to do is give PayPal the boot!
I did... Google Checkout works fine for me as an alternate way to accept credit card payments from people, and seems to cost a little less too.
I think it's great to have knowledge and awareness of HOW to make web pages more accessible to the disabled. As people have already pointed out here, some of the "stumbling blocks" are very simple to remove, often by doing things that make a site cleaner and easier to navigate for EVERYONE. (EG. Take out the unnecessary pop-ups or extra screens telling you that your requested file transfer is "about to begin". We KNOW that, since we clicked the download link already!)
But LEGISLATING more "accessibility" is a big shove down the slippery slope of government interference. I think, perhaps, *government* web sites should have certain accessibility standards, depending on their audience. If the blind are still among those who have to deal with the IRS, for example, then I'd expect the IRS web site to accommodate their needs.
On the other hand, if I'm a business selling hi-def televisions, I doubt I have a whole lot of blind customers interested in my product offerings. A blanket law FORCING me to obey rules to make my page friendly to visually impaired customers would be pointless, at best.
One big concern I have with Craigslist is, eBay apparently invested heavily in them already. I used to wonder why they'd possibly see any benefit to dumping a bunch of money into what's essentially a free version of newspaper classifieds. (I mean, Craigslist has pretty much NO mechanism to collect money, and no rating or "feedback" functionality on the site, seemingly making it useless to something like the eBay business model.)
But now I'm wondering if this was a "plan B" for them all along? If eBay goes "sour", they could leverage Craigslist as an alternative? They probably bet, all along, that most of the people who'd defect from eBay over issues like "mandatory PayPal usage" would wind up on Craigslist. They could institute policies of charging monthly subscription fees to post on Craigslist or something - and keep on taking money, even from the people who thought they were dodging them.
I suspect we'll see the economy get a boost whenever the next person is elected President in the U.S. Traditionally, that's been the case, again due to perception much more than reality. (We like to have a scapegoat for our problems. When they're economic in nature, the President tends to be that scapegoat. The fact he's shown the door and someone new comes in is enough to make people believe things "can get better now", even if nothing has really changed yet.)
The "trend" I've observed in the last couple years is one of businesses trying to be more efficient with the employees they keep. Instead of 3 people, they're always asking, "Can we get by with one higher-paid worker who can then be asked to do the work of those 3?" If not, then they ask "Can we do things differently so we don't need to hire a replacement for employee X who is leaving?"
The statistics I saw published a few weeks ago bore that out. Despite the 5.9% unemployment rate shown, it also indicated average pay was UP over last quarter.
I thought it was pretty blatantly obvious by now that George Lucas is out to milk the Star Wars franchise for every dollar he can squeeze from it. This sort of thing would be par for the course, coming from him.
To an extent, that's not even necessarily a "bad thing". One of the moves Lucas made in the beginning which he's often admired/noted for was his shrewdness in securing the rights to royalties on all the toys and products (which Hollywood thought was worthless).
I think the information we're lacking here is the legal contract made between him and the set designer.... If it's clear that Lucas didn't allow the guy to go off and make money duplicating Stormtrooper outfits, then Lucas is in the right to sue him. Otherwise, I'd say he deserves to lose this case.
The thing is, music has ALWAYS been based off mathematical formulas at its core. The "art" really lies in the musician picking and choosing options that work well together to create something pleasing to the ear. (Well, that plus the skill of being proficient in playing an instrument of choice, and/or talent in singing the vocals well.)
I've played with software in the past that promised to build backing tracks "automatically". There's a pretty neat one called "The Jammer Pro", for example, or the more rudimentary "Band in a Box" software.
The thing is, you still have to make musical decisions as to which portions of what they generate you'd like to keep, which you'd like to delete, and which give you some good ideas, but need "tweaking" to make the best use of them.
The Jammer Pro, for example, would let you drag and drop in a "session rock guitarist" for example, and would write electric guitar solos to go along with the chord changes and tempo you specified as the "core" of your song. Some of these were really good! But you had to audition everything it made, and hit "redo" a lot to discard ones that weren't so good, before it came up with something that was a "keeper".
I really don't envision a computer creating perfect "backing tracks" in real-time to any vocals sung into it. It's more like, it'll sometimes/often make "passable" ones, fun for karaoke or practicing -- but not worthy of recording.
I don't know the answer to those questions either. "Does having a gun make me safer, or is it more likely to get me or someone I love killed?" But I'd argue that it doesn't matter, really. What I *do* know is that I wish to live in a nation where I'm legally allowed to make these types of choices for myself.
If you don't feel that it's wise to keep a gun around in your home, then by all means, don't do it!
Regardless, some people out there do some REALLY stupid things. We just had some idiot around here make the national news because he decided it'd be a good idea to use his shotgun in place of a drill to put a hole in his house to run the cabling for his new satellite dish. He wound up shooting and killing his wife in the process.
I have to think people like that will eventually do something equally stupid, even without the gun in the equation.... That's a horrible reason to outlaw guns for everybody.
Where are my mod points when I need them? This is *exactly* right!
The biggest barrier to getting everyone to use encryption, though, is the relative difficulty in configuring it. For example, I'm on a Mac running OS X right now. This is generally regarded as an "easy to use" OS, and one often recommended for people's parents, relatives, etc. Nonetheless, if I want to encrypt my outgoing email using the Mail.app included with the OS, what are my options? So far, the best I can do for my OS X Leopard 10.5 version is a very buggy beta of a freeware hack that adds PGP support using a GNU PGP add-on. I tried this out the other day, and discovered it crashes or fails to properly decrypt any email containing attachments, and requires the PGP key be generated with ANOTHER GNU program I have to download and run - and it, too is a little buggy. (It added a preference pane to my control panel which promptly told me was "non functional" in my version of OS X. Nice.)
If you want things like this to *really* get used by the masses, the support needs to be included with the core applications, and generation of the public and private keys needs to be done through a "wizard" that pops up at first program launch.
I've been playing with encryption programs for at least 10 or 15 years now on computers, and STILL, it seems to be little more than an afterthought for most popular software. Why isn't this made more of a priority by developers??
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/03/03/tim-cook-apple-has-passed-dell-to-the-head-of-the-class
It would seem from THIS story, students in the U.S. are definitely warming up to Mac purchases, contrary to your experience in Europe.
Recent surveys indicate Microsoft's overall regard by college and university students has dropped over 40 points in relation to other, similar businesses since last year. Meanwhile, Apple was ranked #1 as having the most desirable image.
.COM/.BOMB fiasco - survivors included Amazon and eBay. Both of those sites didn't do so bad for themselves, did they?)
Today's college and university students are tomorrow's tech. consumers, so it actually IS important to maintain a good image with them.
Yes, paid corporate blogging and much of this other "Web 2.0" stuff is ultimately going to be shown to be more "fluff" than worthwhile pursuit. Still, sites like MySpace and Facebook are part of this "next generation of web apps", and by all counts, they DO succeed in keeping the attention of the younger computer-using audience. (History repeats itself, folks. Despite the nay-sayers who were USUALLY quite correct about all the stupid e-commerce ideas springing up all over during the
Microsoft just doesn't want to miss out again, if they ignore the wrong trend and it balloons into something huge....
Right now, their image is really tarnished on many fronts, including the "red ring of death" issues with XBox 360's AND the choice of backing the wrong HD technology for DVDs, the whole Vista fiasco, and an overall perception that the latest updates to their products don't offer very much for the money. (I just don't see nearly the level of "excitement" over the Office 2007 release that I remember people having when, say, Office 2000 came out. Most people using it just seem to be doing so because it was bundled with a new computer system purchase, or they needed to buy it to be legal on a new PC that didn't come bundled with it. Many of these people are students who got a huge price break through their school.)
Honestly, I think as much as people liked to bash Microsoft in the past, they often had a love/hate thing going on. It was difficult not to admire Bill Gates for his success, and/or for his willingness to donate to charities. People were really interested to see documentaries showing the inside of his mansion and so on. He generated a certain amount of "buzz" whenever he gave a speech to discuss his views on technology and ideas for the future. But now, Gates has pretty much retired and people like Steve Balmer are the new "figureheads". Who thinks of Balmer and thinks of anything positive?? He's often referred to as "monkey boy" and is best known for throwing chairs.