I've seen time and time again, the more intelligent people shun TV that isn't intellectually "satisfying" to them. When they glamorize the "thug culture", the latest high-dollar fashions, and so forth - most intelligent kids reject the message, because they know there's no way it's compatible with their own lifestyle.
I really don't think we have an issue of a lack of suitable tech workers in America because of MTV, Hollywood, or any other aspect of television media.
There's actually a surprising amount of television that glamorizes science, technology or even math. (Think of the hit TV show "Numbers" for example, or high-tech crime-solving shows like CSI.) And countless people seem to watch the science-related shows on the Discovery channel, or historical information on the History channel.
Most TV caters to the "lowest common denominator" though. (Many bright people still won't turn down a chance to oogle at some sexy dancers on TV, right?) People like whatever they like, and many of the best innovations in the history of computers were put together by people working in a far more "computer/tech hostile" culture than what we've got right now.
I think you're exactly right about AT&T wanting to make sure these units are perceived as capable of being *useful*, vs. very expensive "toy phones".
Most business executives I've seen using a PDA phone aren't real concerned about its capabilities as an input device. They can *call* people back if they have something important to communicate back to them. They simply want to remain in touch with what's going on. Their phone needs to be reliable and basically free of crashes/freezes (Cough, Treo, Cough!). It needs to have a relatively easy-to-read display and easy-to-navigate interface, so it's comfortable to read incoming emails on. Ability to view attachments is critical too. Too much data arrives as a PDF file, a Word or Excel document, or a JPG or TIFF image for that not to work quickly and smoothly.
It seems to me like the iPhone could meet all of these requirements with little problem, really. The "status symbol" factor is icing on the cake.
Right... I think a good bit of what really happens is, people join the ranks of "management", and then they discover that they have more control over their payscale than they ever did before. If you're an engineer for example, the best you can probably hope for is that all of your hard work and willingness to pull long hours when needed gets noticed, so you get a few extra percent when your annual raise comes around. But your pay is still pretty much fixed, based on what *management* has decided the range of pay will be for that position.
Once you're part of management, you can position yourself so your team of people beneath you accomplishes goals that you can then at least partially claim credit for, thereby giving you "easy reasons" for your own pay raise. They do the work, and you share in the reward. Furthermore, you have all these other tools at your disposal (in many cases). You get the say-so in deciding if your team should hire on additional staff, or cut back, or simply stay put with a "hiring freeze". When you dislike an employee's personality, you can make him go away. The rest of the team just has to put up with these problems, or else potentially face disciplinary measures including docking their pay! And of course, you can juggle all the numbers to put yourself in the most positive light possible, to further justify your own pay raise. (The rest of the people working beneath you probably don't even have access to those numbers, much less authority to present them to top-level execs.)
I have a 160GB Passport drive myself, and while it's pretty cool - I do have to caution people about them. If you have an Apple Powerbook G4 aluminum as your notebook, this drive doesn't work with it. Apparently, those Powerbooks didn't provide quite enough power on their USB ports to run these. It will "sort of" spin up but never actually mount on the desktop as a drive ready to use.
I sold my Powerbook G4 15" a while back though, and now use a Macbook Pro, which works with the WD Passport without problems.
I don't see anything naive about realizing that the bottom line is, it's an issue you have to take upon yourself to solve. Like most addictions, you won't truly get over it until a lot of bad things happen in your life as a result of it. (And I fail to see how it should be any other way, really? If your intense interest/obsession with something isn't interfering with the rest of your life in a significant manner, it's questionable to label it a true "addiction" that needs "treatment". Many of the world's most difficult problems are only solved by people with that type of focus and drive.)
We tend to create groups (like Alanon or the "Bets Off" type groups to stop compulsive gambling) only for problems that have no apparent "good side" to them. (Show me anyone who can say their alcohol addiction provided a number of benefits in their life, despite the damage to their health, the loss of their job, and so on.)
Other "addictions" like getting hooked on multi-player online games may provide several benefits to the player that aren't immediately apparent to people not participating in the games. Perhaps they allow a handicapped person to communicate with the "rest of the world" more easily through online chatting? Perhaps it allows teens to make online friends with people of other cultures, from all over the world, who they'd never have reason to start a conversation with otherwise? They're certainly not *physically* addicting like cigarettes or other drugs can be.
I daresay that rather than relying on some "support group" for help in these cases, individuals need to take control of their own lives. It's a shame that it could mean breaking up a marriage over it, but if that's what it takes to force a person to step back and see the "bigger picture" of what their life is all about, I think that's the only true "solution".
I disagree. China did not "get it right" with these new restrictions, at all! (Let's pretend, for a moment, that their motives behind limiting gameplay have NOTHING to do controlling youth who want a "secret place" to communicate freely and disagree with government.)
Even IF their motives were purely "in the best interests of the kids" (yeah, right!), since when is it government's job to interfere in this way? MMOs *are* addictive. No argument from me there! That's one big reason I'm divorced. My ex-wife got WAY too hooked on them and stopped communicating with me, except to drone on about some virtual achievements in the game (until she had to run and take a phone call from someone in her "clan", bugging her to get back online and help them form a raiding party or what-not). It's crazy....
But STILL, I'd be pissed off if our govt. placed some type of legal restriction on the use of this software! When you're a teenager, you have loads of "free time". If you're at least playing a MMO type game vs. some one-on-one console game, you're socially interacting online. And these Internet cafes get youth out of the house, at least. It's the job of *parents* to decide when their kid has done enough gaming for one day, not the government!
And *adults* getting addicted to MMO games? Well, that's your own problem to deal with. MANY things in life can be addicting.
I've seen that same explanation stated several times before when this discussion came up. But the last time I read about it, I believe it was a message thread on HowardForums.com - a site specifically made to discuss cellphone technology. Many users there work in the industry in one capacity or another. One of the guys who claimed he worked on engineering the cell tower infrastructure said that this is really not a true statement. Yes, the phones are designed to communicate with any towers within range. BUT - the cell towers have the ability to handle situations such as a phone suddenly "appearing" on 40 towers at the same time. They have software that knows such things aren't possible in normal cellphone operation at ground level - so it ignores the signals on all but a few towers at a time.
He claimed that in reality, this process doesn't "tax" the towers inordinately at all. The "bandwidth" tied up is no more than a regular call would tie up, since the towers are rejecting the extra instances of the connection to the phone. There's simply a small amount of overhead involved in the towers passing along the information to each other about the status of your connection.
(I believe this type of software also comes into play for handling problems of "cloned" cellphones. If a connection shows up simultaneously on towers that are spread far apart, they know they're dealing with not just 1 legitimate phone, but also a duplicate in service elsewhere.)
It's different because the person with the information chose to publish a discussion of the events via the Internet!
Do you typically go around publishing a written account for the world to see about every little event you witness in daily life? Likely not! I've witnessed car crashes, a couple younger students getting in a fist-fight in front of a school and many other things in just the last few months, and never published stories about ANY of those things.
So in all of these case, it's clear I wouldn't be able to hide behind a claim of being a "journalist" if I was asked to testify about them.
In the age of digital media, how do you expect to define a "journalist", if publishing a blog or web site with your own stories doesn't count? You're only protected if your work is paid for by a large publishing house? Only if it gets printed on paper vs. electronic media?
I call utter bullshit on this! I'd mod you down if I thought that was more constructive than replying, in fact!
In my mind, Josh *is* a hero of a contemporary sort! I agree he was used as a "pawn", but only in government's attempt to railroad citizens into "on demand compliance" with whatever orders they feel like placing. Why is a publisher of a "blog" any less of a "journalist" than another writer? You think the term should be narrowly defined to people who get published only to dead-tree media!? In the digital era, you simply can NOT hold onto those "old guard" ideas and expect them to be successful. See the RIAA or MPAA if you don't believe this. All forms of media are going digital, and that gives automatic legitimacy to the blogger or other web site publisher - whether or not he/she happens to be getting paid by some big corporation for the articles.
If you looked into this situation, you'd see that this was NOT simply about Josh refusing to turn over the videotape. That ended up being a "side issue" strategy for him. He was refusing to *testify* and potentially get questioned on this case. After he spent a few months in jail already for refusing to testify, then it became clear there was no advantage to turning over the videotape. They'd simply keep in him prison even LONGER once they got it, thinking they were slowly forcing him to comply with everything they asked for.
Every time a "Josh" comes along and is willing to stand up for what he believes in, even to the point of imprisonment, it chips away a little bit further at government's willingness to walk all over the laws of the land to get their way. (Why worry about what's Constitutional or "legal" if you can intimidate people into compliance and not get challenged on it in court, right?)
Sure, most I.T. workers are on salary... but even the "tightest" company has to realize that you can only ask people to work so much overtime before they become disgruntled and quit. (And often, before it even goes that far, they become extremely unproductive, because they're upset with the working conditions - and do their best to slack off, to compensate for the long hours they're expected to pull.)
There's really no such thing as "free productivity". Even if it's "standard practice" to squeeze 10 hour days from your salaried workers vs. 8 hour days, those 2 extra hours you demand from each of them is getting chewed away at by unproductive things (like a user shuffling around windows and constantly resizing things, due to lack of monitor screen space), if you don't address those problems and correct them.
When I bought my Mac Mini, the highest-end CPU option was a 1.42Ghz G4 processor. Not exactly "cutting edge performance" or anything. The Core Duo in current models is a big improvement, but also brings a higher price-tag with it.
And I'd say "Good thing the Mini supports Apple's 23" HD display, because other 21"+ LCD panels featuring rotation capabilities *really* suck on a Mac Mini when you rotate it to landscape mode. The built-in video was so slow dealing with a rotated display, even scrolling down on a web page in Safari had noticeable lag!"
I don't know. Just this morning, I talked to a woman where I work who just went out and plunked down $1500 for a high-end new PC. (She said her old PC was 6-7 years old and pretty much done for, so she wanted something good that would last.) She was so disgusted at Vista's lack of support for her printer and scanner she wanted to re-use, she returned the whole system the next evening!
The number of people "planning to buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed" may not quite equal the number who stick with it after they try it!
I agree about the Mini being crippled by its graphics processor. Otherwise, I don't think it's a bad little machine. I bought one to play with it when it first came out, and it was adequate for your basic web surfing, emailing, and Microsoft Office type tasks. It ran Quicken and/or Quickbooks without a big problem, and ran the little games from companies like Popcap just fine. The main purpose for it was really just to offer an entry-level Mac that let Windows users buy it as a second computer to experience OS X. It also serves a niche market of hobbyists who want them to install in their cars, as home media center boxes, and so on.
I think the iMac also serves its marketplace pretty well. There seems to be a lot of resistance to purchasing one, simply because people have a mindset that an "all in one" computer + display is an outdated concept. Truthfully though, the iMac is *ideal* for many home and small office users, because lack of space is a big problem for them. It eliminates the extra clutter of another power cord, a VGA display cable, and audio cable to go to a display's built-in speakers. And the often cited lack of "expandability"? I used to think that way too, until I realized (when I bought my first PowerMac G4 tower), there's practically nothing you need to put in an expansion card slot on a Mac anyway. You *could* add something like additional USB or firewire ports with a card, but why not just do that with a hub instead? As LANs get more common in households, the worries about packing a system full of hard drive space disappear too. (The future is all about network storage. Even Microsoft has a stand-alone "home server" appliance coming out later this year that will do this for people in a nearly "plug and play" way.)
I don't think Apple will re-release "The Cube" because the Mac Mini was probably the future of that product line. I would like to see some sort of Mac Mini-Tower though. I'm thinking it would be a small version of a Mac Pro with, perhaps, a Core 2 Duo CPU powering it, and would use the same graphics cards as a Mac Pro.
I won't mod you down for your opinion, but are you SURE you aren't a Microsoft stockholder or anything?
I played with Vista since the beta releases, and while it looks pretty - I still prefer XP on my machines. It DOES offer quite a few new features, but many aren't ones I feel a huge need for. EG. It has a nice feature to automatically back up the computer. Ok, but it only works for that specific PC. Microsoft's new "Home Server" product coming out 2nd. half of 2007 will automatically back up ALL the PCs on a LAN - which sounds FAR more useful to me. In the meantime, I just selectively back up my important *documents* to CDR or DVDR, and don't worry about the rest. By the time I suffer from a major drive crash and have to restore everything, I'm usually better off using it as an opportunity to start with a fresh new OS install (no registry clutter, etc.) and just restore the needed data afterwards.
The new toolbar features make my desktop feel a little "cluttered" too. I prefer OS X's dashboard, where they're only on-screen when you bring them forward temporarily, right on top of everything else.
When you couple all of that with the "early adopter" pains Vista brings people (poor support for many games, some driver support still lacking for devices, etc.) - it doesn't seem like it makes sense to use it yet.
To be fair, this comes up with EVERY new OS release from Microsoft. I remember a BUNCH of people saying they saw little or no reason to move from Windows 2000 to XP - because XP was "just a bunch of eye candy, including that ugly new Teletubbies wallpaper background". But soon, people changed their mind to a stance of "XP runs faster than 2000 on my same hardware!", and embraced the improved wi-fi support and much more.
I think you're exactly right on this. I, too, watched Serenity before watching any of the Firefly episodes. (Actually, I got a copy of almost all of them from a friend of mine, but only had time to look at about 5 minutes of one or two of them.) I assumed Serenity would be fine to watch first, being a full-length movie for the masses and all. (You'd THINK a movie would provide some summary of events leading up to wherever they started their story at, etc.) But the Serenity movie really didn't. They just jumped right in with this odd cast of characters I felt like I was supposed to appreciate based on their strong personalities alone. And all I got from it, 15-20 minutes into the movie, was there's a BUNCH of violence and bickering going on.
I got bored and turned it off. Knowing all the hype about Firefly, I even gave this movie a second chance. I tried to watch my rented DVD again, and even on the second try, I was distracted by a phone call and decided it was more interesting talking to my friend on the phone than coming back to the movie....
Very unusual, considering I love good sci-fi. So I'd say yes, Serenity was a MISERABLE failure in its ability to draw in a new audience with no knowledge of the TV series that came before it.
Makes perfect sense to me, in the "big picture" scheme of things. As another poster said, Jobs isn't stupid. This price increase is at just the right price-point to where it doesn't seem like you're paying "a lot more" for these DRM-free, higher-bitrate tracks, yet it's a significant enough increase to potentially give a big boost to EMI's sales figures of purchases made from the iTunes store. Give this a little while, and then watch as analysts start comparing the relative quarterly profits of EMI vs. the other record labels selling on iTunes who still embrace DRM.
It's going to be a powerful incentive for others to switch when they look at the dollar figures and say "Woah! EMI is kicking our butt in sales!"
I can tell you that I came from the same outlook it sounds like you have, and I've completely changed my tone in recent years. I used to *love* building my own PCs, and wouldn't even consider anything pre-built. I wanted to configure a system *my* way, and make sure I had all top-quality components in it, etc. etc.
But after being in this industry for well over a decade, I find myself not really having the time or patience to mess around with some home-built "mutt" of a computer. For example, the last time I considered upgrading my Athlon-based PC, I realized that I was looking at a whole new motherboard (so it could handle the newer CPUs), a new video card (since AGP was on the way out), new memory, and a new power supply that could handle the larger power requirements. Oh, and they were moving to SATA for hard drives too, so I'd only have one IDE port if I wanted to keep my EIDE drives. At this point, you're not re-using anything except maybe the case itself and a floppy drive if you "upgrade".
Instead of starting over totally from scratch, running around buying or ordering all those parts... I bought a Mac Pro. Runs Windows and OS X beautifully, and best of all, it's really well constructed. Nicer case than I'd have if I built my own and quieter too. 1000 watt power supply, removable hard drive trays, easy access to memory slots on riser cards, etc. etc. Yeah, it was expensive, but not bad compared to a comparable quad Xeon workstation from any other vendor. And it saved me a BUNCH of time and hassle doing the system building and setup. Warranty issues? One central place to take care of the whole thing.
I won't even try to argue that Apple *doesn't* have a percentage of customers who will "buy anything they build". Of course they do. But show me ONE successful company who doesn't! As both a Mac and a PC user myself, I find this accusation really tiresome. I know people who will only buy Ford cars and trucks, refusing to even look at what else is out there. I know people who have all Maytag branded appliances, again, just because of their belief that the company can "do no wrong" compared to the competition.
I think, in reality, *most* people you see who own multiple Apple products do so because they were impressed with the first one, and saw the benefits of owning hardware that inter-operates well. (The "bonjour" sharing capabilities of OS X on a LAN can't be fully realized if you only own one OS X based Mac, for example.)
And in fact, Mac fans seem to be quite preoccupied with building and arguing over lists of the "top 10" or "top 20" worst Apple products of all time. Even the biggest Mac zealots will usually admit that Apple's Performa 6x00 line in the 90's was garbage, for example.
That's one opinion, but you don't have a way of knowing exactly what these bands are doing with their money either. Who says R.E.M. isn't spending a good bit of money on other charitable causes and interests? Maybe they are, and maybe they're not. But it's certainly possible.
Quite a few bands were hugely successful for years, only to become completely irrelevant if they stopped putting out material and decided to live off their past success. Maybe R.E.M. and others like them feel that they need to keep putting out new singles and albums, because they can do more good with a constant revenue stream coming in than if they call it quits?
I agree that it might be a nice gesture for successful major-label bands to all dump their labels and go independent. But in the grand scheme of things, that might not really mean a lot anyway. The really *critical* change happens when the new, up-and-coming bands succeed despite never signing with those big labels!
I was, indeed, still thinking of the original XBox. Now that you point it out, I *do* recall reading that the 360 was going to the PPC architecture... but the fact just didn't stick in my head, I guess.
In any case, I still can't help but view it as more like a standard PC than the competition. Perhaps that's partially because Microsoft manufactures them, and tends to only release game title that are "PC like" for it? But you're still getting a little more "exotic" hardware out of a PS3 purchase (blue-ray drive and all).
As a long-time PC gamer, I can't bring myself to buy an XBox 360 at all. Every time I look at one, I'm reminded that under the fancy plastic casing, it's just a rather non-upgradeable PC inside. There's *never* going to be a single piece of software developed for XBox 360 that can't run identically on a modern PC, because they're using the same architecture. (Of course, the modern PC could very well have a *superior* video card and more RAM....)
I did, however, buy a PS3 - because the hardware is different. A Blue-Ray drive is something I didn't own yet on any of my hardware, for one thing. And the PowerPC cell architecture is sufficiently different from any PC or Mac I own to make me feel like I'm not just buying the same old thing again, repackaged in a different shell.
I agree that PS3 content is sorely lacking right now - but it sounds like Sony is taking a pretty long-term view for the PS3 consoles. The last line of their quote in the original article commented on the "value" of buying a PS3 that you'd keep "for the next 10 years". Sure, some of that is just marketing-speak, but it also indicates they envision the PS3 as hardware that will be around for a while.
I wouldn't say the ports of XBox games for PS3 are "pathetic" though. NHL Hockey '07 was highly rated in every online review I saw. I bought it and I'm impressed with it too. Same with Tiger Woods golf. You're certainly not seeing evidence that it's a "poor" port. Runs every bit as well as the 360 version.
I completely disagree! If you have a stuck keyboard issue, it's such a basic problem, you can often diagnose it from the syatem's BIOS screen, before an OS boots at all! (You have to press arrow keys to move around the BIOS selections, and can typically key in numbers for the time/date info. Page Up/Page Down or + and - keys often come into play there too.)
If your stuck key(s) happen to be keys that aren't used anyplace in the BIOS setup screens, then you could do something as simple as booting from a bootable MS-DOS floppy disk and trying to type from the A:> prompt. Failing even that, most PCs sold today have some sort of bootable CD or DVD that allows reinstalling the original OS. Instead of going far enough to wipe out your Linux installation, you should be able to boot one of those just far enough to allow some typing in it - thereby proving your issue is NOT Linux-related.
The demand that a user wipe their whole drive and restore to the originally shipped OS is entirely due to support reps lacking troubleshooting skills, common sense, and/or being forced to follow strict sequences of troubleshooting rules (disregarding their own skills and ability to problem-solve on their own).
I agree. This is an issue that will eventually be corrected in a service pack. (Pretty much anything that starts out in hotfixes ends up in a service pack.) It's not like this is going to be a permanent problem/curse of using Vista.
BUT - the big reason I see for pointing it out to the "general Vista using public" is to make people more aware of the added complexity and potential headaches DRM brings to the table. Until manufacturers give up on the idea of protecting digital content through DRM measures, we're going to keep running into incompatibility problems, performance issues, and other nasty side-effects in the products we use.
Hey, Monster Cables have a huge market too. Mostly from people's word of mouth that "I'm telling ya, it really sounds better with these gold-plated connections!"
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I've seen time and time again, the more intelligent people shun TV that isn't intellectually "satisfying" to them. When they glamorize the "thug culture", the latest high-dollar fashions, and so forth - most intelligent kids reject the message, because they know there's no way it's compatible with their own lifestyle.
I really don't think we have an issue of a lack of suitable tech workers in America because of MTV, Hollywood, or any other aspect of television media.
There's actually a surprising amount of television that glamorizes science, technology or even math. (Think of the hit TV show "Numbers" for example, or high-tech crime-solving shows like CSI.) And countless people seem to watch the science-related shows on the Discovery channel, or historical information on the History channel.
Most TV caters to the "lowest common denominator" though. (Many bright people still won't turn down a chance to oogle at some sexy dancers on TV, right?) People like whatever they like, and many of the best innovations in the history of computers were put together by people working in a far more "computer/tech hostile" culture than what we've got right now.
I think you're exactly right about AT&T wanting to make sure these units are perceived as capable of being *useful*, vs. very expensive "toy phones".
Most business executives I've seen using a PDA phone aren't real concerned about its capabilities as an input device. They can *call* people back if they have something important to communicate back to them. They simply want to remain in touch with what's going on. Their phone needs to be reliable and basically free of crashes/freezes (Cough, Treo, Cough!). It needs to have a relatively easy-to-read display and easy-to-navigate interface, so it's comfortable to read incoming emails on. Ability to view attachments is critical too. Too much data arrives as a PDF file, a Word or Excel document, or a JPG or TIFF image for that not to work quickly and smoothly.
It seems to me like the iPhone could meet all of these requirements with little problem, really. The "status symbol" factor is icing on the cake.
Right... I think a good bit of what really happens is, people join the ranks of "management", and then they discover that they have more control over their payscale than they ever did before. If you're an engineer for example, the best you can probably hope for is that all of your hard work and willingness to pull long hours when needed gets noticed, so you get a few extra percent when your annual raise comes around. But your pay is still pretty much fixed, based on what *management* has decided the range of pay will be for that position.
Once you're part of management, you can position yourself so your team of people beneath you accomplishes goals that you can then at least partially claim credit for, thereby giving you "easy reasons" for your own pay raise. They do the work, and you share in the reward. Furthermore, you have all these other tools at your disposal (in many cases). You get the say-so in deciding if your team should hire on additional staff, or cut back, or simply stay put with a "hiring freeze". When you dislike an employee's personality, you can make him go away. The rest of the team just has to put up with these problems, or else potentially face disciplinary measures including docking their pay! And of course, you can juggle all the numbers to put yourself in the most positive light possible, to further justify your own pay raise. (The rest of the people working beneath you probably don't even have access to those numbers, much less authority to present them to top-level execs.)
I have a 160GB Passport drive myself, and while it's pretty cool - I do have to caution people about them. If you have an Apple Powerbook G4 aluminum as your notebook, this drive doesn't work with it. Apparently, those Powerbooks didn't provide quite enough power on their USB ports to run these. It will "sort of" spin up but never actually mount on the desktop as a drive ready to use.
I sold my Powerbook G4 15" a while back though, and now use a Macbook Pro, which works with the WD Passport without problems.
I don't see anything naive about realizing that the bottom line is, it's an issue you have to take upon yourself to solve. Like most addictions, you won't truly get over it until a lot of bad things happen in your life as a result of it. (And I fail to see how it should be any other way, really? If your intense interest/obsession with something isn't interfering with the rest of your life in a significant manner, it's questionable to label it a true "addiction" that needs "treatment". Many of the world's most difficult problems are only solved by people with that type of focus and drive.)
We tend to create groups (like Alanon or the "Bets Off" type groups to stop compulsive gambling) only for problems that have no apparent "good side" to them. (Show me anyone who can say their alcohol addiction provided a number of benefits in their life, despite the damage to their health, the loss of their job, and so on.)
Other "addictions" like getting hooked on multi-player online games may provide several benefits to the player that aren't immediately apparent to people not participating in the games. Perhaps they allow a handicapped person to communicate with the "rest of the world" more easily through online chatting? Perhaps it allows teens to make online friends with people of other cultures, from all over the world, who they'd never have reason to start a conversation with otherwise? They're certainly not *physically* addicting like cigarettes or other drugs can be.
I daresay that rather than relying on some "support group" for help in these cases, individuals need to take control of their own lives. It's a shame that it could mean breaking up a marriage over it, but if that's what it takes to force a person to step back and see the "bigger picture" of what their life is all about, I think that's the only true "solution".
I disagree. China did not "get it right" with these new restrictions, at all! (Let's pretend, for a moment, that their motives behind limiting gameplay have NOTHING to do controlling youth who want a "secret place" to communicate freely and disagree with government.)
Even IF their motives were purely "in the best interests of the kids" (yeah, right!), since when is it government's job to interfere in this way? MMOs *are* addictive. No argument from me there! That's one big reason I'm divorced. My ex-wife got WAY too hooked on them and stopped communicating with me, except to drone on about some virtual achievements in the game (until she had to run and take a phone call from someone in her "clan", bugging her to get back online and help them form a raiding party or what-not). It's crazy....
But STILL, I'd be pissed off if our govt. placed some type of legal restriction on the use of this software! When you're a teenager, you have loads of "free time". If you're at least playing a MMO type game vs. some one-on-one console game, you're socially interacting online. And these Internet cafes get youth out of the house, at least. It's the job of *parents* to decide when their kid has done enough gaming for one day, not the government!
And *adults* getting addicted to MMO games? Well, that's your own problem to deal with. MANY things in life can be addicting.
I've seen that same explanation stated several times before when this discussion came up. But the last time I read about it, I believe it was a message thread on HowardForums.com - a site specifically made to discuss cellphone technology. Many users there work in the industry in one capacity or another. One of the guys who claimed he worked on engineering the cell tower infrastructure said that this is really not a true statement. Yes, the phones are designed to communicate with any towers within range. BUT - the cell towers have the ability to handle situations such as a phone suddenly "appearing" on 40 towers at the same time. They have software that knows such things aren't possible in normal cellphone operation at ground level - so it ignores the signals on all but a few towers at a time.
He claimed that in reality, this process doesn't "tax" the towers inordinately at all. The "bandwidth" tied up is no more than a regular call would tie up, since the towers are rejecting the extra instances of the connection to the phone. There's simply a small amount of overhead involved in the towers passing along the information to each other about the status of your connection.
(I believe this type of software also comes into play for handling problems of "cloned" cellphones. If a connection shows up simultaneously on towers that are spread far apart, they know they're dealing with not just 1 legitimate phone, but also a duplicate in service elsewhere.)
It's different because the person with the information chose to publish a discussion of the events via the Internet!
Do you typically go around publishing a written account for the world to see about every little event you witness in daily life? Likely not! I've witnessed car crashes, a couple younger students getting in a fist-fight in front of a school and many other things in just the last few months, and never published stories about ANY of those things.
So in all of these case, it's clear I wouldn't be able to hide behind a claim of being a "journalist" if I was asked to testify about them.
In the age of digital media, how do you expect to define a "journalist", if publishing a blog or web site with your own stories doesn't count? You're only protected if your work is paid for by a large publishing house? Only if it gets printed on paper vs. electronic media?
I call utter bullshit on this! I'd mod you down if I thought that was more constructive than replying, in fact!
In my mind, Josh *is* a hero of a contemporary sort! I agree he was used as a "pawn", but only in government's attempt to railroad citizens into "on demand compliance" with whatever orders they feel like placing.
Why is a publisher of a "blog" any less of a "journalist" than another writer? You think the term should be narrowly defined to people who get published only to dead-tree media!? In the digital era, you simply can NOT hold onto those "old guard" ideas and expect them to be successful. See the RIAA or MPAA if you don't believe this. All forms of media are going digital, and that gives automatic legitimacy to the blogger or other web site publisher - whether or not he/she happens to be getting paid by some big corporation for the articles.
If you looked into this situation, you'd see that this was NOT simply about Josh refusing to turn over the videotape. That ended up being a "side issue" strategy for him. He was refusing to *testify* and potentially get questioned on this case. After he spent a few months in jail already for refusing to testify, then it became clear there was no advantage to turning over the videotape. They'd simply keep in him prison even LONGER once they got it, thinking they were slowly forcing him to comply with everything they asked for.
Every time a "Josh" comes along and is willing to stand up for what he believes in, even to the point of imprisonment, it chips away a little bit further at government's willingness to walk all over the laws of the land to get their way. (Why worry about what's Constitutional or "legal" if you can intimidate people into compliance and not get challenged on it in court, right?)
Sure, most I.T. workers are on salary ... but even the "tightest" company has to realize that you can only ask people to work so much overtime before they become disgruntled and quit. (And often, before it even goes that far, they become extremely unproductive, because they're upset with the working conditions - and do their best to slack off, to compensate for the long hours they're expected to pull.)
There's really no such thing as "free productivity". Even if it's "standard practice" to squeeze 10 hour days from your salaried workers vs. 8 hour days, those 2 extra hours you demand from each of them is getting chewed away at by unproductive things (like a user shuffling around windows and constantly resizing things, due to lack of monitor screen space), if you don't address those problems and correct them.
And considering it's a Pontiac Trans-Am, it should, in fact, depreciate in value at a frightening pace!
When I bought my Mac Mini, the highest-end CPU option was a 1.42Ghz G4 processor. Not exactly "cutting edge performance" or anything. The Core Duo in current models is a big improvement, but also brings a higher price-tag with it.
And I'd say "Good thing the Mini supports Apple's 23" HD display, because other 21"+ LCD panels featuring rotation capabilities *really* suck on a Mac Mini when you rotate it to landscape mode. The built-in video was so slow dealing with a rotated display, even scrolling down on a web page in Safari had noticeable lag!"
I don't know. Just this morning, I talked to a woman where I work who just went out and plunked down $1500 for a high-end new PC. (She said her old PC was 6-7 years old and pretty much done for, so she wanted something good that would last.) She was so disgusted at Vista's lack of support for her printer and scanner she wanted to re-use, she returned the whole system the next evening!
The number of people "planning to buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed" may not quite equal the number who stick with it after they try it!
I agree about the Mini being crippled by its graphics processor. Otherwise, I don't think it's a bad little machine. I bought one to play with it when it first came out, and it was adequate for your basic web surfing, emailing, and Microsoft Office type tasks. It ran Quicken and/or Quickbooks without a big problem, and ran the little games from companies like Popcap just fine. The main purpose for it was really just to offer an entry-level Mac that let Windows users buy it as a second computer to experience OS X. It also serves a niche market of hobbyists who want them to install in their cars, as home media center boxes, and so on.
I think the iMac also serves its marketplace pretty well. There seems to be a lot of resistance to purchasing one, simply because people have a mindset that an "all in one" computer + display is an outdated concept. Truthfully though, the iMac is *ideal* for many home and small office users, because lack of space is a big problem for them. It eliminates the extra clutter of another power cord, a VGA display cable, and audio cable to go to a display's built-in speakers. And the often cited lack of "expandability"? I used to think that way too, until I realized (when I bought my first PowerMac G4 tower), there's practically nothing you need to put in an expansion card slot on a Mac anyway. You *could* add something like additional USB or firewire ports with a card, but why not just do that with a hub instead? As LANs get more common in households, the worries about packing a system full of hard drive space disappear too. (The future is all about network storage. Even Microsoft has a stand-alone "home server" appliance coming out later this year that will do this for people in a nearly "plug and play" way.)
I don't think Apple will re-release "The Cube" because the Mac Mini was probably the future of that product line. I would like to see some sort of Mac Mini-Tower though. I'm thinking it would be a small version of a Mac Pro with, perhaps, a Core 2 Duo CPU powering it, and would use the same graphics cards as a Mac Pro.
I won't mod you down for your opinion, but are you SURE you aren't a Microsoft stockholder or anything?
I played with Vista since the beta releases, and while it looks pretty - I still prefer XP on my machines. It DOES offer quite a few new features, but many aren't ones I feel a huge need for. EG. It has a nice feature to automatically back up the computer. Ok, but it only works for that specific PC. Microsoft's new "Home Server" product coming out 2nd. half of 2007 will automatically back up ALL the PCs on a LAN - which sounds FAR more useful to me. In the meantime, I just selectively back up my important *documents* to CDR or DVDR, and don't worry about the rest. By the time I suffer from a major drive crash and have to restore everything, I'm usually better off using it as an opportunity to start with a fresh new OS install (no registry clutter, etc.) and just restore the needed data afterwards.
The new toolbar features make my desktop feel a little "cluttered" too. I prefer OS X's dashboard, where they're only on-screen when you bring them forward temporarily, right on top of everything else.
When you couple all of that with the "early adopter" pains Vista brings people (poor support for many games, some driver support still lacking for devices, etc.) - it doesn't seem like it makes sense to use it yet.
To be fair, this comes up with EVERY new OS release from Microsoft. I remember a BUNCH of people saying they saw little or no reason to move from Windows 2000 to XP - because XP was "just a bunch of eye candy, including that ugly new Teletubbies wallpaper background". But soon, people changed their mind to a stance of "XP runs faster than 2000 on my same hardware!", and embraced the improved wi-fi support and much more.
I think you're exactly right on this. I, too, watched Serenity before watching any of the Firefly episodes. (Actually, I got a copy of almost all of them from a friend of mine, but only had time to look at about 5 minutes of one or two of them.) I assumed Serenity would be fine to watch first, being a full-length movie for the masses and all. (You'd THINK a movie would provide some summary of events leading up to wherever they started their story at, etc.) But the Serenity movie really didn't. They just jumped right in with this odd cast of characters I felt like I was supposed to appreciate based on their strong personalities alone. And all I got from it, 15-20 minutes into the movie, was there's a BUNCH of violence and bickering going on.
I got bored and turned it off. Knowing all the hype about Firefly, I even gave this movie a second chance. I tried to watch my rented DVD again, and even on the second try, I was distracted by a phone call and decided it was more interesting talking to my friend on the phone than coming back to the movie....
Very unusual, considering I love good sci-fi. So I'd say yes, Serenity was a MISERABLE failure in its ability to draw in a new audience with no knowledge of the TV series that came before it.
Makes perfect sense to me, in the "big picture" scheme of things. As another poster said, Jobs isn't stupid. This price increase is at just the right price-point to where it doesn't seem like you're paying "a lot more" for these DRM-free, higher-bitrate tracks, yet it's a significant enough increase to potentially give a big boost to EMI's sales figures of purchases made from the iTunes store. Give this a little while, and then watch as analysts start comparing the relative quarterly profits of EMI vs. the other record labels selling on iTunes who still embrace DRM.
It's going to be a powerful incentive for others to switch when they look at the dollar figures and say "Woah! EMI is kicking our butt in sales!"
I can tell you that I came from the same outlook it sounds like you have, and I've completely changed my tone in recent years. I used to *love* building my own PCs, and wouldn't even consider anything pre-built. I wanted to configure a system *my* way, and make sure I had all top-quality components in it, etc. etc.
... I bought a Mac Pro. Runs Windows and OS X beautifully, and best of all, it's really well constructed. Nicer case than I'd have if I built my own and quieter too. 1000 watt power supply, removable hard drive trays, easy access to memory slots on riser cards, etc. etc. Yeah, it was expensive, but not bad compared to a comparable quad Xeon workstation from any other vendor. And it saved me a BUNCH of time and hassle doing the system building and setup. Warranty issues? One central place to take care of the whole thing.
But after being in this industry for well over a decade, I find myself not really having the time or patience to mess around with some home-built "mutt" of a computer. For example, the last time I considered upgrading my Athlon-based PC, I realized that I was looking at a whole new motherboard (so it could handle the newer CPUs), a new video card (since AGP was on the way out), new memory, and a new power supply that could handle the larger power requirements. Oh, and they were moving to SATA for hard drives too, so I'd only have one IDE port if I wanted to keep my EIDE drives. At this point, you're not re-using anything except maybe the case itself and a floppy drive if you "upgrade".
Instead of starting over totally from scratch, running around buying or ordering all those parts
I won't even try to argue that Apple *doesn't* have a percentage of customers who will "buy anything they build". Of course they do. But show me ONE successful company who doesn't! As both a Mac and a PC user myself, I find this accusation really tiresome. I know people who will only buy Ford cars and trucks, refusing to even look at what else is out there. I know people who have all Maytag branded appliances, again, just because of their belief that the company can "do no wrong" compared to the competition.
I think, in reality, *most* people you see who own multiple Apple products do so because they were impressed with the first one, and saw the benefits of owning hardware that inter-operates well. (The "bonjour" sharing capabilities of OS X on a LAN can't be fully realized if you only own one OS X based Mac, for example.)
And in fact, Mac fans seem to be quite preoccupied with building and arguing over lists of the "top 10" or "top 20" worst Apple products of all time. Even the biggest Mac zealots will usually admit that Apple's Performa 6x00 line in the 90's was garbage, for example.
That's one opinion, but you don't have a way of knowing exactly what these bands are doing with their money either. Who says R.E.M. isn't spending a good bit of money on other charitable causes and interests? Maybe they are, and maybe they're not. But it's certainly possible.
Quite a few bands were hugely successful for years, only to become completely irrelevant if they stopped putting out material and decided to live off their past success. Maybe R.E.M. and others like them feel that they need to keep putting out new singles and albums, because they can do more good with a constant revenue stream coming in than if they call it quits?
I agree that it might be a nice gesture for successful major-label bands to all dump their labels and go independent. But in the grand scheme of things, that might not really mean a lot anyway. The really *critical* change happens when the new, up-and-coming bands succeed despite never signing with those big labels!
I was, indeed, still thinking of the original XBox. Now that you point it out, I *do* recall reading that the 360 was going to the PPC architecture ... but the fact just didn't stick in my head, I guess.
In any case, I still can't help but view it as more like a standard PC than the competition. Perhaps that's partially because Microsoft manufactures them, and tends to only release game title that are "PC like" for it? But you're still getting a little more "exotic" hardware out of a PS3 purchase (blue-ray drive and all).
As a long-time PC gamer, I can't bring myself to buy an XBox 360 at all. Every time I look at one, I'm reminded that under the fancy plastic casing, it's just a rather non-upgradeable PC inside. There's *never* going to be a single piece of software developed for XBox 360 that can't run identically on a modern PC, because they're using the same architecture. (Of course, the modern PC could very well have a *superior* video card and more RAM....)
I did, however, buy a PS3 - because the hardware is different. A Blue-Ray drive is something I didn't own yet on any of my hardware, for one thing. And the PowerPC cell architecture is sufficiently different from any PC or Mac I own to make me feel like I'm not just buying the same old thing again, repackaged in a different shell.
I agree that PS3 content is sorely lacking right now - but it sounds like Sony is taking a pretty long-term view for the PS3 consoles. The last line of their quote in the original article commented on the "value" of buying a PS3 that you'd keep "for the next 10 years". Sure, some of that is just marketing-speak, but it also indicates they envision the PS3 as hardware that will be around for a while.
I wouldn't say the ports of XBox games for PS3 are "pathetic" though. NHL Hockey '07 was highly rated in every online review I saw. I bought it and I'm impressed with it too. Same with Tiger Woods golf. You're certainly not seeing evidence that it's a "poor" port. Runs every bit as well as the 360 version.
I completely disagree! If you have a stuck keyboard issue, it's such a basic problem, you can often diagnose it from the syatem's BIOS screen, before an OS boots at all! (You have to press arrow keys to move around the BIOS selections, and can typically key in numbers for the time/date info. Page Up/Page Down or + and - keys often come into play there too.)
If your stuck key(s) happen to be keys that aren't used anyplace in the BIOS setup screens, then you could do something as simple as booting from a bootable MS-DOS floppy disk and trying to type from the A:> prompt. Failing even that, most PCs sold today have some sort of bootable CD or DVD that allows reinstalling the original OS. Instead of going far enough to wipe out your Linux installation, you should be able to boot one of those just far enough to allow some typing in it - thereby proving your issue is NOT Linux-related.
The demand that a user wipe their whole drive and restore to the originally shipped OS is entirely due to support reps lacking troubleshooting skills, common sense, and/or being forced to follow strict sequences of troubleshooting rules (disregarding their own skills and ability to problem-solve on their own).
I agree. This is an issue that will eventually be corrected in a service pack. (Pretty much anything that starts out in hotfixes ends up in a service pack.) It's not like this is going to be a permanent problem/curse of using Vista.
BUT - the big reason I see for pointing it out to the "general Vista using public" is to make people more aware of the added complexity and potential headaches DRM brings to the table. Until manufacturers give up on the idea of protecting digital content through DRM measures, we're going to keep running into incompatibility problems, performance issues, and other nasty side-effects in the products we use.
Hey, Monster Cables have a huge market too. Mostly from people's word of mouth that "I'm telling ya, it really sounds better with these gold-plated connections!"