Ok, at this point, maybe it's not even worth replying - except I'm at a loss here.... You're saying my "list of expensive and time consuming ways to get music" included such "costly" things as checking out music for FREE from a local library, or listening to someone's live piano performance when you're out in public someplace?
If you ask me, the only insulting thing is making the assumption that people aren't capable of exploring any new options for music unless the mainstream radio stations start playing it for them.
If this were true, you wouldn't see ANY interest in obscure music! All I'm saying is, lots of people are comfortable listening to a narrow range of music that caught their fancy, and they're not really motivated to try to acquire a taste for anything else. The Internet-based music models are teriffic for people who DO want to explore new avenues of music, and I *agree* that this scares the "old world" institutions like the RIAA. But as a general rule, I think far more people are content to listen to a small subset of what's available - and that's why commercial radio keeps working with such narrow ranges of music. Practically all the radio stations play little sound-bites of callers raving about how much they love them. Do you think all of those are just staged/faked?
I agree with your comments about music-sharing services on the net destroying the RIAA's business model.... but I don't think I can agree with some of what you're saying. For starters, I don't think it's at all "insulting" to analyze the situation the way I have. It's not really an issue of people being totally "unexposed" to anything but what the big radio stations (and presumably the RIAA by extension?) want them to hear.
People have *many* opportunities to explore and hear all sorts of music. If they stay locked into a very narrow view of what's "good", that's by their own choice. For example, I don't need a local radio station to play classical music in order to develop an appreciation for it. I could go to the symphony hall and hear it performed live, if I liked, or I could get my hands on any number of records, tapes, CDs or DVDs of classical performances. Even my public library lets me check them out for free. I've even heard it played on piano a fair number of times over dinner at various nicer restaurants in town.
It's also not really a fair comparison, in my opinion, to compare video rentals to music listening habits. People who are avid enough of movie watchers to consider signing up with a service like Netflix are already more likely than average to explore a wide range of films. Hollywood only puts out so many films at a time. (On average, you have what? Maybe 2-3 new DVD releases per week?) People who watch movies on a regular basis often watch as many as 2 or 3 movies over just one weekend, and maybe a few more during the week. They easily "burn through" watching whatever the latest, hyped-up new releases are - and have to seek out other material.
With music, people also listen to the same songs over and over if they like them. Far fewer people watch the same movies over and over. (Even people who buy movies on DVD as opposed to renting them for a night or two usually just enjoy having them in their personal collections for the sake of collecting. They take pride in having a nice selection for their friends to borrow or view when they come over more than owning them for many repeat viewings themselves.)
Yeah, except the unfortunate reality seems to be, the "general public" doesn't seem to REALLY want as much variety as they pay lip-service to wanting.
Don't believe me? Try a little experiment sometime. Ask someone if they're "tired of hearing the same old music over and over" on the radio. 10 to 1 says they'll say "Hell yeah!" Then, ask them if they can name 20 or 30 bands (or even songs!) that they wish their favorite station would add to their playlist.
My guess is, most people will be able to name maybe 3-5 and then draw a blank... or else their list will consist of music very similar to what's already being played. (In some cases, they'll name a lot of songs or artists that the station already played in the past, but just sort of let slide off their playlist in recent years due to dwindling popularity.)
We had a classic rock station here in town that did something pretty unique... They turned control over to the DJs to play *anything* they wanted to play, as long as it fit in the overall format. (Basically, it was a last ditch attempt by management to turn the station around, since they were getting killed in ratings by a long-standing classic rock competitor just past them on the FM dial.) They started playing a LOT of obscure stuff, including stacks of old LPs that one of the DJs said he was bringing in from his large personal record collection, and from albums dug out of his parents' attic. Within a year or so, they were bought out and now they play mainstream country music. People just didn't stay tuned-in when they flipped through stations and heard totally unfamiliar music.
By contrast, we've got a hip-hop station here that I swear only plays, at most, 10 different songs at a time. Nonetheless, a LOT of people have that garbage cranked up on their car and home stereos all over town. Even my g/f listens to it. I can't figure out how someone can't get sick and tired of the same few songs in endless rotation - but I guess they just don't leave the radio on for long periods of time at once. There almost seems to be a certain comfort in knowing they can flip to the station and hear exactly the small set of songs they expect to hear from it.
Actually, with SUVs no longer being "in vogue" in the U.S. - I think you'll find quite a few people of limited incomes driving them. The used car lots near me are overfilled with early 2000 model mid-sized SUVs that they're more than happy to resell, especially to people with "less than perfect credit".
"Keeping up with the Jones'" doesn't equate to buying some 2001 or 2002 model Mitsubishi or Nissan SUV. Those are purchased today because someone has few options in the "under $15,000" range for a reasonably nice-looking vehicle that has a decent chance of being reliable for a few more years.
I'm convinced that popular services like Yahoo and MSN Groups will be casualties of a merger of this sort. You currently have both of them primarily because they wanted to compete directly with each other at any cost. After they merge, they'll start by eliminating duplication - meaning either Yahoo or MSN Groups will go. Then, they'll try to find ways to make people pay a fee to use whatever service is left - and that will destroy much of their usefulness. (EG. Freecycle pretty much works through Yahoo groups - and it wouldn't make much sense to have to pay monthly fees to browse listings for free giveaways to those who can't afford to buy them.)
The police VERY rarely prevent a crime from happening. It may happen if they're lucky enough to be in a store just as someone decides to rob it, or if they're right next to someone who is about to get mugged on a street corner. But 99% of the time, their job is to document a crime that was already committed. The biggest part of a police officer's job is usually filling out paperwork.
Securty systems, bullet-proof vests and guard dogs help "protect" people. Police, generally, don't.
That's not to say their purpose has nothing to do with serving the public. Obviously, they do. But the whole "To Protect and Serve" slogan is as much an effort in good "marketing" as anything. It wouldn't be nearly as impressive to say "To document and question", would it?:)
The last couple posts before mine illustrate the nearly "classic" debate raging on open wireless connections.
One side argues that "because it's open and freely available, it's legal to use it". The other side brings up the "If your house has the door open, it doesn't mean it's legal for anyone to wander in." counter-argument.
I'm of the opinion that the first argument is correct. The house analogy has a few fundamental flaws. For starters, the U.S. respects the legal concept of property rights and ownership. Those rights allow you to prosecute someone for trespassing on your physical property, but they don't extend to radio waves emitted from your property. Furthermore, the legal system generally recognizes the concept of "notice". (EG. If you connect to an open wireless network and the first time you try to pull up your web browser, you're brought to a page notifying you that the connection you're on is NOT for public use - then you're likely breaking the law if you keep doing it anyway.) Without some form of notice, a user has no way to determine if a wi-fi connection he/she discovered is meant to be public or not!
In the case of this coffee-house owner, I would think the most viable means to deal with a "wi-fi squatter" would be enforcing traditional laws against loitering. Surely, their parking lot is privately owned? Therefore, they can post signs saying the parking spaces are for customers only. Furthermore, they can run off people who just sit around outside the premesis and use their wi-fi connections without ever coming in to buy anything.
I guess I believe a little bit more in the value of a free marketplace than you do. My take on it is, honestly, the free market would have taken us to the moon as soon as it was economically feasible to go. When we went in 1969, frankly, it wasn't economically feasible at all. It was done at horrendous expense, and with very little "return on investment". Oh, sure, you'll read the NASA propaganda about all the wonderful inventions we enjoy today because of the space program -- and there's an element of truth to that. But I venture to say we'd have just as many, if not *more* great inventions if all the money funding the "space race" was redirected to general research science instead.
Quite a few folks would pay a good sum of money for the opportunity to visit the moon as a tourist, but again, we're not quite able to do that safely and economically yet. Left to purely the free marketplace though, yes - we would get there. Only difference is, we'd let anyone go who wanted to pay to go, rather than a few select "astronauts" on government payroll - and we'd do it only after making it magnitudes less costly and at least somewhat safer.
.... I don't think this article is here as another "Oooh.... the Macbook and Steve Jobs are awesome!" story. The intriguing part is how its users are "thinking different" to an extent Apple themselves didn't seem to. Already, people have taken the relatively boring "sudden motion sensor" that Apple only thought of implementing to help prevent hard drive crashes, and used it for a motion-sensing laptop security system, to roll marbles around in maze games by tilting the laptop, and even to switch virtual desktops by lightly tapping the left or right-hand sides of the machine to "bump" the desktop over one direction or the other.
Now, they're tackling the ambient light sensors, which again, serve a relatively "boring" (if still useful) purpose. I'm intrigued to see what imaginative people will end up doing with this one too. For starters, I could envision some usefulness in things like making the backlit keyboard blink in a repeating pattern to indicate completion of recording in certain audio programs. (Many recording studio environments are kept dark so you can easily see all the readouts on the displays of the equipment while working. Macbook Pros are going to be popular in these environments, and it might be nice to get a subtle indication it finished transcoding or recording some audio - even if the display went blank due to a screen saver?)
"Western society bears a remarkable resemblance to cancer"? Sorry pal - but you lost me on that first sentence!
That sounds like a remarkably nihlistic line of thought to me. Cancer cells lack any real intelligence, capability for rational thought, or even ability to display "common sense". Is that what you really believe defines Western civilization?
Most of the truly unhappy people I run across are uninspired/unmotivated. They take a "Who cares? We're all going to die eventually anyway!" type of attitude, and they regularly engage in self-destructive behaviors - if they do much of anything at all with their free time. That's a problem, but thankfully - many of us don't follow that "Live only for today." path.
Living "for the future" is a great thing! So is capitalism and the desire to have better and more for yourself! I'd say that practically none of the great inventions would have ever been created if it weren't for individuals who were motivated to put in some hard work and lots of trial and error with the hopes of bettering things for themselves and others. Do you think we'd have electric lighting if Thomas Edison wasn't stubbornly motivated to succeed - trying out thousands of different materials to finally find one that lit up with electric current flowing through it, instead of just burning up? What about the Wright Brothers and their motivation to fly, despite most people around them thinking they were foolishly wasting their time? (They could have just been content to fix people's bicycles instead, since that was their "real job".)
Perhaps part of the issue *really* is, people have learned how to hack the DRM on the pay music download services, and they'd now prefer to attack the problem from that angle than simply trying to trade music via p2p services?
www.soundtaxi.info for example, lets one theoretically get quite a bit of commercial music during a free 7 day trial of Yahoo music or Napster.....
As far as I'm concerned, the real humor left PC Mag. whenever Penn Jilette quit writing the back page column for them, years ago.
I don't find Dvorak "funny"... nor do I take him too seriously. I just find his columns to be full of personal ramblings and random "what if?" type thoughts, tossed out there for the world to read.
Sounds about right to me, only hopefully, it will drop to a little less than $50 a month.
What's your point?
My monthly electric bill is around $50 a month (except in a few summer months when I run the air conditioner and that tends to double it). For that money, I can watch a TV, cook some food, light up my choice of any rooms in the house, use a computer, listen to a radio, recharge my cellphone or camera's battery, wash or dry some clothes, etc. etc. and the service provider only gets that $50 or whatever for providing the electricity.
Yes, of course you can - but how many bluetooth enabled devices include antenna jacks suitable for attaching one of these to them?
They only became well-known with wi-fi because so many wireless routers and cards had jacks on them for external antennas. Bluetooth generally has no such thing.
I guess the whole point of this experiment was testing the viability of someone taking a BT enabled device around crowded places and attempting to virus-infect as many people's phones, PDAs, and laptops as possible with it.
But that scenario strikes me as relatively pointless.
The main risk BT enabled device owners are worried about is data theft. (EG. You don't want random people downloading your photo library off your cellphone, or capturing all of your contact list data.) This would require them taking specific steps to target your specific device, and those steps would have to be taken while they're within the 30 foot or so range of you!
Some guy rolling a suitcase through an airport and saying "Ooh! Look at these logs showing all the people I could potentially hack!" means little, if he can't chase individual people down from those logs afterwards and pull down their data.
Actually, I find it somewhat interesting and amusing that people take such a negative stance on "Internet dating". The types of fraud this legislation is concerned with are obvious scams, much like the Nigerian email scams circulating the net. Either you've got supposed foreign women looking for a guy in the U.S. (usually someone so new to a dating site that their profile and description hasn't even been approved yet by the moderators), and they immediately "fall in love" with you after 1 or 2 emails -- or you've got cookie-cutter template "dating sites" that mysteriously happen to have hundreds of photos of extremely attractive women in your zip code or city, and you can't email any of them until you pay a $40 or more monthly "subscription fee".
If you exercise a little common sense and caution, you should be able to avoid being taken by any of these schemes. In my opinion, they do practically nothing to invalidate the concept itself of net dating.
Going back to the "common sense" thing again, of course people want to believe they've met the "perfect" person for them online when they start chatting it up with someone new. The sensible people arrange to meet in person as soon as it's reasonably possible, and find out if the photos are old/fake or not, etc. If they're not honest in their personals ad, then you can bet they're not going to be honest and straightforward with other things either. So cut things off right there and move on!
Done sensibly, I don't see why Internet dating should be any less "useful" than any other form of dating. I know one of my "requirements" for a partner is someone intelligent and educated enough to enjoy doing a little bit of reading and writing. The people who can't put together a complete sentence (or who hate reading) don't typically bother with (or fare well at making ads on) Internet personals sites, so voila - some "pre-screening" is done for me!
I always felt that Blizzard had an edge because they've always been really good about releasin g their titles with both Windows and Mac support on the same CD.
When World of Warcraft came out, for example, a *lot* of Mac owners bought it and gave it a try, simply because the number of games written to run well on new Mac hardware with OS X is pretty limited. (If you're a Mac gamer and you want to play an MMORPG, how many choices do you really have besides WOW? I guess there's Shadowbane... but you have to skip Star Wars: Galaxies and most others.)
By the same token, how many copies of Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft were sold to Mac owners over the years who bought them largely because they were about the only Mac compatible games you could find at the local superstore or discount store?
Ballmer, as a manager of the company making/selling the product he had problems with, would be expected to be able to drum up a solution to the problem one way or another.
It's not that people magically expect him to be "above average" in spyware removal skills. It's more the idea that he's a somewhat resourceful and theoretically intelligent guy (since he is manager of a company the size of Microsoft, vs. working as a ditch digger, burger flipper, or trash collector) - *and* has practically unlimited access to people who *should* be able to remove spyware in the Windows O.S.
Even without any "pull" within the company at all, he should have had a better shot at successfully removing the spyware infections than quite a few of the folks who bought and use Windows every day. (Those previously mentioned burger flippers and so forth are often counted among those using a Windows-based computer, don't forget!) But with the ability to ask MS engineers to assist, it's a pretty bad scenario if they never got it cleaned up properly.
I don't think many businesses out there really *are* trying to run the whole place on Excel. Where it becomes more of a problem is by the nature of it being a format that's compatible with a lot of other software packages.
If you're trying to get data exported from proprietary app A and into proprietary app B, Excel is often used as the "man in the middle" format that both apps know how to work with.
Not only that, but in these situations, you often have some additional manipulation of the figures that needs to go on during the export/import process, so "app B" properly represents some of the data. (EG. Perhaps one program calculates taxes differently than the other, so you need to modify the exported tax numbers so they'll show equivalent amounts in the other program?)
Short of writing custom software for the task (probably the best solution, but also the most expensive one - and toughest to get approval for), custom macros in Excel templates are the likely solution.
IMHO, people should look into how far away their residence is from the nearest central office before ordering DSL service. I have yet to run into anybody who lived really close to theirs, or to a substation built to extend the reach of the C.O., who got really poor DSL bandwidth.
The problems seem to almost always come from folks who live far enough to be on the outer limits of the wire distances supported.
In my own neighborhood, I couldn't even get DSL for years because they claimed the central office my phone lines were on was several counties away. One day, they finally installed a substation really close to my house though, and now I get very reliable 6mbit DSL that consistently gets download rates of around 605Kps.
I think you've hit on something very insightful. I'd probably add that many women have gone down the "I want a career!" route in pursuit of "accomplishing something worthwhile" - only to become disillusioned when they find out that it's a longer, harder road than they expected, and there's not always very much rewarding stuff to accomplish along the way.
Obviously, individual situations vary, but I've certainly observed cases where women seemed to complain bitterly about "glass ceilings" and inequality in the workplace, yet they *really* seemed to be saying "I expected a good, rewarding management type job at this place, and instead, they're making me kiss some manager's butt who I don't even like or respect!" Do they not realize that guys go through the same process?
Perhaps one key difference is, guys are more likely to feel like they're in a "rewarding" job if it's one that lets them bring home enough money (and even benefits) so they can accomplish things with that money. Women, by contrast, seem to crave jobs that make them feel "needed" and important. They could get paid $100K a year to work as a receptionist, and after 6 months of it, I think many would complain about how boring and unrewarding it was, and/or that it didn't give them enough free time to spend at home with the family.
I'd say that finding oneself a job where it's even *possible* to do these things is key. For example, I've worked as a computer technician before in jobs where it was taken for granted that I was going to be holed up in the "back room", doing my thing. I enjoyed it, because I was free of much of the "office politics" and could just concentrate on getting the work done. But ultimately, you don't advance that way. You're generally never given an opportunity to lead a group, because nobody in the company views you as suitable for that role. You might get a raise based on your performance, but that's only because they're treating you as a number. "How quickly are we getting broken PCs turned around with this guy working here? Do we have X percentage more capacity to take on additional repairs now?"
Even after you leave that type of work, it's rough finding something with more room for growth. Your resume says nothing about your potential ability to work with groups or lead one. Several buddies of mine tried to "get a foot in the door" of an I.T. career by starting out on a help-desk or as a PC tech. - and except in one case (the guy got a government job as some type of PC support person), I don't think it gave any of them much of an advantage. If they spent the time as a manager of a retail store, I suspect those skills would have worked just as well for them.
If you never try to discover how an apparently popular product could possibly do something for you, then I'd say you're simply missing out on opportunities to make your life easier or better.
Sometimes, people solve problems you never even thought about enough to say "I need a solution for this!"
It's the marketer's job to try to convince you to buy a product. It's yours to determine if that's really a good idea or not. It hardly makes me "beloved" by marketing types to look at a new product and consider the ways it might be beneficial to me. More often than not, I can't really come up with any - or can only come up with a use that's so marginally useful, it doesn't justify the cost.
With the iPod, it has a plethora of possible benefits - and I was surprised at how many of the possibilites could apply to me, all with one device. That's all I'm saying.
You're correct that Mac games aren't released as quickly as their PC counterparts - BUT, the flip-side of this is, they also don't release titles of unknown quality, only to end up upsetting people who pay out $40 or even $50 for something that's a total flop.
In the current state of Mac gaming, small companies like Aspyr and MacPlay only want to expend effort porting a title that's already proven to be a "winner" in the Windows world.
Right now, no - a "hard core gamer" won't really be happy with a Mac. They want the latest stuff the day it's first released, and they also tend to spend crazy amounts on money on the latest video cards, just for an extra 15 frames per second improvement.
In general, Mac users buy their machines with intentions of getting useful work done. Most PowerMac owners I know use them for projects that pay back more than the cost of the whole machine upon a single project's completion. (Wedding videographers and photographers, for example... or graphics artists designing corporate flyers and artwork for product boxes.) Gaming is also a potential interest, but more of a casual one. They'll buy a good game here or there, but aren't concerned with it being something that "just came out".
That said, I think one problem with Mac action games has traditionally been the way the PPC chip does math. The coders of Doom 3 complained about this holding them back from getting the game running on parity, speed-wise, with the Windows counterpart. With Intel based Macs, maybe they're finally free of this issue.
I remember skipping the first 2 generations of iPods as completely irrelevant. (I already had a nice in-car MP3 playing stereo system, as well as a nice MP3 music collection on my shared LAN at home. I couldn't really grasp why I'd want to spend hundreds on the ability to take yet another copy of those same files around with me in my pocket - especially since most of my music listening happened at home or in the car.)
Then, a friend of mine actually invited me to play around with his new 3rd. gen. iPod, hands-on. I was immediately fascinated. The scroll wheel made it so easy to navigate the menus, and everything was on an easy-to-read display screen. It even had some basic PDA type functionality (contacts and calendar synching), making it more justifiable to carry around than I anticipated. Then I realized one could even boot a Mac from one of these things and use it for emergency recovery in case of a drive crash. A quick look at the available accessories for it made me realize another key point; the iPod was the industry standard! Anything you could imagine wanting to add on to a portable player was available in an iPod friendly version. They even had clock radios with iPod docks on top of them.
Then it struck me. If you can't find some use for an iPod, you're just not trying hard enough. That's the beauty in these things. Photographers can take one around as a mass storage "vault" for their digital photos, instead of juggling a handful of memory sticks or cards. In the current form, you can watch podcasts with training videos for software products like Photoshop, or just the latest comedy skit while you're on the bus or train. It can totally replace music CDs (or even CDRs full of MP3 files) in your car. Take it camping with external speakers... 21st. Century Boom-Box! Battery life is excellent and they "just work", as Apple always promises of their products.
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Ok, at this point, maybe it's not even worth replying - except I'm at a loss here.... You're saying my "list of expensive and time consuming ways to get music" included such "costly" things as checking out music for FREE from a local library, or listening to someone's live piano performance when you're out in public someplace?
If you ask me, the only insulting thing is making the assumption that people aren't capable of exploring any new options for music unless the mainstream radio stations start playing it for them.
If this were true, you wouldn't see ANY interest in obscure music! All I'm saying is, lots of people are comfortable listening to a narrow range of music that caught their fancy, and they're not really motivated to try to acquire a taste for anything else. The Internet-based music models are teriffic for people who DO want to explore new avenues of music, and I *agree* that this scares the "old world" institutions like the RIAA. But as a general rule, I think far more people are content to listen to a small subset of what's available - and that's why commercial radio keeps working with such narrow ranges of music. Practically all the radio stations play little sound-bites of callers raving about how much they love them. Do you think all of those are just staged/faked?
I agree with your comments about music-sharing services on the net destroying the RIAA's business model.... but I don't think I can agree with some of what you're saying.
For starters, I don't think it's at all "insulting" to analyze the situation the way I have. It's not really an issue of people being totally "unexposed" to anything but what the big radio stations (and presumably the RIAA by extension?) want them to hear.
People have *many* opportunities to explore and hear all sorts of music. If they stay locked into a very narrow view of what's "good", that's by their own choice. For example, I don't need a local radio station to play classical music in order to develop an appreciation for it. I could go to the symphony hall and hear it performed live, if I liked, or I could get my hands on any number of records, tapes, CDs or DVDs of classical performances. Even my public library lets me check them out for free. I've even heard it played on piano a fair number of times over dinner at various nicer restaurants in town.
It's also not really a fair comparison, in my opinion, to compare video rentals to music listening habits. People who are avid enough of movie watchers to consider signing up with a service like Netflix are already more likely than average to explore a wide range of films. Hollywood only puts out so many films at a time. (On average, you have what? Maybe 2-3 new DVD releases per week?) People who watch movies on a regular basis often watch as many as 2 or 3 movies over just one weekend, and maybe a few more during the week. They easily "burn through" watching whatever the latest, hyped-up new releases are - and have to seek out other material.
With music, people also listen to the same songs over and over if they like them. Far fewer people watch the same movies over and over. (Even people who buy movies on DVD as opposed to renting them for a night or two usually just enjoy having them in their personal collections for the sake of collecting. They take pride in having a nice selection for their friends to borrow or view when they come over more than owning them for many repeat viewings themselves.)
Yeah, except the unfortunate reality seems to be, the "general public" doesn't seem to REALLY want as much variety as they pay lip-service to wanting.
Don't believe me? Try a little experiment sometime. Ask someone if they're "tired of hearing the same old music over and over" on the radio. 10 to 1 says they'll say "Hell yeah!" Then, ask them if they can name 20 or 30 bands (or even songs!) that they wish their favorite station would add to their playlist.
My guess is, most people will be able to name maybe 3-5 and then draw a blank... or else their list will consist of music very similar to what's already being played. (In some cases, they'll name a lot of songs or artists that the station already played in the past, but just sort of let slide off their playlist in recent years due to dwindling popularity.)
We had a classic rock station here in town that did something pretty unique... They turned control over to the DJs to play *anything* they wanted to play, as long as it fit in the overall format. (Basically, it was a last ditch attempt by management to turn the station around, since they were getting killed in ratings by a long-standing classic rock competitor just past them on the FM dial.) They started playing a LOT of obscure stuff, including stacks of old LPs that one of the DJs said he was bringing in from his large personal record collection, and from albums dug out of his parents' attic. Within a year or so, they were bought out and now they play mainstream country music. People just didn't stay tuned-in when they flipped through stations and heard totally unfamiliar music.
By contrast, we've got a hip-hop station here that I swear only plays, at most, 10 different songs at a time. Nonetheless, a LOT of people have that garbage cranked up on their car and home stereos all over town. Even my g/f listens to it. I can't figure out how someone can't get sick and tired of the same few songs in endless rotation - but I guess they just don't leave the radio on for long periods of time at once. There almost seems to be a certain comfort in knowing they can flip to the station and hear exactly the small set of songs they expect to hear from it.
Actually, with SUVs no longer being "in vogue" in the U.S. - I think you'll find quite a few people of limited incomes driving them. The used car lots near me are overfilled with early 2000 model mid-sized SUVs that they're more than happy to resell, especially to people with "less than perfect credit".
"Keeping up with the Jones'" doesn't equate to buying some 2001 or 2002 model Mitsubishi or Nissan SUV. Those are purchased today because someone has few options in the "under $15,000" range for a reasonably nice-looking vehicle that has a decent chance of being reliable for a few more years.
I'm convinced that popular services like Yahoo and MSN Groups will be casualties of a merger of this sort. You currently have both of them primarily because they wanted to compete directly with each other at any cost. After they merge, they'll start by eliminating duplication - meaning either Yahoo or MSN Groups will go. Then, they'll try to find ways to make people pay a fee to use whatever service is left - and that will destroy much of their usefulness. (EG. Freecycle pretty much works through Yahoo groups - and it wouldn't make much sense to have to pay monthly fees to browse listings for free giveaways to those who can't afford to buy them.)
The police VERY rarely prevent a crime from happening. It may happen if they're lucky enough to be in a store just as someone decides to rob it, or if they're right next to someone who is about to get mugged on a street corner. But 99% of the time, their job is to document a crime that was already committed. The biggest part of a police officer's job is usually filling out paperwork.
:)
Securty systems, bullet-proof vests and guard dogs help "protect" people. Police, generally, don't.
That's not to say their purpose has nothing to do with serving the public. Obviously, they do. But the whole "To Protect and Serve" slogan is as much an effort in good "marketing" as anything. It wouldn't be nearly as impressive to say "To document and question", would it?
The last couple posts before mine illustrate the nearly "classic" debate raging on open wireless connections.
One side argues that "because it's open and freely available, it's legal to use it". The other side brings up the "If your house has the door open, it doesn't mean it's legal for anyone to wander in." counter-argument.
I'm of the opinion that the first argument is correct. The house analogy has a few fundamental flaws. For starters, the U.S. respects the legal concept of property rights and ownership. Those rights allow you to prosecute someone for trespassing on your physical property, but they don't extend to radio waves emitted from your property. Furthermore, the legal system generally recognizes the concept of "notice". (EG. If you connect to an open wireless network and the first time you try to pull up your web browser, you're brought to a page notifying you that the connection you're on is NOT for public use - then you're likely breaking the law if you keep doing it anyway.) Without some form of notice, a user has no way to determine if a wi-fi connection he/she discovered is meant to be public or not!
In the case of this coffee-house owner, I would think the most viable means to deal with a "wi-fi squatter" would be enforcing traditional laws against loitering. Surely, their parking lot is privately owned? Therefore, they can post signs saying the parking spaces are for customers only. Furthermore, they can run off people who just sit around outside the premesis and use their wi-fi connections without ever coming in to buy anything.
I guess I believe a little bit more in the value of a free marketplace than you do. My take on it is, honestly, the free market would have taken us to the moon as soon as it was economically feasible to go. When we went in 1969, frankly, it wasn't economically feasible at all. It was done at horrendous expense, and with very little "return on investment". Oh, sure, you'll read the NASA propaganda about all the wonderful inventions we enjoy today because of the space program -- and there's an element of truth to that. But I venture to say we'd have just as many, if not *more* great inventions if all the money funding the "space race" was redirected to general research science instead.
Quite a few folks would pay a good sum of money for the opportunity to visit the moon as a tourist, but again, we're not quite able to do that safely and economically yet. Left to purely the free marketplace though, yes - we would get there. Only difference is, we'd let anyone go who wanted to pay to go, rather than a few select "astronauts" on government payroll - and we'd do it only after making it magnitudes less costly and at least somewhat safer.
.... I don't think this article is here as another "Oooh.... the Macbook and Steve Jobs are awesome!" story. The intriguing part is how its users are "thinking different" to an extent Apple themselves didn't seem to. Already, people have taken the relatively boring "sudden motion sensor" that Apple only thought of implementing to help prevent hard drive crashes, and used it for a motion-sensing laptop security system, to roll marbles around in maze games by tilting the laptop, and even to switch virtual desktops by lightly tapping the left or right-hand sides of the machine to "bump" the desktop over one direction or the other.
Now, they're tackling the ambient light sensors, which again, serve a relatively "boring" (if still useful) purpose. I'm intrigued to see what imaginative people will end up doing with this one too. For starters, I could envision some usefulness in things like making the backlit keyboard blink in a repeating pattern to indicate completion of recording in certain audio programs. (Many recording studio environments are kept dark so you can easily see all the readouts on the displays of the equipment while working. Macbook Pros are going to be popular in these environments, and it might be nice to get a subtle indication it finished transcoding or recording some audio - even if the display went blank due to a screen saver?)
"Western society bears a remarkable resemblance to cancer"? Sorry pal - but you lost me on that first sentence!
That sounds like a remarkably nihlistic line of thought to me. Cancer cells lack any real intelligence, capability for rational thought, or even ability to display "common sense". Is that what you really believe defines Western civilization?
Most of the truly unhappy people I run across are uninspired/unmotivated. They take a "Who cares? We're all going to die eventually anyway!" type of attitude, and they regularly engage in self-destructive behaviors - if they do much of anything at all with their free time. That's a problem, but thankfully - many of us don't follow that "Live only for today." path.
Living "for the future" is a great thing! So is capitalism and the desire to have better and more for yourself! I'd say that practically none of the great inventions would have ever been created if it weren't for individuals who were motivated to put in some hard work and lots of trial and error with the hopes of bettering things for themselves and others. Do you think we'd have electric lighting if Thomas Edison wasn't stubbornly motivated to succeed - trying out thousands of different materials to finally find one that lit up with electric current flowing through it, instead of just burning up? What about the Wright Brothers and their motivation to fly, despite most people around them thinking they were foolishly wasting their time? (They could have just been content to fix people's bicycles instead, since that was their "real job".)
Perhaps part of the issue *really* is, people have learned how to hack the DRM on the pay music download services, and they'd now prefer to attack the problem from that angle than simply trying to trade music via p2p services?
www.soundtaxi.info for example, lets one theoretically get quite a bit of commercial music during a free 7 day trial of Yahoo music or Napster.....
As far as I'm concerned, the real humor left PC Mag. whenever Penn Jilette quit writing the back page column for them, years ago.
... nor do I take him too seriously. I just find his columns to be full of personal ramblings and random "what if?" type thoughts, tossed out there for the world to read.
I don't find Dvorak "funny"
Sounds about right to me, only hopefully, it will drop to a little less than $50 a month.
What's your point?
My monthly electric bill is around $50 a month (except in a few summer months when I run the air conditioner and that tends to double it). For that money, I can watch a TV, cook some food, light up my choice of any rooms in the house, use a computer, listen to a radio, recharge my cellphone or camera's battery, wash or dry some clothes, etc. etc. and the service provider only gets that $50 or whatever for providing the electricity.
Yes, of course you can - but how many bluetooth enabled devices include antenna jacks suitable for attaching one of these to them?
They only became well-known with wi-fi because so many wireless routers and cards had jacks on them for external antennas. Bluetooth generally has no such thing.
I guess the whole point of this experiment was testing the viability of someone taking a BT enabled device around crowded places and attempting to virus-infect as many people's phones, PDAs, and laptops as possible with it.
But that scenario strikes me as relatively pointless.
The main risk BT enabled device owners are worried about is data theft. (EG. You don't want random people downloading your photo library off your cellphone, or capturing all of your contact list data.) This would require them taking specific steps to target your specific device, and those steps would have to be taken while they're within the 30 foot or so range of you!
Some guy rolling a suitcase through an airport and saying "Ooh! Look at these logs showing all the people I could potentially hack!" means little, if he can't chase individual people down from those logs afterwards and pull down their data.
Actually, I find it somewhat interesting and amusing that people take such a negative stance on "Internet dating". The types of fraud this legislation is concerned with are obvious scams, much like the Nigerian email scams circulating the net. Either you've got supposed foreign women looking for a guy in the U.S. (usually someone so new to a dating site that their profile and description hasn't even been approved yet by the moderators), and they immediately "fall in love" with you after 1 or 2 emails -- or you've got cookie-cutter template "dating sites" that mysteriously happen to have hundreds of photos of extremely attractive women in your zip code or city, and you can't email any of them until you pay a $40 or more monthly "subscription fee".
If you exercise a little common sense and caution, you should be able to avoid being taken by any of these schemes. In my opinion, they do practically nothing to invalidate the concept itself of net dating.
Going back to the "common sense" thing again, of course people want to believe they've met the "perfect" person for them online when they start chatting it up with someone new. The sensible people arrange to meet in person as soon as it's reasonably possible, and find out if the photos are old/fake or not, etc. If they're not honest in their personals ad, then you can bet they're not going to be honest and straightforward with other things either. So cut things off right there and move on!
Done sensibly, I don't see why Internet dating should be any less "useful" than any other form of dating. I know one of my "requirements" for a partner is someone intelligent and educated enough to enjoy doing a little bit of reading and writing. The people who can't put together a complete sentence (or who hate reading) don't typically bother with (or fare well at making ads on) Internet personals sites, so voila - some "pre-screening" is done for me!
I always felt that Blizzard had an edge because they've always been really good about releasin g their titles with both Windows and Mac support on the same CD.
When World of Warcraft came out, for example, a *lot* of Mac owners bought it and gave it a try, simply because the number of games written to run well on new Mac hardware with OS X is pretty limited. (If you're a Mac gamer and you want to play an MMORPG, how many choices do you really have besides WOW? I guess there's Shadowbane... but you have to skip Star Wars: Galaxies and most others.)
By the same token, how many copies of Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft were sold to Mac owners over the years who bought them largely because they were about the only Mac compatible games you could find at the local superstore or discount store?
Ballmer, as a manager of the company making/selling the product he had problems with, would be expected to be able to drum up a solution to the problem one way or another.
It's not that people magically expect him to be "above average" in spyware removal skills. It's more the idea that he's a somewhat resourceful and theoretically intelligent guy (since he is manager of a company the size of Microsoft, vs. working as a ditch digger, burger flipper, or trash collector) - *and* has practically unlimited access to people who *should* be able to remove spyware in the Windows O.S.
Even without any "pull" within the company at all, he should have had a better shot at successfully removing the spyware infections than quite a few of the folks who bought and use Windows every day. (Those previously mentioned burger flippers and so forth are often counted among those using a Windows-based computer, don't forget!) But with the ability to ask MS engineers to assist, it's a pretty bad scenario if they never got it cleaned up properly.
I don't think many businesses out there really *are* trying to run the whole place on Excel. Where it becomes more of a problem is by the nature of it being a format that's compatible with a lot of other software packages.
If you're trying to get data exported from proprietary app A and into proprietary app B, Excel is often used as the "man in the middle" format that both apps know how to work with.
Not only that, but in these situations, you often have some additional manipulation of the figures that needs to go on during the export/import process, so "app B" properly represents some of the data. (EG. Perhaps one program calculates taxes differently than the other, so you need to modify the exported tax numbers so they'll show equivalent amounts in the other program?)
Short of writing custom software for the task (probably the best solution, but also the most expensive one - and toughest to get approval for), custom macros in Excel templates are the likely solution.
IMHO, people should look into how far away their residence is from the nearest central office before ordering DSL service. I have yet to run into anybody who lived really close to theirs, or to a substation built to extend the reach of the C.O., who got really poor DSL bandwidth.
The problems seem to almost always come from folks who live far enough to be on the outer limits of the wire distances supported.
In my own neighborhood, I couldn't even get DSL for years because they claimed the central office my phone lines were on was several counties away. One day, they finally installed a substation really close to my house though, and now I get very reliable 6mbit DSL that consistently gets download rates of around 605Kps.
I think you've hit on something very insightful. I'd probably add that many women have gone down the "I want a career!" route in pursuit of "accomplishing something worthwhile" - only to become disillusioned when they find out that it's a longer, harder road than they expected, and there's not always very much rewarding stuff to accomplish along the way.
Obviously, individual situations vary, but I've certainly observed cases where women seemed to complain bitterly about "glass ceilings" and inequality in the workplace, yet they *really* seemed to be saying "I expected a good, rewarding management type job at this place, and instead, they're making me kiss some manager's butt who I don't even like or respect!" Do they not realize that guys go through the same process?
Perhaps one key difference is, guys are more likely to feel like they're in a "rewarding" job if it's one that lets them bring home enough money (and even benefits) so they can accomplish things with that money. Women, by contrast, seem to crave jobs that make them feel "needed" and important. They could get paid $100K a year to work as a receptionist, and after 6 months of it, I think many would complain about how boring and unrewarding it was, and/or that it didn't give them enough free time to spend at home with the family.
I'd say that finding oneself a job where it's even *possible* to do these things is key. For example, I've worked as a computer technician before in jobs where it was taken for granted that I was going to be holed up in the "back room", doing my thing. I enjoyed it, because I was free of much of the "office politics" and could just concentrate on getting the work done. But ultimately, you don't advance that way. You're generally never given an opportunity to lead a group, because nobody in the company views you as suitable for that role. You might get a raise based on your performance, but that's only because they're treating you as a number. "How quickly are we getting broken PCs turned around with this guy working here? Do we have X percentage more capacity to take on additional repairs now?"
Even after you leave that type of work, it's rough finding something with more room for growth. Your resume says nothing about your potential ability to work with groups or lead one. Several buddies of mine tried to "get a foot in the door" of an I.T. career by starting out on a help-desk or as a PC tech. - and except in one case (the guy got a government job as some type of PC support person), I don't think it gave any of them much of an advantage. If they spent the time as a manager of a retail store, I suspect those skills would have worked just as well for them.
If you never try to discover how an apparently popular product could possibly do something for you, then I'd say you're simply missing out on opportunities to make your life easier or better.
Sometimes, people solve problems you never even thought about enough to say "I need a solution for this!"
It's the marketer's job to try to convince you to buy a product. It's yours to determine if that's really a good idea or not. It hardly makes me "beloved" by marketing types to look at a new product and consider the ways it might be beneficial to me. More often than not, I can't really come up with any - or can only come up with a use that's so marginally useful, it doesn't justify the cost.
With the iPod, it has a plethora of possible benefits - and I was surprised at how many of the possibilites could apply to me, all with one device. That's all I'm saying.
You're correct that Mac games aren't released as quickly as their PC counterparts - BUT, the flip-side of this is, they also don't release titles of unknown quality, only to end up upsetting people who pay out $40 or even $50 for something that's a total flop.
... or graphics artists designing corporate flyers and artwork for product boxes.) Gaming is also a potential interest, but more of a casual one. They'll buy a good game here or there, but aren't concerned with it being something that "just came out".
In the current state of Mac gaming, small companies like Aspyr and MacPlay only want to expend effort porting a title that's already proven to be a "winner" in the Windows world.
Right now, no - a "hard core gamer" won't really be happy with a Mac. They want the latest stuff the day it's first released, and they also tend to spend crazy amounts on money on the latest video cards, just for an extra 15 frames per second improvement.
In general, Mac users buy their machines with intentions of getting useful work done. Most PowerMac owners I know use them for projects that pay back more than the cost of the whole machine upon a single project's completion. (Wedding videographers and photographers, for example
That said, I think one problem with Mac action games has traditionally been the way the PPC chip does math. The coders of Doom 3 complained about this holding them back from getting the game running on parity, speed-wise, with the Windows counterpart. With Intel based Macs, maybe they're finally free of this issue.
I remember skipping the first 2 generations of iPods as completely irrelevant. (I already had a nice in-car MP3 playing stereo system, as well as a nice MP3 music collection on my shared LAN at home. I couldn't really grasp why I'd want to spend hundreds on the ability to take yet another copy of those same files around with me in my pocket - especially since most of my music listening happened at home or in the car.)
Then, a friend of mine actually invited me to play around with his new 3rd. gen. iPod, hands-on. I was immediately fascinated. The scroll wheel made it so easy to navigate the menus, and everything was on an easy-to-read display screen. It even had some basic PDA type functionality (contacts and calendar synching), making it more justifiable to carry around than I anticipated. Then I realized one could even boot a Mac from one of these things and use it for emergency recovery in case of a drive crash. A quick look at the available accessories for it made me realize another key point; the iPod was the industry standard! Anything you could imagine wanting to add on to a portable player was available in an iPod friendly version. They even had clock radios with iPod docks on top of them.
Then it struck me. If you can't find some use for an iPod, you're just not trying hard enough. That's the beauty in these things. Photographers can take one around as a mass storage "vault" for their digital photos, instead of juggling a handful of memory sticks or cards. In the current form, you can watch podcasts with training videos for software products like Photoshop, or just the latest comedy skit while you're on the bus or train. It can totally replace music CDs (or even CDRs full of MP3 files) in your car. Take it camping with external speakers... 21st. Century Boom-Box! Battery life is excellent and they "just work", as Apple always promises of their products.