Well, that's not exactly a new idea.... People have long realized that by starting their own business, they can qualify for all sorts of new tax breaks.
The catch is, the IRS isn't going to just sit back and let people create and keep fake corporations that never attempt to bill anyone for a product or service.
Even if you're a sole proprietorship, you're going to start running a risk of audits on your federal taxes if you claim you never generated a profit after 4 or 5 years. (After all, why would someone keep running a business that keeps losing money for them year after year?)
Adobe Acrobat Pro can actually do quite a few advanced things with PDF creation that you're not going to get with one of the freeware or shareware "PDF writer" utilities or plug-ins.
Most of the time, a Windows user can simply install a free package like "CutePDF Writer" which adds a printer device that makes PDFs out of anything you can send to a printer. I use it at work all the time to do things like conversion of AutoCAD drawings to PDF files.
But Adobe's Acrobat Pro lets you build PDF forms that allow users to make custom input in fields they can tab through in the reader (probably most often seen on govt. web sites that offer electronic downloadable versions of their paper forms, like IRS tax forms). It also has a lot of flexibility in controlling the DPI that a given document will be rendered to when it's made into a PDF, supports annotations and even embedded video clips in a PDF, etc. etc.
Well, that would explain a lot then. If you've ever seen the horrible lack of bandwidth on Yahoo's part for their groups, you'd have to seriously question why they'd even think they could begin to host a bunch of streaming videos.
Yeah, my first thought was "Wow! That's, finally, a thin client that really lives up to its promise of reducing desk space used by a PC!" But then I realized that the big "desk space" problem is caused by the display, keyboard and mouse - not the CPU itself. (Nowdays, it's quite easy to strap a full-featured computer onto the back of a flat panel display - or to buy a machine that's "all in one" like Apple's iMac.)
When you consider that we're talking about "thin clients" here, and not even full-fledged computers, it starts looking even less impressive. (In the old days of "dumb terminals", they didn't require a separate box for the processor either, and generally used LESS space than today's thin clients by the mere fact that they were text-based interfaces with no mice.)
I guess these wall-jack clients might be nice in dusty/dirty shop environments, or places where there was concern of theft? But again, you still have the displays to contend with.
Because most likely, they figure people pre-planning an installation of these will opt to power it with "power over ethernet" instead of using the 5VDC jack on the front anyway.
Power over ethernet allows use of normally unused wires on your standard CAT5 cabling to supply power for devices like this.
When you play through an adventure game, you generally don't play it over and over again. You try to progress through it in a linear fashion, like reading a book. So the humor is fine as long as it's good at least once.
Some of the 3D shooters did manage to pull off comedy pretty well too, IMHO, but they suffer from being too repetitive. At best, you get to the parts that were funny a couple times, and you get kicks out of showing your friends.
Depends a lot on what type of work you do, too....
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Coming from an I.T. background myself (system administration, PC support, etc.) - I usually find that my workload varies wildly, from "wasting all day surfing the net" to an avalanche of work that's due as quickly as it can be completed.
It doesn't really have much to do with my own "work ethic". Rather, I often have my hands tied waiting on others who might be out of the office or busy with something else, or perhaps a project is stuck until a bunch of paperwork is approved and signed off on.
For example, today, I was supposed to get an old Unix-based inventory and sales application modified so the users can email quotes out to customers, instead of just faxing them. I was all set to devote most of my day to the task, until I found out that nobody is sure what the administrator account is to the box, or what the command is to get to the fax software's configuration screens that would let me set it up to do POP/SMTP mail. I had to put in a call to one of the people who helped develop the app, but they're traveling someplace today and can't get back with me until at least tomorrow.
I've got most of the day-to-day things operating smoothly, and the rest of the isuses on my task list involve meeting with others (who aren't available today either) and compiling lists of changes they want for things like our web site.
So voila! Another unproductive day that could have been busy.
The notion that ultimately, public servants work for "the people", is valid - but at the same time, doesn't automatically imply that they can bypass a "chain of command" that has been set up. In the private sector, it's somewhat like a chain of businesses that are ultimately owned by a group of investors, but managed day-to-day by hired management. Said investors are completely uninvolved in the daily workings of the business chain, and trust in the people hired to manage the assets for them.
If a counter-person working at one of the chains came knocking on an investor's door, uninvited, and demanded to speak with him about something he felt was unfair, do you think he'd be welcome to do that?
I tried to make sense of the ruling, and I agree with one of the other posters here who said he's not really sure what the outcome will be. The Slashdot summary makes it sound really bad for individual rights, but the ruling itself sounds like it's trying to ensure govt. workers do the jobs they're paid to do with less ability to file frivolous legal complaints. (It's made clear that their 1st. ammendment rights aren't being "taken away", but rather, limited in ways the court felt appropriate to their circumstances.)
Anyone saying the ever-increasing storage capacity is "pointless" is simply being short-sighted. We're just starting the era of high-definition TV, for example. Editing HD content from an appropriate camcorder and storing footage for possible future use is going to burn up a *lot* of drive space. When prices of HD compatible camcorders fall and when most people have upgraded to HD compatible TV sets, you can bet people will be complaining that their 400GB drives just aren't big enough for everything.
Yeah, I've heard the occasional quip about the PowerMac G5 cases looking like "space heaters" and so on. For that matter though, people gave the flat-panel iMac G4 systems a lot of grief too, for looking like "lampshades".
As time went on though, most people raved about the old iMac G4 design - and the fact that it still fetches more money than its specs would indicate is testimony to its styling. (You can buy a far superior iMac G5 system refurbished from Apple - with full warranty - for only $200 or so less than the typical going rate for the previous-generation iMac G4!)
Being a PowerMac G5 owner myself, I quickly grew to really appreciate its case design. For one thing, the arched "handles" Apple uses on the corners of them are surprisingly practical. Not only do they give you an easy way to pick up the box and move it around, but they help route/contain cabling for external drives and other such devices likely to be placed on the top of the system. The clear plastic inner cover beneath the side panel of the case is a nice touch too. (Notice the PC "copycats" of the G5 case always seem to skip this detail.) It allows someone to look at the insides without having to actually leave the thing open and collecting dust. The many perforations all over the front and back of the case, obviously, help out with cooling too. That may give it a "space heater" look that some people despise - but it's much more functional than throwing a solid faceplate over the front and/or back, and then trying to circulate more air through the case with fans to make up for the lack of ventilation.
I think many consumers would be more accepting/willing to tackle a learning curve to use advanced features of their phones if providers quit trying to use them all cash "cash cows".
I've been using PDA phones for years, and after my Treo 650 just got run over by a car after it fell off my belt-clip in a parking lot at work, I finally decided "Screw it!" and went with a regular phone instead. I got the new Motorola Razr V3c, thinking the thin shape would be a nice break from carrying around "brick-like" boxes as phones.
The biggest shock I got was when I first went through the Razr's menus and realized practically *everything* was a "subscription-based" download. Want your phone to be able to play a game? Navigate through the "e-store" applet and pick one out that can be played 1 day at a time for 99 cents, or played for "flat rate" of $4.99 per month! Uh... wow.... I'm used to just grabbing some freeware or shareware Palm app and hotsyncing into my phone and being done with it.
Then you get to things like emailing photos to other cellphone users. Ok, sounds like it might be cool, once in a while.... but WAIT! Did I sign up for that "unlimited photo-email" package on my plan? If not, I'm gonna get billed some ridiculous price for each little picture that gets sent out! Maybe I'll just ignore that feature after all.....
Oh yeah... they said the Razr was compatible with AOL instant messenger! Ok, where's that in the menus? Oh... darn. Not there! You have to download it and once again, PAY for it. Well, ok... I can live with spending another $7 or $8 to have that on my phone. But NO, it's yet another thing you pay by the month to keep using on the phone! Grr.... forget it! I'll just use it as a *phone* then and forget all the other stuff. I'll go broke trying to play with all of it!
Interestingly enough though, I think your point about the weather might be one of the most significant (and overlooked!).
If you think about it, we've got pretty good ratios of "rich people", "nerds" and "risk takers" in locations like New York City and Dallas, TX - but neither shows signs of being the next "Silicon Valley".
I think a key factor is an environment that encourages like-minded individuals to mingle on a regular basis and hash out ideas. When you've got bad weather (or even a cloudy or foggy day), lots of people don't feel as "energized" to get out of the house and do things. Here in the midwest, I feel that way quite a bit. If it's really cold, raining all afternoon, or just a generally "dreary" day, I'm more likely to feel tired and unmotivated.
I beg to differ. I'm far from a "Mac fanboy" considering I do systems administration for a company using Windows 2003 and 2000 Server and XP workstations (plus an old SCO Unix app running in a virtualized session). I've also spent the last 10 years or more in roles supporting Microsoft products.
Despite that, I use a mix of Macs and Windows PCs for personal use. (I have a new Macbook Pro, which I'm happy can dual-boot into XP and OS X at will, and a PowerMac G5 I use much of the time at home. But I also own an Athlon 64 based PC that's good for gaming and other things.)
Anyway, I think the O.P. is largely correct. With the Vista feature-list, one can't help but cringe after reading a line-item list of features in OSX Tiger 10.4. If I read a bunch of them off to someone who didn't know which OS I was talking about, they could easily guess incorrectly.
Macs aren't first at everything, but they're first with a lot of innovative ideas - largely because they're less hamstrung by backwards compatibility with obscure products and millions of device drivers. The opposite occasionally happens too, but Apple tends to admit it more readily than MS does.
EG. Fast-user switching in XP. Apple admitted they "liked the idea so much, they implemented it themselves" in OS X - but with the cool, 3D rotating cube effect.
Some of the most popular games are the simplest. Take the latest craze of Soduku, for example. It doesn't require much of a CPU at all to run it well. Neither did classics like Tetris, or any of the creative little games put out by companies like "Popcap", who offer theirs for PDAs and cellphones, as well as for Windows, the Mac, and as web-based applets.
In general, the most resource-intensive games out today are all 1st. person shooters, following in the footsteps of Doom and Quake. I can't deny I love playing a good FPS game... but they're short on originality at this point. All the "cool weapons" you can think of seem like they've been done in one variation or another and they've got the game physics down to impressive levels of detail. The only way they seem to be able to "wow" people into buying the "next great FPS" is a promise of more life-like graphics, which requires ever more expensive graphics hardware, system RAM, and CPU power to pull off.
XBox 360 and PS3 are getting caught up in this vicious cycle of "increase the hardware so the remakes of the games can be improved another notch". Nintendo seems to be the only one saying "Wait a minute! We can build something that's updated to a sweet-spot of hardware for the dollar, and then build creative and attractive games to run in those parameters - and do just fine for ourselves!"
The trend will continue to lean towards images that retain as much resolution and picture quality as possible, and away from the concept of compressing to save a few more kilobytes of space at the expense of the former.
The latest "big thing" is making products like Adobe's new "Lightroom" and Apple's "Aperture" that allow working with "RAW" format photo data, straight off of a digital camera.
The prices of storage keep plummeting, as well. You can spend $50 or so for a piece of flash media that holds 10 times as much as the "Zip 100" disks that were the "greatest thing since sliced bread" for storing "large amounts of data conveniently" just 5 or 6 years ago. 400GB hard drives with 5 year warranties go for well under $300 each. In this environment, people cease worrying about new graphics formats that specialize in "better compression". They want *no compression* so they don't lose any quality.
Yep... ironic, yet reality - is it not? I once looked into getting some injection molding done for a plastic case, and discovered that although many engineering firms in the U.S. are happy to help with the initial design, they practically all recommend you have your "thousands of units" pressed over in China where the labor is much cheaper.
Most of those laptop parts are being assembled in the 3rd. world too, like the LCD screens and components that go on the circuit boards.
At least they'll be building devices they can actually benefit from afterwards, instead of only working for someone else's benefit.
Yeah...a valid point, except I would think that as soon as the device is mass-marketed to places other than 3rd. world countries, the manufacturers supplying the parts for it would have to quit selling below cost as a charitable tax write-off. It simply would cease to be accurate.
I'm not so sure this is really what's happening with these machines. Perhaps they're just being sold at *very* little mark-up though? If you think about it, in mass quantities, these really could cost just under $100 each to put together. Nobody's paying much for labor these days if they outsource the work to the right locations. The injection-molded plastic cases are dirt cheap too, other than the initial cost of having the mold itself produced. They're really skimping on the LCD screen display compared to most notebooks on the market, and that's gotta cut costs too. Apparently, that "chicklet" type keyboard is a less expensive alternative too. Of course, there's no licensing fee on the OS and software either. And with the growing popularity of integrated chipsets on motherboards, practically everything else it does (wi-fi, sound, etc.) could all be done with a motherboard that ends up maybe $25 at cost, in sufficient quantity.
...I *never* could comprehend what's even "illegal" about ticket "scalping" in the first place. It seems like it's nothing more than people practicing capitalism at its finest. The "scalpers" didn't steal the tickets, right? They stood in line and bought them, just like anyone else would!
In my mind, ticket sales companies like Ticketmaster writing "contracts" on the backs of tickets that make it some sort of "violation" to resell them at a profit is equivalent to WalMart claiming it's now illegal to buy and resell the latest fad toys around the holidays. (If you manage to get the next great "Tickle Me Elmo" type doll this year by fighting crowds and waiting hours in line to buy yours, you're an illicit scalper if you mark it up $10 and resell it to a friend! You've been warned!)
But yeah... I don't really care *how* Ticketmaster wants to try to sell their tickets, or at what price-point. Most of the big concerts are, ultimately, "entertainment for the wealthy" already. Notice the plethora of rock concerts nowdays where as many as 10+ bands are all billed on one ticket? Hordefest, Pointfest, Lillith Fair, Ozzfest, the Warped Tour, etc. etc. That's the result of people feeling a need to stretch their ticket dollars a lot further. The high-dollar concerts tend to be the big-name "has been" bands, more popular with an older, more affluent audience (The Stones, U2, The Eagles, etc.).
A friend of mine with a biology background took a job involving searching for new plants and herbs with potential scientific/medical uses. He was sent on expensive trips to remote parts of Africa and other locations to examine the plants and flowers - and after years of it, found absolutely nothing useful. Did this mean he was a "failure" or lost his job over it? Heck no... That was pretty much what they *expected* would happen. It's just that there's so much money involved if someone DOES hit upon a useful one, they'll throw wads of money at the problem.
This strikes me as the same thing, only in the ocean rather than on land. Exploring is all well and good, but if there's sufficient risk of doing major damage to the landscape - it seems like the negatives outweigh the lottery-winning like chances of finding a benefit from it.
In the last few years, I've been called on for well over 100 cases of spyware and virus clean-up on customer PCs. (I own my own consulting business now, and do it part-time, while working as a system administrator full-time during the week, and worked for a small on-site service business before that.)
You'll get many, many opinions on "which anti-virus solution is best", and that's partially because people tend to rave about whichever product actually found and successfully cleaned their particular instance of getting a virus. (EG. If someone has Norton AV and it removes the Blaster worm for them successfully, then they're likely to praise Norton - even if it sucks at removing thousands of other virus infections, or has other major issues with use of system resources or conflicts with other software.)
I was always especially interested in the free solutions though. Customers who just paid you upwards of $80-100 to clean a virus don't like to be gouged further on your service call because you had to sell them some $50 anti-virus package too.
I'd sum it up this way:
1. All in all, AVG is my favorite solution. The software grabs AV updates very regularly, and seems to find many lesser-known trojan horse type virii that the others miss. The single biggest headache with AVG is that it can't clean a virus located inside a compressed archive file. If you get an infected Java file inside a.jar file, for example, AVG will complain and complain that the.jar is infected, but will never do anything about it. It's up to you to go in and manually delete the thing.
2. Avast, in my experience, does NOT find nearly as many infections as AVG does - but it sometimes finds a couple that AVG misses. I wouldn't feel comfortable using Avast as my every-day scanner, but it's worth running through a full scan on a PC you know is infected and you're trying to clean. They also offer a rather expensive, but useful product called "BART" that lets you boot from a stripped down XP install on CDR and run a scan, clean up the system registry, etc.
3. AntiVir, I have the least experience with - but I believe it's a product that has been re-incarnated from shareware products sold in the past that would scan/detect viruses, but wouldn't actually clean the results for you automatically unless you paid for it. If it's the same product I think it is, it did well at finding some very obscure trojans. Probably a contender, but I feel more comfortable with AVG because it's more "tried and true" for me in daily use.
I think you have to look at the psychology behind console sales. The buyer wants a fun gaming experience, and the ability to pay for the whole thing piecemeal.
Why didn't you see PS2's bundled with a 5 or 10 pack of games, or even including a memory card and 2 controllers, right in the original box? Simple! Because the typical consumer feels much more comfortable shelling out, say, $600 as $200 here, another $50 here, and maybe $90 there, etc. until reaching that $600 total, rather than bam - $600 up-front.
I barely know *anyone* who uses a PS2 who didn't buy that 2nd. controller and a memory card, and owns at least 5 or 6 game titles! Yet almost none of them would have paid for all of that in one box, even if it was discounted a little bit as a bundle!
This is going to be the PS3's problem too. Even if consumers *do* wind up wanting blue-ray players shortly after the thing is released, and feel it's a good value for all the cool games it plays, plus the blue-ray capability - they won't want to swallow the whole cost up-front. It'll just feel like too much of an investment in something that's far from a necessity.
If Sony wants successful adoption of these units, and this really is close to the cost to build 'em, they're going to have to take a big loss up-front on the sales, and find a way to nickle and dime the buyers on all the "must have" extras and games so they can make it all back in the long-haul.
Have you visited www.colorware.com yet? They apply custom colored finishes to aluminum Powerbooks, and I'd assume therefore, they can do MacBook Pros as well.
With a CRT monitor, all of the supported resolutions display equally well. Unfortunately, as gamers upgraded to fancy, new 19" and 21" LCD monitors, they only look good at a single, native resolution - which is usually much higher than people ran their CRTs at.
This translates to needing a beefier graphics card to get the frame-rates you expect, vs. the "old way" of just playing all your 3D games at a lower resolution like 800x600.
The statement in my message subject will surely rub some Linux and Mac faithful the wrong way... but I don't see how a logical pesonal can deny it. I'm primarily a Mac user myself these days, but use quite a bit of Windows between my PC at work and the occasional use of an Athlon 64 at home (mainly for gaming these days), and I deal with Linux here and there too. (I built my own MythTV box, and our proxy server at work is a Linux-based system I set up with Dansguardian, etc.)
In my opinion, every OS has its good and bad. Just as a good mechanic won't try to get all of his work done with only one tool, a good systems administrator or smart consumer won't assume that there's only one OS that meets *all* of his needs.
But that being said, "majority rules" when you're talking about computer training and the average user's knowledge of computer usage. Windows has so much market-share, it's the platform someone has experience with 9 times out of 10, if you pick a random person who claims some computer literacy and ask them what they're familiar with.
For this reason, Apple is smart to embrace as many Windows technologies as they can (things like Active Directory and Microsoft's networking protocols via Samba), and to keep the basics of the GUI somewhat similar to Windows.
I think part of the Linux community realizes this too, of course. (Heck - look at the Windows look-likes they've grafted on top of the X Windowing environment!) But at the end of the day, the "out of the box" experience for users trying to get the OS to recognize and properly use all of their hardware is key.
Mac users are generally very pleased with OS X because it all "just works" from the time they power on their new Macs. Windows, these days, gives largely the same initial experience. You bring home your new Dell or HP, power it on, and XP starts right up - properly using all of your devices. Linux, however, is usually lacking in this area. You can't often buy systems pre-loaded with a Linux distro that's pre-configured to find everything on the machine and use it 100% properly. But even if you do, you might get stuck as soon as you add another devices. (EG. Throw your new USB scanner into the mix, and will Linux auto-detect it and use it "plug and play"? Possibly... but how do you make it work? Do practically all of your applications have a "Scan" selection on their pull-down menus that automatically realizes your new scanner is installed? In OS X or XP, yes, they would.)
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Well, that's not exactly a new idea.... People have long realized that by starting their own business, they can qualify for all sorts of new tax breaks.
The catch is, the IRS isn't going to just sit back and let people create and keep fake corporations that never attempt to bill anyone for a product or service.
Even if you're a sole proprietorship, you're going to start running a risk of audits on your federal taxes if you claim you never generated a profit after 4 or 5 years. (After all, why would someone keep running a business that keeps losing money for them year after year?)
Adobe Acrobat Pro can actually do quite a few advanced things with PDF creation that you're not going to get with one of the freeware or shareware "PDF writer" utilities or plug-ins.
Most of the time, a Windows user can simply install a free package like "CutePDF Writer" which adds a printer device that makes PDFs out of anything you can send to a printer. I use it at work all the time to do things like conversion of AutoCAD drawings to PDF files.
But Adobe's Acrobat Pro lets you build PDF forms that allow users to make custom input in fields they can tab through in the reader (probably most often seen on govt. web sites that offer electronic downloadable versions of their paper forms, like IRS tax forms). It also has a lot of flexibility in controlling the DPI that a given document will be rendered to when it's made into a PDF, supports annotations and even embedded video clips in a PDF, etc. etc.
Well, that would explain a lot then. If you've ever seen the horrible lack of bandwidth on Yahoo's part for their groups, you'd have to seriously question why they'd even think they could begin to host a bunch of streaming videos.
Yeah, my first thought was "Wow! That's, finally, a thin client that really lives up to its promise of reducing desk space used by a PC!" But then I realized that the big "desk space" problem is caused by the display, keyboard and mouse - not the CPU itself. (Nowdays, it's quite easy to strap a full-featured computer onto the back of a flat panel display - or to buy a machine that's "all in one" like Apple's iMac.)
When you consider that we're talking about "thin clients" here, and not even full-fledged computers, it starts looking even less impressive. (In the old days of "dumb terminals", they didn't require a separate box for the processor either, and generally used LESS space than today's thin clients by the mere fact that they were text-based interfaces with no mice.)
I guess these wall-jack clients might be nice in dusty/dirty shop environments, or places where there was concern of theft? But again, you still have the displays to contend with.
Because most likely, they figure people pre-planning an installation of these will opt to power it with "power over ethernet" instead of using the 5VDC jack on the front anyway.
Power over ethernet allows use of normally unused wires on your standard CAT5 cabling to supply power for devices like this.
When you play through an adventure game, you generally don't play it over and over again. You try to progress through it in a linear fashion, like reading a book. So the humor is fine as long as it's good at least once.
Some of the 3D shooters did manage to pull off comedy pretty well too, IMHO, but they suffer from being too repetitive. At best, you get to the parts that were funny a couple times, and you get kicks out of showing your friends.
Coming from an I.T. background myself (system administration, PC support, etc.) - I usually find that my workload varies wildly, from "wasting all day surfing the net" to an avalanche of work that's due as quickly as it can be completed.
It doesn't really have much to do with my own "work ethic". Rather, I often have my hands tied waiting on others who might be out of the office or busy with something else, or perhaps a project is stuck until a bunch of paperwork is approved and signed off on.
For example, today, I was supposed to get an old Unix-based inventory and sales application modified so the users can email quotes out to customers, instead of just faxing them. I was all set to devote most of my day to the task, until I found out that nobody is sure what the administrator account is to the box, or what the command is to get to the fax software's configuration screens that would let me set it up to do POP/SMTP mail. I had to put in a call to one of the people who helped develop the app, but they're traveling someplace today and can't get back with me until at least tomorrow.
I've got most of the day-to-day things operating smoothly, and the rest of the isuses on my task list involve meeting with others (who aren't available today either) and compiling lists of changes they want for things like our web site.
So voila! Another unproductive day that could have been busy.
The notion that ultimately, public servants work for "the people", is valid - but at the same time, doesn't automatically imply that they can bypass a "chain of command" that has been set up. In the private sector, it's somewhat like a chain of businesses that are ultimately owned by a group of investors, but managed day-to-day by hired management. Said investors are completely uninvolved in the daily workings of the business chain, and trust in the people hired to manage the assets for them.
If a counter-person working at one of the chains came knocking on an investor's door, uninvited, and demanded to speak with him about something he felt was unfair, do you think he'd be welcome to do that?
I tried to make sense of the ruling, and I agree with one of the other posters here who said he's not really sure what the outcome will be. The Slashdot summary makes it sound really bad for individual rights, but the ruling itself sounds like it's trying to ensure govt. workers do the jobs they're paid to do with less ability to file frivolous legal complaints. (It's made clear that their 1st. ammendment rights aren't being "taken away", but rather, limited in ways the court felt appropriate to their circumstances.)
Anyone saying the ever-increasing storage capacity is "pointless" is simply being short-sighted. We're just starting the era of high-definition TV, for example. Editing HD content from an appropriate camcorder and storing footage for possible future use is going to burn up a *lot* of drive space. When prices of HD compatible camcorders fall and when most people have upgraded to HD compatible TV sets, you can bet people will be complaining that their 400GB drives just aren't big enough for everything.
Yeah, I've heard the occasional quip about the PowerMac G5 cases looking like "space heaters" and so on. For that matter though, people gave the flat-panel iMac G4 systems a lot of grief too, for looking like "lampshades".
As time went on though, most people raved about the old iMac G4 design - and the fact that it still fetches more money than its specs would indicate is testimony to its styling. (You can buy a far superior iMac G5 system refurbished from Apple - with full warranty - for only $200 or so less than the typical going rate for the previous-generation iMac G4!)
Being a PowerMac G5 owner myself, I quickly grew to really appreciate its case design. For one thing, the arched "handles" Apple uses on the corners of them are surprisingly practical. Not only do they give you an easy way to pick up the box and move it around, but they help route/contain cabling for external drives and other such devices likely to be placed on the top of the system. The clear plastic inner cover beneath the side panel of the case is a nice touch too. (Notice the PC "copycats" of the G5 case always seem to skip this detail.) It allows someone to look at the insides without having to actually leave the thing open and collecting dust. The many perforations all over the front and back of the case, obviously, help out with cooling too. That may give it a "space heater" look that some people despise - but it's much more functional than throwing a solid faceplate over the front and/or back, and then trying to circulate more air through the case with fans to make up for the lack of ventilation.
I think many consumers would be more accepting/willing to tackle a learning curve to use advanced features of their phones if providers quit trying to use them all cash "cash cows".
I've been using PDA phones for years, and after my Treo 650 just got run over by a car after it fell off my belt-clip in a parking lot at work, I finally decided "Screw it!" and went with a regular phone instead. I got the new Motorola Razr V3c, thinking the thin shape would be a nice break from carrying around "brick-like" boxes as phones.
The biggest shock I got was when I first went through the Razr's menus and realized practically *everything* was a "subscription-based" download. Want your phone to be able to play a game? Navigate through the "e-store" applet and pick one out that can be played 1 day at a time for 99 cents, or played for "flat rate" of $4.99 per month! Uh... wow.... I'm used to just grabbing some freeware or shareware Palm app and hotsyncing into my phone and being done with it.
Then you get to things like emailing photos to other cellphone users. Ok, sounds like it might be cool, once in a while.... but WAIT! Did I sign up for that "unlimited photo-email" package on my plan? If not, I'm gonna get billed some ridiculous price for each little picture that gets sent out! Maybe I'll just ignore that feature after all.....
Oh yeah... they said the Razr was compatible with AOL instant messenger! Ok, where's that in the menus? Oh... darn. Not there! You have to download it and once again, PAY for it. Well, ok... I can live with spending another $7 or $8 to have that on my phone. But NO, it's yet another thing you pay by the month to keep using on the phone! Grr.... forget it! I'll just use it as a *phone* then and forget all the other stuff. I'll go broke trying to play with all of it!
Interestingly enough though, I think your point about the weather might be one of the most significant (and overlooked!).
If you think about it, we've got pretty good ratios of "rich people", "nerds" and "risk takers" in locations like New York City and Dallas, TX - but neither shows signs of being the next "Silicon Valley".
I think a key factor is an environment that encourages like-minded individuals to mingle on a regular basis and hash out ideas. When you've got bad weather (or even a cloudy or foggy day), lots of people don't feel as "energized" to get out of the house and do things. Here in the midwest, I feel that way quite a bit. If it's really cold, raining all afternoon, or just a generally "dreary" day, I'm more likely to feel tired and unmotivated.
I beg to differ. I'm far from a "Mac fanboy" considering I do systems administration for a company using Windows 2003 and 2000 Server and XP workstations (plus an old SCO Unix app running in a virtualized session). I've also spent the last 10 years or more in roles supporting Microsoft products.
Despite that, I use a mix of Macs and Windows PCs for personal use. (I have a new Macbook Pro, which I'm happy can dual-boot into XP and OS X at will, and a PowerMac G5 I use much of the time at home. But I also own an Athlon 64 based PC that's good for gaming and other things.)
Anyway, I think the O.P. is largely correct. With the Vista feature-list, one can't help but cringe after reading a line-item list of features in OSX Tiger 10.4. If I read a bunch of them off to someone who didn't know which OS I was talking about, they could easily guess incorrectly.
Macs aren't first at everything, but they're first with a lot of innovative ideas - largely because they're less hamstrung by backwards compatibility with obscure products and millions of device drivers. The opposite occasionally happens too, but Apple tends to admit it more readily than MS does.
EG. Fast-user switching in XP. Apple admitted they "liked the idea so much, they implemented it themselves" in OS X - but with the cool, 3D rotating cube effect.
Some of the most popular games are the simplest. Take the latest craze of Soduku, for example. It doesn't require much of a CPU at all to run it well. Neither did classics like Tetris, or any of the creative little games put out by companies like "Popcap", who offer theirs for PDAs and cellphones, as well as for Windows, the Mac, and as web-based applets.
... but they're short on originality at this point. All the "cool weapons" you can think of seem like they've been done in one variation or another and they've got the game physics down to impressive levels of detail. The only way they seem to be able to "wow" people into buying the "next great FPS" is a promise of more life-like graphics, which requires ever more expensive graphics hardware, system RAM, and CPU power to pull off.
In general, the most resource-intensive games out today are all 1st. person shooters, following in the footsteps of Doom and Quake. I can't deny I love playing a good FPS game
XBox 360 and PS3 are getting caught up in this vicious cycle of "increase the hardware so the remakes of the games can be improved another notch". Nintendo seems to be the only one saying "Wait a minute! We can build something that's updated to a sweet-spot of hardware for the dollar, and then build creative and attractive games to run in those parameters - and do just fine for ourselves!"
Sounds like a better business plan to me.
The trend will continue to lean towards images that retain as much resolution and picture quality as possible, and away from the concept of compressing to save a few more kilobytes of space at the expense of the former.
The latest "big thing" is making products like Adobe's new "Lightroom" and Apple's "Aperture" that allow working with "RAW" format photo data, straight off of a digital camera.
The prices of storage keep plummeting, as well. You can spend $50 or so for a piece of flash media that holds 10 times as much as the "Zip 100" disks that were the "greatest thing since sliced bread" for storing "large amounts of data conveniently" just 5 or 6 years ago. 400GB hard drives with 5 year warranties go for well under $300 each. In this environment, people cease worrying about new graphics formats that specialize in "better compression". They want *no compression* so they don't lose any quality.
Yep... ironic, yet reality - is it not? I once looked into getting some injection molding done for a plastic case, and discovered that although many engineering firms in the U.S. are happy to help with the initial design, they practically all recommend you have your "thousands of units" pressed over in China where the labor is much cheaper.
Most of those laptop parts are being assembled in the 3rd. world too, like the LCD screens and components that go on the circuit boards.
At least they'll be building devices they can actually benefit from afterwards, instead of only working for someone else's benefit.
Yeah...a valid point, except I would think that as soon as the device is mass-marketed to places other than 3rd. world countries, the manufacturers supplying the parts for it would have to quit selling below cost as a charitable tax write-off. It simply would cease to be accurate.
I'm not so sure this is really what's happening with these machines. Perhaps they're just being sold at *very* little mark-up though? If you think about it, in mass quantities, these really could cost just under $100 each to put together. Nobody's paying much for labor these days if they outsource the work to the right locations. The injection-molded plastic cases are dirt cheap too, other than the initial cost of having the mold itself produced. They're really skimping on the LCD screen display compared to most notebooks on the market, and that's gotta cut costs too. Apparently, that "chicklet" type keyboard is a less expensive alternative too. Of course, there's no licensing fee on the OS and software either. And with the growing popularity of integrated chipsets on motherboards, practically everything else it does (wi-fi, sound, etc.) could all be done with a motherboard that ends up maybe $25 at cost, in sufficient quantity.
All we can hope is that with the money they're saving on these $100 laptops, they'll feel less of a need to scam everyone to make up the difference!
...I *never* could comprehend what's even "illegal" about ticket "scalping" in the first place. It seems like it's nothing more than people practicing capitalism at its finest. The "scalpers" didn't steal the tickets, right? They stood in line and bought them, just like anyone else would!
In my mind, ticket sales companies like Ticketmaster writing "contracts" on the backs of tickets that make it some sort of "violation" to resell them at a profit is equivalent to WalMart claiming it's now illegal to buy and resell the latest fad toys around the holidays. (If you manage to get the next great "Tickle Me Elmo" type doll this year by fighting crowds and waiting hours in line to buy yours, you're an illicit scalper if you mark it up $10 and resell it to a friend! You've been warned!)
But yeah... I don't really care *how* Ticketmaster wants to try to sell their tickets, or at what price-point. Most of the big concerts are, ultimately, "entertainment for the wealthy" already. Notice the plethora of rock concerts nowdays where as many as 10+ bands are all billed on one ticket? Hordefest, Pointfest, Lillith Fair, Ozzfest, the Warped Tour, etc. etc. That's the result of people feeling a need to stretch their ticket dollars a lot further. The high-dollar concerts tend to be the big-name "has been" bands, more popular with an older, more affluent audience (The Stones, U2, The Eagles, etc.).
A friend of mine with a biology background took a job involving searching for new plants and herbs with potential scientific/medical uses. He was sent on expensive trips to remote parts of Africa and other locations to examine the plants and flowers - and after years of it, found absolutely nothing useful. Did this mean he was a "failure" or lost his job over it? Heck no... That was pretty much what they *expected* would happen. It's just that there's so much money involved if someone DOES hit upon a useful one, they'll throw wads of money at the problem.
This strikes me as the same thing, only in the ocean rather than on land. Exploring is all well and good, but if there's sufficient risk of doing major damage to the landscape - it seems like the negatives outweigh the lottery-winning like chances of finding a benefit from it.
In the last few years, I've been called on for well over 100 cases of spyware and virus clean-up on customer PCs. (I own my own consulting business now, and do it part-time, while working as a system administrator full-time during the week, and worked for a small on-site service business before that.)
.jar file, for example, AVG will complain and complain that the .jar is infected, but will never do anything about it. It's up to you to go in and manually delete the thing.
You'll get many, many opinions on "which anti-virus solution is best", and that's partially because people tend to rave about whichever product actually found and successfully cleaned their particular instance of getting a virus. (EG. If someone has Norton AV and it removes the Blaster worm for them successfully, then they're likely to praise Norton - even if it sucks at removing thousands of other virus infections, or has other major issues with use of system resources or conflicts with other software.)
I was always especially interested in the free solutions though. Customers who just paid you upwards of $80-100 to clean a virus don't like to be gouged further on your service call because you had to sell them some $50 anti-virus package too.
I'd sum it up this way:
1. All in all, AVG is my favorite solution. The software grabs AV updates very regularly, and seems to find many lesser-known trojan horse type virii that the others miss. The single biggest headache with AVG is that it can't clean a virus located inside a compressed archive file. If you get an infected Java file inside a
2. Avast, in my experience, does NOT find nearly as many infections as AVG does - but it sometimes finds a couple that AVG misses. I wouldn't feel comfortable using Avast as my every-day scanner, but it's worth running through a full scan on a PC you know is infected and you're trying to clean. They also offer a rather expensive, but useful product called "BART" that lets you boot from a stripped down XP install on CDR and run a scan, clean up the system registry, etc.
3. AntiVir, I have the least experience with - but I believe it's a product that has been re-incarnated from shareware products sold in the past that would scan/detect viruses, but wouldn't actually clean the results for you automatically unless you paid for it. If it's the same product I think it is, it did well at finding some very obscure trojans. Probably a contender, but I feel more comfortable with AVG because it's more "tried and true" for me in daily use.
I think you have to look at the psychology behind console sales. The buyer wants a fun gaming experience, and the ability to pay for the whole thing piecemeal.
Why didn't you see PS2's bundled with a 5 or 10 pack of games, or even including a memory card and 2 controllers, right in the original box? Simple! Because the typical consumer feels much more comfortable shelling out, say, $600 as $200 here, another $50 here, and maybe $90 there, etc. until reaching that $600 total, rather than bam - $600 up-front.
I barely know *anyone* who uses a PS2 who didn't buy that 2nd. controller and a memory card, and owns at least 5 or 6 game titles! Yet almost none of them would have paid for all of that in one box, even if it was discounted a little bit as a bundle!
This is going to be the PS3's problem too. Even if consumers *do* wind up wanting blue-ray players shortly after the thing is released, and feel it's a good value for all the cool games it plays, plus the blue-ray capability - they won't want to swallow the whole cost up-front. It'll just feel like too much of an investment in something that's far from a necessity.
If Sony wants successful adoption of these units, and this really is close to the cost to build 'em, they're going to have to take a big loss up-front on the sales, and find a way to nickle and dime the buyers on all the "must have" extras and games so they can make it all back in the long-haul.
Have you visited www.colorware.com yet? They apply custom colored finishes to aluminum Powerbooks, and I'd assume therefore, they can do MacBook Pros as well.
With a CRT monitor, all of the supported resolutions display equally well. Unfortunately, as gamers upgraded to fancy, new 19" and 21" LCD monitors, they only look good at a single, native resolution - which is usually much higher than people ran their CRTs at.
This translates to needing a beefier graphics card to get the frame-rates you expect, vs. the "old way" of just playing all your 3D games at a lower resolution like 800x600.
The statement in my message subject will surely rub some Linux and Mac faithful the wrong way ... but I don't see how a logical pesonal can deny it. I'm primarily a Mac user myself these days, but use quite a bit of Windows between my PC at work and the occasional use of an Athlon 64 at home (mainly for gaming these days), and I deal with Linux here and there too. (I built my own MythTV box, and our proxy server at work is a Linux-based system I set up with Dansguardian, etc.)
In my opinion, every OS has its good and bad. Just as a good mechanic won't try to get all of his work done with only one tool, a good systems administrator or smart consumer won't assume that there's only one OS that meets *all* of his needs.
But that being said, "majority rules" when you're talking about computer training and the average user's knowledge of computer usage. Windows has so much market-share, it's the platform someone has experience with 9 times out of 10, if you pick a random person who claims some computer literacy and ask them what they're familiar with.
For this reason, Apple is smart to embrace as many Windows technologies as they can (things like Active Directory and Microsoft's networking protocols via Samba), and to keep the basics of the GUI somewhat similar to Windows.
I think part of the Linux community realizes this too, of course. (Heck - look at the Windows look-likes they've grafted on top of the X Windowing environment!) But at the end of the day, the "out of the box" experience for users trying to get the OS to recognize and properly use all of their hardware is key.
Mac users are generally very pleased with OS X because it all "just works" from the time they power on their new Macs. Windows, these days, gives largely the same initial experience. You bring home your new Dell or HP, power it on, and XP starts right up - properly using all of your devices. Linux, however, is usually lacking in this area. You can't often buy systems pre-loaded with a Linux distro that's pre-configured to find everything on the machine and use it 100% properly. But even if you do, you might get stuck as soon as you add another devices. (EG. Throw your new USB scanner into the mix, and will Linux auto-detect it and use it "plug and play"? Possibly... but how do you make it work? Do practically all of your applications have a "Scan" selection on their pull-down menus that automatically realizes your new scanner is installed? In OS X or XP, yes, they would.)