Yes, yes, yes! I'd mod your post up further if I could. The concept of a "tip" isn't a bad thing at all, but it should have been kept completely informal. A "tip" should simply be a small gift from the customer to the employee - *not* anything even remotely tied into the financial structure of the establishment.
IMHO, if a restaurant can't afford to pay their workers at least the same "minimum wage" every other business has to pay, *regardless of tipping*, then they should probably raise prices on their food to make it possible. If they can't compete after doing that, too bad for them. Going out to eat is much about the "atmosphere" and the "service" as it is the food itself. It makes little sense to me to pay as little as possible to your workers, when their attitude and happiness being at the place directly reflects your ability to project your establishment as "superior" to the rest and worthy of return patronage.
Some of the message posters from other countries seem to be taking an attitude of "Ha! Glad the U.S. is finally forced to pay a lot more for their gas! They're the cause of the whole shortage to begin with, because they use up so much of it!" In all fairness, I think that's a short-sighted, myopic attitude - largely for the reasons you're bringing up here.
I've been chatting with a lady friend living in Russia, and the impression I've quickly gotten is that Russians are often poor and struggling because their country is so vast, and population is spread relatively thin over all the open space. A job may be available (or the opportunity to start one's own profitable business may be available), but it may not work out for a family living too far out in the countryside.
This speaks, therefore, to a great need for more readily available transportation. The "suppliers" need better access to the "customers". The "employees" need better access to the "employers".
One reason the U.S. thrives is because we do have the whole transportation thing down pretty well. Practically everyone I know owns a car, and often 2 or 3 of them. Roads interconnect everything, and we've got mass transit in most big cities on top of that. But this comes at a cost.... vastly increased use of gasoline.
As other nations rise to greatness, they'll all have to tackle these same transportation issues. That's going to be where you see most of this "exponential growth" in fuel consumption. China, Russia, etc.... All well-populated nations that haven't quite gotten to the point where personal transportation is an integral part of everyone's daily life yet. But it's coming..... and in some cases, they've got a LOT more land to cover than the United States has!
I've had an interest in following the outcome of this particular case, maybe more than some people, because I used to know Tim Jung, the owner of the Internet Gateway ISP and defendant.
I assume he's not really allowed/able to discuss any specifics of the case, since it's still going on.... but I know a lot of people in the St. Louis area who wonder what ever happened to him. (It seems the www.igateway.net web site is still up, but the contact numbers are disconnected and many things look like they haven't been changed/edited in years. So it's more of a "placeholder site" at this point.)
I'm not sure if the ISP was sold off voluntarily, in an action totally unrelated to the Vivendi/Blizzard suit, or if it had to be done to cover some legal expenses? (Hopefully, it was the former!)
Honestly, I don't think many people have been buying WinZip licenses in the last 3 or 4 years anyway. I could be wrong, but I get the idea that it's much more a matter of people preferring to "stick with what they're already used to and already paid for".
I know I used to work for a business that bought a fairly expensive "site license" for WinZip, but we did that back when many of the laptops were still running Windows '98 and the desktops ran NT 3.51 or NT 4.0. Back then, you really needed a solution like WinZip to make things easier on your users. But I'm sure they still use it today, just because everyone got used to it - so any of these "new features" in an update are still welcome.
Well, the problem *then* becomes, how do you *know* "nobody is listening"?
It's entirely possible (and has already happened) that someone creates a "blog" site intended to serve as sort of an electronic version of a personal diary, accessible anyplace they have Internet access, and mainly intended for a few friends or family members to use if they care to join in. But someone stumbles onto it, discovers what they view as an interesting conversation about something of significance - and starts directing heavy traffic to it. All of a sudden, this person's formerly "unknown" comments have big influence.
Therefore, you have to consider the *potential audience* for your words before you type them - not your current actual audience. When you host a web site on the Internet, the *potential* is always quite large.
If you want to write comments that truly aren't even intended to reach an audience beyond a few selected people, you'd password protect it.
I'm becoming convinced that cellphone service in the U.K. must be FAR superior to what we deal with in the U.S.
First, I complained about the contracts most of us get locked into, and someone from the U.K. laughed at my message - saying he "knew almost nobody still using a cellphone under contract". (Pay-as-you-go phones in the U.S. are *far* more expensive to use, and are generally sold to teens/kids and people with poor credit who can't get service any other way.)
Now, I see this talk about phone reception! I've been a Verizon wireless customer since they bought out my original carrier, Cybertel, years and years ago. Compared to most other providers I've used, I've had pretty good luck getting a signal wherever I go. But what I've noticed is, a *dual mode* analog and digital phone is a MUST with them. My new Treo 650 only works in digital, and when I start walking around indoors - my calls often start "breaking up" or people miss some of the words I say. On my older phone, you'd sometimes see it drop back to analog mode, which usually saved it from doing any of this. The ability to switch to analog mode also let me use my phones pretty far out in the middle of nowhere. When I went camping, for example, I could still get a usable analog signal with Verizon, but not a digital one. My friends who went with me taking their Sprint or Cingular phones, by contrast, had "no service", period.
One of my friends with Sprint always gets other calls "bleeding over" onto hers, too. The person on the other end never hears any of it, but she hears a phone ringing, someone answering, and can often hear the entire conversation in the background.
Practically everyone I know has *some* kind of reception complaint with their cellphone. It's crazy (at least in the U.S.) to make the statemnt that they're "just as clear as land lines". Only in perfect circumstances.
It seems to me this topic has come up a million times before. You can find this question being asked on any given "certification discussion forum" board on the net....
The answer hasn't really changed though. Basically, it depends to some extent on the price of the cert. as to how much "respect" it gets. It's all a bunch of "paper", of course, because certifications (like any other type of formal training) are no guarantee of retained knowledge. But the more costly and the more long and drawn out the process is of obtaining a cert. - the more a potential employer could look at it in a positive light upon seeing it on your resume.
(Let's face it. If you possess an expensive certification, it *likely* means you didn't really pay for it out of your own pocket. Rather, you already worked in that general area for an employer who thought enough of you to pay for you to get that training. If you weren't worth it, they probably wouldn't have invested the money in "improving" you.)
I've held my A+ for years, and to be honest, I don't really feel that it ever helped me get a job. Since I'm trying to do on-site service and computer consulting for myself now, it's nice to have it - just because it makes me look a little better on my web site. But in the grand scheme of things, these CompTIA certs. don't cost a lot to get, and they're relatively "easy". I got mine without ever buying a single study guide or taking a class. I simply took the free sample test questions found on a few web sites - and got the "gist" of the type of material they were interested in. I said "Ok... I know all of this already. I think i can pass that."
But I think for some people, getting certifications becomes a bit of an "addiction". They get a little bit of a "high" from the initial thrill of obtaining one - so they save up money and move on to the next, and the next. If I was hiring and saw somebody with 5 or 6 certs. in all sorts of scattered areas, I'd probably think "Career test taker!" more than "Incredibly knowlegeable candidate!"
Well, sure. I've also known quite a few people who were interesting in secretly eavesdropping on other people's conversations done via computer. In many cases, they paid good money for the software and/or hardware that made it possible.
I'm much less "amazed" by the number of people who "have no problem" doing it though, when I look at the bigger picture. In *every* instance I can think of, it involved somebody who already had reasonable suspicion that the other person was cheating on them, lying to them, or abusing their privileges of using the computer and Internet to begin with.
I'm a big advocate of respecting the privacy of others, to the point where *my* wife was quite likely chatting with other guys and trying to set up affairs on at least a few occasions - but I don't know what really transpired. Because even at that point, I didn't feel right secretly reading her email or private chat conversations. We've been divorced for over a year now though - and looking back at it, what would it have really accomplished if I did read her stuff? She's the one who ended up leaving, and there were plenty of reasons I *did* know for why our divorce became a necessity. In fact, infidelity isn't even considered much of an "issue" in my state - since they embrace the "no fault divorce" concept.
But that aside, I've known of people such as a former boss who set up software to keylog/spy on his daughter's Internet chat. His rationale was, he was already tipped off by her friends that she was starting to take drugs, hang out with the "wrong crowd" and so forth. He had tried confronting her on some of this, but she flat out lied to him and denied everything. So he felt he had some parental responsibility to keep a little bit closer tabs on her activities, with the idea it might keep her out of some trouble.
There are many reasons for wanting to "spy" on someone's computer usage, and some much more "ethical" than others. The problem I see with this particular case is - the author participated directly in the spying process, by hosting these "greeting cards" and collecting data himself.
Nice try, but that probably won't work... I haven't read the fine print on this particular suit, but in the past, most of them I've seen (such as the Toshiba class action suit over the defective floppy drives in a number of their laptops) included a clause that said all money not paid out to consumers up to the X million dollar limit would be paid to a specific charity instead. So while not filing a claim might mean your $25 or $50 would instead go to a charitable cause - it *won't* really discourage lawyers from attempting the same thing another time.
As a parent myself, I've personally discovered that LeapFrog really doesn't seem to make *any* products I'd consider very "useful" for kid's learning.
Reading about this latest gadget from them doesn't surprise me much....
My kid was given one of LeapFrog's earlier products when she was 1 or 2... a big plastic caterpilar pull-toy that speaks letters and sounds of the alphabet when each of its legs (corresponding to one letter each) are pressed. IMHO, this was probably the most sensible/useful thing they've offered in their product line, and for my kid, even it wasn't that good. By the time she was old enough to really get anything out of the whole concept - she wanted it served to her in some other format besides a "toddler pull-toy". (She's 3 now, and learning her alphabet using much cheaper but more effective toys, such as a cardboard alphabet train puzzle, where a letter and picture of something starting with that letter are printed on each "train car" in the puzzle. Not to mention, presenting it visually allows her to learn how to write both the uppercase and lowercase version of the letters.)
If you're willing to invest a little bit of time in working with your kid, you can speak things like vowel and consonant sounds to him/her and save the $30-50 one of these speaking toys costs you - and he/she will probably learn more quickly coming from your own mouth anyway.
I've worked as an on-site tech and PC Support Specialist for quite a long time for various companies, so I've seen a few good ones.
1. We had a lady who kept calling our on-site PC service business every day or two, insisting that her floppy drive was "eating her data". My friend went out there and tested the drive and it seemed fine, but he went ahead and cleaned it with a cleaning kit. But that didn't seem to work. The lady called back the next day reporting the same problem. He went back out again and just replaced the floppy drive with a brand new one. Nope, more complaints after that! So finally, he said to her "Ok. Show me exactly what you do with your computer when you start it up in the morning, an example of what you do with it during the day, and exactly how you shut it down at the end of the day." Everything seemed normal, until the very end, where she said ".... and then I take my disk out of the drive, and I keep it right here on my filing cabinet" (and proceeds to stick it up there with a big refrigerator magnet)!
2. One time, I got a call from a painter that I recently did a bunch of computer work for (memory and hard drive upgrades, etc.). He said he "thought he was going to need to buy a whole new computer". I tried to argue with him, pointing out that it was only a month or so ago that I did a lot of work to it, and it seemed perfectly good to me. But he insisted I come out and look at it. So I did.... When I arrived, I saw his problem. The tower case was completely smashed in on top and the 5.25" drives were falling out of their distorted bays. Turns out he bought a copy of "Battlefield 1942" and couldn't get it to do anything but draw a black screen (probably old video drivers) and in a fit of frustration, whacked it a few times with a sledgehammer.
3. A long time ago, I worked at a mom and pop computer store, and a guy came in with this mangled mess of circuit boards, a hard drive that was split open, misc. cards, and so on - and asked if we could "put it back together again for him"? Apparently, he just bought the computer at another dealership and put it all in the back of his pickup truck, and it flew out on the interstate and got run over by one or two other drivers. I guess he was out on the shoulder of the road trying to scrounge up all the pieces he could find, hoping it was salvagable!
Actually, though I'm sure you're correct in some cases about the cold helping with a malfunctioning temp. sensor in the drive - I think the freezer trick also sometimes just works because of defective IC chips on the controller board portion of the drive.
(Every IDE hard drive actually has the drive controller electronics bolted to a circuit board on the bottom of it. That's why the "IDE interface" is such a basic thing on your PC, whether it's integrated onto the motherboard or is a seperate PCI card. Most of the real work is done on the drive's electronics.)
With some malfunctioning electronics, you can manage to keep them working properly as long as you keep them cold enough. (One of the old tricks for troubleshooting bad parts in TV sets and the like was to selectively spray them with a can of compressed air, chilling them temporarily.)
That's fine, but it doesn't really negate the fact that millions and millions of other consumers still seem to get something out of watching movies.
If they didn't, you wouldn't see today's actors still getting huge salaries and entire cable channels dedicated to keeping tabs on what "so and so" in the industry likes to wear on Saturdays or eat for dinner (E! television).
So why would this affect those of us more interested in such things as computers? Well, just wait until people buy their new computers and movies and can't figure out how to make them play properly. Guess who they're going to come to with questions and hopes of a "work around" solution.
I tend to agree with your basic premise that a toolbar might not really be the ideal direction for Google - at least, if you want to see them remain known for their stark, but useful/powerful web pages.
But my main issue with toolbars are the fact that by their nature, they're gaudy "OS hacks". In essense, every time you see a "toolbar" on a system, it's a 3rd. party "after the fact" workaround for a perceived lack/failing of the OS itself.
A "system utility", "accessory" or "application", by contrast, would be a program that sits on the hard drive someplace and isn't seen or heard from until you specifically launch it.
You recently saw this illustrated in Mac OS X with all the whining over Apple's inclusion of the new "Dashboard" feature in v10.4. (Basically, it was amazingly similar in concept and execution to a shareware app that existed long before.) But ultimately, you see Dashboard winning people over. Why? Because obviously, it's a better situation to have such a thing integrated into the OS itself, even if it has some weaknesses compared to the 3rd. party "add ons". For starters, it's a "level playing field" because *all* users of that version of the OS have the same tool. You also have one less product on your computer supported by a separate party - so less chance of it suddenly becoming "unsupported" or incompatible, forcing you to wait for a fix.
I'm not necessarily against placing items of potential interest right on the user's desktop. I think the Windows clock in the taskbar is perfectly fine and unobtrusive. If people don't think to look at it when they want to know what time it is, well.... that's probably just because it is so unobtrusive. But I've certainly used mine to see what time it is - and it's also a really quick way to realize if a given PC has an incorrectly set date/time which could cause strange errors in some applications.
Yeah, I've always had good luck with nVidia drivers/cards and Linux - although not sure I'd say they're exactly "at the same level" as the Windows driver counterparts.
On my MythTV box, using a GeForce 4Ti 4600 card, I've run into lots of issues of nVidia changing around little details related to the card's ability to output in HDTV resolutions, to properly select or auto-detect which port the card is connected to (s-video, composite, or DVI/VGA) and other such things. It generally works well... don't get me wrong. But some of the optional parameters nVidia says you can specify in your XF86Config-4 file seem to shift around from version to version in their driver updates, and things that work fine in one release are broken again in the next. (Lately, I've had issues where the option to specify some "overscan" for composite or s-video output with an integer value between 0.0 and 1.0 seems to have no effect at all on my card.)
Rather than charging students with crimes for this type of activity, I'd be for the immediate termination of anyone on the high-school's "I.T. staff" who actually thought this was a good or even "workable" policy!
If there really is a "hidden agenda" of fishing for "troublemakers", that's a very poor way to accomplish anything. I mean, hey, why not issue knives to every incoming student too and just sit back and wait to see who starts stabbing people?
And anyway, historically speaking, the tinkerers/experimenters of the world are the ones who accomplished and contributed the most to society as a whole. "Respect for authority" be dammed.... Computers are all about exploring and experimentation. If you can't even create a "virtual sandbox" of sorts out of the system configuration you're issuing your students, so they have "boundaries" to what they can do on said machines, that just illustrates that the students are smarter than the faculty. The tools *are* and *have been* available to restrict usage of computers to only specific applications. If you opt not to use them, then I think you're making a de-facto vote for allowing students to do as they will with the laptops.
You know which ones are most likely to go off and install programs like iChat AV or take full advantage of "remote control" software they figure out how to use? That's right -- the smartest ones and the ones who actually *enjoy* using a computer! But no, we have to punish them and encourage the mediocrity instead. Teach students that computers are ONLY there for specific tasks we set up for them in advance. Don't "have fun" with it or you're a "hacker". Drum all the curiousity out of them. It's EVIL!
Well, my initial reason for posting that comment wasn't necessarily beause it describes me, personally. (As a matter of fact, I do have a kid.) But it's *one* way of looking at the situation, and it's a view you run across quite often, actually.
As a self-proclaimed Libertarian though, I'm a little surprised you're so frustrated with people complaining about "paying twice" to send their kids to private schools? Most Libertarians I know pretty much sympathize with that complaint, offering it as a prime reason to privatize the whole school system.
I, too, consider myself Libertarian - but I have a real problem with the inefficiency of the public school system as a whole. I went to both private and public schools when I was growing up, and I'll be the first to admit that my private school education was overpriced and *not* a good experience for me at all. But by the same token, I feel particularly lucky that I went to a public school that was still of pretty good quality. That was back in the late 80's, but even then, many of my friends attended public high-schools where gang violence and fights/stabbings were the order of the day. Only a couple years after I graduated from my high-school, I heard stories of a student being shot in a drive-by while waiting on the front steps there, and of metal detectors being put in, etc. etc. So I think I may have been one of the last to get a really "good experience" out of the place.
I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I do know that the current system isn't working. And no, I don't feel that my taxes paid into the current school system are a "privilege of living in a well educated society". Perhaps it would be if it really worked. But I look around, and I don't see this "well educated society" at all. Rather, I see little pools of intelligent/successful people - who most often got there because loads of additional money was pumped into their higher education by their own choice. The level of intelligence the public schools are churning out these days is nothing to be proud of as a nation.
One thing I've come to realize is that if you think about it, every single thing we eat is "pretty gross".
Those naturally grown veggies have had all manner of bugs crawling all over them, not to mention being rained on by water containing who knows what pollutants.... and that's not even to mention what may be in the soil itself that surrounds them. Then, if you didn't just pick them yourself and fix them immediately, they've been handled by who knows who, and spent quite a while sitting in less than "clean" environments before they reach you, the consumer.
And that's about the *least gross* scenario I can think of for food. No point even getting into the whole thing of rat hairs and worm parts found in your canned food goods..... or the amount of chemical preservatives holding together everything from our bakery goods to desserts.
Ultimately, everything about food is a "point of view" issue. One man's "disgusting ants" he'd *never eat* are another person's delicacy when covered in chocolate syrup.
So with that in mind, I personally would be rather "put off" by the idea of eating synthetic meat. I just don't like the mental image of eating something that's not really what it purports to be. But I'm also sure I'd eventually get used to it, if it became popular enough and tasted just like the "real thing". Certainly, it would become a non-issue within one more generation, as kids grow up eating it.
No - I think you're missing my point. I'm not "blasting ZoneAlarm" because it doesn't do everything and isn't "idiot-proof". I'm blasting it because it's an extra piece of unnecessary software for most people. If you disregard the fact that it allows you to block malware from communicating *after* it has already gotten in, then what else does it really accomplish that the built-in XP firewall doesn't?
Of course you need several products in tandem to adequately protect a PC. You want anti-virus software, anti-spyware software *and* a basic firewall. But assuming your anti-spyware and anti-virus software is up-to-date and doing its job properly, why would you see a real benefit from your firewall having extra "intelligence" to keep popping up alert dialogs whenever apps try to use the net?
Spyware authors simply engineer their programs to confuse and trick people into letting them past these types of firewalls anyway. EG. There's a popular piece of spyware that identifies itself as "winword.exe" - so most people think "Oh, it's Microsoft Word. That's ok." and authorize it to get past the firewall. I don't think it's fair to label everyone an "idiot" who doesn't figure that stunt out right away.
Well, there are many different ways you can look at this.
If it's a public school, you've already got plenty of people forced to pay into the system who don't even have kids. So getting a cheap laptop back out of the deal is about the *only* direct benefit they'll ever see for the money they've funneled into the school through their taxes. (Granted, they might get the same thing if the school went with your idea of "selling the laptops for fair market value and issuing the taxpayers rebate checks" - but how likely is that to really happen?)
I think the bigger issue might have been, how do you liquidate 1,000 laptops simultaneously and ensure you're paid up-front for the whole lot? I guarantee if you eBay'd all of them, you'd have lots of hassles with non-paying bidders, people demanding refunds because it "broke in shipping", possibly a couple cases of fraudulent cashier's checks or fake money orders, and so on. No way that's worth the bother. And if the school did go with a liquidator, most of them don't cut you a check until *after* they manage to resell all of the products, and then you get what they made, minus their "cut". So that could mean, no idea at all when they'd see money out of the sale. If the funding was needed for new items to be used for this school year, getting all of it immediately could have been worth a lot more than waiting around for months to try to make more in the long-run.
Well, maybe not in *all* cases, but it sure seems to be a decent "rule of thumb". Norton and McAfee are probably the top 2 most popular vendors marketing "Internet Security" type packages - and both seem to flag the most false alarms, disrupt normal, smooth system operation, and "bloat" things FAR more than necessary.
Time and time again, when I'm trying to clean viruses or spyware off machines, I get the best results using relatively obscure, typically foreign-developed software products. And "personal firewall" software for Windows seems like much more of a "scam" or "solution in need of problems" than anything sensible or truly useful.
EG. Say you install "ZoneAlarm" on your Windows XP box because people promise you it's "much more secure and flexible than Windows' built in firewall!". Ok... Well, now you've got this product that's constantly harassing you EVERY TIME some new application or DLL tries to access the net for the first time. Typically, it tells you it has "no information to offer" on what that program really does, so it's up to you, the end-user, to determine if it's "safe" or not. Why would I ever assume that the typical Windows user knows better than applications themselves about which DLL files are "safe" vs. "threats"? But yet, that's pretty much the design model.
And furthermore, much of the supposedly "security" of these firewall products lies in the fact that they can "permanently block" malware from communicating out to the net. But that's *AFTER THE FACT* that the stuff got onto your machine! Who knows what other problems said malware is causing your computer in the meantime... but the user gets a false sense of security because ZoneAlarm "blocked" the stuff. That's like me saying "Hey, I have this cool security system in my house. Anyone can walk right in because I don't have locks on my doors, but once you set off the alarm, the criminal is rendered unable to communicate outside my house to his buddies... so more burglars aren't alerted that it's safe to come in!"
I didn't realize that neither Ian Davis or Drew Olbrich had any interest in being interviewed - but that you did attempt to contact them. In a way, that's an interesting "story" in and of itself. (Might have even made for a good little scrolling text "closing credits" type of scene on the end of the segment, mentioning such things as Olbrich's work on Shrek, etc.?)
But in any case, no -- I didn't mean to imply that after 1990, the ANSI art scene was "over' and didn't warrant any discussion. Only that it seemed an inordinate amount of time was given to the art scene folks vs. the people who I always felt made ANSI art viable in the first place.
(I remember when the whole ANSI art scene got big, the immediate response from most of the older BBSers I knew was rather negative. For starters, a program started circulating that let you take a GIF image and convert it automatically to ANSI. I always suspected that much of the multi-screen length art I saw these later "ANSI artists" submitting was really just generated automatically by such a program - with perhaps a bit of touch-up work done to it after the fact.)
Much of the real "talent" and "skill" involved in ANSI artwork, in my opinion, was the ability to fit the whole picture on a single 80x25 screen and still have it look good. The automated conversion utiities could never accomplish that.
On the "multitude of excuses for piracy" - sure, you've got a plethora of poor ones, and a few much more logical, better-worded ones. But isn't the end result ultimately the same?
I mean, whether you have 1 million people willfully violating copyright law with very strong, ethical arguments for doing so, or 1 million people willfully violating copyright because they say "It's not stealing because I didn't take anything off a store shelf, so nyah-nyah!" - you have the exact same outcome on your hands.
As you said, the answer is somewhere in the middle - but the only way to get there is for the RIAA to take the "battle" to the middle-ground. As the party holding the copyrights on the content, it's up to them to make that move first.
Personally, I don't really believe the problem is that "the other side doesn't want to pay anything". I've got a collection of well over 120 music CDs that I purchased through the mid to late 80's and to a lesser extent into the early 90's. After that, it dropped off to nearly no new CD purchases. Most of the people I know who are around my age (early to mid 30's) have a similar story. Is it because we suddenly decided the industry owed us all of our music for free? No... I've purchased a few select tracks from the iTunes store, even when I could as easily have fired up Limewire or something and downloaded them for free. But overall, I don't like being forced to pay full price for a CD of mostly mediocre material, just to get 1 or 2 tracks I want. And unlike in the 80's, the technology now makes it blatantly obvious that it *should* be possible to do that. Yet - I still can't walk into a store, queue up a list of tracks I want and have it spit out a custom made "mix" CD for me of what I purchased, all for anything resembling a "fair price".
Yeah... I know exactly what you mean. I was just thinking about that for a while before writing this reply. I think my conclusion is, it's probably best to be as "well rounded" an individual as possible. In other words, yes - you *can* be entertained without "escaping reality" at all; whether that means "quality time" spent with someone you love, or simply doing a job that you truly enjoy doing. But at some point, it's still not a bad idea to delve into some of the more constructive forms of "escape entertainment". Reading books or watching movies or a play, catching some live music, or even playing video games are all ways to enjoy the artistic works someone else put effort into creating for you.
Therefore, even if you could be entertained 100% of the time without resorting to escapist entertainment provided by the culture around you, I'm not sure that's "ideal" or even a "worthy pursuit". I think the trick is just "moderation in all things".
I was one of the first people to pre-order the BBS Documentary when I found out about it. I've watched the whole thing, as well as loaned it to a good friend of mine who also watched it all.
I agree with the comments from people saying it was well done, edited well, etc. And if you're "on the fence" about buying a copy of this but have fond memories of the "BBS era" - what are you waiting for? Order this right away!
That said, though, I also felt a few twinges of frustration during portions of the documentary. Probably my biggest "problem" with it was the segment on the ANSI artwork. It seemed like an extrordinary large amount of time was given to interviewing a bunch of younger kids who got in only on the "tail end" of the whole BBS scene, and mistakenly believed their "art groups" held much more significance than they really did in the "grand scheme".
I mean, when I hit "play" on that portion of the DVD, I was hoping to hear interviews with the creators of the first ANSI art software packages like "The Draw" and "ANSIPaint", and/or more time given to the individual artists who first started offering to make free opening ANSI screens for BBSs around the country. (My own BBS, File Cabinet, was approached by "Violet" because I was part of Fidonet, and she was apparently drawing ANSI art for random BBS's in Fido's network, one at a time. Of course, I said "Sure! You can draw me something and I'll use it!") They did talk to "Ebony Eyes" who was another famous ANSI artist from around that time, so that was good. But then the interview immedialtey shifted to this big "story" of the competing art groups like ACiD.... and to me, they were roughly equivalent to "script kiddies" and "warez junkies" anyway. The types of boards they made screens for were "3lit3 0-day warez d00d!" boards, as a whole. Not the pioneering BBS's that "started it all".
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Yes, yes, yes! I'd mod your post up further if I could.
The concept of a "tip" isn't a bad thing at all, but it should have been kept completely informal. A "tip" should simply be a small gift from the customer to the employee - *not* anything even remotely tied into the financial structure of the establishment.
IMHO, if a restaurant can't afford to pay their workers at least the same "minimum wage" every other business has to pay, *regardless of tipping*, then they should probably raise prices on their food to make it possible. If they can't compete after doing that, too bad for them. Going out to eat is much about the "atmosphere" and the "service" as it is the food itself. It makes little sense to me to pay as little as possible to your workers, when their attitude and happiness being at the place directly reflects your ability to project your establishment as "superior" to the rest and worthy of return patronage.
Some of the message posters from other countries seem to be taking an attitude of "Ha! Glad the U.S. is finally forced to pay a lot more for their gas! They're the cause of the whole shortage to begin with, because they use up so much of it!" In all fairness, I think that's a short-sighted, myopic attitude - largely for the reasons you're bringing up here.
I've been chatting with a lady friend living in Russia, and the impression I've quickly gotten is that Russians are often poor and struggling because their country is so vast, and population is spread relatively thin over all the open space. A job may be available (or the opportunity to start one's own profitable business may be available), but it may not work out for a family living too far out in the countryside.
This speaks, therefore, to a great need for more readily available transportation. The "suppliers" need better access to the "customers". The "employees" need better access to the "employers".
One reason the U.S. thrives is because we do have the whole transportation thing down pretty well. Practically everyone I know owns a car, and often 2 or 3 of them. Roads interconnect everything, and we've got mass transit in most big cities on top of that. But this comes at a cost.... vastly increased use of gasoline.
As other nations rise to greatness, they'll all have to tackle these same transportation issues. That's going to be where you see most of this "exponential growth" in fuel consumption. China, Russia, etc.... All well-populated nations that haven't quite gotten to the point where personal transportation is an integral part of everyone's daily life yet. But it's coming..... and in some cases, they've got a LOT more land to cover than the United States has!
I've had an interest in following the outcome of this particular case, maybe more than some people, because I used to know Tim Jung, the owner of the Internet Gateway ISP and defendant.
.... but I know a lot of people in the St. Louis area who wonder what ever happened to him. (It seems the www.igateway.net web site is still up, but the contact numbers are disconnected and many things look like they haven't been changed/edited in years. So it's more of a "placeholder site" at this point.)
I assume he's not really allowed/able to discuss any specifics of the case, since it's still going on
I'm not sure if the ISP was sold off voluntarily, in an action totally unrelated to the Vivendi/Blizzard suit, or if it had to be done to cover some legal expenses? (Hopefully, it was the former!)
Honestly, I don't think many people have been buying WinZip licenses in the last 3 or 4 years anyway. I could be wrong, but I get the idea that it's much more a matter of people preferring to "stick with what they're already used to and already paid for".
I know I used to work for a business that bought a fairly expensive "site license" for WinZip, but we did that back when many of the laptops were still running Windows '98 and the desktops ran NT 3.51 or NT 4.0. Back then, you really needed a solution like WinZip to make things easier on your users. But I'm sure they still use it today, just because everyone got used to it - so any of these "new features" in an update are still welcome.
Well, the problem *then* becomes, how do you *know* "nobody is listening"?
It's entirely possible (and has already happened) that someone creates a "blog" site intended to serve as sort of an electronic version of a personal diary, accessible anyplace they have Internet access, and mainly intended for a few friends or family members to use if they care to join in. But someone stumbles onto it, discovers what they view as an interesting conversation about something of significance - and starts directing heavy traffic to it. All of a sudden, this person's formerly "unknown" comments have big influence.
Therefore, you have to consider the *potential audience* for your words before you type them - not your current actual audience. When you host a web site on the Internet, the *potential* is always quite large.
If you want to write comments that truly aren't even intended to reach an audience beyond a few selected people, you'd password protect it.
I'm becoming convinced that cellphone service in the U.K. must be FAR superior to what we deal with in the U.S.
First, I complained about the contracts most of us get locked into, and someone from the U.K. laughed at my message - saying he "knew almost nobody still using a cellphone under contract". (Pay-as-you-go phones in the U.S. are *far* more expensive to use, and are generally sold to teens/kids and people with poor credit who can't get service any other way.)
Now, I see this talk about phone reception! I've been a Verizon wireless customer since they bought out my original carrier, Cybertel, years and years ago. Compared to most other providers I've used, I've had pretty good luck getting a signal wherever I go. But what I've noticed is, a *dual mode* analog and digital phone is a MUST with them. My new Treo 650 only works in digital, and when I start walking around indoors - my calls often start "breaking up" or people miss some of the words I say. On my older phone, you'd sometimes see it drop back to analog mode, which usually saved it from doing any of this. The ability to switch to analog mode also let me use my phones pretty far out in the middle of nowhere. When I went camping, for example, I could still get a usable analog signal with Verizon, but not a digital one. My friends who went with me taking their Sprint or Cingular phones, by contrast, had "no service", period.
One of my friends with Sprint always gets other calls "bleeding over" onto hers, too. The person on the other end never hears any of it, but she hears a phone ringing, someone answering, and can often hear the entire conversation in the background.
Practically everyone I know has *some* kind of reception complaint with their cellphone. It's crazy (at least in the U.S.) to make the statemnt that they're "just as clear as land lines". Only in perfect circumstances.
It seems to me this topic has come up a million times before. You can find this question being asked on any given "certification discussion forum" board on the net....
The answer hasn't really changed though. Basically, it depends to some extent on the price of the cert. as to how much "respect" it gets. It's all a bunch of "paper", of course, because certifications (like any other type of formal training) are no guarantee of retained knowledge. But the more costly and the more long and drawn out the process is of obtaining a cert. - the more a potential employer could look at it in a positive light upon seeing it on your resume.
(Let's face it. If you possess an expensive certification, it *likely* means you didn't really pay for it out of your own pocket. Rather, you already worked in that general area for an employer who thought enough of you to pay for you to get that training. If you weren't worth it, they probably wouldn't have invested the money in "improving" you.)
I've held my A+ for years, and to be honest, I don't really feel that it ever helped me get a job. Since I'm trying to do on-site service and computer consulting for myself now, it's nice to have it - just because it makes me look a little better on my web site. But in the grand scheme of things, these CompTIA certs. don't cost a lot to get, and they're relatively "easy". I got mine without ever buying a single study guide or taking a class. I simply took the free sample test questions found on a few web sites - and got the "gist" of the type of material they were interested in. I said "Ok... I know all of this already. I think i can pass that."
But I think for some people, getting certifications becomes a bit of an "addiction". They get a little bit of a "high" from the initial thrill of obtaining one - so they save up money and move on to the next, and the next. If I was hiring and saw somebody with 5 or 6 certs. in all sorts of scattered areas, I'd probably think "Career test taker!" more than "Incredibly knowlegeable candidate!"
Well, sure. I've also known quite a few people who were interesting in secretly eavesdropping on other people's conversations done via computer. In many cases, they paid good money for the software and/or hardware that made it possible.
I'm much less "amazed" by the number of people who "have no problem" doing it though, when I look at the bigger picture. In *every* instance I can think of, it involved somebody who already had reasonable suspicion that the other person was cheating on them, lying to them, or abusing their privileges of using the computer and Internet to begin with.
I'm a big advocate of respecting the privacy of others, to the point where *my* wife was quite likely chatting with other guys and trying to set up affairs on at least a few occasions - but I don't know what really transpired. Because even at that point, I didn't feel right secretly reading her email or private chat conversations. We've been divorced for over a year now though - and looking back at it, what would it have really accomplished if I did read her stuff? She's the one who ended up leaving, and there were plenty of reasons I *did* know for why our divorce became a necessity. In fact, infidelity isn't even considered much of an "issue" in my state - since they embrace the "no fault divorce" concept.
But that aside, I've known of people such as a former boss who set up software to keylog/spy on his daughter's Internet chat. His rationale was, he was already tipped off by her friends that she was starting to take drugs, hang out with the "wrong crowd" and so forth. He had tried confronting her on some of this, but she flat out lied to him and denied everything. So he felt he had some parental responsibility to keep a little bit closer tabs on her activities, with the idea it might keep her out of some trouble.
There are many reasons for wanting to "spy" on someone's computer usage, and some much more "ethical" than others. The problem I see with this particular case is - the author participated directly in the spying process, by hosting these "greeting cards" and collecting data himself.
Nice try, but that probably won't work... I haven't read the fine print on this particular suit, but in the past, most of them I've seen (such as the Toshiba class action suit over the defective floppy drives in a number of their laptops) included a clause that said all money not paid out to consumers up to the X million dollar limit would be paid to a specific charity instead. So while not filing a claim might mean your $25 or $50 would instead go to a charitable cause - it *won't* really discourage lawyers from attempting the same thing another time.
As a parent myself, I've personally discovered that LeapFrog really doesn't seem to make *any* products I'd consider very "useful" for kid's learning.
Reading about this latest gadget from them doesn't surprise me much....
My kid was given one of LeapFrog's earlier products when she was 1 or 2... a big plastic caterpilar pull-toy that speaks letters and sounds of the alphabet when each of its legs (corresponding to one letter each) are pressed. IMHO, this was probably the most sensible/useful thing they've offered in their product line, and for my kid, even it wasn't that good. By the time she was old enough to really get anything out of the whole concept - she wanted it served to her in some other format besides a "toddler pull-toy". (She's 3 now, and learning her alphabet using much cheaper but more effective toys, such as a cardboard alphabet train puzzle, where a letter and picture of something starting with that letter are printed on each "train car" in the puzzle. Not to mention, presenting it visually allows her to learn how to write both the uppercase and lowercase version of the letters.)
If you're willing to invest a little bit of time in working with your kid, you can speak things like vowel and consonant sounds to him/her and save the $30-50 one of these speaking toys costs you - and he/she will probably learn more quickly coming from your own mouth anyway.
I've worked as an on-site tech and PC Support Specialist for quite a long time for various companies, so I've seen a few good ones.
1. We had a lady who kept calling our on-site PC service business every day or two, insisting that her floppy drive was "eating her data". My friend went out there and tested the drive and it seemed fine, but he went ahead and cleaned it with a cleaning kit. But that didn't seem to work. The lady called back the next day reporting the same problem. He went back out again and just replaced the floppy drive with a brand new one. Nope, more complaints after that! So finally, he said to her "Ok. Show me exactly what you do with your computer when you start it up in the morning, an example of what you do with it during the day, and exactly how you shut it down at the end of the day." Everything seemed normal, until the very end, where she said ".... and then I take my disk out of the drive, and I keep it right here on my filing cabinet" (and proceeds to stick it up there with a big refrigerator magnet)!
2. One time, I got a call from a painter that I recently did a bunch of computer work for (memory and hard drive upgrades, etc.). He said he "thought he was going to need to buy a whole new computer". I tried to argue with him, pointing out that it was only a month or so ago that I did a lot of work to it, and it seemed perfectly good to me. But he insisted I come out and look at it. So I did.... When I arrived, I saw his problem. The tower case was completely smashed in on top and the 5.25" drives were falling out of their distorted bays. Turns out he bought a copy of "Battlefield 1942" and couldn't get it to do anything but draw a black screen (probably old video drivers) and in a fit of frustration, whacked it a few times with a sledgehammer.
3. A long time ago, I worked at a mom and pop computer store, and a guy came in with this mangled mess of circuit boards, a hard drive that was split open, misc. cards, and so on - and asked if we could "put it back together again for him"? Apparently, he just bought the computer at another dealership and put it all in the back of his pickup truck, and it flew out on the interstate and got run over by one or two other drivers. I guess he was out on the shoulder of the road trying to scrounge up all the pieces he could find, hoping it was salvagable!
Actually, though I'm sure you're correct in some cases about the cold helping with a malfunctioning temp. sensor in the drive - I think the freezer trick also sometimes just works because of defective IC chips on the controller board portion of the drive.
(Every IDE hard drive actually has the drive controller electronics bolted to a circuit board on the bottom of it. That's why the "IDE interface" is such a basic thing on your PC, whether it's integrated onto the motherboard or is a seperate PCI card. Most of the real work is done on the drive's electronics.)
With some malfunctioning electronics, you can manage to keep them working properly as long as you keep them cold enough. (One of the old tricks for troubleshooting bad parts in TV sets and the like was to selectively spray them with a can of compressed air, chilling them temporarily.)
That's fine, but it doesn't really negate the fact that millions and millions of other consumers still seem to get something out of watching movies.
If they didn't, you wouldn't see today's actors still getting huge salaries and entire cable channels dedicated to keeping tabs on what "so and so" in the industry likes to wear on Saturdays or eat for dinner (E! television).
So why would this affect those of us more interested in such things as computers? Well, just wait until people buy their new computers and movies and can't figure out how to make them play properly. Guess who they're going to come to with questions and hopes of a "work around" solution.
I tend to agree with your basic premise that a toolbar might not really be the ideal direction for Google - at least, if you want to see them remain known for their stark, but useful/powerful web pages.
.... that's probably just because it is so unobtrusive. But I've certainly used mine to see what time it is - and it's also a really quick way to realize if a given PC has an incorrectly set date/time which could cause strange errors in some applications.
But my main issue with toolbars are the fact that by their nature, they're gaudy "OS hacks". In essense, every time you see a "toolbar" on a system, it's a 3rd. party "after the fact" workaround for a perceived lack/failing of the OS itself.
A "system utility", "accessory" or "application", by contrast, would be a program that sits on the hard drive someplace and isn't seen or heard from until you specifically launch it.
You recently saw this illustrated in Mac OS X with all the whining over Apple's inclusion of the new "Dashboard" feature in v10.4. (Basically, it was amazingly similar in concept and execution to a shareware app that existed long before.) But ultimately, you see Dashboard winning people over. Why? Because obviously, it's a better situation to have such a thing integrated into the OS itself, even if it has some weaknesses compared to the 3rd. party "add ons". For starters, it's a "level playing field" because *all* users of that version of the OS have the same tool. You also have one less product on your computer supported by a separate party - so less chance of it suddenly becoming "unsupported" or incompatible, forcing you to wait for a fix.
I'm not necessarily against placing items of potential interest right on the user's desktop. I think the Windows clock in the taskbar is perfectly fine and unobtrusive. If people don't think to look at it when they want to know what time it is, well
Yeah, I've always had good luck with nVidia drivers/cards and Linux - although not sure I'd say they're exactly "at the same level" as the Windows driver counterparts.
On my MythTV box, using a GeForce 4Ti 4600 card, I've run into lots of issues of nVidia changing around little details related to the card's ability to output in HDTV resolutions, to properly select or auto-detect which port the card is connected to (s-video, composite, or DVI/VGA) and other such things. It generally works well... don't get me wrong. But some of the optional parameters nVidia says you can specify in your XF86Config-4 file seem to shift around from version to version in their driver updates, and things that work fine in one release are broken again in the next. (Lately, I've had issues where the option to specify some "overscan" for composite or s-video output with an integer value between 0.0 and 1.0 seems to have no effect at all on my card.)
Rather than charging students with crimes for this type of activity, I'd be for the immediate termination of anyone on the high-school's "I.T. staff" who actually thought this was a good or even "workable" policy!
If there really is a "hidden agenda" of fishing for "troublemakers", that's a very poor way to accomplish anything. I mean, hey, why not issue knives to every incoming student too and just sit back and wait to see who starts stabbing people?
And anyway, historically speaking, the tinkerers/experimenters of the world are the ones who accomplished and contributed the most to society as a whole. "Respect for authority" be dammed.... Computers are all about exploring and experimentation. If you can't even create a "virtual sandbox" of sorts out of the system configuration you're issuing your students, so they have "boundaries" to what they can do on said machines, that just illustrates that the students are smarter than the faculty. The tools *are* and *have been* available to restrict usage of computers to only specific applications. If you opt not to use them, then I think you're making a de-facto vote for allowing students to do as they will with the laptops.
You know which ones are most likely to go off and install programs like iChat AV or take full advantage of "remote control" software they figure out how to use? That's right -- the smartest ones and the ones who actually *enjoy* using a computer! But no, we have to punish them and encourage the mediocrity instead. Teach students that computers are ONLY there for specific tasks we set up for them in advance. Don't "have fun" with it or you're a "hacker". Drum all the curiousity out of them. It's EVIL!
Well, my initial reason for posting that comment wasn't necessarily beause it describes me, personally. (As a matter of fact, I do have a kid.) But it's *one* way of looking at the situation, and it's a view you run across quite often, actually.
As a self-proclaimed Libertarian though, I'm a little surprised you're so frustrated with people complaining about "paying twice" to send their kids to private schools? Most Libertarians I know pretty much sympathize with that complaint, offering it as a prime reason to privatize the whole school system.
I, too, consider myself Libertarian - but I have a real problem with the inefficiency of the public school system as a whole. I went to both private and public schools when I was growing up, and I'll be the first to admit that my private school education was overpriced and *not* a good experience for me at all. But by the same token, I feel particularly lucky that I went to a public school that was still of pretty good quality. That was back in the late 80's, but even then, many of my friends attended public high-schools where gang violence and fights/stabbings were the order of the day. Only a couple years after I graduated from my high-school, I heard stories of a student being shot in a drive-by while waiting on the front steps there, and of metal detectors being put in, etc. etc. So I think I may have been one of the last to get a really "good experience" out of the place.
I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I do know that the current system isn't working. And no, I don't feel that my taxes paid into the current school system are a "privilege of living in a well educated society". Perhaps it would be if it really worked. But I look around, and I don't see this "well educated society" at all. Rather, I see little pools of intelligent/successful people - who most often got there because loads of additional money was pumped into their higher education by their own choice. The level of intelligence the public schools are churning out these days is nothing to be proud of as a nation.
One thing I've come to realize is that if you think about it, every single thing we eat is "pretty gross".
.... and that's not even to mention what may be in the soil itself that surrounds them. Then, if you didn't just pick them yourself and fix them immediately, they've been handled by who knows who, and spent quite a while sitting in less than "clean" environments before they reach you, the consumer.
Those naturally grown veggies have had all manner of bugs crawling all over them, not to mention being rained on by water containing who knows what pollutants
And that's about the *least gross* scenario I can think of for food. No point even getting into the whole thing of rat hairs and worm parts found in your canned food goods..... or the amount of chemical preservatives holding together everything from our bakery goods to desserts.
Ultimately, everything about food is a "point of view" issue. One man's "disgusting ants" he'd *never eat* are another person's delicacy when covered in chocolate syrup.
So with that in mind, I personally would be rather "put off" by the idea of eating synthetic meat. I just don't like the mental image of eating something that's not really what it purports to be. But I'm also sure I'd eventually get used to it, if it became popular enough and tasted just like the "real thing". Certainly, it would become a non-issue within one more generation, as kids grow up eating it.
No - I think you're missing my point. I'm not "blasting ZoneAlarm" because it doesn't do everything and isn't "idiot-proof". I'm blasting it because it's an extra piece of unnecessary software for most people. If you disregard the fact that it allows you to block malware from communicating *after* it has already gotten in, then what else does it really accomplish that the built-in XP firewall doesn't?
Of course you need several products in tandem to adequately protect a PC. You want anti-virus software, anti-spyware software *and* a basic firewall. But assuming your anti-spyware and anti-virus software is up-to-date and doing its job properly, why would you see a real benefit from your firewall having extra "intelligence" to keep popping up alert dialogs whenever apps try to use the net?
Spyware authors simply engineer their programs to confuse and trick people into letting them past these types of firewalls anyway. EG. There's a popular piece of spyware that identifies itself as "winword.exe" - so most people think "Oh, it's Microsoft Word. That's ok." and authorize it to get past the firewall. I don't think it's fair to label everyone an "idiot" who doesn't figure that stunt out right away.
Well, there are many different ways you can look at this.
If it's a public school, you've already got plenty of people forced to pay into the system who don't even have kids. So getting a cheap laptop back out of the deal is about the *only* direct benefit they'll ever see for the money they've funneled into the school through their taxes. (Granted, they might get the same thing if the school went with your idea of "selling the laptops for fair market value and issuing the taxpayers rebate checks" - but how likely is that to really happen?)
I think the bigger issue might have been, how do you liquidate 1,000 laptops simultaneously and ensure you're paid up-front for the whole lot? I guarantee if you eBay'd all of them, you'd have lots of hassles with non-paying bidders, people demanding refunds because it "broke in shipping", possibly a couple cases of fraudulent cashier's checks or fake money orders, and so on. No way that's worth the bother. And if the school did go with a liquidator, most of them don't cut you a check until *after* they manage to resell all of the products, and then you get what they made, minus their "cut". So that could mean, no idea at all when they'd see money out of the sale. If the funding was needed for new items to be used for this school year, getting all of it immediately could have been worth a lot more than waiting around for months to try to make more in the long-run.
...the more false-alarms they create.
... so more burglars aren't alerted that it's safe to come in!"
Well, maybe not in *all* cases, but it sure seems to be a decent "rule of thumb". Norton and McAfee are probably the top 2 most popular vendors marketing "Internet Security" type packages - and both seem to flag the most false alarms, disrupt normal, smooth system operation, and "bloat" things FAR more than necessary.
Time and time again, when I'm trying to clean viruses or spyware off machines, I get the best results using relatively obscure, typically foreign-developed software products. And "personal firewall" software for Windows seems like much more of a "scam" or "solution in need of problems" than anything sensible or truly useful.
EG. Say you install "ZoneAlarm" on your Windows XP box because people promise you it's "much more secure and flexible than Windows' built in firewall!". Ok... Well, now you've got this product that's constantly harassing you EVERY TIME some new application or DLL tries to access the net for the first time. Typically, it tells you it has "no information to offer" on what that program really does, so it's up to you, the end-user, to determine if it's "safe" or not. Why would I ever assume that the typical Windows user knows better than applications themselves about which DLL files are "safe" vs. "threats"? But yet, that's pretty much the design model.
And furthermore, much of the supposedly "security" of these firewall products lies in the fact that they can "permanently block" malware from communicating out to the net. But that's *AFTER THE FACT* that the stuff got onto your machine! Who knows what other problems said malware is causing your computer in the meantime... but the user gets a false sense of security because ZoneAlarm "blocked" the stuff. That's like me saying "Hey, I have this cool security system in my house. Anyone can walk right in because I don't have locks on my doors, but once you set off the alarm, the criminal is rendered unable to communicate outside my house to his buddies
I didn't realize that neither Ian Davis or Drew Olbrich had any interest in being interviewed - but that you did attempt to contact them. In a way, that's an interesting "story" in and of itself. (Might have even made for a good little scrolling text "closing credits" type of scene on the end of the segment, mentioning such things as Olbrich's work on Shrek, etc.?)
But in any case, no -- I didn't mean to imply that after 1990, the ANSI art scene was "over' and didn't warrant any discussion. Only that it seemed an inordinate amount of time was given to the art scene folks vs. the people who I always felt made ANSI art viable in the first place.
(I remember when the whole ANSI art scene got big, the immediate response from most of the older BBSers I knew was rather negative. For starters, a program started circulating that let you take a GIF image and convert it automatically to ANSI. I always suspected that much of the multi-screen length art I saw these later "ANSI artists" submitting was really just generated automatically by such a program - with perhaps a bit of touch-up work done to it after the fact.)
Much of the real "talent" and "skill" involved in ANSI artwork, in my opinion, was the ability to fit the whole picture on a single 80x25 screen and still have it look good. The automated conversion utiities could never accomplish that.
On the "multitude of excuses for piracy" - sure, you've got a plethora of poor ones, and a few much more logical, better-worded ones. But isn't the end result ultimately the same?
I mean, whether you have 1 million people willfully violating copyright law with very strong, ethical arguments for doing so, or 1 million people willfully violating copyright because they say "It's not stealing because I didn't take anything off a store shelf, so nyah-nyah!" - you have the exact same outcome on your hands.
As you said, the answer is somewhere in the middle - but the only way to get there is for the RIAA to take the "battle" to the middle-ground. As the party holding the copyrights on the content, it's up to them to make that move first.
Personally, I don't really believe the problem is that "the other side doesn't want to pay anything". I've got a collection of well over 120 music CDs that I purchased through the mid to late 80's and to a lesser extent into the early 90's. After that, it dropped off to nearly no new CD purchases. Most of the people I know who are around my age (early to mid 30's) have a similar story. Is it because we suddenly decided the industry owed us all of our music for free? No... I've purchased a few select tracks from the iTunes store, even when I could as easily have fired up Limewire or something and downloaded them for free. But overall, I don't like being forced to pay full price for a CD of mostly mediocre material, just to get 1 or 2 tracks I want. And unlike in the 80's, the technology now makes it blatantly obvious that it *should* be possible to do that. Yet - I still can't walk into a store, queue up a list of tracks I want and have it spit out a custom made "mix" CD for me of what I purchased, all for anything resembling a "fair price".
Yeah... I know exactly what you mean. I was just thinking about that for a while before writing this reply. I think my conclusion is, it's probably best to be as "well rounded" an individual as possible. In other words, yes - you *can* be entertained without "escaping reality" at all; whether that means "quality time" spent with someone you love, or simply doing a job that you truly enjoy doing. But at some point, it's still not a bad idea to delve into some of the more constructive forms of "escape entertainment". Reading books or watching movies or a play, catching some live music, or even playing video games are all ways to enjoy the artistic works someone else put effort into creating for you.
Therefore, even if you could be entertained 100% of the time without resorting to escapist entertainment provided by the culture around you, I'm not sure that's "ideal" or even a "worthy pursuit". I think the trick is just "moderation in all things".
I was one of the first people to pre-order the BBS Documentary when I found out about it. I've watched the whole thing, as well as loaned it to a good friend of mine who also watched it all.
.... and to me, they were roughly equivalent to "script kiddies" and "warez junkies" anyway. The types of boards they made screens for were "3lit3 0-day warez d00d!" boards, as a whole. Not the pioneering BBS's that "started it all".
I agree with the comments from people saying it was well done, edited well, etc. And if you're "on the fence" about buying a copy of this but have fond memories of the "BBS era" - what are you waiting for? Order this right away!
That said, though, I also felt a few twinges of frustration during portions of the documentary. Probably my biggest "problem" with it was the segment on the ANSI artwork. It seemed like an extrordinary large amount of time was given to interviewing a bunch of younger kids who got in only on the "tail end" of the whole BBS scene, and mistakenly believed their "art groups" held much more significance than they really did in the "grand scheme".
I mean, when I hit "play" on that portion of the DVD, I was hoping to hear interviews with the creators of the first ANSI art software packages like "The Draw" and "ANSIPaint", and/or more time given to the individual artists who first started offering to make free opening ANSI screens for BBSs around the country. (My own BBS, File Cabinet, was approached by "Violet" because I was part of Fidonet, and she was apparently drawing ANSI art for random BBS's in Fido's network, one at a time. Of course, I said "Sure! You can draw me something and I'll use it!") They did talk to "Ebony Eyes" who was another famous ANSI artist from around that time, so that was good. But then the interview immedialtey shifted to this big "story" of the competing art groups like ACiD