Yeah... but this licensing scheme of MS's really turns into a licensing nightmare down the road.
If you're like most companies, you have some older systems still in operation that run an older OS, because that's all they were ever licensed for. Then you're adding these "wildcards" to the mix... machines that are legal to run anything you like, including the most current OS. Wait until the next OS is released, and then you've got some brand new PCs licensed to use it and everything else, some PCs that can run anything but the latest OS, and finally ones that can only run something over 2 versions old.
Wait until someone asks you to give them proof that you're legal on everything, when you've got portables out there running Win2K or '98 and a mix of things on desktops and servers - and you've got to research all of them to figure out why each is legal to run what it runs. Fun stuff....
There's truth in what you're saying (especially in the case of Sony, IMHO), but I still think Apple is focusing more on media from a slightly different angle than the others.
Basically, Apple is courting the artists who create the media. They already had a foot in that door since the early days, when graphics artists and creative types started comprising a large part of Mac sales. But now they're leveraging those connections in new ways.
Dell may be selling televisions in their catalogs now, but that doesn't make them a "shoe in" as the choice of those needing to edit film footage for a new movie production. That's just a reflection of Dell's attitude that "computers are just more pieces of commodity electronics goods that consumers buy". Dell is all about finding out what's desireable to the masses and using their buying power and connections/clout to start offering those items at prices lower than anyone has seen before. (EG. They now have the world's cheapest 24" LCD flat panel monitor, and one of the cheapest laser printers ever offered.)
The fact is, other than some cheesy front-end overlays to the Windows desktop and customized toolbars, Gateway, HP/Compaq, Dell, Toshiba, and the rest of the lot aren't really selling any noteworthy applications software focused on content production and editing. Apple sells quite a bit of it, and it's generally considered "top tier" in the industry.
Any time you build a product that's popular enough with a niche market, you get a certain group of fanatics who try to describe the business as something greater than what is really is.
Those folks aside though, I think Apple is focused more on becoming a "media company" than a "computer company" these days. That's the biggest difference between the Apple of today, and the Apple of the 80's.
After all, when your C.E.O. also happens to run a major motion picture studio, and when your "flagship software applications" include such things as Final Cut Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro and Shake - you have to think this is a company with a primary goal of being a big player in media production and editing.
Computers go hand-in-hand with all of that, of course, but success in offering the "whole package" includes such concepts as retaining control and big market-share of your music downloads and playback mechanisms, tools to ensure your products "play nicely" with copyright restrictions on the use of commercial media, and so on.
I don't say any of this as an "excuse" for Apple's behavior. Rather, it's just important to understand that they *are* looking at things differently than they used to. And not doing so would leave them in a much more place, financially speaking - since they'd be in the exact same marketspace as the rest of the PC clone builders (HP, IBM, Dell, Sony, etc. etc.).
Yep.... The goal of the whole industry has really been to obfuscate things to the point where the vast majority of customers are too confused to make valid purchasing decisions on technical facts.
For one thing, look at the debate on whether DVD-R or DVD+R (or for that matter, + or -RW) was the best format to burn your movies onto for "best compatibility" with set-top players. This was the main reason I bought my first DVD-R drive, after much research. (The consensus seemed to be that movies recorded to DVD-R media had your best shot at playing back right in a randomly used player.) Know what, though? I tried 4 different DVD set-top players I owned and had poor results getting my media to play back properly in any of them! Typically, they'd start playing ok but as they got further through the movie, they'd start stuttering and skipping around, and finally just stop with an error message. One of these included my Playstation 2 I owned at the time!
Much more recently, I tried burning a movie to a piece of DVD+R media and put it in one of these same players that gave me all the trouble before. Know what? It plays my movies perfectly whenever I record them on DVD+R!
But truthfully, results vary. I could bring this same movie in to any Circuit City or Best Buy store right now and try it on all the set-top players on the shelf, and I guarantee it would work in 40 ot 50% and choke in the others. Many that choked would probably play my stuff on DVD-R that I had no many problems with.
(Oh, and I tried - and +RW media too. Had really bad luck with that. I don't think any of my players even recognized it as valid media... but my players are all at least 2 year old models too.)
As yet another example, look at the blank media sold for "music recording". Some customers are tricked into thinking they need this type of more expensive media if they want to burn music CDs. (That would just make logical sense, based on the labeling/packaging, right?)
For those in a technical area, I totally agree. There's a BIG difference between using the Internet to learn of the latest I.T. trends and products/services, and trading jokes around in email.
What scares me most about these types of studies is middle management will grab ahold of them, using them as justification for cracking down on ALL internet usage - without considering the consequences.
Already, we've seen the law offices and accounting firms that slap legal "disclaimers" on the end of every outgoing email - sometimes as long as a full paragraph. Has anyone ever known a case where that excess text on the end really helped a firm in a court of law?? Unless I'm sadly uninformed here, I think most of that 'boilerplate" does little but waste more corporate bandwidth.
There's no way I could have done my job as efficiently without unrestricted access to the net. I even had a couple times where I needed some rather obscure help with Linux issues and I had to turn to IRC chat rooms to get an answer. My workplace had already tried blocking all the IRC chat ports at the firewall, under the idea that "chat is absolutely not work-related", so I had to make special effort to get around that. Just doesn't make sense.
Employees wasting time at work is NOT really a problem caused by the Internet. It's a people problem, that needs to be dealt with by people's managers, on a case-by-case basis. If you just block their net access, the ones intent on screwing around will just walk the hallways, hang out at the water cooler, slip outside for more breaks, read books or magazines, make personal phone calls, or any number of other things.
The western world is ale to define "poverty" much less strictly than other countries for a number of reasons.
For starters, even people with no job and literally zero incone often have amassed quite a few nice things - because we've got so many lines of credit available. Everything from "payday loan" places to pawn shops to credit cards to home equity loans. (If you've got a half-way decent home you received in a will when someone in your family died, you've got a ticket to a pretty good-sized loan right there!) And can't pay the payments afterwards? Well, put aside about $800 and you can easily get a bankruptcy lawyer to write it all off. A little careful planning before and during the process, and you'll probably end up keeping all that stuff you bought on the defaulted loan, too.
I really don't think many, if any, of these mechanisms exist in many poorer nations?
We also have a system of government that's willing to give people quite a bit of "basic necessities" if they're willing to do a baseline minimal amount of work in return. I live in a relatively "poor" neighborhood myself, and I constantly see where my neighbors own just about all of the same things I do - despite the fact I worked in relatively good-paying I.T. and computer type jobs, while most of them worked at places like Waffle House, Steak and Shake, or doing housekeeping. How's it possible? Well, consider SBC gives them heavily subsidized DSL service as long as their income is below a certain point... Consider govt. will pay for their car repairs if their vehicles don't pass state inspection, as long as their income is below a certain point... Consider the food stamps and daycare assistance programs, free or subsidized health insurance, assistance programs for those who can't pay their utilitiy bills, section 8 housing (the house next door to the one I bought is rented out section 8 right now), and so on. If they take full advantage of all of these, it pretty well makes up the full difference between our incomes.
In fact, I think we're rapidly headed towards a United States with no "middle class", except in name only - for just this reason.
Well, the point of my argument was to counter the poster who claimed that it was simply not possible for software coding to be "art".
But I'm considering what you're saying here too. Ultimately, it does come down to opinion, but I feel we all have a right to our opinions, and to voice them. If someone considers themself an artist, part of the "requirements" include ability to accept criticism.
I would lean towards acceptance in most cases where I was unsure if a person's work qualified as art, yet he/she insisted on labeling it as such. But though nobody can truly "see into another man's soul" to tell what's really driving him - I think it's possible to take a good guess at times.
One big "test", I think, would be asking "Is the creator of a given work doing it because it gives him/her pleasure to create it, or not?" It's tough to claim you're creating "art" if you're working on something you'd rather not be doing at all, and only half-heartedly plug along as it because you're being paid for the result. I fail to see how going about it that way could ever produce "art" as the end product?
I live in Missouri myself, so I feel at least partially qualified to comment here.
$30,000 in MO is *not* really equivalent to $250,000 in N.Y. - though one could probably argue the case based simply on ability to buy a house.
Much depends on how much you value the ability to buy a decent sized home. If you've consistently earned a $30K salary in Missouri and have no other bad credit issues, a bank will give you a home loan for a house costing up to at least $140-160K or so. If you really shop around and haggle, or don't mind living in a less than ideal neighborhood - that should be able to buy you a home that's, say, about 5 or 6 years old with a full basement, 3 bedrooms, decent kitchen, and a 2 car garage. Due to the lack of available real-estate in places like NYC, you'll need a LOT more income to get the same thing out there.
BUT - that may or may not concern someone. The lifystyle in N.Y. tends to just be a little different. People don't *expect* for feel they *need* a home like that. Renting is much more a "standard" thing to do, and you might not even use your car too often in parts of N.Y.
Otherwise though, I'd say it does take maybe 2x the money to buy the same things like groceries, gas for your car, etc. etc. if you're in a place like N.Y. vs. Missouri.
But yeah - why not film in Missouri? The movie "White Palace" was filmed partially in St. Louis, MO and that was a full-blown Hollywood production.
Thank you! I'm glad someone else said that! Sci-Fi seems like it's turned into more of a "cheap horror flic" channel than anything else lately.
That, and the modern day equivalent of horrible b-grade 50's campy sci-fi... which I don't think is really what most viewers want to watch on there.
Maybe I'm wrong, but everyone I talk to who likes Sci-Fi likes Battlestar Galactic, Stargate, and the fact that they were showing things like X-Files episodes, not all this "It's half man, half mosquito!" and "Help! A giant snake is loose in the jungle and killing us all!" kind of B.S.
I think all of your examples *can* be art, but aren't necessarily so (or even "typically" or "usually" so).
Limiting art to only encompassing paintings, movies, music or sculpture is pretty restrictive.
For that matter, take your "music" example... Is all music automatically "art"? I'd argue that it depends on how seriously the musician takes his/her work. It's one thing to have a working/functional knowledge of singing or songwriting - but another to put real effort into making a song "your own expression". Would you say Brittney Spears is a true "artist"? I wouldn't. I'd argue she was simply interested in finding a fast track to fame and fortune, and used the medium of popular music as the vehicle to get there. How about Milli Vanilli? Put out lots of very popular music and made lots of money, but didn't even use his own material to do it!
I see software coding as the same thing. If you're just putting in your time at your job, coding whatever you're asked to code - then no, that's just "work", not "art". But if you're inspired by the challenges and restrictions imposed upon you by a device, and create your own game or application that pushes the limits of device (quite possibly through using very creative tricks you came up with yourself) - why isn't that "art"?
(Personally, I think it's much harder to claim "art" when developing on a dominant, fairly mature platform like Windows - because you're probably re-using a lot of "canned" code and published API calls, etc. Where you really see developers speak of elegant code and art is on such things as Palm PDAs with limited CPU power, screen resolution, and input options. Or perhaps the first coders to explore the limits of a particular console system after it's first released.)
One question though: Why computerjobs.com? I'm not real familiar with their site, but are they one of the sites that claims to consolidate complete listings of I.T. jobs from a number of other large job search sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, BrainBuzz, etc. etc.)?
If they really do get a pretty good number of I.T. related listings all collected up in one place, then yes - I think this is a pretty useful little graph/tool.
I've been out of work since the beginning of May, and living in the St. Louis area, it seems to me that there are currently very slim pickings. I keep hearing talk of the economic recovery, but at least around here - I'm not really seeing it.
According to your chart, that would be an accurate accessment too - since it clearly shows a sharp decline in I.T. jobs available in St. Louis since April of 2005. (And worse yet, I'm really mainly interested in the hardware side of things, but if you look at that specifically - you see that in my city, there were only a grand total of about 2 jobs fitting that category, at any given time!) In the whole U.S., it looked like I.T. hardware jobs only averaged around 1,200 *total*, for that matter. Not good... not good at all!
When I read the Slashdot article title, I got the impression Apple was considering building its own complete cellular network. But the article doesn't seem to be saying that at all.
Rather, they're talking about what amounts to "VARs (value added resellers)" in the world of computers.
Companies like ESPN, Disney or Apple just pay one of the existing cellular companies (like Sprint) for rights to use their infrastructure - and they resell customized phones that do some things the carrier doesn't wish to offer with the phones packaged on their regular plans.
Big deal!?! I grant that this might, indeed, be a way for Apple to get their way rolling out phones that play iTunes purchased music and still sync with PCs - but what else does it really offer anyone?
The cellular carriers are still going to call all the shots as far as prices to use their networks - so they're not likely to give Apple some sort of huge discount. Therefore, I'd say you can expect monthy pricing to be the same or higher than you pay now. And if you have issues such as poor reception, slow data xfer rates, or customer service hassles with your carrier, that won't change either.
I would have MUCH preferred to read your story about Dotster. I've had a lot of headaches dealing with those people in the past, while trying to manage a group of web sites for a previous employer.
It wouldn't surprise me they screwed up and tried to cover it up....
No... I don't think that simply because someone else uses your unsecure, open wi-fi network, the mere fact that they temporarily "limited your bandwidth" constitutes "stealing" on their part.
Most consumer broadband services don't guarantee you a specific amount of bandwidth to begin with! They tell you "rates of up to X" speed. In the case of DSL service, Customer A who is lucky enough to live a few houses down from the central office probably gets as much as 2 or 3x the bandwidth for his money as Customer B who is about 12,000 feet from the same central office.
The only thing that makes sense here, in my opinion, is charging someone if they actually do something criminal while borrowing your open network. (EG. If some guy in a van keeps pulling up close to your house and is obviously using your wi-fi network, and the next month you get questioned about downloading child porn - then it's time to report him and have him arrested.)
Short of that, if you don't want other people connecting to your wi-fi network, secure the thing! Otherwise, people really have no way to know if you're purposely offering free Internet access to those around you, or you're just clueless or too lazy to lock it down properly.
(That's where your unlocked door analogy falls flat, too. It's understood that a home belongs to a specific owner, and you're NOT allowed to just walk in, uninvited - especially if the door is closed and you have to turn the knob just to enter. You probably aren't sitting on that person's physical property at all when your laptop picks up their open wi-fi network.)
The *concept* of the courts and legal system is good. The implementation is sometimes lacking....
I'm not a fan of vigilante violence either, but I also realize it's never going to completely disappear - and that's probably as it should be.
If the general rule is to use the legal system and avoid the violence, good. But situations where it becomes clear the courts didn't provide any justice? Let's just say those individuals should "watch their backs", because you never know... Anger enough people, followed by frustrating them by the injustice of our official system of punishment failing to act - and it's a formula for a few people taking things into their own hands.
As a "30-something" myself, and realizing I have practically no savings - I think the problem runs a little bit deeper than "skipping the purchase of that 60" plasma screen".
I know a surprising number of guys like myself, who worked hard in our 20's and started "getting ahead" in I.T. careers, only to start back at the bottom due to divorce. These often lead right into being forced to file for bankruptcy, compounding the problem.
My 401K savings was wiped out with legal fees, and I haven't been able to get another job that even offers one since then.
It's fine to talk about wealth being more "widespread" due to things like 401K's and mutual funds, but those of us who primarily work for smaller businesses don't often get in on any of that. You hear a lot of talk about the small businesses being the "real future" and "cornerstone" of America - but working for them seems to rarely connect someone to any of this wealth that's supposed being "spread around".
The reason I brought it up is to further illustrate that Jeff Bezos isn't my idea of a corporate C.E.O. with loads of sensibility. So when you start asking "Why the hell did this guy think it made sense to try to patent a 1-click shopping cart purchase concept on a web site??", it might make more sense, considering the rest of his business decisions.
And for what it's worth, I don't shop there much. I hate when places want to offer me those "$5 gift certificates for Amazon.com!" and so on. Really, I have little use for 'em. I think I purchased a total of 2 pieces of software from them, and that was for my ex-wife after she complained that she couldn't find them on store shelves anywhere locally.
Absolutely. But to at least some of us, Amazon was also a little frustrating from another standpoint.
When the.com "boom" was underway, Amazon just followed the same boneheaded business model that most of the others were taking; grow as big as possible, as fast as possible!
I remember reading more than one interview with Bezos back then that made it pretty clear the guy really didn't have much of a "common sense" business plan at all. He was often asked exactly what types of products or services he planned to concentrate on offering, and always gave back silly answers like "everything!".
For a while there, I remember them trying to compete directly with eBay, via "Amazon Auctions" - and it seemed like it was starting to gain some traction. I thought "Ah! Finally, Amazon has something really worth pursuing here!" I used their auction site and got great results. Very competitive, results-wise, with what I got from eBay but a little cheaper to use. But then they went off on some other tangent (as I recall, a big hoopla about partnering up with Toys 'r Us and becoming the largest online toy retailer?), and the auction site went into decline as eBay ate their lunch.
Then, that didn't pan out as expected either. All along, they were doing respectable book sales - but people kept questioning how Amazon would really attain/keep profitability as "merely on online bookseller", since books take lots of physical space to warehouse, go out of date rapidly in some cases, don't always have much markup, can get costly to ship, and it's a space with lots of competition.
I've always had a strong feeling that Amazon survived much more by luck than by expert guidance by Bezos or anything of that sort. His "let's get our hands in the middle of everything, and do it all!" attitude should have been the death of the business. That's NOT a smart idea - and shouldn't get your face on the front of magazines as "C.E.O. of the year"! But lots of others went bust faster than he did, so he got lots of inertia just by being "last man standing" in some areas. And perhaps all those non-profitable book sales finally earned him a lot of "brand recognition" that helped too. So now, he's managed to sell a "critical mass" of things that *are* profitable to sell in quantity, so it haphazzardly fell together. But bleah.... I can't say that makes me "respect" their business model.
Your logic would be fine, EXCEPT, when you're talking about a clear case of individual rights or freedoms at stake, why shouldn't govt. at the federal level have legislation that helps preserve those rights/freedoms? That's not the type of thing you really want left open for change, just because of some corruption at the local level.
I'm not a fan of giving federal govt. any more power than necessary either - but laying down "ground rules" that ensure freedom and individual liberties are preserved is one of their basic functions.
As a general rule, the idea of charging people fines is a terrible way to punish the breaking of minor laws. I can't really speak for other nations, but in the U.S. - I see fines being levied as tax collection tools more than for any real interest in stopping the crimes they claim to help stop.
Where I live, you can almost tell how small a municipality is by how often you see the police sitting in one of the same sneaky places, spending most of the day looking for speeders. Larger municipalities with a bigger tax base don't *need* to pressure their police to hand out so many traffic tickets. They typically have more important things to do with their time.
The typical fine only punishes the poor. If you make enough money, paying a fine because you parked your car in a much more convenient place that happened to be a "no parking" zone is probably no big deal. Send off the money order and you're done. Might have been well worth the price of the ticket, really.
Nonetheless, making fines so high that even the rich get "punished" just makes it *impossible* for the poor to pay them - and that makes no sense either.
Crimes of "convenience" such as littering are going to happen whether the fine is $25 or $25,000. As another poster said, it's all about the would-be litterer's confidence level in not getting caught. In the case of littering, it only takes a split second to throw something out a car window - and especially at night, people probably won't ever see that you did it.
What would be better, IMHO, is in lieu of fines, order these people to perform community service. Make them pick up litter for a couple weekends. (Right now, we've got all these "adopt a highway" programs with volunteers - but seems unnecessary if you could make the people doing the littering do the cleanup instead.)
If you still want fun games for kids that don't include lots of graphic violence, and you're on a PC (or Mac) instead of a console - I think almost all the stuff from GameHouse is excellent. My kid is only 3, yet she already loves playing their "Gutterball 3D" game, just to try different colored bowling balls and watch them roll down the lane and knock pins down. And if they're a little older, all the stuff like TextTwist makes you think as well as have fun.
They're inexpensive and downloadable off the net, too... so if you want a new one, you don't even have to go to the store to get it first.
These days, most of the really good, non-violent stuff in PC/Mac gaming comes from web sites marketing their goods online. The small developers haven't "sold out" to Hollywood yet.
What if someone starts selling completely customizable cellphones, on a direct order web site similar to Dell?
To do this right, you'd want to offer contracts with any of your choice of pretty much all the available carriers for your given area though - which might prove to be tough to arrange.
But even if they had to settle for new phones you bought straight out with no service contract, at least they wouldn't be "chipped" to only work on a particular carrier's network - so people might still buy them.
Offer, say, 2 or 3 basic "skeletons" of cellphones, like a flip style and a "candy bar" style, and then let people buy options like "Add camera: $39" until they have exactly what they'd like.
No, what I meant was - if someone really thought they could do something original and valuable enough with the bandwidth and general technoligies cable providers use, they could indeed lay new cable and give it a shot. The Supreme Court ruling shoudn't affect that, unless I'm misunderstanding something about it?
EG. Someone might figure it's not worth the risk to try to be "just another cable competitor peddling the same sets of movie channels to people" - but they might want to try it in the form of "cheaper, faster, better broadband with VoIP service", or maybe they'd do it offering something completely new that we haven't considered yet?
When it comes to my iPod, I confess I did probably buy it largely because of all the "buzz" surrounding it. I KEPT it because it was technically superior.
Most manufacturers of MP3 players seemed to either be focusing on building one as cheaply as possible (and I have zero interest in some cheaply made doodad with buttons the size of the ones on a digital watch), or loaded with features and gimicks at the expense of usability.
Since the iPod has now been through a full 4 generations, some of the competition has had a lot of time to try to play catch-up. I'll admit that if I bought a new player today, I might have to take a closer look at some of the competition's newer offerings. But still, there's always something to be said for owning a device that's the "defacto standard". With an iPod, I have LOADS of options for accessories... Anything from microphones to turn it into a digital tape recorder to adapters so it stores images straight off my digital camera, to various "boom box" type amplifier speakers it docks into and charges while it plays through them. (And don't forget, Alpine even offers a line of car stereos that interface directly with an iPod, so the car stereo front panel mimics the iPod's own screens.)
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Yeah... but this licensing scheme of MS's really turns into a licensing nightmare down the road.
If you're like most companies, you have some older systems still in operation that run an older OS, because that's all they were ever licensed for. Then you're adding these "wildcards" to the mix... machines that are legal to run anything you like, including the most current OS. Wait until the next OS is released, and then you've got some brand new PCs licensed to use it and everything else, some PCs that can run anything but the latest OS, and finally ones that can only run something over 2 versions old.
Wait until someone asks you to give them proof that you're legal on everything, when you've got portables out there running Win2K or '98 and a mix of things on desktops and servers - and you've got to research all of them to figure out why each is legal to run what it runs. Fun stuff....
There's truth in what you're saying (especially in the case of Sony, IMHO), but I still think Apple is focusing more on media from a slightly different angle than the others.
Basically, Apple is courting the artists who create the media. They already had a foot in that door since the early days, when graphics artists and creative types started comprising a large part of Mac sales. But now they're leveraging those connections in new ways.
Dell may be selling televisions in their catalogs now, but that doesn't make them a "shoe in" as the choice of those needing to edit film footage for a new movie production. That's just a reflection of Dell's attitude that "computers are just more pieces of commodity electronics goods that consumers buy". Dell is all about finding out what's desireable to the masses and using their buying power and connections/clout to start offering those items at prices lower than anyone has seen before. (EG. They now have the world's cheapest 24" LCD flat panel monitor, and one of the cheapest laser printers ever offered.)
The fact is, other than some cheesy front-end overlays to the Windows desktop and customized toolbars, Gateway, HP/Compaq, Dell, Toshiba, and the rest of the lot aren't really selling any noteworthy applications software focused on content production and editing. Apple sells quite a bit of it, and it's generally considered "top tier" in the industry.
Any time you build a product that's popular enough with a niche market, you get a certain group of fanatics who try to describe the business as something greater than what is really is.
Those folks aside though, I think Apple is focused more on becoming a "media company" than a "computer company" these days. That's the biggest difference between the Apple of today, and the Apple of the 80's.
After all, when your C.E.O. also happens to run a major motion picture studio, and when your "flagship software applications" include such things as Final Cut Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro and Shake - you have to think this is a company with a primary goal of being a big player in media production and editing.
Computers go hand-in-hand with all of that, of course, but success in offering the "whole package" includes such concepts as retaining control and big market-share of your music downloads and playback mechanisms, tools to ensure your products "play nicely" with copyright restrictions on the use of commercial media, and so on.
I don't say any of this as an "excuse" for Apple's behavior. Rather, it's just important to understand that they *are* looking at things differently than they used to. And not doing so would leave them in a much more place, financially speaking - since they'd be in the exact same marketspace as the rest of the PC clone builders (HP, IBM, Dell, Sony, etc. etc.).
... but I guess you didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, because you just re-posted pretty much a dupe with the Bubba quote.
Yep.... The goal of the whole industry has really been to obfuscate things to the point where the vast majority of customers are too confused to make valid purchasing decisions on technical facts.
For one thing, look at the debate on whether DVD-R or DVD+R (or for that matter, + or -RW) was the best format to burn your movies onto for "best compatibility" with set-top players. This was the main reason I bought my first DVD-R drive, after much research. (The consensus seemed to be that movies recorded to DVD-R media had your best shot at playing back right in a randomly used player.) Know what, though? I tried 4 different DVD set-top players I owned and had poor results getting my media to play back properly in any of them! Typically, they'd start playing ok but as they got further through the movie, they'd start stuttering and skipping around, and finally just stop with an error message. One of these included my Playstation 2 I owned at the time!
Much more recently, I tried burning a movie to a piece of DVD+R media and put it in one of these same players that gave me all the trouble before. Know what? It plays my movies perfectly whenever I record them on DVD+R!
But truthfully, results vary. I could bring this same movie in to any Circuit City or Best Buy store right now and try it on all the set-top players on the shelf, and I guarantee it would work in 40 ot 50% and choke in the others. Many that choked would probably play my stuff on DVD-R that I had no many problems with.
(Oh, and I tried - and +RW media too. Had really bad luck with that. I don't think any of my players even recognized it as valid media... but my players are all at least 2 year old models too.)
As yet another example, look at the blank media sold for "music recording". Some customers are tricked into thinking they need this type of more expensive media if they want to burn music CDs. (That would just make logical sense, based on the labeling/packaging, right?)
For those in a technical area, I totally agree. There's a BIG difference between using the Internet to learn of the latest I.T. trends and products/services, and trading jokes around in email.
What scares me most about these types of studies is middle management will grab ahold of them, using them as justification for cracking down on ALL internet usage - without considering the consequences.
Already, we've seen the law offices and accounting firms that slap legal "disclaimers" on the end of every outgoing email - sometimes as long as a full paragraph. Has anyone ever known a case where that excess text on the end really helped a firm in a court of law?? Unless I'm sadly uninformed here, I think most of that 'boilerplate" does little but waste more corporate bandwidth.
There's no way I could have done my job as efficiently without unrestricted access to the net. I even had a couple times where I needed some rather obscure help with Linux issues and I had to turn to IRC chat rooms to get an answer. My workplace had already tried blocking all the IRC chat ports at the firewall, under the idea that "chat is absolutely not work-related", so I had to make special effort to get around that. Just doesn't make sense.
Employees wasting time at work is NOT really a problem caused by the Internet. It's a people problem, that needs to be dealt with by people's managers, on a case-by-case basis. If you just block their net access, the ones intent on screwing around will just walk the hallways, hang out at the water cooler, slip outside for more breaks, read books or magazines, make personal phone calls, or any number of other things.
The western world is ale to define "poverty" much less strictly than other countries for a number of reasons.
For starters, even people with no job and literally zero incone often have amassed quite a few nice things - because we've got so many lines of credit available. Everything from "payday loan" places to pawn shops to credit cards to home equity loans. (If you've got a half-way decent home you received in a will when someone in your family died, you've got a ticket to a pretty good-sized loan right there!) And can't pay the payments afterwards? Well, put aside about $800 and you can easily get a bankruptcy lawyer to write it all off. A little careful planning before and during the process, and you'll probably end up keeping all that stuff you bought on the defaulted loan, too.
I really don't think many, if any, of these mechanisms exist in many poorer nations?
We also have a system of government that's willing to give people quite a bit of "basic necessities" if they're willing to do a baseline minimal amount of work in return. I live in a relatively "poor" neighborhood myself, and I constantly see where my neighbors own just about all of the same things I do - despite the fact I worked in relatively good-paying I.T. and computer type jobs, while most of them worked at places like Waffle House, Steak and Shake, or doing housekeeping. How's it possible? Well, consider SBC gives them heavily subsidized DSL service as long as their income is below a certain point... Consider govt. will pay for their car repairs if their vehicles don't pass state inspection, as long as their income is below a certain point... Consider the food stamps and daycare assistance programs, free or subsidized health insurance, assistance programs for those who can't pay their utilitiy bills, section 8 housing (the house next door to the one I bought is rented out section 8 right now), and so on. If they take full advantage of all of these, it pretty well makes up the full difference between our incomes.
In fact, I think we're rapidly headed towards a United States with no "middle class", except in name only - for just this reason.
Well, the point of my argument was to counter the poster who claimed that it was simply not possible for software coding to be "art".
But I'm considering what you're saying here too. Ultimately, it does come down to opinion, but I feel we all have a right to our opinions, and to voice them. If someone considers themself an artist, part of the "requirements" include ability to accept criticism.
I would lean towards acceptance in most cases where I was unsure if a person's work qualified as art, yet he/she insisted on labeling it as such. But though nobody can truly "see into another man's soul" to tell what's really driving him - I think it's possible to take a good guess at times.
One big "test", I think, would be asking "Is the creator of a given work doing it because it gives him/her pleasure to create it, or not?" It's tough to claim you're creating "art" if you're working on something you'd rather not be doing at all, and only half-heartedly plug along as it because you're being paid for the result. I fail to see how going about it that way could ever produce "art" as the end product?
I live in Missouri myself, so I feel at least partially qualified to comment here.
$30,000 in MO is *not* really equivalent to $250,000 in N.Y. - though one could probably argue the case based simply on ability to buy a house.
Much depends on how much you value the ability to buy a decent sized home. If you've consistently earned a $30K salary in Missouri and have no other bad credit issues, a bank will give you a home loan for a house costing up to at least $140-160K or so. If you really shop around and haggle, or don't mind living in a less than ideal neighborhood - that should be able to buy you a home that's, say, about 5 or 6 years old with a full basement, 3 bedrooms, decent kitchen, and a 2 car garage. Due to the lack of available real-estate in places like NYC, you'll need a LOT more income to get the same thing out there.
BUT - that may or may not concern someone. The lifystyle in N.Y. tends to just be a little different. People don't *expect* for feel they *need* a home like that. Renting is much more a "standard" thing to do, and you might not even use your car too often in parts of N.Y.
Otherwise though, I'd say it does take maybe 2x the money to buy the same things like groceries, gas for your car, etc. etc. if you're in a place like N.Y. vs. Missouri.
But yeah - why not film in Missouri? The movie "White Palace" was filmed partially in St. Louis, MO and that was a full-blown Hollywood production.
Thank you! I'm glad someone else said that! Sci-Fi seems like it's turned into more of a "cheap horror flic" channel than anything else lately.
... which I don't think is really what most viewers want to watch on there.
That, and the modern day equivalent of horrible b-grade 50's campy sci-fi
Maybe I'm wrong, but everyone I talk to who likes Sci-Fi likes Battlestar Galactic, Stargate, and the fact that they were showing things like X-Files episodes, not all this "It's half man, half mosquito!" and "Help! A giant snake is loose in the jungle and killing us all!" kind of B.S.
I think all of your examples *can* be art, but aren't necessarily so (or even "typically" or "usually" so).
Limiting art to only encompassing paintings, movies, music or sculpture is pretty restrictive.
For that matter, take your "music" example... Is all music automatically "art"? I'd argue that it depends on how seriously the musician takes his/her work. It's one thing to have a working/functional knowledge of singing or songwriting - but another to put real effort into making a song "your own expression". Would you say Brittney Spears is a true "artist"? I wouldn't. I'd argue she was simply interested in finding a fast track to fame and fortune, and used the medium of popular music as the vehicle to get there. How about Milli Vanilli? Put out lots of very popular music and made lots of money, but didn't even use his own material to do it!
I see software coding as the same thing. If you're just putting in your time at your job, coding whatever you're asked to code - then no, that's just "work", not "art". But if you're inspired by the challenges and restrictions imposed upon you by a device, and create your own game or application that pushes the limits of device (quite possibly through using very creative tricks you came up with yourself) - why isn't that "art"?
(Personally, I think it's much harder to claim "art" when developing on a dominant, fairly mature platform like Windows - because you're probably re-using a lot of "canned" code and published API calls, etc. Where you really see developers speak of elegant code and art is on such things as Palm PDAs with limited CPU power, screen resolution, and input options. Or perhaps the first coders to explore the limits of a particular console system after it's first released.)
One question though: Why computerjobs.com? I'm not real familiar with their site, but are they one of the sites that claims to consolidate complete listings of I.T. jobs from a number of other large job search sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, BrainBuzz, etc. etc.)?
If they really do get a pretty good number of I.T. related listings all collected up in one place, then yes - I think this is a pretty useful little graph/tool.
I've been out of work since the beginning of May, and living in the St. Louis area, it seems to me that there are currently very slim pickings. I keep hearing talk of the economic recovery, but at least around here - I'm not really seeing it.
According to your chart, that would be an accurate accessment too - since it clearly shows a sharp decline in I.T. jobs available in St. Louis since April of 2005. (And worse yet, I'm really mainly interested in the hardware side of things, but if you look at that specifically - you see that in my city, there were only a grand total of about 2 jobs fitting that category, at any given time!) In the whole U.S., it looked like I.T. hardware jobs only averaged around 1,200 *total*, for that matter. Not good... not good at all!
When I read the Slashdot article title, I got the impression Apple was considering building its own complete cellular network. But the article doesn't seem to be saying that at all.
Rather, they're talking about what amounts to "VARs (value added resellers)" in the world of computers.
Companies like ESPN, Disney or Apple just pay one of the existing cellular companies (like Sprint) for rights to use their infrastructure - and they resell customized phones that do some things the carrier doesn't wish to offer with the phones packaged on their regular plans.
Big deal!?! I grant that this might, indeed, be a way for Apple to get their way rolling out phones that play iTunes purchased music and still sync with PCs - but what else does it really offer anyone?
The cellular carriers are still going to call all the shots as far as prices to use their networks - so they're not likely to give Apple some sort of huge discount. Therefore, I'd say you can expect monthy pricing to be the same or higher than you pay now. And if you have issues such as poor reception, slow data xfer rates, or customer service hassles with your carrier, that won't change either.
I would have MUCH preferred to read your story about Dotster. I've had a lot of headaches dealing with those people in the past, while trying to manage a group of web sites for a previous employer.
It wouldn't surprise me they screwed up and tried to cover it up....
No... I don't think that simply because someone else uses your unsecure, open wi-fi network, the mere fact that they temporarily "limited your bandwidth" constitutes "stealing" on their part.
Most consumer broadband services don't guarantee you a specific amount of bandwidth to begin with! They tell you "rates of up to X" speed. In the case of DSL service, Customer A who is lucky enough to live a few houses down from the central office probably gets as much as 2 or 3x the bandwidth for his money as Customer B who is about 12,000 feet from the same central office.
The only thing that makes sense here, in my opinion, is charging someone if they actually do something criminal while borrowing your open network. (EG. If some guy in a van keeps pulling up close to your house and is obviously using your wi-fi network, and the next month you get questioned about downloading child porn - then it's time to report him and have him arrested.)
Short of that, if you don't want other people connecting to your wi-fi network, secure the thing! Otherwise, people really have no way to know if you're purposely offering free Internet access to those around you, or you're just clueless or too lazy to lock it down properly.
(That's where your unlocked door analogy falls flat, too. It's understood that a home belongs to a specific owner, and you're NOT allowed to just walk in, uninvited - especially if the door is closed and you have to turn the knob just to enter. You probably aren't sitting on that person's physical property at all when your laptop picks up their open wi-fi network.)
The *concept* of the courts and legal system is good. The implementation is sometimes lacking....
I'm not a fan of vigilante violence either, but I also realize it's never going to completely disappear - and that's probably as it should be.
If the general rule is to use the legal system and avoid the violence, good. But situations where it becomes clear the courts didn't provide any justice? Let's just say those individuals should "watch their backs", because you never know... Anger enough people, followed by frustrating them by the injustice of our official system of punishment failing to act - and it's a formula for a few people taking things into their own hands.
As a "30-something" myself, and realizing I have practically no savings - I think the problem runs a little bit deeper than "skipping the purchase of that 60" plasma screen".
I know a surprising number of guys like myself, who worked hard in our 20's and started "getting ahead" in I.T. careers, only to start back at the bottom due to divorce. These often lead right into being forced to file for bankruptcy, compounding the problem.
My 401K savings was wiped out with legal fees, and I haven't been able to get another job that even offers one since then.
It's fine to talk about wealth being more "widespread" due to things like 401K's and mutual funds, but those of us who primarily work for smaller businesses don't often get in on any of that. You hear a lot of talk about the small businesses being the "real future" and "cornerstone" of America - but working for them seems to rarely connect someone to any of this wealth that's supposed being "spread around".
The reason I brought it up is to further illustrate that Jeff Bezos isn't my idea of a corporate C.E.O. with loads of sensibility. So when you start asking "Why the hell did this guy think it made sense to try to patent a 1-click shopping cart purchase concept on a web site??", it might make more sense, considering the rest of his business decisions.
And for what it's worth, I don't shop there much. I hate when places want to offer me those "$5 gift certificates for Amazon.com!" and so on. Really, I have little use for 'em. I think I purchased a total of 2 pieces of software from them, and that was for my ex-wife after she complained that she couldn't find them on store shelves anywhere locally.
Absolutely. But to at least some of us, Amazon was also a little frustrating from another standpoint.
.com "boom" was underway, Amazon just followed the same boneheaded business model that most of the others were taking; grow as big as possible, as fast as possible!
When the
I remember reading more than one interview with Bezos back then that made it pretty clear the guy really didn't have much of a "common sense" business plan at all. He was often asked exactly what types of products or services he planned to concentrate on offering, and always gave back silly answers like "everything!".
For a while there, I remember them trying to compete directly with eBay, via "Amazon Auctions" - and it seemed like it was starting to gain some traction. I thought "Ah! Finally, Amazon has something really worth pursuing here!" I used their auction site and got great results. Very competitive, results-wise, with what I got from eBay but a little cheaper to use. But then they went off on some other tangent (as I recall, a big hoopla about partnering up with Toys 'r Us and becoming the largest online toy retailer?), and the auction site went into decline as eBay ate their lunch.
Then, that didn't pan out as expected either. All along, they were doing respectable book sales - but people kept questioning how Amazon would really attain/keep profitability as "merely on online bookseller", since books take lots of physical space to warehouse, go out of date rapidly in some cases, don't always have much markup, can get costly to ship, and it's a space with lots of competition.
I've always had a strong feeling that Amazon survived much more by luck than by expert guidance by Bezos or anything of that sort. His "let's get our hands in the middle of everything, and do it all!" attitude should have been the death of the business. That's NOT a smart idea - and shouldn't get your face on the front of magazines as "C.E.O. of the year"! But lots of others went bust faster than he did, so he got lots of inertia just by being "last man standing" in some areas. And perhaps all those non-profitable book sales finally earned him a lot of "brand recognition" that helped too. So now, he's managed to sell a "critical mass" of things that *are* profitable to sell in quantity, so it haphazzardly fell together. But bleah.... I can't say that makes me "respect" their business model.
Your logic would be fine, EXCEPT, when you're talking about a clear case of individual rights or freedoms at stake, why shouldn't govt. at the federal level have legislation that helps preserve those rights/freedoms? That's not the type of thing you really want left open for change, just because of some corruption at the local level.
I'm not a fan of giving federal govt. any more power than necessary either - but laying down "ground rules" that ensure freedom and individual liberties are preserved is one of their basic functions.
I absolutely diagree with you on this!
As a general rule, the idea of charging people fines is a terrible way to punish the breaking of minor laws. I can't really speak for other nations, but in the U.S. - I see fines being levied as tax collection tools more than for any real interest in stopping the crimes they claim to help stop.
Where I live, you can almost tell how small a municipality is by how often you see the police sitting in one of the same sneaky places, spending most of the day looking for speeders. Larger municipalities with a bigger tax base don't *need* to pressure their police to hand out so many traffic tickets. They typically have more important things to do with their time.
The typical fine only punishes the poor. If you make enough money, paying a fine because you parked your car in a much more convenient place that happened to be a "no parking" zone is probably no big deal. Send off the money order and you're done. Might have been well worth the price of the ticket, really.
Nonetheless, making fines so high that even the rich get "punished" just makes it *impossible* for the poor to pay them - and that makes no sense either.
Crimes of "convenience" such as littering are going to happen whether the fine is $25 or $25,000. As another poster said, it's all about the would-be litterer's confidence level in not getting caught. In the case of littering, it only takes a split second to throw something out a car window - and especially at night, people probably won't ever see that you did it.
What would be better, IMHO, is in lieu of fines, order these people to perform community service. Make them pick up litter for a couple weekends. (Right now, we've got all these "adopt a highway" programs with volunteers - but seems unnecessary if you could make the people doing the littering do the cleanup instead.)
If you still want fun games for kids that don't include lots of graphic violence, and you're on a PC (or Mac) instead of a console - I think almost all the stuff from GameHouse is excellent. My kid is only 3, yet she already loves playing their "Gutterball 3D" game, just to try different colored bowling balls and watch them roll down the lane and knock pins down. And if they're a little older, all the stuff like TextTwist makes you think as well as have fun.
... so if you want a new one, you don't even have to go to the store to get it first.
They're inexpensive and downloadable off the net, too
These days, most of the really good, non-violent stuff in PC/Mac gaming comes from web sites marketing their goods online. The small developers haven't "sold out" to Hollywood yet.
What if someone starts selling completely customizable cellphones, on a direct order web site similar to Dell?
To do this right, you'd want to offer contracts with any of your choice of pretty much all the available carriers for your given area though - which might prove to be tough to arrange.
But even if they had to settle for new phones you bought straight out with no service contract, at least they wouldn't be "chipped" to only work on a particular carrier's network - so people might still buy them.
Offer, say, 2 or 3 basic "skeletons" of cellphones, like a flip style and a "candy bar" style, and then let people buy options like "Add camera: $39" until they have exactly what they'd like.
No, what I meant was - if someone really thought they could do something original and valuable enough with the bandwidth and general technoligies cable providers use, they could indeed lay new cable and give it a shot. The Supreme Court ruling shoudn't affect that, unless I'm misunderstanding something about it?
EG. Someone might figure it's not worth the risk to try to be "just another cable competitor peddling the same sets of movie channels to people" - but they might want to try it in the form of "cheaper, faster, better broadband with VoIP service", or maybe they'd do it offering something completely new that we haven't considered yet?
When it comes to my iPod, I confess I did probably buy it largely because of all the "buzz" surrounding it. I KEPT it because it was technically superior.
... Anything from microphones to turn it into a digital tape recorder to adapters so it stores images straight off my digital camera, to various "boom box" type amplifier speakers it docks into and charges while it plays through them. (And don't forget, Alpine even offers a line of car stereos that interface directly with an iPod, so the car stereo front panel mimics the iPod's own screens.)
Most manufacturers of MP3 players seemed to either be focusing on building one as cheaply as possible (and I have zero interest in some cheaply made doodad with buttons the size of the ones on a digital watch), or loaded with features and gimicks at the expense of usability.
Since the iPod has now been through a full 4 generations, some of the competition has had a lot of time to try to play catch-up. I'll admit that if I bought a new player today, I might have to take a closer look at some of the competition's newer offerings. But still, there's always something to be said for owning a device that's the "defacto standard". With an iPod, I have LOADS of options for accessories