IMHO, the levels on the original Halo game were just fine. The only problem I had was the lack of variety of them! I enjoyed playing the game on the PC and on my Mac, but unlike the UT series, I find I'm getting pretty bored with it after only 30-45 minutes of gameplay at one time. It's nice to come back to it once in a while, and having good competitors in multiplayer helps quite a bit, but ultimately - it just feels like you're stuck playing the *demo* version of Quake 3 or something. You feel forced into playing the same battlefields over and over and over....
Well, it's all speculation - but Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy, whether you like his products or not.
Rather than doing things that would get Microsoft "sued out of existance", I suspect he would have actually just done things differently to remain quite successful while not running too far afoul of laws that would destroy his business.
Why do they misrepresent products? Because it's the status-quo for commercial software! To look at it another way, "Why not?" Who ever really got in trouble for doing it? People sell buggy software applications that don't work as promised every day - and companies other than Microsoft sell the most expensive ones I know of. Look at ERP systems like "OneWorld" or specialized applications that handle inventory and bills of lading for shippers, or even specialty apps to manage Doctor or Dentist offices. Much of this stuff is, honestly, garbage, with HUGE price tags both during and after the sale (by way of support contracts). In this climate, of course Microsoft opts to run things the same way.
Although I totally get where you're coming from, there IS a market for "desktop replacements". For starters, the gaming community.... Even if your laptop is a "brick", it's magnitudes of order easier to take it to and from LAN parties than lugging around a tower case with seperate display, keyboard and mouse.
Another group of buyers are folks who don't really travel much, but simply want the ability to use their computer in "non-traditional settings". Many of these people are trying to completely get rid of a desktop system and have something portable that compares favorably in overall system performance to their former desktop PC. Power-hungry isn't that much of an issue if you're just going to sit on the couch in the family room, or temporary set up the system on a kitchen counter while you're fixing dinner....
I had this whole debate with one of my best friends when I chose an Apple Powerbook 17" and he chose (for about the same price) a Sager "desktop replacement" laptop. Eventually, he sold the Sager - and has decided to go back to an old Dell Inspiron he owned before. The graphics capabilites on the Dell make it unsuitable for some gaming, but I think he finally realized what I kept trying to tell him. When I'm doing things that require hard-core CPU power (whether it's gaming or video editing from camcorder footage or what-not), I'm more comfortable just sitting down at a desk, in a good computer chair, anyway. I'd rather have my portable be as portable as possible (without sacrificing too much screen real-estate, which is why I still went with the 17" PB).
From what I've read, the Mac gaming companies do have a real challenge making the sale of games a profitable venture.
I think Aspyr recently said that they have a certain percentage of games developed and released for Mac that aren't ever profitable, so that's figured into the business model. They pretty much expect a ratio like 1 in 8 or 1 in 6 not making money, so it has to be covered by the rest.
Maybe this is true for PC game titles too, actually, but probably not to nearly the same extent. I'm sure with a 90%+ greater potential market out there for them, they *usually* at least break even on them after they're on the shelves long enough.
What you do see, though, is a much more careful, conservative approach to game development. They wait and see how a game fares on the PC and/or on consoles before they make the move to port it over. That means on the Mac, the only really innovative games you'll see for it first are released by the shareware/freeware authors.
Well, I think the way it's probably panning out right at this moment, the banks are only really paying attention when the checks being cashed are for someone *outside the country* - since that's where all the "terrorist scares" lie.
I know my bank does at least some cursory looking-over what I try to deposit though.... Not too long ago, I had an insurance settlement check written out to both me and a dealership that I told them I was going to have do the repair work on my car. The bank sent it back to me, and even called me on the phone to inform me they couldn't cash the check - because it had BOTH parties written on it. They wanted me to get the dealership to sign it too.
Truthfully, it's getting to the point where going to see a movie is primarily attractive just because it's the only way to see something that's just come out.
It used to be, while that was a big factor, it was combined with seeing it on a "big screen" with a "great sound system", and of course the social aspects.
With the advances in home theater systems, plus the high ticket prices making folks a lot less likely to just "gather up a big group to go see movie X or Y", there's not much left besides the thrill of "seeing it first".
I think THAT might really be why they're so afraid of p2p movie sharing. The new stuff is leaking out in some cases BEFORE it even hits the theater, so paying for a ticket no longer really even means you get the bragging rights of seeing it first.
Eh.... I'd agree that the L.P. needs to get more serious, but more than anything else - I think the limitation here is money/funding related.
The biggest problem Libertarian candidates face right now is a general lack of understanding of what they stand for. The public as a whole is still pretty clueless about their political stance. Who can blame them, really? Heck, I had to actually do some conscious digging myself this year to find out the name of the guy they had running for office - and I'm a self-proclaimed Libertarian already! In all of 2004, I think I've only spotted a grand total of *2* bumper stickers promoting Libertarians, and not even one sign in anyone's yard.
People, in general, aren't even aware Libertarians exist. I'd say there's more awareness of the Green party, and that's only because Ralph Nader is already pretty much a "household name" to folks.....
If you want people to sit down and study a political platform and consider it, you have to do some advertising to them first. I should have had easy access to a "Badnarik in '04!" sign for my front yard and free Libertarian Party bumper stickers. I didn't.
The Patriot Act added a new rule for banks that forces them not to let you cash a check that's signed to anything other than your own name.
At first glance, this might seem like "no big deal" or even "a good idea" - but think a little more about this. I've seen several shareware authors already becoming negatively affected by this rule. (Often-times, another party was collecting shareware payments for the actual author, and depositing them for him/her. This is most often seen where a software developer lives in a country other than the U.S. but sells much of his/her product in the U.S. via the web. He/she often had a friend in the U.S. act as his/her "agent", collecting up the U.S. funds and taking care of their deposits.)
This rule concerns me much more directly because I do on-site computer service for a living. Sometimes, a customer ends up buying a used computer part directly from me, instead of wanting to buy something new that's sold to them through our business. It used to be, I could just take their check, written out to our business name, deposit it in my personal account if needed, and write a new check to my employer for the difference between what they owed for the service work and the part they bought from me. Now, I'm not so sure I can do that anymore? Technically, it sounds like the Patriot Act makes it illegal for me to deposit the check made out to our business name.....
Well, perhaps it bears reminding you then that BOTH Bush AND Kerry came out in support of the suggested "part 2" of the original Patriot Act. In fact, when questioned about the details, Bush said he would be "largely in support of it, with a few changes" while Kerry said he was in total support of the bill, as-is.
I'm an American who is deeply disappointed that more people can't see past the B.S. that is our current 2-party system and place a vote for the Libertarians.
Insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.....
I'm in the same boat as the parent poster. I like playing computer games, but I purchased a PowerMac (and soon afterwards a Powerbook laptop too) because the overall experience was just better. OS X is teriffic, and so are some of the bundled apps. There are some incredibly good shareware and freeware packages out there too, and of course, most of the "general business/small office/home" applications you might need (MS Office, Print Shop, Quicken, etc.). Most of the "cream of the crop" games make it to the Mac eventually, so there's a good number of things to play on mine.
The fact that games come out for Windows first and Windows has "twice as many games" as Mac seems like a pretty flimsy reason to base a computer buying decision on. If you're THAT obsessed with games and gaming, I'd think you would just want a console or two. That's ALL they're designed for! I've seen so many POOR games on my PC, I almost prefer the fact that my Mac acts like a "filter". Nobody's going to waste the time and money/effort porting a game that wasn't any good in Windows so it can suck on the Mac too.
Yeah, all that said, there are a handful of game titles I'm really sorry to see never made it to the Mac (or looks like they won't in the future, like Half Life 2), but that's just market economics in action. When you opt for a system that has MUCH less marketshare than the dominant platform, you have to realize your software options may not be identical.....
Good point! I remember years ago, one of our local ISPs registered under.org (they claimed it was an accident, but a little quick searching revealed someone else owned their domain name of choice with.net on the end - so go figure).
Anyway, at that time, I wondered why the registrar wouldn't just deny their application upon seeing they obviously weren't some type of non-profit organization? I guess if the people granting the domain registrations don't even make any attempt to enforce the "rules", you can't expect people registering to obey them either.
Hey - makes you wonder how easy it'd be to register some fake.gov sites and parody real ones?
At first this excited me because I thought "Hey, cool! A small, stand-alone GPS solution that could be mounted in people's cars and not cost a fortune!" But then I saw the $900 suggested retail price. I'm currently using a Garmin Streetpilot in my car, and we paid somewhere around $850 for it, over a year ago. It comes with a surprisingly usable "pillow mount"; (Basically like a black, nylon beanbag with a stalk sticking out of the top, center of it to snap the Garmin unit onto it. You can just plop it down on your dashboard and it stays put. No messy tape or velcro needed.) It also uses SD flash memory with a USB port for attaching to a PC to download new map data into it and do firmware upgrades to the unit itself. The speaker for the voice synthesizer is integrated into the lighter plug adapter, which usually ends up putting it in a better place for the driver to hear it clearly, and can get plenty loud too.
This might be cool if you really do need the GPS to be "hand held", but if you're downloading *street maps* into it, the obviously use I'd see would be for driving with it. Therefore, I think it needs to be priced more like $400-500 at most, so people will considering cutting holes in their dash and installing it to look like original factory equipment....
It's amazing how the old argument of "vote in this tax increase for the kids!" fools the masses so often. It's probably one of the oldest tricks in the book if you're looking for ways to get people to agree to give government more money.
In reality, what "jcr" (parent poster) just said is the root of the problem. When we spend TOO MUCH money on the school systems, it just encourages corruption. (Administrators see the total dollar amount coming in and realize they can skim some off the top and still keep the system basically running, so they often do. Then, people complain about some maintenance that's been skipped over in the building, or teacher's poor salaries, or what-not, and greedy folks in charge counter with "We're going to need more money to do that!" If they get it, the process continues and the corruption grows.)
What *really* needs to happen is some unbiased, outside accounting done to see what it REALLY would cost each school district to run efficiently, and ensure they don't receive any more tax money than that. If administrative staff realizes that there's no longer any "wiggle room" to scam, the scammers will go elsewhere. (This accounting estimate should include reasonable guaranteed min. salaries for the teachers too.)
Well, IMHO, there's practically nobody in the electronics or computer retail sector doing well with salespeople paid based on commission.
Radio Shack may be one of the last holdouts still getting away with it, but let's face it... who really takes them seriously as a store you can get good advice at? Their staff tends to be teenagers who needed a first job, or people in management who couldn't be "management material" anywhere else besides fast-food, and they just stick around for the "title".
Best Buy used to do commissioned sales, and they dropped that in a hurry. CompUSA keeps flirting with the concept, but it always seems to go over like a lead balloon so they retreat again. One store near me started some policy where sales staff received bonuses if they were the ones who helped you pick out whatever item(s) you took up to the checkout lanes. It was ludicrous... People in red shirts all fighting to put some little identifying colored sticker on your box, so they could claim it as "their sale". After a couple months, I saw it pretty much die down. Probably too many customers complained, or just retaliated by refusing to let anyone mark their purchases for credit!
I agree! I've been using this product for a while now to provide remote assistance to corporate clients, so we can avoid traveling on-site just to troubleshoot something relatively simple like email configuration mistakes or incorrect/lost printer driver setups.
The real "power" of Remote Anything comes with using the directory service "middle-man", but the product also seems surprisingly fast. I used RAdmin in the past and thought it was by far the fastest remote control package out, but Remote Anything almost feels like it's built from the same codebase.
I happen to be one of those folks who pre-ordered this DVD set as soon as I heard it was available.
Sure, this could be pared down to a 2 hour documentary, but my problem with that is - there's not a single competing product on the market covering anything about the BBS community! If we were talking about yet another documentary on "The Titanic" or "Egyptian pyramids" - I wouldn't bother with anything much over even 1 hour long. (And at that, it better offer an original viewpoint on the events.)
I invested over 10 years of my life in running the best possible BBS I could, including writing my own from scratch back in the days of the Tandy Color Computer. (It only had 2 pre-made BBS packages for it at the time, and I really didn't want a BBS that looked and felt just like the others.) After all that, 7 hours of coverage seems like relatively little.
This isn't really supposed to be "entertaining" for the masses. The people who will really get something out of it are the ones who were an active part of the BBS community, and remember first-hand all of the peculiarities that have long since gone by the wayside. (ANSI art coding groups, user validation phone calls, the progression of download protocols, experiments in graphical-based BBSs using protocols like RLE and RIP, various methods of handling inter-BBS emails and message forums, early multi-player online games, and much much more)
Sure, but I still use Windows XP on one of my boxes, despite largely being a Mac OS X user and running Linux in niche places (recently set up a MythTV PVR box, for example) -- and guess when the last time was *I* had a problem with spyware?
The difference between us "geeks" and most of the population is they just see their computers as tools they have to (often against their will) use to get certain things done. Spyware victimizes the masses who have no desire to spend the amount of effort it would take to become proficient enough to avoid all the places it can come in from.
Linux isn't some magic pill for the "average user" and their computer headaches. Far from it. Heck, wait until they want to start playing newly released games on their Linux box and see how long they like the OS?
One big reason I started gravitating towards the Mac is the nice mix of having a Unix-based box plus a somewhat respectable list of commercial software titles to choose from for it, plus all the freeware/shareware. I think pointing the "average users" towards Apple's offerings makes more sense than trying to push a Linux box off on them at this time - except for specific cases.
This has come up before, and just like last time someone said it, I argued the point.
Education, in a general, overall sense, is *always* the best answer. If you really *know* how to avoid all the problems, then you shouldn't have any of them.
But that's as much a "cop out" as anything, if you're trying to offer up workable solutions to the current spyware/malware epidemic we're seeing on Windows-based machines.
Quite a bit of spyware I've run across initially gets on machines because users installed an otherwise legitimate piece of freeware that was bundled with a few hidden "gotchas". Worse yet, many of these "more than you bargained for when you ran setup.exe" programs know how to download additional trojan horse virii and spyware. So all it takes is a user mistakenly deciding to download a p2p sharing package like BearShare or Kaaza, or perhaps even a nifty-looking waterfall screen saver, and a few weeks later, the computer is infested with hundreds of things and rendered unusable.
When you've still got plenty of people just trying to learn the basics of getting on the Internet and sending relatives/friends email - you can't realistically demand that they memorize a complete list of known "bad to download" free programs that include bundled malware!
I do on-site PC repair for a living, and believe me - for every 1 person who obviously has spyware/virus problems from surfing porn sites and trying to download "warez" from the web, there are probably 10 who are just retired folks, doctors, lawyers, or college professors who tried really hard not to open email from anyone they didn't know, etc. etc. and STILL ran into big problems.
Is it just me, or does that thing look like....
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Hip-e All-In-One PC
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iMac crashes into AlienWare and out of the rubble comes Hip-E?
Bleah... Much of the attraction to Apple's current product designs are their rather "minimalistic" looks. Everything's solid white or aluminum. The iPod is half and half, with all the controls recessed so they're practically flush with the case. The new iMac takes design cues from the iPod (no accident).
This Hip-E thing might be shaped a lot like the new iMac, but bright colors and contrasting colors on the keyboard, accented speakers, etc.? That's not Apple-like at all. Apple ditched the multi-colored iMac idea years ago!
I'm not kidding at all, but I didn't necessarily say that trucking will disappear in our own lifetime either. Note my comment about building special lanes off to the side of the main roadways. Instead of trying to make an automated delivery vehicle deal with the complexities of traffic and the expense of tearing up al the highways and roads to install sensors in them, it would be much easier and more feasible to construct special lanes.... Think of it more like a light-rail system or something.
We're still talking about enormous cost, but there are some strong benefits too. It should improve safety on the roads for everyone else, since it eliminates many of the largest vehicles from driving in and out of traffic with everyone else. It should improve delivery times and save on fuel costs too. (Not to mention the obvious; no more delivery drivers on the payroll.)
I.T. is in a state of transition right now, the way I see it. The jobs really aren't "going away"... but they're changing focus. I work with a guy who quit a good paying job with IBM to start his own on-site PC service business, and we're certainly not finding a lack of work out there. It just doesn't really make any sense to claim I.T. and software development jobs are coming to an end when we're just now reaching a point where more Americans have broadband connections at home than dial-up internet, and more homes have at least 1 computer in them than ever before.
What I *do* see happening, though, is larger companies learning to be more efficient with their resources. I, myself, lost a PC support job at a mid-sized firm a few years ago, mainly because they transitioned to thin client computing and automated tools to alert key people as soon as a server or network connection went down. That, combined withn an overall increase in knowledge of how to use the system on your desk as an "average employee" means less need for support staff dealing with issues at the desktop level.
Software development is going to come and go in cycles, IMHO, because we're reached a critical mass of pre-packaged applications out there. Almost anything you can conceive of needing to do with your PC already exists, for sale, someplace out there. We're past the stage of needing lots of programmers to write all of these new applications that don't yet exist. Nowdays, software development demand only "spikes" when a major new idea takes hold (EG. the internet and web design). Wiat until everyone starts really using RFID technology. I predict that'll spawn some new hiring for development jobs too.
Can I ask you a question then? What about this contest did you like enough to participate (twice, in fact)?
I'm just curious, because I used to enjoy writing, but I generally wrote short poems and a few short stories, years ago. These days, I sometimes briefly consider the idea of writing a book - but the task seems too daunting and time-consuming. The idea of spewing out 50,000 words or so in only 30 days' time and producing something I'm not embarassed to have my name attached to doesn't sound like a concept I like at all.
I always found short stories more "manageable", since you basically just have to come up with a good idea, a few interesting characters, and be descriptive about what happens, related to that "core concept" you had in your head. A novel, on the other hand, seems like it requires much more structure. Your characters are going to be described as they sequentially go through a big series of events. (Maybe even a good part of their life!)
I totally agree that the trades and "blue collar" jobs will always be viable. On the other hand, like everything else, I think they'll change with the times. As technology progresses, for example, I forsee the whole profession of long-haul and short-haul trucking going away. Right now, we have to hire truckers simply because we don't have good enough artifical intelligence systems to drive a vehicle safely in traffic from one point to another.
If we reach a point where sensors are embedded in all of the major roadways though, driverless trucks will probably become a reality. After all, the computer doesn't have to sleep or take breaks, and the route is pretty much pre-planned. They might even just design a special lane off to the side just for these automated delivery vehicles to use.
To those complaining about paying "$100/hr. or more!" to those in the home construction type fields, I think there's a hidden reality behind much of it. Folks handy enough with tools/carpentry + knowing the way to do things according to "code" have a very valuable way to "get rich quick". Instead of doing work on YOUR home, they can buy inexpensive homes in need of work, fix them up, and resell them at huge profits. I know a number of former handymen who woke up one day and realized this, and are now semi-retired real-estate moguls.
A lot of the guys out there are trying to stash away enough cash at their trade to buy that first home to remodel/repair and break free of working for other people.
Yeah.... I was suspicious of the same thing. At best, I figured this was sort of a "fork" of the PearPC project. Maybe they added some of their own code to handle some G4 specific functions and bundled it up with a cleaner installer/setup program. But I bet it's still just PearPC at the core.
Their screenshots I saw this morning on their web site were only depicting OS X's main desktop and finder screens. Never once did they show it running a single app! (That was the deal with PearPC too, wasn't it? At first, people could run OS X itself, view the finder, and the prefs panes - but that was about all it could do without crashing.)
Now, it looks like they're claiming people are "trying to hack the site" and so on, and they only have some video movie available to download/watch. I was getting horribly slow connections to them, but the first 50% or so of the video I watched only showed the program being installed on an XP box. (Big whoop! It has an installer program that can actually copy files over to the PC.)
Following your logic, we'd be restricted from doing almost *anything* - based on the simplistic concept of "Well, we never had a problem with item X before people started doing item Y - so let's seriously investigate stopping item X!"
It seems fairly obvious to me that the planet is still operating just fine. The only "signs of a problem" we've received are some scientists spouting *theories* based on watching numbers changing by a few parts per million.
Meanwhile, just as many scientists are arguing counter-theories cancelling those theories out. This hardly sounds like "cause for alarm" to me.
We've already spent many millions on reducing CO2 emissions at power plants, among other places - and yet nobody seems to be able to show evidence of any improvements from it.
Well, yes... It's always better to keep things completely out of sight. But I recall working at a job where one of the salesmen was just issued a new laptop, and someone saw him carrying it out to his car and putting it in his trunk. They waited until nobody was looking and pried his trunk open with a crowbar to get the laptop.
So you're still better off if people don't even think you're carrying a laptop when you're walking around. You never know if they're watching you put it away!
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IMHO, the levels on the original Halo game were just fine. The only problem I had was the lack of variety of them! I enjoyed playing the game on the PC and on my Mac, but unlike the UT series, I find I'm getting pretty bored with it after only 30-45 minutes of gameplay at one time. It's nice to come back to it once in a while, and having good competitors in multiplayer helps quite a bit, but ultimately - it just feels like you're stuck playing the *demo* version of Quake 3 or something. You feel forced into playing the same battlefields over and over and over....
Well, it's all speculation - but Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy, whether you like his products or not.
Rather than doing things that would get Microsoft "sued out of existance", I suspect he would have actually just done things differently to remain quite successful while not running too far afoul of laws that would destroy his business.
Why do they misrepresent products? Because it's the status-quo for commercial software! To look at it another way, "Why not?" Who ever really got in trouble for doing it? People sell buggy software applications that don't work as promised every day - and companies other than Microsoft sell the most expensive ones I know of. Look at ERP systems like "OneWorld" or specialized applications that handle inventory and bills of lading for shippers, or even specialty apps to manage Doctor or Dentist offices. Much of this stuff is, honestly, garbage, with HUGE price tags both during and after the sale (by way of support contracts). In this climate, of course Microsoft opts to run things the same way.
Although I totally get where you're coming from, there IS a market for "desktop replacements". For starters, the gaming community.... Even if your laptop is a "brick", it's magnitudes of order easier to take it to and from LAN parties than lugging around a tower case with seperate display, keyboard and mouse.
Another group of buyers are folks who don't really travel much, but simply want the ability to use their computer in "non-traditional settings". Many of these people are trying to completely get rid of a desktop system and have something portable that compares favorably in overall system performance to their former desktop PC. Power-hungry isn't that much of an issue if you're just going to sit on the couch in the family room, or temporary set up the system on a kitchen counter while you're fixing dinner....
I had this whole debate with one of my best friends when I chose an Apple Powerbook 17" and he chose (for about the same price) a Sager "desktop replacement" laptop. Eventually, he sold the Sager - and has decided to go back to an old Dell Inspiron he owned before. The graphics capabilites on the Dell make it unsuitable for some gaming, but I think he finally realized what I kept trying to tell him. When I'm doing things that require hard-core CPU power (whether it's gaming or video editing from camcorder footage or what-not), I'm more comfortable just sitting down at a desk, in a good computer chair, anyway. I'd rather have my portable be as portable as possible (without sacrificing too much screen real-estate, which is why I still went with the 17" PB).
From what I've read, the Mac gaming companies do have a real challenge making the sale of games a profitable venture.
I think Aspyr recently said that they have a certain percentage of games developed and released for Mac that aren't ever profitable, so that's figured into the business model. They pretty much expect a ratio like 1 in 8 or 1 in 6 not making money, so it has to be covered by the rest.
Maybe this is true for PC game titles too, actually, but probably not to nearly the same extent. I'm sure with a 90%+ greater potential market out there for them, they *usually* at least break even on them after they're on the shelves long enough.
What you do see, though, is a much more careful, conservative approach to game development. They wait and see how a game fares on the PC and/or on consoles before they make the move to port it over. That means on the Mac, the only really innovative games you'll see for it first are released by the shareware/freeware authors.
Well, I think the way it's probably panning out right at this moment, the banks are only really paying attention when the checks being cashed are for someone *outside the country* - since that's where all the "terrorist scares" lie.
I know my bank does at least some cursory looking-over what I try to deposit though.... Not too long ago, I had an insurance settlement check written out to both me and a dealership that I told them I was going to have do the repair work on my car. The bank sent it back to me, and even called me on the phone to inform me they couldn't cash the check - because it had BOTH parties written on it. They wanted me to get the dealership to sign it too.
Truthfully, it's getting to the point where going to see a movie is primarily attractive just because it's the only way to see something that's just come out.
It used to be, while that was a big factor, it was combined with seeing it on a "big screen" with a "great sound system", and of course the social aspects.
With the advances in home theater systems, plus the high ticket prices making folks a lot less likely to just "gather up a big group to go see movie X or Y", there's not much left besides the thrill of "seeing it first".
I think THAT might really be why they're so afraid of p2p movie sharing. The new stuff is leaking out in some cases BEFORE it even hits the theater, so paying for a ticket no longer really even means you get the bragging rights of seeing it first.
Eh.... I'd agree that the L.P. needs to get more serious, but more than anything else - I think the limitation here is money/funding related.
The biggest problem Libertarian candidates face right now is a general lack of understanding of what they stand for. The public as a whole is still pretty clueless about their political stance. Who can blame them, really? Heck, I had to actually do some conscious digging myself this year to find out the name of the guy they had running for office - and I'm a self-proclaimed Libertarian already! In all of 2004, I think I've only spotted a grand total of *2* bumper stickers promoting Libertarians, and not even one sign in anyone's yard.
People, in general, aren't even aware Libertarians exist. I'd say there's more awareness of the Green party, and that's only because Ralph Nader is already pretty much a "household name" to folks.....
If you want people to sit down and study a political platform and consider it, you have to do some advertising to them first. I should have had easy access to a "Badnarik in '04!" sign for my front yard and free Libertarian Party bumper stickers. I didn't.
The Patriot Act added a new rule for banks that forces them not to let you cash a check that's signed to anything other than your own name.
At first glance, this might seem like "no big deal" or even "a good idea" - but think a little more about this. I've seen several shareware authors already becoming negatively affected by this rule. (Often-times, another party was collecting shareware payments for the actual author, and depositing them for him/her. This is most often seen where a software developer lives in a country other than the U.S. but sells much of his/her product in the U.S. via the web. He/she often had a friend in the U.S. act as his/her "agent", collecting up the U.S. funds and taking care of their deposits.)
This rule concerns me much more directly because I do on-site computer service for a living. Sometimes, a customer ends up buying a used computer part directly from me, instead of wanting to buy something new that's sold to them through our business. It used to be, I could just take their check, written out to our business name, deposit it in my personal account if needed, and write a new check to my employer for the difference between what they owed for the service work and the part they bought from me. Now, I'm not so sure I can do that anymore? Technically, it sounds like the Patriot Act makes it illegal for me to deposit the check made out to our business name.....
Well, perhaps it bears reminding you then that BOTH Bush AND Kerry came out in support of the suggested "part 2" of the original Patriot Act. In fact, when questioned about the details, Bush said he would be "largely in support of it, with a few changes" while Kerry said he was in total support of the bill, as-is.
I'm an American who is deeply disappointed that more people can't see past the B.S. that is our current 2-party system and place a vote for the Libertarians.
Insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.....
I'm in the same boat as the parent poster. I like playing computer games, but I purchased a PowerMac (and soon afterwards a Powerbook laptop too) because the overall experience was just better. OS X is teriffic, and so are some of the bundled apps. There are some incredibly good shareware and freeware packages out there too, and of course, most of the "general business/small office/home" applications you might need (MS Office, Print Shop, Quicken, etc.). Most of the "cream of the crop" games make it to the Mac eventually, so there's a good number of things to play on mine.
The fact that games come out for Windows first and Windows has "twice as many games" as Mac seems like a pretty flimsy reason to base a computer buying decision on. If you're THAT obsessed with games and gaming, I'd think you would just want a console or two. That's ALL they're designed for! I've seen so many POOR games on my PC, I almost prefer the fact that my Mac acts like a "filter". Nobody's going to waste the time and money/effort porting a game that wasn't any good in Windows so it can suck on the Mac too.
Yeah, all that said, there are a handful of game titles I'm really sorry to see never made it to the Mac (or looks like they won't in the future, like Half Life 2), but that's just market economics in action. When you opt for a system that has MUCH less marketshare than the dominant platform, you have to realize your software options may not be identical.....
Good point! I remember years ago, one of our local ISPs registered under .org (they claimed it was an accident, but a little quick searching revealed someone else owned their domain name of choice with .net on the end - so go figure).
.gov sites and parody real ones?
Anyway, at that time, I wondered why the registrar wouldn't just deny their application upon seeing they obviously weren't some type of non-profit organization? I guess if the people granting the domain registrations don't even make any attempt to enforce the "rules", you can't expect people registering to obey them either.
Hey - makes you wonder how easy it'd be to register some fake
At first this excited me because I thought "Hey, cool! A small, stand-alone GPS solution that could be mounted in people's cars and not cost a fortune!" But then I saw the $900 suggested retail price. I'm currently using a Garmin Streetpilot in my car, and we paid somewhere around $850 for it, over a year ago. It comes with a surprisingly usable "pillow mount"; (Basically like a black, nylon beanbag with a stalk sticking out of the top, center of it to snap the Garmin unit onto it. You can just plop it down on your dashboard and it stays put. No messy tape or velcro needed.) It also uses SD flash memory with a USB port for attaching to a PC to download new map data into it and do firmware upgrades to the unit itself. The speaker for the voice synthesizer is integrated into the lighter plug adapter, which usually ends up putting it in a better place for the driver to hear it clearly, and can get plenty loud too.
This might be cool if you really do need the GPS to be "hand held", but if you're downloading *street maps* into it, the obviously use I'd see would be for driving with it. Therefore, I think it needs to be priced more like $400-500 at most, so people will considering cutting holes in their dash and installing it to look like original factory equipment....
It's amazing how the old argument of "vote in this tax increase for the kids!" fools the masses so often. It's probably one of the oldest tricks in the book if you're looking for ways to get people to agree to give government more money.
In reality, what "jcr" (parent poster) just said is the root of the problem. When we spend TOO MUCH money on the school systems, it just encourages corruption. (Administrators see the total dollar amount coming in and realize they can skim some off the top and still keep the system basically running, so they often do. Then, people complain about some maintenance that's been skipped over in the building, or teacher's poor salaries, or what-not, and greedy folks in charge counter with "We're going to need more money to do that!" If they get it, the process continues and the corruption grows.)
What *really* needs to happen is some unbiased, outside accounting done to see what it REALLY would cost each school district to run efficiently, and ensure they don't receive any more tax money than that. If administrative staff realizes that there's no longer any "wiggle room" to scam, the scammers will go elsewhere. (This accounting estimate should include reasonable guaranteed min. salaries for the teachers too.)
Well, IMHO, there's practically nobody in the electronics or computer retail sector doing well with salespeople paid based on commission.
... who really takes them seriously as a store you can get good advice at? Their staff tends to be teenagers who needed a first job, or people in management who couldn't be "management material" anywhere else besides fast-food, and they just stick around for the "title".
Radio Shack may be one of the last holdouts still getting away with it, but let's face it
Best Buy used to do commissioned sales, and they dropped that in a hurry. CompUSA keeps flirting with the concept, but it always seems to go over like a lead balloon so they retreat again. One store near me started some policy where sales staff received bonuses if they were the ones who helped you pick out whatever item(s) you took up to the checkout lanes. It was ludicrous... People in red shirts all fighting to put some little identifying colored sticker on your box, so they could claim it as "their sale". After a couple months, I saw it pretty much die down. Probably too many customers complained, or just retaliated by refusing to let anyone mark their purchases for credit!
I agree! I've been using this product for a while now to provide remote assistance to corporate clients, so we can avoid traveling on-site just to troubleshoot something relatively simple like email configuration mistakes or incorrect/lost printer driver setups.
The real "power" of Remote Anything comes with using the directory service "middle-man", but the product also seems surprisingly fast. I used RAdmin in the past and thought it was by far the fastest remote control package out, but Remote Anything almost feels like it's built from the same codebase.
I happen to be one of those folks who pre-ordered this DVD set as soon as I heard it was available.
Sure, this could be pared down to a 2 hour documentary, but my problem with that is - there's not a single competing product on the market covering anything about the BBS community! If we were talking about yet another documentary on "The Titanic" or "Egyptian pyramids" - I wouldn't bother with anything much over even 1 hour long. (And at that, it better offer an original viewpoint on the events.)
I invested over 10 years of my life in running the best possible BBS I could, including writing my own from scratch back in the days of the Tandy Color Computer. (It only had 2 pre-made BBS packages for it at the time, and I really didn't want a BBS that looked and felt just like the others.) After all that, 7 hours of coverage seems like relatively little.
This isn't really supposed to be "entertaining" for the masses. The people who will really get something out of it are the ones who were an active part of the BBS community, and remember first-hand all of the peculiarities that have long since gone by the wayside. (ANSI art coding groups, user validation phone calls, the progression of download protocols, experiments in graphical-based BBSs using protocols like RLE and RIP, various methods of handling inter-BBS emails and message forums, early multi-player online games, and much much more)
Sure, but I still use Windows XP on one of my boxes, despite largely being a Mac OS X user and running Linux in niche places (recently set up a MythTV PVR box, for example) -- and guess when the last time was *I* had a problem with spyware?
The difference between us "geeks" and most of the population is they just see their computers as tools they have to (often against their will) use to get certain things done. Spyware victimizes the masses who have no desire to spend the amount of effort it would take to become proficient enough to avoid all the places it can come in from.
Linux isn't some magic pill for the "average user" and their computer headaches. Far from it. Heck, wait until they want to start playing newly released games on their Linux box and see how long they like the OS?
One big reason I started gravitating towards the Mac is the nice mix of having a Unix-based box plus a somewhat respectable list of commercial software titles to choose from for it, plus all the freeware/shareware. I think pointing the "average users" towards Apple's offerings makes more sense than trying to push a Linux box off on them at this time - except for specific cases.
This has come up before, and just like last time someone said it, I argued the point.
Education, in a general, overall sense, is *always* the best answer. If you really *know* how to avoid all the problems, then you shouldn't have any of them.
But that's as much a "cop out" as anything, if you're trying to offer up workable solutions to the current spyware/malware epidemic we're seeing on Windows-based machines.
Quite a bit of spyware I've run across initially gets on machines because users installed an otherwise legitimate piece of freeware that was bundled with a few hidden "gotchas". Worse yet, many of these "more than you bargained for when you ran setup.exe" programs know how to download additional trojan horse virii and spyware. So all it takes is a user mistakenly deciding to download a p2p sharing package like BearShare or Kaaza, or perhaps even a nifty-looking waterfall screen saver, and a few weeks later, the computer is infested with hundreds of things and rendered unusable.
When you've still got plenty of people just trying to learn the basics of getting on the Internet and sending relatives/friends email - you can't realistically demand that they memorize a complete list of known "bad to download" free programs that include bundled malware!
I do on-site PC repair for a living, and believe me - for every 1 person who obviously has spyware/virus problems from surfing porn sites and trying to download "warez" from the web, there are probably 10 who are just retired folks, doctors, lawyers, or college professors who tried really hard not to open email from anyone they didn't know, etc. etc. and STILL ran into big problems.
iMac crashes into AlienWare and out of the rubble comes Hip-E?
Bleah... Much of the attraction to Apple's current product designs are their rather "minimalistic" looks. Everything's solid white or aluminum. The iPod is half and half, with all the controls recessed so they're practically flush with the case. The new iMac takes design cues from the iPod (no accident).
This Hip-E thing might be shaped a lot like the new iMac, but bright colors and contrasting colors on the keyboard, accented speakers, etc.? That's not Apple-like at all. Apple ditched the multi-colored iMac idea years ago!
I'm not kidding at all, but I didn't necessarily say that trucking will disappear in our own lifetime either. Note my comment about building special lanes off to the side of the main roadways. Instead of trying to make an automated delivery vehicle deal with the complexities of traffic and the expense of tearing up al the highways and roads to install sensors in them, it would be much easier and more feasible to construct special lanes.... Think of it more like a light-rail system or something.
... but they're changing focus. I work with a guy who quit a good paying job with IBM to start his own on-site PC service business, and we're certainly not finding a lack of work out there. It just doesn't really make any sense to claim I.T. and software development jobs are coming to an end when we're just now reaching a point where more Americans have broadband connections at home than dial-up internet, and more homes have at least 1 computer in them than ever before.
We're still talking about enormous cost, but there are some strong benefits too. It should improve safety on the roads for everyone else, since it eliminates many of the largest vehicles from driving in and out of traffic with everyone else. It should improve delivery times and save on fuel costs too. (Not to mention the obvious; no more delivery drivers on the payroll.)
I.T. is in a state of transition right now, the way I see it. The jobs really aren't "going away"
What I *do* see happening, though, is larger companies learning to be more efficient with their resources. I, myself, lost a PC support job at a mid-sized firm a few years ago, mainly because they transitioned to thin client computing and automated tools to alert key people as soon as a server or network connection went down. That, combined withn an overall increase in knowledge of how to use the system on your desk as an "average employee" means less need for support staff dealing with issues at the desktop level.
Software development is going to come and go in cycles, IMHO, because we're reached a critical mass of pre-packaged applications out there. Almost anything you can conceive of needing to do with your PC already exists, for sale, someplace out there. We're past the stage of needing lots of programmers to write all of these new applications that don't yet exist. Nowdays, software development demand only "spikes" when a major new idea takes hold (EG. the internet and web design). Wiat until everyone starts really using RFID technology. I predict that'll spawn some new hiring for development jobs too.
Can I ask you a question then? What about this contest did you like enough to participate (twice, in fact)?
I'm just curious, because I used to enjoy writing, but I generally wrote short poems and a few short stories, years ago. These days, I sometimes briefly consider the idea of writing a book - but the task seems too daunting and time-consuming. The idea of spewing out 50,000 words or so in only 30 days' time and producing something I'm not embarassed to have my name attached to doesn't sound like a concept I like at all.
I always found short stories more "manageable", since you basically just have to come up with a good idea, a few interesting characters, and be descriptive about what happens, related to that "core concept" you had in your head. A novel, on the other hand, seems like it requires much more structure. Your characters are going to be described as they sequentially go through a big series of events. (Maybe even a good part of their life!)
I totally agree that the trades and "blue collar" jobs will always be viable. On the other hand, like everything else, I think they'll change with the times. As technology progresses, for example, I forsee the whole profession of long-haul and short-haul trucking going away. Right now, we have to hire truckers simply because we don't have good enough artifical intelligence systems to drive a vehicle safely in traffic from one point to another.
If we reach a point where sensors are embedded in all of the major roadways though, driverless trucks will probably become a reality. After all, the computer doesn't have to sleep or take breaks, and the route is pretty much pre-planned. They might even just design a special lane off to the side just for these automated delivery vehicles to use.
To those complaining about paying "$100/hr. or more!" to those in the home construction type fields, I think there's a hidden reality behind much of it. Folks handy enough with tools/carpentry + knowing the way to do things according to "code" have a very valuable way to "get rich quick". Instead of doing work on YOUR home, they can buy inexpensive homes in need of work, fix them up, and resell them at huge profits. I know a number of former handymen who woke up one day and realized this, and are now semi-retired real-estate moguls.
A lot of the guys out there are trying to stash away enough cash at their trade to buy that first home to remodel/repair and break free of working for other people.
Yeah.... I was suspicious of the same thing. At best, I figured this was sort of a "fork" of the PearPC project. Maybe they added some of their own code to handle some G4 specific functions and bundled it up with a cleaner installer/setup program. But I bet it's still just PearPC at the core.
Their screenshots I saw this morning on their web site were only depicting OS X's main desktop and finder screens. Never once did they show it running a single app! (That was the deal with PearPC too, wasn't it? At first, people could run OS X itself, view the finder, and the prefs panes - but that was about all it could do without crashing.)
Now, it looks like they're claiming people are "trying to hack the site" and so on, and they only have some video movie available to download/watch. I was getting horribly slow connections to them, but the first 50% or so of the video I watched only showed the program being installed on an XP box. (Big whoop! It has an installer program that can actually copy files over to the PC.)
Following your logic, we'd be restricted from doing almost *anything* - based on the simplistic concept of "Well, we never had a problem with item X before people started doing item Y - so let's seriously investigate stopping item X!"
It seems fairly obvious to me that the planet is still operating just fine. The only "signs of a problem" we've received are some scientists spouting *theories* based on watching numbers changing by a few parts per million.
Meanwhile, just as many scientists are arguing counter-theories cancelling those theories out. This hardly sounds like "cause for alarm" to me.
We've already spent many millions on reducing CO2 emissions at power plants, among other places - and yet nobody seems to be able to show evidence of any improvements from it.
Well, yes... It's always better to keep things completely out of sight. But I recall working at a job where one of the salesmen was just issued a new laptop, and someone saw him carrying it out to his car and putting it in his trunk. They waited until nobody was looking and pried his trunk open with a crowbar to get the laptop.
So you're still better off if people don't even think you're carrying a laptop when you're walking around. You never know if they're watching you put it away!