This is true up to a point. The line about "just become an OSS developer yourself!" is getting stale though. Companies have always taken that option into consideration, no matter what platform they used.
I've worked for several places where each time a special piece of software was needed for a task, the question came up of "Should we assign that job to our software development team, or is there a pre-made solution that will do the job?" These were typically "Microsoft shops" too.
Open source is teriffic, but the fact still remains that most businesses prefer pre-packaged solutions, provided at a perceived fair price and with some level of trust/confidence the product will be supported in the future. Your software development team is a costly resource that can only work on so much code at one time. You don't want them building a big solution you could have gotten 95% of for 1/3rd. the cost if you just visited your software store.
That's why companies *do* need to feel they can trust open source developers. The most widely implemented packages in Linux are all projects that are "tried and true" solutions, with long histories of updates and support. (Apache, postfix, mysql, etc. etc.)
This is true to a point - but the faster cards handle higher resolutions at good frame-rates before choking on all the pixels streaming through them. On the high end cards like the Radeon 9800XT, the system bus often gets saturated before the card itself is maxxed out (when gaming at some resolution like 1600x1280).
If you're one of the majority of people who see no real reason to play games at resolutions above 1024x768, then yeah - anything since a GeForce 2 is probably plenty fast enough to make all the games "playable".
The huge resolutions only start making sense when you use really large monitors (which some people are starting to do nowdays). In fact, this is one reason I think the Apple Mac was getting left out of most of the gaming marketplace for so long. Until recently, they didn't really offer any high end 3D cards for their PowerMac line, but at the same time, were much more likely than most PC users to have a large Cinema display running natively at a high resolution.
I think a good part of this is due to kids wanting to play with the same toys their peers are playing with.
When everyone in your class is talking about how they found secret levels or cheats for game XY, or how they're all trying to beat "Ken's high score", or whatever - you're going to feel left out if you're just going home and playing around with your legos, instead of getting in on the gaming action.
If you think about it, most big "fads" in toys are due to achieving a "critical mass" of kids playing with them. When you get enough kids interested in the same toy at the same time, the rest start buying just because of the need to be "part of the group". Wben I was a kid, this happened with the Rubik's Cube and other spin-off puzzles. Left to my own whims, I would have never found one of those things very interesting. But once everyone in school had one in their backpack - it seemed like a "must have" item.
My intent wasn't to "point the finger at Apple" for PC BIOS limitations. Rather, Apple could make more of an effort than they do to allow cross platform iPod compatibility. (EG. Build support into iTunes for Windows to read files from the HFS+ filesystem via firewire.)
Since they don't seem too excited at adding this sort of support, that tells me maybe they'd rather just let an OEM like HP handle the "Windows side" of the iPod?
I don't know that it would play out this way, but potentially, this move might allow Apple to start offering all Apple branded iPods as being the natively Mac-formatted versions, while the blue HP versions come formatted for Windows by default.
(Apple currently offers only second-rate Windows support for the iPod as it stands, anyway. You can't boot a DOS/Windows type OS over firewire to a PC - although you CAN do this on a Mac system. iPods formatted in Apple's HFS+ format won't synchronize to iTunes on a Windows PC unless you run Apple's utility to reformat the iPod in FAT32, erasing anything already on it. That or you buy a 3rd. party PC product that can read Mac filesystems, like "MacOpener".)
Yes, you are correct about this (and actually, I'd forgotten about those) -- but still, USB support in any '95 version was sketchy at best. (Remember the fiasco when Bill Gates himself tried to demo the hot-plug USB support and his computer crashed, on stage?)
USB didn't really work the way it was supposed to work until '98 came out.
Yep! Microsoft announced the new Office 2004 for Mac at the MacWorld expo yesterday. Among the new features are toolbars that fade to transparent when not actively being used, so they don't eat up your available screen space, and new "fit to page" features in Excel, ensuring all your pie charts and graphs, etc. don't end up crossing between 2 seperate pages when printed out.
In fact, the MS rep made a point to comment that "Microsoft brought Word and Excel to the Mac before we ever wrote a Windows version."
Microsoft has also purchased VirtualPC from Connectix, and has VirtualPC 7.0 coming out for the Mac in the next few months - with full G5 processor support added. So yes, MS has plenty of reason to be purchasing Apple G5 computers!
Always an option, but then - you also might come back in a body bag, or with strange medical conditions that don't show up until years later - thanks to some military experimentation on their recruits?
Ok, so I'm only being half-serious here.... But still, I'm not all that impressed with the military. I have a few good friends who went that route right after high-school, and they all felt they got "screwed over" by the whole thing. (Typically, the recruiter makes a lot of big promises and feeds you exactly what you want to hear, but once you sign on the dotted line, your ass belongs to them - and not much is anything like what you were told. The "Oh sure, we can make sure you get to work in technology and computers!" promise translates to "Here soldier, mop up these hallways to our computer lab so they SHINE!"
I can't say for certain, but I'd be willing to bet that you actually did the upgrade from '95 to '98, rather than backing up any important data, and just wiping the hard drive and doing a fresh '98 install?
I've almost never had really good luck with doing an upgrade installation of a Microsoft product. We went from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 Server by way of upgrade at a previous job, and all seemed fine. Only thing was, about 48 hours later, the systems upgraded in this manner all froze up and developed problems. When we reformatted and did full NT 4 install on them, no more problems.
I've seen a good number of largely "successful" upgrades to '98 on machines that originally shipped with '95, but in almost every case, there's quite a bit of extra "garbage" left over on the hard drive. The upgrades seem to be far too careless in cleaning up unneeded/unnecessary files left over from '95. In one case, I saw a system that worked fine except the Windows Updates would never install successfully from the update web site. It turned out he still had an old "CATROOT" directory on the drive with data in it from his previous OS and it was breaking the updates. I wiped out that directory (leaving another CATROOT directory which was under his SYSTEM32 directory, as opposed to this old one in the main WINDOWS directory), and all of a sudden, updates started working fine.
I love OS X myself, but I still have to say you're off base a bit on '98. The nice thing about Win '98 is MS had the product out for so long, they did quite a few revisions to it, improving things like USB support and networking capabilities. The original '98 release might not have been spectacular, but most people I know found that '98 "Second Edition" was about as good as Windows ever got, before changing to the NT-based design found in 2000 and XP.
When they did the Windows Millenium version, THAT'S where they really blew it. All they did was add fluff, plus a half-broken system to roll-back to previous system states that ends up slowing the whole thing down.
I don't know how you can claim Windows '95 was superior to '98, when it lacked USB support completely, had very little native device driver support by comparison, didn't support Internet Connection Sharing or even support for internal ISDN modems (no native support for bonding multiple 64K "B" data channels together), and a slew of other things.
Yes, I think you summed it up rather well. I have no problem with "feminism", if by the term, one means ensuring that women aren't prevented from doing something they want to do, simply because they're not the "correct sex" for the task.
Today, I see quite a few women working in traditionally male roles, and nobody even questions it. (EG. Road construction workers, maintenance workers, etc.)
Many of society's widely-held beliefs about women just not physically being able to do certain tasks don't hold true for all women. The "weaker sex" isn't so weak after all, once you set them free from society's taboos on letting women lift weights in the gym for other than purely "fitness/staying trim". Look at someone like powerlifter Jill Mills (www.jillmills.com), for example. I doubt there are many men here who can honestly say they're stronger and in better physical shape than she is, and she's married with a kid.
So the question is, what else do "feminists" need to accomplish at this point? I think very little, at least here in the United States. Therefore, the group has turned into more of a "hate group" against men.
Ok, but do you really think it's going to play out this way? I've often left theaters after the late movie ends at night, and there's barely any staff left in the building. You see a few guys sweeping the floors or maybe closing down the snack bar - but the ticket-takers and ushers look like they've all gone home.
If people tape the movie and then remove the tape from the camera, replacing it with an unused blank, whoever does inspect the camera isn't going to find anything, anyway.
I have a feeling they'll just decide "inspection" is too time-intensive and costs the theater more in paying staff to do it, so they'll just "call the cops" on anyone seen seated in the theater with a camcorder next to them.
Well, yes, this is true -- but you're talking about DOS based operating systems. The problem is, people running Windows 2000 or XP typically have an NTFS file system on their boot drive nowdays, so modern scanners need to deal with this.
Symantec Anti-Virus 2004 allows booting from the installation CD so you can scan a boot drive without even starting the OS up at all - but again, they're still only supporting DOS filesystems.
No, there's plenty wrong with this law. You can't simply judge the merits of new legislation based on the results it aims to achieve.
For a slightly more extreme example, what if I passed a new law that made it legal in Ohio to outlaw women's purses in all grocery stores? After all, I could probably make a pretty good case that much shoplifting happens when women have the ability to hide products in their purses.
The problem in both cases is this: You're not addressing the problem the best way. As others pointed out already, it's not that uncommon to carry a camcorder into a movie theater, simply because the family is on vacation, and decides to catch a movie right after some other activity. Why should they risk being pegged as criminals, simply because they didn't have a safe, convenient place to drop off their camcorder before they came in?
There's no need for legislation of this type. Where the legal system comes into play is with stopping the illegal resale of copied movies. Let the theaters deal with people filming movies on their own.
I can personally attest to this. I've been doing on-site PC service for a local company for the last couple months, and our #1 call by far is for problems that end up being spyware/ad-ware related.
In my experience, SpyBot works extremely well, but it has a few quirks in its interface that lead people to not get everything cleaned up that it can clean up.
Most importantly, when it finds spyware it tells you requires a reboot to remove, you'll notice that it rescans everything during the system restart. The thing is, though, it isn't *removing* everything during this stage. It's only setting itself up so it *can* remove what it finds successfully, if you click to "fix problems" on its console window after everything finishes and the Windows desktop comes back up!
Also, I'm seeing more and more virii/trojan horse type infections that are smart enough to kill processes of any known virus scanner. These wouldn't have the chance to infect a PC in the first place if people kept their virus scanner running and updated, but many people don't. Then when someone like myself comes in and tries putting an updated one on the PC, the install won't even complete successfully. (This also manifests itself as a scanner that shows itself as "disabled" in the system tray, but which won't ever stay enabled when you try to toggle it back on.)
I'm at a loss as to why Symantec, McAfee, AVG, and the other popular scanners don't allow doing a "reboot and scan/remove virii before system startup", so the virus code can't get a jump on the scanner??
Yes, maybe you are just poor. That's not a bad thing. I'm not exactly "made of money" either. But one thing I continue to discover is just how relative a dollar amount is, from person to person.
Doing on-site PC service, I charge people $75 per hour of time plus a trip charge. I've seen the whole range, from people who think that's impossibly overpriced and hang up on us as soon as we tell them the rates, to people who keep me at their place for hour after hour, and pay the bill like it's nothing at all. They even comment on what a "good deal" the service was.
I've also seen such things as doctors living by themselves in a huge mansion, but the inside of the place had hardly any furniture and was a total disaster. (They make plenty of money, but they don't have time to really do much with it. The big house was sort of an investment expense... a way to sink some of their money into something "sensible", even though they didn't need anything that size at all. But they don't even have the free time to clean the place up or do the interior decorating.)
People who succeed in making big money usually run out of "sensible basics" to buy pretty quickly. At that point, they often grow tired of just watching money pile up in bank accounts and investments, where it's just numbers and monthly statements on paper - and decide they can start buying things just because they sound "cool" or "interesting". That's the market this Pluto is aimed at.
I love the technology in the TiVo, but I still haven't brought myself to purchase one. Every time I think I should, I start thinking about which programs I'll have it record for me to watch later - and I think "Gee, there's hardly anything I need to see badly enough to be worth paying hundreds of dollars for the ability." Then I leave the store, one more day without a PVR.
I'm really not "anti television" or anything. If you have a bunch of "must see" shows, good for you. Enjoy them! I just find that when I do get the free time to sit down and watch TV, I'd rather watch a movie than some sitcom or TV serial drama.
Sure, a really good new show might pop up and I'll want to watch it - but chances are, I could just tape it on the old-fashioned VCR and that'd be good enough.
Also though, there's something I sort of like about just randomly flipping through the channels on cable or satellite and stopping on anything that catches my attention. Sometimes, I've watched programs I would *never* have thought I'd be interested in - and liked them. TiVo would shield me from these opportunities - and that may not really be a plus.
Generally, I agree that it borders on silly/worthless to "IM" each other when you're both in the same house.
I've had a few exceptions to the rule, though. For example, a couple times I've been sick and pretty much lost my voice. If I was in the basement and my wife was upstairs, it was nice to be able to get and easily respond to simple messages, like "I've almost got dinner ready." or "Can you come upstairs for a minute and help me with...." It really sucks trying to yell back to someone when you have a sore throat.
I've also used it as a way to "multitask" communications while I'm talking on the phone to someone. Instead of having to put the person on hold or interrupt the converstion, I can type in the background.
I have mixed feelings on the software firewalls, either included with the OS or 3rd. party. Yes, it's probably "safer" if they just enabled them by default - but I've seen a LOT of problems come up with them.
EG. The Symantec "Personal Firewall" is troublesome for Windows users who aren't very computer-savvy. They install it using all the defaults, because they're told it's "a good idea to have a firewall". Then, it ends up preventing local printer and file sharing or wi-fi cards from functioning, because IP ranges to allow on the local LAN aren't properly configured in it.
The OS X firewall is probably a little more friendly "out of the box" than some, but it's probably better to default to it being disabled. I can understand the argument for enabling it by default - but it bothers me that your system would default to preventing some protcols or ports from functioning as they're originally intended to function. Anything that restricts/prevents some items from doing what they natively do should be an option to enable.
This is just one more reason I'm glad I don't live in California. They're constantly passing more legislation restricting what people can and can't do on a micro-management level.
I've seen a number of people with LCD panels mounted in the passenger seat of their vehicle. Typically, it's so the passenger can watch a DVD movie while sitting in the car. Since the passenger isn't the one driving, I see no harm in that. (Debating whether or not people really need the ability to watch movies in their car is a whole different issue, and one that comes down to personal choice, IMHO. I wouldn't opt to spend the money for this sort of thing, but some people would, and do - and that should be their right to do so.)
If the driver of the car was trying to watch the display on the *passenger* side of the car and got in an accident, then that's his/her own fault for doing something stupid. Don't punish everyone else for that!
I've gone on several road trips where having a laptop running GPS software was very handy. One person drove while the other person in the passenger seat ran the laptop and told the driver what to look out for ahead, how far we'd gone, etc. If CA thinks this should be illegal, I can't see how they'd allow a passenger to look at a paper road map either??
I think they probably will, but cellphone technology (and most recently, the available of "portable numbers" for them) will breathe a little more life into the phone number concept first.
In fact, I could even see where a switchover to IP based telephony would be made more seamless to the general public by offering DNS type services that convert your phone number into your assigned IP address.
Yeah, I might "come around" a bit if I listened to them more. I'm still trying to keep an open mind about it. So far though, the White Stripes grate on my nerves. I can appreciate "raw" rock music without lots of post-production cleanup and effects added, but I think bands like the Black Crowes exemplify that - without giving a feel that they're "purposely trying" for that sound.
The White Stripes may use electric guitar and effects pedals, but I think they view that as "ok because the 60's rock did that too". It seems to me like they're shunning modern studio recording techniques (digital recording and advanced microphones, etc. etc.) and avoiding anything 80's or 90's or beyond, instrument-wise, in an effort to force an "old time, straight-ahead rock" tone to their music. I'd rather see a band just work with whatever tools they find useful for each song they want to write - and let it naturally "flow".
Actually, I've tried switching to water - and it just didn't do it for me. I will agree with your statement that most people don't drink enough water though. I started having horrible leg cramps at night, and finally realized that it was due to being dehydrated! I make a habit of drinking several dixie cups of water right before bed now - and voila, no more cramps.
In fact, it's this whole dehydration thing that now motivates me to occasionally buy a bottled water when I stop someplace, instead of automatically grabbing a soda. I never got to where soda tastes "too sweet" to me, but I try to mix things up now and then.
As far as I've been able to gather, the "White Stripes" are a band taking pride in the fact that they're pretty "anti-technology". Their whole thing is about not using any electronic/synthetic instruments, and going back to the basics.
As many other bands have commented though, in the end, it just gives them a "fake" sound - like everything they do pretends to have been recorded 30 years earlier than it was, but isn't quite right.
I'm sure lots of people think their sound is simply "refreshing" - since it stands in pretty stark contrast to the other music played on the radio stations that play their genre of music. But to me, they're not really doing anything redeeming.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to make claims that DVD-R can "be read in almost anything". Believe me.... I went through a bunch of hassle trying to make a DVD movie that played back properly on the DVD players I had around here (and the ones my friends and family owned). Just for that limited scope of usage, DVD-R had issues. For one, I had a fairly expensive Toshiba DVD set-top player that didn't seem to work with any recordable media at all. My Playstation 2 would at least attempt to play movies on DVD-R media, but it had problems reading as it got towards the end of almost-full discs. It would begin stuttering and skipping, and usually just freeze up at some point.
I also tried DVD+R though, and it's decidedly LESS compatible than -R for this type of thing. Where +R (and +RW) shine is with a better feature-set and design for working with packet-writing data.
I think the bottom line is, compatibility for *both* formats will only improve as people get rid of their old DVD set-top players and replace them with newer models. Most of the problems lie in what the firmware is capable of that's inside the player siting on someone's TV set.
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This is true up to a point. The line about "just become an OSS developer yourself!" is getting stale though. Companies have always taken that option into consideration, no matter what platform they used.
I've worked for several places where each time a special piece of software was needed for a task, the question came up of "Should we assign that job to our software development team, or is there a pre-made solution that will do the job?" These were typically "Microsoft shops" too.
Open source is teriffic, but the fact still remains that most businesses prefer pre-packaged solutions, provided at a perceived fair price and with some level of trust/confidence the product will be supported in the future. Your software development team is a costly resource that can only work on so much code at one time. You don't want them building a big solution you could have gotten 95% of for 1/3rd. the cost if you just visited your software store.
That's why companies *do* need to feel they can trust open source developers. The most widely implemented packages in Linux are all projects that are "tried and true" solutions, with long histories of updates and support. (Apache, postfix, mysql, etc. etc.)
This is true to a point - but the faster cards handle higher resolutions at good frame-rates before choking on all the pixels streaming through them. On the high end cards like the Radeon 9800XT, the system bus often gets saturated before the card itself is maxxed out (when gaming at some resolution like 1600x1280).
If you're one of the majority of people who see no real reason to play games at resolutions above 1024x768, then yeah - anything since a GeForce 2 is probably plenty fast enough to make all the games "playable".
The huge resolutions only start making sense when you use really large monitors (which some people are starting to do nowdays). In fact, this is one reason I think the Apple Mac was getting left out of most of the gaming marketplace for so long. Until recently, they didn't really offer any high end 3D cards for their PowerMac line, but at the same time, were much more likely than most PC users to have a large Cinema display running natively at a high resolution.
I think a good part of this is due to kids wanting to play with the same toys their peers are playing with.
When everyone in your class is talking about how they found secret levels or cheats for game XY, or how they're all trying to beat "Ken's high score", or whatever - you're going to feel left out if you're just going home and playing around with your legos, instead of getting in on the gaming action.
If you think about it, most big "fads" in toys are due to achieving a "critical mass" of kids playing with them. When you get enough kids interested in the same toy at the same time, the rest start buying just because of the need to be "part of the group". Wben I was a kid, this happened with the Rubik's Cube and other spin-off puzzles. Left to my own whims, I would have never found one of those things very interesting. But once everyone in school had one in their backpack - it seemed like a "must have" item.
My intent wasn't to "point the finger at Apple" for PC BIOS limitations. Rather, Apple could make more of an effort than they do to allow cross platform iPod compatibility. (EG. Build support into iTunes for Windows to read files from the HFS+ filesystem via firewire.)
Since they don't seem too excited at adding this sort of support, that tells me maybe they'd rather just let an OEM like HP handle the "Windows side" of the iPod?
I don't know that it would play out this way, but potentially, this move might allow Apple to start offering all Apple branded iPods as being the natively Mac-formatted versions, while the blue HP versions come formatted for Windows by default.
(Apple currently offers only second-rate Windows support for the iPod as it stands, anyway. You can't boot a DOS/Windows type OS over firewire to a PC - although you CAN do this on a Mac system. iPods formatted in Apple's HFS+ format won't synchronize to iTunes on a Windows PC unless you run Apple's utility to reformat the iPod in FAT32, erasing anything already on it. That or you buy a 3rd. party PC product that can read Mac filesystems, like "MacOpener".)
Yes, you are correct about this (and actually, I'd forgotten about those) -- but still, USB support in any '95 version was sketchy at best. (Remember the fiasco when Bill Gates himself tried to demo the hot-plug USB support and his computer crashed, on stage?)
USB didn't really work the way it was supposed to work until '98 came out.
Yep! Microsoft announced the new Office 2004 for Mac at the MacWorld expo yesterday. Among the new features are toolbars that fade to transparent when not actively being used, so they don't eat up your available screen space, and new "fit to page" features in Excel, ensuring all your pie charts and graphs, etc. don't end up crossing between 2 seperate pages when printed out.
In fact, the MS rep made a point to comment that "Microsoft brought Word and Excel to the Mac before we ever wrote a Windows version."
Microsoft has also purchased VirtualPC from Connectix, and has VirtualPC 7.0 coming out for the Mac in the next few months - with full G5 processor support added. So yes, MS has plenty of reason to be purchasing Apple G5 computers!
Always an option, but then - you also might come back in a body bag, or with strange medical conditions that don't show up until years later - thanks to some military experimentation on their recruits?
Ok, so I'm only being half-serious here.... But still, I'm not all that impressed with the military. I have a few good friends who went that route right after high-school, and they all felt they got "screwed over" by the whole thing. (Typically, the recruiter makes a lot of big promises and feeds you exactly what you want to hear, but once you sign on the dotted line, your ass belongs to them - and not much is anything like what you were told. The "Oh sure, we can make sure you get to work in technology and computers!" promise translates to "Here soldier, mop up these hallways to our computer lab so they SHINE!"
I can't say for certain, but I'd be willing to bet that you actually did the upgrade from '95 to '98, rather than backing up any important data, and just wiping the hard drive and doing a fresh '98 install?
I've almost never had really good luck with doing an upgrade installation of a Microsoft product. We went from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 Server by way of upgrade at a previous job, and all seemed fine. Only thing was, about 48 hours later, the systems upgraded in this manner all froze up and developed problems. When we reformatted and did full NT 4 install on them, no more problems.
I've seen a good number of largely "successful" upgrades to '98 on machines that originally shipped with '95, but in almost every case, there's quite a bit of extra "garbage" left over on the hard drive. The upgrades seem to be far too careless in cleaning up unneeded/unnecessary files left over from '95. In one case, I saw a system that worked fine except the Windows Updates would never install successfully from the update web site. It turned out he still had an old "CATROOT" directory on the drive with data in it from his previous OS and it was breaking the updates. I wiped out that directory (leaving another CATROOT directory which was under his SYSTEM32 directory, as opposed to this old one in the main WINDOWS directory), and all of a sudden, updates started working fine.
I love OS X myself, but I still have to say you're off base a bit on '98. The nice thing about Win '98 is MS had the product out for so long, they did quite a few revisions to it, improving things like USB support and networking capabilities. The original '98 release might not have been spectacular, but most people I know found that '98 "Second Edition" was about as good as Windows ever got, before changing to the NT-based design found in 2000 and XP.
When they did the Windows Millenium version, THAT'S where they really blew it. All they did was add fluff, plus a half-broken system to roll-back to previous system states that ends up slowing the whole thing down.
I don't know how you can claim Windows '95 was superior to '98, when it lacked USB support completely, had very little native device driver support by comparison, didn't support Internet Connection Sharing or even support for internal ISDN modems (no native support for bonding multiple 64K "B" data channels together), and a slew of other things.
Yes, I think you summed it up rather well.
I have no problem with "feminism", if by the term, one means ensuring that women aren't prevented from doing something they want to do, simply because they're not the "correct sex" for the task.
Today, I see quite a few women working in traditionally male roles, and nobody even questions it. (EG. Road construction workers, maintenance workers, etc.)
Many of society's widely-held beliefs about women just not physically being able to do certain tasks don't hold true for all women. The "weaker sex" isn't so weak after all, once you set them free from society's taboos on letting women lift weights in the gym for other than purely "fitness/staying trim". Look at someone like powerlifter Jill Mills (www.jillmills.com), for example. I doubt there are many men here who can honestly say they're stronger and in better physical shape than she is, and she's married with a kid.
So the question is, what else do "feminists" need to accomplish at this point? I think very little, at least here in the United States. Therefore, the group has turned into more of a "hate group" against men.
Ok, but do you really think it's going to play out this way? I've often left theaters after the late movie ends at night, and there's barely any staff left in the building. You see a few guys sweeping the floors or maybe closing down the snack bar - but the ticket-takers and ushers look like they've all gone home.
If people tape the movie and then remove the tape from the camera, replacing it with an unused blank, whoever does inspect the camera isn't going to find anything, anyway.
I have a feeling they'll just decide "inspection" is too time-intensive and costs the theater more in paying staff to do it, so they'll just "call the cops" on anyone seen seated in the theater with a camcorder next to them.
Well, yes, this is true -- but you're talking about DOS based operating systems. The problem is, people running Windows 2000 or XP typically have an NTFS file system on their boot drive nowdays, so modern scanners need to deal with this.
Symantec Anti-Virus 2004 allows booting from the installation CD so you can scan a boot drive without even starting the OS up at all - but again, they're still only supporting DOS filesystems.
No, there's plenty wrong with this law. You can't simply judge the merits of new legislation based on the results it aims to achieve.
For a slightly more extreme example, what if I passed a new law that made it legal in Ohio to outlaw women's purses in all grocery stores? After all, I could probably make a pretty good case that much shoplifting happens when women have the ability to hide products in their purses.
The problem in both cases is this: You're not addressing the problem the best way. As others pointed out already, it's not that uncommon to carry a camcorder into a movie theater, simply because the family is on vacation, and decides to catch a movie right after some other activity. Why should they risk being pegged as criminals, simply because they didn't have a safe, convenient place to drop off their camcorder before they came in?
There's no need for legislation of this type. Where the legal system comes into play is with stopping the illegal resale of copied movies. Let the theaters deal with people filming movies on their own.
I can personally attest to this. I've been doing on-site PC service for a local company for the last couple months, and our #1 call by far is for problems that end up being spyware/ad-ware related.
In my experience, SpyBot works extremely well, but it has a few quirks in its interface that lead people to not get everything cleaned up that it can clean up.
Most importantly, when it finds spyware it tells you requires a reboot to remove, you'll notice that it rescans everything during the system restart. The thing is, though, it isn't *removing* everything during this stage. It's only setting itself up so it *can* remove what it finds successfully, if you click to "fix problems" on its console window after everything finishes and the Windows desktop comes back up!
Also, I'm seeing more and more virii/trojan horse type infections that are smart enough to kill processes of any known virus scanner. These wouldn't have the chance to infect a PC in the first place if people kept their virus scanner running and updated, but many people don't. Then when someone like myself comes in and tries putting an updated one on the PC, the install won't even complete successfully. (This also manifests itself as a scanner that shows itself as "disabled" in the system tray, but which won't ever stay enabled when you try to toggle it back on.)
I'm at a loss as to why Symantec, McAfee, AVG, and the other popular scanners don't allow doing a "reboot and scan/remove virii before system startup", so the virus code can't get a jump on the scanner??
Yes, maybe you are just poor.
... a way to sink some of their money into something "sensible", even though they didn't need anything that size at all. But they don't even have the free time to clean the place up or do the interior decorating.)
That's not a bad thing. I'm not exactly "made of money" either. But one thing I continue to discover is just how relative a dollar amount is, from person to person.
Doing on-site PC service, I charge people $75 per hour of time plus a trip charge. I've seen the whole range, from people who think that's impossibly overpriced and hang up on us as soon as we tell them the rates, to people who keep me at their place for hour after hour, and pay the bill like it's nothing at all. They even comment on what a "good deal" the service was.
I've also seen such things as doctors living by themselves in a huge mansion, but the inside of the place had hardly any furniture and was a total disaster. (They make plenty of money, but they don't have time to really do much with it. The big house was sort of an investment expense
People who succeed in making big money usually run out of "sensible basics" to buy pretty quickly. At that point, they often grow tired of just watching money pile up in bank accounts and investments, where it's just numbers and monthly statements on paper - and decide they can start buying things just because they sound "cool" or "interesting". That's the market this Pluto is aimed at.
I love the technology in the TiVo, but I still haven't brought myself to purchase one. Every time I think I should, I start thinking about which programs I'll have it record for me to watch later - and I think "Gee, there's hardly anything I need to see badly enough to be worth paying hundreds of dollars for the ability." Then I leave the store, one more day without a PVR.
I'm really not "anti television" or anything. If you have a bunch of "must see" shows, good for you. Enjoy them! I just find that when I do get the free time to sit down and watch TV, I'd rather watch a movie than some sitcom or TV serial drama.
Sure, a really good new show might pop up and I'll want to watch it - but chances are, I could just tape it on the old-fashioned VCR and that'd be good enough.
Also though, there's something I sort of like about just randomly flipping through the channels on cable or satellite and stopping on anything that catches my attention. Sometimes, I've watched programs I would *never* have thought I'd be interested in - and liked them. TiVo would shield me from these opportunities - and that may not really be a plus.
Generally, I agree that it borders on silly/worthless to "IM" each other when you're both in the same house.
I've had a few exceptions to the rule, though. For example, a couple times I've been sick and pretty much lost my voice. If I was in the basement and my wife was upstairs, it was nice to be able to get and easily respond to simple messages, like "I've almost got dinner ready." or "Can you come upstairs for a minute and help me with...." It really sucks trying to yell back to someone when you have a sore throat.
I've also used it as a way to "multitask" communications while I'm talking on the phone to someone. Instead of having to put the person on hold or interrupt the converstion, I can type in the background.
I have mixed feelings on the software firewalls, either included with the OS or 3rd. party. Yes, it's probably "safer" if they just enabled them by default - but I've seen a LOT of problems come up with them.
EG. The Symantec "Personal Firewall" is troublesome for Windows users who aren't very computer-savvy. They install it using all the defaults, because they're told it's "a good idea to have a firewall". Then, it ends up preventing local printer and file sharing or wi-fi cards from functioning, because IP ranges to allow on the local LAN aren't properly configured in it.
The OS X firewall is probably a little more friendly "out of the box" than some, but it's probably better to default to it being disabled. I can understand the argument for enabling it by default - but it bothers me that your system would default to preventing some protcols or ports from functioning as they're originally intended to function. Anything that restricts/prevents some items from doing what they natively do should be an option to enable.
This is just one more reason I'm glad I don't live in California. They're constantly passing more legislation restricting what people can and can't do on a micro-management level.
I've seen a number of people with LCD panels mounted in the passenger seat of their vehicle. Typically, it's so the passenger can watch a DVD movie while sitting in the car. Since the passenger isn't the one driving, I see no harm in that. (Debating whether or not people really need the ability to watch movies in their car is a whole different issue, and one that comes down to personal choice, IMHO. I wouldn't opt to spend the money for this sort of thing, but some people would, and do - and that should be their right to do so.)
If the driver of the car was trying to watch the display on the *passenger* side of the car and got in an accident, then that's his/her own fault for doing something stupid. Don't punish everyone else for that!
I've gone on several road trips where having a laptop running GPS software was very handy. One person drove while the other person in the passenger seat ran the laptop and told the driver what to look out for ahead, how far we'd gone, etc. If CA thinks this should be illegal, I can't see how they'd allow a passenger to look at a paper road map either??
I think they probably will, but cellphone technology (and most recently, the available of "portable numbers" for them) will breathe a little more life into the phone number concept first.
In fact, I could even see where a switchover to IP based telephony would be made more seamless to the general public by offering DNS type services that convert your phone number into your assigned IP address.
Yeah, I might "come around" a bit if I listened to them more. I'm still trying to keep an open mind about it. So far though, the White Stripes grate on my nerves. I can appreciate "raw" rock music without lots of post-production cleanup and effects added, but I think bands like the Black Crowes exemplify that - without giving a feel that they're "purposely trying" for that sound.
The White Stripes may use electric guitar and effects pedals, but I think they view that as "ok because the 60's rock did that too". It seems to me like they're shunning modern studio recording techniques (digital recording and advanced microphones, etc. etc.) and avoiding anything 80's or 90's or beyond, instrument-wise, in an effort to force an "old time, straight-ahead rock" tone to their music. I'd rather see a band just work with whatever tools they find useful for each song they want to write - and let it naturally "flow".
Actually, I've tried switching to water - and it just didn't do it for me. I will agree with your statement that most people don't drink enough water though. I started having horrible leg cramps at night, and finally realized that it was due to being dehydrated! I make a habit of drinking several dixie cups of water right before bed now - and voila, no more cramps.
In fact, it's this whole dehydration thing that now motivates me to occasionally buy a bottled water when I stop someplace, instead of automatically grabbing a soda. I never got to where soda tastes "too sweet" to me, but I try to mix things up now and then.
As far as I've been able to gather, the "White Stripes" are a band taking pride in the fact that they're pretty "anti-technology". Their whole thing is about not using any electronic/synthetic instruments, and going back to the basics.
As many other bands have commented though, in the end, it just gives them a "fake" sound - like everything they do pretends to have been recorded 30 years earlier than it was, but isn't quite right.
I'm sure lots of people think their sound is simply "refreshing" - since it stands in pretty stark contrast to the other music played on the radio stations that play their genre of music. But to me, they're not really doing anything redeeming.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to make claims that DVD-R can "be read in almost anything". Believe me.... I went through a bunch of hassle trying to make a DVD movie that played back properly on the DVD players I had around here (and the ones my friends and family owned). Just for that limited scope of usage, DVD-R had issues. For one, I had a fairly expensive Toshiba DVD set-top player that didn't seem to work with any recordable media at all. My Playstation 2 would at least attempt to play movies on DVD-R media, but it had problems reading as it got towards the end of almost-full discs. It would begin stuttering and skipping, and usually just freeze up at some point.
I also tried DVD+R though, and it's decidedly LESS compatible than -R for this type of thing. Where +R (and +RW) shine is with a better feature-set and design for working with packet-writing data.
I think the bottom line is, compatibility for *both* formats will only improve as people get rid of their old DVD set-top players and replace them with newer models. Most of the problems lie in what the firmware is capable of that's inside the player siting on someone's TV set.