Well, historically, it seems to me MS usually fails when they stray too far from new products related to their core software/OS products.
Let's see... We have that Microsoft Phone they sold. I never saw too many people using that. They failed miserably with the partnership with Clarion to build Windows CE based car stereos. (Not too many Clarion Joyrides in people's cars, are there?) Then they bought all those satellites for broadband, and that didn't seem to pan out. The X-Box hasn't been real profitable for them either, even if it sold a lot of units. MSN is still a big question-mark, but AOL was kicking their butt last time I paid attention to it. Either way, they're selling a product that's largely irrelevant - because Internet is quickly becoming all about broadband connections. That means your local cable company or telco is your ISP, not Microsoft.
So sure, Microsoft would love to get their hands into as many markets as possible. That's what any successful business should be striving for, at least in the backs of their minds. Fact is, they're not good at everything, and having the most money to throw around doesn't guarantee success.
You're possibly correct, but I still have my doubts. Apple took too long to get the product to market, and then when they did, they released 10.0.x and 10.1.x versions, both of which were really litle more than glorified beta releases. They've finally got something of quality with the 10.2.x version - but it's a year later....
Apple will almost certainly be around for a long time to come, but they're a niche player. Even if you consider their products vastly superior, you're talking about something analogous to "Rolls Royce vs. Ford" in the car industry. Most people would say a Rolls is a better car than a Ford product, yet you see very few Rolls Royces driving around town.
The problem is, Apple isn't equivalent to Rolls Royce in the minds of well over 50% of the population. Instead, many view them as a "has been" or a "wanna-be" computer maker. Granted, these are usually the same folks who haven't really sat down at a new Mac and used it long enough to give it a chance. Nonetheless, perception is 9/10th's of reality - and Apple has a lot of perception to change.
You can even buy systems pre-loaded with Linux through Wal-Mart, but not a new Mac with OSX.
If Apple wanted to really become a "driver" of new technologies, they probably should have kept the options available for clone-makers to build Mac compatibles. It appears, though, they still view all of their software and OS products as tools/leverage to sell people their hardware. They don't really want to see anyone running their code on systems not assembled by them.
Mmm... I have mixed feelings myself. I've been playing electric guitar for over 10 years now (although lately, just on the rare occasion that I get free time and feel like plinking around on it), and I can understand both sides of an argument like this.
I think the bottom line is, as long as the instrument still has 6 strings and is played by hand - it will only be as good (or bad) as the abilities + imagination of the person playing it.
The primary "benefit" of going digital with any of these things is to clean up background noise. I've sure had my share of hassles with guitar cables going bad and causing loud buzzing/humming sounds through my amp, or intermittently cutting out. By changing the signal path to digital, at least you'd have much more of an "either it works or it doesn't" situation. A bad cable would mean no sound at all.
On the flip-side, I don't think I'd pay a premium price for a guitar just because it converts analog to digital and back again on the other end of the cable. This seems like just the type of thing that allows Gibson to boost prices on their guitars, and pad their wallets.
The thing Line 6 was doing with their "digital guitar" appears to be much more interesting and useful. They're basically taking what used to be an external effects processor and integrating it into the guitar, so with a twist of the dial - you can make their generic guitar emulate the tone of many different popular guitars. Of course, that also means your Line 6 instrument has no unique, defining "character" of its own. That automatically makes me, as a musician, feel like I'd only want it as a second (or third) guitar. Not my *only* guitar.
Really, I didn't stop buying music because I was "sick and tired of helping finance the rock & roll lifestyle". I agree that it's wasteful and more than a little senseless/stupid -- but I also firmly believe in everyone's individual right to spend their own money as they please.
The simple fact is, the artists aren't giving me anything I feel is worth spending my money on!
The other fact is, the Internet and all the recent alternative ways to listen to new music (XM Radio, the music played on satellite and digital cable TV, organized by format on seperate "music only" channels, etc.) are starting to make the idea of the "album" obsolete.
I'm interested in individual songs I hear that I like. The whole idea of selling music by the "12 pack" of songs recorded by one artist at the same time is not really so attractive, unless the artist really puts out a lot of top-notch material on said album/CD/cassette.
In the past, people just bought albums because that was the only way to get the song(s) they liked. (Well, that or buy singles, which many people do and have done.... But then you have this annoying piece of physical media that only plays a few minutes of music, and has to be ejected/removed from your player. Annoying!)
Actually, it wasn't strictly the "big business" articles in Wired that bothered me.
For the first few years, I appreciated Wired magazine because it seemed like they explored new technology-related ideas in depth, often before they became realized in a commercial product. They also generally began featuring one really good interview with a C.E.O. or other "bigwig" of a tech-related company that produced products or services we all use. Unlike a Newsweek style interview, though, they'd ask the questions that the "geek crowd" really wanted to know the answers to.
IMHO, Wired's big failing was getting caught up in "techno-lust", to the point where every overpriced gadget was featured - whether it had real value or not. They tried too hard to be "cool" with the techno-savvy crowd, and wasted too much effort on strange cover art and layouts, rather than dispensing useful information.
With the dot-com boom, you could practically track Wired's downward spiral into the mess. Every month, they were telling me about some multi-thousand dollar new watch I "had to have", or some imported set of loudspeakers shaped like rare art that some Finnish or German engineer swore made music sound more "life-like" than anything else on the market. Whatever.....
Sure, bid histories and auctions won are available for viewing on eBay itself.... and so is whatever email address you chose to use with their service.
But that's *nothing* compared to what they're talking about willingly handing over to anyone claiming to be "law enforcement".
Tracing an email address back to the actual person using it isn't necessarily an easy task at all. Many services out there let people create email accounts on their servers for free, and they barely ask for any personal information at all. (What they did ask for, you could easily lie about.)
As just one example, one of the web sites promoting legalization of marijuana used to run a free mail server that let you get an account at hempseed@org. If you created one of those accounts using false info, plus used a dial-up connection with a dynamically issued IP address - how could anyone trace it back to the originator?
eBay, on the other hand, has your credit card in their possession - which is magnitudes more useful in hunting down a person than some email address it publically displays on auction listings.
Yes, I do stand corrected. They are in Overland Park, KS. However, they've still got a large presence in KC, Missouri - last time I checked. I knew quite a few people working in Sprint buildings in KC.
Oh well.... either way, they're right there on the border.
Another big problem I saw with the Segway is the lack of protection for the rider from the elements. Maybe in sunny California, this isn't a huge issue. But in much of the country, a big attraction to driving a vehicle around for even short delivery-type trips is the shelter it provides from the rain or snow. You get in, close the doors and windows, and you even have a climate controlled environment with heater or air-conditioning.
Any type of motorized transportation I'm paying thousands for should offer some of this, IMHO. Otherwise, as many people pointed out - why not save all the money and ride a bike, or even a small scooter/moped?
One big show-stopper for threedegrees could possibly be problems xferring files back and forth when some of the users are behind a firewall.
I don't know how much care MS has taken to deal with this issue -- but here's hoping it's not using sloppy "DirectPlay" type code, where the games may be talking on any random subset of thousands of possible port numbers!
Even on the venerable IRC chat, DCC of files has been troublesome. Many clients require tweaking of settings before they'll properly do a DCC receive or send.
ICQ seems to be trying to avoid much of this hassle by placing their centralized server(s) in the middle of data transactions, as sort of a middle-man that ensures a chat or file request gets from point A to point B. Is that the MS strategy here too?
A couple things come to mind, regarding this situation.
First of all, Kansas is a fairly spread-out, sparsely populated state. Not the environment that encourages broadband deployments right now.....
It sounds to me like the people of Kansas made the right decision by rejecting Bell's power-play. The fact is, Bell hasn't and isn't going to offer them much more than they're getting right now. Their best hope for the future is to minimize Bell's power over telecommunications, so a new, 3rd. party, will hopefully rise up and provide high speed internet connections.
Secondly, right on the eastern border of Kansas lies Kansas City, Missouri - the home of Sprint. It seems like if anyone was in a position to roll out broadband in Kansas, it'd be Sprint - since they've got loads of offices right next door.
Yeah, I remember years ago, the big competitor to the x00 fossil driver was bnu.sys. (Generally, the BBS sysops I knew preferred x00 though.)
As I recall, x00 went on to support a few rather esoteric hardware configurations, including the Hayes ESP accelerator boards. (These were serial cards with a 16550 UART emulation mode, but also a native mode that allowed extremely high baud rates.) Basically, you could do x2, x4 and even x8 multipliers of the usual 115,000 BPS serial port limit. Those types of speeds weren't too useful for dial-up modems, but people using the first external ISDN modems appreciated them. Otherwise, your 128K ISDN circuit bottlenecked at the 115K max. of the serial port.
Re: the "nightmare" of self-respresented litigants
on
Democracy in the Dark?
·
· Score: 1
IMHO, that "nightmare" you speak of is a beautiful thing to behold. Personally, I'm proud to hear there are still people in this country confident enough in their beliefs and in themselves that they'll try to represent themselves in a courtroom.
It might not be fun having to hand-hold them and put up with all the technicalities they have to muddle their way through. But good for them! They've taken the initiative to give it their best shot, instead of giving in to intimidation and paying someone else to do it for them.
I don't care what you say about the technicalities being there for good reasons. It simply shouldn't require 652 pages of rules! At that point, instead of it being about justice, it's about game-playing. "Which lawyer is going to screw up and forget one of the minute details mentioned briefly on page 473, paragraph 6 - allowing me to "one-up" him?"
What I don't get is why so many people keep buying and installing the TurboTax software product in the first place?
They offer the exact same thing via the web (www.turbotax.com). I'd rather just use the online version, and not have extra software wasting my hard drive space. Solves all these DRM worries too.
(I suppose some folks are paranoid because they store a copy of your tax info on their server. Personally though, I think it's an advantage. It lets you import your previous year's info when you use it the next year, saving you a lot of time and effort filling out duplicate fields. Plus, it's one less thing I have to worry about keeping good backups of, in case my drive crashes and I lose my tax records.)
Sure, if your return is complex enough - you really have no business trying to use tax software for "beginners" to get it done.
In my experience, as your tax situation gets more complex, TurboTax starts asking questions and prompting for information that you don't really know the correct answers to. (Perhaps they need figures from a particular statement or form you're not even aware you have, for example?)
On the other hand, I still think these packages are great for the average person. Quite a few friends of mine pay someone to do their taxes each year, and it's primarily out of irrational fear of taxes. Basically, they're afraid they'll make a mistake and it will cost them dearly later on. That, or they're convinced the H & R Block guy" will really get them more money back than TurboTax or Tax Edge.
Since my own return is usually pretty straightforward, I always use tax software to file. It's cheaper than paying an accountant, and I'm pretty confident the computer will do the math correctly. Not to mention, I *know* how it ended up with the results it got. I feel a little more informed about the whole process if I can see my refund or amount owed changing as I enter my figures.
Sure, what you say sounds good on paper -- but in a depressed economy, it's not very practical.
Many employers know the deck is stacked in their favor right now, so the demands for extra hours without extra pay aren't just coincidence.
I know right now, in my own situation, I'm putting in a lot of unpaid extra time at my job. Does my wife like it? No, not at all. I constantly get lectured on how I can't keep doing this, etc. etc.
Fact is though, I'm just thankful I finally found another job in my field (computer support/consulting/service) that gives me some challenges to solve each day, and something new to learn here and there. If I thought I had other, similar employment options readily available right now, I'd get up and leave in a heartbeat. The pay is about half what I used to make, unpaid overtime not factored in.
Still, I'm scraping by now with just enough pay to keep the important bills paid up - and that sure beats unemployment pay that doesn't begin to cover them all, or some dead-end temp. job that's not even in my field.
Anyone who values their family is also acutely aware that their child's welfare depends on them bringing home that paycheck every week or two. If a condition of my continued employment is "going above and beyond the average work-week" right now, then that's how I guess it has to be.
Re: There *could* be value in this, yet....
on
A Tale in the Desert
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Personally, I have a blast playing quite a few violent games -- but they're also usually fast-action arcade games, requiring little thought.
Sometimes, that's what you want... a stress-reliever or some "instant action entertainment".
When you're ready to sit down and get immersed in a detailed virtual world, however, I think you expect more. Violence in role-playing and multi-player games gets old and cliche pretty quickly. To me, they all feel like "Dungeon Hack", over and over again - except with different scenery and sounds. I mean, how "immersing" is the same tired concept that you kill, collect items, and then go spend the money/gold to buy bigger and better items?
A good MMORPG should be more like reading chapters of a novel. (Only it's a novel that's being written as you go along, and there's no "last chapter" or "last page" to come across.) The fact that you can communicate with other live human players is always the "key point" to these types of games, but what makes it "good" or "bad" is how much is built around that basic premise.
Before I'd play this particular game, I'd want to know that there's some quality storyline unfolding, and lots of interesting puzzles, twists, and discoveries to make as a group effort.
As a resident of Missouri myself, I think this law will largely be pointless. Not that I'm at all against getting rid of the spam - but the usual problem is in finding the origin of the email.
Sure, if you put in enough effort, you can usually get it tracked down -- but who has the free time to chase after this stuff, when it takes 1 or 2 seconds to hit "delete" and move on?
At least with the "no call" anti-telemarketing lists, you have such tools as caller ID at your disposal. (Not to mention, anyone trying to sell you a service or goods via phone pretty much has to give out some sort of valid contact info. Otherwise, how would you complete a business transaction with them? With email spam, they don't care if you're able to contact them with an email reply. They just want to get a generic message sent your way, or send you to some largely unrelated destination to buy the product or service they're pushing.)
Even if you do trace the original of a spam mail, these days, there's a good likelihood it came from a foreign country that isn't going to help prosecute the spammer.
I can't speak for the folks you've personally encountered - but my experience is vastly different.
Some of the best and brightest I.T. people I've ever had the pleasure of working with didn't possess college degrees.
By contrast, I'd be a very rich man by now if I had a dollar for every college-degreed "professional" I've seen who can't write a complete sentence to save his/her life.
If anything, the "chips on the shoulders" of the H.S. diploma only folks were placed there by the jealous majority of college-degreed folks who have lesser skills despite the formal education.
Social skills, writing skills, exposure to a broad range of topics -- sure, all are valuable and important. Does one need to attend college (or even finish college with a 4 year degree) to have increased levels of any of these? Not that I know of! These skills are developed simply by going through life, trying to be the best person you can be. That means taking a little initiative to learn new things on your own. Most self-taught I.T. people are happy to do this.
That's just it, though. There are two different types of programmers out there. You're in the first camp. Optimize, optimize, optimize! Do as much as possible with as little as possible!
It's a great idea, and used to be a requirement for development when memory cost hundreds of times per meg. what it does today, and disk storage space was measured in kilobytes, not gigabytes.
It's still useful in niche areas, of course, like embedded devices and cellphones.
For the generic desktop computer, however, things have advanced to the point where a second type of programmer is more valuable. Corporate America needs developers who can bang out quick solutions to problems. You say you want to optimize it? We might let you do that.... all depends on how well your first version works for us. The time you spend shaving 150K off the total file-size or making it run a couple seconds faster simply isn't worth the money they're paying you , in some cases. I mean, seriously, you can drop another 32MB of RAM in a PC for what, $25 or so? That's an upgrade that can be used for *every* program a company runs on the computer - not just yours, and at a cost that's likely less than they spend for you to optimize your code for one hour out of a day!
That's a very interesting theory you have, that limited resources forced programmers to develop more original and creative games.
I think there's a lot of truth to it, and I hadn't really considered that before. (After all, if all you can draw without running out of resources is small circles and squares - why not create a game with a circular guy who has to avoid the "evil square creatures". )
I'm not so sure "weirdness" in games really sells today, however. Even if programmers dropped the simulations and the sports games tomorrow and went for weirdness and total creativity, I bet the general public wouldn't go for it.
The oddness of the Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, QBert, Qix, and other "classics" defined the era -- but it also dated itself. In 2003, people don't necessarily want to pay $40-50 for a new game that's just a glorified throwback to the days when game characters and plots were utterly bizarre.
Well, I think sci-fi dealing with space exploration is dying out in mainstream culture, in general.
Most of the people attending these movies are the same ones who have been faithful to the genre all along. And let's face it, that's the same group that's spending more time criticizing the new movies than praising them! (EG. The last couple Star Wars movies.)
Being a "thirty-something" myself, I'm not sure I can accurately speak for younger movie-goers - but I get a strong "vibe" that fantasy, witchcraft, and magic makes for more popular TV and movies than the standard space exploration/adventure theme with that age group. (EG. Even the fairly poor quality vampire hunter type flicks of the last few years did pretty well at the box office.)
Beyond that, though - there's also the poor economy to partially blame. I didn't go see thw new Star Trek movie - and it was mainly due to lack of finances. I haven't gone to see *any* movie in months, as a matter of fact. Star Trek was on my "I'd considering see that" list - but in the end, my priorities were in other areas.
Basically, they seem to say it's safe for the general public, but do acknowledge that there seem to be some individuals who are sensitive to it, and get such side-effects as headaches from it.
Personally, it doesn't really concern me. If you discover you're senstive to MSG and it upsets your stomach, gives you a headache, or whatnot - then obviously avoid it. I've never had any problem eating foods that contained it though - and to me, it's no worse than the hundreds of other modifications made to commercial foods. (Coloring and dyes to enhance the look of a food, for example.)
Maybe you're "sick of hearing this" because it's the truth, and people keep trying to get you to understand the facts?
I've used the older versions of MacOS quite a bit, thank-you. I'm not just talking from some magazine quote here. If you launch an application on, say, System 7.x, what do you get? The spinning ying-yang cursor and an inability to click on anything else until the application returns control to you! That is NOT the behavior in a Windows environment (except for the Win 3.1 days, with the dreaded "hourglass").
And yes, of course a reboot from Mac OS X into 9.2 feels "zippy"! Booting into MS-DOS feels pretty darn "zippy" on a Pentium 4 system too! That wasn't really my point.
The original discussion was dealing with the latest generation of system offerings from both Intel and Apple, and a perception of which seemed "faster" by the users. That means, we're basically talking OS X vs. Windows XP or 2000 on the OS side.
I've heard more than a few OS X users try to justify their Mac's supposed performance increase over a P4 by using the multitasking arguments. "Oh, sure, my OS X desktop seems to take forever to boot up and things don't pop right up when I launch them -- but the performance is really still there. I can keep launching stuff and have 6 or 7 things going at once, and it doesn't really get any slower than it is now!" Nope, sorry.... flawed argument! Any WinTel user could say this to the same degree. (In fact, if everything else was equal and the Mac and the PC user kept opening up the same apps at the same time, I suspect the Mac system would finally get unresponsive slightly before the P4 did.)
It *is* nice to see Apple finally selling a dual 1.43Ghz G4 though. I don't dispute that's speedy. Nonetheless, at 100% efficiency (which you never really hit on a multiprocessor system), that would equate to 2.86Ghz of total CPU power. You can buy an Intel P4 that goes faster than that....
Yeah, I think there's much truth in what you say. Nonetheless, I also think when it comes to software development/coding - some people made their own bed to lie in.
I've watched quite a few teenagers and 20-somethings get their first "real job" as a coder, after spending 3 or 4 years mastering arcade games and bragging about their great computer skills. Then, they go "gung-ho", working on problems and stumbling blocks late into the night, long after they're off the clock (and to the exclusion of pretty much everything else). After a while, it gets old and they start falling into a more normal work pattern. (Put in your time, but when you get home, tune it out completely.) It's too late though. Their bosses are already used to that higher level of output, and they see this as "slacking off". Next thing you know, they're getting bad performance reviews at work, and they get frustrated and move to another job. (Then, in many cases, the cycle repeats itself.)
In a nutshell, younger coders' arrogance has raised the bar of expectations to a very demanding level. It's become a "standard" in the industry now. Foreigners with a strong work ethic, a good measure of desperation, and a language barrier hindering any social life in the first place will keep accepting those challenges - to the growing exclusion of the rest of us.
You ask why a completely subjective comparison on CPU speed would be modded up?
Answer: Perception is 9/10's of reality. This holds true in the courtroom every day (as any good lawyer can tell you), just as it does when it comes down to people using their computers.
No benchmark can account for the millions of combinations of hardware/software people run on a given platform. Why do you think most of the PC benchmarking sites (Tom's hardware, etc.) typically pick a few games like Quake 3 as "standards" for comparison? They simply chose popular programs that seem to heavily tax many aspects of a system.
I have a theory, too, when it comes to long-time Mac users. They've been stuck in a basically non multitasking environment for so long, they often get an overrated perception of their newer system's overall power in OS X. (Quite simply, their eyes are opened to how much more they can get accomplished on their new computer because things put in the background really do process in the background.) They forget that over on the "Intel" side of the fence, people have been doing this (and expecting it to work that way) ever since the days of Windows '95 and NT 3.5, not to mention all the Linux and BSD users).
When you put aside any personal efficiency gains obtained simply from the OS allowing true multitasking - I think you find OSX lacking in speed compared to Linux or even Windows XP on a P4 class computer.
(Not that OS X isn't still pretty cool.... I've got it running on a Mac system at home myself. I just accept that the hardware isn't as powerful as my PC's, and use it for other reasons.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, historically, it seems to me MS usually fails when they stray too far from new products related to their core software/OS products.
Let's see... We have that Microsoft Phone they sold. I never saw too many people using that. They failed miserably with the partnership with Clarion to build Windows CE based car stereos. (Not too many Clarion Joyrides in people's cars, are there?) Then they bought all those satellites for broadband, and that didn't seem to pan out. The X-Box hasn't been real profitable for them either, even if it sold a lot of units. MSN is still a big question-mark, but AOL was kicking their butt last time I paid attention to it. Either way, they're selling a product that's largely irrelevant - because Internet is quickly becoming all about broadband connections. That means your local cable company or telco is your ISP, not Microsoft.
So sure, Microsoft would love to get their hands into as many markets as possible. That's what any successful business should be striving for, at least in the backs of their minds. Fact is, they're not good at everything, and having the most money to throw around doesn't guarantee success.
You're possibly correct, but I still have my doubts. Apple took too long to get the product to market, and then when they did, they released 10.0.x and 10.1.x versions, both of which were really litle more than glorified beta releases. They've finally got something of quality with the 10.2.x version - but it's a year later....
Apple will almost certainly be around for a long time to come, but they're a niche player. Even if you consider their products vastly superior, you're talking about something analogous to "Rolls Royce vs. Ford" in the car industry. Most people would say a Rolls is a better car than a Ford product, yet you see very few Rolls Royces driving around town.
The problem is, Apple isn't equivalent to Rolls Royce in the minds of well over 50% of the population. Instead, many view them as a "has been" or a "wanna-be" computer maker. Granted, these are usually the same folks who haven't really sat down at a new Mac and used it long enough to give it a chance. Nonetheless, perception is 9/10th's of reality - and Apple has a lot of perception to change.
You can even buy systems pre-loaded with Linux through Wal-Mart, but not a new Mac with OSX.
If Apple wanted to really become a "driver" of new technologies, they probably should have kept the options available for clone-makers to build Mac compatibles. It appears, though, they still view all of their software and OS products as tools/leverage to sell people their hardware. They don't really want to see anyone running their code on systems not assembled by them.
Mmm... I have mixed feelings myself. I've been playing electric guitar for over 10 years now (although lately, just on the rare occasion that I get free time and feel like plinking around on it), and I can understand both sides of an argument like this.
I think the bottom line is, as long as the instrument still has 6 strings and is played by hand - it will only be as good (or bad) as the abilities + imagination of the person playing it.
The primary "benefit" of going digital with any of these things is to clean up background noise.
I've sure had my share of hassles with guitar cables going bad and causing loud buzzing/humming sounds through my amp, or intermittently cutting out. By changing the signal path to digital, at least you'd have much more of an "either it works or it doesn't" situation. A bad cable would mean no sound at all.
On the flip-side, I don't think I'd pay a premium price for a guitar just because it converts analog to digital and back again on the other end of the cable. This seems like just the type of thing that allows Gibson to boost prices on their guitars, and pad their wallets.
The thing Line 6 was doing with their "digital guitar" appears to be much more interesting and useful. They're basically taking what used to be an external effects processor and integrating it into the guitar, so with a twist of the dial - you can make their generic guitar emulate the tone of many different popular guitars. Of course, that also means your Line 6 instrument has no unique, defining "character" of its own. That automatically makes me, as a musician, feel like I'd only want it as a second (or third) guitar. Not my *only* guitar.
Really, I didn't stop buying music because I was "sick and tired of helping finance the rock & roll lifestyle". I agree that it's wasteful and more than a little senseless/stupid -- but I also firmly believe in everyone's individual right to spend their own money as they please.
The simple fact is, the artists aren't giving me anything I feel is worth spending my money on!
The other fact is, the Internet and all the recent alternative ways to listen to new music (XM Radio, the music played on satellite and digital cable TV, organized by format on seperate "music only" channels, etc.) are starting to make the idea of the "album" obsolete.
I'm interested in individual songs I hear that I like. The whole idea of selling music by the "12 pack" of songs recorded by one artist at the same time is not really so attractive, unless the artist really puts out a lot of top-notch material on said album/CD/cassette.
In the past, people just bought albums because that was the only way to get the song(s) they liked. (Well, that or buy singles, which many people do and have done.... But then you have this annoying piece of physical media that only plays a few minutes of music, and has to be ejected/removed from your player. Annoying!)
Actually, it wasn't strictly the "big business" articles in Wired that bothered me.
For the first few years, I appreciated Wired magazine because it seemed like they explored new technology-related ideas in depth, often before they became realized in a commercial product. They also generally began featuring one really good interview with a C.E.O. or other "bigwig" of a tech-related company that produced products or services we all use. Unlike a Newsweek style interview, though, they'd ask the questions that the "geek crowd" really wanted to know the answers to.
IMHO, Wired's big failing was getting caught up in "techno-lust", to the point where every overpriced gadget was featured - whether it had real value or not. They tried too hard to be "cool" with the techno-savvy crowd, and wasted too much effort on strange cover art and layouts, rather than dispensing useful information.
With the dot-com boom, you could practically track Wired's downward spiral into the mess. Every month, they were telling me about some multi-thousand dollar new watch I "had to have", or some imported set of loudspeakers shaped like rare art that some Finnish or German engineer swore made music sound more "life-like" than anything else on the market. Whatever.....
That's when I quit renewing or reading....
Sure, bid histories and auctions won are available for viewing on eBay itself.... and so is whatever email address you chose to use with their service.
But that's *nothing* compared to what they're talking about willingly handing over to anyone claiming to be "law enforcement".
Tracing an email address back to the actual person using it isn't necessarily an easy task at all. Many services out there let people create email accounts on their servers for free, and they barely ask for any personal information at all. (What they did ask for, you could easily lie about.)
As just one example, one of the web sites promoting legalization of marijuana used to run a free mail server that let you get an account at hempseed@org. If you created one of those accounts using false info, plus used a dial-up connection with a dynamically issued IP address - how could anyone trace it back to the originator?
eBay, on the other hand, has your credit card in their possession - which is magnitudes more useful in hunting down a person than some email address it publically displays on auction listings.
Yes, I do stand corrected. They are in Overland Park, KS. However, they've still got a large presence in KC, Missouri - last time I checked.
I knew quite a few people working in Sprint buildings in KC.
Oh well.... either way, they're right there on the border.
Another big problem I saw with the Segway is the lack of protection for the rider from the elements. Maybe in sunny California, this isn't a huge issue. But in much of the country, a big attraction to driving a vehicle around for even short delivery-type trips is the shelter it provides from the rain or snow. You get in, close the doors and windows, and you even have a climate controlled environment with heater or air-conditioning.
Any type of motorized transportation I'm paying thousands for should offer some of this, IMHO.
Otherwise, as many people pointed out - why not save all the money and ride a bike, or even a small scooter/moped?
One big show-stopper for threedegrees could possibly be problems xferring files back and forth when some of the users are behind a firewall.
I don't know how much care MS has taken to deal with this issue -- but here's hoping it's not using sloppy "DirectPlay" type code, where the games may be talking on any random subset of thousands of possible port numbers!
Even on the venerable IRC chat, DCC of files has been troublesome. Many clients require tweaking of settings before they'll properly do a DCC receive or send.
ICQ seems to be trying to avoid much of this hassle by placing their centralized server(s) in the middle of data transactions, as sort of a middle-man that ensures a chat or file request gets from point A to point B. Is that the MS strategy here too?
A couple things come to mind, regarding this situation.
First of all, Kansas is a fairly spread-out, sparsely populated state. Not the environment that encourages broadband deployments right now.....
It sounds to me like the people of Kansas made the right decision by rejecting Bell's power-play. The fact is, Bell hasn't and isn't going to offer them much more than they're getting right now. Their best hope for the future is to minimize Bell's power over telecommunications, so a new, 3rd. party, will hopefully rise up and provide high speed internet connections.
Secondly, right on the eastern border of Kansas lies Kansas City, Missouri - the home of Sprint. It seems like if anyone was in a position to roll out broadband in Kansas, it'd be Sprint - since they've got loads of offices right next door.
Yeah, I remember years ago, the big competitor to the x00 fossil driver was bnu.sys. (Generally, the BBS sysops I knew preferred x00 though.)
As I recall, x00 went on to support a few rather esoteric hardware configurations, including the Hayes ESP accelerator boards. (These were serial cards with a 16550 UART emulation mode, but also a native mode that allowed extremely high baud rates.) Basically, you could do x2, x4 and even x8 multipliers of the usual 115,000 BPS serial port limit. Those types of speeds weren't too useful for dial-up modems, but people using the first external ISDN modems appreciated them. Otherwise, your 128K ISDN circuit bottlenecked at the 115K max. of the serial port.
IMHO, that "nightmare" you speak of is a beautiful thing to behold. Personally, I'm proud to hear there are still people in this country confident enough in their beliefs and in themselves that they'll try to represent themselves in a courtroom.
It might not be fun having to hand-hold them and put up with all the technicalities they have to muddle their way through. But good for them! They've taken the initiative to give it their best shot, instead of giving in to intimidation and paying someone else to do it for them.
I don't care what you say about the technicalities being there for good reasons. It simply shouldn't require 652 pages of rules! At that point, instead of it being about justice, it's about game-playing. "Which lawyer is going to screw up and forget one of the minute details mentioned briefly on page 473, paragraph 6 - allowing me to "one-up" him?"
What I don't get is why so many people keep buying and installing the TurboTax software product in the first place?
They offer the exact same thing via the web (www.turbotax.com). I'd rather just use the online version, and not have extra software wasting my hard drive space. Solves all these DRM worries too.
(I suppose some folks are paranoid because they store a copy of your tax info on their server. Personally though, I think it's an advantage. It lets you import your previous year's info when you use it the next year, saving you a lot of time and effort filling out duplicate fields. Plus, it's one less thing I have to worry about keeping good backups of, in case my drive crashes and I lose my tax records.)
Sure, if your return is complex enough - you really have no business trying to use tax software for "beginners" to get it done.
In my experience, as your tax situation gets more complex, TurboTax starts asking questions and prompting for information that you don't really know the correct answers to. (Perhaps they need figures from a particular statement or form you're not even aware you have, for example?)
On the other hand, I still think these packages are great for the average person. Quite a few friends of mine pay someone to do their taxes each year, and it's primarily out of irrational fear of taxes. Basically, they're afraid they'll make a mistake and it will cost them dearly later on. That, or they're convinced the
H & R Block guy" will really get them more money back than TurboTax or Tax Edge.
Since my own return is usually pretty straightforward, I always use tax software to file. It's cheaper than paying an accountant, and I'm pretty confident the computer will do the math correctly. Not to mention, I *know* how it ended up with the results it got. I feel a little more informed about the whole process if I can see my refund or amount owed changing as I enter my figures.
Sure, what you say sounds good on paper -- but in a depressed economy, it's not very practical.
Many employers know the deck is stacked in their favor right now, so the demands for extra hours without extra pay aren't just coincidence.
I know right now, in my own situation, I'm putting in a lot of unpaid extra time at my job. Does my wife like it? No, not at all. I constantly get lectured on how I can't keep doing this, etc. etc.
Fact is though, I'm just thankful I finally found another job in my field (computer support/consulting/service) that gives me some challenges to solve each day, and something new to learn here and there. If I thought I had other, similar employment options readily available right now, I'd get up and leave in a heartbeat. The pay is about half what I used to make, unpaid overtime not factored in.
Still, I'm scraping by now with just enough pay to keep the important bills paid up - and that sure beats unemployment pay that doesn't begin to cover them all, or some dead-end temp. job that's not even in my field.
Anyone who values their family is also acutely aware that their child's welfare depends on them bringing home that paycheck every week or two. If a condition of my continued employment is "going above and beyond the average work-week" right now, then that's how I guess it has to be.
Personally, I have a blast playing quite a few violent games -- but they're also usually fast-action arcade games, requiring little thought.
Sometimes, that's what you want... a stress-reliever or some "instant action entertainment".
When you're ready to sit down and get immersed in a detailed virtual world, however, I think you expect more. Violence in role-playing and multi-player games gets old and cliche pretty quickly. To me, they all feel like "Dungeon Hack", over and over again - except with different scenery and sounds. I mean, how "immersing" is the same tired concept that you kill, collect items, and then go spend the money/gold to buy bigger and better items?
A good MMORPG should be more like reading chapters of a novel. (Only it's a novel that's being written as you go along, and there's no "last chapter" or "last page" to come across.) The fact that you can communicate with other live human players is always the "key point" to these types of games, but what makes it "good" or "bad" is how much is built around that basic premise.
Before I'd play this particular game, I'd want to know that there's some quality storyline unfolding, and lots of interesting puzzles, twists, and discoveries to make as a group effort.
As a resident of Missouri myself, I think this law will largely be pointless. Not that I'm at all against getting rid of the spam - but the usual problem is in finding the origin of the email.
Sure, if you put in enough effort, you can usually get it tracked down -- but who has the free time to chase after this stuff, when it takes 1 or 2 seconds to hit "delete" and move on?
At least with the "no call" anti-telemarketing lists, you have such tools as caller ID at your disposal. (Not to mention, anyone trying to sell you a service or goods via phone pretty much has to give out some sort of valid contact info. Otherwise, how would you complete a business transaction with them? With email spam, they don't care if you're able to contact them with an email reply. They just want to get a generic message sent your way, or send you to some largely unrelated destination to buy the product or service they're pushing.)
Even if you do trace the original of a spam mail, these days, there's a good likelihood it came from a foreign country that isn't going to help prosecute the spammer.
I can't speak for the folks you've personally encountered - but my experience is vastly different.
Some of the best and brightest I.T. people I've ever had the pleasure of working with didn't possess college degrees.
By contrast, I'd be a very rich man by now if I had a dollar for every college-degreed "professional" I've seen who can't write a complete sentence to save his/her life.
If anything, the "chips on the shoulders" of the H.S. diploma only folks were placed there by the jealous majority of college-degreed folks who have lesser skills despite the formal education.
Social skills, writing skills, exposure to a broad range of topics -- sure, all are valuable and important. Does one need to attend college (or even finish college with a 4 year degree) to have increased levels of any of these? Not that I know of! These skills are developed simply by going through life, trying to be the best person you can be. That means taking a little initiative to learn new things on your own. Most self-taught I.T. people are happy to do this.
That's just it, though. There are two different types of programmers out there. You're in the first camp. Optimize, optimize, optimize! Do as much as possible with as little as possible!
It's a great idea, and used to be a requirement for development when memory cost hundreds of times per meg. what it does today, and disk storage space was measured in kilobytes, not gigabytes.
It's still useful in niche areas, of course, like embedded devices and cellphones.
For the generic desktop computer, however, things have advanced to the point where a second type of programmer is more valuable. Corporate America needs developers who can bang out quick solutions to problems. You say you want to optimize it? We might let you do that.... all depends on how well your first version works for us. The time you spend shaving 150K off the total file-size or making it run a couple seconds faster simply isn't worth the money they're paying you , in some cases. I mean, seriously, you can drop another 32MB of RAM in a PC for what, $25 or so? That's an upgrade that can be used for *every* program a company runs on the computer - not just yours, and at a cost that's likely less than they spend for you to optimize your code for one hour out of a day!
That's a very interesting theory you have, that limited resources forced programmers to develop more original and creative games.
I think there's a lot of truth to it, and I hadn't really considered that before. (After all, if all you can draw without running out of resources is small circles and squares - why not create a game with a circular guy who has to avoid the "evil square creatures". )
I'm not so sure "weirdness" in games really sells today, however. Even if programmers dropped the simulations and the sports games tomorrow and went for weirdness and total creativity, I bet the general public wouldn't go for it.
The oddness of the Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, QBert, Qix, and other "classics" defined the era -- but it also dated itself. In 2003, people don't necessarily want to pay $40-50 for a new game that's just a glorified throwback to the days when game characters and plots were utterly bizarre.
Well, I think sci-fi dealing with space exploration is dying out in mainstream culture, in general.
Most of the people attending these movies are the same ones who have been faithful to the genre all along. And let's face it, that's the same group that's spending more time criticizing the new movies than praising them! (EG. The last couple Star Wars movies.)
Being a "thirty-something" myself, I'm not sure I can accurately speak for younger movie-goers - but I get a strong "vibe" that fantasy, witchcraft, and magic makes for more popular TV and movies than the standard space exploration/adventure theme with that age group. (EG. Even the fairly poor quality vampire hunter type flicks of the last few years did pretty well at the box office.)
Beyond that, though - there's also the poor economy to partially blame. I didn't go see thw new Star Trek movie - and it was mainly due to lack of finances. I haven't gone to see *any* movie in months, as a matter of fact. Star Trek was on my "I'd considering see that" list - but in the end, my priorities were in other areas.
Actually, if you do a little research on MSG on the net, you'll find a fairly hot debate going on as to the side-effects/dangers of MSG.
. ht m?site=http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/2455/ba k%2Dmsg.html
The official FDA stance on it is pretty well summed up here:
http://chinesefood.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite
Basically, they seem to say it's safe for the general public, but do acknowledge that there seem to be some individuals who are sensitive to it, and get such side-effects as headaches from it.
Personally, it doesn't really concern me. If you discover you're senstive to MSG and it upsets your stomach, gives you a headache, or whatnot - then obviously avoid it. I've never had any problem eating foods that contained it though - and to me, it's no worse than the hundreds of other modifications made to commercial foods. (Coloring and dyes to enhance the look of a food, for example.)
Maybe you're "sick of hearing this" because it's the truth, and people keep trying to get you to understand the facts?
I've used the older versions of MacOS quite a bit, thank-you. I'm not just talking from some magazine quote here. If you launch an application on, say, System 7.x, what do you get? The spinning ying-yang cursor and an inability to click on anything else until the application returns control to you! That is NOT the behavior in a Windows environment (except for the Win 3.1 days, with the dreaded "hourglass").
And yes, of course a reboot from Mac OS X into 9.2 feels "zippy"! Booting into MS-DOS feels pretty darn "zippy" on a Pentium 4 system too! That wasn't really my point.
The original discussion was dealing with the latest generation of system offerings from both Intel and Apple, and a perception of which seemed "faster" by the users. That means, we're basically talking OS X vs. Windows XP or 2000 on the OS side.
I've heard more than a few OS X users try to justify their Mac's supposed performance increase over a P4 by using the multitasking arguments. "Oh, sure, my OS X desktop seems to take forever to boot up and things don't pop right up when I launch them -- but the performance is really still there. I can keep launching stuff and have 6 or 7 things going at once, and it doesn't really get any slower than it is now!" Nope, sorry.... flawed argument! Any WinTel user could say this to the same degree. (In fact, if everything else was equal and the Mac and the PC user kept opening up the same apps at the same time, I suspect the Mac system would finally get unresponsive slightly before the P4 did.)
It *is* nice to see Apple finally selling a dual 1.43Ghz G4 though. I don't dispute that's speedy. Nonetheless, at 100% efficiency (which you never really hit on a multiprocessor system), that would equate to 2.86Ghz of total CPU power. You can buy an Intel P4 that goes faster than that....
Yeah, I think there's much truth in what you say. Nonetheless, I also think when it comes to software development/coding - some people made their own bed to lie in.
I've watched quite a few teenagers and 20-somethings get their first "real job" as a coder, after spending 3 or 4 years mastering arcade games and bragging about their great computer skills. Then, they go "gung-ho", working on problems and stumbling blocks late into the night, long after they're off the clock (and to the exclusion of pretty much everything else). After a while, it gets old and they start falling into a more normal work pattern. (Put in your time, but when you get home, tune it out completely.) It's too late though. Their bosses are already used to that higher level of output, and they see this as "slacking off". Next thing you know, they're getting bad performance reviews at work, and they get frustrated and move to another job. (Then, in many cases, the cycle repeats itself.)
In a nutshell, younger coders' arrogance has raised the bar of expectations to a very demanding level. It's become a "standard" in the industry now. Foreigners with a strong work ethic, a good measure of desperation, and a language barrier hindering any social life in the first place will keep accepting those challenges - to the growing exclusion of the rest of us.
You ask why a completely subjective comparison on CPU speed would be modded up?
Answer: Perception is 9/10's of reality. This holds true in the courtroom every day (as any good lawyer can tell you), just as it does when it comes down to people using their computers.
No benchmark can account for the millions of combinations of hardware/software people run on a given platform. Why do you think most of the PC benchmarking sites (Tom's hardware, etc.) typically pick a few games like Quake 3 as "standards" for comparison? They simply chose popular programs that seem to heavily tax many aspects of a system.
I have a theory, too, when it comes to long-time Mac users. They've been stuck in a basically non multitasking environment for so long, they often get an overrated perception of their newer system's overall power in OS X. (Quite simply, their eyes are opened to how much more they can get accomplished on their new computer because things put in the background really do process in the background.) They forget that over on the "Intel" side of the fence, people have been doing this (and expecting it to work that way) ever since the days of Windows '95 and NT 3.5, not to mention all the Linux and BSD users).
When you put aside any personal efficiency gains obtained simply from the OS allowing true multitasking - I think you find OSX lacking in speed compared to Linux or even Windows XP on a P4 class computer.
(Not that OS X isn't still pretty cool.... I've got it running on a Mac system at home myself. I just accept that the hardware isn't as powerful as my PC's, and use it for other reasons.)