This is true, if and when we're talking about changes that are true advances. With cloud computing, I'd say the jury's still out.
Among other things, the data security issues really haven't been adequately addressed. If a cloud provider upgrades their old equipment, what guarantee do you have that they really did a secure wipe of the drives in the old systems before reselling them or scrapping them? What happens if someone hacks into one of these services and gets ahold of your data? Will you even know it happened? How many people have the opportunity to get their hands on your personal data who aren't even your own employees or hired consultants you interact with directly?
There's also a real question about outages being handled in a timely manner. Theoretically, the professionals using high-end gear at these data centers (hopefully with redundancy) can do a better job at keeping your data online than you can as a small or mid-sized business running everything yourself. BUT, the catch is, when they have an outage, they've got hundreds (even thousands?) of pissed off users, ALL of whom think their data is the most important to get back online. Meanwhile, these guys only make relative peanuts from you in monthly hosting fees so unlike your own employees, they won't have the vested interest in getting you running again.
Great question, IMO... and I think the answer is, it's only an instantaneous distraction using a cellphone to text. It'd be rather pointless to run one of these studies where you asked a person to just drive with a smartphone sitting next to them in a cupholder, right?
What bothers me the most are summaries like the one in this topic, stating "more work needs to be done by the government" to help solve this issue.
You know what? Government is NOT always your "go to" group for all the answers. In fact, it often creates more problems than it solves!
Better technology IS a probable useful solution, however. Eliminate the need to look at the phone display to see when a text messages comes in, and make a good speech recognition system for responding hands-free. Nobody I know would actually prefer to try to juggle keying in a text reply while driving a vehicle to simply speaking a verbal reply.
Right now, this is one of my pet peeves with Apple's iPhone. Despite being practically the most popular smartphone in use, Apple doesn't even allow developers access to the APIs they'd need to build their own SMS to speech / speech to SMS add-on. And Siri? That's not even an option for all the iPhone 3GS or 4 owners out there. Even with a new 4s, it's not ideal. Yes, you can tell Siri to compose an SMS for you or read one to you that came in, but so far, you can't just order it to run in an "automatic" mode where it speaks all of them as they come in without user intervention. And on many bluetooth implementations in vehicles, Siri doesn't even work properly because they weren't designed expecting such a thing to exist in a phone. (EG. In my 2011 GM car, hands-free bluetooth is built into the factory stereo - but here's what happens with Siri: I activate it and the car realizes it should do a hands-free connection. I hear Siri speak through my car stereo. I give it a command. Siri starts to reply and my car breaks the bluetooth connection so I don't hear its response. Only way it functions is when issuing commands to Siri that don't require verbal responses, such as an order to dial a certain phone number for me.)
By the same logic, isn't it also at least plausible that this is simply happening because the President today is more of a figurehead than anything else? What if the reality of the situation is, you get elected President and then immediately find out it's really your job to go along with what a whole cabinet of advisers tells you to say and do? Your speeches are all put together for you by speechwriters, and designed to make the general public feel like you're calling all the shots -- except you're not.
Just throwing out an alternate theory here, but it doesn't seem impossible, does it? I mean, we've heard so much speculation as to how relatively unknown people like a Governor from Arkansas or a relatively unknown Senator from Illinois (who we can barely even find more than 3 or 4 people admitting they remembered him in college, and who some people even claim isn't really a U.S. citizen at all) got elected. And Busch, Sr.? Well, he was pretty clearly tied closely to the CIA, and once he was in, that'd kind of explain his son's ability to leverage that.
Not saying this IS how things are working... but only, it's an interesting alternate option to consider.
They were Apple's very last system to use a standard CRT monitor instead of a flat panel. That alone relegates them to the realm of "antiquated hardware" in many people's eyes, no matter what else they're capable of doing.
I'd venture to say the Apple eMac is generally looked upon as the least desirable Mac Apple released ever since the dawn of OS X. Not sure that's really a fair assessment -- but it's the reality of the situation.
I don't know that a lot of people are holding Kim Dotcom up as an example of a hero or "Robin Hood" figure, really? But having followed this story for a while now (wrote a few articles about it on a blog I contribute to, in fact), I'd say it's complicated.
For starters, just before Megaupload was raided, there was a whole case underway regarding his right to upload a song ("Megasong") he paid a bunch of big-name artists to put together for him, advertising the service. In that instance at least, it sure seemed to be that Dotcom was the "good guy" vs. Universal Music Group, who immediately filed for a takedown of the video (using a back door we now know Universal cut a deal with Google to be able to use, vs. going the standard route of filing a DMCA takedown request with them, as most others would be required to do). Universal's only defense? They felt they basically owned the rights to the artists on their label, so Dotcom wasn't supposed to be making music with them, without going through Universal first!
Beyond that? I'm not really defending what he did, profiting from encouraging people to share copyrighted content on his servers... but the current state of U.S. copyright legislation only encourages the behavior, vs. the original copyright law (pre Bill Clinton and DMCA law he signed into effect while President). Traditionally, you weren't guilty of criminal copyright infringement if you simply gave away some copies of a work. The intent to financially gain was a required component. Otherwise, all you had was a potential CIVIL case, if the actual content creator/owner wished to take you to court over it directly.
Now, it doesn't seem to matter if you're in it to make millions, or you just intended to share some music with your college buddies in your dorm, at your own expense. You're guilty of a felony crime either way. So why risk if if you can't potentially make big bucks out of the whole thing?
Yeah.... I purchased a brand new 32GB HP TouchPad just recently, as one of Micro Center's special offers. (Basically, they're selling off the last of their inventory of them for $149.95 each if you add it to a purchase of some other new HP computer. My day job wanted me to pick up a new HP desktop PC for them anyway, so I paid the extra and got the TouchPad for myself.)
My impressions of it were:
1. Upon initial unboxing? OMG, HP tried like mad to make this thing copy-cat an Apple product! Same predominantly snow-white box with a lid that lifts off to reveal the contents in a minimalistic type of packaging. Same clear plastic you peel off before using the product. Same type of instruction pamphlet found inside a little cardboard envelope with a cute slogan printed on the front of it. Even the same idea of a uniquely shaped AC wall charger (as opposed to a typical power "brick" like 99% of other consumer electronics products include). 2. When I started giving the unit an actual try, I quickly realized webOS is a really competent operating system for a tablet like this. The "cards" concept works pretty well, and everything has a polished, quality look to it (including such things as the rippling effect when you tap anyplace on the screen). It absolutely needed the latest OS update to be downloaded/installed, to make it work 100% properly though. (I had a Kensington tablet case with integrated bluetooth keyboard, and I couldn't even make the non-HP branded keyboard pair properly until I did the update.) But after that, it "just worked", as the Apple faithful would say. 3. The Touchstone dock/charger is really a "must have" accessory to round out the product. The fact they included inductive charging capabilities in the hardware itself AND designed it intelligently enough so it detects when it's sitting on the stand, and can swtich modes (to a photo frame, a clock, etc.) is VERY slick, and makes you aware it's not just an iPad wannabe after all.
I really believe HP made a MASSIVE mistake by letting webOS go and canceling the TouchPad project. IMO, this was the ONLY real potential competitor to Apple's iPad, and another version or two of the hardware - combined with regular webOS improvements, could have been HP's shining star of a product to carry the whole company. It seems like it was JUST starting to gain the momentum needed when HP pulled the rug out from under it. Horrible timing....
I don't get all the people rushing to hack these to run Android, quite frankly? webOS is far more enjoyable to work with for a tablet than any of the Android tablets I've seen. Android feels like it was "made for a phone, but shoehorned onto a tablet".
At least, I disagree based on this particular case.
Apple didn't pull the app immediately, without warning. They contacted the developer and offered to help work with them to make changes so they'd find it acceptable. That's not usually how antitrust situations pan out at all. (Do you remember Microsoft approaching Netscape and saying, "Hey... we're cool with your web browser alternative and we'd even offer it as a download from our own site if you'd work with us to make sure we're satisfied it's not just an Internet Explorer clone, borrowing too many of our ideas and UI design cues."?)
Seriously, is that *really* what the Progressive tracking box does? I got the idea it's not so much a GPS location tracker as it is a box that "phones home" to Progressive occasionally, with general data about your driving style (EG. g-forces logged when you brake or accelerate, and log of your speed you're traveling at).
Although I used to have Progressive, I opted not to take one of those boxes, so I never saw one first-hand. But from what I read, it attaches to the OBDII diagnostic port, usually found under your dashboard near the steering column. That port would typically be one you'd tap into to record vehicle stats such as your current speed (something you'd be able to get without using that port at all if you were running an internal GPS).
I could be wrong, but I doubt Progressive even has the interest in spending the time it would take to analyze data about which roads each customer traveled on, and how often they exceeded posted speed limits on each of them? It'd be a lot easier for them to simply know when and for how long you exceed a preset MPH value like 70MPH, and when your braking is sudden enough to exceed some threshold of deceleration. Count how often those events happen per month and if it's more than a certain allowed number, flag the customer for increased rates. (If such events stay at or near 0 consistently, offer them a small discount, to encourage continued use of the device.)
Well, first off, I think your analogy is a little extreme... but regardless? The initial invasiveness isn't as serious as the long-term potential for hassles for the end-user. I'm sure my HTML 5 enabled browser will perform just fine whether or not DRM extensions are added to the codebase. (If they caused performance or reliability issues like random freezes/crashes, people would scream and complain until those problems were fixed -- just like any other code.)
IMO, the hassle comes in when we transition from traditional cable TV/satellite/over the air broadcasts to internet streaming for our media content. We've long enjoyed certain usage rights for said content (such as court rulings allowing personal use of the VCR to record television programming). But now, the studios and content owners view the move to digital as an excuse to take back some of those usage rights. At best, I think we're looking at a whole new round of court cases just to win back rights we had previously, if everything moves to streaming with DRM. (You know they're not going to simply allow you to click to save a copy of this DRM enabled content as you stream it to your browser, for the sake of "time shifting".)
Worse yet, there's FAR from a guarantee we'd even win such cases. The content owners like to use the argument that these digital copies encourage copyright infringements in a way the lossy analog copies of VHS tape days didn't. (Duplicating digital content doesn't create poorer quality copies; it creates perfectly identical ones. And that means, by extension, you can make a copy of a copy or a copy, and it's just as good as possessing the original content first.)
I was driving a Hyundai Genesis Coupe since early '09, when they were first available in the U.S. At the end of last year, I got that "3 year itch" to get something new/different, and I found out one of our area Cadillac dealers had a pretty deep discount on a 2011 CTS Coupe someone had just traded in with low mileage. I hadn't ever considered anything Cadillac built as being "my type of vehicle", but I saw the CTS Coupe and was immediately impressed. I wound up trading in the Hyundai, and by most people's counts, I made a "huge upgrade" in vehicles.
Well, as I tend to do, I got on the message forums for the car and did a LOT of reading in the weeks that followed. I learned as much as I could about the car, both good and bad. And right now? I'd have to caution anyone thinking of buying one of these cars to REALLY think long and hard before pulling the trigger on it.
The consensus on the forums, including a lot of input from guys who actually designed parts of the cars themselves, mechanics who have rebuilt a number of these engines, and more? GM quality *really* sunk to a low from the mid 2000's through 2009 or so, when parts suppliers feared not getting paid for the parts they supplied, and quality control was all over the place. After the bailout, quality suddenly shot up in 2010, when suppliers knew they'd be paid promptly for parts they supplied, and morale got a boost among everyone from assembly line workers to quality engineers inside GM.
(You can see evidence of this simply by looking up the Consumer Reports reliability scoring for the Cadillac CTS... It's pretty poor in 2008 and only marginally better in '09, but suddenly above average in 2010 and 2011 -- and no real major changes were done to the car between those years.)
Still, there are some serious flaws with the 3.6 liter direct injection engines GM uses across their whole product line, from the V6 Camaro to the Cadillac CTS I own to the Acadia crossover -- and it's clear they've done little to address them, despite using this engine for the last 4 years. Basically, they have a lot of issues with the timing chains stretching, causing your engine to need a rebuild -- sometimes with as little as 25,000 miles on it. GM continuously blamed it on the chains being "too soft a metal" thanks to parts supplier error, but the guys doing rebuilds on these say no.... The *real* culprit with this engine lies in its core design. For starters, with direct injection, the fuel gets sprayed right into the cylinders. It never goes past the valves like it would in most engines. Therefore, no matter how good the detergents are in your gas, they never get the opportunity to do their job keeping the valves clear of gunk. Meanwhile, the timing chain is kept tensioned hydraulically, using only oil pressure. There's no spring or other mechanism involved. And the chain itself has practically no margin for error, as GM designed it so its teeth are spaced much closer together than most chains. It doesn't take much for it to skip timing. So if your oil gets too dirty, or a little bit low and the hydraulic tensioner doesn't keep consistent tension on the chain? Recipe for disaster. Oh, and did I forget to mention? The 3.6 liter DI engine just loves to do a vanishing act on some of your oil. If you go 3,000 miles without checking it, it's very likely you'll be at least 1 quart low. That, in itself, is usually considered an "acceptable level of oil usage" by industry standards... but combined with the issues this particular engine has, it's a serious problem, especially when GM says you can / should go at least 7,500 miles or so between oil changes!
I guess I can't speak for everyone, but I can't summon much outrage over this at all? Personally, I feel like it's simply a case of another "special interest group" with an agenda getting caught up in a situation of someone showing the world some of their internal content that leaked. I don't even care if people can eventually prove that one of their specific papers was real or fake.... As others posted, we know where they sided on the cigarette issue, and we're pretty clear where they side with respect to the global warming controversy too. Fine... but ANY issues like this require people doing a lot more of their own reading and interpreting of studies -- not just going along with whatever special interest "think tank" is around, making bold statements.
My own take on things, just using a little bit of common sense, is that sure, things are looking pretty darn likely that our planet is gradually warming up. People bickering back and forth about the accuracy of that claim are wasting their time, if we can't move on to question #2, which is: "What can/should we really do about it?" That's where, IMO, things quickly get out of hand.
I mean, by most counts, the currently estimated world supply of untapped crude oil will be depleted in roughly 40 more years, if current rates of usage are sustained (and more quickly than that if they increase). If we stop burning oil (because it gets too scarce and its price gets prohibitive), some of the most likely alternatives seem to involve much "cleaner" forms of energy (solar and nuclear power, for example, or maybe hydrogen powered vehicles). So effectively, is this whole hullabaloo a "non issue" in the sense it's self-correcting anyway, as we run out of oil?
When you start asking multiple thousands of dollars for a software package, no matter WHAT it claims to be capable of doing, you're setting yourself up for a predictable chain of events:
1. You attract the interest of crackers and pirates, who get cheap thrills or bragging rights simply from saying they were able to copy and distribute something so valuable. 2. You lock out a number of potential customers for your product because the price tag is simply too high for them to consider it. 3. You create expectations from those who DO buy your product that they'll receive a superior amount of support and even "hand-holding" long after the sale.
I'm not saying these are reasons you're "charging too much" for your application. Only you can really determine if that's true or not. I'm simply saying these are practically guaranteed side-effects of doing so. In most cases, you see the folks selling such high priced packages implementing all sorts of copy-protection schemes, precisely out of fear about items 1 and 2, but the most effective schemes will put a severe crimp in your ability to deliver on expectations for item 3.
I work for a steel fabricator, a business where very niche (and costly) software is found all over the place. In every single instance, the copy protection schemes included with these programs we've used has caused us considerable hassle in the long haul. For example, many years ago, they spent tens of thousands on a steel detailing package which was loaded on a PC given to an outside detailer, as part of a long-term arrangement. (He'd do detailing of our drawings for us at a greatly reduced rate, in exchange for us supplying the hardware/software -- and he was free to use the equipment to do other peoples' work too, as long as ours too precedent.) That was great, except he suddenly became unreliable (personal/family problems, we assume), and we wound up having to reclaim our hardware/software. Problem is, nobody in-house is currently able to use the software, nor do we really want to hire or train anyone. (At this point, it's cheaper for now to just send the work out and pay regular rates... We have far less need to detail drawings than we used to anyway.) Meanwhile though, the software maker requires we keep paying thousands annually to maintain a contract on the package, or lose all upgrade rights down the road -- rendering it pretty worthless. Without a current maintenance agreement, we can't even call up and get the key code transferred over if we wanted to migrate the app to different hardware.
In another case (our document management package), we were getting absolutely reamed on annual support costs, but again, were trapped between a rock and a hard place because we had so much data in the package already, and migration costs to use someone else's produce were huge too. We got lucky and found a guy who used to work for the place, who now has his own consulting business. He was able to give us a far cheaper support contract to help us with any issues we had in the program (software crashes, questions about custom coding, etc.) - but was unable to provide us with any update patches. He bailed us out of a serious database problem the software developed at one point... but again, we're trapped if we ever need the features or fixes put in newer service packs. (They want to back charge us for all previous unpaid years of support to "get current" before we can even buy a new contract from the original vendor!)
Still another situation involves a vendor who has to email us new, lengthy key codes to copy/paste into the application every so often, so it then "phones home" to verify it's allowed to keep legally operating. It could be worse, but it still stinks. If someone isn't available with administrator rights who can get the emails in a timely manner and take care of it, the whole package shuts down on everyone. And you can't update the key code while anyone is actually IN the software either, meaning it's best done after hou
But where I've seen this fall apart is when management lacks the backbone to manage properly.
EG. My wife works in I.T. for an area hospital, and their department is insanely stressed out and disorganized. They have a system in place, at least on paper, for assigning priority level to trouble tickets. (It's based on pretty clear criteria, such as only getting the highest level if it's a piece of computer equipment required by doctors in the process of doing medical procedures.) The problem is, any of their medical staff who complain loudly enough about an issue get priority, thanks to managers who regard high-paid medical staff as "more important to please" than anyone working in I.T. (There's a general, overall perception of the I.T. workforce as similar to the janitors or other maintenance people... useful when you need them, but ultimately disposable, if it turns into one of them vs. a doctor, nurse, or medical technician.)
Just last week, she encountered a situation where a manager went along with assigning "level 1" priority to a staffer because she didn't have enough mice on hand for a bunch of spare computers she wanted to set up in a conference room for training. (She should have been prepared in advance, but wasn't bothered to make sure everything was ready ahead of time, so she put in the emergency ticket a couple hours before training began, making an on-call I.T. person drive in, very early in the morning, just to give her extra mice!)
Depends on your use case... You're right about Keynote, but it's probably the single strongest component of Apple's iWork suite for the Mac to begin with. It was developed before any of the other parts, as a program for Steve Jobs to use personally when giving his presentations and speeches, because he found it distasteful and limiting to keep using a competitor's product for the purpose.
I happen to like Pages too, but honestly, it wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it weren't for Apple including some very elegant templates with it. For my business, I was able to knock out a new invoice and a 3-fold flier which looked like I paid a high dollar firm to design them for me, just by modifying templates included with the software. The Microsoft Word templates, by contrast, look more like "basic starting points" and they're so widely used, people recognize when you've used one.
For serious work with spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel has the competition beat hands-down, and that's proving to be their single strongest app in their Office suite. Apple's Numbers app is really more suitable for someone who's not even a "numbers person" to begin with, but finds him/herself with the occasional need to generate some basic spreadsheets anyway. It can produce results that look really nice, but it doesn't have the raw number crunching power of Excel (gets VERY slow with large spreadsheets), and lacks the power Excel had to do complex calculations with Visual Basic macros attached to cells.
Obviously, I'm talking about the full blown desktop/laptop versions of these programs here, but all of this translates to the iPad in fairly equal proportions. So I'd say yes, SOME iPad owners would like Office on it, especially if they do a lot with Excel. But many of us wouldn't see a point to it.
I went through a (by all counts HORRIBLY messy) divorce myself, some years ago. But at that time, despite both of us being avid "computer people", there was no such thing as "social networking" websites or "cloud storage".
I'm not even sure there was much in the way of "digital data" we felt we needed to divvy up?
As I think about this now, though, I think it does make yet one more strong argument against DRM. It would have been a much bigger hassle if all of my purchased music, video content, or even digitally downloaded software titles were authorized for her use (and vice-versa), and then we had to concern ourselves with how that would be handled after going our separate ways. In our situation, there were a few instances where she had a user account for a paid MMORPG game or what-not, and I simply let her keep it, while cancelling any credit card attached to it for billing purposes. That made it her problem to pay for it herself, moving forward, or just opting to let the account go.
I don't know how amicable your particular divorce is, but I can tell you this much: In the long run, it'll make things go much more smoothly for both parties if you do the "right thing" in such situations as perhaps having a Dropbox account with some of HER data trapped in it. Back it up onto DVD-R or CD-R for her and give her those backups of her share of the content. Don't just wipe it, no matter how satisfying that idea is at the time. It's not worth starting an escalating battle over it, where she may well be able to delete some of YOUR info you're not even thinking about right now....
I'd ask if you can do an exchange for one with Windows 7 on it, since XP is getting pretty long in the tooth....
Seriously though, it sounds like NewEgg is usually putting the used drives through some sort of diagnostic process, if they all had special partitions on them for the purpose. Maybe they simply need to train their bench techs to wipe the drives first, instead of making the assumption that creating the new partition is ensuring any old data on the drive becomes unreadable/inaccessible?
I met my partner on okcupid, after pretty much writing off the site as getting me nowhere. (Oddly enough, I could search and find a good 6-12 women on there in my age range, who lived near me, who I thought were interesting and appeared to share several common interests -- but every time I contacted one of them, I got no response.) I left my own ad up there though, basically forgetting about it, until I got one of those email notices that someone had "woo'd" me (kind of like a Facebook "poke"). I logged in to see what that was all about, and discovered we had a *lot* in common, but she lived in a different state. One thing led to another and here we are, still together after 3 years.
Even though before meeting her, my online dating experiences were more "bad" than "good"? I don't really have a problem with the concept at all. They've evolved from being perceived as "weird" or something you don't admit to using to a mainstream way to meet new people. I think you have to go into the online dating thing without any big expectations though. A lot of women tend to use them in sort of a "kid in a candy store" way, checking out all the photos and looking for only the ones they find really cute or sexy, and stroking their own egos as their mailboxes fill up with guys trying to contact them.
One of my good female friends amazed me when she showed me how much mail she'd get in just 1-2 days of posting a new ad on any of the dating sites... and that happened regardless of what she actually said in her description. A photo was all it took. In that environment, it's probably kind of difficult to keep a firm grip on reality, realizing 90% of those guys contacting you are just trying to hook up for a night, and you're not really THAT desirable to the general public....
As someone well over 30, I think I'm somewhat qualified to comment here.
The "nice guys finish last" thing is alive and well, and there's nothing about it that's a "cop out". Where you're correct is that as we get older, our priorities change (largely due to having more life experiences).
Most men AND women I know are working on "climbing that ladder" throughout their 20's and into their early 30's. They score that first "career job" after finishing school (or dropping out with it partially finished, as the case may be?) and start obtaining things such as their first new car or truck, perhaps a home of their own (or even stepping up from a small apartment unit to a rental house or townhouse apartment counts).... and sooner or later, they're considering obtaining a life partner too. Still working from the angle of "I've got nowhere to go from here but up!", they're concerned with their appearance to their peers, and with selecting a partner who has the best possible combination of looks, intelligence and personality/character.
When you're still in THAT stage of life? Yeah, dating is very competitive and you really can finish last in that area if you bring integrity and "character" to the table, but not much else. Without money and/or looks, you're short a couple of key items that help "sell" yourself vs. your competition.
Where things change, IMO, is somewhere between the mid 30's and 40's. By that time, many people already TRIED a marriage that ended badly. Others just matured a bit (or even simply let life wear them down a bit, to where they quit trying to impress -- and resigned themselves to just getting up each day, going to their 9-5 job, and keeping busy with whatever chores and tasks life demanded of them). All of a sudden, they're no longer focusing time and energy on searching for someone. They're just being themselves, and are actually in a better position to stumble across someone else like-minded who likes them for them.
BTW, I really think wealth serves as a huge barrier to one's self-awareness. Why do so many Hollywood celebs and pro sports athletes have relationship problems? Why do big-shot CEOs constantly get involved in sex scandals? When you have enough money, you're able to spend your way out of looking in the mirror and getting a true sense of who you are. Someone's always happy to stroke your ego, hoping for some sort of payoff. Doctors and surgeons will do all sorts of procedures to you, to make sure you physically appear younger than you really are. You can afford all the best/trendiest clothing items, vehicles, and everything else that distracts people from seeing who YOU are when they look at you. Every time you screw up in public, you can pay off someone to bail you back out of the situation.
I'd say it's ALSO a fact that the only products Honeywell has been offering consumers are basic, dumb thermostats or overpriced digital models with very basic functionality and a high price-tag that you're presumably supposed to pay to get that respected Honeywell name badge on the front.
If there are issues over some specifics, such as the particular control mechanism used, violating Honeywell patents? Then fine... let them demand licensing fees for those items and move on. The fact Honeywell hasn't done this and instead, demands the product be pulled from the market and damages collected (before most people have even had the chance to BUY one!) speaks volumes about their true concerns here.
The Nest is almost impossible to think of as a "cheap knockoff" of anything Honeywell sells, consumer OR industrial. The Nest is designed very much along the same lines as the original Apple iPod... meant to be very easy to use, with a simplified UI that encourages its use instead of intimidating a person into leaving it alone.
Your argument here sounds a bit like an architect who primarily designs skyscrapers (with a little bit of side work sketching up basic 1 bedroom shotgun shacks) claiming another architect designing elegant 2 story luxury homes must cease and desist, because he's clearly violated a number of design concepts used in those skyscrapers (and probably not so much in the shotgun shacks, but wants you to note he's familiar with those low-end products too).
If you believe what's said over on the MacRumors website, they already hashed this possibility out pretty thoroughly and the consensus was that Apple has no real interest in trying to place iOS on a notebook form-factor piece of hardware. The iPad has plenty of room left for improvement and will probably serve as their dominant iOS platform for quite some time.
I have no doubt Apple is working on (even finished?) an ARM port of OS X, but if it's like last time (developed an Intel x86 port of OS X they kept secret and sat on for years, until they decided to leverage it), it'll be something else they keep under wraps, "just in case".
What I think you might see are new computers from Apple running OS X with a touch-screen. That's really the only sensible reason OS X Lion bothered to port over the iOS app screen/launcher. Practically everyone says that's useless/pointless on their Mac, *except* for the possibility it would make a user-friendly option if a touchscreen was present.
The only reason Apple would really be motivated to switch the Air to an ARM processor would be a scenario where Intel quit giving them "first dibs" on new or custom-designed CPUs they'd want. If, say, Toshiba or HP or Dell paid off Intel to get some special treatment Apple couldn't get until after their products were in the pipeline, and it involved making faster, slimmer, lighter notebooks than the Air -- THAT might prompt Apple to retaliate with a switch to ARM.
I agree with everything you said, except I'd say that honestly, I'd be surprised if more than a small minority are revealing all in the interest of "avoiding suspicion from overbearing governments"?
That would indicate a level of paranoia I'm not sure most of us are at (yet).
More accurately, I'd say the vast majority is sharing a lot of personal information via tools like Twitter or Facebook because it satisfies some needs or desires. For starters, I think most people enjoy the idea of publishing content. In the "old days" of the internet, the "geeks" did this by way of Usenet message discussions or even networked message forums on BBS's. As more of the general public got on-board though, there weren't really many good outlets for them. (The majority of people aren't really very good writers, and often don't even LIKE trying to write very much at a time - so message forums weren't for them.) You could build your own "home page" on the web, and tools proliferated to do it with increasing ease (including PICTURES if you didn't want to write much!). But you still had the difficultly of driving traffic to actually look at what you put up. Many people lost interest in "personal" web pages after the initial thrill of building them subsided.
The social networking sites solved 2 problems at once in this area: They made it easy to generate "personal pages" that actually looked decent and were easy to update/modify, and more importantly, they brought along an audience for the content by encouraging linking up with acquaintances or friends who would actually have SOME reason to care about the relatively unimportant "little stuff" their connections were likely to publish.
All of a sudden, you could post a silly joke or describe a situation you had that day and get rapid feedback... people LOLing at your material, contributing their own stories, etc.
The realization that advertisers might collect up the info you post and use it to target market to you doesn't seem like such a horrible thing, at least on the surface, to most folks. We all take advertising and marketing for granted as part of our daily life.If you're going to be faced with it anyway, why not for products or services you actually might be interested in?
Where I really start to have a problem with all of it, though, is when the providers of the social networking services betray people's trust..... I'm talking about such things as archiving information permanently that one would assume was deleted, by way of deleting a user account on the service. Or constantly changing privacy features so if you don't regularly keep on top of it, new posts are visible to more people than your intended audience you USED to have the service configured for.
IMO, the *real* question we should be asking is why we believed this costly new technology, coupled with a whole new govt. agency to operate it, was going to accomplish anything substantial in the first place? The argument over the cost is tough to make without somebody insisting that either A) it created so many new jobs for American citizens that it added a lot of value, and/or B) if it saves even ONE human life, how can you put a price on that? So IMO, we can probably just ignore the "cost" angle, and simply ask if the TSA screening procedure we've implemented is a net positive, or a net negative for everyone?
Personally, I think you've got to be drinking some serious govt. kool-aid if you REALLY believe this nonsense of putting anyone on a secret "watch list" (based on the discretion of agents hired from the general public at hourly pay starting at around $11/hr.), and making everyone walk through body scanners before boarding commercial planes is going to save you from terrorist acts. As one of my friends pointed out, you can go to most airports in the U.S. and find that the only thing keeping you from wandering out to the hangars and runways is a chain-link fence around their perimeter. If someone REALLY wanted to sabotage a plane, they could throw on a mechanics' outfit or something, run out onto the tarmac, and do whatever they wanted to do with a parked jet, or even quickly insert something into some luggage on one of the transports, waiting to be loaded onto a flight. Trying to secure the plane from the terminal's boarding gate so heavily ignores all the other possibilities. Meanwhile, we've created a situation where EVERYONE is inconvenienced and put at risk of being falsely labeled a "potential terrorist" for transgressions as simple as wearing a t-shirt with a counter-culture political message printed on it, or making the wrong comment while standing in line.
Nice job bashing both the product and Apple in one paragraph... but the guy actually had a valid point, which you simply wanted to bulldoze over. SMALL businesses are not likely to invest in a Lotus Notes solution. A copy of Bento (mobile version of FMP for iOS devices) is very inexpensive and has a modern, up-to-date look. (Not some relic from the 90's.)
If, like many businesses, they simply need a basic database of contacts or some other specific info, accessible and editable from multiple, portable devices? It's not a bad solution at all.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true, if and when we're talking about changes that are true advances. With cloud computing, I'd say the jury's still out.
Among other things, the data security issues really haven't been adequately addressed. If a cloud provider upgrades their old equipment, what guarantee do you have that they really did a secure wipe of the drives in the old systems before reselling them or scrapping them? What happens if someone hacks into one of these services and gets ahold of your data? Will you even know it happened? How many people have the opportunity to get their hands on your personal data who aren't even your own employees or hired consultants you interact with directly?
There's also a real question about outages being handled in a timely manner. Theoretically, the professionals using high-end gear at these data centers (hopefully with redundancy) can do a better job at keeping your data online than you can as a small or mid-sized business running everything yourself. BUT, the catch is, when they have an outage, they've got hundreds (even thousands?) of pissed off users, ALL of whom think their data is the most important to get back online. Meanwhile, these guys only make relative peanuts from you in monthly hosting fees so unlike your own employees, they won't have the vested interest in getting you running again.
Great question, IMO ... and I think the answer is, it's only an instantaneous distraction using a cellphone to text. It'd be rather pointless to run one of these studies where you asked a person to just drive with a smartphone sitting next to them in a cupholder, right?
What bothers me the most are summaries like the one in this topic, stating "more work needs to be done by the government" to help solve this issue.
You know what? Government is NOT always your "go to" group for all the answers. In fact, it often creates more problems than it solves!
Better technology IS a probable useful solution, however. Eliminate the need to look at the phone display to see when a text messages comes in, and make a good speech recognition system for responding hands-free. Nobody I know would actually prefer to try to juggle keying in a text reply while driving a vehicle to simply speaking a verbal reply.
Right now, this is one of my pet peeves with Apple's iPhone. Despite being practically the most popular smartphone in use, Apple doesn't even allow developers access to the APIs they'd need to build their own SMS to speech / speech to SMS add-on. And Siri? That's not even an option for all the iPhone 3GS or 4 owners out there. Even with a new 4s, it's not ideal. Yes, you can tell Siri to compose an SMS for you or read one to you that came in, but so far, you can't just order it to run in an "automatic" mode where it speaks all of them as they come in without user intervention. And on many bluetooth implementations in vehicles, Siri doesn't even work properly because they weren't designed expecting such a thing to exist in a phone. (EG. In my 2011 GM car, hands-free bluetooth is built into the factory stereo - but here's what happens with Siri: I activate it and the car realizes it should do a hands-free connection. I hear Siri speak through my car stereo. I give it a command. Siri starts to reply and my car breaks the bluetooth connection so I don't hear its response. Only way it functions is when issuing commands to Siri that don't require verbal responses, such as an order to dial a certain phone number for me.)
By the same logic, isn't it also at least plausible that this is simply happening because the President today is more of a figurehead than anything else? What if the reality of the situation is, you get elected President and then immediately find out it's really your job to go along with what a whole cabinet of advisers tells you to say and do? Your speeches are all put together for you by speechwriters, and designed to make the general public feel like you're calling all the shots -- except you're not.
Just throwing out an alternate theory here, but it doesn't seem impossible, does it? I mean, we've heard so much speculation as to how relatively unknown people like a Governor from Arkansas or a relatively unknown Senator from Illinois (who we can barely even find more than 3 or 4 people admitting they remembered him in college, and who some people even claim isn't really a U.S. citizen at all) got elected. And Busch, Sr.? Well, he was pretty clearly tied closely to the CIA, and once he was in, that'd kind of explain his son's ability to leverage that.
Not saying this IS how things are working ... but only, it's an interesting alternate option to consider.
"Are we there yet?" "Are we ......
(That's better!)
They were Apple's very last system to use a standard CRT monitor instead of a flat panel. That alone relegates them to the realm of "antiquated hardware" in many people's eyes, no matter what else they're capable of doing.
I'd venture to say the Apple eMac is generally looked upon as the least desirable Mac Apple released ever since the dawn of OS X. Not sure that's really a fair assessment -- but it's the reality of the situation.
I don't know that a lot of people are holding Kim Dotcom up as an example of a hero or "Robin Hood" figure, really? But having followed this story for a while now (wrote a few articles about it on a blog I contribute to, in fact), I'd say it's complicated.
For starters, just before Megaupload was raided, there was a whole case underway regarding his right to upload a song ("Megasong") he paid a bunch of big-name artists to put together for him, advertising the service. In that instance at least, it sure seemed to be that Dotcom was the "good guy" vs. Universal Music Group, who immediately filed for a takedown of the video (using a back door we now know Universal cut a deal with Google to be able to use, vs. going the standard route of filing a DMCA takedown request with them, as most others would be required to do). Universal's only defense? They felt they basically owned the rights to the artists on their label, so Dotcom wasn't supposed to be making music with them, without going through Universal first!
Beyond that? I'm not really defending what he did, profiting from encouraging people to share copyrighted content on his servers ... but the current state of U.S. copyright legislation only encourages the behavior, vs. the original copyright law (pre Bill Clinton and DMCA law he signed into effect while President). Traditionally, you weren't guilty of criminal copyright infringement if you simply gave away some copies of a work. The intent to financially gain was a required component. Otherwise, all you had was a potential CIVIL case, if the actual content creator/owner wished to take you to court over it directly.
Now, it doesn't seem to matter if you're in it to make millions, or you just intended to share some music with your college buddies in your dorm, at your own expense. You're guilty of a felony crime either way. So why risk if if you can't potentially make big bucks out of the whole thing?
Yeah.... I purchased a brand new 32GB HP TouchPad just recently, as one of Micro Center's special offers. (Basically, they're selling off the last of their inventory of them for $149.95 each if you add it to a purchase of some other new HP computer. My day job wanted me to pick up a new HP desktop PC for them anyway, so I paid the extra and got the TouchPad for myself.)
My impressions of it were:
1. Upon initial unboxing? OMG, HP tried like mad to make this thing copy-cat an Apple product! Same predominantly snow-white box with a lid that lifts off to reveal the contents in a minimalistic type of packaging. Same clear plastic you peel off before using the product. Same type of instruction pamphlet found inside a little cardboard envelope with a cute slogan printed on the front of it. Even the same idea of a uniquely shaped AC wall charger (as opposed to a typical power "brick" like 99% of other consumer electronics products include).
2. When I started giving the unit an actual try, I quickly realized webOS is a really competent operating system for a tablet like this. The "cards" concept works pretty well, and everything has a polished, quality look to it (including such things as the rippling effect when you tap anyplace on the screen). It absolutely needed the latest OS update to be downloaded/installed, to make it work 100% properly though. (I had a Kensington tablet case with integrated bluetooth keyboard, and I couldn't even make the non-HP branded keyboard pair properly until I did the update.) But after that, it "just worked", as the Apple faithful would say.
3. The Touchstone dock/charger is really a "must have" accessory to round out the product. The fact they included inductive charging capabilities in the hardware itself AND designed it intelligently enough so it detects when it's sitting on the stand, and can swtich modes (to a photo frame, a clock, etc.) is VERY slick, and makes you aware it's not just an iPad wannabe after all.
I really believe HP made a MASSIVE mistake by letting webOS go and canceling the TouchPad project. IMO, this was the ONLY real potential competitor to Apple's iPad, and another version or two of the hardware - combined with regular webOS improvements, could have been HP's shining star of a product to carry the whole company. It seems like it was JUST starting to gain the momentum needed when HP pulled the rug out from under it. Horrible timing ....
I don't get all the people rushing to hack these to run Android, quite frankly? webOS is far more enjoyable to work with for a tablet than any of the Android tablets I've seen. Android feels like it was "made for a phone, but shoehorned onto a tablet".
At least, I disagree based on this particular case.
Apple didn't pull the app immediately, without warning. They contacted the developer and offered to help work with them to make changes so they'd find it acceptable. That's not usually how antitrust situations pan out at all. (Do you remember Microsoft approaching Netscape and saying, "Hey... we're cool with your web browser alternative and we'd even offer it as a download from our own site if you'd work with us to make sure we're satisfied it's not just an Internet Explorer clone, borrowing too many of our ideas and UI design cues."?)
Seriously, is that *really* what the Progressive tracking box does? I got the idea it's not so much a GPS location tracker as it is a box that "phones home" to Progressive occasionally, with general data about your driving style (EG. g-forces logged when you brake or accelerate, and log of your speed you're traveling at).
Although I used to have Progressive, I opted not to take one of those boxes, so I never saw one first-hand. But from what I read, it attaches to the OBDII diagnostic port, usually found under your dashboard near the steering column. That port would typically be one you'd tap into to record vehicle stats such as your current speed (something you'd be able to get without using that port at all if you were running an internal GPS).
I could be wrong, but I doubt Progressive even has the interest in spending the time it would take to analyze data about which roads each customer traveled on, and how often they exceeded posted speed limits on each of them? It'd be a lot easier for them to simply know when and for how long you exceed a preset MPH value like 70MPH, and when your braking is sudden enough to exceed some threshold of deceleration. Count how often those events happen per month and if it's more than a certain allowed number, flag the customer for increased rates. (If such events stay at or near 0 consistently, offer them a small discount, to encourage continued use of the device.)
Well, first off, I think your analogy is a little extreme ... but regardless? The initial invasiveness isn't as serious as the long-term potential for hassles for the end-user.
I'm sure my HTML 5 enabled browser will perform just fine whether or not DRM extensions are added to the codebase. (If they caused performance or reliability issues like random freezes/crashes, people would scream and complain until those problems were fixed -- just like any other code.)
IMO, the hassle comes in when we transition from traditional cable TV/satellite/over the air broadcasts to internet streaming for our media content. We've long enjoyed certain usage rights for said content (such as court rulings allowing personal use of the VCR to record television programming). But now, the studios and content owners view the move to digital as an excuse to take back some of those usage rights. At best, I think we're looking at a whole new round of court cases just to win back rights we had previously, if everything moves to streaming with DRM. (You know they're not going to simply allow you to click to save a copy of this DRM enabled content as you stream it to your browser, for the sake of "time shifting".)
Worse yet, there's FAR from a guarantee we'd even win such cases. The content owners like to use the argument that these digital copies encourage copyright infringements in a way the lossy analog copies of VHS tape days didn't. (Duplicating digital content doesn't create poorer quality copies; it creates perfectly identical ones. And that means, by extension, you can make a copy of a copy or a copy, and it's just as good as possessing the original content first.)
You are ABSOLUTELY right on this one!
I was driving a Hyundai Genesis Coupe since early '09, when they were first available in the U.S. At the end of last year, I got that "3 year itch" to get something new/different, and I found out one of our area Cadillac dealers had a pretty deep discount on a 2011 CTS Coupe someone had just traded in with low mileage. I hadn't ever considered anything Cadillac built as being "my type of vehicle", but I saw the CTS Coupe and was immediately impressed. I wound up trading in the Hyundai, and by most people's counts, I made a "huge upgrade" in vehicles.
Well, as I tend to do, I got on the message forums for the car and did a LOT of reading in the weeks that followed. I learned as much as I could about the car, both good and bad. And right now? I'd have to caution anyone thinking of buying one of these cars to REALLY think long and hard before pulling the trigger on it.
The consensus on the forums, including a lot of input from guys who actually designed parts of the cars themselves, mechanics who have rebuilt a number of these engines, and more? GM quality *really* sunk to a low from the mid 2000's through 2009 or so, when parts suppliers feared not getting paid for the parts they supplied, and quality control was all over the place. After the bailout, quality suddenly shot up in 2010, when suppliers knew they'd be paid promptly for parts they supplied, and morale got a boost among everyone from assembly line workers to quality engineers inside GM.
(You can see evidence of this simply by looking up the Consumer Reports reliability scoring for the Cadillac CTS... It's pretty poor in 2008 and only marginally better in '09, but suddenly above average in 2010 and 2011 -- and no real major changes were done to the car between those years.)
Still, there are some serious flaws with the 3.6 liter direct injection engines GM uses across their whole product line, from the V6 Camaro to the Cadillac CTS I own to the Acadia crossover -- and it's clear they've done little to address them, despite using this engine for the last 4 years. Basically, they have a lot of issues with the timing chains stretching, causing your engine to need a rebuild -- sometimes with as little as 25,000 miles on it. GM continuously blamed it on the chains being "too soft a metal" thanks to parts supplier error, but the guys doing rebuilds on these say no.... The *real* culprit with this engine lies in its core design. For starters, with direct injection, the fuel gets sprayed right into the cylinders. It never goes past the valves like it would in most engines. Therefore, no matter how good the detergents are in your gas, they never get the opportunity to do their job keeping the valves clear of gunk. Meanwhile, the timing chain is kept tensioned hydraulically, using only oil pressure. There's no spring or other mechanism involved. And the chain itself has practically no margin for error, as GM designed it so its teeth are spaced much closer together than most chains. It doesn't take much for it to skip timing. So if your oil gets too dirty, or a little bit low and the hydraulic tensioner doesn't keep consistent tension on the chain? Recipe for disaster. Oh, and did I forget to mention? The 3.6 liter DI engine just loves to do a vanishing act on some of your oil. If you go 3,000 miles without checking it, it's very likely you'll be at least 1 quart low. That, in itself, is usually considered an "acceptable level of oil usage" by industry standards ... but combined with the issues this particular engine has, it's a serious problem, especially when GM says you can / should go at least 7,500 miles or so between oil changes!
I guess I can't speak for everyone, but I can't summon much outrage over this at all? Personally, I feel like it's simply a case of another "special interest group" with an agenda getting caught up in a situation of someone showing the world some of their internal content that leaked. I don't even care if people can eventually prove that one of their specific papers was real or fake.... As others posted, we know where they sided on the cigarette issue, and we're pretty clear where they side with respect to the global warming controversy too. Fine ... but ANY issues like this require people doing a lot more of their own reading and interpreting of studies -- not just going along with whatever special interest "think tank" is around, making bold statements.
My own take on things, just using a little bit of common sense, is that sure, things are looking pretty darn likely that our planet is gradually warming up. People bickering back and forth about the accuracy of that claim are wasting their time, if we can't move on to question #2, which is: "What can/should we really do about it?" That's where, IMO, things quickly get out of hand.
I mean, by most counts, the currently estimated world supply of untapped crude oil will be depleted in roughly 40 more years, if current rates of usage are sustained (and more quickly than that if they increase). If we stop burning oil (because it gets too scarce and its price gets prohibitive), some of the most likely alternatives seem to involve much "cleaner" forms of energy (solar and nuclear power, for example, or maybe hydrogen powered vehicles). So effectively, is this whole hullabaloo a "non issue" in the sense it's self-correcting anyway, as we run out of oil?
When you start asking multiple thousands of dollars for a software package, no matter WHAT it claims to be capable of doing, you're setting yourself up for a predictable chain of events:
1. You attract the interest of crackers and pirates, who get cheap thrills or bragging rights simply from saying they were able to copy and distribute something so valuable.
2. You lock out a number of potential customers for your product because the price tag is simply too high for them to consider it.
3. You create expectations from those who DO buy your product that they'll receive a superior amount of support and even "hand-holding" long after the sale.
I'm not saying these are reasons you're "charging too much" for your application. Only you can really determine if that's true or not. I'm simply saying these are practically guaranteed side-effects of doing so. In most cases, you see the folks selling such high priced packages implementing all sorts of copy-protection schemes, precisely out of fear about items 1 and 2, but the most effective schemes will put a severe crimp in your ability to deliver on expectations for item 3.
I work for a steel fabricator, a business where very niche (and costly) software is found all over the place. In every single instance, the copy protection schemes included with these programs we've used has caused us considerable hassle in the long haul. For example, many years ago, they spent tens of thousands on a steel detailing package which was loaded on a PC given to an outside detailer, as part of a long-term arrangement. (He'd do detailing of our drawings for us at a greatly reduced rate, in exchange for us supplying the hardware/software -- and he was free to use the equipment to do other peoples' work too, as long as ours too precedent.) That was great, except he suddenly became unreliable (personal/family problems, we assume), and we wound up having to reclaim our hardware/software. Problem is, nobody in-house is currently able to use the software, nor do we really want to hire or train anyone. (At this point, it's cheaper for now to just send the work out and pay regular rates ... We have far less need to detail drawings than we used to anyway.) Meanwhile though, the software maker requires we keep paying thousands annually to maintain a contract on the package, or lose all upgrade rights down the road -- rendering it pretty worthless. Without a current maintenance agreement, we can't even call up and get the key code transferred over if we wanted to migrate the app to different hardware.
In another case (our document management package), we were getting absolutely reamed on annual support costs, but again, were trapped between a rock and a hard place because we had so much data in the package already, and migration costs to use someone else's produce were huge too. We got lucky and found a guy who used to work for the place, who now has his own consulting business. He was able to give us a far cheaper support contract to help us with any issues we had in the program (software crashes, questions about custom coding, etc.) - but was unable to provide us with any update patches. He bailed us out of a serious database problem the software developed at one point ... but again, we're trapped if we ever need the features or fixes put in newer service packs. (They want to back charge us for all previous unpaid years of support to "get current" before we can even buy a new contract from the original vendor!)
Still another situation involves a vendor who has to email us new, lengthy key codes to copy/paste into the application every so often, so it then "phones home" to verify it's allowed to keep legally operating. It could be worse, but it still stinks. If someone isn't available with administrator rights who can get the emails in a timely manner and take care of it, the whole package shuts down on everyone. And you can't update the key code while anyone is actually IN the software either, meaning it's best done after hou
Exactly!
But where I've seen this fall apart is when management lacks the backbone to manage properly.
EG. My wife works in I.T. for an area hospital, and their department is insanely stressed out and disorganized. They have a system in place, at least on paper, for assigning priority level to trouble tickets. (It's based on pretty clear criteria, such as only getting the highest level if it's a piece of computer equipment required by doctors in the process of doing medical procedures.) The problem is, any of their medical staff who complain loudly enough about an issue get priority, thanks to managers who regard high-paid medical staff as "more important to please" than anyone working in I.T. (There's a general, overall perception of the I.T. workforce as similar to the janitors or other maintenance people ... useful when you need them, but ultimately disposable, if it turns into one of them vs. a doctor, nurse, or medical technician.)
Just last week, she encountered a situation where a manager went along with assigning "level 1" priority to a staffer because she didn't have enough mice on hand for a bunch of spare computers she wanted to set up in a conference room for training. (She should have been prepared in advance, but wasn't bothered to make sure everything was ready ahead of time, so she put in the emergency ticket a couple hours before training began, making an on-call I.T. person drive in, very early in the morning, just to give her extra mice!)
Depends on your use case... You're right about Keynote, but it's probably the single strongest component of Apple's iWork suite for the Mac to begin with. It was developed before any of the other parts, as a program for Steve Jobs to use personally when giving his presentations and speeches, because he found it distasteful and limiting to keep using a competitor's product for the purpose.
I happen to like Pages too, but honestly, it wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it weren't for Apple including some very elegant templates with it. For my business, I was able to knock out a new invoice and a 3-fold flier which looked like I paid a high dollar firm to design them for me, just by modifying templates included with the software. The Microsoft Word templates, by contrast, look more like "basic starting points" and they're so widely used, people recognize when you've used one.
For serious work with spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel has the competition beat hands-down, and that's proving to be their single strongest app in their Office suite. Apple's Numbers app is really more suitable for someone who's not even a "numbers person" to begin with, but finds him/herself with the occasional need to generate some basic spreadsheets anyway. It can produce results that look really nice, but it doesn't have the raw number crunching power of Excel (gets VERY slow with large spreadsheets), and lacks the power Excel had to do complex calculations with Visual Basic macros attached to cells.
Obviously, I'm talking about the full blown desktop/laptop versions of these programs here, but all of this translates to the iPad in fairly equal proportions. So I'd say yes, SOME iPad owners would like Office on it, especially if they do a lot with Excel. But many of us wouldn't see a point to it.
"God's only merciful sometimes, other times he's wrathful, dopey, sleepy, happy, grumpy, sneezy, bashful, doc, and pissed."
Yep... hence the many claims that God must be a woman. :P
I went through a (by all counts HORRIBLY messy) divorce myself, some years ago. But at that time, despite both of us being avid "computer people", there was no such thing as "social networking" websites or "cloud storage".
I'm not even sure there was much in the way of "digital data" we felt we needed to divvy up?
As I think about this now, though, I think it does make yet one more strong argument against DRM. It would have been a much bigger hassle if all of my purchased music, video content, or even digitally downloaded software titles were authorized for her use (and vice-versa), and then we had to concern ourselves with how that would be handled after going our separate ways. In our situation, there were a few instances where she had a user account for a paid MMORPG game or what-not, and I simply let her keep it, while cancelling any credit card attached to it for billing purposes. That made it her problem to pay for it herself, moving forward, or just opting to let the account go.
I don't know how amicable your particular divorce is, but I can tell you this much: In the long run, it'll make things go much more smoothly for both parties if you do the "right thing" in such situations as perhaps having a Dropbox account with some of HER data trapped in it. Back it up onto DVD-R or CD-R for her and give her those backups of her share of the content. Don't just wipe it, no matter how satisfying that idea is at the time. It's not worth starting an escalating battle over it, where she may well be able to delete some of YOUR info you're not even thinking about right now....
I'd ask if you can do an exchange for one with Windows 7 on it, since XP is getting pretty long in the tooth ....
Seriously though, it sounds like NewEgg is usually putting the used drives through some sort of diagnostic process, if they all had special partitions on them for the purpose. Maybe they simply need to train their bench techs to wipe the drives first, instead of making the assumption that creating the new partition is ensuring any old data on the drive becomes unreadable/inaccessible?
I met my partner on okcupid, after pretty much writing off the site as getting me nowhere. (Oddly enough, I could search and find a good 6-12 women on there in my age range, who lived near me, who I thought were interesting and appeared to share several common interests -- but every time I contacted one of them, I got no response.) I left my own ad up there though, basically forgetting about it, until I got one of those email notices that someone had "woo'd" me (kind of like a Facebook "poke"). I logged in to see what that was all about, and discovered we had a *lot* in common, but she lived in a different state. One thing led to another and here we are, still together after 3 years.
Even though before meeting her, my online dating experiences were more "bad" than "good"? I don't really have a problem with the concept at all. They've evolved from being perceived as "weird" or something you don't admit to using to a mainstream way to meet new people. I think you have to go into the online dating thing without any big expectations though. A lot of women tend to use them in sort of a "kid in a candy store" way, checking out all the photos and looking for only the ones they find really cute or sexy, and stroking their own egos as their mailboxes fill up with guys trying to contact them.
One of my good female friends amazed me when she showed me how much mail she'd get in just 1-2 days of posting a new ad on any of the dating sites... and that happened regardless of what she actually said in her description. A photo was all it took. In that environment, it's probably kind of difficult to keep a firm grip on reality, realizing 90% of those guys contacting you are just trying to hook up for a night, and you're not really THAT desirable to the general public....
As someone well over 30, I think I'm somewhat qualified to comment here.
The "nice guys finish last" thing is alive and well, and there's nothing about it that's a "cop out". Where you're correct is that as we get older, our priorities change (largely due to having more life experiences).
Most men AND women I know are working on "climbing that ladder" throughout their 20's and into their early 30's. They score that first "career job" after finishing school (or dropping out with it partially finished, as the case may be?) and start obtaining things such as their first new car or truck, perhaps a home of their own (or even stepping up from a small apartment unit to a rental house or townhouse apartment counts).... and sooner or later, they're considering obtaining a life partner too. Still working from the angle of "I've got nowhere to go from here but up!", they're concerned with their appearance to their peers, and with selecting a partner who has the best possible combination of looks, intelligence and personality/character.
When you're still in THAT stage of life? Yeah, dating is very competitive and you really can finish last in that area if you bring integrity and "character" to the table, but not much else. Without money and/or looks, you're short a couple of key items that help "sell" yourself vs. your competition.
Where things change, IMO, is somewhere between the mid 30's and 40's. By that time, many people already TRIED a marriage that ended badly. Others just matured a bit (or even simply let life wear them down a bit, to where they quit trying to impress -- and resigned themselves to just getting up each day, going to their 9-5 job, and keeping busy with whatever chores and tasks life demanded of them). All of a sudden, they're no longer focusing time and energy on searching for someone. They're just being themselves, and are actually in a better position to stumble across someone else like-minded who likes them for them.
BTW, I really think wealth serves as a huge barrier to one's self-awareness. Why do so many Hollywood celebs and pro sports athletes have relationship problems? Why do big-shot CEOs constantly get involved in sex scandals? When you have enough money, you're able to spend your way out of looking in the mirror and getting a true sense of who you are. Someone's always happy to stroke your ego, hoping for some sort of payoff. Doctors and surgeons will do all sorts of procedures to you, to make sure you physically appear younger than you really are. You can afford all the best/trendiest clothing items, vehicles, and everything else that distracts people from seeing who YOU are when they look at you. Every time you screw up in public, you can pay off someone to bail you back out of the situation.
I'd say it's ALSO a fact that the only products Honeywell has been offering consumers are basic, dumb thermostats or overpriced digital models with very basic functionality and a high price-tag that you're presumably supposed to pay to get that respected Honeywell name badge on the front.
If there are issues over some specifics, such as the particular control mechanism used, violating Honeywell patents? Then fine ... let them demand licensing fees for those items and move on. The fact Honeywell hasn't done this and instead, demands the product be pulled from the market and damages collected (before most people have even had the chance to BUY one!) speaks volumes about their true concerns here.
The Nest is almost impossible to think of as a "cheap knockoff" of anything Honeywell sells, consumer OR industrial. The Nest is designed very much along the same lines as the original Apple iPod ... meant to be very easy to use, with a simplified UI that encourages its use instead of intimidating a person into leaving it alone.
Your argument here sounds a bit like an architect who primarily designs skyscrapers (with a little bit of side work sketching up basic 1 bedroom shotgun shacks) claiming another architect designing elegant 2 story luxury homes must cease and desist, because he's clearly violated a number of design concepts used in those skyscrapers (and probably not so much in the shotgun shacks, but wants you to note he's familiar with those low-end products too).
If you believe what's said over on the MacRumors website, they already hashed this possibility out pretty thoroughly and the consensus was that Apple has no real interest in trying to place iOS on a notebook form-factor piece of hardware. The iPad has plenty of room left for improvement and will probably serve as their dominant iOS platform for quite some time.
I have no doubt Apple is working on (even finished?) an ARM port of OS X, but if it's like last time (developed an Intel x86 port of OS X they kept secret and sat on for years, until they decided to leverage it), it'll be something else they keep under wraps, "just in case".
What I think you might see are new computers from Apple running OS X with a touch-screen. That's really the only sensible reason OS X Lion bothered to port over the iOS app screen/launcher. Practically everyone says that's useless/pointless on their Mac, *except* for the possibility it would make a user-friendly option if a touchscreen was present.
The only reason Apple would really be motivated to switch the Air to an ARM processor would be a scenario where Intel quit giving them "first dibs" on new or custom-designed CPUs they'd want. If, say, Toshiba or HP or Dell paid off Intel to get some special treatment Apple couldn't get until after their products were in the pipeline, and it involved making faster, slimmer, lighter notebooks than the Air -- THAT might prompt Apple to retaliate with a switch to ARM.
I agree with everything you said, except I'd say that honestly, I'd be surprised if more than a small minority are revealing all in the interest of "avoiding suspicion from overbearing governments"?
That would indicate a level of paranoia I'm not sure most of us are at (yet).
More accurately, I'd say the vast majority is sharing a lot of personal information via tools like Twitter or Facebook because it satisfies some needs or desires. For starters, I think most people enjoy the idea of publishing content. In the "old days" of the internet, the "geeks" did this by way of Usenet message discussions or even networked message forums on BBS's. As more of the general public got on-board though, there weren't really many good outlets for them. (The majority of people aren't really very good writers, and often don't even LIKE trying to write very much at a time - so message forums weren't for them.) You could build your own "home page" on the web, and tools proliferated to do it with increasing ease (including PICTURES if you didn't want to write much!). But you still had the difficultly of driving traffic to actually look at what you put up. Many people lost interest in "personal" web pages after the initial thrill of building them subsided.
The social networking sites solved 2 problems at once in this area: They made it easy to generate "personal pages" that actually looked decent and were easy to update/modify, and more importantly, they brought along an audience for the content by encouraging linking up with acquaintances or friends who would actually have SOME reason to care about the relatively unimportant "little stuff" their connections were likely to publish.
All of a sudden, you could post a silly joke or describe a situation you had that day and get rapid feedback ... people LOLing at your material, contributing their own stories, etc.
The realization that advertisers might collect up the info you post and use it to target market to you doesn't seem like such a horrible thing, at least on the surface, to most folks. We all take advertising and marketing for granted as part of our daily life.If you're going to be faced with it anyway, why not for products or services you actually might be interested in?
Where I really start to have a problem with all of it, though, is when the providers of the social networking services betray people's trust..... I'm talking about such things as archiving information permanently that one would assume was deleted, by way of deleting a user account on the service. Or constantly changing privacy features so if you don't regularly keep on top of it, new posts are visible to more people than your intended audience you USED to have the service configured for.
The obvious answer to the question is, as usual; "Follow the money!"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-11-22-scanner-lobby_N.htm
http://www.infowars.com/chertoff-linked-to-body-scanner-manufacturer/
IMO, the *real* question we should be asking is why we believed this costly new technology, coupled with a whole new govt. agency to operate it, was going to accomplish anything substantial in the first place? The argument over the cost is tough to make without somebody insisting that either A) it created so many new jobs for American citizens that it added a lot of value, and/or B) if it saves even ONE human life, how can you put a price on that? So IMO, we can probably just ignore the "cost" angle, and simply ask if the TSA screening procedure we've implemented is a net positive, or a net negative for everyone?
Personally, I think you've got to be drinking some serious govt. kool-aid if you REALLY believe this nonsense of putting anyone on a secret "watch list" (based on the discretion of agents hired from the general public at hourly pay starting at around $11/hr.), and making everyone walk through body scanners before boarding commercial planes is going to save you from terrorist acts. As one of my friends pointed out, you can go to most airports in the U.S. and find that the only thing keeping you from wandering out to the hangars and runways is a chain-link fence around their perimeter. If someone REALLY wanted to sabotage a plane, they could throw on a mechanics' outfit or something, run out onto the tarmac, and do whatever they wanted to do with a parked jet, or even quickly insert something into some luggage on one of the transports, waiting to be loaded onto a flight. Trying to secure the plane from the terminal's boarding gate so heavily ignores all the other possibilities. Meanwhile, we've created a situation where EVERYONE is inconvenienced and put at risk of being falsely labeled a "potential terrorist" for transgressions as simple as wearing a t-shirt with a counter-culture political message printed on it, or making the wrong comment while standing in line.
Freedom = 0, Terrorists = 1 by my score-card
Nice job bashing both the product and Apple in one paragraph ... but the guy actually had a valid point, which you simply wanted to bulldoze over. SMALL businesses are not likely to invest in a Lotus Notes solution. A copy of Bento (mobile version of FMP for iOS devices) is very inexpensive and has a modern, up-to-date look. (Not some relic from the 90's.)
If, like many businesses, they simply need a basic database of contacts or some other specific info, accessible and editable from multiple, portable devices? It's not a bad solution at all.