Absolutely correct.... Even Apple suffered from the issue. Revision "A" iMac G5 logic boards often died off from the capacitor leakage issue, and though it wasn't hugely publicized, Apple did make them right, even if they were a little bit past their warranty period, with a rev "B" replacement board that fixed them back up again.
Actually, I think we need *both* bigger AND faster, more secure storage. This only addresses one of the issues, mind you - but it has some definite uses.
Off-hand, I wouldn't mind owning one of these as a "Time Machine" backup drive for my Mac Pro tower, for example. When I start working with video editing and try to keep around a library of clips I might want to re-use, plus having my entire iTunes music library and photo collection stored on it, I reach a point where a 3TB external backup drive would be nice. Not saying I'd have 3TB of data to back up... but it allows keeping enough changed data over time so you can go back further in the past to retrieve older (now deleted) files you realize you want back.
True, but you're only looking at the "how many bytes can I move/store for my dollar" aspect of things. The problem is, everything on the content side was exponentially increasing at the same time!
EG. Despite the vast improvement in Internet transfer speeds over what my 2400 or 9600BPS modem could do - I still wind up able to read the typical web-based message forum at about the same speed I could read online BBS forum content back then! Why? Because when all the content was straight ASCII text, even 2400BPS could move it across at least as quickly as I could read it. But now? We've got all these graphics files and HTML overhead that has to download along-side the text content, to make the web forum look pretty and properly formatted.
(That doesn't even factor in the fact that a typical Internet message forum probably runs on a server handling 50 or more simultaneous users trying to view the content. Back in the BBS days, a computer usually just had to serve ONE caller at a time, or MAYBE 2-4 of them as things progressed and people added more phone lines, etc.)
Except technically, your statement doesn't seem to be quite accurate?
I remember going to my local post office and trying to mail out small packages via "1st. class" instead of "Priority Mail", and depending on the size, both options were indeed offered to me (with 1st. class being slightly cheaper), as well as having the even cheaper "parcel post" rate (SLOW).
I agree that they've done a lot to blur the lines between the services (larger boxes don't really have a "First Class" option anymore, because they claim it wouldn't be any cheaper than Priority anyway).
But they do maintain both options as separate entities:
To be fair, the guy is correct about how the net worked back around '84. But like you say, there were FAR fewer regular users back then, and most content was plain ASCII text, suitable for transfer via dial-up modem speeds.
As you scale everything up, costs increase.
Also, I'd argue that an awful lot of those "free" services you saw on the net back in the mid 80's were FAR from free. They were simply being funded by your tax dollars or by the tuition dollars of students, since much of it was built and hosted on university or research lab servers.
Whatever.... People have been predicting the demise of the "personal computer" for quite some time now. First it was the idea that nobody would bother with a dedicated box sitting on a desk anymore, as powerful as portables became. Then it was the idea, a la Sun's whole "The Network Is The Computer" slogan, that the personal computer would become irrelevant and die, because people would need no more than a "thin client" consisting of a display, input device(s) and network connection. Everything they'd do or save would be done and stored off-site on big servers elsewhere. Now it's this idea that just because Apple designed a new OS that works well at turning mobile phones, music players, and tablet devices into "alternatives to using a standard notebook computer", it's going to mean the end of them marketing traditional "personal computers" to anyone.
In reality? All of these models can co-exist quite nicely, and almost everyone would rather have ALL of these choices available to them than pretending one obsoletes the other.
About the only trend I've seen is that practically every device you use that once consisted of specialized parts now has a little computer someplace in it. You see this immediately if you take a good look at machinery on the typical shop floor in an industrial environment. Everything from blast furnaces to waterjet cutting machines to devices made to punch holes in steel beams? Their "control panels" are basically desktop computers running DOS or Windows or Linux, interfaced to the mechanical parts of the machine, and placed in a custom enclosure so they don't look like a desktop PC anymore.
Heck... my Canon EOS Digital Rebel camera runs DOS in its firmware, and every Android cellphone out there is really just a little tiny PC running Linux. Every car or truck out there has a computer doing all the engine fuel management and monitoring a bunch of its mechanical systems to record and report failures.
The way I see it though? The more specialized little computers we've got out there inside of everything else, the more it perpetuates a need for a full-blown desktop computer, so someone can sit comfortably at it for long periods of time to do the development work required to build, maintain and update the code in all those other little computers!
You can yell all you want for the advertisers to "just go away", but the problem is, the collective "we" that use the Internet DEMANDED that monster, with our insistence on free services everywhere.
I don't like the ad banners a bit, but I also realize I'm grown used to the idea of visiting my choice of tech or news sites without paying monthly subscription fees. I use several free email sites, and I've got a places that host my photo collections for free and keep backups of 2GB or so of my files for free. I've got some (again free) software on my iPad that lets me send and receive unlimited SMS messages over it, using a new local phone number they assigned me. Google is willing to assign me yet another free local phone number to handle voice mail services for me, au gratis. Need a quick translation of some text from one language to another, or maybe just a conversion between units of measure? Free sites out there give you those features too. Plenty of other message forums let you share info on your favorite hobby or cheat codes and walkthroughs for your favorite games. The list goes on and on. Do you REALLY think all these things should just be done out the kindess of people's hearts, despite the ongoing expense of hosting them?
I think you make a great point. (I'm approaching 40 myself, and I'm definitely starting to realize the extent of the truth in these statements, as I watch younger employees from a different perspective.)
Still, just to play devil's advocate here... I think there's also a perception (sometimes accurate and sometimes not) that younger workers get more accomplished despite those drunken weekends and sports injuries. Younger workers sometimes have more of a tendency to mix their work with their play. So when they're out drinking with buddies, they're quite possibly spending some of that time hashing out problems they ran into at work and brainstorming solutions. (All my friends and I did this quite a bit when we were younger. These days, it's not that I wouldn't do so anymore... but it's simply a case of not having time to just hang out with buddies/former co-workers like I used to. Somewhere in my mid 30's, I realized everyone just got too "busy" to hang out with their friends, except by scheduled appointments on a calendar.)
Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
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iOS 4 Releases Today
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Let's get a grip on reality here, people. First and foremost? This device is a CELLPHONE. Many, MANY cellphones have been made before the iPhone was released, and many more have been made since then which NEVER get a firmware update at all! You simply "get what you get" with them, often meaning even functionality the original manufacturer intended the phone to have is stripped out by your cellular carrier and their custom version of the firmware. (EG. Despite it supporting bluetooth data transfer, you *may* get blocked from copying over your own ringtone files from a computer -- or maybe you're disallowed from moving over your contact info as vcard files, or ??)
Yet along comes the iPhone, which by contrast, has an INCREDIBLE amount of flexibility, and people are screaming FASCIST?!
As phone handsets go, it's pretty empowering, I'd say. (And I say this as someone who used to own the original iPhone as well as a 3G, but now uses a Samsung Messager II phone instead of "drinking the kool-aid" and extending my AT&T contract out another 2 years just to get the latest iPhone.)
My experience doing on-site service for years, plus working in I.T. in both a support and management role, tells me that Windows users are NOT "safer because they know there is malware for Windows". Not by a long shot....
The anecdote about having to clean a few Macs with DNSChanger on them really is the exception. It's actually an interesting little story for those of us who use Macs regularly, because it's a pretty uncommon find. If you said the same thing about Windows, that "You had to clean a few Windows PCs the other day because they had such-and-such malware on them.", people would laugh at you for bothering to post it, most likely!
As soon as a Windows PC is connected to the Internet, it's basically under attack. If you ever try doing a full system recovery on some of the older PCs out there using their included "recovery disc" - you actually have to apply the service packs for the OS *before* you connect it to the Internet. Otherwise, it's quite possible it will get infected with trojans within under 10 minutes, while you're trying to download the automatic updates to secure it! (A good firewall in front of it does help, mind you -- but there are still a lot of people out there simply connecting a single PC to their cable modem or DSL modem directly, and relying solely on the software firewalls built into the OS.)
It's never really been true to say "Macs can't get infected!"... but they're a lot closer to Linux or BSD in this regard than Windows. On the whole, the user just trying to use the Internet in a normal manner (reading legitimate news web sites, doing web-based email, reading a few web-based message forums perhaps, and doing some online shopping) has a VERY low risk of getting infected on a Mac. At the very least, the sites that try to trick a user into installing an executable will usually fail with Mac users because they keep trying to download them an.EXE file, which OS X can't even run!
Yeah.... You could already buy a "Kill-a-watt" meter and hook it up to a device to see how much power it draws. Most people probably haven't bothered, even though it only costs $20 or so.
The thing is, beyond taking steps to simply reduce usage of the device in question, or alter your usage patterns so you use it more at night (or otherwise deemed "off peak" electrical usage hours), you can't do anything else to make it cost less to operate. Your only option becomes getting rid of it and buying a new, more efficient alternative. And THAT usually costs FAR more than the savings is worth, unless you simply wait until the old one wears out and needs replacing anyway. Even then, some of these "super energy efficient" appliances sell at a large premium price. Will it pay for itself before it breaks down and is taken out of service? It's often a gamble!
Actually, I've read other studies about driving games and their effects on real driving - and the one correlation they were able to find was a very temporary one. (EG. If you *just* finished an hour of playing an action-packed high-speed driving game, and proceeded to get in the car and go to the store? You were more likely to drive above the speed limit, make quick lane changes, etc. than if you didn't.) But the effect very quickly faded, too.
I don't really think the fact you can "crash repeatedly with no consequences" in a game affects your risk-assessment skills though. At least, it really shouldn't in a typical person. I think most of us see a pretty big distinction, even at a subconscious level, between sitting in front of a TV or monitor screen, driving a computer-generated vehicle using a game controller (or even plastic driving wheel and pedals), and getting in a real car and driving it. Perhaps if people were playing with full-fledged "driving simulators" where they felt all the same forces they'd feel in a real car as they went into a sharp turn, slammed on the brakes, etc. etc. -- and if the whole experience promised it was an "accurate simulation" vs. a make-believe game scenario, it would be different.....
To the extent that either a Libertarian and a Communist ideology only works "100% according to intent" when you have all the people involved on-board with the ethical/moral requirements - no, they're both impossible to achieve. (For that matter, the same can be said of true anarchy. IMHO, it's really a great idea in theory, but it doesn't appear to stand the "test of time" if it's actually implemented. Ultimately, it has a fundamental requirement that everyone living in that system functions on a mentally high enough level to see that it's very destructive for ALL involved to become greedy or power-hungry.)
I'm still far from convinced that a libertarian form of government is "incompatible with reality", though. It appears to be pretty much what the Founding Fathers of the USA intended. It's only brought up as though it's some "radically different political idea" because the standard two parties of our era, the Republicans and the Democrats, have wandered so far from those original intentions and plans for U.S. government.
Personally, I think the USA would be far more in line with what the Libertarians are advocating if it weren't for allowing the Judicial branch of govt to subvert so many laws by creating rulings that changed their original intent. That ability to "interpret" the law is a very powerful one, and if the Founding Fathers overlooked anything - it was probably the extent of change of fundamental laws that eventually provided for.
(Then again, I believe it was Ben Franklin who once expressed concern that the government they set up could only last, at best, 200 years or so, before corruption tore it apart from within?)
I've recently become a big Cory Doctorow fan, reading several of his sci-fi books in electronic format. (I'm reading through "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" right now on my iPad.)
This interview just further impressed me with him... Great, insightful comments on both DRM and on "piracy" vs. "publicity"!
I'll admit that as much as I like science-fiction, I'm not exactly an "avid reader" - so maybe some of Doctorow's work is just a "re-hash" of ideas already used before. But I found lots of very interesting and unique (at least to me) concepts in his writing. I particularly like his premise in "Down and Out..." that the world has solved its energy problems, which led to sort of a new "enlightenment" era of rapid advances in technology - with one of them being the ability to "reboot" a dead person from recent backups of the knowledge in their head that were taken at regular intervals. People measure their age in how many lifetimes + years old they are. Of course, this leads to massive overpopulation, but the masses accept it because they're confident that problem can also be resolved somehow. And in the meantime, many people opt to "deadhead" for X number of hundred years - voluntarily putting themselves in a suspended state, when they feel they've done everything they really want to do and see everything they want to see. This just seems a few steps beyond the material you typically find in science fiction in the movies or on TV, not to mention in other books I've read so far!
I know what you're trying to say here; that it's the automation and increased efficiency that allows a company to make so much product... and not vice-versa.
But I'd argue that there's some of *both* going on in mass production of goods, so you and I are both right.
EG. A company might automate a process to increase efficiency, and the result is an increase in product output. But past a certain point, they've automated all the obvious/no-brainer stuff that all the employees are happy to see automated. Then, thanks to diminishing returns, they've got to "dig deeper". That's when they begin the "race to the lowest wage workers" (because the single biggest expense for a business is their workers). That's where they look for solutions like letting go of the higher paid employees with lots of skills by automating away the more difficult tasks they used to perform. That tends to become a huge up-front expense though -- and out of the reach of a smaller business (who can't even get the bank loan required for such a project, in many cases).
Net result? Maximum efficiency at cranking out a widget is closer to being achieved -- but at the "price" of no longer being a company that employs people at higher salaries they used to command for possessing more advanced skill-sets.
Automation only creates "higher salaried jobs" for the installers, designers, and to a lesser extent, maintainers of said automation products. And as big businesses consolidate/merge and become dominant to the point of squeezing out small businesses - this issue worsens.
This also illustrates why in the USA, *small business* success is so critically important to any hope of "economic recovery".
When we talk about such items as $75 Nikes that "would cost $300 if they were made in a factory full of USA union labor, paid $45K plus per year", we neglect the possibility that SMALL companies making unique shoes could compete nicely - providing a truly USA made shoe at more like an $85-100 price point - while still earning respectable salaries for the people working there. Sure, they won't employ nearly as many people as a big factory, or even sell as much product -- but the point is, MANY smaller companies can co-exist, all offering alternatives for footwear.
Sometimes, I think we're so fixated on the concepts of "economies of scale" that we forget it's not a universally beneficial thing? When a business grows to a certain size, they have to spend a LOT of money on advertising/marketing to convince people their product is the one they want to buy/keep buying. (And how is all of THAT paid for? Yep... rolled right back into the price tag of the product.) They also tend to make so much product, it starts making economic sense for them to automate/mechanize all sorts of processes that allow hiring cheaper labor (employees who don't need as many skills or as much intelligence, because they're pressing a button or pulling a level repeatedly, instead of *understanding* how to do whatever process happens as a result). That leads to a lot of low-paying jobs, vs. a relatively small number of higher-paying ones.
With many smaller businesses turning out similar, competing products - you tend to encourage people to buy more regionally/locally from whichever supplier is nearby -- and they can sell to those folks without needing to launch multi-million dollar marketing campaigns with celebrity sponsors, etc.
Umm.... can't speak for anyone else, but I know I've never really thought the media had so much direct influence on getting a president elected as they did with Obama.
Presidents you could call "media darlings" are few and far between, and I think they come from either camp. JFK was a Democrat who you could say was a media darling, right? To a slightly lesser extent, I think Bill Clinton was too. (Of course, he was trying to copycat JFK in a lot of ways anyway.) On the Republican side, I think Ronald Reagan qualified, if only because of his Hollywood background. ("The Governator", Arnold, may not have gone for presidential status, but he's yet another Republican media darling thanks to his own Hollywood past.)
The key difference with Obama, like I tried to explain in my original message, is the way he was marketed to the public, more like a "cool, revolutionary new product you've GOT to buy!" than anything else. Before Obama, we didn't really see ad campaign posters with artistic head-shots, or the idea of a candidate having his own logo. Plus, they tied it all in with the "historical moment" it would create to elect him as the first black president. This is all unique stuff that I expect we'll see more of in future campaigns.
Sounds a lot like the old "640K should be enough for ANYONE!" line to me.
You make a very flawed assumption that past usage trends are a reliable predictor of future needs. If the new iPhone and next generation of iPad include forward-facing cameras, and video conferencing becomes popular - how much monthly usage will that generate? As another example? AT&T has been talking for a while now about the possibility of offering the ability to stream recorded TV shows from a U-Verse DVR to mobile devices. What will THAT do to people's bandwidth usage?
The "elephant in the room" that few people seemed to notice about AT&T's old "unlimited" plans is, they've always had a 5GB monthly cap anyway! It's in the fine print people usually don't read.... The thing is, it turns out that 5GB per month may as well be unlimited usage for most people, because it's a generous enough amount that it covers the vast majority of use cases. (Anyone exceeding that is PROBABLY doing it via tethering their mobile to a laptop or desktop computer... and most carriers have tried to steer those folks towards different cellular packages anyway, like buying an "aircard" with its own plan independent of the phone.) So what's REALLY going on is AT&T is trying to bring down the largest available cap from 5GB to 2GB (despite the rest of the industry having standardized on a 5GB data cap).
Exactly! I realize J.P. Barlow probably has a traditional liberal take on things (hence his belief that Obama's election somehow "fundamentally changed American politics"), but the Internet has done nothing but shed a little more light on the political situation. IMO, it hasn't "broken" it in any way, shape or form!
Legislation that was once FAR too difficult for the average person to peruse is now available for download on various governmental web sites. (It's still far too wordy and obtuse, but making it easily available is a good start!)
The problems and struggles we're seeing today with "information overload at the top" are simply because the federal govt. is trying to claim FAR more power and control than it was ever designed to have! (And people, at the core of things, THIS is exactly what Ron Paul was referring to when he made a few negative comments about President Lincoln during his campaign.... It was NOT some sort of racist suggestion on his part. He correctly pointed out that State's rights lost out to Federal govt. rights under his presidency, and ever since, the idea of centralization of governmental power has increasingly taken hold in the USA.) I don't think many people would entirely blame Lincoln for the mess we're in today... but he did start the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill.
I completely disagree with Barlow's assertion that Obama was able to win, thanks to "lots of small political contributions". He was able to win because #1, he became a media darling. The press was so excited to see history made with the first black president in the United States, they couldn't stop heaping praise on the man and giving him the spotlight. The man had his own friggin' LOGO, for crying out loud! That "looks sort of like the Pepsi swirl" thing of his was unprecedented in political campaigning -- and shows his campaign was treated much more like product placement than anything else.
Plenty of small political donations have been made to 3rd. party candidates who get immediately shut out of the running anyway... We're nowhere NEAR a point in this country where that sort of thing makes any real dent in ability to get elected. You've got to be on one of the "big two teams" first (Democrat or Republican), and you've got to make friends with the right, influential people who help guide you through the process.
For the iPhone, I don't really have a complaint. I've owned one for years now, and I don't think I've ever used 3G data to the extent that I went over 2GB of usage in a month. The people who do are probably either A) tethering a jailbroken iPhone to a laptop on a very regular basis, or B) using it to watch streaming movies.
If you've been doing the former, you knew you were already violating the AT&T terms of usage and were trying to slip under their radar anyway. So you don't really have room to complain. If the later, why are you so into watching movies on a screen that small? Maybe you should consider other options, like ripping a movie and copying it to your iPhone before traveling someplace?
The *iPad* is where I have a real problem with this whole thing,because the ability to "grandfather in" is useless when the plan's whole initial selling point was the ability to go month-to-month, without being locked into a contract. The flexibility of it was key. You could sign up for one month when you knew you were going to need it (as I'd do when I went on a summer vacation trip), and then not pay for several consecutive months after that, when you could do without it. AT&T is saying that if you quit paying the monthly fee for even one month, you lose your grandfathered status!
Most people who bought an iPhone or iPad bought it for what it offered out of the box, plus some vague idea that there were also going to be "plenty of games and other cool things to download for it in the future". The fact that it's a "closed usage" platform isn't really a factor for most of us (myself included).
It's pretty clear that Apple is "winging it" with a lot of this app store approval stuff. Things keep getting developed that they obviously didn't consider in advance, so while reviewing them, they're basically thinking, "Hmm.... is THIS particular thing something that could get in our way, down the road?" If they decide it is, then bam... no approval for you.
But 90% of the time, the people I see complaining about this stuff were writing apps they should have known were pushing the boundaries in some way. EG. Don't try to re-invent or modify the look and/or functionality of any of the existing UI elements or applications. Don't try to create apps that add features to existing, basic functionality of the device either (such as trying to offer wireless iTunes syncing). Otherwise, you're deep into that gray area where Apple may, at any time, suddenly decide they dislike what you're doing.
If your app brings something new and useful to an iPad/iPhone - then you should be just fine, assuming you followed the rules and didn't use off-limits APIs or something to build it.
I doubt, for example, the guys bringing the Bento database to the iPhone/iPad had any issues, since the devices never had built-in database functionality before. I'm not aware of anyone having a lot of app approval issues when submitting apps allowing people to draw pictures with an iPhone/iPad either.
From everything I've read recently about the state of Internet usage in China, and an Asian friend of mine who just got back from spending 2 weeks over there.... I'm not so sure Google pulling out of China was as meaningful as people like to claim?
The vast majority of Chinese citizens seem to use their OWN web sites for various things. They have a big multi-user chat network (called YY, I believe), and they have their own version of Facebook over there too. They prefer native sites for the same reasons we Americans generally only use Western-based sites; we'd rather use sites written in our own native language!
Sure, there's an "underground" of political dissidents and rabble-rousers who want to spread the word about govt. corruption and so forth, and such activities are strictly prohibited by the Chinese government. But those people are already using encryption technologies as well as launching things from U.S. based sites, so as to make it harder to locate them. They, for example, might host articles on a U.S. based Google Apps account, or set up a U.S. based Twitter feed where news updates are sent out in Mandarin.
Ultimately, by pulling out of China, Google won a lot of positive P.R. from the West, while reducing some exposure to Asian hackers - so it wasn't "all pain, no gain" for them. And they'll continue to provide useful search and other tools to the Chinese who need them anyway. They'll simply have to go to a bit more trouble to get there.
As for Apple resembling a totalitarian state? Only if you believe a private business shouldn't ever be able to exert controls and limitations on the goods they sell!
Far from there being some "giant bureaucracy of app store censors", it appears to me their problem may largely be a LACK of people to review new uploads! One of the biggest complaints seems to be with the delays in approval of apps. As for not being able to say bad things about Apple? Not sure exactly what you're referring to here -- but I'm pretty sure MOST companies wouldn't allow software to be published by their own company that put their name and products in a bad light. (Ever see any Sony PS3 game releases or Nintendo Wii games that disparage their respective brands?)
The whole "porn" thing is overblown and shows a lack of understanding of the big picture by a lot of people, I think. Yes, Steve Jobs has personally said he doesn't really want a bunch of porn available on Apple products like the iPad and iPhone. So what? That's just as often a selling point as it is a negative, depending on who's buying. But most importantly, most of the porn sellers on the Internet have proven to be unscrupulous, cheating and lying bastards who just want to make an easy buck. Look how many PAID porn sites out there make attempts to infect your PC with spyware/ad-ware! They're not even satisfied taking your money... they still want to hijack your computer for more profit! Do you really want to associate your devices with/do business with those people? I don't blame Apple for taking a pass on it.
Playboy is a valid exception to the rule because #1, they're really only "soft porn". Playboy has quite a few limitations in place on what they will/won't show in their magazines and they have decades of evidence they've been consistent on that. #2, they're a legitimate publishing business that HAS proven itself more trustworthy to do business with than many others out there. They're not the "only, designated porn distributors" for the iPad/iPhone -- but they're certainly one of only a FEW long-standing print publishers of porn that has clear "standards". (Frankly, I don't know that others like Penthouse have even approached Apple about doing an app? But I wouldn't be surprised if they'd get a "green light" too, because again, they've got a pretty established business that DOESN'T just think customers are there to take advantage of with spyware and questionable billing practices, etc. etc.)
Exactly! These people were building products for Dell too (among other well-known computer companies). Wonder if we'll see Dell step up to the plate and offer a larger percentage of their profits to these folks as a pay increase? (I'm betting not.)
I'd argue that one of the "poisons" of modern society is all the garbage where "nobody loses". We have contests in school these days where everyone wins a prize.... Instead of coming in "last" and "losing", you get a 4th. or 5th. place ribbon. Instead of letting people score poorly on tests, you've got people trying to change the scores around. And instead of "hurting someone's feelings" - there's this whole thing of labeling them as having some sort of "disorder", implying they can't help their actions and they need special consideration/treatment.
If this generation is lacking some of THAT empathy, that's a step in the right direction!
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Absolutely correct.... Even Apple suffered from the issue. Revision "A" iMac G5 logic boards often died off from the capacitor leakage issue, and though it wasn't hugely publicized, Apple did make them right, even if they were a little bit past their warranty period, with a rev "B" replacement board that fixed them back up again.
Actually, I think we need *both* bigger AND faster, more secure storage. This only addresses one of the issues, mind you - but it has some definite uses.
Off-hand, I wouldn't mind owning one of these as a "Time Machine" backup drive for my Mac Pro tower, for example. When I start working with video editing and try to keep around a library of clips I might want to re-use, plus having my entire iTunes music library and photo collection stored on it, I reach a point where a 3TB external backup drive would be nice. Not saying I'd have 3TB of data to back up ... but it allows keeping enough changed data over time so you can go back further in the past to retrieve older (now deleted) files you realize you want back.
True, but you're only looking at the "how many bytes can I move/store for my dollar" aspect of things. The problem is, everything on the content side was exponentially increasing at the same time!
EG. Despite the vast improvement in Internet transfer speeds over what my 2400 or 9600BPS modem could do - I still wind up able to read the typical web-based message forum at about the same speed I could read online BBS forum content back then! Why? Because when all the content was straight ASCII text, even 2400BPS could move it across at least as quickly as I could read it. But now? We've got all these graphics files and HTML overhead that has to download along-side the text content, to make the web forum look pretty and properly formatted.
(That doesn't even factor in the fact that a typical Internet message forum probably runs on a server handling 50 or more simultaneous users trying to view the content. Back in the BBS days, a computer usually just had to serve ONE caller at a time, or MAYBE 2-4 of them as things progressed and people added more phone lines, etc.)
Except technically, your statement doesn't seem to be quite accurate?
I remember going to my local post office and trying to mail out small packages via "1st. class" instead of "Priority Mail", and depending on the size, both options were indeed offered to me (with 1st. class being slightly cheaper), as well as having the even cheaper "parcel post" rate (SLOW).
I agree that they've done a lot to blur the lines between the services (larger boxes don't really have a "First Class" option anymore, because they claim it wouldn't be any cheaper than Priority anyway).
But they do maintain both options as separate entities:
http://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/senditwithintheus/firstclassmail.htm?from=home_mailandshipping&page=firstclassmail
To be fair, the guy is correct about how the net worked back around '84. But like you say, there were FAR fewer regular users back then, and most content was plain ASCII text, suitable for transfer via dial-up modem speeds.
As you scale everything up, costs increase.
Also, I'd argue that an awful lot of those "free" services you saw on the net back in the mid 80's were FAR from free. They were simply being funded by your tax dollars or by the tuition dollars of students, since much of it was built and hosted on university or research lab servers.
Whatever .... People have been predicting the demise of the "personal computer" for quite some time now. First it was the idea that nobody would bother with a dedicated box sitting on a desk anymore, as powerful as portables became. Then it was the idea, a la Sun's whole "The Network Is The Computer" slogan, that the personal computer would become irrelevant and die, because people would need no more than a "thin client" consisting of a display, input device(s) and network connection. Everything they'd do or save would be done and stored off-site on big servers elsewhere. Now it's this idea that just because Apple designed a new OS that works well at turning mobile phones, music players, and tablet devices into "alternatives to using a standard notebook computer", it's going to mean the end of them marketing traditional "personal computers" to anyone.
In reality? All of these models can co-exist quite nicely, and almost everyone would rather have ALL of these choices available to them than pretending one obsoletes the other.
About the only trend I've seen is that practically every device you use that once consisted of specialized parts now has a little computer someplace in it. You see this immediately if you take a good look at machinery on the typical shop floor in an industrial environment. Everything from blast furnaces to waterjet cutting machines to devices made to punch holes in steel beams? Their "control panels" are basically desktop computers running DOS or Windows or Linux, interfaced to the mechanical parts of the machine, and placed in a custom enclosure so they don't look like a desktop PC anymore.
Heck... my Canon EOS Digital Rebel camera runs DOS in its firmware, and every Android cellphone out there is really just a little tiny PC running Linux. Every car or truck out there has a computer doing all the engine fuel management and monitoring a bunch of its mechanical systems to record and report failures.
The way I see it though? The more specialized little computers we've got out there inside of everything else, the more it perpetuates a need for a full-blown desktop computer, so someone can sit comfortably at it for long periods of time to do the development work required to build, maintain and update the code in all those other little computers!
You can yell all you want for the advertisers to "just go away", but the problem is, the collective "we" that use the Internet DEMANDED that monster, with our insistence on free services everywhere.
I don't like the ad banners a bit, but I also realize I'm grown used to the idea of visiting my choice of tech or news sites without paying monthly subscription fees. I use several free email sites, and I've got a places that host my photo collections for free and keep backups of 2GB or so of my files for free. I've got some (again free) software on my iPad that lets me send and receive unlimited SMS messages over it, using a new local phone number they assigned me. Google is willing to assign me yet another free local phone number to handle voice mail services for me, au gratis. Need a quick translation of some text from one language to another, or maybe just a conversion between units of measure? Free sites out there give you those features too. Plenty of other message forums let you share info on your favorite hobby or cheat codes and walkthroughs for your favorite games. The list goes on and on. Do you REALLY think all these things should just be done out the kindess of people's hearts, despite the ongoing expense of hosting them?
I think you make a great point. (I'm approaching 40 myself, and I'm definitely starting to realize the extent of the truth in these statements, as I watch younger employees from a different perspective.)
Still, just to play devil's advocate here ... I think there's also a perception (sometimes accurate and sometimes not) that younger workers get more accomplished despite those drunken weekends and sports injuries. Younger workers sometimes have more of a tendency to mix their work with their play. So when they're out drinking with buddies, they're quite possibly spending some of that time hashing out problems they ran into at work and brainstorming solutions. (All my friends and I did this quite a bit when we were younger. These days, it's not that I wouldn't do so anymore ... but it's simply a case of not having time to just hang out with buddies/former co-workers like I used to. Somewhere in my mid 30's, I realized everyone just got too "busy" to hang out with their friends, except by scheduled appointments on a calendar.)
Let's get a grip on reality here, people. First and foremost? This device is a CELLPHONE. Many, MANY cellphones have been made before the iPhone was released, and many more have been made since then which NEVER get a firmware update at all! You simply "get what you get" with them, often meaning even functionality the original manufacturer intended the phone to have is stripped out by your cellular carrier and their custom version of the firmware. (EG. Despite it supporting bluetooth data transfer, you *may* get blocked from copying over your own ringtone files from a computer -- or maybe you're disallowed from moving over your contact info as vcard files, or ??)
Yet along comes the iPhone, which by contrast, has an INCREDIBLE amount of flexibility, and people are screaming FASCIST?!
As phone handsets go, it's pretty empowering, I'd say. (And I say this as someone who used to own the original iPhone as well as a 3G, but now uses a Samsung Messager II phone instead of "drinking the kool-aid" and extending my AT&T contract out another 2 years just to get the latest iPhone.)
My experience doing on-site service for years, plus working in I.T. in both a support and management role, tells me that Windows users are NOT "safer because they know there is malware for Windows". Not by a long shot....
The anecdote about having to clean a few Macs with DNSChanger on them really is the exception. It's actually an interesting little story for those of us who use Macs regularly, because it's a pretty uncommon find. If you said the same thing about Windows, that "You had to clean a few Windows PCs the other day because they had such-and-such malware on them.", people would laugh at you for bothering to post it, most likely!
As soon as a Windows PC is connected to the Internet, it's basically under attack. If you ever try doing a full system recovery on some of the older PCs out there using their included "recovery disc" - you actually have to apply the service packs for the OS *before* you connect it to the Internet. Otherwise, it's quite possible it will get infected with trojans within under 10 minutes, while you're trying to download the automatic updates to secure it! (A good firewall in front of it does help, mind you -- but there are still a lot of people out there simply connecting a single PC to their cable modem or DSL modem directly, and relying solely on the software firewalls built into the OS.)
It's never really been true to say "Macs can't get infected!" ... but they're a lot closer to Linux or BSD in this regard than Windows. On the whole, the user just trying to use the Internet in a normal manner (reading legitimate news web sites, doing web-based email, reading a few web-based message forums perhaps, and doing some online shopping) has a VERY low risk of getting infected on a Mac. At the very least, the sites that try to trick a user into installing an executable will usually fail with Mac users because they keep trying to download them an .EXE file, which OS X can't even run!
Yeah.... You could already buy a "Kill-a-watt" meter and hook it up to a device to see how much power it draws. Most people probably haven't bothered, even though it only costs $20 or so.
http://www.amazon.com/P3-International-P4400-Electricity-Monitor/dp/B00009MDBU
The thing is, beyond taking steps to simply reduce usage of the device in question, or alter your usage patterns so you use it more at night (or otherwise deemed "off peak" electrical usage hours), you can't do anything else to make it cost less to operate. Your only option becomes getting rid of it and buying a new, more efficient alternative. And THAT usually costs FAR more than the savings is worth, unless you simply wait until the old one wears out and needs replacing anyway. Even then, some of these "super energy efficient" appliances sell at a large premium price. Will it pay for itself before it breaks down and is taken out of service? It's often a gamble!
Actually, I've read other studies about driving games and their effects on real driving - and the one correlation they were able to find was a very temporary one. (EG. If you *just* finished an hour of playing an action-packed high-speed driving game, and proceeded to get in the car and go to the store? You were more likely to drive above the speed limit, make quick lane changes, etc. than if you didn't.) But the effect very quickly faded, too.
I don't really think the fact you can "crash repeatedly with no consequences" in a game affects your risk-assessment skills though. At least, it really shouldn't in a typical person. I think most of us see a pretty big distinction, even at a subconscious level, between sitting in front of a TV or monitor screen, driving a computer-generated vehicle using a game controller (or even plastic driving wheel and pedals), and getting in a real car and driving it. Perhaps if people were playing with full-fledged "driving simulators" where they felt all the same forces they'd feel in a real car as they went into a sharp turn, slammed on the brakes, etc. etc. -- and if the whole experience promised it was an "accurate simulation" vs. a make-believe game scenario, it would be different.....
To the extent that either a Libertarian and a Communist ideology only works "100% according to intent" when you have all the people involved on-board with the ethical/moral requirements - no, they're both impossible to achieve. (For that matter, the same can be said of true anarchy. IMHO, it's really a great idea in theory, but it doesn't appear to stand the "test of time" if it's actually implemented. Ultimately, it has a fundamental requirement that everyone living in that system functions on a mentally high enough level to see that it's very destructive for ALL involved to become greedy or power-hungry.)
I'm still far from convinced that a libertarian form of government is "incompatible with reality", though. It appears to be pretty much what the Founding Fathers of the USA intended. It's only brought up as though it's some "radically different political idea" because the standard two parties of our era, the Republicans and the Democrats, have wandered so far from those original intentions and plans for U.S. government.
Personally, I think the USA would be far more in line with what the Libertarians are advocating if it weren't for allowing the Judicial branch of govt to subvert so many laws by creating rulings that changed their original intent. That ability to "interpret" the law is a very powerful one, and if the Founding Fathers overlooked anything - it was probably the extent of change of fundamental laws that eventually provided for.
(Then again, I believe it was Ben Franklin who once expressed concern that the government they set up could only last, at best, 200 years or so, before corruption tore it apart from within?)
I've recently become a big Cory Doctorow fan, reading several of his sci-fi books in electronic format. (I'm reading through "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" right now on my iPad.)
This interview just further impressed me with him... Great, insightful comments on both DRM and on "piracy" vs. "publicity"!
I'll admit that as much as I like science-fiction, I'm not exactly an "avid reader" - so maybe some of Doctorow's work is just a "re-hash" of ideas already used before. But I found lots of very interesting and unique (at least to me) concepts in his writing. I particularly like his premise in "Down and Out..." that the world has solved its energy problems, which led to sort of a new "enlightenment" era of rapid advances in technology - with one of them being the ability to "reboot" a dead person from recent backups of the knowledge in their head that were taken at regular intervals. People measure their age in how many lifetimes + years old they are. Of course, this leads to massive overpopulation, but the masses accept it because they're confident that problem can also be resolved somehow. And in the meantime, many people opt to "deadhead" for X number of hundred years - voluntarily putting themselves in a suspended state, when they feel they've done everything they really want to do and see everything they want to see. This just seems a few steps beyond the material you typically find in science fiction in the movies or on TV, not to mention in other books I've read so far!
I know what you're trying to say here; that it's the automation and increased efficiency that allows a company to make so much product ... and not vice-versa.
But I'd argue that there's some of *both* going on in mass production of goods, so you and I are both right.
EG. A company might automate a process to increase efficiency, and the result is an increase in product output. But past a certain point, they've automated all the obvious/no-brainer stuff that all the employees are happy to see automated. Then, thanks to diminishing returns, they've got to "dig deeper". That's when they begin the "race to the lowest wage workers" (because the single biggest expense for a business is their workers). That's where they look for solutions like letting go of the higher paid employees with lots of skills by automating away the more difficult tasks they used to perform. That tends to become a huge up-front expense though -- and out of the reach of a smaller business (who can't even get the bank loan required for such a project, in many cases).
Net result? Maximum efficiency at cranking out a widget is closer to being achieved -- but at the "price" of no longer being a company that employs people at higher salaries they used to command for possessing more advanced skill-sets.
Automation only creates "higher salaried jobs" for the installers, designers, and to a lesser extent, maintainers of said automation products. And as big businesses consolidate/merge and become dominant to the point of squeezing out small businesses - this issue worsens.
http://www.activeprint.net/
That's just one solution ....
This also illustrates why in the USA, *small business* success is so critically important to any hope of "economic recovery".
When we talk about such items as $75 Nikes that "would cost $300 if they were made in a factory full of USA union labor, paid $45K plus per year", we neglect the possibility that SMALL companies making unique shoes could compete nicely - providing a truly USA made shoe at more like an $85-100 price point - while still earning respectable salaries for the people working there. Sure, they won't employ nearly as many people as a big factory, or even sell as much product -- but the point is, MANY smaller companies can co-exist, all offering alternatives for footwear.
Sometimes, I think we're so fixated on the concepts of "economies of scale" that we forget it's not a universally beneficial thing? When a business grows to a certain size, they have to spend a LOT of money on advertising/marketing to convince people their product is the one they want to buy/keep buying. (And how is all of THAT paid for? Yep ... rolled right back into the price tag of the product.) They also tend to make so much product, it starts making economic sense for them to automate/mechanize all sorts of processes that allow hiring cheaper labor (employees who don't need as many skills or as much intelligence, because they're pressing a button or pulling a level repeatedly, instead of *understanding* how to do whatever process happens as a result). That leads to a lot of low-paying jobs, vs. a relatively small number of higher-paying ones.
With many smaller businesses turning out similar, competing products - you tend to encourage people to buy more regionally/locally from whichever supplier is nearby -- and they can sell to those folks without needing to launch multi-million dollar marketing campaigns with celebrity sponsors, etc.
Umm.... can't speak for anyone else, but I know I've never really thought the media had so much direct influence on getting a president elected as they did with Obama.
Presidents you could call "media darlings" are few and far between, and I think they come from either camp. JFK was a Democrat who you could say was a media darling, right? To a slightly lesser extent, I think Bill Clinton was too. (Of course, he was trying to copycat JFK in a lot of ways anyway.) On the Republican side, I think Ronald Reagan qualified, if only because of his Hollywood background. ("The Governator", Arnold, may not have gone for presidential status, but he's yet another Republican media darling thanks to his own Hollywood past.)
The key difference with Obama, like I tried to explain in my original message, is the way he was marketed to the public, more like a "cool, revolutionary new product you've GOT to buy!" than anything else. Before Obama, we didn't really see ad campaign posters with artistic head-shots, or the idea of a candidate having his own logo. Plus, they tied it all in with the "historical moment" it would create to elect him as the first black president. This is all unique stuff that I expect we'll see more of in future campaigns.
Sounds a lot like the old "640K should be enough for ANYONE!" line to me.
You make a very flawed assumption that past usage trends are a reliable predictor of future needs. If the new iPhone and next generation of iPad include forward-facing cameras, and video conferencing becomes popular - how much monthly usage will that generate? As another example? AT&T has been talking for a while now about the possibility of offering the ability to stream recorded TV shows from a U-Verse DVR to mobile devices. What will THAT do to people's bandwidth usage?
The "elephant in the room" that few people seemed to notice about AT&T's old "unlimited" plans is, they've always had a 5GB monthly cap anyway! It's in the fine print people usually don't read.... The thing is, it turns out that 5GB per month may as well be unlimited usage for most people, because it's a generous enough amount that it covers the vast majority of use cases. (Anyone exceeding that is PROBABLY doing it via tethering their mobile to a laptop or desktop computer ... and most carriers have tried to steer those folks towards different cellular packages anyway, like buying an "aircard" with its own plan independent of the phone.) So what's REALLY going on is AT&T is trying to bring down the largest available cap from 5GB to 2GB (despite the rest of the industry having standardized on a 5GB data cap).
Exactly! I realize J.P. Barlow probably has a traditional liberal take on things (hence his belief that Obama's election somehow "fundamentally changed American politics"), but the Internet has done nothing but shed a little more light on the political situation. IMO, it hasn't "broken" it in any way, shape or form!
Legislation that was once FAR too difficult for the average person to peruse is now available for download on various governmental web sites. (It's still far too wordy and obtuse, but making it easily available is a good start!)
The problems and struggles we're seeing today with "information overload at the top" are simply because the federal govt. is trying to claim FAR more power and control than it was ever designed to have! (And people, at the core of things, THIS is exactly what Ron Paul was referring to when he made a few negative comments about President Lincoln during his campaign .... It was NOT some sort of racist suggestion on his part. He correctly pointed out that State's rights lost out to Federal govt. rights under his presidency, and ever since, the idea of centralization of governmental power has increasingly taken hold in the USA.) I don't think many people would entirely blame Lincoln for the mess we're in today ... but he did start the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill.
I completely disagree with Barlow's assertion that Obama was able to win, thanks to "lots of small political contributions". He was able to win because #1, he became a media darling. The press was so excited to see history made with the first black president in the United States, they couldn't stop heaping praise on the man and giving him the spotlight. The man had his own friggin' LOGO, for crying out loud! That "looks sort of like the Pepsi swirl" thing of his was unprecedented in political campaigning -- and shows his campaign was treated much more like product placement than anything else.
Plenty of small political donations have been made to 3rd. party candidates who get immediately shut out of the running anyway... We're nowhere NEAR a point in this country where that sort of thing makes any real dent in ability to get elected. You've got to be on one of the "big two teams" first (Democrat or Republican), and you've got to make friends with the right, influential people who help guide you through the process.
For the iPhone, I don't really have a complaint. I've owned one for years now, and I don't think I've ever used 3G data to the extent that I went over 2GB of usage in a month. The people who do are probably either A) tethering a jailbroken iPhone to a laptop on a very regular basis, or B) using it to watch streaming movies.
If you've been doing the former, you knew you were already violating the AT&T terms of usage and were trying to slip under their radar anyway. So you don't really have room to complain. If the later, why are you so into watching movies on a screen that small? Maybe you should consider other options, like ripping a movie and copying it to your iPhone before traveling someplace?
The *iPad* is where I have a real problem with this whole thing,because the ability to "grandfather in" is useless when the plan's whole initial selling point was the ability to go month-to-month, without being locked into a contract. The flexibility of it was key. You could sign up for one month when you knew you were going to need it (as I'd do when I went on a summer vacation trip), and then not pay for several consecutive months after that, when you could do without it. AT&T is saying that if you quit paying the monthly fee for even one month, you lose your grandfathered status!
Most people who bought an iPhone or iPad bought it for what it offered out of the box, plus some vague idea that there were also going to be "plenty of games and other cool things to download for it in the future". The fact that it's a "closed usage" platform isn't really a factor for most of us (myself included).
It's pretty clear that Apple is "winging it" with a lot of this app store approval stuff. Things keep getting developed that they obviously didn't consider in advance, so while reviewing them, they're basically thinking, "Hmm.... is THIS particular thing something that could get in our way, down the road?" If they decide it is, then bam... no approval for you.
But 90% of the time, the people I see complaining about this stuff were writing apps they should have known were pushing the boundaries in some way. EG. Don't try to re-invent or modify the look and/or functionality of any of the existing UI elements or applications. Don't try to create apps that add features to existing, basic functionality of the device either (such as trying to offer wireless iTunes syncing). Otherwise, you're deep into that gray area where Apple may, at any time, suddenly decide they dislike what you're doing.
If your app brings something new and useful to an iPad/iPhone - then you should be just fine, assuming you followed the rules and didn't use off-limits APIs or something to build it.
I doubt, for example, the guys bringing the Bento database to the iPhone/iPad had any issues, since the devices never had built-in database functionality before. I'm not aware of anyone having a lot of app approval issues when submitting apps allowing people to draw pictures with an iPhone/iPad either.
From everything I've read recently about the state of Internet usage in China, and an Asian friend of mine who just got back from spending 2 weeks over there .... I'm not so sure Google pulling out of China was as meaningful as people like to claim?
The vast majority of Chinese citizens seem to use their OWN web sites for various things. They have a big multi-user chat network (called YY, I believe), and they have their own version of Facebook over there too. They prefer native sites for the same reasons we Americans generally only use Western-based sites; we'd rather use sites written in our own native language!
Sure, there's an "underground" of political dissidents and rabble-rousers who want to spread the word about govt. corruption and so forth, and such activities are strictly prohibited by the Chinese government. But those people are already using encryption technologies as well as launching things from U.S. based sites, so as to make it harder to locate them. They, for example, might host articles on a U.S. based Google Apps account, or set up a U.S. based Twitter feed where news updates are sent out in Mandarin.
Ultimately, by pulling out of China, Google won a lot of positive P.R. from the West, while reducing some exposure to Asian hackers - so it wasn't "all pain, no gain" for them. And they'll continue to provide useful search and other tools to the Chinese who need them anyway. They'll simply have to go to a bit more trouble to get there.
As for Apple resembling a totalitarian state? Only if you believe a private business shouldn't ever be able to exert controls and limitations on the goods they sell!
Far from there being some "giant bureaucracy of app store censors", it appears to me their problem may largely be a LACK of people to review new uploads! One of the biggest complaints seems to be with the delays in approval of apps. As for not being able to say bad things about Apple? Not sure exactly what you're referring to here -- but I'm pretty sure MOST companies wouldn't allow software to be published by their own company that put their name and products in a bad light. (Ever see any Sony PS3 game releases or Nintendo Wii games that disparage their respective brands?)
The whole "porn" thing is overblown and shows a lack of understanding of the big picture by a lot of people, I think. Yes, Steve Jobs has personally said he doesn't really want a bunch of porn available on Apple products like the iPad and iPhone. So what? That's just as often a selling point as it is a negative, depending on who's buying. But most importantly, most of the porn sellers on the Internet have proven to be unscrupulous, cheating and lying bastards who just want to make an easy buck. Look how many PAID porn sites out there make attempts to infect your PC with spyware/ad-ware! They're not even satisfied taking your money... they still want to hijack your computer for more profit! Do you really want to associate your devices with/do business with those people? I don't blame Apple for taking a pass on it.
Playboy is a valid exception to the rule because #1, they're really only "soft porn". Playboy has quite a few limitations in place on what they will/won't show in their magazines and they have decades of evidence they've been consistent on that. #2, they're a legitimate publishing business that HAS proven itself more trustworthy to do business with than many others out there. They're not the "only, designated porn distributors" for the iPad/iPhone -- but they're certainly one of only a FEW long-standing print publishers of porn that has clear "standards". (Frankly, I don't know that others like Penthouse have even approached Apple about doing an app? But I wouldn't be surprised if they'd get a "green light" too, because again, they've got a pretty established business that DOESN'T just think customers are there to take advantage of with spyware and questionable billing practices, etc. etc.)
Exactly! These people were building products for Dell too (among other well-known computer companies). Wonder if we'll see Dell step up to the plate and offer a larger percentage of their profits to these folks as a pay increase? (I'm betting not.)
I'd argue that one of the "poisons" of modern society is all the garbage where "nobody loses". We have contests in school these days where everyone wins a prize.... Instead of coming in "last" and "losing", you get a 4th. or 5th. place ribbon. Instead of letting people score poorly on tests, you've got people trying to change the scores around. And instead of "hurting someone's feelings" - there's this whole thing of labeling them as having some sort of "disorder", implying they can't help their actions and they need special consideration/treatment.
If this generation is lacking some of THAT empathy, that's a step in the right direction!