I don't really agree.... What I mean is, we the consumers simply have energy needs for the things we use in daily life. The only logical course of action is to go with whichever options are readily available to use and at the lowest cost. I don't think I "owe" the nation, the world, or anyone else some sort of obligation to ignore the standards currently in use, and pay FAR more to use an alternative.
It's not that we have a "desire to consume oil". We have a desire to retain a certain standard of living. Without oil, truck, rail and air deliveries of goods come to a halt. Transportation as we know it stops. That alone is a critical blow... not even factoring in things like people's need for climate control in their dwellings.
And "carbon credits" and all this other "Green initiative" stuff? Mark my words.... it's a lot of "feel good" nonsense for the general public to eat up, and a big profit center for others. It won't amount to a hill of beans at addressing any real issues. A lot of people who are unemployed or underemployed right now are salivating at the prospects of finding high paying new jobs in one of these govt. mandated "Green" industries. But it's artificially sensible.... (EG. We have a construction company in town called Alberici. A while back, they made local news headlines everywhere when they put up a big wind turbine and started bragging out their environmentally efficient new building. The "Green" advocates hailed it as a great move that more businesses needed to follow, etc. In reality? They mainly did it to score a big tax credit and some free P.R. The thing was so expensive to implement and returns relatively little payback on electricity savings - it's not really practical for purely what it DOES for them. Someone recently interviewed their management, asking if they were considering putting up a second one, and they sort of laughed, and said "No plans right now.") If it wasn't for govt. making tax credits or paying subsidies to keep these things afloat, they simply wouldn't make any economic sense to do.
See... the thing is, eventually, they won't HAVE an alternative to putting up with people making copies of their works without getting paid for every single one!
The harder they push to *force* payment from everyone involved, the more interest will form in using technologies that render it impossible to determine WHO downloaded which file. Right now, those technologies are slower, more complicated to use, and seen as "more trouble than they're worth"... but these lawsuits will act as motivation for that to change.
THEN where will they be? Right back at square 1 again, and forced to do what they NEEDED to do all along; come up with alternate business models.
The fact is, these guys are over-valuing their products and trying to maximize their profits with coercion (force of copyright law), vs. offering entertainment at a lower "optimal price" for the best value to the consumer. Why do I say this? Let me explain:
1. New movie is produced and heads to the theaters. Assuming it's not a total flop (their fault for doing a poor job with it), it will earn X number of million dollars in the first month or so it's in the box office. 2. Only after that window of time is closed, they THEN release the movie on DVD to rake in ADDITIONAL profits. At this point, it's effectively on store shelves for an indefinite length of time. 3. Movie comes to pay-per-view satellite and cable TV somewhere shortly after the DVD release, where still MORE profits are made. 4. Finally, movie is considered "old" and gets shown on regular movie channels or local stations (where a little more money changes hands for the broadcast rights).
All of this generally allows for all the actors, actresses, film production crew, light and sound guys, editing techs, screen-writers, director and producer to earn a very good living and for the movie studio to make a big profit after all those folks are paid. Unlike the work most of us do, royalties KEEP getting paid out to people LONG after they're done doing ANY of the work that was required to make the film. It's literally "money for nothing" at that point. (Imagine if your boss paid you for the rest of your life in royalty installments, long after you quit working for them, because you were "entitled to a piece of the future profits made with the aid of projects you once worked on"?)
Now, factoring all of this in, they're STILL complaining about "piracy" doing irreparable damage, etc. etc.? Sorry if my heart isn't bleeding for them..... If they feel their profits aren't what they "could/should be", they could start with revamping the whole movie theater system we've got today. An awful lot of people I know are passing on going to see movies simply because it's too much of a financial commitment. (By the time you buy some popcorn and a couple drinks, plus a couple tickets, you're into things for $40 or so easily.)
I'm not so sure.... I think there's always going to be a market for inexpensive "dead tree" publications, geared towards pleasure-reading. The web is a great, powerful resource - but it still has some "barriers to entry", including a need for a relatively expensive electronic device to view it with and some type of connectivity. Until we reach the point envisioned in cyberpunk novels where we're all networked to the "grid" with chips implanted in our brains, a paper magazine is going to be really practical in many situations where electronic readers just aren't.
What about those camping trips where the *point* is to get "unplugged" from everything? You still might want to lay in your tent or outside in a hammock and read for a while. What about airline flights where you're asked to "please turn off all electronic devices until cruising altitude has been reached"? Or how about just wanting your reading material to be on a relatively low $ value format, so you won't care if something gets spilled on it or it gets rained on, stepped on or stolen?
All this being said? I'm actually a big fan of this whole e-publication thing. I bought an iPad 3G the first day it was released and I've read several books on my iPhone in the past, too. The problem I have with it is that publishers haven't gotten creative enough with the possibilities for the digital format. Stand-alone apps that constitute 1 issue per app? Terrible idea! For the iPad, specifically? They need to offer magazines so they interact the same way the electronic book downloads do. I want my magazine issues to display on the virtual bookshelf, the same way the e-books do -- and hopefully not use up a whole lot more storage space than the e-books do, either! I also want to see them do new, interesting things with digital versions of magazines. Don't just imitate paper copies, or add 90's multimedia B.S. How about dynamic content? As I've suggested on other forums, a magazine like Consumer Reports would be AWESOME in a digital format if you knew the reviews in a given issue were updated to add new products in the category over the length of time you subscribed!
Really, I don't know what some people were expecting, who are whining that digital magazines look "just like something they could have done years ago on the web". Of COURSE they do! Once you progress from black and white to color, from text to images, and from images to video and even sound (which the web did already), what other kinds of content are there to display? And WHY would a small computer tablet enable forms of it that a full-size computer and display couldn't do? A book or magazine is only as good as its written content, and that will never change. That's what it's all about really.... so leveraging the advantages of digital media should include promising more timely content, and as I suggested, content updated dynamically. (Remember how the newspapers used to release several editions as the day progressed, so you could buy one with the latest news items in it? Again, a digital version would presumably deliver you the news as early in the AM as you'd ever want to read it, followed by automatic article updates and corrections throughout the day.)
The problem with doing a security freeze on your account is that many places will charge you a fee every time they have to un-freeze it to run your credit when you DO authorize it.
Like you say, it's probably fine if you have no intentions of applying for any credit or loans for quite a while. But it gets annoying when, say, a person decides to buy a new car and finds out they're hit with a $25 charge just so the dealership can verify they're a good credit risk.
I'd think this makes no practical sense with current internal combustion engine designs. Where you might want to look into such a technology would be with all electric vehicles, though one wonders why they wouldn't just be designed to ALWAYS tun off when you come to a complete stop for more than a few seconds?
I don't see how *anyone* can reasonably claim that starting the engine more often wouldn't increase wear on the starter? As it is, those things are basically rated to only so many cycles of operation. If your car has upwards of 100,000 miles on it, chances are REAL good you're going to be buying a replacement starter soon, if you didn't do so already.
And of course, you've got all the other factors mentioned -- such as safety issues. (How quickly will people crack the method used to signal vehicles to shut off their engines and start using it for other purposes? Seems like a bad thing if the criminal element can randomly shut down a car engine and proceed to carjack the owner?)
It's all relative though. When you say, now, that "you certainly wouldn't do it" about the job, you say that from a completely different country and situation, I bet. (With a nick like "commodore64_love", I'm betting you're NOT living in China presently.....)
Workers being denied their 10 minute breaks? Not good, obviously, but I see people right here in the USA purposely skipping both their breaks AND lunch hours, because they feel they've got "too much business to catch up on" or what-not, too. Most of the time, they survive just fine... even if they're a bit over-stressed and over-worked.
I bet I can also find a LOT of people working here who'd write similar things in their diary.... Workplace hell? That describes a TON of jobs around here!
If you're surrounded by a mentality that the worker never earns more than what they're paying there and things are "just that way"... you're more likely to accept a job like that as just the "norm".
I know you're just trying to make a point... but seriously, it's pretty doubtful the CEO had any real clue about the shortcuts that were taken that compromised safety in this situation.
CEO's usually worry about the high level decisions. Someone's decision to remove one of the lock-down devices on part of a containment cap and replace it with a dummy version to make demo tests easier? Probably NOT something that was ever kicked up to him to sign off on.....
The bigger the company, in fact, the LESS likely a CEO is informed of day-to-day changes in operations. Holding a corporation financially accountable for screw-ups? Absolutely! But pinning blame on one person, because he's the one who got elected to serve as the head of the company? Not really logical. (He or she is already going to be punished by that whole "financially accountable" part -- since that's the performance metric his/her job performance is usually judged by.)
Personally, I think it's amazing that one of our solutions for these spills is still to "burn it off" from the surface of the ocean. Then another alternative involves dumping bacteria into the water that will "eat" the oil.
Why haven't we done more to build devices to collect up the oil that's spilled (since oil and water don't mix anyway, you'd think their separation wouldn't be a huge technological hurdle), vs. wasting a natural resource we've already gone to such great lengths to collect in the first place?
Seems to me the best course of action would have been to plug up the well ASAP, followed by recovering as much oil as possible that leaked to the surface, BEFORE it had days or weeks to float all over the place with the changing currents.....
You're basing all of this on a philosophical belief of yours that a content creator has a right to impose specific rules on the consumption of their work, and therefore, the consumers MUST adhere to those rules at all times, or simply deny themselves the use of the content.
I'd say that's unrealistic when you're talking about intangibles. A more "workable" scenario is to say that content creators have every right to ATTEMPT to impose whichever rules of usage they wish to impose, but it's not ethical to demand that government agencies (funded by our collective tax dollars) be held accountable for enforcing those rules. If you feel someone is infringing on your work to the extent you need to address it through the legal system, fine. File a civil lawsuit against them and deal with it in that manner! Pay for your own lawyer(s) and court costs! But we need to decriminalize all of this stuff, pronto - so groups like our FBI aren't turned into bill collectors for everyone creating IP who thinks they weren't paid for a duplication of it.
Why do we legally protect ideas in the first place? Traditionally, it seems clear it was to give content a chance to prosper, because it was deemed a net benefit to all. (We're not so concerned that the content creator is guaranteed a long-term profit from creating said content. Rather, we're concerned that there's at least a window of opportunity for them to profit with minimal interference, so more works will be created inside our nation and everyone will wind up with a richer experience for it.)
Truthfully, as a content creator, the sensible thing to do is keep creating on a regular basis, vs. worrying about those who copy your works without paying your asking price. The "sweet spot" of profit is in that window when your content is fresh and new anyway. If people could come to grips with this fact, and accept it as a natural consequence of doing this type of business - we'd all get along much better (and they'd likely find many of those "illegally redistributed" copies of their work served a positive purpose in providing free advertising/marketing, to create awareness so future works would be purchased by new customers).
While I'll be among the first to say that I hate people who go around with a sense of entitlement towards almost anything -- I think that's often a misused term when we're talking about "copyright infringement".
Do SOME people go around thinking the "industry" owes them free copies of anything they want? I'm sure they do. But MOST people I know simply feel that as soon as you start trying to sell intellectual property (especially for entertainment purposes), you've entered a little bit different business model than the type for physical property.
If you really corner most creators of works (whether it be a musician, a software developer, a movie producer or a book author), they'll usually admit (eventually) that they don't have any "absolutes" when it comes to the ethics of "piracy". EG. If they put out a music album and it doesn't do very well in stores UNTIL p2p sharing and/or illicit use of it as background music to YouTube videos helps it take off, they'll probably condone THAT piracy. By the same token, if the publishing industry starts throwing around statistics about huge losses incurred from all the copying going on, the artist/creator is likely to get more worked up about it and decry it as evil.
So effectively, that amounts to selective enforcement.... They're against duplicating their works without paying IF and WHEN they think it's cutting into their potential earnings, BUT they'll look the other way if it appears to be more of a help than a harm. They just want to maximize their profits.
I'd say that mentality is *identical* to the one most of us have about copying the works! We're generally ok with supporting the content creators who bring us quality works we enjoy, but we also have financial concerns and limitations of our own. So we *selectively* pay for the things we feel deserve our hard-earned money, and other things, we copy because we know it's not depriving another customer of the ability to buy one for him/herself.
Anyone trying too hard to put a stop to this and DEMANDING that each and every copy a person makes is paid for is "biting the hands that feed them", and it winds up being counterproductive.
(As is so often pointed out, but never sufficiently addressed - what about situations where a work was paid for initially, but formats changed and the user simply wants to preserve the work on the currently popular replacement format? I have a bunch of bought cassette tapes of music, but only one remaining tape player that's dying on me. Why would I pay full price to re-buy these albums on CD or as purchased MP3 tracks? I shouldn't have to pay a second time for the licensing to listen to them? All I should be paying is a menial cost for the distribution and related media it might be distributed on. Therefore, you're darn right I'm going to seek out free downloads of those tracks.)
I don't get all the bellyaching about companies moving forward quickly with improvements and changes?
If they didn't do this, people would complain that buying a new machine from them sucks, because it doesn't feature items X, Y or Z.
For as long as I've done anything related to corporate I.T. - businesses have been depreciating their computer workstation assets on a 3 year basis (maybe 4 if they stretch things out). If they believe a computer has "zero value" after 3-4 years, it's no wonder you're finding a 5 year old one to be less functional than you'd like....
Here's the thing; Mac users have taken a certain pride in bragging about the longevity of their machines, vs. their Windows counterparts. For quite some time, that had validity, for a few reasons. For one thing, the Mac systems really were built with above-average quality of construction. (So were the original IBM PC's and PC XT's, with those solid metal 5lb. keyboards and steel cases, etc. But the PC clone market quickly became commodity-based, so people were more interested in something with cheap sleeve-bearing cooling fans, a power supply JUST adequate to power it up, and a thin plastic or sheet metal case that cost as little as possible.) So you had a lot of cheap PC clone desktops out there that were literally beat up and falling apart after they got a few years of use in a school computer lab or what-not, while the comparable Macs just needed a good scrubbing with a Brillo pad and some 409 cleaner, and they looked good again, and kept on chugging. Additionally, the MacOS had a more limited selection of software -- and the "staple item" apps were usually updated regularly for a long period of time, but not written to push the limits of available hardware. (Their authors knew their sales numbers were going to be roughly 1/10th. of what a Windows counterpart program might net... so they weren't going to whittle that down any further by saying "only works with the latest Mac with such-and-such specs!") Therefore, people with older Macs could keep running the latest software for longer than most Windows users could, and that gave them a feeling of getting more "value" out of their Mac purchases.
But times have changed, and today's Macs use the same Intel processors that the latest Windows PCs get (sometimes even a little bit earlier, thanks to exclusive deals Apple and Intel worked out). Like it or not, OS X and modern Macs are on the same upgrade path/treadmill as everything else out there now. As I say though, I actually LIKE it, because it means a new Mac purchase gives you much more of a cutting edge computer while still getting all the benefits of their operating system (which I vastly prefer to Windows). Just resell your old hardware on a 3 or 4 year cycle, while you can still get some money out of the old stuff, and you'll do fine. (The money you get from the used system sales will offset the cost of upgrading more often, basically.)
I don't doubt you, but do you really think it's because the light from the screen fools your brain into thinking it's still daytime, or do you think it's something completely different?
Personally, I think a lot of people just need to "wind down" before they can get to sleep. They can't go from doing something mentally stimulating to sleeping, just like that. People can fall asleep watching TV because it's a passive activity... but using your computer requires some interaction and mental processing.
Somewhat valid point, except the people with those total "dead end" jobs are responsible for furthering themselves. The grocery store or janitorial service or landscaping firm isn't going to pay for their education or have any vested interest in helping them advance their careers and quit the jobs they were hired for!
The reason it seems relatively "more unfair" when people in I.T. get treated like crap is because they already did all the things society told them to do.... They got an education and invested a lot of personal time and effort in learning and keeping up with their field. They're *supposed* to be people earning a higher wage (just like those checkout clerks and ditch diggers were promised they could do too, if they'd apply themselves and get an education, etc.). And yet, here we are, demanding 60 hour weeks from them, and/or expecting them to be on-call over entire weekends or evenings, via cellphone or pager.
I'm not trying to exaggerate the plight of the I.T. worker by saying all of this, so much as I'm pointing out the grim "bigger picture" it paints.... Perhaps our country isn't in a position to really sustain more than a relatively small percentage of citizens earning jobs paying far above minimum wage?
Actually, a whole bunch of us REALLY wish one of you experts at ECM hacking would figure out the Delphi branded ECU found in the Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8 V6!
It's a great little sports car at a reasonable price-point, but so far, it seems like its engine is held back from its full potential because the ECU can't be directly reprogrammed. (Apparently, some folks in Korea have already cracked its ECU and done some custom tuning so they could add things like superchargers or turbos... but here in the USA, we can't seem to get our hands on any of that info. I suspect part of it is purposeful on their part. I think the Korean tuning community rather enjoys keeping a lead over people in the USA for as long as possible, so they can keep taunting us with YouTube videos of their accomplishments, etc.)
A company called Road Race Motorsports released a couple different "piggyback" boxes that claimed to add as much as 20HP or so by plugging-in between the ECU connector and one of the sensors on the car -- but everyone on the car forums testing them out has seen negligible results, and sometimes dyno tests show power LOSSES with these things. As best as we can determine, the boxes are functioning like they're supposed to, but modifying the data coming from just one sensor (such as the mass airflow sensor) isn't enough to really trick the ECU into advancing timing or changing air/fuel ratios. Apparently, it sees unchanged readings from other sensors on the car and assumes the input is flawed, and starts disregarding it or acting on it in unexpected ways.
Sure, but don't we ALWAYS adjust our behavior to devices? (Oh, I'm sorry... some of your engineering and software developer types out there think YOUR creations are so perfectly crafted, they just meet everyone's needs intuitively and without compromise, right?!)
Seriously... who wouldn't like a cellphone that never worries you with a battery running down and needing to be swapped with a charged one, or recharged? Who wouldn't like a fast network connection anywhere, without any caps or usage restrictions, and a display that's always able to show your video in its original resolution, no matter how high it was?
I *always* feel like I'm making compromises when using a cellphone, no matter WHICH model it is. Data entry is a pain on all of them, to some extent, for starters.
The iPhone, like any other device, forces a lot of limitations on the user -- and he/she has to learn to adjust to those, in order to effectively use it. Unless those restrictions are unacceptably bad, though, they're par for the course. I don't think things like "lack of multitasking" are that big a deal at all, really. They're more of selling points the competition wants to hype up than anything else. People's brains really don't multitask to begin with, so merely using a cellphone while doing anything else involves a lot of "task switching" for us, and a relative lack of concentration/attention paid to BOTH activities. We'd be better off not trying so hard to make matters even worse, by demanding our phones let us listen to music while reading/replying to emails, etc.
Very true... but I'd also point out that Facebook is achieving "staying power" by letting 3rd. party software interact with it. For example, Apple's iPhoto software allows automatic uploading of photo collections to Facebook with a single click. These things make Facebook feel more like a "free hosting service" than just another expendable social networking site. It becomes the vested interest of MANY people for their site to stay online, because otherwise, functionality in other software packages is broken or reduced.
(YouTube has done the same thing, with many video editing packages supporting one-click movie uploads.)
And regarding the "sharing of private information", I think there are varying degrees of "private". You can't really lump it all into one category. Your basic information (such as your first and last name, city and state you live in, and even a basic head-shot photo of yourself) are really not that big a deal to publish for the world to see. Unless you live underground in some secret building and use an alias every time you communicate with people, anyone who cares can EASILY gather this same data about you, Facebook or not. Going beyond that, you get into details of your daily life - which vary wildly in how "safe" they may be to publish online. I don't think it's going to matter if you update your status to tell people you tried a certain type of Campbell's soup and really like it, or that you just got back from taking your kid out to a movie. On the other hand, it's proven to be detrimental to one's employment prospects to post drunk/high pictures of oneself, or to talk/brag about illegal activities one might have taken part in. Other details (like telling everyone you're going to be gone on vacation for 2 weeks) might not be as harmless as they seem. Potentially, you just announced that your home is safe to burglarize because nobody will be home for a while....
I like Facebook and find it entertaining AND useful, but I always try to be cautious what I put up there. Jokes are fine, for example, except I try to refrain from posting any that might be taken the wrong way and offend certain people in my "friends" list. I post a lot of political content and make commentary on some of it, because I welcome intelligent debate on those topics and hope I've managed to nudge others to actually *care* about certain things going on around them. But understandably, this could be "risky" material for others to post, depending on their job situation, etc.
Except I have to disagree.... It's a valid theory, but you *really* foresee a future where everyone wants to develop their apps for the iPhone using Flash, just to keep it cross-platform compatible??
This seems rather like the Cider-ports of Windows games for Mac OS X. Sure, you can go that route and achieve cross-platform compatibility - but performance and stability take a huge hit. EA tried it with a few titles, but it didn't exactly take the world by storm....
This cyber-security stuff is largely nonsense, IMO.
The fact is, the Internet was designed from the ground up to support flexible and open standards, and it makes certain assumptions about the credibility and honesty of those put in charge of its routing. (I was just reading an article complaining about the lack of "action" taken after the Bush administration did a security review of the Internet back in the 2003 time-frame and determined it was, indeed, quite possible to take down the entire Internet in a matter of hours or less, thanks to weaknesses in how traffic is routed. The fact is though, all the major ISPs expressed NO interest in changing the current system -- because they realize that would still require a "central authority" someplace to determine the "correct" routes traffic should follow to get from point A to B. The current system is rather like trying to drive on a road trip from, say, Dallas to San Francisco, except you have no road map in advance. You simply start out on your journey and follow the road signs as you go, until you arrive. Except in the case of the Internet, even those "road signs" aren't controlled by any central authority. If someone accidentally or purposely changes one, traffic gets shunted in the wrong direction (possibly to a destination router that just black-holes all of it, since it wasn't expecting it).
As we can see though, it generally works quite well, because the people doing most of the heavy-duty routing are ISPs with a vested interest in making sure it keeps performing well. If and when something goes wrong, they tend to pick up the telephone and start making phone calls, getting people to intervene and make manual routing changes to eliminate the problem.
As you look past this supposed "security weakness" and get more detailed about security of individual destination points on the Internet, you see a similar situation. People bitch and moan about security issues (PCI compliance, for example), and spend thousands of dollars trying to address it. Yet in the end, you still HAVE to place trust in your employees. If they're willing to let outsiders in to get information you're trying to protect? All bets are off, no matter how much you spend on the latest "next generation firewall solution" or what-not. (Remember the huge credit card breach AOL had a while back? Turned out to be an inside job.)
Right now, as an I.T. manager, I'm seeing a large number of start-up and obscure "computer security" businesses trying to get my attention. I was just invited to listen to a presentation given by Palo Alto Networks, for example, followed by a free pre-screening of Iron Man 2. (Yep, I went.... not a bad way to get our attention, actually!) But the presentation honestly didn't tell me anything new. It was full of a bunch of well-heeled customers of theirs talking about liking the device, and their founder making a few rather arrogant comments - suggesting they were going to be huge in the future, because unlike most companies doing firewalls, they were focused on "innovation". He commented that "Checkpoint hasn't innovated in at least a decade." and "Cisco has NEVER innovated at all. They just bought a bunch of start-ups."
I can't speak for the quality (or lack thereof) of their product, but I CAN say that it was exactly what I was expecting them to try to sell.... another "next gen firewall/traffic flow controller" device that tries to "wow" middle and upper management types by acting like they've unlocked a huge revelation, by realizing that port and IP based firewall rules aren't the complete answer for companies today.
Funny, but I think Rapid7 was just calling, trying to get me to attend a seminar about THEIR product that was essentially the same idea, and to hear them talk, THEY thought of it all first, too.
A lot of people see a chance to grab some money thanks to fear of the unknown out there, and they may have products that really DO address specific scenarios really well. But I'm convinced most companies would b
The Macbook Air was a very *weak* product release on Apple's part. (Heck, so was the AppleTV box... but nobody's really too concerned about that either.)
I think you're going to find that the iPad addresses some of the same market-segment that the Air was after, though, but also MANY more users that the Air wasn't even a consideration for. (IMHO, the Macbook Air filled 2 different niches. #1 was the user who simply wanted a light, portable computer to act as sort of a "satellite platform" to desktop machines they used as primaries. In other words, they did most of their data creation/editing on their desktop, but occasionally wanted a small machine to offload some of that data to, to travel with it or access/use it in parts of the house other than at their desk. The iPad will probably cover 95% of those needs, often better than the Air... but 2 years ago, it wasn't an option.... #2 was the user who wanted a thin, light portable because he/she traveled extensively, and was as concerned about style and the impression they made as anything else. The Macbook Air still serves this audience pretty well.
My feelings as well.... I just plunked down the money for a 64GB iPad 3G, which was quite frankly a lot MORE expensive than most netbooks or half the notebooks out there. Why? Because I'm a believer in the idea that it's in a class of its own... not just a "netbook killer/competitor" or what-not.
I've never had a netbook or a notebook that was worth a darn if you had to use it while standing up, for example. And I wind up doing quite a bit of that when I go out someplace and have to wait in long lines. (Ever notice how a lot of people try to take a notebook computer with them to use on lunch breaks during the business day, and then they waste a good 10 or 15 minutes in line to order their food, while carrying the thing under one arm, closed and shut off or in "sleep" mode?)
And furthermore, the respective strengths and weaknesses of a tablet type computer like the iPad depend a LOT on the software. If it's intelligently designed for the touch-screen environment, it may be GREAT. If it's a port of something designed for a keyboard and mouse originally? It may be frustrating and useless. People saying the iPad is no good for gaming, for example, are just focusing on certain types of games and not others. I was just playing "Crazy Birds HD" on mine earlier tonight, and it's IDEAL for a touch-screen environment. I think the board games lend themselves extremely well to the touch-screen setup too. Scrabble for iPad does an excellent job of demoing the possibilities, including letting multiple players use iPod touches or iPhones as the holders of their letter tiles, and the screen turning so its oriented properly for each player sitting at a table with the iPad in the middle, as each player takes a turn.
The iPad is also "instant on", most of the time. I understand a notebook/netbook is similar if you just leave it powered on but put it to sleep whenever you're not using it for a few minutes... but that whole sleep/wake thing doesn't work nearly as well as the custom OS in an iPad or iPhone. It'll eat your battery up a lot faster, for starters... (Hence the "hibernate" mode most portables offer along with plain "sleep".... but coming out of hibernation takes a little while as the system reloads the saved state of the system from the hard drive.)
Lastly, even *if* I want to use a full-size bluetooth keyboard with the iPad... at least I can do so on-demand and have a "best of both worlds" scenario where I can carry just the tablet when I like, but use it more like a traditional computer when I like. With a netbook, I'm still stuck carrying around the keyboard at ALL times and can't just opt to do everything by touching the screen.
A typical individual wouldn't have a whole lot of unique information to store in the first place.... Basically, a collection of photos and some video from a few vacation trips or holidays, and some handwritten notes.... Maybe some artistic works (a few original songs or paintings, or ?) if he/she was interested in such endeavors. Oh, and your tax records and resume. But let's face it. Most of us are FAR more of content consumers than creators. Content creation usually results in mass re-distribution of the original work, as others want to enjoy a copy of it.
I don't see any harm with this either, since duplication is the best way to protect against data loss. (When my parents were trying to trace their family history, they reached a dead-end because a library had burnt up in a fire that contained the only known records of some of the people they needed to research. With so much data going digital, on media that's practically EXPECTED to fail after less than 10 years of regular use? You better believe we need lots of duplicates out there!)
Agreed about CoD 4. As a Mac OS X user, I find myself playing CoD 4 quite often, to this day. Partially, that's because I own the native OS X version and there aren't a whole lot of good game options for native OS X out there. But it's ALSO largely because it's a good enough game to have that kind of "staying power". To this day, I keep finding custom servers to connect to that download all sorts of modified maps and games. Many are taken from mods done for earlier 3D shooter titles (like Unreal Tournament) -- but they're still just as fun, if not better than ever, on a more modern game title.
(Just last week, I played a "freeze tag" version of a Team Deathmatch game on a custom CoD 4 server. It was a LOT of fun, and I wasn't expecting it. When you shot an enemy, you froze them in a block of ice. Then they were only able to sit and observe the game going on around them, unless/until a team-mate was able to run up to them and hold down a button to thaw the ice (took a few seconds to fully melt the ice too - so there was a risk of getting shot while in the middle of a rescue).
With the restrictions on Internet multiplayer in the newer CoD titles, all of this is completely "out the window" and makes me uninterested in buying them -- at least at anywhere near their asking prices.
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I don't really agree.... What I mean is, we the consumers simply have energy needs for the things we use in daily life. The only logical course of action is to go with whichever options are readily available to use and at the lowest cost. I don't think I "owe" the nation, the world, or anyone else some sort of obligation to ignore the standards currently in use, and pay FAR more to use an alternative.
It's not that we have a "desire to consume oil". We have a desire to retain a certain standard of living. Without oil, truck, rail and air deliveries of goods come to a halt. Transportation as we know it stops. That alone is a critical blow ... not even factoring in things like people's need for climate control in their dwellings.
And "carbon credits" and all this other "Green initiative" stuff? Mark my words.... it's a lot of "feel good" nonsense for the general public to eat up, and a big profit center for others. It won't amount to a hill of beans at addressing any real issues. A lot of people who are unemployed or underemployed right now are salivating at the prospects of finding high paying new jobs in one of these govt. mandated "Green" industries. But it's artificially sensible.... (EG. We have a construction company in town called Alberici. A while back, they made local news headlines everywhere when they put up a big wind turbine and started bragging out their environmentally efficient new building. The "Green" advocates hailed it as a great move that more businesses needed to follow, etc. In reality? They mainly did it to score a big tax credit and some free P.R. The thing was so expensive to implement and returns relatively little payback on electricity savings - it's not really practical for purely what it DOES for them. Someone recently interviewed their management, asking if they were considering putting up a second one, and they sort of laughed, and said "No plans right now.") If it wasn't for govt. making tax credits or paying subsidies to keep these things afloat, they simply wouldn't make any economic sense to do.
See... the thing is, eventually, they won't HAVE an alternative to putting up with people making copies of their works without getting paid for every single one!
The harder they push to *force* payment from everyone involved, the more interest will form in using technologies that render it impossible to determine WHO downloaded which file. Right now, those technologies are slower, more complicated to use, and seen as "more trouble than they're worth" ... but these lawsuits will act as motivation for that to change.
THEN where will they be? Right back at square 1 again, and forced to do what they NEEDED to do all along; come up with alternate business models.
The fact is, these guys are over-valuing their products and trying to maximize their profits with coercion (force of copyright law), vs. offering entertainment at a lower "optimal price" for the best value to the consumer. Why do I say this? Let me explain:
1. New movie is produced and heads to the theaters. Assuming it's not a total flop (their fault for doing a poor job with it), it will earn X number of million dollars in the first month or so it's in the box office.
2. Only after that window of time is closed, they THEN release the movie on DVD to rake in ADDITIONAL profits. At this point, it's effectively on store shelves for an indefinite length of time.
3. Movie comes to pay-per-view satellite and cable TV somewhere shortly after the DVD release, where still MORE profits are made.
4. Finally, movie is considered "old" and gets shown on regular movie channels or local stations (where a little more money changes hands for the broadcast rights).
All of this generally allows for all the actors, actresses, film production crew, light and sound guys, editing techs, screen-writers, director and producer to earn a very good living and for the movie studio to make a big profit after all those folks are paid. Unlike the work most of us do, royalties KEEP getting paid out to people LONG after they're done doing ANY of the work that was required to make the film. It's literally "money for nothing" at that point. (Imagine if your boss paid you for the rest of your life in royalty installments, long after you quit working for them, because you were "entitled to a piece of the future profits made with the aid of projects you once worked on"?)
Now, factoring all of this in, they're STILL complaining about "piracy" doing irreparable damage, etc. etc.? Sorry if my heart isn't bleeding for them..... If they feel their profits aren't what they "could/should be", they could start with revamping the whole movie theater system we've got today. An awful lot of people I know are passing on going to see movies simply because it's too much of a financial commitment. (By the time you buy some popcorn and a couple drinks, plus a couple tickets, you're into things for $40 or so easily.)
I'm not so sure.... I think there's always going to be a market for inexpensive "dead tree" publications, geared towards pleasure-reading. The web is a great, powerful resource - but it still has some "barriers to entry", including a need for a relatively expensive electronic device to view it with and some type of connectivity. Until we reach the point envisioned in cyberpunk novels where we're all networked to the "grid" with chips implanted in our brains, a paper magazine is going to be really practical in many situations where electronic readers just aren't.
What about those camping trips where the *point* is to get "unplugged" from everything? You still might want to lay in your tent or outside in a hammock and read for a while. What about airline flights where you're asked to "please turn off all electronic devices until cruising altitude has been reached"? Or how about just wanting your reading material to be on a relatively low $ value format, so you won't care if something gets spilled on it or it gets rained on, stepped on or stolen?
All this being said? I'm actually a big fan of this whole e-publication thing. I bought an iPad 3G the first day it was released and I've read several books on my iPhone in the past, too. The problem I have with it is that publishers haven't gotten creative enough with the possibilities for the digital format. Stand-alone apps that constitute 1 issue per app? Terrible idea! For the iPad, specifically? They need to offer magazines so they interact the same way the electronic book downloads do. I want my magazine issues to display on the virtual bookshelf, the same way the e-books do -- and hopefully not use up a whole lot more storage space than the e-books do, either! I also want to see them do new, interesting things with digital versions of magazines. Don't just imitate paper copies, or add 90's multimedia B.S. How about dynamic content? As I've suggested on other forums, a magazine like Consumer Reports would be AWESOME in a digital format if you knew the reviews in a given issue were updated to add new products in the category over the length of time you subscribed!
Really, I don't know what some people were expecting, who are whining that digital magazines look "just like something they could have done years ago on the web". Of COURSE they do! Once you progress from black and white to color, from text to images, and from images to video and even sound (which the web did already), what other kinds of content are there to display? And WHY would a small computer tablet enable forms of it that a full-size computer and display couldn't do? A book or magazine is only as good as its written content, and that will never change. That's what it's all about really .... so leveraging the advantages of digital media should include promising more timely content, and as I suggested, content updated dynamically. (Remember how the newspapers used to release several editions as the day progressed, so you could buy one with the latest news items in it? Again, a digital version would presumably deliver you the news as early in the AM as you'd ever want to read it, followed by automatic article updates and corrections throughout the day.)
The problem with doing a security freeze on your account is that many places will charge you a fee every time they have to un-freeze it to run your credit when you DO authorize it.
Like you say, it's probably fine if you have no intentions of applying for any credit or loans for quite a while. But it gets annoying when, say, a person decides to buy a new car and finds out they're hit with a $25 charge just so the dealership can verify they're a good credit risk.
That's probably why Apple just put together a new data center in North Carolina:
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100222/that%E2%80%99s-apple%E2%80%99s-new-data-center-where%E2%80%99s-the-giant-glass-cube/
I'd think this makes no practical sense with current internal combustion engine designs. Where you might want to look into such a technology would be with all electric vehicles, though one wonders why they wouldn't just be designed to ALWAYS tun off when you come to a complete stop for more than a few seconds?
I don't see how *anyone* can reasonably claim that starting the engine more often wouldn't increase wear on the starter? As it is, those things are basically rated to only so many cycles of operation. If your car has upwards of 100,000 miles on it, chances are REAL good you're going to be buying a replacement starter soon, if you didn't do so already.
And of course, you've got all the other factors mentioned -- such as safety issues. (How quickly will people crack the method used to signal vehicles to shut off their engines and start using it for other purposes? Seems like a bad thing if the criminal element can randomly shut down a car engine and proceed to carjack the owner?)
It's all relative though. When you say, now, that "you certainly wouldn't do it" about the job, you say that from a completely different country and situation, I bet. (With a nick like "commodore64_love", I'm betting you're NOT living in China presently.....)
Workers being denied their 10 minute breaks? Not good, obviously, but I see people right here in the USA purposely skipping both their breaks AND lunch hours, because they feel they've got "too much business to catch up on" or what-not, too. Most of the time, they survive just fine ... even if they're a bit over-stressed and over-worked.
I bet I can also find a LOT of people working here who'd write similar things in their diary .... Workplace hell? That describes a TON of jobs around here!
If you're surrounded by a mentality that the worker never earns more than what they're paying there and things are "just that way" ... you're more likely to accept a job like that as just the "norm".
I know you're just trying to make a point ... but seriously, it's pretty doubtful the CEO had any real clue about the shortcuts that were taken that compromised safety in this situation.
CEO's usually worry about the high level decisions. Someone's decision to remove one of the lock-down devices on part of a containment cap and replace it with a dummy version to make demo tests easier? Probably NOT something that was ever kicked up to him to sign off on.....
The bigger the company, in fact, the LESS likely a CEO is informed of day-to-day changes in operations. Holding a corporation financially accountable for screw-ups? Absolutely! But pinning blame on one person, because he's the one who got elected to serve as the head of the company? Not really logical. (He or she is already going to be punished by that whole "financially accountable" part -- since that's the performance metric his/her job performance is usually judged by.)
Personally, I think it's amazing that one of our solutions for these spills is still to "burn it off" from the surface of the ocean. Then another alternative involves dumping bacteria into the water that will "eat" the oil.
Why haven't we done more to build devices to collect up the oil that's spilled (since oil and water don't mix anyway, you'd think their separation wouldn't be a huge technological hurdle), vs. wasting a natural resource we've already gone to such great lengths to collect in the first place?
Seems to me the best course of action would have been to plug up the well ASAP, followed by recovering as much oil as possible that leaked to the surface, BEFORE it had days or weeks to float all over the place with the changing currents.....
I was just wondering why this wasn't handled with a work-around, vs. dealing with all the hassle?
A single underscore does wonders: geek_girl
Or the "even more hip" geekgrrl ?
Even the more passe minus sign would do: geek-girl
If she's into copyright infringement, may I suggest: g33kg1rl ?
You're basing all of this on a philosophical belief of yours that a content creator has a right to impose specific rules on the consumption of their work, and therefore, the consumers MUST adhere to those rules at all times, or simply deny themselves the use of the content.
I'd say that's unrealistic when you're talking about intangibles. A more "workable" scenario is to say that content creators have every right to ATTEMPT to impose whichever rules of usage they wish to impose, but it's not ethical to demand that government agencies (funded by our collective tax dollars) be held accountable for enforcing those rules. If you feel someone is infringing on your work to the extent you need to address it through the legal system, fine. File a civil lawsuit against them and deal with it in that manner! Pay for your own lawyer(s) and court costs! But we need to decriminalize all of this stuff, pronto - so groups like our FBI aren't turned into bill collectors for everyone creating IP who thinks they weren't paid for a duplication of it.
Why do we legally protect ideas in the first place? Traditionally, it seems clear it was to give content a chance to prosper, because it was deemed a net benefit to all. (We're not so concerned that the content creator is guaranteed a long-term profit from creating said content. Rather, we're concerned that there's at least a window of opportunity for them to profit with minimal interference, so more works will be created inside our nation and everyone will wind up with a richer experience for it.)
Truthfully, as a content creator, the sensible thing to do is keep creating on a regular basis, vs. worrying about those who copy your works without paying your asking price. The "sweet spot" of profit is in that window when your content is fresh and new anyway. If people could come to grips with this fact, and accept it as a natural consequence of doing this type of business - we'd all get along much better (and they'd likely find many of those "illegally redistributed" copies of their work served a positive purpose in providing free advertising/marketing, to create awareness so future works would be purchased by new customers).
While I'll be among the first to say that I hate people who go around with a sense of entitlement towards almost anything -- I think that's often a misused term when we're talking about "copyright infringement".
Do SOME people go around thinking the "industry" owes them free copies of anything they want? I'm sure they do. But MOST people I know simply feel that as soon as you start trying to sell intellectual property (especially for entertainment purposes), you've entered a little bit different business model than the type for physical property.
If you really corner most creators of works (whether it be a musician, a software developer, a movie producer or a book author), they'll usually admit (eventually) that they don't have any "absolutes" when it comes to the ethics of "piracy". EG. If they put out a music album and it doesn't do very well in stores UNTIL p2p sharing and/or illicit use of it as background music to YouTube videos helps it take off, they'll probably condone THAT piracy. By the same token, if the publishing industry starts throwing around statistics about huge losses incurred from all the copying going on, the artist/creator is likely to get more worked up about it and decry it as evil.
So effectively, that amounts to selective enforcement.... They're against duplicating their works without paying IF and WHEN they think it's cutting into their potential earnings, BUT they'll look the other way if it appears to be more of a help than a harm. They just want to maximize their profits.
I'd say that mentality is *identical* to the one most of us have about copying the works! We're generally ok with supporting the content creators who bring us quality works we enjoy, but we also have financial concerns and limitations of our own. So we *selectively* pay for the things we feel deserve our hard-earned money, and other things, we copy because we know it's not depriving another customer of the ability to buy one for him/herself.
Anyone trying too hard to put a stop to this and DEMANDING that each and every copy a person makes is paid for is "biting the hands that feed them", and it winds up being counterproductive.
(As is so often pointed out, but never sufficiently addressed - what about situations where a work was paid for initially, but formats changed and the user simply wants to preserve the work on the currently popular replacement format? I have a bunch of bought cassette tapes of music, but only one remaining tape player that's dying on me. Why would I pay full price to re-buy these albums on CD or as purchased MP3 tracks? I shouldn't have to pay a second time for the licensing to listen to them? All I should be paying is a menial cost for the distribution and related media it might be distributed on. Therefore, you're darn right I'm going to seek out free downloads of those tracks.)
I don't get all the bellyaching about companies moving forward quickly with improvements and changes?
If they didn't do this, people would complain that buying a new machine from them sucks, because it doesn't feature items X, Y or Z.
For as long as I've done anything related to corporate I.T. - businesses have been depreciating their computer workstation assets on a 3 year basis (maybe 4 if they stretch things out). If they believe a computer has "zero value" after 3-4 years, it's no wonder you're finding a 5 year old one to be less functional than you'd like ....
Here's the thing; Mac users have taken a certain pride in bragging about the longevity of their machines, vs. their Windows counterparts. For quite some time, that had validity, for a few reasons. For one thing, the Mac systems really were built with above-average quality of construction. (So were the original IBM PC's and PC XT's, with those solid metal 5lb. keyboards and steel cases, etc. But the PC clone market quickly became commodity-based, so people were more interested in something with cheap sleeve-bearing cooling fans, a power supply JUST adequate to power it up, and a thin plastic or sheet metal case that cost as little as possible.) So you had a lot of cheap PC clone desktops out there that were literally beat up and falling apart after they got a few years of use in a school computer lab or what-not, while the comparable Macs just needed a good scrubbing with a Brillo pad and some 409 cleaner, and they looked good again, and kept on chugging. Additionally, the MacOS had a more limited selection of software -- and the "staple item" apps were usually updated regularly for a long period of time, but not written to push the limits of available hardware. (Their authors knew their sales numbers were going to be roughly 1/10th. of what a Windows counterpart program might net ... so they weren't going to whittle that down any further by saying "only works with the latest Mac with such-and-such specs!") Therefore, people with older Macs could keep running the latest software for longer than most Windows users could, and that gave them a feeling of getting more "value" out of their Mac purchases.
But times have changed, and today's Macs use the same Intel processors that the latest Windows PCs get (sometimes even a little bit earlier, thanks to exclusive deals Apple and Intel worked out). Like it or not, OS X and modern Macs are on the same upgrade path/treadmill as everything else out there now. As I say though, I actually LIKE it, because it means a new Mac purchase gives you much more of a cutting edge computer while still getting all the benefits of their operating system (which I vastly prefer to Windows). Just resell your old hardware on a 3 or 4 year cycle, while you can still get some money out of the old stuff, and you'll do fine. (The money you get from the used system sales will offset the cost of upgrading more often, basically.)
I don't doubt you, but do you really think it's because the light from the screen fools your brain into thinking it's still daytime, or do you think it's something completely different?
Personally, I think a lot of people just need to "wind down" before they can get to sleep. They can't go from doing something mentally stimulating to sleeping, just like that. People can fall asleep watching TV because it's a passive activity... but using your computer requires some interaction and mental processing.
Somewhat valid point, except the people with those total "dead end" jobs are responsible for furthering themselves. The grocery store or janitorial service or landscaping firm isn't going to pay for their education or have any vested interest in helping them advance their careers and quit the jobs they were hired for!
The reason it seems relatively "more unfair" when people in I.T. get treated like crap is because they already did all the things society told them to do.... They got an education and invested a lot of personal time and effort in learning and keeping up with their field. They're *supposed* to be people earning a higher wage (just like those checkout clerks and ditch diggers were promised they could do too, if they'd apply themselves and get an education, etc.). And yet, here we are, demanding 60 hour weeks from them, and/or expecting them to be on-call over entire weekends or evenings, via cellphone or pager.
I'm not trying to exaggerate the plight of the I.T. worker by saying all of this, so much as I'm pointing out the grim "bigger picture" it paints.... Perhaps our country isn't in a position to really sustain more than a relatively small percentage of citizens earning jobs paying far above minimum wage?
Actually, a whole bunch of us REALLY wish one of you experts at ECM hacking would figure out the Delphi branded ECU found in the Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8 V6!
It's a great little sports car at a reasonable price-point, but so far, it seems like its engine is held back from its full potential because the ECU can't be directly reprogrammed. ... but here in the USA, we can't seem to get our hands on any of that info. I suspect part of it is purposeful on their part. I think the Korean tuning community rather enjoys keeping a lead over people in the USA for as long as possible, so they can keep taunting us with YouTube videos of their accomplishments, etc.)
(Apparently, some folks in Korea have already cracked its ECU and done some custom tuning so they could add things like superchargers or turbos
A company called Road Race Motorsports released a couple different "piggyback" boxes that claimed to add as much as 20HP or so by plugging-in between the ECU connector and one of the sensors on the car -- but everyone on the car forums testing them out has seen negligible results, and sometimes dyno tests show power LOSSES with these things. As best as we can determine, the boxes are functioning like they're supposed to, but modifying the data coming from just one sensor (such as the mass airflow sensor) isn't enough to really trick the ECU into advancing timing or changing air/fuel ratios. Apparently, it sees unchanged readings from other sensors on the car and assumes the input is flawed, and starts disregarding it or acting on it in unexpected ways.
http://www.carpartslights.com/elm327-bluetooth-obdii-obd2-scanner-vagcom-can-elm-327-p-28.html
(Now you know what to look for at least, when checking to see what the crazy ex-g/f might have put in there....)
Sure, but don't we ALWAYS adjust our behavior to devices? (Oh, I'm sorry... some of your engineering and software developer types out there think YOUR creations are so perfectly crafted, they just meet everyone's needs intuitively and without compromise, right?!)
Seriously ... who wouldn't like a cellphone that never worries you with a battery running down and needing to be swapped with a charged one, or recharged? Who wouldn't like a fast network connection anywhere, without any caps or usage restrictions, and a display that's always able to show your video in its original resolution, no matter how high it was?
I *always* feel like I'm making compromises when using a cellphone, no matter WHICH model it is. Data entry is a pain on all of them, to some extent, for starters.
The iPhone, like any other device, forces a lot of limitations on the user -- and he/she has to learn to adjust to those, in order to effectively use it. Unless those restrictions are unacceptably bad, though, they're par for the course. I don't think things like "lack of multitasking" are that big a deal at all, really. They're more of selling points the competition wants to hype up than anything else. People's brains really don't multitask to begin with, so merely using a cellphone while doing anything else involves a lot of "task switching" for us, and a relative lack of concentration/attention paid to BOTH activities. We'd be better off not trying so hard to make matters even worse, by demanding our phones let us listen to music while reading/replying to emails, etc.
Very true ... but I'd also point out that Facebook is achieving "staying power" by letting 3rd. party software interact with it. For example, Apple's iPhoto software allows automatic uploading of photo collections to Facebook with a single click. These things make Facebook feel more like a "free hosting service" than just another expendable social networking site. It becomes the vested interest of MANY people for their site to stay online, because otherwise, functionality in other software packages is broken or reduced.
(YouTube has done the same thing, with many video editing packages supporting one-click movie uploads.)
And regarding the "sharing of private information", I think there are varying degrees of "private". You can't really lump it all into one category. Your basic information (such as your first and last name, city and state you live in, and even a basic head-shot photo of yourself) are really not that big a deal to publish for the world to see. Unless you live underground in some secret building and use an alias every time you communicate with people, anyone who cares can EASILY gather this same data about you, Facebook or not. Going beyond that, you get into details of your daily life - which vary wildly in how "safe" they may be to publish online. I don't think it's going to matter if you update your status to tell people you tried a certain type of Campbell's soup and really like it, or that you just got back from taking your kid out to a movie. On the other hand, it's proven to be detrimental to one's employment prospects to post drunk/high pictures of oneself, or to talk/brag about illegal activities one might have taken part in. Other details (like telling everyone you're going to be gone on vacation for 2 weeks) might not be as harmless as they seem. Potentially, you just announced that your home is safe to burglarize because nobody will be home for a while....
I like Facebook and find it entertaining AND useful, but I always try to be cautious what I put up there. Jokes are fine, for example, except I try to refrain from posting any that might be taken the wrong way and offend certain people in my "friends" list. I post a lot of political content and make commentary on some of it, because I welcome intelligent debate on those topics and hope I've managed to nudge others to actually *care* about certain things going on around them. But understandably, this could be "risky" material for others to post, depending on their job situation, etc.
Except I have to disagree.... It's a valid theory, but you *really* foresee a future where everyone wants to develop their apps for the iPhone using Flash, just to keep it cross-platform compatible??
This seems rather like the Cider-ports of Windows games for Mac OS X. Sure, you can go that route and achieve cross-platform compatibility - but performance and stability take a huge hit. EA tried it with a few titles, but it didn't exactly take the world by storm....
This cyber-security stuff is largely nonsense, IMO.
The fact is, the Internet was designed from the ground up to support flexible and open standards, and it makes certain assumptions about the credibility and honesty of those put in charge of its routing. (I was just reading an article complaining about the lack of "action" taken after the Bush administration did a security review of the Internet back in the 2003 time-frame and determined it was, indeed, quite possible to take down the entire Internet in a matter of hours or less, thanks to weaknesses in how traffic is routed. The fact is though, all the major ISPs expressed NO interest in changing the current system -- because they realize that would still require a "central authority" someplace to determine the "correct" routes traffic should follow to get from point A to B. The current system is rather like trying to drive on a road trip from, say, Dallas to San Francisco, except you have no road map in advance. You simply start out on your journey and follow the road signs as you go, until you arrive. Except in the case of the Internet, even those "road signs" aren't controlled by any central authority. If someone accidentally or purposely changes one, traffic gets shunted in the wrong direction (possibly to a destination router that just black-holes all of it, since it wasn't expecting it).
As we can see though, it generally works quite well, because the people doing most of the heavy-duty routing are ISPs with a vested interest in making sure it keeps performing well. If and when something goes wrong, they tend to pick up the telephone and start making phone calls, getting people to intervene and make manual routing changes to eliminate the problem.
As you look past this supposed "security weakness" and get more detailed about security of individual destination points on the Internet, you see a similar situation. People bitch and moan about security issues (PCI compliance, for example), and spend thousands of dollars trying to address it. Yet in the end, you still HAVE to place trust in your employees. If they're willing to let outsiders in to get information you're trying to protect? All bets are off, no matter how much you spend on the latest "next generation firewall solution" or what-not. (Remember the huge credit card breach AOL had a while back? Turned out to be an inside job.)
Right now, as an I.T. manager, I'm seeing a large number of start-up and obscure "computer security" businesses trying to get my attention. I was just invited to listen to a presentation given by Palo Alto Networks, for example, followed by a free pre-screening of Iron Man 2. (Yep, I went.... not a bad way to get our attention, actually!) But the presentation honestly didn't tell me anything new. It was full of a bunch of well-heeled customers of theirs talking about liking the device, and their founder making a few rather arrogant comments - suggesting they were going to be huge in the future, because unlike most companies doing firewalls, they were focused on "innovation". He commented that "Checkpoint hasn't innovated in at least a decade." and "Cisco has NEVER innovated at all. They just bought a bunch of start-ups."
I can't speak for the quality (or lack thereof) of their product, but I CAN say that it was exactly what I was expecting them to try to sell.... another "next gen firewall/traffic flow controller" device that tries to "wow" middle and upper management types by acting like they've unlocked a huge revelation, by realizing that port and IP based firewall rules aren't the complete answer for companies today.
Funny, but I think Rapid7 was just calling, trying to get me to attend a seminar about THEIR product that was essentially the same idea, and to hear them talk, THEY thought of it all first, too.
A lot of people see a chance to grab some money thanks to fear of the unknown out there, and they may have products that really DO address specific scenarios really well. But I'm convinced most companies would b
The Macbook Air was a very *weak* product release on Apple's part. (Heck, so was the AppleTV box ... but nobody's really too concerned about that either.)
I think you're going to find that the iPad addresses some of the same market-segment that the Air was after, though, but also MANY more users that the Air wasn't even a consideration for. (IMHO, the Macbook Air filled 2 different niches. #1 was the user who simply wanted a light, portable computer to act as sort of a "satellite platform" to desktop machines they used as primaries. In other words, they did most of their data creation/editing on their desktop, but occasionally wanted a small machine to offload some of that data to, to travel with it or access/use it in parts of the house other than at their desk. The iPad will probably cover 95% of those needs, often better than the Air ... but 2 years ago, it wasn't an option.... #2 was the user who wanted a thin, light portable because he/she traveled extensively, and was as concerned about style and the impression they made as anything else. The Macbook Air still serves this audience pretty well.
My feelings as well.... I just plunked down the money for a 64GB iPad 3G, which was quite frankly a lot MORE expensive than most netbooks or half the notebooks out there. Why? Because I'm a believer in the idea that it's in a class of its own ... not just a "netbook killer/competitor" or what-not.
I've never had a netbook or a notebook that was worth a darn if you had to use it while standing up, for example. And I wind up doing quite a bit of that when I go out someplace and have to wait in long lines. (Ever notice how a lot of people try to take a notebook computer with them to use on lunch breaks during the business day, and then they waste a good 10 or 15 minutes in line to order their food, while carrying the thing under one arm, closed and shut off or in "sleep" mode?)
And furthermore, the respective strengths and weaknesses of a tablet type computer like the iPad depend a LOT on the software. If it's intelligently designed for the touch-screen environment, it may be GREAT. If it's a port of something designed for a keyboard and mouse originally? It may be frustrating and useless. People saying the iPad is no good for gaming, for example, are just focusing on certain types of games and not others. I was just playing "Crazy Birds HD" on mine earlier tonight, and it's IDEAL for a touch-screen environment. I think the board games lend themselves extremely well to the touch-screen setup too. Scrabble for iPad does an excellent job of demoing the possibilities, including letting multiple players use iPod touches or iPhones as the holders of their letter tiles, and the screen turning so its oriented properly for each player sitting at a table with the iPad in the middle, as each player takes a turn.
The iPad is also "instant on", most of the time. I understand a notebook/netbook is similar if you just leave it powered on but put it to sleep whenever you're not using it for a few minutes ... but that whole sleep/wake thing doesn't work nearly as well as the custom OS in an iPad or iPhone. It'll eat your battery up a lot faster, for starters ... (Hence the "hibernate" mode most portables offer along with plain "sleep" .... but coming out of hibernation takes a little while as the system reloads the saved state of the system from the hard drive.)
Lastly, even *if* I want to use a full-size bluetooth keyboard with the iPad ... at least I can do so on-demand and have a "best of both worlds" scenario where I can carry just the tablet when I like, but use it more like a traditional computer when I like. With a netbook, I'm still stuck carrying around the keyboard at ALL times and can't just opt to do everything by touching the screen.
A typical individual wouldn't have a whole lot of unique information to store in the first place.... Basically, a collection of photos and some video from a few vacation trips or holidays, and some handwritten notes .... Maybe some artistic works (a few original songs or paintings, or ?) if he/she was interested in such endeavors. Oh, and your tax records and resume. But let's face it. Most of us are FAR more of content consumers than creators. Content creation usually results in mass re-distribution of the original work, as others want to enjoy a copy of it.
I don't see any harm with this either, since duplication is the best way to protect against data loss. (When my parents were trying to trace their family history, they reached a dead-end because a library had burnt up in a fire that contained the only known records of some of the people they needed to research. With so much data going digital, on media that's practically EXPECTED to fail after less than 10 years of regular use? You better believe we need lots of duplicates out there!)
Agreed about CoD 4. As a Mac OS X user, I find myself playing CoD 4 quite often, to this day. Partially, that's because I own the native OS X version and there aren't a whole lot of good game options for native OS X out there. But it's ALSO largely because it's a good enough game to have that kind of "staying power". To this day, I keep finding custom servers to connect to that download all sorts of modified maps and games. Many are taken from mods done for earlier 3D shooter titles (like Unreal Tournament) -- but they're still just as fun, if not better than ever, on a more modern game title.
(Just last week, I played a "freeze tag" version of a Team Deathmatch game on a custom CoD 4 server. It was a LOT of fun, and I wasn't expecting it. When you shot an enemy, you froze them in a block of ice. Then they were only able to sit and observe the game going on around them, unless/until a team-mate was able to run up to them and hold down a button to thaw the ice (took a few seconds to fully melt the ice too - so there was a risk of getting shot while in the middle of a rescue).
With the restrictions on Internet multiplayer in the newer CoD titles, all of this is completely "out the window" and makes me uninterested in buying them -- at least at anywhere near their asking prices.