The issue might be DRM, it might be something else, but for me, I have a nice KVM I use. 4 PCs connect via VGA and PS/2. It all works and connected to my 3 monitor setup. Yes I can do this with a current HDMI splitter, but how is the keyboard and mouse copied over? I have to have one for video and one for the rest of the KV. I know they might have something else out there, and in 5 years it might be cheap enough, but the main question is WHY? My 24" monitors will still work (they have HDMI, I made sure of that when I got them) but why would others who were not as forward thinking have to throw away perfectly good monitors (yes there are converters, but most people don't think of that, they just go to best buy and talk to pimple boy #56). Oh well. Welcome to the world of content control.
Where do I start. Office, Mac OS, Mac Hardware, Unix OS, and system management are the answers. I spend all day on computers, and I spend multiple hours at night, I want to use something that works and I don't want to spend all the time screwing with something, and I want it to just work. I am not talking some meme that some think, I have tried many of the things I speak of (recently) and don't see it easier or cheaper to go the other way. I will hit each of these one by one.
Office is the the standard for doing things with productivity software. Yes I can not tell you many features that do not work identically, but one thing for sure, not all the features are in open office (or libre office) that are in MS office. I am in an MBA class and doing finance. I can download the finance packs for office, but cannot download those same packs for the Libre office on my Unbutu install. I have to do it all in excel. There are several examples of that. If I am going do a simple spreadsheet or word document - it works, if you use it as a professional, you have to have the full MS versions.
Mac OS to me is too cluttered and too backwards to understand. I cannot install it on what ever hardware I want, and have to hack it for a VM, but that is not necessarily the best solution. Plus simple things like changing the max, min, and close buttons being on the wrong side, and several other weird things. I cannot use all my software on it (I have to do something to make it work) and also not all my hardware will work either as they don't have Mac Drivers or are not updated. I hate itunes and most of the mac thought process for apps. I want control, not the software. If I cannot control it, I don't use it.
I am sorry but Mac hardware is way over priced. I cannot say I can pay double or triple the price for equivalent hardware... Yes it just works but I cannot for the life of me justify the price when I hate the OS and software (read above).
For unix (linux, what ever). I run it at home on a VM on my windows PC. I like it but cannot justify it full time due to lack of software that will integrate with my windows systems, lack of games, and lack of drivers that work on my systems, just make it not the primary OS. I use my Linux box to run thunderbird for my email (in case of viruses), a LAMP server, a couple web sites, a mail relay, and a p2p client. They all work and won't bother my windows box.
The final reason, system management. Until Mac or Linux can run in a domain infrastructure type thing where I can set the settings in one place, and not worry about people changing settings, I don't see it replacing windows. Yes for a single home PC, yeah - I can do it all myself. I have 8 people in my house and all my PCs are joined to my domain, and they are managed by my domain. No one bypasses the proxy, no one installs anything not already approved, all updates are managed centrally, etc. There are apps that can do some of this for linux (jump start servers) but with all the other negatives listed above, the case is clear.
I think there is a lot of weird thoughts on this topic. Yes the tough subjects are tough. Yes there are weed out courses. Yes you have to work harder in STEM classes than underwater basket weaving. I went to a college prep high school and I was totally not ready for the type of work I was presented in EE. I knew circuitry (analog and digital) and understood most of the technical courses, but when I got to college level Calculus and Physics and Chemistry, I was screwed. Oh don't get me wrong, I am damn good at those subjects, just not at what the university coursework deemed required for it. I got 100% on all of my homework in each of those classes, but failed every test. Why? Because the University made the choice to make those classes exams all theory and nothing having to do with the practical application (and by extension, what the homework was over). When you get every homework assignment right, but your first exam is one question "Prove this using Chevychev's (sp?) theorem" and you look at the test like "What?" That has nothing to do with practical application of the work, and what they were going for.
I decided then I was not going to be a EE or a CS major. I went into a degree that was IT Technology which was the practical application of IT concepts. I could do programming (and took several courses) but ended up with a Telecom concentration (and a MS in it as well). I am now an IT architect and provide large scale solutions for my customers. I never have to prove a Calculus theorem, while taking 3 semesters of Calculus for Technologists (getting an A in each one) as they were "here is a problem, solve it" and nothing to do with proofs or any of that other stuff which makes no difference to me.
At the end of the day, there are two different style of concepts. There are technologists, and those that are true engineers. My hats off to those people who could make it through all those classes, but not me. I know how to implement and make things work, and that is better than 98% of the people in the US. I am just not in that extra 1% that knows exactly how the digital circuit in the CPU works (well I might, but that is not my point). According to what the president wants, he is looking for people to get into technology and engineering. I think they need to classify what they are looking for as if they want pure engineering, they have to figure out how to get more people to pass those courses (not lower the bar, just make the education system better), or they have to accept those that can do (those of us with technology degrees).
The hate here is from the consumer standpoint. Something that was seen as cheap or a free add on to a previous versions/price point on a service is now costing more. Big Deal. People they have giving you more choice and your overall cost may go up, but for me it is going down.
I would like to point out to all the people that are not looking at this from a business perspective, they have another thing coming. Do you know where 75% of the streaming library came from? A small ($10million) contract with Starz, who had a loophole in their contract that they can resell their content from their network to anyone). Guess what, for $10million and hosting, Netflix paid Starz. The major studios have said publicly (and in their annual reports) that since such a gross injustice has been perpetuated on them, they will not accept less than $150 million dollars from Netflix and are closing the Starz contract loops. So Netflix is in the process of determining how many people are out there paying for each service, so they can go to the negotiating table with numbers. Here are the people doing streaming. Here are the people doing DVD. They have valid figures and they can determine going forward if the $150 million will be a good business decision for them to continue with the streaming. This is pretty simple business 101 folks.
Yes, my content price is going up, it is still cheaper than me going to see 1 movie in a theater if I include popcorn. I wait a few months for it to come out on streaming and I am good. Fine. I don't have to every pay to sit through an Adam Sandler flick - where I can see it at home for 8 bucks a month with 25 other movies and it does not make me angry to go see it.
Not to be technical, but if this thing works by reducing the amount of time cooking, smoke, and all the other efficiencies gained in the process that was already going to be done by the cook, that is a green initiative. Going overboard is what gives environmentalism a bad name.
Okay.. so the Texas power grid is not interconnected to anyone outside of Texas. Cannot ship power to the Northeast as the original person said. Arizona, New Mexico and Utah are all part of the western interconnect and thus physically are disconnected from the eastern power grid, thus cannot power someone in the Northeast. Plus you have not even talked about loss of power across multiple thousands of miles of wire. Georgia and the Carolinas? Yes those are candidates, and they are looking into them.
I will take this step further and say that who is the direct customer? Since most all the cable providers don't care about the boxes but two things (Cost and reliability) and really only cost if it is cheap enough. So the manufacturers of these bases are listening to their customers - the cable companies. Since me, as a customer of the cable company cannot get a commercial cable box for anything as cheap as they can - without renting a cable card, etc. They don't care as they have their stranglehold.
Yes I agree wholeheartedly with you. They don't listen to the true customer, just the one paying them for the items.
While I would agree whole heartedly with you about the vast majority of songs which are out there being only a fraction of what could possibly be out there. There were multiple barriers to entry into the guitar player games. 1) The songs had to have no swearing, or the artist had to be willing to bleep out those obscenities (which lots wont). 2) the record label and artist have to agree to put their song in the game. 3) artists have to spend sometime with the programmers or at least their "resident artist" to get the guitar parts down so they can make it close to real. 4) the artists chosen had to be "rock" enough to be a good song, and had to have enough appeal to be almost pop. Notice how many "metal" tracks there are outside of guitar hero: metallica.
Again - this is not saying you are wrong - just adding to it.
And your points would be great if it weren't for politics, and government. Yes in a perfect would, our government would fix our roads which our taxes pay for, and there would be proper drainage. However they do pet projects like parks or building restoration instead of doing what they are supposed to do.
One thing that many people don't realize, that the police forces utilize in many ways the military mentality of doing things. One of those military sayings is "Two is one, and one is none." Unless you don't have a redundancy, then you are likely to have nothing due to lowest bid/cost government contract procedures.
Again - I am not trying to disagree with you in terms that it is as superfluous as a third nipple, but it is just our government "ensuring" they get a result.
Not necessarily.. sunlight of a passing car might cause glare. They might have one of those illegal covers over their plate to "hide" their license plate. It might be raining and you get a waft of rain on the first picture due to rooster tail or puddle splash. If you are saying there are two pictures, at the same time? Yes I agree. However most cameras that I have seen have two separate pictures at a minor time distance apart for just those reasons.
I thought long and hard about this prior to me responding. I read almost every response and I think the biggest reasons are several fold. I am a typical person when it comes to my movies. I like my movies, I like good movies, I watch them frequently, I have a good stereo system and a HD tv (more later). However I think the reason it has not "taken off" is because the studios miscalculated their audiences for what they are offering.
First off, when I got my first DVD player, I was blown away. I had a VHS player, and a good VHS and DVD player at the time (late 1990's) were the same price. Yes the DVDs were more expensive, but the prices eventually came down. However the biggest thing was you bought DVD since you could get nothing else. If you wanted to rent a movie, it was several dollars a night, and buying a movie for $10 bucks was almost cheaper in case you wanted to watch it again later. What does this have to do with Blu-Rays? Well now there are other cheaper options to get your content.
Next, Netflix. You can use this for your on demand stuff for decent quality. Why pay good $ for a season of a TV show just to see if you like it? Same thing for the latest Romantic Comedy. This goes right in line with what you purchase. I used to think that any movie purchased was a movie I did not have to see in the theaters due to the cost of tickets. While this still holds true, I don't go and see movies as much anymore as most of them are shit.
The next is Price. I have a golden rule of $10 bucks is the most I will ever pay for a DVD or blu-ray. I hold true to that. I hardly ever deviate as I know in 3 months after a DVD/BR release, the price will come down. So what I don't get to see Iron Man 2 until 8 months after it came out. The movie is still the same. If the picture is the same, why pay more for the DVD and BR (see below for my setup).
Extra features. Who cares. I like them in some movies, but hardly worth the watch. I never watch them a second time. If they are there, I never pay extra for them. I can care less about commentary or freaking Portuguese subtitles. I am American, in Region 1, English with English subtitles.
Not able to skip content. I usually turn on the BR player, pop in the disk, and walk upstairs, and take a leak, get a diet cherry 7-up and pop some pop corn, and come back and I am at the main menu.
Limited use of BR vs DVD ubiquity. You cannot give your brother a copy of a BR movie to borrow since he does not have a BR player. There is ubiquity in DVD.
My TV/Video setup. I have a 51" 2004 rear projection 1080i TV. I have a 2001 Onkyo-503 (DTS, 5.1, etc.) receiver. I had a DVD/VHS system give up the ghost (well it was drowned in a basement flood), so I replaced it with a BR player. It works great for DVD, but not for BR due to lack of HDMI inputs. So what do you ask.. well it does not look much better than an upscaled DVD to go BR. Why pay a cost premium.
Firmware updates. I have had to do 3 on my BR player. I don't find it difficult, but annoying. Cannot do it online - have to use a USB disk formatted to put it in and tell it to update.
Computers lack of cheap support. This one is self explanatory. I cannot take my BR from downstairs and play it on my computer. Oh well - guess they don't want me to watch it more often.
Don't get me wrong - I have some Blu-Rays.. but I also have some DVDs as well purchased in the last 2 years. When I can find a movie for $4 in a best buy bin, I will buy that for some stupid movie I might watch once or twice. A movie I want on Blu-Ray is Sherlock Holmes. I would purchase that in a heartbeat, but I have yet to see it for less than $15 in the 2 years since its release. Again - Oh well - does not beat my $10 rule.
Army of Two.. both of them. The premise has you and your best friend as Mercenaries doing missions. You have to do a lot of "you do this, I do that to get past this obstacle." It is not the best game from a graphics perspective, but it is actually a good play and you can get it used for under 15 bucks.
Yes it is covered by the gas tax. Yes the legally should repeal their section ( not states, but federal) before they implement this. And wake up, the government double dips all the time. Tarriffs, Stamps, Electricity or any public utility, etc.
Agreed - 169.254 is not routable, but it is owned by Microsoft. They donated it to the so that you can get an APIPA address when you get no static or DHCP address.
I agree with a majority of your points, however there are a few that I would like to accentuate/comment on. First off most corporate customers, which count on 50% of all PC sales, pretty much don't care about what video cards there are. Will it allow them to webex, spreadsheets, training videos, etc. That is all that they need. They don't need top of the line, and if they can get by with a few year old graphics card on the die, that will work. The people who care are those that are trying to get the advantage in gaming or want to brag they have a lot of money.
One other thing, you brought up you have never changed a CPU out of a system. I have, lots of times. The deal was (when I was younger) that I would buy what I could afford, and save up for what I wanted. Then I could sell off what I had. I remember going from a amd k6-200 to a k6-266. That was a huge upgrade at the time and it was $50 for the proc. That is a lot of cheddar when you are lowly college student. So you got what you could afford and upgraded later. Since I have had a job, and been out of school - I have not upgraded a CPU, without just buying a new motherboard/CPU combo. This is more to your point, however to discount the 5% of the population which might/does do this is naive.
Every person is different, and that is why the PC market thrives. If you want to buy something, and never change/upgrade, and want it to work forever with no customization.. buy a MAC. Some have customized theirs, but at the end of the day, they make it hard for that very reason. The point of a PC, is that all the parts are customizable, no two systems are identical, and those with know how can tweak something to make them happy.
Now, 1280x1024 might not be "high" as in bleeding edge, however it is still the preferred market for a majority of all companies buying PCs for their employees. If someone runs only to best buy to look at monitors, then fine. Most corporate environments have their PCs in a 4:3 ratio and 1280x1024 is a good size for a 19" monitor. Anyone doing spreadsheets and excel/word all day should be fine with that. They are cheap and work. So what you are doing is making your arguement for approx 50% or less of the market right now.
Funny - I got the data from the Toyota website. I guess I must be missing something, a 2x4 with 2.7 L V4, manual transmission got 21/25 according to the selections I saw.
Really, that is only if you tow crap, are fully loaded, or have the big engine in it. The Toyota Tacoma (small one) with their smallest 4 banger engine in it, gets 21/25 mpg. Weigh it down with 500 pounds of sand bags, plus 5 people, and tow a trailer, then you get 12 around town. The only other way is if the car was broken and needed repaired.
To quote my son.. "Wow.. Oh Wow". Lets take these one by one.
1) For the government to come out break even the GM stock price has to hit around 56 (stock has to almost double here).
There are 100 different ways GM can pay back the ownership stake that the government has in GM. The easiest way is to buy back the shares of stock the government has in GM. The government does not have to buy them on the open market. GM can buy a few million shares at $50 bucks a share with their profits. They can give them $ for their shares at fair market value to buy them out. The government does not have to sell the stock at 56 dollars to break even - that is just one route (by the way the number is $51.25).
3) Only in the case of GM is there an income gap. Most other companies tend to not have such a huge gap. This is a play by GM to put on a good face that they are "clean" when in fact they are not. Look at the model lineup. They have 4 economical fuel efficient cars. YET they have 5 different Corvette models. Yeah a company that has its priorities straight.
And your oh so mentioned below ford has 24 different models of pick up trucks (www.ford.com/trucks), what is your point? GM has a dedicated plant (bowling green, Kentucky) that makes corevettes. They have different models, based on price range, and is a profitable product line for Chevrolet. You say they have only 4 fuel efficient cars? What is your definition of fuel efficient? More car models getting more than 30 MPG than any one else? GM has that. Better fuel efficiency for similar car models? Check.
GM has Hybrid pickup trucks and large SUVs (as well as smaller). Most other companies don't have that. Yes they don't have a Yaris or Prius or Ford Edge that is hybrid. However they do have the Volt now which they have put a lot of money into and is a game changer. So much that the #4 car maker in the US (Nissan) made a car to combat it with the Leaf. They also have more cars that can do E-85.
Ignoring the facts does not help your case.
4) GM is not staking its future in clean technology. Look at point 3, and look at their line up. Ford is staking a part of their future on clean cars. Ford is doing the right things. GM is once again putting lipstick on a pig!
Not a sigle major car company is betting their future on clean technology. Ford is not betting the future on cleaner technology. I can still buy a pickup truck with the big honking V8 and and 400HP diesel. If they were betting their future on clean technology, they would put a 100 HP Piece of crap engine in the pickup truck to make sure it got 30 MPG. That is betting the future. What you are talking about is incremental gains. Get back to me in 5 years now that GM has lost their heavy debt burden from the Union Retirement Funds and am not paying janitors 45 dollars and how to sleep all day, and we can see who has the better lineup.
>>>>Having said all this, it is not impossible to re-engineer GM, but GM has never shown a willingness to do so. GM thinks this little happening as a blip introduced by the market and not by them. Right now GM thinks that they have done everything they and it is smooth sailing from this point on. RIGHT... WRONG! What bothers me is that Ford did real change... They did not take money from the government, and they are going to get hit again below the belt by GM. I just hope the next time GM is let to collapse.
Re-engineer GM? Re-engineer their lineup? I am confused as to what you are saying. So they have cars which are more fuel efficient than their direct competitors, get more power, are more reliable (JD power and associates), and in the same general ballpark in price. Hmmmm sounds like a winning combination for me.
Why do people not buy American? Simple. Grandpa Joe bought a Chevy in 1974 and he had a problem at 100k miles. Yes they have had problems in the past but people think they cannot change (and apparently you don't either). You have to look at the evidence and make your determinations from there, not from a grudge from 20 years ago from some wrong.
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The issue might be DRM, it might be something else, but for me, I have a nice KVM I use. 4 PCs connect via VGA and PS/2. It all works and connected to my 3 monitor setup. Yes I can do this with a current HDMI splitter, but how is the keyboard and mouse copied over? I have to have one for video and one for the rest of the KV. I know they might have something else out there, and in 5 years it might be cheap enough, but the main question is WHY? My 24" monitors will still work (they have HDMI, I made sure of that when I got them) but why would others who were not as forward thinking have to throw away perfectly good monitors (yes there are converters, but most people don't think of that, they just go to best buy and talk to pimple boy #56). Oh well. Welcome to the world of content control.
Where do I start. Office, Mac OS, Mac Hardware, Unix OS, and system management are the answers. I spend all day on computers, and I spend multiple hours at night, I want to use something that works and I don't want to spend all the time screwing with something, and I want it to just work. I am not talking some meme that some think, I have tried many of the things I speak of (recently) and don't see it easier or cheaper to go the other way. I will hit each of these one by one.
Office is the the standard for doing things with productivity software. Yes I can not tell you many features that do not work identically, but one thing for sure, not all the features are in open office (or libre office) that are in MS office. I am in an MBA class and doing finance. I can download the finance packs for office, but cannot download those same packs for the Libre office on my Unbutu install. I have to do it all in excel. There are several examples of that. If I am going do a simple spreadsheet or word document - it works, if you use it as a professional, you have to have the full MS versions.
Mac OS to me is too cluttered and too backwards to understand. I cannot install it on what ever hardware I want, and have to hack it for a VM, but that is not necessarily the best solution. Plus simple things like changing the max, min, and close buttons being on the wrong side, and several other weird things. I cannot use all my software on it (I have to do something to make it work) and also not all my hardware will work either as they don't have Mac Drivers or are not updated. I hate itunes and most of the mac thought process for apps. I want control, not the software. If I cannot control it, I don't use it.
I am sorry but Mac hardware is way over priced. I cannot say I can pay double or triple the price for equivalent hardware ... Yes it just works but I cannot for the life of me justify the price when I hate the OS and software (read above).
For unix (linux, what ever). I run it at home on a VM on my windows PC. I like it but cannot justify it full time due to lack of software that will integrate with my windows systems, lack of games, and lack of drivers that work on my systems, just make it not the primary OS. I use my Linux box to run thunderbird for my email (in case of viruses), a LAMP server, a couple web sites, a mail relay, and a p2p client. They all work and won't bother my windows box.
The final reason, system management. Until Mac or Linux can run in a domain infrastructure type thing where I can set the settings in one place, and not worry about people changing settings, I don't see it replacing windows. Yes for a single home PC, yeah - I can do it all myself. I have 8 people in my house and all my PCs are joined to my domain, and they are managed by my domain. No one bypasses the proxy, no one installs anything not already approved, all updates are managed centrally, etc. There are apps that can do some of this for linux (jump start servers) but with all the other negatives listed above, the case is clear.
I think there is a lot of weird thoughts on this topic. Yes the tough subjects are tough. Yes there are weed out courses. Yes you have to work harder in STEM classes than underwater basket weaving. I went to a college prep high school and I was totally not ready for the type of work I was presented in EE. I knew circuitry (analog and digital) and understood most of the technical courses, but when I got to college level Calculus and Physics and Chemistry, I was screwed. Oh don't get me wrong, I am damn good at those subjects, just not at what the university coursework deemed required for it. I got 100% on all of my homework in each of those classes, but failed every test. Why? Because the University made the choice to make those classes exams all theory and nothing having to do with the practical application (and by extension, what the homework was over). When you get every homework assignment right, but your first exam is one question "Prove this using Chevychev's (sp?) theorem" and you look at the test like "What?" That has nothing to do with practical application of the work, and what they were going for.
I decided then I was not going to be a EE or a CS major. I went into a degree that was IT Technology which was the practical application of IT concepts. I could do programming (and took several courses) but ended up with a Telecom concentration (and a MS in it as well). I am now an IT architect and provide large scale solutions for my customers. I never have to prove a Calculus theorem, while taking 3 semesters of Calculus for Technologists (getting an A in each one) as they were "here is a problem, solve it" and nothing to do with proofs or any of that other stuff which makes no difference to me.
At the end of the day, there are two different style of concepts. There are technologists, and those that are true engineers. My hats off to those people who could make it through all those classes, but not me. I know how to implement and make things work, and that is better than 98% of the people in the US. I am just not in that extra 1% that knows exactly how the digital circuit in the CPU works (well I might, but that is not my point). According to what the president wants, he is looking for people to get into technology and engineering. I think they need to classify what they are looking for as if they want pure engineering, they have to figure out how to get more people to pass those courses (not lower the bar, just make the education system better), or they have to accept those that can do (those of us with technology degrees).
Really? You have not heard of Christopher Nolan? Director and writer of Batman Begins, The Dark Night, and winner for Inception?
.. but not hearing of him is like wow.
Granted, he is the only one that I heard of
The hate here is from the consumer standpoint. Something that was seen as cheap or a free add on to a previous versions/price point on a service is now costing more. Big Deal. People they have giving you more choice and your overall cost may go up, but for me it is going down.
I would like to point out to all the people that are not looking at this from a business perspective, they have another thing coming. Do you know where 75% of the streaming library came from? A small ($10million) contract with Starz, who had a loophole in their contract that they can resell their content from their network to anyone). Guess what, for $10million and hosting, Netflix paid Starz. The major studios have said publicly (and in their annual reports) that since such a gross injustice has been perpetuated on them, they will not accept less than $150 million dollars from Netflix and are closing the Starz contract loops. So Netflix is in the process of determining how many people are out there paying for each service, so they can go to the negotiating table with numbers. Here are the people doing streaming. Here are the people doing DVD. They have valid figures and they can determine going forward if the $150 million will be a good business decision for them to continue with the streaming. This is pretty simple business 101 folks.
Yes, my content price is going up, it is still cheaper than me going to see 1 movie in a theater if I include popcorn. I wait a few months for it to come out on streaming and I am good. Fine. I don't have to every pay to sit through an Adam Sandler flick - where I can see it at home for 8 bucks a month with 25 other movies and it does not make me angry to go see it.
Not to be technical, but if this thing works by reducing the amount of time cooking, smoke, and all the other efficiencies gained in the process that was already going to be done by the cook, that is a green initiative. Going overboard is what gives environmentalism a bad name.
Okay .. so the Texas power grid is not interconnected to anyone outside of Texas. Cannot ship power to the Northeast as the original person said. Arizona, New Mexico and Utah are all part of the western interconnect and thus physically are disconnected from the eastern power grid, thus cannot power someone in the Northeast. Plus you have not even talked about loss of power across multiple thousands of miles of wire. Georgia and the Carolinas? Yes those are candidates, and they are looking into them.
I will take this step further and say that who is the direct customer? Since most all the cable providers don't care about the boxes but two things (Cost and reliability) and really only cost if it is cheap enough. So the manufacturers of these bases are listening to their customers - the cable companies. Since me, as a customer of the cable company cannot get a commercial cable box for anything as cheap as they can - without renting a cable card, etc. They don't care as they have their stranglehold. Yes I agree wholeheartedly with you. They don't listen to the true customer, just the one paying them for the items.
While I would agree whole heartedly with you about the vast majority of songs which are out there being only a fraction of what could possibly be out there. There were multiple barriers to entry into the guitar player games. 1) The songs had to have no swearing, or the artist had to be willing to bleep out those obscenities (which lots wont). 2) the record label and artist have to agree to put their song in the game. 3) artists have to spend sometime with the programmers or at least their "resident artist" to get the guitar parts down so they can make it close to real. 4) the artists chosen had to be "rock" enough to be a good song, and had to have enough appeal to be almost pop. Notice how many "metal" tracks there are outside of guitar hero: metallica.
Again - this is not saying you are wrong - just adding to it.
And your points would be great if it weren't for politics, and government. Yes in a perfect would, our government would fix our roads which our taxes pay for, and there would be proper drainage. However they do pet projects like parks or building restoration instead of doing what they are supposed to do. One thing that many people don't realize, that the police forces utilize in many ways the military mentality of doing things. One of those military sayings is "Two is one, and one is none." Unless you don't have a redundancy, then you are likely to have nothing due to lowest bid/cost government contract procedures. Again - I am not trying to disagree with you in terms that it is as superfluous as a third nipple, but it is just our government "ensuring" they get a result.
Not necessarily .. sunlight of a passing car might cause glare. They might have one of those illegal covers over their plate to "hide" their license plate. It might be raining and you get a waft of rain on the first picture due to rooster tail or puddle splash. If you are saying there are two pictures, at the same time? Yes I agree. However most cameras that I have seen have two separate pictures at a minor time distance apart for just those reasons.
In case one is blurry.
I thought long and hard about this prior to me responding. I read almost every response and I think the biggest reasons are several fold. I am a typical person when it comes to my movies. I like my movies, I like good movies, I watch them frequently, I have a good stereo system and a HD tv (more later). However I think the reason it has not "taken off" is because the studios miscalculated their audiences for what they are offering.
.. well it does not look much better than an upscaled DVD to go BR. Why pay a cost premium.
.. but I also have some DVDs as well purchased in the last 2 years. When I can find a movie for $4 in a best buy bin, I will buy that for some stupid movie I might watch once or twice. A movie I want on Blu-Ray is Sherlock Holmes. I would purchase that in a heartbeat, but I have yet to see it for less than $15 in the 2 years since its release. Again - Oh well - does not beat my $10 rule.
First off, when I got my first DVD player, I was blown away. I had a VHS player, and a good VHS and DVD player at the time (late 1990's) were the same price. Yes the DVDs were more expensive, but the prices eventually came down. However the biggest thing was you bought DVD since you could get nothing else. If you wanted to rent a movie, it was several dollars a night, and buying a movie for $10 bucks was almost cheaper in case you wanted to watch it again later. What does this have to do with Blu-Rays? Well now there are other cheaper options to get your content.
Next, Netflix. You can use this for your on demand stuff for decent quality. Why pay good $ for a season of a TV show just to see if you like it? Same thing for the latest Romantic Comedy. This goes right in line with what you purchase. I used to think that any movie purchased was a movie I did not have to see in the theaters due to the cost of tickets. While this still holds true, I don't go and see movies as much anymore as most of them are shit.
The next is Price. I have a golden rule of $10 bucks is the most I will ever pay for a DVD or blu-ray. I hold true to that. I hardly ever deviate as I know in 3 months after a DVD/BR release, the price will come down. So what I don't get to see Iron Man 2 until 8 months after it came out. The movie is still the same. If the picture is the same, why pay more for the DVD and BR (see below for my setup).
Extra features. Who cares. I like them in some movies, but hardly worth the watch. I never watch them a second time. If they are there, I never pay extra for them. I can care less about commentary or freaking Portuguese subtitles. I am American, in Region 1, English with English subtitles.
Not able to skip content. I usually turn on the BR player, pop in the disk, and walk upstairs, and take a leak, get a diet cherry 7-up and pop some pop corn, and come back and I am at the main menu.
Limited use of BR vs DVD ubiquity. You cannot give your brother a copy of a BR movie to borrow since he does not have a BR player. There is ubiquity in DVD.
My TV/Video setup. I have a 51" 2004 rear projection 1080i TV. I have a 2001 Onkyo-503 (DTS, 5.1, etc.) receiver. I had a DVD/VHS system give up the ghost (well it was drowned in a basement flood), so I replaced it with a BR player. It works great for DVD, but not for BR due to lack of HDMI inputs. So what do you ask
Firmware updates. I have had to do 3 on my BR player. I don't find it difficult, but annoying. Cannot do it online - have to use a USB disk formatted to put it in and tell it to update.
Computers lack of cheap support. This one is self explanatory. I cannot take my BR from downstairs and play it on my computer. Oh well - guess they don't want me to watch it more often.
Don't get me wrong - I have some Blu-Rays
popcorn .. for something to aspire to when it grows up.
Army of Two .. both of them. The premise has you and your best friend as Mercenaries doing missions. You have to do a lot of "you do this, I do that to get past this obstacle." It is not the best game from a graphics perspective, but it is actually a good play and you can get it used for under 15 bucks.
One death is a tragedy, One million deaths is a statistic - Stalin
Yes it is covered by the gas tax. Yes the legally should repeal their section ( not states, but federal) before they implement this. And wake up, the government double dips all the time. Tarriffs, Stamps, Electricity or any public utility, etc.
Agreed - 169.254 is not routable, but it is owned by Microsoft. They donated it to the so that you can get an APIPA address when you get no static or DHCP address.
I agree with a majority of your points, however there are a few that I would like to accentuate/comment on. First off most corporate customers, which count on 50% of all PC sales, pretty much don't care about what video cards there are. Will it allow them to webex, spreadsheets, training videos, etc. That is all that they need. They don't need top of the line, and if they can get by with a few year old graphics card on the die, that will work. The people who care are those that are trying to get the advantage in gaming or want to brag they have a lot of money. One other thing, you brought up you have never changed a CPU out of a system. I have, lots of times. The deal was (when I was younger) that I would buy what I could afford, and save up for what I wanted. Then I could sell off what I had. I remember going from a amd k6-200 to a k6-266. That was a huge upgrade at the time and it was $50 for the proc. That is a lot of cheddar when you are lowly college student. So you got what you could afford and upgraded later. Since I have had a job, and been out of school - I have not upgraded a CPU, without just buying a new motherboard/CPU combo. This is more to your point, however to discount the 5% of the population which might/does do this is naive. Every person is different, and that is why the PC market thrives. If you want to buy something, and never change/upgrade, and want it to work forever with no customization .. buy a MAC. Some have customized theirs, but at the end of the day, they make it hard for that very reason. The point of a PC, is that all the parts are customizable, no two systems are identical, and those with know how can tweak something to make them happy.
Now, 1280x1024 might not be "high" as in bleeding edge, however it is still the preferred market for a majority of all companies buying PCs for their employees. If someone runs only to best buy to look at monitors, then fine. Most corporate environments have their PCs in a 4:3 ratio and 1280x1024 is a good size for a 19" monitor. Anyone doing spreadsheets and excel/word all day should be fine with that. They are cheap and work. So what you are doing is making your arguement for approx 50% or less of the market right now.
Funny - I got the data from the Toyota website. I guess I must be missing something, a 2x4 with 2.7 L V4, manual transmission got 21/25 according to the selections I saw.
Really, that is only if you tow crap, are fully loaded, or have the big engine in it. The Toyota Tacoma (small one) with their smallest 4 banger engine in it, gets 21/25 mpg. Weigh it down with 500 pounds of sand bags, plus 5 people, and tow a trailer, then you get 12 around town. The only other way is if the car was broken and needed repaired.
Dennis Leary doing stand-up again?
You mean they ran out of money before the banking collapse, and got their cash infusion from the private sector rather than the public sector.
To quote my son .. "Wow .. Oh Wow". Lets take these one by one.
1) For the government to come out break even the GM stock price has to hit around 56 (stock has to almost double here).
There are 100 different ways GM can pay back the ownership stake that the government has in GM. The easiest way is to buy back the shares of stock the government has in GM. The government does not have to buy them on the open market. GM can buy a few million shares at $50 bucks a share with their profits. They can give them $ for their shares at fair market value to buy them out. The government does not have to sell the stock at 56 dollars to break even - that is just one route (by the way the number is $51.25).
3) Only in the case of GM is there an income gap. Most other companies tend to not have such a huge gap. This is a play by GM to put on a good face that they are "clean" when in fact they are not. Look at the model lineup. They have 4 economical fuel efficient cars. YET they have 5 different Corvette models. Yeah a company that has its priorities straight.
And your oh so mentioned below ford has 24 different models of pick up trucks (www.ford.com/trucks), what is your point? GM has a dedicated plant (bowling green, Kentucky) that makes corevettes. They have different models, based on price range, and is a profitable product line for Chevrolet. You say they have only 4 fuel efficient cars? What is your definition of fuel efficient? More car models getting more than 30 MPG than any one else? GM has that. Better fuel efficiency for similar car models? Check.
GM has Hybrid pickup trucks and large SUVs (as well as smaller). Most other companies don't have that. Yes they don't have a Yaris or Prius or Ford Edge that is hybrid. However they do have the Volt now which they have put a lot of money into and is a game changer. So much that the #4 car maker in the US (Nissan) made a car to combat it with the Leaf. They also have more cars that can do E-85.
Ignoring the facts does not help your case.
4) GM is not staking its future in clean technology. Look at point 3, and look at their line up. Ford is staking a part of their future on clean cars. Ford is doing the right things. GM is once again putting lipstick on a pig!
Not a sigle major car company is betting their future on clean technology. Ford is not betting the future on cleaner technology. I can still buy a pickup truck with the big honking V8 and and 400HP diesel. If they were betting their future on clean technology, they would put a 100 HP Piece of crap engine in the pickup truck to make sure it got 30 MPG. That is betting the future. What you are talking about is incremental gains. Get back to me in 5 years now that GM has lost their heavy debt burden from the Union Retirement Funds and am not paying janitors 45 dollars and how to sleep all day, and we can see who has the better lineup.
>>>>Having said all this, it is not impossible to re-engineer GM, but GM has never shown a willingness to do so. GM thinks this little happening as a blip introduced by the market and not by them. Right now GM thinks that they have done everything they and it is smooth sailing from this point on. RIGHT... WRONG! What bothers me is that Ford did real change... They did not take money from the government, and they are going to get hit again below the belt by GM. I just hope the next time GM is let to collapse.
Re-engineer GM? Re-engineer their lineup? I am confused as to what you are saying. So they have cars which are more fuel efficient than their direct competitors, get more power, are more reliable (JD power and associates), and in the same general ballpark in price. Hmmmm sounds like a winning combination for me.
Why do people not buy American? Simple. Grandpa Joe bought a Chevy in 1974 and he had a problem at 100k miles. Yes they have had problems in the past but people think they cannot change (and apparently you don't either). You have to look at the evidence and make your determinations from there, not from a grudge from 20 years ago from some wrong.