When are people going to see that Apple is just another company. They might have come up with the Ipod, but like any other company, a lot of their product designs are going to be cannon fodder. Even Microsoft has had product lines that fell flat on their faces.
For those of you looking for Apple to solve the world's problems, remember, they are a company. They have an image, which is "look at me I'm the slick design innovator guy." They have a following based largely in pretty little things, and while pretty little things are nice to look at, they don't always make for the best products.
Of course you were expecting something earth shattering and you got the same old plus a hundred dollar case pitch. Apple is trying to do what all companies do, exploit their own product with mediocre accessories and pretend like they are the solution to global hunger. Anyone who throws their stereo away for the Ipod Hifi is a complete moron.
...that this is what I've been wanting for a long time in this country.
I've always said that I wish the movies, music, and whatever industries would just get together and charge a flat fee, and offer all their content for one monthly fee. It might be expensive, say 100 a month or something, but that would be better I think. That way the people who like music more wouldn't be punished by the RIAA or have to buy a billion CDs for 15 a piece. You don't have to go bankrupt to be interested in pop culture and we can finally have a truly free exchange of information. How many people buy more than 100 dollars a month worth of movies and music anyway? I know I'd be under that bar even if I was still buying albums. I think this french thing is a great idea.
You can drink up buddy. Let that artificial sugar like substance ravage through your body on a daily basis. Then when you got some kind of rare disease because your corporate sponsors put something in your soda you weren't aware of, enjoy trying to sue them to garner some kind of version of a basic expense out of them. They'll laugh as they give you 100,000 out of court, and continue making products that kill their customers gladly.
All the health nut types I know (and I'm not one of them) say that granulated sugar is one of the worst things for you. It's not an intrinsic property of sugar but rather this specific type. They recommend you eat/drink things with natural sugars in them because they have less of an overall effect on your body. They say the same thing about processed flour too by the way.
I didn't really want to get into this line of argument. I mentioned my mother's allergy or reaction or whatever you want to call it to a specific type of soda as a point.
Nobody ever told anyone of any risk involved drinking diet soda. They never mentioned migraines or anything. You'd think that if my mom just happened to have this issue, that it probably was more widespread than one person. However, you'll never know because as my point originally was, the FDA and the news media were bought and sold. The FDA is eager to push drugs and food on through the system, and the media is happy to sell you the new type of coke, in fact, they'll dedicate 30-minutes on an hour morning show to talk about how Coke added some vanilla extract to their cans! WOW!
I understand that this is just a case of one person having a reaction to one specific thing, and there's no telling the amount of factors that are involved. But you hear nothing as if there's no risk at all, and it makes you wonder.
"piracy, a problem that has cost the music industry billions in revenues in recent years.'"
Right, and what statistician came up with this number? It doesn't take a mathematical genius to see that there's not only an x factor here, but a y and probably z and alpha beta gamma factor here.
How do they even know how much people are downloading? Some traffic is encrypted, some isn't, there's no way they are monitoring every traffic type. So there's one thing. If they even managed to grab that statistic, how do they know what percentage of this is piracy? A lot of it could be legitimate use, even bittorrent gets used on linux distributions. Let's say they grabbed that number too, how do they know what percentage of this piracy is music piracy versus games piracy, or application piracy, or ebooks, or movies, or whatever? Even if they came up with that, how do they know the person who pirated the music would've bought it.
I understand that they have calculated that they should've grown x% last year and instead they lost y%, but there could also be other factors that play a role in that. Growth could simply slow of its own accord. People could've already bought all the CDs they wanted and didn't buy as many this year. How about maybe a lot of people don't like the new music coming out? Or maybe a lot of people bought indie or underground releases and listened to them instead of the latest offerings from the crapaganda kings like Sony and Atlantic. There's no way they know even one of these factors because other than random polling you couldn't even estimate. The average person probably doesn't even know how much they would've spent if they didn't download a few bittorrents here or there, what they would've bought and wouldn't have, so who knows?
For years your corporate musical sponsors have gotten away with relaying garbage albums put together by elected pop princes and princesses with one popular song that people like and a bunch of gibberish in place of the rest of the album. Then they'd charge 15 dollars a CD even though it cost them 25 cents because your 11 year old daughter simply had to had the latest Shitney Spears album. Well, now all of that is coming back to haunt them. The consumer has another option that involves paying the amount that this kind of trash is worth: $0.
While I don't like outsourcing from a consumer perspective (spend four hours on the phone with a Dell "technician" that can't speak English), I think there is a point to be made in the fact that we don't try nearly as hard to sell our crap overseas as foreigners do selling their crap to us. Outsourcing wouldn't be such an issue if we weren't the only people buying our stuff.
We aren't the only people buying our stuff. We just don't make anything anymore. Some stuff, ford cars, budweiser, etc. goes overseas and is popular elsewhere, but it doesn't matter. The only people seeing those profits are the board members of the companies. I would actually say that we'd benefit more greatly by localizing again, instead of doing everything on a global scale. Because we just became a small fish in a big pond really quickly.
That's because their focus isn't on product delivery. It's on problem solving. A lot of OS projects exist simply because the author saw a problem with either an expensive, or no solution and decided he was smart enough to start working on an alternative. Other people join in, boom, project. It's not about share value or anything like that. If more people think something is important, more people will work on it in their spare time. The only incentive is doing something good. People control OS, it is what it is, you don't need big business in there telling them what features to develop and not to develop. It's the plus and minus of OS development, it's a hobby not a business. Not everything has to work in the marketplace.
Does she still drink any caffenated in varying does? I used to get migranes due to caffeine withdrawal. No more irregular doses of caffeine; no more problem.
Her poison of choice was caffeine free diet pepsi. I remember she used to drink a lot of it. The instant she cut it out from her diet all of her migraines got reduced to irregular mild headaches after noise exposure (like a regular person). She didn't cut out all soda, or anything like this. She simply cut out the nutrisweet or the whatever the hell it was in that type of soda. I'm not saying that it's not a specific allergy, I'm just saying nobody is even informed of the side effects of the crap they consume. That's the difference. There's a lack of dialog.
And I know people who get horribly sick from eating wheat products. Does that mean wheat is dangerous? Generalising from a sample size of one is far more dangerous that drinking diet soda.
But wheat doesn't cntain artificial sweeteners. Let me put it to you this way. Granulated sugar is bad, it's already processed, it has health effects to the point where any truly healthy conscious person will tell you straight up to try to cut it out of your diet as much as possible. Then they take it a step further and attempt to replicate this already awful but tasty crap chemically so they can sell it to body conscious people. Ingenious invention for marketing and pushing product, probably not the best as far as health benefits. The media covers this in a way that doesn't even address potential concerns, the FDA approves without adequate testing and boom, you begin getting headaches. Because you assume that the product is safe, that the FDA is righteous, you don't evaluate your eating and drinking habits, but instead start taking medication for the side effects. Now Tylenol and Bayer get a piece of the action as well. It's a wonderful money machine in action.
open source projects are only successful when major technology corporations get involved and doubted that open source will have a major impact on the software areas in which the company operates.
Because major corporations have done a lot for linux, which basically sprung out of a hobbyist's basement. It doesn't surprise me that corporate guys like this one don't understand open source. They'd never understand doing something for the point of doing it becaue it needs to be done. They only understand dollars and cents. Even if open source can't have a major market effect without corporate entities getting involved, what's the difference? It offers me a free alternative to the crapware that a lot of people put out and then charge exorbanant amounts for because they have the monopoly on the market. Open source keeps corporations in check because it provides another model. Being bought up would only help people like this guy.
Would we just deal with the risk? Rebuild all the towers to use frequencies that don't penetrate human skin? Give up cell phones altogether? Would insurance companies hike your rates if you use a cellphone?
Whether or not they had a risk would be downplayed in the media to the point of uselessness. Everyone would nod in unison that "well everything causes cancer nowadays," and nobody would even think it was a risk. Till a rash of cancer appeared and then everyone would finally figure out that the link was real and maybe sue the makers of the cell phones from their death beds.
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone. You are exposing yourself to all kinds of risks you have no idea about. Because the media and the FDA were bought and sold a long time ago.
The market is cyclical, yes. It does tend to favor large corporations (which benefits you with convienence and lower prices) to a point - but there has historically been a tipping point where these conglomerates stagnate and smaller, innovative companies rise to provide new or better products or services, and even create entire new markets. The market provides incentive to do this - you have to beat the big boys, so you have to innovate.
Doesn't matter how innovative it is if the innovation is kept out by barriers. The most you can hope for in this model is that the big corporation takes notice and incorporates the little guy's changes into it's products.
Yes, again, incentive. If everyone is guaranteed the same things, why would we ever work hard to advance ourselves in life? The failure of communism and the economoic stagnation of socialist countries should illustrate this point. Meanwhile, those embracing capitalism thrive (India, China to an increasing extent, South Korea)
Certain rights everyone deserves. The phrase voting with your dollar poses a problem. It's taking issues that should be political and making them monetary. It's not about socialism, it's about when a corporate entity infringes upon my rights, the only recourse in which I can pursue them is monetary, making whether or not they want to trample on my rights a cost/benefit decision. I'm not saying give everyone the same products, that's fine, people who work harder can get more stuff. I'm saying give us the same rights.
The problem with government research is that too often it is politically motivated, which benefits nobody but the politician. Corporate research is generally intended to make profit - by providing new and better products and services.
The problem with this type of thinking is that new and better products and services aren't the only way to make profit. You can profit off of wars, and off of disasters. Their concern isn't with the betterment of the national good, their concern is with the betterment of the profit and the two don't always agree with each other.
Obviously, arguing about political viewpoints is a no-win situation. You slant towards socialistic thinking, me towards liberatarian thinking.
I am advocating for democratically executed control over the marketplace. This isn't socialist, it's democratic. There is a difference folks... I'm saying if you have a problem company, put it to a vote on whether or not to revoke their charter maybe. There's a hypothetical for you.
So maybe it's the so-called "liberal media" who is just raking the GOP over the coals.
The liberal media is a myth. The media isn't either way, it's both. You can see this by the amount of attention stories brought up in the true liberal media get. None. The McNews is now centered around "truthiness," the gut feelings behind the story instead of the facts, because Americans for the most part aren't interesting in nerdy things like "proof" or "facts" anyway. "Truthiness" makes for ratings, so they go with that. People these days are still more appealed to by emotions than information.
This is another example of why you cannot rely on the government to "solve" these fuel problems. They end up making bad situations worse. Take the oil crisis of the mid 70's. The government tries to solve the problem by implementing price controls instead of letting market forces take hold and lowering demand. They end up running half the stations out of business for a time and creating huge lines at the ones that do manage to stay open. I'm not a Bush fan, but he should be praised for leaving things alone after Katrina. Gas prices worked themselves out because people became concious of their consumption. Demand fell, prices fell. The Market worked.
I marvel at this neo-capitalistic, liberatarian viewpoint on everything. I hear it a lot here. The market will work itself out. The market works towards a monopoly that creates barriers of entry. If government can't police the market at least a little bit, then we don't even live in a democracy anymore. Because when you vote with your dollar, your vote only counts as much as the contents of your wallet. Maybe this is an issue with the way in which government attempts to help things instead of an issue of them helping at all. Government funds a lot of research that would otherwise not happen because it is unprofitable. Just because it's bureacratic and awful doesn't mean the free market is the answer, it means we need to make it a better government.
I know that most of the/. posters are going to bitch and moan about how horrible this is, since Bush is such a Nazi and we're building the American police state, but......could someone please give me three examples where your civil liberties were actually violated or you were prevented from performing some legitimate task* by the Patriot Act? Prevented from borrowing a library book because John Ashcroft was reading your library patron log? Anything?
Three, no, I have one for you though. My sister opened a checking account using a school ID and my mother went with her to open it. The lady at the bank said fine. A week or two later a letter arrives in the mail about how her account is about to be closed because of the USA Patrior Act unless she provided state issued ID or something.
Because that's how the terrorists did it, with non-interest earning checking accounts.
I think a lot of the problems with OSS stem from one issue, the fact that the developers are very out of touch with the average user. I'll give you an example:
I have been striving to use all open source or free software on my latest windows machine. I found that winamp had become problemsome for multiple reasons, and that I disliked windows media player 9 for certain reasons as well. So for video playback, I've attempted to use VLC (something I'm still trying to play with). Now, VLC seems all-in-all like a great player. However, it lacks very basic features that every single other player has.
One of these is a draggable on screen display so you can seek while you play full-screen video. While this may not be the most important item on the geek list, it's definitely important to an average person. We've grown accustomed to seeing a drag bar pop up when we move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen, and it's simply not there.
Another one, at least in windows, is the lack of reasonable playlist support. Not only does "play all" not work from windows explorer (which I honestly could say I wouldn't even expect as it is a multi-platform software project), but the playlist in general is buggy. About 50% of the time, when it goes from one video file to another, the program completely dumps and commits some type of illegal operation.
At the same time, VLC has plenty of options not in regular players that all work perfectly fine. This just goes to show me that the talent and the effort is there, but the priorities are out of line with the audience. They could fix the issues, but they'd rather work on geeky features like "background mode" instead.
I've noticed this with Linux as well. There is definitely more support for some really neat little gadgets, but then base functionality may not even work without a lot of tweaking. Not to mention, installing applications on Linux is something an average unknowledgable computer could even conceivably do without a manual or someone instructing them.
I understand that Linux and OSS is hobbyist stuff, that's why I love it. But being built by a hobbyist is a double-edged sword, you have to realize that if you are coding based on your own priorities, that your priorities might often be out of line with the average user. Which is fine if you don't want to convert everyone.
"So, in essence, they're saying they want desktops cluttered with unnecessary features."
I think, that in essence they honestly just want to justify the decision they make. It's harder to go out on a limb and go open source if you are the person making decisions. The old addage that "Nobody was ever fired for going Microsoft" is still correct, it's still correct as ever.
I know, they are weblogs or whatever, but who even termed these things into gimmicky little catchphrases. I remember back when I first heard the word I thought I had been left behind on the technology train, then I found out what it meant and I discovered I already had two. "Blogs" started out as just online diaries with random content, content often so random, in fact, that it wasn't worth saving in any other form (at least I find that to be the case personally). How do you expect something that is basically a child's journal with a URL to actually generate revenue? Face it, blogs are just connected journals, always have been, always will be. And how many people seriously make a buck off of a diary?
The vast majority of the people I know aren't using 90% of their hard drives, 90% of their bandwidth, 90% of their brains, and you are trying to tell me that somehow a little Internet video is slowing down everyone? I have yet to see a day where the whole Internet just backlogged because of video traffic. Besides, it's not like dedicated video. Someone might watch 10-20 minutes of video online a day resulting in approximately 3-8 minutes of actual full-pull traffic. The video buffers and is eventually playing from memory anyway. There are lots of people who still just use the Internet for web and e-mail and cause about 0 traffic on a widescale basis. This is a total propaganda story that could be used to scare people into thinking the Internet can't function in it's current structure. And it's full of crap. Internet video has existed since the late nineties and hasn't caused a footprint, now all of a sudden because of iTunes video store we are going to need to change the Internet's structure? Please. To the telcos: stop overextending your networks and saying you can offer 3mb/customer when you can't because your bandwidth pool is shared and you didn't dedicate enough bandwidth to mom and pop who are now discovering all the features that you advertise to get them to buy into the service in the first place. This has to be from the marketing department.
You don't want to read every piece of e-mail that comes into even one site, let alone the whole internet. You don't even want to try to write programs to do it.
That's definitely the reason why the Internet has stayed even resonably anonymous, there's simply too much going on at once to keep track of everyone's every move.
For instance, I run a private web server on my IP address without paying for a domain. I designed the server myself from the source up using only basic HTTP components for base functionality. With this unadvertised web server I immediately noticed a phenomenon that needed addressing: random IP addresses, whether they were bots, or hackers, or ghosts or whatever they were, would continually try to connect to my typical port 80 webserver. By the end of a day running it, I would have quite a list (at least 20-30 tries at connecting). Now if you take that absolutely unadvertised response to a server's presence, I can only imagine the amount of info a company like Google would have. You'd have to have a very large team dedicated to monitoring or looking through that traffic. Even if you did it through a program of some sort, it would take a hell of a lot of processing power to pull off. I'm sure it could happen, but it's a lot of work. Which makes me think I'm just a bit safer than all the paranoid people think.
I've noticed a pattern among people here sometimes, which is that they are too quick to praise MS if they do something right. The way I look at it is, we have Firefox, it's open source, it works on something like 95% of all webpages with no problem. Just the concept of having an extendable, open source browser is powerful enough to continue using Firefox even if it lacks a few IE7 features, because it will continue to adapt and will probably have all the features in 2 months anyway.
To translate for/. readers: You have one C++ programmer, and you need more work done. Just hire one more programmer, and to your surprise, you get 4 times as much done.
Too often (I'm just out of college), I will list myself as looking for a position with zero years experience, or entry level and still I get all kinds of listings for jobs that want 3 years experience or more. I find it frustrating that I type one thing in the search and get another in the results entirely.
Yet, the format itself is not offered from places young people are buying music, and we nerds have moved on to other formats.
Certainly not all, or even most people have moved onto other formats. CD releases tend to be in MP3, most major filesharing ventures use MP3 as the majority of their files. And the fact remains that MP3 works everywhere. It works in everything from your DVD player, quite possibly your CD player, your portable, your Mac, your PC, your other portable, etc. I mean, come on, the truth is that MP3 is just plain widespread. I have a whole lot of albums and I don't plan on converting them to some proprietary format which sounds worse or has worse support for no better reason than surround or the little bit of loss the format contains. Let's not forget the reason why MP3s became widespread in the first place..wav is always lossless, but MP3s take up so little space that it's very convenient. Sure, I could fill my player with lossless files (provided the format was even supported) but it would mean that now I have to double my hard drive space to fit the same amount of music. And when I'm listening to music through dime-store quality headphones anyway, does it really matter if it's better quality? Simply put, MP3s sound good enough and there's no compatibility issues, so why bother switching formats?
I'm afraid that if newspapers get poorer and poorer, we citizens lose one of our country's main forces against political evils - skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth. By not registering for sites like the NYT, we make it harder for that newspaper to get ad revenue, which ultimately jeopardizes its ability to investigate the Bushs, Rumsfelds, and Nixons of the world.
How have the newspaper reporters really been doing lately, however? I mean, they have practically allowed this administration to pass on lie after lie without real opposition and online news sources have been more willing and eager to go for the throat of the truth. I get my news online not just because it's easier, but because I find that it's more of a free press than the supposed "free press" of the NY Times or something which is at times easily becomes just another extension of corrupt politicians.
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When are people going to see that Apple is just another company. They might have come up with the Ipod, but like any other company, a lot of their product designs are going to be cannon fodder. Even Microsoft has had product lines that fell flat on their faces.
For those of you looking for Apple to solve the world's problems, remember, they are a company. They have an image, which is "look at me I'm the slick design innovator guy." They have a following based largely in pretty little things, and while pretty little things are nice to look at, they don't always make for the best products.
Of course you were expecting something earth shattering and you got the same old plus a hundred dollar case pitch. Apple is trying to do what all companies do, exploit their own product with mediocre accessories and pretend like they are the solution to global hunger. Anyone who throws their stereo away for the Ipod Hifi is a complete moron.
Maybe now people will wake up and realize that they don't need to pay for AOL and broadband... Or, *gasp* maybe even find another Internet carrier.
I've always said that I wish the movies, music, and whatever industries would just get together and charge a flat fee, and offer all their content for one monthly fee. It might be expensive, say 100 a month or something, but that would be better I think. That way the people who like music more wouldn't be punished by the RIAA or have to buy a billion CDs for 15 a piece. You don't have to go bankrupt to be interested in pop culture and we can finally have a truly free exchange of information. How many people buy more than 100 dollars a month worth of movies and music anyway? I know I'd be under that bar even if I was still buying albums. I think this french thing is a great idea.
You can drink up buddy. Let that artificial sugar like substance ravage through your body on a daily basis. Then when you got some kind of rare disease because your corporate sponsors put something in your soda you weren't aware of, enjoy trying to sue them to garner some kind of version of a basic expense out of them. They'll laugh as they give you 100,000 out of court, and continue making products that kill their customers gladly.
All the health nut types I know (and I'm not one of them) say that granulated sugar is one of the worst things for you. It's not an intrinsic property of sugar but rather this specific type. They recommend you eat/drink things with natural sugars in them because they have less of an overall effect on your body. They say the same thing about processed flour too by the way.
I didn't really want to get into this line of argument. I mentioned my mother's allergy or reaction or whatever you want to call it to a specific type of soda as a point.
Nobody ever told anyone of any risk involved drinking diet soda. They never mentioned migraines or anything. You'd think that if my mom just happened to have this issue, that it probably was more widespread than one person. However, you'll never know because as my point originally was, the FDA and the news media were bought and sold. The FDA is eager to push drugs and food on through the system, and the media is happy to sell you the new type of coke, in fact, they'll dedicate 30-minutes on an hour morning show to talk about how Coke added some vanilla extract to their cans! WOW!
I understand that this is just a case of one person having a reaction to one specific thing, and there's no telling the amount of factors that are involved. But you hear nothing as if there's no risk at all, and it makes you wonder.
Right, and what statistician came up with this number? It doesn't take a mathematical genius to see that there's not only an x factor here, but a y and probably z and alpha beta gamma factor here.
How do they even know how much people are downloading? Some traffic is encrypted, some isn't, there's no way they are monitoring every traffic type. So there's one thing. If they even managed to grab that statistic, how do they know what percentage of this is piracy? A lot of it could be legitimate use, even bittorrent gets used on linux distributions. Let's say they grabbed that number too, how do they know what percentage of this piracy is music piracy versus games piracy, or application piracy, or ebooks, or movies, or whatever? Even if they came up with that, how do they know the person who pirated the music would've bought it.
I understand that they have calculated that they should've grown x% last year and instead they lost y%, but there could also be other factors that play a role in that. Growth could simply slow of its own accord. People could've already bought all the CDs they wanted and didn't buy as many this year. How about maybe a lot of people don't like the new music coming out? Or maybe a lot of people bought indie or underground releases and listened to them instead of the latest offerings from the crapaganda kings like Sony and Atlantic. There's no way they know even one of these factors because other than random polling you couldn't even estimate. The average person probably doesn't even know how much they would've spent if they didn't download a few bittorrents here or there, what they would've bought and wouldn't have, so who knows?
For years your corporate musical sponsors have gotten away with relaying garbage albums put together by elected pop princes and princesses with one popular song that people like and a bunch of gibberish in place of the rest of the album. Then they'd charge 15 dollars a CD even though it cost them 25 cents because your 11 year old daughter simply had to had the latest Shitney Spears album. Well, now all of that is coming back to haunt them. The consumer has another option that involves paying the amount that this kind of trash is worth: $0.
We aren't the only people buying our stuff. We just don't make anything anymore. Some stuff, ford cars, budweiser, etc. goes overseas and is popular elsewhere, but it doesn't matter. The only people seeing those profits are the board members of the companies. I would actually say that we'd benefit more greatly by localizing again, instead of doing everything on a global scale. Because we just became a small fish in a big pond really quickly.
That's because their focus isn't on product delivery. It's on problem solving. A lot of OS projects exist simply because the author saw a problem with either an expensive, or no solution and decided he was smart enough to start working on an alternative. Other people join in, boom, project. It's not about share value or anything like that. If more people think something is important, more people will work on it in their spare time. The only incentive is doing something good. People control OS, it is what it is, you don't need big business in there telling them what features to develop and not to develop. It's the plus and minus of OS development, it's a hobby not a business. Not everything has to work in the marketplace.
Her poison of choice was caffeine free diet pepsi. I remember she used to drink a lot of it. The instant she cut it out from her diet all of her migraines got reduced to irregular mild headaches after noise exposure (like a regular person). She didn't cut out all soda, or anything like this. She simply cut out the nutrisweet or the whatever the hell it was in that type of soda. I'm not saying that it's not a specific allergy, I'm just saying nobody is even informed of the side effects of the crap they consume. That's the difference. There's a lack of dialog.
But wheat doesn't cntain artificial sweeteners. Let me put it to you this way. Granulated sugar is bad, it's already processed, it has health effects to the point where any truly healthy conscious person will tell you straight up to try to cut it out of your diet as much as possible. Then they take it a step further and attempt to replicate this already awful but tasty crap chemically so they can sell it to body conscious people. Ingenious invention for marketing and pushing product, probably not the best as far as health benefits. The media covers this in a way that doesn't even address potential concerns, the FDA approves without adequate testing and boom, you begin getting headaches. Because you assume that the product is safe, that the FDA is righteous, you don't evaluate your eating and drinking habits, but instead start taking medication for the side effects. Now Tylenol and Bayer get a piece of the action as well. It's a wonderful money machine in action.
Because major corporations have done a lot for linux, which basically sprung out of a hobbyist's basement. It doesn't surprise me that corporate guys like this one don't understand open source. They'd never understand doing something for the point of doing it becaue it needs to be done. They only understand dollars and cents. Even if open source can't have a major market effect without corporate entities getting involved, what's the difference? It offers me a free alternative to the crapware that a lot of people put out and then charge exorbanant amounts for because they have the monopoly on the market. Open source keeps corporations in check because it provides another model. Being bought up would only help people like this guy.
Whether or not they had a risk would be downplayed in the media to the point of uselessness. Everyone would nod in unison that "well everything causes cancer nowadays," and nobody would even think it was a risk. Till a rash of cancer appeared and then everyone would finally figure out that the link was real and maybe sue the makers of the cell phones from their death beds.
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone. You are exposing yourself to all kinds of risks you have no idea about. Because the media and the FDA were bought and sold a long time ago.
Doesn't matter how innovative it is if the innovation is kept out by barriers. The most you can hope for in this model is that the big corporation takes notice and incorporates the little guy's changes into it's products.
Certain rights everyone deserves. The phrase voting with your dollar poses a problem. It's taking issues that should be political and making them monetary. It's not about socialism, it's about when a corporate entity infringes upon my rights, the only recourse in which I can pursue them is monetary, making whether or not they want to trample on my rights a cost/benefit decision. I'm not saying give everyone the same products, that's fine, people who work harder can get more stuff. I'm saying give us the same rights.
The problem with this type of thinking is that new and better products and services aren't the only way to make profit. You can profit off of wars, and off of disasters. Their concern isn't with the betterment of the national good, their concern is with the betterment of the profit and the two don't always agree with each other.
I am advocating for democratically executed control over the marketplace. This isn't socialist, it's democratic. There is a difference folks... I'm saying if you have a problem company, put it to a vote on whether or not to revoke their charter maybe. There's a hypothetical for you.
The liberal media is a myth. The media isn't either way, it's both. You can see this by the amount of attention stories brought up in the true liberal media get. None. The McNews is now centered around "truthiness," the gut feelings behind the story instead of the facts, because Americans for the most part aren't interesting in nerdy things like "proof" or "facts" anyway. "Truthiness" makes for ratings, so they go with that. People these days are still more appealed to by emotions than information.
I marvel at this neo-capitalistic, liberatarian viewpoint on everything. I hear it a lot here. The market will work itself out. The market works towards a monopoly that creates barriers of entry. If government can't police the market at least a little bit, then we don't even live in a democracy anymore. Because when you vote with your dollar, your vote only counts as much as the contents of your wallet. Maybe this is an issue with the way in which government attempts to help things instead of an issue of them helping at all. Government funds a lot of research that would otherwise not happen because it is unprofitable. Just because it's bureacratic and awful doesn't mean the free market is the answer, it means we need to make it a better government.
Three, no, I have one for you though. My sister opened a checking account using a school ID and my mother went with her to open it. The lady at the bank said fine. A week or two later a letter arrives in the mail about how her account is about to be closed because of the USA Patrior Act unless she provided state issued ID or something.
Because that's how the terrorists did it, with non-interest earning checking accounts.
I think a lot of the problems with OSS stem from one issue, the fact that the developers are very out of touch with the average user. I'll give you an example:
I have been striving to use all open source or free software on my latest windows machine. I found that winamp had become problemsome for multiple reasons, and that I disliked windows media player 9 for certain reasons as well. So for video playback, I've attempted to use VLC (something I'm still trying to play with). Now, VLC seems all-in-all like a great player. However, it lacks very basic features that every single other player has.
One of these is a draggable on screen display so you can seek while you play full-screen video. While this may not be the most important item on the geek list, it's definitely important to an average person. We've grown accustomed to seeing a drag bar pop up when we move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen, and it's simply not there.
Another one, at least in windows, is the lack of reasonable playlist support. Not only does "play all" not work from windows explorer (which I honestly could say I wouldn't even expect as it is a multi-platform software project), but the playlist in general is buggy. About 50% of the time, when it goes from one video file to another, the program completely dumps and commits some type of illegal operation.
At the same time, VLC has plenty of options not in regular players that all work perfectly fine. This just goes to show me that the talent and the effort is there, but the priorities are out of line with the audience. They could fix the issues, but they'd rather work on geeky features like "background mode" instead.
I've noticed this with Linux as well. There is definitely more support for some really neat little gadgets, but then base functionality may not even work without a lot of tweaking. Not to mention, installing applications on Linux is something an average unknowledgable computer could even conceivably do without a manual or someone instructing them.
I understand that Linux and OSS is hobbyist stuff, that's why I love it. But being built by a hobbyist is a double-edged sword, you have to realize that if you are coding based on your own priorities, that your priorities might often be out of line with the average user. Which is fine if you don't want to convert everyone.
I think, that in essence they honestly just want to justify the decision they make. It's harder to go out on a limb and go open source if you are the person making decisions. The old addage that "Nobody was ever fired for going Microsoft" is still correct, it's still correct as ever.
I know, they are weblogs or whatever, but who even termed these things into gimmicky little catchphrases. I remember back when I first heard the word I thought I had been left behind on the technology train, then I found out what it meant and I discovered I already had two. "Blogs" started out as just online diaries with random content, content often so random, in fact, that it wasn't worth saving in any other form (at least I find that to be the case personally). How do you expect something that is basically a child's journal with a URL to actually generate revenue? Face it, blogs are just connected journals, always have been, always will be. And how many people seriously make a buck off of a diary?
The vast majority of the people I know aren't using 90% of their hard drives, 90% of their bandwidth, 90% of their brains, and you are trying to tell me that somehow a little Internet video is slowing down everyone? I have yet to see a day where the whole Internet just backlogged because of video traffic. Besides, it's not like dedicated video. Someone might watch 10-20 minutes of video online a day resulting in approximately 3-8 minutes of actual full-pull traffic. The video buffers and is eventually playing from memory anyway. There are lots of people who still just use the Internet for web and e-mail and cause about 0 traffic on a widescale basis. This is a total propaganda story that could be used to scare people into thinking the Internet can't function in it's current structure. And it's full of crap. Internet video has existed since the late nineties and hasn't caused a footprint, now all of a sudden because of iTunes video store we are going to need to change the Internet's structure? Please. To the telcos: stop overextending your networks and saying you can offer 3mb/customer when you can't because your bandwidth pool is shared and you didn't dedicate enough bandwidth to mom and pop who are now discovering all the features that you advertise to get them to buy into the service in the first place. This has to be from the marketing department.
That's definitely the reason why the Internet has stayed even resonably anonymous, there's simply too much going on at once to keep track of everyone's every move.
For instance, I run a private web server on my IP address without paying for a domain. I designed the server myself from the source up using only basic HTTP components for base functionality. With this unadvertised web server I immediately noticed a phenomenon that needed addressing: random IP addresses, whether they were bots, or hackers, or ghosts or whatever they were, would continually try to connect to my typical port 80 webserver. By the end of a day running it, I would have quite a list (at least 20-30 tries at connecting). Now if you take that absolutely unadvertised response to a server's presence, I can only imagine the amount of info a company like Google would have. You'd have to have a very large team dedicated to monitoring or looking through that traffic. Even if you did it through a program of some sort, it would take a hell of a lot of processing power to pull off. I'm sure it could happen, but it's a lot of work. Which makes me think I'm just a bit safer than all the paranoid people think.
I've noticed a pattern among people here sometimes, which is that they are too quick to praise MS if they do something right. The way I look at it is, we have Firefox, it's open source, it works on something like 95% of all webpages with no problem. Just the concept of having an extendable, open source browser is powerful enough to continue using Firefox even if it lacks a few IE7 features, because it will continue to adapt and will probably have all the features in 2 months anyway.
You would if you hired me!
Too often (I'm just out of college), I will list myself as looking for a position with zero years experience, or entry level and still I get all kinds of listings for jobs that want 3 years experience or more. I find it frustrating that I type one thing in the search and get another in the results entirely.
Certainly not all, or even most people have moved onto other formats. CD releases tend to be in MP3, most major filesharing ventures use MP3 as the majority of their files. And the fact remains that MP3 works everywhere. It works in everything from your DVD player, quite possibly your CD player, your portable, your Mac, your PC, your other portable, etc. I mean, come on, the truth is that MP3 is just plain widespread. I have a whole lot of albums and I don't plan on converting them to some proprietary format which sounds worse or has worse support for no better reason than surround or the little bit of loss the format contains. Let's not forget the reason why MP3s became widespread in the first place. .wav is always lossless, but MP3s take up so little space that it's very convenient. Sure, I could fill my player with lossless files (provided the format was even supported) but it would mean that now I have to double my hard drive space to fit the same amount of music. And when I'm listening to music through dime-store quality headphones anyway, does it really matter if it's better quality? Simply put, MP3s sound good enough and there's no compatibility issues, so why bother switching formats?
How have the newspaper reporters really been doing lately, however? I mean, they have practically allowed this administration to pass on lie after lie without real opposition and online news sources have been more willing and eager to go for the throat of the truth. I get my news online not just because it's easier, but because I find that it's more of a free press than the supposed "free press" of the NY Times or something which is at times easily becomes just another extension of corrupt politicians.