The problem with talking on a cell phone is not that it takes your hands off the wheel, but that it takes your brain off of the traffic around you. A fair number of studies have been done that show cell phone use has an effect akin to being drunk in some instances.
When you begin a conversation on a cell phone while driving, your primary cognitive centers focus on the conversation because of the immediacy of the contact and the relative complexity of the conversation. The big problem is that people try to hace substantive converations, trying to exchange really information or discuss something important while one party cannot adequately concentrate on the conversation. As the conversation progresses, more focus is paid to the phone than the road.
Allowing hands free devices is merely a cop out that has been allowed to ease the idea that there is some nefarious "Big Brother" aspect to the law. Studies show that even with a hands free device, the level of distraction is quite high.
Talking on the phone and driving is a behaviour that needs to change. Everybody does it, and we all get distracted only we don't admit it.
Your analogy has a flaw in that there is no technology in existence that allows me to take your lawn mower, duplicate it perfectly, and then offer those duplicates back to your market. All the while, my only cost is for the initial lawnmower and the relatively trivial resources required to duplicate it and then share that one duplicate with many others who share it. That's why there are so many problems with copyright and DRM. With actual, tangible goods, you can't just make infinite copies. There is an issue of culture and technology that needs to be addressed and good or bad, the copyright holders are seeking to gain protection of those copyrights before they lose any and all control over their works.
Arguments about whether corporations deserve copyright protection, I have always thought that the idea of copyright was pretty fundamental. I mean, whether or not I expressly copyright a work, the copyright is implicit, is it not?
Now that is quite dramatic. Funny, I don't recall where anyone is given the right to consume entertainment. I mean, it would be a direct attack on your freedom if you had to get a license to make public comments about our government. Just because a bunch of companies are going to refuse to allow you to enjoy media without DRM is merely an attack on your entertainment.
The fact is that "Big Media" own the content and are free to distribute it as they see fit. Yeah, it sucks, and DRM has a truckload of issues, but it isn't going away.
RIM Actually had 700+ million ion cash at the end of Q3 2005, so they have been set for this for a while. I'd heard that they were positioning themselves to have to pay up to 1 Billion, so it will hurt, but it isn't going to destroy the company.
On the contrary, RIM ought to see stronger sales going forward now that there is a settlement.
I see article after article on/. about these RIAA suits and settlements, and everbody is so outraged that the RIAA is actually going about suing people for sharing files. I'll grant that it seems to be a bit absurd, but they need to show that they will enforce their rights.
What I don't get is why most of the nutjob/left leaning/information should be free/I'm a poor student/linux geek/over caffeinated WoW player/atheist/libertarian/nutjob thinks that it is perfectly OK to serve 1000's of files to 1000's of people when said people ought to paying for said files. The argument that p2p sharing actually entices people to buy more CD's is ridiculous, that is just a pseudo moral justification to convince oneself that it is OK to keep doing it. I'll be that I can find at least 10 people who don't buy the whole album after downloading a song. This justification of simple thievery is laughable, and a sign of just how disconnected people are, especially those pseudo-academic, activist students who will use any reason to justify stealing.
Look, sharing music files via p2p or any other method is not a valid form of protest. This isn't a debate about government too far, it is about an industry reticent to offer a service and enforce a distribution method for its products. Just because you are a student doesn't give you the right to pilfer and purloin because you are "poor". Oh yeah, and you aren't "poor", you are cheap. Get a job hippie.
People who get busted for sharing their music need to own up to their own folly. Most, I would gather, were at least vaguely aware that it wasn't entirely legal, and therefore shouldn't have done it.
How about this : I'll scan copies of all of the books that I own and make them available online, for free, to any body, and I will continue to do so with every other book that I buy in the future. I mean, I am sure that a lot of people would love to be able to read "hitchhiker's Guide", "Dune", "The DaVinci Code", "Harry Potter"(ext.), as well everything else. Maybe after reading the 3 Preez-Reverte that I have, lots of people will buy his other books, just not the ones they have already read. Next, I'll tell you how to print it at work so you can get a hard copy for free. Anyone have a problem with that?
Why don't I just make copies of all of the software that I have bought available for free? And if p2p sharing is OK, can I then burn those songs to CD and sell the CD's on the street?
The RIAA mught be ridiculous and acting like prats, but the underlying point they have has been glossed over. What people are doing is a form of stealing. If I stole a dollar from you everyday, I am not sure that you would mind, but in a few years, I am sure that'd you's have a problem with it.
I think that you are missing a giant nuance that, in fact, makes what TiVo does novel.
Certainly, with a VCR, you could record something on one channel and watch another, but you weren't watching it via the VCR, you were watching it via the TV as the VCR was not applying a carrier signal to its output. With a VCR, you were also unable to setup the VCR to record and then, at any time during the recording, rewind and watch from an arbitrary point. You could only view the recording after the recording was finished.
As far as streaming media is concerned, streaming media is a host to host connection that does not, in general, allow you to store the media as a usual feature. Further, when rewinding or advancing a streaming file, the application must, again in general, re-buffer the stream to the point where you wish to resume. With the TiVo, one can simply rewind and advance, there is no re-buffering because the recording is kept in place.
The novelty of TiVo is that it is the first commercially succesful product that allows one to watch a program and rewind and advance that program as the recording occurs. There is no consumer analog to this technology. Certainly, commercial broadcasters use something tangentially equivalent for replays and "5-second delays", but there has never been something readily available that would allow you to record like a VCR and allow you to move arround in the recording as it happened.
So this isn't IP nonsense. It is an actual technology, implemented from an idea that no one else, apparently, has brought to market.
Ballmer mentioned it at the end of the article, and wee see it with the SLVR, ROCKR, cable boxen that double as DVRS and all in one DVD players and hoem theatre systems.
I've allways felt that convergence is great in some cases. I think that it is great that I can get my email on my phone, but I just don't see how broad based convergence will work. Technology in different products changes at different rates, but putting your money in a convergent device is going to lock you into a device that is not as feature rich as the individual devices, and that you won't want to half replace. For example, are you going to really want to replace your entire home theatre system for one that plays HD-DVD because you bought a combo DVD/home theatre system? I wouldn't. And when the DVD player piece or the home theatre piece breaks, what then?
What if I want a newer music player than the one that is also my phone? Or hey, there is a new phone out that is pretty cool, but it doesn't have music capabilities yet.
I just don't see why convergence makes sense in a lot of areas, to me it just means feature subsets and a disinsentive to upgrade. Businesses use disparate suppliers and solutions because of the total set of features because it is ultimately more cost effective to have each piece sum to the whole requirement, rather than making do with one monolith that can't sastify everything.
Is my bartender guilty of invading my privacy.
on
iTunes is Malware?
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I mean, I have hung out at more than a few bars where I've gotten to know the staff, and they've gotten to know my tastes. The question I ask then is should these people be informing me that they have used my observed preferences when they tell me I might like a new beer or that I ought to try a new gin?
If something is useful and only marginally invasive, is it really that bad? People like to harp about how they gurad their privacy, but I bet every single one of us has signed up for some kind of service that traacks something about us. Netflix comes to mind, the fob you use to get 2-for-1 on Pop-Tarts at the Piggly Wiggly, your frequent flier account, your Starbucks card, that pron website that you subscribe to, they all track information that we voluntarily give.
I have a problem when a company takes my info and sells it to someone else, and then that 3rd party starts offering me stuff. I don't have much of an issue with a company that is taking information that I VOLUNTEER and using to market their products to me. iTunes is free software, like a lot of other software, it is going to seek to use ads. Doesn't Opera use ads to support itself, at least in one version. Do the ads track to your browsing habits? Do you know that they don't?
You've got to be kidding me, I stood in the parking lot after a football game on Saturday and tried to call the same person 65 times before getting through. I would love to know where these super-intelligent networks are, because I wasn't near one yesterday.
After reading a lot of comments, I have come to the conclusion that this is really only of importance to non-mac users. There is an awful lot of energy spent decrying the iPod in favor of the karma or other players, but I think the division is between people without macs and people with.
If you own a Mac and an iPod, it is, undoubtedly, the best player for that platform. It works seemlessly with Mac both as a music player and a removeable disk. I think the disappointment really speaks to the fact that mos players for other formats a) suck and b) don't work very seemelessly in windows.
Linux is for geeks that like to spend their time compiling a bunch of junk to work just right. The same guys who go to Kevin Smith Q&A's and ask "dude, is Yoda cool, or what?" When are the Linux fanbois going to wake up and realize that BSD an OS X are the mongeese to Liinux's snake? Or is that snake to Linux's mongoose? I don't know from mongeeese.
If you work in a vaccum, working from home is great, but when you are trying to produce a coherent product, and market it with one message, you need to be in an office.
I do a lot of work from home and find that I goof off more than when I used to work in an office. I may work when want and get things done on time, buttoo frequently, I just procrstinate until I can't put things off any more. I think that, socially speaking, being an office is a good thing.
But it isn't jus the social aspect of being in an office that is important. I work in an organization that has consultants spread across the counrtry and we all have our own tools for accomplishing the same tasks. When I take on a development project, I attack much differently than my other co workers, sometimes to my detriment. If we were all in the same office, the differences in how we accomplish some tasks would be mitigated as we all learned from one another what works and what doesn't.
I would be curious to see research on how well a new company does when its people all work from home versus companies that open an office. I think you would find that the centralized office based companies are going to be more successful and consistent in their products.
When Mac OS X came out, any hopes that Linux had for the desktop died. Linux is a great OS to work with as a server platform, most of the time. It does share a similar problem as Perl in that it can be sometimes a pain to install and configure, but it is free, just as powerful as any commercial UNIX, and extremely stable.
All that said, Linux is a pain for the average user to learn to use as a desktop OS. there is too much variation between interfaces, an inconsistent set of applications, and few click to install user applications. Apple took BSD, made a great "Joe Sixpack" desktop OS, and forced the learning curve on the gearheads.
If you are a UNIX gear head, making somethings work right on OS X is a bit of a pain, but once you figure out the environment, you are good to go. The big problem with Linux is the "desktop ready" variations, still force a HUGE learning curve on Windows users, with no concerted support for those switching.
I switched both of my parents to jaguar a few years ago and wasn't even there when my father started using his Mac. Do you think I could switch my parents to a Linux distro with 12 minutes of introduction and the walk out the door? I don't think so, but I could with Mac OS.
I have spent enourmous amount of time in front of computers and key boards over the last 14-15 years and have never, ever experiecned RSI as a result of the typing. Maybe this is related to my continued inability to touch type. If this is true, then I don't want to be able to touch type. I figure that I have been able to type quickly enough so that it isn't a burden, I merely have to look at the ketboard as I type.
Exactly what does touch typing get me? If I was able to write papers in college in a reasonable amount of time, if my coding doesn;t suffer, why must i be able to touch type. I find the inadequacies of the QWERTY keyboard are overblown when most of us don't need to type as fast or as efficiently as we think we ought to. Does a few extra words per minute matter when the difference is finishing a document in an hour vs. 55 minutes? I think not.
While my job has always involved computers, I find that I spend enough time not typing that I don't experience RSI, and I find that I don't know that many people that do, so is it really a problem?
This is the kind of thing that highlights he worthlessness of about 50% of the studies done by pyschologists. You don't need to perform a targetted study to realize that our thought processes are cascading, look at people who play Scrabble, are good at Jumble, or athletes even.
Those people are cases of different streams of input, different possibilities, coalescing into an idea. When people see a byunch of leters umbled up, they don't often run through all of the possibilities, rather, a word or word "appears". Similarly, on a basketball court, players don't tend to analyze the situation, they "feel" things happening. Like the article said about the curved trajectories in the case of candle and candy being presented when candy is spoken, intercepted passes or bad plays happen when a player "sees" one situation close to another and makes a bad pass, shot, etc.
Face it, when people saw how eye catching AND easy to use OSX is, Linux pretty much lost any hope at becoming a viable desktop OS. I like Linux, and I would use were I to run one or more servers in a rack, but I am just not interested in it as a desktop OS any more.
Purely in terms of looks, OSX has it all over anything else available, and one needs to admit that aesthetics are a major component to a user interface. Combine the aesthetics of OSX with things like Quartz, and Core Image, along with the raft of software available, AND the ease of use, and you have an OS that, from a desktop standpoint, is a dreadnought to the Linux clipper.
Linux still may be cheaper, but there just isn't a distribution out there that makes it as easy to make my printers work, or burn DVD's. Oh, and did I mention metadata?
Linux was never a very serious option as a wideranging desktop OS, and Apple's announcement just confirms that idea.
I posted about this a couple of years ago I think.
Everyone keeps talkign about NAT and its problems and support for apps and services. The real reason that IPv6 isn't being adopted is because core backbone providers aren't forcing it. No one has made a real commitment to IPv6, so it is not used at the enterprise level.
If you start with service providers, I don't believe that there is a lot of IPv6 even at that level. This is only really my conjecture, but as a consultant in the network management space, I don't hear customers begging for products that support IPv6. And until the backbone providers , and the IETF, decide that IPv6 must go forward, NAT is going to work for most people, and not much will change.
IPv6 is going to be a tough row to hoe, it will necessitate a lot of updates to libraries and software before it can be fully supported. A lot of companies spend a lot of money every year to monitor and manage their business systems with IPv4 based applications, and aren't going to risks the expense until IPv6 is necessary and vendors fully support it.
Is this really worth anyone's time? Big deal, a machine broke down and an alternative was found. Does this really count as noteworthy outside of the relatively low "ha-ha" factor?
So if this passes, Then all of the other weather sites can decide that they won't provide anything for free and charge for the weather. If I want access to see weather information as a hurricane bares down on family members in Florida I guess it would go something like this:
1. Find out a hurricane is heading to Florida. 2. Check weather.com or accuweather for the information. Hmm, seems I need to pay for it there. 3. File a Frredom of Information Act request to NOAA for the weather data. 4. Wait several weeks for the request to be processed. 5. In the meantime, watch CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. for continuing coverage on "Orange Rage! Hurricane's Aftermath" or some nonsense like that. 6. Take that vacation to Disney anyway. 7. Return from vacation in time to recive the NOAA data from 2 months ago. 8. Call my aunt, warn her that a hurricane probably blew through some time ago.
Now some would say the following is redundant, but it is merely repetition for reinforcement of the arguemnt:
Don't taxes pay for at least PART of NOAA's budget? What's next, making me pay to find out what the "terror" alert level is? Or wait, the IRS allows people to file their tax returns for free, thereby competing with private business.
I always thought that good security, at least in terms of authentication, was based on something you have, and something you know. I have always taken the "something you have part" to be a soemthing independantly verifiable.
With biometric information on an ID, I have always taken that to mean that something can read the information uses it to verify me. I don't find that so secure, like a signature on the back of a credit card, it only verifies that I am telling you what I am telling you.
Someone could, possibly, have a fake ID card with his picture and biometric information, but a different name. In this case, the card holder is verified by the information he provides.
Sure, they could have endured a fifth season in order to have something to syndicate, but shows that no one watches in the first run don't generally don't get syndicated for re-runs.
There was probably no market for a syndication deal, otherwise they may have eked out enough for syndication. The most likely scenario is for paramount to release the individual seasons on DVD, thus making it available for people that want it and making a buck in the process.
The other problem with a syndication deal is the profit angle. Enterprise most likely cost more to produce than many other shows, and would have needed to fetch a good price in syndication in order to justify blowing the money for a 5th season no one would watch.
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Why is the parent insightful?
The problem with talking on a cell phone is not that it takes your hands off the wheel, but that it takes your brain off of the traffic around you. A fair number of studies have been done that show cell phone use has an effect akin to being drunk in some instances.
When you begin a conversation on a cell phone while driving, your primary cognitive centers focus on the conversation because of the immediacy of the contact and the relative complexity of the conversation. The big problem is that people try to hace substantive converations, trying to exchange really information or discuss something important while one party cannot adequately concentrate on the conversation. As the conversation progresses, more focus is paid to the phone than the road.
Allowing hands free devices is merely a cop out that has been allowed to ease the idea that there is some nefarious "Big Brother" aspect to the law. Studies show that even with a hands free device, the level of distraction is quite high.
Talking on the phone and driving is a behaviour that needs to change. Everybody does it, and we all get distracted only we don't admit it.
For example, they demanded that all shipments to Walmart must be RFID tagged.
Yeah, and don't forget that Wal-Mart dings you for getting your shipments there too early. It is as bad as being late in their eyes.
I applaud your well structured and useful argument.
I don't see it as that black and white.
Your analogy has a flaw in that there is no technology in existence that allows me to take your lawn mower, duplicate it perfectly, and then offer those duplicates back to your market. All the while, my only cost is for the initial lawnmower and the relatively trivial resources required to duplicate it and then share that one duplicate with many others who share it. That's why there are so many problems with copyright and DRM. With actual, tangible goods, you can't just make infinite copies. There is an issue of culture and technology that needs to be addressed and good or bad, the copyright holders are seeking to gain protection of those copyrights before they lose any and all control over their works.
Isn't copyright a fundamental right?
Arguments about whether corporations deserve copyright protection, I have always thought that the idea of copyright was pretty fundamental. I mean, whether or not I expressly copyright a work, the copyright is implicit, is it not?
A direct attack on your Freedom?!?!?
Now that is quite dramatic. Funny, I don't recall where anyone is given the right to consume entertainment. I mean, it would be a direct attack on your freedom if you had to get a license to make public comments about our government. Just because a bunch of companies are going to refuse to allow you to enjoy media without DRM is merely an attack on your entertainment.
The fact is that "Big Media" own the content and are free to distribute it as they see fit. Yeah, it sucks, and DRM has a truckload of issues, but it isn't going away.
RIM Actually had 700+ million ion cash at the end of Q3 2005, so they have been set for this for a while. I'd heard that they were positioning themselves to have to pay up to 1 Billion, so it will hurt, but it isn't going to destroy the company.
On the contrary, RIM ought to see stronger sales going forward now that there is a settlement.
I see article after article on /. about these RIAA suits and settlements, and everbody is so outraged that the RIAA is actually going about suing people for sharing files. I'll grant that it seems to be a bit absurd, but they need to show that they will enforce their rights.
What I don't get is why most of the nutjob/left leaning/information should be free/I'm a poor student/linux geek/over caffeinated WoW player/atheist/libertarian/nutjob thinks that it is perfectly OK to serve 1000's of files to 1000's of people when said people ought to paying for said files. The argument that p2p sharing actually entices people to buy more CD's is ridiculous, that is just a pseudo moral justification to convince oneself that it is OK to keep doing it. I'll be that I can find at least 10 people who don't buy the whole album after downloading a song. This justification of simple thievery is laughable, and a sign of just how disconnected people are, especially those pseudo-academic, activist students who will use any reason to justify stealing.
Look, sharing music files via p2p or any other method is not a valid form of protest. This isn't a debate about government too far, it is about an industry reticent to offer a service and enforce a distribution method for its products. Just because you are a student doesn't give you the right to pilfer and purloin because you are "poor". Oh yeah, and you aren't "poor", you are cheap. Get a job hippie.
People who get busted for sharing their music need to own up to their own folly. Most, I would gather, were at least vaguely aware that it wasn't entirely legal, and therefore shouldn't have done it.
How about this : I'll scan copies of all of the books that I own and make them available online, for free, to any body, and I will continue to do so with every other book that I buy in the future. I mean, I am sure that a lot of people would love to be able to read "hitchhiker's Guide", "Dune", "The DaVinci Code", "Harry Potter"(ext.), as well everything else. Maybe after reading the 3 Preez-Reverte that I have, lots of people will buy his other books, just not the ones they have already read. Next, I'll tell you how to print it at work so you can get a hard copy for free. Anyone have a problem with that?
Why don't I just make copies of all of the software that I have bought available for free? And if p2p sharing is OK, can I then burn those songs to CD and sell the CD's on the street?
The RIAA mught be ridiculous and acting like prats, but the underlying point they have has been glossed over. What people are doing is a form of stealing. If I stole a dollar from you everyday, I am not sure that you would mind, but in a few years, I am sure that'd you's have a problem with it.
I think that you are missing a giant nuance that, in fact, makes what TiVo does novel.
Certainly, with a VCR, you could record something on one channel and watch another, but you weren't watching it via the VCR, you were watching it via the TV as the VCR was not applying a carrier signal to its output. With a VCR, you were also unable to setup the VCR to record and then, at any time during the recording, rewind and watch from an arbitrary point. You could only view the recording after the recording was finished.
As far as streaming media is concerned, streaming media is a host to host connection that does not, in general, allow you to store the media as a usual feature. Further, when rewinding or advancing a streaming file, the application must, again in general, re-buffer the stream to the point where you wish to resume. With the TiVo, one can simply rewind and advance, there is no re-buffering because the recording is kept in place.
The novelty of TiVo is that it is the first commercially succesful product that allows one to watch a program and rewind and advance that program as the recording occurs. There is no consumer analog to this technology. Certainly, commercial broadcasters use something tangentially equivalent for replays and "5-second delays", but there has never been something readily available that would allow you to record like a VCR and allow you to move arround in the recording as it happened.
So this isn't IP nonsense. It is an actual technology, implemented from an idea that no one else, apparently, has brought to market.
Ballmer mentioned it at the end of the article, and wee see it with the SLVR, ROCKR, cable boxen that double as DVRS and all in one DVD players and hoem theatre systems.
I've allways felt that convergence is great in some cases. I think that it is great that I can get my email on my phone, but I just don't see how broad based convergence will work. Technology in different products changes at different rates, but putting your money in a convergent device is going to lock you into a device that is not as feature rich as the individual devices, and that you won't want to half replace. For example, are you going to really want to replace your entire home theatre system for one that plays HD-DVD because you bought a combo DVD/home theatre system? I wouldn't. And when the DVD player piece or the home theatre piece breaks, what then?
What if I want a newer music player than the one that is also my phone? Or hey, there is a new phone out that is pretty cool, but it doesn't have music capabilities yet.
I just don't see why convergence makes sense in a lot of areas, to me it just means feature subsets and a disinsentive to upgrade. Businesses use disparate suppliers and solutions because of the total set of features because it is ultimately more cost effective to have each piece sum to the whole requirement, rather than making do with one monolith that can't sastify everything.
I mean, I have hung out at more than a few bars where I've gotten to know the staff, and they've gotten to know my tastes. The question I ask then is should these people be informing me that they have used my observed preferences when they tell me I might like a new beer or that I ought to try a new gin?
If something is useful and only marginally invasive, is it really that bad? People like to harp about how they gurad their privacy, but I bet every single one of us has signed up for some kind of service that traacks something about us. Netflix comes to mind, the fob you use to get 2-for-1 on Pop-Tarts at the Piggly Wiggly, your frequent flier account, your Starbucks card, that pron website that you subscribe to, they all track information that we voluntarily give.
I have a problem when a company takes my info and sells it to someone else, and then that 3rd party starts offering me stuff. I don't have much of an issue with a company that is taking information that I VOLUNTEER and using to market their products to me. iTunes is free software, like a lot of other software, it is going to seek to use ads. Doesn't Opera use ads to support itself, at least in one version. Do the ads track to your browsing habits? Do you know that they don't?
You've got to be kidding me, I stood in the parking lot after a football game on Saturday and tried to call the same person 65 times before getting through. I would love to know where these super-intelligent networks are, because I wasn't near one yesterday.
After reading a lot of comments, I have come to the conclusion that this is really only of importance to non-mac users. There is an awful lot of energy spent decrying the iPod in favor of the karma or other players, but I think the division is between people without macs and people with.
If you own a Mac and an iPod, it is, undoubtedly, the best player for that platform. It works seemlessly with Mac both as a music player and a removeable disk. I think the disappointment really speaks to the fact that mos players for other formats a) suck and b) don't work very seemelessly in windows.
Linux is for geeks that like to spend their time compiling a bunch of junk to work just right. The same guys who go to Kevin Smith Q&A's and ask "dude, is Yoda cool, or what?" When are the Linux fanbois going to wake up and realize that BSD an OS X are the mongeese to Liinux's snake? Or is that snake to Linux's mongoose? I don't know from mongeeese.
If you work in a vaccum, working from home is great, but when you are trying to produce a coherent product, and market it with one message, you need to be in an office.
I do a lot of work from home and find that I goof off more than when I used to work in an office. I may work when want and get things done on time, buttoo frequently, I just procrstinate until I can't put things off any more. I think that, socially speaking, being an office is a good thing.
But it isn't jus the social aspect of being in an office that is important. I work in an organization that has consultants spread across the counrtry and we all have our own tools for accomplishing the same tasks. When I take on a development project, I attack much differently than my other co workers, sometimes to my detriment. If we were all in the same office, the differences in how we accomplish some tasks would be mitigated as we all learned from one another what works and what doesn't.
I would be curious to see research on how well a new company does when its people all work from home versus companies that open an office. I think you would find that the centralized office based companies are going to be more successful and consistent in their products.
When Mac OS X came out, any hopes that Linux had for the desktop died. Linux is a great OS to work with as a server platform, most of the time. It does share a similar problem as Perl in that it can be sometimes a pain to install and configure, but it is free, just as powerful as any commercial UNIX, and extremely stable.
All that said, Linux is a pain for the average user to learn to use as a desktop OS. there is too much variation between interfaces, an inconsistent set of applications, and few click to install user applications. Apple took BSD, made a great "Joe Sixpack" desktop OS, and forced the learning curve on the gearheads.
If you are a UNIX gear head, making somethings work right on OS X is a bit of a pain, but once you figure out the environment, you are good to go. The big problem with Linux is the "desktop ready" variations, still force a HUGE learning curve on Windows users, with no concerted support for those switching.
I switched both of my parents to jaguar a few years ago and wasn't even there when my father started using his Mac. Do you think I could switch my parents to a Linux distro with 12 minutes of introduction and the walk out the door? I don't think so, but I could with Mac OS.
I have spent enourmous amount of time in front of computers and key boards over the last 14-15 years and have never, ever experiecned RSI as a result of the typing. Maybe this is related to my continued inability to touch type. If this is true, then I don't want to be able to touch type. I figure that I have been able to type quickly enough so that it isn't a burden, I merely have to look at the ketboard as I type.
Exactly what does touch typing get me? If I was able to write papers in college in a reasonable amount of time, if my coding doesn;t suffer, why must i be able to touch type. I find the inadequacies of the QWERTY keyboard are overblown when most of us don't need to type as fast or as efficiently as we think we ought to. Does a few extra words per minute matter when the difference is finishing a document in an hour vs. 55 minutes? I think not.
While my job has always involved computers, I find that I spend enough time not typing that I don't experience RSI, and I find that I don't know that many people that do, so is it really a problem?
This is the kind of thing that highlights he worthlessness of about 50% of the studies done by pyschologists. You don't need to perform a targetted study to realize that our thought processes are cascading, look at people who play Scrabble, are good at Jumble, or athletes even.
Those people are cases of different streams of input, different possibilities, coalescing into an idea. When people see a byunch of leters umbled up, they don't often run through all of the possibilities, rather, a word or word "appears". Similarly, on a basketball court, players don't tend to analyze the situation, they "feel" things happening. Like the article said about the curved trajectories in the case of candle and candy being presented when candy is spoken, intercepted passes or bad plays happen when a player "sees" one situation close to another and makes a bad pass, shot, etc.
Why is this news to people?
Really, what does "fully Loaded" mean?
256MB of memory and a 40 GB drive isn't that loaded to me.
Face it, when people saw how eye catching AND easy to use OSX is, Linux pretty much lost any hope at becoming a viable desktop OS. I like Linux, and I would use were I to run one or more servers in a rack, but I am just not interested in it as a desktop OS any more.
Purely in terms of looks, OSX has it all over anything else available, and one needs to admit that aesthetics are a major component to a user interface. Combine the aesthetics of OSX with things like Quartz, and Core Image, along with the raft of software available, AND the ease of use, and you have an OS that, from a desktop standpoint, is a dreadnought to the Linux clipper.
Linux still may be cheaper, but there just isn't a distribution out there that makes it as easy to make my printers work, or burn DVD's. Oh, and did I mention metadata?
Linux was never a very serious option as a wideranging desktop OS, and Apple's announcement just confirms that idea.
I posted about this a couple of years ago I think.
Everyone keeps talkign about NAT and its problems and support for apps and services. The real reason that IPv6 isn't being adopted is because core backbone providers aren't forcing it. No one has made a real commitment to IPv6, so it is not used at the enterprise level.
If you start with service providers, I don't believe that there is a lot of IPv6 even at that level. This is only really my conjecture, but as a consultant in the network management space, I don't hear customers begging for products that support IPv6. And until the backbone providers , and the IETF, decide that IPv6 must go forward, NAT is going to work for most people, and not much will change.
IPv6 is going to be a tough row to hoe, it will necessitate a lot of updates to libraries and software before it can be fully supported. A lot of companies spend a lot of money every year to monitor and manage their business systems with IPv4 based applications, and aren't going to risks the expense until IPv6 is necessary and vendors fully support it.
Is this really worth anyone's time? Big deal, a machine broke down and an alternative was found. Does this really count as noteworthy outside of the relatively low "ha-ha" factor?
So if this passes, Then all of the other weather sites can decide that they won't provide anything for free and charge for the weather. If I want access to see weather information as a hurricane bares down on family members in Florida I guess it would go something like this :
:
1. Find out a hurricane is heading to Florida.
2. Check weather.com or accuweather for the information. Hmm, seems I need to pay for it there.
3. File a Frredom of Information Act request to NOAA for the weather data.
4. Wait several weeks for the request to be processed.
5. In the meantime, watch CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. for continuing coverage on "Orange Rage! Hurricane's Aftermath" or some nonsense like that.
6. Take that vacation to Disney anyway.
7. Return from vacation in time to recive the NOAA data from 2 months ago.
8. Call my aunt, warn her that a hurricane probably blew through some time ago.
Now some would say the following is redundant, but it is merely repetition for reinforcement of the arguemnt
Don't taxes pay for at least PART of NOAA's budget? What's next, making me pay to find out what the "terror" alert level is? Or wait, the IRS allows people to file their tax returns for free, thereby competing with private business.
I always thought that good security, at least in terms of authentication, was based on something you have, and something you know. I have always taken the "something you have part" to be a soemthing independantly verifiable.
With biometric information on an ID, I have always taken that to mean that something can read the information uses it to verify me. I don't find that so secure, like a signature on the back of a credit card, it only verifies that I am telling you what I am telling you.
Someone could, possibly, have a fake ID card with his picture and biometric information, but a different name. In this case, the card holder is verified by the information he provides.
What is the point?
Sure, they could have endured a fifth season in order to have something to syndicate, but shows that no one watches in the first run don't generally don't get syndicated for re-runs.
There was probably no market for a syndication deal, otherwise they may have eked out enough for syndication. The most likely scenario is for paramount to release the individual seasons on DVD, thus making it available for people that want it and making a buck in the process.
The other problem with a syndication deal is the profit angle. Enterprise most likely cost more to produce than many other shows, and would have needed to fetch a good price in syndication in order to justify blowing the money for a 5th season no one would watch.