I love all the elitist geeks in here slamming what other people like to do with their free time as a waste. You may get a big stiffy spending 10 hours struggling to compile the latest *nix app, but I guarantee a large % of those 62 million farmVille players think that's a waste of time too. I have a lot of friends that play farmville. Personally I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, but if they like it, who cares? They aren't wasting MY time.
Ironic isn't it, since you get people shouting all day long on here about wanting to use their media/computer/apps/OS/golf cart the way THEY want to use it. Stop with the sour grapes. You coulda designed a rediculously simple, highly addictive game with social interaction and made millions, but you didn't, probably woulda been a waste of time...
I'm not sure what your point is. A quick google will turn up numerous examples of the same behavior.
you can insert whatever time waster you want and probably find:
mom shakes baby for interrupting WoW, pleads guilty to murder
mom shakes baby for interrupting Biggest Loser, pleads guilty to murder
dad shakes baby for interrupting football, pleads guilty to murder
Bad parents are bad parents. It might have been Farmville that day, 5 minutes earlier it could have been youTube interruptions that set her over the edge.
This is not obvious to a non techie. I can tell you that my non techie friends are amazed when told they don't HAVE to use iTunes. Most of them just go on using it anyway, since the thought of using something not "official" to manage the iPod scares them. Your daughter doesn't count, she either has you to inform her of options or is the geek child of a geek and should know. Not typical.
Some of these same non techies have been so frustrated with iTunes that i've frequently heard comments like "apple makes great software?", "just works, my ass". I doubt they will be rushing to the Apple store to grab a copy of OSX any time soon.
it's ok for them to stick the knife in ya as long as they do it slowwwwwly. When Apple fully locks down the OS and the only avenue for applications is to get Apple blessed apps via the app store you'll keep begging for more and justify something you'd have denounced 5 years ago. Don't sit there and scream FUD at everyone when the last decade (at least) of Apple history shows that this move is inevitable. What is it that compels people to want a nanny no matter how much they claim otherwise? I will never understand why you guys buy into the "we know better than you" mentality of Apple. I reserve the right to screw up my user experience and suffer the consequences. Butt out please.
The irony of it all is that when any other company turns the screws and locks things down a little more each year, you same guys scream and whine. Mobile carriers spring to mind as getting lots of mileage and hate around here for closed platforms and stores. Yet when Apple learns the lesson well and gets into bed with AT/T, it's ok, since it's shiny and has a half eaten fruit logo.
You will play in Steve's playground, by his rules or he will take his ball and YOU'LL go home. Brilliant he might be, but a childish control freak as well. If it makes me shallow to not purchase Apple products because I just don't like the way Steve does business, oh well. But before you start pickin on me for that, remember that there are loads of Apple fanboys (plenty on this site) that don't use Wintel platforms because of a personal dislike of Gates and Ballmer.
Why would you want on demand payments?? Sure, I use Amazon for new releases, but for old content, why would you want to be nickle and dimed like that? Say you're a big fan of TJ Hooker. Now, at this point, the only people willing to pay for something like that have to be serious fans that would probably want all the episodes, not just one or two. You can stream it from Amazon for the low price of $2 per episode. For a one time viewing. At that price, you can just buy the DVD's and "enjoy" Hooker as often as you want.
I just used TJ Hooker as an example, but the pricing was consistent for most old shows on Amazon. At least with Netflix, my $9 a month lets me watch the content they do have over and over. Until the pay per view types start charging realistic prices for content I'm out. Even at.99/episode, it's hard to justify not just ordering the damn DVDs from Amazon instead.
There is no reason an episode of a 20 or 30 year old TV show should cost as much as many newer release movies. At this point they should be grateful that they get ANY revenue from old content instead of being greedy about it. Still, it's probably hard to accept the lower end of pricing for these guys. There's just not a good pricing model for content that should probably be sold for pennies but costs a dollar to encode and stream.
i also wanted to point out that when i make reservations for car rental, I've never even seen an option to pay by the mile or limit the miles to get a cheaper price. The base rate always seems to include unlimited mileage.
that's interesting. I can't remember the last time I rented a car that had a mileage restriction or a pay by the mile arrangement. I think you're confusing truck rentals from the likes of U-Haul with passenger rentals from Hertz, National et al. The only restriction on mileage these days is self imposed (ie. How much do I want to spend on gas?) I've frequently rented a car and put 500+ miles on it at no additional cost from the rental company. That includes the time I went to the Coachella music festival and logged nearly 1000 miles driving through nearby national parks and sightseeing in Southern California. Not a peep from Hertz about the mileage.
Anecdotal, yes, but I've been a frequent car renter all over the U.S. for probably 15 years, so lots of data points and I've rented 3 cars in 2 states since August...
If I was making a reservation and saw the words mileage limit or per mile, I'd take my business elsewhere.
At my previous residence, there was coax from the local cable provider strung down the alley. On 2 occasions whereI had my internet service go out the cause turned out to be squirrels eating through the coax housing. I can only hope that the little guy got a nice zap when he broke through to the copper core.
That's all i really want, my Roku box with the added ability to stream video from my box o' hard drives to my TV. The Roku box is cheap, small, low power drain, silent and can handle new content when they add additional channels such as amazon. Its one shortcoming for me has been that I can't use it to access media that's NOT on the internet.
give me this and i'll buy one for every room with a TV.
Unfortunatly, the Blockbuster library has gotten smaller and smaller over the years. To the point the average store is 50% games, 25% older movies and 25% multiple copies of the latest releases. It's that ever shrinking proportion of older movies that is driving people to Netflix.
dunno... he's a major technology figure, not a small number of people on/. worship him, it's kind of a funny story (rich guy can't bring what he wants on own private plane) and it's kind of shocking (rich guy can't bring what he wants on own private plane).
"Heinlein was amazing at predicting tech & science advances far, far ahead of any of his contemporaries."
True, except for the proliferation of computers and the radical miniaturization of electronic components we enjoy today. Heinlein missed that completely. It's all tubes and wires in his stories and tasks that are done quickly by computer today (calculating an orbit for example) are nearly always done by hand. It's almost as if he had a blind spot for computers and envisioned a future society where math was the cool subject.
he's still one of my favorite authors of all time.
wish i had mod points for you. the only times i see flash crash a browser is when my mother in law tries to open farmville AND cafe world AND mafia wars AND a few more large flash games in tabs in one browser window. even then it's less of a crash than a slowing to a crawl. Personally, I've always had way more issues with the Adobe Acrobat browser plugin than with Flash. THAT thing is horrible, thank god for Foxit.
"Sounds like the right mentality to go to Mars/ Asteroids/ or anywhere else off this planet. How many Luddite flat-landers does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
there's a world of difference between going to the moon/mars etc. and a station in low earth orbit, that was largely created to keep the space agencies of several countries employed and to justify the continuation of the shuttle program. How much more time do we need to spend in LEO? Imagine if Columbus and all those other great explorers had been content to just keep circling the Mediterranean...
I'm all for manned exploration, so long as it's exploration. If NASA says tomorrow they are willing to take some risk and send people to the moon to do something other than plant a flag again, or they want to go to mars and see how long they can keep a small group of people there, I will support it wholeheartedly and wish I could go along. What I won't support is off world make-work that turns the astronaut into a maintenance man or the guy that rotates the plants in some experiment.
wait a sec, if there were no humans on the ISS, much of its complexity would be unnecessary, eliminating the need to have humans in the loop. Specifically, i'm thinking of all the components that make it able to support human life, which seem to have a higher incidence of failure/issue. It's always a toilet or a/c unit freaking out up there.
net zero press releases to the contrary, the real reasons net zero failed would include
1. The expanding availability of broadband
2. Did anyone look at the ads? I don't recall using anything to block ads from netZero, i just remember them fading into the background mentally.
3. Poor to non existent customer service
4. Insufficient bandwidth connecting to backbone. If you were lucky enough to connect at 56k, it made no difference because you were sharing too little bandwidth with everyone else.
Note to Steve, my computer is NOT your personal channel into my home. I'm really surprised by the number of posts on here saying that this is even a remotely good concept. If it were MS proposing this one, the Apple contingent would be up in arms and major media would be predicting the end of the world and/or MS. With Apple it's so insidious, like a little sugar with the poison. Every move they make is designed to bring in more revenue by locking you in a little more and making you feel good about giving up a little more control. I just get a creepy vibe from Apple that I've never gotten from another company before.
ahhh iTunes for Windows. Anyone want to explain why, when i recently installed the new version, the iTunes installer 1. disconnected my pc from the internet and 2. attempted to shut off my anti-virus (avast)? whaaaat? i'm installing a media player/manager. why should any of that be necessary?
It all comes back to my #1 complaint about Apple, "we know best". That attitude, that, you're all a buncha dumb shmucks, just let Steve show you how it's done, philosophy is what really keeps me from buying Apple products. I don't want a tech nanny thanks. I do have a gen1 iphone, and have been happy with it... in general. however, most of the issues i've had are directly related to the Apple strategy of "being different" even when it doesn't make sense to do so. At the time, the iphone was superior to just about every other smartphone available. now? not so much. i certainly wouldn't get a gen4 iphone given what's available today.
Why is it, when a new version of an OS, any OS it seems, comes out, printer manufacturers seem unable to have a functional driver available? This, despite the fact that they know well in advance and most of them have access to the OS vendors. win2k, XP, Vista, win7... Every time a new OS is released I get stuck finding workarounds or unsigned/hacked party drivers because some relative had to have a new computer and they can't print coupons anymore. You shoulda seen the nightmare I went through with my mother in law's brand new win7 laptop and her 2 year old HP printer. Even on the HP website, they seemed confused; alternately suggesting using a vista driver while offering a win7 driver for her printer (that didn't work of course).
Personally, I think they just hope most people will give up because they need to print NOW, and buy a new "YOUR OS COMPATIBLE" printer. The fact that 12 months later they always seem to magically produce a stable, fully functional driver kinda reinforces that thinking.
For that matter, why do you need to download a 100mb "driver package" to print a b/w text page...
"It is all about risk versus reward, and let's see, risk: major oil spill that is really going to fuck the eco system up for a long time (potentially world wide). Reward: none. Yep, ZERO reward. Oil should just go away already. As long as it sticks around, the longer we are NOT going to have alternative fuel sources taken seriously."
"Now I am not some eco-nut that is against everything that could damage the environment"
Funny how statement 1 seems to contradict statement 2. This thread is full of a bunch of idealistic soap boxers that preface every other statement with either "i'm no expert but..." or "i don't know but...". "Oil should just go away already." That's great. Hey, i can make awesome statements like that too! "People should live longer already", "Cars should fly already". Got any suggestions for oil? No, wait. REALISTIC suggestions that don't involve going back to some by-gone age of agrarian utopia that never existed?
Breeder reactors are great, got one that fits in my car? Oh, you mean they can create electricity for my ELECTRIC CAR? Show me the PRACTICAL electric cars I have to choose from. The ones with lightweight, efficient batteries that don't jack the price up enough to require a government or manufacturer subsidy to sell. Not to mention breeders are not without their own issues, not least of which is the NIMBY crowd, which ironically is frequently made up of people that drive Prius's and want to "go green" at any cost, as long as the cost is in someone ELSE'S back yard...
Accidents DO happen, really. Sometimes people do everything exactly right and bad things happen. It's called life. You clean up, figure out a way to do it better and you move on. There seems to be this fantasy land thinking that you can eliminate risk rather than mitigate it.
"No, other apps that do the same thing are still allowed and available in the app store."
NO! they do not "do the same thing". I just tried two of the remaining apps. when you launch it, it asks for your location or permission to use location services. THEN it searches a database of "free" wifi hotspots near you. near meaning 5 miles away at the nearest starbucks, not the 5 networks my neighbors have listed in my laptop's wifi app. what it does not do, then, is sniff the air for random wifi signals and let you know there's one available. seems like only apps that direct you to retail locations are gonna be approved.
the deal is, i don't see the usefulness of this kind of app in either implementation. if you open the wifi section in the iphone settings screen, you get a list of all networks within range of your phone and whether they are secured. in my experience, MOST pay networks seem to be secured in some way, so that's a fairly accurate indicator of whether you can get free wifi.
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I love all the elitist geeks in here slamming what other people like to do with their free time as a waste. You may get a big stiffy spending 10 hours struggling to compile the latest *nix app, but I guarantee a large % of those 62 million farmVille players think that's a waste of time too. I have a lot of friends that play farmville. Personally I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, but if they like it, who cares? They aren't wasting MY time.
Ironic isn't it, since you get people shouting all day long on here about wanting to use their media/computer/apps/OS/golf cart the way THEY want to use it. Stop with the sour grapes. You coulda designed a rediculously simple, highly addictive game with social interaction and made millions, but you didn't, probably woulda been a waste of time...
I'm not sure what your point is. A quick google will turn up numerous examples of the same behavior.
you can insert whatever time waster you want and probably find:
mom shakes baby for interrupting WoW, pleads guilty to murder
mom shakes baby for interrupting Biggest Loser, pleads guilty to murder
dad shakes baby for interrupting football, pleads guilty to murder
Bad parents are bad parents. It might have been Farmville that day, 5 minutes earlier it could have been youTube interruptions that set her over the edge.
"You don't need iTunes to use an iPod; "
This is not obvious to a non techie. I can tell you that my non techie friends are amazed when told they don't HAVE to use iTunes. Most of them just go on using it anyway, since the thought of using something not "official" to manage the iPod scares them. Your daughter doesn't count, she either has you to inform her of options or is the geek child of a geek and should know. Not typical.
Some of these same non techies have been so frustrated with iTunes that i've frequently heard comments like "apple makes great software?", "just works, my ass". I doubt they will be rushing to the Apple store to grab a copy of OSX any time soon.
it's ok for them to stick the knife in ya as long as they do it slowwwwwly. When Apple fully locks down the OS and the only avenue for applications is to get Apple blessed apps via the app store you'll keep begging for more and justify something you'd have denounced 5 years ago. Don't sit there and scream FUD at everyone when the last decade (at least) of Apple history shows that this move is inevitable. What is it that compels people to want a nanny no matter how much they claim otherwise? I will never understand why you guys buy into the "we know better than you" mentality of Apple. I reserve the right to screw up my user experience and suffer the consequences. Butt out please.
The irony of it all is that when any other company turns the screws and locks things down a little more each year, you same guys scream and whine. Mobile carriers spring to mind as getting lots of mileage and hate around here for closed platforms and stores. Yet when Apple learns the lesson well and gets into bed with AT/T, it's ok, since it's shiny and has a half eaten fruit logo.
You will play in Steve's playground, by his rules or he will take his ball and YOU'LL go home. Brilliant he might be, but a childish control freak as well. If it makes me shallow to not purchase Apple products because I just don't like the way Steve does business, oh well. But before you start pickin on me for that, remember that there are loads of Apple fanboys (plenty on this site) that don't use Wintel platforms because of a personal dislike of Gates and Ballmer.
i almost cried when i moved to an area with FiOS. I'm getting 35/35 Mb for only $15 more than what I used to pay Time Warner cable for 15/1 Mb...
Why would you want on demand payments?? Sure, I use Amazon for new releases, but for old content, why would you want to be nickle and dimed like that? Say you're a big fan of TJ Hooker. Now, at this point, the only people willing to pay for something like that have to be serious fans that would probably want all the episodes, not just one or two. You can stream it from Amazon for the low price of $2 per episode. For a one time viewing. At that price, you can just buy the DVD's and "enjoy" Hooker as often as you want.
.99/episode, it's hard to justify not just ordering the damn DVDs from Amazon instead.
I just used TJ Hooker as an example, but the pricing was consistent for most old shows on Amazon. At least with Netflix, my $9 a month lets me watch the content they do have over and over. Until the pay per view types start charging realistic prices for content I'm out. Even at
There is no reason an episode of a 20 or 30 year old TV show should cost as much as many newer release movies. At this point they should be grateful that they get ANY revenue from old content instead of being greedy about it. Still, it's probably hard to accept the lower end of pricing for these guys. There's just not a good pricing model for content that should probably be sold for pennies but costs a dollar to encode and stream.
i also wanted to point out that when i make reservations for car rental, I've never even seen an option to pay by the mile or limit the miles to get a cheaper price. The base rate always seems to include unlimited mileage.
that's interesting. I can't remember the last time I rented a car that had a mileage restriction or a pay by the mile arrangement. I think you're confusing truck rentals from the likes of U-Haul with passenger rentals from Hertz, National et al. The only restriction on mileage these days is self imposed (ie. How much do I want to spend on gas?) I've frequently rented a car and put 500+ miles on it at no additional cost from the rental company. That includes the time I went to the Coachella music festival and logged nearly 1000 miles driving through nearby national parks and sightseeing in Southern California. Not a peep from Hertz about the mileage.
Anecdotal, yes, but I've been a frequent car renter all over the U.S. for probably 15 years, so lots of data points and I've rented 3 cars in 2 states since August...
If I was making a reservation and saw the words mileage limit or per mile, I'd take my business elsewhere.
At my previous residence, there was coax from the local cable provider strung down the alley. On 2 occasions whereI had my internet service go out the cause turned out to be squirrels eating through the coax housing. I can only hope that the little guy got a nice zap when he broke through to the copper core.
well that's where it falls apart, $200 per room. ouch. I got my roku for $99. that's what i'd consider cheap.
That's all i really want, my Roku box with the added ability to stream video from my box o' hard drives to my TV. The Roku box is cheap, small, low power drain, silent and can handle new content when they add additional channels such as amazon. Its one shortcoming for me has been that I can't use it to access media that's NOT on the internet.
give me this and i'll buy one for every room with a TV.
Unfortunatly, the Blockbuster library has gotten smaller and smaller over the years. To the point the average store is 50% games, 25% older movies and 25% multiple copies of the latest releases. It's that ever shrinking proportion of older movies that is driving people to Netflix.
dunno... he's a major technology figure, not a small number of people on /. worship him, it's kind of a funny story (rich guy can't bring what he wants on own private plane) and it's kind of shocking (rich guy can't bring what he wants on own private plane).
"Heinlein was amazing at predicting tech & science advances far, far ahead of any of his contemporaries."
True, except for the proliferation of computers and the radical miniaturization of electronic components we enjoy today. Heinlein missed that completely. It's all tubes and wires in his stories and tasks that are done quickly by computer today (calculating an orbit for example) are nearly always done by hand. It's almost as if he had a blind spot for computers and envisioned a future society where math was the cool subject.
he's still one of my favorite authors of all time.
looks like he had a great birthday! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzqNkIkj3rE
wish i had mod points for you. the only times i see flash crash a browser is when my mother in law tries to open farmville AND cafe world AND mafia wars AND a few more large flash games in tabs in one browser window. even then it's less of a crash than a slowing to a crawl. Personally, I've always had way more issues with the Adobe Acrobat browser plugin than with Flash. THAT thing is horrible, thank god for Foxit.
"Sounds like the right mentality to go to Mars/ Asteroids/ or anywhere else off this planet. How many Luddite flat-landers does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
there's a world of difference between going to the moon/mars etc. and a station in low earth orbit, that was largely created to keep the space agencies of several countries employed and to justify the continuation of the shuttle program. How much more time do we need to spend in LEO? Imagine if Columbus and all those other great explorers had been content to just keep circling the Mediterranean...
I'm all for manned exploration, so long as it's exploration. If NASA says tomorrow they are willing to take some risk and send people to the moon to do something other than plant a flag again, or they want to go to mars and see how long they can keep a small group of people there, I will support it wholeheartedly and wish I could go along. What I won't support is off world make-work that turns the astronaut into a maintenance man or the guy that rotates the plants in some experiment.
wait a sec, if there were no humans on the ISS, much of its complexity would be unnecessary, eliminating the need to have humans in the loop. Specifically, i'm thinking of all the components that make it able to support human life, which seem to have a higher incidence of failure/issue. It's always a toilet or a/c unit freaking out up there.
Ball A Rat? am i the only one that finds that funny? probably so.
net zero press releases to the contrary, the real reasons net zero failed would include
1. The expanding availability of broadband
2. Did anyone look at the ads? I don't recall using anything to block ads from netZero, i just remember them fading into the background mentally.
3. Poor to non existent customer service
4. Insufficient bandwidth connecting to backbone. If you were lucky enough to connect at 56k, it made no difference because you were sharing too little bandwidth with everyone else.
Note to Steve, my computer is NOT your personal channel into my home. I'm really surprised by the number of posts on here saying that this is even a remotely good concept. If it were MS proposing this one, the Apple contingent would be up in arms and major media would be predicting the end of the world and/or MS. With Apple it's so insidious, like a little sugar with the poison. Every move they make is designed to bring in more revenue by locking you in a little more and making you feel good about giving up a little more control. I just get a creepy vibe from Apple that I've never gotten from another company before.
ahhh iTunes for Windows. Anyone want to explain why, when i recently installed the new version, the iTunes installer 1. disconnected my pc from the internet and 2. attempted to shut off my anti-virus (avast)? whaaaat? i'm installing a media player/manager. why should any of that be necessary?
It all comes back to my #1 complaint about Apple, "we know best". That attitude, that, you're all a buncha dumb shmucks, just let Steve show you how it's done, philosophy is what really keeps me from buying Apple products. I don't want a tech nanny thanks. I do have a gen1 iphone, and have been happy with it... in general. however, most of the issues i've had are directly related to the Apple strategy of "being different" even when it doesn't make sense to do so. At the time, the iphone was superior to just about every other smartphone available. now? not so much. i certainly wouldn't get a gen4 iphone given what's available today.
Why is it, when a new version of an OS, any OS it seems, comes out, printer manufacturers seem unable to have a functional driver available? This, despite the fact that they know well in advance and most of them have access to the OS vendors. win2k, XP, Vista, win7... Every time a new OS is released I get stuck finding workarounds or unsigned/hacked party drivers because some relative had to have a new computer and they can't print coupons anymore. You shoulda seen the nightmare I went through with my mother in law's brand new win7 laptop and her 2 year old HP printer. Even on the HP website, they seemed confused; alternately suggesting using a vista driver while offering a win7 driver for her printer (that didn't work of course).
Personally, I think they just hope most people will give up because they need to print NOW, and buy a new "YOUR OS COMPATIBLE" printer. The fact that 12 months later they always seem to magically produce a stable, fully functional driver kinda reinforces that thinking.
For that matter, why do you need to download a 100mb "driver package" to print a b/w text page...
"It is all about risk versus reward, and let's see, risk: major oil spill that is really going to fuck the eco system up for a long time (potentially world wide). Reward: none. Yep, ZERO reward. Oil should just go away already. As long as it sticks around, the longer we are NOT going to have alternative fuel sources taken seriously."
"Now I am not some eco-nut that is against everything that could damage the environment"
Funny how statement 1 seems to contradict statement 2. This thread is full of a bunch of idealistic soap boxers that preface every other statement with either "i'm no expert but..." or "i don't know but...". "Oil should just go away already." That's great. Hey, i can make awesome statements like that too! "People should live longer already", "Cars should fly already". Got any suggestions for oil? No, wait. REALISTIC suggestions that don't involve going back to some by-gone age of agrarian utopia that never existed?
Breeder reactors are great, got one that fits in my car? Oh, you mean they can create electricity for my ELECTRIC CAR? Show me the PRACTICAL electric cars I have to choose from. The ones with lightweight, efficient batteries that don't jack the price up enough to require a government or manufacturer subsidy to sell. Not to mention breeders are not without their own issues, not least of which is the NIMBY crowd, which ironically is frequently made up of people that drive Prius's and want to "go green" at any cost, as long as the cost is in someone ELSE'S back yard...
Accidents DO happen, really. Sometimes people do everything exactly right and bad things happen. It's called life. You clean up, figure out a way to do it better and you move on. There seems to be this fantasy land thinking that you can eliminate risk rather than mitigate it.
"No, other apps that do the same thing are still allowed and available in the app store."
NO! they do not "do the same thing". I just tried two of the remaining apps. when you launch it, it asks for your location or permission to use location services. THEN it searches a database of "free" wifi hotspots near you. near meaning 5 miles away at the nearest starbucks, not the 5 networks my neighbors have listed in my laptop's wifi app. what it does not do, then, is sniff the air for random wifi signals and let you know there's one available. seems like only apps that direct you to retail locations are gonna be approved.
the deal is, i don't see the usefulness of this kind of app in either implementation. if you open the wifi section in the iphone settings screen, you get a list of all networks within range of your phone and whether they are secured. in my experience, MOST pay networks seem to be secured in some way, so that's a fairly accurate indicator of whether you can get free wifi.
"Even though in theory you might end up with Madonna from a picture of E-T"
and how would anyone be able to tell the difference?
i do hope something like this makes it into a photoshop plugin.