Where do you live in Canada? I've lived in Ottawa and Toronto, and the Best Buys and Future Shops there have always had every new release in stock on launch day.
GameStop/EB's days are numbered. I don't even go to them anymore. The local big box electronic retailers like Best Buy constantly have a massive stack of them in stock on release day, no pushy sales guys, no constant badgering for product service plans (it's a disc, leave me alone). I walk in, pick the game I want, and walk out. I recall making the mistake recently and pre-ordering Halo 3 at the local EB. By the time I got to the mall at 10:30pm the line was already easily 100 people long, their tills went down, causing even more delays, and it was 1am by the time I smartened up and went to the local Best Buy (who also had a midnight release event) with the guy next to me in line. We both just waltzed in, and 5 minutes later walked out with our copies of the game. Both of us got our preorder money back from EB the next day.
The only thing they're good for is rare games and used games. IMHO they need to convert themselves to a "classics and used" shop, which should make them more customer-satisfaction oriented. I'd like a game shop in town that specializes in collecting older, proven classics. God knows I'd kill for a copy of the old Master of Orion 2 if I could still find one.
Anti-Apple bias much? I also agree that the iPhone isn't a cut and dry "invention", but there is plenty of novelty and ingenuity in that product, above and beyond its aesthetic appeal. It is, bar none, the best phone UI on the market today. It throws away old paradigms of input, and has invented a few others (pinch to zoom, anyone?).
I've used an N95 (which I gather from the marketing is Nokia's super-phone, of sorts), and I'm not impressed. Great features like you say, but completely underutilized. All that 3G radio gooey goodness and the phone UI is still cumbersome and a pain to use. This is very typical of Apple vs. their competition. The competition can cram as many features as they want into a neat little device, but Apple will still win by usability alone. Can't say I don't like that, since IMHO technology has always been far too inaccessible to the masses.
Canada uses metres as a distance measure, even on roads, I've never seen any speed limit or road signs in imperial units. We only use pounds for our produce...
Jobs isn't stupid, he won't can a product because someone talked. Just expect the inevitable Apple Tablet to come without Asus parts inside;) I believe this is also why all newer Apple machines run NVidia graphics chips, something about an ATI exec being indiscreet with information about their partnership. Wham, Jobs pulls the contract from under them.
I agree SE phones are leaps and bounds better than Motorola's offerings, but IMHO they still cannot hold a candle to Apple in terms of user interface quality. The software is solid, stable, and quick (everything Moto isn't), but they are still treading the same tired paradigms.
And by that I mean the olde standard interface: home screen, hit button to go to tiled menu, use a joystick to wag about in the menu, have two contextual buttons for each menu item, etc etc. It encourages a lot of menu-digging as soon as you do something OTHER than making a call. It also wreaks havoc when your contact list gets large (to the order of hundreds of numbers), since anything else involves typing the name of your contact in on that forsaken keypad-turned-keyboard.
Both SE and its competitors (Moto included) have interfaces that are menu-obsessed, which leads to slow workflows and less-than-optimal ergonomics. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a well placed button with a good icon is infinitely easier to understand than yet another menu item. Not to mention, even when in a menu, I can hit the item I want immediately, whereas you'd have to scroll. Is the SE phone functional? Yes, but one is much more pleasant to use.
From the Mac Classic user's perspective, OS X just does what you'd expect a spatially-designed interface to do, treat every object the same.
Sometimes designing by philosophy is a bad idea. A good file management paradigm should never get in the way of doing what users want and expect. If your little file management philosophy does something clearly most users do not expect, then it's not a very good philosophy now is it?
I'm a Mac user and even I know this type of shenanigans are bull. This is Apple refusing to get with the times, nothing more and nothing less. This should have been fixed in 10.2, and we're sitting here with 10.5, with the same problems.
I'm glad to see many file management front-end improvements in Leopard. It dismays me to see that the backend is still as shoddy as it's ever been.
Pretty well? I know exactly how that one sounds like, and compared to modern text-to-speech output the difference is night and day. Where one was marginally intelligible if you listen intently enough, with very jarring and audible gaps where phenomes changed, the new ones had proper sentence pacing, proper transfer between phenomes, and a host of stuff that makes it sound like natural human speech. Even playing with stuff rom the late '90s there are still relatively simple sentences that the TTS system will regularly mangle beyond recognition.
You may say all of that is just fancy luxuries we don't need. I would beg to differ, it makes our technology more accessible and more useful. It makes text-to-speech an actual aid, instead of a chore, for people who actually need it.
You're completely forgetting that this is "medicine" we're talking about here, and not "biology". One was to observe nature, the other one for curing people.
They go hand in hand. Do you think they were trying to invent some miracle cure for some disease when they stumbled upon the structure of the DNA? Better understanding of our biology will eventually lead to better technologies and medicines. I'm not talking about pharma companies, I'm talking more about the guy's notion that research that has no immediate application is somehow a waste of time.
researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.
And that's the way it ought to be. Not all things need immediate applications. Many of the most impressive inventions of our time have been a fusion of research that seemingly have few worthwhile applications. Expanding the sum of human knowledge is never a waste of time.
And take twice as long to develop for, generate codebases that are 10 times more difficult to maintain... Computing power in general is being put to very good use. Look at Expose on Mac OS X, it can render *all* of your windows in real-time in an arrayed view. This is extremely useful for multitaskers who need to be able to get an overview of all of their open tasks, and switch between them quickly. Try doing that on a 100MHz machine (20 times slower than a 2GHz "modern" CPU).
Or heck, voice recognition input for handicapped people, try doing that to the same reliability and responsiveness as we can now, with a 100MHz machine. Or text-to-speech output, for visually impaired people, without the stuttering stilted sounds of yester-year, only possible because we have so many cycles to put towards it. Or for other visually impaired people - seamlessly scaling up UI elements without pixelation, using all vector resources, you can't do that on a 100MHz machine either.
Or more productively, photo manipulation and video production. Do you seriously mean to tell me that a 100MHz machine can edit videos just as well as a 2GHz machine? Way back in the day when I used an early version of Adobe Premiere to edit videos, you couldn't preview effects added to a video stream until you rendered it - simply not even CPU power to keep things smooth if you tried.
So yeah, if you're stuck in a CLI all day, maybe a modern computer can't do much more than an old busted one, but for the rest of the world it's fairly obvious where all the power is going.
The OP claimed that he built a significantly faster machine for less than the price in the article. The article calls for a 8800GT, which runs faster than the 8800GTS, and is basically the second-fastest card on the market. Quite a deal I would say. You want to find something *faster* than a 8800GT, is used (yeah right, at that performance level?!), and isn't stolen, and is much cheaper than retail to boot. Not going to happen.
Perhaps you're looking at the wrong games. There are games that will run very well on extremely low end machines, even AAA titles. Valve's Orange Box comes to mind. There are also games that will demand a ludicrous machine to even contemplate playing. If you walk into your local Best Buy and look on the shelves, you will find system requirements on average to be overwhelmingly low. It's just that games like Crysis get a lot of press, so you're getting the *impression* that the entire industry demands expensive, insane hardware, when it really does not.
I mean c'mon, Quake at the time the demo came out brought my machine to its knees. Gaming has always required decent hardware, and especially if you're talking about Crytek or id, insane hardware.
Ah yes, eventually I figured out how to do it with my old Toshiba, considering how the default mode was hibernate, and nowhere does it recommend or even mention that an alternate, faster sleep mode was available, and indeed the option was hidden deep within the guts of the OS.
Apple's "it just works" mantra isn't rocket science, among other things it's about being non-stupid with your default settings, and exposing features in a usable, easy to find manner.
Joe user isn't going to know the difference between hibernate and sleep, he just wants his machine to be snappy and work. So while the underlying technology is no different, one machine gets a much more favorable impression.
Oh 'tis a beauty. On my old Windows laptop, un-hibernating takes an ungodly amount of time - it's about equivalent to a normal boot, except the added bonus of not losing my work. On a Mac the sleep mode rules - a slight amount of battery usage, but my machine is on (and totally interactive, as opposed to un-hibernation, where between "Desktop displayed" and "machine usable" is a good full minute), within 2-3 seconds of flipping open the lid.
Except, of course, like all legitimate engineering projects in academia, your budget is entirely open to public scrutiny and review by funding committees. Even something as little as $1000 is subject to funding review.
Sure, but that's not news. You can save a lot of money by buying goods with no proven legitimate source of supply, and could have come from anywhere, under any means. Not that I'm condemning you for it, but just food for thought. A *huge* amount of goods on eBay are stolen (or worse, robbed).
If you're talking about >40% off store prices, your goods are almost certainly stolen, since that is below even wholesale cost.
Did you miss all the expensive equipment mounted on the car? Have you ever entered an engineering competition? Almost all teams take commercial sponsors, annd rarely do teams make a profit - after all, you only solicit as many sponsors as it takes to get the project built.
If you want to exploit clever loopholes in things, go into science. As a fellow engineer I completely understand why your prof took off marks for your trick - it's bad engineering practice. You were in school to train to be a professional engineer, and with it comes certain responsibilities and mindsets. Sure, this one project was for a college course, and nobody's ever going to die from it, but in your school projects you are expected to show the same due care and diligence that would otherwise be expected of you in the workplace.
A better course of action would be to document the loophole and suggest in your documentation that, in certain, very controlled circumstances, this can be used to optimize performance (but it's a PLC, seriously, performance?). As engineers we're expected to do things by the book, following accepted standards, and if we deviate from it we are to document it fully with gigantic red underlines or whatever. This is the type of procedure that keeps planes in the sky and cars on the road.
I do wonder what the fuss is all about. I don't live in the States, but up here in Canada cell phone is not a problem. The only place I've seen with a "turn off your cell phones" sign is a movie theatre, and I haven't been annoyed by a cell phone in a restaurant in a LONG time. I do recall when cell phones were just becoming popular, that we had some growing pains, as people established new social expectations for their usage. IMHO we're past that point, and the overwhelming majority of people respect the new "rules".
This is also why all small-time etailers should NEVER keep any pertinent data on the server. I run a small arts and crafts online store for my parents, and the most we keep are customer names and shipping addresses, so that they don't have to type it all back in each time they visit. Credit card info? Processed then immediately discarded. Passwords are all properly hashed. While I pray that my server never gets stolen like this, at least I know that my customers will not be in danger of identity theft (reasonably), if it does happen.
Armed staff are a bad idea, all it does is makes them targets. For one thing, they're not security professionals, they probably can't even shoot straight at a human being, much less incapacitate any intruder. Secondly, you're SERIOUSLY not paying them enough to put their life on the line for the company. I wouldn't. You can call me undedicated or whatever, but seriously, risking life and limb for my company is not in my job description.
The problem with security is that it adds directly to the cost of your service. A hardcore security system like you're proposing above costs major $$$ to install and maintain. I'm sure there ARE datacentres out there this well protected, but they're for people willing to pay for that level of security. You do get what you pay for, after all.
I'm a happy DH customer, and while when I first signed up there were some disconcerting outages, the general experience has been rock solid, and from my own anecdotal experience I can definitely say they at least hit 99% uptime. This may not be good enough if you're trying to run an online service that demands 24/7/365 uptime, but it's certainly good enough for $10/month.
DH practices overselling to an extreme degree, I totally agree, but in my experience they're capable of handling the aggregate load. You'd be right, if every DH customer decided to use their 2TB of bandwidth a month, then they'd go out of business within hours. But that's really never going to happen. Overselling is only an issue if the hosting provider is not prepared to provide the service when called upon to do it.
Your post doesn't make sense. How are we judging the length of a sentence? Is a long sentence to take revenge upon the criminal for having harmed society? Or is it to to give the criminal sufficient time to rehabilitate, and hopefully live out the remainder of his life as a reasonably productive citizen? Is the length of a sentence also proportional to the likelihood of recommission?
If we ignore the first (revenge) issue, then clearly drug use, theft, and robbery deserve far longer sentences than murder. Statistically drug users who've been through the joint are EXTREMELY likely to commit another drug-related crime (or worse), and in fact I believe the stats show that the vast majority do. For the sake of protecting society (many drug users also deal drugs, not to mention committing many other crimes to fuel their habit), shouldn't these guys be in jail longer?
As opposed to the murderer, who killed his cheating wife in a fit of rage. How likely is he to commit the crime, or any crime for that matter, again?
Clearly this must be judged on a case by case basis. If the guy is a psychopathic serial killer, then yeah, throw him in the slammer for a very good long time...
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Where do you live in Canada? I've lived in Ottawa and Toronto, and the Best Buys and Future Shops there have always had every new release in stock on launch day.
GameStop/EB's days are numbered. I don't even go to them anymore. The local big box electronic retailers like Best Buy constantly have a massive stack of them in stock on release day, no pushy sales guys, no constant badgering for product service plans (it's a disc, leave me alone). I walk in, pick the game I want, and walk out. I recall making the mistake recently and pre-ordering Halo 3 at the local EB. By the time I got to the mall at 10:30pm the line was already easily 100 people long, their tills went down, causing even more delays, and it was 1am by the time I smartened up and went to the local Best Buy (who also had a midnight release event) with the guy next to me in line. We both just waltzed in, and 5 minutes later walked out with our copies of the game. Both of us got our preorder money back from EB the next day.
The only thing they're good for is rare games and used games. IMHO they need to convert themselves to a "classics and used" shop, which should make them more customer-satisfaction oriented. I'd like a game shop in town that specializes in collecting older, proven classics. God knows I'd kill for a copy of the old Master of Orion 2 if I could still find one.
Anti-Apple bias much? I also agree that the iPhone isn't a cut and dry "invention", but there is plenty of novelty and ingenuity in that product, above and beyond its aesthetic appeal. It is, bar none, the best phone UI on the market today. It throws away old paradigms of input, and has invented a few others (pinch to zoom, anyone?).
I've used an N95 (which I gather from the marketing is Nokia's super-phone, of sorts), and I'm not impressed. Great features like you say, but completely underutilized. All that 3G radio gooey goodness and the phone UI is still cumbersome and a pain to use. This is very typical of Apple vs. their competition. The competition can cram as many features as they want into a neat little device, but Apple will still win by usability alone. Can't say I don't like that, since IMHO technology has always been far too inaccessible to the masses.
Canada uses metres as a distance measure, even on roads, I've never seen any speed limit or road signs in imperial units. We only use pounds for our produce...
Jobs isn't stupid, he won't can a product because someone talked. Just expect the inevitable Apple Tablet to come without Asus parts inside ;) I believe this is also why all newer Apple machines run NVidia graphics chips, something about an ATI exec being indiscreet with information about their partnership. Wham, Jobs pulls the contract from under them.
I agree SE phones are leaps and bounds better than Motorola's offerings, but IMHO they still cannot hold a candle to Apple in terms of user interface quality. The software is solid, stable, and quick (everything Moto isn't), but they are still treading the same tired paradigms.
And by that I mean the olde standard interface: home screen, hit button to go to tiled menu, use a joystick to wag about in the menu, have two contextual buttons for each menu item, etc etc. It encourages a lot of menu-digging as soon as you do something OTHER than making a call. It also wreaks havoc when your contact list gets large (to the order of hundreds of numbers), since anything else involves typing the name of your contact in on that forsaken keypad-turned-keyboard.
Both SE and its competitors (Moto included) have interfaces that are menu-obsessed, which leads to slow workflows and less-than-optimal ergonomics. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a well placed button with a good icon is infinitely easier to understand than yet another menu item. Not to mention, even when in a menu, I can hit the item I want immediately, whereas you'd have to scroll. Is the SE phone functional? Yes, but one is much more pleasant to use.
Sometimes designing by philosophy is a bad idea. A good file management paradigm should never get in the way of doing what users want and expect. If your little file management philosophy does something clearly most users do not expect, then it's not a very good philosophy now is it?
I'm a Mac user and even I know this type of shenanigans are bull. This is Apple refusing to get with the times, nothing more and nothing less. This should have been fixed in 10.2, and we're sitting here with 10.5, with the same problems.
I'm glad to see many file management front-end improvements in Leopard. It dismays me to see that the backend is still as shoddy as it's ever been.
Pretty well? I know exactly how that one sounds like, and compared to modern text-to-speech output the difference is night and day. Where one was marginally intelligible if you listen intently enough, with very jarring and audible gaps where phenomes changed, the new ones had proper sentence pacing, proper transfer between phenomes, and a host of stuff that makes it sound like natural human speech. Even playing with stuff rom the late '90s there are still relatively simple sentences that the TTS system will regularly mangle beyond recognition.
You may say all of that is just fancy luxuries we don't need. I would beg to differ, it makes our technology more accessible and more useful. It makes text-to-speech an actual aid, instead of a chore, for people who actually need it.
They go hand in hand. Do you think they were trying to invent some miracle cure for some disease when they stumbled upon the structure of the DNA? Better understanding of our biology will eventually lead to better technologies and medicines. I'm not talking about pharma companies, I'm talking more about the guy's notion that research that has no immediate application is somehow a waste of time.
And that's the way it ought to be. Not all things need immediate applications. Many of the most impressive inventions of our time have been a fusion of research that seemingly have few worthwhile applications. Expanding the sum of human knowledge is never a waste of time.
And take twice as long to develop for, generate codebases that are 10 times more difficult to maintain... Computing power in general is being put to very good use. Look at Expose on Mac OS X, it can render *all* of your windows in real-time in an arrayed view. This is extremely useful for multitaskers who need to be able to get an overview of all of their open tasks, and switch between them quickly. Try doing that on a 100MHz machine (20 times slower than a 2GHz "modern" CPU).
Or heck, voice recognition input for handicapped people, try doing that to the same reliability and responsiveness as we can now, with a 100MHz machine. Or text-to-speech output, for visually impaired people, without the stuttering stilted sounds of yester-year, only possible because we have so many cycles to put towards it. Or for other visually impaired people - seamlessly scaling up UI elements without pixelation, using all vector resources, you can't do that on a 100MHz machine either.
Or more productively, photo manipulation and video production. Do you seriously mean to tell me that a 100MHz machine can edit videos just as well as a 2GHz machine? Way back in the day when I used an early version of Adobe Premiere to edit videos, you couldn't preview effects added to a video stream until you rendered it - simply not even CPU power to keep things smooth if you tried.
So yeah, if you're stuck in a CLI all day, maybe a modern computer can't do much more than an old busted one, but for the rest of the world it's fairly obvious where all the power is going.
The OP claimed that he built a significantly faster machine for less than the price in the article. The article calls for a 8800GT, which runs faster than the 8800GTS, and is basically the second-fastest card on the market. Quite a deal I would say. You want to find something *faster* than a 8800GT, is used (yeah right, at that performance level?!), and isn't stolen, and is much cheaper than retail to boot. Not going to happen.
Perhaps you're looking at the wrong games. There are games that will run very well on extremely low end machines, even AAA titles. Valve's Orange Box comes to mind. There are also games that will demand a ludicrous machine to even contemplate playing. If you walk into your local Best Buy and look on the shelves, you will find system requirements on average to be overwhelmingly low. It's just that games like Crysis get a lot of press, so you're getting the *impression* that the entire industry demands expensive, insane hardware, when it really does not.
I mean c'mon, Quake at the time the demo came out brought my machine to its knees. Gaming has always required decent hardware, and especially if you're talking about Crytek or id, insane hardware.
Ah yes, eventually I figured out how to do it with my old Toshiba, considering how the default mode was hibernate, and nowhere does it recommend or even mention that an alternate, faster sleep mode was available, and indeed the option was hidden deep within the guts of the OS.
Apple's "it just works" mantra isn't rocket science, among other things it's about being non-stupid with your default settings, and exposing features in a usable, easy to find manner.
Joe user isn't going to know the difference between hibernate and sleep, he just wants his machine to be snappy and work. So while the underlying technology is no different, one machine gets a much more favorable impression.
Oh 'tis a beauty. On my old Windows laptop, un-hibernating takes an ungodly amount of time - it's about equivalent to a normal boot, except the added bonus of not losing my work. On a Mac the sleep mode rules - a slight amount of battery usage, but my machine is on (and totally interactive, as opposed to un-hibernation, where between "Desktop displayed" and "machine usable" is a good full minute), within 2-3 seconds of flipping open the lid.
Except, of course, like all legitimate engineering projects in academia, your budget is entirely open to public scrutiny and review by funding committees. Even something as little as $1000 is subject to funding review.
Sure, but that's not news. You can save a lot of money by buying goods with no proven legitimate source of supply, and could have come from anywhere, under any means. Not that I'm condemning you for it, but just food for thought. A *huge* amount of goods on eBay are stolen (or worse, robbed).
If you're talking about >40% off store prices, your goods are almost certainly stolen, since that is below even wholesale cost.
Did you miss all the expensive equipment mounted on the car? Have you ever entered an engineering competition? Almost all teams take commercial sponsors, annd rarely do teams make a profit - after all, you only solicit as many sponsors as it takes to get the project built.
If you want to exploit clever loopholes in things, go into science. As a fellow engineer I completely understand why your prof took off marks for your trick - it's bad engineering practice. You were in school to train to be a professional engineer, and with it comes certain responsibilities and mindsets. Sure, this one project was for a college course, and nobody's ever going to die from it, but in your school projects you are expected to show the same due care and diligence that would otherwise be expected of you in the workplace.
A better course of action would be to document the loophole and suggest in your documentation that, in certain, very controlled circumstances, this can be used to optimize performance (but it's a PLC, seriously, performance?). As engineers we're expected to do things by the book, following accepted standards, and if we deviate from it we are to document it fully with gigantic red underlines or whatever. This is the type of procedure that keeps planes in the sky and cars on the road.
I do wonder what the fuss is all about. I don't live in the States, but up here in Canada cell phone is not a problem. The only place I've seen with a "turn off your cell phones" sign is a movie theatre, and I haven't been annoyed by a cell phone in a restaurant in a LONG time. I do recall when cell phones were just becoming popular, that we had some growing pains, as people established new social expectations for their usage. IMHO we're past that point, and the overwhelming majority of people respect the new "rules".
This is also why all small-time etailers should NEVER keep any pertinent data on the server. I run a small arts and crafts online store for my parents, and the most we keep are customer names and shipping addresses, so that they don't have to type it all back in each time they visit. Credit card info? Processed then immediately discarded. Passwords are all properly hashed. While I pray that my server never gets stolen like this, at least I know that my customers will not be in danger of identity theft (reasonably), if it does happen.
Armed staff are a bad idea, all it does is makes them targets. For one thing, they're not security professionals, they probably can't even shoot straight at a human being, much less incapacitate any intruder. Secondly, you're SERIOUSLY not paying them enough to put their life on the line for the company. I wouldn't. You can call me undedicated or whatever, but seriously, risking life and limb for my company is not in my job description.
The problem with security is that it adds directly to the cost of your service. A hardcore security system like you're proposing above costs major $$$ to install and maintain. I'm sure there ARE datacentres out there this well protected, but they're for people willing to pay for that level of security. You do get what you pay for, after all.
I'm a happy DH customer, and while when I first signed up there were some disconcerting outages, the general experience has been rock solid, and from my own anecdotal experience I can definitely say they at least hit 99% uptime. This may not be good enough if you're trying to run an online service that demands 24/7/365 uptime, but it's certainly good enough for $10/month.
DH practices overselling to an extreme degree, I totally agree, but in my experience they're capable of handling the aggregate load. You'd be right, if every DH customer decided to use their 2TB of bandwidth a month, then they'd go out of business within hours. But that's really never going to happen. Overselling is only an issue if the hosting provider is not prepared to provide the service when called upon to do it.
Your post doesn't make sense. How are we judging the length of a sentence? Is a long sentence to take revenge upon the criminal for having harmed society? Or is it to to give the criminal sufficient time to rehabilitate, and hopefully live out the remainder of his life as a reasonably productive citizen? Is the length of a sentence also proportional to the likelihood of recommission?
If we ignore the first (revenge) issue, then clearly drug use, theft, and robbery deserve far longer sentences than murder. Statistically drug users who've been through the joint are EXTREMELY likely to commit another drug-related crime (or worse), and in fact I believe the stats show that the vast majority do. For the sake of protecting society (many drug users also deal drugs, not to mention committing many other crimes to fuel their habit), shouldn't these guys be in jail longer?
As opposed to the murderer, who killed his cheating wife in a fit of rage. How likely is he to commit the crime, or any crime for that matter, again?
Clearly this must be judged on a case by case basis. If the guy is a psychopathic serial killer, then yeah, throw him in the slammer for a very good long time...