because suburbanites and flyover folks won't shop in them. Mom and pop and competing national chain open on the same block, the entire crowd flocks to national chains, particularly in smaller communities. Hell, they're even proud to have them. Getting a Wal-Mart means they've arrived, it puts them on the map.

The only place where Mom-and-pop shops still survive are in heavily blue urban areas, where they continue to do well. That's no accident.

I've been shooting with four thirds since it was released, and I have the same great lenses that remain perfect as they day I bought them.

This year I finally upgraded my body (to an E-3) for the first time in years. Logged over 150k actuations on my E-1 previously.

So I bought one body and zero lenses in a decade.

Once all of the pros and semi-pros and serious shooters have made the switch from film to digital, and are fully satisfied with the quality they're getting, and once all of the snapshot shooters have a camera that is automatically included and upgraded each time they get a phone (which everyone has), there's just not a lot of growth market left.

The switch from digital to film was a one-time boom until parity was reached in quality, and now it's done.

WANT greater depth of field. You want LESS.

That's what the non-photographer public senses when they talk about the difference between "professional photos" and "snapshots."

In a snapshot (small camera), everything in the picture is in sharp focus, which makes the photo about the "scene" and distracts eyes from any one particular subject.

Shooting at f/2 on a tiny sensor, you get only snapshots.

Shooting at f/2 on a DSLR, only the subject (the person, the face, the rock feature, whatever) is in focus, and everything else is slightly blurred, which brings attention to the subject of the image, and at the same time blurs out distracting, unimportant details in the background.

Here's a good example from Google Images: http://ns12.sovdns.com/~nich61...

On a small camera or a smartphone, only the photo on the left is possible. In fact, on the smallest phones/cameras, you won't even get that much blur in the background; nearly everything can be razor sharp.

Generally, that's not good for subject work—only for scene work.

Apple pays out 67%. That's on Gross.

If they were to perhaps, talk about the expense of promotion, servers, and the fact that all the toys for Whack-A-Mole ended up in lawsuits, they could use Hollywood accounting. It would still be 67%, but of the net -- which means cab fair instead of money to buy the Limo.

I don't except that Programming is "Bigger than Hollywood" until we have people saying they are programmers while the bulk of their income comes from waiting tables, and I have to sleep with my Employer to get a job interview.

I WISH the process were that simple.

I saw a lot of EISA systems. It was a reasonable performer and physically robust (not as sensitive as PCI cards to positioning in slots, etc.). I'd say that EISA hardware was generally of very good quality, but high-end enough that most consumers wouldn't run into it despite being a commodity standard, sort of like PCI-X.

The systems I had experience with were running Linux, even then. :-)

Yeah but can we all just agree that connecting some of these systems to the internet or a wireless network is a bad idea?

I want a person who sees one screen with internet access, makes a decision, and presses a physical button on the controls for the nuclear power plant.

So auto driving cars are great -- can be secured, but let's not be cavalier about "other things are computer controlled" -- there's going to be iPhone software that tweaks the car and that means 100X more access by script kiddies to mayhem.

For a very long time, tape drives and media gave tape drives and media a bad name.

Consumer QIC — about 1% of tapes actually held any data, total snake oil that took 10 days to "store" 10 megs (immediately unreadable in all cases)
4mm — Tapes good for one pass thru drive; drive good for about 10 tape passes
8mm —Tapes good for maybe 10 passes thru drive; drive good for about 100 tape passes before it starts eating tapes

For all three of the above: Don't bother trying to read a tape on any drive other than the one that wrote it; you won't find data there.

Real QIC —Somewhat more reliable but vulnerable to dust, magnetic fields; drive mechanisms not robust, finicky about door closings

Basically, the only tapes that have ever been any damned good are 1/2 inch or wider and single-reel for storage. Problem is that none of these have ever been particularly affordable at contemporary capacities and they still aren't. Any non-enterprise business should just buy multiple hard drives for their rotating backups and replace the lot of them once a year.

Nobody said "the science is done" -- they said; "the alarm has been sounded."

A fire alarm goes off in your house -- do you wait for the research to be conclusive or do you look for smoke, get a fire extinguisher, call 911, leave the building or do something useful to deal with it? The research into; "what do we do, the alarms are going off?" Is underway.

Know, you are talking about an exploit that could be affecting 60% of Android phones vs. "a potential" of affecting iOS but no proof and you point out "but if there was a problem you'd have no options".

Sounds like someone in a campaign defending a corrupt and incompetent politician with the potential that the other candidate could start Armageddon based on them not doing anything to prevent Armageddon.

There are orders of magnitude better security on Bitcoins then there are on our electronic voting systems. They were designed in the first place by two hackers Rove got out of prison. They had three "Access databases" one for query, one that was used to submit the vote, and a third with no particular reason given. Any reason other than fraud to have three databases in a simple voting system and any REASON why a touch screen device is so expensive and flakes out so often? If Banks had these problems they'd lose billions at ATMS; they don't, so the only reason is fraud or incompetence.

I'd say that government agencies or very advanced hackers working for the mob took out some bitcoin companies with my first suspect being governments as it challenges the bankers they work for.

I already know I vote on a totally hackable system and it's just honest enough to be plausible. Pay no attention to Max Cleland's vote flipping in the last few minutes of the election.

Yeah, I notice how many foreign agents and bankers the FBI gets.

I'd like for once the FBI not to arrest someone from Green Peace, a protestor with Occupy Wall Street, a group of homeless men who had an FBI handler who put them up to it.

Eric Holder could take the Fed Chairman and the heads of Goldman Sachs and prosecute them for all sorts of crimes -- anyone paying attention will know about the abuse that one company has made. Why is this not happening?

There is nothing "legit" going on -- merely agencies preserving the status quo and a government owned by the people who they have to borrow from to get into office.

It's worse than "papers please" -- there are a lot of laws making it illegal to cover your face or disguise your appearance. Facial recognition software is not good enough yet to really track everyone -- but they've laid the groundwork.

Total Information Awareness means that all things are known about all people. Being that there are so many laws, I'm very sure we are all guilty of something. Prosecution therefore, is selective and can be used to target anyone getting in the way of people with power and three letter agencies.

And they ALREADY have expertise.

A computing expert already has decades of highly detailed experience and familiarity with a bunch of paradigms, uses, and conventions.

Experts are the LAST people that want to read manuals for basic things they already have extensive experience with, like desktop environments. Again, they're busy. Being experts.

So, reading the manual on new tech that needs to be implemented in a complex system—great. Reading the manual on a desktop environment? Seriously? That's the last thing an expert wants to be bothered with. "I've used ten different desktop environments over thirty years. Can't you pick one set of conventions I'm already familiar with and use it, so that I can apply my expertise to the actual problems I'm trying to solve? Why reinvent the wheel in such a simple, basic system?"

DEs should leverage existing knowledge and use habits to enable experts to get their real work done quickly. For an expert, using the desktop is NOT the problem at hand requiring a solution. It's not what they're being paid for and not what they care about. Experts love to learn new things—in their area of expertise.

So sure, desktop environment developers probably love to poke around in KDE's front end, code, and docs. But anyone else? People that are not DE specialists are not so excited about the new learning project that is "my desktop," I assure you. The desktop is the last thing they want to be consciously focusing on over the course of the day.

The tree widgets on the left are mismatched: some solid lines, some spaces with alphanumeric characters; the alpha characters are black, yet the lines are gray visual noise that creates visual processing and cognitive load for no reason, adding nothing.

The parenthetical text at the top has a title whose margin (left whitespace to other widgets) is significantly different from the text below it; there are spaces between the parentheses and the text, which no text or print style guide in the world endorses because it separates the parenthetical indicators from the parenthetical text, when they should be tightly bound for clarity.

The window title preserves the absurd convention of using both the binary name and a descriptive title together, and separates them with a typographical element (an em-dash) which is inappropriate in a label or design element because it is asynchronous—it indicates a delay in interpretation and pronunciation (as the em-dash just a few words ago in this paragraph does) and thus suggests long-form reading, which is not the intent for at-a-glance window titles (unless you don't want them to be very usable).

The title of the list widget, "Information Modules" is superfluous and redundant; the user starting an "About" dialogue expects to see "information" from the start, and they do not need to know about implementation ("modules").

The resize handle contrasts significantly with the window background, drawing undue attention to this particular area of the window above others (why is it "louder" than the window title, for example? Window controls should be secondary to window content and all at the same visual "volume" for usability).

In short—they still don't get it; they are signaling, in conventional ways that most users process subconsciously, thought habits and forms of attention that are not contributing to efficiency and use, but rather detracting/distracting from it. This is the same old KDE with poor, unprofessional design that leads to cognitive clutter. It's not that KDE has "too much going on" but rather that KDE has "too much going on that isn't actually functional and adds nothing to users ability to get things done).

Yuck.