Well, it certainly seems to apply in a number of areas. To wit:
- Clothing - Of course
- Computer hardware - Apple, Alienware
- Books - "Real Literature"
- Food - French Cuisine
- Music
Actually, there's probably a general market development pattern there that pretty much applies across most, if not all, areas of the economy. I think even financial investment instruments were affected by this (how else can anyone explain how Maddox, among others, did what he did?).
The world would probably appear to be much more sane to me if I hadn't (symbolically speaking) taken the blue pill a long time ago. As human beings, we're far too easily manipulated, and your observation along with my own over the years have demonstrated to me that capitalism needs an upgrade; that it's not the highest possible expression of/for human endeavor. The non-profit and creative commons models come closer, but those models seem to lack intrinsic motivators/reward mechanisms (e.g. greed in capitalism) and I'm assuming a good economic model needs one. Still looking I guess. Of course, there's lots I don't know, so if you know of better, I'm all ears.
Essentially, its retail as advertising. As capitalism ages everything essentially becomes the fashion industry. All style, perhaps a chance of substance.
Frankly, I find this idea for more interesting than anything else in this thread. Did this quote originate with you or someone else?
> One of my biggest regrets in 100 years of life is the things I didn't accomplish because of exuberant modesty
I've got to know - where did that sig come from? Google'd it with no luck.
TIA!
FireFox is bloated and crash prone
That's probably your own fault. Uninstall the add-ons, themes, turn down the cache size, etc. and it will speed up significantly. Barring that, enjoy your time with Opera. It's a great browser, but I dumped it once FF3 was out.
Go to the options for the Tree Style Tab add-on, click the "Auto hide" button at the top, then choose "Auto Shrink tab bar" or "Auto Hide tab bar". YMMV, but it's an option.
Install the Tree Style Tab add then switch your tabs to vertical orientation. With that in place on a wide screen monitor (or even not), plus being able to hide tabs by collapsing parts of the tree, my only complaint is the 300+ MBs of RAM Firefox 3 tab takes when I have 50+ tabs open.
Oracle's acquisition of BEA probably means that WebLogic is going to rule the Oracle JEE roost for the foreseeable future. Orion/OAS/OC4J is likely dead within 2 years; just as soon as they can incent customers onto WebLogic (which may well be renamed into the OAS brand). I don't know what they'll do with Glassfish; it's clearly redundant. However, as FOSS, it will surely live on perhaps as a fork.
If Applets are dead then so is client-side RIA. And it's not dead; just look at Adobe Flex then AIR. BTW - JavaFX deserves a place at the table no less than Adobe. Client-side RIA is at least as viable as HTML5 going forward; especially since client-side RIA is hand in glove architecturally speaking, which is something HTML can not achieve without a re-design.
Hopefully, someday it will just be common practice to stop abusing document oriented architectures for complex application creation. I saw it done with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office automation, and on the web with HTML, etc. and I'm sick of these architectural abominations.
They could.. oh, I don't know, just ignore her? Now, if she were cheating on a test, that would be different, but this is just a school asserting a policy in the most totalitarian way possible. And, at the end of the day, what public good came out of this? Oh goody, so now she REALLY knows they don't want her to use a phone in school. Like she didn't know that already. It certainly isn't going to improve the educational environment.
I wish I could mod down individual paragraphs of articles.
Like our current financial crisis, the aging process might also be a product excessive deregulation.
-1, Off-topic
I don't know why the hacker community keeps bothering with breaking these DRM schemes. It's clear that most people aren't going to use BlueRay unless it's significantly more accessible/cheap, more ubiquitous, and (by extension) much more open. You're just doing the hard work for them by enabling the dissemination of a technology which you actually oppose.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.