Slashdot Mirror
Is "Good Enough" the Future of Technology?
himitsu writes "In an article titled 'The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine,' Wired claims that the future of technology, warfare and medicine will be filled with 'good enough' solutions; situations where feature-rich and expensive products are replaced with bare-bones infrastructures and solutions. 'We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."'"
Look at a large amount of government systems. Everything is to the cheapest bidder. But the cheapest bidder isn't always the best or product, and contains issues. Also known as 'good enough.'
So...yeah.
That's like saying WindowsMobile will trump the iPhone.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.
When I was in high school I always used to aim for 51% in tests, claiming it was the most efficient pass mark. Lower than that you fail, but higher than that and there is no extra reward, you still pass.
Why should life be any different. If its "good enough" IE meets its design goals, why should you work harder just to make it better? You won't be paid more, that is for damn sure.
I would be more worried about people (as in 90%+ of it) choosing lower quality products not because they are cheaper, or is delivered faster, or safer (in fact, none of them), but better marketed.
... then it is good enough for me. Competition sorts everything else out. Take the mobile phone as an example: first you could dial numbers and it was good enough, then you could write text messages, and now I'm posting on Slashdot from my Nokia (which has a full QWERTY keyboard, thankyouverymuch).
Simplicity is the key... just like my post.
I myself use maybe 10%. There are parts (of Windows Vista) that I have never explored and will never explore. I just do not need all that functionality.
I bet that the majority of non-technical users are just like me. Suppose that Microsoft created a "good enough" operating system called "Windows Minimum" (WM). It has 10% of the functions of Windows Vista and 10% of its size. WM would also likely be 10 times more reliable since it is small and easy to verify to be correct. Best of it, WM would likely be 10% of the price of Windows Vista. $20 is just about right for most people.
This article is really just one guy pointificating about a few anecdotes. Of course he's right that the mass market is in the middle to low end. But what was it not so? Ford outsells Ferrari. This is not news.
Nothing is perfect and we are all just left to our own for a definition of "good enough".
Seriously, Even with the U.S. space effort etc, there are things checked a bizillion times on a manned space craft. This is because the mission cannot just pull over for parts mid-flight. And even with all that, shit still breaks or doesn't do as expected.
We are all just left to hope that any given "good enough" is, well, actually good enough.
Ta Dah!
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
But wait there's more! I for one welcome our mediocre yet satisfactory overlords.
My line of work - which is patent law, crucify me - brings me in contact with a lot of mechanical engineers. One complaint I often get to hear from the older ones is that in ye olden days, most people in management were engineers themselves, who had worked up their way through a lifelong career. Those were the days of quality products, of taking pride in the excellence of your work. Now, as MBAs have taken over, we have the days of producing as cheap and sloppy as you can get away with. This may be partially nostalgia-filtered, but I guess it has some reality to it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Contrary to popular believe its always been the case that tools and machines were made just good enough.
The definition of "just good enough" depends almost entirely on the cost to manufacturer any given device.
When a given tool is manufactured, its engineered to withstand its expected life span, within the budget available.
If you know you can buy a plow that will last for 20 years for X dollars, and a longer lasting plow for a lot more money, you immediately start thinking about how much cheaper it will be to build the same plow in 5 years, after the new mine is open, and the new forge set up. If its going to be cheaper, you don't bother beefing it up.
Things in the past were built to last their expected life time (or the life of the owner), or the duration for which the device is needed.
Per unit Cost, and per unit lead time to manufacture just about anything has shortened progressively over the centuries.
We don't need the plow, the ship, or the building to last that long any more, and in fact it is detrimental that they do, because that delays progress of new technology. Its easier to recycle it and build next year's model, which will be cheaper.
I don't see anything new here. Its been this way since dirt.
Even my long dead grandfather used to complain "They don't make em like the used to".
Thanks for that.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If this post is not good enough now...It will be tomorrow.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
So? If you brought this grave problem to the attention of the average Windows user they
wouldn't have any clue what you are talking about. Trying this test with MacOS users
won't cause you to fare any better.
Some bitter old Atari ST users might actually be aware of what you're talking about.
Clearly the Lemming Trolls have to find more obscure "multimedia problems" to whine
about since the more mainstream use cases no longer favor Windows or MacOS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The author is an idiot. This has been going on forever. Using his camera example, anyone over 50 or so will remember the Kodak Instamatic cameras of the 1960's, when expensive cameras were on the rise, the cheap and easy Instamatic turned the market around.
Cheap and easy has been #1 forever.
As someone who has been in the computer industry for a long time, I can tell you that there are sweet spots everywhere. Would you pay $100 for a good video card, capable of 80% of the power of a $200 one? Or would you pay $400 for one with 110% of the power of a $200 one?
'Good Enough' is how technology has always been. Sure, we could make our jet fighters 10% more fuel efficient, if we added 50% to the cost of the engines, and a similar amount to the upkeep. We COULD do a lot of things, but one or two steps down from the best is still good enough for most applications in the real world.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
'Good enough' is relative. Of course if it is not good enough then no one will buy it, but the real question is where is the line? Apple's products are probably the most polished on the market today yet they are still not 'perfect'. Is Apple operating on a good enough principle? It is all about standards. Good enough for me may not be good enough for you. Also, different requirements mean different solutions. Linux is great for people with time and a tech mindset, it allows tinkering and tweaking and is a wonderful solution for many people. Apple is great for people with little time and less of a tech mindset. No need to dig through manuals and mess around with things... just press Go!
Basically I think this is just an article for an articles sake. Humanity has been doing good enough since the dawn of time, and the only thing that has changed is that standards that good enough entails. Nothing is changing, people will continue to sell/buy products that beat the competition for the specified market.
Um, it probably would cost about the same as XP/Vista/7, assuming most end-users would get this 'WinMin' OS instead of WinXP/Vista/7, as the market has shown that people are willing to pay that much for the OS, even if they don't use all the features of it.
And somehow I doubt Microsoft would devote all that extra money into making the OS more secure/reliable/easy to use. They probably would blow it trying to diversify into some other markets, such as a licensable OS for routers (so Cisco can make the hardware, and MS would provide the software!).
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Wired are actually telling us that we LIKE high quality stuff, but after a point, consumer products are just repetitive. It's pornographic to the T - they're exploiting consumers by pushing for higher and higher quality while the essential creation remains the same.
So we're starting to get a sense for what industrialism brought us: The need to put a harness on creativity, to attempt to "own" creativity. And it can't be done.
My own theory is that we've tried unsuccessfully to sustain ourselves on consumerism, and the people who are doing the real creative stuff now are no longer what would be termed "consumers." They have withdrawn from the marketplace. So industry and media need to put a spin on this fast - they need to siphon off what's left in the can before they start to die. They're just in a mad grab for gobs of raw ideas, knowing that they can't hold onto individual ideas for so long anymore.
They'd probably charge more because it was better. See Windows 7 (aka NT 6.1/Vista 2.0) for an example.
I drive a Toyota Matrix. It's no Lexus, but's it's plenty "good enough".
I live in a two-story, 2,000 Sq Ft home. It's no mansion, but it's quite nice, and it's "good enough".
My computer is an almost-3-year-old Dell running Fedora Core Linux. Although it was a bit spendy when I bought it, it's worth 1/10 of it's original value. I still use it because it's "good enough".
My shoes, purchased at Payless shoe source, black leather Airwalks. Are they the nicest shoes in the world? Well, they are if by nicest you mean "easy to come by for $30 or less". Oh, and "good enough".
Lame article is lame. We *always* compromise quality for price to find a healthy balance between the two. You don't drive a bulletproof limousine, nor do you (likely) travel to work every day in a private jet. Given a particular product marketplace, as features broaden, they become less and less important. The marketplace for the product as a whole commoditizes, and prices collapse.
This is the natural order of market progression, and is the march towards general social wealth. The author of this article needs a little Econ 101, as does the article submitter.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's the economy, stupid.
But it's good enough to get me annoyed!
This is just another diseased mind thinking that nostalgic reminiscing is when it was good. Ya, I remember when I was young and everything was so great! High quality stuff was everywhere. My Kraft dinner was so much better when my mom made it for me! That is just nonsense. Technology gets better all the time. "Good Enough" differs depending on the product. A CPU that doesn't quite do logic is not going to be "Good Enough", but a program that crashes some times might be "Good Enough".
Get over yourself, is what I say.
The article does not support the statement. None of the examples support unless you ignore the real reason.
There was a need for low res video cameras. so they were bought to put videos on the internet. Not to replace the ones recording event for TV. (17% cheap not 17% high end). The Predator did not replace the fight or bomber. It can fly for a long time. Much longer than a piloted plane. The Taliban and Iraq have no air defense. So a Predator works in that narrow situation. Bring in a fighter or some Anti Aircraft Missiles, then the game changes. A Bomber? A B52 can drop more bombs in one trip then a Predator could drop in a month. The real conclusion is that some time cheap and simple fits the need better than expensive and high tech, but not always.
Without the independent clause, the original sentence means nothing.
heh... english... who'd a thought...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
It's good for the economy to produce stuff that people have to replace regularly. We should produce crap that breaks every few months. That would really boost consumerism and spin up the economy. But what we really need are cheap and simple replacement societies. When a world police like the US bombs another country and takes their resources, they can just slap in a modern, cheap and simple solution. Benefit for all.
that applies to cars too. The tata nano is essentailly that. No seat belts, most of the time people don't need those. Rear view mirrors, got by for 60 years without em. Airconditioning? Open a window. Air bags? If something goes wrong they can hurt you, even without an serious accident. Anti lock breaks, well with some practice a good driver can do better than ABS, and you aren't going fast most of the time anwyay. Radio, distracting. Cost: 2500 bucks US (or thereabouts).
The reason you can't sell them for that price in Europe/the US - the governments (including others such as Canada where I am), have decided if you want a car you must have all sorts of that stuff. Projected cost to bring them to 'western' markets ~10k. And even then they wouldn't go highway speeds.
Windows - for all of it's faults, does a lot of stuff you don't see, and don't know you use. So does linux of course. And both of them are deisgned for 'marginal' situations as well as main use ones. How many people plug in a monitor that's rotated 90 degrees or how often do you change the audio output/input device? Some of that is draconian, and some of it is good planning microsoft telling you things you should be able to do.
Ever see the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car? He talks about 'rack and peanut stearing' - the average consumer doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and is possibly better off not knowing what their stuff does. If they think they know, and don't, they may try and fix it themselves and end up more in trouble. The standard of 'good enough' needs to be chosen by people with brains- unfortunately they tend to get overruled by management, but that's cost/benefit analysis for you.
Up until this summer my mother was using a computer with Windows 98. All she does is e-mail. Is that good enough? Well she thought so. But I couldn't find a free AV program that was up to date and didn't cripple her system. Firewall? Good luck. Need a USB device for anything, not going to happen. Once I moved far enough away I couldn't help her on a regular basis she started getting nasty e-mails from the cable company about how they detected 'virus like activity' from the network. She of course doesn't understand and ignored them. Good enough in the context of computer needs to be sustainable - which by definition a paid product won't be, since adding stuff costs money and they will eventually charge for added stuff. Linux can be, but when linux fails it doesn't tend to fail as gracefully, recovery as easily or get fixed as easily - which isn't a technical problem but a proliferation of skills issue, though my mother doesn't care why it can't get fixed, she cares that it won't.
I think you'd be suprised how useless a windows minimum with 10% of the functions 7/Vista would be. Lots of stuff 'under the hood' of vista is there for application developers to do stuff, and stripping out a lot of functionality would cripple hardware and severely limit what programs you can run. Granted there are computer systems out there with very software features (think ATMs), but really simple is almost a specialized market in itself.
This isn't really new, it's just the 95% rule (where admittedly 95% is just a WAG) and I've considered it a rule of thumb for decades
Basically anything that's 95% good enough and has some other overwhelming advantage (cheapness, convenience, lack of confusion) wins over technically more capable competitors, except for a few fanatics who aren't enough to drive the market. MP3s lose some quality from CDs and FLAC/WAV, but who cares? They're more convenient. YouTube is a horrid example of this - everyone thinks blocky, tiny, hitching video is good enough because it's so convenient and there's so much content. So you have to reboot your mobile phone now and then or can't get coverage in some places, when land-lines work damn near 100% of the time - who cares? Apple knows this rule and uses it brilliantly - Mac OS and its apps do 95% of what people need and it don't bother you about or give you decision paralysis for the other 5% that only tech-heads want.
I find that Linux with package management does about 95% of what I need to do out of the box and I have to script the rest... but that's good enough for me to just run Debian on all my servers and not worry about it. It's worth not having to fetch and compile every damn dependency by scratch or wade through all of Windows's hideously incestuous server configuration crap. More to the point, I could run BSD on all those servers, but why bother? Yes, I know you have all sorts of technical reasons why I should, but they don't matter. It's good enough and more convenient.
I've got about 10 more examples but will shut up now, because I think I've made 95% of the point.
'Good enough' is what funds 'advancement.' See Bugatti Veyron for reference.
It is the average/affordable/usable sales that fund advancement for the high-tech/advanced. Another excellent example of this is photography. The development for the latest and greatest DSLR low-light cameras with anamorphowidealcoholic lenses is paid for by point-and-shoots. Video cards are another example -- the low- and mid-range cards fund the cutting-edge. The only purposes for high-end are advertising of brand name superiority and to have trickle-down on the 'good enough' stuff.
I can't believe no one's mentioned "worse is better" yet. An excerpt:
I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing
Another example would be Linux. It can be argued that Minix and Gnu HURD both likely had superior designs -- in fact, at the time, Linus fully expected Linux to become irrelevant once HURD was released. It never happened -- because Linux was available now, and was free and freely modifiable now, even though it was worse, it attracted enough developers so that it ultimately became more practical for most tasks.
And of course, the most obvious example is Windows. This follows the pattern:
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
DOS was an abomination, especially considering real OSes existed at the time. Windows 3.1 was barely more than a multiplexer for DOS, and Windows 95/98/ME were similarly backward abominations. Windows NT was unusable by ordinary users until Windows 2000, and why would power users prefer it over Unix?
Yet they were half the right thing, and they were usable by ordinary people, on the PC, faster and cheaper than anyone else.
The story mentions netbooks, but that's just the latest iteration of this. Remember, the original PCs weren't as powerful as minicomputers, which weren't as powerful as mainframes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Perhaps a pencil is good enough - there isn't much research going into them about how to improve them.
The author of this article definitely brought this out a bit too far. Sure, they use the predator much more then "far superior" manned aircraft, but this isn't a "good enough" effect. This is a cost effect. Predators are cheap! They can be shot down and there's relatively little fuss over them. You can have them easily manned from afar by a series of workers and keep them in the air longer. It's not that it's "good enough", it's better! The fact that other planes can fly further and carry more ammo doesn't enter into the reason why they use the predator
The same thing is true of the connections made for things like software in the cloud: it may be a revolution soon enough, but as it stands it really hasn't done much. Most people don't use google docs, and most people don't use apps in the cloud. I don't think I know any university which doesn't make heavy use of Microsoft products, especially for english classes. The same is true of any engineering class: you won't be using google sketch-up to make their next propeller...
But that being said these weren't exactly the point of the article, they're talking about the consumer level not the professional level.
Look at the competition. They are (1) Linux, and (2) BSD (including Mac OSX). Both are very generic OS, serving a wide variety of settings including the desktop, the server, laptops, and handhelds and at times embedded systems like routers. Both don't care that average user will use only a tiny fraction of the OS. This is general in software: things get generalized to all similar areas. There is no point for MS to create a "WM" from scratch, if MS need one it simply disables the unneeded features from Vista. Because it costs essentially nothing to Microsoft to make a new copy of Vista. Making a "WM", in contrast, means engineering efforts.
Incidentally, I'd call "just disable some feature of Vista" a good enough solution: it is good enough because the average computer has the capability to run Vista anyway (or so MS think), so they don't create a "perfect" solution to match the average desktop usage exactly.
There are 2 problems that the "disable method" (DM) does not address. First, merely switching off the features does not reduce the size. Windows Vista still wastes 5 gigabytes of disk space.
Second, the advantage of the small size of Windows Minimum (WM) is that it is much easier to verify to be correct. Checking 500 megabytes of code is easier than checking 5 gigabytes. Small, light, and efficient is the advantage of a minimalist operating system.
And what about Henry Ford's T-model? It most certainly wasn't anything to brag about, technology-wise. It most certainly wasn't any better than the competition, but yet gaain it was "good enough" and accessible (in the sense of affordable).
Now what was that about "the future of technology" again?
The most well-known example of technology overkill is Windows XP and its successors. Think about it for a minute. How many of the functions in these operating systems do you actually use?
If an OSS advocate made this same argument as a reason to adopt Linux and OpenOffice, you'd have the OSS detractors screaming at him for not understanding business and productivity. I recall quite a flame fest over replacements for Adobe products a day or two ago.
Windows is popular despite that it is only good enough. Linux dominates the OSS market despite its myriad shortcomings. Plenty of better solutions have come and gone, but good enough solutions spread like wildfire because they are not actually optimized to be solutions. They are optimized for one thing: spreading.
Just callin' it like I see it.
It's not just technology it's all things. As much as engineers want to have a perfect widget and developers want to have a perfect system it's just not practical. What is "good enough" is determined by exterior factors and most notably economics/usage. If a product is desirable enough to make it the most profitable at a given price point with a given feature set and less than optimal quality then there is no incentive to improve the product beyond that point. In fact it is damaging the economic value of the product to do so since it consumes resources without an expected return. For those of you who find the economic argument in poor taste and just want to make things good on principle switch the concept over to helping people solve their problems or pure usage of your product(s). Investing more in a product won't help more people or get more people to use it beyond a certain point where as focusing your efforts on a new product will help more people or get more usage of your portfolio of products as a whole.
Regardless this is nothing new and yes "Good Enough" will be the future of all things not just technology. What is good enough will largely depend on the economic concept of "utility" and maximizing that utility for the greatest number as well as the impact of failures. If failures kill people the definition of what is good enough is different than if you just have to reboot and wait 20 seconds.
Heck life just works this way. Evolution isn't an optimal system for the individual but by being suboptimal at that level it tries out failure paths and becomes optimal for a species as a whole. Economics and how "good" something gets works in a similar manner serving the needs of the whole population rather than the needs of the individual user or small group who want the product to reach it's perfect form.
Good enough is what most people can afford; past, present and future. The question is not will we be satisfied with less. It is can we afford better?
Personally, I see more mass happiness and leisure in a future where the answer is YES. So let's all work to make it that way. Screw this article.
People make the trade-off between quality and price all the time. TFA seems pretty pointless to me.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think the bare-bones and full featured are niches that will always exist.
Things like Notepad, Vi/Emacs and Notepad++
Google Docs, Microsoft Word/OpenOffice
Photoshop, GIMP then Paint.NET
Apache, lightHTTPd
Any other examples?
It's kind of sad that the most full featured projects are commercial. I think TIME makes all bare bones software into full featured. I mean, Word is 1983, it has been re-envisioned and re-written many times whereas Google Docs is built on a relatively recent platform.
The Pure Digital camcorder is just another niche. I doubt that the expensive camcorders lost sales to this? Or did they? Does Word lose sales to users of Google Docs?
I think the world wide web IS an example of worse is better! Desktop applications are faster, more capable and powerful yet we rely on relaying redundant TEXT and continually re-drawing the screen. ...terminal much?
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
... if it's taken them THIS long to notice the inexorable descent from qualitative focus to a quantitative one. It's only been progressing for over a century, after all. That descent is one of the primary things that has made my life hell, because I will not and cannot make that descent. I'm not "wired" for it like all the neurotypical types. I'm not alone in that inability and refusal; when can we emigrate to another planet and create a culture of craftsmen? This culture of suits and middlemen is killing me!
Way to go with that prescient observation, Wired.
Look at a large amount of government systems. Everything is to the cheapest bidder. But the cheapest bidder isn't always the best or product, and contains issues. Also known as 'good enough.'
Parent is ignorant of how the government buys. The days of low price are gone. -- That's a how to buy question anyway, not *what to buy* which is discussed in the article.
Today most of the buys are still encumbered by perfection.
Examples? How about the IRS and FAA computer systems. Or the F22 fighter. Or the continuing drive to put humans in space.
Recently, I read an article on slashdot that OSS UI development should stop imitating Mac and Windows, and should start innovating. Also, I've read various things from Eric Raymond and others that OSS should be prized for its innovativeness. But I think that's all wrong. OSS is most valuable when it's not innovative. The most successful OSS projects (like Linux, gcc, mysql, OpenSSL, and others) have been shameless clones, while the innovative OSS projects (like Hurd) died off. Of course there are exceptions, but usually OSS software is the generic drug of the software industry.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I am tired of all that "people are stupid and don't want quality" and "worse is better" crap. This is not true at all.
People want quality products that last, unless they are overpriced. The problem is, it's much harder to recognize quality, especially in modern products, thus there is no market pressure for it. But there is a market pressure from the investor's end to produce as much things as possible.
Ultimately, it's an issue of asymmetric information and trust. Consider buying a computer. Say, you have a 2 year warranty period in EU. You have two choices - one for 200$, and the other for 300$, but the producer claims it will last at least 3 years (but the warranty is still 2 years). So, which one are you going to choose? The cheaper one of course. Because you have no insurance that the other will not last say 2.5 year, in which case you would be screwed. This is a classic situation on a market with asymmetric information, as described in George Akerlof's Market for Lemons.
Furthermore, the companies want to sell as much product as they can. Company building products to last 20 years (with warranty, so assume you can trust this deal) would be at a disadvantage to company making products to last 5 years, because the profits of the latter would be higher (it costs more to produce 4 products than 1, so with the same margin, company can make more profit). In history, companies (mostly found by idealistic engineers) believed that building quality product is better, but in the 70s the MBA types they installed instead realized they are wrong, so that's why it went downhill ever since. Even if you would try to switch companies, if all of them are doing that, it gets useful.
It's just normal capitalism in play, but most people didn't know the rules at the beginning, and now that large companies started to optimize by the rules, it's just not fun anymore.
It is the average/affordable/usable sales that fund advancement for the high-tech/advanced. Another excellent example of this is photography.
I think that's backwards. It's Nikon and Canon's premium-paying professional market that funded their move into point-and-shoots and consumer cameras. The technology in the professional cameras is handed down to the consumer ones. It's not like point-and-shoot cameras start out with advanced technology that later gets added to the pro line.
Likewise, in computing the high margins from Apple's Mac Pro, Macbook Pro and professional software help subsidize the lower-cost Macbook and iMac, while high-end software research contributes to consumer apps like iLife.
... and then they built the supercollider.
"Hooray for mediocrity" is not an excuse for doing crappy things the wrong way. Neither is "The Simpsons did it".
The Tata Nano car was not rejected because of consumerism or market protection, but because it is a low quality, highly dangerous piece of technology. Coupled with its cheapness and almost limitless availability, we all would've had a quagmire on the roads pretty quickly.
Just a few examples: seatbelts, the car safety feature that has saved more lives than the alcohol prohibition or the traffic light. A hard braking without actual impact can send you smashing on the steering wheel or knocking your teeth out - while with a seatbelt you and your car would've had no damage whatsoever. People not wearing seatbelts are very hesitating in applying full brake power in an emergency situation because of this and that would've cost lives of passengers, pedestrians and other drivers. That's why they're mandatory and why you're fined for not wearing them.
ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. We're talking about "half a million mile" or "NASCAR experience". Beginners cause the most crashes and one out of three drivers will have a situation where having ABS will mean the difference between sweating and loss of money, limb or life. Even if one is an experienced driver, I bet you hope the other guy is also experienced or has ABS. I hope on both.
The Nano is destined for markets where it is the only mobility alternative for much of the population and better than the ubiquitous scooter everyone has now. There, the Nano can decrease total road deaths simply because four wheels and a windshield are much safer in the downpouring rain that parts of India and Asia seasonally experience.
In Western markets, the Nano would increase road deaths, possibly up to terrible levels from the Fifties. I'm with you when you say we COULD omit air conditions, power windows, central locking, electric mirrors, electric hatches. But safety features like seatbelts (pennies), ABS (a few hundred bucks) or ESP (another few hundred bucks) will cost more if they're missing. You could not save more than 1500 bucks (at most) on manufacturing the car but the first accident will cost more than you'd ever saved in property damage alone. Or worse.
Extremely cold-heartedly saying: it costs about 150'000 bucks to raise and educate one kid to be an average adult in our society. Because of that, even if we all were the most heartless, profit-oriented bastards on earth, we'd equip our cars with all affordable safety features.
In doubt, drive to an empty street somewhere and practice maximum emergency braking, with and without wearing the seatbelt. Hesitated smashing your teeth on the steering wheel, even for a fraction of a second?. Wear a seatbelt, dude.
Obligatory wiki links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
I myself use maybe 10%. There are parts (of Windows Vista) that I have never explored and will never explore. I just do not need all that functionality.
Yes, but who is to say that every user uses the same 10%? If most users only utilise 10%, I would think that these 10% segments overlap enough to cover a significant proportion of the total function of the OS.
Remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Let the Lord of Chaos Rule
Well, "Good Enough" was the Past of Technology, so I guess so. But the truth is that industries fluctuate on their focus.
When the market demands more features and performance than the technology provides, then the businesses that improve the technology become the industry leaders. Think silicon: intel, RAM, Flash, iPods.
But when the market is happy with the features ("good enough"), and demands cheaper products, then the businesses that can make them cheaper become the market leaders.
As the first poster indicates, we are already there... or it's already here. But what does it mean?
New tech has certainly lost its luster and people are certainly realizing that new doesn't always mean better. But this cannot be the whole reason can it? Is this yet another sign of economic down-turn? Maybe, but for many, this started happening before the downturn really started having affect. I think it's the consumer pushing back and demanding value in larger and larger numbers. With every "new thing" that replaces old things that work just fine, we are seeing more and more "needless" advancement or changes that aren't really advancements at all.
We see this especially in things like Windows where resistance to moving away from "Just Fine" Windows XP to the newer, shinier "Aero" interfaced versions is surprisingly strong... well, surprising for Microsoft I am sure, and surprising when you see how abrupt this movement has been. After all, people had been discussing the new Windows for years with excitement only to be disappointed with all the most significant features removed. We see this in the shrinking numbers of "Hummer" vehicles on the road as well, though we might argue that has more to do with fuel costs than anything else, but from where I sit, Hummers are nothing more than oversized pickup trucks as they only bear slight resemblance to the HumVee which is what really excited people about "Hummer" in the first place, but "Looks like a HumVee" doesn't sell Hummers the way it did at first. People soon realized that there should be more to expensive cars than what it looks like and the price tag.
I think what the "push back" is all about it a crying out for "substance" in our new stuff. What all the new stuff we see these days really lacks is substance. I'm not saying that turds are not useful, but we want turds that are more than just polished... otherwise, our old turds are "just fine."
I think Davester answered your question quite well. MS is in the business of making money, NOT the business of making a stable, secure operating system.
Some of the most stable, secure operating systems can be downloaded for FREE. They also pretty much give the lie to the "good enough" mentioned in TFA. Linux is already "good enough" for any purpose to which it might be put, with the exception of high end gaming. People won't accept "good enough". They want bells and whistles, eyecandy, and someone to hold their hands while reassuring them that a corporate giant cares about them.
Cares about them? Yeah, right - the check is in the mail, too.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
When MS Provides an OS for Cisco Routers...the end of the internet will be upon us.
It would be terrible to grow up in a world where there are real consequences for our actions, wouldn't it? It's just wonderful that we have a nanny state to mandate the use of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, etc ad nauseum, all designed to protect us from our own idiocy.
I have a couple of better ideas. First, let's get about 2/3 of the people off of the roads. We don't NEED the millions of automobiles that are out there. Second, let's have real driver's education. It was silently dropped sometime after I got out of high school. Today, driver's ed is less than a sick joke.
Quick, without looking it up, tell me what the stopping distances are, including reaction time, at 40, 50, 60, and 70 mph. How many school kids are being taught that sort of stuff?
I was tested on it. Failing the test would have meant that I could not take the driving part of the course, and I wouldn't have been able to get my driver's license til I was 18. My, my, how the laws have changed.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"The Nano is destined for markets where it is the only mobility alternative for much of the population and better than the ubiquitous scooter everyone has now. There, the Nano can decrease total road deaths simply because four wheels and a windshield are much safer in the downpouring rain that parts of India and Asia seasonally experience."
I'm really not sure what part of the phrase "good enough" you do not understand. Re-read your two sentences above, then read the phrase "the Nano is good enough". What is the point you are tying to make?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Just BTW, the Nano does have seatbelts as they're mandatory on Indian roads now. It also meets all the safety requirements of a car running in India. This is not to say that either it, or Indian safety requirements are perfect, but that it does fulfill them.
If you think something fulfills your needs at a reasonable price, then it's good enough. If it's a little better, it's just good value for money. Isn't this simple, and a really old observation? All the examples provide value for money. And as someone has pointed out earlier, it's all intrinsically linked to affordability. Why is Wired getting so desperate these days?
I'm fine with getting two thirds with people off the road. We don't need the millions of automobiles out there.
Now would you be so kind to hand over your car keys and driver's license? You do want to follow your own example, right?
The Nano is good enough for a society where most households do not have any transportation and everyone else drives a two-stroke stinking scooter or an older-than-dirt car.
A four-wheel is safer than a two-wheel in most cases. When you can supplant scooters or old rust buckets with new Nanos, you reduce road deaths. Still, you create more mobility and more congestion which will create more road deaths.
For the situation in India, this may be acceptable, but for the situation in Western countries, it is not. To put it bluntly: we have much fewer people with much higher education here that are orders of magnitude more expensive to replace if killed.
I know that "human lives as costs" is the most heartless and perverse assessment ever made, but it provides the lowest low floor of cost vs. benefit comparison. And even this low floor is overwhemlingly in favor of saving people vs. saving a small buck on safety.
I would be glad if India would come to the same conclusions and mandated more safety for the Nano. I can only speak for Western countries because I know nothing about the mobility-vs-safety tradeoff in India and don't want to tell them what's right or wrong.
And by the time you've recalled the appropriate stopping distance for the speed, you've just ploughed straight into the car in front without slowing. The only reason it's taught is to show the differences. All that needs to be taught and tested is 'keep your distance and maintain it at all costs'.
But then I live in a country with bends, and shit.
Article uses the ambiguous concept of "good enough" to create false dichotomies. Article also implies that the subjective "good enough" always falls short of an idealistic view of quality.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Very well then. The seatbelts alone will save a few thousand per year.
It does say that the Nano is good enough for Indian road regulation mandated by Indian government elected by Indian people.
And our road regulation mandated by our government elected by our people declared the Nano a safety risk.
So the tradeoff "mobility vs. safety" in India favors mobility while it does favor safety in Western countries. Which is, I guess, pretty sensible. Sometimes, democracy does seem to work.
Take the human body for example, I find that evolution has also given us "good enough" solutions in many respects. Our sense of smell is not very good, we are not very fast and I don't think we are getting much smarter at the moment as a result of evolution. At some point, the requirements of the market are met, and developement slows down relative to previous periods, similarly the requirements for survival in an environment are met, and evolution slows down.
So, do you follow the 2 second rule, the 3 second rule, or the 5 second rule?
The stopping distances are taught for a reason, yes. That reason is that graphic demonstrations make lasting impressions. I took my own sons out, and DEMONSTRATED. We made paint marks on the roadway, I let them accelerate to a given speed, then hit the brakes at the first mark, and made a new mark where the car stopped. No, this didn't measure reaction time - but I stressed with each test that they had to add that little bit to their stopping distance.
When the kid stands there, and sees just how far he travels AFTER hitting the break pedal, he begins to understand.
"And by the time you've recalled the appropriate stopping distance for the speed, you've just ploughed straight into the car in front without slowing."
Yes, I understand that some people have problems walking and chewing gum at the same time. Go back to my original post. We don't NEED THEM on the highways. Deny them a driver's license.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No, I won't hand my keys over. I share my vehicle with three other adult drivers. I oversee the usage of that vehicle like a petty tyrant. "You can't combine those 3 trips into just ONE trip into town?" I will continue to jealously guard my car keys. I hope to have everyone trained to think in terms of one trip into town each week. Just doing my little bit to save fuel, and make the roadways safer.
Now, how many frivolous trips do you make each week?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Even though the 1964 episode on the PBS site is in black-and-white and has some picture glitches -- and with several fluffs (which were always part of the fun with the "French Chef") -- her points were very clearly and efficiently made.
Bet that it took 1/10 the number of people and 1/10 the amount of inflation-adjusted dollars vs later episodes.
The myth that you can do better without ABS is stupid one. Yes you can break better then most cheap ABS, if you are a good driver, but you will never outbreak a proper ABS with EBD ( on top). People drive shitty car and then brag around how they can do it better.
ABS was banned from F1 for a reason, it was too good. Leading to no difference in breaking between a talented and a normal driver.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Mr. Tyrant - It's still a car...get it off the road as per your own example.
The example of you gave why you should keep your car is lame. You have described millions of families around the world that have 1 car with a 16 - 20 year old living at home. Nothing special! nothing to be proud of!
Just like all tyrants, you make excuses for why you should be exempted from your own rules.
What TFA is attempting to say is that consumers needs are being driven by technology to the point where they have the potential to be met in far overreaching capacities. You just want to hop onto that YouTube thing and realize that you've got to get a camera. Welcome to good enough. We haven't seen this before, really. Cameras and MP3s are a great example. I've seen some discussions here about tools being used as an example, but that's a bad one and here's why: you actually NEED tools.
They didn't need them, but the reason people bought consumer cameras back in the day was because there was an immediately visible value in them. People want to permanently capture their memories. But in the beginning cameras were big, difficult to use & expensive, so a good enough solution was just that, good enough to meet the demands of most and still be highly desirable. But, there was a ton of technology involved in bringing that camera to the consumer, which is the point of the article: that technology may actually be motivating a shift away from quality feature design to a method based purely on facilitating consumer desire.
So here we are today and we still realize value in technology with regard to our desires as is evident in the advance of MP3s and cheap PCs and other such consumer-level tech. Yesterday it was cameras, today it's much much more, but the thing that remains the same is that the technology is what's pushing it along.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
When you look back a few years, then "second grade" was inferior and often not up to speed. Remember those Cyrix processors, the kinda-sorta-intel-compatible ones? They were cheap, they were allegedly compatible, but often they were anything but "good enough". Or the cheap knockoff electronics that first came from Japan (in the 50s/60s) and then from China? They were kinda-sorta good, but if you wanted quality you headed for the real stuff.
Today, everything is from China. The allegedly "good stuff" and the cheap knockoffs, often they come from the same conveyor belt. Brand name is no longer a sign and guarantee for quality. Manufacturers, or rather, the companies that have others manufacture for them more and more these days, realized that it's cheaper to produce cheap products that break sometimes/often and just replace them under warranty. Of 100 pieces you sell, maybe 70 will work ok, of the 30 non working ones you'll get 20 thrown back, the other 10 will just toss it and buy something new or don't know enough about the merchandize to even realize it doesn't work as advertised. That's cheaper than producing quality goods where 99 of 100 will work.
Another thing is life expectancy. 40 years ago, you could sensibly expect your TV to last at least a decade. And you also had it for a decade, it was expensive enough to have it repaired if its magic smoke escaped. Today, you'll be lucky to have it for more than its warranty period. But even that is 'good enough'. By the time those 2 years are over, some new standard is coming out and you want a new set anyway.
It actually is "good enough". People don't expect things to last anymore. And often don't even want them to last. They want cheap. They want cheaper. They want new, shiny stuff and not cling to that old appliance forever and a day. Quality, of course, suffers in such an environment. It's very difficult to get quality products anymore, if you need some, you will have to look very carefully.
And if you find something, inform me. I'm looking for quality instead of cheap, but I can't find anything anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Personally, the only laptops I will buy for myself or a family member will be Thinkpads. No compromises. Technology is there to improve life and be as unobtrusive as possible. Something that works and that I dont have to think about or fight with continually is fine, but "good enough" doesnt cut it. It would fine if companies employed proper industrial design protocols when trying to get products out the door quickly, hell they can even do proper Q&A these days.
The one place where I think this may well be true is in the cargo crate servers that google and other big internet companies use, of course, its just the hardware that is good enough, the engineering of the whole systems is designed to make something highly robust out of good enough, but guess what, that still costs money, even if it is less money.
Good enough also varies by field, since there are institutions for whom 99.99% uptime is NOT "good enough."
For all products and all "good enough" products especially, the question will be whether the upfront cost/features are worth the cost of maintenance down the road (in time and money), and in my experience "good enough" products tend to fail this test. Most kids I know have had to replace their Dell laptops after about 3 years. My 7 year old Thinkpad T30 runs like a champ and is not going anywhere. (you get what you pay for etc.)
So 4 people in one car. Now take away those three other drivers licenses, and you must now drive them around. Think about that as you take away their ability to drive.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Most of your millions of people who own cars live in the city. They can walk to anything and everything that is necessary in life. There's a grocery store, a hardware store, and a department store within walking distance of wherever they live. They have buses. They have trains. They have all sort of mass transit options, that I don't have. Not to mention, most of them CHOOSE to live in a suburb located 30 miles of more from where they work.
Me? I'm a long damn way from the nearest grocery store, doctor's office, or anything else. You begrudge me a trip into town each week to buy groceries? As I said, I'll keep my keys. At least until the roads become safe to ride horses on again.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Mod parent up !
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
a perfect example of "good enough" technology is the mp3 audio file.
we all know it is a compressed(crappy) version of the original but still, mp3s are accepted by virtually all consumers.
For what vehicle mass, brake type, wheel count, tyre type, roadway surface, and roadway condition?
It would be terrible to grow up in a world where there are real consequences for our actions, wouldn't it? It's just wonderful that we have a nanny state to mandate the use of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, etc ad nauseum, all designed to protect us from our own idiocy.
If, as the GP said, people driving cars where they (or their passengers) aren't wearing seatbelts are more hesitant to apply the brakes sharply for the reasons given, this has consequences for other drivers on the road.
If it was solely a case of the unbelted drivers flying through their own windscreen or dying in a crash because they didn't want to apply the brakes, fair enough; but the latter case has consequences for others on the road. Therefore it's not simply a "nanny state" (i.e. supposedly for one's one good) issue, but more complicated.
Of course, taken to its extreme, you could use such logic to justify all manner of draconian measures. So it's a question of balancing the others' safety with the driver's freedoms.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
ABS extends stopping distance. Want proof? Go out in a parking lot and "lock 'em up"
Now pull your ABS fuse and do it again. It's quite a difference.
Credentials:
Electrical Engineer, Muscle/Tuner/EV Builder/Racer and Professional driver.
>>>assuming most end-users would get this 'WinMin' OS instead of WinXP/Vista
I'd simply run Win95 or NT 4. Have you ever seen how fast these OSes operate on a modern PC - zoom-zoom! I've never understood why somebody somewhere doesn't take these ancient OSes, add a few extra drivers like USB, and run them. Win NT 4 can run on just 8 megabytes! Imagine how cheaply computers could be made if they only used ~1/500th as much RAM.
Today's modern OSes really and truly are top-heavy monstrosities.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>Up until this summer my mother was using a computer with Windows 98. All ...I couldn't find a free AV program that was up to
>she does is e-mail.
>date and didn't cripple her system. Firewall? Good luck.
Well I must be VERY lucky indeed! I'm using a Win98SE system on an PIII computer to e-mail, AND surf the web. I'm running a FREE anti-virus program, a FREE anti-spyware program and a FREE firewall. I update the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs weekly. Yes, I must be very lucky, since the anti-virus program is also open source. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to figure out what I'm using.
>Need a USB device for anything, not going to happen.
My USB/mp3 player disagrees. Bought it a few months ago.
Seems like your research falls into the "good enough" category.
Not to mention that they don't *want* to make their OS highly secure. Their OS's security flaws created a huge market, for anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc after all - why would they want to take that market down?
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
"Good Enough" is enough, the last mini-project I'm working on involve Solaris/Legacy System/W2K3/Active Directory/IIS/MSSQL/.NET/HP-UX/Apache/WebSphere/Cryptography/WebServices/JavaScript and the User only sees THREE web pages and ONE PDF report. There are six persons directly involved from very different disciplines, we are in the 8th month and it is at 15% complete.
But when I get my night vision cornea replacements, I'll want really _good_ ones.
I was tested on it. Failing the test would have meant that I could not take the driving part of the course, and I wouldn't have been able to get my driver's license til I was 18. My, my, how the laws have changed.
So in the first paragraph you're complaining a nanny state with too many protections, but in the last paragraph you're complaining that the government isn't strict enough? Huh?
I have what I think is a better idea: actually enforcing the traffic laws. Don't signal when changing lanes? Ticket. Hogging the left (aka, "passing") lane? Ticket. Lane hopping? Ticket. Going way to slow? Ticket. If people know they have to do things properly or else face the consequences of their action, they will do things properly.
Also have retesting every time you renew your license (5 year intervals?). This way you're less likely to pick up bad habits and get them fixed before they're completely ingrained.
Virtual trade shows? Let's wait until they're actually successful before tossing them in the pot?
Kindle? It's a marketing success, but regular PDAs and even some cellphones were already "good enough" for reading and are often a good deal cheaper. Kindle's marketing punch is that it's better than "good enough".
> 'Good enough' is what funds 'advancement.' See Bugatti Veyron for reference.
I think that you will have to elaborate on this step. What does Bugatti have to do with cheap, but good enough, cars?
NT4's not half bad, but 95?! IMO, 98 is definitely the best of the DOS-based OSes.
The Tata Nano is reviewed here. The dashboard is ... interesting, but who needs to pay attention to all those dials anyway?
"Good Enough" would be a step up for a lot of stuff. Our standards for quality these days are in the toilet.
But HEY! We're getting Lower Prices Everday[TM]!
ABS extends stopping distance. Want proof? Go out in a parking lot and "lock 'em up" Now pull your ABS fuse and do it again. It's quite a difference. Credentials: Electrical Engineer, Muscle/Tuner/EV Builder/Racer and Professional driver.
Now do it while steering around an obstacle.
Go out on any icy or wet parking lot and lock up the brakes without ABS, next try it with.
Check your results again.
Gone!
Mac OS X market is like that, maybe. But Windows is definitely not like it. And "most people" want a, completely, vertically integrated piece of machinery. Almost no one(statistically speaking) buys Windows OS updates or retail packages these days.
Airbags killed the AM radio star.
The author argues that any savings associated with manual windows are eaten up by the costs of training assemblers to install the cheaper part. designing the door assembly to support both automatic and manual parts, and so on. I'm not sure that the site its hosted on adds much credibility, though.
Good enough is already many IT "professionals" operate. They don't look for the best solution but the bare minimum. And often times they don't consider any other options but the "good enough" one.
Bit twiddlers vs technologists.
And a reason why the MS empire is what it is. : )
That "good enough" is the antithesis of good engineering.
Look at the bell curve. Look at a field of corn, look at the height of people in a crowd.
The middle of the bell curve is where the money is, because that is where most people are.
Poorly Made in China
Most of Paul Midler's work is coping with what he calls âoequality fadeâ as the Chinese factories transform what were, in fact, profitless contracts into lucrative relationships. The production cycle he sees is the opposite of the theoretical model of continuous improvement. After resolving teething problems and making products that match specifications, innovation inside the factory turns to cutting costs, often in ways that range from unsavoury to dangerous. Packaging is cheapened, chemical formulations altered, sanitary standards curtailed, and on and on, in a series of continual product debasements.
NT4 can run on 8MB in the same way that Windows 95 can run on 4MB; with a lot of swapping. I ran NT4 on a machine with 32MB, which was okay, but it really worked well when I upgraded to 64MB (although IE4 helped use up a lot of that shortly after). NT 4 on a P3 550 with 128MB of RAM was insanely fast.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The OEM service release 2.1 of Windows 95 added USB support and was both faster and more stable than Windows 98. It wasn't until Win98SE that this changed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agree. You and I have no choice but to live in the suburbs far from everywhere. Sacrifice is something other people should do.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
that applies to cars too. The tata nano is essentailly that. No seat belts, most of the time people don't need those. Rear view mirrors, got by for 60 years without em. Airconditioning? Open a window. Air bags? If something goes wrong they can hurt you, even without an serious accident. Anti lock breaks, well with some practice a good driver can do better than ABS, and you aren't going fast most of the time anwyay. Radio, distracting. Cost: 2500 bucks US (or thereabouts).
The reason you can't sell them for that price in Europe/the US - the governments (including others such as Canada where I am), have decided if you want a car you must have all sorts of that stuff. Projected cost to bring them to 'western' markets ~10k. And even then they wouldn't go highway speeds.
Windows - for all of it's faults, does a lot of stuff you don't see, and don't know you use.
"Hooray for mediocrity" is not an excuse for doing crappy things the wrong way. Neither is "The Simpsons did it".
The Tata Nano car was not rejected because of consumerism or market protection, but because it is a low quality, highly dangerous piece of technology. Coupled with its cheapness and almost limitless availability, we all would've had a quagmire on the roads pretty quickly.
I think you missed his point, that first paragraph does not read like "Hooray for mediocrity" as you put it, but sarcasm. It's pretty clear he's 'for' the extra features in OS's, and probably cars too. *Sigh* This is why we have to put emoticons everywhere *Looks at floor*
To be fair to the GP, I had to stop after reading your first paragraph too. ;) /sarcasm
Ohhh, you are talking about windows FLP, its a nice OS!
My experience is the 'good enough' and 'not quite good enough but marketable' has always worked especially for software. It simply a fact that get the product out the door and fix it later as evolved to the point where the product cycle has gotten short enough so that there is no need to do the fix.
I predict Blueray won't have much success and might be actually skipped over by people for a better/cheaper technology because DVDs are good enough.
(not much of a prediction, this is already happening)
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
The whole issue is nothing more than an empty concept that has been pulled out of the air for the sake of creating a story. The "good enough" principle is actually the "cheap enough" principle and has been used since time immemorial to accomodate the unfulfilled dreams of the middle and lower classes. This is the whole idea behind budget brands that often mimic high end products but are actually designed and built according to inferior specifications.
Example: Everyone wants a fine, high quality bicycle but most cannot afford the exorbitant price. As a consequence, all budget retailers across the country offer some brand of bicycle that gives the impression of being top-of-the-line but yet is very cheaply manufactured and offered at a very cheap price.
Example: All serious photographers dream of owning a large collection of various lenses to suit various, but few can afford to realize the dream. As a consequence, an entire industry has been formed that manufacturers inferior quality lenses at prices that fall far below the big name brands, and this industry has been thriving for a long, long time.
Wherever there are luxury goods, there will be cheap imitations to appease the masses. This is a long-standing practice and does not require a rebranding in the form of a "good enough" principle.
The article is fabricated junk.
And it'll run a maximum of 10% of the processes your system can actually handle before giving you a friendly dialog box offering to let you upgrade to the full Windows XYZ experience by purchasing Windows XYZ Ultimate Edition.
--Obyron
If an OSS advocate made this same argument as a reason to adopt Linux and OpenOffice, you'd have the OSS detractors screaming at him for not understanding business and productivity. I recall quite a flame fest over replacements for Adobe products a day or two ago.
Maybe operating system's "bloat" is more important than either of you think? Maybe it's only called bloat in the first place when someone else have it but you don't? Sort of like Accelerated desktop UI prior to Compiz. Guess who won the bloat award there...
Windows is popular despite that it is only good enough.
It's actually pretty damn good, for both businesses and home users. It's not for everyone, but it has grown quite a few organic advantages from having the largest install base. It's easy to say "If my OS was the most popular, I'd have those things too," but it's wishful thinking. Windows grew into it, and it shows. I don't think the Linux development practices lend well to the range of hardware support Windows has, even if it were as popular. Apple would have to change more than a few things as well, but they are better equipped to handle change than who/whatever represents Linux.
Plenty of better solutions have come and gone, but good enough solutions spread like wildfire because they are not actually optimized to be solutions. They are optimized for one thing: spreading.
Err.. I think I agree with you, but spreading here sounds like a bad word for 'useful to a wide audience'. I like to bash social networking crapware, but they got something right I guess.
When you need a major operation, you probably don't say "let me find a good enough doctor". You want the best! It's your life at stake! Medicine is the last place this attitude should become prevalent.
microsoft aims to satisfy X percent of the population with their product. instead of making multiple OS's for every different kind of user, they just create one, and then offer a few different "versions", that end up not being that different after all. from their perspective, it makes complete sense to do this, since wasting a few MB's on DVD's and their users' HDD's costs less to them than carefully stripping away parts of WinXxx and offering super-customized OS's.
weinersmith
Reminds me of a guy laughing about the amount of precision his job required -- he worked under that mountain from which World War III was expected to be fought. Radio interviewer asked him about accuracy of the missiles used.
He said with what they were throwing, hitting anywhere in the time zone would suffice for their purposes.
Then he laughed and said no, no, only kidding.
How do you know that there is that much more functionality? I mean if you don't use it, is it really there?
Once you explore Windows Vista, I think that you will find that you had about the same functionality that you had with a computer running XP, a clock and a calendar, and maybe add a picture in a picture frame to that?
Way too much emphasis on marketing and not enough on bugs. *Cough* microsoft *Cough*
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
This "Tato Nano" sounds great. I wish they would offer it here in the US.
Full disclosure: I'm also in favor of taking down guard rails during ice storms.
Good enough.. Always depends on who you are asking. :)
It also also implies that it could be better, admitting obvious shortcomings.
The supplier will find it good enough when the product meets the requirement specs.
The customer will find it good enough when the product actually supports the business process.
The end user will (almost) never find the product good enough.
Its just a matter of getting the contracts right. Dealing with large government projects, thats as easy as it is impossible
The problem with good enough is that it colides with quality. And bad quality is always expensive in the long run.
The supplier: Just be good at two things. Customer expectation management (do the talk) and Estimating/Developing (do the walk)
The customer: You can't manage what you dont understand. So understand what you are dealing with. Alot of IT managers dont have a clue about IT at all, especially in the government sector.
Me? I'm a long damn way from the nearest grocery store, doctor's office, or anything else. You begrudge me a trip into town each week to buy groceries? As I said, I'll keep my keys. At least until the roads become safe to ride horses on again.
You're not actually part of society. Seriously. Those of us living cheek-and-jowl will figure out how best to get along with each other and ensure each other's safety while respecting each other's rights. It doesn't involve you. Living way out in the middle of nowhere, you cannot imagine what it is to be in our shoes. I interact with literally hundreds of people a day - if only 99.9% of them are responsible enough to not need a "nanny state", then I'm going to have a really bad day sometime in the next month.
If you do ever come visit the city, a friendly word of advice: Please don't stop at the top of the escalator to stare gape-jawed at the buildings and crowds. Step off to the side to do that. Also, the Circle Line is a pretty decent way to see Lower Manhattan if the weather's good.
I think this is all an inverted corollary of the old engineering maxim "Good, Fast, Cheap, pick two". If you do two of them well enough, the third one will drive sales. It might make more sense if you think of "fast" in terms of convenience. Nothing new here, just old mechanisms showing up in new places.
Engineering has always been about "good enough." You are balancing good (quality/features), cheap (price), and fast (deployment schedule). Better quality (more testing, redundanct design, careful design, quality-oriented design/development process, etc) adversely affects the price and schedule. If you're willing to wait years for a project and/or pay through the nose, you can get an amazing product. However, you have to pick "good enough." Not everyone wants to spend a couple million for carbon fiber bodied custom build performance sports car. For most people, a couple hundred thousand dollar limited production car is all they need. For most people, a production car for tens of thousands is all they want, and a used car for a few thousand would be "good enough" if that's all they could afford. These's also another rule that you spend 90% of your time/money on the last 10% of performance. You can get the basic functionality done quickly, but the bulk of the time is spend with corner cases, error recovery, handling failures gracefully, etc.
The 2nd fastest processor in a family can be 50% of the price for a 10% clock decrease from the fastest. Is the 2nd fastest satisfy your needs? If so, then it's "good enough" and saving the money outweights the unnecessary performance. If you need the fastest processor and can afford it, then that one is "good enough". If the fastest processor is still too slow or too expensive, you can either call it "good enough" and make due, or you can wait for a faster one to be released.
If I need a tool a couple times and it doesn't need precision, then the Harbor Freight crap is "good enough.". If I'm going to use it a lot or need precision work, then I'm going to be paying a premium for the good, name-brand stuff.
I love the concept, but believe that the problem is complexity, not functionality. Something simple, and stable can also be feature rich and fast. It should not take an expensive week course to figure out how to completely use something. Technology changes so fast that we will all end up spending months a year just learning how to use things that will be replaced in five years or less. Life is too short my friends.
Umm, the US Air Force would suck Osama Bin Ladden's dick to achieve a 10% increase in fighter jet fuel efficiency.
Fuel logistics are a large part of the cost of modern warfare, and fuel prices are a large part of the training costs of a modern military.
Dog fights, as such, a a thing of the past, and even if you don't buy that - nobody suggested decreasing performance to get that 10% - the OP suggested raising costs.
then he *is* good enough. See, your problem seemms to be a misunderstanding of the terms. If the doctor screws something up, he's *not* good enough. But, a good enough doctor is just fine, and if you aren't rich, that's basically what you'll get. Most people cannot *afford* to be so damn choosy. People have this misconception that because they *want* the world to be some way, the universe will re-arrange itself around their desires. It's part of what very well might bankrupt the US with healthcare in the coming decades - *overspending* because people can't be content with 'good enough' solutions.
I heard something on NPR recently about a guy who was trying to compare health systems around the world (although, his methodology seems rather anecdotal and therefor unconvincing, but it's still interesting). A number of years ago, he had some sort of shoulder injury. At the time, the doctors used some sort of screw to hold the shoulder together. He still has almost full usage of the shoulder, but it was starting to cause him some discomfort.
He went to a US Orthopedic surgeon, who recommended a very expensive shoulder replacement surgery, which if it went well, would give him a near perfect replacement, but there is some risk of serious complications from the surgery that would leave him worse than before. He went to other doctors around the world (U.K., France, Japan, Canada, and I think Germany). Most of the other doctors mentioned the replacement surgery as an option, but *recommended* some sort of steroidal treatment to reduce the inflamation, coupled with some occupational therapy, which would basically get rid of the pain, and be much cheaper.
The point is, did that guy really *need* a replacement shoulder that would cost something like $30,000 for the surgery? Probably not - the original 'fix' by the doctors years ago, really was *good enough*. People might want to complain bitterly about that, and say that is exactly what is wrong with government managed healthcare - as long as people who can afford it can 'opt out' of the government healthcare option, I really don't care if there is a 'public option', and if there is a public option, I don't expect taxpayers to have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the 'best' solution when there is a perfectly reasonable "good enough" solution.
I thought "good enough" was the inevitable landing spot of technology ever since the betamax. Corporations won't go for that much better than consumers do(the consumers pay up anyways), and the inefficiencies in publically funded anything are just frightful. So I posit that technology that will be "good enough" will always win, unless the consumers start asking for "better than good enough" consistently. So far they haven't.
Excuses, excuses. Turn in your damned car or shut up. You CHOSE to live in the boonies. You CHOSE to propose that people get rid of their cars.
Good enough and affordable ALWAYS wins against excellent but unaffordable.
Also, never forget that in the USA and increasingly in the rest of the world, marketing trumps engineering.
Finally, the USA is the home of the "quantity beats quality" mantra.
'Nuff said.
K.
I agree we should get people off the road - but how will they travel most distances between 1 and 4 km? Over 4km, it makes sense to use public transit. Below 1 km, walk. between that? Bicycle. But, bicycling is dangerous...
I don't consider danger the main yard stick to judge a vehicle. It is an important one, but not the only one.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Easy. You have a shortcut to loadlin on your desktop which kickstarts your Ubuntu install.
I don't see why not. It's the past of technology, after all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There is. It's called Windows Mobile. it's fully featured enough for most uses, but it lacks tools which are "extra" on Windows, but crucial to the advanced user. By default, there is no regedit, no keyboard remapper, no task scheduling, Explorer is crippled, etc. It takes up less then 256MB, and for most users it would be sufficient. For those needing further tools, they are freely available if you know where to look. "Windows Minimum" does exist, it's just that it's commonly deployed on mobile phones, and not available for the general user environment of the desktop.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Bugatti is owned by Volkwagen, who developed the Veyron at a loss as a show of corporate prestige.
How about an operating system like Vista/7 that has a decent support structure for combing through features and allowing users to decide the ones that they want and do not want to initially install? Slipstream disks do this but are not always pretty in what it takes to handle them and the results they produce. What really annoys me is how non-compartmentalized these unused features are, although that may a false perception generated by MS. I remember one point in time where they claimed IE wasn't removable from the core of Windows, they came up with something...
No, asshole - I was born in the boonies. What? You think everyone in the world chose where to be born? Did you choose YOUR parents? You got to choose your color, your nationality, your parent's religion, the whole works, huh?
You, and others, seem to have made the assumption that I'm a suburbanite who has escaped the city. The old "back to my roots" thing that country singers like to sing about. That crap doesn't apply to me.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If you know how to drive, it's not an issue.
Well, sad to disappoint some people, but the whole history of humanity is filled with using the thing that was only 80% as good, but cost a tenth as much as the best-of-the-best.
E.g., in WW2 it meant losing IIRC 4 Shermans to kill a Tiger... but here's the funny stuff: it cost the USA less to replace the 4 Shermans than it cost the Germans to replace the Tiger. Guess who won that war?
E.g., other than the English virtually nobody used the superior longbow. Why? Because longbowmen had to be well trained, they cost a lot to hire, they cost a lot to replace, and they needed better pay and rations. Meanwhile every freshly-drafted peasant could point and click a crossbow or later musket. Sure, it had a crap rate of fire. But you could hire a lot more crossbowmen for the same money. And so the longbow was pretty much doomed to the garbage bin of history.
E.g., going even further back in time, the big expensive quinquereme were put out of business by cheap liburnians. The latter was the kind of ships that Augustus used to rout Marcus Antonius's and Cleopatra's state-of-the-art fleet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to use outright crap. (Ask the Chinese how well their dadaos -- big swords -- fared against Japanese machineguns and tanks.) But the cost rises exponentially when you approach the best-of-the-best grade of equipment. "Good enough" is often "good enough" because you can buy several of it for the same price as one state of the art whatever-you're-buying.
Even in computers, it's nothing new. Minis won against big iron, because you could afford several "good enough" minis, for the price of one state-of-the-art big iron machines. Then minis got spanked by micros for the same reason: you can put a full PC on several people's desks for actually less money than a mini with that number of terminals.
And somewhere in between, UNIX became the next big thing because... it was a simple unsophisticated OS that could run on (and had been developped for) a cheap mini with 4k RAM, that was originally sold as a coprocessor for a bigger machine. You could actually do real work in UNIX with a cheap little machine that cost a fraction of the cost of the state-of-the-art stuff. You could do a lot less with it, mind you, and it lacked most features of the "real" OS's of the day. But you could get several of those crap little machines with UNIX on it, for the same price as one big serious machine with a big serious OS and tools. It was, you guessed, "good enough."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Linux desktop programs have still yet to master copy and paste! HAHAHAHA!
You aren't alone in that prediction. Biotech, I think, will be bigger and more broad-reaching than our little dot-com boom of yore.
But in the beginning it will look a lot like the dot-com era did. Nerds in startups trying to change the world who are paired with venture capitalists trying to get rich.
The one thing that will make the two different is the internet was never regulated. Biotech falls under pharmaceuticals/health care and thus has the FDA to contend with. The internet had no regulations at all.
did good enough technology get us to the Moon or win World War II? Did good enough laws and policies and economic plans get us out of The Great Depression? No and we deserve better than just good enough. The problem with the USA and products and services is the level of quality. That is why companies are bleeding money because they sell good enough products and services.
You see when you have a high level of quality you end up with fewer expenses because of the support costs of the higher quality products and services cause less troubles and thus cut support costs, warranty works, and drive more customers to your business.
Now when a company does good enough products and services, the quality is so bad that support costs rise throu8gh the roof, help desks and support desks are flooded with issues and complaints, refunds are given, warranty work goes up and products are exchanged for another, and customers go to your competitors hoping to find a better deal.
In the case of Microsoft they use vendor lock in to keep customers loyal by pre-installing the Windows OS to each OEM PC sold.
A lot of companies stuck with legacy software than is DOS based, 16 bit Windows based, or runs on Windows 2000/98/95/NT4.0 because it won't run on modern operating systems because the legacy software is of a better quality and the cost of upgrading to new hardware and a new operating system is not worth the cost.
During a good economy people usually buy superior goods that cost more and are of a better quality, but during a bad economy people settle for good enough inferior goods that barely work or work good enough but are so cheap they can easily replace it with another cheap one.
As US jobs got offshored to China, Russia, India, etc the products and services became poor quality or good enough quality. But they also got cheaper in price. So you get what you paid for. During the offshoring moves, many companies forgot to put in a decent quality control program to save on more costs.
The Wired article makes good points. But, behind those points (in the US) has been essentially no growth in income for most wage earners since 2000. In these circumstances, crap is king, despite the observable truth that those who buy cheap, buy at least twice.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I do it all the time. I race year round in PA.
I keep wondering when the Good Enough phenomenon will hit movie theater projection systems. Currently, Hollywood is making a slow, painfully expensive transition from film projection, which has fairly low hardware cost but very high media cost, to 3 DLP chip digital projection, which has nearly zero media cost but extremely high hardware cost. Hollywood is going from one expensive projection system to another because they insist that picture quality only ever go up. But movie theaters have already installed a cheap, dim, LCD projector next to every one of their Hollywood-approved projectors to display preshow ads.
So far, about 450 screens in the US also use these dim preshow projectors to show an alternative content series called Fathom Events that includes independent movies, live news events, and live opera. Fathom is not yet big, but it's in mainstream theaters like Regal, AMC and Cinemark. Interestingly, the theater chains own Fathom and the creators of content are nobodies compared to Hollywood, so theaters may be getting a larger cut of the ticket than Hollywood lets them have. Fathom is the only theatrical system in which both the hardware and the media are low cost, so why hasn't its popularity exploded?
P.S.
The first thing I do after I boot XP or Vista is to open the task manager, and kill any running programs or processes that I don't need. Why all this crap is running in the background when I don't want it makes no sense to me, but killing them does free-up a lot of RAM and speed-up the computer (no hard drive thrashing).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Because I don't want a table piece, I don't want a fashion statement, I don't want an appliance. I want something I can make into my own. If technology is too expensive, I'll be afraid to hack it. This is the number one reason why netbooks are so popular among geeks, no matter how much snobbish Mac users and Wired writers hate it. It's not because netbooks are super great products, but because we're not afraid to hack them, we're not afraid of them breaking. If it breaks, we'll buy a new one, or even several. And that's why we hate proprietary cell phones where the manufacturer controls the device even after you own it. If I can't hack it then it's dead to me.
Well said. This has really opened my eyes.
I don't think I buy your reasoning here.
Do you have any evidence that the car is unsafe? It seems to have done pretty well in EuroNCAP type test. It also probably handles as well if not better than most Toyotas and has better steering feedback as well. It's also rear engined and RWD, so it's just like a Porsche! I'm sure it will suck for hammering down the Autobahn at 250 km/h but then so will a Prius and in any case it's not its intended primary use anyway.
Basically, it seems to be as "good" as a Smart car, but with a reasonable price tag. If you still think it's too dangerous, how safe do you want to make it? S-class safe? If that's good enough, how did you come to the conclusion? Why not make it WRC-car safe? GT-car safe?
Why would you be glad if India decided it's not safe enough? Didn't you state at the beginning that the Nano was good enough for that society? The only thing banning it will achieve now is that fewer people will have access to a reasonably safe four-wheel vehicle. I don't even see how this would create more total deaths as most people would simply be switching from shittier methods of transport instead of just going out and buying a brand new car as their first vehicle.
Correct, because a good driver doesn't lock up their brakes when steering around an obstacle. So please explain how ABS would increase stopping distance in this case then.
Your assertion was both overly broad and disingenuous - ABS increases stopping distance only under certain specific driving conditions, and increasingly fewer of those as the technology continues to improve. (Have you looked at the stuff Honda's been doing with the CBR600RR?)
It also ignores the fact that ABS is intended to preserve vehicle control under panic braking conditions, not to reduce stopping distance.
ABS extends stopping distance. Want proof? Go out in a parking lot and "lock 'em up"
Now pull your ABS fuse and do it again. It's quite a difference.
Credentials:
Electrical Engineer, Muscle/Tuner/EV Builder/Racer and Professional driver.
And now try it on snow and ice. Have you ever seen snow? Do you know what it is?
Although the seatbelt is a good idea, it has nothing to do with securing you for maximum breaking. I've done that w/o a seatbelt and never had any issue staying in my seat.
What it's good for is a sudden stop like if you hit something. Then it keeps you from going through the windshield.
Of course, seatbelts are inexpensive.
As for the rest, we insist in the U.S. on going 70 on the interstate, and we have built the entire country based on that and on doing 45 most everywhere else. A car that only goes 30 wouldn't need anti-lock brakes, traction control, or airbags (as long as NO car went over 30), but nobody would stand for it because it would be over an hour each way getting to work.
Been there, done that, not a mark on anything. Car never had ABS.
the problem is, that the 10% of features varies from one user to the next, so much, that essentially it's necessary to add them, sooner or later to the core OS. look at linux: there's many utilities, that developers rely on (and as a result end users), it's just more modular there.
True that. I upgraded to 8gb of RAM for some design work & rendering, and made the big leap to XP 64-bit. Not a cheap path, granted. As best as I can tell, XP wouldn't bring in drivers for the SATA controller from anything except a floppy disk, the process of ripping the ISO, adding the drivers, and reburning was annoying at best. The bonus, however, was taking some time to go through nLite (I believe) and stripping what I don't use out. It was quite zippy afterwards, worth the initial time.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
Quality is whatever the customer requires. So, quality is and always has been "good enough".
In fact, that's EXACTLY what quality is.
Better than "good enough" wastes my money.
I am not a machinist. I have absolutely no need for professional grade drill, bits, press, grinders, etc. For me, such a set would be a complete waste of my money.
If you offered me such a set for the price of the set I was about to buy, then my next question is "what's the price of the consumer grade tools?"
Apocryphal or not, this story makes the point.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"It's just wonderful that we have a nanny state to mandate the use of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, etc ad nauseum, all designed to protect us from our own idiocy."
Actually, as the GP pointed out, some of those are to protect ME from YOUR idiocy. ;)
Forget knowing what the stopping distance, including reaction time is, at whatever. Who cares. If we're in the car doing whatever, can you point out where you can stop by?
What? You think everyone in the world chose where to be born? Did you choose YOUR parents?
No, but most of us *did* choose the place we live in. Choose one *inside* the city and there, problem solved.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
"35. (de Saint-Exupery's Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Taken from Dave Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design: http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
good enough would have gotten 0 out of 10 to the moon, or 8/10 rockets landing on where people live.
which come to think of that is ok by military standards
...that I'm a suburbanite who has escaped the city....
You can't be that far in the boonies, because you're posting on /. That means you must have at least a dial-up Internet connection and a telephone.
All theory is gray
One problem with just learning how long it takes you to stop though is motorbikes, a decent one can stop from 100km/h (60mpg) to dead halt in less than 10m... catch is, there is almost no chance in hell the car behind you would be able to stop that fast a rear ending is not fun.
In the United States, there has been a phone line almost everywhere for decades. A phone line allows dial up. We even have electricity! In recent years the "Rural Water Development" has even brought "city water" out into - get this - RURAL AMERICA! Get a clue.
It's a one hour drive to the nearest hospital that will deliver a baby. It's more than a 1/2 hour drive to pay the electric bill. The nearest grocery store is a 5 minute drive - a family operation that's been in the same small building since about the time the Oklahoma territory opened up. Any grocery store chain that most Americans would recognize, is an hour away, in the same city with the hospital.
This ain't the suburbs.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I think if you're willing to work that hard to get the OS you want, you're probably already running something like Linux. Not that Linux distros are typically lean and mean out of the box, but if you're a hacker, Linux wants to be hacked. Windows will fight you.
...Windows Vista still wastes 5 gigabytes of disk space....
Now that is a big deal with terabyte disk drives costing under $100?
All theory is gray
I don't think the Linux development practices lend well to the range of hardware support Windows has, even if it were as popular.
Wait a second.. you do realize out of the box linux supports easily 50x the hardware windows does right? and support for hardware doesn't just magically disappear when the next version comes out either
....People won't accept "good enough"...
A cheap Dell or HP is good enough for many people, but the fact that Apple is able to make more money than both of those manufacturers, shows that there are a sizable number of people for whom "good enough" is not good enough and they are willing to pay a premium for a better product. I'm sure there are also plenty of Windows users that simply can't afford a premium computer. They have to be satisfied with what they can afford.
All theory is gray
Because kicking 2/3 of the drivers off the roads is being less of a nanny than making people wear seatbelts.
Nitpick - it also secures you after an off-center or side impact.
Get sideswiped and have a belt on? Your hands are on the wheel and your ass is on the seat, and you can still steer what's left of the car to the shoulder, or away from the guardrail, or from oncoming traffic.
Get sideswiped without a belt? Your hands are on the wheel and your ass is in the general vicinity of the gearshift (or the door jamb), and the car veers wildly to the left (or the right). In 99% of cases, neither of those outcomes is what you want.
As the old adage says: "Keep driving (flying) until you die." Unless it's got an ejection seat, if the vehicle is still responsive to its controls, no matter how bad the situation is, you keep driving it (or flying it) until it stops responding to its controls, or until you're dead, whichever comes first. Seatbelts aren't for maintaining control during normal - or even emergency - braking, but they are helpful in increasing the probability that you'll maintain control after the shit's hit the fan.
Suppose that Microsoft created a "good enough" operating system called "Windows Minimum" (WM).
They do that to an extent. Windows XP had 'Starter' edition, and Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, in addition to Embeded, Home and Professional versions. I wish they made the WFfLP available through retail. A stripped down version of XP, made to run on old computers, but still compatible with new (when it was made) software. None of the extras most people didn't need, and ran rather snappy compared to the regular XPs.
ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. Also only if they have brakes that are amenable to modulation. The power-assisted brakes on most modern cars are heavily damped, causing a noticeable lag (a tenth of a second or so) between pedal pressure changes and braking effect. The ABS actuator is in the hydraulic system, bypassing the power assist booster and thus allowing fast response when a wheel loses traction. ABS can release the locked wheel and reapply the brake almost instantly. It is not possible to do that with the brake pedal, no matter how skilled a driver you are. The brake booster doesn't respond fast enough, no matter how well trained your foot is.
ABS allows for "good enough" at the weakest link in the system: the human element! That is what makes it a good solution.
It also ignores the fact that ABS is intended to preserve vehicle control under panic braking conditions, not to reduce stopping distance.
Not only that, but multi-channel ABS can keep things under control much better than a human driver - unless he's got four brake pedals (and four feet). For example, braking heavily at speed in a typical 2-wheels on dirt/2 wheels on tarmac collision avoidance situation without ABS will usually result in the vehicle spinning off the other side of the road.
Add in the relatively trivial software patch for ESP and you've got a car that's quite capable of saving your life on that *one day* that you exceeded your capabilites.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Actually win95 isn't too good on modern hardware. It makes certain "assumptions" about hardware speeds, maximum drive sizes etc that royally screw things up on fast systems (and yes, I've tried). Probably trivial to fix, but re-releasing win95 now would hardly be great publicity for MS after they've trash-talked not only it but several of its predecessors to sell the latest "fixed" version.
But I agree with your point re modern OSes: seems like a job for linux... now if only I had the time, skill and dedication to make a branch to fit the bill (or even search out one that does).
There should be a name for this "10% of functions is all that's needed" fallacy. Yes, you only need 10% of functions at any given time, but that does not mean that you always need the same 10%. Right now I'm using the web browser to connect to the Internet, so all I need from the OS is a network stack and some memory management. Tomorrow I might connect my digital camera to my laptop, so I need from the OS some USB support, some way to access removable media, and some way to transfer files.
I wish I wasn't so late to this article, because this comment is probably going to get buried, but anyway...
"Good Enough," syndrome is exactly the reason why Ubuntu is taking over the world, while even though poor old Patrick Volkerding is still churning out a distro which, by virtually any technical or engineering measure, is infinitely better quality, Slackware by comparison is probably only barely managing to continue to exist.
This is also why Debian fanboys need to stop defending their distribution on the basis of quality, as well. Again, in terms of actual engineering, Debian is unmitigated garbage of the lowest order. It is the single worst Linux distribution ever created, bar none.
However, that is exactly the reason why the only Linux distro less popular than Ubuntu is Debian itself. It isn't because these two distributions are good, at all; it's actually entirely because they're so appallingly bad.
Look at Microsoft. In engineering terms, Windows has always been an absolute train wreck. Again, in design terms it is the worst operating system ever devised; it's absolutely rock bottom. As far as robustness or security was concerned, literally anything is or was better than it; AmigaOS, MacOS Classic, Linux, commercial UNIX, you name it. Yet in terms of sales, usage, or popularity, it obliterated the competition.
The same thing actually happened with UNIX itself. If you read the UNIX Hater's Handbook, it lists other mainframe operating systems which were supposedly infinitely more elegant; RiscOS I think was one, and something else of which Lisp was more native than UNIX apparently, which the name of escapes me now. Yet UNIX wiped those and several others off the map.
People love crap, as long as said crap lets them perform single, rote tasks in less than a minute.
Although I might be rooting more for Patrick Volkerding myself, Mark Shuttleworth knows something that Patrick apparently doesn't. Namely, that where popularity at least is concerned, the inferior product always wins.
Congratulations, Debian. I'm serious. You've earned it. Your distribution is a turd of genuinely Herculean proportions.
I fully expect it to become the universal Linux standard.
What? That's the first time I see this claim. A car in reasonable shape and average load will outbreak a bike almost any time, but even if it doesn't, there's simply no way a any motorbike can stop from 100km/h within 10 meters. Check your information before you get in an accident.
Check your information before you get in an accident.
I have stopped on my bike from 80 to stopped in less length than the width of a single driveway (bout 7m) will try 100km/h next time, if I'm off I doubt it would be by too much
Bikes have a LOT less inertia than cars, wind resistance helps a lot to slow you down when you go faster speeds than it does a car
But maybe it's increasing true today, just as it's been increasing true in every other era of mankind.
In other news: a tautology is a tautology.
.... We even have electricity!....
Up until February of this year, we too lived in the country on a ranch. We had electricity and phone, but all we could get this dial-up. That changed when the phone company put in DSL boxes everywhere in the Valley. We now live in a small town about 5 miles away from the ranch, with a population of about 2500 people. We live about 40 minutes drive from the nearest hospital, but we do have a local medical clinic and a grocery store supermarket. In the summer, the population of our Valley almost doubles because of the many tourists.
Living in a less populated area has its advantages, such as the fact that we have very clean air and water, but to do any serious shopping we depend on our cars as well as doctors appointments and other travel. There is no public transit here.
All theory is gray
"There is no public transit here."
Thank you for speaking up. I was beginning to think that I'm the only slashdotter who lives outside of a greater metropolitan area. :^)
Population 2500? There are city blocks with that many people, lol
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Snow and Ice are one of the worst places for ABS. It makes it near impossible to brake in an efficient manner. I can't tell you how many times I have been wishing that I could turn ABS off up here in Canada. It turns even slow speed braking into a complete nightmare as the system goes crazy. A good set of tires that are specific to the conditions and being a good driver trump ABS every day of the week.
Bikes also have two skinny tires with small contact areas instead of a car's four wider tires with much larger contact areas.
It's surprisingly difficult to find concrete data on stopping distances, but here's something from a credible looking source: the best stopping distance from 48 km/h was 10.40 meters for a Yamaha FJR 1300 without ABS. That's already longer than your performance and only at 60% of the speed. Unfortunately, they only have one other test speed which is 129 km/h where the Yamaha was again best at 67.5 meters. That's more than double of what a good car can achieve from 100 km/h but of course different speeds make it hard to compare these numbers.
Here's the test:
A Comparison of Stopping Distance Performance for Motorcycles Equipped with ABS, CBS and Conventional Hydraulic Brake Systems
Also, here a GT-R races a Ducati 1098s on a track. Notice how the car always catches up at the braking areas.
"The most well-known example of technology overkill is Windows XP and its successors. Think about it for a minute. How many of the functions in these operating systems do you actually use? "
And yet a simple thing like managing .ISO files - which, you know, comes under the "disk operating" part of "system" - is apparently still far beyond Windows XP's capabilities.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
FJR1300 is more of a fast touring bike than sports, and upon checking weigh's 295kg, more than double the weight of mine.
here's another non-sports bike that does 100km/h-0 in 44m it's also a bit of a heavy machine though in comparison.
guess my bike is a bit odd in that the weight is extremely low to the ground in comparison to other bikes, thusly I can brake harder before the rear end lifts, as well as I have somewhat.. large front and rear tyres for the weight of the bike
I do completely agree that a sports car will out brake a motorcycle, but most people don't drive sports cars around the place everywhere, and I wouldn't count on an average car coming behind you being one.
I also concede that after measuring even my bike cannot do 100km/h in 10m, the initial speed travels distance too quickly, was about 35m to complete halt, couldn't brake harder if I tried, would have locked up the front wheel from the shocks being completely compressed.
Compared to the likely unreliable 'flashscience' website since they have an average car stopping distance calculator, while it's only like 20% shorter, that 20% shorter would still be enough to, on average, get your ass rear ended.
Of course it would be even worse for exotic sports cars, heavy braking would almost guarantee rear ending.
P.S.
The first thing I do after I boot XP or Vista is to open the task manager, and kill any running programs or processes that I don't need. Why all this crap is running in the background when I don't want it makes no sense to me, but killing them does free-up a lot of RAM and speed-up the computer (no hard drive thrashing).
run msconfig ? reboot once to clear the dialog box checkmark. problem solved.
If you want quality it still here it just costs more. There are tons of quality audio equipment out there, some priced in line and others outrageously over price. Into cycling -- there are great high quality bikes out there waiting to be purchased. Cars -- last longer than they did before and are safer to drive, etc. Camera's anyone? New lens are shaper with better color than before, etc. Want a quality well build camera? Get a pro/prosumer DSLR model but again be prepared to pay out over two large.
Man up people; save your dollars and purchase some quality products.
This isn't so uncommon as it may seem. A certain industry that I should better not mention because they got more money than dear God himself and the willingness to sue is under heavy scrutiny when they put a product on the market but once products are they're pretty much ignored. Testing is allegedly strict, but in fact you'd be really unlucky if your 10 year old (but still sold) product gets "mystery shopped".
How much less dramatic is it when we're not talking about stuff that requires the ok from someone who studied the human biological system to get it?
In other words, companies usually don't test what they get after the product passes the initial test. They don't really care too much whether the next batches follow the specs or whether that paint has led or the crap falls apart because the self esteem of China tells them that two Chinese screws are as good as three foreign ones? In fact, if you plan to get something that's "Made in China" (i.e. pretty much everything these days), get it early, try to get one of the first batch. It might even work. Don't count on it in later batches.
And still, it's profitable. Simply because of what I originally wrote: It's more profitable to have 50 pieces of 100 working, because of the 50 faulty ones only 30 will be returned and people will wait (at their expense, since you already have their money) for a replacement, which again has a 50 percent chance to work and another 50 percent chance that they just say "heck, screw it" and give up. Yes, you could get 90 of 100 working units. At higher expense and thus higher price, and nobody is willing to pay that.
John Ruskin had it right a hundred years ago. Too bad nobody listens anymore. We rely on warranty and that "they have to replace it if it's not good". Yes they do. And yes, they even do replace it, no worries. What people fail to see is the work and effort associated with the trade in of faulty goods they have to put up with. There's the interest you lose, because more often than not you don't immediately get a replacement. There's the time you had to invest to get the item back to the dealer. There is transporting costs (either shipment cost or gas, depending on what you prefer to do) and so on. Essentially, I'm wondering if our cheaper goods are really cheaper than what we used to have back when goods were built to last.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You forget that even if users need only 10 % of the features, each user needs a differentset of features. So implementing only 10 % of the features makes the product unusable for the majority of users, and diminishes the value to the rest, as there would not be a necessary "critical mass" using the OS.
I bet that the majority of non-technical users are just like me. Suppose that Microsoft created a "good enough" operating system called "Windows Minimum" (WM). It has 10% of the functions...
it's called mac os.
One of my favorite old machines is actually my NT4 box. P-200MMX, 80MB RAM. And you know what? It is really quick. I'd have the task bar two rows tall because I'd have that much crap open and it still ran fine.
That was intended as tongue in cheek. I took as self evident the merits of ABS, air conditioning, air bags, and rear view mirrors.
The nano is in many ways marketed as 'good enough'. Certainly governments in richer countries would disagree - and rightfuly so. Maybe it's good enough for the indian market, my relatives there aren't thrilled about it, but they are far from average at this point.
If you never exceeded 10Km/h but needed to seat 4 there are probably a lot of things you could cut from typical car design and not compromise saftey. However if said vehicle will still go 80, and be regularly used at 80, even though it was never expected to much exceed 10 you have a problem.
note: Maybe they don't expect it to exceed 20, or 40 or whatever, the same principle applies, but at some point all of those fancy saftey features they make us buy in north america start to be useful.
...I just wanna tell you, that you're actually pretty lonely out there, with that "we".
Doesn't include anyone I know.
But then again, I live in Germany, home of the perfectionists. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Both of the problems are valid, but again, what you call "DM" is good enough for Microsoft to suck money, so there is no incentive for them to invest in engineering method to do what you call "WM".