Are you feeling sick? Do you want to lead a consumer revolt by not buying HDTV sets? Don't worry; they have that covered too. In 10-15 years, by law, all NTSC broadcasts will be halted and everyone will be forced to switch over to HDTV. Unless you want to quit watching TV of any kind, you *must* purchase an HDTV set.
I wouldn't worry about this too much. Remember that when you say "by law" you are really saying "by the whim of whatever politicians happen to be running the country right now". This almost guarantees that the nightmare scenario above will never happen.
I mean, picture it. In the mid-1990s, a bunch of legislators get together and write legislation that will obsolete every TV set currently extant in the US. When do they set the deadline for? Why, a good ten years down the pike -- when many of them will have left government for lucrative lobbying positions. And of course, the sitting President has no problem with this either, since the Constitution (the only law that's hard to change) says that he'll be out of office for good by 2000 no matter what; so he signs it, and the bill becomes law.
Fast-forward a few years -- to, say, a year before the deadline (if memory serves, the deadline set was 2006, so say we're at 2005). The electronics industry hasn't gotten its act together yet regarding standards issues like the one described in this article, and HDTV equipment remains expensive. Suddenly, the public is told that the Big Bad Government is coming to take their $99 Wal-Mart Crud-Vision 2000 19" sets away from them. Uproar! Protest! People are up in arms!
So what happens then? Well, for the politicians in Congress in 2005, the deadline isn't some far-off place in the future. It's Right Now -- close enough to affect the outcome of the next election. So they look at the opinion polls and do the only sensible thing -- extend the deadline out to some new date that's far in the future (2016?) and repeat the exercise then if the hardware gods still haven't gotten their heads on straight, or just repeal the legislation that caused the ruckus in the first place.
This sort of thing happens in government all the time. Believe me, no Congressman is going to want to be tarred as The Man Who Took Your TV Away. If HDTV isn't a viable technology by 2006, you can bet that the death-to-NTSC deadline will automagically disappear.
I can't help but feel we brought this on ourselves. You know, for a long time, I thought that the idea of paying for a decent browser was Unspeakable -- it was like my birthright as an American included having a stable, free (as in beer) Web browser. Now I look at the market, though, and I wonder if what we're seeing isn't just the logical extension of that expectation:
Netscape, realizing that it couldn't stay alive if its primary product was something you couldn't sell, focused its attention on things it could make money on, such as Netcenter and Enterprise Server. Not surprisingly, development of the browser suffered as Netscape's priorities shifted away from it, sputtering and finally dying out.
Microsoft, knowing that it didn't need browser revenue one way or the other, used its browser to defend the thing it makes money on -- the Windows platform.
The thing is, these corporate strategies are perfectly rational reactions to a market where web browsers are regarded as economically valueless. Would you expect Netscape (a public company, don't forget) to have poured millions of dollars more into R & D for a product they would never see one cent of revenue from?
Maybe if we had voted with our dollars for the proposition that a good browser was important to us, rather than expecting one to automagically appear and get better every year, things would be different today. Maybe if, back in 1996 when it mattered, we had stepped forward and said "Yes, I'll gladly pay a fair price for a good, stable cross-platform browser," someone would be providing one today, rather than what we ended up with: one browser that's cross-platform and another that's stable. Just a thought.
All the hand-wringing over this is really amusing. What it points to is the fact that the vendors of DVD movies don't understand their business: they think they're selling movies, when what they're really selling is convenience.
What I mean by this is that, when you "buy" a DVD movie (or VHS, or whatever), you don't own the actual movie. All you're really buying is a license to view this one copy of the movie in perpetuity. If you wanted to, you could wait for a friend to buy it and watch their copy, or wait for it to show up in dollar revival houses, but you want to see it now in all its digital glory, so you shell out the US$20 to buy the license.
Now, the point is, viewed from this perspective the cracking of the encryption system is fairly irrelevant. Sure, I could try to download some 9GB file from a pirate FTP site over a 56k modem (have fun), or I could buy some cruddy VCD-quality pirate disk. But that's not convenient! For US$20 I can get the whole movie, in crystal-clear MPG2 and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, right now! What kind of a moron would futz with the pirate stuff when the real deal is so cheap?
Audio CDs aren't encrypted, and the advent of the cheap CD-R and MP3 hasn't (and won't) destroy the market for CD recordings. What they absolutely do, however, is prevent the industry from gouging consumers with ridiculous prices. Piracy only becomes economically sensible when the real product is priced so high that people think the product's value doesn't correlate to its price.
Andy Patrizio suggests that the thing for the industry to do would be to change the encryption firmware used for DVD, thus negating the hack. Andy Patrizio, who is normally a very good tech reporter, is on crack. He seriously proposes telling the 2 million plus people in the US alone who have bought players in the last 2 years that their substantial investment is instantly obsolete? Just as the DVD market is taking off? This is idiocy. No hardware solution is feasible when you have a large installed base of non-upgradable or difficult to upgrade players.
So the thing for the industry to do would be to keep pumping out great DVDs and keep the prices in the US$20-29 dollar range, which seems to be the "sweet spot" for consumer acceptance. But of course they won't do this; they'll cry "pirates!" and raise the price on product to squeeze margins before the market collapses, which will lead otherwise honest people to pirate DVDs because they can't justify spending $50 on a movie (ask the laserdisc producers about this), which will collapse the market.
Or maybe I'm being too cynical. I hope so. It'll be interesting to see what happens, that's for sure.
They want to keep you on their pages, so that they can display ads and get $ 0.005 cent per pageview.
True enough, I suppose. Though it does beggar the question a bit of "What is Yahoo?". Perhaps Yahoo is a bad example, as they are fortunate enough to be the Big Gorilla net company -- they can be as vague as they want regarding their business plan and people will still bookmark them. Of course, there aren't many other companies that can apply this strategy successfully.
I've actually grown to like Deja's implementation of the ratings features. It's really pretty well done. Sadly, the puke blue and bile green colour scheme makes me shudder every time I enter the site... These annoying facts have caused my total visits to Deja to drop something like 80%. It's pretty sad, since I think what they're doing with the ratings is actually not half bad.
Yeah, Deja is in trouble. They were actually a prime factor that prompted my earlier rant -- their new ratings stuff is neat, but their Usenet search features have become highly difficult to use, and return spotty, inconsistent results. They'd be better off changing the name of the company again and ditching Usenet altogether, IMHO, rather than continue with their half-ratings, half-Usenet strategy. But why do one thing well when you can do two things poorly?:-)
What is up with all these big players losing their focus? Yahoo wants to have a branded version of everything you can do on the Net. Deja News wasn't happy being a world-class Usenet index, so they've revamped themselves into a sucky consumer portal. Now AltaVista has decided that the thing to do is to is to forget what they used to do well and instead do 12 other things poorly.
On the face of it, this is irrational. The value of the Net was supposed to be precisely that it would allow people to focus on doing one thing well, and then the rest of the world would link to them rather than reinventing the wheel. Why does the world need Yahoo! Auctions, for example, when eBay exists and has a near-perfect implementation of Internet auctioning? Wouldn't the logical thing be for Yahoo to just link to eBay and focus on improving their index?
The thing is -- that would be the logical thing, but we're not living in logical times. All this "portal" BS is a function of the Internet stock bubble. Yahoo IS focused -- on keeping their stock price high, not on the quality of their index. This means that they must jump on every bandwagon that comes along in order to keep all those nervous day traders out there from hitting "SELL" on their Yahoo stock. Same deal for Deja (which is in the process of going public) and AltaVista (owned by CMGI, a public company), as well as Amazon and many others too numerous to mention.
The point is, someday this Net stock bubble is going to burst, and then we'll probably see logic take hold of the Net market and Yahoo! will focus on its directory, Deja on Usenet, AltaVista on searching, etc. -- assuming they survive the downturn -- but as long as crazy investors are willing to throw money at any company that's more focused on being buzzword-compliant than focused on their core business, this weird diversification will persist.
But, isn't there somebody out there in the development world who thinks that an OS like Linux, with the quality of Linux, could be developed for the layperson?
Seriously, though -- it's an interesting question. IMHO, Linux will get more suited for the consumer desktop when one of two things happen:
Someone gets annoyed at the lack of a truly newbie-friendly Linux and voluntarily hacks one out. Probability: highly unlikely, as the people who are most likely to find this annoying (non-technical newbies) are also the least likely to be able to do anything about it! How many users in the mass-market do you think come equipped with programming skills, or are willing to learn said skills just to get their OS to work better?
Someone finds it's in their economic interest for a newbie-friendly Linux to exist, so they develop it. Probability: unlikely (though more likely than the first option), because nobody will make a killing selling desktop Linux until the applications are there to make switching from Windoze worthwhile -- and application developers won't come until the user base is large enough to make it worth THEIR while. Classic chicken-and-egg quandary. (It's possible the release of StarOffice may get things started here, though.)
I would say that the best prospects for a consumer-friendly Linux aren't in the realm of general-purpose computing, but rather in specialized devices like the TiVo, where consumers are going to expect a crash-free user experience, and you can expect once you get the device configured nobody's going to tinker with it. (Good luck building a crash-free appliance around WinCE!) Which is actually probably good news for Linux, since there'll probably be more growth in demand for these devices in the next several years than there will be for desktop PCs anyway...
Media attention can be bad for Linux and the OSS community, but only if it deludes the community into playing by the media's rules. You see, you have to understand how the media operates.
Take political coverage, for example. In politics, liberals complain that the media is biased towards conservatives, and conservatives complain that the media is biased towards liberals. Both camps are missing the point. The media does have a bias, all right, but it's not towards liberals or conservatives -- it's towards controversy, which sells newspapers and attracts eyeballs. Thus, the Prime Directive is, if controversy exists, great; if not, find something that could be construed as controversial and put it front and center -- even if the controversy is artificial.
You can see this same dynamic occuring in coverage of the open source movement. Every journalist who wants to write about Linux wants to do so in the context of Linux vs. Windows. When will Linux push Windows off the desktop? This is the only question journalists care about. Why? Because it's dramatic -- and it's easy to get people to pay attention to a story with inherent drama.
The problem with this is, a story about Linux vs. Windows isn't, when you think about it, really about Linux. Linux is just filling the "designated MS challenger" role in these stories -- ten years ago it would have been Apple, five years ago Netscape, now it's Linux. It's an artificial controversy. Nobody here really believes that Linux is ready for the consumer desktop, right? What's important is that Linux is smacking NT around in the server space, Apache is wiping the floor with IIS in web serving, etc.
But the danger here is if people in the community start believing those stories -- and decide that Linux's destiny is to kill MS. This fits the media's agenda more than it does the community's, because it will stir up huge amounts of controversy around something that's basically very silly. And then, because Linux isn't really ready for the desktop yet, the media will declare MS the winner, and go looking for the next story -- and the bubble of interest in Linux will burst. It's the classic game from the schoolyard, "Let's You and Him Fight", writ large -- and just like in the schoolyard, it'd be a mistake to get suckered into playing.
I'm surprised anyone is comparing this to Priceline. The college admission market is different than, say, the plane ticket market in one critically important way -- a major (maybe THE major) factor on both ends of the admissions transaction is prestige, which leads people to make economically irrational decisions.
Take the idea of buying a plane ticket through Priceline. In this transaction, all you care about is:
Cost
Convenience
Note that these are both easily quantifiable factors. Cost = which ticket is cheaper; convenience = fewest stopovers, shortest flying time. We don't decide to fly, say, USAirways over United because somehow we perceive USAirways passengers as being smarter or more successful than United passengers. We are free to make a rational economic calculation based on the two factors above, and we'll usually take whichever airline comes out best in this calculation.
Similarly, USAirways doesn't have any interest in attracting the smartest or wealthiest people in America to use its service -- one butt fills a seat as well as another, and the important thing is to make sure 100% of available seats are filled with butts. The only prestige distinction is between Coach and First/Business class seating, but even this is limited -- no major airline caters solely to the well-heeled, with 100% First Class seating and wine and Brie servings instead of Coke and peanuts. They provide a limited amount of 1st class seating to squeeze a bigger margin out of those passengers who can afford to pay for more legroom, not to become the Airline of the Elite.
College admissions are totally different. Sure, we think about cost, but the most important factor is usually prestige. This is why, if a child of a lower middle-class family is smart/lucky enough to get into Harvard, the parents will go broke (an economically irrational decision) to keep her there -- the value of a Harvard education isn't quantifiable in, say, higher standardized test scores, but rather a shot at social mobility, a chance to take a step up the ladder. Now, the problem is, factors like "prestige" and "social mobility" are incredibly non-quantifiable, which makes it extremely hard to make an economically rational decision. Do you perceive a prestige difference between USAirways and United? Of course not. How about between, say, Harvard and Podunk State?
This is also in evidence on the other end of the transaction. Colleges, unlike airlines, NEED to attract the best and brightest, to move up in academic rankings, to attract prominent faculty, and to ensure big donations to the endowment fund in the future. So the ones that can't rely on their prestige to attract these kids offer big scholarships to the smartest students ("prestige" applicants), which means that these kids are served well by the current system. Why should they offer themselves through a system that won't offer those prestige schools? They have a shot at going to Harvard -- or going to Podunk State for free!
What this all adds up to is that eCollegeBid won't work. The "stars" on both ends of the transaction have no reason to play -- the best schools have more applicants than they need, the best students have more offers than they can accept. This means that eCollegeBid will turn into something of an academic ghetto, where low-rated schools (the least attractive to applicants) will compete for low-rated applicants (the least attractive to schools). Overall, "demand collection" ala Priceline is a good idea, but it works best in systems where the product is a commodity -- and a college education is pretty much the definition of a non-commodity item.
The important thing to understand here is that it's not just tech types who are offended by simplified portrayals of their profession. Imagine being a cop -- you spend all day crunching paperwork in the station house, and then you can't turn on the tv without seeing actors in cop outfits in 125 mph high speed chases!
Now, turning to our specific question of Why Can't Hollywood Get the Tech Right, there are really 2 types of inaccuracy about these things that show up in the movies. One bugs me alot more than the other.
Inaccuracy in Presentation. This is the depiction of technology doing something plausible in a silly way. Example: Our Hero pulls out his trusty PowerBook to check email, and instead of seeing Eudora Pro fire up in the MacOS environment, we see giant flying envelopes whiz across his screen and dancing stamps singing "New! Mail! New! Mail!".
Inaccuracy in Content. This is where technology is depicted doing something completely implausible. Example: Our Hero takes out his trusty PowerBook and hits the "S" key, which must stand for "Satellite" because we hear a modem dialing and then he has complete maneuvering control over a US$500 million orbiting SDI satellite.
Now, we geeks get the reputation for being nit-picky about this stuff because we go nuts when we see inaccuracy in presentation ("hey! that's not a Linux command line!"), even if the use of the tech is reasonably realistic. This is counterproductive. Filmmakers alter the presentation in order to quickly communicate something to the audience. If Our Hero is checking e-mail, the whizzing envelopes tell us that without us all having to squint at the title bar of his Eudora window. Inaccuracy in content, though, is much more offensive -- it indicates that the screenwriter and director have failed to do even the simplest research on their topic, and it undermines the whole impact of the story. Unless a story is science fiction, it can only be harmed by showing technology doing things that are completely implausible -- especially as the film ages, and people get more and more sophisticated WRT these things.
Take the example of "WarGames" -- it was inaccurate in presentation but accurate in content. Remember the end, where everyone's gathered at NORAD, and Joshua speaks to them -- in the voice that we heard earlier coming from Matthew Broderick's PC voice synthesizer? Or how he enters his commands in natural-language strings ? Completely implausible presentation, but it doesn't detract from the story. In content, though, "WarGames" is almost completely plausible - which is why it has aged so well. Nobody remembers old CP/M PCs with 8" floppies like the ones in the movie, but everyone understands the idea of data trespassing.
In short, don't get your shorts in a bunch if the tech looks real. Look at whether the story uses it in a realistic way or not. That's the true measure of whether the filmmakers "get it" or not.
Actually, this is pretty common. I worked for a lobbying organization for a while and "Government Affairs" is the polite term for "lobbying". So "Director of Federal Government Affairs" is really the polite way of saying "Head Lobbyist for Congress". Lots of big corporations and corporate special interest organizations have "Government Affairs" offices to watch out for their interests.
Shame you and I can't afford a "Government Affairs Director" to watch out for our interests, eh?
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I wouldn't worry about this too much. Remember that when you say "by law" you are really saying "by the whim of whatever politicians happen to be running the country right now". This almost guarantees that the nightmare scenario above will never happen.
I mean, picture it. In the mid-1990s, a bunch of legislators get together and write legislation that will obsolete every TV set currently extant in the US. When do they set the deadline for? Why, a good ten years down the pike -- when many of them will have left government for lucrative lobbying positions. And of course, the sitting President has no problem with this either, since the Constitution (the only law that's hard to change) says that he'll be out of office for good by 2000 no matter what; so he signs it, and the bill becomes law.
Fast-forward a few years -- to, say, a year before the deadline (if memory serves, the deadline set was 2006, so say we're at 2005). The electronics industry hasn't gotten its act together yet regarding standards issues like the one described in this article, and HDTV equipment remains expensive. Suddenly, the public is told that the Big Bad Government is coming to take their $99 Wal-Mart Crud-Vision 2000 19" sets away from them. Uproar! Protest! People are up in arms!
So what happens then? Well, for the politicians in Congress in 2005, the deadline isn't some far-off place in the future. It's Right Now -- close enough to affect the outcome of the next election. So they look at the opinion polls and do the only sensible thing -- extend the deadline out to some new date that's far in the future (2016?) and repeat the exercise then if the hardware gods still haven't gotten their heads on straight, or just repeal the legislation that caused the ruckus in the first place.
This sort of thing happens in government all the time. Believe me, no Congressman is going to want to be tarred as The Man Who Took Your TV Away. If HDTV isn't a viable technology by 2006, you can bet that the death-to-NTSC deadline will automagically disappear.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
I can't help but feel we brought this on ourselves. You know, for a long time, I thought that the idea of paying for a decent browser was Unspeakable -- it was like my birthright as an American included having a stable, free (as in beer) Web browser. Now I look at the market, though, and I wonder if what we're seeing isn't just the logical extension of that expectation:
The thing is, these corporate strategies are perfectly rational reactions to a market where web browsers are regarded as economically valueless. Would you expect Netscape (a public company, don't forget) to have poured millions of dollars more into R & D for a product they would never see one cent of revenue from?
Maybe if we had voted with our dollars for the proposition that a good browser was important to us, rather than expecting one to automagically appear and get better every year, things would be different today. Maybe if, back in 1996 when it mattered, we had stepped forward and said "Yes, I'll gladly pay a fair price for a good, stable cross-platform browser," someone would be providing one today, rather than what we ended up with: one browser that's cross-platform and another that's stable. Just a thought.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
All the hand-wringing over this is really amusing. What it points to is the fact that the vendors of DVD movies don't understand their business: they think they're selling movies, when what they're really selling is convenience.
What I mean by this is that, when you "buy" a DVD movie (or VHS, or whatever), you don't own the actual movie. All you're really buying is a license to view this one copy of the movie in perpetuity. If you wanted to, you could wait for a friend to buy it and watch their copy, or wait for it to show up in dollar revival houses, but you want to see it now in all its digital glory, so you shell out the US$20 to buy the license.
Now, the point is, viewed from this perspective the cracking of the encryption system is fairly irrelevant. Sure, I could try to download some 9GB file from a pirate FTP site over a 56k modem (have fun), or I could buy some cruddy VCD-quality pirate disk. But that's not convenient! For US$20 I can get the whole movie, in crystal-clear MPG2 and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, right now! What kind of a moron would futz with the pirate stuff when the real deal is so cheap?
Audio CDs aren't encrypted, and the advent of the cheap CD-R and MP3 hasn't (and won't) destroy the market for CD recordings. What they absolutely do, however, is prevent the industry from gouging consumers with ridiculous prices. Piracy only becomes economically sensible when the real product is priced so high that people think the product's value doesn't correlate to its price.
Andy Patrizio suggests that the thing for the industry to do would be to change the encryption firmware used for DVD, thus negating the hack. Andy Patrizio, who is normally a very good tech reporter, is on crack. He seriously proposes telling the 2 million plus people in the US alone who have bought players in the last 2 years that their substantial investment is instantly obsolete? Just as the DVD market is taking off? This is idiocy. No hardware solution is feasible when you have a large installed base of non-upgradable or difficult to upgrade players.
So the thing for the industry to do would be to keep pumping out great DVDs and keep the prices in the US$20-29 dollar range, which seems to be the "sweet spot" for consumer acceptance. But of course they won't do this; they'll cry "pirates!" and raise the price on product to squeeze margins before the market collapses, which will lead otherwise honest people to pirate DVDs because they can't justify spending $50 on a movie (ask the laserdisc producers about this), which will collapse the market.
Or maybe I'm being too cynical. I hope so. It'll be interesting to see what happens, that's for sure.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
True enough, I suppose. Though it does beggar the question a bit of "What is Yahoo?". Perhaps Yahoo is a bad example, as they are fortunate enough to be the Big Gorilla net company -- they can be as vague as they want regarding their business plan and people will still bookmark them. Of course, there aren't many other companies that can apply this strategy successfully.
Yeah, Deja is in trouble. They were actually a prime factor that prompted my earlier rant -- their new ratings stuff is neat, but their Usenet search features have become highly difficult to use, and return spotty, inconsistent results. They'd be better off changing the name of the company again and ditching Usenet altogether, IMHO, rather than continue with their half-ratings, half-Usenet strategy. But why do one thing well when you can do two things poorly? :-)
What is up with all these big players losing their focus? Yahoo wants to have a branded version of everything you can do on the Net. Deja News wasn't happy being a world-class Usenet index, so they've revamped themselves into a sucky consumer portal. Now AltaVista has decided that the thing to do is to is to forget what they used to do well and instead do 12 other things poorly.
On the face of it, this is irrational. The value of the Net was supposed to be precisely that it would allow people to focus on doing one thing well, and then the rest of the world would link to them rather than reinventing the wheel. Why does the world need Yahoo! Auctions, for example, when eBay exists and has a near-perfect implementation of Internet auctioning? Wouldn't the logical thing be for Yahoo to just link to eBay and focus on improving their index?
The thing is -- that would be the logical thing, but we're not living in logical times. All this "portal" BS is a function of the Internet stock bubble. Yahoo IS focused -- on keeping their stock price high, not on the quality of their index. This means that they must jump on every bandwagon that comes along in order to keep all those nervous day traders out there from hitting "SELL" on their Yahoo stock. Same deal for Deja (which is in the process of going public) and AltaVista (owned by CMGI, a public company), as well as Amazon and many others too numerous to mention.
The point is, someday this Net stock bubble is going to burst, and then we'll probably see logic take hold of the Net market and Yahoo! will focus on its directory, Deja on Usenet, AltaVista on searching, etc. -- assuming they survive the downturn -- but as long as crazy investors are willing to throw money at any company that's more focused on being buzzword-compliant than focused on their core business, this weird diversification will persist.
Somebody has. They're called TiVo . :-)
Seriously, though -- it's an interesting question. IMHO, Linux will get more suited for the consumer desktop when one of two things happen:
I would say that the best prospects for a consumer-friendly Linux aren't in the realm of general-purpose computing, but rather in specialized devices like the TiVo, where consumers are going to expect a crash-free user experience, and you can expect once you get the device configured nobody's going to tinker with it. (Good luck building a crash-free appliance around WinCE!) Which is actually probably good news for Linux, since there'll probably be more growth in demand for these devices in the next several years than there will be for desktop PCs anyway...
Media attention can be bad for Linux and the OSS community, but only if it deludes the community into playing by the media's rules. You see, you have to understand how the media operates.
Take political coverage, for example. In politics, liberals complain that the media is biased towards conservatives, and conservatives complain that the media is biased towards liberals. Both camps are missing the point. The media does have a bias, all right, but it's not towards liberals or conservatives -- it's towards controversy, which sells newspapers and attracts eyeballs. Thus, the Prime Directive is, if controversy exists, great; if not, find something that could be construed as controversial and put it front and center -- even if the controversy is artificial.
You can see this same dynamic occuring in coverage of the open source movement. Every journalist who wants to write about Linux wants to do so in the context of Linux vs. Windows. When will Linux push Windows off the desktop? This is the only question journalists care about. Why? Because it's dramatic -- and it's easy to get people to pay attention to a story with inherent drama.
The problem with this is, a story about Linux vs. Windows isn't, when you think about it, really about Linux. Linux is just filling the "designated MS challenger" role in these stories -- ten years ago it would have been Apple, five years ago Netscape, now it's Linux. It's an artificial controversy. Nobody here really believes that Linux is ready for the consumer desktop, right? What's important is that Linux is smacking NT around in the server space, Apache is wiping the floor with IIS in web serving, etc.
But the danger here is if people in the community start believing those stories -- and decide that Linux's destiny is to kill MS. This fits the media's agenda more than it does the community's, because it will stir up huge amounts of controversy around something that's basically very silly. And then, because Linux isn't really ready for the desktop yet, the media will declare MS the winner, and go looking for the next story -- and the bubble of interest in Linux will burst. It's the classic game from the schoolyard, "Let's You and Him Fight", writ large -- and just like in the schoolyard, it'd be a mistake to get suckered into playing.
I'm surprised anyone is comparing this to Priceline. The college admission market is different than, say, the plane ticket market in one critically important way -- a major (maybe THE major) factor on both ends of the admissions transaction is prestige, which leads people to make economically irrational decisions.
Take the idea of buying a plane ticket through Priceline. In this transaction, all you care about is:
- Cost
- Convenience
Note that these are both easily quantifiable factors. Cost = which ticket is cheaper; convenience = fewest stopovers, shortest flying time. We don't decide to fly, say, USAirways over United because somehow we perceive USAirways passengers as being smarter or more successful than United passengers. We are free to make a rational economic calculation based on the two factors above, and we'll usually take whichever airline comes out best in this calculation.Similarly, USAirways doesn't have any interest in attracting the smartest or wealthiest people in America to use its service -- one butt fills a seat as well as another, and the important thing is to make sure 100% of available seats are filled with butts. The only prestige distinction is between Coach and First/Business class seating, but even this is limited -- no major airline caters solely to the well-heeled, with 100% First Class seating and wine and Brie servings instead of Coke and peanuts. They provide a limited amount of 1st class seating to squeeze a bigger margin out of those passengers who can afford to pay for more legroom, not to become the Airline of the Elite.
College admissions are totally different. Sure, we think about cost, but the most important factor is usually prestige. This is why, if a child of a lower middle-class family is smart/lucky enough to get into Harvard, the parents will go broke (an economically irrational decision) to keep her there -- the value of a Harvard education isn't quantifiable in, say, higher standardized test scores, but rather a shot at social mobility, a chance to take a step up the ladder. Now, the problem is, factors like "prestige" and "social mobility" are incredibly non-quantifiable, which makes it extremely hard to make an economically rational decision. Do you perceive a prestige difference between USAirways and United? Of course not. How about between, say, Harvard and Podunk State?
This is also in evidence on the other end of the transaction. Colleges, unlike airlines, NEED to attract the best and brightest, to move up in academic rankings, to attract prominent faculty, and to ensure big donations to the endowment fund in the future. So the ones that can't rely on their prestige to attract these kids offer big scholarships to the smartest students ("prestige" applicants), which means that these kids are served well by the current system. Why should they offer themselves through a system that won't offer those prestige schools? They have a shot at going to Harvard -- or going to Podunk State for free!
What this all adds up to is that eCollegeBid won't work. The "stars" on both ends of the transaction have no reason to play -- the best schools have more applicants than they need, the best students have more offers than they can accept. This means that eCollegeBid will turn into something of an academic ghetto, where low-rated schools (the least attractive to applicants) will compete for low-rated applicants (the least attractive to schools). Overall, "demand collection" ala Priceline is a good idea, but it works best in systems where the product is a commodity -- and a college education is pretty much the definition of a non-commodity item.
-- Jason Lefkowitz
The important thing to understand here is that it's not just tech types who are offended by simplified portrayals of their profession. Imagine being a cop -- you spend all day crunching paperwork in the station house, and then you can't turn on the tv without seeing actors in cop outfits in 125 mph high speed chases!
Now, turning to our specific question of Why Can't Hollywood Get the Tech Right, there are really 2 types of inaccuracy about these things that show up in the movies. One bugs me alot more than the other.
Now, we geeks get the reputation for being nit-picky about this stuff because we go nuts when we see inaccuracy in presentation ("hey! that's not a Linux command line!"), even if the use of the tech is reasonably realistic. This is counterproductive. Filmmakers alter the presentation in order to quickly communicate something to the audience. If Our Hero is checking e-mail, the whizzing envelopes tell us that without us all having to squint at the title bar of his Eudora window. Inaccuracy in content, though, is much more offensive -- it indicates that the screenwriter and director have failed to do even the simplest research on their topic, and it undermines the whole impact of the story. Unless a story is science fiction, it can only be harmed by showing technology doing things that are completely implausible -- especially as the film ages, and people get more and more sophisticated WRT these things.
Take the example of "WarGames" -- it was inaccurate in presentation but accurate in content. Remember the end, where everyone's gathered at NORAD, and Joshua speaks to them -- in the voice that we heard earlier coming from Matthew Broderick's PC voice synthesizer? Or how he enters his commands in natural-language strings ? Completely implausible presentation, but it doesn't detract from the story. In content, though, "WarGames" is almost completely plausible - which is why it has aged so well. Nobody remembers old CP/M PCs with 8" floppies like the ones in the movie, but everyone understands the idea of data trespassing.
In short, don't get your shorts in a bunch if the tech looks real. Look at whether the story uses it in a realistic way or not. That's the true measure of whether the filmmakers "get it" or not.
-- Jason
Actually, this is pretty common. I worked for a lobbying organization for a while and "Government Affairs" is the polite term for "lobbying". So "Director of Federal Government Affairs" is really the polite way of saying "Head Lobbyist for Congress". Lots of big corporations and corporate special interest organizations have "Government Affairs" offices to watch out for their interests.
Shame you and I can't afford a "Government Affairs Director" to watch out for our interests, eh?