That is a good comment. You'd think a guy running a company that has already done a fair amount to help change the world in many ways would realize that the world is going to continue to change.
Politicians are actually ahead of the curve on this in a way.
If you're running for a significant office, any and all dirt on you will get dug up. It just happens that everyone has some dirt, and in politics it is going to be found by the other side. They've got the motivation and resources to keep digging. So you end up with everybody being "dirty" to some degree, and so people shrug their shoulders and don't worry about it. Basically there's so much noise everywhere you look that it tends to balance out and make itself irrelevant for the most part.
For an employer or whatever, if they spent enough time and resources, they could dig up questionable history on all of their potential employees, but they don't have the time. Instead they spend 10 minutes looking through facebook and make a judgement based on that. That's not enough time for everyone's dirt to show itself, you just get random bits and pieces for random people. Basically the sample size isn't big enough, so some of the noise starts to look like data, and decisions get made based on it.
I don't think there's a path that's always right in every situation. I left my previous job because I was entirely underwhelmed with the management and the quality of work that resulted from the chaos there, and I certainly didn't feel like I owed my boss anything. But I gave plenty of notice and spent that time transitioning my responsibilities to other people in a somewhat controlled manner. I was willing to do this not for the benefit of my boss, or the company, or our clients, but mostly for the benefit of my coworkers, many of whom I became friends with during my years at the company, and who were already stressed enough without having my work dumped on them suddenly one day.
Although I don't have any data to back it up for sure, I'm willing to bet that way more books were printed in the past 50 years than in the previous 5000. Millions of books are still printed every year, and that will continue for the foreseeable future. The "paperless office" only exists in a few isolated cases, paper is still ubiquitous in most of what people do. Even if all our digital data vanished tomorrow, contemporary civilization has left an enormous paper trail, and I would expect there to be plenty for future historians to sift through.
These almost certainly wouldn't be impossible to build, in fact they don't look like they'd even be that difficult to engineer. The more practical question is how much more would they cost compared to a more traditional tower, and does society see a value in spending that extra money. Just because something is utilitarian doesn't mean that it shouldn't look nice. While a straightforward steel bridge can certainly have an inherent beauty to it, I'm glad that I see many different designs in my travels. Helps keep the world a more interesting place.
So basically you're saying that since whatever you move to will one day fall to obsolescence, you might as well stick with your current system that's already basically obsolete?
CEO's are paid in ways other than just a salary. Even the ones who get a big fat yearly paycheck still tend to make even more off of stock options and such. To pretend that the CEO of Bank of America was living on 32k is silly.
And while it's true that $400,000 isn't that much over the course of a lifetime, I think the grandparent's comment was true in the sense that most people will never see a lump sum of anywhere near that. They certainly shouldn't expect it as a severance package if they lose their job.
They don't have to block content in order to make things unfair, just intentionally slowing something down could be enough to make a big difference in user perception. Part of the usefulness of Google is that I can enter a search query and have an answer in under a second. Literally, in less than a second I can have results in front of me. If somebody else comes out with an better search engine, but due to them not giving my ISP as much as Google did, this new search engine's results always take at least 5 seconds to appear. From my point of view as a user, this new search engine is significantly deficient in speed, and annoying to use. So people keep using Google and write off this new option as too slow and crappy. And any established player could use this to their advantage. Amazon, ebay, facebook, whoever. It would be a terrible situation for everyone except the already established companies and the telecoms.
I think the issue here is that a lot of these manufacturers are looking at the tablet market through the same lens that they currently view the PC market, in which for the majority of users, the standard hardware set is more than enough, the OS is basically the same across all manufacturers, and the only thing that you can really compete on is price. This drives prices down which is nice, but it ends up leading to reduced build quality. There are tons of plenty cheap laptops out there, but they're pretty much all pieces of crap.
Whether or not iOS is better than Android is certainly up for debate, but regardless it's a significant point on which Apple is able to differentiate their product from the competition. Just like OSX does in the PC market, which in a way allows Apple to stay at the edges of the price war that has Dell, HP, etc. selling boxes with almost no margin and making little to no money. HP shows signs of understanding this, which is maybe why they bought Palm, in order to get their own mobile OS. It's really hard to differentiate your hardware without driving your manufacturing costs up and pricing yourself out of the market. Software is a much cheaper way to do it, but running Android like everyone else doesn't help in that regard.
It's standard issue CYA. Riker can't say, "Oh I never got that email, so I didn't know that the deflector dish was offline. It's not my fault the ship crashed into that asteroid." if you personally handed him the note.
I think the really interesting thing here is that some big and well funded companies have been trying to sell tablet computers for over a decade, yet never made the same decision concerning the form factor that was obvious to a art director for a TV show twenty years ago. Basically that a computing device accessed via a touchscreen should have an interface specifically designed to be operated via a touchscreen. That is the big difference between the iPad and the tablets that came before it. And also one of the big differences between the PADD and most of the tablets we've seen in the real world.
And I'd argue that it's not necessarily the job of computer scientists to make computing more friendly. They should be working on making software more efficient and powerful. Interface designers should be the ones worrying about making it more friendly. There is of course overlap and cross-communication between the two disciplines, but interface design is important enough that people should dedicate their work specifically to it.
The ability to lose everything you've earned and the fact that there are thousands of players trying to take it from you makes it all the much better when you manage to build something significant, or organize a bunch of people around a shared goal and manage to be successful.
There are plenty of MMO's where your items are basically protected. And many where you don't have to fork over any real cash (besides the normal subscription fee ) for items if you're willing to spend the time to earn the "wealth" in game.
Agreed. Flash causes at least half of my webbrowsing headaches. I'm glad that somebody is taking steps to make it less relevant. Just like when Apple hurried along the death of the floppy drive by leaving it out of their computers starting with the iMac, they're doing the computer world a long-term service by helping us phase out flash more quickly.
The mobile computing world is much better off not being tied down by technology that doesn't even run well on desktop systems. Good riddance to Flash.
I call BS. People worry about plenty of longer term stuff, but they generally keep it in the realm of things that they feel they can control at some level. You get your oil changed so your car lasts more than six months. Plenty of people save up money for vacations and such. Some people work their whole lives at jobs they don't enjoy just with the hope that their efforts will allow their kids a better life.
It's all well and good to want to save the ice caps or colonize other planets, but most people have their hands full just solving all the problems that continually crop up under their own roof, so it's understandable why something like space exploration would be low on their priority list. The people who get paid to worry about these larger problems need to a better job of educating the public and the politicians on why this stuff should matter.
Just because someone isn't interested in the same things that you are doesn't mean that they're not curious. Maybe they're interested in understanding people, maybe they're interested in how to run a business, maybe they just want to know everything about training dogs. Civilization takes all kinds of people, and fortunately different people seems to be attracted to different things.
Price fixing is different than setting a price. It's not illegal to set a price, you can generally charge whatever you want and let people decide whether or not to buy it. It only becomes problematic if you control such a big portion of that particular market that you're using your position to unfairly suppress competitors, or to charge a price beyond what the market would normally accept. (Or colluding with the other players in the market to do the same). The iPhone is, at the end of the day, just a fancy mobile phone, and in a very real sense has to compete with $20 phones that are sold on shelves right across from them at the AT&T store. People have plenty of phones to choose from at a wide range of prices if they don't want to spend $600 on an iPhone.
Your satellite radio example is kind of silly when you think about it. Should the government not allow any new business models or products until there are at least two companies ready to sell them? One of the basic tenants of capitalism is that competition forces efficiency, and the market benefits from that. Once you've got that competition, allowing one side to buy out all of its peers is basically reducing that competitive pressure, and in the long run slows the evolution of that market.
There's certainly no agreement on when it's right for society/government/whoever to step in and regulate these things, but the general idea is to maintain some level of competition, because it forces the various players to continually improve their products and stay efficient. Companies that fail to do so eventually weaken or even collapse, and that creates space for new players and new ideas. Then there are more specific instances, such as commodities/utilities, but even then it's often only an issue in less competitive markets. An example would be if the gas station down the street from me decided that tomorrow they were going to raise their prices to $17.00 per gallon. That would be unlikely to draw a government response, because there are four other gas stations within a couple minutes drive that I could go to to get reasonably priced gasoline. Now if the managers of all of the gas stations in the area got together and decided that they'd all raise their price that high, then that'd be price fixing, and the government would come down hard on them (if public outcry didn't change their mind first). A similar issue happens because I live in a hurricane zone, and when there's an evacuation, sometimes a gas station will try to significantly raise their prices to profit off of people who are trying to leave, and that's considered price gouging and can get them in some serious trouble.
I'm about to blow your mind. In the previous versions, if you can figure out how to use the number pad (or mouse) instead of your arrow keys, you can move diagonally. Woah.
No kidding. I absolutely hate talking on the phone, but I would be a fool to deny the reality that voice communication can solve many problems way faster than trading emails back and forth, even when the people on both ends are plenty comfortable with the internet. Email has a few big advantages, you can send a message to multiple people at once, it creates a "paper trail", and it's generally less intrusive than a ringing phone when you're trying to get stuff done, but there's plenty that phones are way better at.
Now fax machines, that's a technology that's lived way past its prime.
Yeah,, I can see how a relatively small and resource strapped company like google couldn't manage to throw together something to process applications for it. It's not like they already had a dozen or so other web apps that people could set up accounts for. Besides, even if someone did write it, where would they find a server to host that on?
Closed beta, plus when you finally found someone with an invite to give you, then you'd still have to wait for a few days for some reason. What did they need those three days for? Were they doing background checks on me? Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database? I was excited when one of my buddies offered me the invite, but by the time I actually got to sign up, much of that excitement had already passed.
Spoken like someone who's never spent more than 10 seconds around kids. That's about all the time it takes for a child capable of walking to wander off out of view. Kids are curious, often fearless, and not old enough to know any better. Even with excellent parenting they'll find ways to hurt themselves. A little bit of preventive measures to make swimming pools less deadly is not some grave burden upon you.
The gaming market is far from the most profitable software market, but anyways, as I stated earlier, Apple doesn't make much of their money from software, hardware is their main revenue and profit source. Neither apple nor anybody else would be able to make any money selling a mobile OS, because there is a competent mainstream competitor that is free.
You can extrapolate marketshare all that you want, but those same numbers that you're using show that Apple is selling more iPhones now than ever before, and as long as that is the case, they'll do just fine.
Yes, because two year olds who can't swim are obviously too fucking stupid / incompetent to be allowed to live. We should try to make the world more dangerous, so we can filter out these morons who aren't contributing anything to society.
Slashdot Mirror
Enough of us do it that if you decide to make it a threshold for which you won't employ someone, you're going to have a hard time finding employees.
That is a good comment. You'd think a guy running a company that has already done a fair amount to help change the world in many ways would realize that the world is going to continue to change.
Politicians are actually ahead of the curve on this in a way.
If you're running for a significant office, any and all dirt on you will get dug up. It just happens that everyone has some dirt, and in politics it is going to be found by the other side. They've got the motivation and resources to keep digging. So you end up with everybody being "dirty" to some degree, and so people shrug their shoulders and don't worry about it. Basically there's so much noise everywhere you look that it tends to balance out and make itself irrelevant for the most part.
For an employer or whatever, if they spent enough time and resources, they could dig up questionable history on all of their potential employees, but they don't have the time. Instead they spend 10 minutes looking through facebook and make a judgement based on that. That's not enough time for everyone's dirt to show itself, you just get random bits and pieces for random people. Basically the sample size isn't big enough, so some of the noise starts to look like data, and decisions get made based on it.
I don't think there's a path that's always right in every situation. I left my previous job because I was entirely underwhelmed with the management and the quality of work that resulted from the chaos there, and I certainly didn't feel like I owed my boss anything. But I gave plenty of notice and spent that time transitioning my responsibilities to other people in a somewhat controlled manner. I was willing to do this not for the benefit of my boss, or the company, or our clients, but mostly for the benefit of my coworkers, many of whom I became friends with during my years at the company, and who were already stressed enough without having my work dumped on them suddenly one day.
Although I don't have any data to back it up for sure, I'm willing to bet that way more books were printed in the past 50 years than in the previous 5000. Millions of books are still printed every year, and that will continue for the foreseeable future. The "paperless office" only exists in a few isolated cases, paper is still ubiquitous in most of what people do. Even if all our digital data vanished tomorrow, contemporary civilization has left an enormous paper trail, and I would expect there to be plenty for future historians to sift through.
These almost certainly wouldn't be impossible to build, in fact they don't look like they'd even be that difficult to engineer. The more practical question is how much more would they cost compared to a more traditional tower, and does society see a value in spending that extra money. Just because something is utilitarian doesn't mean that it shouldn't look nice. While a straightforward steel bridge can certainly have an inherent beauty to it, I'm glad that I see many different designs in my travels. Helps keep the world a more interesting place.
So basically you're saying that since whatever you move to will one day fall to obsolescence, you might as well stick with your current system that's already basically obsolete?
CEO's are paid in ways other than just a salary. Even the ones who get a big fat yearly paycheck still tend to make even more off of stock options and such. To pretend that the CEO of Bank of America was living on 32k is silly.
And while it's true that $400,000 isn't that much over the course of a lifetime, I think the grandparent's comment was true in the sense that most people will never see a lump sum of anywhere near that. They certainly shouldn't expect it as a severance package if they lose their job.
They don't have to block content in order to make things unfair, just intentionally slowing something down could be enough to make a big difference in user perception. Part of the usefulness of Google is that I can enter a search query and have an answer in under a second. Literally, in less than a second I can have results in front of me. If somebody else comes out with an better search engine, but due to them not giving my ISP as much as Google did, this new search engine's results always take at least 5 seconds to appear. From my point of view as a user, this new search engine is significantly deficient in speed, and annoying to use. So people keep using Google and write off this new option as too slow and crappy. And any established player could use this to their advantage. Amazon, ebay, facebook, whoever. It would be a terrible situation for everyone except the already established companies and the telecoms.
I think the issue here is that a lot of these manufacturers are looking at the tablet market through the same lens that they currently view the PC market, in which for the majority of users, the standard hardware set is more than enough, the OS is basically the same across all manufacturers, and the only thing that you can really compete on is price. This drives prices down which is nice, but it ends up leading to reduced build quality. There are tons of plenty cheap laptops out there, but they're pretty much all pieces of crap.
Whether or not iOS is better than Android is certainly up for debate, but regardless it's a significant point on which Apple is able to differentiate their product from the competition. Just like OSX does in the PC market, which in a way allows Apple to stay at the edges of the price war that has Dell, HP, etc. selling boxes with almost no margin and making little to no money. HP shows signs of understanding this, which is maybe why they bought Palm, in order to get their own mobile OS. It's really hard to differentiate your hardware without driving your manufacturing costs up and pricing yourself out of the market. Software is a much cheaper way to do it, but running Android like everyone else doesn't help in that regard.
It's standard issue CYA. Riker can't say, "Oh I never got that email, so I didn't know that the deflector dish was offline. It's not my fault the ship crashed into that asteroid." if you personally handed him the note.
I think the really interesting thing here is that some big and well funded companies have been trying to sell tablet computers for over a decade, yet never made the same decision concerning the form factor that was obvious to a art director for a TV show twenty years ago. Basically that a computing device accessed via a touchscreen should have an interface specifically designed to be operated via a touchscreen. That is the big difference between the iPad and the tablets that came before it. And also one of the big differences between the PADD and most of the tablets we've seen in the real world.
And I'd argue that it's not necessarily the job of computer scientists to make computing more friendly. They should be working on making software more efficient and powerful. Interface designers should be the ones worrying about making it more friendly. There is of course overlap and cross-communication between the two disciplines, but interface design is important enough that people should dedicate their work specifically to it.
The ability to lose everything you've earned and the fact that there are thousands of players trying to take it from you makes it all the much better when you manage to build something significant, or organize a bunch of people around a shared goal and manage to be successful.
There are plenty of MMO's where your items are basically protected. And many where you don't have to fork over any real cash (besides the normal subscription fee ) for items if you're willing to spend the time to earn the "wealth" in game.
Agreed. Flash causes at least half of my webbrowsing headaches. I'm glad that somebody is taking steps to make it less relevant. Just like when Apple hurried along the death of the floppy drive by leaving it out of their computers starting with the iMac, they're doing the computer world a long-term service by helping us phase out flash more quickly.
The mobile computing world is much better off not being tied down by technology that doesn't even run well on desktop systems. Good riddance to Flash.
I call BS. People worry about plenty of longer term stuff, but they generally keep it in the realm of things that they feel they can control at some level. You get your oil changed so your car lasts more than six months. Plenty of people save up money for vacations and such. Some people work their whole lives at jobs they don't enjoy just with the hope that their efforts will allow their kids a better life.
It's all well and good to want to save the ice caps or colonize other planets, but most people have their hands full just solving all the problems that continually crop up under their own roof, so it's understandable why something like space exploration would be low on their priority list. The people who get paid to worry about these larger problems need to a better job of educating the public and the politicians on why this stuff should matter.
Just because someone isn't interested in the same things that you are doesn't mean that they're not curious. Maybe they're interested in understanding people, maybe they're interested in how to run a business, maybe they just want to know everything about training dogs. Civilization takes all kinds of people, and fortunately different people seems to be attracted to different things.
Price fixing is different than setting a price. It's not illegal to set a price, you can generally charge whatever you want and let people decide whether or not to buy it. It only becomes problematic if you control such a big portion of that particular market that you're using your position to unfairly suppress competitors, or to charge a price beyond what the market would normally accept. (Or colluding with the other players in the market to do the same). The iPhone is, at the end of the day, just a fancy mobile phone, and in a very real sense has to compete with $20 phones that are sold on shelves right across from them at the AT&T store. People have plenty of phones to choose from at a wide range of prices if they don't want to spend $600 on an iPhone.
Your satellite radio example is kind of silly when you think about it. Should the government not allow any new business models or products until there are at least two companies ready to sell them? One of the basic tenants of capitalism is that competition forces efficiency, and the market benefits from that. Once you've got that competition, allowing one side to buy out all of its peers is basically reducing that competitive pressure, and in the long run slows the evolution of that market.
There's certainly no agreement on when it's right for society/government/whoever to step in and regulate these things, but the general idea is to maintain some level of competition, because it forces the various players to continually improve their products and stay efficient. Companies that fail to do so eventually weaken or even collapse, and that creates space for new players and new ideas. Then there are more specific instances, such as commodities/utilities, but even then it's often only an issue in less competitive markets. An example would be if the gas station down the street from me decided that tomorrow they were going to raise their prices to $17.00 per gallon. That would be unlikely to draw a government response, because there are four other gas stations within a couple minutes drive that I could go to to get reasonably priced gasoline. Now if the managers of all of the gas stations in the area got together and decided that they'd all raise their price that high, then that'd be price fixing, and the government would come down hard on them (if public outcry didn't change their mind first). A similar issue happens because I live in a hurricane zone, and when there's an evacuation, sometimes a gas station will try to significantly raise their prices to profit off of people who are trying to leave, and that's considered price gouging and can get them in some serious trouble.
I'm about to blow your mind. In the previous versions, if you can figure out how to use the number pad (or mouse) instead of your arrow keys, you can move diagonally. Woah.
No kidding. I absolutely hate talking on the phone, but I would be a fool to deny the reality that voice communication can solve many problems way faster than trading emails back and forth, even when the people on both ends are plenty comfortable with the internet. Email has a few big advantages, you can send a message to multiple people at once, it creates a "paper trail", and it's generally less intrusive than a ringing phone when you're trying to get stuff done, but there's plenty that phones are way better at.
Now fax machines, that's a technology that's lived way past its prime.
Yeah,, I can see how a relatively small and resource strapped company like google couldn't manage to throw together something to process applications for it. It's not like they already had a dozen or so other web apps that people could set up accounts for. Besides, even if someone did write it, where would they find a server to host that on?
Closed beta, plus when you finally found someone with an invite to give you, then you'd still have to wait for a few days for some reason. What did they need those three days for? Were they doing background checks on me? Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database? I was excited when one of my buddies offered me the invite, but by the time I actually got to sign up, much of that excitement had already passed.
Spoken like someone who's never spent more than 10 seconds around kids. That's about all the time it takes for a child capable of walking to wander off out of view. Kids are curious, often fearless, and not old enough to know any better. Even with excellent parenting they'll find ways to hurt themselves. A little bit of preventive measures to make swimming pools less deadly is not some grave burden upon you.
The gaming market is far from the most profitable software market, but anyways, as I stated earlier, Apple doesn't make much of their money from software, hardware is their main revenue and profit source. Neither apple nor anybody else would be able to make any money selling a mobile OS, because there is a competent mainstream competitor that is free.
You can extrapolate marketshare all that you want, but those same numbers that you're using show that Apple is selling more iPhones now than ever before, and as long as that is the case, they'll do just fine.
Yes, because two year olds who can't swim are obviously too fucking stupid / incompetent to be allowed to live. We should try to make the world more dangerous, so we can filter out these morons who aren't contributing anything to society.