There are laws in place and a judiciary system that has been created to help determine what speech is and isn't worthy of protection.
Part of those laws allow for things like NDA's and the like. The violation of which is the core of this whole issue.
The question is, does the title of "journalist" make those laws inapplicable to you. Any sort of title making anyone above any laws seems fairly undemocratic to me.
I started high school in 1994. My freshman year, I had a required course called Intro to Data Processing. The course was designed to teach us two things. How to touch type, and how to use a word processor.
At home I had a mac that i had been spending most of my free time on for a couple years. I was just transitioning from the BBS scene to the internet at large. I knew my computer inside and out, I resedited the hell out of it, I had delved into the hardware some. I was a reasonably smart kid.
The computers at school were really old machines, with two of the 5.25" floppy drives, and the orange/black screens. No mouse, no harddrive, just a nasty dirty keyboard.
I really appreciate that I learned to touch type. That's probably one of the most useful technical skills I'll ever possess. I did, however, almost fail the class due to the word processing part. And that was only because it was entirely boring and useless to me. They were teaching us how to use an old, obsolete piece of software. They wanted me to memorize the series of function keys that I had to press to get the font size bumped up to 14 or whatever. I could certainly do it. i learned it all the night before the final exam because I didn't want to fail. I just couldn't be bothered because they were trying to teach me stuff that bored the hell out of me.
I suspect part of your class was like that. Of course, there may have been some jackasses who really couldn't get a grasp on the basics of computers. If those people actually graduated, then it's your school that I'd be more worried about, not those individuals.
Oh, and a funny story that I'm reminded of. One day in my data processing class, someone asked a substitute teacher how the floppy disks worked. The teacher started talking, grabbed the nearest disk, ripped it apart, and showed us all the pieces. The poor kid from another class who owned that disk had to redo all that work. Good times.
I was a webcoding monkey for a while for a graphic designer who decided to offer websites as part of a package deal for some clients.
I tried really hard to explain to her how websites should work, but she only learned what she wanted to. All of her designs ended up constrained into a box that would basically fit in 800x600, a box that ended up being a tiny floating rectangle on a larger screen.
The reason that she did this, as far as I can determine, is that she's unable to make the cognitive leap between something dynamic like a webpage, and a static piece of paper. The website I did for her are basically a graphically fancy powerpoint presentation. All of the random graphical elements floating around everywhere were a complete bitch to code, and browser compatibility required hours upon hours of trial and error. When Microsoft updates IE again, I'm guessing most of those sites will break pretty badly. I'm not fixing them though, I warned her.
The issue is whether the second monitor is being used just as more space, as a separate space, or a combination of both. When I was using a 15" powerbook with 1024x768, I always used an external monitor as well if I could, because there just wasn't enough screen real estate.
Now I've got a powermac with a 23" screen, and I find that I don't miss the second screen all that much, except for in a few specific applications. Those applications are ones where the separate screens were a type of organization for me. All the palettes on the left screen, the working documents on the right. The majority of both screens was empty space, I didn't really need all those pixels, I just got used to that visual separation.
Now that I've got a bigger screen, I could probably fake that visual separation with a clever background pattern, but it's easier for me to just get used to a new way of working.
Out of curiosity one day, I set up a second monitor next to my 23". I measured out and moved it the appropriate distance away so that the far edges of each screen were approximately the same distance apart that two of the 30" dealies would be. That's a good bit of head turning. And mouse movement. I don't think it'd be all that comfortable to use for an extended period of time.
Exactly. When TV over the internet becomes a reality, I don't want to have to find 30 different channels that I like and send each of them $1/month to subscribe. I'd rather buy a package deal, where I just pay one bill, where someone else will keep track of whether a particular channel is having financial or technical difficulties, etc. It only sucks with current cable TV because we're stuck with huge monopoly companies that are basically free to treat us poorly.
If the industry doesn't get too swamped by legislation and unfair competition, it'd be feasible for there to be hundreds of these different companies offering different packages. Competition will force them to offer smaller and more focused packages, so I can find what I like, and maybe get some new stuff that's similar, and that I might not have discovered on my own.
While the internet and micropayments could create an economy without the middle men skimming some of the money, I'd be pretty happy with an economy consisting of a wider range of middle men, forcing a lot more competition between them. They would be less distributors and more aggregators/organizers. We're going to need that if we want the internet's vast info stores to be useful. Note the success of, oh....say, Google?
That's what I was thinking. Anyone who's got needs so specific that, as the article write up says, they don't include the full functionality of the hardware; well, if that's you, you're probably capable of building your own systems for a even cheaper.
The mac mini is cool and all, but it's not the first solution to cheap machine with free software. Maybe the first powerPC machine, maybe the first that has a the fancy case design, but that's about it. This is not going to be the piece of hardware that finally brings linux to the third world masses. You'd have to bring the price down quite a bit more for that.
I have no real knowledge of space elevator science, nor the desire to do any math, so I'm going to try and just reason this out a little. For the space elevator to actual work and stay up in space, parts of it would be moving quite fast.
Consider a bicycle wheel. The whole wheel is spinning, and every time the axle in the middle makes a full rotation, the outside edge of the tire also makes a full rotation. So a point on the outside of the tire has to move significantly faster, since it has to go a much further distance in the same period of time. If you ripped all the spokes off of the bicycle wheel except for one, and just left a little bit of the tire at the top of this lone spoke, you'd have, in a very abstract and probably out of scale sense, a model of the earth and a space elevator. As the earth (the axle) rotates, the space elevator (spoke+wheel piece) must make just as many rotations around the center of the earth. Or else, it would wind up around the axle, or at least break, or something bad.
So I guess the question becomes, as something travels up this space elevator, does it pick up that speed. It seems to me that it should. But where does the energy to accelerate that mass come from? I would think that it'd leech some of the kinetic energy from the space elevator cable itself, and so there'd need to be a way to give the cable some of that energy back. Maybe some thrusters all the way up on the other end. I don't know.
Why did they have to wait for them if they knew the money was legit? Is there a law that says if some random cashier thinks money might be bogus, then you can't go till the secret service checks it out? I think that's putting a little too much power in the hands of a register monkey.
It is functional though. As long as all the parts they sold you work. I can go to CompUSA and buy an optical mouse. It's pretty much worthless without a computer to go with it, but that doesn't mean that it's nonfunctional. My computer came with a CD burner, but no blank cd's. So I couldn't burn a CD without making another purchase, but that doesn't mean my computer was broken.
There's a perfectly good excuse. Noone tells them that. When you open up your new dell, cause you saw a commercial that said that it'll get you on the internet two times faster because of its intel inside pentium 4 with superMMX, you don't get a page full of warnings like the emergency instructions in an airplane. When you open up the box, a computer tech doesn't jump out and tell you what not to do.
When someone gets a mortgage, they know it's a big deal, they know it's going to be complicated, and they know that it's a major investment that they need to be really careful about.
When was the last time you saw an advertisement in a computer mag that touted all the complicated instructions the machine came with? That's the excuse right there. People are learning that computers are fragile pieces of garbage by owning one and having it fall apart. And by then, half of them are so disillusioned that they wish they'd never have to touch the stupid machine again.
It's more complicated than that because the majority of computer problems are software based. Software exists in a state that most people are not used to seeing, in that it's not physical. How can something not physical be broken? What does it mean for it to be broken? Many people don't have any intuitive sense or past experiences to help them understand.
One of the first things to try when you're fixing a computer problem is to turn the machine off, then back on. That magically fixes all sorts of things. How weird is that, if you don't understand how a computer functions. If something on my car isn't functioning, shutting off the engine and restarting probably isn't going to help. It'll be just as broken when I start driving again.
When I take my car into the shop, even if I don't know what's wrong, a mechanic can point at worn down parts, broken seals, etc, and I can at least understand how something failed. I might not know what that piece does exactly, or even care, but I can see with my own eyes what went wrong.
Computer problems are entirely different. A tech might show me an errant process in the task manager, but that doesn't mean anything to a lot of people. Even the ones that are supposed to be there look pretty random. And the same. How does a registry get corrupted? Aren't bits and bytes non-physical objects? Can't they be copied indefinitely? If so, how can my copy get messed up? Why don't I have backup copies? On the surface, a lot of it doesn't make any sense.
Car - Computer Analogies tend to be problematic in most cases, but here's the differences I see in this case.
First and foremost, cars are generally just big complicated pieces of hardware, while computers have this whole extra level of complexity. It's called software. Cars nowadays have some software, but it's got to be so rigorously tested that the average car owner will never have problems with it.Computers, on the other hand, break in software a lot more than hardware.
My mom doesn't know too much about cars, but she has a good general understanding of how the everyday world works. Mechanical things wear out, they break, they need to be lubricated, etc. Software is a completely different beast. To someone who's never programmed, it's just this ephemeral, basically invisible thing that is always breaking. All you know is that it's very complicated, it doesn't work a lot, and nothing else that you've ever seen break in your life has given you much understanding as to what is wrong.
Add to the fact things like "Check oil" is just two really simple words. It's not telling you what's wrong, it's not asking you what you want to do next, it's giving you a command; Get your damn oil checked!" Software breaks a little too often for commands like that to be feasible in most cases, I guess better programming is the solution.
When computer hardware breaks, it's a little easier, because things stop working in much more understandable ways. I get phone calls from my mom asking for help when a program is repeatedly quitting with some weird error message. When a piece of hardware breaks, I get a call from her at a store/repair shop, asking me if a certain price for a new part is fair. She knows what to do when something physical breaks. The whole concept of software and how it actually works is just so foreign to her mindset that I don't think she'll ever understand it, even though her job requires her to spend 8 hours per day in front of a computer.
While private interests moving into space is in general a good thing that should be encouraged, I don't see any feasible way that a business could hope to make money operating something like the voyager probe, at least not until a far into the future.
Companies have generally become far more short term based, and even the long term minded ones would have to have quite an imagination to figure out a way to make money exploring the edge of the solar system.
NASA should be focusing on the pure science, no profit space stuff, and letting private interests take over the earth orbit stuff.
Look, I'm not going to argue that Nintendo is totally going to have the hugest bestest console ever, and that they're going to sell 600 million revolutions while sony and MS only sell 12 million total.
But I am going to predict that Nintendo will release a solid piece of hardware, one that's affordable for them to build, and one that has some quality games for it.
The gamecube is not the super greatest #1 in terms of marketshare, but Nintendo has been making plenty of money selling it, and they're not in danger of going bankrupt.
I don't know why so many people have this all or nothing view of the video game industry. It's like a lot of you want there to be just one big console, so we can all start bitching some more about monopolies and how they make innovation impossible.
Here's the innovation. Nintendo is trying their best. Why are so many people so quick to criticize it? WTF does too much innovation mean?
Actually I never did. The story behind that was when I was in college, I had to sit through a little class that was basically an intro to Quark. I was already fairly familiar with quark, so I did most of the assigned tasks in as random and bizarre ways that i could. For the largest piece of text on my final presentation, I came up with the text, "One time I threw a brick at a duck". It wasn't true, but it made me smile. When my assignment was submitted, it caused a little bit of controversy amongst some faculty members who thought it might be true. It wasn't hard to clear up, and the whole situation was actually pretty amusing. So I make it my sig on most forums, cause even if my post is boring, maybe people will talk about bricks and ducks.
The fact that it's a a point release is basically just semantics. Apple sort of painted themselves into a corner with the name OSX. It's sort of the 10th version of the Mac OS, but the X was to make it sound cooler and sort of clever, but what comes after? OS XI? That looks weird. And a little too close to XP. So they've gone with 10.whatever, and used 10.x.x for what'd normally be considered a point release. 10.4 has been a long time coming, and it's got plenty of big changes over 10.3, such that a bigger name change wouldn't be that surprising, if apple could come up with a better name for it. That's probably why they've been making the big cat code names more official. Jaguar, Panther, Tiger...
If you want, you can complain that Apple's devaluing the normal versioning numbering system, but I don't think they'll care much if you do.
You're spot on. The problem that Nintendo is having is that the majority of the market is still in the teenage 'gotta be cool' stage. I grew up with nintendo stuff, and I just recently got out of that age bracket. I never really fell into that mindset all that much, probably cause I couldn't have been cool no matter how hard I tried, but my younger brother did, and he's just starting to get out of it. When I took my gamecube home for christmas, he was blown away by super smash bros.
So my hope is that as a critical mass of the so called gamer generation hits adulthood, Nintendo will still be around and reasonably strong. I don't have any kids yet, but I'd have no problem deciding which system to get them today if I did. Timeless franchises, solid gameplay, and maybe a dose of nostalgia will keep me a fan of Nintendo forever.
Oh, I totally agree. But like you said, it'd take a whole lot of compromising to get it to work, and I just don't see that as being feasible.
Going back to the ringtones deal. If I had an Apple phone with iTMS integration, you can bet your ass I'd want the capability to make any song I downloaded into my ringtone. Although hard numbers are tough to come by, it's guessed that Apple sees around 10 cents out of every dollar spent on a song in the iTMS. Do you really think a cell phone company is going to give up $3.95 every 90 days in exchange for a sharing agreement with Apple's 10 cents per song?
Do you think Jobs would adopt the cellphone carriers' pricing scheme for songs downloaded to the Applephone? Do you think customers would go for that? I sure don't.
But yes, I totally agree that there is an insane amount of potential to improve cellphones from a hardware/interface perspective. And Apple would be one of my top picks for a company that could get it right. If only it were that easy.
First off, The iPod does not need iTMS to function. Second, when you buy a song off there, you're paying for content, not functionality.
My phone can browse websites, but I have to pay for that capability, regardless of what website I browse. Even if it's my own website. I not only pay for the minutes that I'm using on my phone like a normal call, I also have to pay an extra monthly fee just for the right to have my phone accept data. Regardless of where that data is coming from.
I did some research when I got my phone, so I bought one where I could upload my own ringtones. Yet I still have to pay extra to get that ringtone file emailed to me. Plenty of other people have phones that either don't have that option, or make it so hard that it might as well not exist. They have to pay extra to be allowed to use functionality that's already available.
I agree with you on the phone. No matter how nice a piece of hardware they can cook up, and no matter how well they think out the features, they're still going to have to wrestle for control with a carrier. Even ignoring the whole Jobs' ego deal, the amount of back and forth compromise will ruin a lot of it.
Apple makes some expensive stuff, and often overcharges, but they don't try and screw customers over anywhere near as hard as the cell phone carriers do.
Add in the fact that, in the US at least, almost all cell phone services are subscription or pay per use based. You spend a chunk of change up front for this phone with all these cool features, but then you have to pay a little extra for each one of those features you use every month. That goes totally against Apple's ease-of-use, integrated design philosophy.
the iTMS has some DRM restrictions on how you can use the songs you purchase, but it doesn't hold a candle to the cell phone crap. $1 for a song that you can put on multiple computers/iPods/CDs vs. a $3.50 midi ringtone of the same song that expires in 90 days? Good luck finding a quality compromise there.
Well, if that's her attitude, then so be it. My mom, however, spends eight hours per day at home in front of her computer for work. She's always emailing me all that stupid stuff from her friends, sending me dumb webcards for holidays, Instant messenger-ing me when I'm trying to spend time with my gf, etc. So she's got no inherent problem with the computer. She just panics when things go wrong.
Total agreement on your point. You learn a whole lot by just trying stuff, and seeing what happens. Sure, sometimes you break stuff, but that's part of the game. Now, I know not everyone has the time to do that every time something breaks, but you can at least try clicking on a few dialog boxes before looking for help.
My mom calls me with computer problems from time to time. I currently live about a thousand miles from her, so it's not that easy for me to diagnose and fix her problems, so I don't particularly enjoy it. Occasionally she'll call me while I'm busy at work, and so I can't even try to help her. A few times when that's happened, she's called me back later to tell me that she spent some time experimenting, and she figured out whatever it was that was giving her problems. So I know she can figure out some of it. She's no geek, but she's smart and when she actually tries, she makes progress on her problems. And even if she can't figure it out completely, when I do get around to helping her, she knows more about the problem, and we make progress faster.
I just wish she'd accept that, and not call me as quickly in the future.
Just to counteract your anecdotal evidence with some other. I spent weeks trying to find a DS around here for my GF. I checked websites, called places, reserved things and drove over just to find out that they had sold it while I was making the reservation over the phone. Now this is in new orleans, which is a significantly less tech savvy area, generally lacking disposable income. Maybe they didn't receive as many units as other places, but the ones that did get here sure did get picked up quickly.
I can't afford a PSP right now, so I haven't bothered looking, so I can't speak about it. Yes, I know, useless anecodtes...but so was the parent post.
Exactly. Even nintendo seems to be missing their own big lesson from the past. Tetris is what made the game boy work for them. The DS came with a little piece of the metroid game. It's a nice tech demo, but it's really just a quick little piece of gameplay that won't even appeal to that many people.
When I went to the DMV to get my license renewed, I put my Zoo Keeper game in my DS. It's a bejewelled clone basically, easy to play for a quick session while I'm waiting for something. Not too big of a deal to get interrupted in the middle of, etc. The best advertising something like the PSP or DS can get is for people to see others sitting out somewhere playing it, and talking to them about it. Where I can hand them the game, and let them try it for two minutes, and where they can have fun.
I don't know why both nintendo and sony ignored this fact. They should be looking for the next tetris. It's simple to understand, easy to start playing, addictive as hell, offensive to no one, and worth buying a game system to play.
The DS should've come with minesweeper built in. It'd be so perfect.
Re:What will Apple do next?
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Re-Imagining Apple
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, those upset mac faithful should get over it. And I say that as mac user for the past 15 years.
Sure, so Apple's kicking some ass with the ipod/iTMS. They're also giving us constant updates to OSX, lots of fun to play with consumer software, a solid lineup of hardware, and with the mac mini, a cheapo machine that everyone's been clamoring for for years.
Part of being the mac faithful is a belief that the average person would be much better off with a mac than a windows machine. Apple's finally making some progress in reaching those average people, and providing them with a cheap computer. What more could we reasonably ask from them? They're not perfect, but I don't think their success in music is causing any big problems.
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There are laws in place and a judiciary system that has been created to help determine what speech is and isn't worthy of protection.
Part of those laws allow for things like NDA's and the like. The violation of which is the core of this whole issue.
The question is, does the title of "journalist" make those laws inapplicable to you. Any sort of title making anyone above any laws seems fairly undemocratic to me.
I started high school in 1994. My freshman year, I had a required course called Intro to Data Processing. The course was designed to teach us two things. How to touch type, and how to use a word processor.
At home I had a mac that i had been spending most of my free time on for a couple years. I was just transitioning from the BBS scene to the internet at large. I knew my computer inside and out, I resedited the hell out of it, I had delved into the hardware some. I was a reasonably smart kid.
The computers at school were really old machines, with two of the 5.25" floppy drives, and the orange/black screens. No mouse, no harddrive, just a nasty dirty keyboard.
I really appreciate that I learned to touch type. That's probably one of the most useful technical skills I'll ever possess. I did, however, almost fail the class due to the word processing part. And that was only because it was entirely boring and useless to me. They were teaching us how to use an old, obsolete piece of software. They wanted me to memorize the series of function keys that I had to press to get the font size bumped up to 14 or whatever. I could certainly do it. i learned it all the night before the final exam because I didn't want to fail. I just couldn't be bothered because they were trying to teach me stuff that bored the hell out of me.
I suspect part of your class was like that. Of course, there may have been some jackasses who really couldn't get a grasp on the basics of computers. If those people actually graduated, then it's your school that I'd be more worried about, not those individuals.
Oh, and a funny story that I'm reminded of. One day in my data processing class, someone asked a substitute teacher how the floppy disks worked. The teacher started talking, grabbed the nearest disk, ripped it apart, and showed us all the pieces. The poor kid from another class who owned that disk had to redo all that work. Good times.
I was a webcoding monkey for a while for a graphic designer who decided to offer websites as part of a package deal for some clients.
I tried really hard to explain to her how websites should work, but she only learned what she wanted to. All of her designs ended up constrained into a box that would basically fit in 800x600, a box that ended up being a tiny floating rectangle on a larger screen.
The reason that she did this, as far as I can determine, is that she's unable to make the cognitive leap between something dynamic like a webpage, and a static piece of paper. The website I did for her are basically a graphically fancy powerpoint presentation. All of the random graphical elements floating around everywhere were a complete bitch to code, and browser compatibility required hours upon hours of trial and error. When Microsoft updates IE again, I'm guessing most of those sites will break pretty badly. I'm not fixing them though, I warned her.
The issue is whether the second monitor is being used just as more space, as a separate space, or a combination of both. When I was using a 15" powerbook with 1024x768, I always used an external monitor as well if I could, because there just wasn't enough screen real estate.
Now I've got a powermac with a 23" screen, and I find that I don't miss the second screen all that much, except for in a few specific applications. Those applications are ones where the separate screens were a type of organization for me. All the palettes on the left screen, the working documents on the right. The majority of both screens was empty space, I didn't really need all those pixels, I just got used to that visual separation.
Now that I've got a bigger screen, I could probably fake that visual separation with a clever background pattern, but it's easier for me to just get used to a new way of working.
Out of curiosity one day, I set up a second monitor next to my 23". I measured out and moved it the appropriate distance away so that the far edges of each screen were approximately the same distance apart that two of the 30" dealies would be. That's a good bit of head turning. And mouse movement. I don't think it'd be all that comfortable to use for an extended period of time.
Exactly. When TV over the internet becomes a reality, I don't want to have to find 30 different channels that I like and send each of them $1/month to subscribe. I'd rather buy a package deal, where I just pay one bill, where someone else will keep track of whether a particular channel is having financial or technical difficulties, etc. It only sucks with current cable TV because we're stuck with huge monopoly companies that are basically free to treat us poorly.
If the industry doesn't get too swamped by legislation and unfair competition, it'd be feasible for there to be hundreds of these different companies offering different packages. Competition will force them to offer smaller and more focused packages, so I can find what I like, and maybe get some new stuff that's similar, and that I might not have discovered on my own.
While the internet and micropayments could create an economy without the middle men skimming some of the money, I'd be pretty happy with an economy consisting of a wider range of middle men, forcing a lot more competition between them. They would be less distributors and more aggregators/organizers. We're going to need that if we want the internet's vast info stores to be useful. Note the success of, oh....say, Google?
That's what I was thinking. Anyone who's got needs so specific that, as the article write up says, they don't include the full functionality of the hardware; well, if that's you, you're probably capable of building your own systems for a even cheaper.
The mac mini is cool and all, but it's not the first solution to cheap machine with free software. Maybe the first powerPC machine, maybe the first that has a the fancy case design, but that's about it. This is not going to be the piece of hardware that finally brings linux to the third world masses. You'd have to bring the price down quite a bit more for that.
I have no real knowledge of space elevator science, nor the desire to do any math, so I'm going to try and just reason this out a little. For the space elevator to actual work and stay up in space, parts of it would be moving quite fast.
Consider a bicycle wheel. The whole wheel is spinning, and every time the axle in the middle makes a full rotation, the outside edge of the tire also makes a full rotation. So a point on the outside of the tire has to move significantly faster, since it has to go a much further distance in the same period of time. If you ripped all the spokes off of the bicycle wheel except for one, and just left a little bit of the tire at the top of this lone spoke, you'd have, in a very abstract and probably out of scale sense, a model of the earth and a space elevator. As the earth (the axle) rotates, the space elevator (spoke+wheel piece) must make just as many rotations around the center of the earth. Or else, it would wind up around the axle, or at least break, or something bad.
So I guess the question becomes, as something travels up this space elevator, does it pick up that speed. It seems to me that it should. But where does the energy to accelerate that mass come from? I would think that it'd leech some of the kinetic energy from the space elevator cable itself, and so there'd need to be a way to give the cable some of that energy back. Maybe some thrusters all the way up on the other end. I don't know.
Why did they have to wait for them if they knew the money was legit? Is there a law that says if some random cashier thinks money might be bogus, then you can't go till the secret service checks it out? I think that's putting a little too much power in the hands of a register monkey.
It is functional though. As long as all the parts they sold you work. I can go to CompUSA and buy an optical mouse. It's pretty much worthless without a computer to go with it, but that doesn't mean that it's nonfunctional. My computer came with a CD burner, but no blank cd's. So I couldn't burn a CD without making another purchase, but that doesn't mean my computer was broken.
That's not a compelling reason at all.
There's a perfectly good excuse. Noone tells them that. When you open up your new dell, cause you saw a commercial that said that it'll get you on the internet two times faster because of its intel inside pentium 4 with superMMX, you don't get a page full of warnings like the emergency instructions in an airplane. When you open up the box, a computer tech doesn't jump out and tell you what not to do.
When someone gets a mortgage, they know it's a big deal, they know it's going to be complicated, and they know that it's a major investment that they need to be really careful about.
When was the last time you saw an advertisement in a computer mag that touted all the complicated instructions the machine came with? That's the excuse right there. People are learning that computers are fragile pieces of garbage by owning one and having it fall apart. And by then, half of them are so disillusioned that they wish they'd never have to touch the stupid machine again.
It's more complicated than that because the majority of computer problems are software based. Software exists in a state that most people are not used to seeing, in that it's not physical. How can something not physical be broken? What does it mean for it to be broken? Many people don't have any intuitive sense or past experiences to help them understand.
One of the first things to try when you're fixing a computer problem is to turn the machine off, then back on. That magically fixes all sorts of things. How weird is that, if you don't understand how a computer functions. If something on my car isn't functioning, shutting off the engine and restarting probably isn't going to help. It'll be just as broken when I start driving again.
When I take my car into the shop, even if I don't know what's wrong, a mechanic can point at worn down parts, broken seals, etc, and I can at least understand how something failed. I might not know what that piece does exactly, or even care, but I can see with my own eyes what went wrong.
Computer problems are entirely different. A tech might show me an errant process in the task manager, but that doesn't mean anything to a lot of people. Even the ones that are supposed to be there look pretty random. And the same. How does a registry get corrupted? Aren't bits and bytes non-physical objects? Can't they be copied indefinitely? If so, how can my copy get messed up? Why don't I have backup copies? On the surface, a lot of it doesn't make any sense.
Car - Computer Analogies tend to be problematic in most cases, but here's the differences I see in this case.
First and foremost, cars are generally just big complicated pieces of hardware, while computers have this whole extra level of complexity. It's called software. Cars nowadays have some software, but it's got to be so rigorously tested that the average car owner will never have problems with it.Computers, on the other hand, break in software a lot more than hardware.
My mom doesn't know too much about cars, but she has a good general understanding of how the everyday world works. Mechanical things wear out, they break, they need to be lubricated, etc. Software is a completely different beast. To someone who's never programmed, it's just this ephemeral, basically invisible thing that is always breaking. All you know is that it's very complicated, it doesn't work a lot, and nothing else that you've ever seen break in your life has given you much understanding as to what is wrong.
Add to the fact things like "Check oil" is just two really simple words. It's not telling you what's wrong, it's not asking you what you want to do next, it's giving you a command; Get your damn oil checked!" Software breaks a little too often for commands like that to be feasible in most cases, I guess better programming is the solution.
When computer hardware breaks, it's a little easier, because things stop working in much more understandable ways. I get phone calls from my mom asking for help when a program is repeatedly quitting with some weird error message. When a piece of hardware breaks, I get a call from her at a store/repair shop, asking me if a certain price for a new part is fair. She knows what to do when something physical breaks. The whole concept of software and how it actually works is just so foreign to her mindset that I don't think she'll ever understand it, even though her job requires her to spend 8 hours per day in front of a computer.
While private interests moving into space is in general a good thing that should be encouraged, I don't see any feasible way that a business could hope to make money operating something like the voyager probe, at least not until a far into the future.
Companies have generally become far more short term based, and even the long term minded ones would have to have quite an imagination to figure out a way to make money exploring the edge of the solar system.
NASA should be focusing on the pure science, no profit space stuff, and letting private interests take over the earth orbit stuff.
Look, I'm not going to argue that Nintendo is totally going to have the hugest bestest console ever, and that they're going to sell 600 million revolutions while sony and MS only sell 12 million total.
But I am going to predict that Nintendo will release a solid piece of hardware, one that's affordable for them to build, and one that has some quality games for it.
The gamecube is not the super greatest #1 in terms of marketshare, but Nintendo has been making plenty of money selling it, and they're not in danger of going bankrupt.
I don't know why so many people have this all or nothing view of the video game industry. It's like a lot of you want there to be just one big console, so we can all start bitching some more about monopolies and how they make innovation impossible.
Here's the innovation. Nintendo is trying their best. Why are so many people so quick to criticize it? WTF does too much innovation mean?
Actually I never did. The story behind that was when I was in college, I had to sit through a little class that was basically an intro to Quark. I was already fairly familiar with quark, so I did most of the assigned tasks in as random and bizarre ways that i could. For the largest piece of text on my final presentation, I came up with the text, "One time I threw a brick at a duck". It wasn't true, but it made me smile. When my assignment was submitted, it caused a little bit of controversy amongst some faculty members who thought it might be true. It wasn't hard to clear up, and the whole situation was actually pretty amusing. So I make it my sig on most forums, cause even if my post is boring, maybe people will talk about bricks and ducks.
The fact that it's a a point release is basically just semantics. Apple sort of painted themselves into a corner with the name OSX. It's sort of the 10th version of the Mac OS, but the X was to make it sound cooler and sort of clever, but what comes after? OS XI? That looks weird. And a little too close to XP. So they've gone with 10.whatever, and used 10.x.x for what'd normally be considered a point release. 10.4 has been a long time coming, and it's got plenty of big changes over 10.3, such that a bigger name change wouldn't be that surprising, if apple could come up with a better name for it. That's probably why they've been making the big cat code names more official. Jaguar, Panther, Tiger...
If you want, you can complain that Apple's devaluing the normal versioning numbering system, but I don't think they'll care much if you do.
You're spot on. The problem that Nintendo is having is that the majority of the market is still in the teenage 'gotta be cool' stage. I grew up with nintendo stuff, and I just recently got out of that age bracket. I never really fell into that mindset all that much, probably cause I couldn't have been cool no matter how hard I tried, but my younger brother did, and he's just starting to get out of it. When I took my gamecube home for christmas, he was blown away by super smash bros.
So my hope is that as a critical mass of the so called gamer generation hits adulthood, Nintendo will still be around and reasonably strong. I don't have any kids yet, but I'd have no problem deciding which system to get them today if I did. Timeless franchises, solid gameplay, and maybe a dose of nostalgia will keep me a fan of Nintendo forever.
Oh, I totally agree. But like you said, it'd take a whole lot of compromising to get it to work, and I just don't see that as being feasible.
Going back to the ringtones deal. If I had an Apple phone with iTMS integration, you can bet your ass I'd want the capability to make any song I downloaded into my ringtone. Although hard numbers are tough to come by, it's guessed that Apple sees around 10 cents out of every dollar spent on a song in the iTMS. Do you really think a cell phone company is going to give up $3.95 every 90 days in exchange for a sharing agreement with Apple's 10 cents per song?
Do you think Jobs would adopt the cellphone carriers' pricing scheme for songs downloaded to the Applephone? Do you think customers would go for that? I sure don't.
But yes, I totally agree that there is an insane amount of potential to improve cellphones from a hardware/interface perspective. And Apple would be one of my top picks for a company that could get it right. If only it were that easy.
First off, The iPod does not need iTMS to function. Second, when you buy a song off there, you're paying for content, not functionality.
My phone can browse websites, but I have to pay for that capability, regardless of what website I browse. Even if it's my own website. I not only pay for the minutes that I'm using on my phone like a normal call, I also have to pay an extra monthly fee just for the right to have my phone accept data. Regardless of where that data is coming from.
I did some research when I got my phone, so I bought one where I could upload my own ringtones. Yet I still have to pay extra to get that ringtone file emailed to me. Plenty of other people have phones that either don't have that option, or make it so hard that it might as well not exist. They have to pay extra to be allowed to use functionality that's already available.
I agree with you on the phone. No matter how nice a piece of hardware they can cook up, and no matter how well they think out the features, they're still going to have to wrestle for control with a carrier. Even ignoring the whole Jobs' ego deal, the amount of back and forth compromise will ruin a lot of it.
Apple makes some expensive stuff, and often overcharges, but they don't try and screw customers over anywhere near as hard as the cell phone carriers do.
Add in the fact that, in the US at least, almost all cell phone services are subscription or pay per use based. You spend a chunk of change up front for this phone with all these cool features, but then you have to pay a little extra for each one of those features you use every month. That goes totally against Apple's ease-of-use, integrated design philosophy.
the iTMS has some DRM restrictions on how you can use the songs you purchase, but it doesn't hold a candle to the cell phone crap. $1 for a song that you can put on multiple computers/iPods/CDs vs. a $3.50 midi ringtone of the same song that expires in 90 days? Good luck finding a quality compromise there.
Well, if that's her attitude, then so be it. My mom, however, spends eight hours per day at home in front of her computer for work. She's always emailing me all that stupid stuff from her friends, sending me dumb webcards for holidays, Instant messenger-ing me when I'm trying to spend time with my gf, etc. So she's got no inherent problem with the computer. She just panics when things go wrong.
Total agreement on your point. You learn a whole lot by just trying stuff, and seeing what happens. Sure, sometimes you break stuff, but that's part of the game. Now, I know not everyone has the time to do that every time something breaks, but you can at least try clicking on a few dialog boxes before looking for help.
My mom calls me with computer problems from time to time. I currently live about a thousand miles from her, so it's not that easy for me to diagnose and fix her problems, so I don't particularly enjoy it. Occasionally she'll call me while I'm busy at work, and so I can't even try to help her. A few times when that's happened, she's called me back later to tell me that she spent some time experimenting, and she figured out whatever it was that was giving her problems. So I know she can figure out some of it. She's no geek, but she's smart and when she actually tries, she makes progress on her problems. And even if she can't figure it out completely, when I do get around to helping her, she knows more about the problem, and we make progress faster.
I just wish she'd accept that, and not call me as quickly in the future.
Just to counteract your anecdotal evidence with some other. I spent weeks trying to find a DS around here for my GF. I checked websites, called places, reserved things and drove over just to find out that they had sold it while I was making the reservation over the phone. Now this is in new orleans, which is a significantly less tech savvy area, generally lacking disposable income. Maybe they didn't receive as many units as other places, but the ones that did get here sure did get picked up quickly.
I can't afford a PSP right now, so I haven't bothered looking, so I can't speak about it. Yes, I know, useless anecodtes...but so was the parent post.
Exactly. Even nintendo seems to be missing their own big lesson from the past. Tetris is what made the game boy work for them. The DS came with a little piece of the metroid game. It's a nice tech demo, but it's really just a quick little piece of gameplay that won't even appeal to that many people.
When I went to the DMV to get my license renewed, I put my Zoo Keeper game in my DS. It's a bejewelled clone basically, easy to play for a quick session while I'm waiting for something. Not too big of a deal to get interrupted in the middle of, etc. The best advertising something like the PSP or DS can get is for people to see others sitting out somewhere playing it, and talking to them about it. Where I can hand them the game, and let them try it for two minutes, and where they can have fun.
I don't know why both nintendo and sony ignored this fact. They should be looking for the next tetris. It's simple to understand, easy to start playing, addictive as hell, offensive to no one, and worth buying a game system to play.
The DS should've come with minesweeper built in. It'd be so perfect.
Well, those upset mac faithful should get over it. And I say that as mac user for the past 15 years.
Sure, so Apple's kicking some ass with the ipod/iTMS. They're also giving us constant updates to OSX, lots of fun to play with consumer software, a solid lineup of hardware, and with the mac mini, a cheapo machine that everyone's been clamoring for for years.
Part of being the mac faithful is a belief that the average person would be much better off with a mac than a windows machine. Apple's finally making some progress in reaching those average people, and providing them with a cheap computer. What more could we reasonably ask from them? They're not perfect, but I don't think their success in music is causing any big problems.