I think the F-16 is like a race car and a commercial jet is like a bus. The race car goes at the highest speed but is horribly expensive to run (requiring several man hours per hour on the road), while the bus can run for a long time between services.
Even the commercial jet requires a lot of maintenance per trip, but nothing like the Hornet.
That's my informed guess, and I'd say it's a good one based on the other replies.
All that aside, how much would it cost, in terms of fuel and maintenance, to get it in the air?
I asked someone at an airshow this question, and they said a "mission" cost between $100k (just to take off and land) to $1m (to do a lot more than take off and land).
It might be substantially more expensive than that for a private person who doesn't have the huge infrastructure needed to maintain it.
I have to agree with the other poster on this thread - Larry Ellison is likely to be a seller. Or a buyer. He's one of the few people in the world who could actually afford to run it on a regular basis.
Bob Lutz is another possibility, but I don't know if he's rich enough.
Doing it myself produces the best ease of use since I can simplify things to the point that every feature that exists is there because someone really needed it.
The custom software I write is a lot simpler than a typical accounting application, and much easier to use because it's far less complex.
My personal use of computers includes heavy use of motion video software and graphics, all of which is available in massive profusion on the Mac. There are more applications of this type available on the PC, but all the best ones are on the Mac.
That's not so true of accounting software, but it still exists on the Mac - there are just not the overwhelming number of choices you see in the PC world.
I'd take the lack of software in exchange for the lack of malware any day, since the malware decreases productivity so much and is almost impossible to get rid of.
At the end of the day, I think perceived cost and the herd instinct (Jenny uses a PC, so I should too) are the main things that cause people to select PCs over Macs.
My point was that you pay for this with productivity-killing applications like Hotbar and Klez, both of which exist and are viable only on the PC.
To me, the Mac is a happy medium. In the PC world you have lots of software and malware. On the Mac, you have lots of software, including Office, but next to no malware. On Linux, I think you actually have more malware (but still not much), and for Office you have only "compatible" near-clones of Office which in my experience are not really compatible.
I would say there are few software needs that cannot be met with a Mac in some way or the other. What I need, and I don't have, I simply write myself.
I suppose not everyone has that option, but it works for me.
I wonder if JWZ ever tried MacOS X. The ideas behind it seem like a very nice answer to his "The X-Windows Disaster" chapter.
I guess he did - I read a few of his comments where he apparently got his xscreensaver application to work, and he mentioned in a few places that he was thinking of switching.
I wonder if he ever did, and what sort of problems he found.
You're right! There's no version of HotBar for the Mac. For some strange reason, the Klez worm has yet to sprout a Mac version. How can my users live without these vital applications?
But at my company, all people do is read email, write email, browse the web (including use of my custom web application), and create documents. Maybe 10% of our employees use a Windows-based accounting package my custom web application manipulates.
Since the Mac supports Microsoft Office, there's nothing our people don't do that couldn't be done with a Mac.
Most people don't need, use or want a huge amount of software.
I think this is one of the most interesting problems. Many users love their Hotbar and ever-changing desktops, even when I explain that it's what's making their computers run at the speed of a drugged slug.
I have one particular user, a cute girl, who just loves her Hotbar. "It's pretty!" she gushes. And of course her desktop picture is filled with Pink, her favourite colour.
I have been quite surprised how much people get attached to these things. As someone who doesn't even switch away from the default MacOS X desktop theme (it's tasteful!), I find them absolutely bewildering
But since they love their Hotbars, I leave them alone, because above all, I want my users to be happy. Happy users are productive users. And so on.
But why are people addicted to things as silly as ever-changing resource-killing screensavers, and Hotbar?
Of course that's why they won't do it. If they fire someone's favourite salesperson, and she goes to Gucci, that customer is now lost to Gucci.
However, the RFID tags will help the salesperson remember, and will help a salesperson in a different branch know what the first salesperson did. In that situation, it simply helps great salespeople give better service.
Not quite. If my memory serves, with Shake they kept the SGI and Linux versions and dumped the Windows version. They also halved the price of the MacOS X version, so you could get it and a "free" fully loaded G5 for less than the cost of a copy of the software alone for the other platforms.
I hope they do buy it. They've done amazing things with Final Cut Pro, and if they halved the price of Maya, I just might buy it even just to dabble with it.
In a narrow sense, this is of course true, but I don't think it pays to be that negative.
If we show appreciation to them for doing the right thing, they may well keep on doing it. I buy IBM server hardware explicitly because they support Linux development.
The great thing about capitalism is that we can help out companies friendly to us by buying their products, and we can hurt those who are not our friends by not buying theirs.
Easier to have a champion who wants to keep being one than to find another.
IBM is also making substantial contributions to Linux, and defending it against the bizarre SCO assault. They're a pretty useful lesson now in how to change with the times.
They're spending quite a bit of money doing the right thing, and they should be applauded for it.
You are correct. But if the iTunes music store remains the most popular outlet for legal downloadable music, they have enormous leverage.
A better comparison might be between book publishers and Borders or Barnes & Noble. Getting a book prominently shown on those shelves can mean success; having it absent can mean failure. So of course those chains get the best terms.
Same with iTunes. If it becomes a distribution choke point for music, Jobs will do just fine when he renegotiates the contract.
You are right. The iPod presently allows him to subsidize his music store, to the benefit of all parties involved. If his strategy works, most other music stores will go out of business due to the unsustainable business model, and then he'll go back to the labels.
For an idea of how this will work, consider his contract with Disney over Pixar. Disney got 50% of revenues, got sequel rights, got merchandising rights and all sorts of other stuff.
When he signs a new distribition contract, odds are that the new distributor will get 10% of revenues, no sequel rights and merchandising rights split.
That's the difference between a venture capital investment that's basically a gamble on everyone's part, and the closest thing to a sure thing.
I'm sure his negotiations to renew iTunes Music Store contracts will be very similar, and he will get similar results: A bigger share of the pie in return for a proven success.
I don't think anyone has ever accused Steve Jobs of being a dummy.
You know, I don't mind giving them the information. They're giving me free articles from the newspaper, which costs them a bundle to provide.
What I DO mind is having to remember a user name and password to get into the site.
For some reason, probably thanks to excessive code complexity or checks, the overwhelming majority of online sites don't seem to save my registration information in a long-running cookie. So as soon as I leave the site and forget my user name and password, I'm locked out.
That's such a royal pain that I do my best to avoid such sites.
In our current society, is there any kid who has NOT been exposed to this sort of thing?
I don't particularly like it, but it's the way our culture works right now, and there's not a lot we can do to change it.
That being said, I read the article and loved it, because it encapsulated exactly what I hated about school. In English class, you are asked to interpret what others have written, not create your own stuff. I wanted so badly to create my own material in class, rather than reading other people's stuff and critiquing it.
In all my years of English, there was only one year of creative writing, and I think that's a darn shame. People should learn to create their own stuff, not write boring essays nobody would ever want to read again.
How does that help you do anything but write more boring essays?
The way we teach English makes it so much less interesting and absorbing than it should be. I think of this phenomenon as a way to reverse that and get people interested in writing, which I think is extremely cool.
since in the case of pretty much every version of Windows, the box requirements are simply to run the operating system, and you'll need a much faster PC with a lot more RAM to actually run today's applications without wincing - and I'm referring to "simple" word processing and spreadsheets, not games.
I think you could help answer your own question by trying the experiment of buying the game and checking out how well it works on your system. Then let us know, since you've made us curious:-).
That being said, the odds are pretty good that more features mean more code bloat, which mean the need for faster processors and more memory. But since game performance has to be high, and since game customers are likely to complain about poor performance, the fudge factors used to determine performance specifications are probably a lot different from what Microsoft uses for Windows.
To put this in perspective, consider Windows 2000, which ran fine on a 500mhz Celeron with 64MB RAM. Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM, and I know this because we have several of both systems. The 500mhz Windows 2000 system will actually outperform the XP box on a clean installation.
What's strange about this, of course, is that there are few substantiative differences between 2000 and XP. There's more eye candy in XP and that's about it. So think about this: A little extra eye candy and you've worse than halved the performance.
Since games are all about eye candy nowadays, that might be a good start at explaining the situation.
The users at my company can't stand the Windows-based accounting system we have for exactly the reasons you cite. It's not designed to be user-friendly.
I don't think there's a critical mass of users who favour one accounting system or another. In my experience, virtually all of them are pretty user-unfriendly, no matter what platform they use. In fact, when we switched from DOS to Windows, productivity plummented because data entry in the new system was clunky and over-dependent on the mouse.
As long as your company's too big for QuickBooks, you're pretty much messed up in training terms no matter what accounting system you use.
In my company, I wrote a web-based CRM system that includes order entry specialized to how my company works, and that feeds into the accounting system for invoicing. This works great and minimizes training since the web-based system is very easy to use.
If this is an open-source project, why not check out the source code and see if you can hire someone to change the date entry module?
If there's already a centralized routine they use to parse dates, it might only be a few hours' work. If they parse dates throughout the program, changing all the major screens that deal with dates isn't going to take that long. Write a single function to do it, put it in the common functions area, and then call it every time dates are entered. Dull to implement, but fast and oh-so-useful.
Do you really like the notion of a country where you can be tortured and killed if you as much as look at Uday Hussein cross-eyed, or have a prettier girlfriend than he?
Actually, it sounds like it's an enormous improvement over Iraq before the war. Plenty of goods in the stores, throngs of people searching for opportunity and finding it, computers and Internet access readily available. And, of course, nobody's going to shoot you for not having your picture of Saddam up.
Sure, people are skeptical about the Americans, and life isn't perfect, but it's paradise compared to life under Saddam.
Conservative columnist Mark Steyn visited and found one telling detail: The UN's gigantic refugee camps aren't being used. Nobody's fleeing the country. People may not love America, but they see potential in the society America has freed.
I think we did a great thing.
To tell the truth, I'd love to visit and see what it's really like over there. Unfortunately, neither Travelocity nor Orbitz advertise flights. I guess we'll know things are truly normal when they do.
So I guess I shouldn't be allowed to own my house (which I just bought, by the way).
Who owns it then, if it is not the State?
If I am one of these workers, and I work and slave for years and years so I can own my own factory, should I not have the freedom to buy it?
The way I see it is that capitalism is the freeest economic system around, because in time anyone can become a capitalist, owning their own show. I don't want to give up that freedom in exchange for being a "worker" for the rest of my life, with no possibility of escape.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a tablet PC review which might be interesting in this context.
Summary: for anything other than truly unique situations, it's not worth it.
D
I think the F-16 is like a race car and a commercial jet is like a bus. The race car goes at the highest speed but is horribly expensive to run (requiring several man hours per hour on the road), while the bus can run for a long time between services.
Even the commercial jet requires a lot of maintenance per trip, but nothing like the Hornet.
That's my informed guess, and I'd say it's a good one based on the other replies.
D
All that aside, how much would it cost, in terms of fuel and maintenance, to get it in the air?
I asked someone at an airshow this question, and they said a "mission" cost between $100k (just to take off and land) to $1m (to do a lot more than take off and land).
It might be substantially more expensive than that for a private person who doesn't have the huge infrastructure needed to maintain it.
I have to agree with the other poster on this thread - Larry Ellison is likely to be a seller. Or a buyer. He's one of the few people in the world who could actually afford to run it on a regular basis.
Bob Lutz is another possibility, but I don't know if he's rich enough.
D
Doing it myself produces the best ease of use since I can simplify things to the point that every feature that exists is there because someone really needed it.
The custom software I write is a lot simpler than a typical accounting application, and much easier to use because it's far less complex.
My personal use of computers includes heavy use of motion video software and graphics, all of which is available in massive profusion on the Mac. There are more applications of this type available on the PC, but all the best ones are on the Mac.
That's not so true of accounting software, but it still exists on the Mac - there are just not the overwhelming number of choices you see in the PC world.
I'd take the lack of software in exchange for the lack of malware any day, since the malware decreases productivity so much and is almost impossible to get rid of.
At the end of the day, I think perceived cost and the herd instinct (Jenny uses a PC, so I should too) are the main things that cause people to select PCs over Macs.
D
My point was that you pay for this with productivity-killing applications like Hotbar and Klez, both of which exist and are viable only on the PC.
To me, the Mac is a happy medium. In the PC world you have lots of software and malware. On the Mac, you have lots of software, including Office, but next to no malware. On Linux, I think you actually have more malware (but still not much), and for Office you have only "compatible" near-clones of Office which in my experience are not really compatible.
I would say there are few software needs that cannot be met with a Mac in some way or the other. What I need, and I don't have, I simply write myself.
I suppose not everyone has that option, but it works for me.
D
I wonder if JWZ ever tried MacOS X. The ideas behind it seem like a very nice answer to his "The X-Windows Disaster" chapter.
I guess he did - I read a few of his comments where he apparently got his xscreensaver application to work, and he mentioned in a few places that he was thinking of switching.
I wonder if he ever did, and what sort of problems he found.
D
You're right! There's no version of HotBar for the Mac. For some strange reason, the Klez worm has yet to sprout a Mac version. How can my users live without these vital applications?
But at my company, all people do is read email, write email, browse the web (including use of my custom web application), and create documents. Maybe 10% of our employees use a Windows-based accounting package my custom web application manipulates.
Since the Mac supports Microsoft Office, there's nothing our people don't do that couldn't be done with a Mac.
Most people don't need, use or want a huge amount of software.
Unless they have a HotBar addiction, that is.
D
Sadly, as a mere peon in death, I wasn't able to find out. They don't let us near the big guys.
:-)
Hope that helps
D
I think this is one of the most interesting problems. Many users love their Hotbar and ever-changing desktops, even when I explain that it's what's making their computers run at the speed of a drugged slug.
I have one particular user, a cute girl, who just loves her Hotbar. "It's pretty!" she gushes. And of course her desktop picture is filled with Pink, her favourite colour.
I have been quite surprised how much people get attached to these things. As someone who doesn't even switch away from the default MacOS X desktop theme (it's tasteful!), I find them absolutely bewildering
But since they love their Hotbars, I leave them alone, because above all, I want my users to be happy. Happy users are productive users. And so on.
But why are people addicted to things as silly as ever-changing resource-killing screensavers, and Hotbar?
I'd love to know.
D
Have you tried Lindows?
That would seem to be exactly what you're suggesting.
I haven't tried it myself (being a died in the wool Mac guy nowadays), but it would definitely be worth a look.
D
Of course that's why they won't do it. If they fire someone's favourite salesperson, and she goes to Gucci, that customer is now lost to Gucci.
However, the RFID tags will help the salesperson remember, and will help a salesperson in a different branch know what the first salesperson did. In that situation, it simply helps great salespeople give better service.
D
Not quite. If my memory serves, with Shake they kept the SGI and Linux versions and dumped the Windows version. They also halved the price of the MacOS X version, so you could get it and a "free" fully loaded G5 for less than the cost of a copy of the software alone for the other platforms.
I hope they do buy it. They've done amazing things with Final Cut Pro, and if they halved the price of Maya, I just might buy it even just to dabble with it.
D
In a narrow sense, this is of course true, but I don't think it pays to be that negative.
If we show appreciation to them for doing the right thing, they may well keep on doing it. I buy IBM server hardware explicitly because they support Linux development.
The great thing about capitalism is that we can help out companies friendly to us by buying their products, and we can hurt those who are not our friends by not buying theirs.
Easier to have a champion who wants to keep being one than to find another.
D
IBM is also making substantial contributions to Linux, and defending it against the bizarre SCO assault. They're a pretty useful lesson now in how to change with the times.
They're spending quite a bit of money doing the right thing, and they should be applauded for it.
D
You are correct. But if the iTunes music store remains the most popular outlet for legal downloadable music, they have enormous leverage.
A better comparison might be between book publishers and Borders or Barnes & Noble. Getting a book prominently shown on those shelves can mean success; having it absent can mean failure. So of course those chains get the best terms.
Same with iTunes. If it becomes a distribution choke point for music, Jobs will do just fine when he renegotiates the contract.
D
You are right. The iPod presently allows him to subsidize his music store, to the benefit of all parties involved. If his strategy works, most other music stores will go out of business due to the unsustainable business model, and then he'll go back to the labels.
For an idea of how this will work, consider his contract with Disney over Pixar. Disney got 50% of revenues, got sequel rights, got merchandising rights and all sorts of other stuff.
When he signs a new distribition contract, odds are that the new distributor will get 10% of revenues, no sequel rights and merchandising rights split.
That's the difference between a venture capital investment that's basically a gamble on everyone's part, and the closest thing to a sure thing.
I'm sure his negotiations to renew iTunes Music Store contracts will be very similar, and he will get similar results: A bigger share of the pie in return for a proven success.
I don't think anyone has ever accused Steve Jobs of being a dummy.
Or a poor negotiator.
D
the exact amount will not be displayed until the song has been purchased.
If you want to know why people feel so much anger over DRM, this pretty much says it all.
What justification is there for not disclosing the terms of sale until you've already sold?
D
You know, I don't mind giving them the information. They're giving me free articles from the newspaper, which costs them a bundle to provide.
What I DO mind is having to remember a user name and password to get into the site.
For some reason, probably thanks to excessive code complexity or checks, the overwhelming majority of online sites don't seem to save my registration information in a long-running cookie. So as soon as I leave the site and forget my user name and password, I'm locked out.
That's such a royal pain that I do my best to avoid such sites.
D
In our current society, is there any kid who has NOT been exposed to this sort of thing?
I don't particularly like it, but it's the way our culture works right now, and there's not a lot we can do to change it.
That being said, I read the article and loved it, because it encapsulated exactly what I hated about school. In English class, you are asked to interpret what others have written, not create your own stuff. I wanted so badly to create my own material in class, rather than reading other people's stuff and critiquing it.
In all my years of English, there was only one year of creative writing, and I think that's a darn shame. People should learn to create their own stuff, not write boring essays nobody would ever want to read again.
How does that help you do anything but write more boring essays?
The way we teach English makes it so much less interesting and absorbing than it should be. I think of this phenomenon as a way to reverse that and get people interested in writing, which I think is extremely cool.
D
since in the case of pretty much every version of Windows, the box requirements are simply to run the operating system, and you'll need a much faster PC with a lot more RAM to actually run today's applications without wincing - and I'm referring to "simple" word processing and spreadsheets, not games.
:-).
I think you could help answer your own question by trying the experiment of buying the game and checking out how well it works on your system. Then let us know, since you've made us curious
That being said, the odds are pretty good that more features mean more code bloat, which mean the need for faster processors and more memory. But since game performance has to be high, and since game customers are likely to complain about poor performance, the fudge factors used to determine performance specifications are probably a lot different from what Microsoft uses for Windows.
To put this in perspective, consider Windows 2000, which ran fine on a 500mhz Celeron with 64MB RAM. Windows XP struggles on a 1.2ghz Celeron with 128MB RAM, and I know this because we have several of both systems. The 500mhz Windows 2000 system will actually outperform the XP box on a clean installation.
What's strange about this, of course, is that there are few substantiative differences between 2000 and XP. There's more eye candy in XP and that's about it. So think about this: A little extra eye candy and you've worse than halved the performance.
Since games are all about eye candy nowadays, that might be a good start at explaining the situation.
Hope that helps.
D
The users at my company can't stand the Windows-based accounting system we have for exactly the reasons you cite. It's not designed to be user-friendly.
I don't think there's a critical mass of users who favour one accounting system or another. In my experience, virtually all of them are pretty user-unfriendly, no matter what platform they use. In fact, when we switched from DOS to Windows, productivity plummented because data entry in the new system was clunky and over-dependent on the mouse.
As long as your company's too big for QuickBooks, you're pretty much messed up in training terms no matter what accounting system you use.
In my company, I wrote a web-based CRM system that includes order entry specialized to how my company works, and that feeds into the accounting system for invoicing. This works great and minimizes training since the web-based system is very easy to use.
D
If this is an open-source project, why not check out the source code and see if you can hire someone to change the date entry module?
If there's already a centralized routine they use to parse dates, it might only be a few hours' work. If they parse dates throughout the program, changing all the major screens that deal with dates isn't going to take that long. Write a single function to do it, put it in the common functions area, and then call it every time dates are entered. Dull to implement, but fast and oh-so-useful.
Hope that helps.
D
Do you really like the notion of a country where you can be tortured and killed if you as much as look at Uday Hussein cross-eyed, or have a prettier girlfriend than he?
D
Actually, it sounds like it's an enormous improvement over Iraq before the war. Plenty of goods in the stores, throngs of people searching for opportunity and finding it, computers and Internet access readily available. And, of course, nobody's going to shoot you for not having your picture of Saddam up.
Sure, people are skeptical about the Americans, and life isn't perfect, but it's paradise compared to life under Saddam.
Conservative columnist Mark Steyn visited and found one telling detail: The UN's gigantic refugee camps aren't being used. Nobody's fleeing the country. People may not love America, but they see potential in the society America has freed.
I think we did a great thing.
To tell the truth, I'd love to visit and see what it's really like over there. Unfortunately, neither Travelocity nor Orbitz advertise flights. I guess we'll know things are truly normal when they do.
D
So I guess I shouldn't be allowed to own my house (which I just bought, by the way).
Who owns it then, if it is not the State?
If I am one of these workers, and I work and slave for years and years so I can own my own factory, should I not have the freedom to buy it?
The way I see it is that capitalism is the freeest economic system around, because in time anyone can become a capitalist, owning their own show. I don't want to give up that freedom in exchange for being a "worker" for the rest of my life, with no possibility of escape.
D