First, I agree with the grandparent that this seems a little chintzy, particularly the "if we like your idea, we give you a six month subscription to the online edition". Surely at least a 12 month subscription to the print and online editions would be warranted? I would hope my submitted idea would be worth a hundred and ten bucks at least, not $39.95.
I actually think the idea itself is good. What they're trying to do is prevent the stale thinking caused by a bunch of like-minded toffs(*) in a room all exposed to the same ideas. So they invite us to send in our ideas, and they'll take a look. I don't see that as being a bad strategy at all. They figure that they need to be exposed to people unlike them.
Pearson, the group that I believe still runs the Economist, had an interesting foray into movie production. Called Goldcrest, it was completely different from their normal business, and they got into it more or less by accident. Goldcrest was run on a shoestring by a brilliant chief executive, Jake Eberts. Because of Pearson's corporate culture, they were unwilling to pay him what he was worth, and so he reluctantly left (to an extremely high level of success in his own production company).
His successor ran Goldcrest straight into the ground, with decisions that looked bad even at the time they were made. Of coure the subsequent losses were many times Eberts' salary demands. (This is all told in an extremely well-written book, 'My Indecision is Final', which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the world of film finance).
I think Pearson would rather not make similar mistakes in online publishing, and that's why they're soliciting outside input. A very good idea, even if combing through the submissions will take a fair amount of time.
One thing that helps them is that The Economist is a magazine with an unusually high level of intelligence and so the readers are pretty intelligent. I would think most of the submissions would be of high quality and worth reading.
But a six month subscription? To the online edition?
That kind of prize is simply not worthy of The Economist. Surely as a free-market publication they should appreciate our value better?
D
(*) This is a Britsh term for upscale, well-educated people, like Economist employees.
What I was seeking to prove was that a requirement to get a TIFF to a news agency would not be a huge hardship as long as the RAW file existed. So if you have a camera incapable of shooting TIFF, you can use Adobe's or Apple's software to automatically convert the RAW file to TIFF.
Is that not pretty much the same as shooting TIFF in the first place, except that you're having Adobe or Apple's software doing the conversion instead of the camera's, and you have more control over the process?
I agree that pro photographers might want to do the conversion with more control. In fact, they would most likely also do similar processing to the TIFF. In fact, starting with RAW gives quite a few more tweaking options and could be a competitive advantage in getting better quality photographs to the news agency.
Isn't it trivial to generate a TIFF from RAW using Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom or the software that came with the camera?
As for Microsoft's format, if it's not freely usable I don't see it taking off, and others have said it can't be used in GPL style projects, so it's clearly not for me.
It might be nice to have a format that compressed better than JPEG and had higher quality. Does JPEG-2000 render in web browsers?
I do miss Fry's. If you hate having Frys around and being able to buy the most bizarre stuff at your fingertips, consider how barren the shopping world would be without it. They obviously are lacking in some areas, but their selection certainly beats the competition easily.
Of course if you want service, the Apple Retail Stores are where to get it. But of course if you don't want an Apple computer that's not terribly helpful.
If you live in Los Angeles, get your groceries at Gelson's. The people there are very friendly, know their stuff, and you never have to stand in line.
It's about 10% more expensive than Ralphs (the mainstream market there), but worth the extra cash for the better shopping experience.
I'm sure there are similar stores in Silicon Valley too, but I don't know of them.
And if you don't live in one of those places, I don't like Whole Foods as much as Gelson's - Gelson's is less absurdly expensive - but you still do get quality service.
I don't know if I'd say it's absurd. Hardware is still being sold, by Dell and others, that does not have the memory or graphics card power to run Aero Glass properly. I have a six month old computer that will never upgrade to Vista, because it can't run any more than Basic without a tiresome card upgrade. The card upgrade + a Windows Vista upgrade combined would cost about as much as a new computer.
You bought a computer in 2003 that had a massive graphics card for the time, that I'll bet alone cost more than the XP computer on my desk. Granted, I'm an Apple user and that's not my main computer, but it still exists, functions and browses the web successfully. You should understand that unless you're among Slashdotters, you're a tiny minority for buying such a system when it was very expensive.
Rest assured that average users don't buy what you bought. That's nothing negative towards you personally; I spend similar amounts on my personal hardware. But you should not minimize the actual impact of the Vista GPU and memory requirements on typical users.
The MacOS X types will be lined up around the block and across the street to buy Leopard... and an iPhone(tm) to go with it.
The Linux people will install their version of Umbu... um... however you spell it... minutes after it hits the mirrors.
Unfortunately, the Microsoft people have learned from bitter experience that a Microsoft upgrade means misery. And most Microsoft people are pragmatic; they use it for their job, and know upgrades will interfere with things while they get up to speed.
So Microsoft people don't act like computer enthusiasts, because they are not enthusiasts and think the WOW! will turn into WAHHH! faster than you can count.
Well, if there were no Microsoft, Apple still would have developed the Apple II, which used a homegrown version of Basic. And it seems likely that Steve Jobs still would have found Xerox Parc and therefore we would still have our current interfaces.
It's intresting to note how different the world would have been even at the beginning, since Radio Shack, Apple (Applesoft) and just about everyone else save Commodore used a Microsoft Basic as an integral component of their systems.
I think that without Microsoft, IBM would have built a closed and corporate-style computer that would have probably still been popular. Apple still would have had the Mac. There would still be CP/M machines but I doubt Gary Kildall had the killer vision needed to become Microsoft on his own.
I wonder if the big workstation companies like Sun or SGI would have built down their systems to a mass market price point in the absence of Microsoft. If so, that probably would have been the most open major platform. And then eventually open source BSD Unix would have leant itself to mass-market opportunities.
I think Commodore's Basic was homegrown, so they would have still existed. They did do well as a mass market company until Microsoft swept them away.
Just a few random observations. In the end, I think someone would have spotted the mass market computing opportunity and ran with it, and we'd probably have computers at similar price points to what we have today. That much, I think, was inevitable. What they'd be like is anybody's guess.
Doesn't Superfetch work like the cache on other operating systems, where memory used by the cache is automatically taken back by applications when they request it?
If it doesn't work that way, it sounds like a huge step backwards to me.
I wonder if Vista's ReadyBoost feature, which lets you use compact flash memory as RAM, are hard on the memory. I know that CF cards have a finite lifespan and it might be a huge strain to use them as swap or cache.
Are there any reports about device lifespan with that type of setup? It feels very risky to me but I'd be curious to hear other opinions.
It seems to me that how our world looks affects how we respond to it. Otherwise we would not spend billions of dollars making our houses and shopping centers look aesthetically appealing.
I happen to love the kind of light Halogen lights create and think compact florescents are hideous. Halogen lights are not quite as efficient as compact florescents but they're more efficient than incandescents. They create a different quality of light that I really love.
I visited a restaurant where they replaced incandescent lights with CF fixtures and they look just plain awful.
This type of social control just doesn't sit well with me at all. I think people should have the right to light their house as they want. If you want me to switch to a different kind of light, you should have to persuade me to do it, not ban what is to me a cherished source of light and warmth.
I'm sure the planet will muddle through no matter what we do. Over the years, I have seen environmentalist after environmentalist predict apocalypse after apocalypse that has never arrived. I think these predictions give them money and attention they need, making them no better than any other special interest.
They'll pry my incandecent and halogen bulbs from my cold, dead fingers.
Of course if they were on when I had them in my fingers that would be quite an ouch:-(.
Alas, as you probably know, most developers are not artists. I'm a developer at heart who's trying to keep control over the site, and avoid spending money I don't have by designing it myself.
The big problem I have, though, is that most sites I see created by designers seem to follow the same rather boring mold. Every site developed in the last year or two looks just like every other site developed in the last year or two.
I'd appreciate knowing what it is that creates such a negative reaction to what I've produced. It's an effort to be unique and stand out from the crowd. Are there ways you would suggest to improve it without making it bland?
I'd appreciate your ideas and feedback. You can send it to my email, david@amazing.com if you'd like. Please be sure to use a subject like Ruby or Slashdot so I catch it from all the spam i get.
Ruby and Ruby on Rails seem to appeal largely to Mac users. The Mac-only textmate text editor is extremely well integrated with Ruby and Rails, and I believe almost all the principal developers of Rails work on Macs. Apple includes Ruby in their standard OS distribution.
I think the "it just works" philosophy of the Mac has a lot in common with the similar philosophy of Ruby and Rails. So if you are attracted to Rails you are likely to be attracted to Apple products and vice versa.
Since Ruby adoption is largely driven by Ruby on Rails, i strongly suspect this Mac bias for the client side of computing is a major reason Ruby for Windows is not highly developed.
(Note: I'm a Mac user and amazing.com was developed (and is being developed) using Ruby on Rails).
I thought about this for a long time, and I'm not sure it's that great an idea.
99 times out of 100, if I had a Tesla Roadster (the only currently practical electric car[*]), I would charge it overnight, when electricity rates are low, and use it during the day. Then I would park it and the charging cycle begins again. It requires no infrastructure beyond the cost of the charger, which I think is about $3,500. If I was really eco-friendly I would put solar panels on the roof of my house, and add storage batteries to the house to capture the solar energy as it is generated. This would keep my Tesla charged using solar power. This would only work in a warm climate, of course, but you can bet that if I were in a position to afford a Tesla, I would be living in a warm climate.
If instead of that, I had to do a lobotomy on my car, replacing its most expensive single component, every time I needed to charge, I would bet this would be a very expensive process. The refueling station, after all, would have to inventory battery packs costing, at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars each, which are leased and not sold. That doesn't strike me as a financially viable business model.
Let's say I spent the summer in New York and the winter in Key West. (Many wealthy New Yorkers do this). I would make a very, very long trek down to Key West every winter, and I would have to stop for a battery exchange about every 250 miles. It would take just tremendous infrastructure to be able to rely on that, since during a trip down to Florida, you go through a lot of parts of the country with few inhabitants and very, very few affluent ones capable of buying Tesla roadsters. If they existed, they would have to charge me highway robbery prices for the amps I would need.
And yet this is a road trip people make; I myself went from Pittsburgh down to Miami about a month ago and of course had no problem finding premium unleaded fuel for my Mercedes S500 sedan.
So in the end, it seems to me that the best solution for me as a hypothetical rich New Yorker is to have my Tesla Roadster carried on a flatbed towtruck down to the Keys. I can then fly via my private jet[**] to Key West International Airport and therefore emit all the carbon dioxide I have so carefully saved emitting by driving a Tesla... and then some.
(Yes, I am laughing at the absurdity of this. But then again, I would buy a Tesla because I love the concept of a better car, not because I really care about global warming.)
D
[*] No, please, I do not want a car with a top speed of 25mph authorized for roads with speed limits up to 35. What do you want to do, get me killed?
[**] Of course if I could afford a Tesla Roadster, again, the likelihood of me affording a private jet, at least on a timeshare basis, is pretty high.
Europeans will pass laws to protect the business of the gas stations. They are more afraid of the destructive impact of new technology than its promise.
Exxon et al cannot prevent people from buying electric cars. If the electric product is superior, it will be used.
I highly recommend the Tesla Motors web site - http://www.teslamotors.com/ as an example of a compelling electric car that's already sold out its production for the next year - at $100k a pop. They plan to extend their line to cheaper vehicles in the next couple of years.
Reading of their blog and comments are especially recommended.
A nice thought in theory, but note some interesting points:
- This would require completely standardized battery technology - the battery you get would have to be of the same type you gave them. Since battery technology is under rapid development and change, I don't see this working at all. The batteries in a Tesla Roadster cost about $50k and i'm sure next year's batteries will be different (and substantially improved) from this year's.
- Battery wear would be a concern. How would the quality of my replacement battery pack be guaranteed? And how would they deal with people who tried to swap their almost worn battery? It sounds too risky to me on both sides.
A site i like very much, The Truth About Cars, thought about charging a subscription for use but realized it would cut down traffic enormously and make themselves a less useful resource in the end. I had a long discussion with the very nice fellow who runs the site and he considered ads to be a solution of last resort because they would give advertisers power over him and eventually they would wind up influencing what was written.
I pointed out to him that adding Google text ads would in no way do this, because the transaction is isolated from the site's owner. Effectively, Google text ads duplicate the well known concept of an iron wall between the news and commercial considerations, since there is no link between the advertisers and the people creating the publication.
He didn't seem to like that argument at the time but a few weeks later I noticed that he has in fact put Google text ads up, and I have to assume they are working since he has not brought up the subscriptions idea since.
I see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't do the same thing. I know that I would occasionally click on relevant text ads, and really the site is a monetizer's dream because it's easy to match article content to advertising.
If this was done, I think it might be possible to pay prominent Wikipedia contributors and editors salaries out of the money pool generated by the ads, and that would enable more people to work on it full time, thus adding to the site's professionalism and greatly improving the response to vandalism others have mentioned.
To me it seems like a win-win because the ads are not distracting, and are effective for both Wikipedia and its advertisers.
I like the new ribbon. I think it's a nice idea and from what I can see it's executed pretty well.
Vista, on the other hand, is hugely expensive, both in terms of upgrade costs and hardware costs required to make the change.
On the other hand, new PC sales are up 67% thanks to pent-up demand for new PCs. That's pretty good.
I just wonder how many of those PCs will be able to run Aero. I've already noticed rumblings from people disappointed that their brand new computers won't do the advertised tricks.
Yes, if you wade through the marketing materials, you can find out what you need to run Aero. But it seems to have been made almost deliberately difficult to do this. Microsoft is going to be able to say, "Well, we did tell you" but I really don't think the average consumer has a clue what he's being told and why.
If you ask me, Microsoft sacrificed short term expediency for huge long-term pain and loss of trust.
Essentially, Microsoft seems to have committed a severe blunder.
They decided to require fancy graphics cards to run the best version of Vista. This is because Vista offloads the graphics performance from the CPU to the card. This also means that the extremely common "shared memory" graphics subsystems are unusable with the modern Vista, making a lot of strong-selling hardware obsolete overnight. This is the same hardware that makes the $299 PC possible, so you can probably tell how happy this makes hardware vendors.
The funny thing is that if you have a 400mhz Titanium PowerBook you get those effects and they run a little slowly but just fine overall. Surely the right thing to do with a modern 3.2ghz PC would be to make the effects run off the CPU unless the graphics card was capable, like Apple does with the MacOS?
I have to guess that Microsoft really wanted to sell video cards, but not even the video card makers seem too happy about this - early reports indicate that driver support still seems a bit shaky.
So why does the system essentially require 1gb RAM to run applications, when 512mb is ample for XP? It's hard to believe that much requested features like user account control and trying to protect "premium content" would double the requirements. And using your flash card to increase available RAM seems like an act of desperation.
My best guess is that Aero Glass is really piggish for some reason, but that doesn't explain why even Vista Basic has similar memory requirements...
Maybe some other Slashdotters can tell you about that, but hopefully at least I've clarified the video issue a bit.
A third party now offers a pretty cool Apple tablet. They take a Macbook and add a tablet screen. Costs about the same as a MacBook Pro, but I can understand the level of difficulty involved.
Intriguingly enough, I believe there are no software additions. Apple has tablet software built into MacOS X. You can use it if you buy a Wacom tablet and hook it up to your Mac.
The options may have been legal. There is a distinct possibility that they were agreed to through an earlier contract. Stock option backdating is also legal if disclosed and I really don't think Pixar's share price would have been materially impacted even if there was a flaw in the disclosures.
And if that is so, this just isn't something I can get excited by. I can be excited by material differences but not by rounding errors.
The amount in question was approximately $6.8 million. Pixar was sold for 1,000 times that amount. No shareholder is even going to notice that rounding error in a spectacular return that benefitted everyone.
I don't think anyone wants Steve Jobs fired from Apple or John Lassater fired from Disney/Pixar. Both are supremely talented individuals who work very hard to earn their money, and who have earned many times the disputed amounts for their shareholders, fair and square.
It bothers me that so much time is being wasted on what seems to me like a complete non-issue that isn't worth even 1% of the energy spent on it.
What I'm really opposing is the mentality that says "global warming is bad! Run for the hills! Blow up everyone's SUV!".
I'm saying, gee, really I think a lot of people would like warmer winters better, so why are we so upset about the world warming up? Could we not do things to mitigate the impacts on areas this would damage, and then help them and enjoy the genuine advantages warming obviously has?
My proposal to ship the artic ice pack down to the Middle East, where it could do some good, was a joke... but one designed to make you think. I don't know enough to know whether my idea would be feasible. But gee, what a cool idea, really. We have one place with a surplus of water and another place with a shortage. People have been sending boats around the world, often in very difficult situations, to adjust those situations for centuries... and making piles of money at it, too. Why should this be any different?
Global warming, then, should inherently create opportunities as well as problems. By looking only at the bad side of it, you miss the full truth. Will global warming benefit us or make us worse off? It seems intuitively that, since (as my fellow poster has said) the temperature increases are mainly in during winter in areas that could use them, global warming would be a definite positive development for humankind.
To just bring up the negatives, without trying to balance negatives and positives, scientists and journalists are being irresponsible in my opinion. I would like to see a more balanced picture including both costs and benefits. I suspect that if that was computed, we would find that global warming is more or less a wash overall, and spending trillions of dollars to prevent it would be an enormous waste of resources.
Divert a small portion of those resources to buy out the people who will be harmed strikes me as a far better solution than trying to prevent global warming.
Thanks for your response to the parent. i didn't have research to back up what i'd vaguely remembered, which made my message seem more mushy than it really deserved to be.
You've probably read Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, which makes a similar point. From all the evidence I've seen, I don't think it's possible to stop global warming and so we had might as well make the most of it.
Will Florida coastline values really decline that much? Seems to me temperatures will increase somewhat but true haters of the cold are still going to want to stay in Florida for the winter. (That paper was a bit too technical and dense for me to follow well, so please correct me if I'm wrong).
As long as we have rich people inclined to spend more time in Palm Beach during the winter than NYC, we have a pretty powerful group of people who will want to do something about sea levels, thus saving Florida. Are there any technologically viable ways to prevent sea level increases? There's a lot of money involved down there.
Personally, I'd like to see warmer temperatures AND save Palm Beach:-).
It's Richard Branson's legendary flair for publicity.
He's identified a hot-button issue and knows that people are going to listen to him because of it
Don't knock it. It works and it might even cause some good things to happen.
We're talking about him, no?
Incidentally, I still think we could use some global warming here in the Northeast. Personally if the temperature was up by 50 or so degrees from where it is today, you would not see me complaining.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to "suffer" through warm winters and compensate those who are adversely impacted by global warming than it would be to consider it a problem and cool down the planet?
Here's my plan. We send oil tankers up to the Arctic Circle to grab polar ice before it melts and send it down to Saudi Arabia for irrigation. We get funding from Dubai's real estate developers, who want to promote their latest expensive subdivision with an "Arctic Lake" theme.
In no time at all, the Middle East is green and beautiful, and you should see Dubai's new hotel with its private ocean -- it's spectacular! And maybe even grumpy middle eastern Islamists will look at all this new tropcial beauty and decide opening up a new restaurant is a surer thing than a suicide bomb.
Really, is that any more absurd than halting the world's industrial development in return for colder temperatures that will make the bulk of the industrial world a far worse place to live than it would be if we did nothing?
D
PS Global warming might kill some endangered cold weather species but for every cold weather species that dies there are thousands of warm weather creatures who would thrive and find new homes. Do scientists feel there's some special value to being cold and miserable?
I'm not going to defend Steve for suing the bloggers. That was wrong, and dumb. At the same time, though, it did wind up boosting the bloggers' image. They are journalists now, by honorable precedent, which is a ruling many are quite deservedly proud of.
The iPhone trademark was essentially dead and buried by Cisco, whose laughable efforts to ressurect it were pretty transparent. Come on, sticking a label on a box and sending it to the Trademark office? Lame.
I don't see Steve trying to get John Lassater a few million more bucks through monkeying around with stock option timing worrying a lot of people. Anyone familiar with the history of Pixar knows John deserves every penny and then some.
Microsoft ran into a similar stock options situation earlier and everyone yawned.
Enron's founders deserved jail because they destroyed a lot of people's investments in their company by concealing material facts. Nobody looking at the fate of Apple or Pixar would think the same of Steve jobs et al.
I think it's at least somewhat interesting to note that this is in fact what Microsoft does when you rip a CD to WMA using their software.
Your point is well taken, but Steve is thinking about his overall music store experience, and I think in that context he's basically thinking as I say in my original message.
What I do think they care about is consistency of user experience. They believe, and I think they are right to do so, that having different types of music with different usage rights confuses customers. One reason I hear for the failure of WMA is that you don't know what you can do with the file unless you read the specific license agreement for it. That alienates customers, and I think not alienating customers is what really separates iTunes from the other services.
It also might hurt their ability to negotiate with the labels on other matters ("If you can make this change for such and such a label, well, you can make this higher price or worse term or whatever for us").
Slashdot Mirror
First, I agree with the grandparent that this seems a little chintzy, particularly the "if we like your idea, we give you a six month subscription to the online edition". Surely at least a 12 month subscription to the print and online editions would be warranted? I would hope my submitted idea would be worth a hundred and ten bucks at least, not $39.95.
I actually think the idea itself is good. What they're trying to do is prevent the stale thinking caused by a bunch of like-minded toffs(*) in a room all exposed to the same ideas. So they invite us to send in our ideas, and they'll take a look. I don't see that as being a bad strategy at all. They figure that they need to be exposed to people unlike them.
Pearson, the group that I believe still runs the Economist, had an interesting foray into movie production. Called Goldcrest, it was completely different from their normal business, and they got into it more or less by accident. Goldcrest was run on a shoestring by a brilliant chief executive, Jake Eberts. Because of Pearson's corporate culture, they were unwilling to pay him what he was worth, and so he reluctantly left (to an extremely high level of success in his own production company).
His successor ran Goldcrest straight into the ground, with decisions that looked bad even at the time they were made. Of coure the subsequent losses were many times Eberts' salary demands. (This is all told in an extremely well-written book, 'My Indecision is Final', which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the world of film finance).
I think Pearson would rather not make similar mistakes in online publishing, and that's why they're soliciting outside input. A very good idea, even if combing through the submissions will take a fair amount of time.
One thing that helps them is that The Economist is a magazine with an unusually high level of intelligence and so the readers are pretty intelligent. I would think most of the submissions would be of high quality and worth reading.
But a six month subscription? To the online edition?
That kind of prize is simply not worthy of The Economist. Surely as a free-market publication they should appreciate our value better?
D
(*) This is a Britsh term for upscale, well-educated people, like Economist employees.
What I was seeking to prove was that a requirement to get a TIFF to a news agency would not be a huge hardship as long as the RAW file existed. So if you have a camera incapable of shooting TIFF, you can use Adobe's or Apple's software to automatically convert the RAW file to TIFF.
Is that not pretty much the same as shooting TIFF in the first place, except that you're having Adobe or Apple's software doing the conversion instead of the camera's, and you have more control over the process?
I agree that pro photographers might want to do the conversion with more control. In fact, they would most likely also do similar processing to the TIFF. In fact, starting with RAW gives quite a few more tweaking options and could be a competitive advantage in getting better quality photographs to the news agency.
Did I miss something?
D
Isn't it trivial to generate a TIFF from RAW using Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom or the software that came with the camera?
As for Microsoft's format, if it's not freely usable I don't see it taking off, and others have said it can't be used in GPL style projects, so it's clearly not for me.
It might be nice to have a format that compressed better than JPEG and had higher quality. Does JPEG-2000 render in web browsers?
D
I do miss Fry's. If you hate having Frys around and being able to buy the most bizarre stuff at your fingertips, consider how barren the shopping world would be without it. They obviously are lacking in some areas, but their selection certainly beats the competition easily.
Of course if you want service, the Apple Retail Stores are where to get it. But of course if you don't want an Apple computer that's not terribly helpful.
If you live in Los Angeles, get your groceries at Gelson's. The people there are very friendly, know their stuff, and you never have to stand in line.
It's about 10% more expensive than Ralphs (the mainstream market there), but worth the extra cash for the better shopping experience.
I'm sure there are similar stores in Silicon Valley too, but I don't know of them.
And if you don't live in one of those places, I don't like Whole Foods as much as Gelson's - Gelson's is less absurdly expensive - but you still do get quality service.
D
I don't know if I'd say it's absurd. Hardware is still being sold, by Dell and others, that does not have the memory or graphics card power to run Aero Glass properly. I have a six month old computer that will never upgrade to Vista, because it can't run any more than Basic without a tiresome card upgrade. The card upgrade + a Windows Vista upgrade combined would cost about as much as a new computer.
You bought a computer in 2003 that had a massive graphics card for the time, that I'll bet alone cost more than the XP computer on my desk. Granted, I'm an Apple user and that's not my main computer, but it still exists, functions and browses the web successfully. You should understand that unless you're among Slashdotters, you're a tiny minority for buying such a system when it was very expensive.
Rest assured that average users don't buy what you bought. That's nothing negative towards you personally; I spend similar amounts on my personal hardware. But you should not minimize the actual impact of the Vista GPU and memory requirements on typical users.
D
Most of us like change.
... and an iPhone(tm) to go with it.
... however you spell it ... minutes after it hits the mirrors.
The MacOS X types will be lined up around the block and across the street to buy Leopard
The Linux people will install their version of Umbu... um
Unfortunately, the Microsoft people have learned from bitter experience that a Microsoft upgrade means misery. And most Microsoft people are pragmatic; they use it for their job, and know upgrades will interfere with things while they get up to speed.
So Microsoft people don't act like computer enthusiasts, because they are not enthusiasts and think the WOW! will turn into WAHHH! faster than you can count.
D
Well, if there were no Microsoft, Apple still would have developed the Apple II, which used a homegrown version of Basic. And it seems likely that Steve Jobs still would have found Xerox Parc and therefore we would still have our current interfaces.
It's intresting to note how different the world would have been even at the beginning, since Radio Shack, Apple (Applesoft) and just about everyone else save Commodore used a Microsoft Basic as an integral component of their systems.
I think that without Microsoft, IBM would have built a closed and corporate-style computer that would have probably still been popular. Apple still would have had the Mac. There would still be CP/M machines but I doubt Gary Kildall had the killer vision needed to become Microsoft on his own.
I wonder if the big workstation companies like Sun or SGI would have built down their systems to a mass market price point in the absence of Microsoft. If so, that probably would have been the most open major platform. And then eventually open source BSD Unix would have leant itself to mass-market opportunities.
I think Commodore's Basic was homegrown, so they would have still existed. They did do well as a mass market company until Microsoft swept them away.
Just a few random observations. In the end, I think someone would have spotted the mass market computing opportunity and ran with it, and we'd probably have computers at similar price points to what we have today. That much, I think, was inevitable. What they'd be like is anybody's guess.
D
Doesn't Superfetch work like the cache on other operating systems, where memory used by the cache is automatically taken back by applications when they request it?
If it doesn't work that way, it sounds like a huge step backwards to me.
I wonder if Vista's ReadyBoost feature, which lets you use compact flash memory as RAM, are hard on the memory. I know that CF cards have a finite lifespan and it might be a huge strain to use them as swap or cache.
Are there any reports about device lifespan with that type of setup? It feels very risky to me but I'd be curious to hear other opinions.
D
Aesthetics is not a quality of life issue?
:-(.
It seems to me that how our world looks affects how we respond to it. Otherwise we would not spend billions of dollars making our houses and shopping centers look aesthetically appealing.
I happen to love the kind of light Halogen lights create and think compact florescents are hideous. Halogen lights are not quite as efficient as compact florescents but they're more efficient than incandescents. They create a different quality of light that I really love.
I visited a restaurant where they replaced incandescent lights with CF fixtures and they look just plain awful.
This type of social control just doesn't sit well with me at all. I think people should have the right to light their house as they want. If you want me to switch to a different kind of light, you should have to persuade me to do it, not ban what is to me a cherished source of light and warmth.
I'm sure the planet will muddle through no matter what we do. Over the years, I have seen environmentalist after environmentalist predict apocalypse after apocalypse that has never arrived. I think these predictions give them money and attention they need, making them no better than any other special interest.
They'll pry my incandecent and halogen bulbs from my cold, dead fingers.
Of course if they were on when I had them in my fingers that would be quite an ouch
D
Alas, as you probably know, most developers are not artists. I'm a developer at heart who's trying to keep control over the site, and avoid spending money I don't have by designing it myself.
The big problem I have, though, is that most sites I see created by designers seem to follow the same rather boring mold. Every site developed in the last year or two looks just like every other site developed in the last year or two.
I'd appreciate knowing what it is that creates such a negative reaction to what I've produced. It's an effort to be unique and stand out from the crowd. Are there ways you would suggest to improve it without making it bland?
I'd appreciate your ideas and feedback. You can send it to my email, david@amazing.com if you'd like. Please be sure to use a subject like Ruby or Slashdot so I catch it from all the spam i get.
Many thanks in advance.
D
Ruby and Ruby on Rails seem to appeal largely to Mac users. The Mac-only textmate text editor is extremely well integrated with Ruby and Rails, and I believe almost all the principal developers of Rails work on Macs. Apple includes Ruby in their standard OS distribution.
I think the "it just works" philosophy of the Mac has a lot in common with the similar philosophy of Ruby and Rails. So if you are attracted to Rails you are likely to be attracted to Apple products and vice versa.
Since Ruby adoption is largely driven by Ruby on Rails, i strongly suspect this Mac bias for the client side of computing is a major reason Ruby for Windows is not highly developed.
(Note: I'm a Mac user and amazing.com was developed (and is being developed) using Ruby on Rails).
D
I thought about this for a long time, and I'm not sure it's that great an idea.
... and then some.
99 times out of 100, if I had a Tesla Roadster (the only currently practical electric car[*]), I would charge it overnight, when electricity rates are low, and use it during the day. Then I would park it and the charging cycle begins again. It requires no infrastructure beyond the cost of the charger, which I think is about $3,500. If I was really eco-friendly I would put solar panels on the roof of my house, and add storage batteries to the house to capture the solar energy as it is generated. This would keep my Tesla charged using solar power. This would only work in a warm climate, of course, but you can bet that if I were in a position to afford a Tesla, I would be living in a warm climate.
If instead of that, I had to do a lobotomy on my car, replacing its most expensive single component, every time I needed to charge, I would bet this would be a very expensive process. The refueling station, after all, would have to inventory battery packs costing, at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars each, which are leased and not sold. That doesn't strike me as a financially viable business model.
Let's say I spent the summer in New York and the winter in Key West. (Many wealthy New Yorkers do this). I would make a very, very long trek down to Key West every winter, and I would have to stop for a battery exchange about every 250 miles. It would take just tremendous infrastructure to be able to rely on that, since during a trip down to Florida, you go through a lot of parts of the country with few inhabitants and very, very few affluent ones capable of buying Tesla roadsters. If they existed, they would have to charge me highway robbery prices for the amps I would need.
And yet this is a road trip people make; I myself went from Pittsburgh down to Miami about a month ago and of course had no problem finding premium unleaded fuel for my Mercedes S500 sedan.
So in the end, it seems to me that the best solution for me as a hypothetical rich New Yorker is to have my Tesla Roadster carried on a flatbed towtruck down to the Keys. I can then fly via my private jet[**] to Key West International Airport and therefore emit all the carbon dioxide I have so carefully saved emitting by driving a Tesla
(Yes, I am laughing at the absurdity of this. But then again, I would buy a Tesla because I love the concept of a better car, not because I really care about global warming.)
D
[*] No, please, I do not want a car with a top speed of 25mph authorized for roads with speed limits up to 35. What do you want to do, get me killed?
[**] Of course if I could afford a Tesla Roadster, again, the likelihood of me affording a private jet, at least on a timeshare basis, is pretty high.
Europeans will pass laws to protect the business of the gas stations. They are more afraid of the destructive impact of new technology than its promise.
Exxon et al cannot prevent people from buying electric cars. If the electric product is superior, it will be used.
I highly recommend the Tesla Motors web site - http://www.teslamotors.com/ as an example of a compelling electric car that's already sold out its production for the next year - at $100k a pop. They plan to extend their line to cheaper vehicles in the next couple of years.
Reading of their blog and comments are especially recommended.
D
A nice thought in theory, but note some interesting points:
- This would require completely standardized battery technology - the battery you get would have to be of the same type you gave them. Since battery technology is under rapid development and change, I don't see this working at all. The batteries in a Tesla Roadster cost about $50k and i'm sure next year's batteries will be different (and substantially improved) from this year's.
- Battery wear would be a concern. How would the quality of my replacement battery pack be guaranteed? And how would they deal with people who tried to swap their almost worn battery? It sounds too risky to me on both sides.
D
A site i like very much, The Truth About Cars, thought about charging a subscription for use but realized it would cut down traffic enormously and make themselves a less useful resource in the end. I had a long discussion with the very nice fellow who runs the site and he considered ads to be a solution of last resort because they would give advertisers power over him and eventually they would wind up influencing what was written.
I pointed out to him that adding Google text ads would in no way do this, because the transaction is isolated from the site's owner. Effectively, Google text ads duplicate the well known concept of an iron wall between the news and commercial considerations, since there is no link between the advertisers and the people creating the publication.
He didn't seem to like that argument at the time but a few weeks later I noticed that he has in fact put Google text ads up, and I have to assume they are working since he has not brought up the subscriptions idea since.
I see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't do the same thing. I know that I would occasionally click on relevant text ads, and really the site is a monetizer's dream because it's easy to match article content to advertising.
If this was done, I think it might be possible to pay prominent Wikipedia contributors and editors salaries out of the money pool generated by the ads, and that would enable more people to work on it full time, thus adding to the site's professionalism and greatly improving the response to vandalism others have mentioned.
To me it seems like a win-win because the ads are not distracting, and are effective for both Wikipedia and its advertisers.
D
I like the new ribbon. I think it's a nice idea and from what I can see it's executed pretty well.
Vista, on the other hand, is hugely expensive, both in terms of upgrade costs and hardware costs required to make the change.
On the other hand, new PC sales are up 67% thanks to pent-up demand for new PCs. That's pretty good.
I just wonder how many of those PCs will be able to run Aero. I've already noticed rumblings from people disappointed that their brand new computers won't do the advertised tricks.
Yes, if you wade through the marketing materials, you can find out what you need to run Aero. But it seems to have been made almost deliberately difficult to do this. Microsoft is going to be able to say, "Well, we did tell you" but I really don't think the average consumer has a clue what he's being told and why.
If you ask me, Microsoft sacrificed short term expediency for huge long-term pain and loss of trust.
But that's just me.
D
Essentially, Microsoft seems to have committed a severe blunder.
...
They decided to require fancy graphics cards to run the best version of Vista. This is because Vista offloads the graphics performance from the CPU to the card. This also means that the extremely common "shared memory" graphics subsystems are unusable with the modern Vista, making a lot of strong-selling hardware obsolete overnight. This is the same hardware that makes the $299 PC possible, so you can probably tell how happy this makes hardware vendors.
The funny thing is that if you have a 400mhz Titanium PowerBook you get those effects and they run a little slowly but just fine overall. Surely the right thing to do with a modern 3.2ghz PC would be to make the effects run off the CPU unless the graphics card was capable, like Apple does with the MacOS?
I have to guess that Microsoft really wanted to sell video cards, but not even the video card makers seem too happy about this - early reports indicate that driver support still seems a bit shaky.
So why does the system essentially require 1gb RAM to run applications, when 512mb is ample for XP? It's hard to believe that much requested features like user account control and trying to protect "premium content" would double the requirements. And using your flash card to increase available RAM seems like an act of desperation.
My best guess is that Aero Glass is really piggish for some reason, but that doesn't explain why even Vista Basic has similar memory requirements
Maybe some other Slashdotters can tell you about that, but hopefully at least I've clarified the video issue a bit.
D
A third party now offers a pretty cool Apple tablet. They take a Macbook and add a tablet screen. Costs about the same as a MacBook Pro, but I can understand the level of difficulty involved.
Intriguingly enough, I believe there are no software additions. Apple has tablet software built into MacOS X. You can use it if you buy a Wacom tablet and hook it up to your Mac.
D
The options may have been legal. There is a distinct possibility that they were agreed to through an earlier contract. Stock option backdating is also legal if disclosed and I really don't think Pixar's share price would have been materially impacted even if there was a flaw in the disclosures.
And if that is so, this just isn't something I can get excited by. I can be excited by material differences but not by rounding errors.
The amount in question was approximately $6.8 million. Pixar was sold for 1,000 times that amount. No shareholder is even going to notice that rounding error in a spectacular return that benefitted everyone.
I don't think anyone wants Steve Jobs fired from Apple or John Lassater fired from Disney/Pixar. Both are supremely talented individuals who work very hard to earn their money, and who have earned many times the disputed amounts for their shareholders, fair and square.
It bothers me that so much time is being wasted on what seems to me like a complete non-issue that isn't worth even 1% of the energy spent on it.
D
What I'm really opposing is the mentality that says "global warming is bad! Run for the hills! Blow up everyone's SUV!".
... but one designed to make you think. I don't know enough to know whether my idea would be feasible. But gee, what a cool idea, really. We have one place with a surplus of water and another place with a shortage. People have been sending boats around the world, often in very difficult situations, to adjust those situations for centuries ... and making piles of money at it, too. Why should this be any different?
I'm saying, gee, really I think a lot of people would like warmer winters better, so why are we so upset about the world warming up? Could we not do things to mitigate the impacts on areas this would damage, and then help them and enjoy the genuine advantages warming obviously has?
My proposal to ship the artic ice pack down to the Middle East, where it could do some good, was a joke
Global warming, then, should inherently create opportunities as well as problems. By looking only at the bad side of it, you miss the full truth. Will global warming benefit us or make us worse off? It seems intuitively that, since (as my fellow poster has said) the temperature increases are mainly in during winter in areas that could use them, global warming would be a definite positive development for humankind.
To just bring up the negatives, without trying to balance negatives and positives, scientists and journalists are being irresponsible in my opinion. I would like to see a more balanced picture including both costs and benefits. I suspect that if that was computed, we would find that global warming is more or less a wash overall, and spending trillions of dollars to prevent it would be an enormous waste of resources.
Divert a small portion of those resources to buy out the people who will be harmed strikes me as a far better solution than trying to prevent global warming.
Hope that helps.
D
Thanks for your response to the parent. i didn't have research to back up what i'd vaguely remembered, which made my message seem more mushy than it really deserved to be.
:-).
You've probably read Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, which makes a similar point. From all the evidence I've seen, I don't think it's possible to stop global warming and so we had might as well make the most of it.
Will Florida coastline values really decline that much? Seems to me temperatures will increase somewhat but true haters of the cold are still going to want to stay in Florida for the winter. (That paper was a bit too technical and dense for me to follow well, so please correct me if I'm wrong).
As long as we have rich people inclined to spend more time in Palm Beach during the winter than NYC, we have a pretty powerful group of people who will want to do something about sea levels, thus saving Florida. Are there any technologically viable ways to prevent sea level increases? There's a lot of money involved down there.
Personally, I'd like to see warmer temperatures AND save Palm Beach
Thanks!
D
It's Richard Branson's legendary flair for publicity.
He's identified a hot-button issue and knows that people are going to listen to him because of it
Don't knock it. It works and it might even cause some good things to happen.
We're talking about him, no?
Incidentally, I still think we could use some global warming here in the Northeast. Personally if the temperature was up by 50 or so degrees from where it is today, you would not see me complaining.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to "suffer" through warm winters and compensate those who are adversely impacted by global warming than it would be to consider it a problem and cool down the planet?
Here's my plan. We send oil tankers up to the Arctic Circle to grab polar ice before it melts and send it down to Saudi Arabia for irrigation. We get funding from Dubai's real estate developers, who want to promote their latest expensive subdivision with an "Arctic Lake" theme.
In no time at all, the Middle East is green and beautiful, and you should see Dubai's new hotel with its private ocean -- it's spectacular! And maybe even grumpy middle eastern Islamists will look at all this new tropcial beauty and decide opening up a new restaurant is a surer thing than a suicide bomb.
Really, is that any more absurd than halting the world's industrial development in return for colder temperatures that will make the bulk of the industrial world a far worse place to live than it would be if we did nothing?
D
PS Global warming might kill some endangered cold weather species but for every cold weather species that dies there are thousands of warm weather creatures who would thrive and find new homes. Do scientists feel there's some special value to being cold and miserable?
I'm not going to defend Steve for suing the bloggers. That was wrong, and dumb. At the same time, though, it did wind up boosting the bloggers' image. They are journalists now, by honorable precedent, which is a ruling many are quite deservedly proud of.
The iPhone trademark was essentially dead and buried by Cisco, whose laughable efforts to ressurect it were pretty transparent. Come on, sticking a label on a box and sending it to the Trademark office? Lame.
I don't see Steve trying to get John Lassater a few million more bucks through monkeying around with stock option timing worrying a lot of people. Anyone familiar with the history of Pixar knows John deserves every penny and then some.
Microsoft ran into a similar stock options situation earlier and everyone yawned.
Enron's founders deserved jail because they destroyed a lot of people's investments in their company by concealing material facts. Nobody looking at the fate of Apple or Pixar would think the same of Steve jobs et al.
D
I think it's at least somewhat interesting to note that this is in fact what Microsoft does when you rip a CD to WMA using their software.
Your point is well taken, but Steve is thinking about his overall music store experience, and I think in that context he's basically thinking as I say in my original message.
D
I don't think they really care about that.
What I do think they care about is consistency of user experience. They believe, and I think they are right to do so, that having different types of music with different usage rights confuses customers. One reason I hear for the failure of WMA is that you don't know what you can do with the file unless you read the specific license agreement for it. That alienates customers, and I think not alienating customers is what really separates iTunes from the other services.
It also might hurt their ability to negotiate with the labels on other matters ("If you can make this change for such and such a label, well, you can make this higher price or worse term or whatever for us").
D