Sites are increasingly using Helvetica/Arial or something similar, and it renders under Linux as a truly ghastly font that should have never been let out of the foundary.
I don't know why they are - I think it's really ugly, and it's painfully tough to read, too. Even in Windows, I don't think it looks that hot.
It's fairly well known that serif fonts (such as Times Roman or Palatino) are easier to read than sans serif (like Helvetica). But Helvetica looks more "modern", and I guess looking more "modern" is more important than actually being legible.
The actual concern of Yahoo is perfectly legitimate, regardless of what its stock price is (or isn't). They want to keep you on their pages, so that they can display ads and get $ 0.005 cent per pageview. Yahoo users spend an average of somewhere around 30 minutes a day on the site, and they have around a pageview a minute, so we're talking about $ 0.005 * 30 = $ 0.15. So every minute they can keep you on the site through classifieds and auctions and what-not is a minute where they can make money by showing you ads.
I've actually grown to like Deja's implementation of the ratings features. It's really pretty well done. Sadly, the puke blue and bile green colour scheme makes me shudder every time I enter the site. And I wish they hadn't changed the normal Courier or Times Roman in the message bodies to helvetica, which is barely readable under any Unix I know of.
These annoying facts have caused my total visits to Deja to drop something like 80%. It's pretty sad, since I think what they're doing with the ratings is actually not half bad.
Incidentally, www.epinions.com is doing a very nice job competing with Deja on the ratings category - check 'em out. I really like the "web of trust" and the "payments to reviewers" ideas. We'll see how they do.
Sadly, every product that exists is in some way flawed.
The Ford Contour I'm renting right now has great handling but a mediocre ride and a buzzy engine. Despite this, due to the handling it's one of the best rental cars I've driven.
Windows succeeded because people were ripe for the graphical interface. For mainstream folks, there is no doubt that the graphical interface is better, and so the product succeeded even though it had no reliability. In addition, and most importantly to its success, it was bundled with every non-Apple computer made. People could start with their familiar DOS applications, and slowly migrate over to Windows - which is, of course, exactly what happened.
What rivals existed - Unix on workstations and OS/2 on hopped-up PCs - required way too much in resources for the average computer user to consider. And the Mac was priced far too high for mainstream folks to afford.
This is what made Windows win. For the average consumer, it was the best product. That doesn't mean that it was a good product in any absolute sense. It just means it was the best at the time, or perhaps we should say the least awful.
I think you can see, though, that many of these factors simply would not apply for Marca's latest venture. He has no installed base of people who can be coaxed to try his product without additional effort. But he'll probably get a pile of money, and if he can get a good reputation, I think he has a shot. But only if his product really works, and works well. There will be enough competition in this sector to assure that either the working product will succeed, or Microsoft's will:-(. If Microsoft's does, it's because they have the applications mainstream users want.
I'm hoping that in the coming years, "least awful" will no longer be something you can build a viable business over. The fact that even the corporate lemmings seem skeptical about Windows 2000 is a nice start.
It's interesting to reflect that when there were only three TV networks, executives had a concept called "least objectionable program". The idea is that you have a little momentum that keeps you watching a program. When something comes up that you really hate, you change channels. Cable TV and the 500 channel universe has changed this; now people can actually find stuff they actively want to watch on some channel or another, so the principle just doesn't work as it used to.
I'm hoping the same thing will happen in computing. "Least objectionable software" is one heck of a way to run a business. But it's certainly how things work now.
Remember when Amazon.com, then a puny enterprise, was sued by B&N for being the "World's Biggest Bookstore"?
At that point, I vowed to never, ever buy anything from Barnes & Noble's web site. (I even boycotted B&N stores for about a month, but that one didn't stick -- the stores are just too useful).
I'm appalled by this type of lawsuit. Makes me think I should go buy my next book order from B&N, for they are now both acting like bullies.
(Of course I won't, because they use Windows(tm) servers, but maybe I'll find an entirely different company that's worthy of my patronage).
Any suggestions? Sadly, fatbrain.com uses Microsoft stuff, and my hatred for companies using Microsoft junkware exceeds even that of people putting forth silly lawsuits. But it's a close-run thing.
I, too, make my living this way, and I, too, am frustrated at the prevailance of Windows in this sphere.
However, there is hope in my view, mainly due to the increasing prevailance of web applications, where what runs the server really doesn't matter. I'm working right now on a project through my consulting firm that uses Linux/mySQL as a back-end to churn out web pages that can be viewed on any browser or platform. Those jobs are out there. In my case, one of the problems was to convince my boss in the consulting firm that this was viable technology. But he's heard so much about Linux now that the barriers appear to be falling.
For what it's worth, I found GTK programming disarmingly simple when I bought Eric whatever his last name is's book on GTK. It explained those concepts quite well. I like the way he explained packing by comparing it to HTML tables - GTK formats widgets automatically in a very similar way.
It's certainly a lot easier than raw X. Granted, I've never used raw X, but I've looked at a few books and it seems pretty tough.
One of the things that makes Windows hard is that Microsoft, in an effort to make it easy, generates programs for you with all kinds of incomprehensible junk. It shouldn't take 300 lines of code to do "Hello, world". GTK brings me back to the appealing simplicity of yore, and that makes me really like it.
On the other hand, a lot of direct user interface programming has been replaced with software that spits out HTML for a browser - and I, for one, applaud that trend.
First, I haven't seen Slashdot feature many stories that were not from a site at least pretending to be journalistic. The heart of Slashdot is zdnet, cnn, wired, salon and a handful of other places. When an outside editorial is requested, such as Jon Katz or a book reviewer, it's generally hosted on the Slashdot site itself.
Your suggestion requires that a "foreign" site be nominated, and that nomination be accepted by a member of the Slashdot staff. It seems to me that this would be extraordinarily difficult.
Your best bet might be to crack one of the major sites and wait until Slashdot featured an article on it. Then replace the article with the redirect and you're good to go. Still, that would have legal ramifications and might not be good for a simple prank.
The site has certainly had its share of technical failures - but it was developed with high load in mind, and so it manages to take it.
One major advantage of Slashdot is that until new hardware was bought a few months ago, almost all the pages were static. Before customizable Slashboxes were introduced, the main page was static. The article pages were static until fairly recently - instead of being updated on the fly, a cron job updated them about once a minute. As a result, programs were not run every time someone called up a page - they were run once a minute instead of once a hit, which could be many times a second. (This appears to have changed post-Andover, with some things specific to the user appearing even on article pages. However, this is since the Andover purchase allowed nearly unlimited hardware upgrades).
Many of the Slashdot effect victims have been sites that have bought the Microsoft vision of.ASP and such - sites where every page was generated by a program of some sort. This development methodology is very expensive in terms of hardware when compared to Slashdot's static model.
The Microsoft hype is that pages should be heavily personalized for each individual user. Slashdot does that now, and very cleverly - but I think they had their priorities straight: Create a system that works first, then add neat stuff. Microsoft's approach is to build neat stuff into the system from the ground up, without considering the consequences for system load and reliability.
Hmm, if you want a "Community of Users", I think MacOS would be my first choice. Linux would be my second. Maybe BeOS would be the best solution - at least once Mozilla becomes sufficiently viable to work with it.
Windows wouldn't even be on the map - the only thing I know Windows users have in common is frustration.
When I want a computer, usually I wanted it yesterday. I've bought both HP and IBM Aptivas, and of the pre-packaged computer choices, I find the Aptivas to be by far the best. They have nice big cases, they're easy to open, memory slots right in. And so far my systems have been very reliable.
On the other hand, the systems I buy are always the open box discounted units, so I daresay I haven't given IBM much in the way of profits from my purchases. The open box systems are significantly cheaper and still work great.
I will admit that it bugs me that they've cheaped out on the keyboard, but the last one I bought cost me less than $ 400. And at this very moment, it's running BeOS just fine.
I suppose they had to do something to cut off the bleeding of cash, but I wish they hadn't killed off retail sales entirely.
ThinkPads are the best - I'm using one that's almost three years old (running Linux), and I still love it. To the person who said that they would be doomed because "normal" PC sales support them, I'd like to say that I doubt it. I don't think my ThinkPad has/any/ components in common with an Aptiva. Aren't even the CPUs different?
Well, our 7.x (I thought it was 7.0, not 7.3) produced insignificant damage largely because the epicentre was so far away from us - I think it was something like 100 miles away.
Funny thing is that while it was happening, the shaking felt as bad as Northridge - I was really surprised to see no damage in my apartment after the quake.
My guess is that he defends it at least partially because his wife had a major role in its development. If he admitted it was terrible, there might be some domestic discord in the household.
On the other hand, there's always the Office talking paperclip. While most people seem to really hate the object that I immediately dubbed "The Paperclip Spy", I've actually met people who defend some of the other assistants, such as Einstein. Maybe this means the ideas behind the paperclip are better than any of us thought.
Or maybe I just have deranged friends.
Personally, all I notice is that the help I actually receive from the paperclip is worse than ever, and I take my anger out on the paperclip, not Microsoft. I have to assume this is exactly what MS wants, and is the real reason for the paperclip. "You know, Microsoft and Gates are OK, but gosh, this paperclip, it never tells me what to do!"
Here in Southern California, there's a lot of pressure to be rich. You see, even a really lousy lower middle class home in a crummy neighborhood nudges $ 200,000. If you want a house that feels "upper middle class", you're going to pay almost half a million dollars.
And let's not even talk about a half-decent car: A Mercedes E320 ($46,000).
Because of all this, the desire to be rich infects your brain. You most surely can't get your dream girl - or even something close - without being rich. But I wouldn't laugh too hard at this culture of greed - more than anything, it comes from what are traditionally considered middle-class necessities turning into upper-class luxuries.
I have a friend who wants me to move down to his neck of the woods. I think he feels I'd make a pretty good match for the company he works for, although I'm not so sure. (They are, sadly, still using Windows NT down there, ugh!) But his location is the Space Coast of Florida, which has waterfront homes selling for $ 119,000 and up. Waterfront. With a boat dock. The type of lifestyle that costs a minimum of $ 2,395,000 (!) in Orange County.
This has made me think a lot about this subject. I think many of us are driven to make money not because of innate greed, but because we tend to live in horrendously expensive places. From what I understand, Silicon Valley makes Los Angeles look cheap.
And yet... and yet... I visit 24500 Piuma in Malibu (15 acres of your own hilltop land at a bargain $495,000, "Plans and permits for 4,000 square foot home included"), gaze at the spectacular view, and it is at that moment that I really love Southern California.
But I sure as heck don't have $ 1 million to buy that land and erect a suitable dream house.
Maybe I'd be better off moving to South Florida, enjoying the gloriously comfortable warm water from the vantage point of my own personal boat dock, right off of my comfortable middle class home.
Anyone know what the market for consultants/software developers is like down there?
D
For more on this subject, see my David's Dream House web page: http://www.amazing.com/david/dream-house/
Well, your university discount certainly makes it much cheaper, but sadly that's not something anyone not in the university can legally claim.
However, it's true that we folks who live in massive urban areas tend to take our conveniences for granted. Within an hour's drive, I have at least two CompUSAs and two - no, three - Fry's electronics outlets.
However, that's still no reason to take Apple's lousy non-student pricing. There are any number of fine online Mac retailers, and they all comfortably undercut Apple.
Microsoft got away with producing inferior software because they managed to get it in front of lots of people, which created a critical mass effect.
The definition of quality is a tricky thing. On one level - ease of use and versatility - Microsoft Windows software, aka Word and Excel, were better than what proceeded it. On another level - reliability - Windows software was far worse than what came before.
Consumers noticed the first part, ignored the second. That's why we're in the pickle we are today.
So I would say my point is still valid - if a company more interested in quality had spearheaded the GUI revolution, we'd have better and more productive computers.
This is why I hate mail order - I never buy any equipment unless it's physically in the store and I can wheel the box out with my own hands.
I don't think this is going to hurt Apple much, mainly because the product is so strong. Apple customers love the product more than they hate the company's business practices. This is especially true with the new G4s and DV iMacs, which are looking like fantastic creations.
Where it might have an impact is on the Apple store. I've always wondered why people would buy from Apple, when they can get the same product from a retail computer store for less money. I know retailers are pretty clueless nowadays, but at least you have a nice clean transaction where you give them the money and they hand you a computer. Nothing beats that kind of immediacy.
Next time I buy a Mac, that's exactly what I'm going to do - no messups, clean transaction, I get my machine and walk away with it. Sorry, Apple Store.
What's kind odd is that the comment got a score 0:Troll. So someone actually moderated it up (otherwise it would have been score -1: Troll). In theory, MetaModeration is supposed to make up for that, but obviously it's far from foolproof.
Truthfully, I think there are some genuinely pro-Microsoft folks lurking here. However, I suspect this specific article got moderated up high because many Slashdotters depend to some degree on the packaged software industry for their livelihood. This is a hot-button issue for anyone who sells software - perhaps even more so for small companies then MS.
I can only think of this opinion as being totally bizarre.
The advances in the computer industry in the last 30 years or so have been driven by people wanting to make computers easier to use and more accessible to the common man. None of that research was supported by government. Government didn't fund Xerox PARC, it didn't fund Apple, it didn't fund IBM.
Computers are easy to use because capitalism gives us basically what we want. The society that would stick with green screen terminals and mainframes is the entirely socialist one.
Without government intervention, the car you and I drive would be somewhat more likely to be German or Japanese, because our government propped up the GMs and Chryslers of the world.
"Anything goes" capitalism is not a perfect system, but I'd say it's better than what we have today.
>But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about >$51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an >outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget.
Maybe the real message is how disgustingly cheap it is to get politicians to shill for you.
A well written comment, but I fear you give capitalism too much credit.
Capitalism is a flexible framework on which you can hang pretty much anything. Corporations, after all, publish magazines as diverse as Reason and The Nation. Corporate-run media is best known not for its stalwart defense of the capitalist system, but for its consistent middle-of-the-road nature. Both left and right are consistent in complaining about the media's performance on most issues, which makes me think this "capitalist running-dog lackey" argument is overdone.
Now, it's true that corporate-run media tends to emphasize personalities and de-emphasize issues. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
First, people tend to be entertained by personality stories, and the more of them that exist, the better the paper sells. This is an imperative of capitalism that cannot be ignored -- but note that it's in no way ideological; a paper would call for the complete and utter overthrow of the capitalist system if market research showed that was what the readers wanted to hear.
Second, the issues in our modern society are horrendously complex and difficult to explain. In the amount of time the media has before our attention wanders, I'd say they do a credible job. The problem is more with our contemporary impatience than anything specific with the media.
Finally, not only is NPR a poor marketer, they are distinctly biased against capitalism. I would no more expect to get the whole story through NPR then I would by reading the Wall Street Journal. Both publications look at the news from a totally different perspective, and - like it or not - they tailor the news to what their audience wants to hear.
If money and big corporate interests really controlled the system, there wouldn't be any talk at all about national health care. More than anything, labour unions support that particular cause, and they serve as a counterbalance for big corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
In a word, yes. :-(
Sites are increasingly using Helvetica/Arial or something similar, and it renders under Linux as a truly ghastly font that should have never been let out of the foundary.
I don't know why they are - I think it's really ugly, and it's painfully tough to read, too. Even in Windows, I don't think it looks that hot.
It's fairly well known that serif fonts (such as Times Roman or Palatino) are easier to read than sans serif (like Helvetica). But Helvetica looks more "modern", and I guess looking more "modern" is more important than actually being legible.
D
D
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The actual concern of Yahoo is perfectly legitimate, regardless of what its stock price is (or isn't). They want to keep you on their pages, so that they can display ads and get $ 0.005 cent per pageview. Yahoo users spend an average of somewhere around 30 minutes a day on the site, and they have around a pageview a minute, so we're talking about $ 0.005 * 30 = $ 0.15. So every minute they can keep you on the site through classifieds and auctions and what-not is a minute where they can make money by showing you ads.
I've actually grown to like Deja's implementation of the ratings features. It's really pretty well done. Sadly, the puke blue and bile green colour scheme makes me shudder every time I enter the site. And I wish they hadn't changed the normal Courier or Times Roman in the message bodies to helvetica, which is barely readable under any Unix I know of.
These annoying facts have caused my total visits to Deja to drop something like 80%. It's pretty sad, since I think what they're doing with the ratings is actually not half bad.
Incidentally, www.epinions.com is doing a very nice job competing with Deja on the ratings category - check 'em out. I really like the "web of trust" and the "payments to reviewers" ideas. We'll see how they do.
D
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Sadly, every product that exists is in some way flawed.
:-(. If Microsoft's does, it's because they have the applications mainstream users want.
The Ford Contour I'm renting right now has great handling but a mediocre ride and a buzzy engine. Despite this, due to the handling it's one of the best rental cars I've driven.
Windows succeeded because people were ripe for the graphical interface. For mainstream folks, there is no doubt that the graphical interface is better, and so the product succeeded even though it had no reliability. In addition, and most importantly to its success, it was bundled with every non-Apple computer made. People could start with their familiar DOS applications, and slowly migrate over to Windows - which is, of course, exactly what happened.
What rivals existed - Unix on workstations and OS/2 on hopped-up PCs - required way too much in resources for the average computer user to consider. And the Mac was priced far too high for mainstream folks to afford.
This is what made Windows win. For the average consumer, it was the best product. That doesn't mean that it was a good product in any absolute sense. It just means it was the best at the time, or perhaps we should say the least awful.
I think you can see, though, that many of these factors simply would not apply for Marca's latest venture. He has no installed base of people who can be coaxed to try his product without additional effort. But he'll probably get a pile of money, and if he can get a good reputation, I think he has a shot. But only if his product really works, and works well. There will be enough competition in this sector to assure that either the working product will succeed, or Microsoft's will
I'm hoping that in the coming years, "least awful" will no longer be something you can build a viable business over. The fact that even the corporate lemmings seem skeptical about Windows 2000 is a nice start.
It's interesting to reflect that when there were only three TV networks, executives had a concept called "least objectionable program". The idea is that you have a little momentum that keeps you watching a program. When something comes up that you really hate, you change channels. Cable TV and the 500 channel universe has changed this; now people can actually find stuff they actively want to watch on some channel or another, so the principle just doesn't work as it used to.
I'm hoping the same thing will happen in computing. "Least objectionable software" is one heck of a way to run a business. But it's certainly how things work now.
D
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left as soon as I could because of the ghastly weather.
I mean, how people tolerate this "snow" stuff is beyond me. And daytime temperatures that regularly drop below 60? Like, to 20 and even lower?
I'm surprised anyone still lives there. I live in Southern California now, and I'd never, ever go back.
D
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Remember when Amazon.com, then a puny enterprise, was sued by B&N for being the "World's Biggest Bookstore"?
At that point, I vowed to never, ever buy anything from Barnes & Noble's web site. (I even boycotted B&N stores for about a month, but that one didn't stick -- the stores are just too useful).
I'm appalled by this type of lawsuit. Makes me think I should go buy my next book order from B&N, for they are now both acting like bullies.
(Of course I won't, because they use Windows(tm) servers, but maybe I'll find an entirely different company that's worthy of my patronage).
Any suggestions? Sadly, fatbrain.com uses Microsoft stuff, and my hatred for companies using Microsoft junkware exceeds even that of people putting forth silly lawsuits. But it's a close-run thing.
D
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I, too, make my living this way, and I, too, am frustrated at the prevailance of Windows in this sphere.
However, there is hope in my view, mainly due to the increasing prevailance of web applications, where what runs the server really doesn't matter. I'm working right now on a project through my consulting firm that uses Linux/mySQL as a back-end to churn out web pages that can be viewed on any browser or platform. Those jobs are out there. In my case, one of the problems was to convince my boss in the consulting firm that this was viable technology. But he's heard so much about Linux now that the barriers appear to be falling.
D
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For what it's worth, I found GTK programming disarmingly simple when I bought Eric whatever his last name is's book on GTK. It explained those concepts quite well. I like the way he explained packing by comparing it to HTML tables - GTK formats widgets automatically in a very similar way.
It's certainly a lot easier than raw X. Granted, I've never used raw X, but I've looked at a few books and it seems pretty tough.
One of the things that makes Windows hard is that Microsoft, in an effort to make it easy, generates programs for you with all kinds of incomprehensible junk. It shouldn't take 300 lines of code to do "Hello, world". GTK brings me back to the appealing simplicity of yore, and that makes me really like it.
On the other hand, a lot of direct user interface programming has been replaced with software that spits out HTML for a browser - and I, for one, applaud that trend.
D
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There seem to be a few problems with this.
First, I haven't seen Slashdot feature many stories that were not from a site at least pretending to be journalistic. The heart of Slashdot is zdnet, cnn, wired, salon and a handful of other places. When an outside editorial is requested, such as Jon Katz or a book reviewer, it's generally hosted on the Slashdot site itself.
Your suggestion requires that a "foreign" site be nominated, and that nomination be accepted by a member of the Slashdot staff. It seems to me that this would be extraordinarily difficult.
Your best bet might be to crack one of the major sites and wait until Slashdot featured an article on it. Then replace the article with the redirect and you're good to go. Still, that would have legal ramifications and might not be good for a simple prank.
D
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The site has certainly had its share of technical failures - but it was developed with high load in mind, and so it manages to take it.
.ASP and such - sites where every page was generated by a program of some sort. This development methodology is very expensive in terms of hardware when compared to Slashdot's static model.
One major advantage of Slashdot is that until new hardware was bought a few months ago, almost all the pages were static. Before customizable Slashboxes were introduced, the main page was static. The article pages were static until fairly recently - instead of being updated on the fly, a cron job updated them about once a minute. As a result, programs were not run every time someone called up a page - they were run once a minute instead of once a hit, which could be many times a second. (This appears to have changed post-Andover, with some things specific to the user appearing even on article pages. However, this is since the Andover purchase allowed nearly unlimited hardware upgrades).
Many of the Slashdot effect victims have been sites that have bought the Microsoft vision of
The Microsoft hype is that pages should be heavily personalized for each individual user. Slashdot does that now, and very cleverly - but I think they had their priorities straight: Create a system that works first, then add neat stuff. Microsoft's approach is to build neat stuff into the system from the ground up, without considering the consequences for system load and reliability.
D
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Hmm, if you want a "Community of Users", I think MacOS would be my first choice. Linux would be my second. Maybe BeOS would be the best solution - at least once Mozilla becomes sufficiently viable to work with it.
Windows wouldn't even be on the map - the only thing I know Windows users have in common is frustration.
D
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I can think of a lot of useful things one can do without exposing myself (or my lego) to extremes of heat, chemical spills or pressures.
I think your definition of "useful" is pretty narrow.
D
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When I want a computer, usually I wanted it yesterday. I've bought both HP and IBM Aptivas, and of the pre-packaged computer choices, I find the Aptivas to be by far the best. They have nice big cases, they're easy to open, memory slots right in. And so far my systems have been very reliable.
/any/ components in common with an Aptiva. Aren't even the CPUs different?
On the other hand, the systems I buy are always the open box discounted units, so I daresay I haven't given IBM much in the way of profits from my purchases. The open box systems are significantly cheaper and still work great.
I will admit that it bugs me that they've cheaped out on the keyboard, but the last one I bought cost me less than $ 400. And at this very moment, it's running BeOS just fine.
I suppose they had to do something to cut off the bleeding of cash, but I wish they hadn't killed off retail sales entirely.
ThinkPads are the best - I'm using one that's almost three years old (running Linux), and I still love it. To the person who said that they would be doomed because "normal" PC sales support them, I'd like to say that I doubt it. I don't think my ThinkPad has
D
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Well, our 7.x (I thought it was 7.0, not 7.3) produced insignificant damage largely because the epicentre was so far away from us - I think it was something like 100 miles away.
Funny thing is that while it was happening, the shaking felt as bad as Northridge - I was really surprised to see no damage in my apartment after the quake.
D
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I'm no Applehead, but I'd cut them a little slack here.
This is a problem with Motorola that Apple had to deal with. They trusted Motorola in good faith, and Motorola let them down.
It's a business problem with no good solutions on Apple's part.
D
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My guess is that he defends it at least partially because his wife had a major role in its development. If he admitted it was terrible, there might be some domestic discord in the household.
On the other hand, there's always the Office talking paperclip. While most people seem to really hate the object that I immediately dubbed "The Paperclip Spy", I've actually met people who defend some of the other assistants, such as Einstein. Maybe this means the ideas behind the paperclip are better than any of us thought.
Or maybe I just have deranged friends.
Personally, all I notice is that the help I actually receive from the paperclip is worse than ever, and I take my anger out on the paperclip, not Microsoft. I have to assume this is exactly what MS wants, and is the real reason for the paperclip. "You know, Microsoft and Gates are OK, but gosh, this paperclip, it never tells me what to do!"
D
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Here in Southern California, there's a lot of pressure to be rich. You see, even a really lousy lower middle class home in a crummy neighborhood nudges $ 200,000. If you want a house that feels "upper middle class", you're going to pay almost half a million dollars.
... and yet ... I visit 24500 Piuma in Malibu (15 acres of your own hilltop land at a bargain $495,000, "Plans and permits for 4,000 square foot home included"), gaze at the spectacular view, and it is at that moment that I really love Southern California.
And let's not even talk about a half-decent car: A Mercedes E320 ($46,000).
Because of all this, the desire to be rich infects your brain. You most surely can't get your dream girl - or even something close - without being rich. But I wouldn't laugh too hard at this culture of greed - more than anything, it comes from what are traditionally considered middle-class necessities turning into upper-class luxuries.
I have a friend who wants me to move down to his neck of the woods. I think he feels I'd make a pretty good match for the company he works for, although I'm not so sure. (They are, sadly, still using Windows NT down there, ugh!) But his location is the Space Coast of Florida, which has waterfront homes selling for $ 119,000 and up. Waterfront. With a boat dock. The type of lifestyle that costs a minimum of $ 2,395,000 (!) in Orange County.
This has made me think a lot about this subject. I think many of us are driven to make money not because of innate greed, but because we tend to live in horrendously expensive places. From what I understand, Silicon Valley makes Los Angeles look cheap.
And yet
But I sure as heck don't have $ 1 million to buy that land and erect a suitable dream house.
Maybe I'd be better off moving to South Florida, enjoying the gloriously comfortable warm water from the vantage point of my own personal boat dock, right off of my comfortable middle class home.
Anyone know what the market for consultants/software developers is like down there?
D
For more on this subject, see my David's Dream House web page:
http://www.amazing.com/david/dream-house/
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Well, your university discount certainly makes it much cheaper, but sadly that's not something anyone not in the university can legally claim.
However, it's true that we folks who live in massive urban areas tend to take our conveniences for granted. Within an hour's drive, I have at least two CompUSAs and two - no, three - Fry's electronics outlets.
However, that's still no reason to take Apple's lousy non-student pricing. There are any number of fine online Mac retailers, and they all comfortably undercut Apple.
D
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Microsoft got away with producing inferior software because they managed to get it in front of lots of people, which created a critical mass effect.
The definition of quality is a tricky thing. On one level - ease of use and versatility - Microsoft Windows software, aka Word and Excel, were better than what proceeded it. On another level - reliability - Windows software was far worse than what came before.
Consumers noticed the first part, ignored the second. That's why we're in the pickle we are today.
So I would say my point is still valid - if a company more interested in quality had spearheaded the GUI revolution, we'd have better and more productive computers.
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This is why I hate mail order - I never buy any equipment unless it's physically in the store and I can wheel the box out with my own hands.
I don't think this is going to hurt Apple much, mainly because the product is so strong. Apple customers love the product more than they hate the company's business practices. This is especially true with the new G4s and DV iMacs, which are looking like fantastic creations.
Where it might have an impact is on the Apple store. I've always wondered why people would buy from Apple, when they can get the same product from a retail computer store for less money. I know retailers are pretty clueless nowadays, but at least you have a nice clean transaction where you give them the money and they hand you a computer. Nothing beats that kind of immediacy.
Next time I buy a Mac, that's exactly what I'm going to do - no messups, clean transaction, I get my machine and walk away with it. Sorry, Apple Store.
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What's kind odd is that the comment got a score 0:Troll. So someone actually moderated it up (otherwise it would have been score -1: Troll). In theory, MetaModeration is supposed to make up for that, but obviously it's far from foolproof.
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Truthfully, I think there are some genuinely pro-Microsoft folks lurking here. However, I suspect this specific article got moderated up high because many Slashdotters depend to some degree on the packaged software industry for their livelihood. This is a hot-button issue for anyone who sells software - perhaps even more so for small companies then MS.
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I wonder if we'd be in more of an economic boom if a company that created working software had succeeded in setting standards instead of MS.
Think of all the productivity lost through crashed programs and frequent MS software reboots - that must amount to billions of dollars worldwide.
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I can only think of this opinion as being totally bizarre.
The advances in the computer industry in the last 30 years or so have been driven by people wanting to make computers easier to use and more accessible to the common man. None of that research was supported by government. Government didn't fund Xerox PARC, it didn't fund Apple, it didn't fund IBM.
Computers are easy to use because capitalism gives us basically what we want. The society that would stick with green screen terminals and mainframes is the entirely socialist one.
Without government intervention, the car you and I drive would be somewhat more likely to be German or Japanese, because our government propped up the GMs and Chryslers of the world.
"Anything goes" capitalism is not a perfect system, but I'd say it's better than what we have today.
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>But Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), whose campaign has received about
>$51,000 from Microsoft or its employees since 1997, has been an
>outspoken supporter of a cut in the antitrust budget.
Maybe the real message is how disgustingly cheap it is to get politicians to shill for you.
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A well written comment, but I fear you give capitalism too much credit.
Capitalism is a flexible framework on which you can hang pretty much anything. Corporations, after all, publish magazines as diverse as Reason and The Nation. Corporate-run media is best known not for its stalwart defense of the capitalist system, but for its consistent middle-of-the-road nature. Both left and right are consistent in complaining about the media's performance on most issues, which makes me think this "capitalist running-dog lackey" argument is overdone.
Now, it's true that corporate-run media tends to emphasize personalities and de-emphasize issues. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
First, people tend to be entertained by personality stories, and the more of them that exist, the better the paper sells. This is an imperative of capitalism that cannot be ignored -- but note that it's in no way ideological; a paper would call for the complete and utter overthrow of the capitalist system if market research showed that was what the readers wanted to hear.
Second, the issues in our modern society are horrendously complex and difficult to explain. In the amount of time the media has before our attention wanders, I'd say they do a credible job. The problem is more with our contemporary impatience than anything specific with the media.
Finally, not only is NPR a poor marketer, they are distinctly biased against capitalism. I would no more expect to get the whole story through NPR then I would by reading the Wall Street Journal. Both publications look at the news from a totally different perspective, and - like it or not - they tailor the news to what their audience wants to hear.
If money and big corporate interests really controlled the system, there wouldn't be any talk at all about national health care. More than anything, labour unions support that particular cause, and they serve as a counterbalance for big corporations.
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