Maybe it is elitism, but quite frankly, I don't care. It is true when any "niche" product or genre or whatever gains mass appeal, the people who are really "into" it inevitably get pushed out and the lowest common denomonator gets lower.
To me it is the same thing as having a bunch of strangers show up at a small get-together of friends. Sure, you could turn it into a big party and have lots of fun, but it'll never be that initimate get-together it once was. Is it wrong to prefer to keep a small party small? I don't think so.
Then again, who am I to be a Mac elitist, anyway? I've only been using them full time for like a year. Maybe I'm one of the "unwashed masses" lowering the bar. I'm not exactly the stereotypical Mac user.
Also, I think a large marketshare could be detrimental to the overal user experience. I mean, as long as Apple keeps such tight control over things, users are guaranteed a very consistent, intuitive experience. One of the problems I have with Windows is that there are a zillion different developers all will different "visions" for what what an applicaition should do and be. Every programmer and his mother wants to sell some piece of crap software on Windows. The bar is set so low.
And then there is malware! Ugh. I think it is at least partially true that the reason your typical Windows machine is so riddled with spyware is because of the marketshare. I'd much rather OS X stay under the radar of scammers.
I hope Mac remains largely a niche in the PC market. I'd hate to see such a good brand diluted by marketshare.
government gives corporations a ton of legal protections, they are able to be publicly traded, etc.
For every protection there is a regulation.. and the some. Evironmental regulations, labor regulations, etc. Without these, corporations would have (and historically did have) even more power over people.
asically their immense growth is supported by government. IMO in a libertarian society more "corporations" (read: large companies, since corporate entity is a government word) would be regionally based since they dont have a legal blanket to toss over all the states and have a big picnic on.
I suppose that explains why corporations rarely cross international boundaries. Oh wait, that isn't true.
Differing regional laws actually benefit corporations to a large degree. They allow a corporation to be based in one region where laws favor education and high levels of consumption, for example, and move labor/production to places with minimal environmental and labor standards. They get the best of both worlds.
Really, it isn't government that enables immense growth and control over the masses. It is technology. Mass media and instant global communication makes it trivial to spread beyond regional boundaries. Look at globalization. Look at offshoring of white collar jobs. Has nothing to do with legal protections. The government (in the form of trade regulations) gets in the way more than anything.
The power of corporations to manipulate people on such a large scale is handed to them by the government.
In what way? All corporations need to manipulate people on a large scale is technology, specifically mass media. If anything, the government regulates teh ability of corporations to manipulate people.
The same argument coudl be used for volcanos... they've been emitting all kinds of gasses for billions of years, and everything is just fine. The question is, where is the equibrium? At what point does any additional amount greenhouse gases contribute to a long term net gain?
But you're right, the amount of gases from cigarettes is probably relatively insignificant. Besides, there is no net gain from cigarettes. I mean, carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere to grow the tobacco. Smoking just puts it back.
If my boss came to me and asked me to formulate a plan on "cyber issues," I probably wouldn't accomplish much either.
Here's a thought, maybe there isn't a damn thing DHS can do about a concerted attack on key points of the internet. Maybe it just isn't possible for one government agency, no matter how disgustingly bloated or invasive, to "protect" a largely private, distrubuted, decentralized, global internet. What are they going to do, mandate that all ISPs and carriers around the world stock up on duct tape? I can't describe the kind of warm fuzzies this whole thing sends down my spine.
I say fsck DHS and the Chimp it rode in on.
Hold on a second, someone is knocking on my doorNO CARRIER
It is not a mystery. It is very simple. Our brains are the products of evolution in a competitive environment. In the good old days, the losers got eaten (or starved to death or what have you). So, those who used all their resources to give themselves every advantage they could tended to be the winners.
Depends on what you mean by the "old days." Humans are social animals and always have been (as far as we know). Generally speaking, individuals cooporate in a social situation. It pays to play by the rules within the group (which may include *lawful* competition). In a group, you're more likely to be killed for "cheating" (theft, for example) than get a survival advantage. It is therefore the norm for humans to obey the rules of the social group. "Cheating" is a deviation... an aberation that ultimately hurts the stability of the social group.
Cheating may, however, still be natural in the sense that it is an evolutionary carryover from a time when the animal that humans eventually evolved from was not social/cooporative. But as far as being human goes, it is not "natural."
Good sportsmanship is an arbitrary social construct.
Social contructs are no more or less arbitary than any other survival adaptation such as tool making. We make physical tools. We make social constructs. Same basic purpose: survival.
Keep in mind that we're not talking about raw, unfiltered browsing history or a compete dump of the cache. We're talking about a single thread of tracking. Like you visit one site which puts the said javascript in your cache and later visit another site which references the same item and they knew you were at the first site. They can't read your whole history.
No, what they'll do instead is use your viewing space to overlay ads instead of placing commercial breaks in the show.
Stations already do this to some extent. Ever been watching a show and the network displays some info about an upcoming series at the bottom? God, I hate that. They use up the whole bottom 1/3 of the screen with bright colors. It was bad enough they they put that dumb watermark on the screen. I have not seen ads from third parties yet, but I'm expecting them soon. The thing about advertising is that the old methods won't go away. We'll end up with overlayed ads *in addition to* regular breaks.
WHen spammers have to jump through hoops and be very clever about not being tracked, aren't they hackers? Sure, there are probably many spammers who simply employ pre-made tools to spam. We can equate them with "script kiddies." But there are certainly spammers who go out of their way to find new and novel ways to get their their spam through.
Documentation always available, working in teams, no need for replicated copies of the same revision, reduced risk of data loss through removable devices...
Yeah, we have that already. They're called Wikis. Maybe it woudl be nice to have more advanced inline wiki text editors, but Writely, as a general word processor, is lame. It is at least 10 years behind the state of the art.
it was just an example, I'm not very imaginative:P. The real point I was trying to prove was that something like that holding a user back from switching an operating system no longer would hold them back from switching.
Can you give me an example of a web app that does make it possible to switch? Linux, for example, already had plenty of file editors, a few spreadsheet programs, email clients, etc. I can't think of one single existing or in-development web app that would allow someone to move from Windows to Linux. Basically what they are doing is reinventing common applicaitons that most people already have on all platforms. And that is stupid, IMO.
The point I'm making is that if bandwidth keeps increasing web services keep increasing, a computer will just be a gateway to their apps and files on the internet, leavingn the OS as just a way to get online(for most users I doubt that this would be for companies that don't want to put files on the internet).
Anyone who says that must take for granted all the nicities and conveniences that a good desktop OS provides.. stuff that the browser as we know it is simply incapable of. I guess it is sometimes fun to speculate on how technology will pan out 10+ years from now, but in the end it is just speculation. I prefer to stay grounded in what we have now. And what we have now is a set of web standards that are utterly incapable of delivering the kind of broad OS agnosticism that you are talking about.
And as I mentioned earlier, I am not a heavy user of such apps, and those "mediocre little browser based applications" serve all the purpose for my needs _at home_.
Nothing personal. It is just that so many people on Slashdot act like browser based applications such as Google spreadsheets provide some amazing new capabiiies that non-Windows platforms have never had before... thus making the transition easier. When, in fact, users of OSes other than Windows are generally satisfied with what is available to them natively. At least when it comes to common things like spreadsheets and file editors. What is missing from Linux are good specialized apps like QuickBooks that a lot of people depend on. And there are also a lot of things that you simply can't implement in a browser that people totally take for granted such as access to varoius peripherals like cameras, webcams, iPod, etc. Sure, you can technically do a lot of those things in Linux, but it isn't nearly as seamless as is on OS X or Windows.
The point I'm making is that if bandwidth keeps increasing web services keep increasing, a computer will just be a gateway to their apps and files on the internet, leavingn the OS as just a way to get online(for most users I doubt that this would be for companies that don't want to put files on the internet).
But isn't that a double edged sword? I mean, if the OS is just a way of getting online, why would anyone bother switching OSes? They'd just use whatever is preinstalled.
Anyway, I hope it doesn't happen. I really like the way my applications integrate with the OS. The browser is just one of several applications that I run. If other people want to narrow their application field to whatever they can run in the browser, that is their business, but I have like 6 applications running as we speak that would not work well in a browser even if the browser technology was there to technically support them.
But I hope you can see the the benifits of this type of system in the eyes of the people that are investing in it. Even though we know that it most likely won't be benifitial until it meets a more productive requirement of most users.
I'm weary because almost every commercial endevour that has begun with the premise of "implmement the 10% of features that 80% of people use" has failed. This online application business model sounds exactly like that.
But it does not have bug fixes or improvements that many of us want to keep up with the times.I want vector graphics in my resulting PDFs. If a free word processor will give them to me, but I have to pay to upgrade from Office 95, well one is superior... for those that need or want that option. Staying with old, outdated software is not a good option for a significant number of users
There have been free patches released for Office 95. And in case you haven't noticed, even Office 95 is lightyears a head of anything you can find online, so your arguments about features only exist in a hypothetical space. And if you really don't want to pay anything, run OpenOffice.
I don't know anyone who brings a laptop with them everywhere, and I know some pretty dedicated computer people.
Well, not everywhere, but anywhere that is important, such as a business trip.
More to the point, do they want to carry a laptop everywhere and use it everywhere, instead of having dedicated machines at work and in their home office?
If it means the different between having a computer in a hotel room and not having a computer in a hotel room, no, I don't think they want dedicateed machines. The greatest online application in the world isn't any good if you don't have a computer and internet access.
I have a friend who is currently several hundred miles away from home looking for a job and he is having a hell of a time because he has to rely on internet cafes for 'net access. He is currently shopping for a laptop because it is way more convenient.
Also to the point, of those people who currently don't bring a laptop with them everywhere, how many would like to have that functionality without the hassle.
Putting aside for a second the fact that the functionality of a dedicated computer is NOT available online and probably won't be for the forseeable future, I would say very few.
The penniless hippy wandering the country, sleeping in parks and logging on from libraries and cyber cafes might be writing the great American novel and would like to get to it from anywhere.
Now THERE is a corner case if I have ever heard one.
The average grade school child may not have a laptop, but they might be writing a book report at home and at school and want access both places.
The "average" grade school child writes his/her book reports the night before it is due. And if you think he/she is going to want to access it at school, buy him/her a USB thumb drive.
Your grandmother might want to get to one of her recipes
My grandmother isn't alive anymore, but when she was, she wrote her recipes on 3x5 note cards.
There are many, very real, use cases for those who don't currently carry a laptop everywhere.
Yeah, I especially enjoyed the penniless hippy example.;-)
That is a serious drawback for many, although it may be solved if internet access becomes more reliable. But, we were discussing the advantages of such a system, not the disadvantages. There are plenty of both. And no, we were not comparing the two and trying to make some sort of judgement as to which is better for all people everywhere, since that would be absurd without knowing the use cases of everyone.
Maybe you missed the part where I said "limited application." Not absolutely useless.
Yeah, they said the same thing about automobiles and they were right at the time. Easy to use collaboration software will be of great use to a lot of people, when it gets there. I know a lot of programmers who use it for a sort of pair programming now. When it is easy enough for the masses, it will be used by them.
Wait a minute, suddenly you have narrowed the applicaiton field to "collaboration software." I thought we were talking about replacing traditional desktop applications.
I don't know what kind of "programmers" use online tools for "pair programming", but all the ones I know use version control systems such as subversion or CVS. See, that way they are not locked into using a specific editor and such.
So say word was web based you would be able to use word in OSX, Linux, Unix, Windows.
But you can already run Word on the vast majority of desktop computers (Windows and Mac). And unix users have Openoffice. so why would a web based Word be significant? Who would anyone use it? A web based Word would suck. It would be 10x slower and bloated than a native solution.
The big mistake that these online app companies are making is that they are trying to reinvent common applications that are already available to users of the major platforms. Why the hell do I, as a Linux user, need Google spreadsheets, for example? I have gcalc. OS X users are certainly not hurting for common productivity apps. So what is the market?
And this is just a beginning. Earlier, due to unavaillibity of a lot of applications on non-M$ (read Linux) OS, I had practially no way of getting myself rid of XP. Now, there is only one application (Creative soundblaster music reciever driver, and sadly, I dont see them doing anything for Linux users.*). So, at least the ball has been set to roll, and appear to gather the critical mass pretty soon.
Sorry, but I find it hard to believe that the mediocre little browser based applications that Google and friends have put out really allowed you to get rid of Windows. I mean, simple spreadsheet capabilities matching or exceeding what Google sheets can do has been available on Linux for years.
Yeah, because everyone knows there are no document management solutions outside of *office available for major OSes. Linux users, for example, had no way of editting a text file before Openoffice came out. Programmers simply echoed text to files from teh commandline. And forget about spreadsheets. NObody ever made a stripped down spreadsheet program besides Excel. I had a dream of something called gcalc once, but that was only a dream. I certainly haven't been using it for years. All praise Google for bringing stripped down applications to the masses.
Free and free upgrades - You don't have to worry about paying for this or keeping it up to date especially if you use multiple different computers.
Yeah, because everyone knows that Office 95 stopped working when the next version came out.
Accessible anywhere - you can work on the same files at home, work, the library, your cousin's house, school, or anywhere else without bringing a laptop or constantly transferring it to a disk.
The thing is, people who need to do that kind of thing (work on the same files everywhere) already bring a laptop around with them. And they are not going to give up the convenience of having a computer wherever they need it for some shitty browser based immitation of the applicaitons they use.
Reliability - Network services have real redundancy. If your hard drive dies, you might lose all or some of your work, depending how good your backups are (most people have none at all). If your house burns down, you might lose it all. Having it stored remotely in multiple physical locations is safer.
But if you don't, for some reason, have internet access, you can't do any work. Yeah, I'm sure people will be jumping all over THAT.
Collaboration - With an online service you and a friend can both work on the same documents easily. With the right software, you can both even edit the same word processing doc simultaneously, with multiple insertion points/cursors. It is fun and useful.
It totally works for me. I signed up within the first week of the list opening. And to this day I barely get any unsolicited calls except for political surveys and such (not many). The difference is very noticable.
However, after about 1 year of relief, I moved to a new apartment but kept the same phone number and the calls started coming back in a big way. Apparently, if there is any change in your phone service you get taken off the list again. Even if your number didnt' change.My suggestion to anyone who is still getting sales calls and such is to reregister. Your number may have been delisted because of some change in your phone service.
Overall I am pleasantly surprised by how effective the do not call list has been for me. I was not expecting much. I only wish do-not-spam lists could be this effective.
Just following your logic... Since almost all of pop music is just broadcasted at any point in time, do you think RIAA would mind if I just downloaded all of those songs (not that I'd want to) and play them at my leisure?
Of course they would "mind." They don't even want you to record it directly from teh radio. But that wasn't the quesiton. Just because the RIAA doesn't like something doesn't make it wrong.
My feeling is that a publisher more of less forfeits exclusive ownership by the act of broadcasting. Sure, they still hold copyright which means that you can't claim it as your own. But once it is voluntarily broadcast, it is out there. They can't take it back or prevent you from making copies unless you sign an agreement that says you won't. At least in my own little moral world.
Well, not that I agree with them, but probably their rationale is that you are paying for the convenience of downloading and watching the show in your own time
What's not to agree with? That is a perfectly reasonable rationale. That's not to say that you must pay for the convenience. Just that you could if you wanted that particular convenience.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it is elitism, but quite frankly, I don't care. It is true when any "niche" product or genre or whatever gains mass appeal, the people who are really "into" it inevitably get pushed out and the lowest common denomonator gets lower.
To me it is the same thing as having a bunch of strangers show up at a small get-together of friends. Sure, you could turn it into a big party and have lots of fun, but it'll never be that initimate get-together it once was. Is it wrong to prefer to keep a small party small? I don't think so.
Then again, who am I to be a Mac elitist, anyway? I've only been using them full time for like a year. Maybe I'm one of the "unwashed masses" lowering the bar. I'm not exactly the stereotypical Mac user.
-matthew
Also, I think a large marketshare could be detrimental to the overal user experience. I mean, as long as Apple keeps such tight control over things, users are guaranteed a very consistent, intuitive experience. One of the problems I have with Windows is that there are a zillion different developers all will different "visions" for what what an applicaition should do and be. Every programmer and his mother wants to sell some piece of crap software on Windows. The bar is set so low.
And then there is malware! Ugh. I think it is at least partially true that the reason your typical Windows machine is so riddled with spyware is because of the marketshare. I'd much rather OS X stay under the radar of scammers.
I hope Mac remains largely a niche in the PC market. I'd hate to see such a good brand diluted by marketshare.
-matthew
For every protection there is a regulation.. and the some. Evironmental regulations, labor regulations, etc. Without these, corporations would have (and historically did have) even more power over people.
I suppose that explains why corporations rarely cross international boundaries. Oh wait, that isn't true.
Differing regional laws actually benefit corporations to a large degree. They allow a corporation to be based in one region where laws favor education and high levels of consumption, for example, and move labor/production to places with minimal environmental and labor standards. They get the best of both worlds.
Really, it isn't government that enables immense growth and control over the masses. It is technology. Mass media and instant global communication makes it trivial to spread beyond regional boundaries. Look at globalization. Look at offshoring of white collar jobs. Has nothing to do with legal protections. The government (in the form of trade regulations) gets in the way more than anything.
-matthew
In what way? All corporations need to manipulate people on a large scale is technology, specifically mass media. If anything, the government regulates teh ability of corporations to manipulate people.
-matthew
The same argument coudl be used for volcanos... they've been emitting all kinds of gasses for billions of years, and everything is just fine. The question is, where is the equibrium? At what point does any additional amount greenhouse gases contribute to a long term net gain?
But you're right, the amount of gases from cigarettes is probably relatively insignificant. Besides, there is no net gain from cigarettes. I mean, carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere to grow the tobacco. Smoking just puts it back.
-matthew
If my boss came to me and asked me to formulate a plan on "cyber issues," I probably wouldn't accomplish much either.
Here's a thought, maybe there isn't a damn thing DHS can do about a concerted attack on key points of the internet. Maybe it just isn't possible for one government agency, no matter how disgustingly bloated or invasive, to "protect" a largely private, distrubuted, decentralized, global internet. What are they going to do, mandate that all ISPs and carriers around the world stock up on duct tape? I can't describe the kind of warm fuzzies this whole thing sends down my spine.
I say fsck DHS and the Chimp it rode in on.
Hold on a second, someone is knocking on my doorNO CARRIER
Depends on what you mean by the "old days." Humans are social animals and always have been (as far as we know). Generally speaking, individuals cooporate in a social situation. It pays to play by the rules within the group (which may include *lawful* competition). In a group, you're more likely to be killed for "cheating" (theft, for example) than get a survival advantage. It is therefore the norm for humans to obey the rules of the social group. "Cheating" is a deviation... an aberation that ultimately hurts the stability of the social group.
Cheating may, however, still be natural in the sense that it is an evolutionary carryover from a time when the animal that humans eventually evolved from was not social/cooporative. But as far as being human goes, it is not "natural."
Social contructs are no more or less arbitary than any other survival adaptation such as tool making. We make physical tools. We make social constructs. Same basic purpose: survival.
-matthew
Keep in mind that we're not talking about raw, unfiltered browsing history or a compete dump of the cache. We're talking about a single thread of tracking. Like you visit one site which puts the said javascript in your cache and later visit another site which references the same item and they knew you were at the first site. They can't read your whole history.
That's OK because the browsing habits of the type of people who turn off Javascript are not particularly interesting anyway. So it all works out.
-matthew
Stations already do this to some extent. Ever been watching a show and the network displays some info about an upcoming series at the bottom? God, I hate that. They use up the whole bottom 1/3 of the screen with bright colors. It was bad enough they they put that dumb watermark on the screen. I have not seen ads from third parties yet, but I'm expecting them soon. The thing about advertising is that the old methods won't go away. We'll end up with overlayed ads *in addition to* regular breaks.
-matthew
WHen spammers have to jump through hoops and be very clever about not being tracked, aren't they hackers? Sure, there are probably many spammers who simply employ pre-made tools to spam. We can equate them with "script kiddies." But there are certainly spammers who go out of their way to find new and novel ways to get their their spam through.
-matthew
Yeah, we have that already. They're called Wikis. Maybe it woudl be nice to have more advanced inline wiki text editors, but Writely, as a general word processor, is lame. It is at least 10 years behind the state of the art.
-matthew
Can you give me an example of a web app that does make it possible to switch? Linux, for example, already had plenty of file editors, a few spreadsheet programs, email clients, etc. I can't think of one single existing or in-development web app that would allow someone to move from Windows to Linux. Basically what they are doing is reinventing common applicaitons that most people already have on all platforms. And that is stupid, IMO.
Anyone who says that must take for granted all the nicities and conveniences that a good desktop OS provides.. stuff that the browser as we know it is simply incapable of. I guess it is sometimes fun to speculate on how technology will pan out 10+ years from now, but in the end it is just speculation. I prefer to stay grounded in what we have now. And what we have now is a set of web standards that are utterly incapable of delivering the kind of broad OS agnosticism that you are talking about.
-matthew
Nothing personal. It is just that so many people on Slashdot act like browser based applications such as Google spreadsheets provide some amazing new capabiiies that non-Windows platforms have never had before... thus making the transition easier. When, in fact, users of OSes other than Windows are generally satisfied with what is available to them natively. At least when it comes to common things like spreadsheets and file editors. What is missing from Linux are good specialized apps like QuickBooks that a lot of people depend on. And there are also a lot of things that you simply can't implement in a browser that people totally take for granted such as access to varoius peripherals like cameras, webcams, iPod, etc. Sure, you can technically do a lot of those things in Linux, but it isn't nearly as seamless as is on OS X or Windows.
-matthew
But isn't that a double edged sword? I mean, if the OS is just a way of getting online, why would anyone bother switching OSes? They'd just use whatever is preinstalled.
Anyway, I hope it doesn't happen. I really like the way my applications integrate with the OS. The browser is just one of several applications that I run. If other people want to narrow their application field to whatever they can run in the browser, that is their business, but I have like 6 applications running as we speak that would not work well in a browser even if the browser technology was there to technically support them.
I'm weary because almost every commercial endevour that has begun with the premise of "implmement the 10% of features that 80% of people use" has failed. This online application business model sounds exactly like that.
-matthew
But it does not have bug fixes or improvements that many of us want to keep up with the times.I want vector graphics in my resulting PDFs. If a free word processor will give them to me, but I have to pay to upgrade from Office 95, well one is superior... for those that need or want that option. Staying with old, outdated software is not a good option for a significant number of users
;-)
There have been free patches released for Office 95. And in case you haven't noticed, even Office 95 is lightyears a head of anything you can find online, so your arguments about features only exist in a hypothetical space. And if you really don't want to pay anything, run OpenOffice.
I don't know anyone who brings a laptop with them everywhere, and I know some pretty dedicated computer people.
Well, not everywhere, but anywhere that is important, such as a business trip.
More to the point, do they want to carry a laptop everywhere and use it everywhere, instead of having dedicated machines at work and in their home office?
If it means the different between having a computer in a hotel room and not having a computer in a hotel room, no, I don't think they want dedicateed machines. The greatest online application in the world isn't any good if you don't have a computer and internet access.
I have a friend who is currently several hundred miles away from home looking for a job and he is having a hell of a time because he has to rely on internet cafes for 'net access. He is currently shopping for a laptop because it is way more convenient.
Also to the point, of those people who currently don't bring a laptop with them everywhere, how many would like to have that functionality without the hassle.
Putting aside for a second the fact that the functionality of a dedicated computer is NOT available online and probably won't be for the forseeable future, I would say very few.
The penniless hippy wandering the country, sleeping in parks and logging on from libraries and cyber cafes might be writing the great American novel and would like to get to it from anywhere.
Now THERE is a corner case if I have ever heard one.
The average grade school child may not have a laptop, but they might be writing a book report at home and at school and want access both places.
The "average" grade school child writes his/her book reports the night before it is due. And if you think he/she is going to want to access it at school, buy him/her a USB thumb drive.
Your grandmother might want to get to one of her recipes
My grandmother isn't alive anymore, but when she was, she wrote her recipes on 3x5 note cards.
There are many, very real, use cases for those who don't currently carry a laptop everywhere.
Yeah, I especially enjoyed the penniless hippy example.
That is a serious drawback for many, although it may be solved if internet access becomes more reliable. But, we were discussing the advantages of such a system, not the disadvantages. There are plenty of both. And no, we were not comparing the two and trying to make some sort of judgement as to which is better for all people everywhere, since that would be absurd without knowing the use cases of everyone.
Maybe you missed the part where I said "limited application." Not absolutely useless.
Yeah, they said the same thing about automobiles and they were right at the time. Easy to use collaboration software will be of great use to a lot of people, when it gets there. I know a lot of programmers who use it for a sort of pair programming now. When it is easy enough for the masses, it will be used by them.
Wait a minute, suddenly you have narrowed the applicaiton field to "collaboration software." I thought we were talking about replacing traditional desktop applications.
I don't know what kind of "programmers" use online tools for "pair programming", but all the ones I know use version control systems such as subversion or CVS. See, that way they are not locked into using a specific editor and such.
-matthew
But you can already run Word on the vast majority of desktop computers (Windows and Mac). And unix users have Openoffice. so why would a web based Word be significant? Who would anyone use it? A web based Word would suck. It would be 10x slower and bloated than a native solution.
The big mistake that these online app companies are making is that they are trying to reinvent common applications that are already available to users of the major platforms. Why the hell do I, as a Linux user, need Google spreadsheets, for example? I have gcalc. OS X users are certainly not hurting for common productivity apps. So what is the market?
Sorry, but I find it hard to believe that the mediocre little browser based applications that Google and friends have put out really allowed you to get rid of Windows. I mean, simple spreadsheet capabilities matching or exceeding what Google sheets can do has been available on Linux for years.
-matthew
Yeah, because everyone knows there are no document management solutions outside of *office available for major OSes. Linux users, for example, had no way of editting a text file before Openoffice came out. Programmers simply echoed text to files from teh commandline. And forget about spreadsheets. NObody ever made a stripped down spreadsheet program besides Excel. I had a dream of something called gcalc once, but that was only a dream. I certainly haven't been using it for years. All praise Google for bringing stripped down applications to the masses.
Yeah, because everyone knows that Office 95 stopped working when the next version came out.
The thing is, people who need to do that kind of thing (work on the same files everywhere) already bring a laptop around with them. And they are not going to give up the convenience of having a computer wherever they need it for some shitty browser based immitation of the applicaitons they use.
But if you don't, for some reason, have internet access, you can't do any work. Yeah, I'm sure people will be jumping all over THAT.
It is a novelty with limited application.
-matthew
"Editor" and "word processor" are not the same thing.
If you consilidated your debts, perhaps you could afford a dish.
It totally works for me. I signed up within the first week of the list opening. And to this day I barely get any unsolicited calls except for political surveys and such (not many). The difference is very noticable.
However, after about 1 year of relief, I moved to a new apartment but kept the same phone number and the calls started coming back in a big way. Apparently, if there is any change in your phone service you get taken off the list again. Even if your number didnt' change.My suggestion to anyone who is still getting sales calls and such is to reregister. Your number may have been delisted because of some change in your phone service.
Overall I am pleasantly surprised by how effective the do not call list has been for me. I was not expecting much. I only wish do-not-spam lists could be this effective.
-matthew
Of course they would "mind." They don't even want you to record it directly from teh radio. But that wasn't the quesiton. Just because the RIAA doesn't like something doesn't make it wrong.
My feeling is that a publisher more of less forfeits exclusive ownership by the act of broadcasting. Sure, they still hold copyright which means that you can't claim it as your own. But once it is voluntarily broadcast, it is out there. They can't take it back or prevent you from making copies unless you sign an agreement that says you won't. At least in my own little moral world.
-matthew
What's not to agree with? That is a perfectly reasonable rationale. That's not to say that you must pay for the convenience. Just that you could if you wanted that particular convenience.
-matthew