During the dotcom boom era - I had stock options that were worth in excess of $1,000,000.
When you're that loaded - BANKS treat you differently. They recognize you by name as you walk in the door. They're happy to loan you $10,000, where before you were rich, they'd laugh in your face and tell you you're 'not economically viable'. If you overdraft, they overlook it - where as before, they'll send your rent check back if you're a dollar over and your deposit is in, but not counting until tomorrow because it was deposited after 12pm.
That's one difference between rich and poor I'd like to point out.
Of course, when stocks crashed, I lost a great deal of potential "money" - but much of it hadn't vested yet, and had I tried to protect it and diversify it, the IRS would have bent me over. Easy come, easy go - when it's wealth on paper.
So from the rags-to-riches-to-rags perspective, I'd have to say - no. Money does NOT buy happiness. But, there was a secure feeling of knowing where your next meal was coming from, knowing that you would be able to send your kids to college, and that you would not be eating dogfood in your retirement. For me - this secure feeling was worth all the happiness in the world. This feeling has nothing at all to do with crass materialism.
Needless to say - I'm not destitute, I still have a good job, fairly secure, money put away, lots of equity in a very nice home, and toys toys toys toys toys. But if I lost my job tomorrow - and if I couldn't find a new one relatively quick - I'd be well and truly fucked.
It's possible that this feeling of "security" - and the fact that that security has vanished for a great many other people in this country, is the fact behind the recent month of record labor productivity rise in the US. When people are scared, they'll work harder.
I'll tell you, that feeling of security that came with the wealth - that was FAR better than the feeling of security that came with "nothing to lose" that I had when I was poor back in the 80's.
Re:Go to Africa. Learn what poor means.
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The Almighty Buck
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No matter how miserable other people are, and no matter how nice things are for you - you can still complain, and you can still wish for a better life, because things DON'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
Largely the reason why some people have better lives is because somebody got off their knees, looked around, and said, hey, it doesn't have to be this way, we could make things better. Certainly, in a large part - those Americans that have better lives today are benficiaries of others who refused to accept the crappy situations of their lives and worked to change it. Possibly that was the intention of the ones who worked to change it. After all, the pre-amble of the US Constitution does state: ". . . to ourselves and our posterity. .." - current Americans ARE that posterity. Is it Unfair, that we happen to be the beneficiaries, and others throughout the world are not? Perhaps. Perhaps something can be done to change that. But if it's at the expense of sacrificing our own "good life" - then what you end up with is EVERYBODY poor. What's the point of that?
What I'm saying is; sure - the "first world" should be doing far more to help the less fortunate of the world. But going so far as to opening a vein, and offering a drink - won't make the world a better place in the long run.
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
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I'd add to that that it's probably very likely that - just as when OPEC constrains supply to oil, revenues actually go down because people drive less when gas prices go up - the market will respond the same way with eveyrthing else, if there develops an underclass of people who aren't able to afford goods and services, because monopolies have priced them out of the common man's reach, or licensing agreements become too onerous.
Face it, the whole reason Brittney sold so many zillions of CD's is because there were a whole buttload of 14 year olds whose mummies and daddies gave them too big of an allowance.
And the same thing's going to happen in broadband as the competition dissolves, and they jack up the prices and restrictions. The whole reason why people started getting on the internet back in the early 90's was because it was trivially cheap for every quirky individual to put up his or her own web page, and you could just surf for hours and hours looking at cool stuff. That Internet is long gone, and there's really not a whole lot that's compelling anymore. So why do people feel the need to get broadband? A pissing contest? Sure, the geeks need the bandwidth to download ISOs, and low latency to frag losers - but the rest of them - the ones that got onto the Internet 5 or so years ago because there was so much cool content - now it's pretty much gone - or consolidated into commercial interests which intend to wring every penny out of it - which makes it instantly unappealing to the average websurfer.
There was a resurgence during the era when it was safe and free to download MP3's - the new "killer app" of the Internet - but now - MP3's aren't free anymore. You pay for them by being subject to spyware - or dealing with a low signal-to-noise ratio (vs. spam, poorly ripped, mislabeled, or incomplete tracks).
Re:Journalists, lawyers, politicians vs. computers
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Blogging for Dummies?
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Yes, they all seem to be checking up on eachother when reporting about how the big bad gummint is destroying the economy by interfering with poor innocent Microsoft, and how Jar Jar Bush is SAVING us all by having the DOJ disregard the case.
Yeah, Usenet succummed to the same thing a few years back.
What would be great is if some enterprising bored geek could write a database to track all the sites, and download all MP3s, CRC them, enter them into a database, check "create dates" if that's possible, and corellate them all together to track their origin.
Then find the bastards who are responsible for this, and expose them.
then, the P2P software people could incorporate some kind of watermarking or validation technology to make sure that the MP3's we're downloading are the real deal - ripped by people who care, at high bitrates - quality product.
That's bullshit. Touring and performances are much harder work that you appear to think. Musicians sacrifice a LOT to tour. Then, there's only so many venues, and everybody from the local stagehand unions to TicketBastard take their ever increasing cut of the action.
And then when you get down to it - you're not talking about a musician, you're talking about a performer. The appeal of a live show is often fundamentally different than the appeal of a music video, or recording. The live show has costumes, dancing, scenery, pyrotechnics, lights, all kinds of bullshit that the serious musician and music affictionado doesn't really need. So why be burdened with that? What if a really really good, I mean earth-shatteringly GREAT musician, for some reason, cannot tour, or cannot perform.
One example I've often mentioned is Andy Partridge from XTC. He's got a crippling anxiety disorder, and just plain can't get up on stage and perform. His contribution to music is non-trivial. He's not just another fluff stage performer like Madonna etc.
Are you saying that people like that CAN'T make a living doing music, and must flip burgers?
Granted, there's an awful lot of bullshit music out there that is not worthy of copyright protection, and there are some performers who are simply - performers. But there's also a lot of really fucking great musicians who deserve to be paid for being "recording artists" - and not be required to tour. And it's important that their recordings be protected somehow.
I'm not going to climb down THAT slippery slope, because no matter how you look at it, it's either the honor system (which apparently doesn't work) - or the untenable ugliness that is enforcement of copyright. I'm not here to solve that problem. I'm here to shoot down the absolutely brainless notion that people who only write songs and record them in studios aren't really working, and therefore don't morally deserve to make a living.
Interesting you mention that, because Porsche (the professor, not the car company) built the FIRST hybrid car, the first all-wheel drive car, and the first front-wheel drive car. Almost 100 years ago.
Part of the problem is the insurance industry, which, instead of giving a person a single-car rate for owning two cars (which he obviously can't be driving at the SAME time) - So that, instead of buying a little efficient commuter for driving to work, and a big SUV for the 2 or so camping trips they may take every year, the rest of the time, the truck stays parked - instead of that, the person just buys ONE vehicle that serves all of his purposes, (the versitile SUV) and drives that to work every day.
It's the same logic Microsoft applies to software licensing. You run Word on your home computer, and your work computer? You need two licenses (when obviously, you're not using BOTH at the same time!).
The point is, we "geeks" have a vested interest in the widespread adoption of computer technology.
Yes, it's pure neatness. And - geeks are raised to a higher status when we can understand and perform complex trickery with these expensive toys. Also, when computers are mass manufactured, we geeks benefit from the economies of scale, and our prices our cheaper. Compare the original IBM PC, at around $5000, to your $800 Gateway special today. We HAVE benefitted. But the regular home user has not. They've blown their $2500 on two or three systems, each one supposedly going to fix the problems the last one had - they've frustratedly lost data, dealt with downtime, been laughed at by elitists, been charged outrageous prices to service equipment or reinstall OSes, had their credit cards stolen, spyware and viruses installed, then dumped $40 a month for a faster way to sit and wait for ads to download. Where's the WIN in it for them?
If we geeks TRULY want mass propagation of this technology (and all the benefits it entails) - if we really want their money, computers HAVE to improve, or the market will say fuck you very much, bend over, you can have your overpriced worthless toy back, and I'll keep my money.
I suspect there may be something in this with regard to the dot-bombs.
Oh, there are parallels much earlier in the auto industry.
For instance - in the teens and twenties - many cars often had a knob or a lever on the dash for setting the spark advance. If the spark is too retarded, the engine has moved on and the exhaust valve is opening, and your opportunity for combustion is passed - the engine will stumble and die. But if the spark is too advanced, the engine will produce too much heat, as the piston is still heading upwards, and compressing when combustion occurs. Of course, as the speed of the engine changes, the requirements for timing the spark changes. The timing at 2000 rpm needs to be advanced compared to 800 rpm. So as you accelerated in these older cars, you had to manually set this lever on the dash to advance the timing so the engine didn't die. This was considered too complex for your average woman of the teens and twenties to handle, so there were various laws passed making it illegal for a woman to drive (I think most states have since repealed these laws. Most states).
In later cars, ignition timing is handled by a mechanical "distributor" which advances the spark based on the speed the engine is running. This eliminated one whole control, one whole focus of attention. Later cars eliminated the high maintenance of the mechanical distributor by replacing it with an electronic timing system (electronic ignition). I don't think that there's a single person who will argue that "the old way" was better. Although a lot of people mourn the loss of distributors, everybody's happy about not having to set the timing advance on the dashboard as you accelerate.
Other improvements include automatic transmissions. To this day, my wife refuses to learn to drive stick. Why should she have to do it when there's a perfectly good mechanical device designed to take care of this needless distraction for you? You can get from point a to point b just fine without a clutch and gearshift lever.
Of course, macho purists will give you all kinds of rational explanations as to why driving stick is better; you can judge your speed by the engine note and knowldege of which gear you're in, which is obtained tactile-ly, so you don't have to take your eyes off the road to look at the speedometer. Manual transmissions are more efficient. Easier to maintain and repair. Allow more flexibility when you're driving hard. None of those things matter to the soccer mom with three screaming kids in the back of the van, trying to get them home in time for lunch.
These are only a couple of examples of how the auto industry changed to meet the needs of people whose money it wanted.
If the computer industry wants these people's money - if they truly want to sell a computer for every home - they're going to have to design a computer for EVERY home. Not just the niche geek market. Macintosh made computers more accessible - but not to the poor. Windows made computers more accessible, but simplicity was sacrificed for CHEAPNESS. Linux made computers even more accessible to low income people who were willing and able to "geek out". "modern" Linux (the last 2-3 years) is even more accessible to your typical Windows person - but still has a ways to go to be as simple as a Mac. Personally, while Apple did a great job making Mac OS X a SIMPLE to use Unix, it's a step backwards from the old OS in many ways - as far as mass-market usability is concerned. Nobody really hits that target yet. Or even comes close. I think that ultimately, file systems will have to be transparent. Data has to be accessible, without requiring the user to know about a directory structure. I know those sound pretty unrealistic - but I think that's the only way that, in the long run, "normal" people are going to be able to use computers productively enough to justify their use. Either that, or they're going to have to evolve into limited-use appliances.
In those ten years, I've come to expect that the simple, home user, does not, and *should not* have to know the deep inner workings of their computer. In fact - a great many computer users don't "get" the concept of directories.
In that regard, the computer industry has utterly, completely FAILED to serve the market to which it has desperately tried to sell computers - to the saturation point.
That's a completely different situation than what I deal with on a daily basis, because I support products that are used by businesses - so I deal with professionals. Some of the idiotic things so-called computer professionals do are simply hair-raising. There's no excuse for a person who's drawing a paycheck as a consultant to not know these simple things. I expect my customers to be at least as competent as I am in general computer use. And in many cases, that's simply not true. In some cases, there are people I help who can mouse circles around me. That's fine. I'm paid to be an expert in the products I support. I very much enjoy working with competent customers. The second most frustrating part of my job is dealing with incompetent customers and self-inflicted problems. (the most frustrating part of my job is dealing with my own developers, who refuse to design their products to meet the user halfway).
My point? KaZazAAZaKakaZAA is a product whose target market is the HOME USER. Your mother in law. Your great-uncle. Your little sister. This is a totally different market with a totally different set of requirements. It's unconscionable to design a product for a home user that's this difficult to understand and configure. On the other hand, it's par for the course these days. I guess we're lucky we don't have to be teaching our mother in law how to setup ssl or manage her own sendmail server.
Apparently, like the users who don't "get" directories - the software makers don't "get" usability. While you're prototyping your UI, you need to sit a regular person down in front of it - your target market, and watch how they install it, watch how they navigate it, see the errors they make, and figure out how to make the UI better, so they don't make those errors. This is not "dumbing down" the software. There's always "advanced" settings, (and designing software with a GUI that doesn't also have a good command line interface for the techies is similarly unconscionable). But all that doesn't help anyone make a quick buck.
There IS a huge market of tech savvy people out there. But compared to the dumb home user, it's a niche. So what's it going to be? Are computers destined to forever be a niche? Or is some smart engineer going to figure out how to write software "the rest of us" can use?
What is the maximum negative environmental impact allowable before the economy must be curbed?
It's funny you put it this way. Alan Greenspan fights like hell to put the brakes on the economy when it's expanding too fast - by raising interest rates. Why don't they just use some plug-n-play legislation when the economy's going too fast; slow it down with environmental regs, stop fucking with interest rates - then when the economy slows down, temporarily suspend the environmental regs?
The science supporting both is pretty weak anyways. (not environmental regs in principle, but the actual effectiveness of environmental regs - along with pork, loopholes, trade-offs, etc.)
no, let's just face it. The US Sucks and Europe rocks. We need to do away with all this American Football nonsense, and just sit down and start liking soccer for starters.
Then later, we can adopt the metric system, give all our workers 6 weeks of vacation a year, and endure 10% unemployment.
It will simply be factored into the cost of living. (or hidden somehow by some apparently well-meaning politician in search of votes). But in the end, it will simply cost more to live there, and people who can't afford it will move somewhere else. (Ask the folks in Denver, CO, who have seen a huge spike in property values in the last 10 years as people fleeing California moved in).
So in this way, the invisible hand continues to jerk us off.
Because healthy, happy, non-screwed-over customers:
* Buy more products and services from them in the future; and
* Tell their friends and acquaintances how great the company is, and encourage other people to become customers; and
* Don't involve the company in expensive lawsuits.
* Fight wars to protect businesses from those evil, evil communists. Come on, people gave their LIVES to protect this shit, and this is how they repay us?
It could be said that Netscape's lax policy on piracy of their browser was what forced Microsoft to offer IE for free. This is the big dirty secret of all IP. Give it away for free to gain marketshare, then when the competition is dead, squeeze the users for cash.
To be fair, MS has not turned around and started to charge for IE. But since it's bundled with the OS, it effectively DOES make them money. And it's not just the browser market they're trying to dominate. It's the web standards mindshare. That market's still not tied up.
1) I have a few social skills, but there are times when I prefer to not use them. 2) I am not on good terms with many of my neighbors. 3) What about my neighbors who are happy paying Charter $40 a month? Why should they pay me $60? 4) What about my neighbors who don't have any computers at all - geez, in 802.11 range, I think my market is about, one jerkwad plus myself. 5) Yeah, like I want to dick around trying to shoehorn an 802.11 card into everybody's busted ass old PII 133 running Windows 95, find a driver and make sure there's no interrupt conflicts. 6) Yeah, like I want to take phone calls at 2am because granny's email client wont connect, or Joe Bob can't download his pr0n. The T1 goes down and guess what, I'M responsible for the outage. Fuck that.
I suspect the solution is to move to Japan or Canada where the market forces that have drivin US Broadband services to $50/month apparently don't exist for some strange reason. . .
How in hell are they operating on really thin margins?? This is only a US problem. Broadband in Japan and Canada is much cheaper - how can they do it? Smarter accountants?
I don't give a flying fuck if the terrorists just wanted us to give them a peanut butter sandwich. Appeasement is stupid, and terrorists are murderers, and unless you want to hand over the keys to civilization to these ragheads, whether they want peanut butter sandwiches, or righteous justice for Palestine, terrorism must be fought and destroyed.
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During the dotcom boom era - I had stock options that were worth in excess of $1,000,000.
When you're that loaded - BANKS treat you differently. They recognize you by name as you walk in the door. They're happy to loan you $10,000, where before you were rich, they'd laugh in your face and tell you you're 'not economically viable'. If you overdraft, they overlook it - where as before, they'll send your rent check back if you're a dollar over and your deposit is in, but not counting until tomorrow because it was deposited after 12pm.
That's one difference between rich and poor I'd like to point out.
Of course, when stocks crashed, I lost a great deal of potential "money" - but much of it hadn't vested yet, and had I tried to protect it and diversify it, the IRS would have bent me over. Easy come, easy go - when it's wealth on paper.
So from the rags-to-riches-to-rags perspective, I'd have to say - no. Money does NOT buy happiness. But, there was a secure feeling of knowing where your next meal was coming from, knowing that you would be able to send your kids to college, and that you would not be eating dogfood in your retirement. For me - this secure feeling was worth all the happiness in the world. This feeling has nothing at all to do with crass materialism.
Needless to say - I'm not destitute, I still have a good job, fairly secure, money put away, lots of equity in a very nice home, and toys toys toys toys toys.
But if I lost my job tomorrow - and if I couldn't find a new one relatively quick - I'd be well and truly fucked.
It's possible that this feeling of "security" - and the fact that that security has vanished for a great many other people in this country, is the fact behind the recent month of record labor productivity rise in the US. When people are scared, they'll work harder.
I'll tell you, that feeling of security that came with the wealth - that was FAR better than the feeling of security that came with "nothing to lose" that I had when I was poor back in the 80's.
No matter how miserable other people are, and no matter how nice things are for you - you can still complain, and you can still wish for a better life, because things DON'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
." - current Americans ARE that posterity. Is it Unfair, that we happen to be the beneficiaries, and others throughout the world are not?
Largely the reason why some people have better lives is because somebody got off their knees, looked around, and said, hey, it doesn't have to be this way, we could make things better.
Certainly, in a large part - those Americans that have better lives today are benficiaries of others who refused to accept the crappy situations of their lives and worked to change it. Possibly that was the intention of the ones who worked to change it. After all, the pre-amble of the US Constitution does state: ". . . to ourselves and our posterity. .
Perhaps. Perhaps something can be done to change that. But if it's at the expense of sacrificing our own "good life" - then what you end up with is EVERYBODY poor. What's the point of that?
What I'm saying is; sure - the "first world" should be doing far more to help the less fortunate of the world. But going so far as to opening a vein, and offering a drink - won't make the world a better place in the long run.
I'd add to that that it's probably very likely that - just as when OPEC constrains supply to oil, revenues actually go down because people drive less when gas prices go up - the market will respond the same way with eveyrthing else, if there develops an underclass of people who aren't able to afford goods and services, because monopolies have priced them out of the common man's reach, or licensing agreements become too onerous.
Face it, the whole reason Brittney sold so many zillions of CD's is because there were a whole buttload of 14 year olds whose mummies and daddies gave them too big of an allowance.
And the same thing's going to happen in broadband as the competition dissolves, and they jack up the prices and restrictions. The whole reason why people started getting on the internet back in the early 90's was because it was trivially cheap for every quirky individual to put up his or her own web page, and you could just surf for hours and hours looking at cool stuff. That Internet is long gone, and there's really not a whole lot that's compelling anymore. So why do people feel the need to get broadband? A pissing contest? Sure, the geeks need the bandwidth to download ISOs, and low latency to frag losers - but the rest of them - the ones that got onto the Internet 5 or so years ago because there was so much cool content - now it's pretty much gone - or consolidated into commercial interests which intend to wring every penny out of it - which makes it instantly unappealing to the average websurfer.
There was a resurgence during the era when it was safe and free to download MP3's - the new "killer app" of the Internet - but now - MP3's aren't free anymore. You pay for them by being subject to spyware - or dealing with a low signal-to-noise ratio (vs. spam, poorly ripped, mislabeled, or incomplete tracks).
Yes, they all seem to be checking up on eachother when reporting about how the big bad gummint is destroying the economy by interfering with poor innocent Microsoft, and how Jar Jar Bush is SAVING us all by having the DOJ disregard the case.
Yeah, Usenet succummed to the same thing a few years back.
What would be great is if some enterprising bored geek could write a database to track all the sites, and download all MP3s, CRC them, enter them into a database, check "create dates" if that's possible, and corellate them all together to track their origin.
Then find the bastards who are responsible for this, and expose them.
then, the P2P software people could incorporate some kind of watermarking or validation technology to make sure that the MP3's we're downloading are the real deal - ripped by people who care, at high bitrates - quality product.
I dunno. Tommy Dorsey rocks my world.
That's bullshit. Touring and performances are much harder work that you appear to think. Musicians sacrifice a LOT to tour.
Then, there's only so many venues, and everybody from the local stagehand unions to TicketBastard take their ever increasing cut of the action.
And then when you get down to it - you're not talking about a musician, you're talking about a performer. The appeal of a live show is often fundamentally different than the appeal of a music video, or recording. The live show has costumes, dancing, scenery, pyrotechnics, lights, all kinds of bullshit that the serious musician and music affictionado doesn't really need. So why be burdened with that? What if a really really good, I mean earth-shatteringly GREAT musician, for some reason, cannot tour, or cannot perform.
One example I've often mentioned is Andy Partridge from XTC. He's got a crippling anxiety disorder, and just plain can't get up on stage and perform. His contribution to music is non-trivial. He's not just another fluff stage performer like Madonna etc.
Are you saying that people like that CAN'T make a living doing music, and must flip burgers?
Granted, there's an awful lot of bullshit music out there that is not worthy of copyright protection, and there are some performers who are simply - performers. But there's also a lot of really fucking great musicians who deserve to be paid for being "recording artists" - and not be required to tour. And it's important that their recordings be protected somehow.
I'm not going to climb down THAT slippery slope, because no matter how you look at it, it's either the honor system (which apparently doesn't work) - or the untenable ugliness that is enforcement of copyright. I'm not here to solve that problem. I'm here to shoot down the absolutely brainless notion that people who only write songs and record them in studios aren't really working, and therefore don't morally deserve to make a living.
Interesting you mention that, because Porsche (the professor, not the car company) built the FIRST hybrid car, the first all-wheel drive car, and the first front-wheel drive car. Almost 100 years ago.
Part of the problem is the insurance industry, which, instead of giving a person a single-car rate for owning two cars (which he obviously can't be driving at the SAME time) -
So that, instead of buying a little efficient commuter for driving to work, and a big SUV for the 2 or so camping trips they may take every year, the rest of the time, the truck stays parked - instead of that, the person just buys ONE vehicle that serves all of his purposes, (the versitile SUV) and drives that to work every day.
It's the same logic Microsoft applies to software licensing. You run Word on your home computer, and your work computer? You need two licenses (when obviously, you're not using BOTH at the same time!).
The point is, we "geeks" have a vested interest in the widespread adoption of computer technology.
Yes, it's pure neatness.
And - geeks are raised to a higher status when we can understand and perform complex trickery with these expensive toys.
Also, when computers are mass manufactured, we geeks benefit from the economies of scale, and our prices our cheaper. Compare the original IBM PC, at around $5000, to your $800 Gateway special today. We HAVE benefitted.
But the regular home user has not. They've blown their $2500 on two or three systems, each one supposedly going to fix the problems the last one had - they've frustratedly lost data, dealt with downtime, been laughed at by elitists, been charged outrageous prices to service equipment or reinstall OSes, had their credit cards stolen, spyware and viruses installed, then dumped $40 a month for a faster way to sit and wait for ads to download. Where's the WIN in it for them?
If we geeks TRULY want mass propagation of this technology (and all the benefits it entails) - if we really want their money, computers HAVE to improve, or the market will say fuck you very much, bend over, you can have your overpriced worthless toy back, and I'll keep my money.
I suspect there may be something in this with regard to the dot-bombs.
Oh, there are parallels much earlier in the auto industry.
For instance - in the teens and twenties - many cars often had a knob or a lever on the dash for setting the spark advance. If the spark is too retarded, the engine has moved on and the exhaust valve is opening, and your opportunity for combustion is passed - the engine will stumble and die. But if the spark is too advanced, the engine will produce too much heat, as the piston is still heading upwards, and compressing when combustion occurs. Of course, as the speed of the engine changes, the requirements for timing the spark changes. The timing at 2000 rpm needs to be advanced compared to 800 rpm. So as you accelerated in these older cars, you had to manually set this lever on the dash to advance the timing so the engine didn't die. This was considered too complex for your average woman of the teens and twenties to handle, so there were various laws passed making it illegal for a woman to drive (I think most states have since repealed these laws. Most states).
In later cars, ignition timing is handled by a mechanical "distributor" which advances the spark based on the speed the engine is running. This eliminated one whole control, one whole focus of attention.
Later cars eliminated the high maintenance of the mechanical distributor by replacing it with an electronic timing system (electronic ignition).
I don't think that there's a single person who will argue that "the old way" was better. Although a lot of people mourn the loss of distributors, everybody's happy about not having to set the timing advance on the dashboard as you accelerate.
Other improvements include automatic transmissions. To this day, my wife refuses to learn to drive stick. Why should she have to do it when there's a perfectly good mechanical device designed to take care of this needless distraction for you? You can get from point a to point b just fine without a clutch and gearshift lever.
Of course, macho purists will give you all kinds of rational explanations as to why driving stick is better; you can judge your speed by the engine note and knowldege of which gear you're in, which is obtained tactile-ly, so you don't have to take your eyes off the road to look at the speedometer. Manual transmissions are more efficient. Easier to maintain and repair. Allow more flexibility when you're driving hard.
None of those things matter to the soccer mom with three screaming kids in the back of the van, trying to get them home in time for lunch.
These are only a couple of examples of how the auto industry changed to meet the needs of people whose money it wanted.
If the computer industry wants these people's money - if they truly want to sell a computer for every home - they're going to have to design a computer for EVERY home. Not just the niche geek market. Macintosh made computers more accessible - but not to the poor. Windows made computers more accessible, but simplicity was sacrificed for CHEAPNESS. Linux made computers even more accessible to low income people who were willing and able to "geek out". "modern" Linux (the last 2-3 years) is even more accessible to your typical Windows person - but still has a ways to go to be as simple as a Mac. Personally, while Apple did a great job making Mac OS X a SIMPLE to use Unix, it's a step backwards from the old OS in many ways - as far as mass-market usability is concerned. Nobody really hits that target yet. Or even comes close.
I think that ultimately, file systems will have to be transparent. Data has to be accessible, without requiring the user to know about a directory structure. I know those sound pretty unrealistic - but I think that's the only way that, in the long run, "normal" people are going to be able to use computers productively enough to justify their use. Either that, or they're going to have to evolve into limited-use appliances.
I've been doing tech support for 10 years.
In those ten years, I've come to expect that the simple, home user, does not, and *should not* have to know the deep inner workings of their computer. In fact - a great many computer users don't "get" the concept of directories.
In that regard, the computer industry has utterly, completely FAILED to serve the market to which it has desperately tried to sell computers - to the saturation point.
That's a completely different situation than what I deal with on a daily basis, because I support products that are used by businesses - so I deal with professionals.
Some of the idiotic things so-called computer professionals do are simply hair-raising. There's no excuse for a person who's drawing a paycheck as a consultant to not know these simple things. I expect my customers to be at least as competent as I am in general computer use. And in many cases, that's simply not true.
In some cases, there are people I help who can mouse circles around me. That's fine. I'm paid to be an expert in the products I support. I very much enjoy working with competent customers. The second most frustrating part of my job is dealing with incompetent customers and self-inflicted problems. (the most frustrating part of my job is dealing with my own developers, who refuse to design their products to meet the user halfway).
My point?
KaZazAAZaKakaZAA is a product whose target market is the HOME USER. Your mother in law. Your great-uncle. Your little sister. This is a totally different market with a totally different set of requirements. It's unconscionable to design a product for a home user that's this difficult to understand and configure. On the other hand, it's par for the course these days. I guess we're lucky we don't have to be teaching our mother in law how to setup ssl or manage her own sendmail server.
Apparently, like the users who don't "get" directories - the software makers don't "get" usability. While you're prototyping your UI, you need to sit a regular person down in front of it - your target market, and watch how they install it, watch how they navigate it, see the errors they make, and figure out how to make the UI better, so they don't make those errors. This is not "dumbing down" the software. There's always "advanced" settings, (and designing software with a GUI that doesn't also have a good command line interface for the techies is similarly unconscionable).
But all that doesn't help anyone make a quick buck.
There IS a huge market of tech savvy people out there. But compared to the dumb home user, it's a niche. So what's it going to be? Are computers destined to forever be a niche? Or is some smart engineer going to figure out how to write software "the rest of us" can use?
What is the maximum negative environmental impact allowable before the economy must be curbed?
It's funny you put it this way. Alan Greenspan fights like hell to put the brakes on the economy when it's expanding too fast - by raising interest rates. Why don't they just use some plug-n-play legislation when the economy's going too fast; slow it down with environmental regs, stop fucking with interest rates - then when the economy slows down, temporarily suspend the environmental regs?
The science supporting both is pretty weak anyways. (not environmental regs in principle, but the actual effectiveness of environmental regs - along with pork, loopholes, trade-offs, etc.)
no, let's just face it. The US Sucks and Europe rocks. We need to do away with all this American Football nonsense, and just sit down and start liking soccer for starters.
Then later, we can adopt the metric system, give all our workers 6 weeks of vacation a year, and endure 10% unemployment.
It will simply be factored into the cost of living. (or hidden somehow by some apparently well-meaning politician in search of votes). But in the end, it will simply cost more to live there, and people who can't afford it will move somewhere else. (Ask the folks in Denver, CO, who have seen a huge spike in property values in the last 10 years as people fleeing California moved in).
So in this way, the invisible hand continues to jerk us off.
Because healthy, happy, non-screwed-over customers:
* Buy more products and services from them in the future; and
* Tell their friends and acquaintances how great the company is, and encourage other people to become customers; and
* Don't involve the company in expensive lawsuits.
* Fight wars to protect businesses from those evil, evil communists. Come on, people gave their LIVES to protect this shit, and this is how they repay us?
Yes! I haven't seen a performance like this out of Williams since Mork & Mindy. Maybe he's on coke again?
The RIAA, The MPAA, The BSA, The Muslims, The Church of Scientology. . .
It could be said that Netscape's lax policy on piracy of their browser was what forced Microsoft to offer IE for free. This is the big dirty secret of all IP. Give it away for free to gain marketshare, then when the competition is dead, squeeze the users for cash.
To be fair, MS has not turned around and started to charge for IE. But since it's bundled with the OS, it effectively DOES make them money. And it's not just the browser market they're trying to dominate. It's the web standards mindshare. That market's still not tied up.
1) I have a few social skills, but there are times when I prefer to not use them.
2) I am not on good terms with many of my neighbors.
3) What about my neighbors who are happy paying Charter $40 a month? Why should they pay me $60?
4) What about my neighbors who don't have any computers at all - geez, in 802.11 range, I think my market is about, one jerkwad plus myself.
5) Yeah, like I want to dick around trying to shoehorn an 802.11 card into everybody's busted ass old PII 133 running Windows 95, find a driver and make sure there's no interrupt conflicts.
6) Yeah, like I want to take phone calls at 2am because granny's email client wont connect, or Joe Bob can't download his pr0n. The T1 goes down and guess what, I'M responsible for the outage. Fuck that.
I suspect the solution is to move to Japan or Canada where the market forces that have drivin US Broadband services to $50/month apparently don't exist for some strange reason. . .
How in hell are they operating on really thin margins?? This is only a US problem. Broadband in Japan and Canada is much cheaper - how can they do it? Smarter accountants?
I don't give a flying fuck if the terrorists just wanted us to give them a peanut butter sandwich. Appeasement is stupid, and terrorists are murderers, and unless you want to hand over the keys to civilization to these ragheads, whether they want peanut butter sandwiches, or righteous justice for Palestine, terrorism must be fought and destroyed.
I dunno, 3000 former workers at the World Trade Center would argue that we're in big trouble NOW.
Plus, most of them speak English. And they're white!
3 Trillion (with a capital T) in the ground.
315 billion recoverable with today's technology.
(Calgary Herald)
262 billion in Saudi Arabia.