In my experience with my Android phone, I find quite the opposite. Before, squinting at printed directions from Yahoo / Google maps or trying to read a paper map, it was all I could do to get the right turns in a way that didn't all but cause accidents.
Now, I have a rather timely "lady" give me turn-by-turn directions like "In 1000 feet, turn left on Borkbork road". This, coupled with the fact that it reroutes so smoothly in the case where I miss a turn means that I can focus on driving and spend no effort at all trying to figure out how to get there.
Your blood sucking horde of soulless lawyers can be set at bay with a simple law dictating that in the case where a driverless car can demonstrate an accident rate N% lower than comparable human drivers that the company cannot be found liable for driver mistakes. (they would still be liable for other manufacturing defects)
If Congress was smart, they'd pass a law that starts at 1%, and must improve by at least 2% per year up to 80% reduction. Of course, "pro" is the opposite of "con" so what's the opposite of progress?
Technology would meet this obligation easily, and Google cars can already best people if their reports are any indication.
There's a movement growing rapidly in Europe to reduce traffic signs and lights, and they are finding that removing signs and lights can cause a rather dramtic reduction in accidents. A number of cities have done away with traffic lights and signs entirely with surprisingly good results. (EG: average trip times drop dramatically, accident rate plummets, people report greater satisfaction, etc)
I'm not saying that we should do away with all signs everywhere, but there is sufficient evidence available that the "common sense" utility of the traffic sign or a traffic light is clearly unproven.
The problem here is for the vendors, not the consumers. As a consumer, I, too have always purchased CPU/MB in a pair and I've never upgraded the CPU without upgrading the motherboard. A motherboard's meaningful market life is probably a year, while most upgrades occur at least 2 or 3 years apart. So that's moot.
But the problem is for smaller vendors. Once having been one myself, I'd usually keep a week's stock of motherboards on hand, and somewhat more CPUs on hand, confident that I could meet consumer demands simply by putting the appropriate CPU with the motherboard and hand them something useful.
By soldering CPUs directly to the main board, this modularity is compromised and the cost of delivering numerous options for CPU combos goes up considerably. Now, instead of 10 motherboards and 20 CPUs to offer up to 20 different CPU speeds, a vendor needs to increase inventory overhead in order to maintain a similar selection.
No, not the end of the world, but it may well result in an increase in the desirability of AMD inventory.
I don't know if you remember MacOS prior to OSX, but classically it had two "forks" - the data fork which compares to the typical flat file we all know, and a properties fork which is something like the metadata in a file system (time created, ownership, permissions, etc) but with a much richer syntax.
OSX lost that separation and now uses a Unix-y model.
If we wanted data to be trustably limited in scope, then we'd have to structure *all* our data everywhere so that it contains the literal data being saved, as well as another "properties" fork which could contain information about the scope of acceptable usability.
It could be done, but it would be very, very, very expensive. I'm not sure whether it wouldn't be worth it, the right to privacy and personal rights does count for quite a bit, and the court system in the USA is also very, very expensive and equally worth it.
Note that since we're talking about data, Moore's law means that the cost is about 1 or 2 years of actual growth. 1 or 2 years of no growth at all to accommodate this idea....
But asking for "a cut" is the heart and soul of economics: it's the means by which available resources are allocated and exchanged. If something is valuable, it will have a cost to acquire. It's how economics works, and it really sucks badly; it just sucks less than anything else we've cooked up so far.
There's some movement now underway in the Internet-based digital economy in the area of cooperative trust enabled by digital technology but it's not yet proven enough to be more than a fad. What this "cooperative trust" model might mean for data is anybody's guess. Give it 10 years, and then it will be something we can start to rely on.
Until then, sadly, the old rules based on ownership still have merit, because they've worked for thousands of years.
To be fair, it makes a bit of sense. I know, it sounds dumb, but the horrible truth is that being prepared can be rather expensive and the cost of preparing for every possibility is utterly infeasible.
To be evolutionarily successful, you need to be prepared enough to survive long enough to reproduce, and perhaps to see that your offspring reproduce. Being prepared to live 100 years when you won't breed much past 35 means that there's up to 65 years of time where your cost/benefit to the gene pool drops to near zero.
Clearly, it's not an exactly calculable range, and there are certainly plenty of variables, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be prepared. But on the other hand, there's certainly justification to be biased against being overprepared.
When Meg took over as CEO, the company was already headed skyward, already had upward momentum. Mostly she just had to not screw up too badly to make it successful. EBay was actually rather late to implement such features as "Buy it now" which were already innovated in competing marketplaces that didn't have the same mind share. (I should'a patented that one, oh well)
Ebay's purchase of Skype was the most random purchase ever, it was for a quajillion dollars (Ebay lost virtually all of it) and they didn't even buy the source code.
Oh, and don't forget Meg Whitman 2010! Spent crazy amounts of money on ads that were not effective during a time when the political climate almost could not be better.
Oddly, a simple google search returned this on the first page which says (in part): "Go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts, click on "Launch Terminal". Assign a shortcut (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+T). And that's it.".
Patents literally forbid you to tinker in your own home and then sell the item you just invented, if someone paid a fee and lodged a vague sounding description about something roughly similar already.
This is a very common misconception. Patents do not forbid anything at all. All they do is open you up to liability for violating said patent.
If I get a patent for 1-holed socks, and you start making 1-holed socks, the only thing my patent gives me is grounds to sue you for damages in violating my patent. Typically, I could be awarded part of your profit stream as I could have expected to sell more 1-holed socks if you hadn't been busy competing with me.
Violating a patent isn't illegal, it just opens you up to liability.
Well, Win7 is faster than Vista, and Win8 is faster than Win7, but WinXP is/was faster than all of them, especially when first released. One of the services packs (SP2? SP3?) was a big security upgrade that cut the speed of many operations in half or worse.
When their costs went up they all had to raise prices but when costs go down they can all wait for someone else to lower prices first. No collusion or cartel is required.
Not necessarily. It's likely that there profits were lost, and the cost of rebuilding factories and destroyed equipment would also drive up prices. They'll charge whatever they think will maximize their profits, so if yields still haven't completely caught up or embedded costs prevent them from dropping prices in order to get a volume advantage over their competitors you can bet that prices will remain high.
Failure at Microsoft is good for the computer industry.
I'm not so sure.
Microsoft did a number of evil things and deserve the public spanking that they're getting. That said, they also created a long, huge shadow for Linux to develop in: the x86 marketplace. Here was this huge, open hardware platform of relatively homogeneous machines subsidized by the mass market to ridiculously low cost.
Something like Linux won't develop on iOS, nor the now-closed MS hardware, nor most of the Android phones sold by major retailers - they're all closed and while it's possible to hack around them, you have to (ahem) hack around them and the boot lockers get better each and every year.
But on the open platform of the PC, Linux flourished and has prospered. Linux has become the "go-to" platform for low cost, high-volume web services, and dominates the low end as well (EG: Android devices) but all of the early development was on cheap, widely available hardware made available because of Wintel.
In order to foster innovations like this, we *need* an open platform, and so far, only Microsoft's classical 3rd party vendor model has provided that. When that dies, so too does a host of possibilities.
The problem you face is one that I faced long ago in a completely different vein. I was unemployable, because although I had developed programming skills, they were self-taught by reading books and websites rather than school. Without significant experience, I was unemployable as all the jobs had requirements like Bachelor's requirements.
So I did what seemed to be the only thing left - started my own company! I chatted it up with anybody I could find who ran a business and needed something done, found some people willing to pay for a solution, and worked long hours for a while until my revenue stream was sufficient to live on. Now 15 years later, I have ownership of a valuable company that has grown successfully every single year since starting, employees working a job they like with decent pay and a work environment set up the way I like it. Sure, it has its stresses, but they are stresses I choose to assume or ignore, and I like the control that offers me.
It's not for everyone, but I will probably never have a "job" ever again.
As a former RepubliCrat hater, I can affirm: at the time where I was most negative and despondent about the state of things was during the time of my life that I was least aware of what each party did and stood for.
I actually thought they just might pull it off. Right up until I bought Windows 8. It's such a schizophrenic pile of annoyances that there's no way I figure I could love it. It's everything you want in a PC, except that it switches all around on you and eagerly tries to be a tablet, but only in a way that's both counter-intuitive and confusing.
It's worse than painful. At least Vista, when it worked, did. Win8, when it works, is still confusing as hell.
Strange how your example is a case of limiting supply to cause prices to climb, exactly as the "non-existent" law of supply and demand would dictate? You might want to read up on what Supply and Demand would predict. Specifically predicted:
If demand increases and supply remains unchanged, then it leads to higher equilibrium price and higher quantity
Ethanol is bad for engines. While chances are it isn't going to destroy your modern car's engine, good luck getting your chainsaw, mower, etc. or if you store fuel long-term (backup generators, etc.)
How does stuff like this get upvoted? No, ethanol is not "bad for engines", any more than gas, or butanol, or diesel is!
It's true that ethanol can do some minor damage (such as dissolve some carburetor seals) in cars not made to take ethanol, but all cars sold in the USA for the past few decades won't have a problem at all with ethanol. And it's not that ethanol is particularly bad, it's simply that soft rubber gaskets were originally designed with the assumption that ONLY gasoline was going to be used and so didn't bother to check for other types of decomposition. Further, this problem is only seen with long-term use, not occasional use.
I've used ethanol mix fuel many times in my Briggs and Stratton lawn mower as far back as the 90s, never had a problem. Also, ALL gasoline will go bad after a while, (often just a few months) due to evaporation, oxidation, and biological decomposition (Yes, there are bacteria that eat gasoline) among other things. You can use a fuel stabilizer such as Sta-Bil to make your gas last longer.
I've been maintaining a codebase for 10 years, and it is rather difficult to keep everything crisp. It's harder as we grow (we now have 7 developers) to keep things cohesive because although there may be a "right way" to accomplish something, it's not as though everybody knows about it already.
So you do periodic code reviews, group sessions to discuss the "right way" to solve various types of problems as they arise, and just suck it up and do the refactors when the cost of doing so is lowest in comparison with current needs and urgency while simultaneously trying to keep things working for customers now.
Microsoft has a knack for getting it wrong several times before finally coming up with something that works. They are not, in any way, a visionary company, they are simply good at recognizing their mistakes early and dropping them.
Look at their history going all the way back, it took until MS Word 3.x before it even compared to their competition. They suck at first, and always do.
But now that Apple and Android have led the way, Microsoft is about to release the biggest update to their product suite since Windows 95. And this time, I'm rather certain they mean it. They are betting their farm on Windows 8, and have revamped all their products on a unified code base. This isn't Zune, this isn't Wince, (er, WinCE) this is serious.
And it's about to launch. Speculating about the future at this stage in the game about the most useless endeavor imaginable. I'm willing to throw a few hundred in to buy Nokia junk stocks just because, while the odds of MS making Win8 seem scant, the payout if they do could be significant.
Screens laid down are horrible when using a keyboard. There's just no easy way to do it. For serious data entry, even a mouse is an irritation, something that we specifically design our software to avoid so that data entry can happen at maximum speed.
Touch would make the irritation of mouse use ten times worse.
As a long time Postgresql user, I'd probably agree that hints are largely not needed simply because the structuring of the query itself allows you to "hint" what you need.
Compare these two queries:
SELECT customers.firstname, customers.lastname, invoices.id AS invoices_Id, items.description FROM customers, invoices, items WHERE customers.id = invoices.customers_id and invoices.id = items.invoices_id AND customers.id = 12345;
SELECT customers.firstname, customers.lastname, invoices.id AS invoices_Id, items.description FROM customers JOIN invoices ON (customers.id = invoices.customers_id AND customers.id=12345) JOIN items ON (invoices.id = items.invoices_id);
Baring typos, they are logically equivalent. Yet, based on my understanding of Postgres, the latter one will likely run much quicker because it hints to the query planner that you want to start at the customers table and link against a single record, then move on to the invoices for that customer, etc...
The query itself provides enough "hinting" that I've not had to bother with ugly, non-standard kluges like what hinting typically is elsewhere. Why not just stick to standard SQL?
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[Electronic] Maps distract you more and not less.
Citation needed.
In my experience with my Android phone, I find quite the opposite. Before, squinting at printed directions from Yahoo / Google maps or trying to read a paper map, it was all I could do to get the right turns in a way that didn't all but cause accidents.
Now, I have a rather timely "lady" give me turn-by-turn directions like "In 1000 feet, turn left on Borkbork road". This, coupled with the fact that it reroutes so smoothly in the case where I miss a turn means that I can focus on driving and spend no effort at all trying to figure out how to get there.
Your blood sucking horde of soulless lawyers can be set at bay with a simple law dictating that in the case where a driverless car can demonstrate an accident rate N% lower than comparable human drivers that the company cannot be found liable for driver mistakes. (they would still be liable for other manufacturing defects)
If Congress was smart, they'd pass a law that starts at 1%, and must improve by at least 2% per year up to 80% reduction. Of course, "pro" is the opposite of "con" so what's the opposite of progress?
Technology would meet this obligation easily, and Google cars can already best people if their reports are any indication.
There's a movement growing rapidly in Europe to reduce traffic signs and lights, and they are finding that removing signs and lights can cause a rather dramtic reduction in accidents. A number of cities have done away with traffic lights and signs entirely with surprisingly good results. (EG: average trip times drop dramatically, accident rate plummets, people report greater satisfaction, etc)
I'm not saying that we should do away with all signs everywhere, but there is sufficient evidence available that the "common sense" utility of the traffic sign or a traffic light is clearly unproven.
The problem here is for the vendors, not the consumers. As a consumer, I, too have always purchased CPU/MB in a pair and I've never upgraded the CPU without upgrading the motherboard. A motherboard's meaningful market life is probably a year, while most upgrades occur at least 2 or 3 years apart. So that's moot.
But the problem is for smaller vendors. Once having been one myself, I'd usually keep a week's stock of motherboards on hand, and somewhat more CPUs on hand, confident that I could meet consumer demands simply by putting the appropriate CPU with the motherboard and hand them something useful.
By soldering CPUs directly to the main board, this modularity is compromised and the cost of delivering numerous options for CPU combos goes up considerably. Now, instead of 10 motherboards and 20 CPUs to offer up to 20 different CPU speeds, a vendor needs to increase inventory overhead in order to maintain a similar selection.
No, not the end of the world, but it may well result in an increase in the desirability of AMD inventory.
Given that her house can be found In the Hamptons, an area so wealthy that there's a modestly successful comedy show featuring the area as a Doctor who caters to the wealthy, I'd say I wouldn't mind at all "occupying" the cell next to Martha Stewart...
Now, if only I had a few tens of thousand of dollars in ICOA stock...
I don't know if you remember MacOS prior to OSX, but classically it had two "forks" - the data fork which compares to the typical flat file we all know, and a properties fork which is something like the metadata in a file system (time created, ownership, permissions, etc) but with a much richer syntax.
OSX lost that separation and now uses a Unix-y model.
If we wanted data to be trustably limited in scope, then we'd have to structure *all* our data everywhere so that it contains the literal data being saved, as well as another "properties" fork which could contain information about the scope of acceptable usability.
It could be done, but it would be very, very, very expensive. I'm not sure whether it wouldn't be worth it, the right to privacy and personal rights does count for quite a bit, and the court system in the USA is also very, very expensive and equally worth it.
Note that since we're talking about data, Moore's law means that the cost is about 1 or 2 years of actual growth. 1 or 2 years of no growth at all to accommodate this idea....
But asking for "a cut" is the heart and soul of economics: it's the means by which available resources are allocated and exchanged. If something is valuable, it will have a cost to acquire. It's how economics works, and it really sucks badly; it just sucks less than anything else we've cooked up so far.
There's some movement now underway in the Internet-based digital economy in the area of cooperative trust enabled by digital technology but it's not yet proven enough to be more than a fad. What this "cooperative trust" model might mean for data is anybody's guess. Give it 10 years, and then it will be something we can start to rely on.
Until then, sadly, the old rules based on ownership still have merit, because they've worked for thousands of years.
To be fair, it makes a bit of sense. I know, it sounds dumb, but the horrible truth is that being prepared can be rather expensive and the cost of preparing for every possibility is utterly infeasible.
To be evolutionarily successful, you need to be prepared enough to survive long enough to reproduce, and perhaps to see that your offspring reproduce. Being prepared to live 100 years when you won't breed much past 35 means that there's up to 65 years of time where your cost/benefit to the gene pool drops to near zero.
Clearly, it's not an exactly calculable range, and there are certainly plenty of variables, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be prepared. But on the other hand, there's certainly justification to be biased against being overprepared.
Two words: Skype purchase.
When Meg took over as CEO, the company was already headed skyward, already had upward momentum. Mostly she just had to not screw up too badly to make it successful. EBay was actually rather late to implement such features as "Buy it now" which were already innovated in competing marketplaces that didn't have the same mind share. (I should'a patented that one, oh well)
Ebay's purchase of Skype was the most random purchase ever, it was for a quajillion dollars (Ebay lost virtually all of it) and they didn't even buy the source code.
Oh, and don't forget Meg Whitman 2010! Spent crazy amounts of money on ads that were not effective during a time when the political climate almost could not be better.
Oddly, a simple google search returned this on the first page which says (in part): "Go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts, click on "Launch Terminal". Assign a shortcut (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+T). And that's it.".
Sir, I think you should turn in your geek card.
Ctl-N doesn't give you a new terminal from an active terminal window?!?
Patents literally forbid you to tinker in your own home and then sell the item you just invented, if someone paid a fee and lodged a vague sounding description about something roughly similar already.
This is a very common misconception. Patents do not forbid anything at all. All they do is open you up to liability for violating said patent.
If I get a patent for 1-holed socks, and you start making 1-holed socks, the only thing my patent gives me is grounds to sue you for damages in violating my patent. Typically, I could be awarded part of your profit stream as I could have expected to sell more 1-holed socks if you hadn't been busy competing with me.
Violating a patent isn't illegal, it just opens you up to liability.
Well, Win7 is faster than Vista, and Win8 is faster than Win7, but WinXP is/was faster than all of them, especially when first released. One of the services packs (SP2? SP3?) was a big security upgrade that cut the speed of many operations in half or worse.
When their costs went up they all had to raise prices but when costs go down they can all wait for someone else to lower prices first. No collusion or cartel is required.
Not necessarily. It's likely that there profits were lost, and the cost of rebuilding factories and destroyed equipment would also drive up prices. They'll charge whatever they think will maximize their profits, so if yields still haven't completely caught up or embedded costs prevent them from dropping prices in order to get a volume advantage over their competitors you can bet that prices will remain high.
Failure at Microsoft is good for the computer industry.
I'm not so sure.
Microsoft did a number of evil things and deserve the public spanking that they're getting. That said, they also created a long, huge shadow for Linux to develop in: the x86 marketplace. Here was this huge, open hardware platform of relatively homogeneous machines subsidized by the mass market to ridiculously low cost.
Something like Linux won't develop on iOS, nor the now-closed MS hardware, nor most of the Android phones sold by major retailers - they're all closed and while it's possible to hack around them, you have to (ahem) hack around them and the boot lockers get better each and every year.
But on the open platform of the PC, Linux flourished and has prospered. Linux has become the "go-to" platform for low cost, high-volume web services, and dominates the low end as well (EG: Android devices) but all of the early development was on cheap, widely available hardware made available because of Wintel.
In order to foster innovations like this, we *need* an open platform, and so far, only Microsoft's classical 3rd party vendor model has provided that. When that dies, so too does a host of possibilities.
The problem you face is one that I faced long ago in a completely different vein. I was unemployable, because although I had developed programming skills, they were self-taught by reading books and websites rather than school. Without significant experience, I was unemployable as all the jobs had requirements like Bachelor's requirements.
So I did what seemed to be the only thing left - started my own company! I chatted it up with anybody I could find who ran a business and needed something done, found some people willing to pay for a solution, and worked long hours for a while until my revenue stream was sufficient to live on. Now 15 years later, I have ownership of a valuable company that has grown successfully every single year since starting, employees working a job they like with decent pay and a work environment set up the way I like it. Sure, it has its stresses, but they are stresses I choose to assume or ignore, and I like the control that offers me.
It's not for everyone, but I will probably never have a "job" ever again.
As a former RepubliCrat hater, I can affirm: at the time where I was most negative and despondent about the state of things was during the time of my life that I was least aware of what each party did and stood for.
I actually thought they just might pull it off. Right up until I bought Windows 8. It's such a schizophrenic pile of annoyances that there's no way I figure I could love it. It's everything you want in a PC, except that it switches all around on you and eagerly tries to be a tablet, but only in a way that's both counter-intuitive and confusing.
It's worse than painful. At least Vista, when it worked, did. Win8, when it works, is still confusing as hell.
I live in a first world country, where lots of us are still using Core 2 Duos as primary/sole machines.
Strange how your example is a case of limiting supply to cause prices to climb, exactly as the "non-existent" law of supply and demand would dictate? You might want to read up on what Supply and Demand would predict. Specifically predicted:
If demand increases and supply remains unchanged, then it leads to higher equilibrium price and higher quantity
Ethanol is bad for engines. While chances are it isn't going to destroy your modern car's engine, good luck getting your chainsaw, mower, etc. or if you store fuel long-term (backup generators, etc.)
How does stuff like this get upvoted? No, ethanol is not "bad for engines", any more than gas, or butanol, or diesel is!
It's true that ethanol can do some minor damage (such as dissolve some carburetor seals) in cars not made to take ethanol, but all cars sold in the USA for the past few decades won't have a problem at all with ethanol. And it's not that ethanol is particularly bad, it's simply that soft rubber gaskets were originally designed with the assumption that ONLY gasoline was going to be used and so didn't bother to check for other types of decomposition. Further, this problem is only seen with long-term use, not occasional use.
I've used ethanol mix fuel many times in my Briggs and Stratton lawn mower as far back as the 90s, never had a problem. Also, ALL gasoline will go bad after a while, (often just a few months) due to evaporation, oxidation, and biological decomposition (Yes, there are bacteria that eat gasoline) among other things. You can use a fuel stabilizer such as Sta-Bil to make your gas last longer.
I've been maintaining a codebase for 10 years, and it is rather difficult to keep everything crisp. It's harder as we grow (we now have 7 developers) to keep things cohesive because although there may be a "right way" to accomplish something, it's not as though everybody knows about it already.
So you do periodic code reviews, group sessions to discuss the "right way" to solve various types of problems as they arise, and just suck it up and do the refactors when the cost of doing so is lowest in comparison with current needs and urgency while simultaneously trying to keep things working for customers now.
Truth be told: it's tough.
Microsoft has a knack for getting it wrong several times before finally coming up with something that works. They are not, in any way, a visionary company, they are simply good at recognizing their mistakes early and dropping them.
Look at their history going all the way back, it took until MS Word 3.x before it even compared to their competition. They suck at first, and always do.
But now that Apple and Android have led the way, Microsoft is about to release the biggest update to their product suite since Windows 95. And this time, I'm rather certain they mean it. They are betting their farm on Windows 8, and have revamped all their products on a unified code base. This isn't Zune, this isn't Wince, (er, WinCE) this is serious.
And it's about to launch. Speculating about the future at this stage in the game about the most useless endeavor imaginable. I'm willing to throw a few hundred in to buy Nokia junk stocks just because, while the odds of MS making Win8 seem scant, the payout if they do could be significant.
Screens laid down are horrible when using a keyboard. There's just no easy way to do it. For serious data entry, even a mouse is an irritation, something that we specifically design our software to avoid so that data entry can happen at maximum speed.
Touch would make the irritation of mouse use ten times worse.
As a long time Postgresql user, I'd probably agree that hints are largely not needed simply because the structuring of the query itself allows you to "hint" what you need.
Compare these two queries:
SELECT customers.firstname, customers.lastname, invoices.id AS invoices_Id, items.description FROM customers, invoices, items
WHERE customers.id = invoices.customers_id and invoices.id = items.invoices_id AND customers.id = 12345;
SELECT customers.firstname, customers.lastname, invoices.id AS invoices_Id, items.description FROM customers JOIN invoices ON
(customers.id = invoices.customers_id AND customers.id=12345) JOIN items ON (invoices.id = items.invoices_id);
Baring typos, they are logically equivalent. Yet, based on my understanding of Postgres, the latter one will likely run much quicker because it hints to the query planner that you want to start at the customers table and link against a single record, then move on to the invoices for that customer, etc...
The query itself provides enough "hinting" that I've not had to bother with ugly, non-standard kluges like what hinting typically is elsewhere. Why not just stick to standard SQL?