I don't even USE the menus in my browser. (Much.) Buttons? Sure. "View -> Source"? Yeah. And the occasional trip to "Preferences/Options." Oh yeah, and "History." Everything else falls into the category of "set once and forget forever."
But once you've done that you can have literally dozens of tabs open, play games like Quake Live, and watch high-definition video. Welcome to the future!
A decade ago we used to say "Intel Giveth, and Gates Taketh Away." That's still true, though "Gates" has mostly been replaced by "all the cool stuff on the WWW." (But his old crew is still trying.;-) )
For those interested in more detail about the economics and psychology behind Clay's theory that micropayments will never work, I recommend this earlier piece from 2000. Nine years later, we still haven't seen a viable micropayment system (where "micro" = 25 cents or less) and I don't think that will change.
...micropayments would still seem to have an advantage over larger payments, since the cost of the transaction is so low. Who could haggle over a penny's worth of content? After all, people routinely leave extra pennies in a jar by the cashier. Surely amounts this small makes valuing a micropayment transaction effortless?
Here again micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?
Beneath a certain price, goods or services become harder to value, not easier, because the X for Y comparison becomes more confusing, not less. Users have no trouble deciding whether a $1 newspaper is worthwhile - did it interest you, did it keep you from getting bored, did reading it let you sound up to date - but how could you decide whether each part of the newspaper is worth a penny?
Was each of 100 individual stories in the newspaper worth a penny, even though you didn't read all of them? Was each of the 25 stories you read worth 4 cents apiece? If you read a story halfway through, was it worth half what a full story was worth? And so on.
When you disaggregate a newspaper, it becomes harder to value, not easier. By accepting that different people will find different things interesting, and by rolling all of those things together, a newspaper achieves what micropayments cannot: clarity in pricing.
The very micro-ness of micropayments makes them confusing. At the very least, users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."...
Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free.
Version 5.0 of Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot... In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space...
In fact there are lots of great reasons for bloatware. For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make your life better (when you use them) and don't usually hurt (when you don't). If your software vendor stops, before shipping, and spends two months squeezing the code down to make it 50% smaller, the net benefit to you is going to be imperceptible. Maybe, just maybe, if you tend to keep your hard drive full, that's one more Duran Duran MP3 you can download. But the loss to you of waiting an extra two months for the new version is perceptible, and the loss to the software company that has to give up two months of sales is even worse.
First question: How large is large? 100? 1,000? 10,000? Also: How many admins? How much do they get paid? How well are they trained? Who trains them? You can have some really smart ($$$$) people running good network-based tools (from Apple or others) or you can have some average ($$) people running desktop to desktop with hard drives to do backups, re-images, and restores. The more clients you have, the more it's worth it to have better-trained, more expensive admins doing as much as possible remotely.
Also, if it's an existing network, do the Macs need any Mac-specific servers/services? Or will they just be hooking into existing email, file, and print servers?
It has to be said, though that Eno's definitely nerd-newsworthy in himself; his involvement in the Long Now foundation, his interest in cybernetics - generative methods of creating art and music - all seem fairly relevant.
I've heard the main use of a signature isn't to prove if it's you or not, but to prove intent in cases of fraud. It's one thing for a crook to say he found a credit card and put it in his wallet and then accidentally grabbed the wrong one while paying, but it's really hard to explain away "... and then I accidentally signed someone else's name on the slip."
Agreed--I've wanted something like this for years.:-) I didn't think as far as data and parity platters or multiple heads but I'd be more than happy with large, slow, quiet, cool disks.
I gave a similar presentation to a smaller group. My advice would be to do a live demonstration on the actual information that one can get from a social networking site. For example, I pulled someones information from the social networking site, googled them using stuff I learned about them from facebook, found their email address, home address, and phone number. Using this information I was able to find out friends and family members of theirs, including photos etc. I also found their myspace page and looked up other social networking, dating, etc. sites.
... and then watch productivity plummet as everyone goes back to their desk after the session and does the same thing for the rest of the day.:-)
The funniest part is the headline he chose: "Microsoft launches Zune, clarifies what's up with apps"
Q: Will it open up for third-party app developers?
A: It's hard to say right now.
That's clarification?!?!?
And this absolutely KILLS me:
Q: Are you concerned about competing with new iPods with cameras built in?
A: The more things like that that make their way into these devices that aren't about great music and video playback, the more it's distracting or sacrificing that original purpose of the device. Apps are jamming in, cameras -- that's work that's not being done on the music front.
With this release, you can see we're still really focused on music and video. We're still hyper-focused on that. Maybe that's the benefit of being the little guy. We can have that laser-focus.
Maybe some of those people... did buy an iPod because it's all about music, and now it's not. Maybe we can get some of those folks.
I have never listened to music on my iPhone and thought "Boy, I could really be enjoying this if I weren't constantly distracted by the fact that there's a camera ON THE BACK, and a calculator button on the home screen that I CAN NOT SEE RIGHT NOW."
There's an old saying that goes "If Hitler says 2+2=4, you can't argue with him." Did you RTFA? How is this NOT a convoluted mess?:
It's hard to say right now. If you look around the company at other places where things like this are important, Windows Mobile rises to the top... Right now our product roadmaps didn't line up perfectly for us to snap to what they're doing or vice versa. That being said, we know people want things like this on their devices so we're going to build them ourselves, they're going to be super high-quality, and they're going to be free.
Down the road if there's a way we can work with Windows Mobile or another group inside the company that's building an app store and take advantage of that, that's something we'll look into.
This thing has been in development for YEARS and they're JUST NOW realizing that maybe people will want to run apps on them, and they're announcing that they don't know how, if, or when that will happen? I don't care who says it--John Gruber, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, it doesn't matter--it is clearly a convoluted mess.
For fuck's sake, why on Earth DIDN'T MS just build the Zune functionality on top of WIndows Mobile? Zune has been out for almost 3 years; Windows Mobile for about 9. What is so mind-blowingly intense about what the Zune does (plays music, shows pictures, plays video; probably with neat sliding or fading transitions between menus and modes) that there was NO FUCKING WAY that all the great minds in Redmond could POSSIBLY make it work with ANY variant of Windows Mobile? Really, all they had to do was make a shiny "media app" that ran on top of Windows Mobile, the same way that "Media Center" is just an app that runs on top of regular Windows.
And interesting that the Nano seems better than the iPhone overall, especially in closeups. But the real question is, which is best for shooting upskirts on Japanese escalators? My, uh, friend wants to know.
Well, since Slashdot has gotten better about not posting so many dupes, people have to look somewhere other than yesterday's posting of the same story for highly-rated comments.
Due to how technology advances, and the fact that most of what they have was not produced in huge quantities, it would be a HUGE undertaking to make any of it work and maintain them. Sure, it'd be nice if they ran*, but as it is the CHM is an incredible resource. It's an awesome place and there is great value even in just seeing the items and a brief writeup of them. Plus it's cool. Seeing truly iconic machines, like Crays, and giant computers that look like what you saw in the complex in War Games is truly geek nirvana. And the docents (museum guides) are great--without them it'd still be neat but they add SO much. It will be a real shame when these guys are gone. If you're ever in the Bay Area it's definitely worth a drive. It's like your grandparents--go see it (and them) before it's too late!
* then again, the true legacy of these machines is that they all advanced the state of the art. As TFSlideshow says, the power of the Cray 1 can now be found in your cellphone. For most of them, I'd be happy a) to hear/see the mechanicals spin up in a realistic fashion and b) an emulator hooked up to a display to simulate it running.
Just like you don't send DR AMHED JAFAR OF NIGERIA with your personal information, a rational legal system wouldn't allow just anyone to send an e-mail based DMCA takedown notice.
Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
Worse--it's spreading! Safari 4 has this "feature." You could disable it in Safari 4 Beta but not in the final version, which is why I'll stick with 4 Beta on all of my Macs for as long as possible. I hate it, hate it, HATE IT. Safari 3 did an AWESOME job of weighing which addresses to show first based on frequency and recentness of last visits and if it's a bookmark. So if I start typing 'sla' I see the Slashdot home page followed by my user page and a couple others, followed by a million article and comment pages I went to once and never need to go to again.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this like the fifth person I've seen in the last two months misspell QWERTY?!?!? Did Dell ship a bad batch of keyboards or something?
That said--great post. You deserve your +5. :-)
I don't even USE the menus in my browser. (Much.) Buttons? Sure. "View -> Source"? Yeah. And the occasional trip to "Preferences/Options." Oh yeah, and "History." Everything else falls into the category of "set once and forget forever."
makes ME wonder if they're ever going to release Chrome for Mac OS X or Linux.
But once you've done that you can have literally dozens of tabs open, play games like Quake Live, and watch high-definition video. Welcome to the future!
A decade ago we used to say "Intel Giveth, and Gates Taketh Away." That's still true, though "Gates" has mostly been replaced by "all the cool stuff on the WWW." (But his old crew is still trying. ;-) )
For those interested in more detail about the economics and psychology behind Clay's theory that micropayments will never work, I recommend this earlier piece from 2000. Nine years later, we still haven't seen a viable micropayment system (where "micro" = 25 cents or less) and I don't think that will change.
...micropayments would still seem to have an advantage over larger payments, since the cost of the transaction is so low. Who could haggle over a penny's worth of content? After all, people routinely leave extra pennies in a jar by the cashier. Surely amounts this small makes valuing a micropayment transaction effortless?
Here again micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?
Beneath a certain price, goods or services become harder to value, not easier, because the X for Y comparison becomes more confusing, not less. Users have no trouble deciding whether a $1 newspaper is worthwhile - did it interest you, did it keep you from getting bored, did reading it let you sound up to date - but how could you decide whether each part of the newspaper is worth a penny?
Was each of 100 individual stories in the newspaper worth a penny, even though you didn't read all of them? Was each of the 25 stories you read worth 4 cents apiece? If you read a story halfway through, was it worth half what a full story was worth? And so on.
When you disaggregate a newspaper, it becomes harder to value, not easier. By accepting that different people will find different things interesting, and by rolling all of those things together, a newspaper achieves what micropayments cannot: clarity in pricing.
The very micro-ness of micropayments makes them confusing. At the very least, users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."...
Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free.
Bloat isn't bad.
Version 5.0 of Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot... In 1993, given the cost of hard drives in those days, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, given the cost of hard drives in 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space...
In fact there are lots of great reasons for bloatware. For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make your life better (when you use them) and don't usually hurt (when you don't). If your software vendor stops, before shipping, and spends two months squeezing the code down to make it 50% smaller, the net benefit to you is going to be imperceptible. Maybe, just maybe, if you tend to keep your hard drive full, that's one more Duran Duran MP3 you can download. But the loss to you of waiting an extra two months for the new version is perceptible, and the loss to the software company that has to give up two months of sales is even worse.
First question: How large is large? 100? 1,000? 10,000? Also: How many admins? How much do they get paid? How well are they trained? Who trains them? You can have some really smart ($$$$) people running good network-based tools (from Apple or others) or you can have some average ($$) people running desktop to desktop with hard drives to do backups, re-images, and restores. The more clients you have, the more it's worth it to have better-trained, more expensive admins doing as much as possible remotely.
Also, if it's an existing network, do the Macs need any Mac-specific servers/services? Or will they just be hooking into existing email, file, and print servers?
It has to be said, though that Eno's definitely nerd-newsworthy in himself; his involvement in the Long Now foundation, his interest in cybernetics - generative methods of creating art and music - all seem fairly relevant.
Plus he composed the Windows 95 startup sound! :-)
Fat lot of good proper penmanship did them--they couldn't even spell "Hmerica" or "necefsary" correctly. :-)
I don't see a problem. How are you planning to distribute that schedule--email? Outlook calendar events?
I've heard the main use of a signature isn't to prove if it's you or not, but to prove intent in cases of fraud. It's one thing for a crook to say he found a credit card and put it in his wallet and then accidentally grabbed the wrong one while paying, but it's really hard to explain away "... and then I accidentally signed someone else's name on the slip."
Agreed--I've wanted something like this for years. :-) I didn't think as far as data and parity platters or multiple heads but I'd be more than happy with large, slow, quiet, cool disks.
Do you realize how many individual artists ASCAP represents?
And do you realize who's the largest music retailer in the world? I'm pretty sure ASCAP will fold on this one.
I gave a similar presentation to a smaller group. My advice would be to do a live demonstration on the actual information that one can get from a social networking site. For example, I pulled someones information from the social networking site, googled them using stuff I learned about them from facebook, found their email address, home address, and phone number. Using this information I was able to find out friends and family members of theirs, including photos etc. I also found their myspace page and looked up other social networking, dating, etc. sites.
:-)
... and then watch productivity plummet as everyone goes back to their desk after the session and does the same thing for the rest of the day.
The bigger question is, why do we have a pair of underpants but only one bra?
The funniest part is the headline he chose: "Microsoft launches Zune, clarifies what's up with apps"
Q: Will it open up for third-party app developers?
A: It's hard to say right now.
That's clarification?!?!?
And this absolutely KILLS me:
Q: Are you concerned about competing with new iPods with cameras built in?
A: The more things like that that make their way into these devices that aren't about great music and video playback, the more it's distracting or sacrificing that original purpose of the device. Apps are jamming in, cameras -- that's work that's not being done on the music front.
With this release, you can see we're still really focused on music and video. We're still hyper-focused on that. Maybe that's the benefit of being the little guy. We can have that laser-focus.
Maybe some of those people ... did buy an iPod because it's all about music, and now it's not. Maybe we can get some of those folks.
I have never listened to music on my iPhone and thought "Boy, I could really be enjoying this if I weren't constantly distracted by the fact that there's a camera ON THE BACK, and a calculator button on the home screen that I CAN NOT SEE RIGHT NOW."
There's an old saying that goes "If Hitler says 2+2=4, you can't argue with him." Did you RTFA? How is this NOT a convoluted mess?:
It's hard to say right now. If you look around the company at other places where things like this are important, Windows Mobile rises to the top... Right now our product roadmaps didn't line up perfectly for us to snap to what they're doing or vice versa. That being said, we know people want things like this on their devices so we're going to build them ourselves, they're going to be super high-quality, and they're going to be free.
Down the road if there's a way we can work with Windows Mobile or another group inside the company that's building an app store and take advantage of that, that's something we'll look into.
This thing has been in development for YEARS and they're JUST NOW realizing that maybe people will want to run apps on them, and they're announcing that they don't know how, if, or when that will happen? I don't care who says it--John Gruber, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, it doesn't matter--it is clearly a convoluted mess.
For fuck's sake, why on Earth DIDN'T MS just build the Zune functionality on top of WIndows Mobile? Zune has been out for almost 3 years; Windows Mobile for about 9. What is so mind-blowingly intense about what the Zune does (plays music, shows pictures, plays video; probably with neat sliding or fading transitions between menus and modes) that there was NO FUCKING WAY that all the great minds in Redmond could POSSIBLY make it work with ANY variant of Windows Mobile? Really, all they had to do was make a shiny "media app" that ran on top of Windows Mobile, the same way that "Media Center" is just an app that runs on top of regular Windows.
And interesting that the Nano seems better than the iPhone overall, especially in closeups. But the real question is, which is best for shooting upskirts on Japanese escalators? My, uh, friend wants to know.
Well, since Slashdot has gotten better about not posting so many dupes, people have to look somewhere other than yesterday's posting of the same story for highly-rated comments.
Minus 1 for 'bank' itself, that's still 76 unregisterable words. On top of all the other reasons this is retarded.
Did it say "THE moon" (i.e., ours) or just "A moon"? Forest moon of Endor, perhaps?
Not sure about that. Do diesel locomotives have wiring like this?
Due to how technology advances, and the fact that most of what they have was not produced in huge quantities, it would be a HUGE undertaking to make any of it work and maintain them. Sure, it'd be nice if they ran*, but as it is the CHM is an incredible resource. It's an awesome place and there is great value even in just seeing the items and a brief writeup of them. Plus it's cool. Seeing truly iconic machines, like Crays, and giant computers that look like what you saw in the complex in War Games is truly geek nirvana. And the docents (museum guides) are great--without them it'd still be neat but they add SO much. It will be a real shame when these guys are gone. If you're ever in the Bay Area it's definitely worth a drive. It's like your grandparents--go see it (and them) before it's too late!
* then again, the true legacy of these machines is that they all advanced the state of the art. As TFSlideshow says, the power of the Cray 1 can now be found in your cellphone. For most of them, I'd be happy a) to hear/see the mechanicals spin up in a realistic fashion and b) an emulator hooked up to a display to simulate it running.
Just like you don't send DR AMHED JAFAR OF NIGERIA with your personal information, a rational legal system wouldn't allow just anyone to send an e-mail based DMCA takedown notice.
I think I found the flaw.
Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
Worse--it's spreading! Safari 4 has this "feature." You could disable it in Safari 4 Beta but not in the final version, which is why I'll stick with 4 Beta on all of my Macs for as long as possible. I hate it, hate it, HATE IT. Safari 3 did an AWESOME job of weighing which addresses to show first based on frequency and recentness of last visits and if it's a bookmark. So if I start typing 'sla' I see the Slashdot home page followed by my user page and a couple others, followed by a million article and comment pages I went to once and never need to go to again.