Um, as a replacement for the PowerBook G4: What's wrong with the Macbooks? Or the Macbook Pros?
The Macbook Pros are an excellent replacement for the 15" and 17" Powerbooks. My point was about the 12" Powerbook.
So what about the 13.3" Macbook? It's a little big (cases meant for 12" 4:3 laptops will not fit the Macbook), for one. The case is significantly inferior to the aluminum of the Powerbook/Macbook Pros. A 3 year old 12" Powerbook looks pretty good, while a 1 year old Macbook will show quite a bit of wear and scratches. Also, the video cards on the MBP are superior to the built-on graphics of the MB. It also wasn't until recently (Nov?) that they updated the max memory to 4GB - I hadn't checked on that until just now.
Still, it's not a bad replacement for the 12" Powerbook, it's just not ideal, like the 15" and 17" upgrades are. I had been hoping for an Apple version of the Thinkpad tablets with a keyboard.
The MacBook Air is NOT designed to be a "primary computer."
I agree. My claim is that this is going to limit the market for this laptop to a fairly small niche. This is where we disagree:
In fact, the brilliance on Apple's part here is the recognition (FINALLY) that there are lots of people with big honkin desktop machines who also need a portable computer[...]
$1799 is a fairly hefty price tag to pay for a second computer. People have complained about the lack of replaceable battery hampering business use (perhaps that's a big deal, I don't know). My point was for the "travel" user who wants something for entertainment, I thought that the inability to easily watch DVDs with it would limit that use. That's why I suggested a terrific feature would be the ripping of DVDs into iTunes. This will only happen on a large scale on Macs when Apple does it itself and thus does it legally.
This laptop is competing directly with the Sony Vaio market. That's fine, but my point was that it seems like a much smaller market than a good successor to the 12" Powerbook could have.
So yes, my entire point about it not working as a primary computer is that it is playing for a much smaller market, and that Apple has continued to leave a bit of a hole in the Macbook Pro lineup.
My (anecdotal) experience with USB hubs is that they tend to be less reliable than straight-up ports. Some devices don't work in a hub but do directly (even though it's a powered hub), some devices need to be unplugged and plugged into the hub before they're recognized, etc. Maybe I've just been unlucky.
Still, since many devices are powered USB these days (especially mp3 players) you really should get a powered USB hub, which means another power cable. USB ports are light and small, but Apple went so far towards thinness that they just couldn't spare the space for one more.
This laptop is too small and feature-limited to make a reasonable primary computer for many people, I think. Consider:
1.) No wired ethernet. I don't know if I've seen a recent laptop without wired ethernet. Apple is pushing bluetooth and 802.11* hard. That brings me to
2.) 1 USB port. Seriously? You can have wired ethernet OR a superdrive OR any of a huge number of wired devices, until you end up getting one of those tiny and somewhat annoying USB hubs which don't seem to be as reliable as having multiple USB ports.
3.) 1.8" 80G hard drive. This is the hard drive they use in iPod classics. It's 4200RPM, and it's small by modern laptop standards. The only upgrade option is $1000 for the solid state drive. Why aren't they offering the 160G iPod drive?
4.) Micro-DVI: Unlike the Macbooks, they actually stick a few of these adapters in the package.
It just seems like they tried too hard to go all out for thinness (and with the case design, it's still 3lb like a lot of subnotebooks). One option I thought would make it a lot more attractive would be built-in ripping of DVDs into iTunes. That way it could still function as a useful movie player on the road. Instead, we get an announcement that some distributors (like Fox) will be including iTunes files on new DVDs. No thanks.
There's probably a market niche for this product, but I don't think it's as big as the one for the 12" Powerbook G4. I'm still waiting for a suitable replacement in that category.
I don't expect a company like Netflix to create their own RIAA-approved DRM.
I don't either. I'm not really up on the latest DRM video formats, but I bet a reasonably large player like Netflix could put some money down to make a Mac OS X client happen in some MPAA-acceptable way. It's probably just not worth it to them at this point, which was my point.
It's also a shame that Apple likes to do everything itself with ITMS. Tacking on video rentals to the iTunes setup would be really nice - it would interface nicely with Apple TV I'm sure, increasing the usefulness of the streaming service.
To me the real issue is that I've been paying the same amount for a lesser service. If they can't offer me the streaming that they offer Windows users, they should charge me less. Certainly they can see that I've never streamed a single movie.
The marginal cost of the service to you is probably minimal. Unless, of course, they pay per-view licensing fees, which I doubt. Everything about the streaming service indicates a large fixed cost (setting up the software/interface, ripping movies into the appropriate format, setting up the hardware infrastructure). So rebating that marginal cost to you wouldn't translate into much of a savings.
It's a shame that Netflix only supports Windows XP/Vista for streaming. I'd love to have a Mac OS X or Linux client.
Of course, I consider the mailed DVDs worth the subscription price, so Netflix doesn't have much incentive to make clients for people like me. I wonder if they would get many more subscribers if they offered a Mac client.
Using Kilograms and meters to describe astronomical masses and distances is like using nanometers to describe the distance between London and New York. It's pretty silly, isn't it?
You'd think that, but professional astronomers use some seemingly-bizarre units sometimes (though IANAPA). For example, they sometimes use centimeters (obviously with scientific notation). What I don't get is why they don't use the "base" unit of meters, but there you go; it's probably some historical oddity, or who knows, they might have a very good reason. In the end the base unit of measurement is arbitrary, and what's more important is agreeing to some consensus.
If you can recharge in a short enough period of time, just skip the hybrid and go straight to all-electric. How about a Wendy's or Starbucks with charging stations? Stop for a bite or a cup of coffee, come back out and get into your fully charged vehicle.
The problem there is chicken and egg - you'd need a lot of people driving electric cars before there is sufficient demand for Wendy's or Starbucks to put up a metered electrical outlet. People won't want to buy the cars unless they know they can take them on most trips. With a hybrid, the range is unlimited and the worst inconvenience is simply less use of the electric motor and more use of the gas engine.
That said, if plugins become popular, office/retail buildings are going to have to start locking up any outside-accessible power outlets (if they can be charged with 115V). Why fill up on gas when you can get 50-100 miles range for free by hijacking some company's maintenance power outlet?
No, they'll come home from work and plug in immediately, when the load on the electrical grid is highest (at least during the summer)
As the other responder said, this is easy to fix with a timer. Combine that with time-based electricity rates (kWH which cost a fraction at night of what they do during the day), and the incentives are there for consumers to efficiently use the grid.
According to this article, hybrid cars will be the first use for these batteries.
I would imagine that this will help speed the adoption of "plugin" hybrids, which let you recharge the batteries off the grid in between drives. Who knows, we might even see the ability to charge up your batteries while you fill up your gas tank, if the charge time is sufficiently short.
The biggest bonus to plugin hybrids, though, is probably the efficient use of the power grid - people will tend charge their cars at night, when the load on the electrical grid is lowest. Combine this with time-based metering, and the electric car might actually become a common reality, in the form of hybrid plugins.
Now we just need to get major car manufacturers to make their hybrids plugin instead of forcing enterprising customers to hack it on afterwards.
Can somebody explain why the BBC uses "Nasa" instead of "NASA"? I've noticed that the NYTimes does the same thing (repeatedly), using "Nafta" instead of "NAFTA". It just seems...weird, and I've never seen a journalistic explanation.
The grandparent responded with an explanation, but let me try to explain it a bit differently.
What is the social optimum? In as simple of terms as I can think of, it's the outcome that would happen if an omniscient "social planner" controlled all aspects of the economy. This social planner knew everyone's preferences and abilities, and maximized "social welfare" (admittedly a difficult concept to agree on, but keep reading).
This issue boils down to externalities. If I produce pollution, I feel the direct impact of that pollution on myself, but I do not take into account the impact of that pollution on the people around me. They would be willing to pay me to stop producing pollution. But without some sort of system, that market doesn't exist. Suppose I run a firm whose pollution affects thousands of people just a little bit; the damage in dollar terms to each person might be low, so the market to "pay" this firm to stop polluting won't exist. Yet the combined effects on thousands of people amount to the firm choosing to pollute "too much" for the "social optimum".
To understand why the firm produces too much pollution to be the social optimum doesn't require extensive assumptions about what makes up social welfare. The mere existence of people willing to pay the firm a small amount to pollute less which isn't being considered by the firm is enough. To exactly quantify how much above the social optimum the firm is polluting would require more assumptions about people's preferences (i.e. utility), etc.
So pollution is a negative externality, and the grandparent is claiming that music creation is a positive externality. Musicians are (almost always) willing to produce some music for their own enjoyment. If it were impossible for musicians to get any reward for their music, there is a likely externality here. People would be willing to pay the musician to create more music than the musician is willing to produce only for his or her enjoyment.
Copyrights allow musicians to have a (supposedly temporary) monopoly of the distribution of their work, allowing them to profit from it. This effectively creates the market in which there would otherwise be an externality, and is one case of the government stepping it (copyrights only exist as legal mechanisms) to potentially improve the free-market outcome that would happen otherwise. If copyrights don't exist, the entire method of distributing music in recorded form would be limited in its ability to collect revenue for the musician. This is, of course, assuming that the revenue from the copyrighted recordings form a significant portion of a musician's income, which is likely not the case for some (or many).
Going on that point, some artists have decided that trying to make money off of recordings is a losing battle (since copyrights are hard to enforce, for one), and giving away their recorded music to raise their popularity. Concerts and merchandise are significant sources of income, so the recordings themselves can simply act as advertising. That's the artist's choice, and some are clearly still choosing a system of charging for recorded works.
The choice of the people (and their government) is how long this monopoly should last. The grandparent argued that the current length is too long. How can it be too long, since the longer the copyright simply means the more incentive for musicians to produce music? The answer is of course that people derive benefit from enlarging the public domain: creating derivative works, enjoying creative content that they would not be willing to pay much for (they are on the portion of the demand curve below the copyrighted price). Content producers will almost always have the incentive to raise the copyright length; the interesting thing, of course, is that companies like Disney which push so hard for copyright extension have benefitted hugely from public domain stories which they turn into movies.
Honestly curious here: Why? What on Earth dictates this?
Improving the "incentive structure" can be pareto improving, which is just a fancy way of saying that everyone is at least as well off as before, and some people are better off.
The problem inherent with such statements is that we know what makes people better off. Economists try to make these assumptions as reasonable as possible (e.g. as an individual, having more of a good is weakly better for me). So a pareto improvement would be a change that allows everyone to have the option of their old behavior/consumption while choosing a different behavior/consumption. Because they chose to do something different based on the change (in incentives), they must have made themselves better off (or at worst, simply be indifferent between the choices).
It'd be notable if Apple did much worse than this.
1.) It's boxed sales. The people who upgrade via boxed sales are the ones who aren't going to wait to get new hardware to upgrade the OS. These people are likely to be the early adopters who will buy within the first week
2.) Vista has been out for a while, and the people who have upgraded via boxed sales have likely done it by now. Vista sales come from OEM distribution, not buying a shiny box at Best Buy.
3.) I would expect the numbers for November to drop substantially, as the early adopters will have their copies, and sales of boxed copies drop. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if hardware sales pick up a bit, as people find the holiday season and new OS to be a good time to take the plunge and buy a new computer.
The numbers to pay attention to are Apple's share of new sales, especially in laptops, and Apple's share of total installed base (which is harder to calculate accurately).
There is no fair use exemption for redistributing content. There is nothing that allows you to "build" on another's property to make your own in this context.
That's just simply untrue. Quoting from a book, showing a clip of a movie in a movie review show, etc, are all examples of fair use in which one is redistributing content. The redistribution is for comment/criticism, is short in length, and the resulting work does not compete with the work being derived. Thus, even if it's for commercial purposes, it's seen as being allowed under fair use under provisions 2, 3 and 4 (see the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. 107, reprinted in the Wikipedia page).
For example, no matter how cute I think it might be to overlay Neil Diamond's "Heartlight" with the word "head" everywhere Neil is singing "heart", all I can legally do is play the result for myself. Should I take this "derivative work" and publish it in any form - including just making it available for download on the Internet - I will (rightfully) get sued. I don't get any points for it being a parody, for some kind of fair use, for it being some kind of "sampling" or anything else.
I never claimed any such use was fair use. In fact, I alluded to the fact it probably wasn't, when I suggested that most people don't realize their own published works are automatically copyrighted. Weird Al gets permission when he makes parodies of songs. However, as far as I know it's generally seen as fair use if you are directly parodying the content of a copyrighted work, rather than using the song's music (for example) to create a parody of something unrelated.
Are EULAs legal? Absolutely. Every time one has come up in court it has been ruled enforceable. At no time has a EULA ever been struck down. Good thing that the EULA known as GPL v2 is built on solid ground, isn't it?
Many of the more onerous terms in an EULA have never been tested in court. And the GPL is not an EULA - you are free to use GPLed software however you'd like. The GPL grants you permission to redistribute the code under certain conditions. Without the GPL, you would have no rights under copyright law to do this, even though you own a copy. When I was referring to EULAs, I was referring to them in the form of contracts which restrict use, not just redistribution. Things like, "you may not use this program to create things that compete with our products", have shown up in EULAs. That is a restriction on use, not on copying.
As for your idea that somehow including a public performance of a ringtone is "fair use", I'm afraid you are very, very wrong. There is no such thing as fair use when it comes to redistribution in any form - and including casually recorded sounds is certainly redistribution.
Legally, as far as I know, this is very unsettled territory. But your blanket claim about redistribution in any form is incorrect (see above). Imagine a news broadcaster covering an open-air concert on public ground. Recording a band playing for purposes of broadcasting the news is regarded as fair use, with no royalties owed to the band or anyone else. The person on On The Media regarded the incidental ring tone of a person's phone during the making of a documentary to be clearly under fair use, but she was not a lawyer. You can read the transcript for yourself. This, like I said, is still fairly unsettled in court. People pay up because they are afraid to take it to court, not because it's settled precedent.
Almost no one ever files a counter notice. That's the biggest problem we've encountered [with DMCA claims on sites like YouTube]. Most people have no idea that right exists.
Usual disclaimer: IANAL. Most (or at least many) people have many misconceptions about copyright law, with far more important consequences.
One is that everything you distribute of your own creation is copyrighted (registration is not required except to back up your claim and allow for greater damages). How many people publish their videos to YouTube, get their content used (in full), and not realize that they have some control over whether that is a copyright violation?
Perhaps even more important, the very concept of fair use itself (in the U.S. at least). It wouldn't surprise me if people thought that many more things were copyright violations than really are. I'm sadly lacking in real survey info, but how many people have even heard of the four major tenets of fair use? If you haven't, read the Wikipedia page including the law in the U.S.
As for DMCA counterclaims, I suspect most individuals either 1.) feel that they probably were infringing (even if they could legally argue fair use) or 2.) aren't willing to fight a big corporation in court. As with so many civil and criminal cases, it's much easier just to fold than to fight it. The system is largely designed that way.
One major problem with modern U.S. copyright law is just how big the gray area really is. Are EULAs legal? What can they legally restrict? Are "promotional items" labeled "not for resale" really binding to those who receive them (for an ongoing case about this challenge to the first sale doctrine, see the EFF's page)?
Part of this gray area is that infringement is hard to define except on a case by case basis. Some will happily exploit any gray area, while others will stay far from it and end up bound by fairly restrictive rules. I've heard (on "On the Media", about a year ago) that movie producers will sometimes pay royalties in documentaries for things like ring tones and casual music recorded by the video camera. Common sense suggests that somebody's cell phone going off during a documentary is fair use, but some companies are afraid of litigation.
The unfortunate result is that since fighting back is too much risk or too much work, people will just cave in to the big media companies and their takedown notices.
You are always losing money on those deals, since the expectation cost of equipment failure (probability of failure times cost of replacement) is much lower than the cost of the insurance. (If it wasn't, then the store would lose money on selling the insurance.)
Well, yeah, that's kinda how insurance works. The thing is, people are risk averse; we're often willing to pay money to not face paying out large sums when something really bad happens. Insurance companies can pool the risk of large numbers of people and have much better control over what they have to pay out every year.
Your idea of "small-cost" items is relative. My wife's laptop, for example, cost about $1400 (12" Powerbook a few years back). Since we wanted it to last for 3 years, we bought the Applecare extended warranty. Now anything that goes wrong we don't have to worry about having to shell out for a new laptop unexpectedly. She had her laptop serviced recently for a few issues, and it ended up with a new (or probably refurbished) motherboard and keyboard.
If people are sufficiently risk averse (and don't mind making warranty claims), they will take these extended warranty packages. It doesn't make them (economically) irrational.
When I bought my new HP laptop last October, the first thing I did (before loading Linux) was to create the recovery CDs. I didn't spring for the DVD burner, so the total number of disks I had to burn was 15. This was pre-Vista, a rather simple Windows XP install totally cluttered in stuff that HP loads on. This took at least an hour and was quite annoying. Though I wanted to load Linux, I still wanted to dual-boot Windows. The hard drive's recovery partition worked fine for that, but getting those backup disks was darned annoying.
Strangely enough, reloading the OS fixed a problem I was having with the touchpad's scroll area not working (despite telling the driver about the area), so the image in the restore partition must not have exactly matched that which shipped.
So if I had to go back and do it over, I might be willing to pay $10 or $20 to get a few known-good DVDs for my recovery partition. That'd save me an hour of my time and the potential for any one of the 15 CDs to become unreadable. The article says $30, which seems a bit steep (it took an hour, but I could work on other things while occasionally swapping disks).
Washtenaw county is home to CmdrTaco (Rob Malda), which has a plan to bring wireless to the whole county. It, too, seems to be having problems with financing. The plan was to have a free service with paid members getting faster access. The second link claims that to be profitable, 5% of the county needs to sign up.
But a good portion of the population (i.e. most of Ann Arbor) can get fairly cheap DSL through AT&T/Speakeasy (okay, maybe Speakeasy isn't so cheap), or most of the county (I think) can get cable through Comcast.
Students on the U of M campus (a sizable portion of the city's population) can get wireless from many locations. It's not uncommon to have people run open WiFi spots in neighborhoods around campus as well. People push these wireless services as enabling low-income households and rural areas to get broadband speeds. Low-income households are likely to not find the faster service worth buying, and rural areas still have substantial infrastructure costs (the houses are spread out more, and wireless access points have fairly pitiful range). I'm just not sure current wireless technology is really a better solution for the "last mile".
On the other hand, it seems to make some sense for dense downtown regions. People like to congregate there, and businesses might be willing to chip in (instead of many businesses administering their own wireless access points). People who live downtown might be willing to pay $10 or $20/mo to get faster speeds where they live and in all the businesses they frequent.
But county-wide, like this Washtenaw program? I'm just not sure the demand is there and/or the technology is sufficient.
I have my desktop set up to mail me a warning and shut down on any SMART error. That should give me enough time to buy a new disk and salvage my data.
I've always thought you have a slightly better chance of getting valid data off of a drive if you never actually power it down when it's failing. This is anecdotal from a power outage causing many old hard drives in a building to give up, with their computers normally having uptime measured in months or even years.
Of course, to recover data like this you would need another computer accessible via the network, rather than installing a replacement in the desktop itself. Read any possible data off it while you still can, without putting it through the stress of powerdown/powerup.
Tech is really a big marital issue for some?
on
'Til Tech Do Us Part
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This article is full of so-called problems with relatively simple solutions with little or no compromise. Having been married for 4 year (this month), tech issues are silly things to get worked up about.
Let's take a few examples:
[...]making a folder of family photos on the hard drive available to both husband and wife is still complicated enough to baffle tech-savvy people.
Really? They're talking about the same computer here. Now, my wife and I both make very heavy use of our computers, so she has her own Mac Powerbook, and I have my own computers. We share common files and have ample storage with a simple Linux server in the basement loaded with hard drives.
Sherry and John Cheung created a joint "johnandsherry" email address. Ms. Cheung, 28, says the shared address makes her feel more like she's part of an official couple.
We've set up a mail server with lots of virtual aliases. For a while we had a combined alias, but it started getting spam so we dropped it. We haven't really missed it since. For online accounts (utilities, credit cards, etc.) that we both want to receive the notifications for, it's a trivial matter to have the mail sent to both real email addresses.
Even if you don't have a mail server, don't gmail or Yahoo or something allow you to automatically forward an address to multiple accounts? I'm sure there's some convenient online resource that does that.
[...]he pads into the darkened kitchen, logs onto his computer and changes the Netflix order to put his favorite movies on top
Wow, that's just...mean. We signed up with Netflix after they had the separate queue feature (this was over 2 years ago). For 3 DVDs at a time, we each get one at a time, and we have a shared queue for movies and shows we know we want to watch together.
Even if they didn't have this feature, it wouldn't have been too hard to share equitably. But getting up at 5am to put your movies on the top of the queue is not playing fair.
Every couple has to work out their own relationship and budget. Still, tech issues aren't worth causing fights over; they can usually be resolved with a little time to find a fix or at worst, a little money.
You can save huge amounts of energy by making 100'se little changes a year. If you do it in a away that takes no effort from the consumer, it's that much better. No single one is worth a damn, but a lot of little ones can make a huge difference.
My whole point was that there are tons, and I mean tons, of easy changes that save way, WAY more energy. Changing everybody's homepage to Blackle (even allowing that their energy savings estimates are correct) is a complete and utter waste of time. For the amount of energy saved so far for ALL Blackle use (110,000 Wh), a single person (say, the Blackle creator), could save that within a month or two quite easily.
The cost of getting people to switch to Blackle is getting their attention and getting them to spend a few minutes making a change to their lives. Those two things are hard, and we could get people to do much better things with those few minutes (buy a CFL while in the store, turn off a light a few times). Turning off a 100 watt light bulb for an HOUR (less than a half-second in work, just by shutting off a light you would've have otherwise) will save more than switching to Blackle for a YEAR. And that's if you buy their numbers!
How is $0.01/YEAR per person a lot of energy savings for a little bit of effort? And I'm being really, really generous with the $0.01/year per person estimate.
I more proper formula would be (Energy savings/Effort)
What do you think I meant by: " pick ways that deliver a high level of energy savings for how much behavior you have to change." This is all about picking activities which save a relatively large amount of energy for the amount of effort expended. The effort in energy savings is often a one-time cost in time and money. Replace a light bulb with a CFL, replace an old water heater with a new one, etc.
You say that people should Blackle on top of all of the other ideas. The point is that people don't - changing behavior is HARD. If you're going to go through the effort to change people's behavior, do something that saves more than a penny per person!
So yes, switching to Blackle is a complete waste of everyone's time.
When I found out about Blackle a few months ago, it made me really angry. Finding ways to save electricity is not hard, getting people to change their behavior is. Blackle wants you to change your default website and put up with gray-on-black search results. Using their purported energy saving at the time, and assuming something like 300 million regular Google users, the energy saving was less than $0.01/year per person (at any reasonable kWh like $0.10).
This is for changing someone's behavior for an entire year. Instead, that energy saving could be had by turning off a lightbulb for less than an hour. Better yet, replace any single incandescent with a CFL. Bike to work one day of the year instead of drive a car. Pushing for any of these would have dramatically more impact in terms of energy savings.
Look at blackle's homepage - 116,481.368 watt hours saved right now. At a high energy cost of $0.10/kwh, that's just $12. $12 can be saved in a month by turning down the AC or heat a bit.
The bottom line is, if you're going to push for energy conservation, pick ways that deliver a high level of energy savings for how much behavior you have to change. Blackle fails miserably on both counts.
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The Macbook Pros are an excellent replacement for the 15" and 17" Powerbooks. My point was about the 12" Powerbook.
So what about the 13.3" Macbook? It's a little big (cases meant for 12" 4:3 laptops will not fit the Macbook), for one. The case is significantly inferior to the aluminum of the Powerbook/Macbook Pros. A 3 year old 12" Powerbook looks pretty good, while a 1 year old Macbook will show quite a bit of wear and scratches. Also, the video cards on the MBP are superior to the built-on graphics of the MB. It also wasn't until recently (Nov?) that they updated the max memory to 4GB - I hadn't checked on that until just now.
Still, it's not a bad replacement for the 12" Powerbook, it's just not ideal, like the 15" and 17" upgrades are. I had been hoping for an Apple version of the Thinkpad tablets with a keyboard.
I agree. My claim is that this is going to limit the market for this laptop to a fairly small niche. This is where we disagree:
$1799 is a fairly hefty price tag to pay for a second computer. People have complained about the lack of replaceable battery hampering business use (perhaps that's a big deal, I don't know). My point was for the "travel" user who wants something for entertainment, I thought that the inability to easily watch DVDs with it would limit that use. That's why I suggested a terrific feature would be the ripping of DVDs into iTunes. This will only happen on a large scale on Macs when Apple does it itself and thus does it legally.
This laptop is competing directly with the Sony Vaio market. That's fine, but my point was that it seems like a much smaller market than a good successor to the 12" Powerbook could have.
So yes, my entire point about it not working as a primary computer is that it is playing for a much smaller market, and that Apple has continued to leave a bit of a hole in the Macbook Pro lineup.
My (anecdotal) experience with USB hubs is that they tend to be less reliable than straight-up ports. Some devices don't work in a hub but do directly (even though it's a powered hub), some devices need to be unplugged and plugged into the hub before they're recognized, etc. Maybe I've just been unlucky.
Still, since many devices are powered USB these days (especially mp3 players) you really should get a powered USB hub, which means another power cable. USB ports are light and small, but Apple went so far towards thinness that they just couldn't spare the space for one more.
This laptop is too small and feature-limited to make a reasonable primary computer for many people, I think. Consider:
1.) No wired ethernet. I don't know if I've seen a recent laptop without wired ethernet. Apple is pushing bluetooth and 802.11* hard. That brings me to
2.) 1 USB port. Seriously? You can have wired ethernet OR a superdrive OR any of a huge number of wired devices, until you end up getting one of those tiny and somewhat annoying USB hubs which don't seem to be as reliable as having multiple USB ports.
3.) 1.8" 80G hard drive. This is the hard drive they use in iPod classics. It's 4200RPM, and it's small by modern laptop standards. The only upgrade option is $1000 for the solid state drive. Why aren't they offering the 160G iPod drive?
4.) Micro-DVI: Unlike the Macbooks, they actually stick a few of these adapters in the package.
It just seems like they tried too hard to go all out for thinness (and with the case design, it's still 3lb like a lot of subnotebooks). One option I thought would make it a lot more attractive would be built-in ripping of DVDs into iTunes. That way it could still function as a useful movie player on the road. Instead, we get an announcement that some distributors (like Fox) will be including iTunes files on new DVDs. No thanks.
There's probably a market niche for this product, but I don't think it's as big as the one for the 12" Powerbook G4. I'm still waiting for a suitable replacement in that category.
You mean the MPAA, not the RIAA.
I don't either. I'm not really up on the latest DRM video formats, but I bet a reasonably large player like Netflix could put some money down to make a Mac OS X client happen in some MPAA-acceptable way. It's probably just not worth it to them at this point, which was my point.
It's also a shame that Apple likes to do everything itself with ITMS. Tacking on video rentals to the iTunes setup would be really nice - it would interface nicely with Apple TV I'm sure, increasing the usefulness of the streaming service.
The marginal cost of the service to you is probably minimal. Unless, of course, they pay per-view licensing fees, which I doubt. Everything about the streaming service indicates a large fixed cost (setting up the software/interface, ripping movies into the appropriate format, setting up the hardware infrastructure). So rebating that marginal cost to you wouldn't translate into much of a savings.
It's a shame that Netflix only supports Windows XP/Vista for streaming. I'd love to have a Mac OS X or Linux client.
Of course, I consider the mailed DVDs worth the subscription price, so Netflix doesn't have much incentive to make clients for people like me. I wonder if they would get many more subscribers if they offered a Mac client.
You'd think that, but professional astronomers use some seemingly-bizarre units sometimes (though IANAPA). For example, they sometimes use centimeters (obviously with scientific notation). What I don't get is why they don't use the "base" unit of meters, but there you go; it's probably some historical oddity, or who knows, they might have a very good reason. In the end the base unit of measurement is arbitrary, and what's more important is agreeing to some consensus.
The problem there is chicken and egg - you'd need a lot of people driving electric cars before there is sufficient demand for Wendy's or Starbucks to put up a metered electrical outlet. People won't want to buy the cars unless they know they can take them on most trips. With a hybrid, the range is unlimited and the worst inconvenience is simply less use of the electric motor and more use of the gas engine.
That said, if plugins become popular, office/retail buildings are going to have to start locking up any outside-accessible power outlets (if they can be charged with 115V). Why fill up on gas when you can get 50-100 miles range for free by hijacking some company's maintenance power outlet?
As the other responder said, this is easy to fix with a timer. Combine that with time-based electricity rates (kWH which cost a fraction at night of what they do during the day), and the incentives are there for consumers to efficiently use the grid.
I would imagine that this will help speed the adoption of "plugin" hybrids, which let you recharge the batteries off the grid in between drives. Who knows, we might even see the ability to charge up your batteries while you fill up your gas tank, if the charge time is sufficiently short.
The biggest bonus to plugin hybrids, though, is probably the efficient use of the power grid - people will tend charge their cars at night, when the load on the electrical grid is lowest. Combine this with time-based metering, and the electric car might actually become a common reality, in the form of hybrid plugins.
Now we just need to get major car manufacturers to make their hybrids plugin instead of forcing enterprising customers to hack it on afterwards.
Can somebody explain why the BBC uses "Nasa" instead of "NASA"? I've noticed that the NYTimes does the same thing (repeatedly), using "Nafta" instead of "NAFTA". It just seems...weird, and I've never seen a journalistic explanation.
The grandparent responded with an explanation, but let me try to explain it a bit differently.
What is the social optimum? In as simple of terms as I can think of, it's the outcome that would happen if an omniscient "social planner" controlled all aspects of the economy. This social planner knew everyone's preferences and abilities, and maximized "social welfare" (admittedly a difficult concept to agree on, but keep reading).
This issue boils down to externalities. If I produce pollution, I feel the direct impact of that pollution on myself, but I do not take into account the impact of that pollution on the people around me. They would be willing to pay me to stop producing pollution. But without some sort of system, that market doesn't exist. Suppose I run a firm whose pollution affects thousands of people just a little bit; the damage in dollar terms to each person might be low, so the market to "pay" this firm to stop polluting won't exist. Yet the combined effects on thousands of people amount to the firm choosing to pollute "too much" for the "social optimum".
To understand why the firm produces too much pollution to be the social optimum doesn't require extensive assumptions about what makes up social welfare. The mere existence of people willing to pay the firm a small amount to pollute less which isn't being considered by the firm is enough. To exactly quantify how much above the social optimum the firm is polluting would require more assumptions about people's preferences (i.e. utility), etc.
So pollution is a negative externality, and the grandparent is claiming that music creation is a positive externality. Musicians are (almost always) willing to produce some music for their own enjoyment. If it were impossible for musicians to get any reward for their music, there is a likely externality here. People would be willing to pay the musician to create more music than the musician is willing to produce only for his or her enjoyment.
Copyrights allow musicians to have a (supposedly temporary) monopoly of the distribution of their work, allowing them to profit from it. This effectively creates the market in which there would otherwise be an externality, and is one case of the government stepping it (copyrights only exist as legal mechanisms) to potentially improve the free-market outcome that would happen otherwise. If copyrights don't exist, the entire method of distributing music in recorded form would be limited in its ability to collect revenue for the musician. This is, of course, assuming that the revenue from the copyrighted recordings form a significant portion of a musician's income, which is likely not the case for some (or many).
Going on that point, some artists have decided that trying to make money off of recordings is a losing battle (since copyrights are hard to enforce, for one), and giving away their recorded music to raise their popularity. Concerts and merchandise are significant sources of income, so the recordings themselves can simply act as advertising. That's the artist's choice, and some are clearly still choosing a system of charging for recorded works.
The choice of the people (and their government) is how long this monopoly should last. The grandparent argued that the current length is too long. How can it be too long, since the longer the copyright simply means the more incentive for musicians to produce music? The answer is of course that people derive benefit from enlarging the public domain: creating derivative works, enjoying creative content that they would not be willing to pay much for (they are on the portion of the demand curve below the copyrighted price). Content producers will almost always have the incentive to raise the copyright length; the interesting thing, of course, is that companies like Disney which push so hard for copyright extension have benefitted hugely from public domain stories which they turn into movies.
In the end, figuri
Improving the "incentive structure" can be pareto improving, which is just a fancy way of saying that everyone is at least as well off as before, and some people are better off.
The problem inherent with such statements is that we know what makes people better off. Economists try to make these assumptions as reasonable as possible (e.g. as an individual, having more of a good is weakly better for me). So a pareto improvement would be a change that allows everyone to have the option of their old behavior/consumption while choosing a different behavior/consumption. Because they chose to do something different based on the change (in incentives), they must have made themselves better off (or at worst, simply be indifferent between the choices).
It'd be notable if Apple did much worse than this.
1.) It's boxed sales. The people who upgrade via boxed sales are the ones who aren't going to wait to get new hardware to upgrade the OS. These people are likely to be the early adopters who will buy within the first week
2.) Vista has been out for a while, and the people who have upgraded via boxed sales have likely done it by now. Vista sales come from OEM distribution, not buying a shiny box at Best Buy.
3.) I would expect the numbers for November to drop substantially, as the early adopters will have their copies, and sales of boxed copies drop. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if hardware sales pick up a bit, as people find the holiday season and new OS to be a good time to take the plunge and buy a new computer.
The numbers to pay attention to are Apple's share of new sales, especially in laptops, and Apple's share of total installed base (which is harder to calculate accurately).
That's just simply untrue. Quoting from a book, showing a clip of a movie in a movie review show, etc, are all examples of fair use in which one is redistributing content. The redistribution is for comment/criticism, is short in length, and the resulting work does not compete with the work being derived. Thus, even if it's for commercial purposes, it's seen as being allowed under fair use under provisions 2, 3 and 4 (see the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. 107, reprinted in the Wikipedia page).
I never claimed any such use was fair use. In fact, I alluded to the fact it probably wasn't, when I suggested that most people don't realize their own published works are automatically copyrighted. Weird Al gets permission when he makes parodies of songs. However, as far as I know it's generally seen as fair use if you are directly parodying the content of a copyrighted work, rather than using the song's music (for example) to create a parody of something unrelated.
Many of the more onerous terms in an EULA have never been tested in court. And the GPL is not an EULA - you are free to use GPLed software however you'd like. The GPL grants you permission to redistribute the code under certain conditions. Without the GPL, you would have no rights under copyright law to do this, even though you own a copy. When I was referring to EULAs, I was referring to them in the form of contracts which restrict use, not just redistribution. Things like, "you may not use this program to create things that compete with our products", have shown up in EULAs. That is a restriction on use, not on copying.
Legally, as far as I know, this is very unsettled territory. But your blanket claim about redistribution in any form is incorrect (see above). Imagine a news broadcaster covering an open-air concert on public ground. Recording a band playing for purposes of broadcasting the news is regarded as fair use, with no royalties owed to the band or anyone else. The person on On The Media regarded the incidental ring tone of a person's phone during the making of a documentary to be clearly under fair use, but she was not a lawyer. You can read the transcript for yourself. This, like I said, is still fairly unsettled in court. People pay up because they are afraid to take it to court, not because it's settled precedent.
Usual disclaimer: IANAL. Most (or at least many) people have many misconceptions about copyright law, with far more important consequences.
One is that everything you distribute of your own creation is copyrighted (registration is not required except to back up your claim and allow for greater damages). How many people publish their videos to YouTube, get their content used (in full), and not realize that they have some control over whether that is a copyright violation?
Perhaps even more important, the very concept of fair use itself (in the U.S. at least). It wouldn't surprise me if people thought that many more things were copyright violations than really are. I'm sadly lacking in real survey info, but how many people have even heard of the four major tenets of fair use? If you haven't, read the Wikipedia page including the law in the U.S.
As for DMCA counterclaims, I suspect most individuals either 1.) feel that they probably were infringing (even if they could legally argue fair use) or 2.) aren't willing to fight a big corporation in court. As with so many civil and criminal cases, it's much easier just to fold than to fight it. The system is largely designed that way.
One major problem with modern U.S. copyright law is just how big the gray area really is. Are EULAs legal? What can they legally restrict? Are "promotional items" labeled "not for resale" really binding to those who receive them (for an ongoing case about this challenge to the first sale doctrine, see the EFF's page)?
Part of this gray area is that infringement is hard to define except on a case by case basis. Some will happily exploit any gray area, while others will stay far from it and end up bound by fairly restrictive rules. I've heard (on "On the Media", about a year ago) that movie producers will sometimes pay royalties in documentaries for things like ring tones and casual music recorded by the video camera. Common sense suggests that somebody's cell phone going off during a documentary is fair use, but some companies are afraid of litigation.
The unfortunate result is that since fighting back is too much risk or too much work, people will just cave in to the big media companies and their takedown notices.
Well, yeah, that's kinda how insurance works. The thing is, people are risk averse; we're often willing to pay money to not face paying out large sums when something really bad happens. Insurance companies can pool the risk of large numbers of people and have much better control over what they have to pay out every year.
Your idea of "small-cost" items is relative. My wife's laptop, for example, cost about $1400 (12" Powerbook a few years back). Since we wanted it to last for 3 years, we bought the Applecare extended warranty. Now anything that goes wrong we don't have to worry about having to shell out for a new laptop unexpectedly. She had her laptop serviced recently for a few issues, and it ended up with a new (or probably refurbished) motherboard and keyboard.
If people are sufficiently risk averse (and don't mind making warranty claims), they will take these extended warranty packages. It doesn't make them (economically) irrational.
When I bought my new HP laptop last October, the first thing I did (before loading Linux) was to create the recovery CDs. I didn't spring for the DVD burner, so the total number of disks I had to burn was 15. This was pre-Vista, a rather simple Windows XP install totally cluttered in stuff that HP loads on. This took at least an hour and was quite annoying. Though I wanted to load Linux, I still wanted to dual-boot Windows. The hard drive's recovery partition worked fine for that, but getting those backup disks was darned annoying.
Strangely enough, reloading the OS fixed a problem I was having with the touchpad's scroll area not working (despite telling the driver about the area), so the image in the restore partition must not have exactly matched that which shipped.
So if I had to go back and do it over, I might be willing to pay $10 or $20 to get a few known-good DVDs for my recovery partition. That'd save me an hour of my time and the potential for any one of the 15 CDs to become unreadable. The article says $30, which seems a bit steep (it took an hour, but I could work on other things while occasionally swapping disks).
Washtenaw county is home to CmdrTaco (Rob Malda), which has a plan to bring wireless to the whole county. It, too, seems to be having problems with financing. The plan was to have a free service with paid members getting faster access. The second link claims that to be profitable, 5% of the county needs to sign up.
But a good portion of the population (i.e. most of Ann Arbor) can get fairly cheap DSL through AT&T/Speakeasy (okay, maybe Speakeasy isn't so cheap), or most of the county (I think) can get cable through Comcast.
Students on the U of M campus (a sizable portion of the city's population) can get wireless from many locations. It's not uncommon to have people run open WiFi spots in neighborhoods around campus as well. People push these wireless services as enabling low-income households and rural areas to get broadband speeds. Low-income households are likely to not find the faster service worth buying, and rural areas still have substantial infrastructure costs (the houses are spread out more, and wireless access points have fairly pitiful range). I'm just not sure current wireless technology is really a better solution for the "last mile".
On the other hand, it seems to make some sense for dense downtown regions. People like to congregate there, and businesses might be willing to chip in (instead of many businesses administering their own wireless access points). People who live downtown might be willing to pay $10 or $20/mo to get faster speeds where they live and in all the businesses they frequent.
But county-wide, like this Washtenaw program? I'm just not sure the demand is there and/or the technology is sufficient.
I've always thought you have a slightly better chance of getting valid data off of a drive if you never actually power it down when it's failing. This is anecdotal from a power outage causing many old hard drives in a building to give up, with their computers normally having uptime measured in months or even years.
Of course, to recover data like this you would need another computer accessible via the network, rather than installing a replacement in the desktop itself. Read any possible data off it while you still can, without putting it through the stress of powerdown/powerup.
Let's take a few examples:
Really? They're talking about the same computer here. Now, my wife and I both make very heavy use of our computers, so she has her own Mac Powerbook, and I have my own computers. We share common files and have ample storage with a simple Linux server in the basement loaded with hard drives.
We've set up a mail server with lots of virtual aliases. For a while we had a combined alias, but it started getting spam so we dropped it. We haven't really missed it since. For online accounts (utilities, credit cards, etc.) that we both want to receive the notifications for, it's a trivial matter to have the mail sent to both real email addresses.
Even if you don't have a mail server, don't gmail or Yahoo or something allow you to automatically forward an address to multiple accounts? I'm sure there's some convenient online resource that does that.
Wow, that's just...mean. We signed up with Netflix after they had the separate queue feature (this was over 2 years ago). For 3 DVDs at a time, we each get one at a time, and we have a shared queue for movies and shows we know we want to watch together.
Even if they didn't have this feature, it wouldn't have been too hard to share equitably. But getting up at 5am to put your movies on the top of the queue is not playing fair.
Every couple has to work out their own relationship and budget. Still, tech issues aren't worth causing fights over; they can usually be resolved with a little time to find a fix or at worst, a little money.
s/would've/wouldn't/
My whole point was that there are tons, and I mean tons, of easy changes that save way, WAY more energy. Changing everybody's homepage to Blackle (even allowing that their energy savings estimates are correct) is a complete and utter waste of time. For the amount of energy saved so far for ALL Blackle use (110,000 Wh), a single person (say, the Blackle creator), could save that within a month or two quite easily.
The cost of getting people to switch to Blackle is getting their attention and getting them to spend a few minutes making a change to their lives. Those two things are hard, and we could get people to do much better things with those few minutes (buy a CFL while in the store, turn off a light a few times). Turning off a 100 watt light bulb for an HOUR (less than a half-second in work, just by shutting off a light you would've have otherwise) will save more than switching to Blackle for a YEAR. And that's if you buy their numbers!
How is $0.01/YEAR per person a lot of energy savings for a little bit of effort? And I'm being really, really generous with the $0.01/year per person estimate.
What do you think I meant by: " pick ways that deliver a high level of energy savings for how much behavior you have to change." This is all about picking activities which save a relatively large amount of energy for the amount of effort expended. The effort in energy savings is often a one-time cost in time and money. Replace a light bulb with a CFL, replace an old water heater with a new one, etc.
You say that people should Blackle on top of all of the other ideas. The point is that people don't - changing behavior is HARD. If you're going to go through the effort to change people's behavior, do something that saves more than a penny per person!
So yes, switching to Blackle is a complete waste of everyone's time.
When I found out about Blackle a few months ago, it made me really angry. Finding ways to save electricity is not hard, getting people to change their behavior is. Blackle wants you to change your default website and put up with gray-on-black search results. Using their purported energy saving at the time, and assuming something like 300 million regular Google users, the energy saving was less than $0.01/year per person (at any reasonable kWh like $0.10).
This is for changing someone's behavior for an entire year. Instead, that energy saving could be had by turning off a lightbulb for less than an hour. Better yet, replace any single incandescent with a CFL. Bike to work one day of the year instead of drive a car. Pushing for any of these would have dramatically more impact in terms of energy savings.
Look at blackle's homepage - 116,481.368 watt hours saved right now. At a high energy cost of $0.10/kwh, that's just $12. $12 can be saved in a month by turning down the AC or heat a bit.
The bottom line is, if you're going to push for energy conservation, pick ways that deliver a high level of energy savings for how much behavior you have to change. Blackle fails miserably on both counts.