Specifically, if you subscribe to this journal, how much time will you spend sifting through articles of stuff you already knew about from perl.com, perl.org, or Perl Monks? The lost time looking for that nugget of wisdom may be cost you more than you gain from learning it.
If there was very little free, professionally-written and useful information about Perl out on the web, then maybe $12 would be worth it, but as it is, I'm better off spending that $12 on three yuppie coffee drinks to consume while I read about the latest CPAN module updates on-line.
Not to mention perl.org and a dozen other free sites which provide more perl info than any one person is likely to get around to reading. Why would I spend a dime on a journal of Stuff I Can Read Elsewhere For Free?
In fact, the massive amount of free documentation and information is one of the factors that drew a lot of people to Perl in the first place. You too can be YAPH without ever buying a single publication. (Okay, maybe the Camel Book is a nice jump-start, but it's amazing how much you can accomplish with just that and web resources.)
As I understand it, the equity rule is that your name can not sound the same on the phone as the name of any other equity-card-holding actor. So you could be "Leonardo di Caprio", if you pronounce it "Throat Wabbler Mangrove", but you can't be called "130n4rd0 d3 K4ppr|0" if you pronounce it the same as the guy from Titanic.
That's a very good question. IANAL, but IIRC the ADA applies to any public accomodation, which some would say includes nearly all websites. (Damn, I've been reading/. way too much. Two common slash acronyms in one sentence!)
On the other hand, if you are handing out pamphlets on a street corner, there's no law that says they need to be available in braile.
Bottom line is that if you are going to enforce the ADA for any businesses at all, it should also be enforeced for e-commerce businesses. Private sites, existing for the sake of blogging or whatever, perhaps should be exempt. It will probably take a few of these sorts of lawsuits to hammer it out, because the ADA was, alas, a pathetically vague law.
However, whether or not the law says your site must be blind-accessible, in most cases it ought to be, because if you are simply following standards (which includes proper use of "alt" tags), then most of what you put on the web already is.
If your site can't be read by these text-to-voice tools the blind use, it should be pointed out that you are a shitty webmaster.
If the prices of CDs went down to reflect the drop in costs of manufacturing the CDs, would many people be less inclined to use KaZaa or whatever to pirate them?
You seem to be mushing the terms "geek" and "hacker" together. Why would, for example, a Math Geek studying chaos theory, or an Astronomy Geek puzzling about the origins of the univers, ever give a fuck about Digital Rights Management. He might not even listen to music, let alone want to make MP3's out of his CD collection, and probably considers the crusade to free up media rights (on machines best used for scientific research) to be utterly silly and frivolous. Would such a geek even read Slashdot, beyond the movie reviews and Robot Wars stories?
There is a middle ground. It's called not caring. I think you will find that it is the prevailing majority opinion, even among those who were beat up and shoved into lockers during their formative years.
Both articles are arguing from the faulty premise that there is such a thing as a geek political agenda.
There are plenty of geeks out there who want nothing to do with Linux, prefering the tools of Sun, Apple and even (gasp!) Microsoft. The first article seems to make the case that all geeks demand open source exclusively, because if you don't make such demands, you're not a geek. (A classic falacy of logic).
I would even go so far as to say that the majority of geeks that I have known are aware of open source & Linux, and use both at least some of the time (particularilly some of the better GNU tools), but are not married to the Stalmanist ideology that all software should be free, and spend most of their time working with various closed applications. There are those who fit the description of these articles, but I don't believe they don't even represent the majority of geekdom, let alone a consensus.
The whole debate is downright Katzian, in that it assumes a cultural development that isn't actually happening.
Heh... typing "lost" instead of "lost"... I think that goes beyond a mere typo into the realm of a good-ol malepropism. Yogi Berra & Dan Quayle must be so proud of me.
cron & shell scripting is probaly omitted because lost of old-school Mac apps already exist for automating tasks. Mac users who are UNIX newbies are far more likely to stick with AppleScript.
My understanding is that RDBMS heavy-lifting has always been the Killer App of Solaris. A Sun box running Oracle has pretty much been the "let's buy the cadilac" solution, for anybody who doesn't want a mainframe, for almost as long as these solutions have existed.
And a lot of "giant websites" are really just serving up HTML output from giant databases. Clustering a bunch of x86 boxen might work fine for something like The Drudge Report, where accepting lots of hits is the only priority, but it's not the way to go for everybody.
It sounds to me like the review was a result of misunderstanding. He was hoping for a "OS X UNIX for UNIX geeks" book, when it sounds to me like it's actually meant to be a "the basics of UNIX for OS X n00bs" book, which certainly has its place. A lot of MacOS 7-9 users are totally new to sed, awk, grep, cron, and the common UNIX directory layout. A simple UNIX primer from a good publisher like O'Reilly Press could be very handy for some of them.
My emphasis was on "the". In 84 there was also Amiga, Atari, and various other options. Since Jobs went on his "digital hub" kick, the focus at Apple has been to establish a much more clear advantage for both creators and consumers of multimedia content.
If you read the article, you would notice that the OS cheerfully lets you rip, image, and mount whole DVD's to your hard drive, so you can watch them on battery power without the added electrical drain of the disk player.
Apple is setting themselves up as the computer to own if you want to work with multimedia, and installing DRM (which restricts fair use on a host of multimedia types) gets in the way of that vision.
Do you get it now, or do you need to higher a math tutor outside of school hours?
Urk. That should be "hire" a tutor. When you do, ask her if she can help with my spelling... or at least remind me not to hit the "Submit" button before proof reading my posts.
You are basing your argument on an invalid assumption: That all 5% of Mac users would get this service, if it were made available. This is totally false.
Holy shit! How many poeple on/. are making this same, simple math error! If you people are actually working as programmers, I fear for the world.
He's not assuming that all Mac users are going to use the service. He's only making the reasonable assumption that roughly the same proportion of Mac users will use it.
Let's break it down to small-ish numbers so you can understand.
Let's take a pool of 19,000 PC users, and 1,000 Mac users. In other words, our Mac users are 5% of the total. Now lets say that product x has 1 percent market penetration with our PC group. That means they have 190 customers. Now, suppose the add Mac support, and pick up only 1 percent of our Mac users That means they have 10 new customers. That's about a 5.26% increase.
See, you do not need to get all of the 5% of Mac users to get a 5% increase in sales. Do you get it now, or do you need to higher a math tutor outside of school hours?
First, it's not quite so easy to provide technical support for more than one environment.
Except "Windows" is not exactly one environment, is it? A product like this probably already has customers on 98, NT4, ME, Win2000, and XP, perhaps more, and apart from similar-looking GUI's, the differences (particularilly between 98/ME and NT) are pretty vast, when it comes to what's likely to break for any given app.
You're assuming that the whole 5% will automatically migrate to it if it were to become available.
No he's not, math wizard.
Assuming that 5% of currently used home computers are Macs (there's a lot of conflicting data about that. The 5% number actually represents total new sales, which includes all business sales... but let's roll with that number for this example).
If a product $FOO is currently used by, oh say, 1% of Windows users, and you manage to sell it to 1% of Mac users, you just increased your sales by 5%.
If the whole 5% "automatically" migrated, you would be talking about a massive windfall of profit, due to a more than 500% increase in sales!
This whining is in reality the remaining hopes that Apple finally gets a clue and will listen to user's complaints.
No, submitting suggestions to Apple's customer feedback page, which Apple actually reads, is the best hope of a user's complaint being listened to. Many of the changes in 10.1.x - 10.2.1 have been in direct response to customer feedback.
Whining on Slashdot, which I sincerely hope they don't pay much attention to, accomplishes nothing.
You would think they would want me to buy a new machine from them - it puts money in their pocket and gets me on my way to becoming a Mac evangalist.
You are right. I would think they would want that. Apparently, they don't. There must be few enough people like you that they figure it isn't worth diluting the market for the $1700 tower. In other words, suppose they release a $950 tower with a single 800 MHz G4 in it. Yes, they would sell thousands of them, but how many of those sales would be to people who would have shelled out $1700 for the current dual-head tower if the cheapie Mac wasn't available? It looks like Apple's market research has told them that it would be enough to result in a net loss.
My speculation (and that's all this is), is that they figure they are better off just selling high-end towers to power users that can afford them, iMacs and eMacs to your blue-haired aunt, and lose you to the used market. They probably figure that if you end up using your used Mac in a way that profits you enough, you might eventually pick up a new one someday down the road, but for now the cost of meeting your needs is higher than the potential gain of having your business.
That's just a guess. It could be that they have overlooked how many people like you are out there. I don't have the numbers, and I'm pretty sure that the Apple CFO does, so I'm willing to bet that there's a reason why offering a sub-$k tower is unprofitable to them at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically, if you subscribe to this journal, how much time will you spend sifting through articles of stuff you already knew about from perl.com, perl.org, or Perl Monks? The lost time looking for that nugget of wisdom may be cost you more than you gain from learning it.
If there was very little free, professionally-written and useful information about Perl out on the web, then maybe $12 would be worth it, but as it is, I'm better off spending that $12 on three yuppie coffee drinks to consume while I read about the latest CPAN module updates on-line.
I use Perl, but don't plan on subscribing.
In fact, the massive amount of free documentation and information is one of the factors that drew a lot of people to Perl in the first place. You too can be YAPH without ever buying a single publication. (Okay, maybe the Camel Book is a nice jump-start, but it's amazing how much you can accomplish with just that and web resources.)
Disclaimer: IANAHL (I am not a Hollywood lawyer)
That's a very good question. IANAL, but IIRC the ADA applies to any public accomodation, which some would say includes nearly all websites. (Damn, I've been reading /. way too much. Two common slash acronyms in one sentence!)
On the other hand, if you are handing out pamphlets on a street corner, there's no law that says they need to be available in braile.
Bottom line is that if you are going to enforce the ADA for any businesses at all, it should also be enforeced for e-commerce businesses. Private sites, existing for the sake of blogging or whatever, perhaps should be exempt. It will probably take a few of these sorts of lawsuits to hammer it out, because the ADA was, alas, a pathetically vague law.
However, whether or not the law says your site must be blind-accessible, in most cases it ought to be, because if you are simply following standards (which includes proper use of "alt" tags), then most of what you put on the web already is.
If your site can't be read by these text-to-voice tools the blind use, it should be pointed out that you are a shitty webmaster.
Humor: It's a concept. Look it up sometime during your next kernel re-compile.
No.
Next question.
There is a middle ground. It's called not caring. I think you will find that it is the prevailing majority opinion, even among those who were beat up and shoved into lockers during their formative years.
No, I was pointing out that they were saying "All geeks like open source because if you are against open source, then you aren't a geek."
Circular reasoning is the act of restating of one of the premises as the conclusion.
Which was exactly my point.
There are plenty of geeks out there who want nothing to do with Linux, prefering the tools of Sun, Apple and even (gasp!) Microsoft. The first article seems to make the case that all geeks demand open source exclusively, because if you don't make such demands, you're not a geek. (A classic falacy of logic).
I would even go so far as to say that the majority of geeks that I have known are aware of open source & Linux, and use both at least some of the time (particularilly some of the better GNU tools), but are not married to the Stalmanist ideology that all software should be free, and spend most of their time working with various closed applications. There are those who fit the description of these articles, but I don't believe they don't even represent the majority of geekdom, let alone a consensus.
The whole debate is downright Katzian, in that it assumes a cultural development that isn't actually happening.
Heh... typing "lost" instead of "lost"... I think that goes beyond a mere typo into the realm of a good-ol malepropism. Yogi Berra & Dan Quayle must be so proud of me.
cron & shell scripting is probaly omitted because lost of old-school Mac apps already exist for automating tasks. Mac users who are UNIX newbies are far more likely to stick with AppleScript.
And a lot of "giant websites" are really just serving up HTML output from giant databases. Clustering a bunch of x86 boxen might work fine for something like The Drudge Report, where accepting lots of hits is the only priority, but it's not the way to go for everybody.
It sounds to me like the review was a result of misunderstanding. He was hoping for a "OS X UNIX for UNIX geeks" book, when it sounds to me like it's actually meant to be a "the basics of UNIX for OS X n00bs" book, which certainly has its place. A lot of MacOS 7-9 users are totally new to sed, awk, grep, cron, and the common UNIX directory layout. A simple UNIX primer from a good publisher like O'Reilly Press could be very handy for some of them.
My emphasis was on "the". In 84 there was also Amiga, Atari, and various other options. Since Jobs went on his "digital hub" kick, the focus at Apple has been to establish a much more clear advantage for both creators and consumers of multimedia content.
I mean, I don't like Michael Bolton but I do have the mental capacity to know he had more than one hit.
No, he only had one hit, too.
It appears that your threshold for calling a song a "hit" is a lot lower than mine. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?
Nobody is ever obligated to make a Beastie Boys reference. Not even a reference to their only hit.
Apple is setting themselves up as the computer to own if you want to work with multimedia, and installing DRM (which restricts fair use on a host of multimedia types) gets in the way of that vision.
Urk. That should be "hire" a tutor. When you do, ask her if she can help with my spelling... or at least remind me not to hit the "Submit" button before proof reading my posts.
Holy shit! How many poeple on /. are making this same, simple math error! If you people are actually working as programmers, I fear for the world.
He's not assuming that all Mac users are going to use the service. He's only making the reasonable assumption that roughly the same proportion of Mac users will use it.
Let's break it down to small-ish numbers so you can understand.
Let's take a pool of 19,000 PC users, and 1,000 Mac users.
In other words, our Mac users are 5% of the total.
Now lets say that product x has 1 percent market penetration with our PC group.
That means they have 190 customers.
Now, suppose the add Mac support, and pick up only 1 percent of our Mac users
That means they have 10 new customers.
That's about a 5.26% increase.
See, you do not need to get all of the 5% of Mac users to get a 5% increase in sales. Do you get it now, or do you need to higher a math tutor outside of school hours?
That's got to me the wisest post I've seen in this entire discussion. Kudos.
Except "Windows" is not exactly one environment, is it? A product like this probably already has customers on 98, NT4, ME, Win2000, and XP, perhaps more, and apart from similar-looking GUI's, the differences (particularilly between 98/ME and NT) are pretty vast, when it comes to what's likely to break for any given app.
No he's not, math wizard.
Assuming that 5% of currently used home computers are Macs (there's a lot of conflicting data about that. The 5% number actually represents total new sales, which includes all business sales... but let's roll with that number for this example).
If a product $FOO is currently used by, oh say, 1% of Windows users, and you manage to sell it to 1% of Mac users, you just increased your sales by 5%.
If the whole 5% "automatically" migrated, you would be talking about a massive windfall of profit, due to a more than 500% increase in sales!
This whining is in reality the remaining hopes that Apple finally gets a clue and will listen to user's complaints.
No, submitting suggestions to Apple's customer feedback page, which Apple actually reads, is the best hope of a user's complaint being listened to. Many of the changes in 10.1.x - 10.2.1 have been in direct response to customer feedback.
Whining on Slashdot, which I sincerely hope they don't pay much attention to, accomplishes nothing.
You are right. I would think they would want that. Apparently, they don't. There must be few enough people like you that they figure it isn't worth diluting the market for the $1700 tower. In other words, suppose they release a $950 tower with a single 800 MHz G4 in it. Yes, they would sell thousands of them, but how many of those sales would be to people who would have shelled out $1700 for the current dual-head tower if the cheapie Mac wasn't available? It looks like Apple's market research has told them that it would be enough to result in a net loss.
My speculation (and that's all this is), is that they figure they are better off just selling high-end towers to power users that can afford them, iMacs and eMacs to your blue-haired aunt, and lose you to the used market. They probably figure that if you end up using your used Mac in a way that profits you enough, you might eventually pick up a new one someday down the road, but for now the cost of meeting your needs is higher than the potential gain of having your business.
That's just a guess. It could be that they have overlooked how many people like you are out there. I don't have the numbers, and I'm pretty sure that the Apple CFO does, so I'm willing to bet that there's a reason why offering a sub-$k tower is unprofitable to them at the moment.
Good call. Although I suspect America would find me (a typical thirtysomething Perl hacker) to be far less cute and compelling than her.