Alternatively, one could just buy another phone. As continuously mentioned, the iPhone is just a phone that can run some apps. Not the best phone, not the best interface. If one want to play music, the iTouch is smaller with more memory.
If one wants to be an app junkie, by something that runs the Android. That way one cdan not only run any app available, but can write personal custom apps. This has never been the case with Apple, so is a non issue. When the iPhone came out is had no apps. When apps were available, Apple said they were going to vet them, and anyone with a brain knew that they were going to be unfair.
If one wants to be an OSS advocate, buy an open moko. By buying an iPhone one is not hurting apple, or promoting OSS. They never sell anything at a loss, and they get to put the sales figures, not activation figures, in their annual report stating how much people love the phone, so why should they change? Moko is available now for $399. For that price, one can do whatever one wishes, even to write one's own phone software. Standing up for one's values is not free, it cost a buck o' five.
There is a theoretical importance to this work which I respect, and I am glad it goes on. It advances the art and keeps Apple on it toes. OTOH, complaining that the phone is locked and that the apps are controlled is just juvenile. It is not like, for instance, the new display port on macs that prevent legally acquired content from being displayed on normal display devices. This was a specific reduction in rights that was not initially disclosed to the consumer.
In any case, I feel like most of the people who complain are just like those posers that carry fake Prada or LV bags. People who think that conformity is the ultimate in life, but aren't quite sure why.
Those who value security over liberty deny either.
That is what we should be thinking of. But what we often think of is if discriminating against 1000 of the 'other' is what it takes to save my family, my job, the status quo, then what do I care. As long as I am ok, the so be it.
I am sure that some in new york, as was posted in response to a recent Schneier blog, would say hey, you were obviously not around the twin towers when they fell, otherwise you would feel different. What if they had not allowed any dark people on the plane. Then it would have never have happened. QED, discrimination justified.
People, kids, family will say thigs. I see people praying, and it does not mean they are going to crash a plane. Just because you have nail poiish does not mean you are going to make a bomb. For some strange reason, we do not approach every redneck in a pickup truck loaded with fertilizers and take them down to the Homeland security for integration.
However, given that profiling does appear to be a recognized method to stop even the most rare of crime, and given that we want a security system that eliminates all crime no matter what, even at the cost of freedom, here is my suggestion to all those nations outside the US. The cities of Destroit, Baltimore, St. louis, Newwark, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, all have hugely high murder rates. to the point where maybe one out of every hundred people is a murderer, assuming that each person commits murder only once during their life, likely during 20 and 50. It would therefore be prudent to restrict travel by anyone who has ever lived in these cities. This shouldn't be a big problem, except for washington. Philidelphia is the only city with more than a million people who have an obscenely high murder rate. Most larger cities have about half the murder rate of Oakland. I certainly would feel much safer on an airplane knowing that I am not traveling with a passenger from these cities.
Of course, given that it is more likely that I will killed in a car accident than in a terrorist attack, we could chill and try to save democracy from the fear mongers.
Just perusing the report, I found this section interesting.
Relatively unsafe core programming languages
There is no question that programming in C and C++ requires skill, and that memory management is an issue, and automatic heap allocation and garbage collection is the popular solution to that issue, but there is no silver bullets, and they are always compromises. It seems to me like every is so scared of they tools that they don't even want to learn to use them. They never learn to use an Exacto knife because they never get past those plastic scissors they give you in grade school. At some point one has to take off the training wheels, at least for some projects. For better or worse,the core stuff, the stuff that does the heavy work, has to be written efficiently, and that may mean a human has to code it without over-dependence on the compiler.
No security compartmentalization
Again, there are no silver bullets. For instance, the Java sandbox is one solution to a security issue. It is not perfect, and it's imperfections lead to a false sense of security. It is ok for developers to be sloppy because garbage collection and the sandbox will protect the user. Not true. The real issue is that we are running what are essentially single user stand alone apps in multiuser networked contexts, at least in Windows. Of course in *nix there is segregation of processes built from the OS up, which is good. I do believe that such segregation at the user application level has the same benefit. It is a hack to make people feel better. Now, in chrome there is a side benefit that each page is it's own process. We will see how that works out.
Web technologies are used in browser chrome:
This seems to counteract what they were saying in the first item. C and C++ leads to coding bugs, but using standard complex libraries leads to unexpected behaviour. This is why we use C and C++, because it is simple enough to understand and carries very little useless overhead. Once we start using more complex libraries, we end up with a few functions we use, much more code we do not use, and many side effects we do not understand. I mean do we write everything in C++, and gain understanding, or use a range of technologies to maximize efficiency? If there are bugs in some high level libraries, all we need to do is fix the bug in library. Is the risk of the library greater than the risk of using a simple language like C?
The rest of this just seem like subjective opinions of design. In terms of setting, I almost prefer about:config to any of the GUI stuff. The last item about data storage is important, but again is an OS issue. Each application should have a predefined space in the user directory to store files. If any application can store anything to anywhere on the disk, even outside the user directory, that is not a browser issue.
Netscape did not play tough, and look what happened to them.
Google is becoming a company that we should all be worried about, but they are playing a predictable games. MS grew because it offered the cheapest product on the block that more or less worked. Google is doing the same thing. The problem is that MS is now that inefficient behemoth with a business model that assumes a cut of every PC sales and aftermarket revenue. This is an environment where all Google needs to survive is a fraction of penny from every hit.
Google now offers cheaper products than Microsoft, read free to the user, and few people seem to worry about the opportunity costs in terms of privacy and all that. This is in the same way that no one worry about the issue with MS in terms of being assumed a pirate rather than a paying customer.
Beyond all this, why would any sane person with a competing product want to have anything to do with MS. MS could come up with an update to IE tomorrow that would break google apps. We all know that MS has the motive, and the will to break other peoples software is well documented. This justifies asking people to move away from IE because the day that MS does break Google is the day that google will lose a lot of good will. People will blame Google and not MS.
Not supporting IE is a gutsy move. It shows that Google is willing to play hardball. It shows that google is no longer the feel good get along with everyone company, but a company that is willing to dominate and create monopolies. Good for those that want a competitor to MS. Bad for those of us that want a quality product delivered by a company that treats the end user as a customer, not just a proxy to earn third party money.
The same issue came up as mac screens moved from the original fixed resolution and screen size (9"512X342, 72 DPI) Macs to a more dynamic situation. There were many ways to deal with this. In particular, games that assumed a fixed resolution would run in a window contained on the larger screen.
The challenge of the tablet mac is allowing iPhone and iPod applications to run, while the device itself run the normal Mac OS X WIMP interface. Not necessarily all programs, but not the PDA like interface used on the iPod Touch and many netbook. Virtualization will allow this, and iPod applications will run in a window.
In terms of resolution, this should not be so hard. Mac OS ran on a 12", 1024X768, only about twice the touch resolution. So, if we assume the 7", screen, we have something that the interface has run on, so it is just a matter of using the Atom or similar processor.
From the papers, the paper is credited to iSec partners. This company has almost no details on itself on the web page. The domain was registered in late 2004, and appears to be renewed year to year, which, to me, is suspicious for a going concern.
That and the way the paper is written makes me suspicious as well.
Absolutely. IE and Safari are created to allow the average user to browse average content without thinking about the technical details. That means that cookies has to be on, flash has to be on, and everything has to be relatively open. Otherwise it will not work when trying to download the baby pics or naughty movie. The privacy mode, now in both, is a very good compromise in that it leaves everything open, but more or less covers your tracks when you leave. Of course, the key is more or less, and the average user may not understand that it might less than more. Some of the other browsers assume, at lesat in part, that the users understands what is going on and is set up accordingly.
The key really is that both of these browsers are written to maximize revenue for the content providers, which is not bad, as content needs to be paid for. That is why flash is not easy to turn off, even in safari(though I hear there is now a free plugin). So, for users who want simplicity, and want free content, tends to give up privacy. For the others, firefox on MS, camino on mac, and lynx on *nix.
This to me is an amazing, given that US courts at least have said the opposite. Over the summer the courts ruled that promotional CDs could be resold even though they were stamped with a notice that could not be resold, and no sale took place. So what might this precedent say about what is happening here?
Let's say that some business gave away one plastic widget a day per customer. An enterprising family went and got a number of widget and resold it on the open market. First sale doctrine, as I understand it, would support that entrepreneurial free market efficient movement of product.
Let's say that the some other business gave away as many promotional widgets as one wanted, but only one per visit. That entrepreneurial family previously mentioned expanded the business so, for a small fee, they would pick up the widget and deliver it to the person. The fee might be paid directly by the recipient, or indirectly by a third party wishing access to the participant. IS this illegal?
The point is that giving something away as a gift does not grant any additional rights beyond the original copyright, and I do not believe there is anything, at least, in US law, that prevents regifting. This case may not even involve regifting. It may involve just directing a user to the location of the free loot. Even if a copy is made, on could theoretically just download a new copy off the right holder website for each request.
What complicates things here are two things. First, the tracks may not be free. They may in fact be ad supported, in which the right holder expects eyeballs. If that is the issue, it is covered under whatever legal framework that exsits for webscraping. Even so, if they are giving away music to anyone who drops by, and then we are back to the issue of our right to resell property in our possession, even if we did not pay for it, as long as it was not stolen. Or not. who knows.
If there was ever a reason for me to not recommend anyone buying a Zune, this would be it. A hard reset procedure that requires disassembly of the device is not something that should be required for a consumer device.
'No user serviceable parts inside' is not a just a way to force users to pay for repairs, not just a safety issue, it is a design issue. For instance, some smart phones have a very sloppy design where if the phone gets confused about the sim card, the only way to reset is to remove the battery. I know the battery is a user serviceable part, but many consumers spend their life happily never thinking about the battery, never knowing how to take it out. So when this issue occurs, they really have no way of fixing it, since the normal on/off procedure does not work.
In the long ago, one reason to restrict p0rn and other questionable content was simply to limit the bandwidth of the user or the disk space used at the service. This is one reason why some many services did not carry the alt.* groups. Sure this is where all the real ware p0rn was and still is, but that was secondary to the issue of the cost of hosting.
But now lots of legitimate services need high bandwidth, netflix, iTunes, even youtube, and most kids are used high speed connections that let them play games and watch videos. They need the bandwidth. So many would say we can no longer use bandwidth as a proxy, and need filtering. I disagree.
To me the best way to make sure that the most people can use this, and not just for play, is to limit the speed to.5 Mb/sec. Those who need the service will appreciate it, and those who can afford something faster will buy it. I would love to have free, reliable internet access even at 300 kb/sec. It might be a bummer for people who just want to play, but for most work it is fast enough.
In this case it might be fair to say that the restraint system was fairly well designed. It appeared to have rendered them unconscious during an incident that they could do nothing about and would have been very painful. There is no reason to design a retraint or any kind of protective system that would keep a person alive during that catastrophic breakup. As the report stated, the only reasonable thing to do is to prevent the break up, no keep people alive so they can witness their inevitable demise.
The improvement made to the new crew capsule using suggestions from this report appear to involve immobilizing the head so that if an incident is survivable, there would be less trauma. Also, they want to make the outer skin more durable so bits of foam won't penetrate. There is no indication, that if the same type of thing happened to they new capsule, and it began to spin our of control, with no hope of correcting the behavior, the new restraint system would do anything different, i.e the crew would still black out.
It is amazing what hate there is for anything new. More amazing because many of us have made money off the next new thing. What is even more embarrassing is the innumeracy illustrated in the FUD.
Let's say that you do pay extra for the incandescent light bulb made in the US. Let's further assume that number of times a user has to drive to the store and replace the incandescent light bulb is compensated by the increased mass, and chemicals, in the CFL. Even with that, one can't ignore the basic physics. A basic CFL uses at least 40 watts less than an equivelent incandescent. Most of that excess power is converted to heat. Unless one lives in a cave, or in a cold region, that heat needs to be removed, usually at a lower efficiency. Generally speaking then, that 40 watts results in an excess of at least 100 watts of inefficiency. This 100 watts, over the lifetime of the bulb, say 1200 hours, or 4.32 Msec, results in an inefficiency of more than 0.4 TerraJoules. A gallon of gas is around.1 megajoules. If it takes 4 gallons of gas to transport a single CFL from the factory in china to your local store, because I can buy a CFL for $3, about a third of the what four gallons of gas would cost.
This, of course, does not take into account that a CFL will last 8X longer than an incandescent, so we are really talking about 32 gallons of gas, rather than four.
Get real. We live in a changing world. As much I would prefer to ride a horse, or ride a bike, or take the bus, I know that I have to have a car. Change sucks, but there it is. CFL, like fluorescence, will exist. LEDs are providing us with new opportunities. Hopefully, before I die, there will be another new thing that will continue to make life interesting.
It has very little to with price, it has to do with games. One thing that MS is good at is making it easy for developers to create software. Combined with the reality that most developers are familiar with MS dog food, and one does have a situation where MS can get games out. People buy consoles to play games on, not to have a pretty box in their home.
The WSJ has the same take on the PS3. It is doomed. I am not so sure. Sony always plays to the big picture, is always, as the say in politics, on script. Sony has a lot of different interest, but what is interesting is that all these interests seem to play together, none of them go off script just because it might mean more profit in the unit. For instance, the MP3 players did not sweep the market due to the fact that Sony wanted to protect it's content interests and push the memory card standard. Some might call that a mistake, others might have said it would have been a mistake to stab other divisions in the back by doing otherwise.
So what has happened here. MS built a game console with very good games that they could sell relatively cheaply. Now, dollar for dollar it does not do so well as the WII, which it competes at the entry price level, is still selling more that the XBox. Wii sales doubled, Xbox relatively flat. To be clear, Wii sold twice as many units as XBox, and given street prices, many paid more for the Wii. OTOH, XBox games seems to be selling more. To make it cheap it did not include a big HD or a dvd drive. In effect, MS gave up the living room to save game console. But is likely not to even have the lions share of the game console market.
Sony used an integrated strategy. The built a more expensive console, but made it a complete unit, with blu ray. I think that many would agree that the blu ray decision was a factor in blu ray winning the format wars, and that this has long term strategic significance to Sony, most specifically in keeping the living room away from MS, who bet on HD DVD.
So Xbox likely has fewer consoles out there than Wii. Both are primed for streaming media, and not all XBox 360 are capable of playing stored movies, or at least not a lot of them. The PS3 is half in number, but each one is ready to play a new, expensive, and sometimes Sony generated blu ray disc. I think MS continues on it's way to win the battle but lose the war.
I look around the united states and see that the places that are doing OK use the money of the 90's to diversify, while the places that are not doing so well are still making cars. It makes me think that what the money is spent on specifically is not so important so long as it is not spent on refurbishing buggy whip factories.
We wasted huge sums of cash in the 90's, but we came out the other end with many profitable long term ventures that set up growth or the US economy. Of course some people, comfortable with their 10 million dollar a year jobs did not embrace such a path to growth, and spent most of the past decade fighting or perverting the change that would cost them their jobs and often fraudulent pay checks, so the path to the next big thing is not clear. It never is, especially when we just do the same old thing . What is clear is that we are wasting out money helping old line and fraudulent businesses. For instance, for the amount of money we are giving to the automakers, who knows how much will just go to bonuses, and accounting costs for the planned elimination of half the line workers jobs, we could have a lottery to give away coupons for 80% discounts on American cars for at least 200,0000 people, thus clearing the backlog. You see, innovative ideas for innovate futures, but of course such an idea has not bonuses for the bosses.
The United states has technology for renewable energy, but very little money. Someone is going to make a lot of money on this, and the oil comapanies will lose a lot of money, unless they stop selling buggy whips. Even now I wonder if there is well in the US that can be profitably drilled for $40 a barrel. Someone is going to make a huge amount of money delivering content using TCP/IP, but the broadcasters and cable will lose money, unless they get off their butts and do it. The nice thing about this is that the middle man can be cut out, and the US can distribute to the world, if we have the bandwidth to not only deliver such content to the US population, but also to the world, which we don't.
I don't know what else the US can do, but it has to be more than selling poorly engineered cars and fraudulent financial services. Of course a work ethics that promotes such innovation will have to encouraged, which means that some of he easy jobs, the ones like the we heard about prior to the collapse of the USSR where people got paid to sit around, play chess, and drink vodka all day, will have to go.
The SUV is more insidious than that. In the late 70's, when this country was almost destroyed by the consistent previous lack of political and corporate leadership and the focus of greed, we found ourselves at the mercy of unfriendly countries. The response to this was to ask the countries patriots a very simple thing. Learn to conserve, learn to be efficient, help out the country, in the same way that people did during WWII with victory gardens and the like. Many patriotic americans, seeing the threat, did. Unfortunately many did not, including many in high level executive positions, who were more concerned about personal profits than the country. One can verify this by looking at the number of companies that set up shell companies outside of the USA. This mean, unfortunately, that patriotic americans had to go elsewhere for the many products, including cars, to attain the efficiency.
So it was interesting that the first thing Ronald Reagan did was reward one unpatriotic company with taxpayer money, exactly how much is in dispute, but it is much more than the zero that conservatives would have us believe, so the company could continue to build cars that would deliver us into the hands of unfriendly countries.
As time went by, some political leaders began to understand what was happening, and tried to enact regulation so that all the players would be on equal ground when trying to develop less America Hostile cars, and there would be no competitive disadvantage. As usual, the auto makers refused to allow this patriotic bill to come to term, and insisted on putting a clause in it so it would not hurt the struggling farmer. This limitation said trucks would not have to comply with the regulations.
They then turned around and used that limitation to create the SUV. A auto specifically created to circumvent the attempt of the US goverment to keep us safe from aggressive foreign influence. A car created by companies that wanted to make money, even it meant the destruction of the country.
So, what do we have to show for it. On the terrorist attack on new york, 15 of the 19 terrorist were of Saudi origin, yet we can do nothing because Saudi is out only friend in the oil rich region. Eight years of war to stabilize the oil flow, while Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden continues their work, nearly unfettered, 1000 miles away. And what do thes unpatriotic companies want from us? More cash. Why?
Well, for Ford it might be to actually help american. Since 2000 they have gotten the issues, and tried to help. All they need is a bridge loan anyway. But for the rest? They unlikely have the creativity to do anything other than they have been doing. Which is not much of anything. The free market has spoken and clearly stated that these companies are incapable of producing a product anyone wants. Even with all the free money the banks have been given, no one will loan any of it to the struggling automakers. This should tell us something.
It is one thing to pass right to work laws which prevents labor to organize to prevent such bad behavior. It is understandable to to abuse the H!B visa system so that one can gain completive advantage by creating a workforce of indentured servants with little opportunity to protect themselves against abusive behavior, while jobs that legitimately use the H1B visa program, and do help the overall US economy, for instance skilled seasonal labor, goes unfilled. But preventing a person from earning a living? Preventing a person from supporting their family? That seems beyond any reasonable persons ability to comprehend. I mean it is absolutely the right of a company to fire whom they wish, but to prevent them from getting another job?
The defense of this is that do not have to for RIM, the could be independent contractors. But the non compete clause might prevent a person from doing that as well. Non complete clauses are not uniformly bad. They may be good for preventing someone from quitting and going to a competing entity, or purposefully getting fired and doing the same. OTOH, in a country where many fears the welfare state enough to allow children to die of lack of medical care, but not due to accidental or forced conception, it would seem that we would not laws or regulations hat force highly trained persons onto those roles, or taking lower skilled jobs that might force other who might take the lower skilled jobs onto the rolls.
I never did like DVDs. I only started buying them when they became as cheap as VHS was, and when I could play them on my computer, so I no longer needed a tv.
The insanity of a DVD is how complex it is to use. I did not realize this until I was trying to teach my mother how to watch a movie. Read the barely legible text to select the play option. Since the creators value eye candy over usability, a person with limited vision has a great deal of trouble with this. Next, select the episode on wishes. This HBO DVD did not have a play all option, or just play on insert option. Next, read the another difficult menu and press enter to tell the machine yes, I really do want to play this episode. Really, please, I bought this DVD to watch the miniseries, not play with menus and watch cool graphics. Please, sir, let me watch the movie that I have paid good money for and have a legal right to do. Please!
This is a far cry from the VHS player that went like, put it in, if the tape was at the end autorewind, and start over and play. We have DVD players for many years. Can't we at least be at the usability level of the VHS? Or is selling stale stock for $15 a pop not profitable enough so you have to make sure that some extra monitoring of the customers can be put in.
More likely it is spending money on graphic artists rather than competent UI designers. It is like when we began using the trash can motif on the computer, and for years we were still asked 'are you sure you want to delete this?" Not only is putting something in the trash can not deleting it, but it is also no where near to be irreversible act, so there is really no reason to waste my time asking the question.
And everyone wonders why few people want blu ray. We still remember DVD, and the though many things were better, many things were also worse.
I am going to be really conservative here and say it is easy to blame other people for your problem. You fail at school because the teachers are bad. The police officer is responsible for you being in jail for drunk driving. You got fired because your boss has a stick up his ass and expects you to be at work on time every day. You don't make enough money because no one will give you a raise.
The reason we do not create jobs is because we have cushy government jobs. Just in the past several years we have a whole new department of homeland security with many grade 10 and above jobs making above median income. This in addition to god knows how many people who get paid just to stand around all day and rifle through my stuff. Hell, at the airport there are three people whose job is put a stamp on my ticket. How can I possible expand a business when the government with affordable employees when the government is paying good money for people to play in airports. In most real jobs a person has to work!
Speaking of government theft, how am I supposed to get money when the government is stealing all the capital. In the past eight years, the debt has increased by at least 4 trillion dollars. That is 4 trillion dollars that someone else could use to start a business, but instead is being used to expand government.
So maybe there are forces that hurt entrepreneurs. Those forces are more likely to be the availability of easy jobs rather than accounting laws and safety rules that do not apply to small business. Those rules tend to limit the size of a business, which means that more small operations can exist. In the end, a person with an easy job that pays something is not going to have the hunger to start something new.
As a person who was taught mechanical drawing and computer science at the middle and high school level I must disagree. And I was taught computer science, not just programming. By the time I left high school I learned how to write an algorithm, troubleshoot, optimize, and none of it in pascal. Basic in middle school, fortran, assembly, and C in high school, though the C I did at home with my own compiler. I had CS college hours before I entered college. I know a number of kids who did the same, even now. They have jobs to help pay for college, not just in the campus post office or bookstore serving customers and getting yelled at by insecure bosses.
But I do understand what you mean, and as a science person I agree, at least in part. Math is just one of the many languages we use to describe the world. So, like other language classes, it is important to use it to describe the world, just like one would use in a english, french, spanish, or latin class. The same goes for computers. It is just one of many ways we model the world.
The issue comes in if the student does not have an understanding of these concepts. It is all well and good for me to talk about going to the store to buy stuff, or creating linear equation using patterns of blocks, or non linear equation using the multiplication tables. These things are taught all though grade school. But how am I going to use the incline plane for a trigonometric function is the student was not given the experience in science lab to create and interpret the models. I don't have time in math class, and not all the students are going to have the experience outside of the classroom.
Likewise, it would be very difficult for me to take a class in and have them make graphs on graphviz(for instance, who knows who in the class) if they never had a class to teach them about computers. I would spend all my time introducing them to the computer, and trying to keep them off facebook, because computer time is too valuable to some of them to waste it on lessons. If they do not have a class to play on the computer, like if they do not have a class to play science, then they will not do it maths class.
Which applies to logic as well. There are many good resources for logic. Web pages that create truth table, karnaugh maps, allow you to draw circuits and test them. It would be wonderful to have a month to teach logic using these techniques, maybe even build the circuit to show how a story can be rendered with 74xx or GAL or similar technology. But it the kids never played with such tech in science class, never was trained to use the computer as a tool, not a toy, such effort would be fruitless. The novelty of the computer would overwhelm the topic to be taught.
From my experience, things must be taught separately, in chunks. Sure at the college level you can assume that the kid will learn the tech on their own time, and if not, who cares. The school has the money, it won't be refunded, and the prof still has the tenure track. But in secondary education, the drop rate matters a lot, especially since the realistic number is about 50%. So we can't always assume that tech will be learned, or that tech won't be a distraction. I would argue any kid that does not type by 9th grade, does not have a CS course by 12th grade, and has never had drafting is no more educated than a kid who never had visual art or was never forced to read that 18th century novel crap. It may not be for everyone, and lots of people just want in direct form, not that boring project based learning, but everyone should have it to be educated.
I believe this, not the headline, is the crux of the article
OTOH, it is clear that the way to make a lot of money as a retailer is to have the popular options at a low price, a la Wal Mart. As the article suggests, though, have a few niche items can make money, if you can get people to pay for therm.
Here is what I think. Stocking an item, even a virtual item, incurs a cost. So if one stocks a million different items, and only one thousand different items moves a week, then there are costs not being covered on an even yearly basis. One way to make this work it mark up items a lot, as in the used book store, wher a book can be bought for a dime and sold for a dollar.
To me the long tail means either selling in a high markup niche market, or having the ability to control costs so you can sell less of more different things and actually draw a profit. In either case, the long tail in going to be chanllenged in times that force are going to force some fiscal responsibility, and people are going to focus on necessities and cheap luxuries.
I will second this. Several years ago I had to debug a tcp/ip issues and used this book as a reference. The writing was clear and accurate. The book allowed me to fix the code in a matter of days.
I would recommend the other 'practice' and management book. The mythical man month, Composite/Structured programing.
And, of course, for cryptography, Applied Cryptography. Like TCP/IP illustrated, I have never read the entire book but chapters of it have proved invaluable.
In a way this is simply buzzword compliance. In todays world, the computer with the most usb ports, the fastest processor, the biggest hard drive wins, even if the overall machine is junk. In cars, this used to require maximum number of cup holders, even though it is understanding that such things are dangerous enough to be banned in parts of the EU.
But it is also a lack of understanding of the problem. Many years ago I began looking for ways to run what would become MS Office on a PDA type thing. The issue was getting to the device, and dealing with the excessive need for formating that WYSIWYG editing imposed. There was no good solution, so I suggested what I still suggest. Get a notetop, have a setup or dock at the office, and if one wants at home as well.
Even before notebook I made this work. I had a tandy 100/200 which I could carry around and write, etc. I had a newton with a keyboard. Transfer was much more difficult, as the tech was not where it now is, although my newton had an ethernet connection so I could hook up anywhere I had a drop. Even today if I do not want to take a large machine, and will be away for a while, I have a 12" notebook that just make sure to sync up before I leave. For $50 a month, if I like, I could have all the connectivity of my iPhone without having to deal with the overly small screen and lack of keyboard.
The thing with psystar is that it is disruptive, but not disruptive in any useful way.
For instance, OSS is disruptive but it is also useful to the major players. Closed source and open source can coexist, and the major players make it so.
OTOH, all the major players depend on two things. The EULA and copyright. Copyright, in terms of software, was well defined by the Billg mistakes and the battles between MS and Apple. The system seems to be a point at which most can live with, and the current battles seem to focus on patents, which is not a point most of us can live.
What I don't understand is why any of the major players would want to undermine the EULA. There has been some talk of Psystar having some major backing, but who? Why would MS want to limit it's ability to practically give away the OS on a new machine, with the restriction that it can only be used on that machine and not resold. Certainly I know of no software company whose business model does not depend on a EULA.
iTunes plus is form music only. Even with the DRM iTunes was not such an issue as it would perform the way a reasonable person would expect, i.e. one could burn the music to CD.
However, the videos they sell has DRM and does not expect it the way a reasonable person might expect, i.e. it cannot be burned to DVD as a movie.
This is increasing becoming a problem with Apple. What used to separate it from MS was that the computer used to perform the way a reasonable person would expect. There was no risk that a legally licensed copy of Mac OS X running on mac hardware, no matter the upgrades or the number of reinstalls, would clain the user was a criminal. Now, we have the criminal assumption built into Apples, in the form of the display port, with the apparently optional DRM, which apparently limits the machine below what a reasonable person would expect. To me, this is the type of 'it just doesn't work' that makes me wonder if any apple product is useful.
MS Word works well. It is easy to use and most people have it. Learn to use style sheets and other features. I found that OO.org worked better for me as I was able to understand the master file model. This model encouraged me to use good practices, and imposed the master file style sheets no matter how I might have then defined in the sub files. I think between the two is a personal choice. I suppose each writer will learn to make do with either, although I have never written any thing longer than a memo in word, so my choice is OO.org.
That said, for technical documents, I find MS word or OO.org to be widely inefficient for two reasons. First, getting technical content, such as equation, chemistry, logic circuits, feynman diagrams, etc into either of these can be a extremely tim consuming. Since these will require either the use of the built in GUI, or the importing of a picture, making small changes can be inefficient. One saves time on the initial learning curve, but if one is going to write, the initial learning curve is not the most critical thing.
Second, word processors in general encourages a major mistake. Worrying about page layout and formating during the initial stages of writing. The initial stages of writing should be about laying down text. Producing words and general diagrams. Layout is not so important as accurate content, especially for technical books. So having a specific font for each word, or worrying about the face of the text, or whether the chapter should be 1.2 spaced so it fills the page exactly, is a waste of time. The key thing, to me, is get the words done, revise, expand, add pictures, etc.
So I like to start with just a basic text editor. Even though I have a job, I can lay down a thousand words over a day, then edit and format them as time allows. The editing and formatting can be done in word processor, or, for technical documents, I prefer Latex. Since much content can be entered as text and rendered as a graphic, making small changes and copying for similar graphics is very easy. Can be a steep initial learning curve, but the time is made up when on is generated professional content for money.
Slashdot Mirror
If one wants to be an app junkie, by something that runs the Android. That way one cdan not only run any app available, but can write personal custom apps. This has never been the case with Apple, so is a non issue. When the iPhone came out is had no apps. When apps were available, Apple said they were going to vet them, and anyone with a brain knew that they were going to be unfair.
If one wants to be an OSS advocate, buy an open moko. By buying an iPhone one is not hurting apple, or promoting OSS. They never sell anything at a loss, and they get to put the sales figures, not activation figures, in their annual report stating how much people love the phone, so why should they change? Moko is available now for $399. For that price, one can do whatever one wishes, even to write one's own phone software. Standing up for one's values is not free, it cost a buck o' five.
There is a theoretical importance to this work which I respect, and I am glad it goes on. It advances the art and keeps Apple on it toes. OTOH, complaining that the phone is locked and that the apps are controlled is just juvenile. It is not like, for instance, the new display port on macs that prevent legally acquired content from being displayed on normal display devices. This was a specific reduction in rights that was not initially disclosed to the consumer.
In any case, I feel like most of the people who complain are just like those posers that carry fake Prada or LV bags. People who think that conformity is the ultimate in life, but aren't quite sure why.
That is what we should be thinking of. But what we often think of is if discriminating against 1000 of the 'other' is what it takes to save my family, my job, the status quo, then what do I care. As long as I am ok, the so be it.
I am sure that some in new york, as was posted in response to a recent Schneier blog, would say hey, you were obviously not around the twin towers when they fell, otherwise you would feel different. What if they had not allowed any dark people on the plane. Then it would have never have happened. QED, discrimination justified.
People, kids, family will say thigs. I see people praying, and it does not mean they are going to crash a plane. Just because you have nail poiish does not mean you are going to make a bomb. For some strange reason, we do not approach every redneck in a pickup truck loaded with fertilizers and take them down to the Homeland security for integration.
However, given that profiling does appear to be a recognized method to stop even the most rare of crime, and given that we want a security system that eliminates all crime no matter what, even at the cost of freedom, here is my suggestion to all those nations outside the US. The cities of Destroit, Baltimore, St. louis, Newwark, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, all have hugely high murder rates. to the point where maybe one out of every hundred people is a murderer, assuming that each person commits murder only once during their life, likely during 20 and 50. It would therefore be prudent to restrict travel by anyone who has ever lived in these cities. This shouldn't be a big problem, except for washington. Philidelphia is the only city with more than a million people who have an obscenely high murder rate. Most larger cities have about half the murder rate of Oakland. I certainly would feel much safer on an airplane knowing that I am not traveling with a passenger from these cities.
Of course, given that it is more likely that I will killed in a car accident than in a terrorist attack, we could chill and try to save democracy from the fear mongers.
Relatively unsafe core programming languages
There is no question that programming in C and C++ requires skill, and that memory management is an issue, and automatic heap allocation and garbage collection is the popular solution to that issue, but there is no silver bullets, and they are always compromises. It seems to me like every is so scared of they tools that they don't even want to learn to use them. They never learn to use an Exacto knife because they never get past those plastic scissors they give you in grade school. At some point one has to take off the training wheels, at least for some projects. For better or worse,the core stuff, the stuff that does the heavy work, has to be written efficiently, and that may mean a human has to code it without over-dependence on the compiler.
No security compartmentalization
Again, there are no silver bullets. For instance, the Java sandbox is one solution to a security issue. It is not perfect, and it's imperfections lead to a false sense of security. It is ok for developers to be sloppy because garbage collection and the sandbox will protect the user. Not true. The real issue is that we are running what are essentially single user stand alone apps in multiuser networked contexts, at least in Windows. Of course in *nix there is segregation of processes built from the OS up, which is good. I do believe that such segregation at the user application level has the same benefit. It is a hack to make people feel better. Now, in chrome there is a side benefit that each page is it's own process. We will see how that works out.
Web technologies are used in browser chrome:
This seems to counteract what they were saying in the first item. C and C++ leads to coding bugs, but using standard complex libraries leads to unexpected behaviour. This is why we use C and C++, because it is simple enough to understand and carries very little useless overhead. Once we start using more complex libraries, we end up with a few functions we use, much more code we do not use, and many side effects we do not understand. I mean do we write everything in C++, and gain understanding, or use a range of technologies to maximize efficiency? If there are bugs in some high level libraries, all we need to do is fix the bug in library. Is the risk of the library greater than the risk of using a simple language like C?
The rest of this just seem like subjective opinions of design. In terms of setting, I almost prefer about:config to any of the GUI stuff. The last item about data storage is important, but again is an OS issue. Each application should have a predefined space in the user directory to store files. If any application can store anything to anywhere on the disk, even outside the user directory, that is not a browser issue.
Google is becoming a company that we should all be worried about, but they are playing a predictable games. MS grew because it offered the cheapest product on the block that more or less worked. Google is doing the same thing. The problem is that MS is now that inefficient behemoth with a business model that assumes a cut of every PC sales and aftermarket revenue. This is an environment where all Google needs to survive is a fraction of penny from every hit.
Google now offers cheaper products than Microsoft, read free to the user, and few people seem to worry about the opportunity costs in terms of privacy and all that. This is in the same way that no one worry about the issue with MS in terms of being assumed a pirate rather than a paying customer.
Beyond all this, why would any sane person with a competing product want to have anything to do with MS. MS could come up with an update to IE tomorrow that would break google apps. We all know that MS has the motive, and the will to break other peoples software is well documented. This justifies asking people to move away from IE because the day that MS does break Google is the day that google will lose a lot of good will. People will blame Google and not MS.
Not supporting IE is a gutsy move. It shows that Google is willing to play hardball. It shows that google is no longer the feel good get along with everyone company, but a company that is willing to dominate and create monopolies. Good for those that want a competitor to MS. Bad for those of us that want a quality product delivered by a company that treats the end user as a customer, not just a proxy to earn third party money.
The challenge of the tablet mac is allowing iPhone and iPod applications to run, while the device itself run the normal Mac OS X WIMP interface. Not necessarily all programs, but not the PDA like interface used on the iPod Touch and many netbook. Virtualization will allow this, and iPod applications will run in a window.
In terms of resolution, this should not be so hard. Mac OS ran on a 12", 1024X768, only about twice the touch resolution. So, if we assume the 7", screen, we have something that the interface has run on, so it is just a matter of using the Atom or similar processor.
That and the way the paper is written makes me suspicious as well.
The key really is that both of these browsers are written to maximize revenue for the content providers, which is not bad, as content needs to be paid for. That is why flash is not easy to turn off, even in safari(though I hear there is now a free plugin). So, for users who want simplicity, and want free content, tends to give up privacy. For the others, firefox on MS, camino on mac, and lynx on *nix.
Let's say that some business gave away one plastic widget a day per customer. An enterprising family went and got a number of widget and resold it on the open market. First sale doctrine, as I understand it, would support that entrepreneurial free market efficient movement of product.
Let's say that the some other business gave away as many promotional widgets as one wanted, but only one per visit. That entrepreneurial family previously mentioned expanded the business so, for a small fee, they would pick up the widget and deliver it to the person. The fee might be paid directly by the recipient, or indirectly by a third party wishing access to the participant. IS this illegal?
The point is that giving something away as a gift does not grant any additional rights beyond the original copyright, and I do not believe there is anything, at least, in US law, that prevents regifting. This case may not even involve regifting. It may involve just directing a user to the location of the free loot. Even if a copy is made, on could theoretically just download a new copy off the right holder website for each request.
What complicates things here are two things. First, the tracks may not be free. They may in fact be ad supported, in which the right holder expects eyeballs. If that is the issue, it is covered under whatever legal framework that exsits for webscraping. Even so, if they are giving away music to anyone who drops by, and then we are back to the issue of our right to resell property in our possession, even if we did not pay for it, as long as it was not stolen. Or not. who knows.
'No user serviceable parts inside' is not a just a way to force users to pay for repairs, not just a safety issue, it is a design issue. For instance, some smart phones have a very sloppy design where if the phone gets confused about the sim card, the only way to reset is to remove the battery. I know the battery is a user serviceable part, but many consumers spend their life happily never thinking about the battery, never knowing how to take it out. So when this issue occurs, they really have no way of fixing it, since the normal on/off procedure does not work.
It is just sloppy design.
But now lots of legitimate services need high bandwidth, netflix, iTunes, even youtube, and most kids are used high speed connections that let them play games and watch videos. They need the bandwidth. So many would say we can no longer use bandwidth as a proxy, and need filtering. I disagree.
To me the best way to make sure that the most people can use this, and not just for play, is to limit the speed to .5 Mb/sec. Those who need the service will appreciate it, and those who can afford something faster will buy it. I would love to have free, reliable internet access even at 300 kb/sec. It might be a bummer for people who just want to play, but for most work it is fast enough.
The improvement made to the new crew capsule using suggestions from this report appear to involve immobilizing the head so that if an incident is survivable, there would be less trauma. Also, they want to make the outer skin more durable so bits of foam won't penetrate. There is no indication, that if the same type of thing happened to they new capsule, and it began to spin our of control, with no hope of correcting the behavior, the new restraint system would do anything different, i.e the crew would still black out.
Let's say that you do pay extra for the incandescent light bulb made in the US. Let's further assume that number of times a user has to drive to the store and replace the incandescent light bulb is compensated by the increased mass, and chemicals, in the CFL. Even with that, one can't ignore the basic physics. A basic CFL uses at least 40 watts less than an equivelent incandescent. Most of that excess power is converted to heat. Unless one lives in a cave, or in a cold region, that heat needs to be removed, usually at a lower efficiency. Generally speaking then, that 40 watts results in an excess of at least 100 watts of inefficiency. This 100 watts, over the lifetime of the bulb, say 1200 hours, or 4.32 Msec, results in an inefficiency of more than 0.4 TerraJoules. A gallon of gas is around .1 megajoules. If it takes 4 gallons of gas to transport a single CFL from the factory in china to your local store, because I can buy a CFL for $3, about a third of the what four gallons of gas would cost.
This, of course, does not take into account that a CFL will last 8X longer than an incandescent, so we are really talking about 32 gallons of gas, rather than four.
Get real. We live in a changing world. As much I would prefer to ride a horse, or ride a bike, or take the bus, I know that I have to have a car. Change sucks, but there it is. CFL, like fluorescence, will exist. LEDs are providing us with new opportunities. Hopefully, before I die, there will be another new thing that will continue to make life interesting.
The WSJ has the same take on the PS3. It is doomed. I am not so sure. Sony always plays to the big picture, is always, as the say in politics, on script. Sony has a lot of different interest, but what is interesting is that all these interests seem to play together, none of them go off script just because it might mean more profit in the unit. For instance, the MP3 players did not sweep the market due to the fact that Sony wanted to protect it's content interests and push the memory card standard. Some might call that a mistake, others might have said it would have been a mistake to stab other divisions in the back by doing otherwise.
So what has happened here. MS built a game console with very good games that they could sell relatively cheaply. Now, dollar for dollar it does not do so well as the WII, which it competes at the entry price level, is still selling more that the XBox. Wii sales doubled, Xbox relatively flat. To be clear, Wii sold twice as many units as XBox, and given street prices, many paid more for the Wii. OTOH, XBox games seems to be selling more. To make it cheap it did not include a big HD or a dvd drive. In effect, MS gave up the living room to save game console. But is likely not to even have the lions share of the game console market.
Sony used an integrated strategy. The built a more expensive console, but made it a complete unit, with blu ray. I think that many would agree that the blu ray decision was a factor in blu ray winning the format wars, and that this has long term strategic significance to Sony, most specifically in keeping the living room away from MS, who bet on HD DVD.
So Xbox likely has fewer consoles out there than Wii. Both are primed for streaming media, and not all XBox 360 are capable of playing stored movies, or at least not a lot of them. The PS3 is half in number, but each one is ready to play a new, expensive, and sometimes Sony generated blu ray disc. I think MS continues on it's way to win the battle but lose the war.
We wasted huge sums of cash in the 90's, but we came out the other end with many profitable long term ventures that set up growth or the US economy. Of course some people, comfortable with their 10 million dollar a year jobs did not embrace such a path to growth, and spent most of the past decade fighting or perverting the change that would cost them their jobs and often fraudulent pay checks, so the path to the next big thing is not clear. It never is, especially when we just do the same old thing . What is clear is that we are wasting out money helping old line and fraudulent businesses. For instance, for the amount of money we are giving to the automakers, who knows how much will just go to bonuses, and accounting costs for the planned elimination of half the line workers jobs, we could have a lottery to give away coupons for 80% discounts on American cars for at least 200,0000 people, thus clearing the backlog. You see, innovative ideas for innovate futures, but of course such an idea has not bonuses for the bosses.
The United states has technology for renewable energy, but very little money. Someone is going to make a lot of money on this, and the oil comapanies will lose a lot of money, unless they stop selling buggy whips. Even now I wonder if there is well in the US that can be profitably drilled for $40 a barrel. Someone is going to make a huge amount of money delivering content using TCP/IP, but the broadcasters and cable will lose money, unless they get off their butts and do it. The nice thing about this is that the middle man can be cut out, and the US can distribute to the world, if we have the bandwidth to not only deliver such content to the US population, but also to the world, which we don't.
I don't know what else the US can do, but it has to be more than selling poorly engineered cars and fraudulent financial services. Of course a work ethics that promotes such innovation will have to encouraged, which means that some of he easy jobs, the ones like the we heard about prior to the collapse of the USSR where people got paid to sit around, play chess, and drink vodka all day, will have to go.
So it was interesting that the first thing Ronald Reagan did was reward one unpatriotic company with taxpayer money, exactly how much is in dispute, but it is much more than the zero that conservatives would have us believe, so the company could continue to build cars that would deliver us into the hands of unfriendly countries.
As time went by, some political leaders began to understand what was happening, and tried to enact regulation so that all the players would be on equal ground when trying to develop less America Hostile cars, and there would be no competitive disadvantage. As usual, the auto makers refused to allow this patriotic bill to come to term, and insisted on putting a clause in it so it would not hurt the struggling farmer. This limitation said trucks would not have to comply with the regulations.
They then turned around and used that limitation to create the SUV. A auto specifically created to circumvent the attempt of the US goverment to keep us safe from aggressive foreign influence. A car created by companies that wanted to make money, even it meant the destruction of the country.
So, what do we have to show for it. On the terrorist attack on new york, 15 of the 19 terrorist were of Saudi origin, yet we can do nothing because Saudi is out only friend in the oil rich region. Eight years of war to stabilize the oil flow, while Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden continues their work, nearly unfettered, 1000 miles away. And what do thes unpatriotic companies want from us? More cash. Why?
Well, for Ford it might be to actually help american. Since 2000 they have gotten the issues, and tried to help. All they need is a bridge loan anyway. But for the rest? They unlikely have the creativity to do anything other than they have been doing. Which is not much of anything. The free market has spoken and clearly stated that these companies are incapable of producing a product anyone wants. Even with all the free money the banks have been given, no one will loan any of it to the struggling automakers. This should tell us something.
The defense of this is that do not have to for RIM, the could be independent contractors. But the non compete clause might prevent a person from doing that as well. Non complete clauses are not uniformly bad. They may be good for preventing someone from quitting and going to a competing entity, or purposefully getting fired and doing the same. OTOH, in a country where many fears the welfare state enough to allow children to die of lack of medical care, but not due to accidental or forced conception, it would seem that we would not laws or regulations hat force highly trained persons onto those roles, or taking lower skilled jobs that might force other who might take the lower skilled jobs onto the rolls.
The insanity of a DVD is how complex it is to use. I did not realize this until I was trying to teach my mother how to watch a movie. Read the barely legible text to select the play option. Since the creators value eye candy over usability, a person with limited vision has a great deal of trouble with this. Next, select the episode on wishes. This HBO DVD did not have a play all option, or just play on insert option. Next, read the another difficult menu and press enter to tell the machine yes, I really do want to play this episode. Really, please, I bought this DVD to watch the miniseries, not play with menus and watch cool graphics. Please, sir, let me watch the movie that I have paid good money for and have a legal right to do. Please!
This is a far cry from the VHS player that went like, put it in, if the tape was at the end autorewind, and start over and play. We have DVD players for many years. Can't we at least be at the usability level of the VHS? Or is selling stale stock for $15 a pop not profitable enough so you have to make sure that some extra monitoring of the customers can be put in.
More likely it is spending money on graphic artists rather than competent UI designers. It is like when we began using the trash can motif on the computer, and for years we were still asked 'are you sure you want to delete this?" Not only is putting something in the trash can not deleting it, but it is also no where near to be irreversible act, so there is really no reason to waste my time asking the question.
And everyone wonders why few people want blu ray. We still remember DVD, and the though many things were better, many things were also worse.
The reason we do not create jobs is because we have cushy government jobs. Just in the past several years we have a whole new department of homeland security with many grade 10 and above jobs making above median income. This in addition to god knows how many people who get paid just to stand around all day and rifle through my stuff. Hell, at the airport there are three people whose job is put a stamp on my ticket. How can I possible expand a business when the government with affordable employees when the government is paying good money for people to play in airports. In most real jobs a person has to work!
Speaking of government theft, how am I supposed to get money when the government is stealing all the capital. In the past eight years, the debt has increased by at least 4 trillion dollars. That is 4 trillion dollars that someone else could use to start a business, but instead is being used to expand government.
So maybe there are forces that hurt entrepreneurs. Those forces are more likely to be the availability of easy jobs rather than accounting laws and safety rules that do not apply to small business. Those rules tend to limit the size of a business, which means that more small operations can exist. In the end, a person with an easy job that pays something is not going to have the hunger to start something new.
But I do understand what you mean, and as a science person I agree, at least in part. Math is just one of the many languages we use to describe the world. So, like other language classes, it is important to use it to describe the world, just like one would use in a english, french, spanish, or latin class. The same goes for computers. It is just one of many ways we model the world.
The issue comes in if the student does not have an understanding of these concepts. It is all well and good for me to talk about going to the store to buy stuff, or creating linear equation using patterns of blocks, or non linear equation using the multiplication tables. These things are taught all though grade school. But how am I going to use the incline plane for a trigonometric function is the student was not given the experience in science lab to create and interpret the models. I don't have time in math class, and not all the students are going to have the experience outside of the classroom.
Likewise, it would be very difficult for me to take a class in and have them make graphs on graphviz(for instance, who knows who in the class) if they never had a class to teach them about computers. I would spend all my time introducing them to the computer, and trying to keep them off facebook, because computer time is too valuable to some of them to waste it on lessons. If they do not have a class to play on the computer, like if they do not have a class to play science, then they will not do it maths class.
Which applies to logic as well. There are many good resources for logic. Web pages that create truth table, karnaugh maps, allow you to draw circuits and test them. It would be wonderful to have a month to teach logic using these techniques, maybe even build the circuit to show how a story can be rendered with 74xx or GAL or similar technology. But it the kids never played with such tech in science class, never was trained to use the computer as a tool, not a toy, such effort would be fruitless. The novelty of the computer would overwhelm the topic to be taught.
From my experience, things must be taught separately, in chunks. Sure at the college level you can assume that the kid will learn the tech on their own time, and if not, who cares. The school has the money, it won't be refunded, and the prof still has the tenure track. But in secondary education, the drop rate matters a lot, especially since the realistic number is about 50%. So we can't always assume that tech will be learned, or that tech won't be a distraction. I would argue any kid that does not type by 9th grade, does not have a CS course by 12th grade, and has never had drafting is no more educated than a kid who never had visual art or was never forced to read that 18th century novel crap. It may not be for everyone, and lots of people just want in direct form, not that boring project based learning, but everyone should have it to be educated.
OTOH, it is clear that the way to make a lot of money as a retailer is to have the popular options at a low price, a la Wal Mart. As the article suggests, though, have a few niche items can make money, if you can get people to pay for therm.
Here is what I think. Stocking an item, even a virtual item, incurs a cost. So if one stocks a million different items, and only one thousand different items moves a week, then there are costs not being covered on an even yearly basis. One way to make this work it mark up items a lot, as in the used book store, wher a book can be bought for a dime and sold for a dollar.
To me the long tail means either selling in a high markup niche market, or having the ability to control costs so you can sell less of more different things and actually draw a profit. In either case, the long tail in going to be chanllenged in times that force are going to force some fiscal responsibility, and people are going to focus on necessities and cheap luxuries.
I would recommend the other 'practice' and management book. The mythical man month, Composite/Structured programing.
And, of course, for cryptography, Applied Cryptography. Like TCP/IP illustrated, I have never read the entire book but chapters of it have proved invaluable.
But it is also a lack of understanding of the problem. Many years ago I began looking for ways to run what would become MS Office on a PDA type thing. The issue was getting to the device, and dealing with the excessive need for formating that WYSIWYG editing imposed. There was no good solution, so I suggested what I still suggest. Get a notetop, have a setup or dock at the office, and if one wants at home as well.
Even before notebook I made this work. I had a tandy 100/200 which I could carry around and write, etc. I had a newton with a keyboard. Transfer was much more difficult, as the tech was not where it now is, although my newton had an ethernet connection so I could hook up anywhere I had a drop. Even today if I do not want to take a large machine, and will be away for a while, I have a 12" notebook that just make sure to sync up before I leave. For $50 a month, if I like, I could have all the connectivity of my iPhone without having to deal with the overly small screen and lack of keyboard.
For instance, OSS is disruptive but it is also useful to the major players. Closed source and open source can coexist, and the major players make it so.
OTOH, all the major players depend on two things. The EULA and copyright. Copyright, in terms of software, was well defined by the Billg mistakes and the battles between MS and Apple. The system seems to be a point at which most can live with, and the current battles seem to focus on patents, which is not a point most of us can live.
What I don't understand is why any of the major players would want to undermine the EULA. There has been some talk of Psystar having some major backing, but who? Why would MS want to limit it's ability to practically give away the OS on a new machine, with the restriction that it can only be used on that machine and not resold. Certainly I know of no software company whose business model does not depend on a EULA.
However, the videos they sell has DRM and does not expect it the way a reasonable person might expect, i.e. it cannot be burned to DVD as a movie.
This is increasing becoming a problem with Apple. What used to separate it from MS was that the computer used to perform the way a reasonable person would expect. There was no risk that a legally licensed copy of Mac OS X running on mac hardware, no matter the upgrades or the number of reinstalls, would clain the user was a criminal. Now, we have the criminal assumption built into Apples, in the form of the display port, with the apparently optional DRM, which apparently limits the machine below what a reasonable person would expect. To me, this is the type of 'it just doesn't work' that makes me wonder if any apple product is useful.
That said, for technical documents, I find MS word or OO.org to be widely inefficient for two reasons. First, getting technical content, such as equation, chemistry, logic circuits, feynman diagrams, etc into either of these can be a extremely tim consuming. Since these will require either the use of the built in GUI, or the importing of a picture, making small changes can be inefficient. One saves time on the initial learning curve, but if one is going to write, the initial learning curve is not the most critical thing.
Second, word processors in general encourages a major mistake. Worrying about page layout and formating during the initial stages of writing. The initial stages of writing should be about laying down text. Producing words and general diagrams. Layout is not so important as accurate content, especially for technical books. So having a specific font for each word, or worrying about the face of the text, or whether the chapter should be 1.2 spaced so it fills the page exactly, is a waste of time. The key thing, to me, is get the words done, revise, expand, add pictures, etc.
So I like to start with just a basic text editor. Even though I have a job, I can lay down a thousand words over a day, then edit and format them as time allows. The editing and formatting can be done in word processor, or, for technical documents, I prefer Latex. Since much content can be entered as text and rendered as a graphic, making small changes and copying for similar graphics is very easy. Can be a steep initial learning curve, but the time is made up when on is generated professional content for money.