The fallacy in this argument is that everyone patches, or at least all responsible parties patch. This is similar to assumption that vulnerabilities and exploits do not exist until they hit the public messageboards. Both are false.
As much as MS and the MS fanboys want to deny it, there are many legitimate reasons not to patch a system. Compatibility, cost, and the issue that the damn thing works so why risk the trouble. I have machines running NT and ME just because the upgrade is not worth the hassle. These is the real life that so many people around here ignore.
If you look at the MS security issue, the problem is that users are often put into a crisis situation in which the patch must occur immediately. Not only is this a problem because some people have legitimate reasons not to upgrade, but also because we know that reality indicate that such things will follow a standard growth/decay exponential. This implies that most machines will be patched very quickly, but then it will take a while to get even 99.9% patched, which could still leave thousands of potential zombies.
So, the issue is really solving this crisis situation so that the system will be more resilient to attacks. As other have said, vulnerabilities in the OS are inevitable. As many have said, and many has disagreed, patching will never reach 100% over any period of time. It will not even reach 99% over a short period of time. Therefore if this upgrade makes the system more resilient, then the fact that people upgrade slowly will be irrelevant. That is, if MS fixes the OS so that it is not such as easy target, rather than blaming the users for following the laws of nature, it will be a worthy solution. Upgrades will happen when they happen, as always, but now the upgrades will solve a basic problem, and not just treat the symptoms
I would also suggest that unless you use OS9 very regularly, go into your OSX System Preferences, select the Classic Pane, and check the box that warns you before classic starts.
I am never one to complain about product announcement posts. I realize that everyone wants to hear about new stuff and just because I am not interested in that new stuff, there are probably many people who are.
But could we at least make the product announcement more informative and less generic. I mean what use is it to say that Acme Unlimited is going to release Alderiumusian and Saphiriamius later today and all you Anaracrium whatzits are going to get you laughed at on the golf course. So if you want some action, upgrade today.
We are a tech board. We want to know what the upgrades are. What makes it cool. We are not reading Marie Claire in which the most important thing is that some pop singer has a new fragrance, or Fortune, in which the most important things is that some analyst was bribed to recommend a stock. I mean really, this post used a couple column inches and relayed nearly zero information except for a link.
The man-month spoken in here has little to do with an inability to estimate personal effort needed to complete a project or the quality of a system after a specific amount of personal time expended. While it is true that amateur programers has become more a problem, the fact is at the time the book was written all that existed were amateur programmers.
The actual point is that release time does not scale linearly given additional programmers, even if those programmers are assumed to be of generally equal ability. What this means is that if you calculate 5 man-moths to complete a project, it is a fallacy to believe that 5 programmers can complete it in one month. At a most basic level, there are relationships between each on that much be managed. Those relationships take time. The upshot of this is that you may be better off with 3 programmers than five.
This also leads to encapsulating functionality so that the unnecessary relationships are minimized, which leads to the advice is books such as Composite Structured Programming.
The major books that deal with the problems you cite tend to be more recent, like Debugging the Development Environment and Rapid Development. Yes I know both of these are MS Press. Evil. But the Mac side had really good developers.
Since some are so fond of relating OSS to socialist and communist schemes to destroy the free market, I think it is good that a major socialist party is against OSS. After all if the socialists like closed source software, nee MS, certainly no self respecting patriotic conservative Amercian can support it.
OTOH, does the fact that christians socialists are against OSS mean that we might see a crusade against OSS users. Is it time to prepare our attics?
I think if Microsoft releases their AV software for FREE, it'd be a great boon to the community. It could be a good way to help those hold outs who still wait a couple of weeks (or months) before INSTALLING the latest patch "just in case" and who are then surprised when they get fucked by a virus. And then proceed to wail about in on Slashdot.
I am getting pretty tired of morons blaming users for not upgrading. These people need to look at how bussiness is run and understand that downtime means loss of funds, and change often means uncontrolled downtime. Furthermore, not everyone has a DSL connection and spends hours every month repairing thier machines. Many people only spend a few hours a week at the computer. They have other things to do than to tie up thier phone line for hours on end to solve a problem they may not even understand.
What would be a great boon to the community is if MS would release the patches free to everyone, in serveral different forms. I mean, they only offer dowloads to registered customers. How much would it cost for them to have a list of customers without DSL. They could mail a CD to those customers when an update is released. I think such a service would be worth maybe $20/year.
What would also be a boon would be if MS would decouple it's system components so that I could install only what I needed. Extra stuff on a manufacturer floor production machine, like a full web browser, a media player, full remote access, is just silly. It leaves the machines open to unnecesary vunerabilities.
The problem is that MS has a vision of the machine they want everyone to run. You have little ability to change the configuration. Now, instead of doing something that will cure the sickness, they add another bandaid. They are so afraid of losing thier desktop monopoly that they are condemning all thier customers to a life of endless patches.
It seems to me that dealing with SCO would be too dangerous. Any product one could buy would result in a greater exposure to a lawsuit from them.
For instance, if you bought a new or upgraded a system, they would use that purchase as evidence for a lawsuit should you ever choose to migrate to another *nix.
Likewise, if you bought into their protection scheme you would significantly increase your exposure to lawsuits from all sides. This is not only true because you explicitly agree that SCO is the sole arbitrator of what can and cannot be done with GNU/Linux software, but also because such an agreement may make the use of such software a violation of the GPL. It is really a recursive problem in which you are exposed to lawsuit no matter who wins.
So, I really can't see anyone doing any business with this company. Ever.
Of course firms routinely buy software from companies that spy on and attack customers, so this may be the new model of the new economy!
You know, that is a big reason I have given up on games. They are just too damn inconvenient. I bought my video games. I copied them to my hard drive. I played them off and on. The money that I paid for the games was not a big deal.
But my time is worth something, and I don't want to waste it. So, when I bought a copy of the Sims and it required the CD to be in the drive to play, that was it. I didn't want to waste my time looking for a CD. I did not want to waste my time putting the CD in the computer when I all I wanted to do was to play a game. There was no reason for it.
So, I decided that buying the game was a lesson. I had wasted my money on the game, as the manufacturer had no respect for me as a customer. But i would never spend another dime on the Sims. In fact, I have pretty much given up on games altogether. The manufacturers, like so much of the entertainment industry, seems to have become obsessed with making sure that no one uses their stuff without paying, and in the process condemns them to a less that luxurious life.
This isn't funny, it the natural response. It was the first idea I had when I read the story.
The second thing I thought of was that the BBS served a community. Therefore, you service might be about publicizing events and opportunities in and around the area. If the audience is the coffee house crowd, then think of what they would want to know about. I suspect the one thing that will doom the service, as it tends to doom any service, is to have personal inflexible agenda.
First, I am sure there are hundreds of digital formats out there that could be construed to give a better sound quality than CD. As you may know, many people claimed that CD was an inferior sound quality to LP. This is because each format, and each system of reproduction, tends to be matched and tends to bring out a unique combination of factors. For instant Vacuum tubes on a LP is going to be inherently different that modern ICs.
Second, the average consumer, the consumer that be tempted to buy the product if millions of product are to be sold, may not have anything that reproduces the detail. I myself find that I hear new detail as I use different systems. It is not just the ways a track is recorded, or the individuals ability to hear, or the system used, but the combination of all of these.
Which is just to say that for the masses the sound quality is only a marketing ploy. If the new format works it will do so in the same fashion as the CD or DVD. The kids will buy it because it is new. The price for players will drop. The CD will slowly be phased out. The masses will then buy the new format because it is easier. Which means that if the masses are used to coping the disc on the computer, and they cannot do that, the format might fail.
comparing a GPC to a PDS is like comparing a GPC to game console. They are targeted to different purposes. Now, some people do not want to spend money on specilized technology. They would rather have one machine that does nothing well.
But you do hit a problem in marketing. The companies want to sell these machines for as GPC, and this has been true even before the Palm existed. I remember the Atari being sold not as a gam console, but a GPC. Early PDAs, such as the Newton, was sold as a device capable of editing spreadsheets and text documents. These PDAs including software to synch the data. This lead to unreasonable expectations.
As far as phones go, my old startac does everything a phone needs to do. I might have to upgrade, but i don't see the new features make it easier to place a call, or outside of bluetooth, easier to hold a conversation.
And I bought my phone and Palm V at about the same time. For tracking bussiness contacts, recording time expended and the like, the Palm was a perfect size. Any modern cell phone of reasonable size is not so good.
The real issue to me is price. I cannot get a small simple phone for $100. I cannot get a small simple PDA for $100. I can get a complex phone or PDA that does nothing well for $200-$300. Game consoles are still selling because they understand the concept of delivering the core product at a reasonable pricepoint.
The thing that students forget, or never knew, or refuse to realize, is that learning is a two way street, and as you advance in education the responsibility for learning fall more on the student and less on the teacher. It becomes merely whining to blame the teacher.
In Elementary school you spend the day with a teacher and might get 5-10 minutes of personlized attention from each teacher. By the time you get to highschool, you might get a few minutes of personalized attention from each teacher per week. You can make that more by being a more active student.
In college the students who just want to be told what to do get no personal time with the teacher. They also do not tend to get anything out of the class because the come in with the attitude that the professor do not care and do not want to explain. While this may be true in a limited sense, it is not a helpful philosophy.
In fact you did exactly what you should have done. Go to the books and get other points of view. If you were not connecting with the professor, then he or she did exactly what they should have done, which is to send to get other points of view. Unlike your teachers, professors are not trained to work the issue from every angle until the student understands. Now that the student is in college, they are expected to have the skills to find the answers themselves. A professor merely points out a useful direction.
I think is just another case of wanting to believe. I was involved with purchasing an ERP system in the mid 90's, and it was one of the reasons I was happy to leave. The purchasing decision was based more on bells and whistles than what it could do for the company. I saw no in depth analysis of how each piece of software would pay for itself, what would be required to get it running after initial installation, and or how a group of people who did not use computer would use this. Simplicity should have been the issue, but all I heard was 'Look at the pretty buttons' and 'Windows is always cheaper' and 'Thin nets are the wave of the future.'
One thing that was very clear to everyone who was thinking, even back then, was that an ERP would not pay for itself and therefore had to be bought on the basis on making life easier. Another thing that was clear was that you had to have a clear idea of how it would be used, and how much it would cost to use, otherwise it would never get used.
I saw the same blindness when i was working for a company that sold custom websites. Mostly we took a cut of advertising, and I suppose paid salesmen commission based on what we all now know is mark to market. At that time the advertising market was dying, and all the tech people, and even some of the managers, knew that the deals would result in no money. However that truth was not useful for the salesmen who wanted large commissions or the upper management that wanted large sales. So deals were put together that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to honor, with customers that made not commitments whatsoever. Of course all this came crashing down.
So, having worked in small business, corporate, and academia, I would say there is little difference in the ability to be blinded by greed and the smooth talking salesman.
A PhD is not realy just an indication that one has knowledge in the subject. That is more like a Masters Degree. I mean a masters of Science or a Masters of Art. Not an mba or mls or whatever.
What a PhD means is that a few other PhDs think that you have been trained in the gathering of observables and can be trusted to dessiminate conclusions based on those observable is an honest and relatively objective fashion.
This does not always mean that the conclusions are correct. What this does mean is that the conclusions are not maliciously misleading or fraudulent, which includes forgery to advance one career. To do so is to violate the purpose of the PhD. It can take years to correct an accepted fraudulent conclusion.
So no, the question is not hard to answer. The advancement of knowledge depends on the honesty of the men and women who participate it in. This is not high school. This is academia. This is why plagerism should result in immidiate expulsion. This is why any other sort of data falsification should result in immidiate expulsion. This is not popular opinion. This is nearly 500 years of process in the Western Civilization that had allowed great progress. If we were not serious about finding correct and usefull knowledge, most of you tech toys would not exist.
Just in case some don't know, the formal name for such a tour the 'Dog and Pony Show.' It is just like a cheap carnival, employing simple misdirection and borderline fraund. And just like such a show, you pay $5 to see the same people you see for see everyday, but dressed in cheaper clothes.
Call me naive, but I see nothing wrong with this. Radio stations run on advertising. If a label wants to pay a station to run a song, and the station makes it clear that the song is an ad, then that is just the station and label doing thier jobs. The label exists to promote certain songs. The radio station exists, at least partially, to play those songs.
I would include two caveats. First, the radio station could not include those songs in advertisement that claim they have 'x amount of music per hour' or 'x songs in row.' Second, the stations should include the songs as part of the advertising space. These are kind of the same.
Of course this makes it harder for non-label bands to get airplay. In this day, that is pretty much the standard anyway, and is why most stations are useless for anything but label fodder. If you want new music leave your house and experience it. New bands are everwhere for free. Better bands can be had for a token amount. These bands CDs are still $15, but hey, you are supporting non-label new music. If you don't want to do this, listen to the radio and download the music from P2P.
Actually there is a lot to play up. The interesting thing is that, as normal, the survey was not dishonest, and the presentation was only misleading. As usual the confusion comes from people not uderstanding that questions shape reality.
I have not RTFA, but if the question indeed said replaced, then the 3% number might be accurate. Lets take some examples. If you have a contract worker, and allow that worker to fullfill the contract, and then choose not to renew that contract, but give it to a nonlocal candidate, is that a replacement? If, during the course of the normal business cycle, you fire redundant employees, and, when business picks up, you hire nonlocal employess, is that a replacement. There are all sorts of othe situations like this.
I agree with you on not being protectionist. The problem is that money must be available to purchase the cheap gadgets. Right now, money is quickly moving to the top, with little expendable income left to the masses who would buy the mass produced gadgets. Tech pay drove the tech revolution in this country, just like manufacturing pay drove the automobile revolution. You can put the blame on the worker, i.e. adapt or die, but the corporate entity must do the same. I think it is pretty ludicrous for corporations to complain about taxes, and then go for the governement dole everytime it looks like an executive might make less than 100 million a year. Government policy should not be protectionist. It should be to set up rules that help old corporation manage their money properly, new corporation with new ideas thrive, and insuring the money is distributed in such a way so that the masses can purchase the products without increasing debt.
Have no doubt. Right now the economy is picking up because we are borrowing money from our grandchildren to buy the stuff we need now. I do not understand how this increase in debt, and spend but not tax mentatility fits in with conservative adgenda, but evidently conservatives now believe making our grandchildren poor is a good thing.
Last time I tried to use Linux, was a year ago or so, I was quite dissappointed. The KDE GUI barely worked in an older PC with a couple hundred meg. The machine was slow, and the hard disk small, but the machine did run Windows 95, which really cannot be compared to KDE, but it does show the machine could run a GUI.
I do not think it is the features. I think that Linux has fallen to the same fallacy as MS. Cycles are cheaper than programmers, so attention to effeciency and style are no longer important. The user can always upgrade to a faster machine.
*nix and GUI should be able to run well on a slow machine. NeXTStep ran on 25Mhz 68040! The original ATT machine, which was just Unix with no GUI, ran on something like a 6800.
I think you are right on target. There does seem to be two approaches to animation. The first is to create something completely foriegn. The brain wil try to fit the foriegn concept into some catagory of existing knowledge, i.e. talking animals are expected to have other human qualities, but the animator will have forgivness in the creativity. In other words, the tension of the footage is not with the shape and motion of the character.
The second approach is to create a minimalist figures of known quantities. Given a general outline, the brain will fill in the details. It is good to encourage this because it personalizes the footage to each viewer. This personalization encourages the suspension of reliaty neccesary for for a movie to work. The problem is, therefore, when too many details are supplied. This is also the problem with live action movies that have bad actors or directors. The details conflict with the internal picture the brain develops. Since a movie is entertainment, and this conflict is not entertaining, the movie is a flop.
When I first read this story I thought it was silly to compare the music labels to Scientific journals. After reading your post I must reconsider.
The point of a label, or any music organization, if it works at it's best, is to expose a group of customers to a range of music. Clearly most labels do not do this. These labels merely create a product that pander to perceived taste of a customer group. This leads to homogenized music created by bands that are nearly indistinguishable. It does not have to be this way. Many music organizations truly try to expand the tastes of their customers. Such organizations are important because we as music appreciation people cannot hear every artist. It is useful to have proxies filter content and present what they think are the 'best'. Clearly there is a great deal of added value if this filtering is done from the perspective of advancing the art rather than maximizing shareholder value.
Now, IANAS, but i have observed and worked with scientist since I was very young. The one thing I know is that there is more research going on, and i would even say more good research going on, than any single scientist can adequately review. For example, even if we limit ourselves to the big general Physics journals, say JJAP, Phys Rev Letters, and a couple journals published by a big umbrella organizations, say APS, it quickly becomes overwhelming. Alternatively we might just go through Current Contents and send a lackey to get the papers, which may or may not be read beyond the abstract.
Which means that journals, at their best, are not there primarily to stroke the ego of researchers, but to publish the best content that explores the full reach of current science, and perhaps some content that stretches the current science beyond comfortable limits. Likewise, researches should not subscribe to journals for the sake of adding credibility to their office or in hopes of one day publishing in said journal, but because the journal provides the most relevant papers.
IMHO, if journals, like labels, have degraded into a vehicle of promoting personalities, the blame lies equally with the publishers and researchers. If we move to web publishing the issue will just become worse. Every Dick and Jane will create a vanity site. There will be no hope of finding the researcher that is asking the questions that will drive the next wave of discovery.
I don't know how it is now, but a years ago Apple was the only manufacturer that still had a universal 30 day return policy. This meant that one could return any apple machines the retail outlet for a full refund. I had to fight about this becuase all other computer manufacturers only allowed returns for like one week. After that you had to go through the manufacturers warrenty procedure.
It is the quality thing again. If you don't need, don't pay for it. If you can afford it, quality is a good thing to spend money on.
Out of the mouth of babes...sometime comes nothing but ignorance.
The expensive argument comes from the fact that Apple does not make an entire range of commodity machines. They make machines to meet certain markets. They target those markets, and, when they do a good job, the company makes money. They also use the best technology available to meet customer needs. The seldom skimp on technology to meet a price point.
The first mac was expensive. However, if you did not have skills and were trying to computerize a bussiness, the Mac was worth every peeny. I know this from direct experience.
The mac continued to be relitively expensive until the commodity market matured and created suitable and reliable products. This took about 5 years of so. At that point Apple could, for example, replace SCSI drives, which were realy elegent devices, with commodity drives. This allowed them, for example, to produce desktops for $1000 in the early 90's and, in the mid 90's, very credible laptop for about that same amount. Like now, there was really nothing else that met it's size, weight, and battery. Of course they also had the really expensive nice laptops for $4000.
To give you more data points, my early model G4 tower(2000?) was around $1200. I have upgraded it to OS X with 512MB ram and about 100GB HD. It is fast enough. Sure I could have bought a name brand PC for 2/3 as much, but it would have maxed out at 384MB ram and have no room for a second drive.
The quality price issue is still very real. A good example of this is firewire. Everyone laughs at firewire now, especially with so-called USB 2.0(now is that regular, hyper, or superduper?), but USB 2.0 is pretty new, isn't it? I certainly paid extra for Firewire, but not only do I have a daisy chain plug and play interface, I also do not have to upgrade my old machines just to achieve the performance that was economically availbe 3 or 4 years ago. The fact that I can keep reliable machines in service greatly decreases my strees level.
IANAL, but I think this statement is false. If the license says that you cannot file suit, the first thing you must do file suit is sue for the right to file suit. If it says you can only arbitrate in Pokono, then you may be stuck going to Pokono. We users give up virtually all rights in exchange for using software, and must pay additional money to reclaim some of those right. That is what makes free software so nice. You only have to pay to reclaim rights, not to relinquish them.
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As much as MS and the MS fanboys want to deny it, there are many legitimate reasons not to patch a system. Compatibility, cost, and the issue that the damn thing works so why risk the trouble. I have machines running NT and ME just because the upgrade is not worth the hassle. These is the real life that so many people around here ignore.
If you look at the MS security issue, the problem is that users are often put into a crisis situation in which the patch must occur immediately. Not only is this a problem because some people have legitimate reasons not to upgrade, but also because we know that reality indicate that such things will follow a standard growth/decay exponential. This implies that most machines will be patched very quickly, but then it will take a while to get even 99.9% patched, which could still leave thousands of potential zombies.
So, the issue is really solving this crisis situation so that the system will be more resilient to attacks. As other have said, vulnerabilities in the OS are inevitable. As many have said, and many has disagreed, patching will never reach 100% over any period of time. It will not even reach 99% over a short period of time. Therefore if this upgrade makes the system more resilient, then the fact that people upgrade slowly will be irrelevant. That is, if MS fixes the OS so that it is not such as easy target, rather than blaming the users for following the laws of nature, it will be a worthy solution. Upgrades will happen when they happen, as always, but now the upgrades will solve a basic problem, and not just treat the symptoms
I would also suggest that unless you use OS9 very regularly, go into your OSX System Preferences, select the Classic Pane, and check the box that warns you before classic starts.
But could we at least make the product announcement more informative and less generic. I mean what use is it to say that Acme Unlimited is going to release Alderiumusian and Saphiriamius later today and all you Anaracrium whatzits are going to get you laughed at on the golf course. So if you want some action, upgrade today.
We are a tech board. We want to know what the upgrades are. What makes it cool. We are not reading Marie Claire in which the most important thing is that some pop singer has a new fragrance, or Fortune, in which the most important things is that some analyst was bribed to recommend a stock. I mean really, this post used a couple column inches and relayed nearly zero information except for a link.
The actual point is that release time does not scale linearly given additional programmers, even if those programmers are assumed to be of generally equal ability. What this means is that if you calculate 5 man-moths to complete a project, it is a fallacy to believe that 5 programmers can complete it in one month. At a most basic level, there are relationships between each on that much be managed. Those relationships take time. The upshot of this is that you may be better off with 3 programmers than five.
This also leads to encapsulating functionality so that the unnecessary relationships are minimized, which leads to the advice is books such as Composite Structured Programming.
The major books that deal with the problems you cite tend to be more recent, like Debugging the Development Environment and Rapid Development. Yes I know both of these are MS Press. Evil. But the Mac side had really good developers.
OTOH, does the fact that christians socialists are against OSS mean that we might see a crusade against OSS users. Is it time to prepare our attics?
I am getting pretty tired of morons blaming users for not upgrading. These people need to look at how bussiness is run and understand that downtime means loss of funds, and change often means uncontrolled downtime. Furthermore, not everyone has a DSL connection and spends hours every month repairing thier machines. Many people only spend a few hours a week at the computer. They have other things to do than to tie up thier phone line for hours on end to solve a problem they may not even understand.
What would be a great boon to the community is if MS would release the patches free to everyone, in serveral different forms. I mean, they only offer dowloads to registered customers. How much would it cost for them to have a list of customers without DSL. They could mail a CD to those customers when an update is released. I think such a service would be worth maybe $20/year.
What would also be a boon would be if MS would decouple it's system components so that I could install only what I needed. Extra stuff on a manufacturer floor production machine, like a full web browser, a media player, full remote access, is just silly. It leaves the machines open to unnecesary vunerabilities.
The problem is that MS has a vision of the machine they want everyone to run. You have little ability to change the configuration. Now, instead of doing something that will cure the sickness, they add another bandaid. They are so afraid of losing thier desktop monopoly that they are condemning all thier customers to a life of endless patches.
Bitch.
For instance, if you bought a new or upgraded a system, they would use that purchase as evidence for a lawsuit should you ever choose to migrate to another *nix.
Likewise, if you bought into their protection scheme you would significantly increase your exposure to lawsuits from all sides. This is not only true because you explicitly agree that SCO is the sole arbitrator of what can and cannot be done with GNU/Linux software, but also because such an agreement may make the use of such software a violation of the GPL. It is really a recursive problem in which you are exposed to lawsuit no matter who wins.
So, I really can't see anyone doing any business with this company. Ever.
Of course firms routinely buy software from companies that spy on and attack customers, so this may be the new model of the new economy!
But my time is worth something, and I don't want to waste it. So, when I bought a copy of the Sims and it required the CD to be in the drive to play, that was it. I didn't want to waste my time looking for a CD. I did not want to waste my time putting the CD in the computer when I all I wanted to do was to play a game. There was no reason for it.
So, I decided that buying the game was a lesson. I had wasted my money on the game, as the manufacturer had no respect for me as a customer. But i would never spend another dime on the Sims. In fact, I have pretty much given up on games altogether. The manufacturers, like so much of the entertainment industry, seems to have become obsessed with making sure that no one uses their stuff without paying, and in the process condemns them to a less that luxurious life.
The second thing I thought of was that the BBS served a community. Therefore, you service might be about publicizing events and opportunities in and around the area. If the audience is the coffee house crowd, then think of what they would want to know about. I suspect the one thing that will doom the service, as it tends to doom any service, is to have personal inflexible agenda.
Last movie I rented had an advertisement for a video game. I was not allowed to skip it.
Second, the average consumer, the consumer that be tempted to buy the product if millions of product are to be sold, may not have anything that reproduces the detail. I myself find that I hear new detail as I use different systems. It is not just the ways a track is recorded, or the individuals ability to hear, or the system used, but the combination of all of these.
Which is just to say that for the masses the sound quality is only a marketing ploy. If the new format works it will do so in the same fashion as the CD or DVD. The kids will buy it because it is new. The price for players will drop. The CD will slowly be phased out. The masses will then buy the new format because it is easier. Which means that if the masses are used to coping the disc on the computer, and they cannot do that, the format might fail.
But you do hit a problem in marketing. The companies want to sell these machines for as GPC, and this has been true even before the Palm existed. I remember the Atari being sold not as a gam console, but a GPC. Early PDAs, such as the Newton, was sold as a device capable of editing spreadsheets and text documents. These PDAs including software to synch the data. This lead to unreasonable expectations.
As far as phones go, my old startac does everything a phone needs to do. I might have to upgrade, but i don't see the new features make it easier to place a call, or outside of bluetooth, easier to hold a conversation.
And I bought my phone and Palm V at about the same time. For tracking bussiness contacts, recording time expended and the like, the Palm was a perfect size. Any modern cell phone of reasonable size is not so good.
The real issue to me is price. I cannot get a small simple phone for $100. I cannot get a small simple PDA for $100. I can get a complex phone or PDA that does nothing well for $200-$300. Game consoles are still selling because they understand the concept of delivering the core product at a reasonable pricepoint.
In Elementary school you spend the day with a teacher and might get 5-10 minutes of personlized attention from each teacher. By the time you get to highschool, you might get a few minutes of personalized attention from each teacher per week. You can make that more by being a more active student.
In college the students who just want to be told what to do get no personal time with the teacher. They also do not tend to get anything out of the class because the come in with the attitude that the professor do not care and do not want to explain. While this may be true in a limited sense, it is not a helpful philosophy.
In fact you did exactly what you should have done. Go to the books and get other points of view. If you were not connecting with the professor, then he or she did exactly what they should have done, which is to send to get other points of view. Unlike your teachers, professors are not trained to work the issue from every angle until the student understands. Now that the student is in college, they are expected to have the skills to find the answers themselves. A professor merely points out a useful direction.
Matsushita Patents the Bedroom!
One thing that was very clear to everyone who was thinking, even back then, was that an ERP would not pay for itself and therefore had to be bought on the basis on making life easier. Another thing that was clear was that you had to have a clear idea of how it would be used, and how much it would cost to use, otherwise it would never get used.
I saw the same blindness when i was working for a company that sold custom websites. Mostly we took a cut of advertising, and I suppose paid salesmen commission based on what we all now know is mark to market. At that time the advertising market was dying, and all the tech people, and even some of the managers, knew that the deals would result in no money. However that truth was not useful for the salesmen who wanted large commissions or the upper management that wanted large sales. So deals were put together that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to honor, with customers that made not commitments whatsoever. Of course all this came crashing down.
So, having worked in small business, corporate, and academia, I would say there is little difference in the ability to be blinded by greed and the smooth talking salesman.
What a PhD means is that a few other PhDs think that you have been trained in the gathering of observables and can be trusted to dessiminate conclusions based on those observable is an honest and relatively objective fashion.
This does not always mean that the conclusions are correct. What this does mean is that the conclusions are not maliciously misleading or fraudulent, which includes forgery to advance one career. To do so is to violate the purpose of the PhD. It can take years to correct an accepted fraudulent conclusion.
So no, the question is not hard to answer. The advancement of knowledge depends on the honesty of the men and women who participate it in. This is not high school. This is academia. This is why plagerism should result in immidiate expulsion. This is why any other sort of data falsification should result in immidiate expulsion. This is not popular opinion. This is nearly 500 years of process in the Western Civilization that had allowed great progress. If we were not serious about finding correct and usefull knowledge, most of you tech toys would not exist.
Just in case some don't know, the formal name for such a tour the 'Dog and Pony Show.' It is just like a cheap carnival, employing simple misdirection and borderline fraund. And just like such a show, you pay $5 to see the same people you see for see everyday, but dressed in cheaper clothes.
I would include two caveats. First, the radio station could not include those songs in advertisement that claim they have 'x amount of music per hour' or 'x songs in row.' Second, the stations should include the songs as part of the advertising space. These are kind of the same.
Of course this makes it harder for non-label bands to get airplay. In this day, that is pretty much the standard anyway, and is why most stations are useless for anything but label fodder. If you want new music leave your house and experience it. New bands are everwhere for free. Better bands can be had for a token amount. These bands CDs are still $15, but hey, you are supporting non-label new music. If you don't want to do this, listen to the radio and download the music from P2P.
I have not RTFA, but if the question indeed said replaced, then the 3% number might be accurate. Lets take some examples. If you have a contract worker, and allow that worker to fullfill the contract, and then choose not to renew that contract, but give it to a nonlocal candidate, is that a replacement? If, during the course of the normal business cycle, you fire redundant employees, and, when business picks up, you hire nonlocal employess, is that a replacement. There are all sorts of othe situations like this.
I agree with you on not being protectionist. The problem is that money must be available to purchase the cheap gadgets. Right now, money is quickly moving to the top, with little expendable income left to the masses who would buy the mass produced gadgets. Tech pay drove the tech revolution in this country, just like manufacturing pay drove the automobile revolution. You can put the blame on the worker, i.e. adapt or die, but the corporate entity must do the same. I think it is pretty ludicrous for corporations to complain about taxes, and then go for the governement dole everytime it looks like an executive might make less than 100 million a year. Government policy should not be protectionist. It should be to set up rules that help old corporation manage their money properly, new corporation with new ideas thrive, and insuring the money is distributed in such a way so that the masses can purchase the products without increasing debt.
Have no doubt. Right now the economy is picking up because we are borrowing money from our grandchildren to buy the stuff we need now. I do not understand how this increase in debt, and spend but not tax mentatility fits in with conservative adgenda, but evidently conservatives now believe making our grandchildren poor is a good thing.
I do not think it is the features. I think that Linux has fallen to the same fallacy as MS. Cycles are cheaper than programmers, so attention to effeciency and style are no longer important. The user can always upgrade to a faster machine.
*nix and GUI should be able to run well on a slow machine. NeXTStep ran on 25Mhz 68040! The original ATT machine, which was just Unix with no GUI, ran on something like a 6800.
The second approach is to create a minimalist figures of known quantities. Given a general outline, the brain will fill in the details. It is good to encourage this because it personalizes the footage to each viewer. This personalization encourages the suspension of reliaty neccesary for for a movie to work. The problem is, therefore, when too many details are supplied. This is also the problem with live action movies that have bad actors or directors. The details conflict with the internal picture the brain develops. Since a movie is entertainment, and this conflict is not entertaining, the movie is a flop.
The point of a label, or any music organization, if it works at it's best, is to expose a group of customers to a range of music. Clearly most labels do not do this. These labels merely create a product that pander to perceived taste of a customer group. This leads to homogenized music created by bands that are nearly indistinguishable. It does not have to be this way. Many music organizations truly try to expand the tastes of their customers. Such organizations are important because we as music appreciation people cannot hear every artist. It is useful to have proxies filter content and present what they think are the 'best'. Clearly there is a great deal of added value if this filtering is done from the perspective of advancing the art rather than maximizing shareholder value.
Now, IANAS, but i have observed and worked with scientist since I was very young. The one thing I know is that there is more research going on, and i would even say more good research going on, than any single scientist can adequately review. For example, even if we limit ourselves to the big general Physics journals, say JJAP, Phys Rev Letters, and a couple journals published by a big umbrella organizations, say APS, it quickly becomes overwhelming. Alternatively we might just go through Current Contents and send a lackey to get the papers, which may or may not be read beyond the abstract.
Which means that journals, at their best, are not there primarily to stroke the ego of researchers, but to publish the best content that explores the full reach of current science, and perhaps some content that stretches the current science beyond comfortable limits. Likewise, researches should not subscribe to journals for the sake of adding credibility to their office or in hopes of one day publishing in said journal, but because the journal provides the most relevant papers.
IMHO, if journals, like labels, have degraded into a vehicle of promoting personalities, the blame lies equally with the publishers and researchers. If we move to web publishing the issue will just become worse. Every Dick and Jane will create a vanity site. There will be no hope of finding the researcher that is asking the questions that will drive the next wave of discovery.
It is the quality thing again. If you don't need, don't pay for it. If you can afford it, quality is a good thing to spend money on.
The expensive argument comes from the fact that Apple does not make an entire range of commodity machines. They make machines to meet certain markets. They target those markets, and, when they do a good job, the company makes money. They also use the best technology available to meet customer needs. The seldom skimp on technology to meet a price point.
The first mac was expensive. However, if you did not have skills and were trying to computerize a bussiness, the Mac was worth every peeny. I know this from direct experience.
The mac continued to be relitively expensive until the commodity market matured and created suitable and reliable products. This took about 5 years of so. At that point Apple could, for example, replace SCSI drives, which were realy elegent devices, with commodity drives. This allowed them, for example, to produce desktops for $1000 in the early 90's and, in the mid 90's, very credible laptop for about that same amount. Like now, there was really nothing else that met it's size, weight, and battery. Of course they also had the really expensive nice laptops for $4000.
To give you more data points, my early model G4 tower(2000?) was around $1200. I have upgraded it to OS X with 512MB ram and about 100GB HD. It is fast enough. Sure I could have bought a name brand PC for 2/3 as much, but it would have maxed out at 384MB ram and have no room for a second drive.
The quality price issue is still very real. A good example of this is firewire. Everyone laughs at firewire now, especially with so-called USB 2.0(now is that regular, hyper, or superduper?), but USB 2.0 is pretty new, isn't it? I certainly paid extra for Firewire, but not only do I have a daisy chain plug and play interface, I also do not have to upgrade my old machines just to achieve the performance that was economically availbe 3 or 4 years ago. The fact that I can keep reliable machines in service greatly decreases my strees level.
IANAL, but I think this statement is false. If the license says that you cannot file suit, the first thing you must do file suit is sue for the right to file suit. If it says you can only arbitrate in Pokono, then you may be stuck going to Pokono. We users give up virtually all rights in exchange for using software, and must pay additional money to reclaim some of those right. That is what makes free software so nice. You only have to pay to reclaim rights, not to relinquish them.