Unless, of course, you bought that music in the "wrong" place -- in which case people find that they have been screwed out of something they paid for.
What exactly did they pay for? According to the Terms of Service, they're paying for a pretty specific set of rights that does not (yet) include being able to listen to that same music on "every last single piece of consumer electronics" you own.
I don't see how you can be screwed out of something you didn't even buy.
Battery life changes over time.. testing a brand new laptop against a 1 year old laptop is useless.,
Which is exactly why people shouldn't complain to much about lack of published battery life estimates. As long as it's not really bad or really good, it's really unimportant.
It takes experience, whether in advanced degrees or out working in "the real world" to get the combination of [K]nowledge [S]kills and [A]bility to make a business work.
How, exactly, would working an entry level job at some big company provide any more experience than starting your own company? That's the primary alternative for most of these people, and one that will still be waiting for them in the likely event that the venture fails.
It would be far more realistic to design something like this around the assumption that you *will* be over 30, married, with kids and solid decent paying job (that you can hopefully self-fund with) and teach people how to start a business in THAT scenario.
How would that be more realistic? You're describing the hardest possible situation from which to launch a business.
I can't afford to just drop my middle-income tech job, leave my wife behind while I go haring off hundreds or thousands of miles away, on a chance that my team may successfully code a prototype and get funded.
You're going to have to quit your job and take a lot of huge risks anyway, so don't put those up as reasons not to do it. On the other hand, if it's worth doing and it's something you can do without quitting your job, why aren't you doing it already?
So where's financing that's friendly to our situation?
In the mirror. Taking money from anyone will involve sacrifices or commitments that you can't or don't want to make. Either you're going to have to take on huge debt, or quit your job or school, or move, or live on ramen and sleep on a cot for six months, or give up a lot of control, or spend a lot more time tracking down investors than actually working on the company, or all of the above.
So, if you're looking for something without a lot of sacrifice or upheaval involved, you're not going to find a better deal outside your own pocket.
what type of tools should parents be equipping their children with, today?
The desire to learn. That's really it's all about. A lot of our generation fixates on computers because we grew up with them and learned everything we could about them. So which is more important, developmentaly? The computer, or the fact that we were so damned excited about it?
Practically speaking, I think it's a matter of exposing them to things that they can almost understand, and then letting them explore. That and never dismissing a question with "you wouldn't understand". Instead, give them the big picture first (or the small picture, whichever is easiest), use metaphors, and be more concerned with stimulating their mind than giving an accurate answer.
When Joe User gets to decide, is he a Basic or Premium home user?
Premium, of course. Who the hell wants to be Basic? They might as well call it "Windows Vista for Dumb People Too Dumb and Uncool for Premium" or "Windows Vista for People Picked Last for Kickball in the Fifth Grade". Nobody will willingly buy Basic, and that's the reason it exists.
This is common pricing tactic, and it works amazingly well. Our estimation of value works differently looking up the scale than it does looking down. If something costs half as much but is only half as good, that's not seen as a good deal, where something that costs twice as much only needs to be 50% better to be worth consideration. Adjust this to your products and you can always find a point where people will pay a lot more for very little difference. People will focus on the differences, often fixating on some non-essential feature that they *might* want, and base the final decison on that alone.
Some people seem offended by these kinds of pricing tricks, but I find them incredibly interesting in a "they're hacking my brain" kind of way.
Before iTunes (and other stores), people pirated music "because CDs are so expensive", or "because there's only one or two good songs", or "chain record stores don't carry what I like", and so on.
Now, people pirate music "because $1 a track is gouging", or "DRM is evil" or "the quality isn't high enough", or "OGG is better", and so on.
(None of these opinions are "wrong", but they certainly aren't shared by all.)
My point is that no matter what is on offer, there will always be someone who wants more for less, and chances are, they will be very vocal about it. These are what we call "cheap bastards", characterized by a strong sense of entitlement and the ability to make statements like "If they offered 320kbps MP3s with no DRM for $0.20, then I'd buy tons of music, and so would all of my friends. Until then, I'll stick to BitTorrent." with a straight-face.
Why do so many people think they have a right to dictate the terms of other people's businesses? He does. He's the customer.
The customers right to dictate business begins and ends with the money in his hand. Everything else (as far as actual sales are concerned) is just bitching.
Seriously, why do so many businesses think they can cram whatever garbage they want down our throats?
When you stand before them with your mouth open and a big sign that says "Please Insert Whatever Garbage You Want", that's usually a good indicator. That's basically what you're doing anytime you buy anything from anyone. The hope, generally, is that the garbage they give you is the garbage you wanted, and usually that is the case.
However, many businesses, MS and Apple included, assume they know what's best for me. I disagree. And, since they don't have my checkbook, I get to take it elsewhere.
Yes, this is normal. I'm amazed that people don't understand this, or understand it in such negative terms. I don't know of any company that "assumes they know what's best for me". They just try to appeal to some "average" customer who may resemble me in some ways and not in others. It's always been up to the customer to actually decide whether they want what's for sale at the price it is for sale.
For some reason, people (in the US, especially) have trouble admitting that they *don't* want to buy a certain product at a certain price. This often results in lengthy diatribes about what the seller should do, rather than a simple "No, thanks."
Main people they want a hacked OS is because the un-hacked OS does not run on their machines and for the moment they are not interested in new hardware, thank you, just in new software.
I would love to believe this, but it's not true. That might be the reason *you* want it, but that doesn't explain five thousand other people on BitTorrent. Furthermore it doesn't explain why any of them aren't paying for anything.
_when_ said people try out the OS...what do you think will be the next hardware they'll shop for?
Probably something as cheap as what they already have. Look, I think it's obvious that people who are disinclined to spend money on something now are going to be disinclined to spend money on the same thing later. Your argument here is that stealing something is going to make people want to buy something. Please try again.
"yes, I know two apple pies is just fifty cents more than one, but I will only eat one, thank you"
Unfortunately in this case, pies only come in pairs. Does this give you the right to steal one pie?
The proof that this argument is bogus resides in Apple itself and its iTMS.
Except that that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, and ignores every other reason the music store is a success. The only real connection I see is that you're using the same arguments as people who continue to steal music. Namely, that people have a right to steal what isn't for sale, whether it's an OS that runs on your hardware or downloadable music without DRM.
It's impossible to steal software/movies/music.
Aimless pedantry will get you nowhere. You might think it makes you sound smart, but in reality, it makes you sound unwilling to act like a grown-up.
There is a very simple solution here that will alieviate a LOT of the reasons people will hack or want to get the hacked OS. Just sell it seperate.
This makes no sense at all. The main reason people want a hacked OS is because they are cheap bastards. By definition they aren't interested in spending money. Trying to sell them something that they are already stealing is not an effective tactic.
I figure 90-95% of all the spreadsheets I see don't do any calculations, they're just used as a way to put things in columns.
This is exactly the reason that one of my favorite apps, OmniOutliner (Mac OS X) was created.
"when the Excel product manager got up on stage at MacWorld several years ago and said, "We've found that 85% of our customers use Excel just to make lists and outlines," we (Omni) said, "Shoot, that'll be our next product. We can do a GOOD job of making lists and outlines, and sell it for a lot less."" -- Wil Shipley, Omni co-founder
It seems like there might be a market opening up in the "things that people are already misusing Office for" sector.
Will, I remember back in the late eighties/early nineties you made some of the most indepth yet open-ended games ever....Today? The bulk of your work in the last five years has been a virtual dollhouse...
That "virtual dollhouse" happens to be one of the most in depth yet open-ended games ever. The fact that it's also extremely popular and profitable doesn't make it any less of a brilliant game, as some people seem to think.
As for the quality of the software being in decline, that's an engineering problem that plagues virtually all mainstream game development. I don't think it has anything to do with loss of creative control or Maxis being sold to EA.
Wright has spoken before about how if you look at the size of the team on each of his games and project that growth rate into the future, by 2010 it would take hundreds of thousands of people to produce the average game. While it may not reach such heights, the point is that games today are expected to be much, much, bigger and more complex than "back in the day". I suspect this same line of thought influenced the heavy use of procedural generation in his next game, Spore.
I've seen Windows' "hide extensions for known file types" option described as an OS flaw in the past
The complaint is usually that not only does Windows hide extentions, but it doesn't let you modify them. Since extentions are the only way that Windows determines file types and associations, this is an incredible pain in the ass. In Mac OS X, not only can you change hidden extentions, but you rarely need to because associations can also be determined by type/creator codes, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers.
I'm on board that just "downloading a DVD" is unethical, but if I BUY an official copy of OS/X, then who the hell is Steve Jobs to tell me what I can or can't do with it?
Apple has no incentive to make it easy for you to do unsupported things. If, in the process of making their OS harder to pirate, they make it harder for you to do the unsupported things you want to do, that is acceptable to them. And why shouldn't it be?
As far as I know, Apple hasn't gone after anyone for hacking Mac OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, stripping FairPlay DRM from iTunes files, or anything like that. If they were doing this, your accusation that they are "arrogant" and trying to "control what I do" would make more sense.
DigitalConvergence has every right to choose the mechanism for selling its product.
This might be an apt (indeed, clever) comparison if Apple were continually sending people unusable copies of Mac OS X for free. They are not. You're confusing two different issues.
A more honest answer would be: Battery life depends on configuration, use, temperature, conditioning and age of the battery, luck, and how hard you focus on the advertised battery life, which is never, ever, realistic.
Or maybe: Battery life not significantly better or significantly worse than current generation PowerBooks or other laptops with similarly-sized batteries. We haven't got freakin' magic powers.
Or maybe: 2-6 hours, a range so broad as to be meaningless.
Most people out there have been brought up with the mouse and are very adapt at using it.
Why would you assume that a touch screen would replace the mouse? We've had touch screens, touch pads, pen tablets, mouses, scroll-wheels, joysticks, keyboards, accelerometers, and plenty of other input devices for years, and they all coexist. Some are just more useful for certain kinds of work.
AMD has better and cheaper desktop chips and they keep gaining market share keeps on rising.
So? I mean, from Skype's perspective what difference does this make? Intel still has 75% or more of the market, and is willing to throw around billions in marketing dollars to maintain it. If they can make a quick buck by locking out for a limted time the tiny portion of their userbase that both uses dual-core Athlons and needs to host more than 5-way calls, why is that "stupid" for them? They already limit single-core chips from AMD and Intel both to 5-way calling.
Have an iPod? Better get your music from iTunes, 'cause PlaysForSure files won't play on it.
Sounds more like a problem with PlaysForSure. Given that there are other stores selling content that does work on iPods, it seems the only thing in the way of other stores is their insistence upon using an incompatable format.
Depression, despair, etc are places where you can find amazing creativity of both artistic and scientific nature.
Bullshit. If you're thinking this, you either don't know what it means to be depressed, or you don't know what it means to be creative. I would go so far as to say they are opposite experiences.
I would gladly relive my darkest times because I know they are what made me who I am.
This doesn't even remotely mean that not having those experiences would have made you less creative. In hindsight you can say that they made you who you are, but you could say that about any other experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, of course, you bought that music in the "wrong" place -- in which case people find that they have been screwed out of something they paid for.
What exactly did they pay for? According to the Terms of Service, they're paying for a pretty specific set of rights that does not (yet) include being able to listen to that same music on "every last single piece of consumer electronics" you own.
I don't see how you can be screwed out of something you didn't even buy.
Battery life changes over time.. testing a brand new laptop against a 1 year old laptop is useless.,
Which is exactly why people shouldn't complain to much about lack of published battery life estimates. As long as it's not really bad or really good, it's really unimportant.
Maybe now we can figure out whether that poor cat makes it out of the box alive or not.
It takes experience, whether in advanced degrees or out working in "the real world" to get the combination of [K]nowledge [S]kills and [A]bility to make a business work.
How, exactly, would working an entry level job at some big company provide any more experience than starting your own company? That's the primary alternative for most of these people, and one that will still be waiting for them in the likely event that the venture fails.
It would be far more realistic to design something like this around the assumption that you *will* be over 30, married, with kids and solid decent paying job (that you can hopefully self-fund with) and teach people how to start a business in THAT scenario.
How would that be more realistic? You're describing the hardest possible situation from which to launch a business.
I can't afford to just drop my middle-income tech job, leave my wife behind while I go haring off hundreds or thousands of miles away, on a chance that my team may successfully code a prototype and get funded.
You're going to have to quit your job and take a lot of huge risks anyway, so don't put those up as reasons not to do it. On the other hand, if it's worth doing and it's something you can do without quitting your job, why aren't you doing it already?
So where's financing that's friendly to our situation?
In the mirror. Taking money from anyone will involve sacrifices or commitments that you can't or don't want to make. Either you're going to have to take on huge debt, or quit your job or school, or move, or live on ramen and sleep on a cot for six months, or give up a lot of control, or spend a lot more time tracking down investors than actually working on the company, or all of the above.
So, if you're looking for something without a lot of sacrifice or upheaval involved, you're not going to find a better deal outside your own pocket.
what type of tools should parents be equipping their children with, today?
The desire to learn. That's really it's all about. A lot of our generation fixates on computers because we grew up with them and learned everything we could about them. So which is more important, developmentaly? The computer, or the fact that we were so damned excited about it?
Practically speaking, I think it's a matter of exposing them to things that they can almost understand, and then letting them explore. That and never dismissing a question with "you wouldn't understand". Instead, give them the big picture first (or the small picture, whichever is easiest), use metaphors, and be more concerned with stimulating their mind than giving an accurate answer.
When Joe User gets to decide, is he a Basic or Premium home user?
Premium, of course. Who the hell wants to be Basic? They might as well call it "Windows Vista for Dumb People Too Dumb and Uncool for Premium" or "Windows Vista for People Picked Last for Kickball in the Fifth Grade". Nobody will willingly buy Basic, and that's the reason it exists.
This is common pricing tactic, and it works amazingly well. Our estimation of value works differently looking up the scale than it does looking down. If something costs half as much but is only half as good, that's not seen as a good deal, where something that costs twice as much only needs to be 50% better to be worth consideration. Adjust this to your products and you can always find a point where people will pay a lot more for very little difference. People will focus on the differences, often fixating on some non-essential feature that they *might* want, and base the final decison on that alone.
Some people seem offended by these kinds of pricing tricks, but I find them incredibly interesting in a "they're hacking my brain" kind of way.
That's what Apple did with iTunes
Before iTunes (and other stores), people pirated music "because CDs are so expensive", or "because there's only one or two good songs", or "chain record stores don't carry what I like", and so on.
Now, people pirate music "because $1 a track is gouging", or "DRM is evil" or "the quality isn't high enough", or "OGG is better", and so on.
(None of these opinions are "wrong", but they certainly aren't shared by all.)
My point is that no matter what is on offer, there will always be someone who wants more for less, and chances are, they will be very vocal about it. These are what we call "cheap bastards", characterized by a strong sense of entitlement and the ability to make statements like "If they offered 320kbps MP3s with no DRM for $0.20, then I'd buy tons of music, and so would all of my friends. Until then, I'll stick to BitTorrent." with a straight-face.
Appeasing this kind of person is not a good move.
Why do so many people think they have a right to dictate the terms of other people's businesses? He does. He's the customer.
The customers right to dictate business begins and ends with the money in his hand. Everything else (as far as actual sales are concerned) is just bitching.
Seriously, why do so many businesses think they can cram whatever garbage they want down our throats?
When you stand before them with your mouth open and a big sign that says "Please Insert Whatever Garbage You Want", that's usually a good indicator. That's basically what you're doing anytime you buy anything from anyone. The hope, generally, is that the garbage they give you is the garbage you wanted, and usually that is the case.
However, many businesses, MS and Apple included, assume they know what's best for me. I disagree. And, since they don't have my checkbook, I get to take it elsewhere.
Yes, this is normal. I'm amazed that people don't understand this, or understand it in such negative terms. I don't know of any company that "assumes they know what's best for me". They just try to appeal to some "average" customer who may resemble me in some ways and not in others. It's always been up to the customer to actually decide whether they want what's for sale at the price it is for sale.
For some reason, people (in the US, especially) have trouble admitting that they *don't* want to buy a certain product at a certain price. This often results in lengthy diatribes about what the seller should do, rather than a simple "No, thanks."
Main people they want a hacked OS is because the un-hacked OS does not run on their machines and for the moment they are not interested in new hardware, thank you, just in new software.
I would love to believe this, but it's not true. That might be the reason *you* want it, but that doesn't explain five thousand other people on BitTorrent. Furthermore it doesn't explain why any of them aren't paying for anything.
_when_ said people try out the OS...what do you think will be the next hardware they'll shop for?
Probably something as cheap as what they already have. Look, I think it's obvious that people who are disinclined to spend money on something now are going to be disinclined to spend money on the same thing later. Your argument here is that stealing something is going to make people want to buy something. Please try again.
"yes, I know two apple pies is just fifty cents more than one, but I will only eat one, thank you"
Unfortunately in this case, pies only come in pairs. Does this give you the right to steal one pie?
The proof that this argument is bogus resides in Apple itself and its iTMS.
Except that that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, and ignores every other reason the music store is a success. The only real connection I see is that you're using the same arguments as people who continue to steal music. Namely, that people have a right to steal what isn't for sale, whether it's an OS that runs on your hardware or downloadable music without DRM.
It's impossible to steal software/movies/music.
Aimless pedantry will get you nowhere. You might think it makes you sound smart, but in reality, it makes you sound unwilling to act like a grown-up.
There is a very simple solution here that will alieviate a LOT of the reasons people will hack or want to get the hacked OS. Just sell it seperate.
This makes no sense at all. The main reason people want a hacked OS is because they are cheap bastards. By definition they aren't interested in spending money. Trying to sell them something that they are already stealing is not an effective tactic.
I figure 90-95% of all the spreadsheets I see don't do any calculations, they're just used as a way to put things in columns.
This is exactly the reason that one of my favorite apps, OmniOutliner (Mac OS X) was created.
"when the Excel product manager got up on stage at MacWorld several years ago and said, "We've found that 85% of our customers use Excel just to make lists and outlines," we (Omni) said, "Shoot, that'll be our next product. We can do a GOOD job of making lists and outlines, and sell it for a lot less."" -- Wil Shipley, Omni co-founder
It seems like there might be a market opening up in the "things that people are already misusing Office for" sector.
Will, I remember back in the late eighties/early nineties you made some of the most indepth yet open-ended games ever....Today? The bulk of your work in the last five years has been a virtual dollhouse...
That "virtual dollhouse" happens to be one of the most in depth yet open-ended games ever. The fact that it's also extremely popular and profitable doesn't make it any less of a brilliant game, as some people seem to think.
As for the quality of the software being in decline, that's an engineering problem that plagues virtually all mainstream game development. I don't think it has anything to do with loss of creative control or Maxis being sold to EA.
Wright has spoken before about how if you look at the size of the team on each of his games and project that growth rate into the future, by 2010 it would take hundreds of thousands of people to produce the average game. While it may not reach such heights, the point is that games today are expected to be much, much, bigger and more complex than "back in the day". I suspect this same line of thought influenced the heavy use of procedural generation in his next game, Spore.
I've seen Windows' "hide extensions for known file types" option described as an OS flaw in the past
The complaint is usually that not only does Windows hide extentions, but it doesn't let you modify them. Since extentions are the only way that Windows determines file types and associations, this is an incredible pain in the ass. In Mac OS X, not only can you change hidden extentions, but you rarely need to because associations can also be determined by type/creator codes, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers.
So, it's not really the same thing.
This is to be embraced and celebrated, not criminalized.
Where has it been criminalized?
I've arbitrarily decided that your post hurts me. Do I get to have a gaggle of fanboys bitch at you now?
No, but you do have a right to sue. Just like Apple does.
I'm on board that just "downloading a DVD" is unethical, but if I BUY an official copy of OS/X, then who the hell is Steve Jobs to tell me what I can or can't do with it?
Apple has no incentive to make it easy for you to do unsupported things. If, in the process of making their OS harder to pirate, they make it harder for you to do the unsupported things you want to do, that is acceptable to them. And why shouldn't it be?
As far as I know, Apple hasn't gone after anyone for hacking Mac OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, stripping FairPlay DRM from iTunes files, or anything like that. If they were doing this, your accusation that they are "arrogant" and trying to "control what I do" would make more sense.
DigitalConvergence has every right to choose the mechanism for selling its product.
This might be an apt (indeed, clever) comparison if Apple were continually sending people unusable copies of Mac OS X for free. They are not. You're confusing two different issues.
Yeah, that helps.
A more honest answer would be: Battery life depends on configuration, use, temperature, conditioning and age of the battery, luck, and how hard you focus on the advertised battery life, which is never, ever, realistic.
Or maybe: Battery life not significantly better or significantly worse than current generation PowerBooks or other laptops with similarly-sized batteries. We haven't got freakin' magic powers.
Or maybe: 2-6 hours, a range so broad as to be meaningless.
Any "Gecko is slow and bloated" arguments can be put to rest with Camino.
Meanwhile, "Firefox is slow and bloated" arguments have suddenly gained much more credibility.
Most people out there have been brought up with the mouse and are very adapt at using it.
Why would you assume that a touch screen would replace the mouse? We've had touch screens, touch pads, pen tablets, mouses, scroll-wheels, joysticks, keyboards, accelerometers, and plenty of other input devices for years, and they all coexist. Some are just more useful for certain kinds of work.
AMD has better and cheaper desktop chips and they keep gaining market share keeps on rising.
So? I mean, from Skype's perspective what difference does this make? Intel still has 75% or more of the market, and is willing to throw around billions in marketing dollars to maintain it. If they can make a quick buck by locking out for a limted time the tiny portion of their userbase that both uses dual-core Athlons and needs to host more than 5-way calls, why is that "stupid" for them? They already limit single-core chips from AMD and Intel both to 5-way calling.
Have an iPod? Better get your music from iTunes, 'cause PlaysForSure files won't play on it.
Sounds more like a problem with PlaysForSure. Given that there are other stores selling content that does work on iPods, it seems the only thing in the way of other stores is their insistence upon using an incompatable format.
Depression, despair, etc are places where you can find amazing creativity of both artistic and scientific nature.
Bullshit. If you're thinking this, you either don't know what it means to be depressed, or you don't know what it means to be creative. I would go so far as to say they are opposite experiences.
I would gladly relive my darkest times because I know they are what made me who I am.
This doesn't even remotely mean that not having those experiences would have made you less creative. In hindsight you can say that they made you who you are, but you could say that about any other experience.