Difference is title availability and price
on
The Cult of Kindle
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· Score: 1
The press doesn't just get it. It's not the device, it's the store. With regard to the device, all they needed to do was not screw up, and by all reports they haven't.
There are two immense difference between the Kindle and all previous ventures.
First, the availability of titles is at least an order of magnitude larger than with any previous ventures. Themeans that the chances the title you want to buy is available is much higher.
In my informal personal tests a few years ago, I found that that about 3/4 of the titles in Oprah's book club books were available as audiobooks, yet less than 1/10 were available in any of the three major eBook formats (Gemstar, Microsoft LIT, Adobe) of the time.
If you are someone who buys books, as opposed to someone to whom books are sold, if you know a title you want to buy, I think your chances of buying it in Kindle format may actually be higher than at a brick-and-mortar mall bookstore, and I'm sure they're higher than at an airport bookstore. This was not true before.
Second, the people griping about the $10 pricing for recent books seem to be unaware that in all previous ventures, the publisher charged something close to the hardbound price for books that were not yet available in paper.
Do I think the $10 ($9, $8, $7) prices are fair for an electronic book? No, I do not... but, for a current hardbound bestseller, a sane person could conceivably imaging buying one. Previously, the selling proposition--hardbound pricing--was so excessively greedy as to be a deal-breaker for almost everyone.
The quirky but quite marvelous House on the Rock, a tourist attraction in Wisconsin with geek appeal, is a Barnum-like pseudo-museum that is genuinely awesome, crammed through of things many of which are not quite what they seem. You can't quite call them fakes because the management no longer makes explicit claims of much of anything. Among the marvels are numerous room-sized assemblages of automated musical instruments, automated the good old fashioned way a la player pianos and "orchestrions."
There is a suggestion that these are historical Victorian contraptions, but in fact most of them were built in by showman/architect Alex Jordan and his colleagues.
Quite a few of them feature stringed instruments, and all of them have been devised to look the way you would hope a mechanical violin-player would look: clockwork gadgetry draws a traditional bow visibly across strings. But while visually effective, they are fake; they are silent, violin-like notes being produced elsewhere from an organ or synthesizer.
The collection does include one genuine coin-operated violin playing machine, a "Violano-Virtuoso," but instead of a bow, it uses motorized rosin-covered wheels. Mechanical fingers press the strings down, producing a correct pitch but no vibrato. The sound is just as harsh, unmusical, and "mechanical" sounding as you'd expect. Unlike player pianos and carousel orchestrions, where the mechanical sound can be perceived as having a charm of its own, the Violano-Virtuoso just sounds unpleasant. Apparently, it is really difficult to get a pleasing sound by bowing a string.
Toyota's demonstration thus has added piquancy from the fact that not only is the achievement impressive, but it actually is something that people had been trying to do for about a century, without success.
I'm very curious to know. Are the vendors of voting machines just cynical, and believe that nobody really cares about security and that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the people who make the buying decisions?
Or do they find that the people who buying voting machines are equally cynical, and really just want cheapjack machines, paying only lip service to protecting the public that uses them?
Or, if the truth were known, are ATM machines really just as bad?
(Anyone know what the relative cost is? Judging by general appearance, size, weight, and geek guesswork, I'd think an ATM might cost $50,000 exclusive of installation, an electronic voting machine might cost $5,000, a "traditional" levers-and-counters no-electricity mechanical voting machine about the same, and a punched-card voting machine $500... anyone know the real numbers?)
I find it odd that the article doesn't identify this "secret" mailing list. Is it just wikien-l, which is not secret at all and which anyone can join? I'm not currently on it, so I don't know if the brouhaha in question surfaced there.
Keep in mind that in those days the Internet was not supposed to be used for commercial purposes.
In those days,.com's were only supposed to be on the net as a convenience for fostering research collaboration between them and their.edu partners.
In theory, it was OK to send email from a.edu to a.edu, from a.edu to a.com it had a research relationship with, or from a.com to a.edu it had a research relationship, but.com's were not supposed to exchange email directly.
While this is very cool, it does bring up a pet peeve of mine: why can't devices show accurate battery life?
Currently, all battery charge indicators are wildly nonlinear and grossly inaccurate.
To be more specific. Conceptually, imagine a device that holds three small batteries instead of one large one, and drains them in succession one after the other. The battery life measurement on each battery would be somewhat imprecise, but when you'd exhausted the first battery you'd know that you really had 2/3 of the charge left; when you'd exhausted the second, you'd know that you really had 1/3 left.
Alternatively, how about a device that holds two smaller batteries and double-buffers them; that is, draws from one battery until it's exhausted, then draws from the second while allowing you to replace the first?
For the record, if anyone cares: eight of the ten books on my list, were available. The list included one of the Barbara Kingsolver titles that hadn't been available for the older formats. In fact Amazon had nine of her books available for the Kindle, including two I haven't read yet.
The Kindle might make it. That's a very convincing review.
It's not a hardware problem; it's never been a hardware problem. My year-2000 Rocket eBook is more than good enough to read books for pleasure. Seven years of progress is seven years; all they needed to do was not screw up, and it sounds as if they didn't.
The biggest problem by far with previous efforts was title availability. Sure, they would have an eBookstore with "thousands" of titles, and if you asked the question "is there anything there I want to read?" the answer would be "sure."
But ask the question the other way around, as someone who buys books rather than someone who is sold books. The question then becomes "is book XYZ, that I know I want to read, evenavailable?" The reviewer makes it clear that this is an important question for him, too, and that he thinks Amazon falls a little short. But only by comparison with the ideal. Comparison with earlier eBook efforts is like night and day.
Just before the "eBooks are dead" meme hit, i.e. at about the peak of the craze, I took a look at the book list for Oprah's book club. I thought that was a very fair test. They were scattered across publishers, they were not so old as to be out of print and mostly old enough to allow time for format conversion, and all of them were good books that some disinterested party thought were worth reading. I compared eBook formats and audiobook format, audiobook being an example of a non-print medium for which the conversion costs and distribution costs were far higher than for an eBook.
As I recall, of about forty-four books, something like thirty-eight of them were available as audiobooks, i.e. most of them. And a grand total of six were available in any eBook format at all. And of the three dominant eBook formats at the time--Microsoft.LIT, Adobe eBook Reader, and Gemstar--no format had more than three of the books available.
Now, the very first precondition of eBook success is that, darn it, the books you want need to be available. That's not sufficient, but it's necessary. The holes in title availability were huge. For example, to pick one of my favorites at random, there was nothing by Barbara Kingsolver available in any of the three formats.
On a very informal test recently in which I just listed ten books I had bought or was considering buying, I found that eight out of ten were available in Kindle format. Including nine books by Barbara Kingsolver, two of which I haven't read yet.
The second thing is price. By the way, Amazon is honest in saying most books are under $9.99. Many of them are priced a little lower, in fact. These days mass market paperbacks are costing $6.99, $7.99, $8.99 and trade paperbacks are mostly above $10. So it's fair to say Amazon is charging paperback prices, even for books that aren't out in paper. Do I think that's a good price? No, I think it's way too high. But it is much much much better than before. In the old eBook days, the uniform policy was that if the book wasn't out in paper yet, the eBook price matched the hardbound price.
I must have had a dozen conversations with strangers watching me read my Rocket eBook, and they all went the same way. Increasing interest. Not deterred by the $300 price of the device. But when they asked what the books cost and I said "Hardbound prices if the book isn't in paper," the conversation would stop dead right there and I could see their interest level plummet to zero. Maybe they didn't actually roll their eyes but it felt like it.
DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them. Can you imagine not being able to lend a book to your wife even if you each had your own device? And I am stuck with DRMed Gemstar-format content that will die when my Rocket eBook dies (and its battery life, once 20 hours, is now down to about 2). Locked to a hardware serial number in a proprietary format, and the company is bust and their servers are shut down and no customer-service people to help. So d
Would you believe it changed the whole basis of financial economics: everyone now "get it" that the value of stock is independent of whether the company is doing anything useful or making a profit?
Would you believe it created the dot-com revolution?
Would you believe it sparked the endless bull market and gave ordinary Americans access to the secret of wealth without work?
Would you believe it created 401(k)s growing at 20% per year and has made the average worker so resplendently rich that he couldn't care whether wages are flat?
Would you believe nobody really needs Social Security any more?
Would you believe that my used copy of "Dow 36000" is a steal at just $37.22 plus $7.95 shipping?
"Keep in mind: they might become ubiquitous over the next years."
Why should I keep that in mind? Do I need to prepare myself mentally to compete in the brave new world? Do I need to worry that people who keep in mind that these interfaces might become ubiquitous will become so much better at operating computers than me that I'll become unemployable? Where can I find a community college course on how to play 3D video games?
But, but, but: the fear factor. They might become ubiquitous over the next years. Maybe. And then again, maybe not.
What if I back the wrong horse? What if I budget three hours a day to do exercises to hone my spatial perception skills to a scalpel-like edge, only to find that the real winners are those who anticipated the rise of olfaction-based user interfaces?
Well, gotta go... time to do my PL/I programming exercises. PL/I, it's the wave of the future, y'know.
That's a very good article. The example surprised me. I thought that one would need to be much more far-fetched than he was to get the total that he gets.
It even failed to mention some potential liabilities. When he "emails his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday," the point is the infringement of the copyright of his friend who took the pictures. He doesn't pile on the possibility that the images themselves contain copyrighted team logos, or that... this is so weird that I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly, but I believe the owners of some buildings are now claiming that the appearance of the building itself is copyrighted and that photographing the buildings infringes... so the photographs might be infringing by showing the stadium itself.
What he does not mention is the spectre of selective enforcement. It is very convenient for authorities if everyone is a law-breaker, because then you always have a valid pretext for prosecuting/persecuting them.
"Yet heterogeneous systems management could be a barrier to going with a provider other than Microsoft, the survey found. Respondents reported that challenges include the need to manage multiple operating systems (49%) and the need to learn a different set of management tools (50%)."
Right... exactly the same set of challenges faced by anyone trying to manage more than one version of Windows.
I've always thought that a good measure of the quality of a software ecosystem is its ability to tolerate version skew between components that would be reasonably expected to be forward-compatible. Conversely, if an ecosystem only works smoothly when everything is at exactly the right version and patch level... particularly when the right version is not the latest version, it's an indication of a combination of poor engineering and poor management.
It was a revelation to me when, circa 1991, I heard software developers in a Fortune 500 company use the word "port" to describe what they needed to do to transition software from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1.
This sort of situation is tolerated by Microsoft and other large dominant companies (including Apple, these days, within its own fiefdom of dominance) and by their customers, up to a point.
To some degree it's a win-win scenario. A homogenous environment reduces everyone's support costs, provides a smoother user experience, and allows sloppy engineering to go tolerated and unpunished. It's zero-sum with regard to the cost of keeping the whole company updated, though: that costs the customer and mostly benefits the vendor. Still, a big customer will tolerate that cost, because there's some benefit, in terms of smoother operation. True, better engineering would allow heterogenous versions to interoperate smoothly, so in theory one could have the benefit without the cost, but this is the real world, and many customers may not like the upgrade treadmill but nevertheless see as being the best option.
But there's a breaking point, and it comes if it is not really practical for the customer to go to a homogeneous system.
Clearly it's not practical for a big company to go with homogenous Windows Vista yet.
Microsoft had better have come up with something truly commendable in Vista SP1.
Well, the "stealth" antenna in the article is a huge, glowing tube. According to the article, the antenna is indeed made of "gas-filled tubes reminiscent of neon bulbs."
I wouldn't call an neon sign "essentially vanishes" when it's turned off.
There's no indication in the article that they can generate the plasma without a confining tube, but even if they could, like the Cheshire cat's grin without the cat, it would still be pretty conspicuous when it's on.
Reminds me of an old cartoon in Computerworld, back in the days when corporations had just standardized on IBM PCs and tried to prevent people from bringing in Macintoshes. An IT inspector is saying to a flunky "Desk, chair, filing cabinet, large glowing chef's hat--nope, no Macintoshes here."
...then you'll easily believe that Sir Francis Bacon encoded proof that he wrote Shakespeare's plays by having the printer of Shakespeare's plays use two very slightly different fonts of type, and encoding messages in an ASCII-like binary code in which one font of type represented the zeroes and the other represented the ones.
(No, that's not a joke. That's exactly what Ignatius L. Donnelly claimed in an 1888 book entitled The Great Cryptogram)
How can an operating system be considered "secure" if the inclusion of a third-party component makes it insecure? Why does Vista allow Macrovision's component to do whatever it likes?
Is this a case where Microsoft allowed "signing" to be a substitute for good engineering?
Even if the act of buying Windows implies that I trust Microsoft, does the act of buying Windows imply that I trust Macrovision?
When I buy a home computer with Windows on it, do I even know all of the companies that have contributed content that is included on the hard drive at the time of purchase? Do I have a list? Have I agreed to trust them all? Does Vista trust all of them? Could all them them punch holes in Vista's security if the vendors that supplied them don't have engineers as competent as Microsoft's?
What I'd like to see is a very simple source code control system, built on the same design. Perhaps one that would just serve the needs of a single programmer.
The essential thing is that it should look like a file system, with direct access to the project directories at any state in development... write access to the current version, read-access to previous versions... directly accessible to any piece of code via the normal file API.
There should be no need for copying files back and forth from a central repository to a working directory.
It should be equally friendly to text and binary files. It should not take much disk space to store versions of files that have not changed at all from one project version/label/whatever to the next. It is not necessary or desirable to store just the diffs between text files; in the year 2007 we really can afford the disk space to store an entire new source file even if only a few lines in it have changed.
It should not rely on some central database that can be a central point of failure if it gets corrupted.
It should reliably serve both the functions of version control and backup. Bells and whistles in version control are less important than backup. In particular, if it's on an external drive and the CPU fails, you should be able to plug that external drive into a new CPU and go on accessing it immediately.
To those who work on hundred-engineer projects that need full-bore version control and CASE tools and so forth, peace. I'm not talking about a one-size-fits-all solution. I'm talking about a lightweight, simple, minimalist tool that as far as I know doesn't really exist today.
I could be viewing this through the haze of nostalgia, and I can't swear that I ever took classes in or visited labs on the top floor. But. I don't think the roof leaked.
My recollection is that the famously shabby Building 20, built hastily as a temporary building during World War II and kept in service until the Stata replaced it, was a perfectly adequately functional building that did all the various things you'd expect a building to do. (That could be a sexist remark: I don't remember what the ratio of mens' to womens' bathrooms in building 20 was; they might have been unequal).
I do not remember anyone who worked in it ever complaining about it. There must have been some, but I think it was by and large very well liked by its inhabitants.
One of the things that seemed odd to me about the Stata is that it was often felt that something about Building 20 actually seemed to encourage creativity and collaborative work, and I've always wondered why MIT, Gehry at all didn't first make a serious study Building 20 to see how and why it worked before embarking on what frankly looks to me like a half-baked display of architectural egotism.
I think Building 20's lack of visual distinctiveness may have been a plus, because it did not feel as if you were living under the shadow of someone else's creativity.
Any person with even a touch of humility would have to feel intimidated by looking out the window of one of MIT's main buildings and seeing names like Newton and Lavoisier looming over them. I've never been in the Stata, but I think it would give one the impression of being subordinated to someone else's sense of play, instead of letting one free to express one's own playfulness.
...Androids will not need to mimic human appearance, skin resilience and temperature, etc. with high fidelity.
Human beings are sufficiently capable of anthropomorphizing... or empathizing... to treat even obviously non-humanoid things as human. (As witness the bonding between humans and pets).
Robots only need to be reasonably human-like in appearance and behavior, and humans will meet them more than halfway.
And, of course, and unfortunately, human beings are also capable of treating actual human beings as not human.
It's a good example of something that's gotten ingrained through familiarity. Any textbook will tell you what an OS is. Except... when you start to think about it, there aren't any terribly good reasons behind the structure and organization of traditional OSes.
The name "operating system" was invented by IBM for a software system that would automate the tasks of the human operator that preceded it: loading programs, killing programs that got caught in loops, directing device 6 output to the printer if appropriate or to a magnetic tape to be printed later on an offline 1401 if appropriate, etc. Because of IBM's dominance, "operating system" basically got defined to mean "that glop of stuff IBM thought was appropriate to bundle with their processors circa 1960."
Well, due to IBM's market dominance a generation of programmers grew up with the idea that that was the right way, the real way, the grown-up way to do things. Early microcomputers, programmed by engineers that didn't know any better--or were constrained by limited hardware resources--did "OS-like" tasks in all sorts of ways. But as the hardware became more and more capable, and in particular as disk drives became common, the cultural expectation was "let's write a real OS." Patterned basically on imitating the customary practices in the IBM or Digital Equipment Corporation or, later, UNIX worlds, depending mostly on the acculturation of the people doing the work.
There have been some innovative attempts to rethink the process; FORTH, I think (not my world, don't really know); whatever it was the Newton ran; the Canon Cat; etc. Most have gotten about as far as the Dvorak keyboard.
What seems to be happening is that the OS meme is just permanently ingrained now. Who knows what's happening in an iPod or Zune or something like that when you turn it on? I imagine these days it's a trimmed-down, fast-booting OS that doesn't take time to load and start all the stuff it doesn't use, has no general-purpose file-manipulating "shell," and boots right into a dedicated full-screen application...
It's the FCC's job to prevent radio interference. As nearly as I can tell, they haven't taken this seriously for decades, but it's still their job.
Ham radio operators always used to be told that the FCC had enforcement trucks with triangulating equipment that would locate sources of interference, and that if you didn't keep your signal clean the jackbooted FCC thugs would be rolling up to your door.
I don't know how true this ever was, but interference is becoming an increasing problem. If the FCC needs some enforcement resources to take care of it, they should ask for them and get them. The free market is fine up to a point, but we still need cops and traffic signals.
Slashdot Mirror
The press doesn't just get it. It's not the device, it's the store. With regard to the device, all they needed to do was not screw up, and by all reports they haven't.
There are two immense difference between the Kindle and all previous ventures.
First, the availability of titles is at least an order of magnitude larger than with any previous ventures. Themeans that the chances the title you want to buy is available is much higher.
In my informal personal tests a few years ago, I found that that about 3/4 of the titles in Oprah's book club books were available as audiobooks, yet less than 1/10 were available in any of the three major eBook formats (Gemstar, Microsoft LIT, Adobe) of the time.
If you are someone who buys books, as opposed to someone to whom books are sold, if you know a title you want to buy, I think your chances of buying it in Kindle format may actually be higher than at a brick-and-mortar mall bookstore, and I'm sure they're higher than at an airport bookstore. This was not true before.
Second, the people griping about the $10 pricing for recent books seem to be unaware that in all previous ventures, the publisher charged something close to the hardbound price for books that were not yet available in paper.
Do I think the $10 ($9, $8, $7) prices are fair for an electronic book? No, I do not... but, for a current hardbound bestseller, a sane person could conceivably imaging buying one. Previously, the selling proposition--hardbound pricing--was so excessively greedy as to be a deal-breaker for almost everyone.
The quirky but quite marvelous House on the Rock, a tourist attraction in Wisconsin with geek appeal, is a Barnum-like pseudo-museum that is genuinely awesome, crammed through of things many of which are not quite what they seem. You can't quite call them fakes because the management no longer makes explicit claims of much of anything. Among the marvels are numerous room-sized assemblages of automated musical instruments, automated the good old fashioned way a la player pianos and "orchestrions."
There is a suggestion that these are historical Victorian contraptions, but in fact most of them were built in by showman/architect Alex Jordan and his colleagues.
Quite a few of them feature stringed instruments, and all of them have been devised to look the way you would hope a mechanical violin-player would look: clockwork gadgetry draws a traditional bow visibly across strings. But while visually effective, they are fake; they are silent, violin-like notes being produced elsewhere from an organ or synthesizer.
The collection does include one genuine coin-operated violin playing machine, a "Violano-Virtuoso," but instead of a bow, it uses motorized rosin-covered wheels. Mechanical fingers press the strings down, producing a correct pitch but no vibrato. The sound is just as harsh, unmusical, and "mechanical" sounding as you'd expect. Unlike player pianos and carousel orchestrions, where the mechanical sound can be perceived as having a charm of its own, the Violano-Virtuoso just sounds unpleasant. Apparently, it is really difficult to get a pleasing sound by bowing a string.
Toyota's demonstration thus has added piquancy from the fact that not only is the achievement impressive, but it actually is something that people had been trying to do for about a century, without success.
Windows 3.0 used to run on machines with 512K (that's half a meg, not half a gig).
If Microsoft wants Windows to run on the XO, why should the XO be the one that has to make the accommodation?
I'm very curious to know. Are the vendors of voting machines just cynical, and believe that nobody really cares about security and that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the people who make the buying decisions?
Or do they find that the people who buying voting machines are equally cynical, and really just want cheapjack machines, paying only lip service to protecting the public that uses them?
Or, if the truth were known, are ATM machines really just as bad?
(Anyone know what the relative cost is? Judging by general appearance, size, weight, and geek guesswork, I'd think an ATM might cost $50,000 exclusive of installation, an electronic voting machine might cost $5,000, a "traditional" levers-and-counters no-electricity mechanical voting machine about the same, and a punched-card voting machine $500... anyone know the real numbers?)
I find it odd that the article doesn't identify this "secret" mailing list. Is it just wikien-l, which is not secret at all and which anyone can join? I'm not currently on it, so I don't know if the brouhaha in question surfaced there.
If it's not wikien-l, then what list is it?
Keep in mind that in those days the Internet was not supposed to be used for commercial purposes.
.com's were only supposed to be on the net as a convenience for fostering research collaboration between them and their .edu partners.
.edu to a .edu, from a .edu to a .com it had a research relationship with, or from a .com to a .edu it had a research relationship, but .com's were not supposed to exchange email directly.
In those days,
In theory, it was OK to send email from a
While this is very cool, it does bring up a pet peeve of mine: why can't devices show accurate battery life?
Currently, all battery charge indicators are wildly nonlinear and grossly inaccurate.
To be more specific. Conceptually, imagine a device that holds three small batteries instead of one large one, and drains them in succession one after the other. The battery life measurement on each battery would be somewhat imprecise, but when you'd exhausted the first battery you'd know that you really had 2/3 of the charge left; when you'd exhausted the second, you'd know that you really had 1/3 left.
Alternatively, how about a device that holds two smaller batteries and double-buffers them; that is, draws from one battery until it's exhausted, then draws from the second while allowing you to replace the first?
Yeah, should have pressed "preview."
For the record, if anyone cares: eight of the ten books on my list, were available. The list included one of the Barbara Kingsolver titles that hadn't been available for the older formats. In fact Amazon had nine of her books available for the Kindle, including two I haven't read yet.
Damn, Amazon is good.
The Kindle might make it. That's a very convincing review.
.LIT, Adobe eBook Reader, and Gemstar--no format had more than three of the books available.
It's not a hardware problem; it's never been a hardware problem. My year-2000 Rocket eBook is more than good enough to read books for pleasure. Seven years of progress is seven years; all they needed to do was not screw up, and it sounds as if they didn't.
The biggest problem by far with previous efforts was title availability. Sure, they would have an eBookstore with "thousands" of titles, and if you asked the question "is there anything there I want to read?" the answer would be "sure."
But ask the question the other way around, as someone who buys books rather than someone who is sold books. The question then becomes "is book XYZ, that I know I want to read, evenavailable?" The reviewer makes it clear that this is an important question for him, too, and that he thinks Amazon falls a little short. But only by comparison with the ideal. Comparison with earlier eBook efforts is like night and day.
Just before the "eBooks are dead" meme hit, i.e. at about the peak of the craze, I took a look at the book list for Oprah's book club. I thought that was a very fair test. They were scattered across publishers, they were not so old as to be out of print and mostly old enough to allow time for format conversion, and all of them were good books that some disinterested party thought were worth reading. I compared eBook formats and audiobook format, audiobook being an example of a non-print medium for which the conversion costs and distribution costs were far higher than for an eBook.
As I recall, of about forty-four books, something like thirty-eight of them were available as audiobooks, i.e. most of them. And a grand total of six were available in any eBook format at all. And of the three dominant eBook formats at the time--Microsoft
Now, the very first precondition of eBook success is that, darn it, the books you want need to be available. That's not sufficient, but it's necessary. The holes in title availability were huge. For example, to pick one of my favorites at random, there was nothing by Barbara Kingsolver available in any of the three formats.
On a very informal test recently in which I just listed ten books I had bought or was considering buying, I found that eight out of ten were available in Kindle format. Including nine books by Barbara Kingsolver, two of which I haven't read yet.
The second thing is price. By the way, Amazon is honest in saying most books are under $9.99. Many of them are priced a little lower, in fact. These days mass market paperbacks are costing $6.99, $7.99, $8.99 and trade paperbacks are mostly above $10. So it's fair to say Amazon is charging paperback prices, even for books that aren't out in paper. Do I think that's a good price? No, I think it's way too high. But it is much much much better than before. In the old eBook days, the uniform policy was that if the book wasn't out in paper yet, the eBook price matched the hardbound price.
I must have had a dozen conversations with strangers watching me read my Rocket eBook, and they all went the same way. Increasing interest. Not deterred by the $300 price of the device. But when they asked what the books cost and I said "Hardbound prices if the book isn't in paper," the conversation would stop dead right there and I could see their interest level plummet to zero. Maybe they didn't actually roll their eyes but it felt like it.
DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them. Can you imagine not being able to lend a book to your wife even if you each had your own device? And I am stuck with DRMed Gemstar-format content that will die when my Rocket eBook dies (and its battery life, once 20 hours, is now down to about 2). Locked to a hardware serial number in a proprietary format, and the company is bust and their servers are shut down and no customer-service people to help. So d
Oh, goodness. How can you even ask the question?
Would you believe it changed the whole basis of financial economics: everyone now "get it" that the value of stock is independent of whether the company is doing anything useful or making a profit?
Would you believe it created the dot-com revolution?
Would you believe it sparked the endless bull market and gave ordinary Americans access to the secret of wealth without work?
Would you believe it created 401(k)s growing at 20% per year and has made the average worker so resplendently rich that he couldn't care whether wages are flat?
Would you believe nobody really needs Social Security any more?
Would you believe that my used copy of "Dow 36000" is a steal at just $37.22 plus $7.95 shipping?
"Keep in mind: they might become ubiquitous over the next years."
Why should I keep that in mind? Do I need to prepare myself mentally to compete in the brave new world? Do I need to worry that people who keep in mind that these interfaces might become ubiquitous will become so much better at operating computers than me that I'll become unemployable? Where can I find a community college course on how to play 3D video games?
But, but, but: the fear factor. They might become ubiquitous over the next years. Maybe. And then again, maybe not.
What if I back the wrong horse? What if I budget three hours a day to do exercises to hone my spatial perception skills to a scalpel-like edge, only to find that the real winners are those who anticipated the rise of olfaction-based user interfaces?
Well, gotta go... time to do my PL/I programming exercises. PL/I, it's the wave of the future, y'know.
That's a very good article. The example surprised me. I thought that one would need to be much more far-fetched than he was to get the total that he gets.
It even failed to mention some potential liabilities. When he "emails his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday," the point is the infringement of the copyright of his friend who took the pictures. He doesn't pile on the possibility that the images themselves contain copyrighted team logos, or that... this is so weird that I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly, but I believe the owners of some buildings are now claiming that the appearance of the building itself is copyrighted and that photographing the buildings infringes... so the photographs might be infringing by showing the stadium itself.
What he does not mention is the spectre of selective enforcement. It is very convenient for authorities if everyone is a law-breaker, because then you always have a valid pretext for prosecuting/persecuting them.
I stopped reading the article right there.
"Yet heterogeneous systems management could be a barrier to going with a provider other than Microsoft, the survey found. Respondents reported that challenges include the need to manage multiple operating systems (49%) and the need to learn a different set of management tools (50%)."
Right... exactly the same set of challenges faced by anyone trying to manage more than one version of Windows.
I've always thought that a good measure of the quality of a software ecosystem is its ability to tolerate version skew between components that would be reasonably expected to be forward-compatible. Conversely, if an ecosystem only works smoothly when everything is at exactly the right version and patch level... particularly when the right version is not the latest version, it's an indication of a combination of poor engineering and poor management.
It was a revelation to me when, circa 1991, I heard software developers in a Fortune 500 company use the word "port" to describe what they needed to do to transition software from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1.
This sort of situation is tolerated by Microsoft and other large dominant companies (including Apple, these days, within its own fiefdom of dominance) and by their customers, up to a point.
To some degree it's a win-win scenario. A homogenous environment reduces everyone's support costs, provides a smoother user experience, and allows sloppy engineering to go tolerated and unpunished. It's zero-sum with regard to the cost of keeping the whole company updated, though: that costs the customer and mostly benefits the vendor. Still, a big customer will tolerate that cost, because there's some benefit, in terms of smoother operation. True, better engineering would allow heterogenous versions to interoperate smoothly, so in theory one could have the benefit without the cost, but this is the real world, and many customers may not like the upgrade treadmill but nevertheless see as being the best option.
But there's a breaking point, and it comes if it is not really practical for the customer to go to a homogeneous system.
Clearly it's not practical for a big company to go with homogenous Windows Vista yet.
Microsoft had better have come up with something truly commendable in Vista SP1.
...The ability of people to find new euphemisms always amazes me. I'll have to remember to use this one, it's good.
"Too bad about the Titanic, but they told us to make the maiden voyage on a sprint cycle."
"Sorry about publishing that completely wrong news story, but, you know the news business, always on a sprint cycle."
"Sorry you're not satisfied, honey, I guess I was just on a sprint cycle."
New proverb: Sprint cycles make brown waste.
Well, the "stealth" antenna in the article is a huge, glowing tube. According to the article, the antenna is indeed made of "gas-filled tubes reminiscent of neon bulbs."
I wouldn't call an neon sign "essentially vanishes" when it's turned off.
There's no indication in the article that they can generate the plasma without a confining tube, but even if they could, like the Cheshire cat's grin without the cat, it would still be pretty conspicuous when it's on.
Reminds me of an old cartoon in Computerworld, back in the days when corporations had just standardized on IBM PCs and tried to prevent people from bringing in Macintoshes. An IT inspector is saying to a flunky "Desk, chair, filing cabinet, large glowing chef's hat--nope, no Macintoshes here."
You're only paying $200 for it.
...then you'll easily believe that Sir Francis Bacon encoded proof that he wrote Shakespeare's plays by having the printer of Shakespeare's plays use two very slightly different fonts of type, and encoding messages in an ASCII-like binary code in which one font of type represented the zeroes and the other represented the ones.
(No, that's not a joke. That's exactly what Ignatius L. Donnelly claimed in an 1888 book entitled The Great Cryptogram)
How can an operating system be considered "secure" if the inclusion of a third-party component makes it insecure? Why does Vista allow Macrovision's component to do whatever it likes?
Is this a case where Microsoft allowed "signing" to be a substitute for good engineering?
Even if the act of buying Windows implies that I trust Microsoft, does the act of buying Windows imply that I trust Macrovision?
When I buy a home computer with Windows on it, do I even know all of the companies that have contributed content that is included on the hard drive at the time of purchase? Do I have a list? Have I agreed to trust them all? Does Vista trust all of them? Could all them them punch holes in Vista's security if the vendors that supplied them don't have engineers as competent as Microsoft's?
What I'd like to see is a very simple source code control system, built on the same design. Perhaps one that would just serve the needs of a single programmer.
The essential thing is that it should look like a file system, with direct access to the project directories at any state in development... write access to the current version, read-access to previous versions... directly accessible to any piece of code via the normal file API.
There should be no need for copying files back and forth from a central repository to a working directory.
It should be equally friendly to text and binary files. It should not take much disk space to store versions of files that have not changed at all from one project version/label/whatever to the next. It is not necessary or desirable to store just the diffs between text files; in the year 2007 we really can afford the disk space to store an entire new source file even if only a few lines in it have changed.
It should not rely on some central database that can be a central point of failure if it gets corrupted.
It should reliably serve both the functions of version control and backup. Bells and whistles in version control are less important than backup. In particular, if it's on an external drive and the CPU fails, you should be able to plug that external drive into a new CPU and go on accessing it immediately.
To those who work on hundred-engineer projects that need full-bore version control and CASE tools and so forth, peace. I'm not talking about a one-size-fits-all solution. I'm talking about a lightweight, simple, minimalist tool that as far as I know doesn't really exist today.
I could be viewing this through the haze of nostalgia, and I can't swear that I ever took classes in or visited labs on the top floor. But. I don't think the roof leaked.
My recollection is that the famously shabby Building 20, built hastily as a temporary building during World War II and kept in service until the Stata replaced it, was a perfectly adequately functional building that did all the various things you'd expect a building to do. (That could be a sexist remark: I don't remember what the ratio of mens' to womens' bathrooms in building 20 was; they might have been unequal).
I do not remember anyone who worked in it ever complaining about it. There must have been some, but I think it was by and large very well liked by its inhabitants.
One of the things that seemed odd to me about the Stata is that it was often felt that something about Building 20 actually seemed to encourage creativity and collaborative work, and I've always wondered why MIT, Gehry at all didn't first make a serious study Building 20 to see how and why it worked before embarking on what frankly looks to me like a half-baked display of architectural egotism.
I think Building 20's lack of visual distinctiveness may have been a plus, because it did not feel as if you were living under the shadow of someone else's creativity.
Any person with even a touch of humility would have to feel intimidated by looking out the window of one of MIT's main buildings and seeing names like Newton and Lavoisier looming over them. I've never been in the Stata, but I think it would give one the impression of being subordinated to someone else's sense of play, instead of letting one free to express one's own playfulness.
...Androids will not need to mimic human appearance, skin resilience and temperature, etc. with high fidelity.
Human beings are sufficiently capable of anthropomorphizing... or empathizing... to treat even obviously non-humanoid things as human. (As witness the bonding between humans and pets).
Robots only need to be reasonably human-like in appearance and behavior, and humans will meet them more than halfway.
And, of course, and unfortunately, human beings are also capable of treating actual human beings as not human.
It's a good example of something that's gotten ingrained through familiarity. Any textbook will tell you what an OS is. Except... when you start to think about it, there aren't any terribly good reasons behind the structure and organization of traditional OSes.
The name "operating system" was invented by IBM for a software system that would automate the tasks of the human operator that preceded it: loading programs, killing programs that got caught in loops, directing device 6 output to the printer if appropriate or to a magnetic tape to be printed later on an offline 1401 if appropriate, etc. Because of IBM's dominance, "operating system" basically got defined to mean "that glop of stuff IBM thought was appropriate to bundle with their processors circa 1960."
Well, due to IBM's market dominance a generation of programmers grew up with the idea that that was the right way, the real way, the grown-up way to do things. Early microcomputers, programmed by engineers that didn't know any better--or were constrained by limited hardware resources--did "OS-like" tasks in all sorts of ways. But as the hardware became more and more capable, and in particular as disk drives became common, the cultural expectation was "let's write a real OS." Patterned basically on imitating the customary practices in the IBM or Digital Equipment Corporation or, later, UNIX worlds, depending mostly on the acculturation of the people doing the work.
There have been some innovative attempts to rethink the process; FORTH, I think (not my world, don't really know); whatever it was the Newton ran; the Canon Cat; etc. Most have gotten about as far as the Dvorak keyboard.
What seems to be happening is that the OS meme is just permanently ingrained now. Who knows what's happening in an iPod or Zune or something like that when you turn it on? I imagine these days it's a trimmed-down, fast-booting OS that doesn't take time to load and start all the stuff it doesn't use, has no general-purpose file-manipulating "shell," and boots right into a dedicated full-screen application...
It's the FCC's job to prevent radio interference. As nearly as I can tell, they haven't taken this seriously for decades, but it's still their job.
Ham radio operators always used to be told that the FCC had enforcement trucks with triangulating equipment that would locate sources of interference, and that if you didn't keep your signal clean the jackbooted FCC thugs would be rolling up to your door.
I don't know how true this ever was, but interference is becoming an increasing problem. If the FCC needs some enforcement resources to take care of it, they should ask for them and get them. The free market is fine up to a point, but we still need cops and traffic signals.