CD players have been out for so long that people are declaring the CD itself to be dead, yet there are still people making money by manufacturing record players.
I think virtually all rhetoric about device B being a "device-A-killer," or one technology quickly displacing other, is dumb... and in many cases is promotion by supporters of the new device or technology, hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 2000, when dedicated eBook devices were introduced, one could have imagined people saying "If you're the owner of a bookstore, it may be time to start thinking about getting into a different business."
In 1950, and early adopters were inviting their friends to come over and watch Milton Berle, one could have imagined people saying "If you're the owner of a movie theatre, it may be time to start thinking about getting into a different business."
All businessmen need to be watching their back, and video rental store owners are well advised to be vigilant... the times, they certainly are a' changin'. Going out to the movies and buying overpriced boxes of Nonpareils is a different product and a different experience from watching "The Wizard of Oz" on a television set. The latter model may ultimately displace the former, but it's not at all obvious just how it will happen or at what speed or when
Similarly, downloading a movie and watching it on your PC is going to feel very different from renting a DVD. And speaking of Milton Berle on a 5" diameter round Dumont picture tube... a) who wants to watch movies "on their PCs?" b) Do you have your PC in the living room connected to a big screen? Does anybody you know? Yesyesyes I know all about the technology and Steve Job's "Apple TV" and "convergence," the big buzzword since 1990. I just don't see it actually happening yet. All these companies are selling a solution to something my son-in-law doesn't see as a big problem.
If Netflix would let you burn that movie to a DVD and carry it over to the big-screen TV set that a lot of people I know do have, then, yes, the video stores should worry a bit more. But at the moment the movie industry seems to be adamantly opposed to concepts like "permanent" and "own" and "bought it."
Furthermore, current hybrids fall down specifically on short trips.
The people that complain about their Priuses tend to be people that use them in the city for five and ten-minute trips. The Prius puts a higher priority on low emissions than on fuel efficiency. During the first five minutes or so of operation, it is most concerned with getting the engine up to operating temperature, and gets about 25-30 mpg. During the next five it gets about 40-45.
People whose typical trip length takes a half an hour or so find that their Priuses actually do get something in the (current!) EPA-rating ballpark. People who use them for five- and ten-minute trips get bummed out by getting only 35-40 mpg.
First, the EV-1 did not "fail." Most of the lessees wanted to purchase their vehicles, and GM refused to let them.
Second, that's exactly the point of "The Innovator's Dilemma." He has case study after case study of companies that said "Who wants..." e.g. a 5.25" hard drive that stores less and costs more per megabyte than the 8" drives we're making today. And what happened time after time was that someone, either a small group inside the company or, more often, a startup from engineers leaving the company, built the drive and marketed it anyway, not knowing exactly who wanted it.
In each case, they found and developed the market, and the disruptive devices improved more quickly than the mainstream devices, and eventually became competitive, not only in the new market, but in the old one as well.
You can't use an EV-1? Fine. GM shouldn't try to sell one to you. They should sell them to the people that do want them.
In the article about the Chevy Volt concept car, I ranted about why GM didn't just manufacture and market the EV-1? Most people "don't want" 2-seater cars with an 80-mile range? Fine, no problem, don't try to sell it to most people, just sell it to the few people that do.
Well, since then, I've read Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Great, great book. Everyone should read it. And I'm stunned by how perfectly the car companies are falling into the exact trap he describes. And how perfectly the electric car fits his definition of "disruptive technology." And, yes, he does talk about them in the last chapter.
Chevy and GM need to spin off a small division, a la IBM spinning off the Boca Raton PC division, to make and market an electric car. Not a future "sustaining technology" electric car that meets the needs of existing customers of gasoline cars. (Hybrids a la the Prius are a perfect example of that). Just... EV-1's, which are known to have a small market... a market which puts different values on things than the existing car market. A small spinoff for which that market is worthwhile. A spinoff that plays by its rules and doesn't need to compare the profit margin of an EV-1 with the profit margin of a Suburban, so it won't divert all its effort to building Suburbans. A small spinoff that will sell the cars to anyone it can find who will buy one, and will thereby find the new market for them.
Then, over time, the existing business for currently feasible small EVs will result in learning curve improvements, economies of scale, better batteries, longer ranges, bigger vehicles and suddenly one day the mainstream buyer will notice that the electrics _are_ competitive for the traditional market.
Yes, I know... you can tell that I've just read Christensen's book. Which has been out for a decade. But judging from the big carmakers, I'm not the only one who hasn't read it.
Just do it, Detroit. Stop fooling around with the concept cars, the great stuff that's always been just around the corner since 1939. Don't build a prototype of tomorrow's car, build a real car, now, and sell it, today.
Just start up the EV-1 line and build some more. Just like the last. Then sell them. Then build some that are a little better. Then sell them. And s on.
But, fortunately, each version of Word seems to do an equally bad job of rendering previous versions of its own "standard."
I was in a meeting once that got a little heated. Notes had been circulated in advance by the presenter, as Word attachments to email. After some puzzling exchanges, it became clear that one recipient was on the verge of anger because the presenter had apparently failed to include the key information, the discussion of which was the purpose of the meeting.
Finally the presenter said, "But, but, but, it's all in the table on page 2."
The recipient said, "Yeah, right--but all the important entries are... BLANK!" There were murmurs of "hear, hear" from others. Then someone piped up and said "What do you mean blank? They're not blank in my copy."
About half the attendees had good copies; half had copies where the important table entries appeared blank.
The odd part is that the presenter and the recipients with blank tables were all using identical version numbers of Word and of Windows. Some other recipients, also using the same versions of Word and Windows, had accurate copies.
It turned out that a) if the contents of a table cell were too large to fit in the cell, instead of displaying a clipped or truncated version of the text--as anyone would expect--Word simply rendered the cell contents as perfect and absolute blank. Had you known this was happening, you could have edited the table to widen the column, causing the text magically to appear... but who would have guessed this was happening? b) In order to render the table properly, the recipient needed not only to have the same version of Word and of Windows, as the sender, and not only all of the fonts used by the sender, but needed to have his screen set to the same resolution!
I am not really sure how large organizations manage to tolerate Word. I suppose they must be willing to upgrade the entire desktop configuration--Windows, Word, fonts, screen size and all--of everyone in the company all at the exact same time.
P. S. Annoyingly enough, the presenter at one point suggested that all the problems were probably being experienced by Mac users. Fortuitously, as it happened none of the Mac users in fact had experienced problems. This was not a result of intrinsic Mac superiority, just an illustration that Microsoft incompetence strikes utterly at random and is not always directed by Machivellian Redmond strategy.
P. P. S. Yes, this was some years ago. No, I have no idea whether Microsoft has fixed this in current versions. I'm personally running Office 98 under Classic and won't upgrade until I'm forced to. I've spend way too much money on Microsoft "upgrades" that add some spiffy new features, a lot of bling, gratuitously change the shortcuts and screen locations of every functions, while failing to fix any of the actual bugs that drive me nuts. If anyone has a tutorial on how to edit numbered lists and bullet lists in a long document without changes in one list causing dozens of incomprehensible changes to other totally unrelated lists throughout the document, please let me know...
A few years back I made a big push to try to save money by using rechargeable batteries. I gave up on them. Here are my personal experiences. Your mileage may vary.
--How well devices on 1.2V rechargeable batteries varies a lot from one device to another. Some work just fine. Quite a few work poorly enough to be a nuisance. Conventional incandescent-bulb flashlights, for example, sort of work but are distinctly dim and yellowish. Many motorized devices are noticeably weak and lethargic. You can't really tell how well a device will work until you try it. And then you need to keep mental track of which devices you can use the rechargeables in. I had a cassette recorder that would play OK on 1.2V batteries, but when recording it didn't have quite enough power to hold the recording speed steady and the recordings would have some "wow" and unevenness to them.
--Rechargeables store distinctly less energy, i.e. don't last anywhere near as long on a single charge as a disposable. This creates a large nuisance factor. Even if the device is only going to be used at home, it means that if you have devices that take N disposable batteries, you will need considerably more than N rechargeables, and probably more charges than you thought, in order to have freshly charged batteries always ready to swap in.
--The nuisance factor of storing less energy is considerable. If my wife takes her camera on a vacation, she can put in an (expensive) disposable lithium at the start and that's it, she's set, no charger to drag along.
--Rechargeables lose energy if not kept in the charger. This means you can't just keep a drawerful of freshly-charged batteries available.
--Rechargeables die fairly quickly, typically in about two years. And suffer reduced capacity as they age. Yes, they do this no matter how anal you are about following whatever your favorite superstitious battery-care ritual ([always|never] discharge them completely before recharging, [do|don't] just leave them continuously charging in the charger, etc.) Individual batteries have enormous individual variation in their useful life. You can have two "C" batteries bought in the same package at the same time and one may suddenly crap out in a year, the other may be going strong after four... which makes the management problem more complicated.
ACTUAL USEFUL TIP: In my experience, smaller rechargeables were very consistently worse in terms of premature failure. AA's were terrible. D's were pretty good.
--It is like pulling teeth to get a manufacturer to replace a rechargeable battery that has failed "early." They know darn well the products aren't long-lived and will not just happily replace them on your say-so.
--Because of the various factors mentioned, you cannot just replace all the alkaline disposables in your house with rechargeables, so you still need to have a drawerful of alkaline D's, C's, AA's, and AAA's as well as finding space for a charger or two and another outlet strip and so forth.
--Because rechargeables require a certain amount of attention... what does it mean when the charger is showing a flashing red light? a steady green light? etc... and because so many of us develop our own personal rituals ("the charger on the left is with the charged batteries that are ready for use and just being kept topped up...") you can't really share rechargeables with other family members—even adult members, certainly not kids—except on the basis of "every time you need a battery come see me."
--Because the rechargeable batteries themselves are expensive, and because the chargers are expensive (and because it's never completely clear whether it's safe to use any charger other than the one designed specifically for the specific batteries) and because the batteries tend to fail in a few years, it is not at all clear that you actually save money using them in a general way.
Obviously, if you have a battery-hungry device that you use all the time that runs fine off 1.2V rechargeables... say one that you use so often that you replace the batteries every week... you may save money.
The only apparent benefit I can see to Apple from DRM would be if Apple somehow used it for prevent iPod owners from getting music anywhere else but the iTunes store. But Apple doesn't do this.
Why wouldn't Apple be perfectly happy to sell UNprotected AAC's or MP3's through the iTune store if the music publishers would let them? (Heck, it might even reduce the load on their servers, since I believe the FairPlay DRM has to be embedded into the file on-the-fly uniquely for every download).
Apple doesn't lock down Mac OS X with copy protection schemes or activation, either. And even though Mac OS X runs on Macs, Mac OS X _upgrades_ are a significant source of revenue to them.
Apple is control-freaky about a lot of things, but I see no evidence at all they they're into DRM for DRM's sake.
Nuclear waste has always been the problem that advocates sweep under the rug by handwaving, or empty promises ("The Federal Government will be disposing all that waste by 1998.") In order for waste disposal to sound feasible, advocates are forced into the position of pretending to know things nobody knows and understand things nobody understands.
We barely know how to build structures or institutions that last for a few hundred years. Nobody has a clue as to how to build a nuclear waste disposal facility that will last twenty-four thousand years... or stay funded for twenty-four thousand years.
Predict what's going to happen over the next twenty-four thousand years? We're lucky if we can predict the weather a week from today.
This is, of course, what MUMPS advocates have been saying for years.
MUMPS is a very peculiar language that is very "politically incorrect" in terms of current language fashion. Its development has been entirely governed by pragmatic real-world requirements. It is one of the purest examples of an "application programming" language. It gets no respect from academics or theoreticians.
Its biggest strength is its built-in "globals," which are multidimensional sparse arrays. These arrays and the elements in them are automatically created simply by referring to them. The array indices are arbitrary strings. There can be an arbitrary number of subscripts and the same array can have elements with different numbers of subscripts. Oh, and they're always sorted automatically; each element is created automatically in its proper sequence, and there are fundamental operators for traversing arrays in sequence.
"Global" arrays are persistent across sessions, are stored on the disk, and as in ordinary practice can be hundreds of megabytes in size.
Before you say "this can all be done simply by writing a C++ class," I have to mention the important point, which is that the use of the globals is so intrinsic to the ordinary way MUMPS is really used in practice, that successful implementions of MUMPS must and in practice do make the implementation of globals efficient.
You really can just use "globals" all the time for everything. They work well enough that you don't need to reserve their use for when they're really needed. They're not a luxury. MUMPS programmers rarely use files, except for interchange in and out of the MUMPS universe. Within MUMPS, data is simply kept in globals; it's just the MUMPS way.
"Globals" are extremely flexible and lend themselves naturally to representations of real-world databases. These representations are typically one-off, ad-hoc representations designed by the programmer, who needs to make up-front decisions about the hierarchical organization in which the data will be stored, and writes special-purpose code to perform the accesses. Naturally, this sounds like the dark ages compared to relational technology, but there is an impressive tradeoff. If MUMPS fits the application, development times are short, and performance is dramatically better than for relational systems.
Whether or not this is important in the year 2006, it was very clear a decade ago when medium-scale database applications were typically hosted on minicomputers, that the same hardware resources could support several times as many users running a MUMPS application as a similar application implemented with a relational database, as various organizations found when they converted... in either direction.
Of course relational systems can and are implemented on top of MUMPS.
MUMPS underlies InterSystems' Cache product, and a MUMPS-like language with historical connections to MUMPS underlies the products of Meditech. I'm not sure what the current status of Pick is, but it has some similarities. The company I currently work for has nothing whatsoever to do with either system... except that our business IT system happens to be Pick-based.
Regardless of whether you think of MUMPS itself, there are almost certainly lessons to be learned from the durability of this language and its effectiveness.
So, the choices available to early-adopter, influential, enthusiasts who want to trick out their home theatre with the latest and spiffiest gear, including a PC with Vista, are:
--Use an analog connection and get screwed in 2010 when discs with ICT come out, or
Microsoft designed Vista, Microsoft largely "designed" the Vista hardware requirements, Microsoft is responsible for the complex web of interdependencies that prevent current disks from playing on current digitally-interface displays.
I simply outright do not believe that U. S. law requires Microsoft to prevent the owner of a legally-purchased DVD U.S.-region HD-DVD from displaying that content for on the owner's legally-purchased video display.
I think what you are saying is that Microsoft intended to implement the requirements of the law, but incorrectly designed their system in such a way that it goes beyond the requirements of the law.
The article was not about analog gear, it was about new high-end gear with digital outputs. And you (and Marsh) are saying that current disks will not play on these systems now, not that starting in 2010 they won't play.
Microsoft's representative could easily have chosen to say "In the future, by the year 2010, HD DVD and Blu-ray disks will certainly require such protection."
What he DID say according to TFA was "At the moment HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs certainly require such protection."
I don't know why he would be misinformed, or why, given the importance of this issue to Microsoft, he would be less than careful about what he said.
Most likely, current disks really don't play, because of some complexity in the interaction between Vista's DRM software and hardware that results in an illogical and unintended consequence.
If current disks will play, why on earth wouldn't he have taken great pains to say so and to stress the point.
I have to admit that even though Peter Gutmann is a respected computer security expert while I know virtually nothing about Vista, I was inclined to think his analysis just had to be wrong. He had to be misunderstanding something, or positing a hypothetical situation that would never arise with real-world commercial gear, or something like that. Microsoft simply couldn't be that stupid.
Now it turns out that he's right, and that presumably-unintended but not-unforeseeable consequences of Vista's DRM scheme will prevent it from being used in the one way you'd think Microsoft would most want it to be used. It is precisely the enthusiastic with money to devote to their video hobby who are likely to be the early adopters of PCs as home video platforms.
Microsoft is coming perilously close to providing the platform that secures protected perfectly content by preventing _anyone_ from viewing it.
This is the biggest threat to Wikipedia I've heard in a long time.
If Wikipedia content is used to determine whether a message is spam, suddenly there is a direct incentive to spammers to add spam-related content to Wikipedia.
GM, just start building EV-1's again. Stop with this "always four years away" nonsense. Just get started. You already have a feasible, marketable car. Just start building it and marketing it.
The EV-1's were by all accounts practical, peppy, fun to drive, reliable, the lease terms were affordable, and when the leases expired the lessees wanted to buy them, and they had a waiting list a mile long of people who wanted them.
The R&D has already been amortized. What's this fixation with needing a 400-mile range? Sure, plenty of people do. Don't try to sell them an electric car. Sell electric cars to the people who don't. Duh. Sell convertibles to the people who want convertibles, sell trucks to the people who want trucks, and sell EV-1's to the people who want EV-1's.
Just get started. Get the things on the market. Get the charging stations in place. Sell cars with an 80-mile range this year, then two years from now bring out models with improved batteries and a 120-mile range, or whatever.
It was slightly irrelevant to my already overwrought rant, so I didn't give the full story about how I recently got interrupted _five_ times while trying to pay for my groceries.
First, to ask for my Shaw's card. (I presented it).
Second, to ask whether I wanted to buy a card shaped like a pumpkin and donate $1 to some charity. (I accepted).
Third, to ask whether I had some kind of promotional game card in which my supermarket purchases would entitle me to paste stickers onto a sort of Candyland map with the eventual goal of obtaining a free turkey. (I declined, causing a further forty-five-second delay as the clerk could not tolerate the idea of someone passing up the possibility of getting something for free, and felt obliged, in my own interest, to explain the deal to me several times).
Fourth, to ask whether I wanted to buy the week's X-Treme Value, ten bottles of Ex-Pel sports water fortified with urea or something like that for just $10, regular price $1.29 each. (I declined. I've yet to see anyone accept. This, at least, is always a short interruption as the salespeople, obviously smarting from repeated rejection, make the request in a half-hearted, perfunctory way. I've never yet had one of them actually say "You don't want to buy this weeks X-Treme Value item, do you?" but it's only a matter of time.)
Fifth, to remind me, when asked whether the total is OK, not to push the Yes button, but to push the green Enter button instead. (This has not always been true. It started... ummm... about a year ago. I keep wondering why they don't just fix it...)
There are ads on the back and on the front inside of the shopping cart. There are ads on the floor that I walk on, while trying to manuever my cart around instrusive stands of featured products placed so as to block the aisle. Hanging off shelves in the aisle are little machines with bright blinking LEDs ready to dispense coupons for products. Flat-panel TV sets with sound hang near the meat section, running a continuous informercial. Another TV set with sound hangs above the cash register in the checkout line, running a different infomercial.
As I check out, the process is interrupted by the cashier asking whether I want to buy their X-Treme Value of the Week, which is stacked near the cash register with an ad on it, and hands me two long slips of paper: a receipt, and a bunch of ads and coupons. These latter are "highly targeted," alright: they are always for competing brands of products I just bought.
Can I "imagine getting highly relevant messages, without even pressing a button, simply because you are in the vicinity and your preferences match the content of the post?"
Yes, I can.
And I know exactly kind of messages they'll be.
And I betcha a nickel those preferences will be opt-out.
Unless you can get millions of people to do this en masse, this does more harm than good. It gives Dell and Microsoft a perfect opportunity to say:
"Anyone can return Windows for a refund. (Naturally we take just a few simple, reasonable precautions to ensure that people don't abuse the process.) Of umpteen godzillion copies of Windows bundled with Dell PCs last year, Dell's records show that the total number returned for a refund is... twenty-two[or whatever the number is].
This proves what we've been saying all along. Virtually everyone loves Windows, nobody really minds paying for it. Of the reported 5% [or whatever it is] of Dell customers using Linux, obviously the vast, vast majority of them also enjoying the copy of WIndows that came with their PC and think it is worth far, far more than $52.50.
It also shows, as we've been saying all along, that there's absolutely no need to make available PCs that are not preloaded with Windows. Anyone that doesn't want it can return it, as is proved by the twenty-two who did. Clearly it's not worth the effort of generating an extra SKU just to serve twenty-two eccentrics."
Slashdot Mirror
How refreshing to read something about the Zune by a real consumer who actually has one and is saying things that have the ring of truth to them.
(It doesn't bother you that everything you've bought will go poof if you don't keep paying $15 every month?)
"And when the CD came out, one could have imagined people saying "If you're in the record player manufacturing business..."
Look at this and this and this.
CD players have been out for so long that people are declaring the CD itself to be dead, yet there are still people making money by manufacturing record players.
I think virtually all rhetoric about device B being a "device-A-killer," or one technology quickly displacing other, is dumb... and in many cases is promotion by supporters of the new device or technology, hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 2000, when dedicated eBook devices were introduced, one could have imagined people saying "If you're the owner of a bookstore, it may be time to start thinking about getting into a different business."
In 1950, and early adopters were inviting their friends to come over and watch Milton Berle, one could have imagined people saying "If you're the owner of a movie theatre, it may be time to start thinking about getting into a different business."
All businessmen need to be watching their back, and video rental store owners are well advised to be vigilant... the times, they certainly are a' changin'. Going out to the movies and buying overpriced boxes of Nonpareils is a different product and a different experience from watching "The Wizard of Oz" on a television set. The latter model may ultimately displace the former, but it's not at all obvious just how it will happen or at what speed or when
Similarly, downloading a movie and watching it on your PC is going to feel very different from renting a DVD. And speaking of Milton Berle on a 5" diameter round Dumont picture tube... a) who wants to watch movies "on their PCs?" b) Do you have your PC in the living room connected to a big screen? Does anybody you know? Yesyesyes I know all about the technology and Steve Job's "Apple TV" and "convergence," the big buzzword since 1990. I just don't see it actually happening yet. All these companies are selling a solution to something my son-in-law doesn't see as a big problem.
If Netflix would let you burn that movie to a DVD and carry it over to the big-screen TV set that a lot of people I know do have, then, yes, the video stores should worry a bit more. But at the moment the movie industry seems to be adamantly opposed to concepts like "permanent" and "own" and "bought it."
Furthermore, current hybrids fall down specifically on short trips.
The people that complain about their Priuses tend to be people that use them in the city for five and ten-minute trips. The Prius puts a higher priority on low emissions than on fuel efficiency. During the first five minutes or so of operation, it is most concerned with getting the engine up to operating temperature, and gets about 25-30 mpg. During the next five it gets about 40-45.
People whose typical trip length takes a half an hour or so find that their Priuses actually do get something in the (current!) EPA-rating ballpark. People who use them for five- and ten-minute trips get bummed out by getting only 35-40 mpg.
First, the EV-1 did not "fail." Most of the lessees wanted to purchase their vehicles, and GM refused to let them.
Second, that's exactly the point of "The Innovator's Dilemma." He has case study after case study of companies that said "Who wants..." e.g. a 5.25" hard drive that stores less and costs more per megabyte than the 8" drives we're making today. And what happened time after time was that someone, either a small group inside the company or, more often, a startup from engineers leaving the company, built the drive and marketed it anyway, not knowing exactly who wanted it.
In each case, they found and developed the market, and the disruptive devices improved more quickly than the mainstream devices, and eventually became competitive, not only in the new market, but in the old one as well.
You can't use an EV-1? Fine. GM shouldn't try to sell one to you. They should sell them to the people that do want them.
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Epitaph of John Keats, 1795-1821, on his tombstone in the Protestant Cemetary in Rome.
In the article about the Chevy Volt concept car, I ranted about why GM didn't just manufacture and market the EV-1? Most people "don't want" 2-seater cars with an 80-mile range? Fine, no problem, don't try to sell it to most people, just sell it to the few people that do.
Well, since then, I've read Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Great, great book. Everyone should read it. And I'm stunned by how perfectly the car companies are falling into the exact trap he describes. And how perfectly the electric car fits his definition of "disruptive technology." And, yes, he does talk about them in the last chapter.
Chevy and GM need to spin off a small division, a la IBM spinning off the Boca Raton PC division, to make and market an electric car. Not a future "sustaining technology" electric car that meets the needs of existing customers of gasoline cars. (Hybrids a la the Prius are a perfect example of that). Just... EV-1's, which are known to have a small market... a market which puts different values on things than the existing car market. A small spinoff for which that market is worthwhile. A spinoff that plays by its rules and doesn't need to compare the profit margin of an EV-1 with the profit margin of a Suburban, so it won't divert all its effort to building Suburbans. A small spinoff that will sell the cars to anyone it can find who will buy one, and will thereby find the new market for them.
Then, over time, the existing business for currently feasible small EVs will result in learning curve improvements, economies of scale, better batteries, longer ranges, bigger vehicles and suddenly one day the mainstream buyer will notice that the electrics _are_ competitive for the traditional market.
Yes, I know... you can tell that I've just read Christensen's book. Which has been out for a decade. But judging from the big carmakers, I'm not the only one who hasn't read it.
Just do it, Detroit. Stop fooling around with the concept cars, the great stuff that's always been just around the corner since 1939. Don't build a prototype of tomorrow's car, build a real car, now, and sell it, today.
Just start up the EV-1 line and build some more. Just like the last. Then sell them. Then build some that are a little better. Then sell them. And s on.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
But, fortunately, each version of Word seems to do an equally bad job of rendering previous versions of its own "standard."
I was in a meeting once that got a little heated. Notes had been circulated in advance by the presenter, as Word attachments to email. After some puzzling exchanges, it became clear that one recipient was on the verge of anger because the presenter had apparently failed to include the key information, the discussion of which was the purpose of the meeting.
Finally the presenter said, "But, but, but, it's all in the table on page 2."
The recipient said, "Yeah, right--but all the important entries are... BLANK!" There were murmurs of "hear, hear" from others. Then someone piped up and said "What do you mean blank? They're not blank in my copy."
About half the attendees had good copies; half had copies where the important table entries appeared blank.
The odd part is that the presenter and the recipients with blank tables were all using identical version numbers of Word and of Windows. Some other recipients, also using the same versions of Word and Windows, had accurate copies.
It turned out that a) if the contents of a table cell were too large to fit in the cell, instead of displaying a clipped or truncated version of the text--as anyone would expect--Word simply rendered the cell contents as perfect and absolute blank. Had you known this was happening, you could have edited the table to widen the column, causing the text magically to appear... but who would have guessed this was happening? b) In order to render the table properly, the recipient needed not only to have the same version of Word and of Windows, as the sender, and not only all of the fonts used by the sender, but needed to have his screen set to the same resolution!
I am not really sure how large organizations manage to tolerate Word. I suppose they must be willing to upgrade the entire desktop configuration--Windows, Word, fonts, screen size and all--of everyone in the company all at the exact same time.
P. S. Annoyingly enough, the presenter at one point suggested that all the problems were probably being experienced by Mac users. Fortuitously, as it happened none of the Mac users in fact had experienced problems. This was not a result of intrinsic Mac superiority, just an illustration that Microsoft incompetence strikes utterly at random and is not always directed by Machivellian Redmond strategy.
P. P. S. Yes, this was some years ago. No, I have no idea whether Microsoft has fixed this in current versions. I'm personally running Office 98 under Classic and won't upgrade until I'm forced to. I've spend way too much money on Microsoft "upgrades" that add some spiffy new features, a lot of bling, gratuitously change the shortcuts and screen locations of every functions, while failing to fix any of the actual bugs that drive me nuts. If anyone has a tutorial on how to edit numbered lists and bullet lists in a long document without changes in one list causing dozens of incomprehensible changes to other totally unrelated lists throughout the document, please let me know...
A few years back I made a big push to try to save money by using rechargeable batteries. I gave up on them. Here are my personal experiences. Your mileage may vary.
--How well devices on 1.2V rechargeable batteries varies a lot from one device to another. Some work just fine. Quite a few work poorly enough to be a nuisance. Conventional incandescent-bulb flashlights, for example, sort of work but are distinctly dim and yellowish. Many motorized devices are noticeably weak and lethargic. You can't really tell how well a device will work until you try it. And then you need to keep mental track of which devices you can use the rechargeables in. I had a cassette recorder that would play OK on 1.2V batteries, but when recording it didn't have quite enough power to hold the recording speed steady and the recordings would have some "wow" and unevenness to them.
--Rechargeables store distinctly less energy, i.e. don't last anywhere near as long on a single charge as a disposable. This creates a large nuisance factor. Even if the device is only going to be used at home, it means that if you have devices that take N disposable batteries, you will need considerably more than N rechargeables, and probably more charges than you thought, in order to have freshly charged batteries always ready to swap in.
--The nuisance factor of storing less energy is considerable. If my wife takes her camera on a vacation, she can put in an (expensive) disposable lithium at the start and that's it, she's set, no charger to drag along.
--Rechargeables lose energy if not kept in the charger. This means you can't just keep a drawerful of freshly-charged batteries available.
--Rechargeables die fairly quickly, typically in about two years. And suffer reduced capacity as they age. Yes, they do this no matter how anal you are about following whatever your favorite superstitious battery-care ritual ([always|never] discharge them completely before recharging, [do|don't] just leave them continuously charging in the charger, etc.) Individual batteries have enormous individual variation in their useful life. You can have two "C" batteries bought in the same package at the same time and one may suddenly crap out in a year, the other may be going strong after four... which makes the management problem more complicated.
ACTUAL USEFUL TIP: In my experience, smaller rechargeables were very consistently worse in terms of premature failure. AA's were terrible. D's were pretty good.
--It is like pulling teeth to get a manufacturer to replace a rechargeable battery that has failed "early." They know darn well the products aren't long-lived and will not just happily replace them on your say-so.
--Because of the various factors mentioned, you cannot just replace all the alkaline disposables in your house with rechargeables, so you still need to have a drawerful of alkaline D's, C's, AA's, and AAA's as well as finding space for a charger or two and another outlet strip and so forth.
--Because rechargeables require a certain amount of attention... what does it mean when the charger is showing a flashing red light? a steady green light? etc... and because so many of us develop our own personal rituals ("the charger on the left is with the charged batteries that are ready for use and just being kept topped up...") you can't really share rechargeables with other family members—even adult members, certainly not kids—except on the basis of "every time you need a battery come see me."
--Because the rechargeable batteries themselves are expensive, and because the chargers are expensive (and because it's never completely clear whether it's safe to use any charger other than the one designed specifically for the specific batteries) and because the batteries tend to fail in a few years, it is not at all clear that you actually save money using them in a general way.
Obviously, if you have a battery-hungry device that you use all the time that runs fine off 1.2V rechargeables... say one that you use so often that you replace the batteries every week... you may save money.
This just doesn't make any sense to me at all.
The only apparent benefit I can see to Apple from DRM would be if Apple somehow used it for prevent iPod owners from getting music anywhere else but the iTunes store. But Apple doesn't do this.
Why wouldn't Apple be perfectly happy to sell UNprotected AAC's or MP3's through the iTune store if the music publishers would let them? (Heck, it might even reduce the load on their servers, since I believe the FairPlay DRM has to be embedded into the file on-the-fly uniquely for every download).
Apple doesn't lock down Mac OS X with copy protection schemes or activation, either. And even though Mac OS X runs on Macs, Mac OS X _upgrades_ are a significant source of revenue to them.
Apple is control-freaky about a lot of things, but I see no evidence at all they they're into DRM for DRM's sake.
Nuclear waste has always been the problem that advocates sweep under the rug by handwaving, or empty promises ("The Federal Government will be disposing all that waste by 1998.") In order for waste disposal to sound feasible, advocates are forced into the position of pretending to know things nobody knows and understand things nobody understands.
We barely know how to build structures or institutions that last for a few hundred years. Nobody has a clue as to how to build a nuclear waste disposal facility that will last twenty-four thousand years... or stay funded for twenty-four thousand years.
Predict what's going to happen over the next twenty-four thousand years? We're lucky if we can predict the weather a week from today.
It makes the Clock of the Long Now look trivial by comparison.
This is, of course, what MUMPS advocates have been saying for years.
MUMPS is a very peculiar language that is very "politically incorrect" in terms of current language fashion. Its development has been entirely governed by pragmatic real-world requirements. It is one of the purest examples of an "application programming" language. It gets no respect from academics or theoreticians.
Its biggest strength is its built-in "globals," which are multidimensional sparse arrays. These arrays and the elements in them are automatically created simply by referring to them. The array indices are arbitrary strings. There can be an arbitrary number of subscripts and the same array can have elements with different numbers of subscripts. Oh, and they're always sorted automatically; each element is created automatically in its proper sequence, and there are fundamental operators for traversing arrays in sequence.
"Global" arrays are persistent across sessions, are stored on the disk, and as in ordinary practice can be hundreds of megabytes in size.
Before you say "this can all be done simply by writing a C++ class," I have to mention the important point, which is that the use of the globals is so intrinsic to the ordinary way MUMPS is really used in practice, that successful implementions of MUMPS must and in practice do make the implementation of globals efficient.
You really can just use "globals" all the time for everything. They work well enough that you don't need to reserve their use for when they're really needed. They're not a luxury. MUMPS programmers rarely use files, except for interchange in and out of the MUMPS universe. Within MUMPS, data is simply kept in globals; it's just the MUMPS way.
"Globals" are extremely flexible and lend themselves naturally to representations of real-world databases. These representations are typically one-off, ad-hoc representations designed by the programmer, who needs to make up-front decisions about the hierarchical organization in which the data will be stored, and writes special-purpose code to perform the accesses. Naturally, this sounds like the dark ages compared to relational technology, but there is an impressive tradeoff. If MUMPS fits the application, development times are short, and performance is dramatically better than for relational systems.
Whether or not this is important in the year 2006, it was very clear a decade ago when medium-scale database applications were typically hosted on minicomputers, that the same hardware resources could support several times as many users running a MUMPS application as a similar application implemented with a relational database, as various organizations found when they converted... in either direction.
Of course relational systems can and are implemented on top of MUMPS.
MUMPS underlies InterSystems' Cache product, and a MUMPS-like language with historical connections to MUMPS underlies the products of Meditech. I'm not sure what the current status of Pick is, but it has some similarities. The company I currently work for has nothing whatsoever to do with either system... except that our business IT system happens to be Pick-based.
Regardless of whether you think of MUMPS itself, there are almost certainly lessons to be learned from the durability of this language and its effectiveness.
So, the choices available to early-adopter, influential, enthusiasts who want to trick out their home theatre with the latest and spiffiest gear, including a PC with Vista, are:
--Use an analog connection and get screwed in 2010 when discs with ICT come out, or
--Use a digital connection, and get screwed now.
Sounds like a winning formula to me.
Microsoft designed Vista, Microsoft largely "designed" the Vista hardware requirements, Microsoft is responsible for the complex web of interdependencies that prevent current disks from playing on current digitally-interface displays.
I simply outright do not believe that U. S. law requires Microsoft to prevent the owner of a legally-purchased DVD U.S.-region HD-DVD from displaying that content for on the owner's legally-purchased video display.
I think what you are saying is that Microsoft intended to implement the requirements of the law, but incorrectly designed their system in such a way that it goes beyond the requirements of the law.
The article was not about analog gear, it was about new high-end gear with digital outputs. And you (and Marsh) are saying that current disks will not play on these systems now, not that starting in 2010 they won't play.
Microsoft's representative could easily have chosen to say "In the future, by the year 2010, HD DVD and Blu-ray disks will certainly require such protection."
What he DID say according to TFA was "At the moment HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs certainly require such protection."
I don't know why he would be misinformed, or why, given the importance of this issue to Microsoft, he would be less than careful about what he said.
Most likely, current disks really don't play, because of some complexity in the interaction between Vista's DRM software and hardware that results in an illogical and unintended consequence.
If current disks will play, why on earth wouldn't he have taken great pains to say so and to stress the point.
...because TFA says that according to Marsh, "At the moment HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs certainly require such protection."
"At the moment" are his words. He could have said "in the future" but he said "at the moment."
... it is not an adequate defense for them to say they were "just following orders."
Mind-boggling.
I have to admit that even though Peter Gutmann is a respected computer security expert while I know virtually nothing about Vista, I was inclined to think his analysis just had to be wrong. He had to be misunderstanding something, or positing a hypothetical situation that would never arise with real-world commercial gear, or something like that. Microsoft simply couldn't be that stupid.
Now it turns out that he's right, and that presumably-unintended but not-unforeseeable consequences of Vista's DRM scheme will prevent it from being used in the one way you'd think Microsoft would most want it to be used. It is precisely the enthusiastic with money to devote to their video hobby who are likely to be the early adopters of PCs as home video platforms.
Microsoft is coming perilously close to providing the platform that secures protected perfectly content by preventing _anyone_ from viewing it.
This is the biggest threat to Wikipedia I've heard in a long time.
If Wikipedia content is used to determine whether a message is spam, suddenly there is a direct incentive to spammers to add spam-related content to Wikipedia.
GM, just start building EV-1's again. Stop with this "always four years away" nonsense. Just get started. You already have a feasible, marketable car. Just start building it and marketing it.
The EV-1's were by all accounts practical, peppy, fun to drive, reliable, the lease terms were affordable, and when the leases expired the lessees wanted to buy them, and they had a waiting list a mile long of people who wanted them.
The R&D has already been amortized. What's this fixation with needing a 400-mile range? Sure, plenty of people do. Don't try to sell them an electric car. Sell electric cars to the people who don't. Duh. Sell convertibles to the people who want convertibles, sell trucks to the people who want trucks, and sell EV-1's to the people who want EV-1's.
Just get started. Get the things on the market. Get the charging stations in place. Sell cars with an 80-mile range this year, then two years from now bring out models with improved batteries and a 120-mile range, or whatever.
It was slightly irrelevant to my already overwrought rant, so I didn't give the full story about how I recently got interrupted _five_ times while trying to pay for my groceries.
First, to ask for my Shaw's card. (I presented it).
Second, to ask whether I wanted to buy a card shaped like a pumpkin and donate $1 to some charity. (I accepted).
Third, to ask whether I had some kind of promotional game card in which my supermarket purchases would entitle me to paste stickers onto a sort of Candyland map with the eventual goal of obtaining a free turkey. (I declined, causing a further forty-five-second delay as the clerk could not tolerate the idea of someone passing up the possibility of getting something for free, and felt obliged, in my own interest, to explain the deal to me several times).
Fourth, to ask whether I wanted to buy the week's X-Treme Value, ten bottles of Ex-Pel sports water fortified with urea or something like that for just $10, regular price $1.29 each. (I declined. I've yet to see anyone accept. This, at least, is always a short interruption as the salespeople, obviously smarting from repeated rejection, make the request in a half-hearted, perfunctory way. I've never yet had one of them actually say "You don't want to buy this weeks X-Treme Value item, do you?" but it's only a matter of time.)
Fifth, to remind me, when asked whether the total is OK, not to push the Yes button, but to push the green Enter button instead. (This has not always been true. It started... ummm... about a year ago. I keep wondering why they don't just fix it...)
(Yawn) Death of the internet, ho hum.
It already died. In 1996. Bob Metcalfe said so, didn't he?
There are ads on the back and on the front inside of the shopping cart. There are ads on the floor that I walk on, while trying to manuever my cart around instrusive stands of featured products placed so as to block the aisle. Hanging off shelves in the aisle are little machines with bright blinking LEDs ready to dispense coupons for products. Flat-panel TV sets with sound hang near the meat section, running a continuous informercial. Another TV set with sound hangs above the cash register in the checkout line, running a different infomercial.
As I check out, the process is interrupted by the cashier asking whether I want to buy their X-Treme Value of the Week, which is stacked near the cash register with an ad on it, and hands me two long slips of paper: a receipt, and a bunch of ads and coupons. These latter are "highly targeted," alright: they are always for competing brands of products I just bought.
Can I "imagine getting highly relevant messages, without even pressing a button, simply because you are in the vicinity and your preferences match the content of the post?"
Yes, I can.
And I know exactly kind of messages they'll be.
And I betcha a nickel those preferences will be opt-out.
Unless you can get millions of people to do this en masse, this does more harm than good. It gives Dell and Microsoft a perfect opportunity to say:
"Anyone can return Windows for a refund. (Naturally we take just a few simple, reasonable precautions to ensure that people don't abuse the process.) Of umpteen godzillion copies of Windows bundled with Dell PCs last year, Dell's records show that the total number returned for a refund is... twenty-two[or whatever the number is].
This proves what we've been saying all along. Virtually everyone loves Windows, nobody really minds paying for it. Of the reported 5% [or whatever it is] of Dell customers using Linux, obviously the vast, vast majority of them also enjoying the copy of WIndows that came with their PC and think it is worth far, far more than $52.50.
It also shows, as we've been saying all along, that there's absolutely no need to make available PCs that are not preloaded with Windows. Anyone that doesn't want it can return it, as is proved by the twenty-two who did. Clearly it's not worth the effort of generating an extra SKU just to serve twenty-two eccentrics."