Kid friendly software is not a "straw man." It's just that adults misunderstand what a kid needs to learn software.
It's not big, pleasant buttons that make a software package kid friendly. It's familiar terms and words. When a kid wants to write a book report on dolphins, it does no good to present them with the option to create a new template, "legal preceding" or fax. When they want to see what something looks like, offering them an outline or master view doesn't help them. Furthermore, children think VERY linearly...programs that reformat their work based on paragraph settings after they've already typed it and tried to change the stats further down the page are just confusing.
Incidentally, these are all signs of bad programs for adults, too.
Kids' software generally isn't the most compatible stuff around -- there's just no reason to test on multiple units or port to multiple OSs due to its limited appeal. In order to get any kid's software to work, you're goign to have to fight like crazy to get them to work under windows emulators. Does this sound like the way to teach kids there's a "better way"...by fighting for hours to get software to run just to save $100 off the cost of a win2k license?
Kids' websites tend to be about the same. I run Opera and Moz at home and when my brother comes to visit we often discover that his favorite sites -- all flash intensive with tons of cool intel/windows only games -- don't work so hot. We have the same problem with my Mac.
As for open office...i'd have to say that it's not as kid friendly as MS office, which is NOT kid friendly at all. No office suite is. I pine for the days of Bank Street Writer.
If your kids are under 12, you're probably going to meet a lot of resistance to your plan. I don't think it's worth it...especially since it's so easy to teach kids WHY linux is good when they're older. Young kids don't understand the value of a dollar nor the importance of freedom and until they do it's silly to force it on them. When they hit high school, then's where you spring your plan -- by getting them their OWN pcs, older machines running Linux, for school use.
I wrote massive amounts of documentation before I left my last company, including a 140k "errata" file explaining all the dumb and difficult problems that had caused me to have projects late over the past several years and all the tricks I used to get things back together.
When I left, I neglected to tell anybody where I put these docs...easy thing to forget. I'm waiting for the "didn't you spend two weeks doing documentation" call.
I pay $45 per month for cell phone service. Internet is $45. Electricity is $95. Heat is $60. Hell, my comic books come out to like $60 per month, and I usually buy at least 3 or 4 CDs ($45+). Eating out on alternate fridays at decent restaurants is $50. Eating lunch out every day is $100. Car insurance, $127. Car payment, $450. Going to a movie is $9. Renting a DVD is $4. A goddamn bunch of carrots is $2
$40 comes out to a little over a dollar a day; if you watch just a half hour of CNN per day, that's $2 an hour for entertainment. Chances are you watch more than that.
I think the main problem with the perception of cable is that even though cable is one of the few telecoms making money, the $40 is not all going into TWC's pocket to screw you out of TV choices. So called "basic cable" is a result of legislation and deals with the local companys to carry their signal...there HAS to be an inexpensive service that carries CSPAN and locals and they lose money on it. They recoup a little of it on the "premium" setup, and they also use the fees from premium to buy equipment that runs the premium setup. Therefore, the $40 you'd spend isn't $.50 per channel...it's more like $20 at LEAST for the associated overhead to send you these channels at all, followed by about $5-10 for channel licensing. QVC and HSN are offsetting the license costs; without them on your manifest, your costs would go up further for licensing. If you don't like them, block them.
The only real evidence of cable fleecing people is digital cable. Technically, digital boxes cost less and allow more efficient use of bandwidth which can be resold. It saves a ton of money, and many cable companies charge for the improvement in "quality." But even this is getting better...the local co only charges $5 per month to rent a digital box (a great deal considering that they have to recoup the cost of buying the boxes, which per unit may be as high as $500 and usually hover between $30 and $100), and about $5 more for "basic digital." Not a bad deal considering many people still think digital is better than analogue (it isn't...when there's an error I much prefer a bit of static to missing or low bandwidth audio, and a little ghosting and fuzziness to massive pixelation, not to get into the horrors of fast motion scenes.)
Well, I look at it like this: I love my car very much. But I'm only in it maybe 30 minutes a day and most of that time I'm pissed off. My cable company provides me with The Daily Show, Samurai Jack, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Biography...as well as a good solution to the problem of killing a half an hour while glue dries or bread rises.
You would be surprised. I know people at every level of our local cable co (I also know the business, but can't work there...those goddamn anti-nepotism laws don't seem to bother the OTHER execs, dad) and was surprised to discover that when they introduced a set of digital "ala carte" channels from asia that they were soon outselling HBO -- to the point that they were offering the telesales guys some pretty cool prizes to trade in their commissions on that channel. My friend got a bitchin' Toshiba 7.1 receiver out of the deal.
As for digital radio...I was at a party last weekend where that relatively benign phenomenon became the star attraction. The CD player was broken, you see, so we all fought over the remote, forcing people to listen to power ballads or progressive rock. It was more fun that it sounds in retrospect.
These things get bundled for a reason, and it's that everybody has different tastes.
My dad's worked in cable engineering since its inception and has always said that ala carte pricing is not a good idea.
First off, it's more expensive. Consider: a fair price for a channel you really want is probably 2-5$ per month. I receive 85 channels for $23. Even eliminating the dozens I don't watch, there's more than 10 channels I do want to get, including all five major networks, comedy central, cartoon network and a gaggle of learning channels, BBCA and of course Food TV.
Second off, it's not really good for the cable co based on how the cable companies receive and send the channels themselves. Everything's handled by big blocks of splitters and amplifiers. Each handles a set of channels. Channels are pulled down from satelites in blocks as well...TWC in Albany has a set of five or so, one of which is dedicated to all the myriad HBOs, one to all the turner channels, etc. So it makes sense to sell TV in blocks...it's impossible to accurately tell how much a SINGLE channel costs you. In fact, after setup costs and maintenance costs and offsetting the possibility of customer service, just getting one channel may cost about $15 on a good margin, while getting fifty channels on the same line would only be pennies more.
Finally, it's not fair for marginal channels. You know all those channels you don't watch, like History or Speedvision or Golf TV or Univision? They're all somebody's favorite channel, believe it or not. There may be very few people who watch them, but they're getting equal billing due to being part of a package deal. Thus, they also have the ability to get hugely popular -- after all, you're more likely to catch something interesting on than if you had to order it specifically. Would TV Food be such a mainstay in our house were it not for having actually seen Good Eats, Iron Chef, David Rosengarden's Taste or Jamie Oliver? No. Hell, we wouldn't have ordered "ala carte" a channel that was ostensibly just reruns of Julia Childs.
Block pricing isn't really that expensive, anyway. I get 85 channels and broadband internet for less than the a quarter of the cost of my car's insurance and upkeep, and I sure get a lot more utility out of it.
Easy. People ask slashdot because slashdot readers have actually had to deal with these matters on a day to day basis. Your average lawyer may see a handful of case studies.
Now, he may have gone to the sort of lawyer that specializes in software licenses (what sort of lawyer is this? a very very rich sort), in which case you're right that it is kind of stupid to approach the trolls and IANALs. But if he went to Joe Q. Publicstein of Publicstein, Stern and Lowe, chances are he'll get a much more specific answer and leads on a case he may be able to point his legal eagle towards. Which could result in a much more informed decision.
By the by, I've got a feeling that the people who MIGHT press a case on the GPL have bigger fish to fry than a company writing a device driver. If they can't catch Microsoft biting GPL code, why are they going to hunt down developers expanding the OSS market?
Looks like they're going to need a "Compliance Officer." Think I'll submit my resume. I'm quite compliant, and I'll work for less than 100k. That's dollars, not stock.
A lot of these open source projects are maintained by one or two people. Many of them are in the phone book or have an email address lying around. You might as well just contact them directly.
It's not like the commercial software world, where there may be hundreds of employees and a series of support levels. The developers are all there is, and they may not check all the available bug watch sites because they would rather concentrate on making a better piece of spare time software. Contacting them directly will not only alert them to the error, but probably flatter them as well.
I got an email a while back from somebody who had been using a freeware encoding translation app I wrote a while back as an essential piece of a corporate mailing package. It was very cool to see how they were using it and how different it was from the original intent. Eventually, I arranged for the fix I suggested and he wrote to go up on the sparsely updated freeware site I had set up at my university.
Of course, he was willing to fix the bug in this ancient software himself with a little input. If he had come at me with a lengthy email accusing me of writing buggy software or threatening legal action or demanding a fix on code that really was dead to me, etc, I probably would have ignored him.
By the way, you hit the nail on the head of the anti-OSS argument here. There is really nobody accountable for these bugs, legally or otherwise. You're relying on the kindness of strangers, and if they aren't willing/don't have the time to fix it themselves, you're going to have to pay to have somebody else do it.
Airlines were deregulated a LONG time ago, southwest is a relatively new phenomenom that appears to NOT be working.
And my point about the elimination of perks is not that it decreases the price of a ticket -- most people would gladly pay another $5 for a better meal, which is what it would cost -- but rather that the elimination of perks increases shareholder value. There was a piece of trivia somewhere that said that United Airlines saved something like $50k one year by eliminating a single cherry tomato from a first class salad. Pretty impressive for the company, but it's not enough to drop any significance from the cost of a ticket (what's a tomato? less than a penny?). The problem with recent airline price cuts is that they're entirely market driven and have nothing to do with what it really costs to fly on an airplane, and apparently the big airlines have no interest in finding out what it costs because they have to sell at market value to avoid getting crushed. A government agency, on the other hand, would know exactly how much it costs, to be sure that the airline wasn't unfairly inflating the price. This would prevent cutthroat competition as surely as it prevents the lack of competition we see in unregulated cable.
Basically, regulation serves to capcitate all change. Big profits are removed, and so are big losses. Since the latter is much worse than the former to the country as a whole, I support regulation. Well, SANE regulation, anyway.
One of the first rules of debate is that a title does not make one's argument correct by association. FYI, my information on deregulation comes not from speculation but from observed values and it comes from an article analyzing the subject in March's Scientific American, a magazine that may not have the words "Political" or "Emeritus" in the title but does have the word "Scientific."
By the by, the big cable companies including Cox rolled out their cable modem plans back around 1994 (I was beta testing my TW line in 1996. 800 kB/s was common, I shit you not) when cable was still regulated. That supports the argument that deregulation increases innovation. This was going to be their big play into telephony, to eventually eclipse the phone companys and increase revenue despite regulation. Price for the modem service was $30 per month; it has now risen to $44.95 for a much slower line and shakier service. Thanks for the dereg.
The result was massive deregulation, which was in general a good idea...
Okay, here's one I don't get, and it's been shoved down my throat a hundred times. How is deregulation a good idea?
When the airlines were deregulated, prices skyrocketed and became more mysterious, new aircraft types became fewer, meals and perks got skimpier, and share value was decreased.
When cable was deregulated, price increase rates shifted from less than 5% per year to 10% or more. The price for extending capacity has shifted to the customer (I was asked to pay a portion of $800 for the cable line to be extended 5 miles down the road, on top of monthly service) and competition is non existant in most markets. And Time Warner, the largest cable provider in the country, is suddenly on the ropes after 30 some odd years of profitability. Similarities can be found in the deregulation of other telecommunications industries.
So despite claims that the opposite is true, deregulation has been proved to increase prices while decreasing competition, innovation, shareholder value and the quality of customer service, and this is a good thing? Need I remind you that the majority of telephone, cable and fibre lines were laid during regulation, as were the majority of communications satelite launches?
There is no impetus to innovate when you're milking your customers dry. A high margin with high sales is an invitation for stagnation. Now, when you have to fight for every customer you have and for every penny to stay alive, suddenly you have a reason to offer more than your competitor.
I work in the bowels of an internet company, designing conversion scripts which are invoked by a web scheduler and whose output is never seen by anybody save me. So for the first few months I was there I generally didn't bother cleaning up any of the debug error messages.
Occasionally, something I wrote a while back will break and generally I'll go in and fix it. I usually get a chuckle out of the old error messages which generally are based around whatever non-sequitor humor is popular that week:
"File Not Found. But I'll look harder."
"The invoked class started Okay. Anything else you can't deal with is your own problem."
"All your ads-20021003.xml are belong to httpd!"
"Server reports status as: 'Zzzzzzz....'" (and the genious here, see, is the number of z's corresponded to the number of 30 second wait states between database checkups.)
"An unknown error has ocurred. Don't ask me, I just work here."
Acutally, this isn't such a bad idea. Get a nice camera with macro and you're much more likely to get a high res readable image than you are with a hand scanner. Those things like to skew off their wheels and are no good for use with big books (spine) or older books (they touch the page...not something you want when doing research in century old issues of "Punch" magazine).
I've resisted buying a scanner for a long time due to their bulk and my tendency to have a clutter filled desk. Digital cameras are great for recording tax documents and carbon copies of letters where the gist is more important that a high dpi reproduction of the original.
Just do yourself this favour: don't use the flash! Instead, take the shot from high up with florescent lighting. Close up flash on bright paper is a good way to end up with unreadable images, and reading is fundamental to this project.
Yeah, but that's the problem. There's a handful of developers working in opposite directions on the same theoretical piece. Sure, it's choice...but it means that each progresses slower than if there was a unified push. Furthermore, when time comes to release the package, there are too many choices. How many text editors are there in the default package of linux, each with its own interface and able to do the same things as the others? It's very daunting for the switcher, who's used to one way of doing things, to be presented with a list of five with no "best of breed" winner. I mean, shit, WordPerfect used to have a "Switching from Word" mode, in which access and function keys and toolbar positions were remapped to help ease the transition. I can't even figure out what most of the mysql admin apps are doing or how they expect me to use my computer. Which is, of course, where postgres' pgadmin2 gets it right. It's very similar to enterprise manager...in fact, it's actually easier to use.
Oh, and MS' SQL management system isn't totally closed. We have people who use other apps to admin it, including some GPL stuff written in Perl. But none of that comes even close to the power of enterprise manager, so we stick anybody who can be trusted not to truncate sysobjects behind the wheel of E.M.
Lower bug rate kind of a red herring
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Open Source Studies
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Open source projects tend to have a lower bug-rate than commercial projects"
True. But open source projects are much more precisely targetted, and less functional. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that is very different from marketable commercial software.
Take, for example, IIS vs. Apache. On one hand, yes, Apache is so much better at serving web pages -- faster, more stable, more secure, cheaper etc. But functionally, they don't really do the same thing. IIS encapsulates ASP scripting, database access, file security, web serving, ftp serving, mail serving and a very powerful management interface. Apache is just a core web server. It performs one small task out of dozens, and as such the developers can concentrate on making that work best.
It's hard to do the same with commercial software. You have to keep adding features to stay ahead of the competition -- merely having the fastest webserver is not enough, because hype sells servers, not actual results. For this reason, there are a lot of open source projects that would never survive as viable market solutions. Apache's one of them...considering that "all it does" is serve pages and it relies on "third party" modules to do anything fancier than powerful URL rewrites and server side includes, its market price would be low and thus the margins. Never mind that it's stable as a rock while IIS is as insubstantial as a fart in the wind.
This is a big problem with the adoption of open source as well. You can't just "switch" like you can from, say, Word to WordPerfect. If you use SQL Server and enterprise manager, for example, you can't just "switch" to MySQL. MySQL has no totalitarian interface on par with enterprise manager. It has no massive searchable help database and no "for dummies" option for managing jobs and indexes. If you plug in to MySQL with a SQL Server only toolset, you're in for a shock learning curve, even if the databases themselves are on par with each other and MySQL less buggy. The difference is that what's important to the MySQL developers isn't what sells SQL Server.
On Sept 11th (and you all know what happened there, save the ribbons for a different soapbox), I used the internet as my primary source for what was happening. Somebody here had a radio, and the news channels were spouting lie after lie, rumours on air, digging up unchecked sources, because that's what the mainstream media does.
I, instead, got my news from "switchboard" type sites (/., drudge and a few forum sites), keeping an eye on who was up, mirroring important pages, and basically exchanging as much info as possible. It lagged a bit...I was 10 minutes out of the loop when the tower fell, for example...but I also wasn't supplied rumours like "there are nukes in the air" or "A fifth plane is on its way to chicago."
By the way, BBC had amazing realtime coverage plus rm video that stayed online pretty well. NYTimes was slow as hell. CNN got swamped, as did MSNBC.
Slashdot Mirror
Kid friendly software is not a "straw man." It's just that adults misunderstand what a kid needs to learn software.
It's not big, pleasant buttons that make a software package kid friendly. It's familiar terms and words. When a kid wants to write a book report on dolphins, it does no good to present them with the option to create a new template, "legal preceding" or fax. When they want to see what something looks like, offering them an outline or master view doesn't help them. Furthermore, children think VERY linearly...programs that reformat their work based on paragraph settings after they've already typed it and tried to change the stats further down the page are just confusing.
Incidentally, these are all signs of bad programs for adults, too.
Do you think you could kick Ricardo Montalbahn's ass in a fair fight?
Kids' software generally isn't the most compatible stuff around -- there's just no reason to test on multiple units or port to multiple OSs due to its limited appeal. In order to get any kid's software to work, you're goign to have to fight like crazy to get them to work under windows emulators. Does this sound like the way to teach kids there's a "better way"...by fighting for hours to get software to run just to save $100 off the cost of a win2k license?
Kids' websites tend to be about the same. I run Opera and Moz at home and when my brother comes to visit we often discover that his favorite sites -- all flash intensive with tons of cool intel/windows only games -- don't work so hot. We have the same problem with my Mac.
As for open office...i'd have to say that it's not as kid friendly as MS office, which is NOT kid friendly at all. No office suite is. I pine for the days of Bank Street Writer.
If your kids are under 12, you're probably going to meet a lot of resistance to your plan. I don't think it's worth it...especially since it's so easy to teach kids WHY linux is good when they're older. Young kids don't understand the value of a dollar nor the importance of freedom and until they do it's silly to force it on them. When they hit high school, then's where you spring your plan -- by getting them their OWN pcs, older machines running Linux, for school use.
Then give up. You're probably a shitty programmer and nobody told you.
I wrote massive amounts of documentation before I left my last company, including a 140k "errata" file explaining all the dumb and difficult problems that had caused me to have projects late over the past several years and all the tricks I used to get things back together.
When I left, I neglected to tell anybody where I put these docs...easy thing to forget. I'm waiting for the "didn't you spend two weeks doing documentation" call.
I go to parties once a month BECAUSE of slashdot. slashdot.meetup.com, man.
Is it?
I pay $45 per month for cell phone service. Internet is $45. Electricity is $95. Heat is $60. Hell, my comic books come out to like $60 per month, and I usually buy at least 3 or 4 CDs ($45+). Eating out on alternate fridays at decent restaurants is $50. Eating lunch out every day is $100. Car insurance, $127. Car payment, $450. Going to a movie is $9. Renting a DVD is $4. A goddamn bunch of carrots is $2
$40 comes out to a little over a dollar a day; if you watch just a half hour of CNN per day, that's $2 an hour for entertainment. Chances are you watch more than that.
I think the main problem with the perception of cable is that even though cable is one of the few telecoms making money, the $40 is not all going into TWC's pocket to screw you out of TV choices. So called "basic cable" is a result of legislation and deals with the local companys to carry their signal...there HAS to be an inexpensive service that carries CSPAN and locals and they lose money on it. They recoup a little of it on the "premium" setup, and they also use the fees from premium to buy equipment that runs the premium setup. Therefore, the $40 you'd spend isn't $.50 per channel...it's more like $20 at LEAST for the associated overhead to send you these channels at all, followed by about $5-10 for channel licensing. QVC and HSN are offsetting the license costs; without them on your manifest, your costs would go up further for licensing. If you don't like them, block them.
The only real evidence of cable fleecing people is digital cable. Technically, digital boxes cost less and allow more efficient use of bandwidth which can be resold. It saves a ton of money, and many cable companies charge for the improvement in "quality." But even this is getting better...the local co only charges $5 per month to rent a digital box (a great deal considering that they have to recoup the cost of buying the boxes, which per unit may be as high as $500 and usually hover between $30 and $100), and about $5 more for "basic digital." Not a bad deal considering many people still think digital is better than analogue (it isn't...when there's an error I much prefer a bit of static to missing or low bandwidth audio, and a little ghosting and fuzziness to massive pixelation, not to get into the horrors of fast motion scenes.)
Well, I look at it like this: I love my car very much. But I'm only in it maybe 30 minutes a day and most of that time I'm pissed off. My cable company provides me with The Daily Show, Samurai Jack, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Biography...as well as a good solution to the problem of killing a half an hour while glue dries or bread rises.
You would be surprised. I know people at every level of our local cable co (I also know the business, but can't work there...those goddamn anti-nepotism laws don't seem to bother the OTHER execs, dad) and was surprised to discover that when they introduced a set of digital "ala carte" channels from asia that they were soon outselling HBO -- to the point that they were offering the telesales guys some pretty cool prizes to trade in their commissions on that channel. My friend got a bitchin' Toshiba 7.1 receiver out of the deal.
As for digital radio...I was at a party last weekend where that relatively benign phenomenon became the star attraction. The CD player was broken, you see, so we all fought over the remote, forcing people to listen to power ballads or progressive rock. It was more fun that it sounds in retrospect.
These things get bundled for a reason, and it's that everybody has different tastes.
My dad's worked in cable engineering since its inception and has always said that ala carte pricing is not a good idea.
First off, it's more expensive. Consider: a fair price for a channel you really want is probably 2-5$ per month. I receive 85 channels for $23. Even eliminating the dozens I don't watch, there's more than 10 channels I do want to get, including all five major networks, comedy central, cartoon network and a gaggle of learning channels, BBCA and of course Food TV.
Second off, it's not really good for the cable co based on how the cable companies receive and send the channels themselves. Everything's handled by big blocks of splitters and amplifiers. Each handles a set of channels. Channels are pulled down from satelites in blocks as well...TWC in Albany has a set of five or so, one of which is dedicated to all the myriad HBOs, one to all the turner channels, etc. So it makes sense to sell TV in blocks...it's impossible to accurately tell how much a SINGLE channel costs you. In fact, after setup costs and maintenance costs and offsetting the possibility of customer service, just getting one channel may cost about $15 on a good margin, while getting fifty channels on the same line would only be pennies more.
Finally, it's not fair for marginal channels. You know all those channels you don't watch, like History or Speedvision or Golf TV or Univision? They're all somebody's favorite channel, believe it or not. There may be very few people who watch them, but they're getting equal billing due to being part of a package deal. Thus, they also have the ability to get hugely popular -- after all, you're more likely to catch something interesting on than if you had to order it specifically. Would TV Food be such a mainstay in our house were it not for having actually seen Good Eats, Iron Chef, David Rosengarden's Taste or Jamie Oliver? No. Hell, we wouldn't have ordered "ala carte" a channel that was ostensibly just reruns of Julia Childs.
Block pricing isn't really that expensive, anyway. I get 85 channels and broadband internet for less than the a quarter of the cost of my car's insurance and upkeep, and I sure get a lot more utility out of it.
Easy. People ask slashdot because slashdot readers have actually had to deal with these matters on a day to day basis. Your average lawyer may see a handful of case studies.
Now, he may have gone to the sort of lawyer that specializes in software licenses (what sort of lawyer is this? a very very rich sort), in which case you're right that it is kind of stupid to approach the trolls and IANALs. But if he went to Joe Q. Publicstein of Publicstein, Stern and Lowe, chances are he'll get a much more specific answer and leads on a case he may be able to point his legal eagle towards. Which could result in a much more informed decision.
By the by, I've got a feeling that the people who MIGHT press a case on the GPL have bigger fish to fry than a company writing a device driver. If they can't catch Microsoft biting GPL code, why are they going to hunt down developers expanding the OSS market?
Looks like they're going to need a "Compliance Officer." Think I'll submit my resume. I'm quite compliant, and I'll work for less than 100k. That's dollars, not stock.
A lot of these open source projects are maintained by one or two people. Many of them are in the phone book or have an email address lying around. You might as well just contact them directly.
It's not like the commercial software world, where there may be hundreds of employees and a series of support levels. The developers are all there is, and they may not check all the available bug watch sites because they would rather concentrate on making a better piece of spare time software. Contacting them directly will not only alert them to the error, but probably flatter them as well.
I got an email a while back from somebody who had been using a freeware encoding translation app I wrote a while back as an essential piece of a corporate mailing package. It was very cool to see how they were using it and how different it was from the original intent. Eventually, I arranged for the fix I suggested and he wrote to go up on the sparsely updated freeware site I had set up at my university.
Of course, he was willing to fix the bug in this ancient software himself with a little input. If he had come at me with a lengthy email accusing me of writing buggy software or threatening legal action or demanding a fix on code that really was dead to me, etc, I probably would have ignored him.
By the way, you hit the nail on the head of the anti-OSS argument here. There is really nobody accountable for these bugs, legally or otherwise. You're relying on the kindness of strangers, and if they aren't willing/don't have the time to fix it themselves, you're going to have to pay to have somebody else do it.
Airlines were deregulated a LONG time ago, southwest is a relatively new phenomenom that appears to NOT be working.
And my point about the elimination of perks is not that it decreases the price of a ticket -- most people would gladly pay another $5 for a better meal, which is what it would cost -- but rather that the elimination of perks increases shareholder value. There was a piece of trivia somewhere that said that United Airlines saved something like $50k one year by eliminating a single cherry tomato from a first class salad. Pretty impressive for the company, but it's not enough to drop any significance from the cost of a ticket (what's a tomato? less than a penny?). The problem with recent airline price cuts is that they're entirely market driven and have nothing to do with what it really costs to fly on an airplane, and apparently the big airlines have no interest in finding out what it costs because they have to sell at market value to avoid getting crushed. A government agency, on the other hand, would know exactly how much it costs, to be sure that the airline wasn't unfairly inflating the price. This would prevent cutthroat competition as surely as it prevents the lack of competition we see in unregulated cable.
Basically, regulation serves to capcitate all change. Big profits are removed, and so are big losses. Since the latter is much worse than the former to the country as a whole, I support regulation. Well, SANE regulation, anyway.
One of the first rules of debate is that a title does not make one's argument correct by association. FYI, my information on deregulation comes not from speculation but from observed values and it comes from an article analyzing the subject in March's Scientific American, a magazine that may not have the words "Political" or "Emeritus" in the title but does have the word "Scientific."
By the by, the big cable companies including Cox rolled out their cable modem plans back around 1994 (I was beta testing my TW line in 1996. 800 kB/s was common, I shit you not) when cable was still regulated. That supports the argument that deregulation increases innovation. This was going to be their big play into telephony, to eventually eclipse the phone companys and increase revenue despite regulation. Price for the modem service was $30 per month; it has now risen to $44.95 for a much slower line and shakier service. Thanks for the dereg.
The result was massive deregulation, which was in general a good idea...
Okay, here's one I don't get, and it's been shoved down my throat a hundred times. How is deregulation a good idea?
When the airlines were deregulated, prices skyrocketed and became more mysterious, new aircraft types became fewer, meals and perks got skimpier, and share value was decreased.
When cable was deregulated, price increase rates shifted from less than 5% per year to 10% or more. The price for extending capacity has shifted to the customer (I was asked to pay a portion of $800 for the cable line to be extended 5 miles down the road, on top of monthly service) and competition is non existant in most markets. And Time Warner, the largest cable provider in the country, is suddenly on the ropes after 30 some odd years of profitability. Similarities can be found in the deregulation of other telecommunications industries.
So despite claims that the opposite is true, deregulation has been proved to increase prices while decreasing competition, innovation, shareholder value and the quality of customer service, and this is a good thing? Need I remind you that the majority of telephone, cable and fibre lines were laid during regulation, as were the majority of communications satelite launches?
There is no impetus to innovate when you're milking your customers dry. A high margin with high sales is an invitation for stagnation. Now, when you have to fight for every customer you have and for every penny to stay alive, suddenly you have a reason to offer more than your competitor.
I work in the bowels of an internet company, designing conversion scripts which are invoked by a web scheduler and whose output is never seen by anybody save me. So for the first few months I was there I generally didn't bother cleaning up any of the debug error messages.
Occasionally, something I wrote a while back will break and generally I'll go in and fix it. I usually get a chuckle out of the old error messages which generally are based around whatever non-sequitor humor is popular that week:
"File Not Found. But I'll look harder."
"The invoked class started Okay. Anything else you can't deal with is your own problem."
"All your ads-20021003.xml are belong to httpd!"
"Server reports status as: 'Zzzzzzz....'" (and the genious here, see, is the number of z's corresponded to the number of 30 second wait states between database checkups.)
"An unknown error has ocurred. Don't ask me, I just work here."
It's there man. It's called "spacer.gif".
Wow. And it also destroys the great common interface Apple worked so hard for.
No thanks. I'll take a little headache to do something write rather than use a toy.
Who then? Dell? Packard Bell? Micron? Compaq? HP? Gateway?
They're all still lost in a hopelessly uncool world. Only a handful of PC manufacturers get it. SGI. Falcon. Alienware.
Gateway still things an iMac is just a lamp with DVD playback. Never mind that thousand dollar software setup, guys, it MUST be the $150 flat panel.
Acutally, this isn't such a bad idea. Get a nice camera with macro and you're much more likely to get a high res readable image than you are with a hand scanner. Those things like to skew off their wheels and are no good for use with big books (spine) or older books (they touch the page...not something you want when doing research in century old issues of "Punch" magazine).
I've resisted buying a scanner for a long time due to their bulk and my tendency to have a clutter filled desk. Digital cameras are great for recording tax documents and carbon copies of letters where the gist is more important that a high dpi reproduction of the original.
Just do yourself this favour: don't use the flash! Instead, take the shot from high up with florescent lighting. Close up flash on bright paper is a good way to end up with unreadable images, and reading is fundamental to this project.
Oh funny. Let's all make jokes about marketting gimmicks from three years ago. "Food, Folks and Fun, hahaha. Oh Ronald McDonald, when will you learn?"
Seriously, dude, they moved to an all white and chrome motif a while ago. Get over it.
Yeah, but that's the problem. There's a handful of developers working in opposite directions on the same theoretical piece. Sure, it's choice...but it means that each progresses slower than if there was a unified push. Furthermore, when time comes to release the package, there are too many choices. How many text editors are there in the default package of linux, each with its own interface and able to do the same things as the others? It's very daunting for the switcher, who's used to one way of doing things, to be presented with a list of five with no "best of breed" winner. I mean, shit, WordPerfect used to have a "Switching from Word" mode, in which access and function keys and toolbar positions were remapped to help ease the transition. I can't even figure out what most of the mysql admin apps are doing or how they expect me to use my computer. Which is, of course, where postgres' pgadmin2 gets it right. It's very similar to enterprise manager...in fact, it's actually easier to use.
Oh, and MS' SQL management system isn't totally closed. We have people who use other apps to admin it, including some GPL stuff written in Perl. But none of that comes even close to the power of enterprise manager, so we stick anybody who can be trusted not to truncate sysobjects behind the wheel of E.M.
"Open source projects tend to have a lower bug-rate than commercial projects"
True. But open source projects are much more precisely targetted, and less functional. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that is very different from marketable commercial software.
Take, for example, IIS vs. Apache. On one hand, yes, Apache is so much better at serving web pages -- faster, more stable, more secure, cheaper etc. But functionally, they don't really do the same thing. IIS encapsulates ASP scripting, database access, file security, web serving, ftp serving, mail serving and a very powerful management interface. Apache is just a core web server. It performs one small task out of dozens, and as such the developers can concentrate on making that work best.
It's hard to do the same with commercial software. You have to keep adding features to stay ahead of the competition -- merely having the fastest webserver is not enough, because hype sells servers, not actual results. For this reason, there are a lot of open source projects that would never survive as viable market solutions. Apache's one of them...considering that "all it does" is serve pages and it relies on "third party" modules to do anything fancier than powerful URL rewrites and server side includes, its market price would be low and thus the margins. Never mind that it's stable as a rock while IIS is as insubstantial as a fart in the wind.
This is a big problem with the adoption of open source as well. You can't just "switch" like you can from, say, Word to WordPerfect. If you use SQL Server and enterprise manager, for example, you can't just "switch" to MySQL. MySQL has no totalitarian interface on par with enterprise manager. It has no massive searchable help database and no "for dummies" option for managing jobs and indexes. If you plug in to MySQL with a SQL Server only toolset, you're in for a shock learning curve, even if the databases themselves are on par with each other and MySQL less buggy. The difference is that what's important to the MySQL developers isn't what sells SQL Server.
On Sept 11th (and you all know what happened there, save the ribbons for a different soapbox), I used the internet as my primary source for what was happening. Somebody here had a radio, and the news channels were spouting lie after lie, rumours on air, digging up unchecked sources, because that's what the mainstream media does.
I, instead, got my news from "switchboard" type sites (/., drudge and a few forum sites), keeping an eye on who was up, mirroring important pages, and basically exchanging as much info as possible. It lagged a bit...I was 10 minutes out of the loop when the tower fell, for example...but I also wasn't supplied rumours like "there are nukes in the air" or "A fifth plane is on its way to chicago."
By the way, BBC had amazing realtime coverage plus rm video that stayed online pretty well. NYTimes was slow as hell. CNN got swamped, as did MSNBC.