Say, if you want to give me $1000 to put something in my body that I have complete control over, go ahead. That's what this thing is. Stop acting like it's some mystic tracking device, it's got batteries and an off switch.
Yes, you're right, a mandatory tracking chip with an unlimited power supply would be very scary. But guess what? This ain't it, brother. Save your paranoia for when it matters and maybe it'll still have some impulse left.
My point is that mandating technology has not typically been what insurance companies do. Neither do they raise rates every time new technology comes out. Cars are gradually getting safer, but they're also getting driven gradually faster on more congested roads. The insurance companies want to give good drivers a low rate because they are worth more, and everybody else is trying to get them to switch to their insurance. They do this by offering people who opt for slower cars, safer cars, and now driving on safer roads, a discount because it's not likely that they'll have to shell out for liability. If you want to call this discount for safety a surcharge for unsafety, go ahead. But that seems like a pretty callous way to think.
And has it ever occured to you that a "discount" for OnStar is the same thing mathematically as a surcharge for not having OnStar?
No, because while the math is the same (duh, you're just using addition or subtraction from a different base) it isn't the same theoretically. If OnStar came out and insurance companies raised everybody's rates, then yes, it would be a surcharge. But saying "we don't have to worry as much about you dying in the woods alone and for that you get 5% off" is quite different. If you consider not getting the cheapest possible rate on the planet a "surcharge," then might I suggest selling your car and getting a nice safe Ford Focus? Because there's a surcharge on not driving an inexpensive compact 4 cylinder sedan.
This is a pretty stupid and paranoid argument that is not supported by history. My insurance company recently started offering a discount for driving with in-car services like OnStar. They didn't raise my rates one dollar. My mom's insurance on her Cadillac (with neither ABS nor airbags) has remained constant since 1992. Actually, it's gone down.
but it was legal in my state for me not to? Would they still penalize me?
Absolutely. They might even impound your car. Just because something's legal back home doesn't mean you don't have to follow the law of the land. In some states, you can drive at 14. But you can't leave your state.
Don't try claiming "I didn't know I didn't need insurance." They're not likely to care. Just ask that guy they caned in Singapore. It's up to you to know the laws of the place you're in.
Oh boy, another "insurance tax" post from a libertarian retard.
Hey shit for brains: you are more than welcome to drive your car wherever you like without insurance. So long as you don't drive it on a governmentally controlled highway.
Government's in charge of safety on the roads they build and maintain. They're restricting them to just those drivers willing to take a test, receive a license and drive a registered, inspected and insured automobile. That way they can be at least partially sure there aren't so many maniacs driving badly in unsafe motorcars.
You want a road that doesn't require insurance: make one. Start buying land. Start raising funds and paying pavers and building bridges and who knows? Maybe people will prefer your road and maybe you'll find a way to support all of the lawsuits from all of the people who were killed on it.
I love my government, because it enables me to listen to moronic ideas like yours and then mock them without fear of reprisal. I hope you die in a car crash.
Jeez, you're right. As an unsafe driver, you probably don't want constant monitoring of your habits. Why, they should make this optional, otherwise nobody would buy their insurance from them and they'd soon go out of business.
Oh wait, it is optional. Go foresight! It's far better than posting the blatantly obvious!
Actually, with insurance everybody subsidizes everyone according to their potential for liability. All the money goes into a pool and the pool is invested. Good drivers get a really low rate compared to those with tickets and multiple accidents on their record, because they are less likely to use the money in the pool. My wife, who had three accidents on her record, used to pay three times what I did...because she was three times more likely to pay out in an accident. Now that we have better records, they're always looking for ways to reduce our insurance.
Anyway, the reason cable companies don't want to move to ala carte pricing is that they buy channels in packages, have them delivered in packages from satelites, demux them in packages and deliver them to the box in packages. The actual price of a single channel is really difficult to judge for this reason...obviously, it's not simply # of channels/price of the package. Ala carte pricing is complicated and wouldn't be much cheaper than the current system...you'd be looking at $10 per channel or more just to cover delivery and customer service. That's why HBO is expensive.
I think it's really ridiculous that the first thing people think about whenever anybody proposes a voluntary new monitoring technology is how badly it can be abused.
Yeah -- we all know that people really enjoy paying more for the priviledge of being spied on. And that's why these expensive and complicated technologies will be used to infringe on our privacy?
Bullshit, man. Every one of these things I've seen has had MAJOR privacy provisos, like you can review the data before sending it to your insurance or you can just turn it off whenever you like. They've already THOUGHT about the thing you guys are complaining about! And it's not like they're going to make them mandatory. Airbags aren't mandatory for insurance. Anti-lock brakes aren't mandatory for insurance. Shit, even seat belts aren't mandatory for insurance...I get a good driver rate on my '73 Super Beetle with none of these 3; I pay $30 per month.
I know, we're supposed to have a healthy distrust of anybody who wants to give us a discount. But insurance companies really DO want to give you a discount for being a safe driver. Safe drivers are the most profitable segment of the auto insurance market, because they get to pocket every dollar with little worry that they'll have to pay out massive settlements. Car insurance companies fight for good drivers and fight to keep them...shit, I have such a good record with my current insurer that I could wreck my car tomorrow and my insurance wouldn't go up a dime. They'd assume it was a fluke and pay off without worry. It's in my insurance agreement. It actually happened to my friend (they even bought him nicer rims and gave him a loaner).
These new "big brother" tools are OPTIONAL, they're VOLUNTARY, they're CONTROLLABLE, they can be MONITORED and they are heavily RESTRICTED. We have nothing to worry about -- unless "privacy concerns" cause these great money savers for good drivers to be argued out of existance.
Privacy concerns. Meh. I'd rather have the 100 quid.
Yes, but his market here is the type of unrealistic asshole who pops into my C# channel and says ".NET sucks, I program all my SQL code in machine language." You know -- unrealistic do-it-yourselfers with strong convictions and no real talent. Those who can, do. Those who can't usually have an opinion, anyway.
Anyhow, I will say this: if you can build a nice, efficient graphics and sound demo in assembler, you will have an EASY time using C and a modern API to build an even better one.
If you don't want to have your life destroyed, don't allow strangers to download works you don't have the copyright for.
Seriously, I have no pity at all for these immensely stupid people who broke the law and now are being punished financially. I think it's fantastic. I can't wait for them to ramp it up further. Because if the RIAA can stop file sharing, i mean really stop it, without having to lobby to make copyright infringement a federal crime, we all prosper. This isn't an issue of fair use or realistic copyright law...fair use should not and does not include the wholesale distribution of potentially profitable modern works. But there also shouldn't be a criminal penalty to it. Proving that current copyright law is MORE than sufficient to protect holders' rights is way more important than fighting a losing battle in the name of "realistic copyright."
There's no statiscal reason to worry about lightning strikes or random murders, either. But I'm still wary of lakes during thunderstorms and I lock my door at night.
I mean, there's paranoia, and then there's preparation. It is not likely on a given day that I will need to use the knife in my pocket or the condom in my wallet but when it happens I'm quite grateful I didn't talk myself out of carrying them.
No, the two are a bit different. Bokeh refers to the LOOK of the depth of field effect, not its existance. For example, take the same picture at the same focal length and with the same aperature setting for two separate lenses and you get two different looks to the out-of-focus background.
Good bokeh turns sharp background contrast into soft, slowly sloping gradiants (like the airbrush in Photoshop) that highlight the foreground subject. Bad bokeh turns sharp background contrast into a series of pointed halos around the object that distract from the foreground subject. The ideal for many photographers is bokeh that looks like a pointellist painting does up close, though everybody has a different preference (here's my favorite bokeh and a miserably failed attempt).
For whom? You seem to be of the opinion that complicated networking hardware will just spring up out of a vaccuum. Such is not the case. If and when said technology is invented, it will be BY Cray -- or by another player in the HPC field.
The cost will be high (because of high performance electronics, redundancy etc). The availability will be low. The cabling and control unit will be very expensive.
And at the end of the day, Linux based low latency distributed computing will approach or exceed the cost of Linux based mainframe computing. You're paying a lot for the hardware in either direction. You're paying a company to build and support your solution. You're relying on a single vendor for your processors and interconnects. Where's the benefit?
It's my understanding that Google works because they have split the results system up so granularly and spread the load so accurately that once a machine receives its request, it doesn't have to contact any other machines to make a response. So in essence, each member of the cluster receives a small input task from the controller and does the rest of the work by itself. Google doesn't necessarily need to share information between two artibtrary nodes on its system, which further decreases the complexity of the software.
Very, very few supercomputing tasks can be so easily parallelized. And to be honest, you don't even really need Linux or clustering to do it. I used to do something similar using a regular expression and a BigIP firewall device...servers were numbered 0-9 and pages were broke down to a single number then forwarded to that specific reverse cache server.
A porsche will get you and your girlfriend there faster, but two ford focuses will get your whole family there in less than the time it takes for you to drive back and pick them up.
There are also tasks which are quite paralellizable and quite sequential...but that are so heavily interrelated that they require a fast interconnected bus.
The major benefit of Linux clustering kind of falls apart when the bulk of the cost of your project becomes the interconnect. Mainframes are designed to communicate large data between multiple processors wheras standard servers are designed to communicate over a relatively slow I/O bus. If you're paying a few hundred grand for a top of the line control system and interconnects and that's STILL your major bottleneck...well, you should have had a Cray.
Of course, the Cray also has limited expandability...I guess the point is, do your fucking research, analyze the needs from a total cost perspective and don't go with Linux just because you can imagine a Beowulf cluster.
Thanks. I just completed a three month project to enhance our project in a very subtle way. With the competitor's product, every time you enter a client's name and address, it goes in a different field. To associate the data, they do an on-the-fly lookup at report time comparing names and addresses. The end result is that lazy bookkeeping quickly destroys the value of keeping the records in the first place -- Herbert Walker gets three copies of the catalog because some lazy clerk entered his name as Herb and a dyslexic one as Herbret.
But lazy bookkeeping isn't something that can be changed -- the data entry is necessarily fast and off the cuff and probably wrong. So I rewrote our data entry system with this in mind. It uses a bunch of clues (soundex, common misspellings table, additional addresses, names on credit/debit cards and so forth) to compare a set of new data with the set of existing data. If there's no match that's correct enough (according to a user set percentage), the user is asked which of the most possible entries is correct.
The offshoot of this is that our system permits them to be more lazy -- enter just a little bit of data then hit the "guess" button -- while maintaining a more useful tracking system.
I told the sales team they should use that as the slogan..."Our software lets you be lazy"...but it didn't fly. The "enter quickly, search powerfully, associate meaningfully" line had more zing I guess.
Uh, for Windows you are correct. For office, you're partially correct. But for all of their other programs, Microsoft has direct competition from many sides. Sink even gives an example...where an ISV has created a product that competes with Access built on Open Source technologies.
"So what is the right price range?
This question is the point where most small ISVs will wimp out. "We don't have the Microsoft name." "Our product is less mature." "We feel inferior, so obviously our price has to be lower than theirs."
Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The right answer is: "A lot more than $229."
Basically, Sink is telling ISVs to grow a backbone and realize that the first step isn't competing with Microsoft on price (mostly for the reason you're talking about, MS can just drop the price and thus drop the usefulness of your software) but finding the area in which their product is SUPERIOR to Access and leveraging that.
It's good advice. Because by doing this, you encourage people to move away from Access while at the same time increasing itnerest in your product.
We have a local car dealer who did a commercial claiming that the Hyundai luxury sedan looks "just like" the Jaguar only it costs much less. Needless to say, we laugh our ass off at that commercial. A Hyundai is not a Jaguar only cheaper...it's a Hyundai attempting to LOOK like a Jaguar. Too many low-cost programs suffer from trying to look like a Jaguar, when what they really need to do is analyze what it is about the Jaguar that makes it attractive and what can be gleamed from that and added to that to approach the market from a different direction.
Our company writes software for a saturated niche, but does alright because we look at things from a different perspective. Rather than just allowing our customers to enter and store data with a weak search engine, we allow them to enter it quickly, search it powerfully and associate it meaningfully. Our price is higher for that reason -- and yet we have more customers.
I was referring to air terror, and as for myself I'm always wary of flying. In fact, when I took my honeymoon in September of 2001, I flew Continental rather than Southwest because Continental flew smaller planes and required a layover in Chicago. This meant that the planes never had enough fuel to get anywhere, making their value to hijackers greatly decreased.
Nowadays, I've ammended my policy and won't fly in anything other than an ultralite.
Well, having just read the Cecil Adams treatise on the subject, I have to admit: we're both wrong.
The Inuit have many words for snow slash ice, but they're not really that different from our terms for different properties of snow ( drifting snow, packing snow, sleet, slush, etc ). The inuit language is polysynthetic, meaning you make up your own words from particles of meaning as you go along. Therefore, they have as many words for anything as they have time to speak them. Add the particle for snow to the particle for bureau, and voila! Snowbureau.
In many ways, this is not that different from English speaking idiots who think they can invent plurals however they like (statii, virii, emails, boxen and the like) or sound impressive by putting ir- onto the front of a word starting with r (irrespective, irregardless, irridiculous, etc).
You think and analyze thoughts differently in German because you are not used to it. Obviously if you don't know the specific name of a concept in German, you're going to have to think about it in more abstract terms. I speak four languages and find that when I'm speaking a language other than English I often say things like "Hey, see that long four door automobile in a light greenish sort of blue? I think it's pretty" when in English I'd just say "Dig that teal sedan."
In some ways, this can be a good thing. I talk rather slowly in Spanish and French, but I don't stutter or lose my place like I do in English. It takes so much concentration to be coherent that I rarely find myself thinking before I speak.
There is no difference here. Identifying and understanding a concept without a name is completely possible -- I understood the concept of prototyping well before I ever learned C++. And a name for a concept can exist without understanding what it is -- immenatization of the eschaton comes to mind. I still don't know what the fuck that is.
The brain does indeed need to assign symbols to process a concept, but it does not need to have a name for it! This is why sytagmology exists outside of linguistics -- there are ways to process information without words or discrete language.
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Say, if you want to give me $1000 to put something in my body that I have complete control over, go ahead. That's what this thing is. Stop acting like it's some mystic tracking device, it's got batteries and an off switch.
Yes, you're right, a mandatory tracking chip with an unlimited power supply would be very scary. But guess what? This ain't it, brother. Save your paranoia for when it matters and maybe it'll still have some impulse left.
My point is that mandating technology has not typically been what insurance companies do. Neither do they raise rates every time new technology comes out. Cars are gradually getting safer, but they're also getting driven gradually faster on more congested roads. The insurance companies want to give good drivers a low rate because they are worth more, and everybody else is trying to get them to switch to their insurance. They do this by offering people who opt for slower cars, safer cars, and now driving on safer roads, a discount because it's not likely that they'll have to shell out for liability. If you want to call this discount for safety a surcharge for unsafety, go ahead. But that seems like a pretty callous way to think.
And has it ever occured to you that a "discount" for OnStar is the same thing mathematically as a surcharge for not having OnStar?
No, because while the math is the same (duh, you're just using addition or subtraction from a different base) it isn't the same theoretically. If OnStar came out and insurance companies raised everybody's rates, then yes, it would be a surcharge. But saying "we don't have to worry as much about you dying in the woods alone and for that you get 5% off" is quite different. If you consider not getting the cheapest possible rate on the planet a "surcharge," then might I suggest selling your car and getting a nice safe Ford Focus? Because there's a surcharge on not driving an inexpensive compact 4 cylinder sedan.
This is a pretty stupid and paranoid argument that is not supported by history. My insurance company recently started offering a discount for driving with in-car services like OnStar. They didn't raise my rates one dollar. My mom's insurance on her Cadillac (with neither ABS nor airbags) has remained constant since 1992. Actually, it's gone down.
but it was legal in my state for me not to? Would they still penalize me?
Absolutely. They might even impound your car. Just because something's legal back home doesn't mean you don't have to follow the law of the land. In some states, you can drive at 14. But you can't leave your state.
Don't try claiming "I didn't know I didn't need insurance." They're not likely to care. Just ask that guy they caned in Singapore. It's up to you to know the laws of the place you're in.
Oh boy, another "insurance tax" post from a libertarian retard.
Hey shit for brains: you are more than welcome to drive your car wherever you like without insurance. So long as you don't drive it on a governmentally controlled highway.
Government's in charge of safety on the roads they build and maintain. They're restricting them to just those drivers willing to take a test, receive a license and drive a registered, inspected and insured automobile. That way they can be at least partially sure there aren't so many maniacs driving badly in unsafe motorcars.
You want a road that doesn't require insurance: make one. Start buying land. Start raising funds and paying pavers and building bridges and who knows? Maybe people will prefer your road and maybe you'll find a way to support all of the lawsuits from all of the people who were killed on it.
I love my government, because it enables me to listen to moronic ideas like yours and then mock them without fear of reprisal. I hope you die in a car crash.
Jeez, you're right. As an unsafe driver, you probably don't want constant monitoring of your habits. Why, they should make this optional, otherwise nobody would buy their insurance from them and they'd soon go out of business.
Oh wait, it is optional. Go foresight! It's far better than posting the blatantly obvious!
Actually, with insurance everybody subsidizes everyone according to their potential for liability. All the money goes into a pool and the pool is invested. Good drivers get a really low rate compared to those with tickets and multiple accidents on their record, because they are less likely to use the money in the pool. My wife, who had three accidents on her record, used to pay three times what I did...because she was three times more likely to pay out in an accident. Now that we have better records, they're always looking for ways to reduce our insurance.
Anyway, the reason cable companies don't want to move to ala carte pricing is that they buy channels in packages, have them delivered in packages from satelites, demux them in packages and deliver them to the box in packages. The actual price of a single channel is really difficult to judge for this reason...obviously, it's not simply # of channels/price of the package. Ala carte pricing is complicated and wouldn't be much cheaper than the current system...you'd be looking at $10 per channel or more just to cover delivery and customer service. That's why HBO is expensive.
I think it's really ridiculous that the first thing people think about whenever anybody proposes a voluntary new monitoring technology is how badly it can be abused.
Yeah -- we all know that people really enjoy paying more for the priviledge of being spied on. And that's why these expensive and complicated technologies will be used to infringe on our privacy?
Bullshit, man. Every one of these things I've seen has had MAJOR privacy provisos, like you can review the data before sending it to your insurance or you can just turn it off whenever you like. They've already THOUGHT about the thing you guys are complaining about! And it's not like they're going to make them mandatory. Airbags aren't mandatory for insurance. Anti-lock brakes aren't mandatory for insurance. Shit, even seat belts aren't mandatory for insurance...I get a good driver rate on my '73 Super Beetle with none of these 3; I pay $30 per month.
I know, we're supposed to have a healthy distrust of anybody who wants to give us a discount. But insurance companies really DO want to give you a discount for being a safe driver. Safe drivers are the most profitable segment of the auto insurance market, because they get to pocket every dollar with little worry that they'll have to pay out massive settlements. Car insurance companies fight for good drivers and fight to keep them...shit, I have such a good record with my current insurer that I could wreck my car tomorrow and my insurance wouldn't go up a dime. They'd assume it was a fluke and pay off without worry. It's in my insurance agreement. It actually happened to my friend (they even bought him nicer rims and gave him a loaner).
These new "big brother" tools are OPTIONAL, they're VOLUNTARY, they're CONTROLLABLE, they can be MONITORED and they are heavily RESTRICTED. We have nothing to worry about -- unless "privacy concerns" cause these great money savers for good drivers to be argued out of existance.
Privacy concerns. Meh. I'd rather have the 100 quid.
Yes, but his market here is the type of unrealistic asshole who pops into my C# channel and says ".NET sucks, I program all my SQL code in machine language." You know -- unrealistic do-it-yourselfers with strong convictions and no real talent. Those who can, do. Those who can't usually have an opinion, anyway.
Anyhow, I will say this: if you can build a nice, efficient graphics and sound demo in assembler, you will have an EASY time using C and a modern API to build an even better one.
And the moral of the story is:
If you don't want to have your life destroyed, don't allow strangers to download works you don't have the copyright for.
Seriously, I have no pity at all for these immensely stupid people who broke the law and now are being punished financially. I think it's fantastic. I can't wait for them to ramp it up further. Because if the RIAA can stop file sharing, i mean really stop it, without having to lobby to make copyright infringement a federal crime, we all prosper. This isn't an issue of fair use or realistic copyright law...fair use should not and does not include the wholesale distribution of potentially profitable modern works. But there also shouldn't be a criminal penalty to it. Proving that current copyright law is MORE than sufficient to protect holders' rights is way more important than fighting a losing battle in the name of "realistic copyright."
Twelve is close enough to umpteen as makes no odds.
There's no statiscal reason to worry about lightning strikes or random murders, either. But I'm still wary of lakes during thunderstorms and I lock my door at night.
I mean, there's paranoia, and then there's preparation. It is not likely on a given day that I will need to use the knife in my pocket or the condom in my wallet but when it happens I'm quite grateful I didn't talk myself out of carrying them.
No, the two are a bit different. Bokeh refers to the LOOK of the depth of field effect, not its existance. For example, take the same picture at the same focal length and with the same aperature setting for two separate lenses and you get two different looks to the out-of-focus background.
Good bokeh turns sharp background contrast into soft, slowly sloping gradiants (like the airbrush in Photoshop) that highlight the foreground subject. Bad bokeh turns sharp background contrast into a series of pointed halos around the object that distract from the foreground subject. The ideal for many photographers is bokeh that looks like a pointellist painting does up close, though everybody has a different preference (here's my favorite bokeh and a miserably failed attempt).
Then, Cray, look out!
For whom? You seem to be of the opinion that complicated networking hardware will just spring up out of a vaccuum. Such is not the case. If and when said technology is invented, it will be BY Cray -- or by another player in the HPC field.
The cost will be high (because of high performance electronics, redundancy etc). The availability will be low. The cabling and control unit will be very expensive.
And at the end of the day, Linux based low latency distributed computing will approach or exceed the cost of Linux based mainframe computing. You're paying a lot for the hardware in either direction. You're paying a company to build and support your solution. You're relying on a single vendor for your processors and interconnects. Where's the benefit?
It's my understanding that Google works because they have split the results system up so granularly and spread the load so accurately that once a machine receives its request, it doesn't have to contact any other machines to make a response. So in essence, each member of the cluster receives a small input task from the controller and does the rest of the work by itself. Google doesn't necessarily need to share information between two artibtrary nodes on its system, which further decreases the complexity of the software.
Very, very few supercomputing tasks can be so easily parallelized. And to be honest, you don't even really need Linux or clustering to do it. I used to do something similar using a regular expression and a BigIP firewall device...servers were numbered 0-9 and pages were broke down to a single number then forwarded to that specific reverse cache server.
I could imagine that.
A porsche will get you and your girlfriend there faster, but two ford focuses will get your whole family there in less than the time it takes for you to drive back and pick them up.
There are also tasks which are quite paralellizable and quite sequential...but that are so heavily interrelated that they require a fast interconnected bus.
The major benefit of Linux clustering kind of falls apart when the bulk of the cost of your project becomes the interconnect. Mainframes are designed to communicate large data between multiple processors wheras standard servers are designed to communicate over a relatively slow I/O bus. If you're paying a few hundred grand for a top of the line control system and interconnects and that's STILL your major bottleneck...well, you should have had a Cray.
Of course, the Cray also has limited expandability...I guess the point is, do your fucking research, analyze the needs from a total cost perspective and don't go with Linux just because you can imagine a Beowulf cluster.
Thanks. I just completed a three month project to enhance our project in a very subtle way. With the competitor's product, every time you enter a client's name and address, it goes in a different field. To associate the data, they do an on-the-fly lookup at report time comparing names and addresses. The end result is that lazy bookkeeping quickly destroys the value of keeping the records in the first place -- Herbert Walker gets three copies of the catalog because some lazy clerk entered his name as Herb and a dyslexic one as Herbret.
But lazy bookkeeping isn't something that can be changed -- the data entry is necessarily fast and off the cuff and probably wrong. So I rewrote our data entry system with this in mind. It uses a bunch of clues (soundex, common misspellings table, additional addresses, names on credit/debit cards and so forth) to compare a set of new data with the set of existing data. If there's no match that's correct enough (according to a user set percentage), the user is asked which of the most possible entries is correct.
The offshoot of this is that our system permits them to be more lazy -- enter just a little bit of data then hit the "guess" button -- while maintaining a more useful tracking system.
I told the sales team they should use that as the slogan..."Our software lets you be lazy"...but it didn't fly. The "enter quickly, search powerfully, associate meaningfully" line had more zing I guess.
Uh, for Windows you are correct. For office, you're partially correct. But for all of their other programs, Microsoft has direct competition from many sides. Sink even gives an example...where an ISV has created a product that competes with Access built on Open Source technologies.
"So what is the right price range?
This question is the point where most small ISVs will wimp out. "We don't have the Microsoft name." "Our product is less mature." "We feel inferior, so obviously our price has to be lower than theirs."
Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The right answer is: "A lot more than $229."
Basically, Sink is telling ISVs to grow a backbone and realize that the first step isn't competing with Microsoft on price (mostly for the reason you're talking about, MS can just drop the price and thus drop the usefulness of your software) but finding the area in which their product is SUPERIOR to Access and leveraging that.
It's good advice. Because by doing this, you encourage people to move away from Access while at the same time increasing itnerest in your product.
We have a local car dealer who did a commercial claiming that the Hyundai luxury sedan looks "just like" the Jaguar only it costs much less. Needless to say, we laugh our ass off at that commercial. A Hyundai is not a Jaguar only cheaper...it's a Hyundai attempting to LOOK like a Jaguar. Too many low-cost programs suffer from trying to look like a Jaguar, when what they really need to do is analyze what it is about the Jaguar that makes it attractive and what can be gleamed from that and added to that to approach the market from a different direction.
Our company writes software for a saturated niche, but does alright because we look at things from a different perspective. Rather than just allowing our customers to enter and store data with a weak search engine, we allow them to enter it quickly, search it powerfully and associate it meaningfully. Our price is higher for that reason -- and yet we have more customers.
I was referring to air terror, and as for myself I'm always wary of flying. In fact, when I took my honeymoon in September of 2001, I flew Continental rather than Southwest because Continental flew smaller planes and required a layover in Chicago. This meant that the planes never had enough fuel to get anywhere, making their value to hijackers greatly decreased.
Nowadays, I've ammended my policy and won't fly in anything other than an ultralite.
Well, having just read the Cecil Adams treatise on the subject, I have to admit: we're both wrong.
The Inuit have many words for snow slash ice, but they're not really that different from our terms for different properties of snow ( drifting snow, packing snow, sleet, slush, etc ). The inuit language is polysynthetic, meaning you make up your own words from particles of meaning as you go along. Therefore, they have as many words for anything as they have time to speak them. Add the particle for snow to the particle for bureau, and voila! Snowbureau.
In many ways, this is not that different from English speaking idiots who think they can invent plurals however they like (statii, virii, emails, boxen and the like) or sound impressive by putting ir- onto the front of a word starting with r (irrespective, irregardless, irridiculous, etc).
I refer to it as the "Aughts." Or, at least I have since Aught One.
You think and analyze thoughts differently in German because you are not used to it. Obviously if you don't know the specific name of a concept in German, you're going to have to think about it in more abstract terms. I speak four languages and find that when I'm speaking a language other than English I often say things like "Hey, see that long four door automobile in a light greenish sort of blue? I think it's pretty" when in English I'd just say "Dig that teal sedan."
In some ways, this can be a good thing. I talk rather slowly in Spanish and French, but I don't stutter or lose my place like I do in English. It takes so much concentration to be coherent that I rarely find myself thinking before I speak.
There is no difference here. Identifying and understanding a concept without a name is completely possible -- I understood the concept of prototyping well before I ever learned C++. And a name for a concept can exist without understanding what it is -- immenatization of the eschaton comes to mind. I still don't know what the fuck that is.
The brain does indeed need to assign symbols to process a concept, but it does not need to have a name for it! This is why sytagmology exists outside of linguistics -- there are ways to process information without words or discrete language.