Boxes, plural form of Box: a usually self-contained piece of electronic equipment. My boss bought new Linux boxes for the data center.
Boxen, plural form of fuck all: a term used by goddamn IT morons to identify themselves to other goddamn IT morons. My boss fired me for inventing stupid words and using them in company wide emails; now who will administrate my boxen? See also: PEBKAC, ROFLMAO, User Friendly.
My Best Buy stocks copies of "Big Game Hunter 3D" as well -- that doesn't encourage my Boss to let me run it as an operating system. It's a big jump, Windows to Linux, and besides all the cost-benefit nonsense, there's risk involved. A team of bearded hackers saying "it'll be okay" isn't going to make the risk seem any less daunting.
No, what's going to do that is seeing software for Linux on the shelves. And in the pages of the CDW catalogs he leafs through. And all those articles in Business Week about IBM, Novell, Sun, HP, etc, moving into Linux based systems are helping.
Still, Linux will never overtake Windows offering itself as an "almost as good for less" approach. Linux needs to offer BETTER software than Microsoft, and that means better setup, better imports, and better daily use to go with its better security and lower intial outset cost.
Re:How about the article itself?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Most executives got to BE executives by caring more about leveraging technology than using technology. In other words, by taking X and using it to make money, rather than takign X and using it to do something.
A guy came into my cube today and asked about the box I'm building. When I mentioned that it ran Lniux, he asked me "Really? What *IS* Linux, anyway? What good does it do me?"
This was a brilliant question and it deserved a complete answer. So I looked at him. All of his needs were already met by Windows. We don't upgrade operting systems -- we just buy new machines ever three years or so on R&D grants -- so the cost issue was not there. He has never gotten any viruses and the firewall protects him from worms. In his day, he uses all of three apps: a custom program for customer management (Windows only), PC Anywhere (Windows only) and Microsoft Word. And he's busy as hell -- certainly doesn't have the spare time to pick up bash syntax or play around with Gee Whiz features. So I said to him, "It does you no good at all."
And then I proceeded to explain to him why I used in on the server. "If I ran the company website and that FTP site on Windows, I'd have to constantly worry about them. I'd have to constantly be installing patches and watching for exploits. By running Linux, I can decrease my watchfulness to the point where I only have to check up on it once a month."
Yes. What works better is superliminal messaging. On my website I sell a series of superliminal CDs that will help you lose weight fast. Here's a sample from the transcript:
[soothing new age music plays] [Das speaks] Welcome to the superliminal weight loss tape. I will provide you with the gentle encouragement you need to lose weight and be a better you. Are you ready? Sit someplace comfortable, close your eyes, and turn up your headphones. We're ready to begin. [Das screams] HEY FATTY! GOD YOU ARE FAT! SMALLER PEOPLE ORBIT YOU! EAT LESS FOOD YOU FAT FUCK!
Etcetera. We also have a tape that will make YOU less wishy washy and indecisive and more attractive to girls.
Not really. The reason software "designed for large numbers of users" fails is that it is difficult to understand what all these options do. I've seen people who could turn double spacing on in Word 97, but not in Word 2000. Reason? IN Word 97, it was just "Use Single Spacing/Use Double Spacing/Use Triple Spacing." In 2000, it was "Use spacing: [2]" with a numeric control. As soon as it went from double to a number, people got confused. They didn't want that level of control, and they didn't trust their knowledge of the application to use it properly.
Customizable toolbars get people as well. They are too easy to move and change and most people --myself included -- adjust themselves to a certain config. Move a menu, and you may take a long time to figure something out.
Example: the first thing I do when I install VS.NET is turn off all the toolbars and close all the panels. I just want the editor (and the file selector bar)...when I want to do something else, I'll do it with keyboard commands. Another guy I work with, he turns ALL the toolbars on (boosts the font too, another pet peeve of mine as I like to view 100 vertical lines of code at a time). When he needs to use my environment, he's stuck. At first he couldn't even figure out how to compile. Because in HIS world, compiling is a button you press on a window. In mine, it's ctrl-shift-b. He can figure it out of course, he's not stupid. But imagine if your entire computing experience was a series of adventures in figuring out what the programmer wanted you to press to do a simple task. That's modern computing for the end user.
Design Principle #6: Simplicity BEFORE generality. He's talking about interfaces, but it works here, too. Don't ruin a program for everybody by trying to make it do two completely opposite tasks.
It's embarassing that I once had the opposite job -- purging unneeded paperwork from the files of long deceased criminals for the justice department and recycling it -- and absolutely loved it. I could sit back, pump the headphones, and just zonk out for $8 an hour (respectable summer pay at the time).
For a while I treated it as a game...raced this guy I worked with to see how many file drawers we could do in a day. The two of us got up to 27 or 28 per day before the manager (now my mother in law) asked us to slow down. See, we were budgeted to be there all summer, but they couldn't pay us if there was no work, and at our pace we were each going faster than any other three people working there combined.
So instead, we slowed down and chatted with each other. Showed each other the uglier male prisoners' photos, and the prettier ladies. We read off the obscene things some of these folks did that put them in the big house.
Basically, we dealt with the drudgery by inventing tiny bits of fun. My friend's father did the same when he worked for IBM. At the time, he was also the resident poet at a coffee house. So any time he'd maintain a program, he'd inject a quick haiku or image poem in the source code. Supposedly, the poems are still there...
That is a very powerful argument for corporations who care FAR more about having long-term supportable environments than upgrading hardware or software due to the either obsoleting their environment.
By your argument, they'd be as well off using Windows on those machines. Place I used to work had the whole development team (who were just writing scripts anyway) running Windows 2000 on 500 MHz Celerons. And those were the most powerful desktops there.
Of course, if you're in corporate purchasing, you probably have to deal with things like depreciation and hardware cycles. Which is more likely to be usable in another 4 years: today's top of the line model, or today's bottom of the barrel model? And which has the better warranty, which will require less internal maintenance during its lifespan, etc?
Hey, I didn't say it wasnt' stupid. Just that they were doing it to indicate that, yes, you can make copies of the disc, so long as they aren't for illegal distribution. Maybe the phrasing is bad.
Uh...they point it out because MS EXPECTS you to make copies of their software, for backup and installation purposes. Why else would they send you a site license with a hundred activation keys and a single set of discs? You're supposed to copy the CD, or put it on your network. That's why there's no copy protection on MS CDs, and why they require individual activation codes now. The ILLEGAL isn't there to make people associate it with COPIES, it's there to differentiate between two VERY different uses for copies.
BTW: as greedy as people try to make the new activation scheme seem, MS tends to play pretty loose with their licenses for business customers. They just gave us a key good for 40 installs of a package under our MSDE agreement, which only secures 5.
Right. I don't think what Linux really needs is to be associated with really ugly, underpowered, outdated systems (please no replies on how 1.6 GHz and 128 meg should be good enough or how you're running Linux on a postage stamp). This just make Windows look more like the luxury option.
But how much luxury is it? When I bought my first IBM compatible in 1989, the guy offered to knock $50 off if we went with PC-DOS (or was it DR-DOS) instead of MS-DOS. My dad got pretty pissed at the assumption that he couldn't afford the market leader in software when he was shelling out $2000 for a top of the line 386DX40 (AMD!) with a genuine SoundBlaster 8 bit soundcard. And the difference there was much more subtle...you could run pretty much any MS-DOS app on the alternative OS. You can't do that with Windows and Linux. It's not the difference between power windows or the crank. It's the difference between driving on the interstate, or having to drive backroads all the time. That's one hell of a decision for $50.
Do we really want Linux and Java to be known as the ghetto class solution? Is the benefit of "availability" in Wal-Mart worth the detriment of association with Wal-Mart, especially considering you can't buy a single Linux program at Wal-Mart?
Would you trust your kids to play with your fine china? CD based games are even more fragile than that, and more expensive.
Rather than bemoan the inferior durability of game cds, why not institute a "The Playstation is in a locked cabinet, Dad has to change the disc for you" policy until the kids are mature enough to understand what $50 really is? It's what my wife's aunt does for her kids (they have a similar policy for DVDs).
Actually, there are tons of things that you "own" but can't modify. You can't, for example, run your car without an emissions control system. You won't pass inspection and will have to take it off the road. You can't modify your house's water line (for fear of contamination of the shared aquafer). You can't modify your cell phone to boost the signal power beyond the legal limit. In short, if modifying something you own interferes with others, or allows you to interfere with others, you probably can't do it. Argue if you want that it's the interference, not the modification, that breaks the law, but you can't prevent interference that's already happening. You CAN prevent modification (to a point).
And as for the whole warranty thing: generally, a company is in its right to deny you warranty protection in a static sensitive device if you open it, and they'd be kind of nuts not to warn you of this fact. Otherwise, every inquisitive idiot with a screwdriver would have a never ending source of hardware to break. That note says "Hey, go ahead, if you know what you're doing, but we're not obligated to clean up your mess," and without that warning, they might not be able to afford to offer you a warranty at all. Shit, I broke three dreamcasts trying to put a mod chip in (the old 26 wire style), and it was only the lack of a "don't modify" tag that allowed me to do it.
Congratulations. I know several people who have mod chips and 0 legitimate games. Anecdotal evidence isn't. Which was the problem with this article in the first place.
I'd love to believe that mod chips don't cause piracy or decrease sales in any way. But about three years ago, about the time I started working as a programmer, I made the conscious decision to stop pirating software. And you know what? I started buying a LOT more games. Even when I first bought my house and was living on credit, I was still buying games (not my fault. Blizzard's). Other friends who lost me as the source of their pirated games started buying more, too. In fact, we bought so many games that we wound up as the best customers of the local GameStop and made a lot more friends from this association.
Anecdotal again, I know. But hopefully you found some insight in it.
They did build cities that way. Then rich Americans moved out of them into the outlaying suburbs. Poorer immigrants moved in to their old houses, and businesses moved to where the money was: just outside of town in the suburbs. Soon the poor started moving into the suburbs, so the rich moved further into the country. And businesses followed. Now the countryside is full of mansions interspersed with Lowes warehouses, the suburbs are decaying and overcrowded, and the cities are nearly empty save the poorest of the poor and the occasional confused hipster. You can still bike everywhere in the city; you're just likely to get shot in the next while doing so.
Incidentally, I used to bike 9 miles to and from work every day, from the country to the city. It was great, even without any bike paths or anything. I'd get up a little earlier, hit up the McDonald's for a nice yogurt, and make it home just as the sun was going down. Very enjoyable, aside from the constant annoyances and heckling of people who actually liked their cars. Got hit three or four times as well; once a truck slammed right into my laptop bag and sent my precious powerbook skittering across the highway (in true apple spirit, it worked just fine afterwards, though two of the little rubber feet broke off).
Well, not necessarily. You're assuming that all software users need the same thing. They don't -- and a number of individual "niche" industries exist. In the industry I'm in, everbody already has computers and have for years. There's no new sales to be made. So software prices keep going up. Luckily, so do feature sets, so people have more and more they can do with things.
Besides, the "more people == more sales == lower price" argument is repudiated by the other equation: "more people == more features needed + more bugs found == more tech support + more programmers == roughly the same price." After all, this isn't OSS, where a tool has a single purpose and a single use.
Also, Bill G has been great at predicting the industry. That's why DOS, and later Windows, took off so well...Bill played both the business and consumer markets with the same tool and one both. His book reads like Meine Kampf of the computer world, and a good deal of it has come to pass already. Also, keep in mind he never said the "640k" line, which I thought everybody knew.
Man, in a way, we're always buying nothing. Buy a $15 poster, that's just $.10 worth of paper covered in $.50 worth of ink. Buy a $6salad, you have $.75 worth of vegetable parts in a $.20 plastic case. Shit, even a $200 computer chip is just a few ounces of sand with a negligible amount of metal.
But that doesn't mean these things don't have value. If you think that poster will look good on the wall, you'll pay for it. If you're hungry, you'll buy the salad. And if you need to process something, you'll buy the chip.
This value is in people's perception of the extra effort spent by people in processing these raw materials. Now, those raw materials are basically worthless in the digital world, but if you can process them into a form that people value, then they're worth it.
That doesn't mean this idea isn't stupid, of course. If I want my friends to know I care about them, I'll send them some bitchin' MP3s.
But somebody who didn't understand technology and didn't want to MIGHT pay for it because they thought it was a cute idea. These are the same people who buy new Sims add-ons for the additional wallpaper and landscaping. These are the people keeing Pier 1, Tuesday Morning and the Christmas Tree Shop in business. These are the same people who keep buying me candles, picture frames and other tchotchkes when what I really need is a new fucking laptop.
In short, women will pay for this, because it is useless but kind of cute and not too expensive.
I dunno. Here's how I develop things (background: I write.client-server apps driven by a central database), and it's mostly visual:
Somebody hands me a bunch of interpretations of what they want to do. They are sometimes digitized, but are usually pencil on paper along with a bunch of accompanying forms. I usually write on these my own observations from an interface point of view.
I create a more complete "quicky" interface in VS.NET from these hash outs. I take screenshots to make sure there's room for everything, and to get sign offs on the "how's it gonna work" aspect of the program, which is really all the client cares about. Once the interface and its relationships are hammered out, it's time to do the data layer.
I then use visio to create a datamap of how things are going to associate with each other. This is a little quicker than making the tables first and provides a nice reference for dealing with a shitload of tables.
I generate tables from this map. There's some hand work here, adjusting the types and precision of fields to taste.
Then, I have a program I wrote to write basic data access stored procs for these tables, as well as abstracted classes for my program. Some of the stored procs take some tweaking, but 90% are fine as is.
In the end, writing the program is just a matter of wiring these classes into the interface, and tweaking until it fucking rocks. Most of this is "visual programming," in that I only write or edit about 1/100th of the total codebase by hand. The result is a more complete, easier to maintain system which is just as fast as if i'd hand optimized everything (because this time last year, I DID hand optimize the script and class generators and the abstraction layer that goes with them...and I haven't touched that code in 6 months. performance at this point is incidental!)
Funny...I say the same thing. But a guy just demo'd a tablet PC to my boss and the other guys in development, and everybody BUT me wanted one. And my boss had dollar signs in his eyes, because every single one of our building inspector clients will want one.
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Boxes, plural form of Box: a usually self-contained piece of electronic equipment. My boss bought new Linux boxes for the data center.
Boxen, plural form of fuck all: a term used by goddamn IT morons to identify themselves to other goddamn IT morons. My boss fired me for inventing stupid words and using them in company wide emails; now who will administrate my boxen? See also: PEBKAC, ROFLMAO, User Friendly.
My Best Buy stocks copies of "Big Game Hunter 3D" as well -- that doesn't encourage my Boss to let me run it as an operating system. It's a big jump, Windows to Linux, and besides all the cost-benefit nonsense, there's risk involved. A team of bearded hackers saying "it'll be okay" isn't going to make the risk seem any less daunting.
No, what's going to do that is seeing software for Linux on the shelves. And in the pages of the CDW catalogs he leafs through. And all those articles in Business Week about IBM, Novell, Sun, HP, etc, moving into Linux based systems are helping.
Still, Linux will never overtake Windows offering itself as an "almost as good for less" approach. Linux needs to offer BETTER software than Microsoft, and that means better setup, better imports, and better daily use to go with its better security and lower intial outset cost.
Most executives got to BE executives by caring more about leveraging technology than using technology. In other words, by taking X and using it to make money, rather than takign X and using it to do something.
A guy came into my cube today and asked about the box I'm building. When I mentioned that it ran Lniux, he asked me "Really? What *IS* Linux, anyway? What good does it do me?"
This was a brilliant question and it deserved a complete answer. So I looked at him. All of his needs were already met by Windows. We don't upgrade operting systems -- we just buy new machines ever three years or so on R&D grants -- so the cost issue was not there. He has never gotten any viruses and the firewall protects him from worms. In his day, he uses all of three apps: a custom program for customer management (Windows only), PC Anywhere (Windows only) and Microsoft Word. And he's busy as hell -- certainly doesn't have the spare time to pick up bash syntax or play around with Gee Whiz features. So I said to him, "It does you no good at all."
And then I proceeded to explain to him why I used in on the server. "If I ran the company website and that FTP site on Windows, I'd have to constantly worry about them. I'd have to constantly be installing patches and watching for exploits. By running Linux, I can decrease my watchfulness to the point where I only have to check up on it once a month."
Shit, I'm starving.
Let's have a LAN party!
I'm naming my first born "omg new baby ^_^"
Yes. What works better is superliminal messaging. On my website I sell a series of superliminal CDs that will help you lose weight fast. Here's a sample from the transcript:
[soothing new age music plays]
[Das speaks] Welcome to the superliminal weight loss tape. I will provide you with the gentle encouragement you need to lose weight and be a better you. Are you ready? Sit someplace comfortable, close your eyes, and turn up your headphones. We're ready to begin.
[Das screams] HEY FATTY! GOD YOU ARE FAT! SMALLER PEOPLE ORBIT YOU! EAT LESS FOOD YOU FAT FUCK!
Etcetera. We also have a tape that will make YOU less wishy washy and indecisive and more attractive to girls.
Not really. The reason software "designed for large numbers of users" fails is that it is difficult to understand what all these options do. I've seen people who could turn double spacing on in Word 97, but not in Word 2000. Reason? IN Word 97, it was just "Use Single Spacing/Use Double Spacing/Use Triple Spacing." In 2000, it was "Use spacing: [2]" with a numeric control. As soon as it went from double to a number, people got confused. They didn't want that level of control, and they didn't trust their knowledge of the application to use it properly.
Customizable toolbars get people as well. They are too easy to move and change and most people --myself included -- adjust themselves to a certain config. Move a menu, and you may take a long time to figure something out.
Example: the first thing I do when I install VS.NET is turn off all the toolbars and close all the panels. I just want the editor (and the file selector bar)...when I want to do something else, I'll do it with keyboard commands. Another guy I work with, he turns ALL the toolbars on (boosts the font too, another pet peeve of mine as I like to view 100 vertical lines of code at a time). When he needs to use my environment, he's stuck. At first he couldn't even figure out how to compile. Because in HIS world, compiling is a button you press on a window. In mine, it's ctrl-shift-b. He can figure it out of course, he's not stupid. But imagine if your entire computing experience was a series of adventures in figuring out what the programmer wanted you to press to do a simple task. That's modern computing for the end user.
Design Principle #6: Simplicity BEFORE generality. He's talking about interfaces, but it works here, too. Don't ruin a program for everybody by trying to make it do two completely opposite tasks.
It's embarassing that I once had the opposite job -- purging unneeded paperwork from the files of long deceased criminals for the justice department and recycling it -- and absolutely loved it. I could sit back, pump the headphones, and just zonk out for $8 an hour (respectable summer pay at the time).
For a while I treated it as a game...raced this guy I worked with to see how many file drawers we could do in a day. The two of us got up to 27 or 28 per day before the manager (now my mother in law) asked us to slow down. See, we were budgeted to be there all summer, but they couldn't pay us if there was no work, and at our pace we were each going faster than any other three people working there combined.
So instead, we slowed down and chatted with each other. Showed each other the uglier male prisoners' photos, and the prettier ladies. We read off the obscene things some of these folks did that put them in the big house.
Basically, we dealt with the drudgery by inventing tiny bits of fun. My friend's father did the same when he worked for IBM. At the time, he was also the resident poet at a coffee house. So any time he'd maintain a program, he'd inject a quick haiku or image poem in the source code. Supposedly, the poems are still there...
That is a very powerful argument for corporations who care FAR more about having long-term supportable environments than upgrading hardware or software due to the either obsoleting their environment.
By your argument, they'd be as well off using Windows on those machines. Place I used to work had the whole development team (who were just writing scripts anyway) running Windows 2000 on 500 MHz Celerons. And those were the most powerful desktops there.
Of course, if you're in corporate purchasing, you probably have to deal with things like depreciation and hardware cycles. Which is more likely to be usable in another 4 years: today's top of the line model, or today's bottom of the barrel model? And which has the better warranty, which will require less internal maintenance during its lifespan, etc?
You can get XP Home for $99 retail, and I'm pretty sure OEMs spend less than $50.
That's a pretty good deal considering how much you get for that $50. I've paid more for fewer features...in fact, I paid more for Windows 3.1!
But to some people, $99 is just too much to spend for an operating system. I wonder how much those people spent on tires...
Hey, I didn't say it wasnt' stupid. Just that they were doing it to indicate that, yes, you can make copies of the disc, so long as they aren't for illegal distribution. Maybe the phrasing is bad.
Uh...they point it out because MS EXPECTS you to make copies of their software, for backup and installation purposes. Why else would they send you a site license with a hundred activation keys and a single set of discs? You're supposed to copy the CD, or put it on your network. That's why there's no copy protection on MS CDs, and why they require individual activation codes now. The ILLEGAL isn't there to make people associate it with COPIES, it's there to differentiate between two VERY different uses for copies.
BTW: as greedy as people try to make the new activation scheme seem, MS tends to play pretty loose with their licenses for business customers. They just gave us a key good for 40 installs of a package under our MSDE agreement, which only secures 5.
Right. I don't think what Linux really needs is to be associated with really ugly, underpowered, outdated systems (please no replies on how 1.6 GHz and 128 meg should be good enough or how you're running Linux on a postage stamp). This just make Windows look more like the luxury option.
But how much luxury is it? When I bought my first IBM compatible in 1989, the guy offered to knock $50 off if we went with PC-DOS (or was it DR-DOS) instead of MS-DOS. My dad got pretty pissed at the assumption that he couldn't afford the market leader in software when he was shelling out $2000 for a top of the line 386DX40 (AMD!) with a genuine SoundBlaster 8 bit soundcard. And the difference there was much more subtle...you could run pretty much any MS-DOS app on the alternative OS. You can't do that with Windows and Linux. It's not the difference between power windows or the crank. It's the difference between driving on the interstate, or having to drive backroads all the time. That's one hell of a decision for $50.
Do we really want Linux and Java to be known as the ghetto class solution? Is the benefit of "availability" in Wal-Mart worth the detriment of association with Wal-Mart, especially considering you can't buy a single Linux program at Wal-Mart?
Would you trust your kids to play with your fine china? CD based games are even more fragile than that, and more expensive.
Rather than bemoan the inferior durability of game cds, why not institute a "The Playstation is in a locked cabinet, Dad has to change the disc for you" policy until the kids are mature enough to understand what $50 really is? It's what my wife's aunt does for her kids (they have a similar policy for DVDs).
Actually, there are tons of things that you "own" but can't modify. You can't, for example, run your car without an emissions control system. You won't pass inspection and will have to take it off the road. You can't modify your house's water line (for fear of contamination of the shared aquafer). You can't modify your cell phone to boost the signal power beyond the legal limit. In short, if modifying something you own interferes with others, or allows you to interfere with others, you probably can't do it. Argue if you want that it's the interference, not the modification, that breaks the law, but you can't prevent interference that's already happening. You CAN prevent modification (to a point).
And as for the whole warranty thing: generally, a company is in its right to deny you warranty protection in a static sensitive device if you open it, and they'd be kind of nuts not to warn you of this fact. Otherwise, every inquisitive idiot with a screwdriver would have a never ending source of hardware to break. That note says "Hey, go ahead, if you know what you're doing, but we're not obligated to clean up your mess," and without that warning, they might not be able to afford to offer you a warranty at all. Shit, I broke three dreamcasts trying to put a mod chip in (the old 26 wire style), and it was only the lack of a "don't modify" tag that allowed me to do it.
Congratulations. I know several people who have mod chips and 0 legitimate games. Anecdotal evidence isn't. Which was the problem with this article in the first place.
I'd love to believe that mod chips don't cause piracy or decrease sales in any way. But about three years ago, about the time I started working as a programmer, I made the conscious decision to stop pirating software. And you know what? I started buying a LOT more games. Even when I first bought my house and was living on credit, I was still buying games (not my fault. Blizzard's). Other friends who lost me as the source of their pirated games started buying more, too. In fact, we bought so many games that we wound up as the best customers of the local GameStop and made a lot more friends from this association.
Anecdotal again, I know. But hopefully you found some insight in it.
They did build cities that way. Then rich Americans moved out of them into the outlaying suburbs. Poorer immigrants moved in to their old houses, and businesses moved to where the money was: just outside of town in the suburbs. Soon the poor started moving into the suburbs, so the rich moved further into the country. And businesses followed. Now the countryside is full of mansions interspersed with Lowes warehouses, the suburbs are decaying and overcrowded, and the cities are nearly empty save the poorest of the poor and the occasional confused hipster. You can still bike everywhere in the city; you're just likely to get shot in the next while doing so.
Incidentally, I used to bike 9 miles to and from work every day, from the country to the city. It was great, even without any bike paths or anything. I'd get up a little earlier, hit up the McDonald's for a nice yogurt, and make it home just as the sun was going down. Very enjoyable, aside from the constant annoyances and heckling of people who actually liked their cars. Got hit three or four times as well; once a truck slammed right into my laptop bag and sent my precious powerbook skittering across the highway (in true apple spirit, it worked just fine afterwards, though two of the little rubber feet broke off).
Well, not necessarily. You're assuming that all software users need the same thing. They don't -- and a number of individual "niche" industries exist. In the industry I'm in, everbody already has computers and have for years. There's no new sales to be made. So software prices keep going up. Luckily, so do feature sets, so people have more and more they can do with things.
Besides, the "more people == more sales == lower price" argument is repudiated by the other equation: "more people == more features needed + more bugs found == more tech support + more programmers == roughly the same price." After all, this isn't OSS, where a tool has a single purpose and a single use.
Also, Bill G has been great at predicting the industry. That's why DOS, and later Windows, took off so well...Bill played both the business and consumer markets with the same tool and one both. His book reads like Meine Kampf of the computer world, and a good deal of it has come to pass already. Also, keep in mind he never said the "640k" line, which I thought everybody knew.
Man, in a way, we're always buying nothing. Buy a $15 poster, that's just $.10 worth of paper covered in $.50 worth of ink. Buy a $6salad, you have $.75 worth of vegetable parts in a $.20 plastic case. Shit, even a $200 computer chip is just a few ounces of sand with a negligible amount of metal.
But that doesn't mean these things don't have value. If you think that poster will look good on the wall, you'll pay for it. If you're hungry, you'll buy the salad. And if you need to process something, you'll buy the chip.
This value is in people's perception of the extra effort spent by people in processing these raw materials. Now, those raw materials are basically worthless in the digital world, but if you can process them into a form that people value, then they're worth it.
That doesn't mean this idea isn't stupid, of course. If I want my friends to know I care about them, I'll send them some bitchin' MP3s.
Cats and dogs...living together?
Mass hysteria!
YOU wouldn't pay for this.
But somebody who didn't understand technology and didn't want to MIGHT pay for it because they thought it was a cute idea. These are the same people who buy new Sims add-ons for the additional wallpaper and landscaping. These are the people keeing Pier 1, Tuesday Morning and the Christmas Tree Shop in business. These are the same people who keep buying me candles, picture frames and other tchotchkes when what I really need is a new fucking laptop.
In short, women will pay for this, because it is useless but kind of cute and not too expensive.
I dunno. Here's how I develop things (background: I write .client-server apps driven by a central database), and it's mostly visual:
Somebody hands me a bunch of interpretations of what they want to do. They are sometimes digitized, but are usually pencil on paper along with a bunch of accompanying forms. I usually write on these my own observations from an interface point of view.
I create a more complete "quicky" interface in VS.NET from these hash outs. I take screenshots to make sure there's room for everything, and to get sign offs on the "how's it gonna work" aspect of the program, which is really all the client cares about. Once the interface and its relationships are hammered out, it's time to do the data layer.
I then use visio to create a datamap of how things are going to associate with each other. This is a little quicker than making the tables first and provides a nice reference for dealing with a shitload of tables.
I generate tables from this map. There's some hand work here, adjusting the types and precision of fields to taste.
Then, I have a program I wrote to write basic data access stored procs for these tables, as well as abstracted classes for my program. Some of the stored procs take some tweaking, but 90% are fine as is.
In the end, writing the program is just a matter of wiring these classes into the interface, and tweaking until it fucking rocks. Most of this is "visual programming," in that I only write or edit about 1/100th of the total codebase by hand. The result is a more complete, easier to maintain system which is just as fast as if i'd hand optimized everything (because this time last year, I DID hand optimize the script and class generators and the abstraction layer that goes with them...and I haven't touched that code in 6 months. performance at this point is incidental!)
Funny...I say the same thing. But a guy just demo'd a tablet PC to my boss and the other guys in development, and everybody BUT me wanted one. And my boss had dollar signs in his eyes, because every single one of our building inspector clients will want one.
I guess we just don't get it.
Not to the average OSS hacker. To them, the paper would be free, the text would be free, but the SUPPORT CONTRACT would be fairly priced.