Web Hosting companies and SaaS businesses use Linux because they need lots of inexpensive servers. These companies can reduce their costs and increase profits by deploying linux on all their servers for free. This also means they don't have to track licenses and worry about audits from Microsoft in the future. Unless Microsoft either gives away their software, or provides so much extra functionality that it outweighs the cost of the OS, I don't see how they are going to gain in this area.
That big target that MS needs to hit is the manageability target. We need to be able to install a light OS, pre-configured for our environments, in a fraction of the time it takes today, and it needs to be centrally monitorable and manageable without having to purchase a very expensive commercial package to do so. The entire OS has to be scriptable from the commandline. In server environments, commandline is king.
I quit buying cd's when the ipod came out. I'm on windows, so I had to wait a while with no cd purchases until the PC ipod units came out. Now I buy music online all the time.
So yes, ipod sales drive online music sales. The prices aren't out of line either, especially for whole albums, which is what I tend to buy.
What miffs me are albums that are only partially available. Why do they do this when they also have the option of making the song available on the album only? I don't get it.
Also, doesn't this mean that as a song rises in popularity, it gets more expensive? That's kinda what they want, right, so wouldn't that drive demand down? Economics 101, HELLO!
I couldn't agree more. I started my Computer Science degree at a smaller university, where the teachers actually taught and cared about teaching. There wasn't any research to do. Teaching was why they were there. And while I was not particularly challenged in the computer scinece courses (I passed out of the entire first year), the math teachers were good and I actually learned Calc I and felt I understood the subject.
I moved to a larger, more computer-science-oriented university, after 3 semesters at small U. The math teachers at big U were abysmal. I couldn't understand them, their TA's were even worse, and I got a D...twice...in Calc II. I went to class 4 days a week, mostly with the TA, I studied my rear off trying to comprehend the "why" of the subject, but never really "got it".
I took a full-time day job and went to Big U's night school, and there again were teachers who taught. I loved it.
Big U with Big Bucks and more focus on research than teaching didn't care about me, and I failed. Small U and nightschool were populated by both teachers that wanted to teach, and students that wanted to be there, and I excelled.
Saying that the author of the article was just lazy or had no aptitude smacks of superiority and is really unbecoming. You have no idea what that guy is or isn't capable of, and he certainly writes better than any of the posters in this forum, myself included.
This is an absolute insult to those of us who hold religious beliefs. Now the faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Muslimism are on par with something made up in a movie!
What a bogus article! Windows and Windows software have become more robust, stable and feature-packed over the years, not less.
Case in point is the lack of examples in this article. What software is getting worse?
Like Photoshop, which works perfectly every time and never crashes, is fast, ties into web services, and is easy to use. Ditto with Windows XP. MS Office works great, only problem I have there is that the cost goes up and the new features aren't there, but then don't buy the upgrade! How about Quicken, which handles all of my accounts and transactions, tied into my banks, and again runs flawlessly.
And unlike the bad old days, we get free patches and upgrades for basically the life of the product, for no extra $$$. Businesses have to pay support contracts for this kind of service, but we buy a copy of Windows for $100, complain about it, and get free patches and web support for years.
I just don't see it guys! My windows box is all but flawless, day in and day out.
And honestly I have more trouble with the majority of OSS software, resolving endless dependencies, compilation failures, lack of documentation, poorly implemented GUIs and interfaces, blah blah. Open Office, Firefox and a few others besides, OSS is NOT better quality! Look at KOffice...years of development and still not terribly useful, and the functions that are there don't always work. Or KDevelop, looks nice but nowhere near the productivity of Dev Studio. Don't even get me started about the un-intuitive interface of the Gimp, or the utter lack of robusteness in GNUcash.
Let's face it guys, the interoperability between Windows, IIS,.NET and SQL Server make building apps a snap. So I have to disagree with the typical OSS rhetoric on this. Even the best distros, like SuSE for example, have holes in setup and installation that make getting your environment up and running, with all the features installed, difficult (sometimes painfully so).
Small businesses are the market here. A small business doesn't want to have to pay for a firewall, router, DNS server, spam filter, virus protection, a windows server, Exchange Server license, backup equipment, backup schedules and testing, and an administrator to put it all together, when you can pay $6/mo/user to have someone else do all the pain for you.
I wanted a bigger drive back in June, and the prices were really quite high. I finally bought one in September, by then the prices on a 160GB drive had dropped to a respectible $130 (with rebates). Now the same is on sale for $59 in the latest BestBuy flyer.
The point? Something is happening. Why are they selling off drives like this? Oversupply? Switch to SATA?
For example, I host my websites with host provider. I'd like to install tomcat and run some JSP/J2EE. The application I'd like to run won't work in a hosted environment, where I share my server space with hundreds of other users in virtual domains. I need my own server, but that's cost-prohibitive.
So if I want to run that app, I have to get a hosted server and set it up. My provider has to rack another server and I have to pay quite a bit extra to get it. Not anymore, now my provider sets a virtual server for me on a single piece of hardware that I share with others.
There are any number of apps out there that just won't play well in a virtual domain environment, and yet don't justify dedicated servers either.
On top of that, according to the install guide, the virtual machines can be moved on the fly(!) to other physical hosts, allowing for balancing and perhaps cluster services. If one piece of hardware becomes overloaded, a new host can be setup and the heavily-loaded guest moved to the new host, incurring no downtime in the process.
Heck, we incur downtime and alot of work to move apps to newer, beefier hardware. Imagine if you could move your app on the fly to new hardware? If you setup all of your servers to run as guest OS in Xen, even if there is only one guest per server, you still benefit for being able to migrate on the fly.
I think you've pointed out exactly why MS and Sun have gone to other languages and away from C++: it was so perfect that nobody was making any money! Yeah, so they had to come up with something worse in order to generate revenue!
And..and..and corporate IT shops left C++ because they didn't want stable apps with no memory leaks and an extensive and rich API. Things were getting boring afterall, best to spice up that drudgery and reduce productivity with new languages!
Can someone explain this better? That link to the conjecture is plain awful.
Here are my questions (in parens):
If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink (huh? what do they mean by "shrink" here?) it (rubber band or apple?) down to a point by moving (huh? again, what does "move" mean here) it (rubber band or apple) slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface (okay, must mean rubber band doesn't leave the surface of the apple then?). On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction (what direction would that be?) around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it (rubber band again I assume) to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. (why? the writer made a big leap here, but it's not obvious)
This is a hot-button topic for me, so I'll try to keep it simple.
When I came to my current job, my opinion was to keep as much of the logic in the application as possible, stored procedures should help make the developer's life easier, and make the database more robust (triggers mostly do this part).
When I came here, however, they forced EVERY SINGLE QUERY into a stored procedure, and like you said, it brought development speed to a halt, because every project was assigned "a database guy" to do the work, but there weren't enough database guys for the projects.
It was pathetic, and when our big layoff occurred (we got bought out), we found alot of really really bad stored procedures that the so-called experts made for us.
Worse, it makes code releases a nightmare, because not only does the codebase have to be updated, but the database too, every single time. Unlike code bases where you can checkout your latest release, with databases you have to a) find all the altered database scripts, b) package them up for the release, c) halt the database for the release and d) run the script at go-live and hope you didn't miss one more thing.
Mind you I still use stored procedures, views and triggers where they make sense (when it's obvious that it just belongs in the database), but mostly I try to put as much logic as possible in the app.
Now you want to make me get into NULL values and candidate keys issues too! Bah, no NULLs anywhere, #1, and #2, don't make up integer primary keys when an existing field will work. Don't let your database administrators talk you into it, I beg you!
Is it just me, or have there been alot of responses that boil down to "C++ can be fast if you throw away anything inherently C++ and use straight C instead?"
Part of the point here was to compare two supposedly similar languages. If the author wanted to compare nasty optimized hard-to-read C to Java, he would have.
Java, and.Net too, are great because they are rich, more than anything.
If you really care about speed so much, why are you running an OS to run an application that is a language interpreter (HTML, in this case), the code of which was produced by yet another interpreted program (Perl) that runs through another program (Apache) on top of yet another OS, and which is transported over a low-bandwidth internet connection?
Did I miss something? It's just a frickin calculator! Yeah, it can graph and all that, but SO WHAT! You'll use it for your math classes and then it'll sit and collect dust. What a waste!
Labor costs are only a part of this problem. Time consuption is a bigger problem.
I know several folks who rave about the quality of the work being done for our company overseas (India and China). At the same time, however, the company asks the foreign coders to do a job, and then leaves them to it.
Contrast that with how American workers are hounded all day long. Emails that have to be answered right now. IM. Endless meetings about nothing. Daily or weekly status reports. Conference calls. Daily production support. Human Resources online training sessions, demos, sales calls...the list of distractions goes on and on.
So the irony is that American companies, IMNSHO, are one of the biggest factors driving up the costs of development in the US.
Add to this the percieved need for more "Administrators" to do what programmers did themselves not 5 years ago, and the cost goes even higher.
If American companies instead hired a small group of empowered programmers, gave them a specific task and delivery date, and let them work day in and day out on their code, undistracted, you'd get quality stuff done in English, from people you know, during business hours.
I think the responses here are typical. Typical of those who think "different is better" and that we all have time to devote to this.
I tried and tried to use Gimp over the years, I tried to read through the manuals online...it was PAINFUL. Even the easiest things escaped me. I just wanted to do X very simple procedure, and I spent hours trying to figure out how to do that. I even found newsgroup postings from people trying to do what I was doing and getting responses like "it's just a little different, you have to hold shift-alt drag the mouse and stand on your head to draw a box." Duh.
And then I picked up a trial copy of Elements 2.0, figured it out in about 30 seconds and was doing what I needed to do. I paid my $100 two days later and will never go back. It's super-fast on my machine too.
The lesson: Gimp is different for the sake of being different, which means it's a higher learning curve than I'm willing to give it. I'll gladly pay someone who's taken the time to make their software work in a way that users expect these days.
Take a page about design from Joel on Software, guys. The Gimp isn't worth my time.
Why don't we use more available code? Leaky abstractions for one.
And look at the DLL and.so hell we're in now, where we have libraries that depend on libraries which depend on libraries...yik...all that to save a tiny bit of work, ain't worth it. Write your own.
The problem that arises is that many scripts become mission critical, and yet are "hidden" in root crons or some other root-owned facility, and are not maintained in the corporate source control system. So other developers can't see or alter them. Worse, they don't often go through the same QC process as other pieces of software in the organization.
There is a healthy aversion by management to anything that is critical but not touchable but by a few, and which breaks all the controls put in place by management.
I personally like scripting. It does solve every-day problems efficiently. But I think it gets a bad wrap because of these lack of controls.
That 906.6 million albums includes Bach, Beethoven, The Beetles, Cindy Lauper and so on. What you need to know is how many of those 906.6 mil are NEW releases within that fiscal year, then re-run your numbers.
Maybe $500,000 - $1 million to produce an album isn't so crazy.
I won't pay for XM radio. As soon as a critical mass of people move to XM, the FM/AM stations will go out of business, due to lack of revenue from commercials. As XM grows, Wall Street will continue to push it to make more and more profit, which will push XM to either raise rates, or air more commercials. As that happens, some of us will want to move back to free radio, but there will be no free radio to move back to.
In the end, we'll lose our choices!
Think cable all over again. Today we pay for our shows by watching commercials, like we did on free TV, AND we pay the cable company about $40 a month as well!
Don't do it, don't buy XM! It's a waste of money and in the end, free radio will go the way of free TV.
The computer is the most flexible and powerful tool man has yet invented. The TV, as Mr. Katz points out, is easy to use. A station boradcasts a signal, you receive it on your TV, and the picture shows up. What's there to understand about it? You turn a dial (push a button), the channel changes. You turn another and the volume changes.
Any device with a very limited scope of work is also easily understood. Toaster, microwave, VCR (minus programming of course), car, stereo, camera...
Compare this to the computer, which is doing work not even dreamed up just 20 years ago, and doing dozens or even hundreds of different tasks, all with the same piece of equipment.
If we asked people instead if they knew how the electron gun in the TV operated, how the TV camera converted images into TV waves, how these are beamed to space and back, converted again and thrown on a wire to your house...or for that matter, how the cable company can make sure that you have HBO and your neighbor doesn't...would people still say they understood their TV?
If we were to break the computer back into its functions, we would need dozens of devices hanging around our house. Starting with a typewriter. But most people threw those away, didn't they, because the computer, oft misunderstood, is still far more useful than a simple typewriter, and obviously people know it.
So, it seems to me computers are held to a higher standard of "understanding" than do other devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Web Hosting companies and SaaS businesses use Linux because they need lots of inexpensive servers. These companies can reduce their costs and increase profits by deploying linux on all their servers for free. This also means they don't have to track licenses and worry about audits from Microsoft in the future. Unless Microsoft either gives away their software, or provides so much extra functionality that it outweighs the cost of the OS, I don't see how they are going to gain in this area.
That big target that MS needs to hit is the manageability target. We need to be able to install a light OS, pre-configured for our environments, in a fraction of the time it takes today, and it needs to be centrally monitorable and manageable without having to purchase a very expensive commercial package to do so. The entire OS has to be scriptable from the commandline. In server environments, commandline is king.
I quit buying cd's when the ipod came out. I'm on windows, so I had to wait a while with no cd purchases until the PC ipod units came out. Now I buy music online all the time.
So yes, ipod sales drive online music sales. The prices aren't out of line either, especially for whole albums, which is what I tend to buy.
What miffs me are albums that are only partially available. Why do they do this when they also have the option of making the song available on the album only? I don't get it.
Also, doesn't this mean that as a song rises in popularity, it gets more expensive? That's kinda what they want, right, so wouldn't that drive demand down? Economics 101, HELLO!
I couldn't agree more. I started my Computer Science degree at a smaller university, where the teachers actually taught and cared about teaching. There wasn't any research to do. Teaching was why they were there. And while I was not particularly challenged in the computer scinece courses (I passed out of the entire first year), the math teachers were good and I actually learned Calc I and felt I understood the subject.
I moved to a larger, more computer-science-oriented university, after 3 semesters at small U. The math teachers at big U were abysmal. I couldn't understand them, their TA's were even worse, and I got a D...twice...in Calc II. I went to class 4 days a week, mostly with the TA, I studied my rear off trying to comprehend the "why" of the subject, but never really "got it".
I took a full-time day job and went to Big U's night school, and there again were teachers who taught. I loved it.
Big U with Big Bucks and more focus on research than teaching didn't care about me, and I failed. Small U and nightschool were populated by both teachers that wanted to teach, and students that wanted to be there, and I excelled.
Saying that the author of the article was just lazy or had no aptitude smacks of superiority and is really unbecoming. You have no idea what that guy is or isn't capable of, and he certainly writes better than any of the posters in this forum, myself included.
This is an absolute insult to those of us who hold religious beliefs. Now the faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Muslimism are on par with something made up in a movie!
I said almost the same thing in another post. Amen to this!
What a bogus article! Windows and Windows software have become more robust, stable and feature-packed over the years, not less.
Case in point is the lack of examples in this article. What software is getting worse?
Like Photoshop, which works perfectly every time and never crashes, is fast, ties into web services, and is easy to use. Ditto with Windows XP. MS Office works great, only problem I have there is that the cost goes up and the new features aren't there, but then don't buy the upgrade! How about Quicken, which handles all of my accounts and transactions, tied into my banks, and again runs flawlessly.
And unlike the bad old days, we get free patches and upgrades for basically the life of the product, for no extra $$$. Businesses have to pay support contracts for this kind of service, but we buy a copy of Windows for $100, complain about it, and get free patches and web support for years.
I just don't see it guys! My windows box is all but flawless, day in and day out.
And honestly I have more trouble with the majority of OSS software, resolving endless dependencies, compilation failures, lack of documentation, poorly implemented GUIs and interfaces, blah blah. Open Office, Firefox and a few others besides, OSS is NOT better quality! Look at KOffice...years of development and still not terribly useful, and the functions that are there don't always work. Or KDevelop, looks nice but nowhere near the productivity of Dev Studio. Don't even get me started about the un-intuitive interface of the Gimp, or the utter lack of robusteness in GNUcash.
Gimmie a break!
Let's face it guys, the interoperability between Windows, IIS, .NET and SQL Server make building apps a snap. So I have to disagree with the typical OSS rhetoric on this. Even the best distros, like SuSE for example, have holes in setup and installation that make getting your environment up and running, with all the features installed, difficult (sometimes painfully so).
Small businesses are the market here. A small business doesn't want to have to pay for a firewall, router, DNS server, spam filter, virus protection, a windows server, Exchange Server license, backup equipment, backup schedules and testing, and an administrator to put it all together, when you can pay $6/mo/user to have someone else do all the pain for you.
It's a bargain dude.
I wanted a bigger drive back in June, and the prices were really quite high. I finally bought one in September, by then the prices on a 160GB drive had dropped to a respectible $130 (with rebates). Now the same is on sale for $59 in the latest BestBuy flyer.
The point? Something is happening. Why are they selling off drives like this? Oversupply? Switch to SATA?
This is extremely useful!
For example, I host my websites with host provider. I'd like to install tomcat and run some JSP/J2EE. The application I'd like to run won't work in a hosted environment, where I share my server space with hundreds of other users in virtual domains. I need my own server, but that's cost-prohibitive.
So if I want to run that app, I have to get a hosted server and set it up. My provider has to rack another server and I have to pay quite a bit extra to get it. Not anymore, now my provider sets a virtual server for me on a single piece of hardware that I share with others.
There are any number of apps out there that just won't play well in a virtual domain environment, and yet don't justify dedicated servers either.
On top of that, according to the install guide, the virtual machines can be moved on the fly(!) to other physical hosts, allowing for balancing and perhaps cluster services. If one piece of hardware becomes overloaded, a new host can be setup and the heavily-loaded guest moved to the new host, incurring no downtime in the process.
Heck, we incur downtime and alot of work to move apps to newer, beefier hardware. Imagine if you could move your app on the fly to new hardware? If you setup all of your servers to run as guest OS in Xen, even if there is only one guest per server, you still benefit for being able to migrate on the fly.
Timbert
I think you've pointed out exactly why MS and Sun have gone to other languages and away from C++: it was so perfect that nobody was making any money! Yeah, so they had to come up with something worse in order to generate revenue!
And..and..and corporate IT shops left C++ because they didn't want stable apps with no memory leaks and an extensive and rich API. Things were getting boring afterall, best to spice up that drudgery and reduce productivity with new languages!
Can someone explain this better? That link to the conjecture is plain awful.
Here are my questions (in parens):
If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink (huh? what do they mean by "shrink" here?) it (rubber band or apple?) down to a point by moving (huh? again, what does "move" mean here) it (rubber band or apple) slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface (okay, must mean rubber band doesn't leave the surface of the apple then?). On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction (what direction would that be?) around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it (rubber band again I assume) to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. (why? the writer made a big leap here, but it's not obvious)
This is a hot-button topic for me, so I'll try to keep it simple.
When I came to my current job, my opinion was to keep as much of the logic in the application as possible, stored procedures should help make the developer's life easier, and make the database more robust (triggers mostly do this part).
When I came here, however, they forced EVERY SINGLE QUERY into a stored procedure, and like you said, it brought development speed to a halt, because every project was assigned "a database guy" to do the work, but there weren't enough database guys for the projects.
It was pathetic, and when our big layoff occurred (we got bought out), we found alot of really really bad stored procedures that the so-called experts made for us.
Worse, it makes code releases a nightmare, because not only does the codebase have to be updated, but the database too, every single time. Unlike code bases where you can checkout your latest release, with databases you have to a) find all the altered database scripts, b) package them up for the release, c) halt the database for the release and d) run the script at go-live and hope you didn't miss one more thing.
Mind you I still use stored procedures, views and triggers where they make sense (when it's obvious that it just belongs in the database), but mostly I try to put as much logic as possible in the app.
Now you want to make me get into NULL values and candidate keys issues too! Bah, no NULLs anywhere, #1, and #2, don't make up integer primary keys when an existing field will work. Don't let your database administrators talk you into it, I beg you!
Is it just me, or have there been alot of responses that boil down to "C++ can be fast if you throw away anything inherently C++ and use straight C instead?"
.Net too, are great because they are rich, more than anything.
Part of the point here was to compare two supposedly similar languages. If the author wanted to compare nasty optimized hard-to-read C to Java, he would have.
Java, and
If you really care about speed so much, why are you running an OS to run an application that is a language interpreter (HTML, in this case), the code of which was produced by yet another interpreted program (Perl) that runs through another program (Apache) on top of yet another OS, and which is transported over a low-bandwidth internet connection?
Because it's feature-rich!
We're overlooking that Microsoft has always targeted the average PC. But methinks that Microsoft is selling more OSes on new machines than upgrades.
So perhaps the strategy is to give us "tomorrow's OS on tomorrow's hardware" and really take advantage of it?
Did I miss something? It's just a frickin calculator! Yeah, it can graph and all that, but SO WHAT! You'll use it for your math classes and then it'll sit and collect dust. What a waste!
I own an iPod and a coworker of mine has the Dell. So I've seen and used both.
They are the only two units for sale right now worth having. The others are bulky, ugly, more expensive...why bother.
In the end I went with the lock-in. I bought the iPod becuase I bought alot of iTunes music, and I love my iTrip FM transmitter.
Labor costs are only a part of this problem. Time consuption is a bigger problem.
I know several folks who rave about the quality of the work being done for our company overseas (India and China). At the same time, however, the company asks the foreign coders to do a job, and then leaves them to it.
Contrast that with how American workers are hounded all day long. Emails that have to be answered right now. IM. Endless meetings about nothing. Daily or weekly status reports. Conference calls. Daily production support. Human Resources online training sessions, demos, sales calls...the list of distractions goes on and on.
So the irony is that American companies, IMNSHO, are one of the biggest factors driving up the costs of development in the US.
Add to this the percieved need for more "Administrators" to do what programmers did themselves not 5 years ago, and the cost goes even higher.
If American companies instead hired a small group of empowered programmers, gave them a specific task and delivery date, and let them work day in and day out on their code, undistracted, you'd get quality stuff done in English, from people you know, during business hours.
I think the responses here are typical. Typical of those who think "different is better" and that we all have time to devote to this.
I tried and tried to use Gimp over the years, I tried to read through the manuals online...it was PAINFUL. Even the easiest things escaped me. I just wanted to do X very simple procedure, and I spent hours trying to figure out how to do that. I even found newsgroup postings from people trying to do what I was doing and getting responses like "it's just a little different, you have to hold shift-alt drag the mouse and stand on your head to draw a box." Duh.
And then I picked up a trial copy of Elements 2.0, figured it out in about 30 seconds and was doing what I needed to do. I paid my $100 two days later and will never go back. It's super-fast on my machine too.
The lesson: Gimp is different for the sake of being different, which means it's a higher learning curve than I'm willing to give it. I'll gladly pay someone who's taken the time to make their software work in a way that users expect these days.
Take a page about design from Joel on Software, guys. The Gimp isn't worth my time.
DON'T DO IT!
Remember free tv? Now we are all hostage to cable companies for our tv, broadcast is a joke. Yeah, you can do it, but lets face it, few do.
Don't make our future include "remember free radio?" Boycot this stupid idea.
Yeah, no commercials, I know. Right. That'll last until quarterly profits start slipping and they can't raise rates anymore.
Why don't we use more available code? Leaky abstractions for one. And look at the DLL and .so hell we're in now, where we have libraries that depend on libraries which depend on libraries...yik...all that to save a tiny bit of work, ain't worth it. Write your own.
The problem that arises is that many scripts become mission critical, and yet are "hidden" in root crons or some other root-owned facility, and are not maintained in the corporate source control system. So other developers can't see or alter them. Worse, they don't often go through the same QC process as other pieces of software in the organization.
There is a healthy aversion by management to anything that is critical but not touchable but by a few, and which breaks all the controls put in place by management.
I personally like scripting. It does solve every-day problems efficiently. But I think it gets a bad wrap because of these lack of controls.
That 906.6 million albums includes Bach, Beethoven, The Beetles, Cindy Lauper and so on. What you need to know is how many of those 906.6 mil are NEW releases within that fiscal year, then re-run your numbers.
Maybe $500,000 - $1 million to produce an album isn't so crazy.
I won't pay for XM radio. As soon as a critical mass of people move to XM, the FM/AM stations will go out of business, due to lack of revenue from commercials. As XM grows, Wall Street will continue to push it to make more and more profit, which will push XM to either raise rates, or air more commercials. As that happens, some of us will want to move back to free radio, but there will be no free radio to move back to.
In the end, we'll lose our choices!
Think cable all over again. Today we pay for our shows by watching commercials, like we did on free TV, AND we pay the cable company about $40 a month as well!
Don't do it, don't buy XM! It's a waste of money and in the end, free radio will go the way of free TV.
The computer is the most flexible and powerful tool man has yet invented. The TV, as Mr. Katz points out, is easy to use. A station boradcasts a signal, you receive it on your TV, and the picture shows up. What's there to understand about it? You turn a dial (push a button), the channel changes. You turn another and the volume changes.
Any device with a very limited scope of work is also easily understood. Toaster, microwave, VCR (minus programming of course), car, stereo, camera...
Compare this to the computer, which is doing work not even dreamed up just 20 years ago, and doing dozens or even hundreds of different tasks, all with the same piece of equipment.
If we asked people instead if they knew how the electron gun in the TV operated, how the TV camera converted images into TV waves, how these are beamed to space and back, converted again and thrown on a wire to your house...or for that matter, how the cable company can make sure that you have HBO and your neighbor doesn't...would people still say they understood their TV?
If we were to break the computer back into its functions, we would need dozens of devices hanging around our house. Starting with a typewriter. But most people threw those away, didn't they, because the computer, oft misunderstood, is still far more useful than a simple typewriter, and obviously people know it.
So, it seems to me computers are held to a higher standard of "understanding" than do other devices.