I've done tier 3 support at companies like Microsoft - people complain constantly that we never fixed anything quickly right, so management took that as meaning we needed to release more patches and speed up the quality assurance process by adding more people.
Then when started releasing patches every quarter we got nothing but complaints we were releasing too many fixes. Argh.
This is what gets me - I have a windows mobile device sitting here - its easily 10-11+ years old, has a crummy UI etc but - it can do most anything the iPhone can do just its really clunky and needs to be rebooted 3-4 times a day.
And yes it has a keyboard ui, and a touch screen. No it doesn't have an accelerometer to rotate the screen, but I can tap a button on it and it will rotate for me.
Apple didn't innovate - they took what smart phones already were - fixed all the bugs, streamlined the UI, and shipped that. The only thing I think they can claim is the look and feel of the UI, but we know that is a dead end.
I dunno - I actually like MS-Windows, it has a nice interface, its fast and its stable. I've had a lot of Macs (through work no less) I never found the UI to be that efficient unless you knew all the gestures and tricks. On face value its a lot more cumbersome to me (again - this is a PERSONAL preference!).
I swore up and down though I'd never buy another Windows Mobile phone - for the exact same reasons. Horrible UI, slow, and why should I have to reboot my phone every day? I actually like my Symbian phone better - although I'm going to switch to an Android phone soon (for the same reasons actually:)).
I don't think Monopoly plays into my choice at all. I bought it because I liked it, but feel free to explain why I'm wrong.
I love flash - I love flash videos and flash games. I could spend hours on youtube and similar sites watching their various videos. Or on other sites playing indie games.
The point is - thats MY CHOICE - I installed the client willingly. Its also my choice not to buy any pda's or smart phones from companies who don't think I should be able to install that myself.
The newton did fail to create a new market. It was 3 years later when USR came along with the Palm Pilot that one could really argue that the PDA took off. The Palm Pilot ran for ages on one set of batteries, had a revolutionary hand writing recognition system called graffiti and a lot of developer support.
What killed the newton? Horrible battery life, and high price (as I recall they were 800-900 bucks).
One of the reasons Flash video took off so well over Real Player, Quicktime, and Windows media player is the players themselves were far lower footprint, worked, and seem to stream more seamlessly than any of their competitors - the user experience was better plain and simple (something most Apple people should recognize).
Every one of us has probably had the displeasure of a Real movie that just buffered and didn't play, windows media player that only works in IE, or Quicktime plugin that didn't quite buffer right and would play, then stop and then play and then stop constantly.
The reason Flash won was because it did none of these things, scaled to the speed of the client better, support a lot of different codecs, and worked on all a ton of platforms and devices (Flashlite has been supported for example on Windows Mobile, S60, Android, PSP, PS3, Maemo etc etc) - many of all these devices don't even support HTML5.
HTML5 - while it works, just doesn't offer the same user experience yet (at least in Firefox where I've tested it) - controls are clumsy for instance. And I've had several cases where the video never did come up.
I think content providers will continue to use what works and Flash still works better.
I have to admit: having magic in an SDK must be really nice to fix those obscure bugs or write software that shouldn't run on the device. Just replace buggy functions and methods with Allakhazam() and away it goes.
Maybe I can wave a magic wand and make Flash run on it as well - or any other program I chose to run on my device.
Its not even remotely reasonable to debate this though.
I read somewhere (on youtube I think) that 16 hours of video gets uploaded every minute - you'd have to have like a thousand people watching people get kicked in the nuts over and over - just to watch the videos. Never mind the extra time spent identifying and then emailing/calling everyone who appears in the video to make sure they had consent to post it - so you'd have to have like 2000-2500 employees just screening videos 24-7. That seems to be an unreasonable burden. It would be like having a personal screener for every bulletin board at work or school to make sure people don't post rogue materials on there.
No - that's why they make you check that box that says you have permission to post the video (which includes release and consent for the people who appear in the video), and that the video doesn't violate any acceptable use rules that google wrote (which this video did).
To go back to the bulletin board analogy - it someone posts a nudie pic on the board - it may get removed by a passing employee, or it may get complained about by a student or co-worker, but you certainly can't complain to the company when some idiot decided to break the rules and do that.
The other thing that really killed it is at its peak Beta was licensed to like 3 or 4 manufacturers - while JVC was far more liberal with licensing and the number of VHS tape systems availble - even in its infancy was several dozen (literally every shop you went to had the one or two Sony Beta machines and the 10-15 VHS decks).
Price may have had an effect - I can't remember exact prices, but the Beta machines were far far more expensive than the VHS machines.
If you don't have insurance, and need a major operation to save your life and declare bankruptcy because of it (this happens even if you have insurance - its still the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US) guess who gets the bill? The people who are paying for these hospitals (their loyal customers).
I'd agree with you if and only if you could prove your medical liability didn't affect anyone else - which is impossible unless your really wealthy.
If you ride the bus - you are subsidizing the bus's insurance. If you ride a bike, and aren't insured - same thing if you get hurt/run over. If you get injured you're a big liability to the hospital where you will get hauled to.
Well if it was single payer, and the cost of overhead was reduced (medicare spends far less per dollar than any insurance company on admin fees), and you could fire the CEO's who make 10-100 million a year - surely that would reduce costs no?
That's the wonderful irony - we pay more than any other country on earth, but in general get worse results - oh and we have a missle defense system to defend ourselves from those evil'doer terraists.
Well if your rates went up by 15% that's another $2250 a year... When I was working for PPG a few years back (around 2003) thats how much insurance rates went up every year I worked there. I've heard in the news lately of some people getting hikes fare greater than that however.
One cool thing about single payer - no co-pays and vision/dental is under the same system. Prescription cost is price regulated - so you really don't even have to worry about that.
The productive people of society want our money to buy the health care we need. The under productive still want the health care, but don't want to pay for it. The conservatives don't see the government as the body to be providing health care because it does not employ free-market principals, so our dollar is not maximized. The liberals see the government as the body to provide health care because they are the only ones who can legally confiscate the funds from those who have them to care for those who don't.
A realist like me would point out that you're going to pay one way or another. If that underproductive person who doesn't want to pay (or can't) gets seriously ill - they are going to the emergency room where they will receive the most expensive care the hospital can provide (not expensive because its good or anything, but its prompt). And they get a bill, if they can't pay, they go onto a payment plan - and if they can't pay that then they go bankrupt and who gets the bill? Those who can pay;).
No thank you.... I haven't seen any single payer system that provides better care that I receive now. I prefer a free market approach. Just a few months ago my 26 year old son, who doesn't have health insurance because he free-lances, called a hospital to see how much it would cost to x-ray his ankle so he could make sure he could afford it. Because that's what responsible people do. They refused to give him an estimate. So he said thanks, and said he would look elsewhere.
What if that was an emergency - that had to be treated right away? How do you be responsible when you really feel like your going to die or lose a limb? Last time I was in the emergency room some poor fisherman without insurance got his had caught in a pulley - he needed help right away asap damn the expense, and there's only one hospital in town. I'm sure he's still paying off that bill:(. Whats sad is he had to call a friend to help fill out paperwork because his hand was really messed up.
Also - you should find out how much your employer foots as far as your medical insurance goes - its scary. Mine pays about 1400-1500 dollars a month per employee (and I work for the state!). Our share is around $220 - that comes out of my pocket.
If that $220 was labeled "Tax" people would be pissed. If that tax was $1500 - people would get their pitchforks out. But that is what is happening - except the money isn't going back to the public - its going to some corporation who's led by a CEO who makes 10 million dollars a year.
I honestly don't see how anyone can defend this system. I rather have a publicly financed system so at least there's some transparency and oversight.
I think what your talking about is the core of the problem in the US. Everyone here believes in defending the rich because they "know" that some day they too will be rich (wake up anyone who really believes this - its likely not going to happen).
I personally think I'll be doing good to escape this life with my own house and car - never mind being wealthy beyond the dreams of Avaris.
In the end - better off for most I think should be the goal rather than better off for the few.
Players who endorse PVP realms and trudge through that leveling process tend to be a tad more hardcore. I think this will change however since they allow realm transfers from PVE realms to PVP realms.
I noticed this however when I played on Tichnondrous - it was rare to run into a player who had no idea what they were doing. When I moved to Korialstraz its REALLY common (things like hunters wearing defense trinkets at level 80).
World PVP in wow was kinda lame. Say you did win an actual encounter with another player your level - you'd die 10 minutes later when said play came back with their high level toon.
And running around hellfire with a million DK's is fun for an undergeared priest right? Its too one sided for many of the same reasons. Its not uncommon to hit level 60 and be wearing the same crap you had at level 20.
The problem is - to grief you have to have people to grief, and eventually they get sick of it and go pve.
If WoW had some sort of Karma system like Lineage 2 - I think it would be far more balanced (basically penalities for killing players who can't or don't fight back) - but alas I doubt we'll ever see player controlled factions or PVP in wow ever.
Hah - I clicked on one of those links - randomly clicked and ended up on Ah My Goddess OAV - 27$ for 4 episodes, plus shipping.
Now I asked someone at ADV about this at Sakura con - he said its to offset the cost of what the producers in Japan wanted - so both are to blame. He said in many cases they were literally paying off someone's house in Tokyo.
Whats worse he told me was a hit series that did well on the fan sub "market" (ie - it had a ton of downloads) usually drives higher prices.
So yes the parent is correct - anime is doomed simply because of the economics of licensing it.
This isn't embrace extend and extinguish though. There aren't very many good examples, but two more recent ones are:
HTML - Microsoft embraced it, then added extensions to it (Active X), and then after bundling it with the most popular OS on the planet it became a widely used standard. So much so that there are still apps out there that only run on IE (SAP client for example).
Java - Microsoft embraced Java (there was a time when IE had Java support built right in!), they added some extensions to it that only IE supported, and then Sun sued them. Still the fallout is that MS vowed to destroy them in the marketplace, and I'd say that Oracles purchase of Sun pretty much confirms they are on the right path still.
See the idea is to make it so that anyone who wants Java, or the Web has to use the most complete client - which is only available from MS. Once MS has you using their stuff - they then encourage people to use ActiveX - once everyone is doing that they then annouce that they are discontinuing support for Java or Javascript. That was the plan at least - the only thing that really shut this process down was Netscape opening up the source for their browser.
IBM was pretty good at this back in the day when they were a monopoly. They tended to do it more with communications protocols, cable plugs, disk formats than with software.
Google's purchase of this app, and removing it from the iPhone is actually more similar to something Apple does more frequently. Shake (while I know its discontinued bear with me) there was a time when it ran on Mac, Windows, Irix etc - after purchasing it they immediately discontinued support for Windows and SGI. What google did is a dick move, but it isn't embrace, extend and extinguish - and I'd defy you to find an example of google doing this.
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I've done tier 3 support at companies like Microsoft - people complain constantly that we never fixed anything quickly right, so management took that as meaning we needed to release more patches and speed up the quality assurance process by adding more people.
Then when started releasing patches every quarter we got nothing but complaints we were releasing too many fixes. Argh.
The lawsuit is against HTC America - which is based in Bellevue WA.
This is what gets me - I have a windows mobile device sitting here - its easily 10-11+ years old, has a crummy UI etc but - it can do most anything the iPhone can do just its really clunky and needs to be rebooted 3-4 times a day.
And yes it has a keyboard ui, and a touch screen. No it doesn't have an accelerometer to rotate the screen, but I can tap a button on it and it will rotate for me.
Apple didn't innovate - they took what smart phones already were - fixed all the bugs, streamlined the UI, and shipped that. The only thing I think they can claim is the look and feel of the UI, but we know that is a dead end.
I dunno - I actually like MS-Windows, it has a nice interface, its fast and its stable. I've had a lot of Macs (through work no less) I never found the UI to be that efficient unless you knew all the gestures and tricks. On face value its a lot more cumbersome to me (again - this is a PERSONAL preference!).
I swore up and down though I'd never buy another Windows Mobile phone - for the exact same reasons. Horrible UI, slow, and why should I have to reboot my phone every day? I actually like my Symbian phone better - although I'm going to switch to an Android phone soon (for the same reasons actually :)).
I don't think Monopoly plays into my choice at all. I bought it because I liked it, but feel free to explain why I'm wrong.
I love flash - I love flash videos and flash games. I could spend hours on youtube and similar sites watching their various videos. Or on other sites playing indie games.
The point is - thats MY CHOICE - I installed the client willingly. Its also my choice not to buy any pda's or smart phones from companies who don't think I should be able to install that myself.
The newton did fail to create a new market. It was 3 years later when USR came along with the Palm Pilot that one could really argue that the PDA took off. The Palm Pilot ran for ages on one set of batteries, had a revolutionary hand writing recognition system called graffiti and a lot of developer support.
What killed the newton? Horrible battery life, and high price (as I recall they were 800-900 bucks).
Freescale's stuff is a reference design - you'll be able to buy that stuff from companies like Dell, Asus and MSI (and the like) soon enough.
One of the reasons Flash video took off so well over Real Player, Quicktime, and Windows media player is the players themselves were far lower footprint, worked, and seem to stream more seamlessly than any of their competitors - the user experience was better plain and simple (something most Apple people should recognize).
Every one of us has probably had the displeasure of a Real movie that just buffered and didn't play, windows media player that only works in IE, or Quicktime plugin that didn't quite buffer right and would play, then stop and then play and then stop constantly.
The reason Flash won was because it did none of these things, scaled to the speed of the client better, support a lot of different codecs, and worked on all a ton of platforms and devices (Flashlite has been supported for example on Windows Mobile, S60, Android, PSP, PS3, Maemo etc etc) - many of all these devices don't even support HTML5.
HTML5 - while it works, just doesn't offer the same user experience yet (at least in Firefox where I've tested it) - controls are clumsy for instance. And I've had several cases where the video never did come up.
I think content providers will continue to use what works and Flash still works better.
I have to admit: having magic in an SDK must be really nice to fix those obscure bugs or write software that shouldn't run on the device. Just replace buggy functions and methods with Allakhazam() and away it goes.
Maybe I can wave a magic wand and make Flash run on it as well - or any other program I chose to run on my device.
Its not even remotely reasonable to debate this though.
I read somewhere (on youtube I think) that 16 hours of video gets uploaded every minute - you'd have to have like a thousand people watching people get kicked in the nuts over and over - just to watch the videos. Never mind the extra time spent identifying and then emailing/calling everyone who appears in the video to make sure they had consent to post it - so you'd have to have like 2000-2500 employees just screening videos 24-7. That seems to be an unreasonable burden. It would be like having a personal screener for every bulletin board at work or school to make sure people don't post rogue materials on there.
No - that's why they make you check that box that says you have permission to post the video (which includes release and consent for the people who appear in the video), and that the video doesn't violate any acceptable use rules that google wrote (which this video did).
To go back to the bulletin board analogy - it someone posts a nudie pic on the board - it may get removed by a passing employee, or it may get complained about by a student or co-worker, but you certainly can't complain to the company when some idiot decided to break the rules and do that.
The other thing that really killed it is at its peak Beta was licensed to like 3 or 4 manufacturers - while JVC was far more liberal with licensing and the number of VHS tape systems availble - even in its infancy was several dozen (literally every shop you went to had the one or two Sony Beta machines and the 10-15 VHS decks).
Price may have had an effect - I can't remember exact prices, but the Beta machines were far far more expensive than the VHS machines.
If you don't have insurance, and need a major operation to save your life and declare bankruptcy because of it (this happens even if you have insurance - its still the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US) guess who gets the bill? The people who are paying for these hospitals (their loyal customers).
I'd agree with you if and only if you could prove your medical liability didn't affect anyone else - which is impossible unless your really wealthy.
If you ride the bus - you are subsidizing the bus's insurance. If you ride a bike, and aren't insured - same thing if you get hurt/run over. If you get injured you're a big liability to the hospital where you will get hauled to.
Well if it was single payer, and the cost of overhead was reduced (medicare spends far less per dollar than any insurance company on admin fees), and you could fire the CEO's who make 10-100 million a year - surely that would reduce costs no?
That's the wonderful irony - we pay more than any other country on earth, but in general get worse results - oh and we have a missle defense system to defend ourselves from those evil'doer terraists.
Well if your rates went up by 15% that's another $2250 a year... When I was working for PPG a few years back (around 2003) thats how much insurance rates went up every year I worked there. I've heard in the news lately of some people getting hikes fare greater than that however.
One cool thing about single payer - no co-pays and vision/dental is under the same system. Prescription cost is price regulated - so you really don't even have to worry about that.
Where are these "most Americans"? I've never met anyone personally who likes our health-care system.
Funny thing is the premiums for cobra are like a 10th of what they were for your last company.
A realist like me would point out that you're going to pay one way or another. If that underproductive person who doesn't want to pay (or can't) gets seriously ill - they are going to the emergency room where they will receive the most expensive care the hospital can provide (not expensive because its good or anything, but its prompt). And they get a bill, if they can't pay, they go onto a payment plan - and if they can't pay that then they go bankrupt and who gets the bill? Those who can pay ;).
What if that was an emergency - that had to be treated right away? How do you be responsible when you really feel like your going to die or lose a limb? Last time I was in the emergency room some poor fisherman without insurance got his had caught in a pulley - he needed help right away asap damn the expense, and there's only one hospital in town. I'm sure he's still paying off that bill :(. Whats sad is he had to call a friend to help fill out paperwork because his hand was really messed up.
Also - you should find out how much your employer foots as far as your medical insurance goes - its scary. Mine pays about 1400-1500 dollars a month per employee (and I work for the state!). Our share is around $220 - that comes out of my pocket.
If that $220 was labeled "Tax" people would be pissed. If that tax was $1500 - people would get their pitchforks out. But that is what is happening - except the money isn't going back to the public - its going to some corporation who's led by a CEO who makes 10 million dollars a year.
I honestly don't see how anyone can defend this system. I rather have a publicly financed system so at least there's some transparency and oversight.
I think what your talking about is the core of the problem in the US. Everyone here believes in defending the rich because they "know" that some day they too will be rich (wake up anyone who really believes this - its likely not going to happen).
I personally think I'll be doing good to escape this life with my own house and car - never mind being wealthy beyond the dreams of Avaris.
In the end - better off for most I think should be the goal rather than better off for the few.
Players who endorse PVP realms and trudge through that leveling process tend to be a tad more hardcore. I think this will change however since they allow realm transfers from PVE realms to PVP realms.
I noticed this however when I played on Tichnondrous - it was rare to run into a player who had no idea what they were doing. When I moved to Korialstraz its REALLY common (things like hunters wearing defense trinkets at level 80).
World PVP in wow was kinda lame. Say you did win an actual encounter with another player your level - you'd die 10 minutes later when said play came back with their high level toon.
And running around hellfire with a million DK's is fun for an undergeared priest right? Its too one sided for many of the same reasons. Its not uncommon to hit level 60 and be wearing the same crap you had at level 20.
The problem is - to grief you have to have people to grief, and eventually they get sick of it and go pve.
If WoW had some sort of Karma system like Lineage 2 - I think it would be far more balanced (basically penalities for killing players who can't or don't fight back) - but alas I doubt we'll ever see player controlled factions or PVP in wow ever.
He could always play eve online ;).
Hah - I clicked on one of those links - randomly clicked and ended up on Ah My Goddess OAV - 27$ for 4 episodes, plus shipping.
Now I asked someone at ADV about this at Sakura con - he said its to offset the cost of what the producers in Japan wanted - so both are to blame. He said in many cases they were literally paying off someone's house in Tokyo.
Whats worse he told me was a hit series that did well on the fan sub "market" (ie - it had a ton of downloads) usually drives higher prices.
So yes the parent is correct - anime is doomed simply because of the economics of licensing it.
This isn't embrace extend and extinguish though. There aren't very many good examples, but two more recent ones are:
HTML - Microsoft embraced it, then added extensions to it (Active X), and then after bundling it with the most popular OS on the planet it became a widely used standard. So much so that there are still apps out there that only run on IE (SAP client for example).
Java - Microsoft embraced Java (there was a time when IE had Java support built right in!), they added some extensions to it that only IE supported, and then Sun sued them. Still the fallout is that MS vowed to destroy them in the marketplace, and I'd say that Oracles purchase of Sun pretty much confirms they are on the right path still.
See the idea is to make it so that anyone who wants Java, or the Web has to use the most complete client - which is only available from MS. Once MS has you using their stuff - they then encourage people to use ActiveX - once everyone is doing that they then annouce that they are discontinuing support for Java or Javascript. That was the plan at least - the only thing that really shut this process down was Netscape opening up the source for their browser.
IBM was pretty good at this back in the day when they were a monopoly. They tended to do it more with communications protocols, cable plugs, disk formats than with software.
Google's purchase of this app, and removing it from the iPhone is actually more similar to something Apple does more frequently. Shake (while I know its discontinued bear with me) there was a time when it ran on Mac, Windows, Irix etc - after purchasing it they immediately discontinued support for Windows and SGI. What google did is a dick move, but it isn't embrace, extend and extinguish - and I'd defy you to find an example of google doing this.