I think it is fair to say that 3G is more hype than substance. Comparing the Edge to 3G iPhone in descent coverage circumstances (Cambridge, MA, with lots of bars) the whole thing still leaves me ready to throw the thing out a window and go wardriving. Before the iPhone I had a 3G LG, and browsing on that also felt like dial-up.
The Jump from Edge to 3G is a jump from "Way too F*ing slow" to "basically too F*ing slow."
Also, people were attempting to monotize the success of 3rd parties working on their hardware, a failure of Atari's older model.
But the question is, would a truly open platform survive in modern time with more savvy consumers and a lot more information than was available in 1984? And with competition from other platforms? I don't know, but it would be fun to find out.
As dev units are custom electronics (and plastics), they'd be hard pressed to give new ones away without taking a significant financial hit. However, I've seen lots of disused PS2 equipment loitering around offices in the industry. I'm sure if Sony called back some of those (at least the ones they published), they'd have quite a few to loan out to the community.
On a side note, this may be a pretty historic change. It's difficult to see if they mean that they're removing the initial content approval but not the final quality certification, or if Sony really announced that it will be a completely open platform, ALA the Jaguar at the end of its life. Sony is either saying here "You're free to produce whatever" or "We don't care what you make, as long as it doesn't crash and meets our other requirements." Will Sony still manufacture the disks, or are they out of the loop? Is there still a cert process?
With Sony still referring to "Licensed Developers," it sounds like a process of some sort is still in place. But even with one, this is still a huge announcment in an industry dominated by arbitrary 1st party rules.
Today, I learned something useful the hard way. Which is, incidentally, pretty much the way I learn everything.
A couple months back I was invited to post on a web site that specializes in commentary about the future of the Internet. I did an interview with one of the site's editors. In subsequent weeks, I found it hard to make the time to write a proper editorial-style piece for them. I finally made the time this past weekend, and earlier today my piece was published in an edited form.
I was given the opportunity to see the edits. But I still had my original words so clearly in my head that I glossed over the edited version, checking only for glaring mistakes in grammar. I should have taken more care â" and this is entirely my fault â" because portions of my original piece that were essential to a cogent argument were removed. I don't think the editor had any ill intent, and it was my failed responsibility to ensure that I was happy with what got published.
Presently, the piece is being torn into by commenters, and perhaps rightly so: without some of the material I originally included, it comes off as flimsy troll-bait. I could post the edited-out paragraphs in a comment on the piece, but out of context they don't offer much.
The experience has been a valuable lesson for me. The next time someone wants to edit my writing, I need to take time and approach the edited version as a new reader would. Had I done so, I wouldn't have allowed the piece to be published in its final form. It's not really possible to retract something published on the web, nor is retraction in keeping with the informal ethics of blogging. But like Fred Wilson a few days ago, I just want to take it back.
What I was hoping for was honest answers to an honest question: how much do we have to lose before we consider different strategies for Internet technologies? Because I failed to take care with how my words were published, I'm not going to learn anything. That's the real loss for me."
Twitter is popular basically because it is broadcast SMS. Send a SMS message once, and everyone following you knows that there is a gathering at the pub tonight. Or follow a dozen industry types as they pontificate on the topic of the day.
Twitter occupies a space between pull blogs like using livejournal to schedule meetings and fast-and-dirty chat SMS. It's also fundamentally easy to use, which is nice.
How would you optimize it better? Code redrawal in assembler for the graphics card instead of using direct draw or whatever?
Why the vitrol? Windows is a platform that encompasses everything from 100hz 386's to AMD 64's. You can have 128 MB of RAM or 4GB, running on hardware from 10 years ago or more. There's greater than a 10 fold change of capacity between the lowest computers rated to run IE7 and the highest on the market. There is no guarantee of a graphics card or what type of bus it would use, there isn't even a guarantee tha the system isn't running virtually. You're going to have quite a few layers of abstraction before you actually hit metal.
Additionally, any code that has survived approximately 10 years of development on the Windows platform can be assumed to have gathered a bit of... kruft.
By comparison, you know exactly how many fractions of a millisecond it takes the PS3's main processor to communicate with all of the various subprocessors. You know you can have several threads crunching simultaneously, and they're likely to get a more commanding share fo the processors. You don't have to consider low-ram situations, pagefiling, a lot of the normal security concerns, etc. If you wanted to, you could write more or less directly to the metal on the PS3. Your code is being written from scratch on a very specific piece of hardware, so why not draw to the screen using the graphics co-processor?
That was in no way intended as a slight against windows. But rather that a single-use device should always be able to beat a very general purpose device at specific applications, given the same amount of developer investment.
I'd love to see a congressional voting site where you can vote on X numbers of issues that come before the congress, before they come before the congress. Congressmen could then use or ignore that information when making decisions.
Of course, that congressional divergence would be online for all to see. You could even see the %divergence between various senators and your personal votepoints on the issues. Does Feinstein really agree with your POV? Does Liberman? Now you can know.
So a piece of software optimized for a very specific, limited platform can run faster than software written for a very general and not very well defined platform. This ought to be a no-brainer.
it's important to note how MS Office's new interface breaks all other interface guidelines MS has ever written in substantial and annoying ways. As a user of 2003 and 2007, it simply means to me one more place to not find what I'm looking for.
Ultimately, the ribbon may or may not improve the new end user experience. I have yet to see any evidence that it does, but if it does the improvements are marginal compared to what is needed. What is needed is a fundamental restructuring that removes the millions of inherent structural problems like inserting a table not existing on the "insert-table" menu but rather on "table-insert-table". Or how centering a block of text after a page break will center the text before the page break as well. Or any one of a million other problems associated with having dozens of separate teams working against eachother for the most screen time possible.
It also punished retirees who decided to invest in a diversified portfolio of bonds, mutual funds, etc. It is punishing companies who have been relying upon investment capital to expand their operations. It is punishing car dealerships who would otherwise be making car loans at the moment. It is punishing Fortune 500 companies with solid operations but who rely upon short-term loans to deal with unexpected currency fluctuations. With suppressed economic activity, it will be punishing retail sales people with fewer seasonal hours this Christmas. It is punishing basically all of Iceland.
You can say that the invisible hand of the market is punishing all of those who made bad decisions. But the bad decision that they made could be as simple as being a long-time homeowner in a neighborhood which has become a forclosure graveyard, or having taken any option at all for their retirement fund that wasn't simply government-backed bonds.
The damage from this collapse is extending well beyond the idiotic investment bankers who created a house of card, and is being felt by people who don't have any investments at all. Blaming everyone who is currently suffering for the collapse of the system just makes you sound like an ass.
Estimates are there are currently 850 Billion dollars worth of physical US currency in circulation.
I'd hate to have 850 billion dollars worth of an actual useful commodity tied up as a medium of exchange for the US alone. That's a lot of inherent value to be taking out of the system.
I was under the impression that we balance this out through issuance of government bonds, which we insure. Hence the feds are not generally loaning out "nothing," but are adjusting the value from the input of other bond buyers (usually foreign nations, but recently spooked stockholders) towards banks in this nation.
Similarly, I was under the impression that currency creation in this country is balanced as a function of the risk of deflation, rather than the need for more money, completely separate from the other operations of the fed. Can someone with more experience in the actual day-to-day operation of the federal monetary system comment?
Isn't it great how he posts this analysis on a site that gives it away for free?
It's a good thing, too. I was just about install Linux on my laptop. Whew! Now that I know that Linux and other bits of Open Source software can't weather an economic downturn like private companies, I'm switching to BeOS.
i think it'd make more sense for MMO developers to release their games on platforms that currently have a dearth of MMOs rather than try to compete in an already-saturated market. it's not like the ps3/360/psp/ds can't support MMOs.
Ironically, as always in game development, it's easier to get funding if you can point at someone else and say "we're doing that."
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
Because I'd rather the resources go to new and unique applications rather than inexplicibly being consumed by the system?
I could be getting some steps wrong, but I remember something about this in the Windows overall development arch.
Win 95 kept itself on the disk
Win 98 added system installer CAB files on the disk if needed, so it had effectively 2 copies of itself on disk.
Win ME added a procedural backup system restore based upon key frames (in case something went wrong). These were incremental, so let's call that 4 copies of itself on disk.
XP added a proper backup utility. Assuming the user keeps one additional copy of the system folder for backup, that's 8 copies of itself on disk.
My impression was that the US was under sanctions because we allow meatspace gambling on a state-by-state basis, but forbid internet gambling on a federal level. One of the treaties we signed allows states to allow or forbid gambling, but not selectively allow gambling based upon random criteria. In this case, we forbit internet gambling but allow Indian casinos, state lotteries, Atlanta, Vegas, etc. Antigua wants to compete in the US gambling market over the internet, but is prohibited by federal law. The WTO ruled against us, and we have been in non-compliance for about 4 years now.
Can the software compensate for cardiac arrhythmias which are inherently unpredictable?
If it is going on the current motion of the heart, depending on the sampling rate it should be able to compensate for "unexpected" motions far better than any human doctor would. Most humans have a 200 ms response time anyway, which sounds significantly higher than this machine's.
A parallel would be Lasik: the laser compensates for your eye position every 100th of a second. I've seen studies where a stand-in eye glanced around quickly during the procedure, and came out nearly perfect anyway. Machines tend to compensate better than Man to instantaneous unpredicted circumstances.
Where you're completely right is in the question "so the patient has some Cardiac Arrhythmia... what do you do?" However, as the surgeon is actually in control of the procedure the entire time (you'll notice his hand in the video, holding the contraption), it seems like he should have the same response time directing the team's response.
HDMI equates to "optical out" and is arguably more useful for modern hi-fi equipment. I am relatively ignorant about audio in options.
It depends on the equipment, but HDMI is frequently limited to Stereo sound due to cost cutting on HDMI television implementations (I.E. they chop the signal down when passing through that direction). In those circumstances you'll want either 2 HDMI cables out or to pass the video signal through the reciever, which can introduce lag. Additionally optical connections, not HDMI, are used for most professional sound development equipment. Any equipment that takes HDMI in will take optical in as well, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
If you're a home-theater geek, go with the HDMI. If you're a doing sound-recording work, you'll want the optical connection. The kinds of people who need optical in are the ones who would need optical out.
Tell me, what is the marginal utility of that special Mac aura?
The utility is the difference between (usually) easily discovering how to do something and sitting around and fuming about it for hours.
Here's an example: Outlook. I've had a few consulting gig people who have wanted to tag their logo automatically at the bottom of all of their e-mails. In Outlook, there are roughly 8 locations where you can set preferences (customize, options, account settings, account properties, etc.). Searching through these I find Forms, Macros, Auto-responses, Templates and other things which may be what I'm looking for (but aren't). I actually did get it working correctly with Templates, before realizing that it made all blank Word documents appear with the same e-mail formatting.
Searching Outlook's help for "signatures", I find "In a new message, on the Message tab, in the Include group, click Signature, and then click Signatures. On the E-mail Signature tab, click New."
I actually spent about 15 minutes futzing with trying to find the include group while creating a new message from the Message tab. Actually, I needed to futz with the message tab within a new message to find the include group. Once in the proper section, you can find the signatures and stationary portion of Outlook. Note: this is the ONLY place I've ever found the Signatures and Stationary portion of Outlook. Once in, the construction and assignment of a Signature is pretty smooth, but by now we've wasted about and hour searching for the functionality.
In Mail on OSX, it's under Preferences->Signatures. There is no need to check a help file, check 8 preferences locations, or test out 4 similarly named bits of similar (though differently implemented) functionality to see if they're what we're looking for.
How much is that extra hour (or more) of aggrivation worth? How much additional productivity can be gained because you can easily discover the potential of your tools, rather than fighting with them constantly? If you used a hammer all day, would you be willing to save 10% on the cost of that hammer if it meant you were frustrated and angry with it on a regular basis?
In the balance of things, I choose to live in a Windows world. But come on man, the Windows ecosystem could be light years less frustrating.
As a side note, my clients are generally nice, slightly older folk who can use a computer but need help with the less obvious portions of Windows. The only three clients who have stopped calling me back are: one who moved to europe, and two who switched to OSX. OSX's interface was just usable enough that they didn't need the extra help.
How much is that worth? 50 dollars an hour minimum.
Slashdot Mirror
By the rest of the world, we're still trapped in 10 years ago.
I think it is fair to say that 3G is more hype than substance. Comparing the Edge to 3G iPhone in descent coverage circumstances (Cambridge, MA, with lots of bars) the whole thing still leaves me ready to throw the thing out a window and go wardriving. Before the iPhone I had a 3G LG, and browsing on that also felt like dial-up.
The Jump from Edge to 3G is a jump from "Way too F*ing slow" to "basically too F*ing slow."
Also, people were attempting to monotize the success of 3rd parties working on their hardware, a failure of Atari's older model.
But the question is, would a truly open platform survive in modern time with more savvy consumers and a lot more information than was available in 1984? And with competition from other platforms? I don't know, but it would be fun to find out.
Notice how they waited until PS3's were no longer backwards compatible with PS2 games to make this change?
As dev units are custom electronics (and plastics), they'd be hard pressed to give new ones away without taking a significant financial hit. However, I've seen lots of disused PS2 equipment loitering around offices in the industry. I'm sure if Sony called back some of those (at least the ones they published), they'd have quite a few to loan out to the community.
On a side note, this may be a pretty historic change. It's difficult to see if they mean that they're removing the initial content approval but not the final quality certification, or if Sony really announced that it will be a completely open platform, ALA the Jaguar at the end of its life. Sony is either saying here "You're free to produce whatever" or "We don't care what you make, as long as it doesn't crash and meets our other requirements." Will Sony still manufacture the disks, or are they out of the loop? Is there still a cert process?
With Sony still referring to "Licensed Developers," it sounds like a process of some sort is still in place. But even with one, this is still a huge announcment in an industry dominated by arbitrary 1st party rules.
Note: the author has since posted a retraction of sorts, saying that coherency was edited out of the article in revisions, and he didn't check it thoroughly enough before approving the edits to go through.
"Lessons In Being Edited
Today, I learned something useful the hard way. Which is, incidentally, pretty much the way I learn everything.
A couple months back I was invited to post on a web site that specializes in commentary about the future of the Internet. I did an interview with one of the site's editors. In subsequent weeks, I found it hard to make the time to write a proper editorial-style piece for them. I finally made the time this past weekend, and earlier today my piece was published in an edited form.
I was given the opportunity to see the edits. But I still had my original words so clearly in my head that I glossed over the edited version, checking only for glaring mistakes in grammar. I should have taken more care â" and this is entirely my fault â" because portions of my original piece that were essential to a cogent argument were removed. I don't think the editor had any ill intent, and it was my failed responsibility to ensure that I was happy with what got published.
Presently, the piece is being torn into by commenters, and perhaps rightly so: without some of the material I originally included, it comes off as flimsy troll-bait. I could post the edited-out paragraphs in a comment on the piece, but out of context they don't offer much.
The experience has been a valuable lesson for me. The next time someone wants to edit my writing, I need to take time and approach the edited version as a new reader would. Had I done so, I wouldn't have allowed the piece to be published in its final form. It's not really possible to retract something published on the web, nor is retraction in keeping with the informal ethics of blogging. But like Fred Wilson a few days ago, I just want to take it back.
What I was hoping for was honest answers to an honest question: how much do we have to lose before we consider different strategies for Internet technologies? Because I failed to take care with how my words were published, I'm not going to learn anything. That's the real loss for me."
Twitter is popular basically because it is broadcast SMS. Send a SMS message once, and everyone following you knows that there is a gathering at the pub tonight. Or follow a dozen industry types as they pontificate on the topic of the day.
Twitter occupies a space between pull blogs like using livejournal to schedule meetings and fast-and-dirty chat SMS. It's also fundamentally easy to use, which is nice.
How would you optimize it better? Code redrawal in assembler for the graphics card instead of using direct draw or whatever?
Why the vitrol? Windows is a platform that encompasses everything from 100hz 386's to AMD 64's. You can have 128 MB of RAM or 4GB, running on hardware from 10 years ago or more. There's greater than a 10 fold change of capacity between the lowest computers rated to run IE7 and the highest on the market. There is no guarantee of a graphics card or what type of bus it would use, there isn't even a guarantee tha the system isn't running virtually. You're going to have quite a few layers of abstraction before you actually hit metal.
Additionally, any code that has survived approximately 10 years of development on the Windows platform can be assumed to have gathered a bit of... kruft.
By comparison, you know exactly how many fractions of a millisecond it takes the PS3's main processor to communicate with all of the various subprocessors. You know you can have several threads crunching simultaneously, and they're likely to get a more commanding share fo the processors. You don't have to consider low-ram situations, pagefiling, a lot of the normal security concerns, etc. If you wanted to, you could write more or less directly to the metal on the PS3. Your code is being written from scratch on a very specific piece of hardware, so why not draw to the screen using the graphics co-processor?
That was in no way intended as a slight against windows. But rather that a single-use device should always be able to beat a very general purpose device at specific applications, given the same amount of developer investment.
I'd love to see a congressional voting site where you can vote on X numbers of issues that come before the congress, before they come before the congress. Congressmen could then use or ignore that information when making decisions.
Of course, that congressional divergence would be online for all to see. You could even see the %divergence between various senators and your personal votepoints on the issues. Does Feinstein really agree with your POV? Does Liberman? Now you can know.
So a piece of software optimized for a very specific, limited platform can run faster than software written for a very general and not very well defined platform. This ought to be a no-brainer.
Gavin spends his morning on Slashdot.
it's important to note how MS Office's new interface breaks all other interface guidelines MS has ever written in substantial and annoying ways. As a user of 2003 and 2007, it simply means to me one more place to not find what I'm looking for.
Ultimately, the ribbon may or may not improve the new end user experience. I have yet to see any evidence that it does, but if it does the improvements are marginal compared to what is needed. What is needed is a fundamental restructuring that removes the millions of inherent structural problems like inserting a table not existing on the "insert-table" menu but rather on "table-insert-table". Or how centering a block of text after a page break will center the text before the page break as well. Or any one of a million other problems associated with having dozens of separate teams working against eachother for the most screen time possible.
It also punished retirees who decided to invest in a diversified portfolio of bonds, mutual funds, etc. It is punishing companies who have been relying upon investment capital to expand their operations. It is punishing car dealerships who would otherwise be making car loans at the moment. It is punishing Fortune 500 companies with solid operations but who rely upon short-term loans to deal with unexpected currency fluctuations. With suppressed economic activity, it will be punishing retail sales people with fewer seasonal hours this Christmas. It is punishing basically all of Iceland.
You can say that the invisible hand of the market is punishing all of those who made bad decisions. But the bad decision that they made could be as simple as being a long-time homeowner in a neighborhood which has become a forclosure graveyard, or having taken any option at all for their retirement fund that wasn't simply government-backed bonds.
The damage from this collapse is extending well beyond the idiotic investment bankers who created a house of card, and is being felt by people who don't have any investments at all. Blaming everyone who is currently suffering for the collapse of the system just makes you sound like an ass.
ba:bs?
Estimates are there are currently 850 Billion dollars worth of physical US currency in circulation.
I'd hate to have 850 billion dollars worth of an actual useful commodity tied up as a medium of exchange for the US alone. That's a lot of inherent value to be taking out of the system.
I was under the impression that we balance this out through issuance of government bonds, which we insure. Hence the feds are not generally loaning out "nothing," but are adjusting the value from the input of other bond buyers (usually foreign nations, but recently spooked stockholders) towards banks in this nation.
Similarly, I was under the impression that currency creation in this country is balanced as a function of the risk of deflation, rather than the need for more money, completely separate from the other operations of the fed. Can someone with more experience in the actual day-to-day operation of the federal monetary system comment?
Isn't it great how he posts this analysis on a site that gives it away for free?
It's a good thing, too. I was just about install Linux on my laptop. Whew! Now that I know that Linux and other bits of Open Source software can't weather an economic downturn like private companies, I'm switching to BeOS.
Ass.
i think it'd make more sense for MMO developers to release their games on platforms that currently have a dearth of MMOs rather than try to compete in an already-saturated market. it's not like the ps3/360/psp/ds can't support MMOs.
Ironically, as always in game development, it's easier to get funding if you can point at someone else and say "we're doing that."
I'm not vegging out on the couch. I'm building up my stem-cell reserves.
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
Because I'd rather the resources go to new and unique applications rather than inexplicibly being consumed by the system?
I could be getting some steps wrong, but I remember something about this in the Windows overall development arch.
Win 95 kept itself on the disk
Win 98 added system installer CAB files on the disk if needed, so it had effectively 2 copies of itself on disk.
Win ME added a procedural backup system restore based upon key frames (in case something went wrong). These were incremental, so let's call that 4 copies of itself on disk.
XP added a proper backup utility. Assuming the user keeps one additional copy of the system folder for backup, that's 8 copies of itself on disk.
http://www.antiguawto.com/WTODispPg.html
My impression was that the US was under sanctions because we allow meatspace gambling on a state-by-state basis, but forbid internet gambling on a federal level. One of the treaties we signed allows states to allow or forbid gambling, but not selectively allow gambling based upon random criteria. In this case, we forbit internet gambling but allow Indian casinos, state lotteries, Atlanta, Vegas, etc. Antigua wants to compete in the US gambling market over the internet, but is prohibited by federal law. The WTO ruled against us, and we have been in non-compliance for about 4 years now.
Can the software compensate for cardiac arrhythmias which are inherently unpredictable?
If it is going on the current motion of the heart, depending on the sampling rate it should be able to compensate for "unexpected" motions far better than any human doctor would. Most humans have a 200 ms response time anyway, which sounds significantly higher than this machine's.
A parallel would be Lasik: the laser compensates for your eye position every 100th of a second. I've seen studies where a stand-in eye glanced around quickly during the procedure, and came out nearly perfect anyway. Machines tend to compensate better than Man to instantaneous unpredicted circumstances.
Where you're completely right is in the question "so the patient has some Cardiac Arrhythmia... what do you do?" However, as the surgeon is actually in control of the procedure the entire time (you'll notice his hand in the video, holding the contraption), it seems like he should have the same response time directing the team's response.
If you're putting HP and Lenovo in the same class, you've never had to support a large HP laptop implementation / mistake.
Trust me, don't make that mistake.
HDMI equates to "optical out" and is arguably more useful for modern hi-fi equipment. I am relatively ignorant about audio in options.
It depends on the equipment, but HDMI is frequently limited to Stereo sound due to cost cutting on HDMI television implementations (I.E. they chop the signal down when passing through that direction). In those circumstances you'll want either 2 HDMI cables out or to pass the video signal through the reciever, which can introduce lag. Additionally optical connections, not HDMI, are used for most professional sound development equipment. Any equipment that takes HDMI in will take optical in as well, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
If you're a home-theater geek, go with the HDMI. If you're a doing sound-recording work, you'll want the optical connection. The kinds of people who need optical in are the ones who would need optical out.
Tell me, what is the marginal utility of that special Mac aura?
The utility is the difference between (usually) easily discovering how to do something and sitting around and fuming about it for hours.
Here's an example: Outlook. I've had a few consulting gig people who have wanted to tag their logo automatically at the bottom of all of their e-mails. In Outlook, there are roughly 8 locations where you can set preferences (customize, options, account settings, account properties, etc.). Searching through these I find Forms, Macros, Auto-responses, Templates and other things which may be what I'm looking for (but aren't). I actually did get it working correctly with Templates, before realizing that it made all blank Word documents appear with the same e-mail formatting.
Searching Outlook's help for "signatures", I find "In a new message, on the Message tab, in the Include group, click Signature, and then click Signatures. On the E-mail Signature tab, click New."
I actually spent about 15 minutes futzing with trying to find the include group while creating a new message from the Message tab. Actually, I needed to futz with the message tab within a new message to find the include group. Once in the proper section, you can find the signatures and stationary portion of Outlook. Note: this is the ONLY place I've ever found the Signatures and Stationary portion of Outlook. Once in, the construction and assignment of a Signature is pretty smooth, but by now we've wasted about and hour searching for the functionality.
In Mail on OSX, it's under Preferences->Signatures. There is no need to check a help file, check 8 preferences locations, or test out 4 similarly named bits of similar (though differently implemented) functionality to see if they're what we're looking for.
How much is that extra hour (or more) of aggrivation worth? How much additional productivity can be gained because you can easily discover the potential of your tools, rather than fighting with them constantly? If you used a hammer all day, would you be willing to save 10% on the cost of that hammer if it meant you were frustrated and angry with it on a regular basis?
In the balance of things, I choose to live in a Windows world. But come on man, the Windows ecosystem could be light years less frustrating.
As a side note, my clients are generally nice, slightly older folk who can use a computer but need help with the less obvious portions of Windows. The only three clients who have stopped calling me back are: one who moved to europe, and two who switched to OSX. OSX's interface was just usable enough that they didn't need the extra help.
How much is that worth? 50 dollars an hour minimum.