I hope you'll forgive me for gently tweaking you on the Markets Are Always Your Friend! speech, but your assertion that "If it were a one way street, SCO would still be in business" is highly amusing. You should know, of course, that SCO is in fact still in business, and has recently been tendered a buyout offer by a private equity firm that claims to be willing to pump up to $100M into the company.
Markets with rational actors may function perfectly, but markets rarely provide everyone with sufficient information to act rationally -- and something that tends to be ignored by much "textbook economy talk" is how often it can be in one actor's best interest to try to prevent other actors from obtaining sufficient information to make informed choices. Consumers benefit from a wide choice of producers, but producers benefit from consumers only being able to choose their product.
It's easy to talk about "two way streets," but very often our business transactions aren't that at all: the companies we buy from set all the terms of our sales, and as consumers, our only option is to accept their terms or walk away. (For many workers, this is true of employment contracts, too.) In the case of this article's subject, Meraki essentially changed the terms after the sale, making actual changes to the router which changed the viability of the "micro-ISP" business model they were explicitly selling their product for. If it was truly a "two way street," it wouldn't have been in Meraki's self-interest to screw a percentage of their customers -- the conditions that allowed them to make that business decision include the difficulty in their customers switching to another competing service. And despite what the Big Golden Book of Economics might suggest, this is not some kind of strange and wild condition like nothing we've ever seen before in the business world.
It's apparently difficult to do much with a Windows virus under WINE because there's not much of the system there to infect. If you get lucky, you may hose your WINE installation and need to reinstall it from scratch, though.
If you're running a full installation of Windows in Boot Camp or in a VM, it's subject to viruses the same way any other Windows machine is, and running anti-virus software is advisable. You'll usually hear that you can only screw up the Windows side (or VM), but there's a big "except" there that doesn't always get mentioned: if you have your Mac file system mounted as read/write under the Windows partition, the whole thing is potentially vulnerable. (It can't infect the Mac side, but it could delete/modify files.)
And pretty much, that's it. Full stop. Driver support? Fear that Linux users are cheap bastards won't buy closed source? Yeah, they'll be mentioned, and they may be valid, but it comes down to the bucks.
The problem is that the market for games doesn't function like the market for other software. A word processor, a spreadsheet program, tax software, etc. -- most of these programs have lower development costs than games, particularly when seen over time. (That is, Photoshop 10 builds on the functionality of Photoshop 1-9, and PS 10 started with PS 9's code base.) But by the same token, the word processor and spreadsheet generally sell for a higher price than the game. Yet that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that games, by their nature, have short sell-through periods. After an initial burst of sales at introduction, Office 2007 is still going to keep selling at pretty much a constant rate until Office 2010: A Bloat Odyssey or whatever its next version is replaces it, but Grand Half-Portal Turismo 4 probably has about six months to make 90% of the sales it's gonna make. Unless it's the next Halo, in a year it'll be in the cutout bins.
The reason there aren't many Linux or Mac games is, bluntly, that the economics of the gaming industry are really, really brutal. If you're making a PC game and then decide to make a Mac port of it, you can reuse the art and other media files but only some of the code (a big amount if you're using Transgaming's Cider engine, perhaps), so your development man-hours may only go up by, say, 20%; testing man-hours will probably go up 50% or more, though, because that's a new product as far as QA is concerned. This means extra staff, extra time, or more than likely both. The problem is, that the market you're making this new platform for is much smaller, and your window to make back your money isn't actually much greater. And, of course, if you put off the Mac port until after the PC original is out and has made back its money, your market's actually shrunk; there's not so much excitement about that game 18 months after it came out.
And think about it: it's only just now, with the Mac market share maybe kinda flirting with 7% depending on how you ask and whether a strong headwind is blowing through the Manhattan Mac store, and with the Cider "use your Windows code and it'll only be a little hacky, we promise!" engine, that we're starting to see bigger-name companies take tentative steps into the Mac market. (And I suspect that's in part because Blizzard treated the Mac as a first-class citizen for World of Warcraft and has apparently done fairly well in doing so; of course, WoW is one of the few games that isn't subject to the "make your money back quick before you're irrelevant" rule.)
How big do you think the Linux desktop market, i.e., not servers, is compared to the Mac desktop market? Because Linux has been about to break through on the desktop within two years for, uh, over a decade now, and I'd be surprised if it's much more than one percent. In other words, all the problems the Mac faced just from small market share, Linux also faces, and the numbers are even more grim.
Except that ABBA isn't still around. ABBA's songwriters are overseeing the nostalgia-fest ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!" (movie version to be infesting theaters near you this spring), but the group not only hasn't been together since 1982, they actually turned down a concert promoters' offer for a reunion tour that was estimated to be worth around $1B. (This isn't as crazy as it sounds when you realize that they've sold nearly 400 million records worldwide; they're easy to mock for "Dancing Queen," but they were actually a pretty influential band.)
The Village People may actually be that desperate for money, but I doubt any former member of ABBA is. The "Web Sheriff" is likely trying to bring them on board solely because they're Swedish.
I'd say that if you look back at OS history then, it's clear why Apple went with Next.
BeOS had a lot of buzz and a lot of attention from the media producing world, and in fact, that's where it actually made the most real impact: Level Control Systems was selling a BeOS-based theatre system that actually ran some Broadway and Vegas productions for years, Tascam made a multitrack recording system based on it, Steinberg ported their "Nuendo" system to it, etc. And that's why a lot of people thought it made more sense for Apple to start with it than Next, which was known mostly for their dazzling development environment and deployment through a few large organizations. But Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time, was obsessed with getting into the "enterprise" market. BeOS on the cheap would have been fine, but not at the price Be's CEO was asking -- which was around $250 million, IIRC, not the $400M that someone else mentioned. As it turned out, Amelio paid over $400M for Next, because the "enterprise credibility" he thought they had was that important to him.
At the time, I thought Apple hadn't made the right choice, but in retrospect, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company has almost certainly put them in a much stronger position a decade later than they'd have ever gotten under Amelio. From a purely technical standpoint, BeOS would have been at least as strong a foundation. (It had its share of technical problems, but if it had kept being developed by a team the size of the current OS X team, for another ten years, it's reasonable to assume those would have long since been solved.)
To ignore someone's entire argument (irrespective of its quality) to focus on a grammatical mistake they made in the text is the height of mindless obsessiveness.
If it's one, singular, grammatical (or spelling) mistake, sure. But frequently, we're not talking about a single typo, we're talking about a message which is composed and presented so badly that literate users are going to skip right over it rather than try to puzzle out what the commenter was trying to say. Does this mean that some stunning insights are being overlooked? Maybe, but if you write like you're a C student in junior high, people are highly likely to treat your writing like it's coming from a C student in junior high -- i.e., someone who is not really likely to be able to produce deep, insightful commentary.
If you want to communicate your ideas to others, you have to know how to communicate. That means learning how to write well enough that people aren't going to be tripped up by your crappy composition. I'd argue that it is in fact very much a question of literacy. After that, it may also be a question of "literacy" in the fields that the given argument touches on, something else that's frequently in short supply on the internet -- but basic communication skills, both in terms of composition and reading comprehension, are the bedrock foundation of meaningful dialogue.
I suppose the OP's point is that if you're typing Python code like:
Class FoobarClass:
def foo(x):
return bar(x)
def bar(x):
return x*2
A "smart editor" will know to indent on the second and fourth lines, after you've typed the colon, but it won't know when to unindent the way it would if it was doing brace matching. In other words, you can't just type code on autopilot: at the end of "return bar(x)" you have to hit RETURN BACKSPACE and to end the class you'll have to hit a whole RETURN BACKSPACE BACKSPACE series. Once the code is already indented correctly the editor can obviously preserve the semantic meaning, but there's no algorithmic way for the editor to re-indent code for you there way there is in a C-like language.
Of course, I'd argue that the requirement a language be able to be re-indented algorithmically is actually the real religious issue.
The reason to not click windows to the top is so you can refer to some information in the top window while typing into the lower one! I find that I can usually refer to information in a lower window while typing into the top one. While I can't speak for all window managers, both OS X and (I believe) XP will use focus-follows-mouse with respect to the scroll wheel, which I do like and use -- the point is that I don't like the idea of scrolling the web browser and then discovering I'm typing into nothing because I didn't move the mouse pointer back to the terminal or editor window. (Or worse, that I'm typing into the other editor window.)
And of course one might argue that using the keyboard to switch between windows is often faster if your hands are already on said keyboard as it is; scrolling the other window by pressing Alt-Tab PgDn is not difficult.
Angry capital letters with pseudo-code With all due respect, we're arguing at right angles to one another at this point, I think. That someone can write an application that raises its own damn windows has nothing to do with whether focus follows mouse or other long-standing X-isms are or are not preferable, particularly as default behavior, for most users. My argument was (and remains) that they are not. My argument isn't that those who find they can't live without FFM just need to suck it up.
If you do not understand the above concept, then please understand that the result is EXACTLY the same user interface you get now. IT IS NOT DIFFERENT! No, it actually isn't, because we were talking about a window manager that implemented focus follows mouse on a window manager level, not an application level. The application would have to explicitly turn off FFM, not just add its own "raise my own damn window" function to accept a mouse click.
It simply is a way to make the window system better designed so that alternatives are *possible*. Then design the window manager so it has hooks for behavioral plugins, or hidden/advanced preferences. Again, if you're designing a user interface, you don't design for edge cases. The kind of user who loves those X-isms is almost certainly the kind of user who's capable of finding out how to turn on hidden preferences.
In any case, it'd be nuts to push major UI decisions onto the application developer. You should never have to write a "raise my own damn window" function for anything that isn't an edge case; 99% of the time, the window manager should be, you know, managing windows, not making you do it.
A few people seem to remember how good focus follows mouse is, And a few people find it intensely exasperating to have the window with focus change merely on movement rather than a click. I don't like web sites that produce huge popups when you roll over text; I like text editors that suddenly stop accepting text because I moved the mouse pointer out of the way or just bumped the pointing device measurably less, and for much the same reason.
but the ability to click and do something in a window behind the current one appears to be forgotten by everybody... Perhaps your work style is so blisteringly multitasking that the extra quarter-second wasted clicking on windows add up to hours of lost productivity each week, and the numerous psychological studies that suggest our brains don't, in fact, switch contexts that fast don't apply to you. This is no doubt related to the perfect recall you have of the contents of every partially-obscured window on your desktop. However, those of us who, unlike you, are not destined to have a character on "Heroes" modeled after us don't find these features to be make-or-break for our desktop environments.
And before you say "oh but that is not user friendly", get your head out of the sand and realize... ...that the fraction of hardcore types who truly derive benefit from window managers like ratpoison shouldn't drive UI design considerations?
No, a reasonable idea would be to raise prices to reduce demand... Here's the thing: high prices reduce demand by making consumers say, "Maybe I don't really need [now expensive item]." But with necessities, people don't say that. The electrical grid is most likely to get stressed when the majority of customers are running air conditioning or heating, sure. If you double or triple the price of power during those times, the demand isn't reduced because customers are saying "I guess I don't need to be cool on this day when it's 105 in the shade after all." The demand will be reduced because the poorest customers won't be able to afford their power bills. This has very different implications than raising prices on a luxury item.
This is what happens when you dick with the free market, it stops working! Perhaps, but it's important to recognize that a completely unregulated market matches supply and demand based on who can afford a product or service, and who can afford is not the same as who needs. I know free marketeers start screaming "central planning outcast unclean!" whenever someone uses the word "need" in an economic context, but in a social context, ignoring the difference between affordability and necessity is perilous.
(I should note that I'm not advocating the plan to have the utilities control thermostats, not by government mandate. The idea of allowing consumers to voluntarily put such a thermostat in their home in exchange for a rebate of some kind doesn't sound so unreasonable. Obviously, increasing the generation capacity of the grid is also important, but it's not an either/or situation.)
[The Constitution] does not establish a right to privacy; that right, since it is not expressly surrendered to the government in the Constitution, is reserved to the states and the people via the 10th amendment. While the basic idea that a right that isn't explicitly granted to the Federal government is reserved for the State or "the People" is true, legal precedent generally holds that the right to privacy is protected by the 9th Amendment, and that such a view is buttressed by other amendments such as the 4th.
While the Feds are enjoined from passing legislation that infringes on your privacy if doing so violates the Constitution (such as seaarch and seizure), they are not enjoined from passing legislation that protects a right to privacy on the federal level. They can regulate government agencies (cf. the Privacy Act of 1974), they can regulate specific industries (cf. the Cable Communications Policy Act), and they can restrict information collection and use by private employers when this can lead to discrimination (cf. the Employee Polygraph Protection Act).
The high-quality FYIQ (Fuck You I Quit) has a long tradition. Yeah, but ol' Zed here is taking it to previously unseen heights by doing it in such a public way. He may have a good point or two about Rails in there somewhere, but between the constant undertone of "I can't work with anyone without calling them obscene names" and the somewhat boggling "let me mock this manager telling me that I can't code" segment... wow. He may be thinking about working more with the Python or Lua communities, but the people in those communities are probably locking the doors even as we write this. And for someone so incensed about how little money he made in the Rails community, he's gone so far out of his way to demonstrate how unfit he is for working with others that it's just... wow, again.
Zed, my man, I suggest you take up yak herding for a few years and see if people have forgotten about this when we're on "Web 4.0." This was not a FYIQ Rails, this was a FYIQ the industry.
Clever title, but "Pissy Foul-Mouthed Drama Queen Makes Histrionic Exit from Rails" would have been more accurate. While I (sort of) hate to say it, this shouldn't be a real surprise to anyone who's read Zed Shaw's blog and even Mongrel's official web site... well, we'll just say that the fellow always came across to me as someone who was more interested in railing than Rails, if you get my drift.
I like Mongrel -- I use it to run my Instiki web site -- and think Shaw's an undeniably good programmer. But there's a certain kind of personality in a (fortunately small) subset of tech-heads, that assumes that the sheer brilliance they bring to their work is all that matters. You'd better listen to them because they're fucking brilliant and you're not them and don't you fucking forget it. I have more than one acquaintance who exhibits this attitude -- and who has a whole lot of trouble finding and keeping work. Hmm.
Oddly, I'm exploring Python and Django now after my own long detour through Rails, without quite accomplishing anything on my own part other than cementing an exasperation with PHP (version 4 in particular). Running that Instiki instance is part of what's lessened the appeal of Rails. I don't know how much of that can be blamed on Instiki itself, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "not all of it." But I digress.
It's archaic, but it isn't inherently racist unless you make an effort to know what language the PC corps of America has deemed unacceptable regardless of intent and use it despite that knowledge. I personally didn't know, I expect he didn't either. In other words, you're asserting that words are only offensive because Those Damn Liberals are in your face about it. Whether the people you're referring to with a given term find the term derogatory or demeaning has nothing to do with it. So, really, "nigger" would be okay in all contexts if only the PC corps of America hadn't deemed it unacceptable. Before those damn academics and hippies came along, nobody could possibly have been offended by such a word.
Do you see a logic flaw here? Just a small one?
"Political correctness" may have once been a useful construct, but it only seems to be used these days by people who don't want to face the possibility that the offended party might deserve input into deciding when they're offended. "Chinaman" has a long history of being used in a patronizing way. Did you personally not know that? That's okay. Now you do.
Yes, it is possible to be too easily offended, but isn't excusing everything by saying "oh, if you're offended by that you're just too politically correct" going to be, in the long run, worse? Call me crazy, but I'd rather see people err on the side of civility.
I would say that it was moved into the profit making domain at a time when there was most to benefit and now they have to move into open source simply to continue the product. That's certainly possible. From what I could tell, Movable Type did pretty well for a bit positioning MT as the "commercial" blogging tool, providing infrastructure for big commercial sites that wanted to get into blogging as well as corporate internal sites. But WordPress seems to have worked its way into that market, too, as well as taken on -- and I suspect for practical purposes beaten -- Six Apart's hosted TypePad service. "Free for basic stuff, paid for advanced features" gets a lot more market share than "paid for even basic stuff."
Of course, the big unknown to me is whether Six Apart generates more revenue than WordPress. TypePad may well bring in more money than WP.com does, and 6A may still have a pretty strong corporate following. But in the consumer market, they've gotten their asses kicked pretty soundly, from all appearances. Self-hosted blogs abandoned Movable Type in droves, TypePad never got much traction compared to its free competitors, and their attempt at woo-woo Web 2.0 social networking, "Vox," seems to be more curiosity than solution. (Many good things have been said about Vox, but very few people seem to be using Vox.)
Does anyone know what the original appeal of MT was over Wordpress? It was available earlier. That's mostly it. For a couple years, MT was far and away the most "full-featured" free (as in beer) blogging solution. When I put up my first MT-based blog years ago it was simply because nothing else out there could do what I want as elegantly as MT could without spending fairly big bucks -- the only thing I could find that came close to matching it feature for feature was the expensive and, uh, let's say extremely quirky Userland Radio. MT wasn't perfect; it essentially rebuilt static pages when you added a new post or a new comment was added. If you had a big database, this could mean a minute or two of grinding away in Perl scripts. The solution they proposed -- essentially, embedding PHP in your Movable Type templates -- struck me as kind of... hacky. WordPress (and a few others) solved this problem by, well, just being in PHP from the start.
But MT really dropped the ball when the licensing changed at version 3 to sharply limit free non-commercial use. More than anything else, that's what drove en masse adoption of WordPress, which by that point had achieved, if not feature parity with Movable Type, a solid enough foundation that it was clear it could achieve feature parity. And darn if having thousands of new users virtually overnight doesn't ramp up plug-in development quick.
I'm not sure Movable Type 4 has serious advantages over WordPress 2, although MT's template system is still far more elegant than WordPress's, and there are edge cases -- like one I may be facing myself! -- where MySQL is not available but Postgres is, which means MT wins by default.
There are other entertaining little branches along the Blogging Tree, like the sad story of TextPattern, but that's another topic.
From my reading, HTML5 isn't measurably more complex than HTML4. Back up your assertion otherwise.
A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics... ...is not a simple new format for semantic content. Having a simple format for vector graphics that's also specified as a standard might be a fine thing, but it's solving a different problem. If what you mean is that Thing That Is Better Than HTML5 should have a standard element that supports vector graphics, like, say, HTML5's <canvas> element, might I humbly suggest, I don't know, HTML5's <canvas> element?
...that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML... Really? Let's ask the W3C how that's been working out for the adoption rate of XHTML 1.1.
I always wondered why Radio Shack didn't turn into a huge computer retailer, which was a perfect growth for the only store like that... They tried.
It's been lost to the mists of time now, but Radio Shack was doing the equivalent of the Apple Store a quarter-century ago, with the "Radio Shack Computer Center" stores. They were not only huge in the pre-PC days, they were the leader in "PC clones" for a while.
In the early '90s, though, they decided the Tandy Computer brand just wasn't making it anymore, and they decided to go all-out for retailing. They sold their computer divisions (which included Victor and GRiD) to AST, spun off other brands they owned that were marketed through non-Tandy stores (like Memorex), and opened Computer City, Edge in Electronics, and Incredible Universe. They also bought a couple other chains like McDuff's and Video Concepts.
What killed that path, basically, was in part what just did in CompUSA: Best Buy and Circuit City, combined with bottom-barrel retailers like Wal-Mart. The other part was Incredible Universe itself: picture stores that were 150,000+ square feet, had child care centers and restaurants, and were consciously patterned after Disney theme parks in terms of style and customer service. Basically, Fry's with ten times the dazzle and ten times the overhead.
By the late '90s Radio Shack decided to concentrate only on the little mall stores. I'm not sure how they're doing these days, but a few years ago, at least, this strategy seemed to have worked out pretty well for them, even though old fart TRS-80 users like myself miss the old chain.
On the day that the poorest 51% of the population discovers it can vote itself the wealth of the richest 49%, economic collapse is imminent. Given that the richest ten percent of Americans have about 70% of the wealth, and most high office holders -- and all current presidential candidates, the majority of whom are millionaires -- are from that richest ten percent, I don't think there's a statistically high chance of the huddled masses collectively slapping their foreheads and saying, "Shit! We can 'redistribute' all of Bill Gates' money by just voting it away from him! Thanks, Slashdot!"
It's saying Steve Jobs is trying to make customers pay more for the right to do something that's already a right. It's not that simple. In theory you have the legal right to do non-commercial "space shifting" of content, including video content. Yet per the DMCA, you do not have the legal right to circumvent encryption in order to do space shifting.
There's a short but interesting article on this which gives some of the background of the first legal case to test this (and it's very, very recent); the problem the video industry may run into is that if the DMCA blocks the ability of users to do non-infringing copying, like space-shifting, the DMCA could be the law that gets into trouble. The end of this article, from November of last year?
A better strategy for the studios might be to use the leverage the DMCA gives them now -- before the fair-use question is squarely on the table -- to try to establish some accepted terms and conditions under which such space-shifting happens. Call it a hunch, but if this really happens, we're seeing the first attempt at that "better strategy."
it is also plausible that public libraries, Popular Science magazine, the Radio Shack catalog, the USPS, the public switched phone systems, and dozens of other things that might qualify as helping to spread terrorist ideals, assist in terrorist activities, or otherwise be used by terrorists. All of these things may indeed assist in terrorist activities, although clearly only the Radio Shack catalog "spreads terrorist ideals."
If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. If you outlaw pecan pies, only outlaws will have pecan pies. Fill in any noun you want, and the statement is just as true, which might just suggest it's not all that useful an observation.
The Internet does NOT need to be singled out, and by doing so elected officials are signaling their intent to scrutinize and censor the Internet. Look, if you don't think law enforcement agencies are scrutinizing the internet right now, you haven't been paying much attention. Scrutinize and censor are two vastly different concepts.
I love a good "slippery slope" argument as much as the next guy, really, but let's turn this one on its head: you're essentially asserting that merely enumerating activities in a congressional action that acknowledges the way they could be used to ill effect, is a signal of intent to restrict those activities. Is it wrong to point out that, to borrow the fashionable language of WMD hunting, that many activities are "dual use?"
Yes, I understand the feeling that the Bush team has basically been arguing that when it comes to surveillance powers, accountability and transparency are liabilities. And I'm all for calling that argument bullshit: any, any, claimed government power that essentially relies on trusting officials not to abuse it is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of how the American system is supposed to work and at worst a deliberate attack on it.
But I'm not going to say, "Hey, all you elected officials, you don't even get to talk about security issues because there's the potential you'll do things we don't like." There is indeed that potential, but talking about these issues is part of their job.
All we need is some rural politician to champion it. A Ted Stevens comes to mind. This would be perfect for pork, copious amounts of pork. Well, that takes care of running a maglev train to an uninhabited island in Alaska. I suppose it's a start, but...
There are plenty of used cars that get excellent gas mileage, but that still isn't the key factor buyers look for. That doesn't surprise me. My completely speaking-out-of-my-butt thought on that is that used car shoppers tend to be looking for cars that would be too expensive for them to buy new, and generally that isn't going to mean that they're looking for the $15K Sentra discounted to $10K, they're looking for the $25K SUV discounted to $15K. A lot of people want to have SUVs or minivans, either because they really do haul around that much stuff, or because they believe they're safer.
I think if gas prices stay where they are or climb -- and I'm not sure I expect oil to fall down below $75 a barrel ever again (right now, $75 would seem pretty low!) -- mileage is going to start being a much bigger factor in car purchases. Although I also expect efficient technologies to work their way up the car chain, as it were. It's already possible to get a hybrid SUV that has better mileage than my coupe.
Fact is the typical american makes less than $32,000.00 a year. Well, the fact is that the median household income in the US is about $48,000, which is just as important a figure as the median personal income (about $26,000). However, the fact is that the average cost of a new car in the US is $28,400.
The ONLY way to get this going is get subcompact efficient cars that are under $11,000.00 NEW. That is the only answer, nothing else will make a difference. Is $12-13K enough? You can get a brand new Chevy Aveo or Nissan Versa for that much, you know.
Furthermore, I might gently point out that people who can't afford to buy new cars -- or want something less bare-bones than a modern day equivalent of the original Beetle -- have other options: they can lease a car for considerably less than purchasing (which many consumers do), or they can buy used (often buying the cars that were previously leased by others, which usually means they're fairly new and have relatively low mileage). Or, of course, if they're in an urban area they can often get by with no car at all.
At risk of having them take away my Secret Anti-Capitalist People's Decoder Ring by suggesting that the market as it exists now just isn't that bad... well, I don't think the market as it exists now is that bad. I'd like to see some of those crazy oppressive liberal ideas like higher enforced fuel standards put into place (yes, yes, it'll bankrupt the industry, in exactly the same way mandatory seat belts and air bags did), but it's simply not true to say that you can't get an affordable and efficient car right now if you want one.
The rich making $60,000 a year or more will whine about $5.50 a gallong gas but it will not affect them. If they're actually rich they may not notice. If they're making $60K a year, they will. While that's over the median it's certainly not "rich" by, well, the standards of the rich: for years economists have used working standard, no pun intended, has been a net worth of over $1M. This year I will make over $60K a year, in point of fact, but I am not a homeowner, and my net worth is probably on the order of $6K. Two years ago, while I'd have still been making over the median national (single-person) income my net worth would have been about -$20K.
I'm aware I'm well off compared to many, but please don't suffer under the illusion that those in my financial position aren't affected by high gas prices. I will likely have to buy a car within the next 2-3 years, and there is a reason I know the price points of those highly efficient subcompacts of a few paragraphs ago.
A 200% tax on all luxury cars... is the only workable answer. With all due respect, you are apparently using a radical new definition of "workable" that does not include the concept of feasibility. Do you think a regulation stipulating that a $40,000 car that meets an arbitrary definition of "luxury" is now a $120,000 car has any practical chance of being discussed outside Pacifica Radio talk shows? And where do you draw the line? A hybrid Ford Escape SUV gets comparable gas mileage to the Honda Fit. What about a Lexus hybrid? An $80K, Lotus designed, defiantly luxury and all-electric Tesla roadster like the one described in TFA?
Thinking about it, I'm not sure it's fair to say that the current OS X interface is designed from a single-button mouse perspective. It uses the right button for context menus and has for years (long before Apple broke down and started shipping multi-button mice!), following, IIRC, the lead of OS/2. You do have to hold down a meta key to change the default behavior of dragging an icon from one window to another, but you'd probably design it that way for two-button mice to start with: it maintains the idea that "left button = direct action" and "meta key = modify action," as well as maintaining the idea that "right button = pop-up menu." Designing it so the drag action worked differently depending on which button you were dragging with would be less intuitive.
(I know the case could be argued differently, but that makes sense to me!)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you'll forgive me for gently tweaking you on the Markets Are Always Your Friend! speech, but your assertion that "If it were a one way street, SCO would still be in business" is highly amusing. You should know, of course, that SCO is in fact still in business, and has recently been tendered a buyout offer by a private equity firm that claims to be willing to pump up to $100M into the company.
Markets with rational actors may function perfectly, but markets rarely provide everyone with sufficient information to act rationally -- and something that tends to be ignored by much "textbook economy talk" is how often it can be in one actor's best interest to try to prevent other actors from obtaining sufficient information to make informed choices. Consumers benefit from a wide choice of producers, but producers benefit from consumers only being able to choose their product.
It's easy to talk about "two way streets," but very often our business transactions aren't that at all: the companies we buy from set all the terms of our sales, and as consumers, our only option is to accept their terms or walk away. (For many workers, this is true of employment contracts, too.) In the case of this article's subject, Meraki essentially changed the terms after the sale, making actual changes to the router which changed the viability of the "micro-ISP" business model they were explicitly selling their product for. If it was truly a "two way street," it wouldn't have been in Meraki's self-interest to screw a percentage of their customers -- the conditions that allowed them to make that business decision include the difficulty in their customers switching to another competing service. And despite what the Big Golden Book of Economics might suggest, this is not some kind of strange and wild condition like nothing we've ever seen before in the business world.
It's apparently difficult to do much with a Windows virus under WINE because there's not much of the system there to infect. If you get lucky, you may hose your WINE installation and need to reinstall it from scratch, though.
If you're running a full installation of Windows in Boot Camp or in a VM, it's subject to viruses the same way any other Windows machine is, and running anti-virus software is advisable. You'll usually hear that you can only screw up the Windows side (or VM), but there's a big "except" there that doesn't always get mentioned: if you have your Mac file system mounted as read/write under the Windows partition, the whole thing is potentially vulnerable. (It can't infect the Mac side, but it could delete/modify files.)
And pretty much, that's it. Full stop. Driver support? Fear that Linux users are cheap bastards won't buy closed source? Yeah, they'll be mentioned, and they may be valid, but it comes down to the bucks.
The problem is that the market for games doesn't function like the market for other software. A word processor, a spreadsheet program, tax software, etc. -- most of these programs have lower development costs than games, particularly when seen over time. (That is, Photoshop 10 builds on the functionality of Photoshop 1-9, and PS 10 started with PS 9's code base.) But by the same token, the word processor and spreadsheet generally sell for a higher price than the game. Yet that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that games, by their nature, have short sell-through periods. After an initial burst of sales at introduction, Office 2007 is still going to keep selling at pretty much a constant rate until Office 2010: A Bloat Odyssey or whatever its next version is replaces it, but Grand Half-Portal Turismo 4 probably has about six months to make 90% of the sales it's gonna make. Unless it's the next Halo, in a year it'll be in the cutout bins.
The reason there aren't many Linux or Mac games is, bluntly, that the economics of the gaming industry are really, really brutal. If you're making a PC game and then decide to make a Mac port of it, you can reuse the art and other media files but only some of the code (a big amount if you're using Transgaming's Cider engine, perhaps), so your development man-hours may only go up by, say, 20%; testing man-hours will probably go up 50% or more, though, because that's a new product as far as QA is concerned. This means extra staff, extra time, or more than likely both. The problem is, that the market you're making this new platform for is much smaller, and your window to make back your money isn't actually much greater. And, of course, if you put off the Mac port until after the PC original is out and has made back its money, your market's actually shrunk; there's not so much excitement about that game 18 months after it came out.
And think about it: it's only just now, with the Mac market share maybe kinda flirting with 7% depending on how you ask and whether a strong headwind is blowing through the Manhattan Mac store, and with the Cider "use your Windows code and it'll only be a little hacky, we promise!" engine, that we're starting to see bigger-name companies take tentative steps into the Mac market. (And I suspect that's in part because Blizzard treated the Mac as a first-class citizen for World of Warcraft and has apparently done fairly well in doing so; of course, WoW is one of the few games that isn't subject to the "make your money back quick before you're irrelevant" rule.)
How big do you think the Linux desktop market, i.e., not servers, is compared to the Mac desktop market? Because Linux has been about to break through on the desktop within two years for, uh, over a decade now, and I'd be surprised if it's much more than one percent. In other words, all the problems the Mac faced just from small market share, Linux also faces, and the numbers are even more grim.
Except that ABBA isn't still around. ABBA's songwriters are overseeing the nostalgia-fest ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!" (movie version to be infesting theaters near you this spring), but the group not only hasn't been together since 1982, they actually turned down a concert promoters' offer for a reunion tour that was estimated to be worth around $1B. (This isn't as crazy as it sounds when you realize that they've sold nearly 400 million records worldwide; they're easy to mock for "Dancing Queen," but they were actually a pretty influential band.)
The Village People may actually be that desperate for money, but I doubt any former member of ABBA is. The "Web Sheriff" is likely trying to bring them on board solely because they're Swedish.
I'd say that if you look back at OS history then, it's clear why Apple went with Next.
BeOS had a lot of buzz and a lot of attention from the media producing world, and in fact, that's where it actually made the most real impact: Level Control Systems was selling a BeOS-based theatre system that actually ran some Broadway and Vegas productions for years, Tascam made a multitrack recording system based on it, Steinberg ported their "Nuendo" system to it, etc. And that's why a lot of people thought it made more sense for Apple to start with it than Next, which was known mostly for their dazzling development environment and deployment through a few large organizations. But Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time, was obsessed with getting into the "enterprise" market. BeOS on the cheap would have been fine, but not at the price Be's CEO was asking -- which was around $250 million, IIRC, not the $400M that someone else mentioned. As it turned out, Amelio paid over $400M for Next, because the "enterprise credibility" he thought they had was that important to him.
At the time, I thought Apple hadn't made the right choice, but in retrospect, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company has almost certainly put them in a much stronger position a decade later than they'd have ever gotten under Amelio. From a purely technical standpoint, BeOS would have been at least as strong a foundation. (It had its share of technical problems, but if it had kept being developed by a team the size of the current OS X team, for another ten years, it's reasonable to assume those would have long since been solved.)
If it's one, singular, grammatical (or spelling) mistake, sure. But frequently, we're not talking about a single typo, we're talking about a message which is composed and presented so badly that literate users are going to skip right over it rather than try to puzzle out what the commenter was trying to say. Does this mean that some stunning insights are being overlooked? Maybe, but if you write like you're a C student in junior high, people are highly likely to treat your writing like it's coming from a C student in junior high -- i.e., someone who is not really likely to be able to produce deep, insightful commentary.
If you want to communicate your ideas to others, you have to know how to communicate. That means learning how to write well enough that people aren't going to be tripped up by your crappy composition. I'd argue that it is in fact very much a question of literacy. After that, it may also be a question of "literacy" in the fields that the given argument touches on, something else that's frequently in short supply on the internet -- but basic communication skills, both in terms of composition and reading comprehension, are the bedrock foundation of meaningful dialogue.
Of course, I'd argue that the requirement a language be able to be re-indented algorithmically is actually the real religious issue.
And of course one might argue that using the keyboard to switch between windows is often faster if your hands are already on said keyboard as it is; scrolling the other window by pressing Alt-Tab PgDn is not difficult. Angry capital letters with pseudo-code With all due respect, we're arguing at right angles to one another at this point, I think. That someone can write an application that raises its own damn windows has nothing to do with whether focus follows mouse or other long-standing X-isms are or are not preferable, particularly as default behavior, for most users. My argument was (and remains) that they are not. My argument isn't that those who find they can't live without FFM just need to suck it up. If you do not understand the above concept, then please understand that the result is EXACTLY the same user interface you get now. IT IS NOT DIFFERENT! No, it actually isn't, because we were talking about a window manager that implemented focus follows mouse on a window manager level, not an application level. The application would have to explicitly turn off FFM, not just add its own "raise my own damn window" function to accept a mouse click. It simply is a way to make the window system better designed so that alternatives are *possible*. Then design the window manager so it has hooks for behavioral plugins, or hidden/advanced preferences. Again, if you're designing a user interface, you don't design for edge cases. The kind of user who loves those X-isms is almost certainly the kind of user who's capable of finding out how to turn on hidden preferences.
In any case, it'd be nuts to push major UI decisions onto the application developer. You should never have to write a "raise my own damn window" function for anything that isn't an edge case; 99% of the time, the window manager should be, you know, managing windows, not making you do it.
(I should note that I'm not advocating the plan to have the utilities control thermostats, not by government mandate. The idea of allowing consumers to voluntarily put such a thermostat in their home in exchange for a rebate of some kind doesn't sound so unreasonable. Obviously, increasing the generation capacity of the grid is also important, but it's not an either/or situation.)
While the Feds are enjoined from passing legislation that infringes on your privacy if doing so violates the Constitution (such as seaarch and seizure), they are not enjoined from passing legislation that protects a right to privacy on the federal level. They can regulate government agencies (cf. the Privacy Act of 1974), they can regulate specific industries (cf. the Cable Communications Policy Act), and they can restrict information collection and use by private employers when this can lead to discrimination (cf. the Employee Polygraph Protection Act).
Zed, my man, I suggest you take up yak herding for a few years and see if people have forgotten about this when we're on "Web 4.0." This was not a FYIQ Rails, this was a FYIQ the industry.
I like Mongrel -- I use it to run my Instiki web site -- and think Shaw's an undeniably good programmer. But there's a certain kind of personality in a (fortunately small) subset of tech-heads, that assumes that the sheer brilliance they bring to their work is all that matters. You'd better listen to them because they're fucking brilliant and you're not them and don't you fucking forget it. I have more than one acquaintance who exhibits this attitude -- and who has a whole lot of trouble finding and keeping work. Hmm.
Oddly, I'm exploring Python and Django now after my own long detour through Rails, without quite accomplishing anything on my own part other than cementing an exasperation with PHP (version 4 in particular). Running that Instiki instance is part of what's lessened the appeal of Rails. I don't know how much of that can be blamed on Instiki itself, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "not all of it." But I digress.
Do you see a logic flaw here? Just a small one?
"Political correctness" may have once been a useful construct, but it only seems to be used these days by people who don't want to face the possibility that the offended party might deserve input into deciding when they're offended. "Chinaman" has a long history of being used in a patronizing way. Did you personally not know that? That's okay. Now you do.
Yes, it is possible to be too easily offended, but isn't excusing everything by saying "oh, if you're offended by that you're just too politically correct" going to be, in the long run, worse? Call me crazy, but I'd rather see people err on the side of civility.
Of course, the big unknown to me is whether Six Apart generates more revenue than WordPress. TypePad may well bring in more money than WP.com does, and 6A may still have a pretty strong corporate following. But in the consumer market, they've gotten their asses kicked pretty soundly, from all appearances. Self-hosted blogs abandoned Movable Type in droves, TypePad never got much traction compared to its free competitors, and their attempt at woo-woo Web 2.0 social networking, "Vox," seems to be more curiosity than solution. (Many good things have been said about Vox, but very few people seem to be using Vox.)
But MT really dropped the ball when the licensing changed at version 3 to sharply limit free non-commercial use. More than anything else, that's what drove en masse adoption of WordPress, which by that point had achieved, if not feature parity with Movable Type, a solid enough foundation that it was clear it could achieve feature parity. And darn if having thousands of new users virtually overnight doesn't ramp up plug-in development quick.
I'm not sure Movable Type 4 has serious advantages over WordPress 2, although MT's template system is still far more elegant than WordPress's, and there are edge cases -- like one I may be facing myself! -- where MySQL is not available but Postgres is, which means MT wins by default.
There are other entertaining little branches along the Blogging Tree, like the sad story of TextPattern, but that's another topic.
...that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML... Really? Let's ask the W3C how that's been working out for the adoption rate of XHTML 1.1.It's been lost to the mists of time now, but Radio Shack was doing the equivalent of the Apple Store a quarter-century ago, with the "Radio Shack Computer Center" stores. They were not only huge in the pre-PC days, they were the leader in "PC clones" for a while.
In the early '90s, though, they decided the Tandy Computer brand just wasn't making it anymore, and they decided to go all-out for retailing. They sold their computer divisions (which included Victor and GRiD) to AST, spun off other brands they owned that were marketed through non-Tandy stores (like Memorex), and opened Computer City, Edge in Electronics, and Incredible Universe. They also bought a couple other chains like McDuff's and Video Concepts.
What killed that path, basically, was in part what just did in CompUSA: Best Buy and Circuit City, combined with bottom-barrel retailers like Wal-Mart. The other part was Incredible Universe itself: picture stores that were 150,000+ square feet, had child care centers and restaurants, and were consciously patterned after Disney theme parks in terms of style and customer service. Basically, Fry's with ten times the dazzle and ten times the overhead.
By the late '90s Radio Shack decided to concentrate only on the little mall stores. I'm not sure how they're doing these days, but a few years ago, at least, this strategy seemed to have worked out pretty well for them, even though old fart TRS-80 users like myself miss the old chain.
There's a short but interesting article on this which gives some of the background of the first legal case to test this (and it's very, very recent); the problem the video industry may run into is that if the DMCA blocks the ability of users to do non-infringing copying, like space-shifting, the DMCA could be the law that gets into trouble. The end of this article, from November of last year? A better strategy for the studios might be to use the leverage the DMCA gives them now -- before the fair-use question is squarely on the table -- to try to establish some accepted terms and conditions under which such space-shifting happens. Call it a hunch, but if this really happens, we're seeing the first attempt at that "better strategy."
I love a good "slippery slope" argument as much as the next guy, really, but let's turn this one on its head: you're essentially asserting that merely enumerating activities in a congressional action that acknowledges the way they could be used to ill effect, is a signal of intent to restrict those activities. Is it wrong to point out that, to borrow the fashionable language of WMD hunting, that many activities are "dual use?"
Yes, I understand the feeling that the Bush team has basically been arguing that when it comes to surveillance powers, accountability and transparency are liabilities. And I'm all for calling that argument bullshit: any, any, claimed government power that essentially relies on trusting officials not to abuse it is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of how the American system is supposed to work and at worst a deliberate attack on it.
But I'm not going to say, "Hey, all you elected officials, you don't even get to talk about security issues because there's the potential you'll do things we don't like." There is indeed that potential, but talking about these issues is part of their job.
I think if gas prices stay where they are or climb -- and I'm not sure I expect oil to fall down below $75 a barrel ever again (right now, $75 would seem pretty low!) -- mileage is going to start being a much bigger factor in car purchases. Although I also expect efficient technologies to work their way up the car chain, as it were. It's already possible to get a hybrid SUV that has better mileage than my coupe.
Furthermore, I might gently point out that people who can't afford to buy new cars -- or want something less bare-bones than a modern day equivalent of the original Beetle -- have other options: they can lease a car for considerably less than purchasing (which many consumers do), or they can buy used (often buying the cars that were previously leased by others, which usually means they're fairly new and have relatively low mileage). Or, of course, if they're in an urban area they can often get by with no car at all.
At risk of having them take away my Secret Anti-Capitalist People's Decoder Ring by suggesting that the market as it exists now just isn't that bad... well, I don't think the market as it exists now is that bad. I'd like to see some of those crazy oppressive liberal ideas like higher enforced fuel standards put into place (yes, yes, it'll bankrupt the industry, in exactly the same way mandatory seat belts and air bags did), but it's simply not true to say that you can't get an affordable and efficient car right now if you want one. The rich making $60,000 a year or more will whine about $5.50 a gallong gas but it will not affect them. If they're actually rich they may not notice. If they're making $60K a year, they will. While that's over the median it's certainly not "rich" by, well, the standards of the rich: for years economists have used working standard, no pun intended, has been a net worth of over $1M. This year I will make over $60K a year, in point of fact, but I am not a homeowner, and my net worth is probably on the order of $6K. Two years ago, while I'd have still been making over the median national (single-person) income my net worth would have been about -$20K.
I'm aware I'm well off compared to many, but please don't suffer under the illusion that those in my financial position aren't affected by high gas prices. I will likely have to buy a car within the next 2-3 years, and there is a reason I know the price points of those highly efficient subcompacts of a few paragraphs ago. A 200% tax on all luxury cars... is the only workable answer. With all due respect, you are apparently using a radical new definition of "workable" that does not include the concept of feasibility. Do you think a regulation stipulating that a $40,000 car that meets an arbitrary definition of "luxury" is now a $120,000 car has any practical chance of being discussed outside Pacifica Radio talk shows? And where do you draw the line? A hybrid Ford Escape SUV gets comparable gas mileage to the Honda Fit. What about a Lexus hybrid? An $80K, Lotus designed, defiantly luxury and all-electric Tesla roadster like the one described in TFA?
Thinking about it, I'm not sure it's fair to say that the current OS X interface is designed from a single-button mouse perspective. It uses the right button for context menus and has for years (long before Apple broke down and started shipping multi-button mice!), following, IIRC, the lead of OS/2. You do have to hold down a meta key to change the default behavior of dragging an icon from one window to another, but you'd probably design it that way for two-button mice to start with: it maintains the idea that "left button = direct action" and "meta key = modify action," as well as maintaining the idea that "right button = pop-up menu." Designing it so the drag action worked differently depending on which button you were dragging with would be less intuitive.
(I know the case could be argued differently, but that makes sense to me!)