Where's the evidence of these folks astroturfing? I just did some quick googling on myTriggers, and that site doesn't appear to be a google gamer. I ask the question, because your comment made me mad enough to want to submit a consumer complaint against these people, but it appears that myTriggers at least, may have a valid complaint. If Google hides them as an alternative to Product Search, that could be an anti-trust move.
I'd put myTriggers in as a johnny-come-lately. They're yet another shopbot in a market already saturated by them. They need to come up at the top of search listings or they get lost in the sea of competitors. Look at their complaint. They're upset that their gaming no longer put them high enough to garner business.
The tradecomet website appears to not have much information, so maybe you were referring to them as a known google gamer?
These guys appear to be more of a link farm than anything else. And those operations are all about gaming search engines; it's why they exist.
So please, before you use that “rule” again... Think about actual reality and proof. Think hard. And if you can’t conclusively be sure of it, don’t use it.
Fair enough. However, I don't see Occam's Razor as any sort of fast rule or absolute truth. At best, I'd say it's a rule of thumb. And that's the light in to which I attempted to invoke it. Maybe I should have used something with less historical weight... like Hanlon's Razor?
Don't get me wrong - if I were completely discounting the notion, I wouldn't include a link. It's definitely within the realm of possibility. I'm just not ready to call everyone in to the library to list out the clues and point an accusing finger.
So the first reaction is obvious: who's behind this? From the linked article:
Consumer Watchdog sent a letter to the DOJ Wednesday asking that the agency investigate Google for antitrust violations. "For most Americans -- indeed, for most people in the world -- Google is the gateway to the Internet," the letter said. "How it tweaks its proprietary search algorithms can ensure a business' success or doom it to failure."
...
Google has manipulated search and advertisement placement results to shut out potential competitors who counted on Google results to drive traffic to their sites, said Joseph Bial, a lawyer at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft who represents myTriggers.com and TradeComet.com. Both companies have filed antitrust lawsuits against Google alleging that the search giant shut out their attempts to advertise on Google.com.
Apparently, people who make a business out of gaming Google's algorithm. The very folks that muddy up searches with crap links to various questionable "offers", link farms, and johnny-come-lately web apps. And they're claiming Google has a bias in their search results? Do tell.
Granted - conspiracy theorists might find the possibility of other actors bing involved too hard to pass up. It does look intriguing. But I'm reminded of the whole Occam's Razor thing.
To be honest, I don't know anyone with an Android phone. Just about everyone in my office and about a third of my friends have iPhones (the rest have blackberries or dumbphones), but nobody has an Android. I'd be just as curious as you to know what killer apps that platform might have.
I don't compare phones that much so I'm not entirely sure what the count would be. But I do see a fair number of iPhones around. Plenty of Blackberries. Even more random "dumb phones." And I know a handful of folks who have Android devices. I even met a manager non-techie who picked up a Droid (who's phone kept saying "Droid" throughout the entire meeting). I was even surprised that my sister has a G1 when I went to see the family over Christmas.
Why did this get modded up? I asked a legitimate question, which you are just blowing off.
I didn't get modded up. I come out of the gate with a +1 automagically. And I didn't read your question as legitimate - it sounded rhetorical snarkiness. So I gave a flippant answer (that I thought was amusing).
I bought my iPhone before the Android was out, so that was not an option. I just can't think of a reason why I would switch. Maybe when my contract is up, but then just for the novelty. I want to know from the Slashdot community, is there a better reason?
When I first saw the iPhone, I thought it was FINALLY a US phone that gets it. We were getting to jump in to the sort of action that had been happening on the other side of the pond for years. And maybe even one-upping them.
But the more I dug in to the iPhone, the less thrilled I was with it. Wrong carrier. Tightly controlled market. Grey area for custom images. So I held off on my purchase. When Android came out, I saw promise. If anything, freedom was the killer app. for me. If you don't care about that - I doubt I could sell you on moving away from an iPhone. And I'm sure if I had gotten an iPhone first, I wouldn't be giving an Android device a second look.
But who knows - maybe someone else can come up with a better killer app nomination than I can.
I'm not trying to flame, can someone answer: What kind of apps do you use on the Android that aren't available on the iPhone, but are so important that you have to use them immediately, and can't wait until you're back on a desktop/laptop? (But of course if you can answer that question, then buy an Android, ignore the iPhone and move on)
I can't answer your question because I've ignored the iPhone, bought an Android, and moved on.
Why... very Ultimish I would say... what happened to the eight virtues, making ethical decisions in order to become an Avatar (U4), resolving conflicts thorugh the use of peace and diplomacy (U6), etc...?
Those were nestled in other times. There was stealing food from the drive-thru window at Britania's McDonalds where avoiding guards was a quick few steps out of the city limits (Ultima II). Or seizing a ship in a busy town port meant domination of the entire town's police force (Ultima III). Then there was Ultima Online. An entire "community" of murderers and theives that were either opposed by small bands of bounty-hunters and the occasional posse or served by merchant guilds who's malls profited by being the only source of supplies to individuals who couldn't show their face in town.
Side story - back between Ultima III and Ultima IV, I met Richard Garriot at the Houston Science Fair. I lamented that it seemed the best way to accomplish things in the Ultima series was to turn rogue. I was assured that things were going to be very different come Ultima IV. I also talked to him a bit about the difference between playing Ultima and playing on-line MUDs... and how much more engaging the MUDs seemed when the world was being manipulated by other players. But in those days, I hadn't (knowingly) had access to the Internet and my view of the future of gaming was essentially multi-line BBS' and services like CompuServe.
I should note that the reason I initially set things up the way they are is that I wanted to dual-boot back to the Windows partition at will. Turns out, I can't think of a time where that was useful. Before my current setup, my VM was always a regular local image. I'm probably going to go back to doing that sometime here in the next month or so when I can be bothered to do so.:)
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware.
Woah. Hold on. Who said anything about running hundreds, even thousands of concurrent VMs? I think the parent (and actually the subject) is talking about single local box, single VM.
I've been doing the same thing for a few years now. I can't escape Windows apps so I run a VM to provide a Windows desktop. That's worked pretty well for me except for lately where performance has degraded - I suspect due to my using a real partition (which is no longer supported). Co-worker of mine does the same thing and has no issues whatsoever (which he points out when I grumble at my VM).
Actually I think thats more of a case of the "what if it breaks something, who can we go after?" mentality.
That's one concern. Although I've also had plenty of experience with vendors who can't or won't fix issues. And management who didn't understand what support contract they paid for and what it did or did not cover.
Then there was the belief that "freeware" couldn't be trusted because if it were worth using, people would charge for it.
This suing big companies over GPL violations sounded awesome on the outside.. but I think has done a lot of damage to acceptance of FOSS at large companies. Smaller companies can still roll the dice.. but if you're a big juicy enterprise with lots of money to lose.. just not worth it.
I ran in to this attitude that "freeware" was dangerous back in the 90s. It has nothing to do with going after GPL violations back then. If it has anything to do with GPL violations today, then we have a serious case of management not understanding how licensing works (which wasn't the issue back in the 90s).
In most areas of the world people barter all the time. No two people pay the same amount automatically. Why should a store offer everyone the same price? If you don't like, go someplace else. People will share information online, thus it isn't a secret that you got a better deal than I did, I still fail to see a problem here.
Judging from the response I got, people really attached to this point. It's not that I think that variable pricing is wrong. It's more that I see this mechanism encroaching on areas that haven't been subject to this in the past. A savvy consumer should know how these systems work.
And who cares what terms I was searching for when I found this coupon? Stores have a valid reason for wanting that information. Sometimes picking the best terms for ads and such is really hard. If you find out your customers typically find it by looking for terms you didn't think were all that useful, then it means you were wrong and you should redirect your advertising efforts. In some cases I suppose some embarrassing information might leak through (for some items) but come on, it has to be an edge case most of the time.
I'm sure retailers have valid reasons to know all sorts of things about their customers. That doesn't mean we should provide them with the information. At the very least, I don't want to provide retailers with information that they would use to determine I will pay a higher price.
But I also understand that data itself is dangerous. Minor, disparate facts can be combined to reveal more critical facts. The US military refers to this concept as Essential Elements of Friendly Information (EEFI). The orders for Unit A to ship out to Sandland might be classified. But they could be revealed by knowledge of public news reports that Sandland is having problems, knowledge of Unit A's training, observing sudden changes in the daily schedule of Unit A personnel, and Unit A personnel buying unseasonably warm clothing from the local store(s).
Our local retailer may have no interest in our personal lives beyond determining how to tweak their advertising campaigns to get us in their store. Others may have different intentions and be willing to buy this innocent information from retailers. With storage and CPU cycles being so cheap, huge amounts of junk information can be collected and mined for very revealing details.
That's true of your loyalty-card system too, at least if and when they choose to do so. I'm not sure about grocery stores, but I know airlines and hotels and credit cards offer different perks to different customers in their rewards programs.
I had grocery stores in mind when I was writing my post. When a grocery store sells (let's say) milk - the loyalty card price is set for everyone on the price placard. If you use the card, you pay $x. If you don't, you pay $y (I usually pay $y the one time I have to get something there and make it a point to shop elsewhere). Set prices for everyone.
However, your point is a good one. That doesn't apply for all loyalty card systems. There are rare occasions I've participated in loyalty card systems and their discounts came in the form of offers and discounts after X transactions. Those were likely customized for me (or whatever subclass of shopper they pigeon-holed me as) according to my activity. Oddly enough, those offers tend to come in the form of coupons.
Frankly I'm not sure why anyone sees this as a problem. Maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not understanding the net benefit to society of having fixed prices vs. negotiated prices. For the largest purchases most consumers make -- a house and a car -- the price is almost always negotiated. What's special about shoes that requires we sell them at the same price to everyone? If it's so important to keep prices the same, shouldn't we be worried about prices that different among stores in the same city? In the same state?
My point wasn't that variable pricing was wrong. I was simply defining the issue; pointing out how these mechanisms are different than others. A good consumer should understand how these systems work.
The subtle difference is that with a loyalty card, we both get (say) 20% a Widget. With this coupon system, you might get 20% but my coupon is only good for 15%.
Also, these coupons seem to be encoding a lot more interesting information in them. With a loyalty card, the store can tell that I bought the Widget. With the coupon, they can tell that I was searching for "personal hobby / interest" when stumbling on the coupon. I then printed the coupon and rushed to make the purchase within 1hr of finding the coupon.
Yeah - store cards suck. But they are much more limited in scope than these coupons. These things make store cards look like the days when folks just walked in off the street and paid for a widget in cash. People are unlikely to be aware of this or understand the implications of it. After all, coupons have traditionally been as anonymous as cash.
There are two games. One I know nothing about other then the developer telling me its worth 60$ and one I can actually try a bit of before shelling out the cash. Guess which one I'm going to be buying?
There's the third game - the cracked copy that comes from your favorite illicit data channel. You get a full demo of the entire game before shelling out $60. Of course, you usually trade off time to get that copy. And the copy you then consider for purchase is going to have all kinds of DRM on it.
I can see how "piracy" is really limiting the ability for game publishing houses to put out free demos.
If one didn't know any better, one might come away from that thinking ClamAV did something wrong or even malicious.
There certainly are people who apparently feel that it was wrong (and maybe even malicious). I disagree. But that does seem to be part of the discussion. That you and I find it all rather sensationalist reactions by people who should've known better is also part of that discussion.
I suppose my view is less "what the heck does Slashdot think its doing" and more "what the heck do these people think they're doing?"
This might come as a surprise... but a large part of Slashdot is covering stories and discussing them. Sometimes the stories are based on unsound reasoning, wide-spread misunderstanding, or simple controversy. The existence of a story is not an indicator that any given story has validity. In fact, there are times that a story is posted solely for the value of discussion. I, personally, find that these are especially handy as I can come away with multiple viewpoints and additional information on a subject.
Not to say that it odes not do its work but because there is no incentive "not to break stuff", read 'continued revenue streams', folks just do as they please and we get hurt.
This might shock you, but when revenue steams are involved, there's still no guarantee of an incentive to "not to break stuff."
The difference isn't the hardware, it's the software. Comparing the iPad to a windows tablet is like comparing a car GPS to an iPhone because they both have similar hardware.
Maybe I'm confusing the issue by using the term "form factor." That might imply hardware only. What I mean to say is the entire interface and design of the product; the entire stack from hardware to software. Again, going back to the Palm Pilot / Newton comparison, the Pilot wasn't just smaller than the Newton. It was the right physical size. And it's software interface made all the difference (Graffiti was spot-on at a time where handwriting recognition was notoriously inaccurate).
I'm not saying that Apple hasn't done something really interesting / right. I'm not saying that previous attempts were just as good to Apple's. What I am saying is that Apple hasn't done something that's completely out of nowhere. Like Palm, they might have managed to implement an existing concept in a way that will capture attention and change attitudes.
One final note - I think your analogy has some merit but not in the way you used it. I believe the iPad is more GPS to a laptop / netbook's iPhone. That is, the iPad is purpose-driven while other devices are much more diverse in functionality. It's an imperfect analogy, as most are, as the iPad is more diverse than a GPS. But I believe those who think the iPad is going to be a general computing device will find themselves disappointed.
Evolution is revolution. What I wouldn't pay to have all the other consumer junk I have done right. Having a design that I not only like on day one but am not cursing a year later, if the device hasn't died by then, is absolute revolution.
It's very possible Apple has done this right. And I agree - doing it right matters. Again - Apple had the Newton but it just wasn't the right form factor. Palm wasn't doing things THAT different than others, but Palm got it right with their Pilot and that changed the market. The iPad could very well be the Palm Pilot of it's time.
But even if the iPad changes attitudes towards mobile computing, it's not doing things that weren't fundamentally done before. It isn't that nobody has even thought of doing these sorts of things. Heck - Star Trek had the concept going in the 60's. But having the idea isn't the same thing as implementing it. If anything, Apple has figured out the way to implement the idea in an effective way. That deserves kudos. But let's keep in it perspective. A well designed device isn't in itself a revolution.
Apple will sell these things like absolute hot cakes, and the rest of the I.T. industry is going to be left scratching their heads as to why they didn't come up with this idea sooner.
Yes - because nobody else ever thought about a pad device before. Nobody.
Sure - Apple may have gotten it right. Form factor is important. You can look at the iPod as an example (and for all the mocking - CmdrTaco's analysis was dead-on... at least on the points it touched). You can also look at Apple's Newton vs. the Palm Pilot. And so Apple may have managed to do it right. But please - let's not get too carried away. This is evolution, not revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the evidence of these folks astroturfing? I just did some quick googling on myTriggers, and that site doesn't appear to be a google gamer. I ask the question, because your comment made me mad enough to want to submit a consumer complaint against these people, but it appears that myTriggers at least, may have a valid complaint. If Google hides them as an alternative to Product Search, that could be an anti-trust move.
I'd put myTriggers in as a johnny-come-lately. They're yet another shopbot in a market already saturated by them. They need to come up at the top of search listings or they get lost in the sea of competitors. Look at their complaint. They're upset that their gaming no longer put them high enough to garner business.
The tradecomet website appears to not have much information, so maybe you were referring to them as a known google gamer?
These guys appear to be more of a link farm than anything else. And those operations are all about gaming search engines; it's why they exist.
So please, before you use that “rule” again... Think about actual reality and proof. Think hard. And if you can’t conclusively be sure of it, don’t use it.
Fair enough. However, I don't see Occam's Razor as any sort of fast rule or absolute truth. At best, I'd say it's a rule of thumb. And that's the light in to which I attempted to invoke it. Maybe I should have used something with less historical weight... like Hanlon's Razor?
Don't get me wrong - if I were completely discounting the notion, I wouldn't include a link. It's definitely within the realm of possibility. I'm just not ready to call everyone in to the library to list out the clues and point an accusing finger.
So the first reaction is obvious: who's behind this? From the linked article:
Apparently, people who make a business out of gaming Google's algorithm. The very folks that muddy up searches with crap links to various questionable "offers", link farms, and johnny-come-lately web apps. And they're claiming Google has a bias in their search results? Do tell.
Granted - conspiracy theorists might find the possibility of other actors bing involved too hard to pass up. It does look intriguing. But I'm reminded of the whole Occam's Razor thing.
To be honest, I don't know anyone with an Android phone. Just about everyone in my office and about a third of my friends have iPhones (the rest have blackberries or dumbphones), but nobody has an Android. I'd be just as curious as you to know what killer apps that platform might have.
I don't compare phones that much so I'm not entirely sure what the count would be. But I do see a fair number of iPhones around. Plenty of Blackberries. Even more random "dumb phones." And I know a handful of folks who have Android devices. I even met a manager non-techie who picked up a Droid (who's phone kept saying "Droid" throughout the entire meeting). I was even surprised that my sister has a G1 when I went to see the family over Christmas.
Why did this get modded up? I asked a legitimate question, which you are just blowing off.
I didn't get modded up. I come out of the gate with a +1 automagically. And I didn't read your question as legitimate - it sounded rhetorical snarkiness. So I gave a flippant answer (that I thought was amusing).
I bought my iPhone before the Android was out, so that was not an option. I just can't think of a reason why I would switch. Maybe when my contract is up, but then just for the novelty. I want to know from the Slashdot community, is there a better reason?
When I first saw the iPhone, I thought it was FINALLY a US phone that gets it. We were getting to jump in to the sort of action that had been happening on the other side of the pond for years. And maybe even one-upping them.
But the more I dug in to the iPhone, the less thrilled I was with it. Wrong carrier. Tightly controlled market. Grey area for custom images. So I held off on my purchase. When Android came out, I saw promise. If anything, freedom was the killer app. for me. If you don't care about that - I doubt I could sell you on moving away from an iPhone. And I'm sure if I had gotten an iPhone first, I wouldn't be giving an Android device a second look.
But who knows - maybe someone else can come up with a better killer app nomination than I can.
I'm not trying to flame, can someone answer: What kind of apps do you use on the Android that aren't available on the iPhone, but are so important that you have to use them immediately, and can't wait until you're back on a desktop/laptop? (But of course if you can answer that question, then buy an Android, ignore the iPhone and move on)
I can't answer your question because I've ignored the iPhone, bought an Android, and moved on.
Why... very Ultimish I would say... what happened to the eight virtues, making ethical decisions in order to become an Avatar (U4), resolving conflicts thorugh the use of peace and diplomacy (U6), etc...?
Those were nestled in other times. There was stealing food from the drive-thru window at Britania's McDonalds where avoiding guards was a quick few steps out of the city limits (Ultima II). Or seizing a ship in a busy town port meant domination of the entire town's police force (Ultima III). Then there was Ultima Online. An entire "community" of murderers and theives that were either opposed by small bands of bounty-hunters and the occasional posse or served by merchant guilds who's malls profited by being the only source of supplies to individuals who couldn't show their face in town.
Side story - back between Ultima III and Ultima IV, I met Richard Garriot at the Houston Science Fair. I lamented that it seemed the best way to accomplish things in the Ultima series was to turn rogue. I was assured that things were going to be very different come Ultima IV. I also talked to him a bit about the difference between playing Ultima and playing on-line MUDs... and how much more engaging the MUDs seemed when the world was being manipulated by other players. But in those days, I hadn't (knowingly) had access to the Internet and my view of the future of gaming was essentially multi-line BBS' and services like CompuServe.
Data is valuable. Labor is cheap.
Great point if I had claimed I was being cheated.
I should note that the reason I initially set things up the way they are is that I wanted to dual-boot back to the Windows partition at will. Turns out, I can't think of a time where that was useful. Before my current setup, my VM was always a regular local image. I'm probably going to go back to doing that sometime here in the next month or so when I can be bothered to do so. :)
You're doing this in a laboratory situation, not in the realworld. Your approach will not work when you're talking about running a hundred, or a thousand, concurrent VMs on commodity hardware.
Woah. Hold on. Who said anything about running hundreds, even thousands of concurrent VMs? I think the parent (and actually the subject) is talking about single local box, single VM.
I've been doing the same thing for a few years now. I can't escape Windows apps so I run a VM to provide a Windows desktop. That's worked pretty well for me except for lately where performance has degraded - I suspect due to my using a real partition (which is no longer supported). Co-worker of mine does the same thing and has no issues whatsoever (which he points out when I grumble at my VM).
Actually I think thats more of a case of the "what if it breaks something, who can we go after?" mentality.
That's one concern. Although I've also had plenty of experience with vendors who can't or won't fix issues. And management who didn't understand what support contract they paid for and what it did or did not cover.
Then there was the belief that "freeware" couldn't be trusted because if it were worth using, people would charge for it.
This suing big companies over GPL violations sounded awesome on the outside.. but I think has done a lot of damage to acceptance of FOSS at large companies. Smaller companies can still roll the dice.. but if you're a big juicy enterprise with lots of money to lose.. just not worth it.
I ran in to this attitude that "freeware" was dangerous back in the 90s. It has nothing to do with going after GPL violations back then. If it has anything to do with GPL violations today, then we have a serious case of management not understanding how licensing works (which wasn't the issue back in the 90s).
In most areas of the world people barter all the time. No two people pay the same amount automatically. Why should a store offer everyone the same price? If you don't like, go someplace else. People will share information online, thus it isn't a secret that you got a better deal than I did, I still fail to see a problem here.
Judging from the response I got, people really attached to this point. It's not that I think that variable pricing is wrong. It's more that I see this mechanism encroaching on areas that haven't been subject to this in the past. A savvy consumer should know how these systems work.
And who cares what terms I was searching for when I found this coupon? Stores have a valid reason for wanting that information. Sometimes picking the best terms for ads and such is really hard. If you find out your customers typically find it by looking for terms you didn't think were all that useful, then it means you were wrong and you should redirect your advertising efforts. In some cases I suppose some embarrassing information might leak through (for some items) but come on, it has to be an edge case most of the time.
I'm sure retailers have valid reasons to know all sorts of things about their customers. That doesn't mean we should provide them with the information. At the very least, I don't want to provide retailers with information that they would use to determine I will pay a higher price.
But I also understand that data itself is dangerous. Minor, disparate facts can be combined to reveal more critical facts. The US military refers to this concept as Essential Elements of Friendly Information (EEFI). The orders for Unit A to ship out to Sandland might be classified. But they could be revealed by knowledge of public news reports that Sandland is having problems, knowledge of Unit A's training, observing sudden changes in the daily schedule of Unit A personnel, and Unit A personnel buying unseasonably warm clothing from the local store(s).
Our local retailer may have no interest in our personal lives beyond determining how to tweak their advertising campaigns to get us in their store. Others may have different intentions and be willing to buy this innocent information from retailers. With storage and CPU cycles being so cheap, huge amounts of junk information can be collected and mined for very revealing details.
That's true of your loyalty-card system too, at least if and when they choose to do so. I'm not sure about grocery stores, but I know airlines and hotels and credit cards offer different perks to different customers in their rewards programs.
I had grocery stores in mind when I was writing my post. When a grocery store sells (let's say) milk - the loyalty card price is set for everyone on the price placard. If you use the card, you pay $x. If you don't, you pay $y (I usually pay $y the one time I have to get something there and make it a point to shop elsewhere). Set prices for everyone.
However, your point is a good one. That doesn't apply for all loyalty card systems. There are rare occasions I've participated in loyalty card systems and their discounts came in the form of offers and discounts after X transactions. Those were likely customized for me (or whatever subclass of shopper they pigeon-holed me as) according to my activity. Oddly enough, those offers tend to come in the form of coupons.
Frankly I'm not sure why anyone sees this as a problem. Maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not understanding the net benefit to society of having fixed prices vs. negotiated prices. For the largest purchases most consumers make -- a house and a car -- the price is almost always negotiated. What's special about shoes that requires we sell them at the same price to everyone? If it's so important to keep prices the same, shouldn't we be worried about prices that different among stores in the same city? In the same state?
My point wasn't that variable pricing was wrong. I was simply defining the issue; pointing out how these mechanisms are different than others. A good consumer should understand how these systems work.
The subtle difference is that with a loyalty card, we both get (say) 20% a Widget. With this coupon system, you might get 20% but my coupon is only good for 15%.
Also, these coupons seem to be encoding a lot more interesting information in them. With a loyalty card, the store can tell that I bought the Widget. With the coupon, they can tell that I was searching for "personal hobby / interest" when stumbling on the coupon. I then printed the coupon and rushed to make the purchase within 1hr of finding the coupon.
Yeah - store cards suck. But they are much more limited in scope than these coupons. These things make store cards look like the days when folks just walked in off the street and paid for a widget in cash. People are unlikely to be aware of this or understand the implications of it. After all, coupons have traditionally been as anonymous as cash.
There are two games. One I know nothing about other then the developer telling me its worth 60$ and one I can actually try a bit of before shelling out the cash. Guess which one I'm going to be buying?
There's the third game - the cracked copy that comes from your favorite illicit data channel. You get a full demo of the entire game before shelling out $60. Of course, you usually trade off time to get that copy. And the copy you then consider for purchase is going to have all kinds of DRM on it.
I can see how "piracy" is really limiting the ability for game publishing houses to put out free demos.
If one didn't know any better, one might come away from that thinking ClamAV did something wrong or even malicious.
There certainly are people who apparently feel that it was wrong (and maybe even malicious). I disagree. But that does seem to be part of the discussion. That you and I find it all rather sensationalist reactions by people who should've known better is also part of that discussion.
I suppose my view is less "what the heck does Slashdot think its doing" and more "what the heck do these people think they're doing?"
This might come as a surprise... but a large part of Slashdot is covering stories and discussing them. Sometimes the stories are based on unsound reasoning, wide-spread misunderstanding, or simple controversy. The existence of a story is not an indicator that any given story has validity. In fact, there are times that a story is posted solely for the value of discussion. I, personally, find that these are especially handy as I can come away with multiple viewpoints and additional information on a subject.
Not to say that it odes not do its work but because there is no incentive "not to break stuff", read 'continued revenue streams', folks just do as they please and we get hurt.
This might shock you, but when revenue steams are involved, there's still no guarantee of an incentive to "not to break stuff."
The difference isn't the hardware, it's the software. Comparing the iPad to a windows tablet is like comparing a car GPS to an iPhone because they both have similar hardware.
Maybe I'm confusing the issue by using the term "form factor." That might imply hardware only. What I mean to say is the entire interface and design of the product; the entire stack from hardware to software. Again, going back to the Palm Pilot / Newton comparison, the Pilot wasn't just smaller than the Newton. It was the right physical size. And it's software interface made all the difference (Graffiti was spot-on at a time where handwriting recognition was notoriously inaccurate).
I'm not saying that Apple hasn't done something really interesting / right. I'm not saying that previous attempts were just as good to Apple's. What I am saying is that Apple hasn't done something that's completely out of nowhere. Like Palm, they might have managed to implement an existing concept in a way that will capture attention and change attitudes.
One final note - I think your analogy has some merit but not in the way you used it. I believe the iPad is more GPS to a laptop / netbook's iPhone. That is, the iPad is purpose-driven while other devices are much more diverse in functionality. It's an imperfect analogy, as most are, as the iPad is more diverse than a GPS. But I believe those who think the iPad is going to be a general computing device will find themselves disappointed.
Evolution is revolution. What I wouldn't pay to have all the other consumer junk I have done right. Having a design that I not only like on day one but am not cursing a year later, if the device hasn't died by then, is absolute revolution.
It's very possible Apple has done this right. And I agree - doing it right matters. Again - Apple had the Newton but it just wasn't the right form factor. Palm wasn't doing things THAT different than others, but Palm got it right with their Pilot and that changed the market. The iPad could very well be the Palm Pilot of it's time.
But even if the iPad changes attitudes towards mobile computing, it's not doing things that weren't fundamentally done before. It isn't that nobody has even thought of doing these sorts of things. Heck - Star Trek had the concept going in the 60's. But having the idea isn't the same thing as implementing it. If anything, Apple has figured out the way to implement the idea in an effective way. That deserves kudos. But let's keep in it perspective. A well designed device isn't in itself a revolution.
Could it be that people actually want products that you don't?
I won't know until I read what the pundits and advertisements say. On a related note, this isn't about marketing budgets. It's about marketing itself.
Apple will sell these things like absolute hot cakes, and the rest of the I.T. industry is going to be left scratching their heads as to why they didn't come up with this idea sooner.
Yes - because nobody else ever thought about a pad device before. Nobody.
Sure - Apple may have gotten it right. Form factor is important. You can look at the iPod as an example (and for all the mocking - CmdrTaco's analysis was dead-on... at least on the points it touched). You can also look at Apple's Newton vs. the Palm Pilot. And so Apple may have managed to do it right. But please - let's not get too carried away. This is evolution, not revolution.