Setting up a Flickr-like site on one's own webserver is so far beyond the abilities of most people, probably even many educated users who don't have day jobs writing AJAX-based web applications, that to say that a roll-your-own is any competition to Flickr is pretty ridiculous.
I consider myself a fairly quick learner, and I have no doubt that with sufficient motivation I could probably patch something together on a web server to host my own photos, maybe even something that allowed easy uploading and tagging. But a nice, well-organized site like Flickr's, with nice export plugins for iPhoto -- how many man-hours would it take to code something like that?
Even if your opportunity cost is a minimum-wage job (and most people's free time is worth more than that), you'd hit the $20 a year that Flickr charges pretty quickly, I'd wager.
There are a lot of totally valid reasons for somebody with a little technical skill to run a server. Before the advent of GMail, I used to say that putting together an IMAP server to store and archive all your email across multiple accounts was indispensable. (And if you don't want to trust Google with all your stuff, it still could be.) But I'm not sure that photo sharing is one of them: sometimes the economy of scale offered by a commercial service just beats the pants off of something that even a highly-motivated average person could do by themselves easily.
People bring up vandalism a lot, but I don't really think that vandalism is really that big an issue on Wikipedia from a user's perspective: it seems to be handled pretty quickly and well. It's a pity that most of the Tor proxies have been blocked from editing as a result, but that's just how it goes, I guess.
In many ways I would argue that Wikipedia has more information on many subjects than a conventional encyclopedia; while most conventional ones stop at giving you a brief overview of a topic, there are some WP articles that are surprisingly thorough (they are almost always on basically non-controversial or technical topics, in my experience). Also, the ability to hyperlink and cross-reference articles alone (and more importantly, heavy use of this ability) makes Wikipedia superior in my opinion to reading or using any conventional encyclopedia that I've used.
Wikipedia isn't going to put Britannica out of business; at least not overnight. There is a market for an encyclopedia that is rigorously edited, fact-checked, written in a consistent tone, and is stable in its content. However, there is a seemingly much greater market for an encyclopedia that isn't rigorously edited, that in fact anyone can add information into, is written in a variety of tones and tenses, the content of which changes constantly, but is free: both to view and to use secondhand.
It depends on the type of magnetic field used and how it's applied. If you just put a drive platter (or magnetic tape, or floppy disk) into a static magnetic field, you might bend the platters or disturb the media, without actually destroying the data itself.
I'm most familiar with procedures for erasing magnetic tape than hard drives. The conventional method that I was always taught was to put the tape very close to source of a strong alternating electromagnetic field (so easy way is to just have a small coil hooked up to the wall socket). Then -- and this is the important part -- you move the media away from the coil, while the coil is still operating. So it goes from the near field out to where the field is basically no longer having any effect, but without the field going off. The result is that different layers of the media end up with different magnetic fields: as the media moves further and further away from the coil, the field is no longer able to saturate the center of it, so it's left with a certain state. The material just next to that gets left with a different state, because by then the coil's field has changed directions. So you end up with different magnetic states (polarizations) being written to the media both in the depth direction, and lengthwise (as you pull the tape along past the coil). I guess the thickness of the "stripes" would depend on characteristics of the media, plus the frequency of the coil's field and the speed with which the media was moving past it. I just always moved it slowly away at a few inches per second, personally.
Just holding the media next to a magnet, even an AC electromagnet, and turning the magnet on and off, doesn't erase the data as effectively as moving the media from close to the coil to far away. Or at least that's what I was always told. I suppose if you had a circuit that powered down the coil slowly, it would have much the same effect.
Although I don't necessarily agree with the GP that CACert.org is useless or that it renders certificates meaningless, I don't think it's wise to be quite so cavalier about ARP poisoning-based MITM attacks.
It's perhaps not something that's as easily done from half a world away like current phishing schemes, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be employed on any number of semi-public networks. I'm thinking most commercial/residential broadband systems that are shared between clients (cable modem systems). An attacker could gain entrance to the network via a compromised PC, or a WiFi router that's still running with default settings, and then run an attack on other people in the network connected to the same router. (One would hope the network operator would catch on quickly; hopefully when the users noticed the increased lag, but when's the last time you called Comcast to report crappy ping times?) Or any place where a large number of users are connecting to an AP, e.g. municipal wireless, the possibility exists for poisoning. While right now it's probably easier just to send out phony PayPal emails through a zombie PC or open relay, that doesn't mean we should be complacent about other attack vectors. Authentication is an important part of security, and we need to be teaching users about it. (That's one of the reasons why I think easy-to-obtain certs are important.)
Anyway, enough of that rant. More to the point, it's not as though CACert.org doesn't have any trust framework at all: it just lowers the bar for getting the least-trusted variety of certificates. In essence, it makes the certficicates' trust framework more like that used by GPG (or the personal certificates that Thawte used to give out): any Tom, Dick, or Harry can get a basic certificate, and then you can prove your credentials to other trusted members, and upgrade the 'trusted-ness' of your certificate. It's not a total free-for-all.
There's a pretty good discussion of what CACert.org is and isn't over at O'Reilly: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2004/06/ (It's a little old, and I'm not sure if some of the procedural info is out of date, however.)
which makes a pretty strong case that (if you're a B2B company) your company should sign it and your customers should add your company to the trusted authorities
If you're a B2B company and have good recognition, like the U.S. Government/military and Microsoft both do, then by all means sign your own certificate. But if you don't have any name recognition, as Joe's Pretty Good Office Supplies might not, then you might still need to get a certificate signed by someone who does have some name recognition. It could still be one that isn't in the default trusted root database of most browsers, but it ought to be one that your customers (other businesses) will recognize.
Any large organization (say Fortune 1000 or better) is probably safe in using a self-signed root certificate and then forcing that root cert on its suppliers and client businesses, because they can, and because they have the name recognition necessary to make such a certificate worth something. A smaller organization, whether B2B or B2C, really doesn't.
I was going to bring them up. I'm not sure though that they satisfy his "stupid user" test, since their root certificate isn't included (to my knowledge) with most OSes or browsers.
If I'm wrong, I'll be very happy; it'll be nice when anyone can get a free certificate that's associated with a root cert that everyone has (although I'm not sure whether this would destroy the whole point of certificates -- then again I'm not sure whether I care).
Personally, if you're going to possibly make major changes to an application or service, I think it's proper to keep it as "beta," even if the result is it sitting there for a long time.
I would prefer that people only release '1.0' software that is both stable in terms of bug-free-ness and stable in terms of proposed changes to the API/ABI/file-format/protocol/etc.
When someone releases something as version 1.0, and then completely rewrites it six months later and calls it 1.0.1, that drives me a little nuts. Why not just have kept the "1.0" version as a beta, and not released it if you knew you were going to rewrite the damn thing?
But hey, feel free to call me a curmudgeon; I run Debian Stable after all.:)
It's not any more complicated in Windows; you put the CD into the drive, open up iTunes, click Import. It defaults to 128 kbit AAC, but you can change it to MP3 by going into the Preferences -- I think that requires maybe four clicks at most, although I don't have it in front of me to test.
iTunes became popular both on the Mac and the PC even before the iPod or the iTMS because it made ripping stuff from CD and organizing it dead easy. I know a lot of people (mostly older / nontechnical folks) who never really understood the whole MP3 thing when it was Musicmatch Jukebox or WinAmp, but understood iTunes enough to rip their CD collection and burn mix CDs. (That was the original mantra of iTunes: "Rip, Mix, Burn.")
Now other programs have matched or arguably surpassed iTunes in ease-of-use, but it's certainly not a hassle to rip from a CD.
If Apple has a monopoly on digital music players (which is a big if) then they are illegally tying ITMS and iPods.
You had me up to here. They are doing no such thing: they're not saying you have to use music from their store, in fact you can load music onto that iPod from anyplace you want (including pirated stuff).
If you choose to get music from the iTMS, then it becomes locked to the iPod: but it's not as if the consumer doesn't have a number of alternatives besides the iTMS.
Were Apple to make it so that you suddenly had to get your music from the Music Store in order to use that iPod that you just bought, then there would be a serious antitrust issue. But all the arguments I've seen basically ignore the fact that most people don't get their music from the iTMS! People still buy CDs every day, and put that music onto their iPod.
The line that seems to be coming up in this discussion a lot so far is that the music companies are adding DRM to their CDs, and thus the alternative avenue to the iTMS is being cut off. If this is happening, and if the market doesn't correct it (because I bet people aren't going to be very pleased when they can't put that new CD onto their iPod), then there's a place for regulation: at the very least, DRMed CDs should be required to prominently warn consumers that they're not rippable.
But generally, if the music companies start selling DRMed CDs, it doesn't make sense to turn around and punish Apple. Punish the companies selling "defective" CDs: since many more songs are sold every year on CD than on the iTMS, DRMed CDs present much more of a threat to the marketplace than where you can use iTMS-downloaded songs.
Basically, I find the whole iTMS argument flawed. Basically people are taking the iPod's possible monopoly over portable music players, and use that to justify cracking open Apple's music distribution outfit. This doesn't make any sense: Apple doesn't have a monopoly over music distribution; in reality the iTMS doesn't have more than a few percent of the worldwide music-sales market versus CDs and other sources. The thing they have a monopoly over (the iPod) is already open to non-Apple music.
The only people unwilling to go through the "hassle" of ripping from a CD and who instead buy tracks at $0.99/song are people who have so much money to burn, they probably don't even know SanDisk or Creative exist, or that there are other MP3 players out there besides the iPod.
Seriously -- get a clue. The vast majority of songs on the vast majority of iPods in the world have been ripped from CDs (or downloaded illegally). The iTMS is a sideline, albeit a profitable one, but it's one that Apple would happily sacrifice in a particular market if the alternative in any way cut into their iPod hardware sales.
I don't know anyone who buys an iPod and then loads it up with music from the iTMS, or who bought an iPod because of iTMS. Who can afford to? By the time you filled that iPod up, it would be worth as much as a fairly decent, brand-new car. No, most people rip from CD, and it's dead easy to do. Frankly, sticking the CD in the drive and clicking on Import is easier, out of the box, than getting stuff from the iTMS is. (No signing up for an account, no entering your credit-card number, no high-speed internet required for good experience, etc.)
Nobody HAS to buy anything from iTMS. I'm sure there are lots and lots of people out there who can testify to the fact that they own iPods and have never bought anything from the iTMS. Personally, the only stuff I've bought was a few Audible books, and the free songs I've gotten from Pepsi caps. Even the people who download from the iTMS regularly, I'd wager, have far more songs on their computers from other sources than they do from the iTMS.
In short, you're vastly exaggerating the difficulty of ripping music from CD, and overstating the importance of the iTMS. If anything, the number of people out there with iPods is what will keep record companies from ever selling many un-rippable CDs, since so many people buy CDs and the first thing they do is stick them in their computers and rip them to their iPod.
If Apple offered a Napster-like music subscription ("all you can eat") service through the iTMS, then I would start to see your point of view: then you'd have a digital download service that was a practical source from which to fill up a HD-based music player. But at 99 cents a song, and much higher in some places in Europe, the iTMS certainly isn't it.
So if Apple were to agree to license out FairPlay to anyone willing to pay a "fair market value" for it, where the value of the license was equal to the number of FairPlay-compatible players the licensee planned on selling, times Apple's profit margin on an iPod, everyone would be happy? Because I'm pretty sure Apple would be okay with that. Say $75 USD a unit?
Apple is a company which exists to make money for its shareholders. I can guarantee you that they would license the FairPlay scheme to anyone who was willing to pay Apple what it's worth. Unfortunately, the problem here is that nobody -- least of all SanDisk and Creative -- can afford that.
If you really think that anything going on today in the U.S. is comparable to Hundred Flowers, you should do a bit more reading. Or do whatever else is required to gain some perspective; there's a fundamental difference between discouraging someone from saying something because it's politically expedient, and dragging them off in the middle of the night and torturing them to death.
I admit, I've engaged in some karma-whore Bush-bashing from time to time as well. He's an easy target, and a lot of the stuff that's gone on recently is easy fodder for tinfoil-hat comparisons. But to seriously compare anything that's going on right now to the Chinese under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler, is not only to show your own ignorance and lack of appreciation of scale and perspective, but also to do a disservice to those historical events, by comparing them to something that's quite frankly so trivial in relative impact and suffering.
If you wanted to compare what's going on today to the chilling effect during the 50's Red Scare, or something of similar scale internationally, then I would agree with you that such a comparison is probably apt, or at least closer to being apt than U.S. v. China/Germany/USSR/etc. comparisons are.
Drawing parallels between the U.S. today and actual fascist (whether leftist or rightist) regimes are nothing more than a cheap shot, and intellectually dishonest.
You had me right up until you used the phrase "legitimate laws." The laws in China are no more legitimate than the government which creates and promulgates them, which is to say, not at all. Since it does not derive its power from the consent of the governed, but instead through fear and intimidation (and lack of any alternatives whatsoever, even another party within the same political structure), it cannot claim any legitimacy.
To follow your line of reasoning would be to say that I.G. Farben did nothing wrong when it churned out Zyklon-B, because it was following a "legitimate law" of the government in power at the time. Following a law because you have no other choice, and a gun is being held to your head (figuratively or otherwise), is one thing; calling that sort of rule "legitimate" is quite another. (And don't start whining to me about Godwin's Law, this is a completely apt comparison in this situation. Both governments have roughly the same claim to legitimacy.)
I can excuse companies for falling in line with the Chinese regime because they have no choice but to do so, as long as they admit this is why they're doing it. (I will even accept, if not excuse, a company which stands up and says that they are cooperating with injustice because it is profitable to do so, and doesn't delude itself into thinking it's doing good.) Giving the government a claim to legitimacy is far more damaging, and in my mind inexcusable.
Actually, based on the reports I've read, the majority of Chinese internet users don't care. They search for information on freedom and democracy about as often as the average American, which is to say, not very often.
I would bet that if anything bothers the average Chinese internet user, it's probably the censorship of porn, not political speech.
There are methods available today by which most people with half a brain could circumvent the Chinese authorities and read Western information sources, write blogs, etc. But the great majority of Chinese internet users, just like their American and European counterparts, are probably more interested in searching for the latest information on pop stars and movies than they are in reading some dissident's blog.
Availibility of information is the easy part, compared with getting people interested in reading it.
I think an important point that is being missed here is that for OSS projects developers are both producers and consumers, so trying to get involvement can equally be seen as an effort to attract consumers.
I think this is the only argument I've heard so far in this thread that offers a convincing justification for the forced-diversification of a workforce.
If your goal is to create product which is going to appeal to a broad spectrum of users, and a lot of those users happen to be female, then it might make sense to have some women on board when you're making the product. (Assuming that the needs or preferences of women is different than the needs or preferences of men with regards to an operating system, and that a group of men would not adequately cater to the female component of the audience/market, both of which are debatable.)
It seems as though we've decided -- or academia and political correctness have decided for us -- that "diversity is a Good Thing," but there's rarely ever any discussion on why this is the case. Honestly, I don't think it's always self-evident or obvious, or even universally true.
You jest, but among members of certain intellectual circles (particularly in the "gender studies" and social anthropology disciplines at many universities), it's quite accepted that there are more, perhaps many more, than two genders.
If you accept on premise that gender is a social construct, rather than a binary biological one, then it is not hard to expand the definition out to include various flavors of transgendered and 'queer' people not as 'sexual orientations,' but as distinct genders themselves.
The usual line of argument in favor of this begins by considering other cultures which have believed in more than two genders: e.g. the Berdache people of some Native American tribes, and using this as justification for a socially-constructed view of gender.
On a side note, has anyone noticed that there seems to be substantially less interpersonal drama in jobs dominated by men? Men just go to work, take care of business, and leave their personal bs at the door.
I think we've all noticed: we just don't say a thing about it because to point out any difference between men and women, outside of the obvious biological ones, is to open yourself up (if your are male) to charges of sexism.
The idea that men and women on average interact with each other differently, and build social networks differently, and maybe even think and problem-solve differently, whether as a result of biology or social conditioning, ought to be pretty plainly obvious to anyone who's worked in a mixed environment for any length of time. However, the current climate discourages consideration of such factors to an almost comically ridiculous extent.
People are so afraid of ostracism, that they deny what almost anyone, male or female, knows is probably true: at the heart of most stereotypes is a small kernel of truth.
Actually most datacenters already have massive water-cooling systems: only they're building wide and generally used to cool the air. I'm talking about the HVAC system, of course.
Large buildings generally don't circulate Freon from one floor to another, it would be too expensive. Instead, they have a big refrigeration unit (roof mounted, usually) with big cooling towers and the rest, and use it to chill water, which is pumped throughout the building and used to cool air.
It wouldn't be very difficult to tap into the chilled-water lines that already exist in most buildings, and use them to cool the servers directly. In fact this was once a lot more common: back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for big mainframes to be water-cooled. I've worked with big scientific apparatus that's also water-cooled, and a lot of it used lots of electricity as well, so it's not as though the engineering is impossible.
Yes, there are certain risks associated with having water flow through your computer system, especially in regards to leaks. But there are lots of pieces of equipment that contain liquid and wouldn't appreciate leaks, and we don't think twice about them. For very valuable systems, an additional cooling loop filled with a non-conductive (or even better, a pressurized gas) coolant could be used, with a heat exchanger connecting to the building chilled water.
I think there are some IBM blade systems out there right now that use liquid cooling, but for some dumb reason they won't accept building chilled-water connections (believe it or not, they need water that's warmer than most building supplies). I can't find a link to it right now, but basically it introduces an additional heat exchanger for the sole purpose of warming the incoming chilled water supply before circulating it through the systems. Obviously, this limits their attractiveness and ease of installation.
But at any rate, I think going to liquid cooling, whether water or glycol or something else, is eventually inevitable in high-density applications: despite some of the practical problems involved, when you look at the economics, cooling is one of those things that scales really well. It's going to be cheaper in the long run to reduce the number of heat-transfer steps in between the chip and the outside environment (where the heat is going one way or another), and to do it all at once if possible. Maybe we haven't hit the power/density break-even point yet, but we must be getting close.
I think the reason you still see a lot of air-cooling is because the mass-production of components has made it inexpensive to do, but blade server systems are starting to run into the limits of commodity hardware (as this whole story with HP's fan attests to). When you start having to consider developing specialized cooling hardware anyway, whether for air or liquid, suddenly liquid cooling becomes more attractive.
Of course, HP is modifying the fan design to optimize the pressure which is apparently different from thrust.
It makes sense that this would be the case: if you think about how a jet engine is mounted, there's no backpressure on the exhaust stream aside from atmospheric pressure, which tends to be constant at the altitudes that RC planes fly. However, if you were to mount it so that the out-flow was restricted (because it's blowing into a computer chassis), then you'd need to redesign the blades. My initial guess is that the pitch has to change, although I haven't done any analysis of it.
What I wonder is whether the pitch of the blades and the overall design has to be changed for each application? Depending on the configuration of the machine these fans are going to be used in, the back-pressure (outflow restriction) is going to be different, necessitating different design optimizations.
It would be interesting if they produced a fan that had variable pitch blades, controlled by some sort of servo, that would maximize flow or pressure in different situations. Perhaps such a system could even be used to regulate airflow while keeping the spindle turning at some fixed speed at which the motor was most efficent.
I don't do ducted-fan RC stuff (helis are my thing, personally) so I don't know if anyone has ever made a variable-pitch miniature jet engine. If they did, then the HP guys might be able to use that without much modification. Even if nobody has done it before, it doesn't seem like it would exactly be that difficult, with the correct budget and resources available (like a good shop and skilled prototyping machinist).
I am not confusing the goal and the means at all. What I'm saying, and what I truly believe, is that in large part the patent system does its job: that is, it encourages innovation and promotes development. The abuses of the patent system are more rare than you would think, since the very large majority of patents never make the papers. It's the one bad one that sneaks through among a hundred or a thousand or ten-thousand fair patents that's the problem.
The profitability of companies doing the inventing and promoting invention itself are rather related. If developing new products and inventing things isn't profitable, then it won't happen (at least as quickly). So although the purpose of the patent system should not be the profitability of companies or persons using it, it's fair to assume that it will occur as a side-effect.
In general, I think you have to put the damage caused by overly-broad patents into perspective. I think you're greatly overstating the damage they're doing, versus the benefit we gain as a society from patents (as compared to a society in which patents didn't exist, and everything was protected as trade secrets, etc.). It's like watching CNN and inferring based on what you see there, that air-travel is very dangerous and we should get rid of planes. Obviously they crash all the time, right? No: it's just that the flights that don't crash don't make it onto the news. If you read Slashdot, or are at all attuned to tech news these days, it's easy to have a skewed perception of the patent system, since all we ever hear about are abuses. This totally ignores the unseen benefits of patents, and the very many of them which are filed, used by a company for a while, then fall silently into the public domain for other people to use.
The patent system certainly needs reform, but even in its current incarnation, the damage it does is outweighed by the purpose it still serves. I would rather have it in it's current state, fucked-up as it may be, than nothing at all. And I'm just a regular average-joe consumer: I don't hold any patents and probably never will.
I've seen this same thing happen both to my IBM ThinkPad, and to other laptops that I've owned in the past. (Actually the first time I noticed something like this was on my old PowerBook 165...may it rest in pieces.) I think it's just because the manufacturers, either by accident or design, don't give their plastics an entirely smooth finish. Instead it's lightly matte/pebbled. If you look closely at the surface of a black laptop in the light, you can clearly see this.
The smoothness is just your fingers wearing down the plastic wherever you touch it most. When you wear through the depth of the pebbled surface finish, it starts to get smooth. I've always wondered why companies don't just anticipate this and make the finish glossier, but maybe it's hard to do because of the way the parts come out of the molds (i.e., whatever mold-release agent they're using in manufacturing leads to the pebbled finish). Or maybe they just realize that how the computer looks when it's new contributes more to sales than how it looks 6 months down the road, and allow this tradeoff consiously. (I think this is probably likely.)
I think this is why you don't see manufacturers coating or painting their keys, but rather dying the plastic all the way through. Even if the finish was coated with some very hard lacquer/clearcoat, it would still eventually be worn off and the result would probably be worse than the wear and oxidation of a fully-pigmented plastic. Plus, I suspect it's a lot cheaper just to pigment the plastic during manufacturing, and not have to finish or paint it afterwards.
As an sidenote, you can often tell when a keyboard has been used by an FPS gamer a lot, because the left control and WASD (or QWED, or both) keys will be worn smooth.
In re: bleaching of white shirts -- don't do it without checking the care tag! Bleach will often make white shirts MORE yellow, depending on the materials used in the shirt.
Actually to really get white shirts white again, I've found what's required is bleaching followed by bluing. You have to be very careful not to overdo it (because it's literally a blue dye), but carefully used, it can make white clothes more of a "brilliant white" color again, when they start to look a little too beige.
I'm not sure exactly why it works, I suspect it's just psychological, and adding a little blue tint to an off-white makes it seem brighter white again, but it really does work. You may have to hunt around to find a place that sells it, but a bottle will probably last the rest of your life. (Some laundry detergents may contain bluing already, I'm not sure: I know mine doesn't because it's a "dye free" hypoallergenic.)
Actually many Apple products are rather Terminator-esque in their longevity, but, like Ahnold in the movie, they start to look a bit worse for wear in time.
Take for example my old Apple IIc. That sucker still runs fine: shove a 5.25" floppy into it, and it'll happily run. But I doubt anyone who ever sees it now would believe that it was originally white ("Snow White" in fact): based on all the extant models, someone today would probably assume that Apple went through a phase in the 1980s where it produced nothing but bizarre brownish-yellow computers.
Sorry but being a monopoly isn't a business model.
Actually, in their case it is. Their entire corporate strategy revolves around their monopoly of the desktop OS. If they didn't have that, they'd have nothing. (Well, they'd have a large pile of cash, but what do you do then? Become a bank?) It's their single greatest asset, more valuable than anything else. Next up is probably their brand recognition, but since this is derived from their marketshare, it's not easily separable.
Microsoft is probably the only company that can claim to have made a business model out of being a monopoly. There are perhaps a few other companies in similar positions within their respective markets, but not many. (Lots that would like to be, though, no doubt about that.) In that, they are somewhat unique.
I agree with most of your post, but your average PC user really isn't that different from your average mac user in this regard. It's just us hardcore geeks who care more about utility than appearance.
Actually, I'm not even sure that I would agree with this. I think that, in fact, geeks are motivated by appearance and aesthetics as well, it's just a different sense of aesthetics. For example, things which are designed to have (or simulate) a "form follows function" appearance, appeal to a certain technically-oriented segment of the market. It's really no different from preferring the sleek and shiny designs, just different. You can get cases which look as though they're designed just for "performance," but in reality were created by a designer for all the same reasons that an iMac was: to appeal to a certain target market and their aesthetic preferences.
For an example, look at a lot of (non-Apple) rackmount servers. On one hand, many of them look as though they were designed with no aesthetic appeal in mind at all. But I can almost guarantee you that they were, and some (Sun's low-end ones in particular) almost go so far in the "utilitarian" direction that they're obviously designed to look that way, and appeal to someone who thinks they want something that's designed without regard for aesthetics.
Even if you bought a case that was made out of raw, unfinished and riveted sheet metal, it would still be making a statement (sort of like the paint job on a DeLorian). Once marketers realize that there are people out there who are consiously shopping for something that "looks unfinished," they will design finished products to look that way. The end result is that there are virtually no products made in significant quantity which are actually made without some aesthetic choices inherent in their design: even the ones which attempt to be spartan or utilitarian.
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Setting up a Flickr-like site on one's own webserver is so far beyond the abilities of most people, probably even many educated users who don't have day jobs writing AJAX-based web applications, that to say that a roll-your-own is any competition to Flickr is pretty ridiculous.
I consider myself a fairly quick learner, and I have no doubt that with sufficient motivation I could probably patch something together on a web server to host my own photos, maybe even something that allowed easy uploading and tagging. But a nice, well-organized site like Flickr's, with nice export plugins for iPhoto -- how many man-hours would it take to code something like that?
Even if your opportunity cost is a minimum-wage job (and most people's free time is worth more than that), you'd hit the $20 a year that Flickr charges pretty quickly, I'd wager.
There are a lot of totally valid reasons for somebody with a little technical skill to run a server. Before the advent of GMail, I used to say that putting together an IMAP server to store and archive all your email across multiple accounts was indispensable. (And if you don't want to trust Google with all your stuff, it still could be.) But I'm not sure that photo sharing is one of them: sometimes the economy of scale offered by a commercial service just beats the pants off of something that even a highly-motivated average person could do by themselves easily.
People bring up vandalism a lot, but I don't really think that vandalism is really that big an issue on Wikipedia from a user's perspective: it seems to be handled pretty quickly and well. It's a pity that most of the Tor proxies have been blocked from editing as a result, but that's just how it goes, I guess.
In many ways I would argue that Wikipedia has more information on many subjects than a conventional encyclopedia; while most conventional ones stop at giving you a brief overview of a topic, there are some WP articles that are surprisingly thorough (they are almost always on basically non-controversial or technical topics, in my experience). Also, the ability to hyperlink and cross-reference articles alone (and more importantly, heavy use of this ability) makes Wikipedia superior in my opinion to reading or using any conventional encyclopedia that I've used.
Wikipedia isn't going to put Britannica out of business; at least not overnight. There is a market for an encyclopedia that is rigorously edited, fact-checked, written in a consistent tone, and is stable in its content. However, there is a seemingly much greater market for an encyclopedia that isn't rigorously edited, that in fact anyone can add information into, is written in a variety of tones and tenses, the content of which changes constantly, but is free: both to view and to use secondhand.
It depends on the type of magnetic field used and how it's applied. If you just put a drive platter (or magnetic tape, or floppy disk) into a static magnetic field, you might bend the platters or disturb the media, without actually destroying the data itself.
I'm most familiar with procedures for erasing magnetic tape than hard drives. The conventional method that I was always taught was to put the tape very close to source of a strong alternating electromagnetic field (so easy way is to just have a small coil hooked up to the wall socket). Then -- and this is the important part -- you move the media away from the coil, while the coil is still operating. So it goes from the near field out to where the field is basically no longer having any effect, but without the field going off. The result is that different layers of the media end up with different magnetic fields: as the media moves further and further away from the coil, the field is no longer able to saturate the center of it, so it's left with a certain state. The material just next to that gets left with a different state, because by then the coil's field has changed directions. So you end up with different magnetic states (polarizations) being written to the media both in the depth direction, and lengthwise (as you pull the tape along past the coil). I guess the thickness of the "stripes" would depend on characteristics of the media, plus the frequency of the coil's field and the speed with which the media was moving past it. I just always moved it slowly away at a few inches per second, personally.
Just holding the media next to a magnet, even an AC electromagnet, and turning the magnet on and off, doesn't erase the data as effectively as moving the media from close to the coil to far away. Or at least that's what I was always told. I suppose if you had a circuit that powered down the coil slowly, it would have much the same effect.
Although I don't necessarily agree with the GP that CACert.org is useless or that it renders certificates meaningless, I don't think it's wise to be quite so cavalier about ARP poisoning-based MITM attacks.
It's perhaps not something that's as easily done from half a world away like current phishing schemes, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be employed on any number of semi-public networks. I'm thinking most commercial/residential broadband systems that are shared between clients (cable modem systems). An attacker could gain entrance to the network via a compromised PC, or a WiFi router that's still running with default settings, and then run an attack on other people in the network connected to the same router. (One would hope the network operator would catch on quickly; hopefully when the users noticed the increased lag, but when's the last time you called Comcast to report crappy ping times?) Or any place where a large number of users are connecting to an AP, e.g. municipal wireless, the possibility exists for poisoning. While right now it's probably easier just to send out phony PayPal emails through a zombie PC or open relay, that doesn't mean we should be complacent about other attack vectors. Authentication is an important part of security, and we need to be teaching users about it. (That's one of the reasons why I think easy-to-obtain certs are important.)
Anyway, enough of that rant. More to the point, it's not as though CACert.org doesn't have any trust framework at all: it just lowers the bar for getting the least-trusted variety of certificates. In essence, it makes the certficicates' trust framework more like that used by GPG (or the personal certificates that Thawte used to give out): any Tom, Dick, or Harry can get a basic certificate, and then you can prove your credentials to other trusted members, and upgrade the 'trusted-ness' of your certificate. It's not a total free-for-all.
There's a pretty good discussion of what CACert.org is and isn't over at O'Reilly:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2004/06/
(It's a little old, and I'm not sure if some of the procedural info is out of date, however.)
Any large organization (say Fortune 1000 or better) is probably safe in using a self-signed root certificate and then forcing that root cert on its suppliers and client businesses, because they can, and because they have the name recognition necessary to make such a certificate worth something. A smaller organization, whether B2B or B2C, really doesn't.
I was going to bring them up. I'm not sure though that they satisfy his "stupid user" test, since their root certificate isn't included (to my knowledge) with most OSes or browsers.
If I'm wrong, I'll be very happy; it'll be nice when anyone can get a free certificate that's associated with a root cert that everyone has (although I'm not sure whether this would destroy the whole point of certificates -- then again I'm not sure whether I care).
Personally, if you're going to possibly make major changes to an application or service, I think it's proper to keep it as "beta," even if the result is it sitting there for a long time.
:)
I would prefer that people only release '1.0' software that is both stable in terms of bug-free-ness and stable in terms of proposed changes to the API/ABI/file-format/protocol/etc.
When someone releases something as version 1.0, and then completely rewrites it six months later and calls it 1.0.1, that drives me a little nuts. Why not just have kept the "1.0" version as a beta, and not released it if you knew you were going to rewrite the damn thing?
But hey, feel free to call me a curmudgeon; I run Debian Stable after all.
It's not any more complicated in Windows; you put the CD into the drive, open up iTunes, click Import. It defaults to 128 kbit AAC, but you can change it to MP3 by going into the Preferences -- I think that requires maybe four clicks at most, although I don't have it in front of me to test.
iTunes became popular both on the Mac and the PC even before the iPod or the iTMS because it made ripping stuff from CD and organizing it dead easy. I know a lot of people (mostly older / nontechnical folks) who never really understood the whole MP3 thing when it was Musicmatch Jukebox or WinAmp, but understood iTunes enough to rip their CD collection and burn mix CDs. (That was the original mantra of iTunes: "Rip, Mix, Burn.")
Now other programs have matched or arguably surpassed iTunes in ease-of-use, but it's certainly not a hassle to rip from a CD.
If Apple has a monopoly on digital music players (which is a big if) then they are illegally tying ITMS and iPods.
You had me up to here. They are doing no such thing: they're not saying you have to use music from their store, in fact you can load music onto that iPod from anyplace you want (including pirated stuff).
If you choose to get music from the iTMS, then it becomes locked to the iPod: but it's not as if the consumer doesn't have a number of alternatives besides the iTMS.
Were Apple to make it so that you suddenly had to get your music from the Music Store in order to use that iPod that you just bought, then there would be a serious antitrust issue. But all the arguments I've seen basically ignore the fact that most people don't get their music from the iTMS! People still buy CDs every day, and put that music onto their iPod.
The line that seems to be coming up in this discussion a lot so far is that the music companies are adding DRM to their CDs, and thus the alternative avenue to the iTMS is being cut off. If this is happening, and if the market doesn't correct it (because I bet people aren't going to be very pleased when they can't put that new CD onto their iPod), then there's a place for regulation: at the very least, DRMed CDs should be required to prominently warn consumers that they're not rippable.
But generally, if the music companies start selling DRMed CDs, it doesn't make sense to turn around and punish Apple. Punish the companies selling "defective" CDs: since many more songs are sold every year on CD than on the iTMS, DRMed CDs present much more of a threat to the marketplace than where you can use iTMS-downloaded songs.
Basically, I find the whole iTMS argument flawed. Basically people are taking the iPod's possible monopoly over portable music players, and use that to justify cracking open Apple's music distribution outfit. This doesn't make any sense: Apple doesn't have a monopoly over music distribution; in reality the iTMS doesn't have more than a few percent of the worldwide music-sales market versus CDs and other sources. The thing they have a monopoly over (the iPod) is already open to non-Apple music.
...without the hassle of ripping a CD...
The only people unwilling to go through the "hassle" of ripping from a CD and who instead buy tracks at $0.99/song are people who have so much money to burn, they probably don't even know SanDisk or Creative exist, or that there are other MP3 players out there besides the iPod.
Seriously -- get a clue. The vast majority of songs on the vast majority of iPods in the world have been ripped from CDs (or downloaded illegally). The iTMS is a sideline, albeit a profitable one, but it's one that Apple would happily sacrifice in a particular market if the alternative in any way cut into their iPod hardware sales.
I don't know anyone who buys an iPod and then loads it up with music from the iTMS, or who bought an iPod because of iTMS. Who can afford to? By the time you filled that iPod up, it would be worth as much as a fairly decent, brand-new car. No, most people rip from CD, and it's dead easy to do. Frankly, sticking the CD in the drive and clicking on Import is easier, out of the box, than getting stuff from the iTMS is. (No signing up for an account, no entering your credit-card number, no high-speed internet required for good experience, etc.)
Nobody HAS to buy anything from iTMS. I'm sure there are lots and lots of people out there who can testify to the fact that they own iPods and have never bought anything from the iTMS. Personally, the only stuff I've bought was a few Audible books, and the free songs I've gotten from Pepsi caps. Even the people who download from the iTMS regularly, I'd wager, have far more songs on their computers from other sources than they do from the iTMS.
In short, you're vastly exaggerating the difficulty of ripping music from CD, and overstating the importance of the iTMS. If anything, the number of people out there with iPods is what will keep record companies from ever selling many un-rippable CDs, since so many people buy CDs and the first thing they do is stick them in their computers and rip them to their iPod.
If Apple offered a Napster-like music subscription ("all you can eat") service through the iTMS, then I would start to see your point of view: then you'd have a digital download service that was a practical source from which to fill up a HD-based music player. But at 99 cents a song, and much higher in some places in Europe, the iTMS certainly isn't it.
So if Apple were to agree to license out FairPlay to anyone willing to pay a "fair market value" for it, where the value of the license was equal to the number of FairPlay-compatible players the licensee planned on selling, times Apple's profit margin on an iPod, everyone would be happy? Because I'm pretty sure Apple would be okay with that. Say $75 USD a unit?
Apple is a company which exists to make money for its shareholders. I can guarantee you that they would license the FairPlay scheme to anyone who was willing to pay Apple what it's worth. Unfortunately, the problem here is that nobody -- least of all SanDisk and Creative -- can afford that.
If you really think that anything going on today in the U.S. is comparable to Hundred Flowers, you should do a bit more reading. Or do whatever else is required to gain some perspective; there's a fundamental difference between discouraging someone from saying something because it's politically expedient, and dragging them off in the middle of the night and torturing them to death.
I admit, I've engaged in some karma-whore Bush-bashing from time to time as well. He's an easy target, and a lot of the stuff that's gone on recently is easy fodder for tinfoil-hat comparisons. But to seriously compare anything that's going on right now to the Chinese under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler, is not only to show your own ignorance and lack of appreciation of scale and perspective, but also to do a disservice to those historical events, by comparing them to something that's quite frankly so trivial in relative impact and suffering.
If you wanted to compare what's going on today to the chilling effect during the 50's Red Scare, or something of similar scale internationally, then I would agree with you that such a comparison is probably apt, or at least closer to being apt than U.S. v. China/Germany/USSR/etc. comparisons are.
Drawing parallels between the U.S. today and actual fascist (whether leftist or rightist) regimes are nothing more than a cheap shot, and intellectually dishonest.
You had me right up until you used the phrase "legitimate laws." The laws in China are no more legitimate than the government which creates and promulgates them, which is to say, not at all. Since it does not derive its power from the consent of the governed, but instead through fear and intimidation (and lack of any alternatives whatsoever, even another party within the same political structure), it cannot claim any legitimacy.
To follow your line of reasoning would be to say that I.G. Farben did nothing wrong when it churned out Zyklon-B, because it was following a "legitimate law" of the government in power at the time. Following a law because you have no other choice, and a gun is being held to your head (figuratively or otherwise), is one thing; calling that sort of rule "legitimate" is quite another. (And don't start whining to me about Godwin's Law, this is a completely apt comparison in this situation. Both governments have roughly the same claim to legitimacy.)
I can excuse companies for falling in line with the Chinese regime because they have no choice but to do so, as long as they admit this is why they're doing it. (I will even accept, if not excuse, a company which stands up and says that they are cooperating with injustice because it is profitable to do so, and doesn't delude itself into thinking it's doing good.) Giving the government a claim to legitimacy is far more damaging, and in my mind inexcusable.
Actually, based on the reports I've read, the majority of Chinese internet users don't care. They search for information on freedom and democracy about as often as the average American, which is to say, not very often.
I would bet that if anything bothers the average Chinese internet user, it's probably the censorship of porn, not political speech.
There are methods available today by which most people with half a brain could circumvent the Chinese authorities and read Western information sources, write blogs, etc. But the great majority of Chinese internet users, just like their American and European counterparts, are probably more interested in searching for the latest information on pop stars and movies than they are in reading some dissident's blog.
Availibility of information is the easy part, compared with getting people interested in reading it.
I think an important point that is being missed here is that for OSS projects developers are both producers and consumers, so trying to get involvement can equally be seen as an effort to attract consumers.
I think this is the only argument I've heard so far in this thread that offers a convincing justification for the forced-diversification of a workforce.
If your goal is to create product which is going to appeal to a broad spectrum of users, and a lot of those users happen to be female, then it might make sense to have some women on board when you're making the product. (Assuming that the needs or preferences of women is different than the needs or preferences of men with regards to an operating system, and that a group of men would not adequately cater to the female component of the audience/market, both of which are debatable.)
It seems as though we've decided -- or academia and political correctness have decided for us -- that "diversity is a Good Thing," but there's rarely ever any discussion on why this is the case. Honestly, I don't think it's always self-evident or obvious, or even universally true.
All? There's another one?
You jest, but among members of certain intellectual circles (particularly in the "gender studies" and social anthropology disciplines at many universities), it's quite accepted that there are more, perhaps many more, than two genders.
If you accept on premise that gender is a social construct, rather than a binary biological one, then it is not hard to expand the definition out to include various flavors of transgendered and 'queer' people not as 'sexual orientations,' but as distinct genders themselves.
The usual line of argument in favor of this begins by considering other cultures which have believed in more than two genders: e.g. the Berdache people of some Native American tribes, and using this as justification for a socially-constructed view of gender.
The idea that men and women on average interact with each other differently, and build social networks differently, and maybe even think and problem-solve differently, whether as a result of biology or social conditioning, ought to be pretty plainly obvious to anyone who's worked in a mixed environment for any length of time. However, the current climate discourages consideration of such factors to an almost comically ridiculous extent.
People are so afraid of ostracism, that they deny what almost anyone, male or female, knows is probably true: at the heart of most stereotypes is a small kernel of truth.
Actually most datacenters already have massive water-cooling systems: only they're building wide and generally used to cool the air. I'm talking about the HVAC system, of course.
Large buildings generally don't circulate Freon from one floor to another, it would be too expensive. Instead, they have a big refrigeration unit (roof mounted, usually) with big cooling towers and the rest, and use it to chill water, which is pumped throughout the building and used to cool air.
It wouldn't be very difficult to tap into the chilled-water lines that already exist in most buildings, and use them to cool the servers directly. In fact this was once a lot more common: back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for big mainframes to be water-cooled. I've worked with big scientific apparatus that's also water-cooled, and a lot of it used lots of electricity as well, so it's not as though the engineering is impossible.
Yes, there are certain risks associated with having water flow through your computer system, especially in regards to leaks. But there are lots of pieces of equipment that contain liquid and wouldn't appreciate leaks, and we don't think twice about them. For very valuable systems, an additional cooling loop filled with a non-conductive (or even better, a pressurized gas) coolant could be used, with a heat exchanger connecting to the building chilled water.
I think there are some IBM blade systems out there right now that use liquid cooling, but for some dumb reason they won't accept building chilled-water connections (believe it or not, they need water that's warmer than most building supplies). I can't find a link to it right now, but basically it introduces an additional heat exchanger for the sole purpose of warming the incoming chilled water supply before circulating it through the systems. Obviously, this limits their attractiveness and ease of installation.
But at any rate, I think going to liquid cooling, whether water or glycol or something else, is eventually inevitable in high-density applications: despite some of the practical problems involved, when you look at the economics, cooling is one of those things that scales really well. It's going to be cheaper in the long run to reduce the number of heat-transfer steps in between the chip and the outside environment (where the heat is going one way or another), and to do it all at once if possible. Maybe we haven't hit the power/density break-even point yet, but we must be getting close.
I think the reason you still see a lot of air-cooling is because the mass-production of components has made it inexpensive to do, but blade server systems are starting to run into the limits of commodity hardware (as this whole story with HP's fan attests to). When you start having to consider developing specialized cooling hardware anyway, whether for air or liquid, suddenly liquid cooling becomes more attractive.
Of course, HP is modifying the fan design to optimize the pressure which is apparently different from thrust.
It makes sense that this would be the case: if you think about how a jet engine is mounted, there's no backpressure on the exhaust stream aside from atmospheric pressure, which tends to be constant at the altitudes that RC planes fly. However, if you were to mount it so that the out-flow was restricted (because it's blowing into a computer chassis), then you'd need to redesign the blades. My initial guess is that the pitch has to change, although I haven't done any analysis of it.
What I wonder is whether the pitch of the blades and the overall design has to be changed for each application? Depending on the configuration of the machine these fans are going to be used in, the back-pressure (outflow restriction) is going to be different, necessitating different design optimizations.
It would be interesting if they produced a fan that had variable pitch blades, controlled by some sort of servo, that would maximize flow or pressure in different situations. Perhaps such a system could even be used to regulate airflow while keeping the spindle turning at some fixed speed at which the motor was most efficent.
I don't do ducted-fan RC stuff (helis are my thing, personally) so I don't know if anyone has ever made a variable-pitch miniature jet engine. If they did, then the HP guys might be able to use that without much modification. Even if nobody has done it before, it doesn't seem like it would exactly be that difficult, with the correct budget and resources available (like a good shop and skilled prototyping machinist).
I am not confusing the goal and the means at all. What I'm saying, and what I truly believe, is that in large part the patent system does its job: that is, it encourages innovation and promotes development. The abuses of the patent system are more rare than you would think, since the very large majority of patents never make the papers. It's the one bad one that sneaks through among a hundred or a thousand or ten-thousand fair patents that's the problem.
The profitability of companies doing the inventing and promoting invention itself are rather related. If developing new products and inventing things isn't profitable, then it won't happen (at least as quickly). So although the purpose of the patent system should not be the profitability of companies or persons using it, it's fair to assume that it will occur as a side-effect.
In general, I think you have to put the damage caused by overly-broad patents into perspective. I think you're greatly overstating the damage they're doing, versus the benefit we gain as a society from patents (as compared to a society in which patents didn't exist, and everything was protected as trade secrets, etc.). It's like watching CNN and inferring based on what you see there, that air-travel is very dangerous and we should get rid of planes. Obviously they crash all the time, right? No: it's just that the flights that don't crash don't make it onto the news. If you read Slashdot, or are at all attuned to tech news these days, it's easy to have a skewed perception of the patent system, since all we ever hear about are abuses. This totally ignores the unseen benefits of patents, and the very many of them which are filed, used by a company for a while, then fall silently into the public domain for other people to use.
The patent system certainly needs reform, but even in its current incarnation, the damage it does is outweighed by the purpose it still serves. I would rather have it in it's current state, fucked-up as it may be, than nothing at all. And I'm just a regular average-joe consumer: I don't hold any patents and probably never will.
I've seen this same thing happen both to my IBM ThinkPad, and to other laptops that I've owned in the past. (Actually the first time I noticed something like this was on my old PowerBook 165...may it rest in pieces.) I think it's just because the manufacturers, either by accident or design, don't give their plastics an entirely smooth finish. Instead it's lightly matte/pebbled. If you look closely at the surface of a black laptop in the light, you can clearly see this.
The smoothness is just your fingers wearing down the plastic wherever you touch it most. When you wear through the depth of the pebbled surface finish, it starts to get smooth. I've always wondered why companies don't just anticipate this and make the finish glossier, but maybe it's hard to do because of the way the parts come out of the molds (i.e., whatever mold-release agent they're using in manufacturing leads to the pebbled finish). Or maybe they just realize that how the computer looks when it's new contributes more to sales than how it looks 6 months down the road, and allow this tradeoff consiously. (I think this is probably likely.)
I think this is why you don't see manufacturers coating or painting their keys, but rather dying the plastic all the way through. Even if the finish was coated with some very hard lacquer/clearcoat, it would still eventually be worn off and the result would probably be worse than the wear and oxidation of a fully-pigmented plastic. Plus, I suspect it's a lot cheaper just to pigment the plastic during manufacturing, and not have to finish or paint it afterwards.
As an sidenote, you can often tell when a keyboard has been used by an FPS gamer a lot, because the left control and WASD (or QWED, or both) keys will be worn smooth.
In re: bleaching of white shirts -- don't do it without checking the care tag! Bleach will often make white shirts MORE yellow, depending on the materials used in the shirt.
Actually to really get white shirts white again, I've found what's required is bleaching followed by bluing. You have to be very careful not to overdo it (because it's literally a blue dye), but carefully used, it can make white clothes more of a "brilliant white" color again, when they start to look a little too beige.
I'm not sure exactly why it works, I suspect it's just psychological, and adding a little blue tint to an off-white makes it seem brighter white again, but it really does work. You may have to hunt around to find a place that sells it, but a bottle will probably last the rest of your life. (Some laundry detergents may contain bluing already, I'm not sure: I know mine doesn't because it's a "dye free" hypoallergenic.)
Actually many Apple products are rather Terminator-esque in their longevity, but, like Ahnold in the movie, they start to look a bit worse for wear in time.
Take for example my old Apple IIc. That sucker still runs fine: shove a 5.25" floppy into it, and it'll happily run. But I doubt anyone who ever sees it now would believe that it was originally white ("Snow White" in fact): based on all the extant models, someone today would probably assume that Apple went through a phase in the 1980s where it produced nothing but bizarre brownish-yellow computers.
Sorry but being a monopoly isn't a business model.
Actually, in their case it is. Their entire corporate strategy revolves around their monopoly of the desktop OS. If they didn't have that, they'd have nothing. (Well, they'd have a large pile of cash, but what do you do then? Become a bank?) It's their single greatest asset, more valuable than anything else. Next up is probably their brand recognition, but since this is derived from their marketshare, it's not easily separable.
Microsoft is probably the only company that can claim to have made a business model out of being a monopoly. There are perhaps a few other companies in similar positions within their respective markets, but not many. (Lots that would like to be, though, no doubt about that.) In that, they are somewhat unique.
For an example, look at a lot of (non-Apple) rackmount servers. On one hand, many of them look as though they were designed with no aesthetic appeal in mind at all. But I can almost guarantee you that they were, and some (Sun's low-end ones in particular) almost go so far in the "utilitarian" direction that they're obviously designed to look that way, and appeal to someone who thinks they want something that's designed without regard for aesthetics.
Even if you bought a case that was made out of raw, unfinished and riveted sheet metal, it would still be making a statement (sort of like the paint job on a DeLorian). Once marketers realize that there are people out there who are consiously shopping for something that "looks unfinished," they will design finished products to look that way. The end result is that there are virtually no products made in significant quantity which are actually made without some aesthetic choices inherent in their design: even the ones which attempt to be spartan or utilitarian.