Mixing news feeds and appointments/scheduling seems like an odd idea to me, especially if your iCal gets cluttered with updates and news from even just a few regularly updated sites.
If you've used iCal for any length of time, you'd know that individual calendars are easy to turn on and off. Additionally, if you show the search results area, everything comes out in a nice timeline list, so the visual clutter isn't necessarily a factor. The biggest usability issue I see right now is that iCal 1.0 is slow, but I'd think Apple would address that in future releases.
I'd be interested to hear exactly what your plans are for wCal
Plans? Nobody said there needed to be plans!:-)
and what you see it's primary uses as being.
The reason it initially came about is because I though it was odd that there wasn't a way to get information on new calendars from within iCal itself. Finding iCalShare has an RSS feed just clicked everything into place. Then it because a question of what other sites I could apply it to. No, it's not going to fit every site. In general, I suppose you could say I see it like the email of RSS feeds where things like SlashDock and NetNewsWire are the IRC. iCal is not as demanding of your attention; I like that.
So where to go from here? Hell if I know! It just seemed that people were only seeing calendars as something humans entered and edited, just the same way they saw sites as HTML pages before offering RSS feeds. I want light bulbs to start turning on in peoples heads and think about what else you can do with the software. No, iCal wasn't probably intended to display web site headlines, and it wasn't intended to schedule at/cron processes either, but it would sure be interesting if it could . . .:-)
Interesting use and integration of standard technologies (iCalender, WebDAV and RDF) but it seems like an overly complex way of checking news-feeds.
Where's the complexity you speak of? You click a subscribe link and you're done! Yes, there are other RSS feeds out there, but I don't see how this is any more convoluted than having to run an app on every machine that goes out to various servers, grabs their RSS feed, parses it locally, and displays it in a proprietary format. The only way this could be less convoluted is if the sites provided the calendars themselves.
RSS is a much easier format to use, and there's already much easier, much better tools like Slashdock that take advantage of RSS without being unweildy (as this seems to be).
Uh, it does use the RSS feed to generate the calendar. You need only look in the ics file to see:
PRODID:com.subsume.rssCal-1.0.0a
As for the "unwieldy" comment, how cumbersome is it really to click a subscribe link? I also see an advantage to having headlines listed "as they happen" in an app that's used throughout the day instead of having to navigate Dock menus to see what's new. It all comes down to personal preference, of course, and nobody is expecting you to use a wCal if you don't want to.
"Duck, this is Doc. Sushi's moved back to 9. See you then." (10 seconds, tops)
vs.
"Sushi at 9"
You can't really tout losing all context as being an advantage. If we were supposed to eat at 8, my message is clear while your message leaves my friend wondering if I mistyped or if they're going to be waiting for an hour. That means it's just the start of an annoying text exchange. To clarify exactly what is happening.
You're also leaving out waiting through four rings and a "hi, I'm not in" to leave the message, which alone is likely enough for me to type the above.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know the difference between a busy wait and an interrupt. You're justifying (wrongly) the same thing people say in interface studies where they'll do something with the keyboard and they'll think it's faster than the mouse when it only seems faster because the time is split up into discrete events to focus on. Checking/leaving voicemail is not a busy wait; I can be walking down the street and do it. And if you think people driving with cell phones is dangerous, just imagine all those chuckleheads out there trying to peck out a text message while driving.
Sorry, but you haven't made a compelling argument in favor of text messaging in this society. It just doesn't fit. Now if everyone was taking mass transit, yes pervasive SMS would beat trying to talk over other people on an already noisy bus/train. Same thing goes with pictures; it's just not in the culture. When we talk about seeing someone later, we tend to mean something more personal than a pixelated smudge the size of a postage stamp moving at 1 frame/sec. That is why I say mobile imaging doesn't have a future in the States.
I *could* leave a voicemail message asking a friend when/if we're meeting for dinner, but text messaging is far simpler.
Come again? Try:
"Duck, this is Doc. Sushi's moved back to 9. See you then." (10 seconds, tops)
vs.
3#88222550777788777744 4440280... (I spent a minute on just this part)
Sorry, but that isn't nearly as simple in my book (or the book of millions of others, it seems). You could argue the usefulness of a full keyboard, but then you go adding the bulk of that (even the fold out ones with tiny keys are cumbersome) to what should simply be a phone. I love the fact that I can send actual email to my phone, but I don't ever see sending a message from it because the input is so awkward. Likewise, they better have a killer app for a picture phone before they go touting it as a feature. The prediction of videophone breakthroughs has been constant for decades, but without a cultural buy-in, it's wasted effort.
PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...
So the market is people who don't really need pictures at all? Good luck with that. It seems to me this "feature", just like text messaging, is being pushed by a culture that just doesn't understand Americans. Just because SMS is all the rage in Norway and the Japan has the highest per capita camera ownership doesn't mean some asshole American like myself simply doesn't want to have just a phone to, you know, fucking talk to people. If you want to have these devices Bluetooth (or whatever) data to each other, fine. But it makes me sick to think where cell phones could be if only they'd focus on the phone instead of trying to make it a GameBoy, too.
The back door could so easily disappear if Apple and/or Microsoft changed something.
You misunderstand my suggestion. All I'm saying is that real portability for desktop apps is not as difficult as many imagine. If Apple can write to a set of API that can get them on any platform they want, then so can you. In going that route, you're also probably best off starting with a Mac in the first place because that seems to be where the quality starts as well before it flows off to the other platforms. If Linux on the desktop still sucks after all this time (and, boy, it sure does) it might stem from the fact that most of the people going to Linux came from a pretty sucky desktop (Windows) in the first place. With the solid Unix core of Mac OS X, I look forward to seeing a lot of cross development that really improves the various open source efforts, but that sort of thing will take some time and require more Linux users to switch to the Mac in the first place.
Carbon, OS X's C++ API, is pretty platform-dependent.
Wrong. It is well known that QuickTime for Windows includes large chunks of what is the Carbon API, and that some developers in the past hooked into it to provide Windows ports for some products. It is also well known that Cocoa had to be ported from the x86 in the first place, and had both white and yellow (i.e., OPENSTEP and Windows) versions.
When it gets right down to it, it seems that Mac OS X is the platform all software should be developed on, and then ports can be readily done for Windows, Linux, and other deployment platforms. Believe me, nothing will improve software so much as a trial by fire with some very discriminating Mac users!
To believe that it is still a good decision, one would have to show that today's users with today's technology have an advantage.
Now that you mention it, I do notice that when I go up to the menu, my mouse is more often at the very top of the screen than elsewhere in the menu. I also recall that the Dock used to have a 1 pixel "edge" in an early incarnation of OS X, but they pushed it all the way to the edge because of the number of user complaints. It seems clear to me that the Apple advantage is still there.
Which is rather irrelevant since he isn't an admin, as he stated.
Read again; neither his post nor my reply indicate he's the admin himself. He was responsible for the domain, and if you're getting contact email, you need to be clueful enough to handle it or have someone working for you who does. This person clearly isn't on top of things, and by falsely accusing SpamCop of wrongdoing he is adding to the problem of spam.
I just recieved from SPAMCOP.NET what I suspect might be 'SHAKEDOWN Email.'
No, what you got was essentially a test of your sysadmin skills, and you failed. A quick check of the headers will show that it did not, in fact, come from SpamCop. This was covered long ago, but see this page to get up to speed.
As we all know, open source authors make billions of dollars a year and can obviously afford a protracted legal battle with other multibillion dollar entities.
Gee, something to think about then before you go off and make a derivative work. Really, why is Apple defending their IP wrong but open source advocates don't have a problem doing the same thing when defending GPL'd code? A little consistency here would be nice.
And as far as legal costs, the EFF has in the past provided representation to worthy causes. I don't know if this would qualify, but I don't think the EFF was even consulted as a resource. I've given them my donation so that they can potentially help the little guy defend against companies overstepping their bounds. Where's your support, AC?
It sounds like they got a simple cease-and-desist saying "It seem like a lot of what you have is derived from our product and we'd like you to make changes." They agreed and made changes. It's not like they defended the thing in court and lost. Apple may have been the bully, but these guys are the ones who just gave them their lunch money instead of making them fight for it.
But the one I'm waiting for
on
Animatrix Trailer
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Glad to see Oracle is finally making a public release of 9i for OS X, but what I really want are the development tools.
Then what you really should be doing is asking Apple to move WebObjects out the the Java ghetto they stuck it in and divorce EOF from WOF. EOF was amazingly adept at database-independent development, so getting it back would get you access to not only Oracle, but most other databases that came to the OS X platform. Pitty Apple got so entranced by the Java/Web angle, and has yet to make corrections after the Internet bubble burst. You can still scrounge up a copy of WebObjects 4.5.1, but I don't know if it'll be (or needs to be) update to work with 10.2; again, bug Apple.
how many times does this idea need to be brought up, and then quickly shot down because it will never happen?
As long as the people shooting it down are more ignorant than the people bringing it up, the point will continually be raised until it does happen.
1. apple makes their money selling hardware. they will lose all that revenue if people can just use a walmart $400 pc.
Cluehammer says even a moron knows it doesn't cost $129 to dup the OS X CDs. Yes, Apple is currently a systems company and not just a software company, but you need only look at the revenue that MS has generated to see that running on a Walmart special wouldn't necessarily bankrupt Apple.
3. yet another architecture change? i think not. moving from 68K to ppc went well, it took some time but it was a success. os9 to os10 is going well, most apps are there and the open source/hobby coder population is booming. so to go from ppc to x86 after moving to a new OS, the big software companies are just going to say no. that's suicide.
Here you show no sense of history. In the NeXT roots of OS X, getting a quad-fat binary was a simple matter of clicking some check boxes in ProjectBuilder. And if Apple had stuck with the Yellow Box like they promised, you'd even be seeing Cocoa apps that run under Windows XP. The APIs Apple makes available are, for the most part, at a high enough level that the developer need not worry about the underlying architecture.
i can't see apple going x86 in the future.
Mac OS X came from x86. If they're not going back, it's only because that shitty chip left a bad taste in their mouths. Given the history of Mac OS X, though, I can almost guarantee that they still have it running on a PC internally, in addition to checking out all the other hardware directions they could go in the future.
This is a very good topic, and point. Teaching and education is all messed up.
Why does the blame immediately fall there? Here's a clue for all the parents or wanna-be moms and dads out there: Your Johnny many not turn out to be all that bright a boy! In fact, nearly 50% of the population is going to have below average intelligence. While you'd like to assume it'll be the Smiths next door that raise the moron, you'll do your own kid a bigger favor if you assume the coin flip is not in your favor and thus actively participate in their education.
The problem I always had growing up and learning from teachers was inconsistency. I hated it then, and I hate it now.
Clue time for the young student now: teachers aren't high holy men (and women) with any ultimate truth to offer up. At best, they're just guides along the path and you need to get up off your ass and do the walking yourself. Socrates gave perhaps the best phrase regarding education I can think of: "I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think."
I finally got through school by deciding to tune out the teachers entirely, buying my own text-books (after online research), and doing all my homework and papers in class while the teacher was lecturing.
Now that is a worthy solution. Keep it up and you'll end up doing well in life. But don't go expecting everyone in your class to be so motivated, and then don't go blaming the teacher because some who coasted through their first 18 years ends up hating the rest of their life. You learned the lessons of learning early; some never learn to learn. Sucks to be them!
If those willing to pay $20 can use the $10 ones, do you think that they'll keep selling them for $10? Those that were buying them for $10 will have to shell out the extra dough.
Way to completely miss the reasoned conclusion. They'll have that extra dough (and then some!) because they have that trade imbalance to exploit. Every $10 DVD they ship off for, say, $15 pumps $5 into the local economy. The only reason they can't do this is because of price fixing (via region codes) by the MPAA. If the content is the same, there should just be one price and let the distribution market freely sort out the differences in getting that content to the customers that want it at a price they're willing to pay.
Movies (and many other
kinds of intellectual property) sell at different
prices in different countries, due to differences
in purchasing power.
Translation: The MPAA uses their monopoly powers to engage in price fixing.
However,
without region encoding there would be nothing
to stop someone in the USA importing and
re-selling movies from Australia. The end
result would be that prices would be roughly
the same in all countries.
Yes; it's called a free market. In the process of prices becoming stable, money would flow into Australia to put them on equal economic footing with the countries they trade with. In short, the region encoding hurts Australia to benefit the MPAA.
So maybe the breakdown of region encoding
isn't as good for consumers as you might
first think..
Keep thinking. Region codes aren't in place for the good of anyone but those that put them in place: the movie studios. Yet, as history has shown (e.g. the VCR) those same people are absolutely clueless when it comes to understand what business methods can help or harm them. The consumers actually do know better, and breaking region codes will likely end up benefiting the MPAA greatly, but I doubt they'll ever be thanking us.
So while the US is used to paying $20 for a new DVD, if the region system breaks down . . .
. . . the free market kicks in to stablize prices. Money starts going to those who offer the DVD for $10, and that demand causes a price increase while the people charging $20 have to lower their prices to compete. In the end, everyone pays the same $15 (or whatever), with the net result being that the poor countries are making $5 more from the sales than they had previously. A far cry from your claims that they'll suffer; you sound like little more than an MPAA shill.
Then I came up with my own hypothesis: popular software tends to suck.
It's not a recent development, or unique to software, either:
Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause -- Mark Twain
Re:"...all for about $5 a month."
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
You were saying?
I was saying I wanted you to post a link to the price of common consumer items in Bhutan. You have failed to do so.
What you seem unable to understand is that the per-capita income of the people doesn't significantly reduce the cost of items, but rather increases the value proposition. A $300 iPod doesn't suddenly cost $3 when you cross the border, rather the value of such an item suddenly must be the equivalent of $30,000 to make it worth having. Needless to say, I wouldn't expect many in Bhutan to be dancing around with a portable MP3 player any time soon.
When you actually understand something about economics, I hope you'll post again.
Slashdot Mirror
Mixing news feeds and appointments/scheduling seems like an odd idea to me, especially if your iCal gets cluttered with updates and news from even just a few regularly updated sites.
If you've used iCal for any length of time, you'd know that individual calendars are easy to turn on and off. Additionally, if you show the search results area, everything comes out in a nice timeline list, so the visual clutter isn't necessarily a factor. The biggest usability issue I see right now is that iCal 1.0 is slow, but I'd think Apple would address that in future releases.
I'd be interested to hear exactly what your plans are for wCal
Plans? Nobody said there needed to be plans! :-)
and what you see it's primary uses as being.
The reason it initially came about is because I though it was odd that there wasn't a way to get information on new calendars from within iCal itself. Finding iCalShare has an RSS feed just clicked everything into place. Then it because a question of what other sites I could apply it to. No, it's not going to fit every site. In general, I suppose you could say I see it like the email of RSS feeds where things like SlashDock and NetNewsWire are the IRC. iCal is not as demanding of your attention; I like that.
So where to go from here? Hell if I know! It just seemed that people were only seeing calendars as something humans entered and edited, just the same way they saw sites as HTML pages before offering RSS feeds. I want light bulbs to start turning on in peoples heads and think about what else you can do with the software. No, iCal wasn't probably intended to display web site headlines, and it wasn't intended to schedule at/cron processes either, but it would sure be interesting if it could . . . :-)
Interesting use and integration of standard technologies (iCalender, WebDAV and RDF) but it seems like an overly complex way of checking news-feeds.
Where's the complexity you speak of? You click a subscribe link and you're done! Yes, there are other RSS feeds out there, but I don't see how this is any more convoluted than having to run an app on every machine that goes out to various servers, grabs their RSS feed, parses it locally, and displays it in a proprietary format. The only way this could be less convoluted is if the sites provided the calendars themselves.
RSS is a much easier format to use, and there's already much easier, much better tools like Slashdock that take advantage of RSS without being unweildy (as this seems to be).
Uh, it does use the RSS feed to generate the calendar. You need only look in the ics file to see:
PRODID:com.subsume.rssCal-1.0.0a
As for the "unwieldy" comment, how cumbersome is it really to click a subscribe link? I also see an advantage to having headlines listed "as they happen" in an app that's used throughout the day instead of having to navigate Dock menus to see what's new. It all comes down to personal preference, of course, and nobody is expecting you to use a wCal if you don't want to.
"Duck, this is Doc. Sushi's moved back to 9. See you then." (10 seconds, tops)
vs.
"Sushi at 9"
You can't really tout losing all context as being an advantage. If we were supposed to eat at 8, my message is clear while your message leaves my friend wondering if I mistyped or if they're going to be waiting for an hour. That means it's just the start of an annoying text exchange. To clarify exactly what is happening.
You're also leaving out waiting through four rings and a "hi, I'm not in" to leave the message, which alone is likely enough for me to type the above.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know the difference between a busy wait and an interrupt. You're justifying (wrongly) the same thing people say in interface studies where they'll do something with the keyboard and they'll think it's faster than the mouse when it only seems faster because the time is split up into discrete events to focus on. Checking/leaving voicemail is not a busy wait; I can be walking down the street and do it. And if you think people driving with cell phones is dangerous, just imagine all those chuckleheads out there trying to peck out a text message while driving.
Sorry, but you haven't made a compelling argument in favor of text messaging in this society. It just doesn't fit. Now if everyone was taking mass transit, yes pervasive SMS would beat trying to talk over other people on an already noisy bus/train. Same thing goes with pictures; it's just not in the culture. When we talk about seeing someone later, we tend to mean something more personal than a pixelated smudge the size of a postage stamp moving at 1 frame/sec. That is why I say mobile imaging doesn't have a future in the States.
I *could* leave a voicemail message asking a friend when/if we're meeting for dinner, but text messaging is far simpler.
Come again? Try:
"Duck, this is Doc. Sushi's moved back to 9. See you then." (10 seconds, tops)
vs.
3#88222550777788777744 4440280... (I spent a minute on just this part)
Sorry, but that isn't nearly as simple in my book (or the book of millions of others, it seems). You could argue the usefulness of a full keyboard, but then you go adding the bulk of that (even the fold out ones with tiny keys are cumbersome) to what should simply be a phone. I love the fact that I can send actual email to my phone, but I don't ever see sending a message from it because the input is so awkward. Likewise, they better have a killer app for a picture phone before they go touting it as a feature. The prediction of videophone breakthroughs has been constant for decades, but without a cultural buy-in, it's wasted effort.
PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...
So the market is people who don't really need pictures at all? Good luck with that. It seems to me this "feature", just like text messaging, is being pushed by a culture that just doesn't understand Americans. Just because SMS is all the rage in Norway and the Japan has the highest per capita camera ownership doesn't mean some asshole American like myself simply doesn't want to have just a phone to, you know, fucking talk to people. If you want to have these devices Bluetooth (or whatever) data to each other, fine. But it makes me sick to think where cell phones could be if only they'd focus on the phone instead of trying to make it a GameBoy, too.
The back door could so easily disappear if Apple and/or Microsoft changed something.
You misunderstand my suggestion. All I'm saying is that real portability for desktop apps is not as difficult as many imagine. If Apple can write to a set of API that can get them on any platform they want, then so can you. In going that route, you're also probably best off starting with a Mac in the first place because that seems to be where the quality starts as well before it flows off to the other platforms. If Linux on the desktop still sucks after all this time (and, boy, it sure does) it might stem from the fact that most of the people going to Linux came from a pretty sucky desktop (Windows) in the first place. With the solid Unix core of Mac OS X, I look forward to seeing a lot of cross development that really improves the various open source efforts, but that sort of thing will take some time and require more Linux users to switch to the Mac in the first place.
Carbon, OS X's C++ API, is pretty platform-dependent.
Wrong. It is well known that QuickTime for Windows includes large chunks of what is the Carbon API, and that some developers in the past hooked into it to provide Windows ports for some products. It is also well known that Cocoa had to be ported from the x86 in the first place, and had both white and yellow (i.e., OPENSTEP and Windows) versions.
When it gets right down to it, it seems that Mac OS X is the platform all software should be developed on, and then ports can be readily done for Windows, Linux, and other deployment platforms. Believe me, nothing will improve software so much as a trial by fire with some very discriminating Mac users!
To believe that it is still a good decision, one would have to show that today's users with today's technology have an advantage.
Now that you mention it, I do notice that when I go up to the menu, my mouse is more often at the very top of the screen than elsewhere in the menu. I also recall that the Dock used to have a 1 pixel "edge" in an early incarnation of OS X, but they pushed it all the way to the edge because of the number of user complaints. It seems clear to me that the Apple advantage is still there.
Which is rather irrelevant since he isn't an admin, as he stated.
Read again; neither his post nor my reply indicate he's the admin himself. He was responsible for the domain, and if you're getting contact email, you need to be clueful enough to handle it or have someone working for you who does. This person clearly isn't on top of things, and by falsely accusing SpamCop of wrongdoing he is adding to the problem of spam.
I just recieved from SPAMCOP.NET what I suspect might be 'SHAKEDOWN Email.'
No, what you got was essentially a test of your sysadmin skills, and you failed. A quick check of the headers will show that it did not, in fact, come from SpamCop. This was covered long ago, but see this page to get up to speed.
As we all know, open source authors make billions of dollars a year and can obviously afford a protracted legal battle with other multibillion dollar entities.
Gee, something to think about then before you go off and make a derivative work. Really, why is Apple defending their IP wrong but open source advocates don't have a problem doing the same thing when defending GPL'd code? A little consistency here would be nice.
And as far as legal costs, the EFF has in the past provided representation to worthy causes. I don't know if this would qualify, but I don't think the EFF was even consulted as a resource. I've given them my donation so that they can potentially help the little guy defend against companies overstepping their bounds. Where's your support, AC?
It sounds like they got a simple cease-and-desist saying "It seem like a lot of what you have is derived from our product and we'd like you to make changes." They agreed and made changes. It's not like they defended the thing in court and lost. Apple may have been the bully, but these guys are the ones who just gave them their lunch money instead of making them fight for it.
has yet to be made! :-)
Soon to be announced: Google for Wackos!
Sounds a bit busy. What say we just go with Waacko?
1998 Is Redhat becoming like Microsoft?
.
.
.
How many times can you ask the same stupid question and how many more years can you be wrong?
Sorry, but absolutely nothing Redhat can do will get them to match the leader since 1984:
Apple is dead.
Glad to see Oracle is finally making a public release of 9i for OS X, but what I really want are the development tools.
Then what you really should be doing is asking Apple to move WebObjects out the the Java ghetto they stuck it in and divorce EOF from WOF. EOF was amazingly adept at database-independent development, so getting it back would get you access to not only Oracle, but most other databases that came to the OS X platform. Pitty Apple got so entranced by the Java/Web angle, and has yet to make corrections after the Internet bubble burst. You can still scrounge up a copy of WebObjects 4.5.1, but I don't know if it'll be (or needs to be) update to work with 10.2; again, bug Apple.
how many times does this idea need to be brought up, and then quickly shot down because it will never happen?
As long as the people shooting it down are more ignorant than the people bringing it up, the point will continually be raised until it does happen.
1. apple makes their money selling hardware. they will lose all that revenue if people can just use a walmart $400 pc.
Cluehammer says even a moron knows it doesn't cost $129 to dup the OS X CDs. Yes, Apple is currently a systems company and not just a software company, but you need only look at the revenue that MS has generated to see that running on a Walmart special wouldn't necessarily bankrupt Apple.
3. yet another architecture change? i think not. moving from 68K to ppc went well, it took some time but it was a success. os9 to os10 is going well, most apps are there and the open source/hobby coder population is booming. so to go from ppc to x86 after moving to a new OS, the big software companies are just going to say no. that's suicide.
Here you show no sense of history. In the NeXT roots of OS X, getting a quad-fat binary was a simple matter of clicking some check boxes in ProjectBuilder. And if Apple had stuck with the Yellow Box like they promised, you'd even be seeing Cocoa apps that run under Windows XP. The APIs Apple makes available are, for the most part, at a high enough level that the developer need not worry about the underlying architecture.
i can't see apple going x86 in the future.
Mac OS X came from x86. If they're not going back, it's only because that shitty chip left a bad taste in their mouths. Given the history of Mac OS X, though, I can almost guarantee that they still have it running on a PC internally, in addition to checking out all the other hardware directions they could go in the future.
This is a very good topic, and point. Teaching and education is all messed up.
Why does the blame immediately fall there? Here's a clue for all the parents or wanna-be moms and dads out there: Your Johnny many not turn out to be all that bright a boy! In fact, nearly 50% of the population is going to have below average intelligence. While you'd like to assume it'll be the Smiths next door that raise the moron, you'll do your own kid a bigger favor if you assume the coin flip is not in your favor and thus actively participate in their education.
The problem I always had growing up and learning from teachers was inconsistency. I hated it then, and I hate it now.
Clue time for the young student now: teachers aren't high holy men (and women) with any ultimate truth to offer up. At best, they're just guides along the path and you need to get up off your ass and do the walking yourself. Socrates gave perhaps the best phrase regarding education I can think of: "I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think."
I finally got through school by deciding to tune out the teachers entirely, buying my own text-books (after online research), and doing all my homework and papers in class while the teacher was lecturing.
Now that is a worthy solution. Keep it up and you'll end up doing well in life. But don't go expecting everyone in your class to be so motivated, and then don't go blaming the teacher because some who coasted through their first 18 years ends up hating the rest of their life. You learned the lessons of learning early; some never learn to learn. Sucks to be them!
If those willing to pay $20 can use the $10 ones, do you think that they'll keep selling them for $10? Those that were buying them for $10 will have to shell out the extra dough.
Way to completely miss the reasoned conclusion. They'll have that extra dough (and then some!) because they have that trade imbalance to exploit. Every $10 DVD they ship off for, say, $15 pumps $5 into the local economy. The only reason they can't do this is because of price fixing (via region codes) by the MPAA. If the content is the same, there should just be one price and let the distribution market freely sort out the differences in getting that content to the customers that want it at a price they're willing to pay.
Movies (and many other kinds of intellectual property) sell at different prices in different countries, due to differences in purchasing power.
Translation: The MPAA uses their monopoly powers to engage in price fixing.
However, without region encoding there would be nothing to stop someone in the USA importing and re-selling movies from Australia. The end result would be that prices would be roughly the same in all countries.
Yes; it's called a free market. In the process of prices becoming stable, money would flow into Australia to put them on equal economic footing with the countries they trade with. In short, the region encoding hurts Australia to benefit the MPAA.
So maybe the breakdown of region encoding isn't as good for consumers as you might first think ..
Keep thinking. Region codes aren't in place for the good of anyone but those that put them in place: the movie studios. Yet, as history has shown (e.g. the VCR) those same people are absolutely clueless when it comes to understand what business methods can help or harm them. The consumers actually do know better, and breaking region codes will likely end up benefiting the MPAA greatly, but I doubt they'll ever be thanking us.
So while the US is used to paying $20 for a new DVD, if the region system breaks down . . .
. . . the free market kicks in to stablize prices. Money starts going to those who offer the DVD for $10, and that demand causes a price increase while the people charging $20 have to lower their prices to compete. In the end, everyone pays the same $15 (or whatever), with the net result being that the poor countries are making $5 more from the sales than they had previously. A far cry from your claims that they'll suffer; you sound like little more than an MPAA shill.
Let's skip straight to . . .
3. Profit!!!
Then I came up with my own hypothesis: popular software tends to suck.
It's not a recent development, or unique to software, either:
Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause -- Mark Twain
You were saying?
I was saying I wanted you to post a link to the price of common consumer items in Bhutan. You have failed to do so.
What you seem unable to understand is that the per-capita income of the people doesn't significantly reduce the cost of items, but rather increases the value proposition. A $300 iPod doesn't suddenly cost $3 when you cross the border, rather the value of such an item suddenly must be the equivalent of $30,000 to make it worth having. Needless to say, I wouldn't expect many in Bhutan to be dancing around with a portable MP3 player any time soon.
When you actually understand something about economics, I hope you'll post again.