If you base your development decisions on how many people won't buy your app, then you're doing it wrong.
Also a "lost sale" is actually more of a missed opportunity than any actual loss. When a pirate installs software, that doesn't take any money out of your pocket, it just doesn't put any in. That is not a loss.
If your application is tied to a backend, then you will incur more traffic to that site than you have paid users. However, if a 10-25% increase in traffic is eating all of your profits, then you're doing that wrong, too. You should probably rethink your business model. Maybe it should be charging some sort of in-app service fee to cover those recurring costs. I would guess those payments would be more difficult to pirate than the initial software install.
No one thinks pirates should get away without paying. Not even the pirates (ok, maybe some of them do, but most of them know exactly what they are doing). Pirates know they are taking risks when they board ships to steal cargo. They know that there's a chance the occupants of the ship could fight back, but they are willing to take the risk to get the booty. The problem on the iPhone as yet is that there is no actual risk involved, only upside. "Piracy" on the iPhone is apparently just too easy.
Well you were the one who originally called it a "newspaper", instead of an "escort service flier". Perhaps its not a disguise, but rather just a misrepresentation. A newspaper is more about the content, than the physical medium, though it is their adherence to the physical medium that is leading them to inevitable failure.
In Portland, and several other cities, a new publication has popped up recently called "Busted". Its printed on news-stock, and is simply page after page of mugshots along with the person's name and the offense they were arrested for. I've bought it a couple of times for $1 an issue, which is more than I've spent on actual newspapers in the last decade. Its entertaining, trying to guess the crime based on the picture, or seeing common facial traits of people arrested for possession of meth, or picking out which DUIs were still totally wasted when their picture was taken, etc.
I wouldn't call "Busted" a newspaper, but its certainly a niche publication that can survive on printed media, or at least long enough to make a quick buck before the novelty wears off. As more newspapers fail, I suspect more of these sorts of publications (Busted, Dutch escort fliers, etc) to pop up. A newspaper could offset its losses from reduced circulation by printing these small-batch publications in their off-hours. "Busted" is maybe 10 sheets, and sells for about double the price of the local Portland newspaper, which has several sections each day. The small publications are making way more money per issue, using far fewer resources, than the long-standing, "respected" publications. Newspapers, much like the horse-and-buggy and compact discs, have a limited future. By repurposing their brick-and-morter to fulfill niche markets, a small number of them can "hang on". Even vinyl records survive today; in the hands of a skilled DJ (and for douchebag "audiophiles";) there is no substitute.
So while your "newspaper targetting 25-35 year old males" might be thriving, it is probably not thriving on the news. News delivery is much better served by other sources.
Having said that, F News Corp. I usually turn to online editions of British news outlets for real stories. American "journalism" has gone severely downhill, particularly as the Internet has taken over. While a newspaper is no longer relevant for time-sensitive stories, the ability to disseminate information instantaneously over the Internet has greatly reduced the quality of information. In the salad days of print media, when you broke a story, your article beat the competition by at least a day. Scoop enough stories, and your paper would get a reputation for getting the news first, and circulation would increase.
If you "scoop" a story on the Internet, you might beat your competition by a matter of seconds, or maybe minutes. The old metric of getting the news first is not as important as it used to be. Quality should be more important, but the news outlets do not seem to have made that shift. By adhering to the old metrics of being first, news outlets are in a constant state of urgency, publishing rushed articles as quickly a possible. CNN, Fox, Yahoo, MSNBC, local newspaper websites, etc, all post the same AP, Reuters, and celebrity publicist news feeds verbatim as soon as they hit the wire. Instead of journalists researching information, checking facts and writing responsible articles, we simply have reporters and automated systems relaying the raw information as quickly as they possibly can without any regard for quality, accuracy or truth.
We end up with situations like the "Balloon Boy", where 15 minutes of fact checking could have saved the whole world from weeks of annoyance over what ended up as nothing. Instead we had all of the media outlets trying to get the first interviews with the family, and filling days of airtime with the same meaningless video loops, on the off chance that something might eventually happen so they could report it first. However every news outlet had report
There's not much difference between a generic 42" LCD TV vs a Samsung 42" LCD TV in the game. Now if it was "Samsungs Eco-friendly*, Advanced LCD TV Technology, delivering stunning picture quality, with the Touch of Color Design", it would be an entirely different matter.
I don't mind subtle and tasteful. I don't like billboards for the sake of billboards.
And I hate all those stupid stickers all over cameras detailing every "cool" feature. If video games get plastered like that with in-game ads, it will suck.
Not to mention that he was probably only using Notes for email, which you claim is the reason for "the main criticism and bad reputation" of Notes. He probably missed out on all the cool stuff, and just bitched about the one sucky feature. He wanted the same crappy experience he got with Outlook. He was used to all of its "quirks." He was resistant to change (like when I tried to switch from reading email in vm in emacs to using mutt... ugh... don't get me started!).
20 years is a long time. I missed out on the Notes bus, but I'm pretty excited about Google Waves.
Ohmigod. Really? Yes. I just looked it up. Its really file synchronization.
How is this in any way related to Google Waves? Why is Ray Douchebag (sp?) comparing a file synchronization utlility to an all-encompassing communications tool? Is it just because these are the latest products from Google and Microsoft? Should Apple start comparing the iPhone 3GS to Google waves?
I mean, on the one hand, Waves combines email, instant messaging, and file sharing, but it doesn't have an autofocus camera. Heh. Waves does have push notification, but I hear that's coming in iPhone 2.0. I mean 3.0 (tho I won't hold my breath!)
Microsoft's best attack on Waves is that its too complicated for developers? That its too hard? Wow. News flash: some developers at Google made it. And it exists (mostly). So is Ray saying that Microsoft engineers aren't as good as Google's?
Holy crap. Wasn't file synchronization solved like a decade ago when the Palm Pilot came out? Oh right. It wasn't, and all solutions to date still suck. I suspect Mesh will suck in its own ways, too (like that it won't work on Linux, or Mac or any non-Microsoft platforms.... but Waves will... Not that waves is a file synchronization tool or is in any real way comparable to Mesh in the first place, but either way, Ozzie loses).
That's college, and that's mostly students doing the grunt work, not professors. Why burn or scar yourself when you could have a student do it for you? There are plenty of students, so when one breaks, its easy to find a replacement.;)
Bad analogy. Google didn't take or renovate anything from Sprecht. He still has all the Android Data stuff that ever was (even though none of us seem to be able to find it). The situation in your analogy is definitely not OK, but it isn't really applicable to this.
The Google situation is more like this: You have a broken down car in your driveway that you call "Android Data". Google builds a spaceship at their headquarters, launches it with several partners, then names it "Android". You see pictures of the gleaming ship rocketing through space, then go out to your driveway and see your busted old pile of junk, and decide to sue Google for $94 million.
Google's Android has nothing to do with Sprecht's Android Data. One is a mobile platform, and the other is... uh... maybe an ISP? I doubt there is any confusion about the marks.
Even if the trademark is legit, $94 million is a huge amount of money. I'm curious to see how they came up with that figure? Did Android Data do anywhere near that amount of business before they closed shop 4 years ago?
If you really want to set your filters to read your email at that level of detail, it may be possible.
Spamassassin, Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and probably every other email with any sort of anti-spam already does "read" your email at that level of detail. That's actually a pretty trivial use of email filters. Its pretty much what email filters do.
And I'd have to say spammers do care about filters, or else they wouldn't keep updating their tactics to work around the filters.
"Ever" is a little strong. That's how I used to look for everything, but with all the phishing and squatter sites, that's no longer practical. Now I just use google to find everything.
I do have a bunch of domains in my mental cache (amazon, newegg, google, apple, redrocketrally, etc) that I know work and I only occasionally make typos. Most of the time I just habitually hit "Cmd-L Tab" and type the domain (sometimes even whole URL) into the google search on Safari instead of the address bar.
I bet if you type "Game Maker Technology magazine" into google, it will get you to it. I just typed "Game maker tech" and its the first result.
As long as you can get there, who really cares what the domain name is, much less the suffix. Google (and other search engines) and bookmarks are all that really matter anymore.
I think an even better comparison would be a car with a helicopter stapled to the trunk. That's not even right, since the car & helicopter are more analogous to the ipod and computer. This is more like everything you would put in your car has a 10:1 scale model of itself attached to it.
Its like every shirt in Arizona having a winter coat sewn to the back of it. Closets hold 1/10 as many clothes, but big closets are getting cheaper every day. The largest suitcases barely hold enough for a weekend trip. Everyone ends up dragging around winter coats like tails, even though they rarely ever need them.
My analogy is bad, but not as bad as this hybrid mp3 format. I suppose the format is OK for archival storage, but copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.
Now what if your car comes bundled with 3 steering wheels. The MS wheel comes attached to the steering column in front of the drivers seat, and the other two are in a compartment in the trunk. (The Firefox wheel can change colors and has a button that makes your headlights blink on and off. The Opera wheel is a little smaller, and just has a simple horn button.)
You can swap the steering wheels around, but whenever you get your car serviced they upgrade you to a new MS wheel installed on the column for free, and put your other wheel back in the compartment in the trunk (its part of the EULA... you just didn't read it).
I'm not convinced that bundling of third-party software leads to marketshare the same way that having IE as the default browser on Microsoft OSes does. In fact IE got its market share not with simple bundling, but by being the *only* browser on new installations of Windows, the same way Safari achieves marketshare on Macs.
I used to use Firefox/Mozilla exclusively on all of my computers. I'd even install it on my friends' and family's computers and convince them to use it, too. Back in the day, it was easy. On the Mac, it was the only viable option (Mozilla, Chimera, Firefox... all the same to me). IE was the default Mac browser, and it totally sucked, so I'd download Firefox immediately. On Windows, IE was a gaping security hole. Using IE was dangerous; switching to Firefox was an easy sell.
When Apple came out with Safari I held out for the first few versions, but lately Safari is good enough. After I upgraded to Leopard, it wasn't worth the effort to download Firefox and change my default browser on all of my computers. (Incidentally, my parents still use Firefox on their Macs because a long time ago I told them it was better, and that stuck with them. Inertia builds marketshare for Firefox, too).
If Windows included Opera and Firefox, but still had IE as the default browser, I don't think things would be much different. New users might fire up Opera and Firefox and think, "this is just like Internet Explorer. why bother?" I don't know that they'd necessarily delete it, but certainly it would just be more useless icons cluttering up the desktop. That could put Opera and Firefox at a disadvantage. When a new version is released, they'll think, "why should I upgrade this thing that's just cluttering my computer?"
If instead people learn about Firefox or hear about some feature that interest them, they'll invest (minimal) time and effort into downloading it and trying it out. Sure its still pretty much like Internet Explorer, but the effort involved is a much stronger tie than "oh, look. another icon on my desktop". And whatever feature caught their interest will make them more likely to stick with it. That leads to market share.
Bundling doesn't automatically lead to marketshare. (that would have been a much better quote;).
All we're trying to do here is silence the camera click. The rest of the phone functionality is somewhat irrelevant. If I need people to contact me, there's always vibrate, or I could use a different phone for talking.
Most (at least many) phones have provisions for firmware to be installed. It is usually used for carrier approved updates, but firmware is firmware. The phone doesn't know where it came from. iPhones have been jailbroken. HTC phones have had many unofficial firmware updates. Just because *you* can't personally do it, it doesn't mean it can't be done.
There are plenty of ways to extract a single frame from video. The phone is just the capture device. The video can be processed later on a computer.
There are add-on lenses for many phones that give wide-angle or telephoto capabilites. The lens attaches in front of the cameraphone lens. You can do the same thing by putting a telescope (or binoculars, or whatever you have handy) in front of your cameraphone. You have to play with the distance a little, but it works great. Though if you're far away using a telephoto lens, you are probably better off with a real camera with better optics than found in most cellphones.
Again this is all hypothetical, and an exercise in proving the law is idiotic. The point is, there are plenty of ways to silence a cell phone, even without a menu item.
Even without turning off the sound, I can silence the ringer on most cell phones by placing my thumb over the speaker holes. How do they really expect this to work?
A new Administration should give them some new material, instead of the same stale BS (really, how many times can you say "Bush is an idiot" before it isn't funny anymore?). Moving to quarterly publication should help concentrate the funny again. They'll be able to drop 2/3 of the chaff and pack 3-issues worth of the good stuff into one.
Imagine if Guns and Roses had only produced one CD for "Use Your Illusion" instead of diluting the album to make a box set. Sometimes less is more.
Isn't that sort of like extortion? Like when the gangsters get shop owners to pay them "protection" money, so they won't have to come back and wreck the place later.
I'm pretty sure I scratched "Call of Duty 4" when I tipped the console up to check the connections on the back. The audio/video wasn't coming up on the TV, and you can't really "debug" that with the console turned off.
Had I known about this problem, I suppose I would have removed the disc and done the check on the xbox dashboard.
I have yet to have a game disc get scratched inside my PS2 or my Wii. I've moved the Wii around while playing, and I know I've moved the slimline PS2 (I'm pretty sure I've even accidentally pulled it off the table without seriously damaging anything). I don't know how they fare in an earthquake, but as you said that's not my primary concern. However, it takes far less than an earthquake to get an Xbox360 to destroy a game disc.
When I got my xbox360 (before this problem was widely known), I had taken it to a friend's house and moved it somehow (I don't exactly recall...maybe reorienting, maybe just tipping it to doublecheck connections) and it scratch the disc to the point that it wouldn't play anymore. This was the first game I had, within days of getting the system, and it pretty much cut a circular groove into the CD. It wasn't a minor scratch; it was gouged. I could see and feel the scratch. And I was annoyed as hell that I couldn't play anymore until I went to the store and exchanged the "broken" game disc.
Toys R Us was very nice about exchanging the disc. If I had been out another $50 to replace a game I had only played once, I would be much less sympathetic to Microsoft's problem, and probably would have returned the console instead (and bought a PS3).
Now that I know about the problem, I'm super careful about it. The xbox360 is certainly more prone to scratching than any other device I've ever had. I've never seen a scratch in a disc like the one it made. If Microsoft knew about it (they certainly know now!), I would hope they've fixed it in the current builds, because its a serious design flaw.
Don't worry. Global warming is dramatically increasing the number of ice floes breaking off the poles. There's plenty of room for all of you. Or is it "us"?
Holy crap you're right! My parents have a Mighty Mouse on their iMac. I've been trying to right click with it for 2 weeks, with no luck, and its been driving me nuts. I just went upstairs and tried by lifting my index finger when I clicked, and voila: context menu! My reaction: "stupidest mouse ever."
This has to be the worst human interface design ever. This goes way beyond non-intuitive and is in face counter-intuitive. Why should I have to lift one finger to press with another? Point-and-click is now point-lift-and-click? Its going to take forever to explain this to my mom!
Seriously, who comes up with this crap? And how does it ever get past the testing stages? Does Apple deliberately retard their accessories in order to support a strong third party market?
I wish Apple would stop sacrificing function for obscure coolness. "Check it out, my Apple mouse can tell where my fingers are! Sure its a pain in the ass to use it, but IT CAN TELL WHERE MY FINGERS ARE!!!"
"Yeah? Well my Logitech mouse works right." Suck it, Steve.
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If you base your development decisions on how many people won't buy your app, then you're doing it wrong.
Also a "lost sale" is actually more of a missed opportunity than any actual loss. When a pirate installs software, that doesn't take any money out of your pocket, it just doesn't put any in. That is not a loss.
If your application is tied to a backend, then you will incur more traffic to that site than you have paid users. However, if a 10-25% increase in traffic is eating all of your profits, then you're doing that wrong, too. You should probably rethink your business model. Maybe it should be charging some sort of in-app service fee to cover those recurring costs. I would guess those payments would be more difficult to pirate than the initial software install.
No one thinks pirates should get away without paying. Not even the pirates (ok, maybe some of them do, but most of them know exactly what they are doing). Pirates know they are taking risks when they board ships to steal cargo. They know that there's a chance the occupants of the ship could fight back, but they are willing to take the risk to get the booty. The problem on the iPhone as yet is that there is no actual risk involved, only upside. "Piracy" on the iPhone is apparently just too easy.
Well you were the one who originally called it a "newspaper", instead of an "escort service flier". Perhaps its not a disguise, but rather just a misrepresentation. A newspaper is more about the content, than the physical medium, though it is their adherence to the physical medium that is leading them to inevitable failure.
In Portland, and several other cities, a new publication has popped up recently called "Busted". Its printed on news-stock, and is simply page after page of mugshots along with the person's name and the offense they were arrested for. I've bought it a couple of times for $1 an issue, which is more than I've spent on actual newspapers in the last decade. Its entertaining, trying to guess the crime based on the picture, or seeing common facial traits of people arrested for possession of meth, or picking out which DUIs were still totally wasted when their picture was taken, etc.
I wouldn't call "Busted" a newspaper, but its certainly a niche publication that can survive on printed media, or at least long enough to make a quick buck before the novelty wears off. As more newspapers fail, I suspect more of these sorts of publications (Busted, Dutch escort fliers, etc) to pop up. A newspaper could offset its losses from reduced circulation by printing these small-batch publications in their off-hours. "Busted" is maybe 10 sheets, and sells for about double the price of the local Portland newspaper, which has several sections each day. The small publications are making way more money per issue, using far fewer resources, than the long-standing, "respected" publications. Newspapers, much like the horse-and-buggy and compact discs, have a limited future. By repurposing their brick-and-morter to fulfill niche markets, a small number of them can "hang on". Even vinyl records survive today; in the hands of a skilled DJ (and for douchebag "audiophiles" ;) there is no substitute.
So while your "newspaper targetting 25-35 year old males" might be thriving, it is probably not thriving on the news. News delivery is much better served by other sources.
Having said that, F News Corp. I usually turn to online editions of British news outlets for real stories. American "journalism" has gone severely downhill, particularly as the Internet has taken over. While a newspaper is no longer relevant for time-sensitive stories, the ability to disseminate information instantaneously over the Internet has greatly reduced the quality of information. In the salad days of print media, when you broke a story, your article beat the competition by at least a day. Scoop enough stories, and your paper would get a reputation for getting the news first, and circulation would increase.
If you "scoop" a story on the Internet, you might beat your competition by a matter of seconds, or maybe minutes. The old metric of getting the news first is not as important as it used to be. Quality should be more important, but the news outlets do not seem to have made that shift. By adhering to the old metrics of being first, news outlets are in a constant state of urgency, publishing rushed articles as quickly a possible. CNN, Fox, Yahoo, MSNBC, local newspaper websites, etc, all post the same AP, Reuters, and celebrity publicist news feeds verbatim as soon as they hit the wire. Instead of journalists researching information, checking facts and writing responsible articles, we simply have reporters and automated systems relaying the raw information as quickly as they possibly can without any regard for quality, accuracy or truth.
We end up with situations like the "Balloon Boy", where 15 minutes of fact checking could have saved the whole world from weeks of annoyance over what ended up as nothing. Instead we had all of the media outlets trying to get the first interviews with the family, and filling days of airtime with the same meaningless video loops, on the off chance that something might eventually happen so they could report it first. However every news outlet had report
There's not much difference between a generic 42" LCD TV vs a Samsung 42" LCD TV in the game. Now if it was "Samsungs Eco-friendly*, Advanced LCD TV Technology, delivering stunning picture quality, with the Touch of Color Design", it would be an entirely different matter.
I don't mind subtle and tasteful. I don't like billboards for the sake of billboards.
And I hate all those stupid stickers all over cameras detailing every "cool" feature. If video games get plastered like that with in-game ads, it will suck.
Bingo! Realism isn't always best for gaming.
I think ads detract from the real world. Ads in a game might suck in a realistic way, but they still suck.
Not to mention that he was probably only using Notes for email, which you claim is the reason for "the main criticism and bad reputation" of Notes. He probably missed out on all the cool stuff, and just bitched about the one sucky feature. He wanted the same crappy experience he got with Outlook. He was used to all of its "quirks." He was resistant to change (like when I tried to switch from reading email in vm in emacs to using mutt... ugh... don't get me started!).
20 years is a long time. I missed out on the Notes bus, but I'm pretty excited about Google Waves.
Ohmigod. Really? Yes. I just looked it up. Its really file synchronization.
How is this in any way related to Google Waves? Why is Ray Douchebag (sp?) comparing a file synchronization utlility to an all-encompassing communications tool? Is it just because these are the latest products from Google and Microsoft? Should Apple start comparing the iPhone 3GS to Google waves?
I mean, on the one hand, Waves combines email, instant messaging, and file sharing, but it doesn't have an autofocus camera. Heh. Waves does have push notification, but I hear that's coming in iPhone 2.0. I mean 3.0 (tho I won't hold my breath!)
Microsoft's best attack on Waves is that its too complicated for developers? That its too hard? Wow. News flash: some developers at Google made it. And it exists (mostly). So is Ray saying that Microsoft engineers aren't as good as Google's?
Holy crap. Wasn't file synchronization solved like a decade ago when the Palm Pilot came out? Oh right. It wasn't, and all solutions to date still suck. I suspect Mesh will suck in its own ways, too (like that it won't work on Linux, or Mac or any non-Microsoft platforms.... but Waves will... Not that waves is a file synchronization tool or is in any real way comparable to Mesh in the first place, but either way, Ozzie loses).
That's college, and that's mostly students doing the grunt work, not professors. Why burn or scar yourself when you could have a student do it for you? There are plenty of students, so when one breaks, its easy to find a replacement. ;)
Bad analogy. Google didn't take or renovate anything from Sprecht. He still has all the Android Data stuff that ever was (even though none of us seem to be able to find it). The situation in your analogy is definitely not OK, but it isn't really applicable to this.
The Google situation is more like this: You have a broken down car in your driveway that you call "Android Data". Google builds a spaceship at their headquarters, launches it with several partners, then names it "Android". You see pictures of the gleaming ship rocketing through space, then go out to your driveway and see your busted old pile of junk, and decide to sue Google for $94 million.
Google's Android has nothing to do with Sprecht's Android Data. One is a mobile platform, and the other is... uh... maybe an ISP? I doubt there is any confusion about the marks.
Even if the trademark is legit, $94 million is a huge amount of money. I'm curious to see how they came up with that figure? Did Android Data do anywhere near that amount of business before they closed shop 4 years ago?
If you really want to set your filters to read your email at that level of detail, it may be possible.
Spamassassin, Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and probably every other email with any sort of anti-spam already does "read" your email at that level of detail. That's actually a pretty trivial use of email filters. Its pretty much what email filters do.
And I'd have to say spammers do care about filters, or else they wouldn't keep updating their tactics to work around the filters.
That's why I always surf in Courier ;)
"Ever" is a little strong. That's how I used to look for everything, but with all the phishing and squatter sites, that's no longer practical. Now I just use google to find everything.
I do have a bunch of domains in my mental cache (amazon, newegg, google, apple, redrocketrally, etc) that I know work and I only occasionally make typos. Most of the time I just habitually hit "Cmd-L Tab" and type the domain (sometimes even whole URL) into the google search on Safari instead of the address bar.
I bet if you type "Game Maker Technology magazine" into google, it will get you to it. I just typed "Game maker tech" and its the first result.
As long as you can get there, who really cares what the domain name is, much less the suffix. Google (and other search engines) and bookmarks are all that really matter anymore.
I think an even better comparison would be a car with a helicopter stapled to the trunk. That's not even right, since the car & helicopter are more analogous to the ipod and computer. This is more like everything you would put in your car has a 10:1 scale model of itself attached to it.
Its like every shirt in Arizona having a winter coat sewn to the back of it. Closets hold 1/10 as many clothes, but big closets are getting cheaper every day. The largest suitcases barely hold enough for a weekend trip. Everyone ends up dragging around winter coats like tails, even though they rarely ever need them.
My analogy is bad, but not as bad as this hybrid mp3 format. I suppose the format is OK for archival storage, but copying the huge files to a portable device with limited space is just stupid.
Love it.
Now what if your car comes bundled with 3 steering wheels. The MS wheel comes attached to the steering column in front of the drivers seat, and the other two are in a compartment in the trunk. (The Firefox wheel can change colors and has a button that makes your headlights blink on and off. The Opera wheel is a little smaller, and just has a simple horn button.)
You can swap the steering wheels around, but whenever you get your car serviced they upgrade you to a new MS wheel installed on the column for free, and put your other wheel back in the compartment in the trunk (its part of the EULA... you just didn't read it).
Would you use those other wheels?
I'm not convinced that bundling of third-party software leads to marketshare the same way that having IE as the default browser on Microsoft OSes does. In fact IE got its market share not with simple bundling, but by being the *only* browser on new installations of Windows, the same way Safari achieves marketshare on Macs.
I used to use Firefox/Mozilla exclusively on all of my computers. I'd even install it on my friends' and family's computers and convince them to use it, too. Back in the day, it was easy. On the Mac, it was the only viable option (Mozilla, Chimera, Firefox... all the same to me). IE was the default Mac browser, and it totally sucked, so I'd download Firefox immediately. On Windows, IE was a gaping security hole. Using IE was dangerous; switching to Firefox was an easy sell.
When Apple came out with Safari I held out for the first few versions, but lately Safari is good enough. After I upgraded to Leopard, it wasn't worth the effort to download Firefox and change my default browser on all of my computers. (Incidentally, my parents still use Firefox on their Macs because a long time ago I told them it was better, and that stuck with them. Inertia builds marketshare for Firefox, too).
If Windows included Opera and Firefox, but still had IE as the default browser, I don't think things would be much different. New users might fire up Opera and Firefox and think, "this is just like Internet Explorer. why bother?" I don't know that they'd necessarily delete it, but certainly it would just be more useless icons cluttering up the desktop. That could put Opera and Firefox at a disadvantage. When a new version is released, they'll think, "why should I upgrade this thing that's just cluttering my computer?"
If instead people learn about Firefox or hear about some feature that interest them, they'll invest (minimal) time and effort into downloading it and trying it out. Sure its still pretty much like Internet Explorer, but the effort involved is a much stronger tie than "oh, look. another icon on my desktop". And whatever feature caught their interest will make them more likely to stick with it. That leads to market share.
Bundling doesn't automatically lead to marketshare. (that would have been a much better quote ;).
Not gonna fisk, so match these up with your mind.
All we're trying to do here is silence the camera click. The rest of the phone functionality is somewhat irrelevant. If I need people to contact me, there's always vibrate, or I could use a different phone for talking.
Most (at least many) phones have provisions for firmware to be installed. It is usually used for carrier approved updates, but firmware is firmware. The phone doesn't know where it came from. iPhones have been jailbroken. HTC phones have had many unofficial firmware updates. Just because *you* can't personally do it, it doesn't mean it can't be done.
There are plenty of ways to extract a single frame from video. The phone is just the capture device. The video can be processed later on a computer.
There are add-on lenses for many phones that give wide-angle or telephoto capabilites. The lens attaches in front of the cameraphone lens. You can do the same thing by putting a telescope (or binoculars, or whatever you have handy) in front of your cameraphone. You have to play with the distance a little, but it works great. Though if you're far away using a telephoto lens, you are probably better off with a real camera with better optics than found in most cellphones.
Again this is all hypothetical, and an exercise in proving the law is idiotic. The point is, there are plenty of ways to silence a cell phone, even without a menu item.
Even without turning off the sound, I can silence the ringer on most cell phones by placing my thumb over the speaker holes. How do they really expect this to work?
A new Administration should give them some new material, instead of the same stale BS (really, how many times can you say "Bush is an idiot" before it isn't funny anymore?). Moving to quarterly publication should help concentrate the funny again. They'll be able to drop 2/3 of the chaff and pack 3-issues worth of the good stuff into one.
Imagine if Guns and Roses had only produced one CD for "Use Your Illusion" instead of diluting the album to make a box set. Sometimes less is more.
You won't be able to tear a page out of your laptop when you realize there's no toilet paper. Sometimes print media has an advantage. ;)
Isn't that sort of like extortion? Like when the gangsters get shop owners to pay them "protection" money, so they won't have to come back and wreck the place later.
I'm pretty sure I scratched "Call of Duty 4" when I tipped the console up to check the connections on the back. The audio/video wasn't coming up on the TV, and you can't really "debug" that with the console turned off.
Had I known about this problem, I suppose I would have removed the disc and done the check on the xbox dashboard.
I have yet to have a game disc get scratched inside my PS2 or my Wii. I've moved the Wii around while playing, and I know I've moved the slimline PS2 (I'm pretty sure I've even accidentally pulled it off the table without seriously damaging anything). I don't know how they fare in an earthquake, but as you said that's not my primary concern. However, it takes far less than an earthquake to get an Xbox360 to destroy a game disc.
When I got my xbox360 (before this problem was widely known), I had taken it to a friend's house and moved it somehow (I don't exactly recall.. .maybe reorienting, maybe just tipping it to doublecheck connections) and it scratch the disc to the point that it wouldn't play anymore. This was the first game I had, within days of getting the system, and it pretty much cut a circular groove into the CD. It wasn't a minor scratch; it was gouged. I could see and feel the scratch. And I was annoyed as hell that I couldn't play anymore until I went to the store and exchanged the "broken" game disc.
Toys R Us was very nice about exchanging the disc. If I had been out another $50 to replace a game I had only played once, I would be much less sympathetic to Microsoft's problem, and probably would have returned the console instead (and bought a PS3).
Now that I know about the problem, I'm super careful about it. The xbox360 is certainly more prone to scratching than any other device I've ever had. I've never seen a scratch in a disc like the one it made. If Microsoft knew about it (they certainly know now!), I would hope they've fixed it in the current builds, because its a serious design flaw.
Don't worry. Global warming is dramatically increasing the number of ice floes breaking off the poles. There's plenty of room for all of you. Or is it "us"?
Holy crap you're right! My parents have a Mighty Mouse on their iMac. I've been trying to right click with it for 2 weeks, with no luck, and its been driving me nuts. I just went upstairs and tried by lifting my index finger when I clicked, and voila: context menu! My reaction: "stupidest mouse ever."
This has to be the worst human interface design ever. This goes way beyond non-intuitive and is in face counter-intuitive. Why should I have to lift one finger to press with another? Point-and-click is now point-lift-and-click? Its going to take forever to explain this to my mom!
Seriously, who comes up with this crap? And how does it ever get past the testing stages? Does Apple deliberately retard their accessories in order to support a strong third party market?
I wish Apple would stop sacrificing function for obscure coolness. "Check it out, my Apple mouse can tell where my fingers are! Sure its a pain in the ass to use it, but IT CAN TELL WHERE MY FINGERS ARE!!!"
"Yeah? Well my Logitech mouse works right." Suck it, Steve.
If McDonalds doesn't ship anything, explain how the kangaroo meat gets to all of their restaurants? ;)
And, please. McDonalds has truckloads of reputation (not always good, but they have it).