Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
My Jitterbug disagrees.
Since I not only still see the iPhone being tremendously successful, but have never even heard of the Jitterbug (or at least can't recall having heard of it), I'm going to have to say it, too, has failed to kill the iPhone.
My wife has a Mototola Z6c (I think that's the model, anyway) that's marketed as being a worldphone, because it does Verizon CDMA and GSM, with a slot for a SIM card. She uses it in China, and it works great.
But it would be greater if we didn't have to specifically go looking for a special phone so she can use it in China and at home...
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
If Palm wants to do so, they're going to have to do everything the iPhone does and do it better. That means the interface and the integration, as well. The past decade of iPod dominance has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither a laundry list of features nor a very appealing price can compete with cool factor and a really nice user experience.
In Europe, some countries have adopted the 35-hour working week, which makes it illegal to employ a worker for longer than that. According to your argument, this is unfair...
Close. What's unfair here is if the companies based in 35-hour countries have to compete with products and services made in or delivered from countries without the 35-hour week without any tariffs, the amount of which would only have to be enough to make up for the difference in costs to the companies caused by these regulations.
Also, the average salary in some countries, like Switzerland, is higher than the U.S. ($66,000). According to your argument, this is unfair...
Not even close. The point is not demographics, it's regulations. There is, to my knowledge, no law stating that the Swiss must make an average of $66k/year. It's not even about salaries, directly; it's about costs to the companies in question.
Again, the point is that any country with lower levels of regulation, leading to lower costs to the companies, should, to ensure fair competition, have tariffs on goods and services sold from their country to countries with higher levels of such regulations sufficient to offset the difference in costs.
Personally, I think that a certain amount of such tariffs would be good, to ensure that you can't just ship your manufacturing jobs to the cheapest dirthole you can find and exploit the people there for labour. However, I don't know how far it should be taken. That's the kind of thing I prefer to leave up to economists.
How do you deal with the unsightly bulge the 3"x3"x1" dongle leaves in your laptop's case?;-)
If I had a desktop, I wouldn't care: I'd just leave it plugged into the back of the tower, or to the hub.
The point is, I don't want to have to get out the dongle, plug it into my laptop, have to worry about carrying the dongle when I move my laptop from place to place, then unplug the dongle and put it back in the bag every single day.
Ideally, it could pair with multiple computers, too, so I could use it on my home laptop *and* my work laptop (the trackball is mine).
Come on, you can make, and sell, 1 billion mice; how hard can it be to make a minor variant of the Cordless Optical TrackMan that uses Bluetooth instead of an RF dongle???
I can't imagine the market is smaller than for some of the weird niche mice I've seen out there...
If it is, in fact, a software patent (whether or not it's applicable to the iPhone, which seems unlikely), then from my understanding, it ought to be invalidated under Bilski no matter how many other patents are being "continued" by its claims.
Of course, if it's totally inapplicable in the case at hand, my guess would be the case will be thrown out well before the patent would have a chance of getting invalidated.
It would be very sad to see Spirit run out of power, but honestly, both the rovers have performed so far beyond their original expectations, it's astounding. I seem to recall they were originally meant for something like a two-month mission...four years ago.
So if we do lose Spirit soon, for my part, I think we can be satisfied with what it's already accomplished.
the RIAA/MPAA have government support for forcing ISPs to finger subscribers accused of illegal file sharing, and are even allowed to circumvent the courts to obtain private user info. this may be the interests of a powerful industry lobby, but it in no way serves public interest. meanwhile, clamping down on SPAM originating domestically does serve public interest, but the government has done little to combat spam, even protecting spammers to an extent with the CAN-SPAM act by preventing individuals from suing spammers, or states from enacting stricter anti-spam laws.
Don't tell us, tell your Senators and Representatives. We all know this stuff already...
They don't have to, because it's not a lie, much as I would love it to be. It's an unfortunate truth in 95%* of all businesses, at least here in the USA.
Any replacement for the status quo must not only be able to open and modify all the documents they already had, it must be able to open all documents people send to them, and save documents that they can send to others...and those others are all using Office, too. I think you can see where this leads.
I hate Microsoft as much as you do, but I am in a position where I have the opportunity to push alternatives to MS Office, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that any product that was not fully compatible with the Office file formats at least up to the present (future file formats aren't quite as much of an issue) will never even be considered. And my company is pretty typical in this respect (actually, it's small enough that it can be unusually flexible; I would say that in larger companies, in the hundreds or thousands of employees, suggestions of alternatives wouldn't even be entertained, period).
Dan Aris
* All statistics are for illustrative purposes only, and are pulled directly from my nether regions.
So the Office monopoly is in immediate danger as soon as some other office suit builds enough market share that "send your stuff in.doc because the other guy sure can handle that" doesn't work anymore, and you have to think about document formats.
Except that, invariably, the only office suites that have a snowball's chance in somewhere very hot (Hell having frozen over too many times lately) of actually achieving any market share of consequence are the ones that can read and write.doc as well or nearly as well as (or, sometimes, better than) MS Office.
No; what's needed isn't stuff that's incompatible with Microsoft's stuff. It's stuff that is interchangeable as far as file sharing goes, but clearly better in some way or other in terms of usability, features, or other user-experience metrics. Being free-as-in-beer helps a lot, too.
Once there are enough such products out there—not necessarily all competing with Office; Firefox and Thunderbird help, too, as does the Mac in general—you'll end up with a critical mass of people aware of alternatives, and then you can start introducing other alternatives that aren't API-compatible with Microsoft and actually have a chance.
The root of what the GP is saying is that 'true' communism is a utopia that is essentially impossible to achieve...and consequently you get repressive totalitarian dictators coming out of them.
Well, of course. All pure ideologies are impossible to achieve in this imperfect world. "True capitalism" would degenerate into something at least as bad if it were ever attempted. That's why what we have to do is start with what we have, and cherry-pick the best (and most adaptable) features from other ideologies to form an effective, efficient practical government/economy/culture.
And let's not forget the millions that have died at the hands of communism.
Please let's be clear here: I haven't ever heard of anyone who was killed by communism. (That would be like saying that everyone killed by US troops in World War II were killed by "capitalism"...) The millions you're talking about were killed by repressive totalitarian dictators using the name of "communism" to make themselves sound more palatable to the ordinary people. Their economic systems may have been partially communist-based, but their political systems certainly were basically your garden-variety dictatorship.
Anyone who holds up Stalin as an iron-clad reason why Communism is Evil doesn't actually understand what communism is.
So if I develop and sell copies of a party game for Windows and Mac OS X, will I find a large market of HTPC (home theater personal computing) enthusiasts and few competitors?
Few competitors? Probably. Large market? Not from what I've seen.
So far as I can tell, HTPCs are largely of interest to us geeks—and only accessible to geeks of greater-than-average income (or debt, depending on the level of financial good sense). I think they're gaining some traction, but by and large, if your average person is going to have something connected to their television besides a DVD/VCR, cable/satellite box, or Big 3 game console, it's going to be a cable/satellite-company provided DVR (which may simply double as the cable box), or a TiVo.
So why don't more HDTVs have a Windows PC or a Mac mini by them?
From where I sit, I see 3 main reasons:
Price. Most people have one computer, and it's a desktop, and they want to sit at it and use it like a computer. If they have a second computer, it's probably a laptop (or just their older desktop).
Ignorance. Most people don't even know that you can do something like that.
Lack of a compelling reason. Most people, even if they knew that you could do something like that, wouldn't care. As I said, they've got their desktop, and maybe their laptop; even if they have the cash to burn on another computer for the living room, what does it really get them? They can already play DVDs; they're not torrenting tons of shows; anything they do download, they're OK with watching on their computer screens.
Essentially, it just isn't worth it to most people to have a computer whose sole purpose is to be hooked up to their television. I'm sure that as convergence proceeds and prices drop (assuming this financial meltdown doesn't destroy civilization as we know it first), there will come a point at which the features are good enough, the price is low enough, and there's some killer app that finally drives sales of computers intended to be combination DVR/game machine/general-purpose living room computers. However, that time is still a ways away.
Now, going back to the original point, that's not to say that we won't start to see more casual/party games intended for HTPCs before they really take off among non-geeks. For independent developers, even though the geek market isn't large, it could still be large enough to support moderate-to-low-budget development. But it's still quite a gamble at this point, and I don't think that even many geeks are thinking of HTPCs as party gaming machines...which makes it a chicken-and-egg problem, like so many out there.
Consoles are good party gaming machines. PCs are serious gaming machines
Then which are good indie party gaming machines? Or ought "indie party gaming" not exist?
There's a big difference between what ought to be and what is.
Most people aren't going to have a computer set up in such a way that it's a good fit for party gaming. In general, the screen is small and the location is set up for 1 person to sit at it comfortably.
I would say that console gaming ought to be opened up much more to independent developers (as WiiWare is starting to, and, I think, XBLA, though I know much less about it), but with things as they (largely still) are, "indie party gaming" isn't a big genre.
Aie...for a moment, I read that as RuPerl, and had some horrible visions...
Dan Aris
Re:Just treat them like folders, and they will be
on
Email-only Providers?
·
· Score: 1
There is an inbox. You can put mail folders underneath it, or put them somewhere else.
If you're using Outlook, then yeah, its IMAP handling is a joke. We are slowly moving people to Thunderbird here, despite having been entirely Outlook in the past, precisely because of that. But once people have moved to Thunderbird, they have almost no problems with email.
GMail *does* have some of its own folders: under the [GMail] label, there are Drafts, Sent, Spam, etc. But you can just ignore those if you want: you can even set the client not to see them.
As long as the person setting up the client knows what they're doing (and following GMail's own recommendations for how to set up the client folders really helps in this regard), the label system does emulate folders exactly the way an email client already does.
There will always be people who don't want to switch, and blame every problem they come across on the new system—but that doesn't mean that the switch is a bad one, or that it shouldn't be done regardless of their complaints.
Dan Aris
Just treat them like folders, and they will be
on
Email-only Providers?
·
· Score: 1
I have 2 personal GMail accounts (one @gmail.com, one on a personal Google Apps account) and we recently migrated to Google Apps at my company, and I have had exactly 0 problems treating the "labels" like folders in Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird. So far as I can tell, the only difference is that one message can have multiple labels, and thus deleting it from a folder doesn't necessarily delete the message altogether, but I'm perfectly happy to live with that.
But of course, this notion is laughable, because the people in power aren't going to push for a reform that could remove them from power. They like the two party system, the less competition the better.
That's why I talk about campaign finance reform, generally. It's an issue that is already in the public consciousness, and most people agree that it's a good idea, more or less. I certainly support ideas such as those you advance, but they're much harder to get people to accept right now than campaign finance reform.
Once we get that, the other stuff will come easier.
If the Democrats and Republicans and all the PACs and 527s that surround them are forced to play by rules that are actually reasonable in terms of making sure that more money != more votes, that's when third parties will start to have a real chance of getting into elected office.
I'm a liberal Democrat who believes in my party, and in Obama, but I know that the best way to improve both the Democrats and the Republicans is to make there be some more choices out there.
One thing I noticed in the AfD comments that seems like a pretty good idea was to have any Wikipedia articles that get deleted be instead transwikied to Deletionpedia.
Naturally, that's not as good as not deleting them from Wikipedia in the first place...but it seems to me that at least it solves the problem of the work being lost entirely when the AfD finishes and the article is sent into the aether.
Slashdot Mirror
Aha, I see :-)
You win this round, it seems ;-)
Dan Aris
On the other hand, since my expectations are pretty damn low, I guess they shouldn't have too much trouble meeting them.
Aha, so you have discovered the secret to always being pleasantly surprised ;-)
Dan Aris
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
My Jitterbug disagrees.
Since I not only still see the iPhone being tremendously successful, but have never even heard of the Jitterbug (or at least can't recall having heard of it), I'm going to have to say it, too, has failed to kill the iPhone.
Dan Aris
My wife has a Mototola Z6c (I think that's the model, anyway) that's marketed as being a worldphone, because it does Verizon CDMA and GSM, with a slot for a SIM card. She uses it in China, and it works great.
But it would be greater if we didn't have to specifically go looking for a special phone so she can use it in China and at home...
Dan Aris
Uh... Who said anything about an iPhone killer?
The submitter.
Did you even read the first line of the summary?
Dan Aris
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
If Palm wants to do so, they're going to have to do everything the iPhone does and do it better. That means the interface and the integration, as well. The past decade of iPod dominance has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither a laundry list of features nor a very appealing price can compete with cool factor and a really nice user experience.
Dan Aris
In Europe, some countries have adopted the 35-hour working week, which makes it illegal to employ a worker for longer than that. According to your argument, this is unfair...
Close. What's unfair here is if the companies based in 35-hour countries have to compete with products and services made in or delivered from countries without the 35-hour week without any tariffs, the amount of which would only have to be enough to make up for the difference in costs to the companies caused by these regulations.
Also, the average salary in some countries, like Switzerland, is higher than the U.S. ($66,000). According to your argument, this is unfair...
Not even close. The point is not demographics, it's regulations. There is, to my knowledge, no law stating that the Swiss must make an average of $66k/year. It's not even about salaries, directly; it's about costs to the companies in question.
Again, the point is that any country with lower levels of regulation, leading to lower costs to the companies, should, to ensure fair competition, have tariffs on goods and services sold from their country to countries with higher levels of such regulations sufficient to offset the difference in costs.
Personally, I think that a certain amount of such tariffs would be good, to ensure that you can't just ship your manufacturing jobs to the cheapest dirthole you can find and exploit the people there for labour. However, I don't know how far it should be taken. That's the kind of thing I prefer to leave up to economists.
Dan Aris
How do you deal with the unsightly bulge the 3"x3"x1" dongle leaves in your laptop's case? ;-)
If I had a desktop, I wouldn't care: I'd just leave it plugged into the back of the tower, or to the hub.
The point is, I don't want to have to get out the dongle, plug it into my laptop, have to worry about carrying the dongle when I move my laptop from place to place, then unplug the dongle and put it back in the bag every single day.
Ideally, it could pair with multiple computers, too, so I could use it on my home laptop *and* my work laptop (the trackball is mine).
Dan Aris
Come on, you can make, and sell, 1 billion mice; how hard can it be to make a minor variant of the Cordless Optical TrackMan that uses Bluetooth instead of an RF dongle???
I can't imagine the market is smaller than for some of the weird niche mice I've seen out there...
Dan Aris
If it is, in fact, a software patent (whether or not it's applicable to the iPhone, which seems unlikely), then from my understanding, it ought to be invalidated under Bilski no matter how many other patents are being "continued" by its claims.
Of course, if it's totally inapplicable in the case at hand, my guess would be the case will be thrown out well before the patent would have a chance of getting invalidated.
Dan Aris
Let's hope this case is the first of many to be swiftly decided for throwing out the patent entirely based on In re Bilski.
Dan Aris
It would be very sad to see Spirit run out of power, but honestly, both the rovers have performed so far beyond their original expectations, it's astounding. I seem to recall they were originally meant for something like a two-month mission...four years ago.
So if we do lose Spirit soon, for my part, I think we can be satisfied with what it's already accomplished.
Dan Aris
the RIAA/MPAA have government support for forcing ISPs to finger subscribers accused of illegal file sharing, and are even allowed to circumvent the courts to obtain private user info. this may be the interests of a powerful industry lobby, but it in no way serves public interest. meanwhile, clamping down on SPAM originating domestically does serve public interest, but the government has done little to combat spam, even protecting spammers to an extent with the CAN-SPAM act by preventing individuals from suing spammers, or states from enacting stricter anti-spam laws.
Don't tell us, tell your Senators and Representatives. We all know this stuff already...
Dan Aris
How much does M$ pay for spreading that lie?
They don't have to, because it's not a lie, much as I would love it to be. It's an unfortunate truth in 95%* of all businesses, at least here in the USA.
Any replacement for the status quo must not only be able to open and modify all the documents they already had, it must be able to open all documents people send to them, and save documents that they can send to others...and those others are all using Office, too. I think you can see where this leads.
I hate Microsoft as much as you do, but I am in a position where I have the opportunity to push alternatives to MS Office, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that any product that was not fully compatible with the Office file formats at least up to the present (future file formats aren't quite as much of an issue) will never even be considered. And my company is pretty typical in this respect (actually, it's small enough that it can be unusually flexible; I would say that in larger companies, in the hundreds or thousands of employees, suggestions of alternatives wouldn't even be entertained, period).
Dan Aris
* All statistics are for illustrative purposes only, and are pulled directly from my nether regions.
So the Office monopoly is in immediate danger as soon as some other office suit builds enough market share that "send your stuff in .doc because the other guy sure can handle that" doesn't work anymore, and you have to think about document formats.
Except that, invariably, the only office suites that have a snowball's chance in somewhere very hot (Hell having frozen over too many times lately) of actually achieving any market share of consequence are the ones that can read and write .doc as well or nearly as well as (or, sometimes, better than) MS Office.
No; what's needed isn't stuff that's incompatible with Microsoft's stuff. It's stuff that is interchangeable as far as file sharing goes, but clearly better in some way or other in terms of usability, features, or other user-experience metrics. Being free-as-in-beer helps a lot, too.
Once there are enough such products out there—not necessarily all competing with Office; Firefox and Thunderbird help, too, as does the Mac in general—you'll end up with a critical mass of people aware of alternatives, and then you can start introducing other alternatives that aren't API-compatible with Microsoft and actually have a chance.
Dan Aris
The root of what the GP is saying is that 'true' communism is a utopia that is essentially impossible to achieve...and consequently you get repressive totalitarian dictators coming out of them.
Well, of course. All pure ideologies are impossible to achieve in this imperfect world. "True capitalism" would degenerate into something at least as bad if it were ever attempted. That's why what we have to do is start with what we have, and cherry-pick the best (and most adaptable) features from other ideologies to form an effective, efficient practical government/economy/culture.
Dan Aris
And let's not forget the millions that have died at the hands of communism.
Please let's be clear here: I haven't ever heard of anyone who was killed by communism. (That would be like saying that everyone killed by US troops in World War II were killed by "capitalism"...) The millions you're talking about were killed by repressive totalitarian dictators using the name of "communism" to make themselves sound more palatable to the ordinary people. Their economic systems may have been partially communist-based, but their political systems certainly were basically your garden-variety dictatorship.
Anyone who holds up Stalin as an iron-clad reason why Communism is Evil doesn't actually understand what communism is.
Dan Aris
So if I develop and sell copies of a party game for Windows and Mac OS X, will I find a large market of HTPC (home theater personal computing) enthusiasts and few competitors?
Few competitors? Probably. Large market? Not from what I've seen.
So far as I can tell, HTPCs are largely of interest to us geeks—and only accessible to geeks of greater-than-average income (or debt, depending on the level of financial good sense). I think they're gaining some traction, but by and large, if your average person is going to have something connected to their television besides a DVD/VCR, cable/satellite box, or Big 3 game console, it's going to be a cable/satellite-company provided DVR (which may simply double as the cable box), or a TiVo.
So why don't more HDTVs have a Windows PC or a Mac mini by them?
From where I sit, I see 3 main reasons:
Essentially, it just isn't worth it to most people to have a computer whose sole purpose is to be hooked up to their television. I'm sure that as convergence proceeds and prices drop (assuming this financial meltdown doesn't destroy civilization as we know it first), there will come a point at which the features are good enough, the price is low enough, and there's some killer app that finally drives sales of computers intended to be combination DVR/game machine/general-purpose living room computers. However, that time is still a ways away.
Now, going back to the original point, that's not to say that we won't start to see more casual/party games intended for HTPCs before they really take off among non-geeks. For independent developers, even though the geek market isn't large, it could still be large enough to support moderate-to-low-budget development. But it's still quite a gamble at this point, and I don't think that even many geeks are thinking of HTPCs as party gaming machines...which makes it a chicken-and-egg problem, like so many out there.
Dan Aris
Consoles are good party gaming machines. PCs are serious gaming machines
Then which are good indie party gaming machines? Or ought "indie party gaming" not exist?
There's a big difference between what ought to be and what is.
Most people aren't going to have a computer set up in such a way that it's a good fit for party gaming. In general, the screen is small and the location is set up for 1 person to sit at it comfortably.
I would say that console gaming ought to be opened up much more to independent developers (as WiiWare is starting to, and, I think, XBLA, though I know much less about it), but with things as they (largely still) are, "indie party gaming" isn't a big genre.
Dan Aris
R-Perl may fit your needs.
Aie...for a moment, I read that as RuPerl, and had some horrible visions...
Dan Aris
There is an inbox. You can put mail folders underneath it, or put them somewhere else.
If you're using Outlook, then yeah, its IMAP handling is a joke. We are slowly moving people to Thunderbird here, despite having been entirely Outlook in the past, precisely because of that. But once people have moved to Thunderbird, they have almost no problems with email.
GMail *does* have some of its own folders: under the [GMail] label, there are Drafts, Sent, Spam, etc. But you can just ignore those if you want: you can even set the client not to see them.
As long as the person setting up the client knows what they're doing (and following GMail's own recommendations for how to set up the client folders really helps in this regard), the label system does emulate folders exactly the way an email client already does.
There will always be people who don't want to switch, and blame every problem they come across on the new system—but that doesn't mean that the switch is a bad one, or that it shouldn't be done regardless of their complaints.
Dan Aris
I have 2 personal GMail accounts (one @gmail.com, one on a personal Google Apps account) and we recently migrated to Google Apps at my company, and I have had exactly 0 problems treating the "labels" like folders in Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird. So far as I can tell, the only difference is that one message can have multiple labels, and thus deleting it from a folder doesn't necessarily delete the message altogether, but I'm perfectly happy to live with that.
Try it. It's really not that problematic.
Dan Aris
But of course, this notion is laughable, because the people in power aren't going to push for a reform that could remove them from power. They like the two party system, the less competition the better.
That's why I talk about campaign finance reform, generally. It's an issue that is already in the public consciousness, and most people agree that it's a good idea, more or less. I certainly support ideas such as those you advance, but they're much harder to get people to accept right now than campaign finance reform.
Once we get that, the other stuff will come easier.
Dan Aris
...Support real campaign finance reform.
If the Democrats and Republicans and all the PACs and 527s that surround them are forced to play by rules that are actually reasonable in terms of making sure that more money != more votes, that's when third parties will start to have a real chance of getting into elected office.
I'm a liberal Democrat who believes in my party, and in Obama, but I know that the best way to improve both the Democrats and the Republicans is to make there be some more choices out there.
Dan Aris
One thing I noticed in the AfD comments that seems like a pretty good idea was to have any Wikipedia articles that get deleted be instead transwikied to Deletionpedia.
Naturally, that's not as good as not deleting them from Wikipedia in the first place...but it seems to me that at least it solves the problem of the work being lost entirely when the AfD finishes and the article is sent into the aether.
Dan Aris