Probably feels good to know that you can easily get ripped off because you have no knowledge about the hardware, so you don't know exactly what your paying for or getting.
Your parent made it pretty clear what he is paying for, a hassle-free experience so he can get something productive done instead of tinker and his Apple provides that. Jeesh.
You have a point in people getting ripped off by mechanics, but that doesn't always translate into computers (I suppose if the hard drive died, your parent poster could easily replace it himself). Also, knowing all about cars beyond the basics doesn't really do you a lot of good as models change year after year, and some systems like the transmission need their own expert -- what are you going to do? Diagnose yourself? With a car, if the repair estimate seems out of whack, take it to another garage and get a second opinion even if you have to tow it there, don't mention what the 1st mechanic told you (so you can compare diagnosis w/o influencing the answer), etc. Little car knowledge needed.
They didn't influence the industry with their force to USB. Sorry, I know that Mac users would like to think so but when you look at the history it is clear it made little to no difference. USB peripherals started launching almost right away because it was a good bus and Intel mandated it on all new motherboards.
USB, even after support for it was available in Windows, faced an adoption problem. Standard adoption is largely driven by network effects; the utility of a standard-compatible device comes from its ability to interoperate with other things compatible with the same standard. A standard is only useful to you if there are compatible devices and if there are a lot of them.
This creates a Catch-22 situation for adoption. If users lack USB ports or drivers, those users cannot buy a USB device. For vendors, that limits the market for USB devices and makes it more reasonable to develop peripherals for other ports (such as the once-ubiquitous serial and parallel ports, or the SCSI port if you also wanted to tap the Mac market).
Even if users would prefer a USB device, they would still be more willing to accept a non-USB device since it can be connected to their computer. Even if USB is a better, more desirable piece of technology, it may not be more marketable than the alternatives! The number of people who would buy a USB Webcam might be smaller than the number who would buy a serial Webcam -- and almost all of them could be persuaded to buy a serial one instead.
Enter the iMac.
The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.
The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.
Once adoption was foist onto this substantial segment of users, the technical merits of the technology won out easily. USB's technical superiority (for most peripherals) to the conglomeration of a half-dozen different port types was unambiguous.
That said, the analogy broke down far before that.
All analogies break down. If they didn't, it would be because all properties down the list would be equal meaning the situation is the exact same in every respect.
All that matters with an analogy is if it illustrates the point to the audience and whether it is truthful in doing so.
And then consider it mine to do with as I please. If people thought of internet access like a rented apartment, they would recognize ISPs seeking revenue on the other end for the double dipping and theft for what it was. It would be like a landlord using your rented place as his storage area and requiring toll for any visitors.
Stop trying to make a 50 cents per user with everything else and be happy with my $20-50 per month. I stop frequenting other businesses that stop treating me less like a customer in my own right and more like a revenue stream to be exploited and maximized at all costs.
I know some people put up with this (buying the cheapest computers that have all manor or shitware on them) but I stopped that game long ago. Not worth my time.
I also drop any so-called friends that try to make me their lower step in any mlm scheme. It's all the same thinking and I want none of that.
It's the only semi-progressive tax I see just from treating people fairly all transactions at the same rate - meaning it will hit million dollar stock trades (at $6k) just as much as the guy buying a $100 piece of furniture ($0.60).
All other taxes I see are rather unprogressive. The poorest used the biggest amount of income for daily needs and so sale's tax hits them hardest. Fica is capped at 120k income (or something like that) - that's a staggering 15% of your income (and let's be honest here, if the employer is paying half, he's just figuring so much less from your pay and poor self-employed people pay the 15% all by themselves. Etc, etc, etc.
The only semi-progressive tax is income tax and even that is so riddled with loopholes that it's the middle and upper middle classes that get screwed, the rich can afford to pay for good advice on how to structure.
And since it's deemed $$$==free speech, the rich will always make sure politicians keep it this way. And I'm not talking about rich individuals necessarily, rich corps are the real culprits and since everyone does it, they somewhat owe it to their stockholders to do it as well.
And while it's nice that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett donate to charity, most of it goes to 3rd world countries which they do because it helps the most people per dollar, honestly a big chunk should have gone back to the country (people) that helped them build up in the first place.
But it also was the right time to sell because the Apple brand is riding high at the moment so interest overall is higher.
Collectibles/Antiques are like any other market, and interest fluctuates. I have seen things that used to fetch $100k go for as little as $3k now (for instance, the European Glass market really sunk once communism collapsed and the east opened up). This is not unusual.
Some people think the older something gets, the more it's worth but that's not always the case. Often there's a peak and then decline.
So you would like to continue the tradition of mining other country's best people for your own selfish benefit, while those other countries remain 3rd world because all their resource, including human, gets stripped? Good to know, thanks.
I and many of my friends had PLENTY of shitty lawyers on our side throughout our lives that we ended wishing we hadn't. Note: it wasn't whether we won or lost, but like all things, what value we got for our money.
Some will just hoover any cash out of you pockets while giving the most goddamn awful or self-serving (making sure they have continued work) advice known to man.
I seriously don't know why the car companies go after the diesel electric model trains use (not to be confused with hybrid, as the engine isn't solely there to make electricity but has the added complexity of being coupled to the driveshaft along with the electrical motor).
It would fix the range issues and be more efficient (they wouldn't even need to use a diesel motor...) overall.
I know most green nuts who spring for something like this demand purity in their smug so even a tiny combustion motor is anathema to them, but imo, it's a lot better than lugging tons of batteries around plus the strip mining it would require.
It's a basic phone with oversize numbers on the screen, louder than normal speaker, and big buttons, generally geared towards the senior citizen market.
The only problem is the jitterbug isn't a model you can buy (itself based on some Samsung phone iirc) and use on any service but rather an overpriced prepaid service (and I'm not against prepaid).
However, you say how much money Patents cost the Government? It costs them nothing (well something but it's recuperated in taxes, fees, and corporate income tax) -- the real cost is societal.
However, corps are still under the dream that China will play nice and all that, and they'll get into that huge market. The truth is, countries don't follow IP laws until it is in their interest to do so (America did the same in her early history) and that means when China is ready to follow IP laws, it's only because they'll be so invested and huge that they'll crush us in our own game.
With porn, it is almost entirely a 'black and white' situation -- far more so than even mainstream media, where a huge portion would be, at best, lost rentals. If an average person decides to not download a specific porn title, would they proceed to: a) walk to their local porn shop and purchase that movie, or b) download a different pornographic movie/image (such as a non-studio 'production')? I'd almost be willing to stake my life on 'b' being true the vast majority of the time.
Okay, let's take a different situation. Let's say you are an electrical customer and you decide to shower twice a day and so have that many changes of clothing - meaning twice as many loads in both the washer and the dryer as before. Will your single lifestlye choice result in a new power plant being built? Likely not. But what is 10 million people follow suit in similiar energy sucking choices? Maybe so, then.
It's not an analogy, I'm just trying to illustrate cumulative effects.
It's unlikely that most people are searching for any specific porn title. It's not the nature of this beast, like most movie genres. But the free sharing/uploading/downloading of porn probably has a very real effect on consumers.
Maybe they wouldn't have gone into the store to buy it, but perhaps if they couldn't find the quantity they wanted freely online, they would have to take out a subscription to a site that licensed the works. And in the end, every producer is hit, because subscriptions are down, and the value in licensing every work out there goes down cumulatively as well. I'm sure Hotel PPV is suffering the same way among the younger, computer savvy crowd.
Can we say that not every download is a loss of sale, but some losses of sale can be attributed to downloading?
Just because the RIAA/MPAA presents cases in black and white, doesn't mean we have to. It's harder to make them look ridiculous with their huge fines if we're not grounded in reality either and pretend d/l music/movies is so good that it helps children in Africa heal from AIDS and prolongs unicorn marriages.
Maybe then it would help get saner copyright laws that isn't tilted towards corporate insanity.
Think of Avatar, but as a video game (you don't watch the protagonist, you are the protagonist). That's where games are heading and will overtake movies. The holodeck.
I'm surprised they even let you loan out the whole book and not just 1/2 of it, or more likely, the first chapter. Something just slightly longer than Amazon's preview...
One other thing to remember from that project. My boss was the one that wrote the 30k LoC monstrosity. The week after I showed her the new Unix version, I got downsized out the door. People HATE it when you show them up...
Not knowing your situation, it's just possible you made her look bad to her superiors as her 30k line program probably was an investment of money on the company' part and now seemed to be a waste of money. Perhaps by taking a bit longer and somehow crediting your boss for the inspiration, you could have saved your job.
It may sound like brownnosing and dishonesty, and that her superiors would like the honesty, but from a boss's perspective, if you aren't willing to mutually scratch the last bosses back, what is the likelihood you'll do it with the next boss?
Slashdot Mirror
Your parent made it pretty clear what he is paying for, a hassle-free experience so he can get something productive done instead of tinker and his Apple provides that. Jeesh.
You have a point in people getting ripped off by mechanics, but that doesn't always translate into computers (I suppose if the hard drive died, your parent poster could easily replace it himself). Also, knowing all about cars beyond the basics doesn't really do you a lot of good as models change year after year, and some systems like the transmission need their own expert -- what are you going to do? Diagnose yourself? With a car, if the repair estimate seems out of whack, take it to another garage and get a second opinion even if you have to tow it there, don't mention what the 1st mechanic told you (so you can compare diagnosis w/o influencing the answer), etc. Little car knowledge needed.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html
All analogies break down. If they didn't, it would be because all properties down the list would be equal meaning the situation is the exact same in every respect.
All that matters with an analogy is if it illustrates the point to the audience and whether it is truthful in doing so.
And then consider it mine to do with as I please. If people thought of internet access like a rented apartment, they would recognize ISPs seeking revenue on the other end for the double dipping and theft for what it was. It would be like a landlord using your rented place as his storage area and requiring toll for any visitors.
Stop trying to make a 50 cents per user with everything else and be happy with my $20-50 per month. I stop frequenting other businesses that stop treating me less like a customer in my own right and more like a revenue stream to be exploited and maximized at all costs.
I know some people put up with this (buying the cheapest computers that have all manor or shitware on them) but I stopped that game long ago. Not worth my time.
I also drop any so-called friends that try to make me their lower step in any mlm scheme. It's all the same thinking and I want none of that.
Why? FedEx apparently allows certain radioactive material if packed correctly:
Look on Page 6 here (may be other pages of interest):
http://images.fedex.com/us/services/pdf/HazmatShippingGuide.pdf
Apt Tax.
http://www.apttax.com/
It's the only semi-progressive tax I see just from treating people fairly all transactions at the same rate - meaning it will hit million dollar stock trades (at $6k) just as much as the guy buying a $100 piece of furniture ($0.60).
All other taxes I see are rather unprogressive. The poorest used the biggest amount of income for daily needs and so sale's tax hits them hardest. Fica is capped at 120k income (or something like that) - that's a staggering 15% of your income (and let's be honest here, if the employer is paying half, he's just figuring so much less from your pay and poor self-employed people pay the 15% all by themselves. Etc, etc, etc.
The only semi-progressive tax is income tax and even that is so riddled with loopholes that it's the middle and upper middle classes that get screwed, the rich can afford to pay for good advice on how to structure.
And since it's deemed $$$==free speech, the rich will always make sure politicians keep it this way. And I'm not talking about rich individuals necessarily, rich corps are the real culprits and since everyone does it, they somewhat owe it to their stockholders to do it as well.
And while it's nice that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett donate to charity, most of it goes to 3rd world countries which they do because it helps the most people per dollar, honestly a big chunk should have gone back to the country (people) that helped them build up in the first place.
And Linux is Free only if your time is worth nothing.
But it also was the right time to sell because the Apple brand is riding high at the moment so interest overall is higher.
Collectibles/Antiques are like any other market, and interest fluctuates. I have seen things that used to fetch $100k go for as little as $3k now (for instance, the European Glass market really sunk once communism collapsed and the east opened up). This is not unusual.
Some people think the older something gets, the more it's worth but that's not always the case. Often there's a peak and then decline.
So you would like to continue the tradition of mining other country's best people for your own selfish benefit, while those other countries remain 3rd world because all their resource, including human, gets stripped? Good to know, thanks.
I and many of my friends had PLENTY of shitty lawyers on our side throughout our lives that we ended wishing we hadn't. Note: it wasn't whether we won or lost, but like all things, what value we got for our money.
Some will just hoover any cash out of you pockets while giving the most goddamn awful or self-serving (making sure they have continued work) advice known to man.
I seriously don't know why the car companies go after the diesel electric model trains use (not to be confused with hybrid, as the engine isn't solely there to make electricity but has the added complexity of being coupled to the driveshaft along with the electrical motor).
It would fix the range issues and be more efficient (they wouldn't even need to use a diesel motor...) overall.
I know most green nuts who spring for something like this demand purity in their smug so even a tiny combustion motor is anathema to them, but imo, it's a lot better than lugging tons of batteries around plus the strip mining it would require.
A jitterbug cell phone is what they should have been shooting for:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/2045/jitterbugcellphone.jpg
It's a basic phone with oversize numbers on the screen, louder than normal speaker, and big buttons, generally geared towards the senior citizen market.
The only problem is the jitterbug isn't a model you can buy (itself based on some Samsung phone iirc) and use on any service but rather an overpriced prepaid service (and I'm not against prepaid).
Against Intellectual Property by Boldrin and Leving is a good book:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/intellectual.htm
However, you say how much money Patents cost the Government? It costs them nothing (well something but it's recuperated in taxes, fees, and corporate income tax) -- the real cost is societal.
However, corps are still under the dream that China will play nice and all that, and they'll get into that huge market. The truth is, countries don't follow IP laws until it is in their interest to do so (America did the same in her early history) and that means when China is ready to follow IP laws, it's only because they'll be so invested and huge that they'll crush us in our own game.
Duh. Obviously to run Crysis.
We no longer live in the days of Babelfish being the only game in town. Google Translate does a passable (but far from perfect) job:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2FNeuer-Personalausweis-AusweisApp-mit-Luecken-2-Update-1133376.html
Maybe the are:
-about to start a PR campaign and want to make sure the main catchphrase can be owned
-coming out with a new DK game
I don't know. Most times I see things like this and think the company lawyers are just finding ways to rack up hours.
Let's say very little was out there freely available, would your habits change in some way? Whether it's buy, PPV, or a subscription website?
Okay, let's take a different situation. Let's say you are an electrical customer and you decide to shower twice a day and so have that many changes of clothing - meaning twice as many loads in both the washer and the dryer as before. Will your single lifestlye choice result in a new power plant being built? Likely not. But what is 10 million people follow suit in similiar energy sucking choices? Maybe so, then.
It's not an analogy, I'm just trying to illustrate cumulative effects.
It's unlikely that most people are searching for any specific porn title. It's not the nature of this beast, like most movie genres. But the free sharing/uploading/downloading of porn probably has a very real effect on consumers.
Maybe they wouldn't have gone into the store to buy it, but perhaps if they couldn't find the quantity they wanted freely online, they would have to take out a subscription to a site that licensed the works. And in the end, every producer is hit, because subscriptions are down, and the value in licensing every work out there goes down cumulatively as well. I'm sure Hotel PPV is suffering the same way among the younger, computer savvy crowd.
Can we say that not every download is a loss of sale, but some losses of sale can be attributed to downloading?
Just because the RIAA/MPAA presents cases in black and white, doesn't mean we have to. It's harder to make them look ridiculous with their huge fines if we're not grounded in reality either and pretend d/l music/movies is so good that it helps children in Africa heal from AIDS and prolongs unicorn marriages.
Maybe then it would help get saner copyright laws that isn't tilted towards corporate insanity.
Think of Avatar, but as a video game (you don't watch the protagonist, you are the protagonist). That's where games are heading and will overtake movies. The holodeck.
http://www.foogazi.com/2008/01/25/delta-airlines-runs-linux/
Delta runs linux.
I use a plain old MS comfort curve 2000:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Comfort-Curve-Keyboard-B2L-00002/dp/B0009ZBRS0
Cheap, and negative slop if you want one too iirc, via flop tabs.
Dvorak too. Neo is supposed to be even better (in german, but can't imagine english is too different):
http://pebbles.schattenlauf.de/layout/index_us.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Neo
Ah, well I guess you made out in the end anyway. I try to treat my bosses well and got burned a few times anyway.
I'm surprised they even let you loan out the whole book and not just 1/2 of it, or more likely, the first chapter. Something just slightly longer than Amazon's preview...
Not knowing your situation, it's just possible you made her look bad to her superiors as her 30k line program probably was an investment of money on the company' part and now seemed to be a waste of money. Perhaps by taking a bit longer and somehow crediting your boss for the inspiration, you could have saved your job.
It may sound like brownnosing and dishonesty, and that her superiors would like the honesty, but from a boss's perspective, if you aren't willing to mutually scratch the last bosses back, what is the likelihood you'll do it with the next boss?