I am sorry you had a bad experience with upgrades. I haven't, not in years. To address your points:
1. When a developer writes "WORKS_FOR_ME" && "WONT_FIX", what else do you expect them to do? Unless you invite them to your house and demonstrate the bug, or maybe give them a remote shell (assuming the problem, whatever it is, allows for a remote shell), they can't fix it. And you're not paying them to help, either.
2. I think you're digging for the lack of social skills problem. There are obnoxious, anti-social, and unhygienic people that use Windows and even among the people that use Mac OS X and iOS. Linux does not have a monopoly on technical weirdos. And a lot of the Linux discussion forums have hundreds of skilled and helpful volunteers. Did you try Linuxquestions.org? Linuxforums.org? The OpenSUSE forums? The Ubuntu forums?
3. What does the name matter? You can call it Toaster/Hamster/Linux when you install it, that doesn't change what it does. Yes there are some people that are fanatical about that. But not many - how many Slashdot discussions have people chiming in to correct a post for omitting the GNU/ in GNU/Linux?
4. Insisting that Linux is not ready for the desktop and can never be ready is a stretch, don't you think? I think it really is trolling. I'm sorry you had a stretch of bad luck with your installations.
5. I think if anything gets you labeled a troll, or a shill, is your criticism of the GPL. The freedom of the GPL is freedom to create, freedom to redistribute unmodified, and freedom to redistribute modified, and the freedom of the original developer to release their creation with the knowledge that no one can ever create a proprietary software product with it. The "freedom" to make a proprietary derivative goes against those other freedoms, and it would be paradoxical to include it.
Not bullshit. If you do business, you have to track finances, period. Your accounting department expenses are an inescapable cost.
Tracking software license compliance is an added cost. So you don't weigh software costs against the $0 cost of free software, you weigh software costs plus license management and compliance costs against the cost of free software. I understand the reality that many essential applications run poorly or not at all on Linux, there is a lot of division in the free software community, and many end users would rather saw off a limb than forego Microsoft Office. But I spent the last six years at a company with less than 20 employees, and for us managing Microsoft software licenses is a royal pain in the neck, and adds a lot more to our operating costs than the actual licenses themselves. Microsoft seems to have a corporate edict against user friendly license management, and it suits me fine - we get more done in less time with Debian on our servers, so the COO gave the go ahead for a gradual transition to Linux.
I'm sure a Fortune 500 company can hire a few employees whose entire job is license management, and the cost is statistically insignificant in the overall company budget. For small businesses, the cost really is significant.
No it isn't. As part of the bill, the insurance industry has to spend 80% of their revenue from premiums on patient care. If they spend less than 80% of their revenue from premiums on patient care, they are required to send rebate checks to their subscribers. That's definitely not a gigantic handout, it's a slap in the face. Some insurance companies are spending less than 65% of their revenue from premiums on patient care.
I have a relative that had a warehouse job, and developed what we think is Crohn's Disease. He didn't have health insurance, and could not get emergency room care because presenting with bloody diarrhea is not enough to get you treatment. If you're not in immanent danger, you get sent home. But bloody diarrhea made him too sick to work, so he was fired from his job. If he didn't have family that could take him in, what was he supposed to do?
My out of pocket costs for health insurance and copays for my family last year was $15,000. My employer paid another $6,000. How many American families can afford that? How many have jobs that would contribute $6k towards health insurance?
The Republicans won't attack EMTALA directly because it will push a few more of their adherents far enough to wake them up. But don't fucking tell me the party gives a shit about the middle class and the poor. They don't. If you don't have money, fucking die and stop bothering the oligarchy. That's the Republican motto. This isn't a talking point, it's reality. They oppose the health care reform because they're the party of the insurance industry executives, the pharmaceutical moguls, and the specialist physicians that charge $11,500 for a 90 minute verbal interview with a patient two weeks before spinal surgery (that affected another relative of mine who happened to be uninsured at the time).
You're assuming that all of the Democrats and the two Independents in the Senate who voted for the health care reform would also have voted for it if it included a public option. That's not guaranteed.
The health care reform is incredibly good - prevent insurers from blocking patients due to pre-existing conditions, prevent insurers from imposing lifetime benefit caps, prevent insurers from putting more than 20% of their revenue towards expenses other than patient care, prevent insurers from charging higher prices for any pre-existing condition other than smoking, make it easier to qualify for Medicaid, subsidize health insurance costs for individuals and families that earn too much for Medicaid but less than 400% of the poverty level, and eventually all preventative care and checkups will not carry copays. That's pretty damn far from a public option and pretty damn far from ideal (specifically, it does very little to address costs - I have an indigent relative that spent 24 hours in a hospital because of appendicitis, he got served a $39,000 bill). But it's a damn sight better than the Republican solution - fuck the people that can't pay, let them die.
I know the lesser of two evils argument is frustrating and unsatisfying. But if I'm going to choose between a roommate that steals my money and one that rapes my kids, I'm going to pick the thief every time. So I'm voting for Obama again. He's no better than Bush on civil liberties and foreign policy, but that doesn't mean he's the same as the party "Of the Oligarchy, By the Oligarchy, and For the Oligarchy", so I support him with a clear conscience.
But when a company that has the resources for testing and proper development still screws up, it makes me ten times as angry as when a loosely affiliated group of volunteers makes a mistake. So I'm left with a choice between being annoyed a few times per month at my Ubuntu desktop at home or frothing at the mouth and shouting obscenities at my Windows workstation at the office a few times per year.
And there are some things the open source community plainly does better - try to read the documentation for Microsoft's "Windows Azure" cloud offering and then read "OpenStack" or "OpenNebula" or app deployment platforms like "Heroku" - I tried to get a Windows Azure VM running just to play with it, and after the docs made my brains start leaking out my nose I gave up. I like having to reboot to apply software updates far less often. I like that the default file browser and user interface elements hang less often. And with respect to Macs, I like paying a lot less money.
Also, I think the Peter Principle applies to proprietary vendors as well as it does everywhere else, so I'm not sure what's unique about the open source community. At least here if a jackass runs a project he's not in charge of your chances at a higher salary.:)
But we've truly beaten this horse to death. I understand and respect your choice, good luck with your future Macs.
My point with the Vista and game examples is that the commercial vendors have a generally better end user experience, but they're still very far from perfect. I'm not asking TANSTAAFL to be violated, I'm just providing examples where big players made similar classes of errors to the little community-driven Linux distributions.
As for licenses and license management, I'm hoping nothing is done - because at least for me, high proprietary software costs and license frustration is what got me interested in free software in the first place. If the big name companies keep annoying users, maybe eventually there will be enough volunteers helping Fedora, or Mint, or OpenSuse plus Wine and device driver development that the user experience hits parity with Microsoft and Apple. I know it's a dream, but it's definitely the future I want.
I am most of the local developers, it's a very small company. In our case, we used Crystal Reports Application Server 9 for $650 per permanent server license in 2003. Last time we contacted whoever owns them now for an estimate, it was $15,000 per server per year. We replaced it with Jasper Reports, which is open source, and bought the add-on report server Jasper Server, which is not. Jasper Server's annual price tripled, so we dropped it and wrote our own report display and automated delivery web GUI. All of our research team used to have SPSS statistical software, that went up in price a lot so we've cut back from one copy per researcher to two for the entire company and do the rest of the statistical analysis with spreadsheets and SQL.
I've been using Ubuntu Linux without problems for two years - I know the Unity interface is tremendously unpopular, but I found it very easy to use.
I think you're overstating the quality of Microsoft and Apple products. I have friends who bought PCs with Vista that came bundled with a printer with no Vista-compatible device drivers. I know plenty of people who bought a Windows PC to play games without having a salesman explaining that the device they picked had a low tier graphics card and couldn't handle the games they bought with it. There are a number of old PC applications that run better on emulators than on Windows whatever. And at my job, I shouldn't need to take a Microsoft training seminar just so I can navigate the legalese related to server licensing - we run Ubuntu servers because the administration is damn near idiot proof (if I can figure it out, anyone can) and I don't need to spend 15% of my time managing licenses.
First, I think you and I have at least two goals that are at odds. I want to see more competition to drive down prices, and I want to see more adoption of free software because of both the competition it fosters and the fact that the biggest headaches of my day job is proprietary software. ( I don't object to paying a software license if the product works. I object to the fact that managing the licensing for my proprietary apps is a fucking nightmare, and I object to the fact that no less than five different proprietary programs we use at my company had their licensing costs increase by 10X in a five year period. We have a "free software only" policy for new tools going forward because anything else will blow the IT budget entirely.)
With respect to fragmentation versus choice, I think you have a good point. I think there is some choice, and that's good, but clearly the fragmentation is a serious problem. Likewise Google executives were stupid to think they could influence carriers to facilitate software updates.
With respect to Linux distributions, I've been using Linux since Slackware... 8, I think, not long after you since Slackware jumped a few versions. I've had excellent luck with reliability and stability for five years - no real problems, really. But you're right that hardware support sucks, and that plus the lack of flawless Windows app support are the reason Linux as it currently stands will never dominate the desktop. I think the quote for Linus Torvalds is taken out of context - he was bitching because OpenSUSE and most other versions of Linux maintain a default security policy oriented towards business servers, so you needed root access to change printer settings and a few other things that should not require user root privileges on a personal PC.
I think your iPad2 point is unfair - the iPad2 just dropped in price with the launch of the iPad3. For the months before the iPad3 launched, you could get a number of Android tablets on par with the iPad2 for a lower price. Likewise for phones.
It's an Apple marketing success to convince the general public that "lots of choices" should be stated in media articles as "fragmentation". Android has phones and tablets far cheaper than any iOS device, with more options for peripherals, more user interface options, etc... and it's been spun into a problem instead of an advantage.
In terms of money, Android is a serious investment in Google's long term future. Advertising revenue is Google's lifeblood, and smart phones offer more lucrative targeted advertising - instead of showing a user a Walmart ad when they're shopping for things online, you show them an ad for the Walmart two blocks away when they just did a search for nearby stores. Walmart and everyone else will pay more money per ad under those circumstances. In ten years there will be two billion smart phone users around the globe, and if half of them are using Android devices it will bring in more revenue for Google than Google gets from average PC users.
The real problem with Linux distros and desktop adoption is that 1.) You had a hard time getting Linux pre-installed on a computer. 2.) average buyers expected their computer to run regular Windows applications and older Windows applications they already owned right out of the box, and even with Wine that's often not the case. 3.) The linux community couldn't afford the advertising scale needed to bring in users. Even today most of my non-technical friends have never even heard of Linux. Android has all three problems addressed - you can get Android devices easily, buyers don't expect Android devices to run Windows (or Mac, or iOS) apps, and Google has been advertising the bejeezus out of Android on the web and on television.
Google is driving prices down on smart phones and tablets. That sucks for the industry, but rocks for consumers.
You're incorrect that thin clients block access to productivity applications. You can use remote desktop, Citrix, etc... (on both traditional thin clients and also Chrome OS devices, it's supported) to give user access to a complete desktop environment with spreadsheets, databases, word processors, and almost anything else you can imagine on a full Microsoft Windows (or if you prefer, Linux) desktop. The only exception, as I said earlier, heavily resource or graphics intensive applications that are poorly suited to working over a remote access protocol.
The thin client or Chrome OS device has relatively few configurable settings and is easy to manage remotely. The user's production data lives on company servers that are accessed by the virtual desktop protocol, where it's much easier for administrators to back it up, check it, handle errors, deploy upgrades, etc...
I disagree. The marketing is poor and the hardware is behind the times. I grant both, and both are damning.
But the problem with an iPad 2 or a laptop or a PC for a large group of users is three fold:
1. On laptops and tablets, users have lots of data on the device, which will be lost if the device is lost or stolen unless you have an intelligent automated backup procedure (and an intelligent automated backup procedure requires the same constant network connectivity as a Chrome OS device, so you gain nothing). And the restore process after a hardware failure takes some time - with a Chrome OS device, the restore process is instant. "Here's a new Chromebook, log in and get back to work."
2. On laptops and tablets, you have to worry about security patches and user installation of buggy or malicious software. With Chrome OS, the fewer features of the core operating system mean that it has a smaller attack surface, needs fewer updates, and has fewer opportunities for user problems.
3. On laptops and tablets, access to new company or school applications that are not web-based means you need some kind of distributed deployment system. Making your infrastructure web based means that updates to the applications are available to all users instantly. Now a totally web-based system still works with a laptop or iPad, but now you're paying for other features you don't need.
I'll throw in an advantage the Chrome OS notebook has over an iPad2 - for a large number of business and school applications, having a physical keyboard lets you work faster than having a touch screen. The iPad2 is superior for entertainment and for some forms of productivity, but not all.
Last but not least, there is nothing on Chrome OS tying you to the rest of the Google infrastructure. You can run the Salesforce.com CRM, you can change the search provider to Bing or DuckDuckGo, you can use ThinkFree or Zoho instead of Google Apps for your web-based office suite. You could even put Microsoft Office 365 on an intranet service if you needed to keep your documents internal.
I suspect that Google is unwilling to put the investment into Chrome OS it needs to succeed, and I would love to be proven wrong. But the product itself could work, the features are valuable.
One of the biggest expenses for corporate IT departments is management of user computers. Thin clients make that relatively easy and much cheaper and faster than giving workstations to everyone. Making your application a web application, when that's appropriate (i.e. not for something resource intensive like graphics or computer aided design) also makes corporate IT costs lower - instead of deploying an upgrade to hundreds or thousands of machines, you update server software. In terms of security a thin client runs fewer applications so it has fewer attack surfaces than a full feature workstation.
Thin clients don't make sense for home users, of course. But for businesses, under some circumstances they're a good choice.
I think his laundry list of recommended changes is obvious to anyone that's been paying attention.
1. Better hardware. No kidding - right now Chrome OS is aimed at schools and businesses, which if they need a locked down browser environment should be okay with what they have now. But if they want consumer adaptation, offer at least the option of better hardware. I'll buy a Chomebook when I can get Sandy Bridge or a Tegra 4 (yes, I meant 4) processor and a graphics chip that supports at least one external monitor and really good WebGL.
2. Web-based IDE. Again, I think this would spur power user adoption of Chrome OS, though I consider this the least essential of the features.
3. Support local storage. No kidding. It will be a while before HTML5 storage is available at all the websites people routinely use.
4. Offline apps. No kidding yet again. I don't want my device to be useless for my family every time our internet connection has a hiccup.
1 year old minivan with an original sticker price of $27,000 and 7000 miles on it. I had a $1000 trade and $5000 down payment, and wanted 5 year financing. I figured depreciation of $0.30 per mile * 7000 = $2,100. $27,000 - ($1000 + $5000 + $2100) = $18,900. Add 6% sales tax and maybe $200 in (bullshit) fees, and you have a purchase price of $20,200. Finance that at 6% for five years, and I expected $395 for the monthly payments as their opening offer.
That was my default assumption of their opening offer, and I figured I could talk them down to at best 5% financing and another $2000 off the vehicle price, for maybe $350 per month. Instead, their opening offer didn't list any price or percentage rate, just 5 years at $485 per month. Depending upon how you play with the numbers, they were offering me a 15% on the loan when my credit was excellent.
Instead I went to a Honda dealer. They gave me $500 on the trade, 5% on the loan, and $1500 off MSRP of the new vehicle right when I sat down and said up front that it was their first and last offer and if I was not willing to go for it, I could leave immediately. That was considerably worse than the best offer I got from the other dealer, but I would rather deal with a straightforward seller so I went for it anyway.
I pay the *use tax*. But even ignoring the use tax, I can buy ink, PC components, movies (I prefer to have a physical copy, I know most people these days are coming to prefer streaming video), etc... for much cheaper online. Amazon.com, Newegg.com, Buy.com, Overstock.com, and Ebay vendors can sell all of their products cheaper even when you factor in use tax because they don't have the costs associated with maintaining brick and mortar stores.
The strength of a brick and mortar store has to be in offering something you don't get with online purchases. Right now I think that advantage is just browsing - so far, the "You may also like..." features on websites just aren't as good as looking at six or ten or fifty different options alongside the original one in a display. But I don't think that advantage, by itself, is enough to sustain brick and mortar stores - just ask Circuit City and Borders. Barnes & Noble has, in my view, one of the best walk-in experiences of any store. They have products you can view, no pressure from sales staff, a cafe and plenty of room to sit and enjoy your food while using free wifi, and some toys in the children's area to occupy kids. Even that is probably not enough to save them.
I don't like getting confrontational with anyone unless lives are at stake. But you're right that what they were doing was abusive. A more appropriate but equally effective response would have been to yell loudly, "Hey, I said I would like to leave, now please give me my keys!" Since the showroom had half a dozen other people in it, they probably would have let me out quickly to avoid alienating other customers.
I did have a sales experience where they asked for the keys to my current car to evaluate it for trade in. While their technician was examining the car, they presented me with a finance offer on the purchase of the vehicle I wanted. It was too high. I refused, and asked for my car keys. They said the technician had my car out for a test drive, and since I had no choice but to wait for him to return they would revise their finance offer. The next offer was still too high. I refused again, and asked again for my keys, and yet again was informed that the technician was still out driving my car. This nonsense continued for over an hour before I lost patience and informed them I would sit alone in the lobby until my car and keys were returned.
So a.) car salesmen can be ridiculously pushy and b.) make sure you have your car and car keys in hand before you start negotiating. After I drove off, the salesman called with a last offer that reduced the finance rate on the loan from 13% to 0%. Under other circumstances I would have taken the deal, but I was so angry over the sales tactics I still refused.
Well, judging by their financial returns in 2007 it's clear that the vast majority of CEOs of American corporations are not qualified for the job. ("You can't make a profit in a down economy? Really? Then why do you deserve a seven figure income?")
I guess it varies from store to store. The two Best Buys I use - one by work, the other near home - don't apply any sales pressure at all, and the staff are generally informative and honest. For example, I had someone steer me away from a more expensive product because they said the cheaper one was just as good.
But the fundamental problem remains - it's cheaper and more convenient to order from Amazon and Newegg. I only go to Best Buy when I want to physically examine the purchase first, and that's less than 25% of my electronics and media purchases.
With each new console generation, the vendors put more investment into locking the console down against letting users run their own firmware. It took years for the free60 project to crack the Xbox360 - by the time they got it, someone looking for a cheap computer would have gotten better performance from spending the $300 purchase price on newegg. Sony launched the PS3 with the ability to put Linux on it (but not to run Linux on the bare metal, it was blocked from accessing some features on the console) but a later firmware update removed that ability and Sony attempted to sue Geohotz and others who tried to restore the ability to run Linux.
I suspect some people far smarter than me will also crack the XboxNext and PSNext, but I also suspect that it will again take so long that by the time it works you can build a better system by spending $300 on regular PC components. I wouldn't buy a gaming console today in the hope that I can root it in four years.
Profits aren't evil. But you have to weigh the value of money gained by implementing a policy against money lost by pissing a potential customer off.
So for example, I buy most of my games used. If I can't buy used games for a PSNext or XboxNext, I won't buy one at all. They don't sell the hardware to me. They don't get the sales that might come from me recommending the console to friends. They don't get to count my purchase among the total number of consoles sold when trying to convince a software company to make a port of the game for their console. And they don't get the profits from the 5-10 new games I would buy over the life of the console. Maybe they figure the loss of my purchase and the loss of purchases from others like me is acceptable for the gain of cutting out used game sales... and maybe not.
Also consider the requirement that my internet access always work to play games. So if I lose my internet access, I can't play on the console until it's restored. If the console vendor has a server outage, like for example if the Sony Playstation Network services might be hacked and offline for a few weeks, then I can't play on my console either. I'm the type of person who considers that restriction onerous and won't purchase the console because of it. So again, the vendors can try to guess how many other people will be similarly alienated and decide whether the lost sales is worth the lockdown it gets them.
They have every right to defend their digital property. And I have every right to tell them to go fuck themselves and not use their products if they decide to enforce those rights by making their product more trouble than it is worth to own.
Note that we have been at war since 2003 with no substantial tax increases the entire time - unlike all of the major wars the US participated in during the 20th century. I'm not advocating government waste, but a huge part of our current deficit problem is that in these two wars, for the first time in over a hundred years, the government decided to fund it entirely by borrowing.
Also consider that we were in a recession that was arguably a depression, and just about any way to rapidly pump money into the economy that did something other than sit in a bank account was worthwhile.
Last but not least, I think your assertion that modern science has nothing noteworthy is absurd. Amazing progress is being made in many fields - computing, quantum physics, medicine, biology, astronomy, psychology. What we haven't figured out how to do is enable the poor and middle class in America to accumulate wealth at the same rate that they could forty or fifty years ago. We have a situation where the people who already have wealth are finding it relatively easy to acquire more and everyone else is out in the cold - and despite all their speeches and posturing, it's very clearly that no Democrat or Republican knows how to fix it.
Again, all of your complaints are legitimate. But if you go to a Hyundai salesman and the terms of sale try to dick you over fifty seven ways, you'll just go get something else from another dealer. You don't need to see Scrubs, or American Idol, or 24, or Batman Begins, or The Artist, or whatever it is that you're trying to watch. If you refuse to accept immoral terms of use, don't use.
As I wrote elsewhere, you're correct that it is not theft. Theft implies that the original owner no longer has access to the item. Clearly that doesn't apply. But my point that it's illegal use of a product still stands.
Buying used and even pirating stuff still supports the business model of the people fostering the DRM crap. You're still spreading the use of their products. Even if you're not paying, you're making it more likely that other people will keep buying. This is not too much different than having Microsoft give away Windows and Office to college students - the students are happy to get free stuff, but then when they get out of college they are accustomed to using Microsoft products and resist use of alternatives. In either case, the *AA or Microsoft gets what it wants - the consumer is hooked.
This problem was worse in the past because the movie alternatives to the major studios were rare. Today, there are so many amateur film makers all over the internet that even if only 0.0001% produce movies that don't suck, that's plenty of good material for viewing. And the situation will only improve going forward. Disney and Sony and their partners are doing everything they can to tighten their grip because the days when their combined conglomerates created 90% of the films people watched are over. We're on a path to a time when a significant portion of the best and most popular new media is created by small startups and kickstarter projects and even single individuals. It's both more ethical and also more self-serving for you and me and everyone else here who hates DRM to start supporting the DRM free alternatives early and speed their adoption.
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I am sorry you had a bad experience with upgrades. I haven't, not in years. To address your points:
1. When a developer writes "WORKS_FOR_ME" && "WONT_FIX", what else do you expect them to do? Unless you invite them to your house and demonstrate the bug, or maybe give them a remote shell (assuming the problem, whatever it is, allows for a remote shell), they can't fix it. And you're not paying them to help, either.
2. I think you're digging for the lack of social skills problem. There are obnoxious, anti-social, and unhygienic people that use Windows and even among the people that use Mac OS X and iOS. Linux does not have a monopoly on technical weirdos. And a lot of the Linux discussion forums have hundreds of skilled and helpful volunteers. Did you try Linuxquestions.org? Linuxforums.org? The OpenSUSE forums? The Ubuntu forums?
3. What does the name matter? You can call it Toaster/Hamster/Linux when you install it, that doesn't change what it does. Yes there are some people that are fanatical about that. But not many - how many Slashdot discussions have people chiming in to correct a post for omitting the GNU/ in GNU/Linux?
4. Insisting that Linux is not ready for the desktop and can never be ready is a stretch, don't you think? I think it really is trolling. I'm sorry you had a stretch of bad luck with your installations.
5. I think if anything gets you labeled a troll, or a shill, is your criticism of the GPL. The freedom of the GPL is freedom to create, freedom to redistribute unmodified, and freedom to redistribute modified, and the freedom of the original developer to release their creation with the knowledge that no one can ever create a proprietary software product with it. The "freedom" to make a proprietary derivative goes against those other freedoms, and it would be paradoxical to include it.
Not bullshit. If you do business, you have to track finances, period. Your accounting department expenses are an inescapable cost.
Tracking software license compliance is an added cost. So you don't weigh software costs against the $0 cost of free software, you weigh software costs plus license management and compliance costs against the cost of free software. I understand the reality that many essential applications run poorly or not at all on Linux, there is a lot of division in the free software community, and many end users would rather saw off a limb than forego Microsoft Office. But I spent the last six years at a company with less than 20 employees, and for us managing Microsoft software licenses is a royal pain in the neck, and adds a lot more to our operating costs than the actual licenses themselves. Microsoft seems to have a corporate edict against user friendly license management, and it suits me fine - we get more done in less time with Debian on our servers, so the COO gave the go ahead for a gradual transition to Linux.
I'm sure a Fortune 500 company can hire a few employees whose entire job is license management, and the cost is statistically insignificant in the overall company budget. For small businesses, the cost really is significant.
No it isn't. As part of the bill, the insurance industry has to spend 80% of their revenue from premiums on patient care. If they spend less than 80% of their revenue from premiums on patient care, they are required to send rebate checks to their subscribers. That's definitely not a gigantic handout, it's a slap in the face. Some insurance companies are spending less than 65% of their revenue from premiums on patient care.
I have a relative that had a warehouse job, and developed what we think is Crohn's Disease. He didn't have health insurance, and could not get emergency room care because presenting with bloody diarrhea is not enough to get you treatment. If you're not in immanent danger, you get sent home. But bloody diarrhea made him too sick to work, so he was fired from his job. If he didn't have family that could take him in, what was he supposed to do?
My out of pocket costs for health insurance and copays for my family last year was $15,000. My employer paid another $6,000. How many American families can afford that? How many have jobs that would contribute $6k towards health insurance?
The Republicans won't attack EMTALA directly because it will push a few more of their adherents far enough to wake them up. But don't fucking tell me the party gives a shit about the middle class and the poor. They don't. If you don't have money, fucking die and stop bothering the oligarchy. That's the Republican motto. This isn't a talking point, it's reality. They oppose the health care reform because they're the party of the insurance industry executives, the pharmaceutical moguls, and the specialist physicians that charge $11,500 for a 90 minute verbal interview with a patient two weeks before spinal surgery (that affected another relative of mine who happened to be uninsured at the time).
You're assuming that all of the Democrats and the two Independents in the Senate who voted for the health care reform would also have voted for it if it included a public option. That's not guaranteed.
The health care reform is incredibly good - prevent insurers from blocking patients due to pre-existing conditions, prevent insurers from imposing lifetime benefit caps, prevent insurers from putting more than 20% of their revenue towards expenses other than patient care, prevent insurers from charging higher prices for any pre-existing condition other than smoking, make it easier to qualify for Medicaid, subsidize health insurance costs for individuals and families that earn too much for Medicaid but less than 400% of the poverty level, and eventually all preventative care and checkups will not carry copays. That's pretty damn far from a public option and pretty damn far from ideal (specifically, it does very little to address costs - I have an indigent relative that spent 24 hours in a hospital because of appendicitis, he got served a $39,000 bill). But it's a damn sight better than the Republican solution - fuck the people that can't pay, let them die.
I know the lesser of two evils argument is frustrating and unsatisfying. But if I'm going to choose between a roommate that steals my money and one that rapes my kids, I'm going to pick the thief every time. So I'm voting for Obama again. He's no better than Bush on civil liberties and foreign policy, but that doesn't mean he's the same as the party "Of the Oligarchy, By the Oligarchy, and For the Oligarchy", so I support him with a clear conscience.
But when a company that has the resources for testing and proper development still screws up, it makes me ten times as angry as when a loosely affiliated group of volunteers makes a mistake. So I'm left with a choice between being annoyed a few times per month at my Ubuntu desktop at home or frothing at the mouth and shouting obscenities at my Windows workstation at the office a few times per year.
:)
And there are some things the open source community plainly does better - try to read the documentation for Microsoft's "Windows Azure" cloud offering and then read "OpenStack" or "OpenNebula" or app deployment platforms like "Heroku" - I tried to get a Windows Azure VM running just to play with it, and after the docs made my brains start leaking out my nose I gave up. I like having to reboot to apply software updates far less often. I like that the default file browser and user interface elements hang less often. And with respect to Macs, I like paying a lot less money.
Also, I think the Peter Principle applies to proprietary vendors as well as it does everywhere else, so I'm not sure what's unique about the open source community. At least here if a jackass runs a project he's not in charge of your chances at a higher salary.
But we've truly beaten this horse to death. I understand and respect your choice, good luck with your future Macs.
My point with the Vista and game examples is that the commercial vendors have a generally better end user experience, but they're still very far from perfect. I'm not asking TANSTAAFL to be violated, I'm just providing examples where big players made similar classes of errors to the little community-driven Linux distributions.
As for licenses and license management, I'm hoping nothing is done - because at least for me, high proprietary software costs and license frustration is what got me interested in free software in the first place. If the big name companies keep annoying users, maybe eventually there will be enough volunteers helping Fedora, or Mint, or OpenSuse plus Wine and device driver development that the user experience hits parity with Microsoft and Apple. I know it's a dream, but it's definitely the future I want.
I am most of the local developers, it's a very small company. In our case, we used Crystal Reports Application Server 9 for $650 per permanent server license in 2003. Last time we contacted whoever owns them now for an estimate, it was $15,000 per server per year. We replaced it with Jasper Reports, which is open source, and bought the add-on report server Jasper Server, which is not. Jasper Server's annual price tripled, so we dropped it and wrote our own report display and automated delivery web GUI. All of our research team used to have SPSS statistical software, that went up in price a lot so we've cut back from one copy per researcher to two for the entire company and do the rest of the statistical analysis with spreadsheets and SQL.
I've been using Ubuntu Linux without problems for two years - I know the Unity interface is tremendously unpopular, but I found it very easy to use.
I think you're overstating the quality of Microsoft and Apple products. I have friends who bought PCs with Vista that came bundled with a printer with no Vista-compatible device drivers. I know plenty of people who bought a Windows PC to play games without having a salesman explaining that the device they picked had a low tier graphics card and couldn't handle the games they bought with it. There are a number of old PC applications that run better on emulators than on Windows whatever. And at my job, I shouldn't need to take a Microsoft training seminar just so I can navigate the legalese related to server licensing - we run Ubuntu servers because the administration is damn near idiot proof (if I can figure it out, anyone can) and I don't need to spend 15% of my time managing licenses.
It's a good discussion, thanks.
First, I think you and I have at least two goals that are at odds. I want to see more competition to drive down prices, and I want to see more adoption of free software because of both the competition it fosters and the fact that the biggest headaches of my day job is proprietary software. ( I don't object to paying a software license if the product works. I object to the fact that managing the licensing for my proprietary apps is a fucking nightmare, and I object to the fact that no less than five different proprietary programs we use at my company had their licensing costs increase by 10X in a five year period. We have a "free software only" policy for new tools going forward because anything else will blow the IT budget entirely.)
With respect to fragmentation versus choice, I think you have a good point. I think there is some choice, and that's good, but clearly the fragmentation is a serious problem. Likewise Google executives were stupid to think they could influence carriers to facilitate software updates.
With respect to Linux distributions, I've been using Linux since Slackware... 8, I think, not long after you since Slackware jumped a few versions. I've had excellent luck with reliability and stability for five years - no real problems, really. But you're right that hardware support sucks, and that plus the lack of flawless Windows app support are the reason Linux as it currently stands will never dominate the desktop. I think the quote for Linus Torvalds is taken out of context - he was bitching because OpenSUSE and most other versions of Linux maintain a default security policy oriented towards business servers, so you needed root access to change printer settings and a few other things that should not require user root privileges on a personal PC.
I think your iPad2 point is unfair - the iPad2 just dropped in price with the launch of the iPad3. For the months before the iPad3 launched, you could get a number of Android tablets on par with the iPad2 for a lower price. Likewise for phones.
It's an Apple marketing success to convince the general public that "lots of choices" should be stated in media articles as "fragmentation". Android has phones and tablets far cheaper than any iOS device, with more options for peripherals, more user interface options, etc... and it's been spun into a problem instead of an advantage.
In terms of money, Android is a serious investment in Google's long term future. Advertising revenue is Google's lifeblood, and smart phones offer more lucrative targeted advertising - instead of showing a user a Walmart ad when they're shopping for things online, you show them an ad for the Walmart two blocks away when they just did a search for nearby stores. Walmart and everyone else will pay more money per ad under those circumstances. In ten years there will be two billion smart phone users around the globe, and if half of them are using Android devices it will bring in more revenue for Google than Google gets from average PC users.
The real problem with Linux distros and desktop adoption is that 1.) You had a hard time getting Linux pre-installed on a computer. 2.) average buyers expected their computer to run regular Windows applications and older Windows applications they already owned right out of the box, and even with Wine that's often not the case. 3.) The linux community couldn't afford the advertising scale needed to bring in users. Even today most of my non-technical friends have never even heard of Linux. Android has all three problems addressed - you can get Android devices easily, buyers don't expect Android devices to run Windows (or Mac, or iOS) apps, and Google has been advertising the bejeezus out of Android on the web and on television.
Google is driving prices down on smart phones and tablets. That sucks for the industry, but rocks for consumers.
You're incorrect that thin clients block access to productivity applications. You can use remote desktop, Citrix, etc... (on both traditional thin clients and also Chrome OS devices, it's supported) to give user access to a complete desktop environment with spreadsheets, databases, word processors, and almost anything else you can imagine on a full Microsoft Windows (or if you prefer, Linux) desktop. The only exception, as I said earlier, heavily resource or graphics intensive applications that are poorly suited to working over a remote access protocol.
The thin client or Chrome OS device has relatively few configurable settings and is easy to manage remotely. The user's production data lives on company servers that are accessed by the virtual desktop protocol, where it's much easier for administrators to back it up, check it, handle errors, deploy upgrades, etc...
I disagree. The marketing is poor and the hardware is behind the times. I grant both, and both are damning.
But the problem with an iPad 2 or a laptop or a PC for a large group of users is three fold:
1. On laptops and tablets, users have lots of data on the device, which will be lost if the device is lost or stolen unless you have an intelligent automated backup procedure (and an intelligent automated backup procedure requires the same constant network connectivity as a Chrome OS device, so you gain nothing). And the restore process after a hardware failure takes some time - with a Chrome OS device, the restore process is instant. "Here's a new Chromebook, log in and get back to work."
2. On laptops and tablets, you have to worry about security patches and user installation of buggy or malicious software. With Chrome OS, the fewer features of the core operating system mean that it has a smaller attack surface, needs fewer updates, and has fewer opportunities for user problems.
3. On laptops and tablets, access to new company or school applications that are not web-based means you need some kind of distributed deployment system. Making your infrastructure web based means that updates to the applications are available to all users instantly. Now a totally web-based system still works with a laptop or iPad, but now you're paying for other features you don't need.
I'll throw in an advantage the Chrome OS notebook has over an iPad2 - for a large number of business and school applications, having a physical keyboard lets you work faster than having a touch screen. The iPad2 is superior for entertainment and for some forms of productivity, but not all.
Last but not least, there is nothing on Chrome OS tying you to the rest of the Google infrastructure. You can run the Salesforce.com CRM, you can change the search provider to Bing or DuckDuckGo, you can use ThinkFree or Zoho instead of Google Apps for your web-based office suite. You could even put Microsoft Office 365 on an intranet service if you needed to keep your documents internal.
I suspect that Google is unwilling to put the investment into Chrome OS it needs to succeed, and I would love to be proven wrong. But the product itself could work, the features are valuable.
One of the biggest expenses for corporate IT departments is management of user computers. Thin clients make that relatively easy and much cheaper and faster than giving workstations to everyone. Making your application a web application, when that's appropriate (i.e. not for something resource intensive like graphics or computer aided design) also makes corporate IT costs lower - instead of deploying an upgrade to hundreds or thousands of machines, you update server software. In terms of security a thin client runs fewer applications so it has fewer attack surfaces than a full feature workstation.
Thin clients don't make sense for home users, of course. But for businesses, under some circumstances they're a good choice.
I think his laundry list of recommended changes is obvious to anyone that's been paying attention.
1. Better hardware. No kidding - right now Chrome OS is aimed at schools and businesses, which if they need a locked down browser environment should be okay with what they have now. But if they want consumer adaptation, offer at least the option of better hardware. I'll buy a Chomebook when I can get Sandy Bridge or a Tegra 4 (yes, I meant 4) processor and a graphics chip that supports at least one external monitor and really good WebGL.
2. Web-based IDE. Again, I think this would spur power user adoption of Chrome OS, though I consider this the least essential of the features.
3. Support local storage. No kidding. It will be a while before HTML5 storage is available at all the websites people routinely use.
4. Offline apps. No kidding yet again. I don't want my device to be useless for my family every time our internet connection has a hiccup.
1 year old minivan with an original sticker price of $27,000 and 7000 miles on it. I had a $1000 trade and $5000 down payment, and wanted 5 year financing. I figured depreciation of $0.30 per mile * 7000 = $2,100. $27,000 - ($1000 + $5000 + $2100) = $18,900. Add 6% sales tax and maybe $200 in (bullshit) fees, and you have a purchase price of $20,200. Finance that at 6% for five years, and I expected $395 for the monthly payments as their opening offer.
That was my default assumption of their opening offer, and I figured I could talk them down to at best 5% financing and another $2000 off the vehicle price, for maybe $350 per month. Instead, their opening offer didn't list any price or percentage rate, just 5 years at $485 per month. Depending upon how you play with the numbers, they were offering me a 15% on the loan when my credit was excellent.
Instead I went to a Honda dealer. They gave me $500 on the trade, 5% on the loan, and $1500 off MSRP of the new vehicle right when I sat down and said up front that it was their first and last offer and if I was not willing to go for it, I could leave immediately. That was considerably worse than the best offer I got from the other dealer, but I would rather deal with a straightforward seller so I went for it anyway.
I pay the *use tax*. But even ignoring the use tax, I can buy ink, PC components, movies (I prefer to have a physical copy, I know most people these days are coming to prefer streaming video), etc... for much cheaper online. Amazon.com, Newegg.com, Buy.com, Overstock.com, and Ebay vendors can sell all of their products cheaper even when you factor in use tax because they don't have the costs associated with maintaining brick and mortar stores.
The strength of a brick and mortar store has to be in offering something you don't get with online purchases. Right now I think that advantage is just browsing - so far, the "You may also like..." features on websites just aren't as good as looking at six or ten or fifty different options alongside the original one in a display. But I don't think that advantage, by itself, is enough to sustain brick and mortar stores - just ask Circuit City and Borders. Barnes & Noble has, in my view, one of the best walk-in experiences of any store. They have products you can view, no pressure from sales staff, a cafe and plenty of room to sit and enjoy your food while using free wifi, and some toys in the children's area to occupy kids. Even that is probably not enough to save them.
I don't like getting confrontational with anyone unless lives are at stake. But you're right that what they were doing was abusive. A more appropriate but equally effective response would have been to yell loudly, "Hey, I said I would like to leave, now please give me my keys!" Since the showroom had half a dozen other people in it, they probably would have let me out quickly to avoid alienating other customers.
I did have a sales experience where they asked for the keys to my current car to evaluate it for trade in. While their technician was examining the car, they presented me with a finance offer on the purchase of the vehicle I wanted. It was too high. I refused, and asked for my car keys. They said the technician had my car out for a test drive, and since I had no choice but to wait for him to return they would revise their finance offer. The next offer was still too high. I refused again, and asked again for my keys, and yet again was informed that the technician was still out driving my car. This nonsense continued for over an hour before I lost patience and informed them I would sit alone in the lobby until my car and keys were returned.
So a.) car salesmen can be ridiculously pushy and b.) make sure you have your car and car keys in hand before you start negotiating. After I drove off, the salesman called with a last offer that reduced the finance rate on the loan from 13% to 0%. Under other circumstances I would have taken the deal, but I was so angry over the sales tactics I still refused.
Well, judging by their financial returns in 2007 it's clear that the vast majority of CEOs of American corporations are not qualified for the job. ("You can't make a profit in a down economy? Really? Then why do you deserve a seven figure income?")
I guess it varies from store to store. The two Best Buys I use - one by work, the other near home - don't apply any sales pressure at all, and the staff are generally informative and honest. For example, I had someone steer me away from a more expensive product because they said the cheaper one was just as good.
But the fundamental problem remains - it's cheaper and more convenient to order from Amazon and Newegg. I only go to Best Buy when I want to physically examine the purchase first, and that's less than 25% of my electronics and media purchases.
With each new console generation, the vendors put more investment into locking the console down against letting users run their own firmware. It took years for the free60 project to crack the Xbox360 - by the time they got it, someone looking for a cheap computer would have gotten better performance from spending the $300 purchase price on newegg. Sony launched the PS3 with the ability to put Linux on it (but not to run Linux on the bare metal, it was blocked from accessing some features on the console) but a later firmware update removed that ability and Sony attempted to sue Geohotz and others who tried to restore the ability to run Linux.
I suspect some people far smarter than me will also crack the XboxNext and PSNext, but I also suspect that it will again take so long that by the time it works you can build a better system by spending $300 on regular PC components. I wouldn't buy a gaming console today in the hope that I can root it in four years.
Profits aren't evil. But you have to weigh the value of money gained by implementing a policy against money lost by pissing a potential customer off.
So for example, I buy most of my games used. If I can't buy used games for a PSNext or XboxNext, I won't buy one at all. They don't sell the hardware to me. They don't get the sales that might come from me recommending the console to friends. They don't get to count my purchase among the total number of consoles sold when trying to convince a software company to make a port of the game for their console. And they don't get the profits from the 5-10 new games I would buy over the life of the console. Maybe they figure the loss of my purchase and the loss of purchases from others like me is acceptable for the gain of cutting out used game sales... and maybe not.
Also consider the requirement that my internet access always work to play games. So if I lose my internet access, I can't play on the console until it's restored. If the console vendor has a server outage, like for example if the Sony Playstation Network services might be hacked and offline for a few weeks, then I can't play on my console either. I'm the type of person who considers that restriction onerous and won't purchase the console because of it. So again, the vendors can try to guess how many other people will be similarly alienated and decide whether the lost sales is worth the lockdown it gets them.
They have every right to defend their digital property. And I have every right to tell them to go fuck themselves and not use their products if they decide to enforce those rights by making their product more trouble than it is worth to own.
Note that we have been at war since 2003 with no substantial tax increases the entire time - unlike all of the major wars the US participated in during the 20th century. I'm not advocating government waste, but a huge part of our current deficit problem is that in these two wars, for the first time in over a hundred years, the government decided to fund it entirely by borrowing.
Also consider that we were in a recession that was arguably a depression, and just about any way to rapidly pump money into the economy that did something other than sit in a bank account was worthwhile.
Last but not least, I think your assertion that modern science has nothing noteworthy is absurd. Amazing progress is being made in many fields - computing, quantum physics, medicine, biology, astronomy, psychology. What we haven't figured out how to do is enable the poor and middle class in America to accumulate wealth at the same rate that they could forty or fifty years ago. We have a situation where the people who already have wealth are finding it relatively easy to acquire more and everyone else is out in the cold - and despite all their speeches and posturing, it's very clearly that no Democrat or Republican knows how to fix it.
Again, all of your complaints are legitimate. But if you go to a Hyundai salesman and the terms of sale try to dick you over fifty seven ways, you'll just go get something else from another dealer. You don't need to see Scrubs, or American Idol, or 24, or Batman Begins, or The Artist, or whatever it is that you're trying to watch. If you refuse to accept immoral terms of use, don't use.
As I wrote elsewhere, you're correct that it is not theft. Theft implies that the original owner no longer has access to the item. Clearly that doesn't apply. But my point that it's illegal use of a product still stands.
Buying used and even pirating stuff still supports the business model of the people fostering the DRM crap. You're still spreading the use of their products. Even if you're not paying, you're making it more likely that other people will keep buying. This is not too much different than having Microsoft give away Windows and Office to college students - the students are happy to get free stuff, but then when they get out of college they are accustomed to using Microsoft products and resist use of alternatives. In either case, the *AA or Microsoft gets what it wants - the consumer is hooked.
This problem was worse in the past because the movie alternatives to the major studios were rare. Today, there are so many amateur film makers all over the internet that even if only 0.0001% produce movies that don't suck, that's plenty of good material for viewing. And the situation will only improve going forward. Disney and Sony and their partners are doing everything they can to tighten their grip because the days when their combined conglomerates created 90% of the films people watched are over. We're on a path to a time when a significant portion of the best and most popular new media is created by small startups and kickstarter projects and even single individuals. It's both more ethical and also more self-serving for you and me and everyone else here who hates DRM to start supporting the DRM free alternatives early and speed their adoption.