Audio has reached the point at which most people can't hear the superior quality. If you can't tell, does it matter? Video hasn't reached that point and still has a long way to go. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a while for next-gen video formats to take off because the improvement they offer over DVD is relatively less than DVD offered over VHS.
You haven't seen much improvement in book tech over the last 100 years, and those improvements have been incremental. The same thing is happening to audio and video; once you've made things as nice as people can perceive, there isn't much more to be done.
The rings augment what power their bearer naturally has; Galadriel has a ring, which is actually covered in the same chapter I cited:
[Galadriel] lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Earendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its rays glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come down to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood.
'Yes,' she said, divining his thought, 'it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lorien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.
But the rings themselves are not magic, or at least not magic as the Elves perceive magic. Saruman and Gandalf have staffs, which are of the Five Rods of Wizards, as Saruman makes clear when he accuses Gandalf of being power hungry in The Two Towers after the Ents lay waste to Isengard. I'd quote that too but don't feel like looking it up as well.
Sauron, like Gandalf and Saruman, originated as a Maiar, and they have some inborn power that can be augmented in various ways, like the rings. Saruman has a Palantir, which allows him to see farther than normal and communicate with other users. Sauron has one, which explains his coordination with Isengard, as well as Denethor's despondency. None of these items are "magic" in the sense Tolkien would imagine the word, as he would see magic as chiefly being used in a Faustian, evil way. As the quote in my post above demonstrates, the Elves are cognizant of the difference, and are careful with their language. Sam only calls their gifts "magic" because he's a bumbling Hobbit who doesn't know any better.
None of this mystery and uncertainty translates well into video games, which by their nature are mathematical and designed to be egalitarian in the sense that time spent = abilities gained. Middle Earth, like the Earth we know, does not work in so linear a fashion.
Warning: LOTR nerd nitpicks ahead.
There are only five wizards, two of whom are never named, and they don't use "magic" but have unusual power. Two of the wizards wander into the East and are never heard from again; Radagast is not terribly effective, Saruman lusts for power and becomes corrupt, and only Gandalf remains true to his purpose. The elves may or may not use the same thing, and they certainly do use what Sauron does, as Galadriel says in Book II of Fellowship in "The Mirror of Galadriel":
'And you?' [Galadriel] said, turning to Sam. 'For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?'
Overall your point is well taken, and if everyone could use 'magic" in the way Gandalf does, the LOTR world would lose much of its appeal and just become another of the innumerable MMORPGs. Part of what's so special about Tolkien is that he doesn't translate well to video games, and his wars are not just modern combat but with funny clothes. When there's money to be made, however, the story can be damned.
I think years from now many people will look back on the period of approximately 1985-2005 as a "Golden Age" for Microsoft, when they were able to rake in huge profits by illegally dominating huge chunks of the personal computer industry with the Wintel duopoly.
Look, I dislike Microsoft as much as the next Mac fanboy, but this comment is idiotic. The New York Times reports:
Microsoft reported quarterly sales and profits that surpassed Wall Street's expectations yesterday, suggesting that early sales of its new Windows Vista operating system were off to a solid start.
The company, which is the world's largest software maker, also delivered an outlook for its 2008 fiscal year, which begins in July, in the upper range of analysts' projections. Microsoft said that revenue in fiscal 2008 should reach $56.5 billion to $57.5 billion, and earnings were expected to be $1.68 to $1.72 a share.
If you want to extend your prediction to 2007, and probably beyond that to 2008, go right ahead. But Microsoft shows few signs of waning. In addition, Mac marketshare is actually still declining in spite of rising unit sales. Guess what? Microsoft is selling more copies of Windows than ever, and making more money than ever, and they seem constrained only by the size of the market. I wish it were otherwise, but I don't confuse wishes with reality.
You know, I don't think it's a catch-22 if you jump into the water, insult everyone in earshot, and piss them off so that they all hate you. I think that's called painting yourself in a corner.
I think that's called mixed metaphors. I don't know how you're immersed in water, speaking to others (apparently also immersed in water), and then finding yourself in a corner. What kind of pool do you own, anyway?
Good advice. The grandparent poster is like someone saying, "I can't see in the theatre, so I'm going to stand up." Then no one behind him can see, and if everyone stood up, the problem would be just as acute as it originally was.
Sort of like saying "SUVs are safer in a collision." Well, yes, if you hit someone smaller, but if everyone owned SUVs their advantage would disappear and we'd just be using more fossil fuels.
As others pointed out, Apple's Airport Extreme can broadcast on 5 Ghz, but only so long as every computer talking to it uses 802.11n and 5 Ghz. As soon as you have someone who wants to use b/g and older equipment, you're hosed. And since most people don't have brand new and very expensive Apple kit (is anyone else shipping this stuff yet?), this may not be a practical solution at the moment.
Americans would never accept that. You might as well just say "and fairy princesses should fly down from candyland and give us all ponies to ride."
Americans would and eventually will accept smaller cars, at least as soon as gas prices rise high enough. This could happen through any number of methods, including declining oil production, wars in oil states, or Pigouvian taxes. The latter makes a lot of sense because it would help prevent the first two in a feasible time horizon and with few negative externalities save creating a tax that would probably never die (hence bloating government) and potentially increasing the mass difference between very large and very small cars, leading to additional fatalities when they collide.
Still, the benefits for both geopolitics and the environment would be enormous. It would also be much simpler to implement than the grandiose and probably error-prone systems like the one you propose.
We saw a natural example of what happens to auto sales when prices increase two summers ago: SUV sales dropped precipitously and Honda sold even more Civics than it usually does. Prices have a way of making the unthinkable reality, whether Americans will "accept" them or not.
(Like the academic who said JK Rowling wasn't a great writer...)
She's not, if by great you mean she broke new ground in writing or accomplished aesthetic feats with language. She's also not if by great you mean she achieved something new in her genre, or that she made a contribution to literature that is likely to be enduring. Harry Potter essentially just uses the classic Romance structure to tell a fairly straightforward adventure story that doesn't do much philosophically or artistically, which is why most academics aren't much interested in it.
If you define "great" by sales figures, then you're right, although most academics don't use such metrics. If you define great as getting people to read, then she certainly was. But academics are seldom concerned with such things.
Very true. For whatever it's worth -- and possibly not much -- Consumer Reports says:
The brand repeatedly scores at or near the top in tech support and has been reliable. Our most recent survey of desktop computer users, in fact, rated Apple more than 20 points ahead of all the other computer manufacturers for technical support.
In addition, their detailed subscriber listings consistently show Macs toward or at the top of the scale for reliability in terms of both desktops and laptops. They don't make complete methodology available, so this isn't exactly the gold standard for consumer research, but it's as close as one gets to hard numbers.
Your post describes why Apple is unlikely to find many enterprise customers, despite some of the rah-rah posters in the linked thread. The bigger problem is that getting business-class support on the level of HP or Dell is almost impossible for small- to mid-sized businesses; until you're upgrading hundreds of Macs at a time, Apple isn't likely to give you the time of day. If you buy one computer a month from Dell, they'll assign you a rep and give you a customized store and all kinds of other stuff.
In fact, I imagine that Apple would love to provide corporate support.
I doubt it. See my posts in the above thread for more on this problem.
There actually is a third option: we can cut the requirement that people have teaching certificates to teach. That is a barrier to entry that might, if removed, increase the supply of teachers sufficiently. But that is a totally different argument, and one that might be even more controversial than raising pay for teachers of certain subjects.
Not all barriers to entry are intrinsically bad -- do you want a neurosurgeon who hasn't gone to med school operating on your head? -- and the net result of your proposal might be that truly awful or unqualified teachers enter the classroom. The difficulty of firing teachers and the uniform pay scale in most districts makes this even more likely. Certificates are designed to ensure a minimum level of competence, and if you aren't impressed with the level of competence of teachers at the moment, imagine how you'd like it if even that relatively small barrier were removed.
I posted about the issue earlier: here and you can read an AVALANCHE about the issue at this Ars Technica thread. I linked to it elsewhere in this thread, as it's as much detail as anyone could want on the subject of an xMac and why Apple doesn't produce one (or should produce one).
This is among the most insightful comments I've read in this thread, and completely true; it's also part of the reason Apple is unlikely to make spectacular marketshare gains. The company just can't ignore such a massive swath of the market and expect to really break out. To get more perspective on why people think this is and why it is unlikely to change, read some of this massive thread on the subject of the mythical "xMac," as it's been dubbed.
The article presents a lot of false binary thinking and extrapolation of trends that are unlikely to continue. Yes, Apple's sales growth recently has been tremendous, but it doesn't follow that Apple going from barely distinguishable from white noise to at least a respectable presence in the U.S. consumer market means that Apple is about to take over the world. Apple's biggest problem in terms of marketshare is the lack of an xMac, or mainstream tower; without one, they're artificially limiting the potential size of their market. Furthermore, they happen to have competitive laptop form factors and prices, but a war similar to the one that drove desktop prices into the ground is brewing in laptop land. How will things look in three years when laptop prices fall in the same kind of curve desktop prices saw from 2001 - 2004?
To be sure, Apple is gaining ground, but they're so far from even being a significant threat to Microsoft in terms of OSes that it's almost laughable. The most significant threat Apple poses is by making it necessary for website designers and others to test in Safari and what not; when MS alternatives hit critical mass, then MS is in trouble. That's unlikely to happen from Apple alone or even Apple + Linux; in addition, all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.
Besides, while Apple does make more money per machine, Gateway also sells high-end Xeon workstations and the like. What would be more interesting is to see how many high-margin machines Dell sells in comparison to Apple -- but I'd be willing to bet Dell sells a larger absolute number of them, even if Apple sells more on a percentage basis. Finally, some of the topics raised in an earlier thread about Apple in the enterprise may be worth reading because they apply here too.
Seldom have I seen so disingenuous statements. If the music industry wants to end Apple's alleged "stranglehold," they can do it tomorrow by licensing their catalogs without DRM. The industry brought Apple's domination through its initial demand that DRM be mandatory, and now they're unhappy because they succeeded in that endeavor.
Watching the music industry squirm is like watching FOX news -- war is peace, freedom is slavery.
It's hardly fair to judge Apple's enterprise efforts by the Australian educational market.
I don't. I only use that poster as a specific example, which, if you read his posts, cover things that apply to everyone -- e.g. Exchange support inadequacies. In addition, he's posted about how new Apple machines don't run previous versions of the OS. A version of G5 iMacs came out right after 10.4 Tiger did, for example, but you couldn't (easily or with Apple's support) install Panther on them. At the same time, he had software that didn't run 10.4 on them. It would have been easy for Apple to make sure 10.3 ran on new machines, but they chose not to.
Enterprise users with a large number of machines can't switch to a brand new OS overnight. This caused needless problems for him and demonstrate why Apple is problematic in the enterprise world.
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You haven't seen much improvement in book tech over the last 100 years, and those improvements have been incremental. The same thing is happening to audio and video; once you've made things as nice as people can perceive, there isn't much more to be done.
Is it really so obscure?
You, sir, are a most remarkable man, given the MacBook's release date.
But the rings themselves are not magic, or at least not magic as the Elves perceive magic. Saruman and Gandalf have staffs, which are of the Five Rods of Wizards, as Saruman makes clear when he accuses Gandalf of being power hungry in The Two Towers after the Ents lay waste to Isengard. I'd quote that too but don't feel like looking it up as well.
Sauron, like Gandalf and Saruman, originated as a Maiar, and they have some inborn power that can be augmented in various ways, like the rings. Saruman has a Palantir, which allows him to see farther than normal and communicate with other users. Sauron has one, which explains his coordination with Isengard, as well as Denethor's despondency. None of these items are "magic" in the sense Tolkien would imagine the word, as he would see magic as chiefly being used in a Faustian, evil way. As the quote in my post above demonstrates, the Elves are cognizant of the difference, and are careful with their language. Sam only calls their gifts "magic" because he's a bumbling Hobbit who doesn't know any better.
None of this mystery and uncertainty translates well into video games, which by their nature are mathematical and designed to be egalitarian in the sense that time spent = abilities gained. Middle Earth, like the Earth we know, does not work in so linear a fashion.
Look, I dislike Microsoft as much as the next Mac fanboy, but this comment is idiotic. The New York Times reports:
If you want to extend your prediction to 2007, and probably beyond that to 2008, go right ahead. But Microsoft shows few signs of waning. In addition, Mac marketshare is actually still declining in spite of rising unit sales. Guess what? Microsoft is selling more copies of Windows than ever, and making more money than ever, and they seem constrained only by the size of the market. I wish it were otherwise, but I don't confuse wishes with reality.Do you suppose it would be possible to leave him there?
And until you show up wearing a cape I'm not going to believe it.
I think that's called mixed metaphors. I don't know how you're immersed in water, speaking to others (apparently also immersed in water), and then finding yourself in a corner. What kind of pool do you own, anyway?
Because people will pay the price. If they won't, the product sooner or later disappears.
Sort of like saying "SUVs are safer in a collision." Well, yes, if you hit someone smaller, but if everyone owned SUVs their advantage would disappear and we'd just be using more fossil fuels.
As others pointed out, Apple's Airport Extreme can broadcast on 5 Ghz, but only so long as every computer talking to it uses 802.11n and 5 Ghz. As soon as you have someone who wants to use b/g and older equipment, you're hosed. And since most people don't have brand new and very expensive Apple kit (is anyone else shipping this stuff yet?), this may not be a practical solution at the moment.
Americans would and eventually will accept smaller cars, at least as soon as gas prices rise high enough. This could happen through any number of methods, including declining oil production, wars in oil states, or Pigouvian taxes. The latter makes a lot of sense because it would help prevent the first two in a feasible time horizon and with few negative externalities save creating a tax that would probably never die (hence bloating government) and potentially increasing the mass difference between very large and very small cars, leading to additional fatalities when they collide.
Still, the benefits for both geopolitics and the environment would be enormous. It would also be much simpler to implement than the grandiose and probably error-prone systems like the one you propose.
We saw a natural example of what happens to auto sales when prices increase two summers ago: SUV sales dropped precipitously and Honda sold even more Civics than it usually does. Prices have a way of making the unthinkable reality, whether Americans will "accept" them or not.
She's not, if by great you mean she broke new ground in writing or accomplished aesthetic feats with language. She's also not if by great you mean she achieved something new in her genre, or that she made a contribution to literature that is likely to be enduring. Harry Potter essentially just uses the classic Romance structure to tell a fairly straightforward adventure story that doesn't do much philosophically or artistically, which is why most academics aren't much interested in it.
If you define "great" by sales figures, then you're right, although most academics don't use such metrics. If you define great as getting people to read, then she certainly was. But academics are seldom concerned with such things.
On the other hand, when it sucks, it can suck bad. See this crazy story.
You're not the only one -- see this crazy story.
In addition, their detailed subscriber listings consistently show Macs toward or at the top of the scale for reliability in terms of both desktops and laptops. They don't make complete methodology available, so this isn't exactly the gold standard for consumer research, but it's as close as one gets to hard numbers.
In fact, I imagine that Apple would love to provide corporate support.
I doubt it. See my posts in the above thread for more on this problem.
Not all barriers to entry are intrinsically bad -- do you want a neurosurgeon who hasn't gone to med school operating on your head? -- and the net result of your proposal might be that truly awful or unqualified teachers enter the classroom. The difficulty of firing teachers and the uniform pay scale in most districts makes this even more likely. Certificates are designed to ensure a minimum level of competence, and if you aren't impressed with the level of competence of teachers at the moment, imagine how you'd like it if even that relatively small barrier were removed.
I posted about the issue earlier: here and you can read an AVALANCHE about the issue at this Ars Technica thread. I linked to it elsewhere in this thread, as it's as much detail as anyone could want on the subject of an xMac and why Apple doesn't produce one (or should produce one).
This is among the most insightful comments I've read in this thread, and completely true; it's also part of the reason Apple is unlikely to make spectacular marketshare gains. The company just can't ignore such a massive swath of the market and expect to really break out. To get more perspective on why people think this is and why it is unlikely to change, read some of this massive thread on the subject of the mythical "xMac," as it's been dubbed.
To be sure, Apple is gaining ground, but they're so far from even being a significant threat to Microsoft in terms of OSes that it's almost laughable. The most significant threat Apple poses is by making it necessary for website designers and others to test in Safari and what not; when MS alternatives hit critical mass, then MS is in trouble. That's unlikely to happen from Apple alone or even Apple + Linux; in addition, all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.
Besides, while Apple does make more money per machine, Gateway also sells high-end Xeon workstations and the like. What would be more interesting is to see how many high-margin machines Dell sells in comparison to Apple -- but I'd be willing to bet Dell sells a larger absolute number of them, even if Apple sells more on a percentage basis. Finally, some of the topics raised in an earlier thread about Apple in the enterprise may be worth reading because they apply here too.
Watching the music industry squirm is like watching FOX news -- war is peace, freedom is slavery.
See my post here with commentary issues raised by your post.
I don't. I only use that poster as a specific example, which, if you read his posts, cover things that apply to everyone -- e.g. Exchange support inadequacies. In addition, he's posted about how new Apple machines don't run previous versions of the OS. A version of G5 iMacs came out right after 10.4 Tiger did, for example, but you couldn't (easily or with Apple's support) install Panther on them. At the same time, he had software that didn't run 10.4 on them. It would have been easy for Apple to make sure 10.3 ran on new machines, but they chose not to.
Enterprise users with a large number of machines can't switch to a brand new OS overnight. This caused needless problems for him and demonstrate why Apple is problematic in the enterprise world.