I think you miss my point, but sure... at this point they're not loss leaders. But it wasn't "a short while" that they were, it was several years (excepting the Wii of course). Even so, that just hammers the point home that it is worth the investment in software updates for the consoles -- the longer the console hardware lives, the more money they make, especially since virtually all of the profit is selling the games.
This is completely different than for TVs, where the vendor only makes money when they sell new hardware. Unless they start getting kickbacks from the cable company there is no incentive whatsoever to keep the TV software up to date, and significant incentive *not* to in that you will drive new purchases if the old stuff stops working. (I wonder sometimes if this is a primary reason for RAM limitations in PC designs; PCs can live a lot longer if you can stuff more RAM into them to cope with OS and application growth, but most PCs I have purchased are at RAM limits within 2 years, e.g. a PC bought in 2007 probably cannot have more than 4G RAM, a bare minimum for Win7 so that machine feels very slow even though the same hardware with 8G would be reasonably zippy.)
Back to TV firmware updates: Have you ever done a firmware update for your TV? I did once, since I bought an HDTV prior to HDCP (consider that to be a rough equivalent to buying a TV prior to standardization of an IPTV format, the situation we are in for the next 5+ years). The vendor offered it at a "discount" for those of us who bought early, it was "only" $300 to update since it required a tech visit. Compared to replacing the $3,500 TV (it was less than one year old) this was quite a bargain... but it's still a pretty big chunk of change.
Ok, with built-in internet updates become a whole lot easier, you don't have to have a tech show up with a laptop full of proprietary software. Ideally, then, it will become a lot more cost effective for vendors to provide those updates. Unfortunately Blu-Ray provides a peek into how it will really work -- BR players have always had the ability to do consumer or even automatic firmware updates -- yet as I pointed out the BR vendors do not have a habit of releasing updates beyond a couple of years out. Why should they? The warrantee doesn't require them to support it beyond the end of the period, usually either 90 days or 1 year. If it stops working you are almost certainly going to go buy a new one (which, in fact, I did). They spend money providing you updates, they make it when you buy new stuff.
TVs are just like that and as a result I see no reason to believe that we're going to see high-function TVs go mainstream any time soon. The vendor won't want to support them long term, the consumers won't like the higher up-front prices, and the TVs will get a bad reputation within a few years as the software goes out of date and stops working. And that assumes that the software is decent quality (i.e. usable) to begin with, which is more than a little unlikely if history is any judge.
It's to the vendors' advantage to keep game consoles running as long as they can, especially these days when the consoles are loss leaders. TVs have no such monetary incentive. You'd think phones would, but Apple is one of the best at putting new software on old phones and even they tend to give it up after 3 releases (maybe 2 for iOS5, no 3GS support if rumors are to be believed).
One problem I've long had with the idea that this functionality will migrate into TVs is that traditionally TV firmware has been next to impossible to update.
IPTV protocols are numerous and evolving fast -- there is not now, nor do we really expect there to be any time soon, a hard-and-fast standard for it. If you don't have the ability to easily update the software then it will stop working within a few years.
Now, my TVs have mostly been paragons of reliability, but one thing I cannot say about the TV manufacturers is that they are any good at all at complex software. Or even the very simplest software for that matter; even with the very limited software functionality in a modern TV the configuration and display of information is almost universally lousy.
And it's not just TVs. Most of these consumer electronics guys also make phones, and look what their software looks like when they do it themselves. It just sucks.
Worse, their dedication to ongoing support of hardware that has already sold is damn near zero (there is, after all, no incentive whatsoever once the warrantee periods expire). Ever see an Android phone that cannot be upgraded to the most recent Android, even if the hardware is capable? That is not only common, it is *typical*. And that is pretty much the rule across most consumer electronics. For instance: My first Blu-Ray player had one firmware update a year or so after the model was introduced, and nothing since. The player no longer works on BR discs that use certain new copy protection schemes and there will never be a fix for that, so it became a boat anchor in just two years.
These things are only a mild annoyance for a product that costs perhaps $200. For a nice TV at $2000ish it's a huge problem. Maybe some years hence when there is a real IPTV standard it will stop mattering so much, but that is not going to happen any time soon. Until it does it will be much more cost effective to buy cheap little boxes to attach to the TV.
I can't speak for industry averages, but in 2010 my average e-book price was $8. I calculated out how much it would be for cheapest new versions in paper; ignoring shipping costs, it was about $13. I bought 87 books last year, IIRC. 87*$5 gives you the approximate amount of money I saved by buying e-books. It is quite significant, and actually 2010 was the worst year ever. 2008 e-book prices were more than $1 lower and all told I believe the savings were well over $700 (not including books I got for free).
I note that most of the "higher than paper" prices I'm seeing come from B&N. I have seen the effect on Amazon, but it's very rare... one book in all of them I've ever purchased. It's fairly common to see differences of about a buck, though, which to me is essentially equivalent. And the difference between current hardcover and e-book prices is usually stark: Around $18 in paper, versus $10 to $12 e-book. That's huge. Back-catalog books used to be great deals but the prices have crept up over the last couple of years, though they still tend to be at least a couple of bucks cheaper and there are many deals where they're being sold for only a few dollars to try to drum up business for relatively obscure authors.
Several people here say that there's no reason to buy them if they're available in your library. I don't know about the rest of you, but library hours in my town so heavily overlap working hours as to leave only four hours per week that I could possibly visit. For a heavy reader that's untenable.
To me the value of e-books is several fold. One, I can get them whenever I want with no waiting. When you've finished your current book at 3am and still can't sleep it's great, and god help me I can't even put a price on the value of being able to have a decent book selection while stuck at the Salt Lake City airport (that bookstore BLOWS). Two, it is becoming increasingly easy to get books that are out of print, and which are difficut to find even used. Three, I can carry around a lot of books without much bulk or weight. I don't need hundreds or thousands, but I'm usually reading several books concurrently and it's nice to have all of them with me for whatever mood I happen to be in. Four, I have a personal paper book library of thousands of books. They take up a lot of space, and it has been difficult to trim (though a flood last spring got rid of five cubic yards of them). There really aren't many books I feel I must have in paper; these days I just buy those kinds of books and save the shelve space everything else used to use.
The fact that they save money, quite a lot of money, is just gravy.
I dunno about everyone else, but last time I tried turning on ipv6 I discovered that Comcast didn't route it and a bunch of the internet turned into a black hole.
I keep hearing people like yourself claiming that e-books don't have cost savings versus paper. That is just baloney. It's not even close, and it is really easy to go on Amazon and prove that to yourself. For those of you too lazy to do that, I offer some real numbers.
I have purchased literally hundreds of e-books going back to 1998, mostly fiction and science fiction. Over the last three years since the release of the Kindle I've purchased around three hundred (about twice as many as in all previous years, owing primarily to dramatically enhanced e-book availability). So let me talk about real-world e-book prices.
Back prior to the Kindle, if you could get an e-book at all, it tended to be back-catalog stuff from minor authors and small publishing houses... and about $4-5. In cases involving major publishers they tended to demand full retail price for their books - $8 for paperback equivalents, and a whopping $20-24 for new releases (even though the new releases in paper were available for $18 at local retailers, and $14 from Amazon). Anyway, compare those to paperback prices of the era of $7-8 and you see that I was saving 40-50% over paper. I bought hardcovers for almost all new releases because it was much less expensive.
Amazon changed everything overnight. New releases were $10, and that's the price everyone thinks Amazon sold all their books for -- but they didn't. That was *only* new releases, and that $10 compared to $16 or more for paper from the cheapest sources. Back catalog stuff *never* sold for $10, it was $4-6, compared to paperback prices that were rarely less than $8. Typically you could expect to save $2-3 for an e-book version of a paperback; not big money, but as a percentage quite significant.
As catalogs expanded prices for paperback releases, particularly from the large publishers, went up a bit to $6-7, but new paperbacks were rarely less than $8 -- so you were still saving a couple of bucks per book. I read a mix of new and old stuff and in 2007 and 2008 my average e-book cost was just over $6 (there were a lot of $1-4 steals in there, even by major authors), whereas my average paper price from Amazon in the same period was $12. (That excludes shipping.) From local booksellers, $14. I saved, quite literally, more than 50% by buying e-books. Even considering the $400 cost of the Kindle I saved almost $300 on books by the end of 2008.
When Apple got into this a year ago the market changed again, and Amazon lost the ability to sell new releases for $10 from most of the major publishers. Costs went up -- to about $12. I think I spent $14 on one new release last year, the most I'd spent on a e-book in I think eight years; I haven't bought a new release in paper format for less than $18 in quite some time, and many are $20 now. Paperback books from most publishers are around $5-8 in e-book format now, with major publishers in the $8-10 range. Paper books, of course, got more expensive too -- most of them are $10 or more now from major publishers, and there have been cases where the e-book was within $1 of the cost of the paper book (but that's very unusual). I save less than I did a year ago, but I'm still saving money -- a lot of money.
Because I kept hearing all these claims that the books were now at least as expensive as paper, even though I hadn't thought that was the case, I had noticed the creep up in prices and a few weeks ago I went back and did a sanity check. I looked at my 2010 Kindle purchases. My average e-book cost (on 87 books) has gone up quite a bit since 2007. It's now just under $8, about a 30% increase. I took the opportunity to price all of those books versus Amazon's paper prices too, to see how they compare. Average price would have been just a bit over $12. This represents a 30% savings, a bit more than $4 per book. Times 87 books, that is a savings of around $350 for the year. A new 3G Kindle is $190, so even factoring in the cost of a new device (I didn't buy one in 2010) it would have b
The Wired iPad app does give you a way to see the breadth of the content without having to go page-by-page using a navigation bar that has images of a number of pages across it. It uses a scroll bar whereas I'd rather flick, but either way it is a fine way to browse quickly and I use that pretty regularly. I would like to be able to make the icons bigger, though, so I could get more of an idea of what's on the page... and maybe that becomes a whole new mode.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm disinclined to spend $5 for every issue of things that I pay $12/year for in paper. I have continued to buy most issues of Wired for the iPad because I really like the layout, but I haven't bought all of them because the cost is kind of ridiculous, and I've bought only a handful of issues of any magazines other than Wired. I'm hoping they (and others) offer subscriptions soon. It's crazy that it hasn't happened yet.
I don't know what it's like on Android devices, but this high cost does not carry over to the Kindle -- I get The Atlantic and The New Yorker on the Kindle at very reasonable prices. From magazine-specific apps to Zinio, though, iPad magazines are overpriced. I am really looking forward to photography magazines on the iPad once they realize that one of the big benefits can be to provide high-resolution images for everything they publish; it's irritating when space constraints force small images, and right now that irritation is carried straight to the electronic form... but if they continue with obscene prices I guess it's just going to have to be paper.
Another big irritation e.g. with Wired for the iPad is sheer size. A third of a gig? That's a big hunk of the total storage of the machine, and while I can shuffle them on and off it is really irritating to have to wait for that to download to the device (and wait some more while it "installs"). The result is gorgeous, make no mistake, but I have to believe that there is a better way than providing images of every page.
...is that they wre horribly overpriced. I wanted a Windows tablet when they first came out, right up until I found em priced at $2000 and up. What the hell? You could get two nice laptops for that.
Even today they run about twice what they should. Apple waltzes in with a tablet half the cost of a Windows tablet, and it actually works well with its touch interface... It is not at all hard to see why people liked it.
This is not true. Scramble time alone is around 40 minutes near Washington, that's why they had those "stay in your seats" periods, and that's pretty much best-case. And you can be very sure that they aren't going to shoot that plane down right away, they'll give it every chance; a mistake would be very, very bad.
But it is moot. The ability to take airliner 9/11 style didn't even last out the day of 9/11. Once passengers got the idea that the best thing to do was take down the terrorists, they did so on their own. All of the terrorist attack attempts on planes since then were defeated by passengers, not the TSA or air marshalls.
We are not going to see another 9/11. We are almost certainly going to see another Lockerbie though.
I've been using Firefox on the Mac for years without issues (other than rampant memory growth, but relatively recent versions aren't so bad). It used to crash a lot in the early 2.x days, but that was awhile ago. I typically use FlashBlock, though, so maybe it's not FireFox that gives you the trouble.
You are making a couple of presumptions. First, that you're going to be able to "fix" the user; and second, that there is not a suitable replacement tool that doesn't have the trouble.
The first is certainly not always true. Some people are difficult or impossible to retrain, yet in today's world they lose a lot of they can't use a computer. These people really want an appliance.
And that brings us to the second point. Windows is not the only viable choice in computing! That is *especially* the case for consumers, but it is becoming more and more the case in business too as business apps move to the web.
Back to the case of the Mac for my problem user: There is not much difference from the user perspective these days between a Mac and Windows box. They look almost the same, they work almost the same, there is plenty of software to do whatever you want to do as long as you aren't a hardcore gamer (and let's face it, the people with these problems are rarely if ever hardcore gamers).
That being the case, perhaps there are times when it's better to look at a different tool than to keep blaming the user, especially when blaming the user doesn't actually make the problem go away *and* better tools are readily available.
I note that it's not just blatantly stupid users who have problems with Windows. Malware infections are *endemic* on Windows. *Most* consumers get a malware infection within a year of getting a new PC, and most are completely incapable of removing it on their own, even with commonly used (and recommended) commercial software. Nor is the problem specific to consumers; businesses have fast re-imaging software because they *need* it. That is the elephant in the room when it comes with Windows: Nobody likes to talk about how easily it gets screwed up, and from a consumer's point of view nobody likes to talk about how hard it is to fix problems once they crop up.
Consumers tend to deal with it by buying new PCs much more often than they really need. "It got really slow" and "it does weird things" translates into "PC is broken" and since fixing the PC -- having a Geek Squad type person come and clean it up or reinstall -- can often cost nearly as much as buying a whole new one, they buy new ones. It's like replacing your car when the maintenance gets too expensive.
This is the cost of using Windows. Clearly business finds it an acceptable cost, but that cost is much higher for a consumer. For a long time the consumer really didn't have a whole lot of choice, especially at reasonable price points.
If we presume that this is happening with consumers, then a device that does not get messed up in this way, even if it costs more, may be a better solution. That is what we've got when we talk about Macs. They are more expensive (much more expensive at the low end) but they break much less often, and when they do break it is usually not difficult to fix them. The end result is much longer hardware life. My experience is that the lifetime is double or more. If the cost is less than double that of the Windows PC, and it is, then it's a win for the consumer financially. It's a win anyway because of the reduction in hassle, but there you have it.
I don't think the Mac is going to be a particularly good value proposition much longer, though, if it indeed is the best value even today. Like I said before, most want an appliance. That is what they're getting with an iPhone or Android phone today, although their limited screen size makes them relatively poor internet access devices. We see that kind of appliance scaling up though: The iPad is a terrific web access device, and Android tablets ought to be as well, and GoogleTV and its ilk certainly could work as well. Pricing on these things is already competitive with the least expensive PCs, and ought to be significantly better as volumes rise, simply because they don't need anything like the kind of hardware you need to run Windows effectively.
The iPhone gave the iPad a strong applications base right from the start, so
Obviously YMMV. I have had my share of weird problems with Macs, although none took more than 45 minutes to solve with the help of Google. Regarding hardware, there was a period around 2005 where their initial build quality left something to be desired, every system I bought in 2005 had to have a warrantee claim for some hardware issue. Systems before 2005 and after have been very high quality. En-toto, though, it's been much, much easier to keep them running... and not one single full rebuild in the nine years since I started using OSX aside from a total hard drive failure.
I bought my first OSX laptop in 2001 to replace my wife's Windows laptop. I had been forced to rebuild that Windows laptop every 3 months like clockwork. (This was Win98, XP hadn't hit the scenes yet, although I'd been using NT for years on the desktop.) It drove me insane because rebuilds took 10 hours apiece between the OS reinstall and all the applications. (Reasonably priced imaging software was not yet available, nor back-up software for that matter.) We got the Mac (a Ti Powerbook) and I did almost nothing to it for its entire 5 year lifespan at home, and nothing at all for the 2 years after before the hinges broke from heavy use and destroyed the screen connection ribbon. 7 years out of that laptop and I spent less than *one hour* keeping it running. That is one heck of an improvement.
I thought XP would make things better, but it didn't. The registry was (and is) still a huge disaster, but luckily (or not) most XP boxes are so hugely malware infected within a year (sometimes within weeks) that you have to wipe and rebuild them. (Eradication is nigh impossible these days, and certainly much slower than a rebuild even when it works.) I don't own Acronis True Image because I felt like paying a bunch of money[1], I own it as a purely defensive measure: The Windows systems get imaged at every major installation point so at least I can return them to a near-current configuration within about half an hour.
Malware infections happen despite antivirus software. In fact, I find they're worse when using something mainstream like Norton versus something more oddball like AVG... and most people use mainstream products.
Then there are the users. I had one who would randomly delete things. Like drivers. Her system would just stop working in weird and inscrutable ways, and of course she had no idea what she did. I finally gave up and forced her onto a Mac. I have had to deal with fewer than one issue per *year* since. That is another big improvement, and I think it comes down to the nice separation between system and user permissions; she cannot delete system things willy-nilly.
This is of course possible on Windows systems too (in fact, I gave a talk on how to configure your NT system's security back at WinDev in 1996) but unfortunately a wide variety of applications simply stop working if you are not running as administrator and people totally hate it if you lock the systems down so they can't install things. (That is true on Mac and Windows, although the Mac's security system is vastly less intrusive than UAC despite accomplishing the same thing.) The state of things on Windows has improved a lot since Vista, at least consumer games don't need admin rights just to run anymore, but I still run into it regularly with poorly written or legacy applications. It makes it quite difficult to convince users to run on securely configured systems.
I thought Vista would be a big improvement versus XP and pushed people to upgrade. I was mistaken. Everyone turns off UAC, the only significant improvement in the whole system, because it's just so intrusive. The first year to year and a half of Vista were disastrous due to immature and missing drivers too. But hey, most Windows users skipped Vista and went straight to Win7 so they missed that pain.
Win7 did not improve the malware situation over Vista, UAC or not. Both, according to the statistics, are vastly be
Like a bunch of others I use Firefox too, and recommend it, on MacOS X. Safari is fine these days, but for a long time I got more reliable results with Firefox and it's nice to have the same software everywhere.
The Apple tax bit is a little disingenuous. The mini is indeed expensive (but so very small and quiet and there is value in that) but above that the machines end up being pretty well price-competitive with similar hardware.
I hear "I can get a way better Dell laptop for $600" compared to a Macbook, but it isn't true. The display is crap, the build quality is worse than crap. A comparable laptop is a Thinkpad... And the prices are damn near identical.
Last I checked that was true of all--in-ones too (not my cup of tea). The low end of the Pros are a little expensive, but by the time you're halfway up the line they're a bargain.
Mind you, it irritates me no end that there is no expandable desktop unit except at the high end. On the other hand, the G5 Quad I use for photography is five years old in a couple of weeks and still going strong. Typical Windows desktop lives (and Linux for that matter) are no more than 3 years before it becomes difficult to expand the box enough to run the latest software.
None of that is whoy I buy Macs though. My time is valuable. I spend almost zero time maintaining Macs. No malware. No weird-ass registry issues that are only solveable by rebuilding the machine. Back-ups using in-the-box software that are unobtrusive and restores that are fast and painless. Basic software that works at least reasonably well, and often extremely well, without having to buy anything extra.
I use and manage all of the versions of Windows manufactured in the last decade regularly (some much more often than the Macs). I find it telling that in order to make it run smoothly, reliably, you have to spend hundreds on aftermarket software, and recovery from malware is painful beyond belief if you don't have a recent image. Even migrating to a new box is painful. Dealing with these things costs time and money, and the problems are all but nonexistent on Macs. (Many are nonexistent on Linux too; I make heavy use of Linux for development and on servers. Great bang for the buck.)
From a consumer point of view Macs are a way better deal. Not so much in business given the poor bulk management tools and Apple's legendarily bad business-class hardware support. Remember, though, that many of those tools exist primarily because it was impossible to manage the fragile Windows infrastructure without stuff like fast re-imaging. Windows breaks way more often than anything else and is the least repairable without rebuild system I have ever seen (and that's saying something, I wave worked with a lot of weird stuff).
Someday you should get me going about the design of the Windows VMM amd NTFS; the apathy Microsoft shows toward improving basic function is mind-boggling. There is no reason I should have to defrag drives regularly, that was a solved problem in 1985, for instance, and Microsoft could have all but eliminated it with trivial (and backward compatible) changes to the block allocator. Drives me nuts.
IMO there isn't a whole lot of difference in the basic UI of any of these things anymore. MacOS is easier to use than any of them because it is a whole lot more consistent within and between apps, but realistically things are not so bad anywhere else either.
Anyway Linux is lacking a whole lot more than just major studio games, and WINE only closes the gap in a few places (and with significant irritations). I use Linux daily, so this is not just idle speculation. Creativity products in particular are nonexistent or weak (I'm looking at you Open Office) with the exception of GIMP (and I still strongly prefer Photoshop). It's a superb programming environment though, I wish I had valgrind for Windows. (I do have Purify. When it works it is great. Most of the time it does not work. Oh well.)
I use Windows daily too, many things are just not available anywhere else. I find that a pretty good development environment has Windows running native and Linux in a VM. (I'd rather put Linux native, but Windows has plenty of trouble being performant even when it's on the bare hardware. It's gawdawful in VMs. Linux works fine in VMs excepting mediocre network performance.)
When it comes down to it my favorite desktop environment is the Mac. Excellent applications plus all the goodness that is UNIX, and it's easy enough to run Windows in a VM if I have to (though these days that is a pretty rare exception). I could do without a lot of aspects of His Steveness but I have to weigh that against the huge benefit of how easy it is to keep Macs running even in the hands of naive users.
There are actually several fairly decent image editors on the web now (there weren't even a year ago), like pixlr.com. I'm not uninstalling my copy of Photoshop any time soon, for lots of reasons, but every passing day these programs get closer in functionality and for a whole lot of uses they're already there.
Regardless, I think content creation is going to need a PC or something like a PC for a good long time to come. The combination of high-bandwidth and precise input (keyboard[1], Wacom tablet) and horsepower is enough to take something like an iPad out of the picture completely for a lot of things. Of course, not very many people actually *do* those things, and for some very common tasks -- like constructing a presentation -- an iPad could well be superior. (I've done it with Keynote; It's *almost* there, but several UI annoyances are big enough to make me go back to the desktop. I could totally see using it exclusively with a few UI tweaks though, and in some cases it's already a lot better.)
[1] Of course, you can get a keyboard for an iPad if you want one. That kind of negates the beauty of the device if you ask me, though.
This is pretty similar to the position I'm in. I skipped the HTPC in favor of a Tivo, even though it was more limited, because every experiment I did with HTPCs ended with spending a ton of money to get something pretty fragile. OTA recording worked great, video capture through a cable box worked fine, but HDTV pretty much nuked it. The Tivo was a far better solution, both in that it works (and my wife loves it) and that it wasn't all that expensive over the long term.
Still, the Tivo has been a long-term disappointment. It does the DVR thing brilliantly, but it was obvious to me right from the outset that it could be the center of the AV stack if they put a little effort into it. But they didn't! And every new feature they add has leveraged Tivo's servers, which are so underprovisioned that you often get old waiting for a key click to be responded to. I will continue to use the Tivo until I find the cable connection to be redundant (5 years out, I bet) but I can already see its end-of-life.
$100 for an Apple TV is so cheap, and the interface so clean, that it's worth a shot just to see what it's like. Heck, I'd do it just for Netflix streaming. I will almost certainly buy one before Christmas, as soon as I get around to getting an HDMI switcher so I have an input to hook it up to.
I was surprised that the Logitech Google TV was $300, I expected closer to $200 based on the specs. I think that's going to be a hard sell in a recession economy (I'm certainly not lining up to buy one just yet and I'm very gadget-happy). My gut call is that Apple has the right idea, a dirt-cheap platform that tries to do a few things very well. If they manage to get enough TV content I would drop my cable subscription in a heartbeat, but even without it access to my iTunes database through my AV stack is worth $100. It's "good enough."
And I think my rationalizations come to the heart of the marketing problem with these devices: None of these will go mainstream without something in addition to TV, if only because none of them will have enough content to seriously compete with cable. There must be Something Else.
I think we're going to see the iTunes store for the Apple TV within the next year and they're going to push gaming hard. If they do that I could totally see this device doing a Wii and selling a gazillion units as a cheap little game platform. (Seriously, $5 games on my TV? I would totally do that.) Apple already proved they can sell iPod touches on that model very effectively. If they get that kind of volume the TV content people will sit up and notice. I wonder if that wasn't Jobs' game plan from the start of the Apple TV reboot.
Of course, Google TV could do the same thing (and I know they're talking about it). $300 though... that is not a "take a chance" price, and despite huge gains they still don't have anything like the developer infrastructure of the iPhone/iPod touch to leverage.
No matter which way it goes I guess we will get cool new gadgets though, so bring it on:-).
That was the general practice unless there were overriding concerns. Another thing was that you had to have a straight of at least 1mi (I might have the distance wrong) every so often so it could be used for aircraft.
I don't have the energy to dig up my bibliography of sources but it was certainly not hard to find a lot of detail about the highway system. Quite a lot of thought went into its design, and the most interesting thing is that commerce was really a gravy side-effect.
I read an interview with one of the original architects and he said the one thing they really screwed up was running the interstates so close to cities, and having so many ramps in those areas.
This is not selfishness, I live on the other side of the country where there's no chance in hell of ever getting speed limits raised to 90mph. Nor do I think they should be. Rather, I think highway speeds ought to be 80th percentile. But I have spent lots of time in cars in NV and Utah and NM as a passenger and frankly it seems that the biggest problem out there is simple highway hypnosis. It's a long $#@^ way between anything in those states. Shorter travel time can be a huge win.
Anyway, you are wrong about tighter speed limits, but that's probably because you have not looked at the literature.
What has been shown time and again is that reducing the speed differential between traffic reduces accidents and fatalities, independent of actual speed. Your chances of dying in a crash are higher if you're going faster, but if you can reduce the incidence of crashes it can be -- and is -- a net win. So the goal here is to reduce accident rates as much as possible.
The engineers say that the way to do this is the 80th percentile rule; you let traffic free-flow and watch how fast it goes. Set the speed limit to the 80th percentile, rounded up a little (5mph in the US, 10k elsewhere). Set minimums at 10mph (20kph) lower.
The statistics say that traffic travelling 10mph faster *or* slower than average sees accident rates climb to 300% normal. Moreover, the slower side sees multi-vehicle accident rates climb 900%! Slower drivers cause a lot of accidents, and they involve other people much more often.
Now let's put that into the context of a typical 55mph US highway. Average traffic speed is 67mph on those highways. Minimum limits are 45mph. That means that someone -- legally -- going at the lower limit is actually going more than 20mph too slow! Very, very dangerous, both to themselves and to everyone else. But someone going 70mph -- 15mph too high according to the law -- is statistically very safe.
Given these numbers typical interstate traffic speed limits should be 70 or 75mph, not 55 or 65mph, and minimums should be 60 or 65mph respectively. That's what the engineering says. We have, unfortunately, eschewed engineering in favor of politics.
So, we have some great data from when the NMSL was repealed and a lot of limits jumped to 65mph. The first really interesting figure is that average traffic speeds jumped -- to 69mph. This put to lie the idea that traffic is just going to run at the tolerance limit of the police regardless of the speed limit. In fact, traffic tends to drive at "comfort" speeds, which unsurprisingly are somewhere near the design speed of the road.
With such a minimal increase in typical speed you wouldn't expect a large change in fatalities. There was a significant change though, absolutely -- but not when normalized for vehicle miles traveled. Moreover the fatality rate for the road system as a whole dropped by something like 5%. It's believed that this is because the change in highway limits made drivers prefer the safer interstates to the less safe rural highways (now 70mph was unlikely to get you a ticket).
Anyway, I spent awhile researching this stuff awhile back and may even still have a bibliography buried in my archives somewhere but I encourage you to do the research yourself. Even Wikipedia mentions this stuff, you could start there.
I note that many of these figures are multinational. The data supports this in the US, the UK, France, and Germany at a minimum. The best studies of this are in France and Germany. (Germany is an odd man out though; the autobahn is pretty safe even though it has severe vehicle speed differences; driver training might have a lot to do with it. US driver training is pathetic, nigh on nonexistent, and I would not recommend autobahn-style laws here.)
Here are a couple of additional factoids for you:
- Average accident speed on non-interstates in the US is 27mph. Average accident speed including interstates is 29mph. What this means is that most accidents do not have spe
You've never been to Nevada, have you? 90mph is not stupid fast in much of the state. Dead flat straight roads for hundreds of miles... That's Nevada.
As a general rule the US interstate system was designed to be safe at 75mph in 1950s military vehicles. It is no great trick to be safe at higher speeds in modern cars, particularly in a big empty state like NV. Heck, in that area 80mph limits were the norm until they passed the national speed limit.
Manual management, when it's done properly, is certainly smaller... but you have to balance that against the much larger chance of making errors[1] -- not just a significantly increased tendency to leak, but also serious errors like double-frees and use-after-free and the development time spent tracking that stuff down. (To say nothing of the costs of dealing with customers when their software crashes.) In addition GC mechanisms can have lower overall CPU costs, there are interesting optimizations available when you're doing things in bulk, but you pay for that in less predictability.
There's give and take and strong reasons to pick one or the other depending on the application type. If you step back and think about it, though, there aren't that many cases where the benefits of GC are outweighed by its costs. Software using GC tends to be easier to write and much less prone to crashing, and unpredictability is not usually in the user-perceptible (to say nothing of critical) range. Given that most of the cost of software is writing and maintaining it anything you can do to depress those costs is a big win.
Obviously there are cases where the tradeoffs are too expensive. Cellphones, as you point out, may be one of those -- but Android seems to be doing fine with Java as its principal runtime environment. (Honestly, your typical smartphone has way more memory and CPU than servers did not so long ago, to say nothing of the set-top boxes for which Java was originally designed.) Operating systems, realtime systems, and embedded systems are other cases.
[1] Brooks' _Mythical Man Month_ makes a strong case for development systems that optimize for reduced errors even at the cost of some performance. He was talking about assembly versus high level languages but (perhaps not surprisingly) the more things have changed the more they have remained the same. We have a lot of data on development and maintenance costs of various software environments now and costs tend to be lowest in the cases where the environment makes it harder for programmers to screw up. Usually by significant margins; my experience in comparing Java and C# versus C++ indicated an average time-to-completion differential of 300%, and a bug count reduction of more than 90%, over the long term. In some cases -- like network applications and servers -- the improved libraries found in Java and C# versus C++ yielded order-of-magnitude improvements. These are numbers you can take to the bank. Even if the first generation of the software is slow relative to a language like C++, the ability to rev the software three times as fast means much faster algorithmic development. It is often the case that the Java code would outperform C++ within three or four versions if the code was particularly complicated.
Of course C++ -- as with C before it -- is a particularly lousy language when it comes to memory management. It's a lot closer if you're using something that has, for instance, real arrays or heap validity checking. It annoys me to no end that none of the standard C++ development environments builds in debugging aids as a matter of course on non-release builds. If they exist at all they're hidden features (look at all the debugging heap features Microsoft Visual Studio will give you if you can figure out how to turn it on), and most of the time you have to go buy expensive add-ons (like BoundsChecker or Purify) to do things that would be trivial for the compiler writer to manage with a little extra instrumentation and integration with the library system. Alas. I actually had better debugging tools at my disposal for C++ in 1994 than I do today (although Valgrind is not bad at all), and that really pisses me off given how much money Microsoft gets for the tools I use.
There are a lot of possible answers to that. The most obvious is that you want to limit the growth of the JVM; with garbage collecting there is a tendency to grow the heap without limit.
That was never a satisfactory answer to me, though, because it is not at all difficult to set up an heuristic to watch GC activity and grow the available heap when it looks like memory is tight -- and certainly to try it before throwing OutOfMemory! In fact, it wasn't very long before JVMs that did this started popping up (I think Microsoft's was the first; I think it's pretty darn ironic that the best JVM out there when Sun sued Microsoft was actually Microsoft's, and by no small margin).
IMO it's an anachronism that Sun's JVMs still have the hard fixed limit without even the choice to turn it off. Larger Java applications (e.g. Eclipse, Maven, and of course the web app servers) regularly break for no other reason than running into heap limits even when there is plenty of memory available on the system. I find it a huge and unnecessary irritation.
It's always been the case that there are application-visible differences in JVMs. (Remember that Java is "write once, debug everywhere." It's not just a funny tag line.) You have to detect and work around them somehow and the combination of vendor string and version is a reliable way to do that.
The application didn't do that deliberately, it was a side effect of launching the JVM with a too-small maximum heap size. Because the option to change the VM size is specific to the individual JVM implementation you can't just guess which flags to put in there. They did the reasonable thing in the case that they couldn't identify the JVM and didn't pass any option; unfortunately that meant it ran out of memory.
It's not just smart phones. I had aNoxia 97xx that would drop calls if held a certain way. It always seemed obvious to me that it was attenuation.
Having said that,I thought Apple was nuts to expose the metal, and had presumed originally that it was covered in clear polymer. Every school kid radio fan knows what happens to the signal if you grab the antenna, right? So why would you make a phone with a naked antenna?
On the other hand I've played with a few 4s and the issue is IMO not nearly as severe as the tempest would imply, and while most people I know can reproduce the problem several indicate that the phone works in places where previous models didn't. If I were in the market I would still buy one. I would use a case as a matter of course anyway (put one on the 3gs immediately, have you seen what these things cost?). Not Apple's case, I swear Apple has no idea how to make a good case.
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I think you miss my point, but sure ... at this point they're not loss leaders. But it wasn't "a short while" that they were, it was several years (excepting the Wii of course). Even so, that just hammers the point home that it is worth the investment in software updates for the consoles -- the longer the console hardware lives, the more money they make, especially since virtually all of the profit is selling the games.
This is completely different than for TVs, where the vendor only makes money when they sell new hardware. Unless they start getting kickbacks from the cable company there is no incentive whatsoever to keep the TV software up to date, and significant incentive *not* to in that you will drive new purchases if the old stuff stops working. (I wonder sometimes if this is a primary reason for RAM limitations in PC designs; PCs can live a lot longer if you can stuff more RAM into them to cope with OS and application growth, but most PCs I have purchased are at RAM limits within 2 years, e.g. a PC bought in 2007 probably cannot have more than 4G RAM, a bare minimum for Win7 so that machine feels very slow even though the same hardware with 8G would be reasonably zippy.)
Back to TV firmware updates: Have you ever done a firmware update for your TV? I did once, since I bought an HDTV prior to HDCP (consider that to be a rough equivalent to buying a TV prior to standardization of an IPTV format, the situation we are in for the next 5+ years). The vendor offered it at a "discount" for those of us who bought early, it was "only" $300 to update since it required a tech visit. Compared to replacing the $3,500 TV (it was less than one year old) this was quite a bargain ... but it's still a pretty big chunk of change.
Ok, with built-in internet updates become a whole lot easier, you don't have to have a tech show up with a laptop full of proprietary software. Ideally, then, it will become a lot more cost effective for vendors to provide those updates. Unfortunately Blu-Ray provides a peek into how it will really work -- BR players have always had the ability to do consumer or even automatic firmware updates -- yet as I pointed out the BR vendors do not have a habit of releasing updates beyond a couple of years out. Why should they? The warrantee doesn't require them to support it beyond the end of the period, usually either 90 days or 1 year. If it stops working you are almost certainly going to go buy a new one (which, in fact, I did). They spend money providing you updates, they make it when you buy new stuff.
TVs are just like that and as a result I see no reason to believe that we're going to see high-function TVs go mainstream any time soon. The vendor won't want to support them long term, the consumers won't like the higher up-front prices, and the TVs will get a bad reputation within a few years as the software goes out of date and stops working. And that assumes that the software is decent quality (i.e. usable) to begin with, which is more than a little unlikely if history is any judge.
It's to the vendors' advantage to keep game consoles running as long as they can, especially these days when the consoles are loss leaders. TVs have no such monetary incentive. You'd think phones would, but Apple is one of the best at putting new software on old phones and even they tend to give it up after 3 releases (maybe 2 for iOS5, no 3GS support if rumors are to be believed).
One problem I've long had with the idea that this functionality will migrate into TVs is that traditionally TV firmware has been next to impossible to update.
IPTV protocols are numerous and evolving fast -- there is not now, nor do we really expect there to be any time soon, a hard-and-fast standard for it. If you don't have the ability to easily update the software then it will stop working within a few years.
Now, my TVs have mostly been paragons of reliability, but one thing I cannot say about the TV manufacturers is that they are any good at all at complex software. Or even the very simplest software for that matter; even with the very limited software functionality in a modern TV the configuration and display of information is almost universally lousy.
And it's not just TVs. Most of these consumer electronics guys also make phones, and look what their software looks like when they do it themselves. It just sucks.
Worse, their dedication to ongoing support of hardware that has already sold is damn near zero (there is, after all, no incentive whatsoever once the warrantee periods expire). Ever see an Android phone that cannot be upgraded to the most recent Android, even if the hardware is capable? That is not only common, it is *typical*. And that is pretty much the rule across most consumer electronics. For instance: My first Blu-Ray player had one firmware update a year or so after the model was introduced, and nothing since. The player no longer works on BR discs that use certain new copy protection schemes and there will never be a fix for that, so it became a boat anchor in just two years.
These things are only a mild annoyance for a product that costs perhaps $200. For a nice TV at $2000ish it's a huge problem. Maybe some years hence when there is a real IPTV standard it will stop mattering so much, but that is not going to happen any time soon. Until it does it will be much more cost effective to buy cheap little boxes to attach to the TV.
I can't speak for industry averages, but in 2010 my average e-book price was $8. I calculated out how much it would be for cheapest new versions in paper; ignoring shipping costs, it was about $13. I bought 87 books last year, IIRC. 87*$5 gives you the approximate amount of money I saved by buying e-books. It is quite significant, and actually 2010 was the worst year ever. 2008 e-book prices were more than $1 lower and all told I believe the savings were well over $700 (not including books I got for free).
I note that most of the "higher than paper" prices I'm seeing come from B&N. I have seen the effect on Amazon, but it's very rare ... one book in all of them I've ever purchased. It's fairly common to see differences of about a buck, though, which to me is essentially equivalent. And the difference between current hardcover and e-book prices is usually stark: Around $18 in paper, versus $10 to $12 e-book. That's huge. Back-catalog books used to be great deals but the prices have crept up over the last couple of years, though they still tend to be at least a couple of bucks cheaper and there are many deals where they're being sold for only a few dollars to try to drum up business for relatively obscure authors.
Several people here say that there's no reason to buy them if they're available in your library. I don't know about the rest of you, but library hours in my town so heavily overlap working hours as to leave only four hours per week that I could possibly visit. For a heavy reader that's untenable.
To me the value of e-books is several fold. One, I can get them whenever I want with no waiting. When you've finished your current book at 3am and still can't sleep it's great, and god help me I can't even put a price on the value of being able to have a decent book selection while stuck at the Salt Lake City airport (that bookstore BLOWS). Two, it is becoming increasingly easy to get books that are out of print, and which are difficut to find even used. Three, I can carry around a lot of books without much bulk or weight. I don't need hundreds or thousands, but I'm usually reading several books concurrently and it's nice to have all of them with me for whatever mood I happen to be in. Four, I have a personal paper book library of thousands of books. They take up a lot of space, and it has been difficult to trim (though a flood last spring got rid of five cubic yards of them). There really aren't many books I feel I must have in paper; these days I just buy those kinds of books and save the shelve space everything else used to use.
The fact that they save money, quite a lot of money, is just gravy.
I dunno about everyone else, but last time I tried turning on ipv6 I discovered that Comcast didn't route it and a bunch of the internet turned into a black hole.
I keep hearing people like yourself claiming that e-books don't have cost savings versus paper. That is just baloney. It's not even close, and it is really easy to go on Amazon and prove that to yourself. For those of you too lazy to do that, I offer some real numbers.
I have purchased literally hundreds of e-books going back to 1998, mostly fiction and science fiction. Over the last three years since the release of the Kindle I've purchased around three hundred (about twice as many as in all previous years, owing primarily to dramatically enhanced e-book availability). So let me talk about real-world e-book prices.
Back prior to the Kindle, if you could get an e-book at all, it tended to be back-catalog stuff from minor authors and small publishing houses ... and about $4-5. In cases involving major publishers they tended to demand full retail price for their books - $8 for paperback equivalents, and a whopping $20-24 for new releases (even though the new releases in paper were available for $18 at local retailers, and $14 from Amazon). Anyway, compare those to paperback prices of the era of $7-8 and you see that I was saving 40-50% over paper. I bought hardcovers for almost all new releases because it was much less expensive.
Amazon changed everything overnight. New releases were $10, and that's the price everyone thinks Amazon sold all their books for -- but they didn't. That was *only* new releases, and that $10 compared to $16 or more for paper from the cheapest sources. Back catalog stuff *never* sold for $10, it was $4-6, compared to paperback prices that were rarely less than $8. Typically you could expect to save $2-3 for an e-book version of a paperback; not big money, but as a percentage quite significant.
As catalogs expanded prices for paperback releases, particularly from the large publishers, went up a bit to $6-7, but new paperbacks were rarely less than $8 -- so you were still saving a couple of bucks per book. I read a mix of new and old stuff and in 2007 and 2008 my average e-book cost was just over $6 (there were a lot of $1-4 steals in there, even by major authors), whereas my average paper price from Amazon in the same period was $12. (That excludes shipping.) From local booksellers, $14. I saved, quite literally, more than 50% by buying e-books. Even considering the $400 cost of the Kindle I saved almost $300 on books by the end of 2008.
When Apple got into this a year ago the market changed again, and Amazon lost the ability to sell new releases for $10 from most of the major publishers. Costs went up -- to about $12. I think I spent $14 on one new release last year, the most I'd spent on a e-book in I think eight years; I haven't bought a new release in paper format for less than $18 in quite some time, and many are $20 now. Paperback books from most publishers are around $5-8 in e-book format now, with major publishers in the $8-10 range. Paper books, of course, got more expensive too -- most of them are $10 or more now from major publishers, and there have been cases where the e-book was within $1 of the cost of the paper book (but that's very unusual). I save less than I did a year ago, but I'm still saving money -- a lot of money.
Because I kept hearing all these claims that the books were now at least as expensive as paper, even though I hadn't thought that was the case, I had noticed the creep up in prices and a few weeks ago I went back and did a sanity check. I looked at my 2010 Kindle purchases. My average e-book cost (on 87 books) has gone up quite a bit since 2007. It's now just under $8, about a 30% increase. I took the opportunity to price all of those books versus Amazon's paper prices too, to see how they compare. Average price would have been just a bit over $12. This represents a 30% savings, a bit more than $4 per book. Times 87 books, that is a savings of around $350 for the year. A new 3G Kindle is $190, so even factoring in the cost of a new device (I didn't buy one in 2010) it would have b
The Wired iPad app does give you a way to see the breadth of the content without having to go page-by-page using a navigation bar that has images of a number of pages across it. It uses a scroll bar whereas I'd rather flick, but either way it is a fine way to browse quickly and I use that pretty regularly. I would like to be able to make the icons bigger, though, so I could get more of an idea of what's on the page ... and maybe that becomes a whole new mode.
Zinio does more or less the same thing.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm disinclined to spend $5 for every issue of things that I pay $12/year for in paper. I have continued to buy most issues of Wired for the iPad because I really like the layout, but I haven't bought all of them because the cost is kind of ridiculous, and I've bought only a handful of issues of any magazines other than Wired. I'm hoping they (and others) offer subscriptions soon. It's crazy that it hasn't happened yet.
I don't know what it's like on Android devices, but this high cost does not carry over to the Kindle -- I get The Atlantic and The New Yorker on the Kindle at very reasonable prices. From magazine-specific apps to Zinio, though, iPad magazines are overpriced. I am really looking forward to photography magazines on the iPad once they realize that one of the big benefits can be to provide high-resolution images for everything they publish; it's irritating when space constraints force small images, and right now that irritation is carried straight to the electronic form ... but if they continue with obscene prices I guess it's just going to have to be paper.
Another big irritation e.g. with Wired for the iPad is sheer size. A third of a gig? That's a big hunk of the total storage of the machine, and while I can shuffle them on and off it is really irritating to have to wait for that to download to the device (and wait some more while it "installs"). The result is gorgeous, make no mistake, but I have to believe that there is a better way than providing images of every page.
...is that they wre horribly overpriced. I wanted a Windows tablet when they first came out, right up until I found em priced at $2000 and up. What the hell? You could get two nice laptops for that.
Even today they run about twice what they should. Apple waltzes in with a tablet half the cost of a Windows tablet, and it actually works well with its touch interface ... It is not at all hard to see why people liked it.
This is not true. Scramble time alone is around 40 minutes near Washington, that's why they had those "stay in your seats" periods, and that's pretty much best-case. And you can be very sure that they aren't going to shoot that plane down right away, they'll give it every chance; a mistake would be very, very bad.
But it is moot. The ability to take airliner 9/11 style didn't even last out the day of 9/11. Once passengers got the idea that the best thing to do was take down the terrorists, they did so on their own. All of the terrorist attack attempts on planes since then were defeated by passengers, not the TSA or air marshalls.
We are not going to see another 9/11. We are almost certainly going to see another Lockerbie though.
I've been using Firefox on the Mac for years without issues (other than rampant memory growth, but relatively recent versions aren't so bad). It used to crash a lot in the early 2.x days, but that was awhile ago. I typically use FlashBlock, though, so maybe it's not FireFox that gives you the trouble.
You are making a couple of presumptions. First, that you're going to be able to "fix" the user; and second, that there is not a suitable replacement tool that doesn't have the trouble.
The first is certainly not always true. Some people are difficult or impossible to retrain, yet in today's world they lose a lot of they can't use a computer. These people really want an appliance.
And that brings us to the second point. Windows is not the only viable choice in computing! That is *especially* the case for consumers, but it is becoming more and more the case in business too as business apps move to the web.
Back to the case of the Mac for my problem user: There is not much difference from the user perspective these days between a Mac and Windows box. They look almost the same, they work almost the same, there is plenty of software to do whatever you want to do as long as you aren't a hardcore gamer (and let's face it, the people with these problems are rarely if ever hardcore gamers).
That being the case, perhaps there are times when it's better to look at a different tool than to keep blaming the user, especially when blaming the user doesn't actually make the problem go away *and* better tools are readily available.
I note that it's not just blatantly stupid users who have problems with Windows. Malware infections are *endemic* on Windows. *Most* consumers get a malware infection within a year of getting a new PC, and most are completely incapable of removing it on their own, even with commonly used (and recommended) commercial software. Nor is the problem specific to consumers; businesses have fast re-imaging software because they *need* it. That is the elephant in the room when it comes with Windows: Nobody likes to talk about how easily it gets screwed up, and from a consumer's point of view nobody likes to talk about how hard it is to fix problems once they crop up.
Consumers tend to deal with it by buying new PCs much more often than they really need. "It got really slow" and "it does weird things" translates into "PC is broken" and since fixing the PC -- having a Geek Squad type person come and clean it up or reinstall -- can often cost nearly as much as buying a whole new one, they buy new ones. It's like replacing your car when the maintenance gets too expensive.
This is the cost of using Windows. Clearly business finds it an acceptable cost, but that cost is much higher for a consumer. For a long time the consumer really didn't have a whole lot of choice, especially at reasonable price points.
If we presume that this is happening with consumers, then a device that does not get messed up in this way, even if it costs more, may be a better solution. That is what we've got when we talk about Macs. They are more expensive (much more expensive at the low end) but they break much less often, and when they do break it is usually not difficult to fix them. The end result is much longer hardware life. My experience is that the lifetime is double or more. If the cost is less than double that of the Windows PC, and it is, then it's a win for the consumer financially. It's a win anyway because of the reduction in hassle, but there you have it.
I don't think the Mac is going to be a particularly good value proposition much longer, though, if it indeed is the best value even today. Like I said before, most want an appliance. That is what they're getting with an iPhone or Android phone today, although their limited screen size makes them relatively poor internet access devices. We see that kind of appliance scaling up though: The iPad is a terrific web access device, and Android tablets ought to be as well, and GoogleTV and its ilk certainly could work as well. Pricing on these things is already competitive with the least expensive PCs, and ought to be significantly better as volumes rise, simply because they don't need anything like the kind of hardware you need to run Windows effectively.
The iPhone gave the iPad a strong applications base right from the start, so
Obviously YMMV. I have had my share of weird problems with Macs, although none took more than 45 minutes to solve with the help of Google. Regarding hardware, there was a period around 2005 where their initial build quality left something to be desired, every system I bought in 2005 had to have a warrantee claim for some hardware issue. Systems before 2005 and after have been very high quality. En-toto, though, it's been much, much easier to keep them running ... and not one single full rebuild in the nine years since I started using OSX aside from a total hard drive failure.
I bought my first OSX laptop in 2001 to replace my wife's Windows laptop. I had been forced to rebuild that Windows laptop every 3 months like clockwork. (This was Win98, XP hadn't hit the scenes yet, although I'd been using NT for years on the desktop.) It drove me insane because rebuilds took 10 hours apiece between the OS reinstall and all the applications. (Reasonably priced imaging software was not yet available, nor back-up software for that matter.) We got the Mac (a Ti Powerbook) and I did almost nothing to it for its entire 5 year lifespan at home, and nothing at all for the 2 years after before the hinges broke from heavy use and destroyed the screen connection ribbon. 7 years out of that laptop and I spent less than *one hour* keeping it running. That is one heck of an improvement.
I thought XP would make things better, but it didn't. The registry was (and is) still a huge disaster, but luckily (or not) most XP boxes are so hugely malware infected within a year (sometimes within weeks) that you have to wipe and rebuild them. (Eradication is nigh impossible these days, and certainly much slower than a rebuild even when it works.) I don't own Acronis True Image because I felt like paying a bunch of money[1], I own it as a purely defensive measure: The Windows systems get imaged at every major installation point so at least I can return them to a near-current configuration within about half an hour.
Malware infections happen despite antivirus software. In fact, I find they're worse when using something mainstream like Norton versus something more oddball like AVG ... and most people use mainstream products.
Then there are the users. I had one who would randomly delete things. Like drivers. Her system would just stop working in weird and inscrutable ways, and of course she had no idea what she did. I finally gave up and forced her onto a Mac. I have had to deal with fewer than one issue per *year* since. That is another big improvement, and I think it comes down to the nice separation between system and user permissions; she cannot delete system things willy-nilly.
This is of course possible on Windows systems too (in fact, I gave a talk on how to configure your NT system's security back at WinDev in 1996) but unfortunately a wide variety of applications simply stop working if you are not running as administrator and people totally hate it if you lock the systems down so they can't install things. (That is true on Mac and Windows, although the Mac's security system is vastly less intrusive than UAC despite accomplishing the same thing.) The state of things on Windows has improved a lot since Vista, at least consumer games don't need admin rights just to run anymore, but I still run into it regularly with poorly written or legacy applications. It makes it quite difficult to convince users to run on securely configured systems.
I thought Vista would be a big improvement versus XP and pushed people to upgrade. I was mistaken. Everyone turns off UAC, the only significant improvement in the whole system, because it's just so intrusive. The first year to year and a half of Vista were disastrous due to immature and missing drivers too. But hey, most Windows users skipped Vista and went straight to Win7 so they missed that pain.
Win7 did not improve the malware situation over Vista, UAC or not. Both, according to the statistics, are vastly be
Like a bunch of others I use Firefox too, and recommend it, on MacOS X. Safari is fine these days, but for a long time I got more reliable results with Firefox and it's nice to have the same software everywhere.
The Apple tax bit is a little disingenuous. The mini is indeed expensive (but so very small and quiet and there is value in that) but above that the machines end up being pretty well price-competitive with similar hardware.
I hear "I can get a way better Dell laptop for $600" compared to a Macbook, but it isn't true. The display is crap, the build quality is worse than crap. A comparable laptop is a Thinkpad ... And the prices are damn near identical.
Last I checked that was true of all--in-ones too (not my cup of tea). The low end of the Pros are a little expensive, but by the time you're halfway up the line they're a bargain.
Mind you, it irritates me no end that there is no expandable desktop unit except at the high end. On the other hand, the G5 Quad I use for photography is five years old in a couple of weeks and still going strong. Typical Windows desktop lives (and Linux for that matter) are no more than 3 years before it becomes difficult to expand the box enough to run the latest software.
None of that is whoy I buy Macs though. My time is valuable. I spend almost zero time maintaining Macs. No malware. No weird-ass registry issues that are only solveable by rebuilding the machine. Back-ups using in-the-box software that are unobtrusive and restores that are fast and painless. Basic software that works at least reasonably well, and often extremely well, without having to buy anything extra.
I use and manage all of the versions of Windows manufactured in the last decade regularly (some much more often than the Macs). I find it telling that in order to make it run smoothly, reliably, you have to spend hundreds on aftermarket software, and recovery from malware is painful beyond belief if you don't have a recent image. Even migrating to a new box is painful. Dealing with these things costs time and money, and the problems are all but nonexistent on Macs. (Many are nonexistent on Linux too; I make heavy use of Linux for development and on servers. Great bang for the buck.)
From a consumer point of view Macs are a way better deal. Not so much in business given the poor bulk management tools and Apple's legendarily bad business-class hardware support. Remember, though, that many of those tools exist primarily because it was impossible to manage the fragile Windows infrastructure without stuff like fast re-imaging. Windows breaks way more often than anything else and is the least repairable without rebuild system I have ever seen (and that's saying something, I wave worked with a lot of weird stuff).
Someday you should get me going about the design of the Windows VMM amd NTFS; the apathy Microsoft shows toward improving basic function is mind-boggling. There is no reason I should have to defrag drives regularly, that was a solved problem in 1985, for instance, and Microsoft could have all but eliminated it with trivial (and backward compatible) changes to the block allocator. Drives me nuts.
IMO there isn't a whole lot of difference in the basic UI of any of these things anymore. MacOS is easier to use than any of them because it is a whole lot more consistent within and between apps, but realistically things are not so bad anywhere else either.
Anyway Linux is lacking a whole lot more than just major studio games, and WINE only closes the gap in a few places (and with significant irritations). I use Linux daily, so this is not just idle speculation. Creativity products in particular are nonexistent or weak (I'm looking at you Open Office) with the exception of GIMP (and I still strongly prefer Photoshop). It's a superb programming environment though, I wish I had valgrind for Windows. (I do have Purify. When it works it is great. Most of the time it does not work. Oh well.)
I use Windows daily too, many things are just not available anywhere else. I find that a pretty good development environment has Windows running native and Linux in a VM. (I'd rather put Linux native, but Windows has plenty of trouble being performant even when it's on the bare hardware. It's gawdawful in VMs. Linux works fine in VMs excepting mediocre network performance.)
When it comes down to it my favorite desktop environment is the Mac. Excellent applications plus all the goodness that is UNIX, and it's easy enough to run Windows in a VM if I have to (though these days that is a pretty rare exception). I could do without a lot of aspects of His Steveness but I have to weigh that against the huge benefit of how easy it is to keep Macs running even in the hands of naive users.
There are actually several fairly decent image editors on the web now (there weren't even a year ago), like pixlr.com. I'm not uninstalling my copy of Photoshop any time soon, for lots of reasons, but every passing day these programs get closer in functionality and for a whole lot of uses they're already there.
Regardless, I think content creation is going to need a PC or something like a PC for a good long time to come. The combination of high-bandwidth and precise input (keyboard[1], Wacom tablet) and horsepower is enough to take something like an iPad out of the picture completely for a lot of things. Of course, not very many people actually *do* those things, and for some very common tasks -- like constructing a presentation -- an iPad could well be superior. (I've done it with Keynote; It's *almost* there, but several UI annoyances are big enough to make me go back to the desktop. I could totally see using it exclusively with a few UI tweaks though, and in some cases it's already a lot better.)
[1] Of course, you can get a keyboard for an iPad if you want one. That kind of negates the beauty of the device if you ask me, though.
This is pretty similar to the position I'm in. I skipped the HTPC in favor of a Tivo, even though it was more limited, because every experiment I did with HTPCs ended with spending a ton of money to get something pretty fragile. OTA recording worked great, video capture through a cable box worked fine, but HDTV pretty much nuked it. The Tivo was a far better solution, both in that it works (and my wife loves it) and that it wasn't all that expensive over the long term.
Still, the Tivo has been a long-term disappointment. It does the DVR thing brilliantly, but it was obvious to me right from the outset that it could be the center of the AV stack if they put a little effort into it. But they didn't! And every new feature they add has leveraged Tivo's servers, which are so underprovisioned that you often get old waiting for a key click to be responded to. I will continue to use the Tivo until I find the cable connection to be redundant (5 years out, I bet) but I can already see its end-of-life.
$100 for an Apple TV is so cheap, and the interface so clean, that it's worth a shot just to see what it's like. Heck, I'd do it just for Netflix streaming. I will almost certainly buy one before Christmas, as soon as I get around to getting an HDMI switcher so I have an input to hook it up to.
I was surprised that the Logitech Google TV was $300, I expected closer to $200 based on the specs. I think that's going to be a hard sell in a recession economy (I'm certainly not lining up to buy one just yet and I'm very gadget-happy). My gut call is that Apple has the right idea, a dirt-cheap platform that tries to do a few things very well. If they manage to get enough TV content I would drop my cable subscription in a heartbeat, but even without it access to my iTunes database through my AV stack is worth $100. It's "good enough."
And I think my rationalizations come to the heart of the marketing problem with these devices: None of these will go mainstream without something in addition to TV, if only because none of them will have enough content to seriously compete with cable. There must be Something Else.
I think we're going to see the iTunes store for the Apple TV within the next year and they're going to push gaming hard. If they do that I could totally see this device doing a Wii and selling a gazillion units as a cheap little game platform. (Seriously, $5 games on my TV? I would totally do that.) Apple already proved they can sell iPod touches on that model very effectively. If they get that kind of volume the TV content people will sit up and notice. I wonder if that wasn't Jobs' game plan from the start of the Apple TV reboot.
Of course, Google TV could do the same thing (and I know they're talking about it). $300 though ... that is not a "take a chance" price, and despite huge gains they still don't have anything like the developer infrastructure of the iPhone/iPod touch to leverage.
No matter which way it goes I guess we will get cool new gadgets though, so bring it on :-).
That was the general practice unless there were overriding concerns. Another thing was that you had to have a straight of at least 1mi (I might have the distance wrong) every so often so it could be used for aircraft.
I don't have the energy to dig up my bibliography of sources but it was certainly not hard to find a lot of detail about the highway system. Quite a lot of thought went into its design, and the most interesting thing is that commerce was really a gravy side-effect.
I read an interview with one of the original architects and he said the one thing they really screwed up was running the interstates so close to cities, and having so many ramps in those areas.
This is not selfishness, I live on the other side of the country where there's no chance in hell of ever getting speed limits raised to 90mph. Nor do I think they should be. Rather, I think highway speeds ought to be 80th percentile. But I have spent lots of time in cars in NV and Utah and NM as a passenger and frankly it seems that the biggest problem out there is simple highway hypnosis. It's a long $#@^ way between anything in those states. Shorter travel time can be a huge win.
Anyway, you are wrong about tighter speed limits, but that's probably because you have not looked at the literature.
What has been shown time and again is that reducing the speed differential between traffic reduces accidents and fatalities, independent of actual speed. Your chances of dying in a crash are higher if you're going faster, but if you can reduce the incidence of crashes it can be -- and is -- a net win. So the goal here is to reduce accident rates as much as possible.
The engineers say that the way to do this is the 80th percentile rule; you let traffic free-flow and watch how fast it goes. Set the speed limit to the 80th percentile, rounded up a little (5mph in the US, 10k elsewhere). Set minimums at 10mph (20kph) lower.
The statistics say that traffic travelling 10mph faster *or* slower than average sees accident rates climb to 300% normal. Moreover, the slower side sees multi-vehicle accident rates climb 900%! Slower drivers cause a lot of accidents, and they involve other people much more often.
Now let's put that into the context of a typical 55mph US highway. Average traffic speed is 67mph on those highways. Minimum limits are 45mph. That means that someone -- legally -- going at the lower limit is actually going more than 20mph too slow! Very, very dangerous, both to themselves and to everyone else. But someone going 70mph -- 15mph too high according to the law -- is statistically very safe.
Given these numbers typical interstate traffic speed limits should be 70 or 75mph, not 55 or 65mph, and minimums should be 60 or 65mph respectively. That's what the engineering says. We have, unfortunately, eschewed engineering in favor of politics.
So, we have some great data from when the NMSL was repealed and a lot of limits jumped to 65mph. The first really interesting figure is that average traffic speeds jumped -- to 69mph. This put to lie the idea that traffic is just going to run at the tolerance limit of the police regardless of the speed limit. In fact, traffic tends to drive at "comfort" speeds, which unsurprisingly are somewhere near the design speed of the road.
With such a minimal increase in typical speed you wouldn't expect a large change in fatalities. There was a significant change though, absolutely -- but not when normalized for vehicle miles traveled. Moreover the fatality rate for the road system as a whole dropped by something like 5%. It's believed that this is because the change in highway limits made drivers prefer the safer interstates to the less safe rural highways (now 70mph was unlikely to get you a ticket).
Anyway, I spent awhile researching this stuff awhile back and may even still have a bibliography buried in my archives somewhere but I encourage you to do the research yourself. Even Wikipedia mentions this stuff, you could start there.
I note that many of these figures are multinational. The data supports this in the US, the UK, France, and Germany at a minimum. The best studies of this are in France and Germany. (Germany is an odd man out though; the autobahn is pretty safe even though it has severe vehicle speed differences; driver training might have a lot to do with it. US driver training is pathetic, nigh on nonexistent, and I would not recommend autobahn-style laws here.)
Here are a couple of additional factoids for you:
- Average accident speed on non-interstates in the US is 27mph. Average accident speed including interstates is 29mph. What this means is that most accidents do not have spe
You've never been to Nevada, have you? 90mph is not stupid fast in much of the state. Dead flat straight roads for hundreds of miles ... That's Nevada.
As a general rule the US interstate system was designed to be safe at 75mph in 1950s military vehicles. It is no great trick to be safe at higher speeds in modern cars, particularly in a big empty state like NV. Heck, in that area 80mph limits were the norm until they passed the national speed limit.
Manual management, when it's done properly, is certainly smaller ... but you have to balance that against the much larger chance of making errors[1] -- not just a significantly increased tendency to leak, but also serious errors like double-frees and use-after-free and the development time spent tracking that stuff down. (To say nothing of the costs of dealing with customers when their software crashes.) In addition GC mechanisms can have lower overall CPU costs, there are interesting optimizations available when you're doing things in bulk, but you pay for that in less predictability.
There's give and take and strong reasons to pick one or the other depending on the application type. If you step back and think about it, though, there aren't that many cases where the benefits of GC are outweighed by its costs. Software using GC tends to be easier to write and much less prone to crashing, and unpredictability is not usually in the user-perceptible (to say nothing of critical) range. Given that most of the cost of software is writing and maintaining it anything you can do to depress those costs is a big win.
Obviously there are cases where the tradeoffs are too expensive. Cellphones, as you point out, may be one of those -- but Android seems to be doing fine with Java as its principal runtime environment. (Honestly, your typical smartphone has way more memory and CPU than servers did not so long ago, to say nothing of the set-top boxes for which Java was originally designed.) Operating systems, realtime systems, and embedded systems are other cases.
[1] Brooks' _Mythical Man Month_ makes a strong case for development systems that optimize for reduced errors even at the cost of some performance. He was talking about assembly versus high level languages but (perhaps not surprisingly) the more things have changed the more they have remained the same. We have a lot of data on development and maintenance costs of various software environments now and costs tend to be lowest in the cases where the environment makes it harder for programmers to screw up. Usually by significant margins; my experience in comparing Java and C# versus C++ indicated an average time-to-completion differential of 300%, and a bug count reduction of more than 90%, over the long term. In some cases -- like network applications and servers -- the improved libraries found in Java and C# versus C++ yielded order-of-magnitude improvements. These are numbers you can take to the bank. Even if the first generation of the software is slow relative to a language like C++, the ability to rev the software three times as fast means much faster algorithmic development. It is often the case that the Java code would outperform C++ within three or four versions if the code was particularly complicated.
Of course C++ -- as with C before it -- is a particularly lousy language when it comes to memory management. It's a lot closer if you're using something that has, for instance, real arrays or heap validity checking. It annoys me to no end that none of the standard C++ development environments builds in debugging aids as a matter of course on non-release builds. If they exist at all they're hidden features (look at all the debugging heap features Microsoft Visual Studio will give you if you can figure out how to turn it on), and most of the time you have to go buy expensive add-ons (like BoundsChecker or Purify) to do things that would be trivial for the compiler writer to manage with a little extra instrumentation and integration with the library system. Alas. I actually had better debugging tools at my disposal for C++ in 1994 than I do today (although Valgrind is not bad at all), and that really pisses me off given how much money Microsoft gets for the tools I use.
There are a lot of possible answers to that. The most obvious is that you want to limit the growth of the JVM; with garbage collecting there is a tendency to grow the heap without limit.
That was never a satisfactory answer to me, though, because it is not at all difficult to set up an heuristic to watch GC activity and grow the available heap when it looks like memory is tight -- and certainly to try it before throwing OutOfMemory! In fact, it wasn't very long before JVMs that did this started popping up (I think Microsoft's was the first; I think it's pretty darn ironic that the best JVM out there when Sun sued Microsoft was actually Microsoft's, and by no small margin).
IMO it's an anachronism that Sun's JVMs still have the hard fixed limit without even the choice to turn it off. Larger Java applications (e.g. Eclipse, Maven, and of course the web app servers) regularly break for no other reason than running into heap limits even when there is plenty of memory available on the system. I find it a huge and unnecessary irritation.
It's always been the case that there are application-visible differences in JVMs. (Remember that Java is "write once, debug everywhere." It's not just a funny tag line.) You have to detect and work around them somehow and the combination of vendor string and version is a reliable way to do that.
The application didn't do that deliberately, it was a side effect of launching the JVM with a too-small maximum heap size. Because the option to change the VM size is specific to the individual JVM implementation you can't just guess which flags to put in there. They did the reasonable thing in the case that they couldn't identify the JVM and didn't pass any option; unfortunately that meant it ran out of memory.
It's not just smart phones. I had aNoxia 97xx that would drop calls if held a certain way. It always seemed obvious to me that it was attenuation.
Having said that,I thought Apple was nuts to expose the metal, and had presumed originally that it was covered in clear polymer. Every school kid radio fan knows what happens to the signal if you grab the antenna, right? So why would you make a phone with a naked antenna?
On the other hand I've played with a few 4s and the issue is IMO not nearly as severe as the tempest would imply, and while most people I know can reproduce the problem several indicate that the phone works in places where previous models didn't. If I were in the market I would still buy one. I would use a case as a matter of course anyway (put one on the 3gs immediately, have you seen what these things cost?). Not Apple's case, I swear Apple has no idea how to make a good case.