Of course. Look at how many people buy Bose sound systems. They are roughly the same crap as systems that sell for a third of the price or less. Yet, since Bose has excellent marketing and since most people don't know or care what a good system sounds like, they buy them in droves.
There was a book review on slashdot a couple of days ago that pointed out this exact thing. Give people two practically identical products, and they choose the more expensive one because they think it's higher quality.
Keep in mind that so-called "professors", as well as the book writers, are usually former PHBs who couldn't find a job because they were so incompetent.
First, smart people do not go into IT/MIS type stuff. Second, successful managers generally don't become professors and don't write books. There's a saying that describes the situation perfectly. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
I still want to know why a specialized graphics program like Adobe Photoshop is considered an essential application for Linux adoption. Most people here don't buy $700 applications. Oh wait, let's see, 90% of the people here probably pirated it.
Discussing rights just muddles up the issue and generally leads to circular arguments, such as yours. "Rights" are merely an expression of what the law permits, and they shouldn't be treated as a separate entities. You have rights because the law gives them to you.
Why do we have laws? Because if we didn't, society would fall apart. That part of your reasoning is correct. However, to simply dismiss the gay sex issue or the drug issue is incorrect. They need to be examined based on their merits.
For instance, drug use by an individual does not directly cause harm to someone else. However, unrestricted drug use has been shown by history to cause society fall apart. That's why illegal drugs are made illegal, and that's why the "it doesn't hurt anyone if I use coke/meth/PCP/ecstasy" argument is bogus. It may not hurt any specific person, but it has a detrimental effect on society as a whole. Treating it as a rights issue simply obscures the real issue.
Patents aren't too big a deal, they aren't applicable to source code, only to binaries. If you compile the source code, YOU may be needing a license, but most companies don't care about individual users.
As for the copyrighted data: true, it's a pain in the ass, but MythTV or XMLTV isn't really breaking the law in any way. How is it different from using a web browser to view the website?
My friend once microwaved his roommate's remote control for his CD player (said roommate liked to ghettoblast the same annoying CD all day). It didn't explode, and it took about 3 seconds to fry itself (complete with crackling sounds and that fried-electronics smell). So I doubt an RFID tag would explode.
That's called software engineering. It's one or two courses in any good CS cirriculum, and good programming practices should be emphasized throughout. If people with a BS don't know about unit testing, that either means that they either slept in class or went to a university with a very crappy CS program.
Who cares about small businesses when a large one does the job much better?
Whine all you want, but Wal-mart is cheaper, has a greater selection, and has much better service than any small store I've ever been to. It's not like small shops employ a whole lot of people or pay much more than minimum wage, anyway. They also don't have Wal-mart's buying power or Wal-mart's efficiency. That's the main reason why Wal-mart puts them out of business: it's better in almost every regard.
Who modded this idiot insightful? Why the hell would they squeeze credit card companies (that are actually a large association of banks that wal-mart wouldn't dare fucking with), when they can just squeeze RIAA?
Imagine having a small piece of electronics that works on two AA batteries and burns out all RFIDs within a, say, one foot radius. Shouldn't be hard to make, really.
That would be pretty much impossible to make unless your RFID tags are poorly designed. You have to have something the power of a microwave oven to fry the tags. Now ripping them off or shielding them or interfering with their transmission -- maybe. But that's quite a bit more noticeable than just frying them.
Of course, if you plan to shoplift, you can do it equally well with the current setup.
Ummm... How about telling users to stuff it instead of dumbing down the interface? I had absolutely no trouble learning about all the acronyms and so on. If you actually put towards an effort and RTFM you will not have trouble figuring things out on any modern system. If someone can't quite learn how a computer operates, they should probably be fired.
Re:Too expensive...
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree. Either Tivo needs to turn its product into a subscription model (i.e. you rent a box from them for 10 bucks a month, including the subscription fee), or turn it into a hardware model (buy the box, get free subscription). Otherwise, they WILL die.
The current model has got to go. Let's see, you buy the locked-down box for the full price ($150 - $300+) and then have to pay obscene amounts of money ($12 a month?) for the privilege to download the TV program schedule (which programs like MythTV do for free). I call that a ripoff, and that's why Tivo is hardly selling any standalone units.
Also, many people have digital cable and so on, and you can't really use a PVR with it unless you pay extra for multiple cable boxes (and somehow interface the cable box to the tivo). The way I see it, Tivo can survive only by licensing its stuff to cable/satellite box manufacturers. And I'm sure they would much rather do it in-house to save money. So I definitely think the article has a point.
Not too much. You have to understand how classes and such work pretty well, but you can do many simple applications quite easily. Try the Qt Designer tutorial series (doc.trolltech.com)
Wrong. First, you can't do that (with the GPL anyway). Second, you can perfectly damn well use Qt for commercial applications. You just have to license your commercial application under the GPL, thus making it Free software.
But having to buy fast hardware for all the users running that programmer-friendly program in order to have these users even slightly productive is the most expensive option.
How fast I can write a text document is determined by the speed I can write, not the speed of my word processor. It makes no sense to have lightning-fast desktop applications (that spend 99.9% of the time in the idle loop waiting for user input) at the expense of increased amounts of bugs and general lack of features. As long as my word processor runs more or less fast (i.e. doesn't take more than 30 seconds to start and doesn't bog down the system too much) it's fine.
Face it, programmer time spent optimizing apps is time well spent. That includes language selection.
Correct. That's why you don't write it in C, but instead use a more high-level language that lets you write a more reliable and featureful program, perhaps at the expense of a negligible speed loss. If what you said was true, we should all be writing apps in assembler because it's slightly faster.
Have you ever written a program considerably larger than "Hello, world?" If so, you would probably know why that's not such a great idea. Besides, hardware is cheap. Programmers are not.
I highly doubt that drinking several liters of water would kill you. You would be very hard-pressed to drink that much, anyway. I think the ecstasy was the more likely cause. It's like saying that someone died from eating a sandwich because they were eating one when they got run over by a car.
Hey, smartass, guess what: there aren't that many car companies, and none of them release codes. It's not like you can avoid buying a car.
Secondly, they don't release codes to prevent others from fixing their cars. That's not a trade secret, that's an anticompetitive action.
Third, when individual rights get in the way of the public good, they are typically restricted. That's why I don't have the right to kick you in the nuts, even though I very much would like to. I hope you will agree that this system is better than the one you suggest.
Definitely. Not to mention cheap cell phones, cheap long distance, cheap internet access, and so on. And the system works just as well as it used to under AT&T, if not better.
Except that human psychological responses can vary. What I perceive as good quality, you might perceive as unacceptable blocking artifacts.
Nope. If you see blocky artifacts, chances are good I will see blocky artifacts. How annoying they are depends, but if one codec looks worse than another to me, chances are it will look worse to you.
Also, your example about tube amplifiers has nothing to do with this. If you can't hear _any_ differences, you probably aren't listening too well, and you certainly shouldn't be judging amplifiers. Unless you can't tell recorded music from live music, your problem is most likely low-quality equipment.
However, I can easily tell you which amplifier is "better" if I have access to a spectrum analyzer. There is a relationship between actual signal distortion and what we perceive as "distortion" in the quality of the audio. The same of course goes for video.
Wrong. Simply measuring a random distortion number tells you nothing about an amplifier. You could have small amounts of very annoying intermodulation distortion that will make an amplifier with good numbers sound horrible. A transistor amplifier with 5% THD would be painful to listen to. On the other hand, a single-ended tube amplifier might have 5% THD and sound better than a transistor amplifier with 0.01% THD. One reason is that the human ear isn't sensitive to lower harmonics because it produces them itself. Higher harmonics (such as those produced by the feedback loop of any solid state amp) are much more noticeable. However, there might be more to this that we don't know.
The same certainly does not apply to video because we have essentially zero knowledge about how the brain processes visual information. Therefore, the only good way to analyze video quality is through expert evaluations.
My suggestion: stop trying to quantify everything. Even NASA relies on subjective tests in its missions. Do you rely on your sense of taste or a gas chromatograph to tell if your food tastes good? The same applies to anything intended for human consumption. The numbers are irrelevant if something doesn't look good, sound good, or taste good.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. Look at how many people buy Bose sound systems. They are roughly the same crap as systems that sell for a third of the price or less. Yet, since Bose has excellent marketing and since most people don't know or care what a good system sounds like, they buy them in droves.
There was a book review on slashdot a couple of days ago that pointed out this exact thing. Give people two practically identical products, and they choose the more expensive one because they think it's higher quality.
Keep in mind that so-called "professors", as well as the book writers, are usually former PHBs who couldn't find a job because they were so incompetent.
First, smart people do not go into IT/MIS type stuff. Second, successful managers generally don't become professors and don't write books. There's a saying that describes the situation perfectly. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
I still want to know why a specialized graphics program like Adobe Photoshop is considered an essential application for Linux adoption. Most people here don't buy $700 applications. Oh wait, let's see, 90% of the people here probably pirated it.
Discussing rights just muddles up the issue and generally leads to circular arguments, such as yours. "Rights" are merely an expression of what the law permits, and they shouldn't be treated as a separate entities. You have rights because the law gives them to you.
Why do we have laws? Because if we didn't, society would fall apart. That part of your reasoning is correct. However, to simply dismiss the gay sex issue or the drug issue is incorrect. They need to be examined based on their merits.
For instance, drug use by an individual does not directly cause harm to someone else. However, unrestricted drug use has been shown by history to cause society fall apart. That's why illegal drugs are made illegal, and that's why the "it doesn't hurt anyone if I use coke/meth/PCP/ecstasy" argument is bogus. It may not hurt any specific person, but it has a detrimental effect on society as a whole. Treating it as a rights issue simply obscures the real issue.
Patents aren't too big a deal, they aren't applicable to source code, only to binaries. If you compile the source code, YOU may be needing a license, but most companies don't care about individual users.
As for the copyrighted data: true, it's a pain in the ass, but MythTV or XMLTV isn't really breaking the law in any way. How is it different from using a web browser to view the website?
What IS the government's purpose, then? Ever hear of public roads or city-owned electric or water utilities? What a moron.
Maybe you should stop reading stories written by idiots. $20 bills do not have RFID tags built in.
My friend once microwaved his roommate's remote control for his CD player (said roommate liked to ghettoblast the same annoying CD all day). It didn't explode, and it took about 3 seconds to fry itself (complete with crackling sounds and that fried-electronics smell). So I doubt an RFID tag would explode.
That's called software engineering. It's one or two courses in any good CS cirriculum, and good programming practices should be emphasized throughout. If people with a BS don't know about unit testing, that either means that they either slept in class or went to a university with a very crappy CS program.
Who cares about small businesses when a large one does the job much better?
Whine all you want, but Wal-mart is cheaper, has a greater selection, and has much better service than any small store I've ever been to. It's not like small shops employ a whole lot of people or pay much more than minimum wage, anyway. They also don't have Wal-mart's buying power or Wal-mart's efficiency. That's the main reason why Wal-mart puts them out of business: it's better in almost every regard.
Who modded this idiot insightful? Why the hell would they squeeze credit card companies (that are actually a large association of banks that wal-mart wouldn't dare fucking with), when they can just squeeze RIAA?
Imagine having a small piece of electronics that works on two AA batteries and burns out all RFIDs within a, say, one foot radius. Shouldn't be hard to make, really.
That would be pretty much impossible to make unless your RFID tags are poorly designed. You have to have something the power of a microwave oven to fry the tags. Now ripping them off or shielding them or interfering with their transmission -- maybe. But that's quite a bit more noticeable than just frying them.
Of course, if you plan to shoplift, you can do it equally well with the current setup.
Ummm... How about telling users to stuff it instead of dumbing down the interface? I had absolutely no trouble learning about all the acronyms and so on. If you actually put towards an effort and RTFM you will not have trouble figuring things out on any modern system. If someone can't quite learn how a computer operates, they should probably be fired.
I agree. Either Tivo needs to turn its product into a subscription model (i.e. you rent a box from them for 10 bucks a month, including the subscription fee), or turn it into a hardware model (buy the box, get free subscription). Otherwise, they WILL die.
The current model has got to go. Let's see, you buy the locked-down box for the full price ($150 - $300+) and then have to pay obscene amounts of money ($12 a month?) for the privilege to download the TV program schedule (which programs like MythTV do for free). I call that a ripoff, and that's why Tivo is hardly selling any standalone units.
Also, many people have digital cable and so on, and you can't really use a PVR with it unless you pay extra for multiple cable boxes (and somehow interface the cable box to the tivo). The way I see it, Tivo can survive only by licensing its stuff to cable/satellite box manufacturers. And I'm sure they would much rather do it in-house to save money. So I definitely think the article has a point.
Not too much. You have to understand how classes and such work pretty well, but you can do many simple applications quite easily. Try the Qt Designer tutorial series (doc.trolltech.com)
Wrong. First, you can't do that (with the GPL anyway). Second, you can perfectly damn well use Qt for commercial applications. You just have to license your commercial application under the GPL, thus making it Free software.
But having to buy fast hardware for all the users running that programmer-friendly program in order to have these users even slightly productive is the most expensive option.
How fast I can write a text document is determined by the speed I can write, not the speed of my word processor. It makes no sense to have lightning-fast desktop applications (that spend 99.9% of the time in the idle loop waiting for user input) at the expense of increased amounts of bugs and general lack of features. As long as my word processor runs more or less fast (i.e. doesn't take more than 30 seconds to start and doesn't bog down the system too much) it's fine.
Face it, programmer time spent optimizing apps is time well spent. That includes language selection.
Correct. That's why you don't write it in C, but instead use a more high-level language that lets you write a more reliable and featureful program, perhaps at the expense of a negligible speed loss. If what you said was true, we should all be writing apps in assembler because it's slightly faster.
That's exactly my point. They may have an inferior product (MSIE), yet they still have huge marketshare.
Don't underestimate Microsoft. Mozilla doesn't have monopoly power and billions of dollars; Microsoft does.
Have you ever written a program considerably larger than "Hello, world?" If so, you would probably know why that's not such a great idea. Besides, hardware is cheap. Programmers are not.
I highly doubt that drinking several liters of water would kill you. You would be very hard-pressed to drink that much, anyway. I think the ecstasy was the more likely cause. It's like saying that someone died from eating a sandwich because they were eating one when they got run over by a car.
Hey, smartass, guess what: there aren't that many car companies, and none of them release codes. It's not like you can avoid buying a car.
Secondly, they don't release codes to prevent others from fixing their cars. That's not a trade secret, that's an anticompetitive action.
Third, when individual rights get in the way of the public good, they are typically restricted. That's why I don't have the right to kick you in the nuts, even though I very much would like to. I hope you will agree that this system is better than the one you suggest.
USB is limited to 12 Mbps, which is ~1.2 megabytes a second. PCI is limited to 33 megabytes a second (over 30 times faster).
Definitely. Not to mention cheap cell phones, cheap long distance, cheap internet access, and so on. And the system works just as well as it used to under AT&T, if not better.
Except that human psychological responses can vary. What I perceive as good quality, you might perceive as unacceptable blocking artifacts.
Nope. If you see blocky artifacts, chances are good I will see blocky artifacts. How annoying they are depends, but if one codec looks worse than another to me, chances are it will look worse to you.
Also, your example about tube amplifiers has nothing to do with this. If you can't hear _any_ differences, you probably aren't listening too well, and you certainly shouldn't be judging amplifiers. Unless you can't tell recorded music from live music, your problem is most likely low-quality equipment.
However, I can easily tell you which amplifier is "better" if I have access to a spectrum analyzer. There is a relationship between actual signal distortion and what we perceive as "distortion" in the quality of the audio. The same of course goes for video.
Wrong. Simply measuring a random distortion number tells you nothing about an amplifier. You could have small amounts of very annoying intermodulation distortion that will make an amplifier with good numbers sound horrible. A transistor amplifier with 5% THD would be painful to listen to. On the other hand, a single-ended tube amplifier might have 5% THD and sound better than a transistor amplifier with 0.01% THD. One reason is that the human ear isn't sensitive to lower harmonics because it produces them itself. Higher harmonics (such as those produced by the feedback loop of any solid state amp) are much more noticeable. However, there might be more to this that we don't know.
The same certainly does not apply to video because we have essentially zero knowledge about how the brain processes visual information. Therefore, the only good way to analyze video quality is through expert evaluations.
My suggestion: stop trying to quantify everything. Even NASA relies on subjective tests in its missions. Do you rely on your sense of taste or a gas chromatograph to tell if your food tastes good? The same applies to anything intended for human consumption. The numbers are irrelevant if something doesn't look good, sound good, or taste good.