You don't even know what instant run-off voting is, but you're responding to this post. How's that for "pseudo-intellectual"? It's pretty easy to look something like that up, you know.
You appear not to be familiar with the term "instant runoff." Our Green Party candidate for Secretary of State last time advocated it, so I've read up a little.
What it is is a ranked pairs system that has voters rank candidates from their favorite to their least-favorite. Here's an explanation in some detail of how that works, complete with responses to the usual objections.
I fail to see how that voting method necessarily scuttles geographic representation or the electoral college, the practical and mathematical arguments for which I've looked at a little too. (People often make the argument that their individual votes are worthless except in dead heat elections, but actually the college makes the opposite true.) There's no reason "instant run-off" voting is incompatible with the electoral college at all -- voters in a given state could still see all their electoral votes go to one candidate or another after the runoff votes were tallied.
Apple makes things very similar between different programs, and that makes it easy to use different programs. When I launch a program I've never seen, I already know the exact location of the application's preferences, and I have a good idea of the location of application's menus.
And let's review, kiddos: has Microsoft "gotten" this extraordinarily simple idea -- the central insight behind the 1984 Mac OS release?
Does the standard Windows API include dialogs that handily address 99.7 percent of all the situations you need in something like, oh, a Word processor? Or are your applications littered with shoddily-written, badly-contructed dialogs that force the user to wade through double negatives and ambiguous choices in order to do things like save a.csv file from Excel? How consistent are the menu options you get?
This isn't just a matter of Apple having the control to make its OS for a limited range of systems. That Excel example is real: the choices you get when saving to any format other than Excel are ridiculously muddled, and have been for several generations of the program. In Word, the outline features have always been at war with the style features -- and we never, never have any sort of consistency across the basic Office products in how they do stuff. This is in Microsoft's flagship products.
Do a mental tally of how many developers you think truly understand and accept the importance of consistent API. They're impatient with it, by and large. To wit: Linux. Apple really does understand this, and seemingly very few other companies do. Heck, big brand software makers bring in scads of money just changing their interface and releasing new whole-number releases. (We know where you live, Adobe.)
Personally, I find this SWAG to be wild high by several orders of magnitude... Personally, my guess is that our galaxy has 0-5 other species actively transmitting.
The Drake equation is a way of phrasing the question so that it's not a "SWAG" based on nothing but intuition. It teases out the variables in the equation so that you're able to think clearly about what the chances are, assessing what you think each variable might really be. Choose your values:
number of stars in the Milky Way
the fraction of stars with planets
planets per star capable of life
fraction of those planets where life evolves
the fraction of THOSE where *intelligent* life exists
the share of THOSE life forms that communicate
the fraction of those planets' lives during which they do commuicate
I'm struggling to see how your "0-5" guess approaches anything like the same level of considered thought. I can sure rig one of the Drake calculators out there to get such a result. But you don't want to even bother with that, so you dismiss anything like a real, thoughtful guess as just as haphazard as yours?
Ignorance and incuriosity are soft pillows, but only for hard-headed people...
If you think about it, taste in car size swings back and forth pretty radically. Fashion's going to do that I guess.
Meantime Ford's share of the overall market plummeted next to Japanese makers who weren't even in the picture in my old magazines. Honda and Toyota came into the market in the 70s with the compact commuter car. Volkswagens before them, too, with the original Beetle (and the first minivan, which we never really acknowledge). And Ford, with its surveys showing Americans wanted bigger boat sedans, never saw it coming.
Today Ford's had huge sales in their (supposedly badly unreliable) Focus overseas -- compact car for the European market as much as the home one. Saw Focuses in Paris this last March, where there were *no* other American cars other than a single butt-ugly yellow Humvee. In the US they're selling Explorers still, amazingly.
People are incredibly irrational about cars, for something that's so danged expensive...
So, is U2 the friend, or the enemy of modern music? Is "modern" music that which is envisioned by the likes of Corgan, where expression is free in it's entirety, or is it that which rakes in the cash?
All these bands are caught between a rock and a hard place with the music industry as it is today. Let's not banish U2 for saying they'll release an album early on iTunes. That's hardly the biggest sin in music today, and they're all sinners in your sense -- they all want to make at least a living.
The thing to do is try to work out a new economic model for the industry, and maybe rewarding attitudes like the Pumpkins' is a start, okay. But "everything is free free free" isn't a new way to support music, and neither side is absolutely good or evil.
You're sounding a little like the zealot who's identified an apostate -- "U2 is showing their true colors, now..." They're hardly the first band whose albums fell off some and became more corporate; Joni Mitchell was writing songs about that dissipated feeling in the 70s.
Ha! What you need is that little Honda wagon pretending to be an SUV -- with the hoseable interior. Oops, not enough seats -- but it's getting a little closer to the cartoon, I have to admit.
I'm just surprised they didn't work in radiation or nuclear materials of some sort. "Water simply boils off this couch -- providing a convenient source of energy for the many modern kitchen appliances." They always work in the radiation when they can.
So far, they have always lost. and when doing so, it turns out that the new features actually helped the media companies , not hurt them. And in spite of a long history of being wrong about it each and every single time, they still wish to try and control it. Insanity at its best.
Googled a bit and didn't find it, but I'm sure Jack Valenti has given an interview in the past couple of years in which he said he thought he was right about VCRs all along. After however many years of huge profits on tapes, in a marketplace in which "Spiderman" -- an okay but forgettable summer prefab hit -- can still take in record gate receipts, the guy is still saying VCRs have robbed his industry. 'Cause, you know, think of all those tapes people made off TV that they didn't pay for. It's not that the market is booming in lots of senses -- it's the calculation he's making about how much money he's lost on those other supposed thefts.
As you say -- insanity. The most depressing sign of the madness is their total lack of common feeling with their audience. The more people ask for something, the more they instinctively resist it. The "spin" they put on legislation like this is often so insulting to their market, it's hard to believe. At some point it isn't just a matter of buying politicians, it's a matter of winning over the public. Telling us you think VCRs are inherently criminal is not going to win us over.
Supposedly the way "the scream" came off had to do with quite common directional microphone tech. It didn't play badly at 1 AM or whatever in a crowd in Iowa, it just got blown out of proportion.
Think of seeing an opera star on TV. In person in a crowded hall is one thing. With a televised close-up, suddenly the big stage acting becomes grotesque. That's what happened to Dean.
just the same copy and paste press release stories
(I cut and pasted that text, incidentally.)
Back when I worked at a major modern art museum, we had the two large local papers essentially parroting back our press releases about new shows as "reviews." These were big time journalists covering areas in which their subjective opinions were an accepted, encouraged part of their columns. They showed less intellectual curiosity than most fifth graders I know, at least in print. It was mostly about playing it safe and cashing the checks, from what I could tell, though they all liked what they were writing about and could be very interested and opinionated in person.
I have lots of contact with music reviewers, too. They don't have canned press releases to work from, so they've resorted to their own convention-laced boilerplate reviews. (Period instruments? I will include a tossoff remark about how the orchestra was less squeaky than has been the case in the past.) Pretty often they don't even cut and paste correctly -- the performers' names are often wrong in the review.
And those are in artistic areas -- where you're supposed to have an opinion and inject it into your writing, and where taking risks would theoretically be less damaging.
Also -- more general point -- why do people even write "prediction" stories? They're totally lame even for sports, where you can almost immediately figure out whether you got it right. If I was a news editor, I'd forbid anyone from writing prediction stories. (Maybe that'd change the completely idiotic, inane, asinine, expectations-spinning political coverage we see. Horse race polls before an election aren't informing anyone of anything, they're just attempts to tell me what I supposedly think already. That's utter crap.)
I think both those magazines still regularly throw in a page with articles from 1, 5, 10, or however many years ago.
No news source is ever going to own up to its really spectacular gaffes, though. I'm going off to our family cabin this weekend. There are lots of old Popular Sciences there -- I think my grandfather's -- from the early 1950s. Sample article, paraphrased:
How We'll Reach the Moon!
Develop nuclear missiles to shoot at the moon. This will help us work on guidance systems. We need nuclear explosions to know when we hit it.
...
(And yeah, that's a real example.)
Popular Mechanics from back in the day has a lot of do-it-yourself projects that would kill anyone who tried them. Example: Make a "backpack" for your car from plywood, clip it on with a couple of cheap latches, and let your kids travel cross country back there. That one stuck in my mind, but there are many others.
The ones they'll admit to in articles like this are like the Popular Mechanics article from the cabin about bizarre new cars from Europe: Front Wheel Drive? Seatbelts that go across your shoulder? They'll never catch on, because surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.
At my kids' school, the district computer guy is basically an underpaid guy who got the position mainly by being willing and by being enough of a "build your own box" sort that he could deal with problems as they came up. You can tell that's how the interview went.
When the decision about what to replace existing systems with came up, this guy was totally, unequivocally behind Windows boxes. He knows them, he's hacked around with them because he's had to. The banks of Macs in the library, which had never been any real problem, got replaced with new PCs. Computer guy spends all his time maintaining those. It's a very good think he's so familiar with them.
Oh, and the whole new library system is Windows-based, and it took the librarians more than half of last year to learn to cope with it. Lots of bitching about that when I'd volunteer there.
The professional educators with the library degrees wouldn't have made those choices. We made them indirectly, by selecting for a person who had the most experience dealing with annoying little computer problems. He chose computers whose problems he knew very thoroughly.
since I doubt he'll be hemorrhaging money to the military like Bush is, there should be more cash to go around.
Bush is "hemhorraging money" to folks like Halliburton, which is merely a bizarre sort of multinational nightmare to do with the military industrial complex, not the military itself. The military proper, well, that he's positively decimating -- engaging our soldiers in reckless policy ventures and cutting their bennies at the same moment, and so on.
Even the things the guy says he's about, he's not really about. (As you so adroitly observed of the Mars announcement.)
The iMac disk drive thing was a big shock
on
Birth of the iPod
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Everyone, everyone wrung hands over the original bondi iMacs not having disk drives. I had an old cartoon where someone dressed up as one for Halloween: "I have NO DISK DRIVE!!!" Ooh, scary.
Partly the blind spot comes from critics being a)reactive and b)assigned to review individual products alone.
With the iMac, Apple was aiming to put out a sweet little appliance home computer, with all those ease of UI advantages, designed for internet-able homes. The idea was that swapping files by floppy would be obsolete because they'd be too small for modern files and everyone would be networked to everyone else. (Look up. We live there.) Critics reacted by saying iMacs wouldn't fit the old model, in which computers were isolated islands (or island chains, in LANs) and you had to carry those life rafts from one slot to another.
iPods were definitely an extension of the whole "digital hub" idea. They weren't bigger, badder mp3 players, because Apple wanted to sell them as a complete system built into the whole "hub" idea. Critics saw the price and compared them to other mp3 players. They didn't see how Apple was positioning the product.
In both cases, Apple was thinking about -- cue usually bogus businesspeak -- new paradigms, and the critics were reviewing just the individual product, without appreciating how it'd fit the bigger picture.
Apple (or some third party) should come out with a remote with LCD display,
Totally agree. It's an accessory, though, not part of the base price. (Personally I like armbands, but for those mysterious runners who, unlike me, make iPods skip, the iPod can go at your waist and the remote goes somewhere that takes more punishment.)
You used the "50 years ago" example. Again -- the "Breen code" in Hollywood was around for a long time, it just wasn't enforced. The situations are pretty comparable. This is the thing where history doesn't repeat itself, it just rhymes a whole lot.
Blinding yourself to the fact that the FCC's action against Howard Stern was politically motivated -- because the attempt was inept, to hear you argue it -- doesn't change that this was the FCC cracking down on someone for berating the political establishment. Does that bother you at all? Is there anything conservative about this "decency" position of yours, or do the ends justify the means -- even when the ends aren't what the FCC says they are?
The parent -- anonymous for some reason -- has a huge point.
There are some signs that the Tribune, at least, knows there was a publishing process involved here. They mention the number of errors and lines of codes one can expect in published software in the article. Our slashdot poster, however, goes right to the "Who's the poor rube to blame" model.
If the paper fires whoever was supposedly to blame, this is only going to happen again. What they need is for management to "get" that there's a publishing process with software that involves a certain set of stuff. QA, backups, fallback, and so on are all necessary.
This was a failing in upper management, and the specifics don't matter nearly as much as we think down in the engine room. They gave someone a deadline and didn't understand what was necessary. The IT people were working on no resources -- or maybe they were "can-do" hackers who gave management a bogus estimate that they then had to follow through on. Upper management needs to be able to assess that situation and deal with it.
The process is busted. Scapegoating the gearheads is no solution at all.
The real stinker in Apple's history predated the G3s. It was the PowerBook 5300 -- the first PPC Powerbook. I worked on one in our small office; Apple was its usual wonderful service shop, and they really needed to be in order to keep our business.
Apple up to 1993 or so had really owned the high-quality portable market for much the same reasons they have their share of it today. They went through a long dry spell when they didn't upgrade the portables at all, leaving stuff like the "Duo 230" in the dust of their desktop machines. Then the first PPC machine was just plain crud. Even so, they could have sold more, but they had their usual supply chain problems -- refer to "G4 iMac 2004."
That and the Newton were huge bad spells for the company.
Steve did mention the whole in-the-car thing quite prominently recently. Seems like a sweet spot would be replacing the not-often-used remote -- with something that dovetails with a car setting more naturally somehow. Make it more car-friendly, sell it separately and profit for the redesign.
There's no doubt at all that the car setting is still that weak link, anyway.
Personally I never saw the point of the remote. I do know someone who walks at work listening to audio books, and he's got the iPod on his belt with the remote up on his shoulder -- seems like he's working around the badly-designed Apple "sheath" carrier he got that won't let him at the buttons.
They completely sold out of the iMacs, so while the new model was planned to come out earlier you have to think sales can't have been anemic. In some ways this is just a familiar refrain from the bad old days for Apple: for whatever reasons, they've always had trouble with their supply channel. Try buying an iPod mini in green these days. They have a hot product that's very profitable, and they can't sell you one when you walk into the store.
But your comparison also goes to show how out-of-touch Wall Street can be when it comes to the choices actual consumers make. They looked at the end of the G4 iMac supply and said "Apple won't have anything for the crucial back to school window this year." Um, again, for students in particular an iBook would be the best choice.
Not if it's a decency issue, which is what this is.
Riiiight. It's a decency issue that everyone was perfectly content to let slide forever -- until one day when Howard Stern decided he was going to rag (in his lame, crude, boneheaded way) on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. Then, ta-dum, he suddenly became a threat to decency that we just had to make an example of.
Because, you know, it's really important to turn the screws down on Howard Stern when Janet Jackson's outfit opens. There's a crystal clear connection there.
Fifty years ago, to use your number, the Breen code was muzzling Hollywood. Gee, 1954 -- can you think of anything that was happening politically back then?
6 dollars a month for the rest of your life. Even if you need to buy all new hardware, thats a payback time of 1-2 years. At worst the time to do it will add another year to that. Plus you'll never need to buy a new pc.
The comparison we want to make is between the total costs of ownership over the medium term. It'd be ridiculous to compare costs over "the rest of your life" for any technology like this. What we're after is three or five years, and above that is a real outlier. (And yeah, "lifetime memberships" be damned.)
I don't buy your estimate of the total cost of a MythTV box. You're claiming it's $72 or $144 ("One or two years") or "at worst" $216 for three years. Sorry, that's not flying. And if, on the other hand, a not-made-of-duct-tape MythTV PC is anywhere near the $366-for-three-years price of the Tivo and its service, I'm losing all sorts of convenience in favor of flexibility. Maybe for those who enjoy self-building the machine that's going to seem like fun, but if you're comparing the costs, it's going to be hard to sell that to anyone else.
(As an economic argument, "I hate being nickel and dimed by recurring payments" is neither here nor there. Talk to someone who's bought a camcorder lately in one of those "no interest till" sales. Rather do that than buy a $1000 item with cash up front?)
A guy I knew worked for the Best Buy division that made up those little "motivational" videos you're talking about.
He'd describe the mascots and the slogans and so on, and I was convinced it was some sort of surreal ghost of a Chinese History class, about the "cultural revolution." Nope, just a bunch of guys trying to sell a TV, with Monster cables for the DVD player. Whacky.
(Once before the Christmas rush at one of the book stores I worked at, we were subjected to a superbly inane video about service at gas stations causing word-of-mouth sales. Um -- that'd be self-serve in 99.5% of all cases; you're wanting us to learn to deliver perky service from the guys at Holiday Station??)
Slashdot Mirror
You don't even know what instant run-off voting is, but you're responding to this post. How's that for "pseudo-intellectual"? It's pretty easy to look something like that up, you know.
Physician, heal thyself.
You appear not to be familiar with the term "instant runoff." Our Green Party candidate for Secretary of State last time advocated it, so I've read up a little.
What it is is a ranked pairs system that has voters rank candidates from their favorite to their least-favorite. Here's an explanation in some detail of how that works, complete with responses to the usual objections.
I fail to see how that voting method necessarily scuttles geographic representation or the electoral college, the practical and mathematical arguments for which I've looked at a little too. (People often make the argument that their individual votes are worthless except in dead heat elections, but actually the college makes the opposite true.) There's no reason "instant run-off" voting is incompatible with the electoral college at all -- voters in a given state could still see all their electoral votes go to one candidate or another after the runoff votes were tallied.
And let's review, kiddos: has Microsoft "gotten" this extraordinarily simple idea -- the central insight behind the 1984 Mac OS release?
Does the standard Windows API include dialogs that handily address 99.7 percent of all the situations you need in something like, oh, a Word processor? Or are your applications littered with shoddily-written, badly-contructed dialogs that force the user to wade through double negatives and ambiguous choices in order to do things like save a .csv file from Excel? How consistent are the menu options you get?
This isn't just a matter of Apple having the control to make its OS for a limited range of systems. That Excel example is real: the choices you get when saving to any format other than Excel are ridiculously muddled, and have been for several generations of the program. In Word, the outline features have always been at war with the style features -- and we never, never have any sort of consistency across the basic Office products in how they do stuff. This is in Microsoft's flagship products.
Do a mental tally of how many developers you think truly understand and accept the importance of consistent API. They're impatient with it, by and large. To wit: Linux. Apple really does understand this, and seemingly very few other companies do. Heck, big brand software makers bring in scads of money just changing their interface and releasing new whole-number releases. (We know where you live, Adobe.)
The Drake equation is a way of phrasing the question so that it's not a "SWAG" based on nothing but intuition. It teases out the variables in the equation so that you're able to think clearly about what the chances are, assessing what you think each variable might really be. Choose your values:
I'm struggling to see how your "0-5" guess approaches anything like the same level of considered thought. I can sure rig one of the Drake calculators out there to get such a result. But you don't want to even bother with that, so you dismiss anything like a real, thoughtful guess as just as haphazard as yours?
Ignorance and incuriosity are soft pillows, but only for hard-headed people...
Meantime Ford's share of the overall market plummeted next to Japanese makers who weren't even in the picture in my old magazines. Honda and Toyota came into the market in the 70s with the compact commuter car. Volkswagens before them, too, with the original Beetle (and the first minivan, which we never really acknowledge). And Ford, with its surveys showing Americans wanted bigger boat sedans, never saw it coming.
Today Ford's had huge sales in their (supposedly badly unreliable) Focus overseas -- compact car for the European market as much as the home one. Saw Focuses in Paris this last March, where there were *no* other American cars other than a single butt-ugly yellow Humvee. In the US they're selling Explorers still, amazingly.
People are incredibly irrational about cars, for something that's so danged expensive...
All these bands are caught between a rock and a hard place with the music industry as it is today. Let's not banish U2 for saying they'll release an album early on iTunes. That's hardly the biggest sin in music today, and they're all sinners in your sense -- they all want to make at least a living.
The thing to do is try to work out a new economic model for the industry, and maybe rewarding attitudes like the Pumpkins' is a start, okay. But "everything is free free free" isn't a new way to support music, and neither side is absolutely good or evil.
You're sounding a little like the zealot who's identified an apostate -- "U2 is showing their true colors, now..." They're hardly the first band whose albums fell off some and became more corporate; Joni Mitchell was writing songs about that dissipated feeling in the 70s.
Ha! What you need is that little Honda wagon pretending to be an SUV -- with the hoseable interior. Oops, not enough seats -- but it's getting a little closer to the cartoon, I have to admit. I'm just surprised they didn't work in radiation or nuclear materials of some sort. "Water simply boils off this couch -- providing a convenient source of energy for the many modern kitchen appliances." They always work in the radiation when they can.
Googled a bit and didn't find it, but I'm sure Jack Valenti has given an interview in the past couple of years in which he said he thought he was right about VCRs all along. After however many years of huge profits on tapes, in a marketplace in which "Spiderman" -- an okay but forgettable summer prefab hit -- can still take in record gate receipts, the guy is still saying VCRs have robbed his industry. 'Cause, you know, think of all those tapes people made off TV that they didn't pay for. It's not that the market is booming in lots of senses -- it's the calculation he's making about how much money he's lost on those other supposed thefts.
As you say -- insanity. The most depressing sign of the madness is their total lack of common feeling with their audience. The more people ask for something, the more they instinctively resist it. The "spin" they put on legislation like this is often so insulting to their market, it's hard to believe. At some point it isn't just a matter of buying politicians, it's a matter of winning over the public. Telling us you think VCRs are inherently criminal is not going to win us over.
So do you go retrieve it, do you bring up enough atmosphere to burn it, or what? Any way you look at it, there's a lump exit fee on that car lease...
Think of seeing an opera star on TV. In person in a crowded hall is one thing. With a televised close-up, suddenly the big stage acting becomes grotesque. That's what happened to Dean.
(I cut and pasted that text, incidentally.)
Back when I worked at a major modern art museum, we had the two large local papers essentially parroting back our press releases about new shows as "reviews." These were big time journalists covering areas in which their subjective opinions were an accepted, encouraged part of their columns. They showed less intellectual curiosity than most fifth graders I know, at least in print. It was mostly about playing it safe and cashing the checks, from what I could tell, though they all liked what they were writing about and could be very interested and opinionated in person.
I have lots of contact with music reviewers, too. They don't have canned press releases to work from, so they've resorted to their own convention-laced boilerplate reviews. (Period instruments? I will include a tossoff remark about how the orchestra was less squeaky than has been the case in the past.) Pretty often they don't even cut and paste correctly -- the performers' names are often wrong in the review.
And those are in artistic areas -- where you're supposed to have an opinion and inject it into your writing, and where taking risks would theoretically be less damaging.
Also -- more general point -- why do people even write "prediction" stories? They're totally lame even for sports, where you can almost immediately figure out whether you got it right. If I was a news editor, I'd forbid anyone from writing prediction stories. (Maybe that'd change the completely idiotic, inane, asinine, expectations-spinning political coverage we see. Horse race polls before an election aren't informing anyone of anything, they're just attempts to tell me what I supposedly think already. That's utter crap.)
No news source is ever going to own up to its really spectacular gaffes, though. I'm going off to our family cabin this weekend. There are lots of old Popular Sciences there -- I think my grandfather's -- from the early 1950s. Sample article, paraphrased:
(And yeah, that's a real example.)
Popular Mechanics from back in the day has a lot of do-it-yourself projects that would kill anyone who tried them. Example: Make a "backpack" for your car from plywood, clip it on with a couple of cheap latches, and let your kids travel cross country back there. That one stuck in my mind, but there are many others.
The ones they'll admit to in articles like this are like the Popular Mechanics article from the cabin about bizarre new cars from Europe: Front Wheel Drive? Seatbelts that go across your shoulder? They'll never catch on, because surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.
When the decision about what to replace existing systems with came up, this guy was totally, unequivocally behind Windows boxes. He knows them, he's hacked around with them because he's had to. The banks of Macs in the library, which had never been any real problem, got replaced with new PCs. Computer guy spends all his time maintaining those. It's a very good think he's so familiar with them.
Oh, and the whole new library system is Windows-based, and it took the librarians more than half of last year to learn to cope with it. Lots of bitching about that when I'd volunteer there.
The professional educators with the library degrees wouldn't have made those choices. We made them indirectly, by selecting for a person who had the most experience dealing with annoying little computer problems. He chose computers whose problems he knew very thoroughly.
Bush is "hemhorraging money" to folks like Halliburton, which is merely a bizarre sort of multinational nightmare to do with the military industrial complex, not the military itself. The military proper, well, that he's positively decimating -- engaging our soldiers in reckless policy ventures and cutting their bennies at the same moment, and so on.
Even the things the guy says he's about, he's not really about. (As you so adroitly observed of the Mars announcement.)
Partly the blind spot comes from critics being a)reactive and b)assigned to review individual products alone.
With the iMac, Apple was aiming to put out a sweet little appliance home computer, with all those ease of UI advantages, designed for internet-able homes. The idea was that swapping files by floppy would be obsolete because they'd be too small for modern files and everyone would be networked to everyone else. (Look up. We live there.) Critics reacted by saying iMacs wouldn't fit the old model, in which computers were isolated islands (or island chains, in LANs) and you had to carry those life rafts from one slot to another.
iPods were definitely an extension of the whole "digital hub" idea. They weren't bigger, badder mp3 players, because Apple wanted to sell them as a complete system built into the whole "hub" idea. Critics saw the price and compared them to other mp3 players. They didn't see how Apple was positioning the product.
In both cases, Apple was thinking about -- cue usually bogus businesspeak -- new paradigms, and the critics were reviewing just the individual product, without appreciating how it'd fit the bigger picture.
Totally agree. It's an accessory, though, not part of the base price. (Personally I like armbands, but for those mysterious runners who, unlike me, make iPods skip, the iPod can go at your waist and the remote goes somewhere that takes more punishment.)
Blinding yourself to the fact that the FCC's action against Howard Stern was politically motivated -- because the attempt was inept, to hear you argue it -- doesn't change that this was the FCC cracking down on someone for berating the political establishment. Does that bother you at all? Is there anything conservative about this "decency" position of yours, or do the ends justify the means -- even when the ends aren't what the FCC says they are?
There are some signs that the Tribune, at least, knows there was a publishing process involved here. They mention the number of errors and lines of codes one can expect in published software in the article. Our slashdot poster, however, goes right to the "Who's the poor rube to blame" model.
If the paper fires whoever was supposedly to blame, this is only going to happen again. What they need is for management to "get" that there's a publishing process with software that involves a certain set of stuff. QA, backups, fallback, and so on are all necessary.
This was a failing in upper management, and the specifics don't matter nearly as much as we think down in the engine room. They gave someone a deadline and didn't understand what was necessary. The IT people were working on no resources -- or maybe they were "can-do" hackers who gave management a bogus estimate that they then had to follow through on. Upper management needs to be able to assess that situation and deal with it.
The process is busted. Scapegoating the gearheads is no solution at all.
Apple up to 1993 or so had really owned the high-quality portable market for much the same reasons they have their share of it today. They went through a long dry spell when they didn't upgrade the portables at all, leaving stuff like the "Duo 230" in the dust of their desktop machines. Then the first PPC machine was just plain crud. Even so, they could have sold more, but they had their usual supply chain problems -- refer to "G4 iMac 2004."
That and the Newton were huge bad spells for the company.
There's no doubt at all that the car setting is still that weak link, anyway.
Personally I never saw the point of the remote. I do know someone who walks at work listening to audio books, and he's got the iPod on his belt with the remote up on his shoulder -- seems like he's working around the badly-designed Apple "sheath" carrier he got that won't let him at the buttons.
But your comparison also goes to show how out-of-touch Wall Street can be when it comes to the choices actual consumers make. They looked at the end of the G4 iMac supply and said "Apple won't have anything for the crucial back to school window this year." Um, again, for students in particular an iBook would be the best choice.
Riiiight. It's a decency issue that everyone was perfectly content to let slide forever -- until one day when Howard Stern decided he was going to rag (in his lame, crude, boneheaded way) on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. Then, ta-dum, he suddenly became a threat to decency that we just had to make an example of.
Because, you know, it's really important to turn the screws down on Howard Stern when Janet Jackson's outfit opens. There's a crystal clear connection there.
Fifty years ago, to use your number, the Breen code was muzzling Hollywood. Gee, 1954 -- can you think of anything that was happening politically back then?
(Goes nicely with his censored statue of justice.)
The comparison we want to make is between the total costs of ownership over the medium term. It'd be ridiculous to compare costs over "the rest of your life" for any technology like this. What we're after is three or five years, and above that is a real outlier. (And yeah, "lifetime memberships" be damned.)
I don't buy your estimate of the total cost of a MythTV box. You're claiming it's $72 or $144 ("One or two years") or "at worst" $216 for three years. Sorry, that's not flying. And if, on the other hand, a not-made-of-duct-tape MythTV PC is anywhere near the $366-for-three-years price of the Tivo and its service, I'm losing all sorts of convenience in favor of flexibility. Maybe for those who enjoy self-building the machine that's going to seem like fun, but if you're comparing the costs, it's going to be hard to sell that to anyone else.
(As an economic argument, "I hate being nickel and dimed by recurring payments" is neither here nor there. Talk to someone who's bought a camcorder lately in one of those "no interest till" sales. Rather do that than buy a $1000 item with cash up front?)
He'd describe the mascots and the slogans and so on, and I was convinced it was some sort of surreal ghost of a Chinese History class, about the "cultural revolution." Nope, just a bunch of guys trying to sell a TV, with Monster cables for the DVD player. Whacky.
(Once before the Christmas rush at one of the book stores I worked at, we were subjected to a superbly inane video about service at gas stations causing word-of-mouth sales. Um -- that'd be self-serve in 99.5% of all cases; you're wanting us to learn to deliver perky service from the guys at Holiday Station??)