"In the US we've chosen to subscribe to the radical notion that the poor deserve to be poor because clearly it's less work to work two jobs for minimum wage than to work one that pays substantially more."
Can they DO the job that pays more? Do they have the skills or education or training? This is supply and demand at it's purist. If anyone can do the job, then supply wins, and salary goes down. If only a few can do the job -- and it's in demand -- then demand wins, and salaries go up.
"You'd never need anything other than the replicator."
Not unless you never want anything new.
Take today: I can replicate and "share" a million identical copies of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy... but someone has to actually create the next Hobbit movie.
If they are in the employ of the contractor (General Dynamics IT), then even though the government might be paying them twice as much per hour, they're not getting paid twice as much per hour since General Dynamics IT is pocketing a significant percentage of the money.
In short, they could well be "paid" the same amount, or even less.
The fact the they could theoretically provide a better user experience is irrelevant if Google won't let them do so. In fact Google's actively pressuring vendors to do otherwise by withholding Marketplace access or by not allowing them to bundle Google apps like Mail and Maps if they don't follow the rules.
HTC could tell them to stick it and use Android to base their own system, but without the above integration what you end up with isn't really an "Android" phone, now is it? Actually, you sort of end up with the situation we're seeing with Amazon, who appear to have based their new tablet on a older version of Android, and built entirely without the Google couplings.
Grew up with them. They might have been *the* gaming machine... for an extremely limited number of people. The majority went from the Apple ][ to IBM PCs and DOS. PC games and the rise of the dedicated game machine killed off even that market.
PCs had plenty of side-scrollers and other types of games (Zork), right up until Doom appeared in 1993.
"The reason the Playbook failed wasn't the lack of apps, it was because they insisted on tethering it to a Blackberry for basic functions like e-mail to work. They tried for lock-in, and they failed..."
From what I've heard, the tethering was more do to the fact that their entire system is setup in such a way that one and only one BB cab access a BB account. Allowing multiple devices to access the same account impacts security, not to mention the various synchronization issues involved.
"They need to get humble and quick then let what they do well (corporate integration, great hardware, etc) shine through."
RIM has one and only one crown jewel: They've got a great secure messaging platform.
In my estimation they need to write apps and put that messaging system it on iOS, on Android, and on Windows Phone 7. Charge a fair monthly access fee. Unlike some other "messaging" apps, they've got the name, they've got the business reputation, they've got the security, they can integrate with the existing BB platform, and they can do it cross-platform.
They've lost the hardware wars. Time to go with their strengths.
" I don't think the cell phone market is very analagous to the PC market. Concisely: There was no "open" platform in the PC wars."
The fact -- and to what degree -- Android is "open" doesn't matter. Like DOS and Windows, Android is the "bundled" OS pushed by the majority of carriers and vendors, used and reused across a wide variety of mostly commodity phones (PCs). Not to mention that developers can write software for it just as easily as they could write software for DOS and Windows.
And with Google lobbying for even more standardization in order to turnaround OS versions and updates faster, its "openness" is even less significant. What good is an "open" platform to a vendor if it can't be customized? It just becomes even more of a commodity.
That's why Nokia went with Windows Phone 7. At least with it they'll have SOME differentiation from the pack of Android clones.
"Which is blatantly incorrect- unlike their alleged modern counterparts, they most certainly *did* enjoy the support of third party developers for a number of years, in Europe at least."
DOS. Windows. MacOS. Linux.... Amiga OS. It's not that they didn't "enjoy the support of ANY third party developers. It's just that the numbers -- in terms of mind and marketshare, and compared to its competition -- were insignificant. Couple with the fact that they didn't enjoy the support of any of the major developers (MS, Adobe, etc.), and you have a recipe for failure.
Just because you loved yours doesn't mean that the platform as a whole was viable.
"Why do you think lawyers get to screen jury members?"
To keep fanatics from applying their personal prejudices and biases to a case? From following a logic tree like, "He's black. Black people commit crime. He's guilty"?
Basically, they screen juries in order to weed out people who are predisposed towards a certain outcome, regardless of the actual evidence.
If you and other people want to change the law, then write your Senators and Congressmen, and work to elect those that support your views. If you haven't done so, and your sole contribution is bitching about it on/., then you're one of those "people" equally at guilt.
In all likelihood it was just a lawyer from the Justice department. But it's cooler to say, "Obama administration", as if he personally stood there arguing the case.
No, he's not saying that and you know it. It's not just danger. Where I live there's a $1,000 fine for dumping trash. The fine is outsized to the "crime" since it's hard to catch them in the act or determine guilt after the fact. But if you're caught doing it. Boom.
As such, the fine has to be considered in the risk/reward equation. "I could just toss the bag out the window and... ah, naw. I'll throw it away at the next gas station."
Same concept applies here. "Sharing" is hard to catch and hard prosecute. Hence the risk is low, and the reward (free music) is high. So the idea is to change the equation: Are a few free tracks worth the chance of being ruined?
Probably won't work, since the music is free NOW, and the chance of getting caught and prosecuted probably seems about the same as that of being struck by lightning...
"Or he assumed that a jury made up of his "peers" would have be smart enough to see just how asinine the entire situation really was."
Not many file-sharing college students sit on juries. And juries aren't there to debate the merits of the law, only to decide if the individual in question broke it.
"It's highly unlikely anyone will upload any song more than a few times. That's how file sharing really works."
Funny, I thought it worked by a person uploading portions of a song whenever asked. If asked by a thousand people for some part of a song, then by extension you helped to make the entire song available to a thousand people.
That's how file sharing really works.
(Just demonstrating the other side of your argument.)
"I read an article that said if 10% of the cars in the USA switched to electric, it would collapse the capacity of the grid. "
Read something else...
"Since utilities have built enough power plants to provide electricity when people are operating their air conditioners at full blast, they have excess generating capacity during off-peak hours. As a result, according to an upcoming report from the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy lab, there is enough excess generating capacity during the night and morning to allow more than 80 percent of today's vehicles to make the average daily commute solely using this electricity. If plug-in-hybrid or all-electric-car owners charge their vehicles at these times, the power needed for about 180 million cars could be provided simply by running these plants at full capacity." http://www.evpowersystems.com/PHEVs%20Save%20Grid.htm [evpowersystems.com]
"A new study for the Department of Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of these 198 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics.... Researchers found, in the Midwest and East, there is sufficient off-peak generation, transmission and distribution capacity to provide for ALL of today's vehicles if they ran on batteries." http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=204 [pnl.gov]
"Time and again,/.ers always predict a product's performance based on it's technical merit (e.g. Apple products)."
I wouldn't even give them that much. Time and again they compare checklists, and the cheapest device with the most ports and other checklist features "wins", regardless of how well it's designed, or how well the features are actually implemented.
Slashdot Mirror
"Humans are creative, proactive, curious animals."
American Idol. Reality TV. Fox News.
I rest my case.
"With automated labor, humans can finally do what humans are best at: creating, exploring, asking questions, researching, discovering."
Right. How many people have the education and training to do that?
Now, how many people would rather just sit on the couch and watch American Idol, "reality" TV, and Fox News?
See the post about how Foxconn plans to install 8 million robots by 2013. All to help replace CHINESE labor.
"I wouldn't worry about it. Every so often, there's a story about how robots are going to do everything."
Did you see the story about how Foxconn, home of cheap Chinese labor, hopes to install 8 million robots by 2013?
"In the US we've chosen to subscribe to the radical notion that the poor deserve to be poor because clearly it's less work to work two jobs for minimum wage than to work one that pays substantially more."
Can they DO the job that pays more? Do they have the skills or education or training? This is supply and demand at it's purist. If anyone can do the job, then supply wins, and salary goes down. If only a few can do the job -- and it's in demand -- then demand wins, and salaries go up.
"You'd never need anything other than the replicator."
Not unless you never want anything new.
Take today: I can replicate and "share" a million identical copies of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy... but someone has to actually create the next Hobbit movie.
Someone has to invent the next thing.
If they are in the employ of the contractor (General Dynamics IT), then even though the government might be paying them twice as much per hour, they're not getting paid twice as much per hour since General Dynamics IT is pocketing a significant percentage of the money.
In short, they could well be "paid" the same amount, or even less.
"Do you know how many artists get a multi-million dollar contract waved at them?"
Plenty. Whether or not they actually get paid that money is a different story entirely...
The fact the they could theoretically provide a better user experience is irrelevant if Google won't let them do so. In fact Google's actively pressuring vendors to do otherwise by withholding Marketplace access or by not allowing them to bundle Google apps like Mail and Maps if they don't follow the rules.
HTC could tell them to stick it and use Android to base their own system, but without the above integration what you end up with isn't really an "Android" phone, now is it? Actually, you sort of end up with the situation we're seeing with Amazon, who appear to have based their new tablet on a older version of Android, and built entirely without the Google couplings.
Grew up with them. They might have been *the* gaming machine... for an extremely limited number of people. The majority went from the Apple ][ to IBM PCs and DOS. PC games and the rise of the dedicated game machine killed off even that market.
PCs had plenty of side-scrollers and other types of games (Zork), right up until Doom appeared in 1993.
"You give me a phone that has no numeric pad, and you'll see how quickly it ends up in the closest river."
Ah. Buttons. How quaint...
"The reason the Playbook failed wasn't the lack of apps, it was because they insisted on tethering it to a Blackberry for basic functions like e-mail to work. They tried for lock-in, and they failed..."
From what I've heard, the tethering was more do to the fact that their entire system is setup in such a way that one and only one BB cab access a BB account. Allowing multiple devices to access the same account impacts security, not to mention the various synchronization issues involved.
"They need to get humble and quick then let what they do well (corporate integration, great hardware, etc) shine through."
RIM has one and only one crown jewel: They've got a great secure messaging platform.
In my estimation they need to write apps and put that messaging system it on iOS, on Android, and on Windows Phone 7. Charge a fair monthly access fee. Unlike some other "messaging" apps, they've got the name, they've got the business reputation, they've got the security, they can integrate with the existing BB platform, and they can do it cross-platform.
They've lost the hardware wars. Time to go with their strengths.
" I don't think the cell phone market is very analagous to the PC market. Concisely: There was no "open" platform in the PC wars."
The fact -- and to what degree -- Android is "open" doesn't matter. Like DOS and Windows, Android is the "bundled" OS pushed by the majority of carriers and vendors, used and reused across a wide variety of mostly commodity phones (PCs). Not to mention that developers can write software for it just as easily as they could write software for DOS and Windows.
And with Google lobbying for even more standardization in order to turnaround OS versions and updates faster, its "openness" is even less significant. What good is an "open" platform to a vendor if it can't be customized? It just becomes even more of a commodity.
That's why Nokia went with Windows Phone 7. At least with it they'll have SOME differentiation from the pack of Android clones.
No, there are a lot of Windows/Mac similarities.
"Which is blatantly incorrect- unlike their alleged modern counterparts, they most certainly *did* enjoy the support of third party developers for a number of years, in Europe at least."
DOS. Windows. MacOS. Linux. ... Amiga OS. It's not that they didn't "enjoy the support of ANY third party developers. It's just that the numbers -- in terms of mind and marketshare, and compared to its competition -- were insignificant. Couple with the fact that they didn't enjoy the support of any of the major developers (MS, Adobe, etc.), and you have a recipe for failure.
Just because you loved yours doesn't mean that the platform as a whole was viable.
"Why do you think lawyers get to screen jury members?"
To keep fanatics from applying their personal prejudices and biases to a case? From following a logic tree like, "He's black. Black people commit crime. He's guilty"?
Basically, they screen juries in order to weed out people who are predisposed towards a certain outcome, regardless of the actual evidence.
If you and other people want to change the law, then write your Senators and Congressmen, and work to elect those that support your views. If you haven't done so, and your sole contribution is bitching about it on /., then you're one of those "people" equally at guilt.
It would be great for artists to have those principles.
The question is, will they keep them when a label starts waving a million-dollar contract under their nose.
"It's not the principle, it's the money of the thing..."
In all likelihood it was just a lawyer from the Justice department. But it's cooler to say, "Obama administration", as if he personally stood there arguing the case.
No, he's not saying that and you know it. It's not just danger. Where I live there's a $1,000 fine for dumping trash. The fine is outsized to the "crime" since it's hard to catch them in the act or determine guilt after the fact. But if you're caught doing it. Boom.
As such, the fine has to be considered in the risk/reward equation. "I could just toss the bag out the window and... ah, naw. I'll throw it away at the next gas station."
Same concept applies here. "Sharing" is hard to catch and hard prosecute. Hence the risk is low, and the reward (free music) is high. So the idea is to change the equation: Are a few free tracks worth the chance of being ruined?
Probably won't work, since the music is free NOW, and the chance of getting caught and prosecuted probably seems about the same as that of being struck by lightning...
"Or he assumed that a jury made up of his "peers" would have be smart enough to see just how asinine the entire situation really was."
Not many file-sharing college students sit on juries. And juries aren't there to debate the merits of the law, only to decide if the individual in question broke it.
"It's highly unlikely anyone will upload any song more than a few times. That's how file sharing really works."
Funny, I thought it worked by a person uploading portions of a song whenever asked. If asked by a thousand people for some part of a song, then by extension you helped to make the entire song available to a thousand people.
That's how file sharing really works.
(Just demonstrating the other side of your argument.)
The point is that you could cut the numbers in half, and still be above the 10% mark quoted in the previous post.
[sarcasm]
I installed Classic Start Menu, turned off Aero, added a replacement Explorer shell, and turned off all of that annoying security nonsense...
Now that I've deleted all of the improvements, the latest version of Windows is awesome!
[/sarcasm]
"I read an article that said if 10% of the cars in the USA switched to electric, it would collapse the capacity of the grid. "
Read something else...
"Since utilities have built enough power plants to provide electricity when people are operating their air conditioners at full blast, they have excess generating capacity during off-peak hours. As a result, according to an upcoming report from the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy lab, there is enough excess generating capacity during the night and morning to allow more than 80 percent of today's vehicles to make the average daily commute solely using this electricity. If plug-in-hybrid or all-electric-car owners charge their vehicles at these times, the power needed for about 180 million cars could be provided simply by running these plants at full capacity."
http://www.evpowersystems.com/PHEVs%20Save%20Grid.htm [evpowersystems.com]
"A new study for the Department of Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of these 198 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics. ... Researchers found, in the Midwest and East, there is sufficient off-peak generation, transmission and distribution capacity to provide for ALL of today's vehicles if they ran on batteries."
http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=204 [pnl.gov]
"Time and again, /.ers always predict a product's performance based on it's technical merit (e.g. Apple products)."
I wouldn't even give them that much. Time and again they compare checklists, and the cheapest device with the most ports and other checklist features "wins", regardless of how well it's designed, or how well the features are actually implemented.
It's got 32 USB ports for only $19.95???? SOLD!