The commercials are talking about smartphone plans, which are exempt. I'm not a fan of capping anything, but you should probably make sure you know what you're complaining about or people who don't agree with you will probably dismiss you.
Practically any UI change, for example, feels difficult at first
The Ribbon on MS products feels difficult because it IS difficult. Instead of a menu where you're scanning a bunch of equally sized elements with text, you're scanning a bunch of unevenly sized buttons with text and icons (which often are irrelevant or misleading). In addition, nesting options on the ribbon are often signaled in conflicting ways, and the overall grouping us much more broad, and therefor less sensible than with regular menus. With enough practice you can work around it, but even after years with it, I've never found it easier to use than traditional menus.
By contrast, another fairly major UI change in the MS space is the restructured start menu and task bar in Windows 7, and in that case almost everybody who's tried it has been won over immediately. They combined concepts (running apps and pinned launchers), removed data, shuffled some things around, and made it MORE clear than it used to be.
I don't buy that a UI change necessarily has to be jarring. Yes, the bar is higher to make the concepts more clear than they used to be, but if it's done right it can be an intuitive change at the same time as an improvement.
Seriously, everyone else in the tech industry should just give up. Apple won technology. let them have it. Everyone else in the tech industry, please go back to school. Let Linux die, let Android die, let the PC die. Everyone else should just stop right now and do something else.
Until OSX can copy more than 800 MB from a network share without the OS locking up to the point that I have to hard boot the machine, I think your claims may be a bit premature...
Apple makes shiny hardware, and nice UIs if you want to do exactly the 10 things they have decided to allow you to do. Try anything else, and you run into the walls reaaaaaally quickly.
Once you get beyond that level, most people need face-to-face interaction to really understand the subject.
I don't buy it. Once you go beyond introductory courses you need quality text books, someone competent you can ask questions of (not necessarily in real time or face-to-face), and hands-on experience.
Really, though, where would such "new physics" come from? Einstein didn't exactly refute Newton... he came up with an explanation that behaves like Newtonian physics under the conditions that were observable by Newton, but alter a bit under extremes. And relativity has been experimentally proven under some fairly extreme conditions. In order to come up with "new physics", Rossi would have to be either expanding the scope of the edge cases that his theory addresses while still behaving like relativity everywhere it matters, or splitting one well understood force into several that combine to act exactly like the force we understand in all conditions we've so far been able to observe.
I'm not saying that it's impossible that strong nuclear force (for example) isn't actually two different things that just happen to synchronize and look like a single thing in all cases we've checked so far. But to be able to split it apart into its components, he'd have to exploit some strange interaction that hasn't been observed yet. It's not complacent to say that this is unlikely. Based on all the evidence so far, it really IS unlikely.
And honestly, has nobody ever combined nickel shavings and hydrogen before? If doing so under 20 bars of pressure can power a city on a gram of the stuff, you'd expect there to be a weaker but still noticeable reaction under less extreme conditions.
According to the patent, the 1g of nickel stays in place as roughly 1g of assorted copper (which may be unstable and decay back to a nickel that's heavier by one neutron?) and also lighter elements. So he's basically shuffling a small percentage of the available protons around, in exothermic nuclear reactions. Still sounds improbable to me, but I'm no physicist...
That's pretty awesome... he claims that 1g of nickel can produce as much power as 517 tons of oil. So either he's a genius, or a complete nut. Either way, it should be pretty easy to prove. That kind of scale seems pretty damn hard to fake.
My take is that Microsoft has decided that desktops and laptops are going to vanish (at least by comparative volume) and tablets are going to take over in the next 3-5 years. This is a desperate attempt to make Windows relevant to that vision of the world.
Without getting into whether that assumption is realistic or not, or whether this will make people want Windows on their tablets even if it is, it's definitely going to alienate the power users. In order to suit the UI to a less precise control mechanism, you have to take out fine-grained interface elements, the idea of text inputs as an optimizing input, and generally kill everything that power users rely on to make their lives easier.
Personally I think this is going to backfire spectacularly. Power users will accept a cut down feature set on tablets because they recognize the restrictions of the interface, and because they don't rely on tablets to be full-featured multi-purpose machines to the extent that a laptop or a desktop can be. Try dumbing down the interface on their main system to this extent, though, and the kickback is going to make the reaction to Vista look like a love-in.
They say so, but I don't think many developers trust them to do it honestly. You get the number of people who downloaded the app for free; from Amazon. Who don't have an incentive to tell you the truth, and an incentive to lie.
If you don't trust them to conduct their business honestly, there's not much I or anyone can say to convince you. Personally, I would think the threat of legal action would be enough to keep them honest, even if you didn't trust them to not rip off the very people they're trying to attract to their platform.
Worst case, I would think it would be relatively simple to put a basic "phone home" functionality in the app you want to sell, and track the number of unique devices that record a first launch during that time. Should be enough to find out if there's more than negligible skew.
EasyTether, and scores of other tether applications are available for Google's Market too.
Easy Tether (for example) was removed from the market entirely for the better part of a year, and is STILL blocked from the market for all Verizon devices. (at least according to Wikipedia, I can't test directly)
In fact, for Amazon app store you need to use "Unknown sources" checkbox. Once you have it, you could have installed the EasyTether (or any other "banned" application) anyway. So it is simply your carrier has done a poor job of blocking unwanted applications and tether - they left a huge loophole.
The point isn't about blocking tether, the point is about the carriers having veto power over Google's marketplace. Amazon's App Store, on the other hand, does not have to play nice with carriers. Yes, of course you can go sell the app separately and tell your users to sideload it, that's always been true. But with the Amazon App Store you can sell it through a marketplace that doesn't require this, and if your users are running on an Amazon device, they have access to the App Store without having to sideload anything.
It's not Amazon that'll refuse to sell it, but app makers that'll refuse to offer their apps on the Amazon app store. Amazon's terms and conditions are quite nasty; they require the ability to sell your app for less than it sells for in any other store and then - obviously - the ability for them to pay you proportionally less than you would if the purchasser bought them from another app store.
I get that a lot of people are leery about the terms you described, and I'm not saying they don't have a potentially valid point. But look at it from Amazon's perspective for a second.
They get a flat 30% of whatever the app sells for, down to roughly 30% (actually 28.57%) of the list price. Between that and 20% of list price, their take shrinks to 0 while yours remains constant at 20%, and after that they pay YOU to give your app away.
If they discount the price, they make less money too. So in the ideal situation, they would only decrease the price when they predict that they can make up the loss in increased volume and actually come out ahead. In theory, their incentive is to maximize profits on their 30% cut, which would also maximize profits on the developer's 70%.
Where this breaks down is if they decide that your app is the perfect loss leader, and they discount it steeply without expecting returns, in order to bring more people to the store. Presumably anything popular enough to have an impact as a loss leader would still see relatively elevated sales, although possibly not enough to make up the difference depending on what price is chosen. At the same time, no single app can be the loss leader for the entire store. More likely, the worst case is you'd be a loss leader along with 30 or 50 other apps, and you'd each gain some elevated sales from people brought to the platform by other loss leaders.
I guess my point is, pricing is hard. Yes, giving up control to the marketplace algorithms is scary, but the plus side is, they have a lot of investment in helping you make money. In most cases, it seems you're likely to end up ahead of where you'd be if you tried to price it yourself. Sure, it'd be nice if they gave you access to tools to help you run your own pricing experiments, but this seems like the next best thing. And so far it hasn't been enough of a hurdle to prevent a lot of apps from cross-listing.
And by the way, the alternative is the Google Marketplace, which distributes 30% to the wireless carriers, and has to play nice because of their position with the software... so they happily ban tethering apps and other things the carriers don't like. On the other hand, EasyTether has been available on the Amazon App Store without interruption.
I think the device is pretty decent, but the thing I thought would really have them selling like hotcakes was coming with prime... but I thought it would be more like a year, not 30 days. I don't think 30 days is enough time to really appreciate Prime and get used to random things being practical to get from Amazon because they come so quickly...
The rumors I saw beforehand were $250 or $300 price point, with a free year of prime. So you're basically getting the rumored deal, only Prime is optional. Granted it doesn't have the enticement of "ooh, free things", but it makes the price point a lot more attractive if you don't care about Prime (or already have it).
If not, your ability to create is subject to the application acceptance policy of Amazon Appstore.
Historically, there's relatively little that Amazon has shown interest in refusing to sell. Anything short of child rape guides or state secrets that'll have a couple dozen SWAT teams breaking down the doors of the EC2 datacenters has been A-OK.
Obviously not a guarantee of future results, but I hardly think that any "content creation" program would fall anywhere close to that. The beauty of things that enable creation is that they're generic... it's what you create WITH them that can piss people off, but the tools themselves rarely cross that line, especially when you're talking about digital tools.
Hypothetical scenario time: Say the air force still had a rule that only people with natural 20/20 vision could fly fighter planes (I see from elsewhere in this thread that this used to be true, but no longer is... but for the sake of argument). A prospective pilot lies, and passes the tests while wearing contacts. He does his job as well as anyone else, flies hundreds of missions, and feels smug in having proved them wrong. Then during a critical mission, his contact slips, he can't see, becomes distracted and nose-dives into a building full of civilians.
Is that a freak accident? Sure. But it was possible because he lied about something that the people making the rules had tried to account for. The rules for jobs that involve extreme situations aren't about who can do the job the same on an average day. They're about trying to control a bunch of smaller variables as well, to make even unlikely scenarios manageable.
You can argue that some of the restrictions are arbitrary, or not worth controlling, but it seems naive to say "as long as you can pass the tests, it's fine to lie". The tests aren't going to recreate accidents that may happen in the field.
In this case, where there are literally tens of people who will actually get to go, it's egotistical as hell to demand that YOU be the one who gets to go, when if you hadn't lied they may have chosen someone more qualified. Who knows what past or future catastrophe could have been prevented if someone who was ACTUALLY as good as you think you are had been in the driver's seat? (I'm talking only about the NASA scenario, not your Marine story)
They had absolutely no reason to "jump ship", since they had the perfect business model to smoothly transition without pissing people off. Netflix has, for the past 3 years, been a mediocre-at-best streaming library with a backup of every DVD on the planet which would be shipped to you in 2 days on request. Once they get every studio in the world to put their stuff on streaming, then fine, cancel the DVD branch. But if they're looking to avoid alienating customers, how much does it cost them to keep the DVD branch around to provide backup coverage on things that can't be streamed for contract reasons?
At the very least, they could be up front about it: say, "Look, rising costs on the DVD side require us to raise fees. We think our catalog is strong enough that most people can go streaming only, and we recommend that you do so if possible, but we're keeping the DVD service as an option for those who want access to more rare or more recent releases."
As more things become available on streaming, they could naturally spin down that side of the business. Repurpose staff, sell off inventory, close warehouses, etc. Presumably they've already been doing that if they had any sense. If there are parts they can't ditch because they're in use, then that should be a sign that streaming isn't good enough yet.
and Amazon is only a competitor as far as providing ebooks goes...
... and streaming videos, music, mobile apps, and soon tablet hardware. These aren't as big a splash as the ebook market yet, but these things have a way of booming once they hit a certain point in the adoption curve. Especially when some of them come for free with a service that people are already more than willing to pay for on its own (Amazon Prime). And iTunes has been a direct competitor with Amazon for years in terms of pitting digital purchases against online shopping for physical media.
Aside from Mandarin, you're a bit off... English is 2nd after Mandarin for total speakers, and just about tied with Spanish (for 2nd still) if you count only native speakers.
As far as India goes, English is basically the de-facto national language along with Hindi, since the native language is fragmented into something like hundreds of dialects. The rest you may be right about, although I'd guess it's relatively easy to adapt any input method that works well in English to Spanish, given the common ancestry and similarities in modern use.
I really like the standard Dvorak setup that comes with Windows and Linux for coding. It's actually more convenient for some common code symbols than QWERTY, and since I spend half my time typing emails or other non-code things it pays off on both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
The commercials are talking about smartphone plans, which are exempt. I'm not a fan of capping anything, but you should probably make sure you know what you're complaining about or people who don't agree with you will probably dismiss you.
Weren't they the ones who released a Snoop Dogg branded voice navigation system?
The Ribbon on MS products feels difficult because it IS difficult. Instead of a menu where you're scanning a bunch of equally sized elements with text, you're scanning a bunch of unevenly sized buttons with text and icons (which often are irrelevant or misleading). In addition, nesting options on the ribbon are often signaled in conflicting ways, and the overall grouping us much more broad, and therefor less sensible than with regular menus. With enough practice you can work around it, but even after years with it, I've never found it easier to use than traditional menus.
By contrast, another fairly major UI change in the MS space is the restructured start menu and task bar in Windows 7, and in that case almost everybody who's tried it has been won over immediately. They combined concepts (running apps and pinned launchers), removed data, shuffled some things around, and made it MORE clear than it used to be.
I don't buy that a UI change necessarily has to be jarring. Yes, the bar is higher to make the concepts more clear than they used to be, but if it's done right it can be an intuitive change at the same time as an improvement.
I use the hard drive that came with the machine, direct from Apple. Shouldn't that be sufficient?
Until OSX can copy more than 800 MB from a network share without the OS locking up to the point that I have to hard boot the machine, I think your claims may be a bit premature...
Apple makes shiny hardware, and nice UIs if you want to do exactly the 10 things they have decided to allow you to do. Try anything else, and you run into the walls reaaaaaally quickly.
I don't buy it. Once you go beyond introductory courses you need quality text books, someone competent you can ask questions of (not necessarily in real time or face-to-face), and hands-on experience.
Really, though, where would such "new physics" come from? Einstein didn't exactly refute Newton... he came up with an explanation that behaves like Newtonian physics under the conditions that were observable by Newton, but alter a bit under extremes. And relativity has been experimentally proven under some fairly extreme conditions. In order to come up with "new physics", Rossi would have to be either expanding the scope of the edge cases that his theory addresses while still behaving like relativity everywhere it matters, or splitting one well understood force into several that combine to act exactly like the force we understand in all conditions we've so far been able to observe.
I'm not saying that it's impossible that strong nuclear force (for example) isn't actually two different things that just happen to synchronize and look like a single thing in all cases we've checked so far. But to be able to split it apart into its components, he'd have to exploit some strange interaction that hasn't been observed yet. It's not complacent to say that this is unlikely. Based on all the evidence so far, it really IS unlikely.
And honestly, has nobody ever combined nickel shavings and hydrogen before? If doing so under 20 bars of pressure can power a city on a gram of the stuff, you'd expect there to be a weaker but still noticeable reaction under less extreme conditions.
According to the patent, the 1g of nickel stays in place as roughly 1g of assorted copper (which may be unstable and decay back to a nickel that's heavier by one neutron?) and also lighter elements. So he's basically shuffling a small percentage of the available protons around, in exothermic nuclear reactions. Still sounds improbable to me, but I'm no physicist...
That's pretty awesome... he claims that 1g of nickel can produce as much power as 517 tons of oil. So either he's a genius, or a complete nut. Either way, it should be pretty easy to prove. That kind of scale seems pretty damn hard to fake.
Yeah! On the bus, the only cameras recording me are the 3 or 4 little black domes mounted on the ceiling!
Wait...
My take is that Microsoft has decided that desktops and laptops are going to vanish (at least by comparative volume) and tablets are going to take over in the next 3-5 years. This is a desperate attempt to make Windows relevant to that vision of the world.
Without getting into whether that assumption is realistic or not, or whether this will make people want Windows on their tablets even if it is, it's definitely going to alienate the power users. In order to suit the UI to a less precise control mechanism, you have to take out fine-grained interface elements, the idea of text inputs as an optimizing input, and generally kill everything that power users rely on to make their lives easier.
Personally I think this is going to backfire spectacularly. Power users will accept a cut down feature set on tablets because they recognize the restrictions of the interface, and because they don't rely on tablets to be full-featured multi-purpose machines to the extent that a laptop or a desktop can be. Try dumbing down the interface on their main system to this extent, though, and the kickback is going to make the reaction to Vista look like a love-in.
If you don't trust them to conduct their business honestly, there's not much I or anyone can say to convince you. Personally, I would think the threat of legal action would be enough to keep them honest, even if you didn't trust them to not rip off the very people they're trying to attract to their platform.
Worst case, I would think it would be relatively simple to put a basic "phone home" functionality in the app you want to sell, and track the number of unique devices that record a first launch during that time. Should be enough to find out if there's more than negligible skew.
Easy Tether (for example) was removed from the market entirely for the better part of a year, and is STILL blocked from the market for all Verizon devices. (at least according to Wikipedia, I can't test directly)
The point isn't about blocking tether, the point is about the carriers having veto power over Google's marketplace. Amazon's App Store, on the other hand, does not have to play nice with carriers. Yes, of course you can go sell the app separately and tell your users to sideload it, that's always been true. But with the Amazon App Store you can sell it through a marketplace that doesn't require this, and if your users are running on an Amazon device, they have access to the App Store without having to sideload anything.
I get that a lot of people are leery about the terms you described, and I'm not saying they don't have a potentially valid point. But look at it from Amazon's perspective for a second.
They get a flat 30% of whatever the app sells for, down to roughly 30% (actually 28.57%) of the list price. Between that and 20% of list price, their take shrinks to 0 while yours remains constant at 20%, and after that they pay YOU to give your app away.
If they discount the price, they make less money too. So in the ideal situation, they would only decrease the price when they predict that they can make up the loss in increased volume and actually come out ahead. In theory, their incentive is to maximize profits on their 30% cut, which would also maximize profits on the developer's 70%.
Where this breaks down is if they decide that your app is the perfect loss leader, and they discount it steeply without expecting returns, in order to bring more people to the store. Presumably anything popular enough to have an impact as a loss leader would still see relatively elevated sales, although possibly not enough to make up the difference depending on what price is chosen. At the same time, no single app can be the loss leader for the entire store. More likely, the worst case is you'd be a loss leader along with 30 or 50 other apps, and you'd each gain some elevated sales from people brought to the platform by other loss leaders.
I guess my point is, pricing is hard. Yes, giving up control to the marketplace algorithms is scary, but the plus side is, they have a lot of investment in helping you make money. In most cases, it seems you're likely to end up ahead of where you'd be if you tried to price it yourself. Sure, it'd be nice if they gave you access to tools to help you run your own pricing experiments, but this seems like the next best thing. And so far it hasn't been enough of a hurdle to prevent a lot of apps from cross-listing.
And by the way, the alternative is the Google Marketplace, which distributes 30% to the wireless carriers, and has to play nice because of their position with the software... so they happily ban tethering apps and other things the carriers don't like. On the other hand, EasyTether has been available on the Amazon App Store without interruption.
Last I checked, the Google app suite wasn't available on the Amazon App Store...
The rumors I saw beforehand were $250 or $300 price point, with a free year of prime. So you're basically getting the rumored deal, only Prime is optional. Granted it doesn't have the enticement of "ooh, free things", but it makes the price point a lot more attractive if you don't care about Prime (or already have it).
Historically, there's relatively little that Amazon has shown interest in refusing to sell. Anything short of child rape guides or state secrets that'll have a couple dozen SWAT teams breaking down the doors of the EC2 datacenters has been A-OK.
Obviously not a guarantee of future results, but I hardly think that any "content creation" program would fall anywhere close to that. The beauty of things that enable creation is that they're generic... it's what you create WITH them that can piss people off, but the tools themselves rarely cross that line, especially when you're talking about digital tools.
Hypothetical scenario time: Say the air force still had a rule that only people with natural 20/20 vision could fly fighter planes (I see from elsewhere in this thread that this used to be true, but no longer is... but for the sake of argument). A prospective pilot lies, and passes the tests while wearing contacts. He does his job as well as anyone else, flies hundreds of missions, and feels smug in having proved them wrong. Then during a critical mission, his contact slips, he can't see, becomes distracted and nose-dives into a building full of civilians.
Is that a freak accident? Sure. But it was possible because he lied about something that the people making the rules had tried to account for. The rules for jobs that involve extreme situations aren't about who can do the job the same on an average day. They're about trying to control a bunch of smaller variables as well, to make even unlikely scenarios manageable.
You can argue that some of the restrictions are arbitrary, or not worth controlling, but it seems naive to say "as long as you can pass the tests, it's fine to lie". The tests aren't going to recreate accidents that may happen in the field.
In this case, where there are literally tens of people who will actually get to go, it's egotistical as hell to demand that YOU be the one who gets to go, when if you hadn't lied they may have chosen someone more qualified. Who knows what past or future catastrophe could have been prevented if someone who was ACTUALLY as good as you think you are had been in the driver's seat? (I'm talking only about the NASA scenario, not your Marine story)
And yet, strangely enough, you can circumvent DRM just fine while running Windows...
They had absolutely no reason to "jump ship", since they had the perfect business model to smoothly transition without pissing people off. Netflix has, for the past 3 years, been a mediocre-at-best streaming library with a backup of every DVD on the planet which would be shipped to you in 2 days on request. Once they get every studio in the world to put their stuff on streaming, then fine, cancel the DVD branch. But if they're looking to avoid alienating customers, how much does it cost them to keep the DVD branch around to provide backup coverage on things that can't be streamed for contract reasons?
At the very least, they could be up front about it: say, "Look, rising costs on the DVD side require us to raise fees. We think our catalog is strong enough that most people can go streaming only, and we recommend that you do so if possible, but we're keeping the DVD service as an option for those who want access to more rare or more recent releases."
As more things become available on streaming, they could naturally spin down that side of the business. Repurpose staff, sell off inventory, close warehouses, etc. Presumably they've already been doing that if they had any sense. If there are parts they can't ditch because they're in use, then that should be a sign that streaming isn't good enough yet.
Fixed that for you.
You should watch Moon. They did a bunch of external shots with miniatures, and they're gorgeous.
Aside from Mandarin, you're a bit off... English is 2nd after Mandarin for total speakers, and just about tied with Spanish (for 2nd still) if you count only native speakers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
As far as India goes, English is basically the de-facto national language along with Hindi, since the native language is fragmented into something like hundreds of dialects. The rest you may be right about, although I'd guess it's relatively easy to adapt any input method that works well in English to Spanish, given the common ancestry and similarities in modern use.
I really like the standard Dvorak setup that comes with Windows and Linux for coding. It's actually more convenient for some common code symbols than QWERTY, and since I spend half my time typing emails or other non-code things it pays off on both sides.