Unfortunately, price is not a driving factor for most people. The iPod remains one of the most expensive and successful portable music players on the market. Competing on price alone is a very narrow view of what value actually means.
I can't imagine the challenges you must face in the publishing industry at the moment. It seems anyone with a copy of Illustrator/PageMaker/inDesign/etc can produce a book and try to sell it. But what you are describing here is actual physical copies of the material - this doe snot apply in 37 Signals case. They charge your credit card and automatically produce a PDF document with the purchasers name all over it (probably to prevent piracy). The entire process is automatic and requires no manual intervention besides the initial setup (which does require some in depth technical knowledge). Once this is done all you need to worry about is how to promote and sell the book, which as you mentioned is a whole other problem.
While your point is completely valid, there is another way. Microsoft could create a library or emulation layer to support win32 code on a linux platform (such as Wine), then start developing "native" applications.
What's the thinking here? More market share must mean more sales and therefore more profit? Apple seems to be making plenty of money, so what does more market share gives you, or is it just a measure of how many customers you did not get?
IMHO, the problem is you can not make a product that will please everyone. Apple has decided to make a certain kind of product - looks cool, well designed, easy to use and at a premium price.
I guess it depends on how you classify your market. If you are talking portable mp3 players in the USA, then Apple has around 80% of the market (their figures).
If you mean "laptop computers" then the field is wide open to every man and his dog that can bolt a machine together - including the el cheapo models who compete on price alone. This is akin to putting Mercedes, Audi and Lexus in the "car market" and wondering why their share is so low (hint: you are including Hyundai and others). This is not the same market. Who are the premium computer manufacturers? IBM might be there, Dell isn't.
As long as Apple continues to focus on making their products this way they will have a following and will generate profits - to hell with market share.
Privacy groups have expressed concern that any Human Services Access Card could easily morph into a de facto Australia card and be used to house sensitive information. Human Services Minister Joe Hockey has dismissed such claims, saying the card will only have information on it which is approved by the holder.
The Minister is probably right; they house sensitive information in a central database - the card itself only has a unique identifier on it.
Seriously, by what process do I approve what is held on the card and how can I check they are the only things being stored? How do I know some clandestine government organisation is not collating the data and tracking my every move? What do I care if they are?
While the government could track certain things about you via BAS statements and tax returns, there is a LOT more information available in census data.
1) Of course they exhibit different behaviour, they are different people. The point was, for the enormous number of possible combinations of materials that comprise a person - we are not that different. We are not even the sum of our parts.
2) Did you actually read and understand the part that says "I do not know much about...", or did you ignore that to make your point while posturing and big noting yourself?
1) To eject a CD-ROM, USB-key, or external storage, I drag it to the trash. That seems illogical to me.
If you look carefull the icon changes to an eject symbol when you drag a CD/USB drive around. Besides, you can alway hit the CD eject key on the keyboard.
2) To install a program, I "click-and-drag" it to my "hard drive". I had to google how to install something in OSX. Double-clicking the downloaded file yielded some puzzling prompt I can't recall.
I had the same paradigm-busting problem when I purchased my fist Mac earlier this year; isn't installing an application meant to be difficult? (hint answer=no) What WAS different was how easy it CAN be, and that threw me for a while.
3) Driver management is a nightmare. Sure, it works great with Mac hardware, but who wants to be locked into one brand? Oh wait, Mac-happy fan-boys do.
Drivers for what? My Sony camera works great - fires up iPhoto and I'm away, nothing to install or configure. Many of my other toys are just the same.
4) OSX feels like an OS that is 50 feet thick. And by that I mean it feels like there's layer upon layer of abstraction, as if it were trying to protect me from seeing how a computer really works.
In some ways you're right, in others it's a thin veil - for example how many.OSX or.MAC (can't remember which) folders appear when you copy files onto your windows computer with a thumb drive? SMB is not much better and easily fixed with filters.
5) OSX is not very business friendly. It doesn't fit business-logic.
What does that mean? I use it every day for business, are you suggesting I am not in a *real* business?
6) The bundled applications were inferior. Give me Outlook Express over Apples default mail application any day. That thing was an utter, illogical, painful experience to configure.
Mail works and is dead simple to use. How hard is it to configure an account - prefences => accounts => add.
7) OSX is slow. Seriosuly, it's just not as snappy as winXP. Granted, I was running OSx86 on a Dell laptop, but I've used OSX on a mac before, and it really is a little laggy from all the superflorous garbage it distracts you with. "Ooooh, dancing icon. Thor like!"
While my mac is slow at somethings sometimes, on the whole it is much better than the 3G P4 2G RAM, WD74 raptor, ATI Radeon 9800 I have on my desk at work. XP and all the "required" additional software kill it. When I had the same machine at home with SuSE installed it sang. I am happy with my choice of Apple for my home needs, and so is my wife who now uses the computer everyday (when the PC was @ home she never touched it)
Hell, you can run the whole thing with a mouse with only one button..
While it's true that for many years Apples only had one mouse button, recent incarnations are not so lucky. A myriad of modifiers were intoduced by programmers wanting more functions from a mouse with a single button - shift, control, command, command+shift, etc. These are akin to multiple mouse buttons for mroe experienced users.
As most users are basically clueless, the single button is great as long as the application designers embrace the constraints and develop easier ways to manage their applications. I believe (just as many in the rails community do) that constraints are liberating.
People may be more complex than a neuron, but not nearly as complex as the total and their possible interactions. With billions of neurons, each interacting with 1,000 to 10,000 others the possible configurations are enormous, yet most we do not act in such a wildly differing manners. I don't know much about chaos theory, but it mentions something along the lines of the sinple behaviour of complex systems and the complex behaviour of simple systems. Thinking deeper, I am not sure which category this falls into.
No. 2 is easy access: Computer manufacturers are free to add icons, shortcuts and the like to the Windows Start menu and other places used to access software programs so that customers can easily find them, Microsoft said.
This is one of the worse things about Windows IMHO. I like to keep my desktop clean and don't want installs to drop shortcuts and folders on my desktop, in my start menu, in the quicklunch bar, in the system tray and then set it to autolaunch on startup - especially when the application makes sure all those things exist. Why not store all the applications in one spot, then they're really easy to find?
It's worse than that - our minds are built to automate things as much as possible, which is commanly called "skill". When you were learing to drive it was very difficult as you had to think about everything you needed to do. Just think of changing gears: push the clutch in, change gears, take your foot off the accelerator, let the clutch out, keep you car in the lane, watch that idiot using his ipod in the car next to you, think about where you need to be next, etc
The fact out brains work this way is great as the more practice we get the more tasks become automated and we can stop thinking about them and concentrate on the higher things, like where we need to go. The road safety pundits will argue that we all "need to pay attention" and "drive safer" and try to achieve this by showing us graphic advertisements of the potential consequences. In the end it does not work.
You see, it is impossible to train someone to focus on one particular task for any reasonable length of time, especially when the surroundings are filled with things built to distract you. Stereos, kids, passengers, phones, ipods, etc all distract you from the job of driving. While these *could* be removed, which just moves the distractions to inside your head - What do I need to do today? When is the boss going to give me that raise? How am I going to operate my digital watch now?
The only *real* solution is to engineer the problems away. Air bags, disc brakes, collapsable steering columns, laminated glass, seat belts, etc have saved more lives than telling people to "be save" will ever do. The real solution involves redesigning the roads to reduce the consequences of crashes. Why aren't ALL roads divided? Why aren't there barriers to stop cars runnign off the roads in all locations? Why don;t we seperate traffic to prevent head-ons?
The answer is cost. It is expensive to do these things and no politician wants to commit to a large expenses to clean up the horrific death toll on our roads, and why should they - people are to blame, right? Unfortunatetly, the invesigating authority (police) is *designed* to find someone to blame and bring prosecutions, which is easy to do as someone designed the car, the road, drove the car, did something and lost control.
The whole system needs revision and the Swiss are leading the way. In Switzerland every crash is considered a failure of the *system*, and the driver is only part of that system. By thinking differently they have managed to reduce the death toll.
Ask yourself this question next time you see a "safety sign" on the road - "Why didn't they redesign the road instead of just putting up a sign?". For example, in my state we have am intersection that has been designated a "black spot" because there have been lots of accidents there, so they put up a sign, reduced the speed limit and installed a speed camera. The intersection is between a highway where car travel at 110Kms, around a blind corner on crest covered with plants. Why is this design tollerated?
I dare say the pipe will not just be used for tracker information, but to provide the seed as well.
1G is a decent start and it will be interesting to see what the demand and upload speeds of clients will be. Of course the more popular the content, the larger the swarm will be; so it will largely self regulate.
The next most logical step is to place seeding servers at strategic locations to service the demand. This way download hotspots can be serviced from local seeding servers and the general swarm, which should increase reliability and perfomance.
Thank God! There is someone out there who understands the EBay system and posted this reply; save me having to type it. As you said, the problem is not with sniping, the problem is with the EBay system itself.
I know this is a little of topic, but the design of the EBay system is terrible and largely unusable. It is no wonder that the average Joe out there does not understand how it all works when the process is so unclear and help is buried and spread across numerous screens. Perhaps they should hire this guy.
Still, the three website here is Australia lists their prices at $29 / 100 MB. Using your equations this means VoIP call would cost around $3/hour (or the average 25 cent call should only last 12 minutes).
Besides, I am not sure the mobile networks are well suited to VoIP due to latency and jitter.
You are correct. The article dances around the issues of charges without actually highlighting them, lest the point of the article (if there is one) be lost. Telco's charge for data use on their CDMA/GTSM/3G networks and this won't change. VoIP uses considerable bandwidth and you will be charged for the data generated. The existing limiting factors of bandwidth, latency and jitter are collapsing with these new networks. The only barrier left to overcome is the pricing models and this is mainly due to the enormous expense of installing mobile networks. Cheap, flat rate plans will either rate limit speeds once a data limit is reached, or charge per MB after a "free" amount. Either way the consumer pays.
The finder is multithreaded - try and copy two sets of files to differnet locations and you will see it works fine.
The problem is the network code in finder is blocking. The program must wait for a response before it can continue, which causes long waits for users - bad, bad, bad.
However, the finder does need a rewrite. Doing simple things like saving files to a specific location is difficult, this needs to be fixed. Copying files from one location to another requires juggling of multiple windows, this needs to be fixed. Hitting enter does not open the file/directory as expected - it goes to rename(?). You cannot cut and paste files/directories - huh? The list goes on....
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Unfortunately, price is not a driving factor for most people. The iPod remains one of the most expensive and successful portable music players on the market. Competing on price alone is a very narrow view of what value actually means.
I can't imagine the challenges you must face in the publishing industry at the moment. It seems anyone with a copy of Illustrator/PageMaker/inDesign/etc can produce a book and try to sell it. But what you are describing here is actual physical copies of the material - this doe snot apply in 37 Signals case. They charge your credit card and automatically produce a PDF document with the purchasers name all over it (probably to prevent piracy). The entire process is automatic and requires no manual intervention besides the initial setup (which does require some in depth technical knowledge). Once this is done all you need to worry about is how to promote and sell the book, which as you mentioned is a whole other problem.
There are alternatives - publish it yourself and cut out the middle men completely. 37 Signals did it with "Getting Real" with great success.
While your point is completely valid, there is another way. Microsoft could create a library or emulation layer to support win32 code on a linux platform (such as Wine), then start developing "native" applications.
What is the fascination with market share?
What's the thinking here? More market share must mean more sales and therefore more profit? Apple seems to be making plenty of money, so what does more market share gives you, or is it just a measure of how many customers you did not get?
IMHO, the problem is you can not make a product that will please everyone. Apple has decided to make a certain kind of product - looks cool, well designed, easy to use and at a premium price.
I guess it depends on how you classify your market. If you are talking portable mp3 players in the USA, then Apple has around 80% of the market (their figures).
If you mean "laptop computers" then the field is wide open to every man and his dog that can bolt a machine together - including the el cheapo models who compete on price alone. This is akin to putting Mercedes, Audi and Lexus in the "car market" and wondering why their share is so low (hint: you are including Hyundai and others). This is not the same market. Who are the premium computer manufacturers? IBM might be there, Dell isn't.
As long as Apple continues to focus on making their products this way they will have a following and will generate profits - to hell with market share.
... and with policies like this, we should all be afraid, very afraid.
Seriously, by what process do I approve what is held on the card and how can I check they are the only things being stored? How do I know some clandestine government organisation is not collating the data and tracking my every move? What do I care if they are?
And no one ever filled in their census forms before the "official" day before now?
While the government could track certain things about you via BAS statements and tax returns, there is a LOT more information available in census data.
1) Of course they exhibit different behaviour, they are different people. The point was, for the enormous number of possible combinations of materials that comprise a person - we are not that different. We are not even the sum of our parts.
...", or did you ignore that to make your point while posturing and big noting yourself?
2) Did you actually read and understand the part that says "I do not know much about
3) Please don't pose.
4) Mod me as flame/troll/off topic/whatever
As most users are basically clueless, the single button is great as long as the application designers embrace the constraints and develop easier ways to manage their applications. I believe (just as many in the rails community do) that constraints are liberating.
Just as I am reading this, I have my new browser delivered as well.
Where were you yesterday when I had mod points? I would mod you as informative and/or funny.
People may be more complex than a neuron, but not nearly as complex as the total and their possible interactions. With billions of neurons, each interacting with 1,000 to 10,000 others the possible configurations are enormous, yet most we do not act in such a wildly differing manners. I don't know much about chaos theory, but it mentions something along the lines of the sinple behaviour of complex systems and the complex behaviour of simple systems. Thinking deeper, I am not sure which category this falls into.
Damn.
I look forward to the "good taste" DRM that refuses to play music of questionable quality - maybe we can call it peril sensitive?
It's worse than that - our minds are built to automate things as much as possible, which is commanly called "skill". When you were learing to drive it was very difficult as you had to think about everything you needed to do. Just think of changing gears: push the clutch in, change gears, take your foot off the accelerator, let the clutch out, keep you car in the lane, watch that idiot using his ipod in the car next to you, think about where you need to be next, etc
/rant
The fact out brains work this way is great as the more practice we get the more tasks become automated and we can stop thinking about them and concentrate on the higher things, like where we need to go. The road safety pundits will argue that we all "need to pay attention" and "drive safer" and try to achieve this by showing us graphic advertisements of the potential consequences. In the end it does not work.
You see, it is impossible to train someone to focus on one particular task for any reasonable length of time, especially when the surroundings are filled with things built to distract you. Stereos, kids, passengers, phones, ipods, etc all distract you from the job of driving. While these *could* be removed, which just moves the distractions to inside your head - What do I need to do today? When is the boss going to give me that raise? How am I going to operate my digital watch now?
The only *real* solution is to engineer the problems away. Air bags, disc brakes, collapsable steering columns, laminated glass, seat belts, etc have saved more lives than telling people to "be save" will ever do. The real solution involves redesigning the roads to reduce the consequences of crashes. Why aren't ALL roads divided? Why aren't there barriers to stop cars runnign off the roads in all locations? Why don;t we seperate traffic to prevent head-ons?
The answer is cost. It is expensive to do these things and no politician wants to commit to a large expenses to clean up the horrific death toll on our roads, and why should they - people are to blame, right? Unfortunatetly, the invesigating authority (police) is *designed* to find someone to blame and bring prosecutions, which is easy to do as someone designed the car, the road, drove the car, did something and lost control.
The whole system needs revision and the Swiss are leading the way. In Switzerland every crash is considered a failure of the *system*, and the driver is only part of that system. By thinking differently they have managed to reduce the death toll.
Ask yourself this question next time you see a "safety sign" on the road - "Why didn't they redesign the road instead of just putting up a sign?". For example, in my state we have am intersection that has been designated a "black spot" because there have been lots of accidents there, so they put up a sign, reduced the speed limit and installed a speed camera. The intersection is between a highway where car travel at 110Kms, around a blind corner on crest covered with plants. Why is this design tollerated?
I dare say the pipe will not just be used for tracker information, but to provide the seed as well.
1G is a decent start and it will be interesting to see what the demand and upload speeds of clients will be. Of course the more popular the content, the larger the swarm will be; so it will largely self regulate.
The next most logical step is to place seeding servers at strategic locations to service the demand. This way download hotspots can be serviced from local seeding servers and the general swarm, which should increase reliability and perfomance.
Thank God! There is someone out there who understands the EBay system and posted this reply; save me having to type it. As you said, the problem is not with sniping, the problem is with the EBay system itself.
I know this is a little of topic, but the design of the EBay system is terrible and largely unusable. It is no wonder that the average Joe out there does not understand how it all works when the process is so unclear and help is buried and spread across numerous screens. Perhaps they should hire this guy.
Your right - I never looked at it that way.
Still, the three website here is Australia lists their prices at $29 / 100 MB. Using your equations this means VoIP call would cost around $3/hour (or the average 25 cent call should only last 12 minutes).
Besides, I am not sure the mobile networks are well suited to VoIP due to latency and jitter.
Aren't you on metric time already? If not, please set your clocks to 97 past 8 on the 63rd day of August to fall in line with the rest of us.
You are correct. The article dances around the issues of charges without actually highlighting them, lest the point of the article (if there is one) be lost. Telco's charge for data use on their CDMA/GTSM/3G networks and this won't change. VoIP uses considerable bandwidth and you will be charged for the data generated. The existing limiting factors of bandwidth, latency and jitter are collapsing with these new networks. The only barrier left to overcome is the pricing models and this is mainly due to the enormous expense of installing mobile networks. Cheap, flat rate plans will either rate limit speeds once a data limit is reached, or charge per MB after a "free" amount. Either way the consumer pays.
The finder is multithreaded - try and copy two sets of files to differnet locations and you will see it works fine.
The problem is the network code in finder is blocking. The program must wait for a response before it can continue, which causes long waits for users - bad, bad, bad.
However, the finder does need a rewrite. Doing simple things like saving files to a specific location is difficult, this needs to be fixed. Copying files from one location to another requires juggling of multiple windows, this needs to be fixed. Hitting enter does not open the file/directory as expected - it goes to rename(?). You cannot cut and paste files/directories - huh? The list goes on....