I flew a short San Diego -> San Francisco flight on Virgin America, they already had this lighting idea. To the point where I was told by a fellow passenger that I might actually be asked to close my shades on takeoff and landing (most of the other shades were closed). Thankfully they did not, they're why I request window seats after all.
The rest of the flight was excellent, nowhere near the horror stories we keep hearing about the other American carriers. They even had sky-fi or whatever their in-flight wireless internet was called--free if you'd rented a Chromebook from them.
Most countries don't have the insane sales tax laws the the USA does, where even neighbouring counties in the same state can have slightly different (by as little as 0.05%) tax rates. No wonder online retailers like Amazon hate the thought of collecting and managing taxes on their customers.
Then again, Canada doesn't have municipal/county-level sales taxes, just federal and provincial, and yet we're stuck with pre-tax prices on the sticker too. Chalk that one up to overwhelming US influence (it's why we drive on the right, instead of the left like every other current or former British commonwealth country and territory).
I've never used Netflix and haven't followed their recent moves too closely, but the way you wrote your story, it sounds like Netflix tried being somewhat upfront about changes to their service, contrary to all the other back-stabbing companies out there who would, as you say, stay quiet about changes that negatively impact their customers and hope they don't notice, or won't bother wasting time calling in to cancel.
The implied lesson is that being honest and upfront about changes, when not legally required to be, is bad for your business because the informed customer will punish you.
Blame the insane IP laws for the state of tech litigation.
IIRC fashionwear is explicitly exempt from copyright ie you can't protect a design from being copied (the templates to produce them, maybe can, just like you can't copyright old music but can copyright the sheet music to it and a performance itself).
I believe anti-counterfeiting laws work around this by saying even if it's not labeled Rolex or other major brand, the style and lettering is similar enough to violate trademarks--which are of course protected.
Combining existing technologies and polishing them so they work well together *is* (or can be) innovative. Being first to list 3rd-party components in a spec sheet (larger screen, faster CPU, etc) is not.
No honest Apple fan denies that there were mp3 players that preceded the iPod. Most were cheaper, some had more storage. But Apple combined the smallest physical HDD in an mp3 player (the HDD alone at retail price cost the same as the first iPod), a blazing fast file transfer method (compared to every other mp3 player stuck with USB1.x), and a menu interface that didn't require fiddling with arrow buttons to scroll through a huge list of songs.
Very few people got it. Never mind Slashdot's famous "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", even die-hard Apple fans were slamming it, saying it would be another Mac Cube. My favourite/. comment in that discussion was someone dissing not just HDD but flash-based players too, saying CD mp3 players and burners were way cheaper, so why bother with anything else?
Not so. The iTunes Music Store didn't exist until a year and a half after the first iPod became available. It was also initially compatible only with Macs, which made up only about 5% of the market at the time, further limiting market penetration.
IMHO the revolutionary part was the iPod combining a number of critical elements: - the smallest HDD (physically; by itself the 5GB drive was the price of an iPod) - Firewire for fast transfers and charging (cheaper players were agonizingly slow USB1, and required separate charging cable or bulky batteries) - the iTunes playlist sync, rather than manual file management (which some people still prefer to this day). So you didn't have to manage files in two locations (computer, and what you wanted on your player) - the scrollwheel interface that let you navigate through hundreds of titles efficiently, compared to arrow keys or typing songs to find them.
Looking at the original/. discussion on it, it's especially hilarious to see a comment about how he didn't like HDD or even Flash-based mp3 players, because CD-mp3 players were cheaper and readily available. That line of thinking is what allowed Apple to steamroll over every other player at the time.
Because people tend to pin the fame (or the blame) on leaders. Look at all the crap being heaped on Obama now, or Bush before him; half the stuff they have no possible control over thanks to Congress or the Senate.
With Jobs, this is magnified by the cult of personality that goes with any charismatic leader, and of course he had a huge team behind every successful product and service. During product launch announcements he almost always asked members from the respective teams to stand up and be recognized, even if not by name.
I think it's fair to say though, that certain business deals that were key to the user experience Apple demanded (AT&T and later Verizon denied access to brand the iPhone and pre-install their own apps, as was standard in all their other offerings); forcing $0.99 per song prices in iTunes, etc), Jobs' overwhelming personality were pivotal in negotiations.
Score one for publicly funded broadcasters (also known as "damn left-wing, socialist, state-controlled media" to the Murdoch media empire and those who share their views).
Not really. It's great to know a new model *may* be coming soon, but some people just want to save upfront costs, and the "previous generation" model is fine at the time.
If Apple still sells a model, they should be supported with security, etc updates for two years (typical contract length) after the date a model is officially discontinued.
I have a 3GS, bought just weeks after they were introduced. I updated to iOS5 just fine, and I don't really expect to be able to update to iOS6 whenever it's released.
On the other hand, Apple still sells new 3GS (if $0 on contract counts as "selling") running iOS5, they should be required to provide bug and security fixes for at least two more years.
By that warped definition, the vast majority of Americans are morons (to use the GP's term) or below average intelligence because they can't drive manual transmission cars ("a machine designed for the average person").
Why so hard to believe? Saw an unmodified one two weekends ago in Ottawa, Canada, and in Montreal a couple friends stopped behind one at a stoplight, it was fully decked out in Back To the Future props, with pictures to prove it.
Tell that to the cops saying this, not me. In case you totally misread the tone of my posts, I disagree with their "we'll take care of everything" attitude.
The police stressed that the man did nothing wrong. Their point was that you don't know when a situation will get out of control and turn on you, and it's best to leave it to the professionals. But, in reality that is of course totally out of line with what they can or will actually respond to in a timely fashion.
But that said, when people are being violently hurt in public, SOMEONE needs to step in, immediately. Sadly between the bystander effect and fear, people will usually ignore what is happening. In these cases, somebody needs to stand up. Somebody needs to care.
Two recent cases in my city where good Samaritans have suffered for their efforts. One broke up an alcohol-fueled many-on-one fight at 3am, the thugs turned on him and he suffered serious but non-life threatening head injuries.
Another case where a guy simply told two 19 year olds to return the pumpkin he just saw them steal from a display outside a supermarket. The punks attacked him, causing him to fall back and hit his head. He fell into a coma and died a week later.
In both cases someone cared enough to intervene, but police said the "right" thing to do is call 911 and not get directly involved. You can bet they'd be roasted alive if they'd suggested this in response to a good Samaritan getting beaten up for breaking up a sexual assault.
Ah. It's been years since I got an "evite"; I'd forgotten they were an actual website/service, I thought you meant it as a short form of generic "email invite".
That's probably the biggest difference--with evite you need email addresses (AFAIK), and the entire service is meant as a more fancy special occasion event that you put more thought into, and plan further in advance.
FB events are quick and dirty, but it gets straight to the essential points. Using evite for the casual BBQ party this weekend is overkill, but perfect for FB. And since most of your friends are already on FB (but probably not Evite), it's more convenient than going into a separate service.
Why the comparison? It's pretty irrelevant that FB's trial lasted longer *back then*, because it was new and different enough that it wasn't replacing anything similar. Myspace is often touted as an example of what FB replaced, but only two of my current FB friends ever had a MySpace page.
Google Plus? I eagerly joined it 3 or 4 months ago. About 20 other friends did too. It's obvious interest in it is waning fast, and wasn't really there anyway. No one has posted anything in 3 days. And its lack of events make planning anything on G+ utterly pointless.
People keep saying they're pissed off with FB changes and privacy snafus, but few care enough to give it up for something they know is equally eager to pry into their so-called private lives for profit.
Assuming you've never seen FB events and you're asking a serious question...
For those not on FB you send an email invitation or call them, like you would before.
You can make FB events private and invite only specific friends, thus excluding the pseudo-friends. I live in an apartment, you really think I'm going to post an open invitation that includes everyone in my FB "friends" list, some of whom are on the other side of the world?
By default, an event will show all invitees and their RSVP status. This has the advantage (and disadvantage) of any invitee seeing this, and maybe deciding "oh, not enough people said Yes yet, so I won't bother". You can hide the invitee list, so it's like an email where all invitees are BCC'd, but this goes against the expectations of the FB crowd and can backfire against the organizer (no one wants to risk being the only one going).
Extremists on either side, be they freedom/proprietary, left/right politics, etc always fail to realize that the middle ground is usually best.
Just yesterday/. had the story about a WIPO spokesman saying the web would've been better if it had been patented and licensed. Utter bullshit, we all know it exploded in use *because* it wasn't patented or licensed, but okay the shill is paid to say it.
Stallman at least is pure in his convictions, but he, like the IP special interest groups, fails to realize the world cannot work in the respective extremes that they desire.
Mod up. I had a similar thought, with an added suspicion that they're trying to boost "college/university graduate" stats in order to look more competitive with Asian countries.
One of my local universities (in Canada) has added four or five on-campus residence houses since I graduated ten years ago. With a stagnant or declining domestic birth rate the last 20 years, two possible reasons are: 1, they're attracting more foreign students, and 2, high school is easier and applicants are getting higher grades (and thus getting accepted to universities more) than they would have when I went through the system.
And since more students mean more revenue from tuition, universities can't exactly fail the majority of these new students, so academic standards at universities might be lowering, too. So in another generation, undergrad degrees might not mean much to a hiring company either.
China does have somewhat of an advantage in having one written language to cover the country, although that tends to be rendered moot by the fact that the people being attracted to the factories aren't likely to be literate in the first place.
It may attract them but I'd be curious to see the actual literacy rate stats for those accepted as factory workers.
The adult literacy rate in China is 94%. Granted the raw number of illiterate is still high (80M), but then look at India which has a 63% literacy rate, i.e. over 443M illiterate (about 130M more illiterate than the entire population of the USA).
The Flash update process is pretty retarded, for one.
In the control panel, it can tell me which versions of the ActiveX (IE) and plugin (Firefox, etc) are installed, but when I manually ask to check for updates it sends the default browser to the Flash download page.
What a completely lame-brained approach--the control panel should check for, download and install updates itself, or pass it off to an Adobe Update app, or *something* that doesn't require manually downloading and installing a fresh copy of *both* IE and plugin versions of Flash.
The "tiny" part is key. Smaller countries are more homogeneous (even if there are dozens of dialects of the same language), and being surrounded by countries speaking those other languages, there's political and economic advantages to speaking them all.
Canada is officially bilingual English-French, but only one province is and it isn't Quebec.
Quebec is French-only and there is a lot of resentment over many federal jobs with a bilingual requirement even when the job itself doesn't need it. The feeling is exacerbated by Quebec not reciprocating the effort by neighbouring provinces to use bilingual signs even in key areas, e.g. for road and construction detour signs.
I just realized something. It's on the same primal level as "it isn't affecting *me*" or "it's invisible but it can still get me". It's the same reason people fear flying more than driving even though the stats say more people die in car accidents every year. Or why 9/11 is so much more impactful despite over twice that number (about 8000) each year in gun homicides alone in the US.
It's the failure of the herd to provide sufficient protection.
Everyone understands that individual parts of the herd will be picked off. It could even be you, but the larger the herd, the better your chances that it'll be someone else.
But a nuclear event, or 9/11, or plane crashes takes out or affects a larger part of the herd at once, so your individual chance of being affected is higher as well.
This doesn't seem to apply to natural disasters for some reason--people still live in areas prone to earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. Perhaps there's an inherent distrust of complex human creations, or we're just wired to accept things outside our collective control.
Slashdot Mirror
I flew a short San Diego -> San Francisco flight on Virgin America, they already had this lighting idea. To the point where I was told by a fellow passenger that I might actually be asked to close my shades on takeoff and landing (most of the other shades were closed). Thankfully they did not, they're why I request window seats after all.
The rest of the flight was excellent, nowhere near the horror stories we keep hearing about the other American carriers. They even had sky-fi or whatever their in-flight wireless internet was called--free if you'd rented a Chromebook from them.
Most countries don't have the insane sales tax laws the the USA does, where even neighbouring counties in the same state can have slightly different (by as little as 0.05%) tax rates. No wonder online retailers like Amazon hate the thought of collecting and managing taxes on their customers.
Then again, Canada doesn't have municipal/county-level sales taxes, just federal and provincial, and yet we're stuck with pre-tax prices on the sticker too. Chalk that one up to overwhelming US influence (it's why we drive on the right, instead of the left like every other current or former British commonwealth country and territory).
You could probably get upwards of a month of normal smartphone use without recharging.
And maybe 2 or three days with an iPhone.
Only because iPhones owners actually use their smartphone features regularly.
I've never used Netflix and haven't followed their recent moves too closely, but the way you wrote your story, it sounds like Netflix tried being somewhat upfront about changes to their service, contrary to all the other back-stabbing companies out there who would, as you say, stay quiet about changes that negatively impact their customers and hope they don't notice, or won't bother wasting time calling in to cancel.
The implied lesson is that being honest and upfront about changes, when not legally required to be, is bad for your business because the informed customer will punish you.
Blame the insane IP laws for the state of tech litigation.
IIRC fashionwear is explicitly exempt from copyright ie you can't protect a design from being copied (the templates to produce them, maybe can, just like you can't copyright old music but can copyright the sheet music to it and a performance itself).
I believe anti-counterfeiting laws work around this by saying even if it's not labeled Rolex or other major brand, the style and lettering is similar enough to violate trademarks--which are of course protected.
This is Slashdot, much of the adult population here probably hasn't experienced the likely vector for spreading HPV, so the question stands...
Combining existing technologies and polishing them so they work well together *is* (or can be) innovative. Being first to list 3rd-party components in a spec sheet (larger screen, faster CPU, etc) is not.
No honest Apple fan denies that there were mp3 players that preceded the iPod. Most were cheaper, some had more storage. But Apple combined the smallest physical HDD in an mp3 player (the HDD alone at retail price cost the same as the first iPod), a blazing fast file transfer method (compared to every other mp3 player stuck with USB1.x), and a menu interface that didn't require fiddling with arrow buttons to scroll through a huge list of songs.
Very few people got it. Never mind Slashdot's famous "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", even die-hard Apple fans were slamming it, saying it would be another Mac Cube. My favourite /. comment in that discussion was someone dissing not just HDD but flash-based players too, saying CD mp3 players and burners were way cheaper, so why bother with anything else?
Not so. The iTunes Music Store didn't exist until a year and a half after the first iPod became available. It was also initially compatible only with Macs, which made up only about 5% of the market at the time, further limiting market penetration.
IMHO the revolutionary part was the iPod combining a number of critical elements:
- the smallest HDD (physically; by itself the 5GB drive was the price of an iPod)
- Firewire for fast transfers and charging (cheaper players were agonizingly slow USB1, and required separate charging cable or bulky batteries)
- the iTunes playlist sync, rather than manual file management (which some people still prefer to this day). So you didn't have to manage files in two locations (computer, and what you wanted on your player)
- the scrollwheel interface that let you navigate through hundreds of titles efficiently, compared to arrow keys or typing songs to find them.
Looking at the original /. discussion on it, it's especially hilarious to see a comment about how he didn't like HDD or even Flash-based mp3 players, because CD-mp3 players were cheaper and readily available. That line of thinking is what allowed Apple to steamroll over every other player at the time.
Because people tend to pin the fame (or the blame) on leaders. Look at all the crap being heaped on Obama now, or Bush before him; half the stuff they have no possible control over thanks to Congress or the Senate.
With Jobs, this is magnified by the cult of personality that goes with any charismatic leader, and of course he had a huge team behind every successful product and service. During product launch announcements he almost always asked members from the respective teams to stand up and be recognized, even if not by name.
I think it's fair to say though, that certain business deals that were key to the user experience Apple demanded (AT&T and later Verizon denied access to brand the iPhone and pre-install their own apps, as was standard in all their other offerings); forcing $0.99 per song prices in iTunes, etc), Jobs' overwhelming personality were pivotal in negotiations.
Score one for publicly funded broadcasters (also known as "damn left-wing, socialist, state-controlled media" to the Murdoch media empire and those who share their views).
Not really. It's great to know a new model *may* be coming soon, but some people just want to save upfront costs, and the "previous generation" model is fine at the time.
If Apple still sells a model, they should be supported with security, etc updates for two years (typical contract length) after the date a model is officially discontinued.
I have a 3GS, bought just weeks after they were introduced. I updated to iOS5 just fine, and I don't really expect to be able to update to iOS6 whenever it's released.
On the other hand, Apple still sells new 3GS (if $0 on contract counts as "selling") running iOS5, they should be required to provide bug and security fixes for at least two more years.
By that warped definition, the vast majority of Americans are morons (to use the GP's term) or below average intelligence because they can't drive manual transmission cars ("a machine designed for the average person").
Why so hard to believe? Saw an unmodified one two weekends ago in Ottawa, Canada, and in Montreal a couple friends stopped behind one at a stoplight, it was fully decked out in Back To the Future props, with pictures to prove it.
Tell that to the cops saying this, not me. In case you totally misread the tone of my posts, I disagree with their "we'll take care of everything" attitude.
Not high up on the scale, for sure, but at least it's to report a crime in progress. Unlike, say, calling to ask a 911 operator for a date.
The police stressed that the man did nothing wrong. Their point was that you don't know when a situation will get out of control and turn on you, and it's best to leave it to the professionals. But, in reality that is of course totally out of line with what they can or will actually respond to in a timely fashion.
But that said, when people are being violently hurt in public, SOMEONE needs to step in, immediately. Sadly between the bystander effect and fear, people will usually ignore what is happening. In these cases, somebody needs to stand up. Somebody needs to care.
Two recent cases in my city where good Samaritans have suffered for their efforts. One broke up an alcohol-fueled many-on-one fight at 3am, the thugs turned on him and he suffered serious but non-life threatening head injuries.
Another case where a guy simply told two 19 year olds to return the pumpkin he just saw them steal from a display outside a supermarket. The punks attacked him, causing him to fall back and hit his head. He fell into a coma and died a week later.
In both cases someone cared enough to intervene, but police said the "right" thing to do is call 911 and not get directly involved. You can bet they'd be roasted alive if they'd suggested this in response to a good Samaritan getting beaten up for breaking up a sexual assault.
Ah. It's been years since I got an "evite"; I'd forgotten they were an actual website/service, I thought you meant it as a short form of generic "email invite".
That's probably the biggest difference--with evite you need email addresses (AFAIK), and the entire service is meant as a more fancy special occasion event that you put more thought into, and plan further in advance.
FB events are quick and dirty, but it gets straight to the essential points. Using evite for the casual BBQ party this weekend is overkill, but perfect for FB. And since most of your friends are already on FB (but probably not Evite), it's more convenient than going into a separate service.
Why the comparison? It's pretty irrelevant that FB's trial lasted longer *back then*, because it was new and different enough that it wasn't replacing anything similar. Myspace is often touted as an example of what FB replaced, but only two of my current FB friends ever had a MySpace page.
Google Plus? I eagerly joined it 3 or 4 months ago. About 20 other friends did too. It's obvious interest in it is waning fast, and wasn't really there anyway. No one has posted anything in 3 days. And its lack of events make planning anything on G+ utterly pointless.
People keep saying they're pissed off with FB changes and privacy snafus, but few care enough to give it up for something they know is equally eager to pry into their so-called private lives for profit.
Assuming you've never seen FB events and you're asking a serious question...
For those not on FB you send an email invitation or call them, like you would before.
You can make FB events private and invite only specific friends, thus excluding the pseudo-friends. I live in an apartment, you really think I'm going to post an open invitation that includes everyone in my FB "friends" list, some of whom are on the other side of the world?
By default, an event will show all invitees and their RSVP status. This has the advantage (and disadvantage) of any invitee seeing this, and maybe deciding "oh, not enough people said Yes yet, so I won't bother". You can hide the invitee list, so it's like an email where all invitees are BCC'd, but this goes against the expectations of the FB crowd and can backfire against the organizer (no one wants to risk being the only one going).
Extremists on either side, be they freedom/proprietary, left/right politics, etc always fail to realize that the middle ground is usually best.
Just yesterday /. had the story about a WIPO spokesman saying the web would've been better if it had been patented and licensed. Utter bullshit, we all know it exploded in use *because* it wasn't patented or licensed, but okay the shill is paid to say it.
Stallman at least is pure in his convictions, but he, like the IP special interest groups, fails to realize the world cannot work in the respective extremes that they desire.
Mod up. I had a similar thought, with an added suspicion that they're trying to boost "college/university graduate" stats in order to look more competitive with Asian countries.
One of my local universities (in Canada) has added four or five on-campus residence houses since I graduated ten years ago. With a stagnant or declining domestic birth rate the last 20 years, two possible reasons are: 1, they're attracting more foreign students, and 2, high school is easier and applicants are getting higher grades (and thus getting accepted to universities more) than they would have when I went through the system.
And since more students mean more revenue from tuition, universities can't exactly fail the majority of these new students, so academic standards at universities might be lowering, too. So in another generation, undergrad degrees might not mean much to a hiring company either.
China does have somewhat of an advantage in having one written language to cover the country, although that tends to be rendered moot by the fact that the people being attracted to the factories aren't likely to be literate in the first place.
It may attract them but I'd be curious to see the actual literacy rate stats for those accepted as factory workers.
The adult literacy rate in China is 94%. Granted the raw number of illiterate is still high (80M), but then look at India which has a 63% literacy rate, i.e. over 443M illiterate (about 130M more illiterate than the entire population of the USA).
The Flash update process is pretty retarded, for one.
In the control panel, it can tell me which versions of the ActiveX (IE) and plugin (Firefox, etc) are installed, but when I manually ask to check for updates it sends the default browser to the Flash download page.
What a completely lame-brained approach--the control panel should check for, download and install updates itself, or pass it off to an Adobe Update app, or *something* that doesn't require manually downloading and installing a fresh copy of *both* IE and plugin versions of Flash.
The "tiny" part is key. Smaller countries are more homogeneous (even if there are dozens of dialects of the same language), and being surrounded by countries speaking those other languages, there's political and economic advantages to speaking them all.
Canada is officially bilingual English-French, but only one province is and it isn't Quebec.
Quebec is French-only and there is a lot of resentment over many federal jobs with a bilingual requirement even when the job itself doesn't need it. The feeling is exacerbated by Quebec not reciprocating the effort by neighbouring provinces to use bilingual signs even in key areas, e.g. for road and construction detour signs.
I just realized something. It's on the same primal level as "it isn't affecting *me*" or "it's invisible but it can still get me". It's the same reason people fear flying more than driving even though the stats say more people die in car accidents every year. Or why 9/11 is so much more impactful despite over twice that number (about 8000) each year in gun homicides alone in the US.
It's the failure of the herd to provide sufficient protection.
Everyone understands that individual parts of the herd will be picked off. It could even be you, but the larger the herd, the better your chances that it'll be someone else.
But a nuclear event, or 9/11, or plane crashes takes out or affects a larger part of the herd at once, so your individual chance of being affected is higher as well.
This doesn't seem to apply to natural disasters for some reason--people still live in areas prone to earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. Perhaps there's an inherent distrust of complex human creations, or we're just wired to accept things outside our collective control.