Looking over the wide range of responses, one thing stands out -- one's opinion on whether "cable is dead" has a lot to do with how much importance one puts on TV in general. If you have a need to make sure you don't miss anything, you still need cable and you tend to believe it'll be there for the foreseeable future.. If you only watch TV occasionally, and your head won't explode if a certain series doesn't happen to be on Netflix right now, (because other series worth watching still are) then you tend towards cable's days being numbered.
What's the actual truth? I dunno. I tend towards cable being a dying technology. But I'm definitely in the second camp -- I don't care about whatever is on TV this week. I'm still working through season two of Veronica Mars.
so the population that [subscribes to multichannel pay television] will age out over time even if the streaming services don't change anything.
Will people really "age out" of following the major professional and collegiate sport leagues over time? I was under the impression that sport fandom tended to be something that was passed down from generation to generation.
That's a good question, and one my wife is struggling with now. She's a sports fanatic and loss of cable (and before that, satellite) means she struggles to find ways to watch her games. Part of the solution is to go back to the antenna, part is to watch games on her laptop. I understand that the roku has some kind of sports package, but I don't think she's ready to spend money on that yet. I think the answer will eventually be that sports will be streamed from sources specializing in sports. But it's not all in place or completely working yet. (For instance, lots of sources still use flash, which doesn't work on her tablet.)
I resemble that. We have a roku box in one room and a blu-ray player that includes netflix in the other room, and an ANTENNA (remember those?) on the roof so wife can watch football, and we've been cable-free for almost three years now.
Probably the biggest part of this is no longer caring if we see a show when it first comes out. We've talked about this in other threads, but waiting until a series accumulates a season or so, and then watching it in a few marathons allows one to pick up nuances that would be missed at one episode per week. I'm way WAY ok with not having seen whatever the guy across from me at work saw last night. We can still talk about series, but we talk about them like other people talk about movies. I saw this, it was pretty good, you should try it.
I don't recall the last time I saw a commercial. It might have been the last superbowl. (I don't watch football but I attend the parties because there's beer.) Moreover, the response to "what do you want to see tonight?" is never never NEVER "I dunno, what's on?" Because the networks no longer control what we can watch. (Or choose not to watch.)
> BTW, can we please stop calling it "over the top?" That implies something about the business model that's total nonsense: the idea that IP service is a side business, and cable is the real business. Where did this term come from, anyway?
Completely agree. The term comes from an erroneous assumption.
It's this kind of article that makes me hopeful for the human race. That the answer to corporate solvency isn't necessarily to find some third world country where you can work your employees seven days a week for bottlecaps.
I fought the system for a couple years, got her transferred to IEP ("special needs" program) but they were so hostile to her and to me that I finally pulled her out of school. She was homeschooled for three years, (which, fortunately, is legal here) then she applied for and was accepted into a magnet school for 9th grade. It was still not great (I had to read all of her homework to her, and she had to dictate her assignments to me... every night... it was like having a second job) but the magnet school never questioned her inability to read and at no time suggested she needed to be medicated. It was precisely where she needed to be and I have nightmares sometimes thinking what she would have gone through had she not been accepted.
When we discovered my daughter had a reading problem, I paid for comprehensive tests, delivered the results to the school, (she had severe dyslexia -- the doctors said she probably wouldn't ever read past third grade level) and was told flatly by school officials that they didn't recognize Dyslexia as a condition. That their diagnosis (a school giving a medical diagnosis? never mind...) was that she was hyperactive and had a problem with authority. They suggested Ritalin. I pointed out that an independent psychologist hadn't found any signs of hyperactivity. They stuck to their guns.
So, maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I suspect this new test will just give them another datum to ignore.
But who knows, maybe it depends on the school system.
All that ice on the poles made the Earth all wobbley, which led to Bad Things. We should de-ice the planet, as a precaution so it doesn't happen again!
I mean, you don't let ice build up on your roof, in your freezer, or on airplanes... ice is always bad unless it is in my drink!
Hmm. So these orbital wobbles... are they nature's defrost cycle?
Actually, you have a good point. The suit was probably started by a lawyer and not by a "real" plaintiff. But if we are going to start suing businesses for poor business decisions and a little bit of lying - hell, there are a LOT of businesses that need suing. I would estimate that at, well, every one of them.
You and the OP make very good points, but what's the alternative? Do we give businesses a pass on unethical behavior just because we may reap some small profit from it?
I'm not sure "loved" is the right word. It's the love for a mob enforcer that talks to you calmly while he works you over a little, as opposed to the last one who screamed obscenities while he busted your kneecaps.
Also they sounded like shit. I'm not sure the mugging argument really had a major effect.
God, that's funny. So let me summarize: You gotcher young, hip, fashion-conscious millenial, some really cool cat, grooving to his music, and dressed cooler than you ever could, and his music SOUNDS LIKE CRAP through his trendy white (a color you never see) earphones.
Competitor? Nah. Ellison and Jobs were actually close friends, based on comments both of them made over the years. If anything, this is a case of one person thinking that their friend's life work simply can't exist without the friend. And, despite being an Apple fanboy, I have to admit that he's likely right.
You're not an Apple fanboy, you're perhaps a Jobs fanboi.
I don't think you have to be a Jobs fanboi to say that. I don't consider myself either an Apple fanboi or a Jobs fanboi. (I don't carry an iphone and my ipod is an old firewire touchwheel that remains in the truck for legacy reasons, even though I've had stereo bluetooth and music on my phone since way back in the Blackberry days.) But even if you didn't like the products he created, you can still appreciate the impact he had on society (even while believing that impact wasn't entirely positive). He was a complex individual who got a few things wrong but got many things amazingly right. I agree with OP that it's likely that Apple will suffer without him, and submit that this opinion is entirely pragmatic, not a product of hero worship.
p. Just sayin'. I've run three websites out of my garage for years. The router provided by the ISP has dyndns support built in. A little tricky to set up, and then I forgot about it.
I never suspected that it wouldn't work without Kinect attached. I throw this clearly into the FUD category. I think Microsoft was clarifying that idiots assumed it needed Kinect to work, not reversing a decision that it would require Kinect to work.
The problem is, you can't make it difficult to watch a series, suddenly change your mind near the end, and then be surprised that people haven't abandoned the pirating they had gotten used to by then. A better test would have been to make the show (or some popular show) available globally from the very beginning.
Because in Windows case it's not a command line. For that you need a shell session, not some kind of 80's era video game graphics. You also need a standard set of apps, named in a standard fashion. Typing blind, and trying to guess what apps are installed on this particular machine and what they're called, is not what "command line" means.
You have some good points there, especially about the Blackberry tablet, which could have been good but ended up being... a toy. Blackberry did blow it in many, many ways.
My answer will take the form of a question. Isn't anyone else out there bored with a plethora of applications that consume idle time but don't actually enrich one's life? I'm finding that after a couple years playing with this neat little miniature touchscreen computer, I'm bored. I don't really use it, *really* use it, much except for phone, email, text, calendar in roughly that order. I just don't have enough spare time to devote to playing with my PHONE. I find that I miss the degree of address book / email / calendar integration I used to have, and I MISS THE DAMNED KEYBOARD. There, I said it. A bigger screen seemed like a good idea at the time, but after fighting with virtual keyboards for a couple years, I'd trade half the screen for a keyboard like the Tour on which I could touch-type. (Or touch-thumb, whatever.)
In other words, this smartphone thang seems more like a gimmick to me now. Too small to do serious work, (except slowly and painfully, pinching and pulling as necessary) and the things that used to really matter still don't work very well. When it comes down to shiny objects, my razr maxx is cute and playful. But it isn't really any more useful in my job than my old droid x, and is still less useful than my old Tour.
I wonder sometimes whether we'll look back at this era and call the smartphone thing a kind of madness. Like progressive rock, or spandex.
I suspect that some Blackberry decision makers felt similarly, and felt that they could perhaps wait out the Angry Birds phenomenon until people came back for integration, access, and reliability. And then realized too late that they'd be dead by the time the shift came (if it ever did) and started trying to play catch-up at a time when it was unlikely to do any good.
I guess it doesn't matter. It looks like they're pretty much dead now, and there goes the best keyboard ever on a phone. It's kinda sad.
> If their first offering wasn't called a Surface (a meaningless name) but instead the Xbox Tablet, the response would have likely been quite different as it looks and behaves like an Xbox and doesn't have the same connotation as "it runs Windows, so all my programs will work, and I won't have to learn anything new". That in turn further hurt the Windows brand.
I would submit that the Surface was not a meaningless name, except in the context of this particular tablet product. It was a very descriptive name for a cutting edge tabletop interface, now relabeled Pixelsense, a truly meaningless name. Besides all the ill will and consumer confusion caused by Surface (the tablet) it also shat on what could have been an interesting tabletop interface, had Microsoft ever decided to elevate the product past movie prop status. And, I truly suspect, the only reason for *not* commercializing the technology is that it did not fit in with the "one GUI everywhere" philosophy.
> If you insist on using the horribly inefficient menu paradigm for launching programs
Ok, stop. It's not for Microsoft (and I know you shill for them) to say what is "horribly inefficient" or not in my or anyone else's workflow. This fiction that "hitting a button and typing a few characters" is somehow superior is just a lame attempt at damage control. I'm not even going to waste time trying to explain to you why this is so, because you already know. The menu system was not eliminated because it was "horribly inefficient". It was eliminated because it did not fit in with the "one GUI everywhere" paradigm. We already know from Windows Mobile that the Start button is not a useful paradigm for a mobile device. It'll take some time and quite a few lost sales until Microsoft figures out that big sliding tiles is not a useful paradigm for screens larger than cell phones.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking over the wide range of responses, one thing stands out -- one's opinion on whether "cable is dead" has a lot to do with how much importance one puts on TV in general. If you have a need to make sure you don't miss anything, you still need cable and you tend to believe it'll be there for the foreseeable future.. If you only watch TV occasionally, and your head won't explode if a certain series doesn't happen to be on Netflix right now, (because other series worth watching still are) then you tend towards cable's days being numbered.
What's the actual truth? I dunno. I tend towards cable being a dying technology. But I'm definitely in the second camp -- I don't care about whatever is on TV this week. I'm still working through season two of Veronica Mars.
so the population that [subscribes to multichannel pay television] will age out over time even if the streaming services don't change anything.
Will people really "age out" of following the major professional and collegiate sport leagues over time? I was under the impression that sport fandom tended to be something that was passed down from generation to generation.
That's a good question, and one my wife is struggling with now. She's a sports fanatic and loss of cable (and before that, satellite) means she struggles to find ways to watch her games. Part of the solution is to go back to the antenna, part is to watch games on her laptop. I understand that the roku has some kind of sports package, but I don't think she's ready to spend money on that yet. I think the answer will eventually be that sports will be streamed from sources specializing in sports. But it's not all in place or completely working yet. (For instance, lots of sources still use flash, which doesn't work on her tablet.)
I resemble that. We have a roku box in one room and a blu-ray player that includes netflix in the other room, and an ANTENNA (remember those?) on the roof so wife can watch football, and we've been cable-free for almost three years now.
Probably the biggest part of this is no longer caring if we see a show when it first comes out. We've talked about this in other threads, but waiting until a series accumulates a season or so, and then watching it in a few marathons allows one to pick up nuances that would be missed at one episode per week. I'm way WAY ok with not having seen whatever the guy across from me at work saw last night. We can still talk about series, but we talk about them like other people talk about movies. I saw this, it was pretty good, you should try it.
I don't recall the last time I saw a commercial. It might have been the last superbowl. (I don't watch football but I attend the parties because there's beer.) Moreover, the response to "what do you want to see tonight?" is never never NEVER "I dunno, what's on?" Because the networks no longer control what we can watch. (Or choose not to watch.)
> BTW, can we please stop calling it "over the top?" That implies something about the business model that's total nonsense: the idea that IP service is a side business, and cable is the real business. Where did this term come from, anyway?
Completely agree. The term comes from an erroneous assumption.
It's this kind of article that makes me hopeful for the human race. That the answer to corporate solvency isn't necessarily to find some third world country where you can work your employees seven days a week for bottlecaps.
Or, if that is the answer, you deserve to fail.
Wow. I actually do vaguely remember Geocities. Not in a good way.
I fought the system for a couple years, got her transferred to IEP ("special needs" program) but they were so hostile to her and to me that I finally pulled her out of school. She was homeschooled for three years, (which, fortunately, is legal here) then she applied for and was accepted into a magnet school for 9th grade. It was still not great (I had to read all of her homework to her, and she had to dictate her assignments to me ... every night ... it was like having a second job) but the magnet school never questioned her inability to read and at no time suggested she needed to be medicated. It was precisely where she needed to be and I have nightmares sometimes thinking what she would have gone through had she not been accepted.
When we discovered my daughter had a reading problem, I paid for comprehensive tests, delivered the results to the school, (she had severe dyslexia -- the doctors said she probably wouldn't ever read past third grade level) and was told flatly by school officials that they didn't recognize Dyslexia as a condition. That their diagnosis (a school giving a medical diagnosis? never mind...) was that she was hyperactive and had a problem with authority. They suggested Ritalin. I pointed out that an independent psychologist hadn't found any signs of hyperactivity. They stuck to their guns.
So, maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I suspect this new test will just give them another datum to ignore.
But who knows, maybe it depends on the school system.
All that ice on the poles made the Earth all wobbley, which led to Bad Things. We should de-ice the planet, as a precaution so it doesn't happen again!
I mean, you don't let ice build up on your roof, in your freezer, or on airplanes... ice is always bad unless it is in my drink!
Hmm. So these orbital wobbles... are they nature's defrost cycle?
I want that on a bumper sticker.
Actually, you have a good point. The suit was probably started by a lawyer and not by a "real" plaintiff. But if we are going to start suing businesses for poor business decisions and a little bit of lying - hell, there are a LOT of businesses that need suing. I would estimate that at, well, every one of them.
You and the OP make very good points, but what's the alternative? Do we give businesses a pass on unethical behavior just because we may reap some small profit from it?
I'm not sure "loved" is the right word. It's the love for a mob enforcer that talks to you calmly while he works you over a little, as opposed to the last one who screamed obscenities while he busted your kneecaps.
Also they sounded like shit. I'm not sure the mugging argument really had a major effect.
God, that's funny. So let me summarize: You gotcher young, hip, fashion-conscious millenial, some really cool cat, grooving to his music, and dressed cooler than you ever could, and his music SOUNDS LIKE CRAP through his trendy white (a color you never see) earphones.
Says its all, really.
Competitor? Nah. Ellison and Jobs were actually close friends, based on comments both of them made over the years. If anything, this is a case of one person thinking that their friend's life work simply can't exist without the friend. And, despite being an Apple fanboy, I have to admit that he's likely right.
You're not an Apple fanboy, you're perhaps a Jobs fanboi.
I don't think you have to be a Jobs fanboi to say that. I don't consider myself either an Apple fanboi or a Jobs fanboi. (I don't carry an iphone and my ipod is an old firewire touchwheel that remains in the truck for legacy reasons, even though I've had stereo bluetooth and music on my phone since way back in the Blackberry days.) But even if you didn't like the products he created, you can still appreciate the impact he had on society (even while believing that impact wasn't entirely positive). He was a complex individual who got a few things wrong but got many things amazingly right. I agree with OP that it's likely that Apple will suffer without him, and submit that this opinion is entirely pragmatic, not a product of hero worship.
p.
Just sayin'. I've run three websites out of my garage for years. The router provided by the ISP has dyndns support built in. A little tricky to set up, and then I forgot about it.
The Rockewho?
I never suspected that it wouldn't work without Kinect attached. I throw this clearly into the FUD category. I think Microsoft was clarifying that idiots assumed it needed Kinect to work, not reversing a decision that it would require Kinect to work.
Asked 'does Kinect always have to be connected for the Xbox One to function', Harvey Eagle, Microsoft's Marketing Director of Xbox UK stated simply: "yes it does, in all cases."
Not FUD.
It seems like Microsoft is exploring what the public will let them get away with.
The problem is, you can't make it difficult to watch a series, suddenly change your mind near the end, and then be surprised that people haven't abandoned the pirating they had gotten used to by then. A better test would have been to make the show (or some popular show) available globally from the very beginning.
Because in Windows case it's not a command line. For that you need a shell session, not some kind of 80's era video game graphics. You also need a standard set of apps, named in a standard fashion. Typing blind, and trying to guess what apps are installed on this particular machine and what they're called, is not what "command line" means.
Or,
"I don't care who you are. That's funny right there."
You have some good points there, especially about the Blackberry tablet, which could have been good but ended up being... a toy. Blackberry did blow it in many, many ways.
My answer will take the form of a question. Isn't anyone else out there bored with a plethora of applications that consume idle time but don't actually enrich one's life? I'm finding that after a couple years playing with this neat little miniature touchscreen computer, I'm bored. I don't really use it, *really* use it, much except for phone, email, text, calendar in roughly that order. I just don't have enough spare time to devote to playing with my PHONE. I find that I miss the degree of address book / email / calendar integration I used to have, and I MISS THE DAMNED KEYBOARD. There, I said it. A bigger screen seemed like a good idea at the time, but after fighting with virtual keyboards for a couple years, I'd trade half the screen for a keyboard like the Tour on which I could touch-type. (Or touch-thumb, whatever.)
In other words, this smartphone thang seems more like a gimmick to me now. Too small to do serious work, (except slowly and painfully, pinching and pulling as necessary) and the things that used to really matter still don't work very well. When it comes down to shiny objects, my razr maxx is cute and playful. But it isn't really any more useful in my job than my old droid x, and is still less useful than my old Tour.
I wonder sometimes whether we'll look back at this era and call the smartphone thing a kind of madness. Like progressive rock, or spandex.
I suspect that some Blackberry decision makers felt similarly, and felt that they could perhaps wait out the Angry Birds phenomenon until people came back for integration, access, and reliability. And then realized too late that they'd be dead by the time the shift came (if it ever did) and started trying to play catch-up at a time when it was unlikely to do any good.
I guess it doesn't matter. It looks like they're pretty much dead now, and there goes the best keyboard ever on a phone. It's kinda sad.
> If their first offering wasn't called a Surface (a meaningless name) but instead the Xbox Tablet, the response would have likely been quite different as it looks and behaves like an Xbox and doesn't have the same connotation as "it runs Windows, so all my programs will work, and I won't have to learn anything new". That in turn further hurt the Windows brand.
I would submit that the Surface was not a meaningless name, except in the context of this particular tablet product. It was a very descriptive name for a cutting edge tabletop interface, now relabeled Pixelsense, a truly meaningless name. Besides all the ill will and consumer confusion caused by Surface (the tablet) it also shat on what could have been an interesting tabletop interface, had Microsoft ever decided to elevate the product past movie prop status. And, I truly suspect, the only reason for *not* commercializing the technology is that it did not fit in with the "one GUI everywhere" philosophy.
> If you insist on using the horribly inefficient menu paradigm for launching programs
Ok, stop. It's not for Microsoft (and I know you shill for them) to say what is "horribly inefficient" or not in my or anyone else's workflow. This fiction that "hitting a button and typing a few characters" is somehow superior is just a lame attempt at damage control. I'm not even going to waste time trying to explain to you why this is so, because you already know. The menu system was not eliminated because it was "horribly inefficient". It was eliminated because it did not fit in with the "one GUI everywhere" paradigm. We already know from Windows Mobile that the Start button is not a useful paradigm for a mobile device. It'll take some time and quite a few lost sales until Microsoft figures out that big sliding tiles is not a useful paradigm for screens larger than cell phones.
In the meantime, stop talking to me.