As a practical matter, it's going to be difficult to keep up political momentum in the face of cooler trends. The movement could be essentially dead in a couple years. In ten, we could be looking at films like An Inconvenient Truth, The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld in the same way we now look at Population Explosion, ZPG and Soylent Green from the sixties and seventies.
Hysteria tends to go in cycles. Buried amongst discredited doomsday theories might be the one that actually does kill us. When that happens, I wonder if we'll all be surprised that it's nothing like the articles running in Time, or if scientists will actually see the prediction-of-the-decade come true, whether by brilliant insight or sheer coincidence.
What worries me is that with the best of intentions we do something profoundly stupid and damaging like, I dunno, dumping old tires in the sea in the insane (in hindsight) belief that they would serve as artificial reefs. In the seventies there were plans to coat the ice caps with soot to combat the global cooling that never came about. Now we're talking about dumping iron oxide in the sea as a solution to global warming, something that would be called "polluting our environment" if it didn't have the Climate Change seal of approval. Confidentially, it's unintended consequences from plans like this that scares me more than the fear that the seas will rise and drown us all.
> It has seemed very strange to me seeing all the hype about global warming and such since I was young, yet seeing years like these recent ones where we are hitting some pretty long cold stretches, this year particularly. Are we or are we not actually having "global warming"?
It's particularly hard on us older farts who lived through the global cooling hysteria from the 1970's, promoted by some of the same people. Turns out there was nothing to that. Is it possible there's nothing to this?
> Isn't Earth's orbit intimately mingled with it's moon?? How precise can the potential impact be measured in relation to this fact? I think Earth's orbit is fine where it is...
> You couldn't just make up a valid date that wasn't your mother's real birthday?
I could have, but at that point I didn't want to play anymore. Sometimes we have a moral obligation to refuse to do something stupid just because someone told us to.
...wouldn't activate my card until I created a pin. They wanted me to use the month and day of my mother's birthday. I tried random digits, but -- fer chrissake -- the menu system would only take digits that were valid dates.
Yeah, that's what I want to use for a card with no spending limit, a datum easily discovered through public records.
I finally got hold of a real person, and he insisted I use my mother's birthday. I insisted that I would not. He finally had to get permission from a supervisor for me to use a random four digit string.
I understand, insisting on an easily remembered string probably reduces the number of support calls to reset pins, but at what cost?
Bwaaaa ha ha. My company has adopted the iPhone, but I talked a co-worker into requesting one so I could have his nearly-new Treo 680 to replace my elderly falling-apart 650. That should get me through the next year of iPhone bug fixes, capacity increases and inevitable price drops.
Oh, and I'd like to personally thank each and every one of you for being unpaid quality assurance. (Evil laugh, rubs hands) by the time I'm ready for one, it'll be bug free! Well, maybe not bug free exactly, well, perhaps not bug free at all, but at least it'll be reasonably usable. Maybe. Hopefully. Or maybe Palm will come up with something innovative in the meantime... no... what was I thinking... it's more likely that the iPhone will be bug free.
> I've tried to help people out with it, showing them the different modes and such. Even if they get it, getting them to actually switch ratios between different source material is another matter. Usually they just accept it stretched, or cut off, or whatever.
My favorite is when they leave it in zoom mode, so it's always wrong -- academy ratio content has the tops and bottoms cut off, and widescreen content is cut off on all four sides. (But at least the ratio is usually correct.) Never ever seeing black bands is apparently more important than seeing all of the picture. But we already knew this -- 'S why "pan and scan" existed in the old days.
This is also a strong argument as to why the rank and file don't think they need BluRay. They're already used to watching shite, and only bought into DVD because they stack better than tapes and don't wear out.
Your other point is valid, that the TV or DVD player or something should automatically switch formats as appropriate.
> Yeah but only using 2/3 of my TV is painful too.
I remember this argument. Years ago people were making the same argument about letterboxed films on conventional televisions. I thought it was silly then and still do.
Someone made a really good suggestion at the time -- that you get some red curtain material, and make some curtains to cover the black bands, exactly how they do it in real theaters. You'll need two nearly square pieces for the sides for when you're seeing a film in Academy ratio like The Wizard of Oz, and you'll also need two long narrow strips to cover the black bands on the top and bottom, for when you're watching a movie that was filmed wider than 1.85:1, like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
> Therefore I bought an up-converting DVD player and will eventually buy a PS3.
...But aren't you tired of seeing people reeeeeelyyyy wiiiideee on the screen? I mean, is that the HD experience, watching faces that are wider than they are tall?
> I'm seeing sub-$800 laptops shipping with BluRay drives.
I have not seen prices that low, but will stipulate that for the sake of argument. The point is, daughter already has a high end Thinkpad, and I'm just not a-gonna spring for another one every time some new gimmick comes out.
> [...analog TV turned off, mass purchase of HDTVs...] The need to purchase a new TV will be eliminated, while at the same time, people will suddenly have a greater desire for a device that can take advantage of their new TV.
Maybe. I can't answer for most people, but I've had an HDTV for almost two years and I still feel no need for Blu-Ray. For movies, 480P meets my needs. It'll continue to meet my needs for as long as DVD (players and media) remains substantially cheaper and has significantly more titles than Blu-ray.
I'm a geek, and certainly not a luddite -- I had Laserdisc when everyone else was still squinting at VHS. I was an early adopter of DVD ($700 for my first player -- ouch...) when I saw it not only blew VHS away (not difficult), but decisively blew laserdisc away.
But... looking at that DVD/Blu-Ray side-by-side comparison they have running in a tight loop at Best Buy, I have to say... enh. Yes, you can see the difference, if you know what to look for. But it just isn't the order-of-magnitude, oh-my-God-I've-got-to-have-that feeling that DVD invoked.
Moreover, there were lots of teething problems with DVD in the old days. My copy of 7 Faces of Dr. Lau would not play on my $700 player until it had a $200 (parts and service) eprom upgrade. Even with the latest firmware, it would balk at certain DVDs. Much later, I got a $39 Chinese DVD player that would play absolutely anything and had a better picture than my old unit. You don't just save money by waiting, you save time and annoyance also. Let someone else feel the teething pains this time.
But hell, I'm not everyone. Maybe it'll happen as you say -- in a year or so there'll be some kind of critical mass and Blu-ray will take off like a cat on fire. When we see $39 for a basic player and $14.95 movies in the sale bins, I'll be all over Blu-Ray. I'll be buying players and media for Christmas presents. But I just don't care whether that happens next year, or the next five years, or ever.
....is precisely because the massive indexing of the web makes astroturfing so easy to spot. Keith Oberman plagiarizes "Media Matters" practically word-for-word.
I'd like to add, "the good enough problem" is a problem for the manufacturers, not for the consumer.:-)
> SDTV is good enough- most people are perfectly happy with non-HD sets.
In addition, a well-authored anamorphic conventional DVD at 480P looks just fine on an HDTV set.
> Bluray is going to be dead as a video medium.
Maybe. Does anyone remember exactly how many movies came out in "Super VHS"?
On the other hand, if Blu-Ray players become sub-$50 commodity items, there's no reason not to pick one up. My chinese DVD player is having heat problems and the M$ Media Center doesn't play DVDs very well. I'd pick up a player were it cheap enough.
But I don't know about buying Blu-Ray disks. Maybe for really graphics-intense films. But the main problem is that my daughter can't take Blu-Ray disks to grandma's house, 'cause gramma doesn't have a player and probably won't in her lifetime. Also, Blu-Ray disks won't play on daughter's laptop, and I'm certainly not gonna replace that.
I think I'm vacillating because I don't really care whether or not Blu-Ray takes off as a movie medium. But I think Sony is really under the gun -- if they don't get widespread adoption soon, the format will be replaced by the next great thing before it gets off the ground.
> While I have no plans to ever buy an HDTV or bluray player, when the price comes down to 100 I'd buy a bluray burner for my PC.
Oh, hell yes. The frame counter recently rolled over on my Nikon, (that's over 10,000 photos in raw format) and backing up the library is getting to be a real pain with conventional DVDs. As soon as they drop to sub-$100, I'm snagging one.
Either the url is borked or the story no longer exists, so guessing from what we can read:
"The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux."
So, how I'm reading this is "The slow adoption of Vista provides an opening for Symphony to increase market share" which is a perfectly reasonable strategy for the manager of a product line. (Besides, if you don't like it, you can always download OpenOffice.)
It could also mean "The slow adoption of Vista is cutting into our hardware sales, so we are looking at alternatives to get units out the door" and shipping more copies of Symphony is a happy byproduct.
Either way, it's more new systems that are not running Winders. I don't see a downside.
This could also be read as IBM stating publicly that Vista jumped the shark....which is waaaay different from a bunch of geeks in Slashdot saying it.
Sometimes you really do. Often, with really old systems like this, data that ought to be in tables is hard-coded in the system, sometimes in really obscure places. Or the code may only support pay *increases* because nobody thought there'd ever be a pay decrease for a government employee. (Seriously.) If you've ever worked on a project to replace an antiquated system, especially for a utility or government entity, you'd be shocked at what you saw. It's amazing that anything works at all.
Job security? Incompetence? Micro-management? Probably a combination of all three.
I made the mistake of loaning a cd to a friend before ripping it for ipod. Came back with a scratch that resulted in one unplayable/unrippable track. I suppose I could have just downloaded the missing track from somewhere, but ended up buying it from itunes. $1.00 for lesson learned is cheap enough.
> As software ages and settles, more people are satisfied with old software.
Exactly. It's true for operating systems, applications, and hardware. The biggest aids to the growth of the PC were it's weaknesses. OS bugs. Application issues. Hardware inadequacies. You needed the next incremental upgrade because this one doesn't work worth a crap. And the one after that when that one didn't do the job either.
At some point, the hardware gets fast enough for the average bloke, and hardware sales start to slump. Office tools get good enough, and sales fall off. The OS gets good enough, why upgrade? The companies who became giant players on this growth paradigm will need to adopt new business models. And probably be a lot smaller.
Mind you, I can see a continued although reduced need for bleeding edge hardware. There will always be gamers and others who are pushing the envelope. How fast does my video need to render? As fast as I can conveniently afford.
But I am having a more difficult time seeing an overriding need for another version of Windows, and I just can't make myself believe we need yet another version of Office. To most of my peers, Office 2000 still works fine, thank you very much.
It occurred to me the other day that I was writing a document in a version of Office that just had it's eighth birthday, on a machine built in 2003, using an OS from 2001. And I said to myself "Cool. I am finally spending more time using my PC than I am upgrading it." And that is as it should be. We are over the technology hump, and no amount of marketing can call that back.
Even the guaranteed vendor pipeline, where nearly all new PCs run whatever latest OS managed to escape from Redmond, has to eventually slump, for the simple reason that whatever is currently on your desk meets your needs. (Imagine that?)
Given all that, what, exactly, does Microsoft have to sell? Or, more accurately, how the heck do they maintain explosive growth in a mature market? It's got to be preying on someone's mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that sequel to The Bee Movie didn't pan out.
As a practical matter, it's going to be difficult to keep up political momentum in the face of cooler trends. The movement could be essentially dead in a couple years. In ten, we could be looking at films like An Inconvenient Truth, The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld in the same way we now look at Population Explosion, ZPG and Soylent Green from the sixties and seventies.
Hysteria tends to go in cycles. Buried amongst discredited doomsday theories might be the one that actually does kill us. When that happens, I wonder if we'll all be surprised that it's nothing like the articles running in Time, or if scientists will actually see the prediction-of-the-decade come true, whether by brilliant insight or sheer coincidence.
What worries me is that with the best of intentions we do something profoundly stupid and damaging like, I dunno, dumping old tires in the sea in the insane (in hindsight) belief that they would serve as artificial reefs. In the seventies there were plans to coat the ice caps with soot to combat the global cooling that never came about. Now we're talking about dumping iron oxide in the sea as a solution to global warming, something that would be called "polluting our environment" if it didn't have the Climate Change seal of approval. Confidentially, it's unintended consequences from plans like this that scares me more than the fear that the seas will rise and drown us all.
> It has seemed very strange to me seeing all the hype about global warming and such since I was young, yet seeing years like these recent ones where we are hitting some pretty long cold stretches, this year particularly. Are we or are we not actually having "global warming"?
It's particularly hard on us older farts who lived through the global cooling hysteria from the 1970's, promoted by some of the same people. Turns out there was nothing to that. Is it possible there's nothing to this?
You never buy anything.
> Isn't Earth's orbit intimately mingled with it's moon?? How precise can the potential impact be measured in relation to this fact? I think Earth's orbit is fine where it is...
Sigh. I blame public schooling.
> You couldn't just make up a valid date that wasn't your mother's real birthday?
I could have, but at that point I didn't want to play anymore. Sometimes we have a moral obligation to refuse to do something stupid just because someone told us to.
Cool. Wanna sell it?
Yeah, that's what I want to use for a card with no spending limit, a datum easily discovered through public records.
I finally got hold of a real person, and he insisted I use my mother's birthday. I insisted that I would not. He finally had to get permission from a supervisor for me to use a random four digit string.
I understand, insisting on an easily remembered string probably reduces the number of support calls to reset pins, but at what cost?
> I knew i shouldve waited.
Bwaaaa ha ha. My company has adopted the iPhone, but I talked a co-worker into requesting one so I could have his nearly-new Treo 680 to replace my elderly falling-apart 650. That should get me through the next year of iPhone bug fixes, capacity increases and inevitable price drops.
Oh, and I'd like to personally thank each and every one of you for being unpaid quality assurance. (Evil laugh, rubs hands) by the time I'm ready for one, it'll be bug free! Well, maybe not bug free exactly, well, perhaps not bug free at all, but at least it'll be reasonably usable. Maybe. Hopefully. Or maybe Palm will come up with something innovative in the meantime... no... what was I thinking... it's more likely that the iPhone will be bug free.
That'd happen once, and then it'd be time to find a new bank. Or switch to a credit union.
> I've tried to help people out with it, showing them the different modes and such. Even if they get it, getting them to actually switch ratios between different source material is another matter. Usually they just accept it stretched, or cut off, or whatever.
My favorite is when they leave it in zoom mode, so it's always wrong -- academy ratio content has the tops and bottoms cut off, and widescreen content is cut off on all four sides. (But at least the ratio is usually correct.) Never ever seeing black bands is apparently more important than seeing all of the picture. But we already knew this -- 'S why "pan and scan" existed in the old days.
This is also a strong argument as to why the rank and file don't think they need BluRay. They're already used to watching shite, and only bought into DVD because they stack better than tapes and don't wear out.
Your other point is valid, that the TV or DVD player or something should automatically switch formats as appropriate.
> Yeah but only using 2/3 of my TV is painful too.
I remember this argument. Years ago people were making the same argument about letterboxed films on conventional televisions. I thought it was silly then and still do.
Someone made a really good suggestion at the time -- that you get some red curtain material, and make some curtains to cover the black bands, exactly how they do it in real theaters. You'll need two nearly square pieces for the sides for when you're seeing a film in Academy ratio like The Wizard of Oz, and you'll also need two long narrow strips to cover the black bands on the top and bottom, for when you're watching a movie that was filmed wider than 1.85:1, like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
> Therefore I bought an up-converting DVD player and will eventually buy a PS3.
> I'm seeing sub-$800 laptops shipping with BluRay drives.
I have not seen prices that low, but will stipulate that for the sake of argument. The point is, daughter already has a high end Thinkpad, and I'm just not a-gonna spring for another one every time some new gimmick comes out.
> [...analog TV turned off, mass purchase of HDTVs...] The need to purchase a new TV will be eliminated, while at the same time, people will suddenly have a greater desire for a device that can take advantage of their new TV.
Maybe. I can't answer for most people, but I've had an HDTV for almost two years and I still feel no need for Blu-Ray. For movies, 480P meets my needs. It'll continue to meet my needs for as long as DVD (players and media) remains substantially cheaper and has significantly more titles than Blu-ray.
I'm a geek, and certainly not a luddite -- I had Laserdisc when everyone else was still squinting at VHS. I was an early adopter of DVD ($700 for my first player -- ouch...) when I saw it not only blew VHS away (not difficult), but decisively blew laserdisc away.
But... looking at that DVD/Blu-Ray side-by-side comparison they have running in a tight loop at Best Buy, I have to say... enh. Yes, you can see the difference, if you know what to look for. But it just isn't the order-of-magnitude, oh-my-God-I've-got-to-have-that feeling that DVD invoked.
Moreover, there were lots of teething problems with DVD in the old days. My copy of 7 Faces of Dr. Lau would not play on my $700 player until it had a $200 (parts and service) eprom upgrade. Even with the latest firmware, it would balk at certain DVDs. Much later, I got a $39 Chinese DVD player that would play absolutely anything and had a better picture than my old unit. You don't just save money by waiting, you save time and annoyance also. Let someone else feel the teething pains this time.
But hell, I'm not everyone. Maybe it'll happen as you say -- in a year or so there'll be some kind of critical mass and Blu-ray will take off like a cat on fire. When we see $39 for a basic player and $14.95 movies in the sale bins, I'll be all over Blu-Ray. I'll be buying players and media for Christmas presents. But I just don't care whether that happens next year, or the next five years, or ever.
> It also runs into the good enough problem.
I'd like to add, "the good enough problem" is a problem for the manufacturers, not for the consumer. :-)
> SDTV is good enough- most people are perfectly happy with non-HD sets.
In addition, a well-authored anamorphic conventional DVD at 480P looks just fine on an HDTV set.
> Bluray is going to be dead as a video medium.
Maybe. Does anyone remember exactly how many movies came out in "Super VHS"?
On the other hand, if Blu-Ray players become sub-$50 commodity items, there's no reason not to pick one up. My chinese DVD player is having heat problems and the M$ Media Center doesn't play DVDs very well. I'd pick up a player were it cheap enough.
But I don't know about buying Blu-Ray disks. Maybe for really graphics-intense films. But the main problem is that my daughter can't take Blu-Ray disks to grandma's house, 'cause gramma doesn't have a player and probably won't in her lifetime. Also, Blu-Ray disks won't play on daughter's laptop, and I'm certainly not gonna replace that.
I think I'm vacillating because I don't really care whether or not Blu-Ray takes off as a movie medium. But I think Sony is really under the gun -- if they don't get widespread adoption soon, the format will be replaced by the next great thing before it gets off the ground.
> While I have no plans to ever buy an HDTV or bluray player, when the price comes down to 100 I'd buy a bluray burner for my PC.
Oh, hell yes. The frame counter recently rolled over on my Nikon, (that's over 10,000 photos in raw format) and backing up the library is getting to be a real pain with conventional DVDs. As soon as they drop to sub-$100, I'm snagging one.
> Good luck CA. You'll need it
Part of me wants to see CA crash big time, as a test to see if burning down the house and rebuilding it is a viable strategy.
That's no moon, it's DOMINO!
Copy that. But you don't actually have to use Notes. Make sure the back end is Domino on Linux, and then just use the box for something else...
Either the url is borked or the story no longer exists, so guessing from what we can read:
"The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux."
So, how I'm reading this is "The slow adoption of Vista provides an opening for Symphony to increase market share" which is a perfectly reasonable strategy for the manager of a product line. (Besides, if you don't like it, you can always download OpenOffice.)
It could also mean "The slow adoption of Vista is cutting into our hardware sales, so we are looking at alternatives to get units out the door" and shipping more copies of Symphony is a happy byproduct.
Either way, it's more new systems that are not running Winders. I don't see a downside.
This could also be read as IBM stating publicly that Vista jumped the shark. ...which is waaaay different from a bunch of geeks in Slashdot saying it.
Sometimes you really do. Often, with really old systems like this, data that ought to be in tables is hard-coded in the system, sometimes in really obscure places. Or the code may only support pay *increases* because nobody thought there'd ever be a pay decrease for a government employee. (Seriously.) If you've ever worked on a project to replace an antiquated system, especially for a utility or government entity, you'd be shocked at what you saw. It's amazing that anything works at all.
Job security? Incompetence? Micro-management? Probably a combination of all three.
I made the mistake of loaning a cd to a friend before ripping it for ipod. Came back with a scratch that resulted in one unplayable/unrippable track. I suppose I could have just downloaded the missing track from somewhere, but ended up buying it from itunes. $1.00 for lesson learned is cheap enough.
Sorry. It was the burritos.
> As software ages and settles, more people are satisfied with old software.
Exactly. It's true for operating systems, applications, and hardware. The biggest aids to the growth of the PC were it's weaknesses. OS bugs. Application issues. Hardware inadequacies. You needed the next incremental upgrade because this one doesn't work worth a crap. And the one after that when that one didn't do the job either.
At some point, the hardware gets fast enough for the average bloke, and hardware sales start to slump. Office tools get good enough, and sales fall off. The OS gets good enough, why upgrade? The companies who became giant players on this growth paradigm will need to adopt new business models. And probably be a lot smaller.
Mind you, I can see a continued although reduced need for bleeding edge hardware. There will always be gamers and others who are pushing the envelope. How fast does my video need to render? As fast as I can conveniently afford.
But I am having a more difficult time seeing an overriding need for another version of Windows, and I just can't make myself believe we need yet another version of Office. To most of my peers, Office 2000 still works fine, thank you very much.
It occurred to me the other day that I was writing a document in a version of Office that just had it's eighth birthday, on a machine built in 2003, using an OS from 2001. And I said to myself "Cool. I am finally spending more time using my PC than I am upgrading it." And that is as it should be. We are over the technology hump, and no amount of marketing can call that back.
Even the guaranteed vendor pipeline, where nearly all new PCs run whatever latest OS managed to escape from Redmond, has to eventually slump, for the simple reason that whatever is currently on your desk meets your needs. (Imagine that?)
Given all that, what, exactly, does Microsoft have to sell? Or, more accurately, how the heck do they maintain explosive growth in a mature market? It's got to be preying on someone's mind.
Right away.