MS doesn't have to play catch-up, they just have to beat the iPad at something important enough to make people choose it over iPad.
They need to beat the iPad's price point at a comparable feature set, or provide a lot more (and better) features. If they can do slick platform integration (sharing media from your Windows PC to your Surface, control your PC from Surface, etc.) then that also helps them.
If they try to make something that's almost feature identical to iPad, at the same price point, they will surely fail. A previous story indicated Microsoft may want to target a "premium" market segment, in which case they'd better expect to sell almost none of these things. Whether they like it or not, Apple has already branded itself as the "premium" offering, and I don't think going head-to-head with Apple in that market niche is going to work out very well for MS.
They've got to undercut Apple's price and provide more and better features. If they don't, they shouldn't even bother.
This is incorrect. The NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, signed by President Clinton, criminalized copyright infringement even when there is no profit motive on the part of the infringer.
This is true. I really hated IE and preferred Netscape. Then, Netscape 4.x came out. 4.5 in particular was a hideous, bloated, unstable mess. Things like CSS positioning and JavaScript would randomly crash the browser. It was so unstable as to be unusable. Given that there were very slim alternatives at the time, I grudgingly turned to IE, which wound up being snappy and--hey!--stable. You'll get no argument from me that its default security settings were terrible, but I knew how to lock those down. At least the damn thing worked and rendered pages in a reasonable manner.
Eventually, Firefox came around and I switched to that for several years. More recently, I've gone to Chrome.
There are not other choices. The number of people who vote for third party candidates is inconsequential. I'm not aware of any instance in modern American history where it was even mathematically possible for a third party candidate to win--say, by being on enough state ballots to have the possibility an electoral majority. In addition, our "spoils system" stacks the deck even more against third party candidates.
You are indeed "throwing your vote away" when you vote third party.
That said, I think our political system needs a serious overhaul, but we're not going to get it anytime soon (certainly not now that the money floodgates have been opened.)
Yeah, Palin torpedoed McCain's campaign. He wanted Lieberman, but his handlers were afraid of the fallout from that, so they went with what was supposed to be a "safe" choice.
I think where things go a bit astray is that authorities view child pornography almost exactly like they do the drug trade. You have producers, dealers, and users.
Producers of drugs and child pornography fill the same basic role: they create a product for which there is a demand.
Dealers are a little different. Drug dealers, of course, take money in exchange for the drugs. Child porn "dealers," on the other hand, would be those running websites, most of which are free. I think very few people are making any actual money from it.
Then you have the users/consumers. When it comes to drugs, users consume the drugs themselves (usually.) Since child porn has gone almost 100% digital, though, there is no "consumption" in the sense that a person uses up a finite product. People who view child porn can also share it (read: make copies) so they can also be "dealers."
Authorities try to go after all three tiers in the child porn market, just like they do with drugs, seemingly failing to realize that money is not a key factor in child porn the way it is with drugs. It makes the most sense to focus on the producers of child porn, and those who operate websites distributing it, rather than people who may have downloaded it. In other words: attack it the way copyright infringement is generally attacked, by going after those who make the infringement possible rather than trying to hunt down large numbers of individual infringers. (This is not meant to draw any kind of moral parallel between copyright infringement and child porn, nor between drug use and child porn, it's just about enforcement strategy.)
On the other hand, I can kind of see why they go after individual users: publicly embarrassing people either due to their drug use or taste for child porn could be seen as a significant deterrent. But then that's really nothing to do with any kind of justice, it's just a cynical use of the system to make people behave a certain way.
But people are giving Inman money, knowing where it's going. Ultimately, it is his decision to give it to charity. If people don't like that, they are free not to give to him.
I used to feel this way, too. That is, until I tried to go about filling some vacant developer positions.
The company I work for is located near New York City, so there's presumably a big field of qualified applicants within a 50-100 mile radius, right?
Wrong.
We got a lot of resumes, all right. We weren't even against hiring someone straight out of college, if they were competent and willing to learn. But what I noticed was that the vast majority of resumes were from immigrants, primarily from China and India, though there were a few other countries in the mix. Native-born Americans just don't seem all that interested in writing software. I admit the stuff I work on isn't sexy--it's healthcare software, not something sold to home users. Even so, you'd think more people would be interested in a steady job in a growth field, yet almost all the interest is from people who emigrated here. We don't go out of our way to give jobs to immigrants, we treat all applicants equally and give them a fair shake based on their experience, how they interview, and how they code.
I don't know, maybe all the white guys (let's face it, that's what we're really talking about) only want to work on video games or something.
I did look at some degree statistics recently and saw that computer science degrees (and engineering degrees in general) are quite a small slice of the overall college education pie. You know what most people are going to college for now? Business and law. Everyone wants to either be a CEO or a lawyer.
Anyway, I wish H1Bs weren't necessary, but from what I've seen we really do have a shortage of qualified computer science graduates. What I assume happened is that the dotcom crash put an entire generation off of pursuing CS. The only people going into it now are those with a passion for it, and that's apparently not enough to meet the demand.
I don't think they use that information to decide what ads to show you, specifically, just to determine which ads people find relevant, and which ones they don't. If a particular had as 90% of people clicking on it to say it's not relevant, then Hulu would likely drop it. Hulu seems to want a more TV-style model, with "one size fits all" advertising, not targeted ads like Google uses.
That's an interesting hypothesis and not one that I would rule out.
Likewise, relations between the US and Iran were beginning to warm up early in the Bush administration, right up to the point that Bush put them into the "Axis of Evil" and sabotaged whatever goodwill we'd built up. It sure didn't help that we invaded two of their neighbors.
I would agree that one of the major drawbacks of having a huge military complex (as the US does) is that we feel compelled to use it. Why have it unless we're going to put it to work, right? That is reason enough to drastically cut back the size and expense of our armed forces.
The way I see it, there are two (maybe three) main types of military scenarios the US will have to deal with going forward: states that are dramatically less powerful than us (think Iraq, Afghanistan), which can be decapitated with relative ease (and a second possible scenario being one where we go after stateless actors in such a regime, e.g. al-Qaeda in Afghanistan); the other scenario has us going up against a real player, like China. Our military is currently several times the size it needs to be to handle the first scenario (excluding nation-building, which we've seen to be a very dicey prospect and a business we just shouldn't be involved in), but it can never possibly be big enough to deal with a China-sized threat. The only option there would be a draft, enacted if and when we actually need it.
There is this fantasy that persists among (neo)conservatives that we must keep our military big enough to fight off a threat roughly the scale of the old Soviet Union, as if such a thing were even possible. In reality, the US is way too big, geographically, to conquer via ground invasion. A genuine threat to the US would seek to lay waste to our cities and installations through cruise missiles and possibly asymmetrical methods--you don't need a huge military to deal with those, just credible technological and intelligence countermeasures.
That's true, I just think it's a bit beside the point, as the political situation in 2001 had settled down to have the Taliban in power, trying to keep the warlords at bay, and we were supporting the Taliban at least to some extent (even if we weren't fans of their politics.)
You make some very good points, however I do think a tool maker has to consider the potential uses of a tool, and consider whether the existence of the tool is worth its potential to be exploited for purposes the tool maker disagrees with.
Going by your finance example, let's talk about high frequency trading programs. The intended purpose of those is good: keep people from losing too much money in the stock market by initiating large trades quickly to cut losses and preserve investment capital for your customers. However, they are also used to exploit tiny fluctuations in stock prices to siphon millions of dollars out of the market, without really having done anything to earn that money--it's just a side effect of having software and pipes fast enough to react to and facilitate such operations.
I bring up that example because it shows that technology may not be used just morally or immorally (or ethically/unethically), but also amorally, without any regard for consequences or side effects. We seem to have a lot of this going on with our current technology. Technology enables us to do something, so let's just do it, and not worry about whether it's a good or bad thing to do. A more mundane example would be collecting user information by companies like Google and Facebook. The mere collection of the information has no moral component, and indeed, the companies themselves don't seem interested in the moral implications--they just want the information now so they can decide what they might want to do with it down the road. They currently use what they gather for fairly innocuous (if annoying) stuff like targeted advertising, but who knows what they might opt to do with it later? Just like with Google's vans scouring wifi networks. "Hey, this information is here, let's grab it now and decide what to do with it later."
More and more information is gathered, and meanwhile our legal system and social consciousness have a hard time keeping up. We often don't even know the right questions to ask. We forget that what is wrong is not necessarily illegal, and what is legal is not necessarily right. When dealing with technologies doing things that were not previously possible (or practical on a large scale), we seem content to leave the decisionmaking to others rather than take ownership of the issues ourselves.
Slashdotters tend to be more aware of these issues than the average person on the street, who often doesn't even realize how the technology is being used or what information is being gathered.
I think I've gotten a bit off-track, but it all goes back to a couple of basic questions: is the creator of a tool responsible for its eventual uses? And at what point does the responsibility become a collective one?
Afghanistan was a little more complicated than that, and I think the way it unfolded makes a bit more sense if you understand the context.
The US had relatively little interest in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. While we didn't consider the Taliban our allies, we did find common cause with them in the war on drugs. We paid them handsome sums of money to go about destroying poppy fields to help stem the opium trade, given that Afghanistan has long been one of the world's greatest opium producers.
The Taliban was rather blindsided by 9/11. While they harbored bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it's not clear that the Taliban leadership were aware of any impending attack. Once it happened, the Taliban wanted to negotiate to give up bin Laden and his men. They judged the situation very poorly, seemingly failing to realize that the US was not interested in negotiation. We wanted blood, and we weren't too picky as to where we got our pound of flesh.
That said, I don't think the US and the Taliban could have reached any kind of settlement, given the public's attitude at the time. We would not have accepted anything less than the handing over of bin Laden and anyone loyal to him, and odds are we would not have been willing to give them much (or even anything) in exchange. It's a shame, though, because that scenario could have played out, gotten us bin Laden, and not have saddled us with over a decade of nation-building in Afghanistan. At the very least, toppling the Taliban doesn't seem to have resulted in much better circumstances for Afghanistan as a whole. Most of the country is still under the control of warlords and Taliban fighters, and the central government is hopelessly corrupt. The Taliban was highly repressive, and the new government doesn't seem to be much better, despite supposedly being secular.
Long story short: there were probably better (and more effective, less costly) ways to deal with Afghanistan than to go in guns-blazing, tear the place apart, and try to rebuild it into a modern democracy.
Although I find the tendency to prefix "cyber" to everything a very tedious practice, consider that software flaws very well can be used to inflict physical damage--Stuxnet being the perfect example of that.
As computers take over more and more tasks, I think it's inevitable that a malicious individual will use a software flaw to cause the deaths of a significant number of people. I just think it's silly to call that sort of thing "cyberwarfare." It is sabotage, plain and simple. That it's done with code rather than a wrench doesn't make it fundamentally different, though it is perhaps harder to detect.
I believe his point was that we need to give up this "White Man's Burden" garbage and think it's our job to "save" Africans from themselves. It hurts more than it helps. It makes them dependent on outside assistance to the point that they can't or won't do things for themselves, and a lot of the money and aid just fuel corrupt regimes and tribal warfare anyway. Either way, it's not really making things any better, and it arguably makes them much worse.
Being a phone isn't that hard on the battery, actually. I had a Palm Centro, and it could get at least a few days on a charge--a week if I barely used it.
Contrast that with my current Android phone, which can barely make it through the day even if I don't touch it. (And this is with wi-fi off and no draining background apps running!)
I remember the Centro being quite well-marketed, to the point that it was a huge success. Although perhaps that was more Sprint's doing than Palm's. Anyone else notice how Centros were on damn near every other TV show for a while?
Slashdot Mirror
MS doesn't have to play catch-up, they just have to beat the iPad at something important enough to make people choose it over iPad.
They need to beat the iPad's price point at a comparable feature set, or provide a lot more (and better) features. If they can do slick platform integration (sharing media from your Windows PC to your Surface, control your PC from Surface, etc.) then that also helps them.
If they try to make something that's almost feature identical to iPad, at the same price point, they will surely fail. A previous story indicated Microsoft may want to target a "premium" market segment, in which case they'd better expect to sell almost none of these things. Whether they like it or not, Apple has already branded itself as the "premium" offering, and I don't think going head-to-head with Apple in that market niche is going to work out very well for MS.
They've got to undercut Apple's price and provide more and better features. If they don't, they shouldn't even bother.
This is incorrect. The NET (No Electronic Theft) Act, signed by President Clinton, criminalized copyright infringement even when there is no profit motive on the part of the infringer.
This is true. I really hated IE and preferred Netscape. Then, Netscape 4.x came out. 4.5 in particular was a hideous, bloated, unstable mess. Things like CSS positioning and JavaScript would randomly crash the browser. It was so unstable as to be unusable. Given that there were very slim alternatives at the time, I grudgingly turned to IE, which wound up being snappy and--hey!--stable. You'll get no argument from me that its default security settings were terrible, but I knew how to lock those down. At least the damn thing worked and rendered pages in a reasonable manner.
Eventually, Firefox came around and I switched to that for several years. More recently, I've gone to Chrome.
No, I mean "selfishness" as in "why should I ever have to do anything for anyone else?"
Thanks for the Ron Paul talking points, though. Hadn't heard those lately.
I don't believe we listed a pay range--stuff like that is always negotiable.
There are not other choices. The number of people who vote for third party candidates is inconsequential. I'm not aware of any instance in modern American history where it was even mathematically possible for a third party candidate to win--say, by being on enough state ballots to have the possibility an electoral majority. In addition, our "spoils system" stacks the deck even more against third party candidates.
You are indeed "throwing your vote away" when you vote third party.
That said, I think our political system needs a serious overhaul, but we're not going to get it anytime soon (certainly not now that the money floodgates have been opened.)
I actually am American, although I quite often feel culturally alienated here, with the rampant selfishness, shortsightedness, and petulance.
Yeah, Palin torpedoed McCain's campaign. He wanted Lieberman, but his handlers were afraid of the fallout from that, so they went with what was supposed to be a "safe" choice.
lol.
Various job sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, a few others), for several weeks.
I think where things go a bit astray is that authorities view child pornography almost exactly like they do the drug trade. You have producers, dealers, and users.
Producers of drugs and child pornography fill the same basic role: they create a product for which there is a demand.
Dealers are a little different. Drug dealers, of course, take money in exchange for the drugs. Child porn "dealers," on the other hand, would be those running websites, most of which are free. I think very few people are making any actual money from it.
Then you have the users/consumers. When it comes to drugs, users consume the drugs themselves (usually.) Since child porn has gone almost 100% digital, though, there is no "consumption" in the sense that a person uses up a finite product. People who view child porn can also share it (read: make copies) so they can also be "dealers."
Authorities try to go after all three tiers in the child porn market, just like they do with drugs, seemingly failing to realize that money is not a key factor in child porn the way it is with drugs. It makes the most sense to focus on the producers of child porn, and those who operate websites distributing it, rather than people who may have downloaded it. In other words: attack it the way copyright infringement is generally attacked, by going after those who make the infringement possible rather than trying to hunt down large numbers of individual infringers. (This is not meant to draw any kind of moral parallel between copyright infringement and child porn, nor between drug use and child porn, it's just about enforcement strategy.)
On the other hand, I can kind of see why they go after individual users: publicly embarrassing people either due to their drug use or taste for child porn could be seen as a significant deterrent. But then that's really nothing to do with any kind of justice, it's just a cynical use of the system to make people behave a certain way.
Ugh. Quite familiar with that nonsense already. :-p
I have found the growing number of Randroids on Slashdot in recent years to be a little alarming.
But people are giving Inman money, knowing where it's going. Ultimately, it is his decision to give it to charity. If people don't like that, they are free not to give to him.
Yeah. Caring about other people is such a drag, man.
I used to feel this way, too. That is, until I tried to go about filling some vacant developer positions.
The company I work for is located near New York City, so there's presumably a big field of qualified applicants within a 50-100 mile radius, right?
Wrong.
We got a lot of resumes, all right. We weren't even against hiring someone straight out of college, if they were competent and willing to learn. But what I noticed was that the vast majority of resumes were from immigrants, primarily from China and India, though there were a few other countries in the mix. Native-born Americans just don't seem all that interested in writing software. I admit the stuff I work on isn't sexy--it's healthcare software, not something sold to home users. Even so, you'd think more people would be interested in a steady job in a growth field, yet almost all the interest is from people who emigrated here. We don't go out of our way to give jobs to immigrants, we treat all applicants equally and give them a fair shake based on their experience, how they interview, and how they code.
I don't know, maybe all the white guys (let's face it, that's what we're really talking about) only want to work on video games or something.
I did look at some degree statistics recently and saw that computer science degrees (and engineering degrees in general) are quite a small slice of the overall college education pie. You know what most people are going to college for now? Business and law. Everyone wants to either be a CEO or a lawyer.
Anyway, I wish H1Bs weren't necessary, but from what I've seen we really do have a shortage of qualified computer science graduates. What I assume happened is that the dotcom crash put an entire generation off of pursuing CS. The only people going into it now are those with a passion for it, and that's apparently not enough to meet the demand.
What the hell is wrong with Slashdot? "People should keep the money, not give to charity!"
Did I miss a memo? When did charitable giving become a bad thing?
I don't think they use that information to decide what ads to show you, specifically, just to determine which ads people find relevant, and which ones they don't. If a particular had as 90% of people clicking on it to say it's not relevant, then Hulu would likely drop it. Hulu seems to want a more TV-style model, with "one size fits all" advertising, not targeted ads like Google uses.
That's an interesting hypothesis and not one that I would rule out.
Likewise, relations between the US and Iran were beginning to warm up early in the Bush administration, right up to the point that Bush put them into the "Axis of Evil" and sabotaged whatever goodwill we'd built up. It sure didn't help that we invaded two of their neighbors.
I would agree that one of the major drawbacks of having a huge military complex (as the US does) is that we feel compelled to use it. Why have it unless we're going to put it to work, right? That is reason enough to drastically cut back the size and expense of our armed forces.
The way I see it, there are two (maybe three) main types of military scenarios the US will have to deal with going forward: states that are dramatically less powerful than us (think Iraq, Afghanistan), which can be decapitated with relative ease (and a second possible scenario being one where we go after stateless actors in such a regime, e.g. al-Qaeda in Afghanistan); the other scenario has us going up against a real player, like China. Our military is currently several times the size it needs to be to handle the first scenario (excluding nation-building, which we've seen to be a very dicey prospect and a business we just shouldn't be involved in), but it can never possibly be big enough to deal with a China-sized threat. The only option there would be a draft, enacted if and when we actually need it.
There is this fantasy that persists among (neo)conservatives that we must keep our military big enough to fight off a threat roughly the scale of the old Soviet Union, as if such a thing were even possible. In reality, the US is way too big, geographically, to conquer via ground invasion. A genuine threat to the US would seek to lay waste to our cities and installations through cruise missiles and possibly asymmetrical methods--you don't need a huge military to deal with those, just credible technological and intelligence countermeasures.
That's true, I just think it's a bit beside the point, as the political situation in 2001 had settled down to have the Taliban in power, trying to keep the warlords at bay, and we were supporting the Taliban at least to some extent (even if we weren't fans of their politics.)
You make some very good points, however I do think a tool maker has to consider the potential uses of a tool, and consider whether the existence of the tool is worth its potential to be exploited for purposes the tool maker disagrees with.
Going by your finance example, let's talk about high frequency trading programs. The intended purpose of those is good: keep people from losing too much money in the stock market by initiating large trades quickly to cut losses and preserve investment capital for your customers. However, they are also used to exploit tiny fluctuations in stock prices to siphon millions of dollars out of the market, without really having done anything to earn that money--it's just a side effect of having software and pipes fast enough to react to and facilitate such operations.
I bring up that example because it shows that technology may not be used just morally or immorally (or ethically/unethically), but also amorally, without any regard for consequences or side effects. We seem to have a lot of this going on with our current technology. Technology enables us to do something, so let's just do it, and not worry about whether it's a good or bad thing to do. A more mundane example would be collecting user information by companies like Google and Facebook. The mere collection of the information has no moral component, and indeed, the companies themselves don't seem interested in the moral implications--they just want the information now so they can decide what they might want to do with it down the road. They currently use what they gather for fairly innocuous (if annoying) stuff like targeted advertising, but who knows what they might opt to do with it later? Just like with Google's vans scouring wifi networks. "Hey, this information is here, let's grab it now and decide what to do with it later."
More and more information is gathered, and meanwhile our legal system and social consciousness have a hard time keeping up. We often don't even know the right questions to ask. We forget that what is wrong is not necessarily illegal, and what is legal is not necessarily right. When dealing with technologies doing things that were not previously possible (or practical on a large scale), we seem content to leave the decisionmaking to others rather than take ownership of the issues ourselves.
Slashdotters tend to be more aware of these issues than the average person on the street, who often doesn't even realize how the technology is being used or what information is being gathered.
I think I've gotten a bit off-track, but it all goes back to a couple of basic questions: is the creator of a tool responsible for its eventual uses? And at what point does the responsibility become a collective one?
Afghanistan was a little more complicated than that, and I think the way it unfolded makes a bit more sense if you understand the context.
The US had relatively little interest in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. While we didn't consider the Taliban our allies, we did find common cause with them in the war on drugs. We paid them handsome sums of money to go about destroying poppy fields to help stem the opium trade, given that Afghanistan has long been one of the world's greatest opium producers.
The Taliban was rather blindsided by 9/11. While they harbored bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it's not clear that the Taliban leadership were aware of any impending attack. Once it happened, the Taliban wanted to negotiate to give up bin Laden and his men. They judged the situation very poorly, seemingly failing to realize that the US was not interested in negotiation. We wanted blood, and we weren't too picky as to where we got our pound of flesh.
That said, I don't think the US and the Taliban could have reached any kind of settlement, given the public's attitude at the time. We would not have accepted anything less than the handing over of bin Laden and anyone loyal to him, and odds are we would not have been willing to give them much (or even anything) in exchange. It's a shame, though, because that scenario could have played out, gotten us bin Laden, and not have saddled us with over a decade of nation-building in Afghanistan. At the very least, toppling the Taliban doesn't seem to have resulted in much better circumstances for Afghanistan as a whole. Most of the country is still under the control of warlords and Taliban fighters, and the central government is hopelessly corrupt. The Taliban was highly repressive, and the new government doesn't seem to be much better, despite supposedly being secular.
Long story short: there were probably better (and more effective, less costly) ways to deal with Afghanistan than to go in guns-blazing, tear the place apart, and try to rebuild it into a modern democracy.
Although I find the tendency to prefix "cyber" to everything a very tedious practice, consider that software flaws very well can be used to inflict physical damage--Stuxnet being the perfect example of that.
As computers take over more and more tasks, I think it's inevitable that a malicious individual will use a software flaw to cause the deaths of a significant number of people. I just think it's silly to call that sort of thing "cyberwarfare." It is sabotage, plain and simple. That it's done with code rather than a wrench doesn't make it fundamentally different, though it is perhaps harder to detect.
I believe his point was that we need to give up this "White Man's Burden" garbage and think it's our job to "save" Africans from themselves. It hurts more than it helps. It makes them dependent on outside assistance to the point that they can't or won't do things for themselves, and a lot of the money and aid just fuel corrupt regimes and tribal warfare anyway. Either way, it's not really making things any better, and it arguably makes them much worse.
Being a phone isn't that hard on the battery, actually. I had a Palm Centro, and it could get at least a few days on a charge--a week if I barely used it.
Contrast that with my current Android phone, which can barely make it through the day even if I don't touch it. (And this is with wi-fi off and no draining background apps running!)
I remember the Centro being quite well-marketed, to the point that it was a huge success. Although perhaps that was more Sprint's doing than Palm's. Anyone else notice how Centros were on damn near every other TV show for a while?
Looks to me like Apotheker beat her to it, trying to turn HP into a services company like IBM.