I sort of agree with what the article's saying; that the stand-alone PDA's days are numbered. (pun intended).
But when devices converge, and you get one thing that is a cell phone, and a camera, and an MP3 player, and a GPS/mapping/directions device, and it manages and hotsyncs your email and address book and lets you edit them, then how can you really say which category of device "won" and which ones "died?" Is it based on the existence of a pen for input that truly defines the PDA? Is it based on whether you end up buying the device at an office supply store or a cell-phone store? Is it based on which predecessor device the new device looks the most like?
I don't think PDA functionality is going away, it's either being subsumed or else subsuming the functions of other devices. I think that when functionality is integrated, arguing over which previously separate set of functionality "won" and which "died" is just pointless semantic quibbling.
I'd put "Mod Parent Up" if it weren't already a 5. This takes the cake. It's the most succinct presentation of why all that guy's mumbo-jumbo boils down to nothing.
Just to add what doesn't really need to be added, to really spell things out in case anyone isn't following this:
The guy's saying that velocity in space is measured in such-and-such a way (dx/dt, or change in position relative to change in time) and so velocity in time is impossible because it would be dt/dt, or change in time divided by change in time, which is 1, so we're always moving forward at the same rate. But all this really means is that he's arbitrarily chosen a nonsensical measure of time travel, and then says that time travel's impossible because the measurement system he arbitrarily choose doesn't make any sense.
Beyond that, it's not even entirely clear that the arbitrary system he choose doesn't make any sense. For example, if we ask the question "how far did you move in space compared to me," it presents the perfectly valid math problem dx/dx. For example, you walked two miles down the road, I walked one mile down the road, the relationship between how far we walked is given by 2 miles / 1 mile, or 2. The miles divide out- there is no unit to it, it's just a multiple - you walked twice as far as I did.
So if someone's traveling in time, you might say "how long did the time traveling experience last for you?" And they might reply 1 minute. And you'd say, "how far did you travel," and they might reply 100 minutes. So they traveled in time 100 minutes in 1 minute, and (100 minutes)/(1 minute) = 100. The multiple at which time was passing for them, as opposed to normal, was 100 x. Had they traveled in time for 2 minutes at the same rate, one might have expected them to go 200 minutes back in time. I don't see how it's "nonsensical" to divide time by time, or distance by distance.
I sell potato chips. They're salty, and make people want to drink more soft drinks. I'm going to start threatening the soft drink manufacturers that if they don't start making direct payments to us chip manufacturers for increasing their market access, I'm going to stop selling chips, thereby decreasing demand for their product, and sales.
I also operate a toll road. People use this road to get to all sorts of retail stores to go shopping. Less people would go to these retail stores if they couldn't use my handy toll road, so I'm going to threaten the retail stores, and tell them that they need to start paying me kickbacks. If they don't, I'll start asking people where they're going when they get to my toll road, and if they're going shopping, I won't let them on.
Now, of course, I know that any soft drink manufacturer and retail store in their right mind is going to go tell me what I can insert and where I can insert it. If fact, they might point out that my sales of potato chips and toll road usage are just as dependent on their providing soft drinks and retail outlets as vice versa. This is why I'm already spending a fortune on buying politicians to force them to give me money.
"they have returned to the command line. From the article: 'Our operations group never wants to rely on any sort of user interface"
I always thought that the command line was a user interface. You know, interfacing between a user and a computer.
It's hard to picture using a computer without any sort of user interface. I'm pretty sure that, in order to call it "using" a computer, some sort of interface must exist, be it keyboard mouse and monitor, binary switch, light gun, real gun, neural link, telekinesis, or whatever. Otherwise, you're not using it, are you?
On the other hand, maybe the article is correct- a lot of operations group probably don't want to use "any sort of user interface" to communicate with their computers. They want to be sitting on a beach in tahiti drinking daiquiris, thousands of miles away from the computers they're supposed to maintain.
Some of those are valid criticisms, but most of the ones you checked don't apply.
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
Less than with any other scheme I know of, and each affect will be on an individual basis between the two parties involved, no third party will be able to affect anyone else's email transaction.
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
Wrong. Did you read the system? How often does Paypal or Western Union refuse to pay on a payment they've verified?
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Not at all. It can be phased in gradually.
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
Part of the beauty of the plan is that it requires no centrally controlling authority for email for any part of implementation or adoption.
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
Will have no affect on it.
(x) Asshats
It account perfectly for asshats. That's the whole point, to deal with the kind of jerks who send spam.
(x) Jurisdictional problems
I'm really getting the impression you didn't even read my idea...
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
There are no taxes involved.
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
That's valid.
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
For the umptenth time, SENDING ATTACHMENTS OR EMAIL TEXT DOES NOT REQUIRE CHANGES IN SMTP! It is, in fact, exactly what smtp does.
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Will do what?
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
How?
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
This isn't a legislative solution. People can adopt this unless politicians explicitly outlaw insurance or micropayments or something.
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
How can a dishonest spammer get around this?
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
Since spam is still a problem, no spam elimination scheme has ever been "shown to be practical" beyond theoretically. Therefore, following this objection, none could ever exist. In fact, by this argument, it's impossible to ever solve any problem.
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
They do.
(x) Sending email should be free
It is unless it's spam.
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
Did you just choose check boxes entirely randomly?
Every single reply I get appears to have not payed any attention to the original post.
This is basically like Paypal. Has the existence of Paypal forced mail servers to be more secure or risk spam zombie installers taking over their machines? No. Emailing someone information that tells them how to collect a payment opens no technical vulnerabilities that aren't inherent in emailing them any other type of information people are already emailing anyway. The email simply contains the address of the micropayment company and the purchase number (or whatever you want to call it) of the micropayment. Your computer checks the URL of the micropayment company top be sure it's a valid one from your list (it starts with http://www.paypal.com/ , or whatever), then it uses something such as HTTP to contact that address and make sure the payment number provided is in fact valid. How does this open a mail server to vulnerability, when your computer parses a URL and checks to see if a payment is valid? Again, this simply automates a process people already go through every day with Paypal and many other online transactions, and I haven't heard of it creating a single exploit yet.
The state of OS's is a bizarre exception that's frequently studied in business schools specifically because it is a bizarre exception. There's a bunch of factors involved- Metcalfe's law, software lock-in, shrewd business moves on MS's part, unscrupulous moves on MS's part, idiotic business moves on the parts of IBM, Commodore/Amiga, and others, etc. Still, they don't have a monopoly, there are Apple and Linux, as well as many more exotic minute market share competitors. But just because there are a few industries that at some point have had near monopolies, you condemn any proposed business venture upfront as suffering the unlikely fate of tiny fraction of industries? And what's your suggestion, that we should abandon this market without ever trying it because something could go wrong? You think MS is so bad that we'd be better off now if we'd never made any operating systems and just stopped using computers?
Anyway, there are no network effects or vendor lock-in potential with this, so it would undoubtedly go the way of fast-food, banks, furniture, computers, clothing stores, and almost every other one of thousands of markets- lots of choice, and no potential to charge monopolistic prices because someone will gladly come take your customers away with lower prices, since there aren't compatibility issues and network effects to make people stick with you despite otherwise superior competitive choices.
Your argument regarding cost not meaning anything to criminals is pure BS. Study after study has showed that higher costs to committing crimes (higher chance of being caught, stiffer penalties, more obstacles to committing the crime) reduce crime. This is obviously the case, because there is generally no where near as much trouble with physical mail spam as there is with email spam, largely because it costs at least a few cents to send. You say the spammers just have endless money on stolen credit cards> Well then why are they sending spam, why don't they just keep the stolen money? You think that if spam were made more expensive, so that it costs more to send than spammers make by sending it, they'll go steal more money just to use it to subsidize their spam-sending addiction? Come on- if we raise the cost of sending spam so that it becomes unprofitable, spammers will stop sending spam. If they steal money, they'll keep that money, they won't use it to send spam at a loss just for the fun of it.
Re:Micropayments for eMail
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Spam is Dead
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· Score: 1
The whole purpose of stopping spam is to save bandwidth? I don't give a crap about the bandwidth. Even on my spamiest days, it only takes my client about a second to get my email. I think most people would be happy with a perfect spam filter on their computer, even though such a device would save no bandwidth. I care about my time and my inbox not being cluttered with crap, not the approximately 2k that most of my spam messages take.
At any rate, if the system were successful, it would still reduce bandwidth by a huge factor, because they'd stop sending spam if no one was getting it unless they paid.
The whole insurance model can't work server side, because the insurance isn't collected until the recipient evaluates it and, if they end up looking at the message, decide to collect the insurance.
0. As for a new protocol- why not just use SHTTP to verify and collect the micropayments? All the micropayment data goes in an attachment, there is no need to modify SMTP or any other protocol in any way. You just need to modify email clients to recognize and evaluate standard micropayment attachments. With some clients, this might just be done with plugins.
1. There's no need for any mail server to be changed in any way. They just do what they're doing right now, there's no reason for servers to be micro-payment aware.
2. I don't understand how there's any potential for anyone to launder money or rip people off by setting high rates. Say I set the high rate of $0.25 in my email client, and tell it to trash anything without an insured value of that much. I basically wouldn't get any email. Who gets ripped off? Say someone decides to insure their email for $1. Well, they could lose a lot of money if they send a lot of email and people collect, but who's fault is that? If you buy the $1 insurance, you're not getting ripped off when people collect it.
3. Well, like any other financial dealing you ever have, you should look at the terms and make a decision. People handle dealings like this with banks, cell phones, cable, utilities, credit cards, and hundreds of other things all the time. Yes, someone could get ripped off at some point, and they should probably have been more careful and should find a different provider. But just because, like in pretty much any business there's ever been, there's the potential for someone to be unscrupulous, I don't see that as a good reason to abandon a new undertaking. If it were a good reason, we might as well stop all economic transactions of any kind due to the potential of some form of shady dealings.
There's no reason for this to be at all expensive or time consuming, unless you're a spam house, in which case it'll probably be very expensive and put you out of business.
There's some huge misunderstanding here about the scheme. Say you're the sender- if you want to include a micropayment insurance policy with your email, you have to go buy one and attach it, otherwise there isn't one. There is no legislation or national boundary involved, and if you didn't go buy one, then your email won't have one, and there's no way you'll be considered liable for one. But if the system becomes popular, people might stop getting your email if you didn't include insurance.
Furthermore, it will be no problem for people with non-spam mailing lists, because people won't collect the insurance, and it will cost them nothing or next to nothing. The micropayment fee for a $0.02 insurance policy would probably be under a tenth of a cent, but I bet places would offer email insurance where there's no charge at all unless the insurance is collected by the recipient. So if the recipient wanted the message anyway, they won't collect on the insurance, and it won't cost the sender anything. If the recipient collects the money just for personal financial gain even thought they'd legitimately signed up for the list- great, they just earned two pennies, and the sender can have anyone who collects automatically unsubscribed from their list so they'll never email them again. I don't think that will add up fast. (Maybe they'll have to add captchas to sign up for mailing lists to stop people from automating the signup of a million addresses or something) Insurance collection would basically serve as an "unsubscribe" link- unless it was worth it to the sender to pay that much to get their otherwise unwanted email through, and then they could keep sending.
So it's impossible to be charged without warning, because you have to go buy the insurance before sending the email. For instance, if I were doing this, I'd probably just have my email client automatically insure all my email at $0.10 or something, because it'll probably always get through, and I just email friends, I don't send spam, so I don't expect any of the payments would ever be collected.
There's a few details I didn't get into, like that the insurance policies clearly need to expire eventually, because you can't let someone sign up for your daily newsletter insured at two cents, and then go redeem five years worth of back insurance coupons at once. Anyway, the whole thing requires no legislation, no changes to existing email standards/infrastructure, no centralized authority except the body that writes and updates the open standard for specifying email insurance transaction formats, it's compatible with current spam filtering schemes, it's entirely voluntary, and open to multiple levels of competition. Plus, economically, it doesn't create any inefficient economic losses due to the inability to send ads when you're willing to pay people as much as they want to be paid to read them, etc.
Re:Centralized Email
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Spam is Dead
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Here's how I assume micro-payments work:
You come out with a standardized system for handling micropayments- that is an open, say, xml format so that any micropayment applications can talk to each other. Then any company that wants to handle micropayments (Paypal, Yahoo, Citibank, Fred's Bargain Micropayments, etc.) starts selling them. When you (your email app working automatically, or whatever) buy a micropayment, it comes with a tag saying how much it's for, who sold it, and what it's record number is. These get attached in the standard micropayment format as an attachment to an otherwise normal email record. The recipient computer's email program then goes and establishes a secure connection with the person who sold the micropayment and makes sure it really exists and is for the right amount. Of course, maybe Fred's Bargain Micropayments is an illegitamate vendor who exists only to facilitate spam and will "confirm" payments but never give you the money. This is why your email client will automatically go get lists online of known, valid micropayment vendors.
Who will maintain these lists? Anyone. Google? Consumer Reports? will they be free, or require micropayments or subscription fees to access, or be ad supported? Who cares, markets competition will work it out between vendors and consumers. At any rate, the basic system is sound, and does not necessarily require any sort of vendor lock-in to work.
To the user, all you have to do is set up your email client with the secure server(s) providing lists of valid micro-payment and email-insurance vendors (or use whatever defaults it comes with), and then tell your client how much money you require (reject, or move to SPAM folder, all messages that don't come with a payment or insurance policy of over $0.015) or whatever. Then say you get a piece of marketing mail you don't want insured at $0.02. Your computer checks the micropayment insurance vendor list and finds the vendor specified is valid, then it goes to the vendor and finds that the listed payment is valid, so the message goes in your inbox. You look at it, you decide it's spam, you click the "get insurance payment" button in your email client, and it goes and retrieves the $.02 and puts it in your account. The spammer who sent it will then see that you collected their payment, and either decide it's worth $0.02 to them to get stuff to you, or else take your name off their list so you don't collect any more of their micro-payment insurance policies.
"If game makers would go with the demand and sell games women want to buy"
The demand equation for this isn't so simple. No one knows for sure to what extent women don't play video games because they aren't interested, and to what extent they don't play them because they aren't targeted to them. Men were much bigger gamers back in the days of Atari, and I'd hardly say that Pacman, Frogger, Tennis, etc. were particularly geared towards males.
The financial equation these companies are weighing is this: which is greater, the number of additional game purchases by men if they make the female characters ridiculously sexualized, or the number of additional game purchases by women if they make the female characters more realistic?
I don't know the answer to this, but if I had to guess, I'd say that they stand to sell more with the overly sexualized women. I'm guessing this partly because I suspect the game companies already know the answer, and they tend to overly sexualize the women.
I am in no way evaluating the morality of this here, I'm just pointing out that the economics aren't as cut and dry as you suggest. I doubt the game companies make characters who border on being pornographic despite it causing them financially harm.
I had a close friend who worked at a CD and DVD manufacturer for years (Metatec). I took the plant tour with him twice. When they set up a new line, yields were often as low as 10%. Then they examine, tweak, and repeat for months and months, gradually increasing the yield. At the time of my second tour, they had just set up their first DVD manufacturing line, and it's yield was still under 10%. Of course they can't sell them profitably at that rate, but it was just a phase they had to go through while they got the line up to speed. I don't remember exactly what yield percentage they said they needed for profitability, but I think it was around 75%. (for DVD's, at that time. For CD's, it was much higher, because the yield needed for profitability depended on the competition's yield, which affected industry prices.) I think they said they expected it might take up to 6 months to achieve profitability on the line from the time it spit off its first disk.
This early in the game, I get the impression that 80% yield is pretty good. Maybe the setup, testing, and refinement procedures have improved dramatically since the early 90's, and they expect higher yields faster. But I doubt they're unhappy with that yield that early. If, for example, they expect the long run marginal production cost on one of these disks to be $0.10, then the 80% yield would only take that up to $0.125 each, which is a pretty small detail on disks that will probably sell for $8-$20 as finished products with content. Over millions of disks, those cents add up, so I'm sure they'd like to get six sigma reliability on the things, but I don't think 80% yield is a deal killer.
The CD lines at Metatec, which had been running for years, got yields in the 98-99% range. I suspect they'll hit that eventually.
You have entirely missed the point. New features are fine. Useful new features are great. Randomly rearranging existing features is just annoying. Putting common features in different places in different applications is annoying. Having the same widgets unexpectedly do different things in different scenarios (or even in the same scenario) for no reason is annoying. Woz, many people in this thread, and the linked articles like ARStechnica have commented how great the original Macintosh UI was. It was almost entirely new at the time! We have nothing against new. We have a problem with pointless inconsistency and changes that lower our productivity and force us perform lots of pointless memorization to accomplish our tasks.
Umm, thanks for the "mod this up," but I don't think Microsoft does any better. I'm just saying Apple used to be good about this (say, from System 1 until System 7), and now it's bad. But when I went from Windows 3.1 to NT to 2000 to XP, I'd hardly call that a consistent user interface; it struck me that all sorts of things had been moved around randomly. Their system preferences are awful! It's True that Apple rearranged their system prefs over and over again in early OSX releases, so again, I'm not saying Apple's great here, but MS is also really screwed up when it comes to pointlessly rearranging preferences, not to mention they have an absurdly huge and unnecessarily complex set of preferences in the first place. And betraying user interface guidelines? Does MS even have user interface guidelines? I don't know where to look for many common widgets in programs, I seem to have to memorize them again for every program. They're also terrible about hidden features on right-click pop-up menus and such. Anyway, my Mac-bashing doesn't imply MS endorsement. I don't think anyone's concentrating on ease of use in human interface design in a computer operating system.
The Steve (as opposed to The Woz) does fight for perfection, but he also fights hard for rapid development, early deployment, and lots and lots of features. He doesn't appear to fight at all for a consistent user interface experience, as evidenced by the OSX Finder. He lets them change things back and forth and up and down and left and right all the time, and ignore any sort of plan for consistency, including Apple's own user interface guidelines. Let's put the "find" function in Sherlock! Let's put everything in Sherlock! Let's revise the appearance and API's for Sherlock (by stealing Watson) so the 1,000 existing plugins don't work anymore! Let's take find back out of Sherlock! Let's abandon Sherlock! Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!
In the early days, Apple used to follow their interface guidelines like they were gospel. Now they ignore them in nearly every app they make. No time to start listing all the violations, but for an example, try the minimize and maximize buttons in iTunes. Or try reading their guidelines on when to use brushed metal, and then try to see when they bother to follow their own nearly unintelligible guidelines.
I don't have time to enumerate all of them, but Apple constantly changes how things work for no apparent reason. Key Caps was around since the very early days of the Mac, c. 1986. With OSX, they change the name to Keyboard Viewer. OK, a minor change that makes more sense. Then with 10.3, this handy utility disappears. Did they get rid of it? No! But to find it, you have to dig around in system preferences and activate a special hidden flag-shaped "international" menu, that's always present at the top of your screen, and you can only access it from there.
This is, of course, only one of countless examples.
Apple is missing some user-interface design oversight committee that has the power to review every last change and stop individuals from messing stuff up like this. I shouldn't have to read a Macworld article and dig through the "international" system preferences pane to activate a hidden menu to continue to access a utility that had otherwise been fairly consistent on Macs for 18 years. Again, I'm not just complaining about their one big mistake, there are countless things on par with this.
I remember during the early 90's, when the appliances that wouldn't turn off started to take over. The first appliances I remember that wouldn't turn off were VCRs from the mid 80's- they offered the feature of being impossible to turn off without unplugging them, and always helpfully flashing "12:00" on the display when plugged in. As my parent slowly replaced old appliances with new ones, I remember tech support phone calls from my parents:
"How do I turn it off"
"Press the 'power' button"
"I did that, but there's still a light on."
"That's the 'standby' light."
"The what?"
"That's the light that comes on to tell you that the appliance is off."
"!!???"
"I don't know why."
"You mean one light or another is going to be on the entire time we own this appliance, unless we unplug it?"
"Yep. Get used to it. Everything's that way now."
It used to be that the power button was just a switch that did the same thing as unplugging it, to save you the inconvenience. They've now thoughtfully removed that feature; if you really want it OFF, you have to go back to unplugging it again.
All of this coincided with a preponderance of clocks. I can see two engineers somewhere having a conversation:
"Have you noticed how cheap digital clocks have gotten?"
"Yeah! Let's put them in everything!"
I remember when my neighbor's old analogue kitchen wall clock died, so he said he'd better shop for a new one. I asked him if he really needed another, because there were already digital clocks on his coffee machine, oven, range top, microwave, radio, and even toaster oven. Pretty much everything that used electricity in the kitchen except the refrigerator and mixer had their own LED clock.
They still replaced the wall clock. It's the only one they looked at. It came as news to them that they already had six clocks in their kitchen. They'd never noticed them.
I want to make sure I understand his accusations, because I feel like I might be missing something. He's saying that I'm going to not buy music that's cheap, and only buy music that's expensive, because people are only willing to buy expensive things, (because they must be better)?
Like, for instance, the way gas stations at intersections always compete to have the highest price, going so far as to advertise it out on the corner of the intersection in huge numbers, because everyone knows that people are only willing to buy the highest priced gas they can find, because it must be better. None of that cheap gas for Americans! That's why everyone's been so happy about gas prices going up. Thank god they're finally selling us the good gas, it must be so much better than that old gas that they'd sell for a paltry sub $2.00 a gallon!
To stick with his example- I like REM. So when the next REM album comes out, I'll drop by ITMS to pick it up, but I'll see that it's only $6 for the album! (Apparently because REM wouldn't buckle to some kind of blackmail, the studio decided that as punishment for REM, the studio would throw out millions of dollars in potential profits, because we all know that big business is all about voluntarily forgoing profits. That'll show REM!) Anyway, the theory is that I'll get to ITMS, and be all ready to buy that album, but when I see the price, I won't think "Wow! An REM album for only $6! That's great! Thank you, studios, for such a bargain!" Instead I'll think the only rational thing- "Gee, I thought my taste in music was that I like REM, and I thought I liked the first 30-seconds of these songs I heard on the ITMS, and liked the whole songs when I heard them on the radio, but I guess I must have been wrong, because I'm not the type to like cheap music. I wonder if Prada would sell me some music for like, $5,000 an album? I'd really like that."
Yes, it's common knowledge that capitalism breeds price competition, but I feel so silly- before reading this article, I had it all reversed! I thought that people shopped around to find the lowest prices. How silly of me! In fact, for my whole life, I've been doing it all wrong! It's good to know that I should be shopping around to try to find highest prices, to trick myself into perceiving the value of the item to be greater.
I think you're right that the Quadra 630 was the first IDE Mac, but then the Quadra 630 was pro line when it came out in '94. the Centris was sort of bridging the gap between consumer and pro. LC's were still the consumer line back then. So again, new technology (for Apple at least) on pro hardware first.
Still, that said, you're basically right about IDE, (they went back to SCSI next time they released pro hardware with the jump to PPC and the 6100, etc.) but the whole IDE thing is a bad example for me to have cited. SCSI was superior back then (14 devices per chain instead of 2, internal and external connectors instead of internal only, direct device-device data transfer instead of the computer having to process everything, and higher data speeds), and Apple viewed the move to IDE as a cost-cutting measure, because SCSI drives cost so much, not as an upgrade.
I do sort of miss the numeric designations, it did clear up the specifications, but the clarity and organization of the product line is remarkably improved. Before Jobs came back, their product offerings were insanely confusing, and it was very difficult to figure out what the heck was going on, and what market various models were supposed to appeal to.
"Apple has ALWAYS lead the jump to new and improved technology and aesthetics with the consumer hardware. The pro hardware comes along later"
Right, like when they introduced the 68030, 68040, PPC601, PPC603, PPC604, PPC603e, PPC604e, G3, G4 and G5 chips in their professional hardware first, then let it trickle down to the consumer line. Or SATA. Or Firewire. Or Firewire 800. Or USB 2. Or DDR RAM. Or the switch from NuBUS to PCI. Or the switch from PCI to PCI-X. Or the switch from SCSI to IDE. Or introducing Apple flat-panel pro monitors before the G4 iMac. Or moving from 16->256->Thousands->Millions of colors.
The only thing I can think of where Apple moved the consumer line ahead of the pro line are putting USB on the iMac when their pro line was still the USB-less Beige G3 towers. Or if you want to consider aesthetics, then again with the iMac. But these two examples are the only ones I can think of. Can you point out ANY other example? I don't even buy your example of the 6500- the 6500 was part of their pro line at the time ('97). The consumer line back then was Performas, particularly the Performa 6360, Performa 6410, and Performa 6420, all of which were released just a few months before the 6500 and ran at 160, 180, and 200 mhz. The 6500 was the Pro line. It came with 64 MB of RAM and a 4 GB HD, where the consumer line was 16 MB and 1.2 GB. In fact, this isn't so obscure. From the advent of the PowerPC in early '94 with the 6100, 7100, and 8100, until the G3 came out at the end of 97, the pro line went by numeric designations, and the consumer line went by names like Centris, Quadra, and Performa.
Apple almost always releases the fancy new technology in the pro line, then moves it down to the consumer models.
That clip of Balmer was widely shown, but I think they sneakily cut off the beginning that gives it context, where he said: "If we want anything of theirs, we'll happily massacre our own... Developers! Developers! Developers!..." etc., etc.
Who knows, maybe they've just had an unfortunate series of personal crises or similar unrelated coincidences that don't reflect poorly on the company.
Or, maybe it takes from four to nine months to shovel to the bottom of the accounting muck at Oracle. At that point, a CFO reaches the inescapable conclusion that they must either:
1. Issue a radical restatement of earnings for one or more previous quarters in their next financial report.
2. Commit perjury.
If the CEO and board disagree with the necessity of revising past financial statements, and the CFO doesn't feel like taking his chances with committing fraud (especially in the current post-scandel atmosphere), then it's time to shop for a new CFO. At the least, it will give the higher-ups a few more months to inconspicuously sell some stock while the next CFO's still busy shoveling.
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But when devices converge, and you get one thing that is a cell phone, and a camera, and an MP3 player, and a GPS/mapping/directions device, and it manages and hotsyncs your email and address book and lets you edit them, then how can you really say which category of device "won" and which ones "died?" Is it based on the existence of a pen for input that truly defines the PDA? Is it based on whether you end up buying the device at an office supply store or a cell-phone store? Is it based on which predecessor device the new device looks the most like?
I don't think PDA functionality is going away, it's either being subsumed or else subsuming the functions of other devices. I think that when functionality is integrated, arguing over which previously separate set of functionality "won" and which "died" is just pointless semantic quibbling.
Not to worry, Gromit - just a bit of harmless brain alteration.
Just to add what doesn't really need to be added, to really spell things out in case anyone isn't following this:
The guy's saying that velocity in space is measured in such-and-such a way (dx/dt, or change in position relative to change in time) and so velocity in time is impossible because it would be dt/dt, or change in time divided by change in time, which is 1, so we're always moving forward at the same rate. But all this really means is that he's arbitrarily chosen a nonsensical measure of time travel, and then says that time travel's impossible because the measurement system he arbitrarily choose doesn't make any sense.
Beyond that, it's not even entirely clear that the arbitrary system he choose doesn't make any sense. For example, if we ask the question "how far did you move in space compared to me," it presents the perfectly valid math problem dx/dx. For example, you walked two miles down the road, I walked one mile down the road, the relationship between how far we walked is given by 2 miles / 1 mile, or 2. The miles divide out- there is no unit to it, it's just a multiple - you walked twice as far as I did.
So if someone's traveling in time, you might say "how long did the time traveling experience last for you?" And they might reply 1 minute. And you'd say, "how far did you travel," and they might reply 100 minutes. So they traveled in time 100 minutes in 1 minute, and (100 minutes)/(1 minute) = 100. The multiple at which time was passing for them, as opposed to normal, was 100 x. Had they traveled in time for 2 minutes at the same rate, one might have expected them to go 200 minutes back in time. I don't see how it's "nonsensical" to divide time by time, or distance by distance.
They should have done it ship-in-a-bottle style.
Moses: The Lord, the Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen...
[drops one of the tablets]
Moses: Oy! Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey!
I also operate a toll road. People use this road to get to all sorts of retail stores to go shopping. Less people would go to these retail stores if they couldn't use my handy toll road, so I'm going to threaten the retail stores, and tell them that they need to start paying me kickbacks. If they don't, I'll start asking people where they're going when they get to my toll road, and if they're going shopping, I won't let them on.
Now, of course, I know that any soft drink manufacturer and retail store in their right mind is going to go tell me what I can insert and where I can insert it. If fact, they might point out that my sales of potato chips and toll road usage are just as dependent on their providing soft drinks and retail outlets as vice versa. This is why I'm already spending a fortune on buying politicians to force them to give me money.
I always thought that the command line was a user interface. You know, interfacing between a user and a computer.
It's hard to picture using a computer without any sort of user interface. I'm pretty sure that, in order to call it "using" a computer, some sort of interface must exist, be it keyboard mouse and monitor, binary switch, light gun, real gun, neural link, telekinesis, or whatever. Otherwise, you're not using it, are you?
On the other hand, maybe the article is correct- a lot of operations group probably don't want to use "any sort of user interface" to communicate with their computers. They want to be sitting on a beach in tahiti drinking daiquiris, thousands of miles away from the computers they're supposed to maintain.
Some of those are valid criticisms, but most of the ones you checked don't apply.
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
Less than with any other scheme I know of, and each affect will be on an individual basis between the two parties involved, no third party will be able to affect anyone else's email transaction.
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
Wrong. Did you read the system? How often does Paypal or Western Union refuse to pay on a payment they've verified?
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Not at all. It can be phased in gradually.
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
Part of the beauty of the plan is that it requires no centrally controlling authority for email for any part of implementation or adoption.
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
Will have no affect on it.
(x) Asshats
It account perfectly for asshats. That's the whole point, to deal with the kind of jerks who send spam.
(x) Jurisdictional problems
I'm really getting the impression you didn't even read my idea...
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
There are no taxes involved.
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
That's valid.
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
For the umptenth time, SENDING ATTACHMENTS OR EMAIL TEXT DOES NOT REQUIRE CHANGES IN SMTP! It is, in fact, exactly what smtp does.
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Will do what?
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
How?
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
This isn't a legislative solution. People can adopt this unless politicians explicitly outlaw insurance or micropayments or something.
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
How can a dishonest spammer get around this?
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
Since spam is still a problem, no spam elimination scheme has ever been "shown to be practical" beyond theoretically. Therefore, following this objection, none could ever exist. In fact, by this argument, it's impossible to ever solve any problem.
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
They do.
(x) Sending email should be free
It is unless it's spam.
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
Did you just choose check boxes entirely randomly?
This is basically like Paypal. Has the existence of Paypal forced mail servers to be more secure or risk spam zombie installers taking over their machines? No. Emailing someone information that tells them how to collect a payment opens no technical vulnerabilities that aren't inherent in emailing them any other type of information people are already emailing anyway. The email simply contains the address of the micropayment company and the purchase number (or whatever you want to call it) of the micropayment. Your computer checks the URL of the micropayment company top be sure it's a valid one from your list (it starts with http://www.paypal.com/ , or whatever), then it uses something such as HTTP to contact that address and make sure the payment number provided is in fact valid. How does this open a mail server to vulnerability, when your computer parses a URL and checks to see if a payment is valid? Again, this simply automates a process people already go through every day with Paypal and many other online transactions, and I haven't heard of it creating a single exploit yet.
Anyway, there are no network effects or vendor lock-in potential with this, so it would undoubtedly go the way of fast-food, banks, furniture, computers, clothing stores, and almost every other one of thousands of markets- lots of choice, and no potential to charge monopolistic prices because someone will gladly come take your customers away with lower prices, since there aren't compatibility issues and network effects to make people stick with you despite otherwise superior competitive choices.
Your argument regarding cost not meaning anything to criminals is pure BS. Study after study has showed that higher costs to committing crimes (higher chance of being caught, stiffer penalties, more obstacles to committing the crime) reduce crime. This is obviously the case, because there is generally no where near as much trouble with physical mail spam as there is with email spam, largely because it costs at least a few cents to send. You say the spammers just have endless money on stolen credit cards> Well then why are they sending spam, why don't they just keep the stolen money? You think that if spam were made more expensive, so that it costs more to send than spammers make by sending it, they'll go steal more money just to use it to subsidize their spam-sending addiction? Come on- if we raise the cost of sending spam so that it becomes unprofitable, spammers will stop sending spam. If they steal money, they'll keep that money, they won't use it to send spam at a loss just for the fun of it.
At any rate, if the system were successful, it would still reduce bandwidth by a huge factor, because they'd stop sending spam if no one was getting it unless they paid.
The whole insurance model can't work server side, because the insurance isn't collected until the recipient evaluates it and, if they end up looking at the message, decide to collect the insurance.
0. As for a new protocol- why not just use SHTTP to verify and collect the micropayments? All the micropayment data goes in an attachment, there is no need to modify SMTP or any other protocol in any way. You just need to modify email clients to recognize and evaluate standard micropayment attachments. With some clients, this might just be done with plugins.
1. There's no need for any mail server to be changed in any way. They just do what they're doing right now, there's no reason for servers to be micro-payment aware.
2. I don't understand how there's any potential for anyone to launder money or rip people off by setting high rates. Say I set the high rate of $0.25 in my email client, and tell it to trash anything without an insured value of that much. I basically wouldn't get any email. Who gets ripped off? Say someone decides to insure their email for $1. Well, they could lose a lot of money if they send a lot of email and people collect, but who's fault is that? If you buy the $1 insurance, you're not getting ripped off when people collect it.
3. Well, like any other financial dealing you ever have, you should look at the terms and make a decision. People handle dealings like this with banks, cell phones, cable, utilities, credit cards, and hundreds of other things all the time. Yes, someone could get ripped off at some point, and they should probably have been more careful and should find a different provider. But just because, like in pretty much any business there's ever been, there's the potential for someone to be unscrupulous, I don't see that as a good reason to abandon a new undertaking. If it were a good reason, we might as well stop all economic transactions of any kind due to the potential of some form of shady dealings. There's no reason for this to be at all expensive or time consuming, unless you're a spam house, in which case it'll probably be very expensive and put you out of business.
Furthermore, it will be no problem for people with non-spam mailing lists, because people won't collect the insurance, and it will cost them nothing or next to nothing. The micropayment fee for a $0.02 insurance policy would probably be under a tenth of a cent, but I bet places would offer email insurance where there's no charge at all unless the insurance is collected by the recipient. So if the recipient wanted the message anyway, they won't collect on the insurance, and it won't cost the sender anything. If the recipient collects the money just for personal financial gain even thought they'd legitimately signed up for the list- great, they just earned two pennies, and the sender can have anyone who collects automatically unsubscribed from their list so they'll never email them again. I don't think that will add up fast. (Maybe they'll have to add captchas to sign up for mailing lists to stop people from automating the signup of a million addresses or something) Insurance collection would basically serve as an "unsubscribe" link- unless it was worth it to the sender to pay that much to get their otherwise unwanted email through, and then they could keep sending.
So it's impossible to be charged without warning, because you have to go buy the insurance before sending the email. For instance, if I were doing this, I'd probably just have my email client automatically insure all my email at $0.10 or something, because it'll probably always get through, and I just email friends, I don't send spam, so I don't expect any of the payments would ever be collected.
There's a few details I didn't get into, like that the insurance policies clearly need to expire eventually, because you can't let someone sign up for your daily newsletter insured at two cents, and then go redeem five years worth of back insurance coupons at once. Anyway, the whole thing requires no legislation, no changes to existing email standards/infrastructure, no centralized authority except the body that writes and updates the open standard for specifying email insurance transaction formats, it's compatible with current spam filtering schemes, it's entirely voluntary, and open to multiple levels of competition. Plus, economically, it doesn't create any inefficient economic losses due to the inability to send ads when you're willing to pay people as much as they want to be paid to read them, etc.
Who will maintain these lists? Anyone. Google? Consumer Reports? will they be free, or require micropayments or subscription fees to access, or be ad supported? Who cares, markets competition will work it out between vendors and consumers. At any rate, the basic system is sound, and does not necessarily require any sort of vendor lock-in to work.
To the user, all you have to do is set up your email client with the secure server(s) providing lists of valid micro-payment and email-insurance vendors (or use whatever defaults it comes with), and then tell your client how much money you require (reject, or move to SPAM folder, all messages that don't come with a payment or insurance policy of over $0.015) or whatever. Then say you get a piece of marketing mail you don't want insured at $0.02. Your computer checks the micropayment insurance vendor list and finds the vendor specified is valid, then it goes to the vendor and finds that the listed payment is valid, so the message goes in your inbox. You look at it, you decide it's spam, you click the "get insurance payment" button in your email client, and it goes and retrieves the $.02 and puts it in your account. The spammer who sent it will then see that you collected their payment, and either decide it's worth $0.02 to them to get stuff to you, or else take your name off their list so you don't collect any more of their micro-payment insurance policies.
The demand equation for this isn't so simple. No one knows for sure to what extent women don't play video games because they aren't interested, and to what extent they don't play them because they aren't targeted to them. Men were much bigger gamers back in the days of Atari, and I'd hardly say that Pacman, Frogger, Tennis, etc. were particularly geared towards males.
The financial equation these companies are weighing is this: which is greater, the number of additional game purchases by men if they make the female characters ridiculously sexualized, or the number of additional game purchases by women if they make the female characters more realistic?
I don't know the answer to this, but if I had to guess, I'd say that they stand to sell more with the overly sexualized women. I'm guessing this partly because I suspect the game companies already know the answer, and they tend to overly sexualize the women.
I am in no way evaluating the morality of this here, I'm just pointing out that the economics aren't as cut and dry as you suggest. I doubt the game companies make characters who border on being pornographic despite it causing them financially harm.
This early in the game, I get the impression that 80% yield is pretty good. Maybe the setup, testing, and refinement procedures have improved dramatically since the early 90's, and they expect higher yields faster. But I doubt they're unhappy with that yield that early. If, for example, they expect the long run marginal production cost on one of these disks to be $0.10, then the 80% yield would only take that up to $0.125 each, which is a pretty small detail on disks that will probably sell for $8-$20 as finished products with content. Over millions of disks, those cents add up, so I'm sure they'd like to get six sigma reliability on the things, but I don't think 80% yield is a deal killer.
The CD lines at Metatec, which had been running for years, got yields in the 98-99% range. I suspect they'll hit that eventually.
You have entirely missed the point. New features are fine. Useful new features are great. Randomly rearranging existing features is just annoying. Putting common features in different places in different applications is annoying. Having the same widgets unexpectedly do different things in different scenarios (or even in the same scenario) for no reason is annoying. Woz, many people in this thread, and the linked articles like ARStechnica have commented how great the original Macintosh UI was. It was almost entirely new at the time! We have nothing against new. We have a problem with pointless inconsistency and changes that lower our productivity and force us perform lots of pointless memorization to accomplish our tasks.
Umm, thanks for the "mod this up," but I don't think Microsoft does any better. I'm just saying Apple used to be good about this (say, from System 1 until System 7), and now it's bad. But when I went from Windows 3.1 to NT to 2000 to XP, I'd hardly call that a consistent user interface; it struck me that all sorts of things had been moved around randomly. Their system preferences are awful! It's True that Apple rearranged their system prefs over and over again in early OSX releases, so again, I'm not saying Apple's great here, but MS is also really screwed up when it comes to pointlessly rearranging preferences, not to mention they have an absurdly huge and unnecessarily complex set of preferences in the first place. And betraying user interface guidelines? Does MS even have user interface guidelines? I don't know where to look for many common widgets in programs, I seem to have to memorize them again for every program. They're also terrible about hidden features on right-click pop-up menus and such. Anyway, my Mac-bashing doesn't imply MS endorsement. I don't think anyone's concentrating on ease of use in human interface design in a computer operating system.
In the early days, Apple used to follow their interface guidelines like they were gospel. Now they ignore them in nearly every app they make. No time to start listing all the violations, but for an example, try the minimize and maximize buttons in iTunes. Or try reading their guidelines on when to use brushed metal, and then try to see when they bother to follow their own nearly unintelligible guidelines.
I don't have time to enumerate all of them, but Apple constantly changes how things work for no apparent reason. Key Caps was around since the very early days of the Mac, c. 1986. With OSX, they change the name to Keyboard Viewer. OK, a minor change that makes more sense. Then with 10.3, this handy utility disappears. Did they get rid of it? No! But to find it, you have to dig around in system preferences and activate a special hidden flag-shaped "international" menu, that's always present at the top of your screen, and you can only access it from there.
This is, of course, only one of countless examples.
Apple is missing some user-interface design oversight committee that has the power to review every last change and stop individuals from messing stuff up like this. I shouldn't have to read a Macworld article and dig through the "international" system preferences pane to activate a hidden menu to continue to access a utility that had otherwise been fairly consistent on Macs for 18 years. Again, I'm not just complaining about their one big mistake, there are countless things on par with this.
Steve Wozniak's old company is, of course, Apple.
"How do I turn it off"
"Press the 'power' button"
"I did that, but there's still a light on."
"That's the 'standby' light."
"The what?"
"That's the light that comes on to tell you that the appliance is off."
"!!???"
"I don't know why."
"You mean one light or another is going to be on the entire time we own this appliance, unless we unplug it?"
"Yep. Get used to it. Everything's that way now."
It used to be that the power button was just a switch that did the same thing as unplugging it, to save you the inconvenience. They've now thoughtfully removed that feature; if you really want it OFF, you have to go back to unplugging it again.
All of this coincided with a preponderance of clocks. I can see two engineers somewhere having a conversation:
"Have you noticed how cheap digital clocks have gotten?"
"Yeah! Let's put them in everything!"
I remember when my neighbor's old analogue kitchen wall clock died, so he said he'd better shop for a new one. I asked him if he really needed another, because there were already digital clocks on his coffee machine, oven, range top, microwave, radio, and even toaster oven. Pretty much everything that used electricity in the kitchen except the refrigerator and mixer had their own LED clock.
They still replaced the wall clock. It's the only one they looked at. It came as news to them that they already had six clocks in their kitchen. They'd never noticed them.
Feature-creep didn't originate with software.
Like, for instance, the way gas stations at intersections always compete to have the highest price, going so far as to advertise it out on the corner of the intersection in huge numbers, because everyone knows that people are only willing to buy the highest priced gas they can find, because it must be better. None of that cheap gas for Americans! That's why everyone's been so happy about gas prices going up. Thank god they're finally selling us the good gas, it must be so much better than that old gas that they'd sell for a paltry sub $2.00 a gallon!
To stick with his example- I like REM. So when the next REM album comes out, I'll drop by ITMS to pick it up, but I'll see that it's only $6 for the album! (Apparently because REM wouldn't buckle to some kind of blackmail, the studio decided that as punishment for REM, the studio would throw out millions of dollars in potential profits, because we all know that big business is all about voluntarily forgoing profits. That'll show REM!) Anyway, the theory is that I'll get to ITMS, and be all ready to buy that album, but when I see the price, I won't think "Wow! An REM album for only $6! That's great! Thank you, studios, for such a bargain!" Instead I'll think the only rational thing- "Gee, I thought my taste in music was that I like REM, and I thought I liked the first 30-seconds of these songs I heard on the ITMS, and liked the whole songs when I heard them on the radio, but I guess I must have been wrong, because I'm not the type to like cheap music. I wonder if Prada would sell me some music for like, $5,000 an album? I'd really like that."
Yes, it's common knowledge that capitalism breeds price competition, but I feel so silly- before reading this article, I had it all reversed! I thought that people shopped around to find the lowest prices. How silly of me! In fact, for my whole life, I've been doing it all wrong! It's good to know that I should be shopping around to try to find highest prices, to trick myself into perceiving the value of the item to be greater.
Still, that said, you're basically right about IDE, (they went back to SCSI next time they released pro hardware with the jump to PPC and the 6100, etc.) but the whole IDE thing is a bad example for me to have cited. SCSI was superior back then (14 devices per chain instead of 2, internal and external connectors instead of internal only, direct device-device data transfer instead of the computer having to process everything, and higher data speeds), and Apple viewed the move to IDE as a cost-cutting measure, because SCSI drives cost so much, not as an upgrade.
I do sort of miss the numeric designations, it did clear up the specifications, but the clarity and organization of the product line is remarkably improved. Before Jobs came back, their product offerings were insanely confusing, and it was very difficult to figure out what the heck was going on, and what market various models were supposed to appeal to.
Right, like when they introduced the 68030, 68040, PPC601, PPC603, PPC604, PPC603e, PPC604e, G3, G4 and G5 chips in their professional hardware first, then let it trickle down to the consumer line. Or SATA. Or Firewire. Or Firewire 800. Or USB 2. Or DDR RAM. Or the switch from NuBUS to PCI. Or the switch from PCI to PCI-X. Or the switch from SCSI to IDE. Or introducing Apple flat-panel pro monitors before the G4 iMac. Or moving from 16->256->Thousands->Millions of colors.
The only thing I can think of where Apple moved the consumer line ahead of the pro line are putting USB on the iMac when their pro line was still the USB-less Beige G3 towers. Or if you want to consider aesthetics, then again with the iMac. But these two examples are the only ones I can think of. Can you point out ANY other example? I don't even buy your example of the 6500- the 6500 was part of their pro line at the time ('97). The consumer line back then was Performas, particularly the Performa 6360, Performa 6410, and Performa 6420, all of which were released just a few months before the 6500 and ran at 160, 180, and 200 mhz. The 6500 was the Pro line. It came with 64 MB of RAM and a 4 GB HD, where the consumer line was 16 MB and 1.2 GB. In fact, this isn't so obscure. From the advent of the PowerPC in early '94 with the 6100, 7100, and 8100, until the G3 came out at the end of 97, the pro line went by numeric designations, and the consumer line went by names like Centris, Quadra, and Performa.
Apple almost always releases the fancy new technology in the pro line, then moves it down to the consumer models.
Not just their customers, but one of their Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
(breath) Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
That clip of Balmer was widely shown, but I think they sneakily cut off the beginning that gives it context, where he said: "If we want anything of theirs, we'll happily massacre our own... Developers! Developers! Developers!..." etc., etc.
Or, maybe it takes from four to nine months to shovel to the bottom of the accounting muck at Oracle. At that point, a CFO reaches the inescapable conclusion that they must either:
1. Issue a radical restatement of earnings for one or more previous quarters in their next financial report.
2. Commit perjury.
If the CEO and board disagree with the necessity of revising past financial statements, and the CFO doesn't feel like taking his chances with committing fraud (especially in the current post-scandel atmosphere), then it's time to shop for a new CFO. At the least, it will give the higher-ups a few more months to inconspicuously sell some stock while the next CFO's still busy shoveling.