I appreciate your desire to find common ground for all sides, but my take is different, as per the attitude in my above comment and the reason it was downmodded as a "troll".
Slashdot's active userbase has undergone an astounding contraction over about the last five years. A significantly larger proportion of it now consists of old-guard geeks looking either for validation, or for a fight, and in both cases they often find it because their fellow old-guard geeks are here looking for the same thing.
So when I declared the ad-hominen of "luddite", I was being serious. A texbook luddite is one opposed to technological innovation beyond their own immediate purview. I've met enough folks like this in my work history to know they're around, and they're as annoying as hell. Take for example the entrenched sysadmin who consistently denies your request to integrate a modern tool because he mistrusts it on principle, and won't even do the research that might lead him to trust it, because what's Best for him is Best for you. His attitude affects the workflow of many other people. And then he comes here and proudly declare his luddite nature, with examples, as though it were a point of pride.
You're right - it's a different mental model. But around here, amongst the luddites, it also gets special treatment. And so, my post gets labeled "Troll", and the parent gets labeled "Insightful", and so it goes.
"its popular to label most Bitcoin users as libertarian/anarchists, but nothing could be further from the truth. At most you have a third of users leaning that direction"
What a strange statement. You might need to examine your understanding of the phrase "nothing could be further from the truth".
Also, why do you assert this fraction is "rapidly decreasing"? Online surveys somewhere? A gut feeling?
That would seem to be an argument in favor of DRM-less software. If the person has that "nugget of moral fiber", then they will make the right ethical decision.
But what if we changed the price from $1000 to $5 instead? And what if the software had a cloud-based component - some database it needed to draw from - and the additional installation resulted in more traffic cost for the software company? Wouldn't the ethical thing to do suddenly be "just pay the five bucks; it's easily less than the gas you save driving to the lab, and it covers their operating costs"?
So the difference is the _perception_ of an ecosystem, then?
That is, we (and by "we" I mean a large majority of the userbase) expect music to have portability because almost all music playback devices are perceived to be one ecosystem, whereas smartphones are perceived to be multiple ecosystems divided by operating system?
Why do people have this perception, though? Isn't it a matter of time before this perception changes?
Back in the day, if you bought Photoshop for the PC, you were expected to buy it again for the Mac, even if you only used one at a time. Now, you "subscribe" to Adobe's software and they treat the platforms interchangeably. If Adobe can do it, why not everyone else? Because cross-platform software development is "too hard" to justify pay-once-play-anywhere?
That's no excuse. It's hard to develop a great modern website as well, but your work is judged to be clearly defective if it doesn't run on almost every device around, regardless of platform. Is it so hard to port Angry Birds from iOS to Android that the user MUST pay twice? No, not in my opinion. Not after all the other transitions I've seen in my 25 years in this industry.
The only real reason this doesn't happen is something else: App stores want their cut.
I assert that the perception of multiple ecosystems for software is going to rapidly disintegrate, and the only resistance will come from app-store middlemen.
Or put another way, it is in the direct interest of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft to make software as easy as possible to license on their own platform while simultaneously making it as hard as possible to move that license to another, and we are all rapidly coming to the point where we will need to fight them, quite hard, for the sake of our own userbase.
So people seem to generally agree that the solution to this industry-versus-piracy problem, with music, is to abandon DRM and instead chase the piracy out of the market by offering something easier to find, easier to get, and easier to play.
I wonder, how does this crowd feel about piracy of software then?
The story of DRM on software is long and twisty, including things like proprietary ROM cartridges, weird disk sectors, and hidden codes printed in paper manuals. These days, no physical media is required at all, so those old methods don't work. It's all encryption-based. This makes it equivalent to what music is now: Infinitely copyable for virtually no cost.
On portable devices, the potential arena for app piracy is gigantic, and there is a thriving piracy sector, but users in general are turning to it less than their PC forebears, and DRM on smartphones has been a huge shot of cash into the arm of the software industry. Coders are more in-demand, and paid more, than ever.
Say you purchased Angry Birds on your iPhone, and now you own an Android device. You have to purchase Angry Birds again. You fully expect your DRM-less music to be interoperable. Why not your apps?
Solution: PodWorks It's a 1.4MB application you can copy onto your iPod. Plug the iPod into your friend's computer, launch the application, and you can ""share"" music by dragging straight out of your playists, or browsing the on-board database. There's even a "recreate in iTunes" button that will make local copies of your selection and do just that. It (PodWorks) hasn't been updated in at least 7 years and it still runs fine!
Actually, they do. Because the measure of "suck" has moved on.
A pile of playlists in a filesystem does not track play counts. It does not automatically re-order when I change my rating of something on the device. Or the genre or artist. A pile of playlists does not do any transcoding, like how I can check a box in iTunes and have all my lossless files transcoded down from my Mac Pro to fit on my phone, while still syncing tag edits, play counts, etc. A pile of playlists is inadequate for a podcast subscription that I may listen to on multiple devices, and keep as an archive in one place but not another. If I want to remove something from my phone temporarily, even if it's in 50 playlists, I uncheck its box in iTunes. Later if I want it back in all 50, I re-check the box.
IF I MOVE A MUSIC FILE ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE SAME DRIVE, INCLUDING RENAMING IT, INCLUDING CHANGING ALL TAG DATA, it is still tracked and accounted for everywhere I've referenced it and still syncs automatically, thanks to the magic of inodes.
If you are managing your playlists directly via the filesystem, you are not some kind of "pro uz3r", you are a luddite with simple needs.
Some would suggest that the instability within Europe during the 1940's was "the result of European colonial powers drawing national borders in such a way to cause instability and invoke inter-racial and inter-religious tension."
Those suggestions, however, did not actually constitute a valid argument for staying out of World War II. Barely relevant, actually. No more relevant here.
I think it's rather smart to try and stop a holocaust anywhere you find it. Don't you?
All the money mentioned by the OP that was directly spent by Google is about the salary, resource, and insurance costs for ONE veteran software engineer.
Here's what happened: A handful of directors got together in some enclave of the overgrown dorm-scape that is Google's HQ, and one of them stood up and said "I'm sick of managing coders all day, I wanna fix the educational system instead!"
And they got a new position created with this very charter, with funding pulled from some other less-protected project, because if the other directors said "no", then he/she could potentially raise a huge stink, bring down a bunch of other pet projects, and unearth enough dead bodies to get a few people fired. Best to say "yes", call it "outreach", and let them have their fun.
Honestly, these projects and this money could have come from any private citizen, and in fact DOES elsewhere on DonorsChoose, but since Google can claim involvement, Google is rattling for press coverage. Just remember that, like everything else Google does, it's funded by money laundered from advertisers. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.
... But your "new singularity" has been tried and abandoned by most cultures. (It's more familiar name is "slavery")
was re: if we ever make a robot that's better at everything than humans, and then fail to recognize its civil rights, we will simply be repeating history. I can quote you some nice scifi books that workshop this premise if you like.
Find me another music player that will automatically transcode selected portions of my library (which is all ripped in lossless format) down to a maximum bitrate on my portable devices, so I can listen in hi-fi at home and still carry everything around with me. Then, when I change a tag or edit a playlist or skip a song on either platform, the changes are synced between the full-quality version and the low-quality version, automatically.
Look in your "iTunes music" folder for that folder called "automatically add to iTunes". Make an alias to it if you wish. It's been there since 2010, by the way.
Man, I have no idea what you want from that company.
Take for example the laptops. Under Big Steve's tenure - which everybody is using as an assumed judgement against Cook - Apple laptops got lighter, much faster, acquired new ports, higher resolution screens, more comfortable sizing, way better battery life, magnetic hinges, laser-drilled microphone ports and power lights, tiny built-in webcams, and a huge raft of software innovation like automatic backups, global search, and... "widgets".
But they were still LAPTOPS.
Cook is replacing a CEO who was a worldwide icon who died at the height of his power. He's doing a damn good job in an insanely challenging position. But if all the stuff I listed above had happened under Cook's watch, you'd probably defecate on it, and point out that Apple was not first-to-market with ANY of those innovations.
Consider what's happened with iPhones during Cook's brief tenure. They've gotten lighter, faster, acquired new ports, more comfortable sizing, better battery life, will soon have higher resolution screens, and this year saw a pretty big raft of software innovation. Sound familiar? Was Apple first-to-market with ANY of it?
Go on, keep griping that it's still A PHONE. Keep comparing them to Android phones, as if those were even a cohesive set of products. Keep repeating tired history.
You seem to want an entirely new product category, that is also wildly successful, and also completely rearranges an industry and becomes a cultural phenomenon. Did I say "want"? No, that's the wrong word. You seem to feel you are entitled to it, and that if Apple doesn't keep delivering these miracles like clockwork, it's a company of has-beens. Get off your high-horse.
Actually, "those Mac Pros" do not contain a 64-bit EFI. The choice was not arbitrary. Apple decided not to deal with the complication of driving a 32-bit EFI with an exclusively 64-bit kernel.
Now, you could still perhaps make the case that since Apple has very deep pockets, they could just throw more engineering time at the problem and do that support anyway. In fact, one dedicated hacker out there managed to create a replacement EFI interface for Mavericks that simply translates most of the vital 64-bit EFI calls to their 32-bit equivalents, allowing the OS to run on a Mac Pro 1.1 with very nearly no problems. (There are some sleep-wake issues with custom configurations for example.) If one hacker can do that, why couldn't Apple do it? He even posted the source code for the tool. I used it myself for about 6 months, until I saved up the 500 bucks to upgrade to a used 5.1 instead.
But again, the choice was not arbitrary. Most of development is testing, and it's not just a 32-bit EFI they would need to test for. They would need to test and debug Mavericks on every variation of the Mac Pro 1.1 with every combination of add-on peripheral, video card, RAM size, etc. Including older versions of the bluetooth module hardware, wifi module hardware, ATA bus, etc. That means more bugs, and more of the core developers' attention diverted from current products.
Plus, Mac Pro users may be the most technologically savvy of their entire userbase, but they are not the tastemakers and evangelists of the OS X platform any more. (I'm pretty sure that role is held by Macbook Air-using college students.) Apple isn't under much pressure to cater to us.
Oh also, you want an editable path bar on the stock OS? Type command-shift-U, then T, then command-O. Enjoy.;)
At least, this is what I saw first hand. The teacher ran a lab full of TEN-YEAR-OLD iMacs that were STILL in regular use, and what she really wanted was for the admins to simply fund REPLACING THE ONES THAT BROKE, with SLIGHTLY BETTER USED iMacs.
Her request was denied and her objections shot down, because some salesman from Google had convinced the department head that what students really needed were bottom-of-the-barrel cheap disposable crippleware netbooks that they could take home, because The Internet or whatever.
The teacher had a standing system with a school IT guy, where all the iMacs were rolled back to a known state every night, and the internet connectivity was heavily regulated. It worked fine - all she wanted was more powerful systems so they could use iMovie without things slowing down.
The Chromebooks will all be destroyed or wear out in a couple of years. Then the school will have to fork over another round of cash to Google due to vendor lock-in. There is no advantage here. You buy cheap hardware, you get cheap hardware. Same story as ever. Chromebooks are a "solution" in search of a problem.
Unregulated app installation is a matter of FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS! A consistent UI experience is ESSENTIAL FOR DEMOCRACY! Samsung is evil! Apple is evil! Google is evil! Google is the hero! Apple is the hero! Google is the underdog! Apple is a monopoly! Google is a monopoly! Samsung is a monopoly! (In apps / search / South Korea) ONE OF THEM IS EVIL AND SHOULD BE DESTROYED! The other(s) should be GLORIFIED!
An apple phone is quite flexible and allows quite a bit of freedom to the user. An Android phone may look cool, but as soon as you think of stuff that you like (automatic sync of your chat history, including inline video and photos, across your tablet, laptop, and phone.) you are toast.
Whatevs, yo. Google Earth is pretty damned mainsteam. I run it in my browser FFS. If it's not by your metric, then it's your metric that's wrong, not the OP.
I was particularly surprised to see closures appear. So far I've only been using them in Javascript and Perl, but my experience has been that they are about 15% added flexibility for about -40% readability. That is, they make it harder to tell what's going on, more than they reduce development time.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate your desire to find common ground for all sides, but my take is different, as per the attitude in my above comment and the reason it was downmodded as a "troll".
Slashdot's active userbase has undergone an astounding contraction over about the last five years. A significantly larger proportion of it now consists of old-guard geeks looking either for validation, or for a fight, and in both cases they often find it because their fellow old-guard geeks are here looking for the same thing.
So when I declared the ad-hominen of "luddite", I was being serious. A texbook luddite is one opposed to technological innovation beyond their own immediate purview. I've met enough folks like this in my work history to know they're around, and they're as annoying as hell. Take for example the entrenched sysadmin who consistently denies your request to integrate a modern tool because he mistrusts it on principle, and won't even do the research that might lead him to trust it, because what's Best for him is Best for you. His attitude affects the workflow of many other people. And then he comes here and proudly declare his luddite nature, with examples, as though it were a point of pride.
You're right - it's a different mental model. But around here, amongst the luddites, it also gets special treatment. And so, my post gets labeled "Troll", and the parent gets labeled "Insightful", and so it goes.
Hmm... So are cipher-punks anarchists? Or did BitCoin attract that astounding percentage of anarchists later for some reason?
"its popular to label most Bitcoin users as libertarian/anarchists, but nothing could be further from the truth. At most you have a third of users leaning that direction"
What a strange statement.
You might need to examine your understanding of the phrase "nothing could be further from the truth".
Also, why do you assert this fraction is "rapidly decreasing"? Online surveys somewhere? A gut feeling?
That would seem to be an argument in favor of DRM-less software. If the person has that "nugget of moral fiber", then they will make the right ethical decision.
But what if we changed the price from $1000 to $5 instead? And what if the software had a cloud-based component - some database it needed to draw from - and the additional installation resulted in more traffic cost for the software company? Wouldn't the ethical thing to do suddenly be "just pay the five bucks; it's easily less than the gas you save driving to the lab, and it covers their operating costs"?
So the difference is the _perception_ of an ecosystem, then?
That is, we (and by "we" I mean a large majority of the userbase) expect music to have portability because almost all music playback devices are perceived to be one ecosystem, whereas smartphones are perceived to be multiple ecosystems divided by operating system?
Why do people have this perception, though? Isn't it a matter of time before this perception changes?
Back in the day, if you bought Photoshop for the PC, you were expected to buy it again for the Mac, even if you only used one at a time. Now, you "subscribe" to Adobe's software and they treat the platforms interchangeably. If Adobe can do it, why not everyone else? Because cross-platform software development is "too hard" to justify pay-once-play-anywhere?
That's no excuse. It's hard to develop a great modern website as well, but your work is judged to be clearly defective if it doesn't run on almost every device around, regardless of platform. Is it so hard to port Angry Birds from iOS to Android that the user MUST pay twice? No, not in my opinion. Not after all the other transitions I've seen in my 25 years in this industry.
The only real reason this doesn't happen is something else: App stores want their cut.
I assert that the perception of multiple ecosystems for software is going to rapidly disintegrate, and the only resistance will come from app-store middlemen.
Or put another way, it is in the direct interest of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft to make software as easy as possible to license on their own platform while simultaneously making it as hard as possible to move that license to another, and we are all rapidly coming to the point where we will need to fight them, quite hard, for the sake of our own userbase.
So people seem to generally agree that the solution to this industry-versus-piracy problem, with music, is to abandon DRM and instead chase the piracy out of the market by offering something easier to find, easier to get, and easier to play.
I wonder, how does this crowd feel about piracy of software then?
The story of DRM on software is long and twisty, including things like proprietary ROM cartridges, weird disk sectors, and hidden codes printed in paper manuals. These days, no physical media is required at all, so those old methods don't work. It's all encryption-based. This makes it equivalent to what music is now: Infinitely copyable for virtually no cost.
On portable devices, the potential arena for app piracy is gigantic, and there is a thriving piracy sector, but users in general are turning to it less than their PC forebears, and DRM on smartphones has been a huge shot of cash into the arm of the software industry. Coders are more in-demand, and paid more, than ever.
Say you purchased Angry Birds on your iPhone, and now you own an Android device. You have to purchase Angry Birds again. You fully expect your DRM-less music to be interoperable. Why not your apps?
Solution: PodWorks
It's a 1.4MB application you can copy onto your iPod. Plug the iPod into your friend's computer, launch the application, and you can ""share"" music by dragging straight out of your playists, or browsing the on-board database. There's even a "recreate in iTunes" button that will make local copies of your selection and do just that.
It (PodWorks) hasn't been updated in at least 7 years and it still runs fine!
Actually, they do. Because the measure of "suck" has moved on.
A pile of playlists in a filesystem does not track play counts.
It does not automatically re-order when I change my rating of something on the device. Or the genre or artist.
A pile of playlists does not do any transcoding, like how I can check a box in iTunes and have all my lossless files transcoded down from my Mac Pro to fit on my phone, while still syncing tag edits, play counts, etc.
A pile of playlists is inadequate for a podcast subscription that I may listen to on multiple devices, and keep as an archive in one place but not another.
If I want to remove something from my phone temporarily, even if it's in 50 playlists, I uncheck its box in iTunes. Later if I want it back in all 50, I re-check the box.
IF I MOVE A MUSIC FILE ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE SAME DRIVE,
INCLUDING RENAMING IT,
INCLUDING CHANGING ALL TAG DATA,
it is still tracked and accounted for everywhere I've referenced it and still syncs automatically, thanks to the magic of inodes.
If you are managing your playlists directly via the filesystem, you are not some kind of "pro uz3r", you are a luddite with simple needs.
Um, okay. That does not appear to have anything to do with what I just said.
Some would suggest that the instability within Europe during the 1940's was "the result of European colonial powers drawing national borders in such a way to cause instability and invoke inter-racial and inter-religious tension."
Those suggestions, however, did not actually constitute a valid argument for staying out of World War II. Barely relevant, actually. No more relevant here.
I think it's rather smart to try and stop a holocaust anywhere you find it. Don't you?
All the money mentioned by the OP that was directly spent by Google is about the salary, resource, and insurance costs for ONE veteran software engineer.
Here's what happened: A handful of directors got together in some enclave of the overgrown dorm-scape that is Google's HQ, and one of them stood up and said "I'm sick of managing coders all day, I wanna fix the educational system instead!"
And they got a new position created with this very charter, with funding pulled from some other less-protected project, because if the other directors said "no", then he/she could potentially raise a huge stink, bring down a bunch of other pet projects, and unearth enough dead bodies to get a few people fired. Best to say "yes", call it "outreach", and let them have their fun.
Honestly, these projects and this money could have come from any private citizen, and in fact DOES elsewhere on DonorsChoose, but since Google can claim involvement, Google is rattling for press coverage. Just remember that, like everything else Google does, it's funded by money laundered from advertisers. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.
... But your "new singularity" has been tried and abandoned by most cultures. (It's more familiar name is "slavery")
was re: if we ever make a robot that's better at everything than humans, and then fail to recognize its civil rights, we will simply be repeating history. I can quote you some nice scifi books that workshop this premise if you like.
Find me another music player that will automatically transcode selected portions of my library (which is all ripped in lossless format) down to a maximum bitrate on my portable devices, so I can listen in hi-fi at home and still carry everything around with me. Then, when I change a tag or edit a playlist or skip a song on either platform, the changes are synced between the full-quality version and the low-quality version, automatically.
Yeah I didn't think so.
Look in your "iTunes music" folder for that folder called "automatically add to iTunes". Make an alias to it if you wish. It's been there since 2010, by the way.
Man, I have no idea what you want from that company.
Take for example the laptops. Under Big Steve's tenure - which everybody is using as an assumed judgement against Cook - Apple laptops got lighter, much faster, acquired new ports, higher resolution screens, more comfortable sizing, way better battery life, magnetic hinges, laser-drilled microphone ports and power lights, tiny built-in webcams, and a huge raft of software innovation like automatic backups, global search, and ... "widgets".
But they were still LAPTOPS.
Cook is replacing a CEO who was a worldwide icon who died at the height of his power. He's doing a damn good job in an insanely challenging position. But if all the stuff I listed above had happened under Cook's watch, you'd probably defecate on it, and point out that Apple was not first-to-market with ANY of those innovations.
Consider what's happened with iPhones during Cook's brief tenure. They've gotten lighter, faster, acquired new ports, more comfortable sizing, better battery life, will soon have higher resolution screens, and this year saw a pretty big raft of software innovation. Sound familiar? Was Apple first-to-market with ANY of it?
Go on, keep griping that it's still A PHONE.
Keep comparing them to Android phones, as if those were even a cohesive set of products. Keep repeating tired history.
You seem to want an entirely new product category, that is also wildly successful, and also completely rearranges an industry and becomes a cultural phenomenon. Did I say "want"? No, that's the wrong word. You seem to feel you are entitled to it, and that if Apple doesn't keep delivering these miracles like clockwork, it's a company of has-beens. Get off your high-horse.
Actually, "those Mac Pros" do not contain a 64-bit EFI. The choice was not arbitrary. Apple decided not to deal with the complication of driving a 32-bit EFI with an exclusively 64-bit kernel.
Now, you could still perhaps make the case that since Apple has very deep pockets, they could just throw more engineering time at the problem and do that support anyway. In fact, one dedicated hacker out there managed to create a replacement EFI interface for Mavericks that simply translates most of the vital 64-bit EFI calls to their 32-bit equivalents, allowing the OS to run on a Mac Pro 1.1 with very nearly no problems. (There are some sleep-wake issues with custom configurations for example.) If one hacker can do that, why couldn't Apple do it? He even posted the source code for the tool. I used it myself for about 6 months, until I saved up the 500 bucks to upgrade to a used 5.1 instead.
But again, the choice was not arbitrary. Most of development is testing, and it's not just a 32-bit EFI they would need to test for. They would need to test and debug Mavericks on every variation of the Mac Pro 1.1 with every combination of add-on peripheral, video card, RAM size, etc. Including older versions of the bluetooth module hardware, wifi module hardware, ATA bus, etc. That means more bugs, and more of the core developers' attention diverted from current products.
Plus, Mac Pro users may be the most technologically savvy of their entire userbase, but they are not the tastemakers and evangelists of the OS X platform any more. (I'm pretty sure that role is held by Macbook Air-using college students.) Apple isn't under much pressure to cater to us.
Oh also, you want an editable path bar on the stock OS? Type command-shift-U, then T, then command-O. Enjoy. ;)
At least, this is what I saw first hand. The teacher ran a lab full of TEN-YEAR-OLD iMacs that were STILL in regular use, and what she really wanted was for the admins to simply fund REPLACING THE ONES THAT BROKE, with SLIGHTLY BETTER USED iMacs.
Her request was denied and her objections shot down, because some salesman from Google had convinced the department head that what students really needed were bottom-of-the-barrel cheap disposable crippleware netbooks that they could take home, because The Internet or whatever.
The teacher had a standing system with a school IT guy, where all the iMacs were rolled back to a known state every night, and the internet connectivity was heavily regulated. It worked fine - all she wanted was more powerful systems so they could use iMovie without things slowing down.
The Chromebooks will all be destroyed or wear out in a couple of years. Then the school will have to fork over another round of cash to Google due to vendor lock-in. There is no advantage here. You buy cheap hardware, you get cheap hardware. Same story as ever. Chromebooks are a "solution" in search of a problem.
Unregulated app installation is a matter of FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS! A consistent UI experience is ESSENTIAL FOR DEMOCRACY! Samsung is evil! Apple is evil! Google is evil! Google is the hero! Apple is the hero! Google is the underdog! Apple is a monopoly! Google is a monopoly! Samsung is a monopoly! (In apps / search / South Korea) ONE OF THEM IS EVIL AND SHOULD BE DESTROYED! The other(s) should be GLORIFIED!
P.s. has anyone seen my schizophrenia meds?
An apple phone is quite flexible and allows quite a bit of freedom to the user. An Android phone may look cool, but as soon as you think of stuff that you like (automatic sync of your chat history, including inline video and photos, across your tablet, laptop, and phone.) you are toast.
But us geeks LIKE jihad! It makes us feel important! Like our opinion of which F&%# PHONE a person buys is somehow the morally superior one!
Don't take that from us!!!!
What would we do with all this technical knowledge!
I didn't know jQuery provided those. Thank you!
Whatevs, yo. Google Earth is pretty damned mainsteam. I run it in my browser FFS. If it's not by your metric, then it's your metric that's wrong, not the OP.
I was particularly surprised to see closures appear. So far I've only been using them in Javascript and Perl, but my experience has been that they are about 15% added flexibility for about -40% readability. That is, they make it harder to tell what's going on, more than they reduce development time.
What a pathetic individual.
Actually, parking does. And maintenance goes way down. And insurance too, if you file your paperwork properly. And registration is what - ten bucks? :P