The key question is this: are there network effects? That's really all that matters with monopolies with computing and internet. If 1 company controlled 95% of the internet chocolate market (hypothetically), it doesn't matter. You can still use one of the 5%, and new entrants can arrive
When MS was at 95% market share, I would say that we were very close to having network effects. But at 80%, they've disappeared. Companies building sites HAVE to support both browsers, and they're not going to have 2 code bases, so Microsoft isn't going to be able to slip in binary blobs for new features that only their servers deliver. The only exception may be Silverlight, and frankly, with Flash so well established and things like AJAX, no-one is using it.
The worst company out there right now is eBay, because it has network effects. If you want to sell, you have to use them because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go there because that's where the sellers are. They've basically forced people on there to use CrapPal, and treated sellers like shit. I hope that they go too far and Amazon Marketplace gets a bit of a break with regards to this.
Most "environmental" projects are designed to help political friends.
You need one thing, and one thing only in terms of pollution, and that is to apply a tax on fuel. That's it. No pork barrel windfarm projects, no throwing money at car companies. Tax pollution and let the market work it out.
It *is* good economics. Maybe it does not lend an astonishing improvement in fleet efficiency but it does spark car sales.
Which is not good economics. It may be good for the car industry, but it will lead to a cost elsewhere. It means that a non-driver will be subsidising the purchase for a driver, so they now won't be able to go and buy an extra latte, putting a Starbucks barista or two out of work.
The correct economic solution to pollution is to apply a Pigovian tax to fuel, and let the market sort things out from there.
The question is, how much did Steve jobs have to do with that? Obviously, the same hardware engineers and programmers are still working at Apple. How much did Jobs need to persuade the board of Apple to put the time into being innovative rather than pursue more short-term gains that would be good for the quarterly results? I don't know. I do know that at least one board member, Al Gore, does have the vision and the patience for long-term gains.
I recently attended a conference where Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research spoke about Jonathan Ive, gave Ive a load of credit for being a very good designer, but then pointed out that Ive had been at Apple for a few years before Jobs arrived. That it took Jobs leadership to see the importance of industrial design and push that forward.
I've also personally seen the impact of new IT directors or CEOs arriving into a company. Within a year or 2, a new CEO can either transform a company or set them on the path to destruction. Assholes frequently hire other assholes, and many people just fall into line with what those assholes want. Good, innovative people leave and go find better jobs doing something more creative.
Maybe Jobs has a great successor. It's entirely possible. But it can take a long time to find out.
I remember when we first got Word at work (long time ago) sitting down and reading things about Styles, numbering and all that. I was working with people doing technical documents who were manually numbering, and I couldn't convince them to learn it, despite all the time they were wasting adjusting numbering.
There was an experiment carried out on the Should I Worry About TV show, where they switched on mobile phone masts for a week and then off, and asked people to record their health. They told them a lie - that in week 1, the masts were on, and in week 2, they were off. They were actually the other way around, and the reports of people's health suggested that they were sicker when the masts were off.
The problem is that non-vaccination doesn't just affect the children of idiot parents. There are some children who can't have the vaccine because of allergies.
This wasn't a problem in the past because the level of vaccination was so high that there was herd immunity. The virus couldn't spread because the odds of someone with measles passing it on to someone else, then on to someone else and so on were incredibly low.
Personally, I'd tell parents that they can't attend state school without a vaccine certificate. You either have a measles jab, or you homeschool them.
The funny thing was that even 10 years ago, I was telling people that speech wasn't going to happen. Had speech arrived in the early 90s in a very usable form before the growth of home PCs, we may have seen it as the dominant computer interface for home users (maybe). But by the time it had evolved, so many people were using Windows, mice and keyboards that we had adapted to that interface.
The problem is that the average person does NOT operate that way. They might by the latest Harry Potter book... and no other book that year. The same with music. The same with movies.
Not sure about that. Most people watch far more movies and hear more new music than read novels. If you look at the movie charts, the biggest films are, at least, quite good. Almost all the worst critical turkeys are also financial bombs. But with books, the big hits are rarely critical successes.
People generally know a good movie because they get exposed to so much choice, but they don't know a good book, because they only read a small number of books.
The main problem is that the term limits have gone beyond "public interest". We've got some artists in the UK who want the copyright on their recordings (rather than composition) extended past 50 years. Is there any public interest in this? No. If the purpose of copyright is encouraging creativity, retro-extending the term doesn't do this at all. The works were created before it.
The term limits should not be about making artists richer, they should be set at a level at which artists create work. One problem with copyright terms as they are is that they lock up our cultural history. No-one can adapt a Beatles song without paying the rights holders.
"Upon a proper challenge, the copyright should expire after a few years if they are failing to actually print or offer the copyrighted material for sale. "
At which point, every book gets published at a price which would allow the publisher to pay for a print run of 1 (and make a profit).
What's happening with books is no different to what happened with records in the past where they got "deleted". If demand is too low, holding stock costs a lot of money and the costs of the runs to produce the records for the demand gets so high that it becomes uneconomic.
That depends really... how efficient was it having those extra 30,000 vehicles vs not?
The point of congestion zones is that by reducing vehicles, those that remain are more efficient, and this improves prosperity.
But if the roads can cope with the traffic to the point that it's actually more economic to have more vehicles, then you shouldn't have a congestion charge.
My own suspicion is that the western extension was just a tax take. So, the London council got a load of cash, regardless of the impact on economic activity.
You want to actually read some news on studies on these things.
There is no evidence that it increases participation.
At best, tourism is slightly improved while it's on, but it also has an effect of offsetting tourists who might have come (Athens saw this). It has little long term tourism impact (NSW found this this).
With regards to redevelopment... sure. But actually develop the area if that's your intention. What are the people of Stratford going to do with a velodrome or a volleyball centre? My estimate is that there's around £500mn of benefits - things that will actually benefit the people of Stratford out of a total of £10bn being spent.
As for the NHS. Well, yes, it pisses money away, but that doesn't justify this either.
Does it really matter? You can only buy the iPhone on 1 network in the UK, and only buy the G1 on 1 network in the UK. There's no way of having a different experience.
haha. I did that to my Speccy too. Learnt to switch the keys after that.
It's funny how many speccy games would be in my list, and I don't think it's just nostalgia. The restrictions of the hardware and that film companies hadn't caught on to licensing meant that people had to innovate with gameplay.
I'd add 3d Monster Maze and also the Scrabble on the Speccy (which seemed to use some clever compression to squeeze as many words as they did into 48k).
And as such, are another reason why paper ballots are best. People should have confidence in the voting and if people think there's corruption going on (even if it's simply callibration), it's bad for democracy.
Just sits there doing it's job, warning me when there's a virus. Never upsets other software, never prompts me to tell me that I don't have some other product of theirs like a firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
The key question is this: are there network effects? That's really all that matters with monopolies with computing and internet. If 1 company controlled 95% of the internet chocolate market (hypothetically), it doesn't matter. You can still use one of the 5%, and new entrants can arrive
When MS was at 95% market share, I would say that we were very close to having network effects. But at 80%, they've disappeared. Companies building sites HAVE to support both browsers, and they're not going to have 2 code bases, so Microsoft isn't going to be able to slip in binary blobs for new features that only their servers deliver. The only exception may be Silverlight, and frankly, with Flash so well established and things like AJAX, no-one is using it.
The worst company out there right now is eBay, because it has network effects. If you want to sell, you have to use them because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go there because that's where the sellers are. They've basically forced people on there to use CrapPal, and treated sellers like shit. I hope that they go too far and Amazon Marketplace gets a bit of a break with regards to this.
What? Who said I supported any bail outs?
So, you can see where billions of dollars are being spent on failing car companies. Not that you can do much about it for 4 years.
Most "environmental" projects are designed to help political friends.
You need one thing, and one thing only in terms of pollution, and that is to apply a tax on fuel. That's it. No pork barrel windfarm projects, no throwing money at car companies. Tax pollution and let the market work it out.
It *is* good economics. Maybe it does not lend an astonishing improvement in fleet efficiency but it does spark car sales.
Which is not good economics. It may be good for the car industry, but it will lead to a cost elsewhere. It means that a non-driver will be subsidising the purchase for a driver, so they now won't be able to go and buy an extra latte, putting a Starbucks barista or two out of work.
The correct economic solution to pollution is to apply a Pigovian tax to fuel, and let the market sort things out from there.
The question is, how much did Steve jobs have to do with that? Obviously, the same hardware engineers and programmers are still working at Apple. How much did Jobs need to persuade the board of Apple to put the time into being innovative rather than pursue more short-term gains that would be good for the quarterly results? I don't know. I do know that at least one board member, Al Gore, does have the vision and the patience for long-term gains.
I recently attended a conference where Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research spoke about Jonathan Ive, gave Ive a load of credit for being a very good designer, but then pointed out that Ive had been at Apple for a few years before Jobs arrived. That it took Jobs leadership to see the importance of industrial design and push that forward.
I've also personally seen the impact of new IT directors or CEOs arriving into a company. Within a year or 2, a new CEO can either transform a company or set them on the path to destruction. Assholes frequently hire other assholes, and many people just fall into line with what those assholes want. Good, innovative people leave and go find better jobs doing something more creative.
Maybe Jobs has a great successor. It's entirely possible. But it can take a long time to find out.
I remember when we first got Word at work (long time ago) sitting down and reading things about Styles, numbering and all that. I was working with people doing technical documents who were manually numbering, and I couldn't convince them to learn it, despite all the time they were wasting adjusting numbering.
Yeah? What show was that?
There was an experiment carried out on the Should I Worry About TV show, where they switched on mobile phone masts for a week and then off, and asked people to record their health. They told them a lie - that in week 1, the masts were on, and in week 2, they were off. They were actually the other way around, and the reports of people's health suggested that they were sicker when the masts were off.
The whole thing is psychological.
This wasn't a problem in the past because the level of vaccination was so high that there was herd immunity. The virus couldn't spread because the odds of someone with measles passing it on to someone else, then on to someone else and so on were incredibly low.
Personally, I'd tell parents that they can't attend state school without a vaccine certificate. You either have a measles jab, or you homeschool them.
The funny thing was that even 10 years ago, I was telling people that speech wasn't going to happen. Had speech arrived in the early 90s in a very usable form before the growth of home PCs, we may have seen it as the dominant computer interface for home users (maybe). But by the time it had evolved, so many people were using Windows, mice and keyboards that we had adapted to that interface.
The problem is that the average person does NOT operate that way. They might by the latest Harry Potter book ... and no other book that year. The same with music. The same with movies.
Not sure about that. Most people watch far more movies and hear more new music than read novels. If you look at the movie charts, the biggest films are, at least, quite good. Almost all the worst critical turkeys are also financial bombs. But with books, the big hits are rarely critical successes.
People generally know a good movie because they get exposed to so much choice, but they don't know a good book, because they only read a small number of books.
The main problem is that the term limits have gone beyond "public interest". We've got some artists in the UK who want the copyright on their recordings (rather than composition) extended past 50 years. Is there any public interest in this? No. If the purpose of copyright is encouraging creativity, retro-extending the term doesn't do this at all. The works were created before it.
The term limits should not be about making artists richer, they should be set at a level at which artists create work. One problem with copyright terms as they are is that they lock up our cultural history. No-one can adapt a Beatles song without paying the rights holders.
"Upon a proper challenge, the copyright should expire after a few years if they are failing to actually print or offer the copyrighted material for sale. "
At which point, every book gets published at a price which would allow the publisher to pay for a print run of 1 (and make a profit).
What's happening with books is no different to what happened with records in the past where they got "deleted". If demand is too low, holding stock costs a lot of money and the costs of the runs to produce the records for the demand gets so high that it becomes uneconomic.
That depends really... how efficient was it having those extra 30,000 vehicles vs not?
The point of congestion zones is that by reducing vehicles, those that remain are more efficient, and this improves prosperity.
But if the roads can cope with the traffic to the point that it's actually more economic to have more vehicles, then you shouldn't have a congestion charge.
My own suspicion is that the western extension was just a tax take. So, the London council got a load of cash, regardless of the impact on economic activity.
There is no evidence that it increases participation.
At best, tourism is slightly improved while it's on, but it also has an effect of offsetting tourists who might have come (Athens saw this). It has little long term tourism impact (NSW found this this).
With regards to redevelopment... sure. But actually develop the area if that's your intention. What are the people of Stratford going to do with a velodrome or a volleyball centre? My estimate is that there's around £500mn of benefits - things that will actually benefit the people of Stratford out of a total of £10bn being spent.
As for the NHS. Well, yes, it pisses money away, but that doesn't justify this either.
Quite. I want to be able to write emails or text messages quicker than I can now. I've tried the iPhone and instantly hated the touch keyboard.
Some people may be happy to self-justify how good the iPhone is to be part of the herd/have a pretty phone, but I won't.
Does it really matter? You can only buy the iPhone on 1 network in the UK, and only buy the G1 on 1 network in the UK. There's no way of having a different experience.
Here's your opportunity to ignore Occam's Razor and instead blame everything else.
Ooops: For 3d monster maze read 3d Ant Attack
haha. I did that to my Speccy too. Learnt to switch the keys after that.
It's funny how many speccy games would be in my list, and I don't think it's just nostalgia. The restrictions of the hardware and that film companies hadn't caught on to licensing meant that people had to innovate with gameplay.
I'd add 3d Monster Maze and also the Scrabble on the Speccy (which seemed to use some clever compression to squeeze as many words as they did into 48k).
Well, yes. We know that you can just switch it internally, so it's probably an issue more about incompetence.
Even so, it's bad for democracy. Someone reading this article might think about not voting ("because it's rigged").
And as such, are another reason why paper ballots are best. People should have confidence in the voting and if people think there's corruption going on (even if it's simply callibration), it's bad for democracy.
Yes, I realised that moments after I posted it.
For me, it's worth the money (something like £20 a year).
Just sits there doing it's job, warning me when there's a virus. Never upsets other software, never prompts me to tell me that I don't have some other product of theirs like a firewall.