Your argument is romantic but it doesn't reflect reality. Real businesses want something that works and works as is expected for a long time. If they have to support or do custom programming, it has to be a predictable environment. That's Marcus' point. The larger world needs consistency. You can argue all you want about how diversity is good for the current Linux user base but it has no bearing on the rest of the 98% of computer users. For argument sake, would Linux have more change of competing with Windows if this happened?:
1. Standardize on a GUI
2. Standardize on an upgrade system
3. Standardize on the low-level I/O stuff
4. Provide a consistent programming environment/API
5. Make all of the above near as good or better than Windows
I think anyone can see that would guarantee a very high probability of success against Microsoft. Why not work towards something that is quite sure to succeed? As Marcus says, the only reason not to is ego.
The mini is the repository of everything and it gets beamed to the Airport Express. It already works nicely with music. Apple is going to skip the whole DVR in the living room which will always be a commodity and keep it all coming off the PC wherever and however you want. Brilliantly efficient, simple, and they control the front end of the media delivery. No one is ever going to make money with something like TIVO.
Fines are a deterrent to bad behaviour. Sure, the "average" nuclear accident might be small and non-lethal, but if the fines aren't large, there's no incentive to keep standards high to prevent a huge accident. If a bad nuclear accident was to happen, the total cost on the environment and human lives would be far greater than what one TV or Radio show was worth or could affect.
I was trading files with my friends with a 1200 baud modem and a Mac SE/30 back in '89. That doesn't count. Certainly the "first image" would have had to been linked off a page for it to qualify. Where's the page?
You know what, the simple fact is that nowadays, there are thousands upon thousands of people who have the technical knowledge to do everything you want. The bottom line is that they're all going to feed you a line of crap and you're going to get as many answers as people you consider. I think you should treat it the same as if you were trying to find a GP. Just use your instinct.
1. Do you feel comfortable with the consultant?
2. Does the person seem to understand your goals and character of your organization?
3. Does the person try to oversell a particular service as opposed to offering a reasonable explanation and comparison of the options at hand?
4. Do you feel assured the person can provide the variety of needed services and where they can't, can they delegate to an appropriate specialist?
5. Does the person show a commitment to their job both now and in the past.
You can go and poll references from past jobs but the reality is that most clients don't know what a good job is, their working style is probably totally different than yours and in most cases the job was compromised by time, money, poor taste or poor business decisions. Until you meet with the consultant face to face you never really know.
I've had hundreds of jobs as a designer and I can say that the jobs that turned out well were the ones where there was a mutual respect and a minimum of compromises from both sides. If you're fighting all the time and have different styles of working it doesn't matter if you agree on the technology or the implementation or anything- the end result will suck.
This has probably already been devised but this could work via a kind of key where the system on the other end would only know the individual key pertaining to your computer. The data would be read out, encoded and stored on the remote computer encoded. If you assigned a unique key, revolving hardware keys and perhaps an optional user password there would simply be so many varieties of encoding that it would be hard to break all of them for every person's info. Even if the keys were simpler the time to crack the millions of simple keys would certainly slow or make ineffective the stealing many peoples' information.
Sony has always made junk, they've just make a little better junk than everyone else. Essentially they provide a product that is 10%-20% better sounding or better looking or better to use than a competitor yet the cost of components or quality is the same or lower. After a while (or right away) the thing just falls apart. I guess it's a tough trade off. Would you rather a product that performs like crap but lasts a long time, or something that works well and lasts a little? Sony is the latter.
You hit the nail on the head. Mac users want consistency and they'll pay for a commercial product just for that. Eventually though, if OpenOffice gets popular enough and becomes a standard in itself, Apple will step in and do an Aqua port so that its customers give their money to Apple instead of Microsoft. For the time being the gains just don't outweigh the risks for Apple or for their customers so they're not going to do it but in time it will have value.
Who really thinks that iWork is only about word processing and presentations... it's just the beginning of Gen 2 of their office suite.
The iPod is really nothing other than a distribution format. Did anyone sue Sony/Phillips because they invented the Compact Disc and another competing format couldn't get in without being a licensee? Even if Apple had 100% of the market someone could invent another music storage device that was proprietary and better and they could recapture the market. Same goes for the format itself really. If Microsoft brought out Windows Media and it was 10 times better than AAC and the price was the same or lower, wouldn't there be room for fair competition?
Basically it's like suing a CD company because your company makes LPs or tapes.
it seems very likely that the 21st century will simply disappear from history
I don't have any doubt that most all of the media created in the 20th century will survive, it will just be of such a compromised nature as to kill most or all of the significance. As many people have pointed out, there will still be MP3s floating around and lots of bad VHS copies of TV shows but all of the glorious masters will be lost.
It will be like reading every second page of a Shakespearean play. You still get the idea but all the nuance is gone. To go one step further, nuances are what inspire a new generation's creations.
Now that there are so many digital recording formats, with various numbers of tracks, it is essentially impossible to create legacy recordings. Many programs we use today won't even run in 5 years let alone 100 and all we will have is basic 2 track mixdown masters of many records.
With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus. Better yet, often times the recording equipment was better than the tape playback so as time went on you could get better sound off the same tape because technology had advanced. Digital is locked in stone forever, never to reveal any improvements. Even as a crude 2nd step backup there is the potential to bounce your multi-track masters to multi-track tape for preservation.
Steve Albini, one of the world's best recording engineers has a good lecture about the importance of tape here
Essentially you're saying that no one should be considered a reputable source because no one can ever agree with someone else about something being factual. That's complete bullshit. The reality is that in most cases the FACTS are relatively easy to agree on and the presentation is only a little more difficult. Considering this is a repository of known information it seems rather nihilistic to say that nothing has an absoluteness or basis in truth.
Also, experts are rare. Even if you get 5 or 10 fighting over something that's still magnitudes more productive than having millions of idiots fighting. Experts have a tendency to be considerate of opposing views and are usually rational enough to accept a different opinion if it is proven superior to theirs.
Lastly, in the absence of a perfect world of having one grand expert in every topic, you can just have a number of omnipotent Wiki editors who have good sense. Much like Cowboy Neal, there are many people who are not experts in everything but are very good JUDGES of experts. It goes a long way to putting the odds with the right facts and not just the popular facts.
If you can have a solution that fulfills their need for open contribution AND society's need for milestones of knowledge, why fight it? It kind of flies in the face of their open philosophy to not let the device itself change.
Wikipedia has the right basic structure but they need a rotating team of pro Guest Editors to go through and fact-check and then "lock" articles, or portions of articles. I'm sure they could easily add a section entitled "Are you and Expert" and many experts would volunteer their time to look at specific sections.
14 interviews is unnecessary
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyone that takes 14 times to figure out if an employee is 1. suitable and 2. better than the other candidates is wasting a lot of business resources. If you can't tell on the first interview through half an hour of specific questions you're not a great hiring manager. It may take 2 or 3 follow-ups to address specific hypothetical job-related questions but that's it. Anything more and it's not a job interview but a pre-work endurance test. Personally, I would find it insulting to have to sit through that kind of process, especially if I was qualified.
I have a friend who applied at Chapters and was told up front that it was going to be a 5 interview process over 2 months. This was for a freakin' $7 an hour stock job. Even though she was more than qualified and had already accepted the lesser reality of working a shitty retail job, by the 3rd call back she told them to shove it. And don't say that's what the interview is designed to screen out. She was honest and hardworking and would have outperformed any of the "me too" candidates.
I've heard people say things like this before... oh, you just wait, when somebody invents a fantabulous operating system and gives it away for free, THEN Microsoft will come tumbling down. Just another one of those craaaazy-talkers.
So one group made 1.5 million from switching UPCs. That's a drop in the ocean compared to Walmart's overall sales. Think of what it would cost to hire employees who cared, just to catch the rare occurrence of something like this. Totally a no brainer, you just keep doing what you're doing.
I've had the same experiences with multi-tasking. If you do it too much you just get drained and if you do it when you're drained, nothing gets done well or at all. The key is to switch off between focussed-tasks and multi-tasking. I think working on focussed tasks 75% of the time with 25% multitasking is a very good balance. The focussed-tasks get done well and there's a great sense of accomplishment. In crunch times, or to simply keep the mind out of tunnel vision, multitasking can be very invigorating. Doing only one method makes for poor mental health.
1. Apple might decide to make less money and go for some market share. At worst they'll break even, at best they will win a lot of converts. Cheap is good for Apple.
2. Even if the $500 Mac is 1.25GHz, that's more than enough for almost everybody. I can still run the newest OS X and Photoshop on my PB G4 400mhz with 384MB of RAM. I do design work on this thing. It's not fast, but it's still plenty POWERFUL.
3. There's plenty to differentiate between Apple's product lines already. Even between a $500 headless Mac and the eMac, the big differentiation is THE FORM FACTOR. Believe it or not, most people who buy the eMac actually like having it all-in-one and will still buy it even if it costs more. Schools are the big one here.
4. Small PCs are big now. People are putting PCs in places that they never went before, the kitchen, the bedroom, installations, on top of the TV. Small is a growing niche and it will sell on this alone.
5. Go fanless and you never go back. Silent computing is the biggest trend to come. Everyone I know who bought a fanless iMac or nearly fanless laptop has sworn to never buy a computer with a fan again.
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Your argument is romantic but it doesn't reflect reality. Real businesses want something that works and works as is expected for a long time. If they have to support or do custom programming, it has to be a predictable environment. That's Marcus' point. The larger world needs consistency. You can argue all you want about how diversity is good for the current Linux user base but it has no bearing on the rest of the 98% of computer users. For argument sake, would Linux have more change of competing with Windows if this happened?:
1. Standardize on a GUI 2. Standardize on an upgrade system 3. Standardize on the low-level I/O stuff 4. Provide a consistent programming environment/API 5. Make all of the above near as good or better than Windows
I think anyone can see that would guarantee a very high probability of success against Microsoft. Why not work towards something that is quite sure to succeed? As Marcus says, the only reason not to is ego.
The mini is the repository of everything and it gets beamed to the Airport Express. It already works nicely with music. Apple is going to skip the whole DVR in the living room which will always be a commodity and keep it all coming off the PC wherever and however you want. Brilliantly efficient, simple, and they control the front end of the media delivery. No one is ever going to make money with something like TIVO.
Fines are a deterrent to bad behaviour. Sure, the "average" nuclear accident might be small and non-lethal, but if the fines aren't large, there's no incentive to keep standards high to prevent a huge accident. If a bad nuclear accident was to happen, the total cost on the environment and human lives would be far greater than what one TV or Radio show was worth or could affect.
I was trading files with my friends with a 1200 baud modem and a Mac SE/30 back in '89. That doesn't count. Certainly the "first image" would have had to been linked off a page for it to qualify. Where's the page?
You know what, the simple fact is that nowadays, there are thousands upon thousands of people who have the technical knowledge to do everything you want. The bottom line is that they're all going to feed you a line of crap and you're going to get as many answers as people you consider. I think you should treat it the same as if you were trying to find a GP. Just use your instinct.
1. Do you feel comfortable with the consultant?
2. Does the person seem to understand your goals and character of your organization?
3. Does the person try to oversell a particular service as opposed to offering a reasonable explanation and comparison of the options at hand?
4. Do you feel assured the person can provide the variety of needed services and where they can't, can they delegate to an appropriate specialist?
5. Does the person show a commitment to their job both now and in the past.
You can go and poll references from past jobs but the reality is that most clients don't know what a good job is, their working style is probably totally different than yours and in most cases the job was compromised by time, money, poor taste or poor business decisions. Until you meet with the consultant face to face you never really know.
I've had hundreds of jobs as a designer and I can say that the jobs that turned out well were the ones where there was a mutual respect and a minimum of compromises from both sides. If you're fighting all the time and have different styles of working it doesn't matter if you agree on the technology or the implementation or anything- the end result will suck.
The storyboard is probably better edited and narrated than the movie! I doubt Lucas could have distilled to such a nice balanced story.
This has probably already been devised but this could work via a kind of key where the system on the other end would only know the individual key pertaining to your computer. The data would be read out, encoded and stored on the remote computer encoded. If you assigned a unique key, revolving hardware keys and perhaps an optional user password there would simply be so many varieties of encoding that it would be hard to break all of them for every person's info. Even if the keys were simpler the time to crack the millions of simple keys would certainly slow or make ineffective the stealing many peoples' information.
Sony has always made junk, they've just make a little better junk than everyone else. Essentially they provide a product that is 10%-20% better sounding or better looking or better to use than a competitor yet the cost of components or quality is the same or lower. After a while (or right away) the thing just falls apart. I guess it's a tough trade off. Would you rather a product that performs like crap but lasts a long time, or something that works well and lasts a little? Sony is the latter.
You hit the nail on the head. Mac users want consistency and they'll pay for a commercial product just for that. Eventually though, if OpenOffice gets popular enough and becomes a standard in itself, Apple will step in and do an Aqua port so that its customers give their money to Apple instead of Microsoft. For the time being the gains just don't outweigh the risks for Apple or for their customers so they're not going to do it but in time it will have value.
Who really thinks that iWork is only about word processing and presentations... it's just the beginning of Gen 2 of their office suite.
Next to conan, he looks like a 12 year old kid.
The iPod is really nothing other than a distribution format. Did anyone sue Sony/Phillips because they invented the Compact Disc and another competing format couldn't get in without being a licensee? Even if Apple had 100% of the market someone could invent another music storage device that was proprietary and better and they could recapture the market. Same goes for the format itself really. If Microsoft brought out Windows Media and it was 10 times better than AAC and the price was the same or lower, wouldn't there be room for fair competition?
Basically it's like suing a CD company because your company makes LPs or tapes.
I think he's suffering from delusions of grandeur.
it seems very likely that the 21st century will simply disappear from history
I don't have any doubt that most all of the media created in the 20th century will survive, it will just be of such a compromised nature as to kill most or all of the significance. As many people have pointed out, there will still be MP3s floating around and lots of bad VHS copies of TV shows but all of the glorious masters will be lost.
It will be like reading every second page of a Shakespearean play. You still get the idea but all the nuance is gone. To go one step further, nuances are what inspire a new generation's creations.
Now that there are so many digital recording formats, with various numbers of tracks, it is essentially impossible to create legacy recordings. Many programs we use today won't even run in 5 years let alone 100 and all we will have is basic 2 track mixdown masters of many records.
With tape you could use whatever you wanted to record a record, it all got put to the same tape and in most cases the tape lasted a very long time, 50 years plus. Better yet, often times the recording equipment was better than the tape playback so as time went on you could get better sound off the same tape because technology had advanced. Digital is locked in stone forever, never to reveal any improvements. Even as a crude 2nd step backup there is the potential to bounce your multi-track masters to multi-track tape for preservation.
Steve Albini, one of the world's best recording engineers has a good lecture about the importance of tape here
Essentially you're saying that no one should be considered a reputable source because no one can ever agree with someone else about something being factual. That's complete bullshit. The reality is that in most cases the FACTS are relatively easy to agree on and the presentation is only a little more difficult. Considering this is a repository of known information it seems rather nihilistic to say that nothing has an absoluteness or basis in truth.
Also, experts are rare. Even if you get 5 or 10 fighting over something that's still magnitudes more productive than having millions of idiots fighting. Experts have a tendency to be considerate of opposing views and are usually rational enough to accept a different opinion if it is proven superior to theirs.
Lastly, in the absence of a perfect world of having one grand expert in every topic, you can just have a number of omnipotent Wiki editors who have good sense. Much like Cowboy Neal, there are many people who are not experts in everything but are very good JUDGES of experts. It goes a long way to putting the odds with the right facts and not just the popular facts.
This is the unfortunate reality outside of the glitzy Google microcosm.
If you can have a solution that fulfills their need for open contribution AND society's need for milestones of knowledge, why fight it? It kind of flies in the face of their open philosophy to not let the device itself change.
Just have 2 versions of every article - Evolving and Edited. People could toggle between the two depending on their preference.
Wikipedia has the right basic structure but they need a rotating team of pro Guest Editors to go through and fact-check and then "lock" articles, or portions of articles. I'm sure they could easily add a section entitled "Are you and Expert" and many experts would volunteer their time to look at specific sections.
Anyone that takes 14 times to figure out if an employee is 1. suitable and 2. better than the other candidates is wasting a lot of business resources. If you can't tell on the first interview through half an hour of specific questions you're not a great hiring manager. It may take 2 or 3 follow-ups to address specific hypothetical job-related questions but that's it. Anything more and it's not a job interview but a pre-work endurance test. Personally, I would find it insulting to have to sit through that kind of process, especially if I was qualified.
I have a friend who applied at Chapters and was told up front that it was going to be a 5 interview process over 2 months. This was for a freakin' $7 an hour stock job. Even though she was more than qualified and had already accepted the lesser reality of working a shitty retail job, by the 3rd call back she told them to shove it. And don't say that's what the interview is designed to screen out. She was honest and hardworking and would have outperformed any of the "me too" candidates.
I've heard people say things like this before... oh, you just wait, when somebody invents a fantabulous operating system and gives it away for free, THEN Microsoft will come tumbling down. Just another one of those craaaazy-talkers.
You could just put some raised bumps on the stickers so that a new one wouldn't stick nicely, or would easily be caught by "feel".
So one group made 1.5 million from switching UPCs. That's a drop in the ocean compared to Walmart's overall sales. Think of what it would cost to hire employees who cared, just to catch the rare occurrence of something like this. Totally a no brainer, you just keep doing what you're doing.
I've had the same experiences with multi-tasking. If you do it too much you just get drained and if you do it when you're drained, nothing gets done well or at all. The key is to switch off between focussed-tasks and multi-tasking. I think working on focussed tasks 75% of the time with 25% multitasking is a very good balance. The focussed-tasks get done well and there's a great sense of accomplishment. In crunch times, or to simply keep the mind out of tunnel vision, multitasking can be very invigorating. Doing only one method makes for poor mental health.
1. Apple might decide to make less money and go for some market share. At worst they'll break even, at best they will win a lot of converts. Cheap is good for Apple. 2. Even if the $500 Mac is 1.25GHz, that's more than enough for almost everybody. I can still run the newest OS X and Photoshop on my PB G4 400mhz with 384MB of RAM. I do design work on this thing. It's not fast, but it's still plenty POWERFUL. 3. There's plenty to differentiate between Apple's product lines already. Even between a $500 headless Mac and the eMac, the big differentiation is THE FORM FACTOR. Believe it or not, most people who buy the eMac actually like having it all-in-one and will still buy it even if it costs more. Schools are the big one here. 4. Small PCs are big now. People are putting PCs in places that they never went before, the kitchen, the bedroom, installations, on top of the TV. Small is a growing niche and it will sell on this alone. 5. Go fanless and you never go back. Silent computing is the biggest trend to come. Everyone I know who bought a fanless iMac or nearly fanless laptop has sworn to never buy a computer with a fan again.