1440x960 is good enough for me on a 15" - close enough to what I'm used to on my old Dell laptop (14" 1400x1050). If I could just jump to, say, 1280x1024 on the 12"... Of course, there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't offer two different screens as a BTO option and satisfy both the 100dpi and 120dpi camps, which would get the vast majority of people out there.
Finally Apple has upped the resolution on their powerbooks to something more reasonable (at least, reasonable to me - other people have different requirements). Whoops, no, I tell a lie, its only on their 15" and 17" models. The 12" i^HpowerBook is still at 1024x768. If this had been equally increased, I'd be very happy. As it is, the form factor is perfect but the resolution just too limiting for it to be my standard road machine.
Likewise - I got a Dell (mainly for the sweet deal on the 24" LCD) and went with the dual core Pentium D, just the 2.8ghz version. Its a remarkably responsive machine, for not a huge amount of money. Powerful, quiet, and cheap. I'd like to have gone AMD, but on the (relatively speaking) low end, Intel's pricing just spanked theirs for dual core.
Yeah, but when I, as a Linux user look at a fresh Windows install/reinstall I note a lot of things missing...
1) No decent photo editing software. Sorry, gotta pay extra for that, or download it.
You had me at, "Pay extra." Then again, if you're talking GIMP, it runs on Windows anyway. Sure, you have to d/l it, but its hardly a significant issue these days. Not that I really care for GIMP, but that's another debate entirely.
2) No decent office suite. MS Office is an extra, that you have to pay for.
Agreed, you have to pay for it. Its not really that expensive, and it does what it claims to do. I've yet to have a good enough experience with OO to risk using it to create a document I'd send to someone important (ie, sending something to a customer or working on a friend's resume or, well, much over internal documents).
3) No decent web browser. Anyone who says that IE is decent deserves a punch in the mouth.
Quit FUDding yourself. IE works just fine for the majority of people, as long as you don't go clicking "Yes," when it asks you to install randomCrap3.0 - something people could do just as easily on any other browser. Hell, my company creates web-based applications and I run it (and Firefox) and, really, it works pretty well these days.
4) No video editing software. That's another extra you have to pay for with Windows.
Er, How about Windows Movie Maker? Its a free download from MSFT and works well enough for the vacation-dvd crowd. Sure, its not stellar, but I wasn't aware that there was really good free OSS for video editing either. Its not iMovie but, hey, few things are.
5) IRC? Nope...gotta go download it somewhere.
Sure, somewhere like download.com that has a boatload of free IRC clients. If anyone cares which, hey, most people don't. But its not like finding something and downloading it is harder than figuring out which bizarre Linux package you want (ie: both are on the surface "difficult," in reality quite easy).
6) CD/DVD burning software? Nope, gotta pay extra for that too.
CD/DVD data burning has been built into XP from day one. For DVD movies, see the MovieMaker download referenced above.
7) Desktop publishing software. Yeah...gonna have to go to the store again...
Yup. And what you get will be a lot easier for most people to use, too - whether they're newbies who need a lot of hand-holding, or pros who want something great.
8) Personal finance software. Oh great, gotta go to the store again.
At least its an option - I've yet to see any OSS finance software that supported any significant automatic online synchronization, for example, which I would consider mandatory for any personal finance package.
Look, modern Linux distros are really good at server-side work. I use them a lot for just that. You don't have to spread FUD around with a shovel claiming that they do everything better than anything else does - if for no other reason than it helps mask the problems and slows down the fix rate. Mmmkay?
My pointis that users shouldn't have to set the clock. They do need to enter some basic information, but that shoudln't be what I condsider 'admin'
Then its a UI problem. Let's think this through. The system should check to see if NTP is running. If it has, it displays a dialog prompting the user to change their timezone and explaining that their clock has been synced to as of and is displaying the correct time already? Maybe they just don't know that their watch is more likely to be off.
Now, what if NTP isn't running? You need a different dialog asking them to turn it on but, if they don't want to for whatever reason, then giving them the opportunity to set the time. What if the daemon is running but can't connect to any servers? Similar dialog, but they need the option to disable it, and another one to see its logs to try to troubleshoot the issue (or better yet, also see a "hint" panel that explains which ports their network admin (in a corporate environment) needs to open up).
Just as an example though, what if the user wasn't using automatic OS updates (hardly a rare occurance) and got bit by the upcoming daylight-savings-time changes? Should they be forced to update their OS? Or to put another spin on it, what if MSFT forced the user to update their OS to have the clock set right and/. heard about it?
Good UI - even Windows XP level UI - is far from being either easy or obvious. And like many things, you have to cover your edge cases while optimizing for the general path, both things that Linux desktops have historically struggled with.
Would you really like to compare the different packaging methods on Linux with the different packaging methods on Windows? MSI, Installshield (and about 4 different subtypes), NSIS, InnoSetup, Wise, a few other big ones, and let's not forget those who say that all of those are broken and so therefore roll their own. And with each succeeding version of Windows, the "official" procedure changes slightly. Why is it Joe Schmo's problem to deal with the ever changing Windows target?
Sure. I can use the packaging tool of my choice as a developer and produce something that has a very high probability of installing on a wide variety of Windows platforms. Hell, using something like Installshield (often free with even cheap compilers) or even most of the free install packages, its damn near guaranteed. The GUI may look a little unusual on a significantly newer or older package than the installer was designed for, but chances are it'll work just fine. That just plain doesn't happen on UNIX systems.
Oh, and uninstalling? Personally, I've never been brave enough to uninstall most packaged Linux software, after far too many bad experiences of random things breaking afterwards. Its easier just to add hard drive space.
By the way, your "Company Name" comment was a little bogus - I could put a stupid meaningless check into any install script, UNIX or Windows or whatever. Sorry that it annoyed you, but its far from a standard piece of an installation process.
And your RH comments? Hey, this is the platform that our latest Linux customer wants us to certify our product against their tech stack on. What am I supposed to do, suggest that they change distros because the pacakage manager is inconvenient? Although this thread is wandering off into another discussion entirely.
Well, let's see. That "fix" artificially limits his site's line length. Something that you could easily change by, oh, resizing your browser window (that way we don't have to all use the same width regardless of font size or screen resolution). As to why his site is "broken" that way, let's check it out. Hmm. Number 9 of his top 10 design mistakes seems interesting:
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
Complaints here fell into two categories:
On big monitors, websites are difficult to use if they don't resize with the window. Conversely, if users have a small window and a page doesn't use a liquid layout, it triggers insufferable horizontal scrolling. The rightmost part of a page is cut off when printing a frozen page. This is especially true for Europeans, who use narrower paper (A4) than Americans. Font sizes are a related issue. Assuming a site doesn't commit mistake #1 and freeze the fonts, users with high-resolution monitors often bump up the font size. However, if they also want to bump up the window size to make the bigger text more readable, a frozen layout thwarts their efforts.
The very worst offenders are sites that freeze both the width and height of the viewport when displaying information in a pop-up window. Pop-ups are a mistake in their own right. If you must use them, don't force users to read in a tiny peephole. At an absolute minimum, let users resize any new windows.
Interestingly enough Slashdot has exactly the same "problem" and I don't see too many people complaining about it here...
Grandparent: every linux user knows [although some of they deny it] those are non trivial tasks in a linux distribution
Parent: No, these are non-trivial tasks in a *ms-windows* distribution
Oh, come off it. These tasks - ripping CDs, installing printers, etc - are things that millions of Windows users, despite the ill-wishes of a lot of Linux folk, manage to do every single fscking day. And yet even some fairly technical users still get confused as to things like which sound daemon to run on which distribution of Linux just to play a CD. Linux is a lot better than it was, that's for damn sure. But Windows, for the most part, works well for even fairly ignorant people. If it didn't, it'd have Linux's market share and we'd all be using something else right now.
And, by the same token, if the Windows developer did not spend the time to PACKAGE his app in a Windows INSTALLER you'd have the same problem.
Why do you assume that Windows developers will package their apps correctly but that Linux developers will not?
Well, possibly because 99% (conservatively) of all Windows programs are packaged correctly - and this holds true on everything from, say, MyMinesweeper to DB2. At best I'd say that 90% of the software I install from source works first time (sure, all the really major apps do, but beyond that). Probably 50% of the apps I go for offer an RPM for my distro (RHEL4) and, of those, only 75% work without needing some manual futzing.
Windows development makes it easy to create correctly formed install packages. Linux development does not. Heck, its surprisingly difficult (from the perspective of someone who's been doing s/w development since '84, on UNIX since '92) to even get a "correct" autoconf going. And yes, a lot of autoconf'd software is pretty broken (and by that I mean that for the most part it will work on Linux because a lot of people crib from existing Linux autoconfs and a lot of Linux systems have the same general setup, but it falls over annoyingly elsewhere or often has random dependencies on things that aren't actually necessary).
But for Joe Schmo developer - what's the path for him to get his app into the distributions trees again? How is this simple? And why is it his problem to do a separate build every time a new distro comes out with a slightly changed packaging procedure?
Granted it wont ride as nice as most commercial cars but it will stand up in an accident better than any of them.
Personally, I'd rather have a car designed to absorb that impact at the cost of itself rather than just passing it along to me... heck, maybe I'm just weird that way. Forces have to go somewhere, don't'cha know.
Did anyone else notice that they have a street map of Japan now? It's all in Japanese only, though, which is less useful
I'd guess that its more useful to the majority of people who would be wanting to use that information in Japanese. Adding it in English would be nice, but I can certainly see why they wouldn't want to do it first.
By the way I am tired of getting a troll designation...
Fair enough, fair enough. And you've made some reasonable (although unsubstantiated) points that, while unconventional, are certainly not trollish. I don't necessarily agree with them, but that's just fine.
... because some of you are illiterates (like most medical doctors)
Oh, and there you go. Now since that's pretty much the textbook definition of a comment deserving, "-1 Troll," being both innacurate and inflamatory, you'll probably get dinged for this one too, as well you should. Just not by me. But if and when it happens, it's not for the main body of your views - or at least it shouldn't be.
What happens if I've published my code under v2 and the users everywhere decide to apply v3 to it? What if I don't find v3 particularly appealing?
Well, then you really shouldn't have released your code under a license that had subclauses that you disagreed with. Once its released though you can't go back and relicense it retroactively. You can add optional licenses, but can never retract them. Unless the license says that you can, which the GPL does not.
Oh, and IIRC (although I'd have to check with our accountant (which I won't do because I don't care enough)), entertainment expenses are only 50% deductible, so that would drop the savings down to under 20%; an even less compelling reason.
the prices for sports tickets are due more to corporate tax breaks than demand
Not quite - after all (and I do have a business, so feel qualified to respond here, although it should be obvious) even if I can write off 35% of the cost of a sky box by not paying taxes on that money, I'm still spending 65% of the cost. And anyway, if I chose to spend that money in other ways (such as, oh, salaries/bonuses) I'd get exactly the same tax deduction. Its a common argument, but not a very compelling one I'm afraid.
Full disclosure: we've never bought so much as a nosebleed seat yet. Who knows, maybe we'll get into that one of these days, but at the moment its unlikely.
Cost of manufacture (and its a lot more than $5,000 if you want a decent crew involved) is not the issue. Cost of promotion, now, that's something else entirely - especially when you're spending the promotion/manufacture/support costs on many bands that never make it for one reason or another, and need to recoup all of that cost. After all, if that wasn't the case, and it was so so easy, why aren't we all music producers? Oh, yeah, because it doesn't work that way in real life.
Is a movie or music CD that costs less than $2 to print really worth $30 or $15? Is it really worth $10 a ticket to go to a movie theater? Is it worth close to $100 to go to an NFL game?
According to millions of people, the answer to your questions is, "Yes." It may not be worth that much money to you - hey, don't buy 'em and save the cash. But for many, many other people, its worth all that and more. Otherwise they wouldn't keep buying those movie tickets, NFL season passes, et cetera. When they stop, the prices will come down or the services will change. Until that point, its not like only 50 people a week are paying to go to football games...
Take a look at the Mirrormask promo site. They list all of its theaters on a single page. Not exactly a major blockbuster release, but hey one of them is near me, so I won't complain.
I will then - I wish I'd checked this earlier. Neil was in town this week for an Anansi Boys signing too, with a great crowd - they even had movie posters up. If I'd realized it wouldn't be showing locally (and hey, this is Austin, not podunk-ville) I'd have at least asked about it.
Anyone know if this is going to be a staged release, or if its going to go wide fairly soon?
Its a cultural thing. Growing up in England, I knew one (and only one) person with an automatic transmission and I never did understand it. Moving to the 'States, its pretty much all people drive - 90% at least I'd say. Stick shifts are for people who actually want to get more involved in the whole driving process. I'd say that any born American would have understood it, drivers or no, from popular cultural references. Apologies for the confusion:)
the difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI
Actually it did, quite a lot. Think about cold starts, for example. The coordination needed between pumping the gas pedal - or not, dealing with a flooded carb, handling a powerful engine's rough idle while moving off from a start: all of that mess pretty much disappeared with EFI, greatly simplifying the car's UI (even if not visibly simplifying the dashboard). Same with things like stability control. Grandma can comfortably drive a 500hp supercar these days, not something that most grandma's would have been comfortable with 40 years ago.
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.
Actually, a lot of newer cars just say, "Service in xxxx miles," doing a countdown by hundreds, until its "Time for Service." The user never needs to know what happens.
I'm sure that some people don't need to decide whether to use the postal service or, say, FedEx. The shipping department decides for them. So, what is this person's goal when emailing a large attachment? "I want these other people to see this document. Computer, make it so." Could the computer not make a decision whether to email this as an attachment or for example, upload it somewhere and email a link? Sure that opens up a bunch of problems, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. And there are probably better ways to implement such a thing, but the idea is there.
Very good point, and of course I don't have mod-points so I have to say so the old fashioned way. This is exactly the kind of service that companies like Apple are becoming better at providing - and that people get completely up in arms about when companies like Microsoft (yeah, yeah, evil, whatever) so much as mention them. Of course, it makes it harder for geeks to differentiate themselves, making it seem that there's less "value" for being one as far as acting superior, so no wonder that people don't go for it. Yeah, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
If you've never flown a plane before, and you get hired as a commercial pilot, "your own work" is flying a plane. Sorry, but that involves knowing lots of unnecessary crap like what an engine is, what RPMs mean, why oil pressure is important, and so on.
If you're an office worker who's never emailed someone before, and your co-workers use email to communicate with each other, learning what "email" is (bits, bytes, file sizes, file formats, base64/MIME, addresses, domain names, bounce messages, headers, and where messages are stored on the server and client side... is part of your job.
Whoa. I need to know what base64 is in order to email someone? Bounce messages? Headers? Where messages are stored? That's what email administrators should know in the same way that a passenger on a commercial jet doesn't (and shouldn't) need to know much more than boarding procedures and the fact that a beer costs $5. As an email user, I should simply know how to click "send" and that new mail "appears" in those folder thingies.
If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
Car: Accelerator/Gas, Brake, Shift, Gear, Mile(KM), Miles(KM) per Hour, bucket seats, overdrive, fuel efficiency, gallons, gas tank, windshield, wipers, wiper fluid, oil/lubricant, glove compartment, tire rotation, coolant, etc, etc, etc.
My turn for Car:
Get in, sit down, turn the key. Transmission in drive. Gas pedal, brake pedal, steering wheel. That's about it. If the car says "low fuel", add fuel. If it says "need maintenance" (or, on older/cheaper cars, every x000 miles), take it to the shop. They do "stuff," I pay money.
Oil? Coolant? Rotation? Lubricant? Bucket? Shift? Not necessary to get from point A to point B really. Want to get into it? The jargon becomes to get more useful. However... if you don't need the extra detail, you don't have to worry about it. Personally, I'm a bit of a car nut, but that's just me. My mother certainly isn't, doesn't want to be, and doesn't have to be either.
Jobs knows this, which is why he's resorting to the (much less interesting) argument that iTMS reduces piracy. I don't think this is going to do much, because (a) no, it really doesn't --- people pirate music to get it for free, not to get it more conveniently, and (b) piracy doesn't REALLY cost the industry that much money.
Weeeel, yes and no. People used to pirate for three reasons: its cool, its cheap, and its convenient. iTMS removed the third of those reasons, and significantly lessened the first.
Slashdot Mirror
1440x960 is good enough for me on a 15" - close enough to what I'm used to on my old Dell laptop (14" 1400x1050). If I could just jump to, say, 1280x1024 on the 12"... Of course, there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't offer two different screens as a BTO option and satisfy both the 100dpi and 120dpi camps, which would get the vast majority of people out there.
Finally Apple has upped the resolution on their powerbooks to something more reasonable (at least, reasonable to me - other people have different requirements). Whoops, no, I tell a lie, its only on their 15" and 17" models. The 12" i^HpowerBook is still at 1024x768. If this had been equally increased, I'd be very happy. As it is, the form factor is perfect but the resolution just too limiting for it to be my standard road machine.
Likewise - I got a Dell (mainly for the sweet deal on the 24" LCD) and went with the dual core Pentium D, just the 2.8ghz version. Its a remarkably responsive machine, for not a huge amount of money. Powerful, quiet, and cheap. I'd like to have gone AMD, but on the (relatively speaking) low end, Intel's pricing just spanked theirs for dual core.
Yeah, but when I, as a Linux user look at a fresh Windows install/reinstall I note a lot of things missing...
1) No decent photo editing software. Sorry, gotta pay extra for that, or download it.
You had me at, "Pay extra." Then again, if you're talking GIMP, it runs on Windows anyway. Sure, you have to d/l it, but its hardly a significant issue these days. Not that I really care for GIMP, but that's another debate entirely.
2) No decent office suite. MS Office is an extra, that you have to pay for.
Agreed, you have to pay for it. Its not really that expensive, and it does what it claims to do. I've yet to have a good enough experience with OO to risk using it to create a document I'd send to someone important (ie, sending something to a customer or working on a friend's resume or, well, much over internal documents).
3) No decent web browser. Anyone who says that IE is decent deserves a punch in the mouth.
Quit FUDding yourself. IE works just fine for the majority of people, as long as you don't go clicking "Yes," when it asks you to install randomCrap3.0 - something people could do just as easily on any other browser. Hell, my company creates web-based applications and I run it (and Firefox) and, really, it works pretty well these days.
4) No video editing software. That's another extra you have to pay for with Windows.
Er, How about Windows Movie Maker? Its a free download from MSFT and works well enough for the vacation-dvd crowd. Sure, its not stellar, but I wasn't aware that there was really good free OSS for video editing either. Its not iMovie but, hey, few things are.
5) IRC? Nope...gotta go download it somewhere.
Sure, somewhere like download.com that has a boatload of free IRC clients. If anyone cares which, hey, most people don't. But its not like finding something and downloading it is harder than figuring out which bizarre Linux package you want (ie: both are on the surface "difficult," in reality quite easy).
6) CD/DVD burning software? Nope, gotta pay extra for that too.
CD/DVD data burning has been built into XP from day one. For DVD movies, see the MovieMaker download referenced above.
7) Desktop publishing software. Yeah...gonna have to go to the store again...
Yup. And what you get will be a lot easier for most people to use, too - whether they're newbies who need a lot of hand-holding, or pros who want something great.
8) Personal finance software. Oh great, gotta go to the store again.
At least its an option - I've yet to see any OSS finance software that supported any significant automatic online synchronization, for example, which I would consider mandatory for any personal finance package.
Look, modern Linux distros are really good at server-side work. I use them a lot for just that. You don't have to spread FUD around with a shovel claiming that they do everything better than anything else does - if for no other reason than it helps mask the problems and slows down the fix rate. Mmmkay?
My pointis that users shouldn't have to set the clock. They do need to enter some basic information, but that shoudln't be what I condsider 'admin'
/. heard about it?
Then its a UI problem. Let's think this through. The system should check to see if NTP is running. If it has, it displays a dialog prompting the user to change their timezone and explaining that their clock has been synced to as of and is displaying the correct time already? Maybe they just don't know that their watch is more likely to be off.
Now, what if NTP isn't running? You need a different dialog asking them to turn it on but, if they don't want to for whatever reason, then giving them the opportunity to set the time. What if the daemon is running but can't connect to any servers? Similar dialog, but they need the option to disable it, and another one to see its logs to try to troubleshoot the issue (or better yet, also see a "hint" panel that explains which ports their network admin (in a corporate environment) needs to open up).
Just as an example though, what if the user wasn't using automatic OS updates (hardly a rare occurance) and got bit by the upcoming daylight-savings-time changes? Should they be forced to update their OS? Or to put another spin on it, what if MSFT forced the user to update their OS to have the clock set right and
Good UI - even Windows XP level UI - is far from being either easy or obvious. And like many things, you have to cover your edge cases while optimizing for the general path, both things that Linux desktops have historically struggled with.
Would you really like to compare the different packaging methods on Linux with the different packaging methods on Windows? MSI, Installshield (and about 4 different subtypes), NSIS, InnoSetup, Wise, a few other big ones, and let's not forget those who say that all of those are broken and so therefore roll their own. And with each succeeding version of Windows, the "official" procedure changes slightly. Why is it Joe Schmo's problem to deal with the ever changing Windows target?
Sure. I can use the packaging tool of my choice as a developer and produce something that has a very high probability of installing on a wide variety of Windows platforms. Hell, using something like Installshield (often free with even cheap compilers) or even most of the free install packages, its damn near guaranteed. The GUI may look a little unusual on a significantly newer or older package than the installer was designed for, but chances are it'll work just fine. That just plain doesn't happen on UNIX systems.
Oh, and uninstalling? Personally, I've never been brave enough to uninstall most packaged Linux software, after far too many bad experiences of random things breaking afterwards. Its easier just to add hard drive space.
By the way, your "Company Name" comment was a little bogus - I could put a stupid meaningless check into any install script, UNIX or Windows or whatever. Sorry that it annoyed you, but its far from a standard piece of an installation process.
And your RH comments? Hey, this is the platform that our latest Linux customer wants us to certify our product against their tech stack on. What am I supposed to do, suggest that they change distros because the pacakage manager is inconvenient? Although this thread is wandering off into another discussion entirely.
Interestingly enough Slashdot has exactly the same "problem" and I don't see too many people complaining about it here...
Grandparent: every linux user knows [although some of they deny it] those are non trivial tasks in a linux distribution
Parent: No, these are non-trivial tasks in a *ms-windows* distribution
Oh, come off it. These tasks - ripping CDs, installing printers, etc - are things that millions of Windows users, despite the ill-wishes of a lot of Linux folk, manage to do every single fscking day. And yet even some fairly technical users still get confused as to things like which sound daemon to run on which distribution of Linux just to play a CD. Linux is a lot better than it was, that's for damn sure. But Windows, for the most part, works well for even fairly ignorant people. If it didn't, it'd have Linux's market share and we'd all be using something else right now.
And, by the same token, if the Windows developer did not spend the time to PACKAGE his app in a Windows INSTALLER you'd have the same problem.
Why do you assume that Windows developers will package their apps correctly but that Linux developers will not?
Well, possibly because 99% (conservatively) of all Windows programs are packaged correctly - and this holds true on everything from, say, MyMinesweeper to DB2. At best I'd say that 90% of the software I install from source works first time (sure, all the really major apps do, but beyond that). Probably 50% of the apps I go for offer an RPM for my distro (RHEL4) and, of those, only 75% work without needing some manual futzing.
Windows development makes it easy to create correctly formed install packages. Linux development does not. Heck, its surprisingly difficult (from the perspective of someone who's been doing s/w development since '84, on UNIX since '92) to even get a "correct" autoconf going. And yes, a lot of autoconf'd software is pretty broken (and by that I mean that for the most part it will work on Linux because a lot of people crib from existing Linux autoconfs and a lot of Linux systems have the same general setup, but it falls over annoyingly elsewhere or often has random dependencies on things that aren't actually necessary).
But for Joe Schmo developer - what's the path for him to get his app into the distributions trees again? How is this simple? And why is it his problem to do a separate build every time a new distro comes out with a slightly changed packaging procedure?
Granted it wont ride as nice as most commercial cars but it will stand up in an accident better than any of them.
Personally, I'd rather have a car designed to absorb that impact at the cost of itself rather than just passing it along to me... heck, maybe I'm just weird that way. Forces have to go somewhere, don't'cha know.
Did anyone else notice that they have a street map of Japan now? It's all in Japanese only, though, which is less useful
I'd guess that its more useful to the majority of people who would be wanting to use that information in Japanese. Adding it in English would be nice, but I can certainly see why they wouldn't want to do it first.
Fair enough, fair enough. And you've made some reasonable (although unsubstantiated) points that, while unconventional, are certainly not trollish. I don't necessarily agree with them, but that's just fine.
Oh, and there you go. Now since that's pretty much the textbook definition of a comment deserving, "-1 Troll," being both innacurate and inflamatory, you'll probably get dinged for this one too, as well you should. Just not by me. But if and when it happens, it's not for the main body of your views - or at least it shouldn't be.
What happens if I've published my code under v2 and the users everywhere decide to apply v3 to it? What if I don't find v3 particularly appealing?
Well, then you really shouldn't have released your code under a license that had subclauses that you disagreed with. Once its released though you can't go back and relicense it retroactively. You can add optional licenses, but can never retract them. Unless the license says that you can, which the GPL does not.
Oh, and IIRC (although I'd have to check with our accountant (which I won't do because I don't care enough)), entertainment expenses are only 50% deductible, so that would drop the savings down to under 20%; an even less compelling reason.
the prices for sports tickets are due more to corporate tax breaks than demand
Not quite - after all (and I do have a business, so feel qualified to respond here, although it should be obvious) even if I can write off 35% of the cost of a sky box by not paying taxes on that money, I'm still spending 65% of the cost. And anyway, if I chose to spend that money in other ways (such as, oh, salaries/bonuses) I'd get exactly the same tax deduction. Its a common argument, but not a very compelling one I'm afraid.
Full disclosure: we've never bought so much as a nosebleed seat yet. Who knows, maybe we'll get into that one of these days, but at the moment its unlikely.
Cost of manufacture (and its a lot more than $5,000 if you want a decent crew involved) is not the issue. Cost of promotion, now, that's something else entirely - especially when you're spending the promotion/manufacture/support costs on many bands that never make it for one reason or another, and need to recoup all of that cost. After all, if that wasn't the case, and it was so so easy, why aren't we all music producers? Oh, yeah, because it doesn't work that way in real life.
Is a movie or music CD that costs less than $2 to print really worth $30 or $15? Is it really worth $10 a ticket to go to a movie theater? Is it worth close to $100 to go to an NFL game?
According to millions of people, the answer to your questions is, "Yes." It may not be worth that much money to you - hey, don't buy 'em and save the cash. But for many, many other people, its worth all that and more. Otherwise they wouldn't keep buying those movie tickets, NFL season passes, et cetera. When they stop, the prices will come down or the services will change. Until that point, its not like only 50 people a week are paying to go to football games...
Take a look at the Mirrormask promo site. They list all of its theaters on a single page. Not exactly a major blockbuster release, but hey one of them is near me, so I won't complain.
I will then - I wish I'd checked this earlier. Neil was in town this week for an Anansi Boys signing too, with a great crowd - they even had movie posters up. If I'd realized it wouldn't be showing locally (and hey, this is Austin, not podunk-ville) I'd have at least asked about it.
Anyone know if this is going to be a staged release, or if its going to go wide fairly soon?
... was this a contest or a recruitment tool?
Yes.
(I would have thought that was obvious)
Its a cultural thing. Growing up in England, I knew one (and only one) person with an automatic transmission and I never did understand it. Moving to the 'States, its pretty much all people drive - 90% at least I'd say. Stick shifts are for people who actually want to get more involved in the whole driving process. I'd say that any born American would have understood it, drivers or no, from popular cultural references. Apologies for the confusion :)
the difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI
Actually it did, quite a lot. Think about cold starts, for example. The coordination needed between pumping the gas pedal - or not, dealing with a flooded carb, handling a powerful engine's rough idle while moving off from a start: all of that mess pretty much disappeared with EFI, greatly simplifying the car's UI (even if not visibly simplifying the dashboard). Same with things like stability control. Grandma can comfortably drive a 500hp supercar these days, not something that most grandma's would have been comfortable with 40 years ago.
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.
Actually, a lot of newer cars just say, "Service in xxxx miles," doing a countdown by hundreds, until its "Time for Service." The user never needs to know what happens.
I'm sure that some people don't need to decide whether to use the postal service or, say, FedEx. The shipping department decides for them. So, what is this person's goal when emailing a large attachment? "I want these other people to see this document. Computer, make it so." Could the computer not make a decision whether to email this as an attachment or for example, upload it somewhere and email a link? Sure that opens up a bunch of problems, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. And there are probably better ways to implement such a thing, but the idea is there.
Very good point, and of course I don't have mod-points so I have to say so the old fashioned way. This is exactly the kind of service that companies like Apple are becoming better at providing - and that people get completely up in arms about when companies like Microsoft (yeah, yeah, evil, whatever) so much as mention them. Of course, it makes it harder for geeks to differentiate themselves, making it seem that there's less "value" for being one as far as acting superior, so no wonder that people don't go for it. Yeah, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
If you've never flown a plane before, and you get hired as a commercial pilot, "your own work" is flying a plane. Sorry, but that involves knowing lots of unnecessary crap like what an engine is, what RPMs mean, why oil pressure is important, and so on.
If you're an office worker who's never emailed someone before, and your co-workers use email to communicate with each other, learning what "email" is (bits, bytes, file sizes, file formats, base64/MIME, addresses, domain names, bounce messages, headers, and where messages are stored on the server and client side... is part of your job.
Whoa. I need to know what base64 is in order to email someone? Bounce messages? Headers? Where messages are stored? That's what email administrators should know in the same way that a passenger on a commercial jet doesn't (and shouldn't) need to know much more than boarding procedures and the fact that a beer costs $5. As an email user, I should simply know how to click "send" and that new mail "appears" in those folder thingies.
If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
Car: Accelerator/Gas, Brake, Shift, Gear, Mile(KM), Miles(KM) per Hour, bucket seats, overdrive, fuel efficiency, gallons, gas tank, windshield, wipers, wiper fluid, oil/lubricant, glove compartment, tire rotation, coolant, etc, etc, etc.
My turn for Car:
Get in, sit down, turn the key. Transmission in drive. Gas pedal, brake pedal, steering wheel. That's about it. If the car says "low fuel", add fuel. If it says "need maintenance" (or, on older/cheaper cars, every x000 miles), take it to the shop. They do "stuff," I pay money.
Oil? Coolant? Rotation? Lubricant? Bucket? Shift? Not necessary to get from point A to point B really. Want to get into it? The jargon becomes to get more useful. However... if you don't need the extra detail, you don't have to worry about it. Personally, I'm a bit of a car nut, but that's just me. My mother certainly isn't, doesn't want to be, and doesn't have to be either.
Jobs knows this, which is why he's resorting to the (much less interesting) argument that iTMS reduces piracy. I don't think this is going to do much, because (a) no, it really doesn't --- people pirate music to get it for free, not to get it more conveniently, and (b) piracy doesn't REALLY cost the industry that much money.
Weeeel, yes and no. People used to pirate for three reasons: its cool, its cheap, and its convenient. iTMS removed the third of those reasons, and significantly lessened the first.