Looking at the ipod/iphone application gold rush, I think the future is cheap and easy.
Easy to get in a moment (a click in the app store).
So inexpensive that people won't even think of wasting their precious time checking Pirate Bay.
Money will be made by small motivated teams/individuals pulling 70% of the sales revenues, volume and no reproduction costs...
If you need to create something low volume with high work inputs, good luck. You will have to count on the user base being to small and dispersed that they are forced to pay your high price and not file share.I would look to switching to something higher in volume.
I am a working developer. I used to buy technology books on regular basis, but these days (not in many years) I don't, I don't use the ones on my shelf either.
It isn't because I am stealing them either.
It is just that any question related to coding/algorithms/standards/methodology/etc.. has been pretty much asked and answered online. I can google it faster than I can reach for my book shelf. The only books I would buy would be for reading. Not reference.
I don't envy your position.
Repeat the behavior expecting a different outcome?
on
Why Bother With DRM?
·
· Score: 1
Isn't that insanity.
I started playing computer games on the C64. We were knee deep in pirate games and this was pre-internet. They had disk checks that would rattle and wreck the poor C-64 drive, then there copy software that duplicated the errors, or crackers that removed all the copy protection, and made the game smaller and faster to load, and didn't rattle the floppy drive. This is when they started training me that publishers were knobs and crackers were white knights. Publisher: Force a disk check that will hammer the disk drive against the stops, cracker remove all that crap and make it load fast and smooth.
In over 25 years what have we seen? Absolutely nothing has changed. Publishers keep making paying customers suffer while not even slowing down the crackers by a day. Crackers keep delivering a superior user experience absent of the hassles involved in using the actual product.
Every day for 25 years, the same bone headed failing decision is made again and again, with the expectation that they will get a different outcome. That is insane. Clearly driven by out of touch, cover their ass managers enforcing the status quo.
In the intervening 25 years! How many times was it decided again and again to pay money to DRM vendors, whos product worsen the user experience, and has never actually worked in its stated purpose been used again and again.
How do you build a completely failing product (DRM systems) endlessly? The whole thing is mind boggling.
DRM salesmen must be the best in the business. "My product will annoy your paying customers and utterly fail to deliver on any of the stated claims of quelling piracy. Here is the contract..."
As far as the latst software rental schemes (AKA Server based DRM). Fine just make sure you change the price to reflect the new non ownership mode. A game that you can resell is worth about triple the price of one that you can't, so I expect a 66% price cut to go along with the new model.
In a hybrid the strain on the batteries is much smaller than in a full EV. NiMh in current hybrids seem quite robust under the very small charge/discharge cycles of current hybrids.
Full charge/discharge on Lithiums in a full EV won't be so lucky.
Right and no one ever invested in anything that wasn't financially sensible.
No amount of reconditioning/repair will make using up $16000 battery to save $800 dollars demand shifting electricity make sense. This was part of your original assertion and it is completely unreasonable and untenable.
You can't recondition Lithiums and they are unlikely to get much better deals on batteries than car makers are already getting. So my numbers are likely close. Close enough for illustrative purposes. At some point in the future you might get BEV economics down to gas burning economics, but it isn't there yet.
People will invest because a lot of this will be made to work with government grants and some people will drive electric even if it isn't economically advantageous.
This is a house of cards that will collapse without government grants/subsidies/tax breaks, and will likely collapse anyway if things are ever fairly priced. Agassi is slick salesman but what he talks about when on his sales spiel are ridiculous numbers like "$10 for 1,000 miles". In reality that is low by at least an order of magnitude. People are buying in on salesmans dream and will likely be let down on the financial reality. Likely government will be supporting this infrastructure long after it goes bankrupt.
If you own the battery swapping is unworkable for the reasons you state. As most people would quickly realize this and swap their old dead batteries near end of life.
You have to have leased batteries for this to make sense. But then leasing costs for the battery would end up being more than Gas and remind people how uneconomical BEVs really are.
This was my favorite show until the end of the second season where they went through the looking glass (New Caprica) and never returned. I was stunned by the flash forward episode where none of the characters made any sense (and pretty much haven't since). It was like a bad parody of evil opposite universe from Star Trek - Adama with a mustache, Apollo in the fat suit, Starbuck grew a lot of hair (or extensions) and they all seemed completely out character, the show has felt like a surreal mess since, when the hard boiled realism of the first two seasons are what drew me to it.
From then on I think the initial success went to their heads and they went more grandiose/artsy with each episode, with terrible results. Here is where I see Parallel with M Knight Shamalan, letting success then attempting to produce self aggrandizing artsy drek as favorable press goes to your head. Fitting that he gave himself a cameo in the end.
We then had two seasons of pushing characters in completely unbelievable directions, Captain one day, mutineer the next, president the next, spin and repeat. The fleet goes into bloody civil war just from the thought of allying with the Cylons, then they volunteer to go on a suicide mission to rescue one half cyclon kid. All the other plot elements all made up as they went that could never have a satisfying end.
Then we got the cop out "God/super being did it all" explanation for anything. Yes during the last two seasons they laid it on thick but unfortunately I was still hoping against hope for a return of the show that was the first two seasons, hoping for some redemption. Back in Season 1&2 when it was still good and my friends used to discuss it. Baltars Head-6 was insanity or implanted technology, there was ZERO discussion of angles and god pulling all the strings. Basically because such an explanation is completely lacking in imagination and satisfaction.
Once you go down that road, you can do practically anything you want with no need for anything to have any logical reason behind it. Music activating the Final 5; God did it. Visions in peoples heads; God did it. Starbuck back from the dead; God did it. Empty Raptor launching missiles and destroying the whole giant Cylon Colony; God did it. etc... Once you go down this road, logic is out the window. God becomes the ultimate non explanation for everything. Blah.
The utterly ridiculous final act of jettisoning all technology into the sun is in keeping with the mess that has been season 3 and 4. Whatever the plot element is we want this week, the characters will nonsensically jump through any hoop to make it happen. Since they wanted this to be our past, so all that pesky technology had to go. Simple toss it into the sun. So what if it make no sense at all. It serves our cutesy ending.
Summary: Two great initial season driven by hard edged realism, sane plots, believably characters. Then two season of grandiose wacky plots, mysteries that weren't and unbelievable characters. The finale was just more of the same final two seasons that fed into it. Too bad it didn't end two years ago when it still could have had a satisfying end.
It is an outsourced jungle these days. Do you really want to justify why you think you are worth 10 times the salary of a coder in China? Or work for a while then train your Chinese replacements, spend EARLY morning and evenings across the timezones on calls with them to make sure everything is finally working out their new team, so they can cut you.
Meanwhile your company is going down the toilet while your execs reward themselves for reducing salary expenses with drastic moves to low cost centers.
Not a career I would recommend unless you are in some high security area that can't be outsourced.
I would say for every "freak" like this there must be a thousand+ that can code as well and are great to work with. This is just a egregious stereotype that would be quite hard to find in most modern Dev shops.
I have been doing SW dev for a living for about 15 years. Most of it large scale teams. I never saw anyone remotely close to this description and I have worked with some brilliant people. The best were humble, normal down to earth people. There has been a touch of arrogance, by some, but nothing like this.
I don't think the described person would last a week in the environments I work in.
Only in a small shop run by an idiot who won't pay for quality developers that are both talented and decent to work with, would you get this kind of freak and any dependency on him.
Note I said the Charisma aspect was overplayed. He would still be a big loss, because they would be losing the Product Visionary, Taskmaster, Marketer, CEO and Charismatic showman in one fell swoop if he died.
Which is why he should probably give up some of these roles and stick only to his favorites.
Jobs is remarkable in that he Part product visionary, part perfectionist taskmaster, part marketing guru, and part charismatic showman.
But more is made of his lesser role as showman than is warranted. I seriously doubt anything more than 10% of Apple product owners have ever even watched a Keynote. Steve Jobs charisma is nice for the free press it gets them but little else. If they keep building good products and doing half decent marketing there will be no problem. I don't watch the keynotes, but read about them. I was disappointed because there was no Mac Mini, not because Jobs wasn't there.
But in my opinion the greater loss might be in the loss of Steve Jobs the product visionary with the right measure of taskmaster.
I don't think these roles can be filled at a post Jobs Apple by one person. The probably need at CTO visionary/taskmaster + CEO-Showman. The should be figuring Steves roles in the company and how they can interact if those roles are split among different people. At some point the should staff all the roles and let Jobs supervise them, but let them run with it, but only if he feels that he is planning to leave sooner rather than later.
Newsflash. Macs run windows too now. When I bought a new PC last year I would have bought a Mac instead if there had been a decent mid tower.
Instead I handpicked my components for another PC. Nice mid tower (Antec Solo) dual core, 8800GT graphics. 500G HD. For not much more than a woefully underpowered mac mini.
I use my PC for a bit of everything. Media center duty with dual screens. Mini fails, can't drive dual screens, might have a hard time with some 1080p codecs as well. I also play some games. Newsflash, you can dual boot macs now.
I also added 2TB more internal HDs.
If there had been a mac with decent graphics and dual monitor support and full size internal HD, I would have bought one. But nothing like that existed, forcing me back to the PC even though, I was willing to try a MAC.
A mid tower or a mini with upgradable graphics and full size HD would be a great media center PC IMO. I am sure it would fit a lot of other peoples needs as well.
But instead Apple makes a line of laptops, but some don't have batteries (Imac) and some don't have batteries or a screen, or a keyboard (mini), but they all share laptop limitations.
They need to build at least one real desktop machine (and no the ridiculously priced pro doesn't count).
Seriously. Ask most people in the field today and they will tell you to stay away.
Working conditions tend toward inhumane. No overtime pay and deadlines that require 60 hour weeks. Get laid off at middle age and you will have a harder time than most fields competing with 20 year olds who will work 12 hours a day for half your salary.
It is one of the most easily outsourced technology fields. My company regularly brings in a set of green recruits from China, we train them, they go back to the Chinese office and they lay more of us off. This has been happening for years. Morale is in the negative numbers for almost everyone I know working in the field (mostly telecom SW dev).
If anyone asks me if I recommend this for their children. I say NO! Not unless they live/eat/sleep the stuff and are already doing some development and still I would ask what their second choice is.
I read several articles on this when news first broke. The above indicates the Stirlin isn't even connected. When it is, it doesn't produce enough power to actually move the car. Kamen has a 1KW Stirling that is about the same size as what is pictured and other articles mentioned it as a "trickle charger".
In this case the Stirling is essentially a novelty, it doesn't drive the car when the battery is run down.
What the world is applauding now is the historic and symbolic victory. These are real things that create goodwill from others in the world. It demonstrates that American democracy is a powerful idea that can deliver on its ideals. That no man possessing the talent, will be held back by race alone. Along with Obamas message of hope, inclusion, and interaction, it helps to reverse Americas sinking reputation abroad.
It helps race relations at home, it helps leave behind a slave mentality for African Americans. Now when a single mother tells her minority child that if he works hard he could be President some day, she is speaking truth and she can point to a real example.
These things are accomplished merely by the win. People are swept in part by the symbolic win he is already delivered, that is pretty much guaranteed to pay dividends.
But the next layer is the quality of the individual. President Elect Obama is a win for Intelligence and Ability. This is refreshing change. This grueling race has shown a calm, reasoned, well read, thinking man. Does anyone doubt the shaper mind won here?
Expectations on the challenges ahead. It will be interesting to see how President Obama manages Washington. In the end I expect there will be much disappointment all around. I expect those that voted against him will be unhappy with too much change, those that voted for him unhappy with to little. He has a fine line to walk and he is facing and economic disaster and like upheavals in the middle east following an Iraq withdrawal. Challenges everywhere. I don't think he is some kind of miracle worker, but my gut says this is the best man for the job. Intelligent, willing to listen, organized, disciplined.
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Looking at the ipod/iphone application gold rush, I think the future is cheap and easy.
Easy to get in a moment (a click in the app store).
So inexpensive that people won't even think of wasting their precious time checking Pirate Bay.
Money will be made by small motivated teams/individuals pulling 70% of the sales revenues, volume and no reproduction costs...
If you need to create something low volume with high work inputs, good luck. You will have to count on the user base being to small and dispersed that they are forced to pay your high price and not file share.I would look to switching to something higher in volume.
I am a working developer. I used to buy technology books on regular basis, but these days (not in many years) I don't, I don't use the ones on my shelf either.
It isn't because I am stealing them either.
It is just that any question related to coding/algorithms/standards/methodology/etc.. has been pretty much asked and answered online. I can google it faster than I can reach for my book shelf. The only books I would buy would be for reading. Not reference.
I don't envy your position.
Isn't that insanity.
I started playing computer games on the C64. We were knee deep in pirate games and this was pre-internet. They had disk checks that would rattle and wreck the poor C-64 drive, then there copy software that duplicated the errors, or crackers that removed all the copy protection, and made the game smaller and faster to load, and didn't rattle the floppy drive. This is when they started training me that publishers were knobs and crackers were white knights. Publisher: Force a disk check that will hammer the disk drive against the stops, cracker remove all that crap and make it load fast and smooth.
In over 25 years what have we seen? Absolutely nothing has changed. Publishers keep making paying customers suffer while not even slowing down the crackers by a day. Crackers keep delivering a superior user experience absent of the hassles involved in using the actual product.
Every day for 25 years, the same bone headed failing decision is made again and again, with the expectation that they will get a different outcome. That is insane. Clearly driven by out of touch, cover their ass managers enforcing the status quo.
In the intervening 25 years! How many times was it decided again and again to pay money to DRM vendors, whos product worsen the user experience, and has never actually worked in its stated purpose been used again and again.
How do you build a completely failing product (DRM systems) endlessly? The whole thing is mind boggling.
DRM salesmen must be the best in the business. "My product will annoy your paying customers and utterly fail to deliver on any of the stated claims of quelling piracy. Here is the contract..."
As far as the latst software rental schemes (AKA Server based DRM). Fine just make sure you change the price to reflect the new non ownership mode. A game that you can resell is worth about triple the price of one that you can't, so I expect a 66% price cut to go along with the new model.
In what cars?
In a hybrid the strain on the batteries is much smaller than in a full EV. NiMh in current hybrids seem quite robust under the very small charge/discharge cycles of current hybrids.
Full charge/discharge on Lithiums in a full EV won't be so lucky.
The commodity cells are likely well under 1000. The more expensive cells may have more cycles, but they price goes up dramatically.
I think my numbers are close enough for a back of the envelope ballpark calculation.
Right and no one ever invested in anything that wasn't financially sensible.
No amount of reconditioning/repair will make using up $16000 battery to save $800 dollars demand shifting electricity make sense. This was part of your original assertion and it is completely unreasonable and untenable.
You can't recondition Lithiums and they are unlikely to get much better deals on batteries than car makers are already getting. So my numbers are likely close. Close enough for illustrative purposes. At some point in the future you might get BEV economics down to gas burning economics, but it isn't there yet.
People will invest because a lot of this will be made to work with government grants and some people will drive electric even if it isn't economically advantageous.
This is a house of cards that will collapse without government grants/subsidies/tax breaks, and will likely collapse anyway if things are ever fairly priced. Agassi is slick salesman but what he talks about when on his sales spiel are ridiculous numbers like "$10 for 1,000 miles". In reality that is low by at least an order of magnitude. People are buying in on salesmans dream and will likely be let down on the financial reality. Likely government will be supporting this infrastructure long after it goes bankrupt.
You are again neglecting the economics of battery life. You can't use batteries to demand shift and make money.
For Example:
16KWh packs costs ~$16000
Lasts 1000 cycles.
You can save what by demand shifting? 5 cents/KWh?
So you can save .05*16kwh*1000 cycles = $800
That isn't an $800 profit. It's a $15200 loss.
You just burned out a $16000 battery to do it.
Now in a car, You get what with that 16K battery? 50 Miles?
How much does it cost to 50 miles. It costs the price for 16KWh of electricity ( ~$1.60) + 1 cycle loss of your battery 16000/1000 = $16.00 = $17.60.
How many cars (small one like these electrics) require greater than $17gas to go 50 miles?
Every charge cycle of a battery currently has an expense greater than burning gas.
We need a battery breakthough to make electric car economical.
If you own the battery swapping is unworkable for the reasons you state. As most people would quickly realize this and swap their old dead batteries near end of life.
You have to have leased batteries for this to make sense. But then leasing costs for the battery would end up being more than Gas and remind people how uneconomical BEVs really are.
Traditional DRM meant the disk was protected, but I could still install it and play it on any computer in my house.
I could install it on an unconnected laptop at the cottage and play...
This is one of those totally dependant on the DRM servers, type DRM. It is even worse IMO.
This is game rental, not purchase.
This was my favorite show until the end of the second season where they went through the looking glass (New Caprica) and never returned. I was stunned by the flash forward episode where none of the characters made any sense (and pretty much haven't since). It was like a bad parody of evil opposite universe from Star Trek - Adama with a mustache, Apollo in the fat suit, Starbuck grew a lot of hair (or extensions) and they all seemed completely out character, the show has felt like a surreal mess since, when the hard boiled realism of the first two seasons are what drew me to it.
From then on I think the initial success went to their heads and they went more grandiose/artsy with each episode, with terrible results. Here is where I see Parallel with M Knight Shamalan, letting success then attempting to produce self aggrandizing artsy drek as favorable press goes to your head. Fitting that he gave himself a cameo in the end.
We then had two seasons of pushing characters in completely unbelievable directions, Captain one day, mutineer the next, president the next, spin and repeat. The fleet goes into bloody civil war just from the thought of allying with the Cylons, then they volunteer to go on a suicide mission to rescue one half cyclon kid. All the other plot elements all made up as they went that could never have a satisfying end.
Then we got the cop out "God/super being did it all" explanation for anything. Yes during the last two seasons they laid it on thick but unfortunately I was still hoping against hope for a return of the show that was the first two seasons, hoping for some redemption. Back in Season 1&2 when it was still good and my friends used to discuss it. Baltars Head-6 was insanity or implanted technology, there was ZERO discussion of angles and god pulling all the strings. Basically because such an explanation is completely lacking in imagination and satisfaction.
Once you go down that road, you can do practically anything you want with no need for anything to have any logical reason behind it. Music activating the Final 5; God did it. Visions in peoples heads; God did it. Starbuck back from the dead; God did it. Empty Raptor launching missiles and destroying the whole giant Cylon Colony; God did it. etc... Once you go down this road, logic is out the window. God becomes the ultimate non explanation for everything. Blah.
The utterly ridiculous final act of jettisoning all technology into the sun is in keeping with the mess that has been season 3 and 4. Whatever the plot element is we want this week, the characters will nonsensically jump through any hoop to make it happen. Since they wanted this to be our past, so all that pesky technology had to go. Simple toss it into the sun. So what if it make no sense at all. It serves our cutesy ending.
Summary: Two great initial season driven by hard edged realism, sane plots, believably characters. Then two season of grandiose wacky plots, mysteries that weren't and unbelievable characters. The finale was just more of the same final two seasons that fed into it. Too bad it didn't end two years ago when it still could have had a satisfying end.
Geez.
It is an outsourced jungle these days. Do you really want to justify why you think you are worth 10 times the salary of a coder in China? Or work for a while then train your Chinese replacements, spend EARLY morning and evenings across the timezones on calls with them to make sure everything is finally working out their new team, so they can cut you.
Meanwhile your company is going down the toilet while your execs reward themselves for reducing salary expenses with drastic moves to low cost centers.
Not a career I would recommend unless you are in some high security area that can't be outsourced.
Best of luck.
I would say for every "freak" like this there must be a thousand+ that can code as well and are great to work with. This is just a egregious stereotype that would be quite hard to find in most modern Dev shops.
I have been doing SW dev for a living for about 15 years. Most of it large scale teams. I never saw anyone remotely close to this description and I have worked with some brilliant people. The best were humble, normal down to earth people. There has been a touch of arrogance, by some, but nothing like this.
I don't think the described person would last a week in the environments I work in.
Only in a small shop run by an idiot who won't pay for quality developers that are both talented and decent to work with, would you get this kind of freak and any dependency on him.
Same thing happened around the time Vista was coming out. You could buy Vista and get a free upgraded to XP. :D
Ok the opposite happened to. If you bought XP near the time Vista was coming out, you got vouchers etc for free Vista...
This is just business as usual to stop people from holding off on purchases until the new OS arrives.
You have something there. A search says 6 or 7 hours of continuous reading on an iPod touch.
But for me, it is not Kindle or Ipod. It is Ipod or forget about it. Kindle is too much of a one trick pony and not pocketable.
I really don't get the giant borders around the kindle screen wasting space either.
I read a couple of books on a Palm. I don't need a screen this big, so the device is no longer portable.
I am instead considering an ipod touch with stanza. That screen is much better than my old palm and should be plenty good for reading on the go.
The touch is smaller and more versatile to me.
Is there much of a counter argument for people who don't have eyesight issues?
I know VISTA had 32/64 bit included in retail, but OEM was still divided into 32bit and 64bit versions. Is that split going to continue?
Isn't it very unhealthy for your skin to spend that much time submerged in sea water.
Not to mention it can't be that comfortable, hypothermia issues?
Note I said the Charisma aspect was overplayed. He would still be a big loss, because they would be losing the Product Visionary, Taskmaster, Marketer, CEO and Charismatic showman in one fell swoop if he died.
Which is why he should probably give up some of these roles and stick only to his favorites.
Agreed. RDF exaggerated.
Jobs is remarkable in that he Part product visionary, part perfectionist taskmaster, part marketing guru, and part charismatic showman.
But more is made of his lesser role as showman than is warranted. I seriously doubt anything more than 10% of Apple product owners have ever even watched a Keynote. Steve Jobs charisma is nice for the free press it gets them but little else. If they keep building good products and doing half decent marketing there will be no problem. I don't watch the keynotes, but read about them. I was disappointed because there was no Mac Mini, not because Jobs wasn't there.
But in my opinion the greater loss might be in the loss of Steve Jobs the product visionary with the right measure of taskmaster.
I don't think these roles can be filled at a post Jobs Apple by one person. The probably need at CTO visionary/taskmaster + CEO-Showman. The should be figuring Steves roles in the company and how they can interact if those roles are split among different people. At some point the should staff all the roles and let Jobs supervise them, but let them run with it, but only if he feels that he is planning to leave sooner rather than later.
Newsflash. Macs run windows too now. When I bought a new PC last year I would have bought a Mac instead if there had been a decent mid tower.
Instead I handpicked my components for another PC. Nice mid tower (Antec Solo) dual core, 8800GT graphics. 500G HD. For not much more than a woefully underpowered mac mini.
I use my PC for a bit of everything. Media center duty with dual screens. Mini fails, can't drive dual screens, might have a hard time with some 1080p codecs as well. I also play some games. Newsflash, you can dual boot macs now.
I also added 2TB more internal HDs.
If there had been a mac with decent graphics and dual monitor support and full size internal HD, I would have bought one. But nothing like that existed, forcing me back to the PC even though, I was willing to try a MAC.
A mid tower or a mini with upgradable graphics and full size HD would be a great media center PC IMO. I am sure it would fit a lot of other peoples needs as well.
But instead Apple makes a line of laptops, but some don't have batteries (Imac) and some don't have batteries or a screen, or a keyboard (mini), but they all share laptop limitations.
They need to build at least one real desktop machine (and no the ridiculously priced pro doesn't count).
The central issue is the reliance on a central server, this changes nothing.
I have no problem with this RENTAL model. But as the same with music, this is not a purchase model.
So when it is $5, then it will be priced right for a rental model.
$50 for a game rental is a gross rip off.
If I buy a game, it shouldn't need a central server check to allow me to play it...
How about making it usable first. Let me know when there are plug ins. Specifically Flashblock. No flashblock, no browser.
Seriously. Ask most people in the field today and they will tell you to stay away.
Working conditions tend toward inhumane. No overtime pay and deadlines that require 60 hour weeks. Get laid off at middle age and you will have a harder time than most fields competing with 20 year olds who will work 12 hours a day for half your salary.
It is one of the most easily outsourced technology fields. My company regularly brings in a set of green recruits from China, we train them, they go back to the Chinese office and they lay more of us off. This has been happening for years. Morale is in the negative numbers for almost everyone I know working in the field (mostly telecom SW dev).
If anyone asks me if I recommend this for their children. I say NO! Not unless they live/eat/sleep the stuff and are already doing some development and still I would ask what their second choice is.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/10/27/sv_deankamen.xml
I read several articles on this when news first broke. The above indicates the Stirlin isn't even connected. When it is, it doesn't produce enough power to actually move the car. Kamen has a 1KW Stirling that is about the same size as what is pictured and other articles mentioned it as a "trickle charger".
In this case the Stirling is essentially a novelty, it doesn't drive the car when the battery is run down.
What the world is applauding now is the historic and symbolic victory. These are real things that create goodwill from others in the world. It demonstrates that American democracy is a powerful idea that can deliver on its ideals. That no man possessing the talent, will be held back by race alone. Along with Obamas message of hope, inclusion, and interaction, it helps to reverse Americas sinking reputation abroad.
It helps race relations at home, it helps leave behind a slave mentality for African Americans. Now when a single mother tells her minority child that if he works hard he could be President some day, she is speaking truth and she can point to a real example.
These things are accomplished merely by the win. People are swept in part by the symbolic win he is already delivered, that is pretty much guaranteed to pay dividends.
But the next layer is the quality of the individual. President Elect Obama is a win for Intelligence and Ability. This is refreshing change. This grueling race has shown a calm, reasoned, well read, thinking man. Does anyone doubt the shaper mind won here?
Expectations on the challenges ahead. It will be interesting to see how President Obama manages Washington. In the end I expect there will be much disappointment all around. I expect those that voted against him will be unhappy with too much change, those that voted for him unhappy with to little. He has a fine line to walk and he is facing and economic disaster and like upheavals in the middle east following an Iraq withdrawal. Challenges everywhere. I don't think he is some kind of miracle worker, but my gut says this is the best man for the job. Intelligent, willing to listen, organized, disciplined.
Best of luck President Elect Obama.