The thing is, most users don't NEED or WANT to know about how the tool works. Doesn't matter what tool that is.
WE do.
A general car driver WILL say "the engine is broken" if the engine, drive-train or ANY other mechanical part between engine and wheels seems to malfunction. That goes about many of you computer experts as well. Why? You don't NEED or WANT to know anything about flywheels, transmissions, cam-shafts, fuel injector nozzles or other car crap.
Respect the user as a USER of a tool. A very advanced and complicated tool which needs a specialist to understand it.
As for the understanding the average user does need. They need to know about the storage, the hard disk. Just so they can find files. They don't need to know about the CPU, RAM (except that you can only run a few apps at once, if the computer gets slow then shut down some programs) or PSUs or motherboards or any of that crap.
Just think about your life and all the tools YOU use, yet don't really understand. When it fails, it's broken. Just... youknow...the box, it dun broked!
Even where you have some limited laymans understanding that may still be rather faulty (most people don't understand microwaves for instance)
If the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd had their way we would all be using carrier pigeons..
Seriously, Netscape stopped innovating and died. IE stopped improving and lost an amazing amount of market share. Firefox HAS to keep awake and on top of the game if they want to stay relevant.
And improving the web using experience at home is an excellent idea. Just test lots of cool ideas until we find one that works well. Then try to figure out something better.
Now I usually don't have more than 5-20 broswer tabs max, often split across 2 or three workspaces. That still doesn't mean that the system can't be improved!
Offering the e-book free will probably not solve anything. Offering it really cheap might help.
The book is just published and sold at to high a unit price. You have to find a price point which strikes the best balance between per unit profit and number of units sold. If the book is too expensive that gives people much more incentive to obtain it by other means.
Nowadays, only textbooks which will be sold in VERY limited quantities can be sold at high prices (up to many hundreds of dollars). Any books which rely on achieving modest sales must be priced for its intended audience. Your book seems mostly geared towards programming students and programming graduates who want to expand their knowledge. Both these groups have no money. Then there is the seasoned veteran who wants to add some skill, he might buy the book.
Summary: make it cheaper and monetize the e-book version. If the dead-tree version can turn a profit at a lower price then think it through. The e-book could be priced at a slightly higher price than the profit margin of the dead-tree version.
Even lower. Each e-book sold is one e-book not pirated. That really IS profit
It depends on a lot of things. In the current economic climate I would think that using the downturn to get ready for the next upturn is probably a good idea. It depends on what you want to add in your masters degree.
Going super theoretical may give you some interesting opportunities if you are really good. That sort of specialization could get you into interesting territory. If you are only an average student then I think doing the masters degree as practical as possible could still be a big help.
Parts of the masters degree can be done in conjunction with some kinds of real world companies as well, so that gives contacts and experience.
Just approach contact building and experience gathering as an ongoing project and you should do fine.
are you counting in the transaction fee you get stuck with on ebay? No matter whether you are getting payed with a credit card or through paypal they also take a percentage. Try to get that back if you need to cancel the sale..
Plus, apple don't just have a few servers in a datacenter to handle the downloads. They also need to handle the financial transaction. That's a second job they do for you.
Any extra company which comes into the deal wants their share.
I think the CSI team are probably suspected of hundreds of murders.
Think about it.
They come onto the crime scene with their hair flowing in the wind, flakes of makeup breaking of, scratch their heads, then suddenly zoom to x30 magnification and find..... a hair.
After all that head scratching, who would you bet on that hair belonging to?
Of course in a commercial environment some things change. If I am using any software or song (for sampling) in a professional manner other laws may apply, as well as more incentive for the copyright holders to hunt that infraction down.
Anyone actually making money from their piracy, whether selling cds on a street corner, selling the music they produced in their pirated software or running Excel in the accounting department without a license (thus creating value for the company) is committing an extra crime in addition to that of merely copying.
Even so, piracy is not theft in any sense of the word. Not morally, not legally.
That doesn't make it good or right.
Additionally, musicians income does not necessarily fall from piracy, they have another source of income (live venues) which may climb substantially if more people access their music. Software companies are generally rather bad at playing live gigs.
I mean, who else can get ALL the tech journals to publish news on the fact that they are updating one program (OS) that functions on one of their devices.
It's an update people. Not news.
I wantz it for my iPhone, but it's still not news.
No question about the understanding of how, why and cost.
BUT as we both say, seeing initiative and ideas from the beginning is good. If those silly ideas are ignored that tends to completely kill this initiative.
Also, sometimes having someone find problems without the mind limitation of how and why the original was done in this way can give a new, clear view.
If these impractical ideas are saved, written down and put in an ideas folder which is then regularly examined, that should give ideas, show trends and be massively useful the next tima a major revision has to be done.
The views of the people who designed the system may not be the clearest. At least not regarding how real people might want to use it.
A noob is likely to see the longer, more complicated ways of doing things as a hindrance. In six months he will have become blind to these things.
errr
Eyes to ceiling may not always be a good idea..
Even if the greenies solution may not be practical, and you have more experience so you see that, the fact that they point out problems which you have become immune to is something to capitalize upon.
Remember that as an experienced member of staff you may have become insensitive to the myriad problems which may exist in your systems and organization.
Also realize that when the person has been there six months he has realized that the stagnation within is so rampant that he'll never be able to change anything and given up on offering ideas towards improvement. This realization is fueled by more experienced workers rolling their eyes towards the ceiling whenever a suggestion is made.
Point: write down silly suggestions (all of them) and try to find the problem they are meant to solve. Figure out whether it is a real problem, if yes, then solve.
I have gotten silly suggestions, looked into them, solved the problem and gotten increased productivity. I have also given silly suggestions, sometimes looked at, sometimes ignored. It feels good when they are at least looked at, even if the decision is not to implement them
Doing that also shows that you appreciate the people working for/with you, even if they are new.
By offering (or showing in news and tv shows) such crazy extrinsic rewards (piles of money, fast cars and hot men/women) you weaken peoples intrinsic rewards. This means that success won't give you the lovely feeling it should because you'll be comparing your worth to someone else and focusing on silly little things like the size of your bonus.
This means that doing the right/good thing will give you little to no reward (less feeling of well being) so you don't do those things.
Personally I think that our current form of society is nearing its end and we'll rather large changes start emerging within the next 30-50 years.
We could liken it to the fall of Rome.
Takes a while, but will fall.
I would have to second that, unless you need Flash to work for some reason.
The Apple devices are in some ways more limited than some of the competition but the ease of use is unparallelled.
Webpage rendering is good and navigation is surprisingly easy on such a small screen.
The netbook ideas are probably not so good. Battery life and boot times are just not good enough for what you are talking about. Nobody is going to wait around for between 30 seconds and 3 minutes while you start the thing up, only to find that you need to recharge.
A small, cellphone like device is probably the way to go, and the iPod Touch is the nicest to use of those that I know of. No phone bill, no activation or other bull..
The real issue (apart from the problems in actually tracking all users and treating them like criminals) is whether there might not be more constructive ways for the movie industry to spend their money?
One brilliant idea might be to give scriptwriters the money to write better scripts that are actually worth the cost of the ticket.
Or maybe theater owners try to IMPROVE the theater going experience. There are many things to complain about in a regular trip to the movies. Most are age old complaints like inconsiderate fellow moviegoers that like chatting. Others are newer like getting frisked when going to an early screening of a movie.
Treat customers like criminals and they will behave that way.
Make going to a movie theater worth the price of admission. Make it as easy as possible to go and as cheap as possible while keeping the quality of the experience as high as possible.
There will be some trade-offs, but such is life.
Just don't model the experience on the airlines models. Remember that people are almost at a point where they would rather swim across the Atlantic than use the bloody airlines.
Malware targets Symantec prducts because they are popular.
When that kind of malware has messed up critical parts of Norton or placed locked down dummy files or registry changes then you can't install their product.
This is not just "the computer being too infected", this is the computer being infected with components directly attacking the most popular AV/malware programs.
Again, glad I'm not in USA.
A woman who has had a miscarriage should not lift ANYTHING.
If the guys at the job can't handle that they're total a**holes.
In civilised countries, long medical leave is partly on the government. That's what taxes do. Taxes are meant as a mutual support fund. They run all the stuff that society needs.
Of course you could just pour all the money into unwinnable wars of stupidity. That's one way to do it, but most of us prefer low infant mortality rates (USA is 42nd lowest according to CIA world factbook, just a bit worse than South Korea) and high life expectancy (USA sits in 35th, along with Guam. GUAM ferrcrissakes!)
I am so glad I am not in USA, have never worked in USA and intend to keep it that way.
What a shitty system.
And of course the usual goes for lawyers. A former place of employment got bought by a VC and a lawyer, I contracted to stay one year to help them get on their feet (I was the most experienced at the place, and assistand manager) and was so glad never to have to deal with the lawyer after that. All lawyers I have done business with, worked for or talked to have fitted the stereotype.
Ok, it would be nicer for this to work on ideals than technicalities. But the fact that the half the prosecutions case is based on them not understanding what is going on makes it likely that their understanding of the rest of the case may be a bit shaky as well.
If that is the case they are going to screw up nicely in the next few days, which is what I feel is most likely.
In Iceland the opposite happened (well, not really. The prosecution didn't know anything but the torrentsite operator didn't defend himself well enough) and now Iceland is one of those places where no search engine or data collection system wants a home base.
These people really don't think of the consequences. Studies show that piracy does not cut into profit margins in any significant way (Canadian government study being notable), which correlates with entertainment industry growth following economic trends and not increase in piracy efficiency.
Music can have soul and character no matter what tools are used in its creation. Auto-tune is just another tool in a good musicians aresenal. Yes, it, like many other good tools, can be used to make bad singers sound better, good singers to sound awesome or weird. That has nothing to do with whether the song has artistic worth or not.
You may be shocked to find out that many of the old classics you remember (Sinatra and such) were written by people who could not sing and sung by singers which were better at marketing themselves than actually singing. They may have been great live performers, but that is not necessarily all about the singing.
Writing and performing with passion is ultimately worth more than the tools used, but the tools are often the means to get your vision out.
Recorded music was denounced as soulless and artificial when it first started. Look where we are now.
..as I know that my university has been doing similar things with the source engine for training firefighters. We have a room, known as the cave, which is a small 1,5mx1,5m box with graphics projected on all walls for a comletely immersive environment.
I have paid the Apple tax (bought their hardware) and can upgrade to the latest and greatest OS from them for $129 (or 5licenses for $229).
There is one version for homes or businesses and one server version which is not in the shops (a user who needs it knows what to ask for).
For this price I get all the graphic goodies of OS X (which are technically similar to all the Win7 thingies, although less flashy and more geared towards usability) with all the networking (actually a bit easier in most cases).
So, by paying the Apple tax I get a simpler life and can upgrade the OS for $129 and always use the Ultimate version.
Of course the Apple tax also included a host of other applications all of which were excellent and full featured applications (iLife suite)
When I want to save money I get myself some spare parts and select an appropriate Linux distro (usually just something simple, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, something like that). There I pay a time tax (select the distro and make sure the H/W I use works with linux. I can get quite nice graphic goodies, on par with anything else out there, but the general ease of use is lower (with some cool exceptions, the simplified package manager/add remove programs dialog on Ubuntu is a nice example of how computers should work) than MacOSX, in most ways on par with WinXP (Windows 7 seems to have improved usability in several important aspects, dragging windows out of that hole).
Ok, so I pay the apple tax, or pay the time tax on Linux. So far so good, a fair swap.
What incentive do I as a longtime MS user to get their latest and greatest? When I bought my first mac it was because the price difference between a Mac and a Win laptop that could actually run Vista properly (with all the apps that I needed) was very small. The Vista machine would have had more RAM, a similar CPU, a better GPU and a bigger HDD. Still it could not run the audio apps that I needed (available on Mac and PC) as well as the Mac.
And $300 for a usable version of the OS? WTF?
And don't even try tp say that it's as low as $200 because that version is a piece of crippleware. The $260 version is the minimum that is even remotely usable, but who knows that except the type of nerd who is likely to spend his/her time on slashdot?
Most regular users want a computer (they don't care about what an OS is) that can open their documents(pictures, sound files, movies etc), save their documents, share their documents and not lose their documents or make the user feel stupid. What MS is giving them is none of the above because first you need to figure out what version to select. The regular user has no interest in knowing the difference between the version WITH remote desktop or without it. Until they need help. Then they see their friend use some cool features like that and get annoyed that their computer can't do that just because they didn't understand the long list of tecnical items that the salesman spewed out.
MS really NEEDS to get this one right and not annoy their possible users any more. And it seems that technically they are doing cool stuff now (at least interface wise). I just hope that their marketing department doesn't screw it up completely, although that seems too late.
My hope was for having 3 equally good options, Win7, OSX, and the many flavours of Linux.
Alas, it seems that MS marketing is their worst enemy.
Good to see that their technical department seems back in the game though.
If I want to pay a bunch of money extra I'll just buy apple products, be done with the confusion and insanity and get a product that works (mostly).
If I want the hot cheapness I choose between Linux distros.
I won't be buying anything with Windows preinstalled if I can avoid it (even if I think they are doing interesting stuff in their Win7 interface).
Adding to that, I can't even be bothered to PIRATE microsoft products anymore. How bad is that?
just in case you missed my diatribe against those who answer pretty legitamate posts posting as Anonymous Coward.
Here's one article for you. If your little Anonymous ass starts bleeding from reading it, shove a tampon in it.
Next time, please comment under your login name. People are more friendly towards you then (at least I would be).
Your halfwit comments about "opening my flap" are unnecessary, asking for sources is perfectly legit. Just ask next time, instead of being a jerk.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, most users don't NEED or WANT to know about how the tool works. Doesn't matter what tool that is.
WE do.
A general car driver WILL say "the engine is broken" if the engine, drive-train or ANY other mechanical part between engine and wheels seems to malfunction. That goes about many of you computer experts as well.
Why?
You don't NEED or WANT to know anything about flywheels, transmissions, cam-shafts, fuel injector nozzles or other car crap.
Respect the user as a USER of a tool. A very advanced and complicated tool which needs a specialist to understand it.
As for the understanding the average user does need.
They need to know about the storage, the hard disk. Just so they can find files. They don't need to know about the CPU, RAM (except that you can only run a few apps at once, if the computer gets slow then shut down some programs) or PSUs or motherboards or any of that crap.
Just think about your life and all the tools YOU use, yet don't really understand. When it fails, it's broken. Just... youknow...the box, it dun broked!
Even where you have some limited laymans understanding that may still be rather faulty (most people don't understand microwaves for instance)
This sounds brilliant to me.
If the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd had their way we would all be using carrier pigeons..
Seriously, Netscape stopped innovating and died. IE stopped improving and lost an amazing amount of market share. Firefox HAS to keep awake and on top of the game if they want to stay relevant.
And improving the web using experience at home is an excellent idea. Just test lots of cool ideas until we find one that works well. Then try to figure out something better.
Now I usually don't have more than 5-20 broswer tabs max, often split across 2 or three workspaces. That still doesn't mean that the system can't be improved!
Offering the e-book free will probably not solve anything. Offering it really cheap might help.
The book is just published and sold at to high a unit price. You have to find a price point which strikes the best balance between per unit profit and number of units sold.
If the book is too expensive that gives people much more incentive to obtain it by other means.
Nowadays, only textbooks which will be sold in VERY limited quantities can be sold at high prices (up to many hundreds of dollars). Any books which rely on achieving modest sales must be priced for its intended audience.
Your book seems mostly geared towards programming students and programming graduates who want to expand their knowledge. Both these groups have no money. Then there is the seasoned veteran who wants to add some skill, he might buy the book.
Summary: make it cheaper and monetize the e-book version. If the dead-tree version can turn a profit at a lower price then think it through.
The e-book could be priced at a slightly higher price than the profit margin of the dead-tree version.
Even lower. Each e-book sold is one e-book not pirated. That really IS profit
It depends on a lot of things. In the current economic climate I would think that using the downturn to get ready for the next upturn is probably a good idea. It depends on what you want to add in your masters degree.
Going super theoretical may give you some interesting opportunities if you are really good.
That sort of specialization could get you into interesting territory.
If you are only an average student then I think doing the masters degree as practical as possible could still be a big help.
Parts of the masters degree can be done in conjunction with some kinds of real world companies as well, so that gives contacts and experience.
Just approach contact building and experience gathering as an ongoing project and you should do fine.
are you counting in the transaction fee you get stuck with on ebay?
No matter whether you are getting payed with a credit card or through paypal they also take a percentage. Try to get that back if you need to cancel the sale..
Plus, apple don't just have a few servers in a datacenter to handle the downloads. They also need to handle the financial transaction. That's a second job they do for you.
Any extra company which comes into the deal wants their share.
All in all, the Appstore is not a bad deal.
not only bank charges but server, bandwith and maintenance staff.
Nowhere else in retail does the original maker get 70% of the price to himself. People count themselves lucky to receive 10-20%
Apple is treading on thin ice, but has some serious arguments behind themselves.
And BTW, if the makers themselves were running their own store you can bet that the losses from returns would not be any lower.
Hey, that wouldn't help on CSI.
I think the CSI team are probably suspected of hundreds of murders.
Think about it.
They come onto the crime scene with their hair flowing in the wind, flakes of makeup breaking of, scratch their heads, then suddenly zoom to x30 magnification and find..... a hair.
After all that head scratching, who would you bet on that hair belonging to?
right you are.
technically.
Of course in a commercial environment some things change. If I am using any software or song (for sampling) in a professional manner other laws may apply, as well as more incentive for the copyright holders to hunt that infraction down.
Anyone actually making money from their piracy, whether selling cds on a street corner, selling the music they produced in their pirated software or running Excel in the accounting department without a license (thus creating value for the company) is committing an extra crime in addition to that of merely copying.
Even so, piracy is not theft in any sense of the word. Not morally, not legally.
That doesn't make it good or right.
Additionally, musicians income does not necessarily fall from piracy, they have another source of income (live venues) which may climb substantially if more people access their music. Software companies are generally rather bad at playing live gigs.
I mean, who else can get ALL the tech journals to publish news on the fact that they are updating one program (OS) that functions on one of their devices.
It's an update people. Not news.
I wantz it for my iPhone, but it's still not news.
No question about the understanding of how, why and cost.
BUT as we both say, seeing initiative and ideas from the beginning is good. If those silly ideas are ignored that tends to completely kill this initiative.
Also, sometimes having someone find problems without the mind limitation of how and why the original was done in this way can give a new, clear view.
If these impractical ideas are saved, written down and put in an ideas folder which is then regularly examined, that should give ideas, show trends and be massively useful the next tima a major revision has to be done.
The views of the people who designed the system may not be the clearest. At least not regarding how real people might want to use it.
A noob is likely to see the longer, more complicated ways of doing things as a hindrance. In six months he will have become blind to these things.
errr Eyes to ceiling may not always be a good idea..
Even if the greenies solution may not be practical, and you have more experience so you see that, the fact that they point out problems which you have become immune to is something to capitalize upon.
Remember that as an experienced member of staff you may have become insensitive to the myriad problems which may exist in your systems and organization.
Also realize that when the person has been there six months he has realized that the stagnation within is so rampant that he'll never be able to change anything and given up on offering ideas towards improvement. This realization is fueled by more experienced workers rolling their eyes towards the ceiling whenever a suggestion is made.
Point: write down silly suggestions (all of them) and try to find the problem they are meant to solve. Figure out whether it is a real problem, if yes, then solve.
I have gotten silly suggestions, looked into them, solved the problem and gotten increased productivity. I have also given silly suggestions, sometimes looked at, sometimes ignored. It feels good when they are at least looked at, even if the decision is not to implement them
Doing that also shows that you appreciate the people working for/with you, even if they are new.
I think your assessment is pretty realistic.
By offering (or showing in news and tv shows) such crazy extrinsic rewards (piles of money, fast cars and hot men/women) you weaken peoples intrinsic rewards. This means that success won't give you the lovely feeling it should because you'll be comparing your worth to someone else and focusing on silly little things like the size of your bonus.
This means that doing the right/good thing will give you little to no reward (less feeling of well being) so you don't do those things.
Personally I think that our current form of society is nearing its end and we'll rather large changes start emerging within the next 30-50 years.
We could liken it to the fall of Rome.
Takes a while, but will fall.
woohoo, now I can get viruses even FASTER!
I would have to second that, unless you need Flash to work for some reason. The Apple devices are in some ways more limited than some of the competition but the ease of use is unparallelled. Webpage rendering is good and navigation is surprisingly easy on such a small screen. The netbook ideas are probably not so good. Battery life and boot times are just not good enough for what you are talking about. Nobody is going to wait around for between 30 seconds and 3 minutes while you start the thing up, only to find that you need to recharge. A small, cellphone like device is probably the way to go, and the iPod Touch is the nicest to use of those that I know of. No phone bill, no activation or other bull..
The real issue (apart from the problems in actually tracking all users and treating them like criminals) is whether there might not be more constructive ways for the movie industry to spend their money?
One brilliant idea might be to give scriptwriters the money to write better scripts that are actually worth the cost of the ticket.
Or maybe theater owners try to IMPROVE the theater going experience. There are many things to complain about in a regular trip to the movies. Most are age old complaints like inconsiderate fellow moviegoers that like chatting. Others are newer like getting frisked when going to an early screening of a movie.
Treat customers like criminals and they will behave that way.
Make going to a movie theater worth the price of admission. Make it as easy as possible to go and as cheap as possible while keeping the quality of the experience as high as possible.
There will be some trade-offs, but such is life.
Just don't model the experience on the airlines models. Remember that people are almost at a point where they would rather swim across the Atlantic than use the bloody airlines.
Malware targets Symantec prducts because they are popular.
When that kind of malware has messed up critical parts of Norton or placed locked down dummy files or registry changes then you can't install their product.
This is not just "the computer being too infected", this is the computer being infected with components directly attacking the most popular AV/malware programs.
Again, glad I'm not in USA.
A woman who has had a miscarriage should not lift ANYTHING.
If the guys at the job can't handle that they're total a**holes.
In civilised countries, long medical leave is partly on the government. That's what taxes do. Taxes are meant as a mutual support fund. They run all the stuff that society needs.
Of course you could just pour all the money into unwinnable wars of stupidity. That's one way to do it, but most of us prefer low infant mortality rates (USA is 42nd lowest according to CIA world factbook, just a bit worse than South Korea) and high life expectancy (USA sits in 35th, along with Guam. GUAM ferrcrissakes!)
I am so glad I am not in USA, have never worked in USA and intend to keep it that way. What a shitty system. And of course the usual goes for lawyers. A former place of employment got bought by a VC and a lawyer, I contracted to stay one year to help them get on their feet (I was the most experienced at the place, and assistand manager) and was so glad never to have to deal with the lawyer after that. All lawyers I have done business with, worked for or talked to have fitted the stereotype.
Ok, it would be nicer for this to work on ideals than technicalities. But the fact that the half the prosecutions case is based on them not understanding what is going on makes it likely that their understanding of the rest of the case may be a bit shaky as well.
If that is the case they are going to screw up nicely in the next few days, which is what I feel is most likely.
In Iceland the opposite happened (well, not really. The prosecution didn't know anything but the torrentsite operator didn't defend himself well enough) and now Iceland is one of those places where no search engine or data collection system wants a home base.
These people really don't think of the consequences. Studies show that piracy does not cut into profit margins in any significant way (Canadian government study being notable), which correlates with entertainment industry growth following economic trends and not increase in piracy efficiency.
Aw, snap. I didn't see your comment before I made mine lower down. Basically saying the same thing..
Music can have soul and character no matter what tools are used in its creation. Auto-tune is just another tool in a good musicians aresenal. Yes, it, like many other good tools, can be used to make bad singers sound better, good singers to sound awesome or weird. That has nothing to do with whether the song has artistic worth or not.
You may be shocked to find out that many of the old classics you remember (Sinatra and such) were written by people who could not sing and sung by singers which were better at marketing themselves than actually singing. They may have been great live performers, but that is not necessarily all about the singing.
Writing and performing with passion is ultimately worth more than the tools used, but the tools are often the means to get your vision out.
Recorded music was denounced as soulless and artificial when it first started. Look where we are now.
..as I know that my university has been doing similar things with the source engine for training firefighters. We have a room, known as the cave, which is a small 1,5mx1,5m box with graphics projected on all walls for a comletely immersive environment.
;)
But although that's not really new, it IS cool
I use OSX, Ubuntu an WinXP pro.
I have paid the Apple tax (bought their hardware) and can upgrade to the latest and greatest OS from them for $129 (or 5licenses for $229).
There is one version for homes or businesses and one server version which is not in the shops (a user who needs it knows what to ask for).
For this price I get all the graphic goodies of OS X (which are technically similar to all the Win7 thingies, although less flashy and more geared towards usability) with all the networking (actually a bit easier in most cases).
So, by paying the Apple tax I get a simpler life and can upgrade the OS for $129 and always use the Ultimate version.
Of course the Apple tax also included a host of other applications all of which were excellent and full featured applications (iLife suite)
When I want to save money I get myself some spare parts and select an appropriate Linux distro (usually just something simple, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, something like that). There I pay a time tax (select the distro and make sure the H/W I use works with linux.
I can get quite nice graphic goodies, on par with anything else out there, but the general ease of use is lower (with some cool exceptions, the simplified package manager/add remove programs dialog on Ubuntu is a nice example of how computers should work) than MacOSX, in most ways on par with WinXP (Windows 7 seems to have improved usability in several important aspects, dragging windows out of that hole).
Ok, so I pay the apple tax, or pay the time tax on Linux. So far so good, a fair swap.
What incentive do I as a longtime MS user to get their latest and greatest? When I bought my first mac it was because the price difference between a Mac and a Win laptop that could actually run Vista properly (with all the apps that I needed) was very small. The Vista machine would have had more RAM, a similar CPU, a better GPU and a bigger HDD. Still it could not run the audio apps that I needed (available on Mac and PC) as well as the Mac.
And $300 for a usable version of the OS? WTF?
And don't even try tp say that it's as low as $200 because that version is a piece of crippleware. The $260 version is the minimum that is even remotely usable, but who knows that except the type of nerd who is likely to spend his/her time on slashdot?
Most regular users want a computer (they don't care about what an OS is) that can open their documents(pictures, sound files, movies etc), save their documents, share their documents and not lose their documents or make the user feel stupid. What MS is giving them is none of the above because first you need to figure out what version to select. The regular user has no interest in knowing the difference between the version WITH remote desktop or without it. Until they need help. Then they see their friend use some cool features like that and get annoyed that their computer can't do that just because they didn't understand the long list of tecnical items that the salesman spewed out.
MS really NEEDS to get this one right and not annoy their possible users any more. And it seems that technically they are doing cool stuff now (at least interface wise). I just hope that their marketing department doesn't screw it up completely, although that seems too late.
My hope was for having 3 equally good options, Win7, OSX, and the many flavours of Linux.
Alas, it seems that MS marketing is their worst enemy.
Good to see that their technical department seems back in the game though.
If I want to pay a bunch of money extra I'll just buy apple products, be done with the confusion and insanity and get a product that works (mostly). If I want the hot cheapness I choose between Linux distros. I won't be buying anything with Windows preinstalled if I can avoid it (even if I think they are doing interesting stuff in their Win7 interface). Adding to that, I can't even be bothered to PIRATE microsoft products anymore. How bad is that?
just in case you missed my diatribe against those who answer pretty legitamate posts posting as Anonymous Coward. Here's one article for you. If your little Anonymous ass starts bleeding from reading it, shove a tampon in it.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/2/9/
Next time, please comment under your login name. People are more friendly towards you then (at least I would be). Your halfwit comments about "opening my flap" are unnecessary, asking for sources is perfectly legit. Just ask next time, instead of being a jerk.