The problem here is that MS needs to make a significant profit on the venture, as opposed to Apple, who has a music store to sell music players. Apple is content to give away the bulk of the proceeds from its store for market share so they can drive iTunes sales. What does MS stand to gain by giving away the bulk of its profits? More WMA licenses? Those can hardly bring in more than a few dollars per player. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to see MS do everything at a total loss just for the sake of controlling the market.
The subsidy is indeed from me paying the difference - as a single young person with a high paying job and no house, I'm definitely not on the receiving end of taxation. Since I pay out into a pool, and other people who buy hybrids pay less into that pool simply because they purchaesd a hybrid, I'm arguing that that I'm subsidizing that person's purchase. I do agree that foreign investment also covers part (perhaps most of) the tab, but that doesn't mean that deficit spending is ok or a good thing. If gas prices rise, that may automatically increase the viability of hybrids and drive their adoption - without tax incentives. However, I think higher gas prices would encourage true conservation by encouraging shorter commutes, carpooling, etc. Instead, hybrids allow people to get into the carpool lane here in California - even though I'm burning less fuel than the hybrid SUVs. Hybrids really don't save that much fuel relative to their expense (and their stated mileages are under ideal temperature conditions under driving cycles that are very optimistic). The problem is that legislators, rather than engineers, are trying to devise fuel economy solutions, and in the process stifling other technologies (such as diesel, smaller turbocharged engines, etc).
People see a hybrid as a cure-all for the real problem - people drive too much. The fact that they need tax breaks for hybrids means that they do not make finacial sense, and frankly, makes me livid. I drive a non-hybrid that gets 30+ mpg and drive ~5 miles/day. Why should I subsidize someone who drives a hybrid SUV getting the same mileage 60 miles per day?
Because CDs, by definition, follow a standard, and play on all devices that conform to that standard. He should say "Playing music on a Mac from silver coasters that happen to play music in some CD players isn't a right."
The Dell offering is almost double the size as the shuffle (1.98 in^3 vs 1.07 in^3). It's 1.29 oz instead of 0.78oz. The iPod Nano is only 1.5 in^3. Now you see the difference between Apple's design team and Dell's.
But an iPod nano wouldn't be nano-sized if it included things like a radio, microphone, etc. Is it worth a cost, weight, and size hit for the small percentage of the market that wants a radio? The marketing studies seem to say no.
This represents what is inherently flawed with Microsoft's software development processes. Instead of translating industrial design concepts into code, they code up some f-ed up concept of industrial design.
I see what the Tivo folks are doing, but I can't understand why. Are they trying to preempt regulation? What's in it for them to cripple their products?
Already there are several comments about how "Brand X" player is cheaper, or "Brand Y" player has more features, or "Brand Z" has more capacity. What nobody will accept is that no other player has the same _combination_. Anyone can make a big player cheaply. Or a small player with 128MB of flash. Only this has the capacity, size, and usability combination. If you don't value that, that's fine, but many people are willing to pay for quality.
Adobe Indesign does a great job of presenting a usable interface to a complex piece of software. Changing fundamental user interface metaphpors is not necessary. The problem is that the folks at MS can't seem to understand that simpler can be better. Half the menu items are replicated in and clutter the toolbars; the toolbars are long rows of buttons without good visual cues as to their action. They are terrible, and now MS is coming up with an even more complicated solution to the problem they created.
A simpler interface using palettes of logically grouped tools, combined with fixing the broken typography (auto ligatures, proper auto hyphenation, proper math typesetting instead of Equation Editor, etc.) would go a lot further for getting real work done than these types of efforts.
And the Carbon is more than double the weight and 3 times the physical volume. If you're going to use specs for a comparison, you need the whole picture.
Shouldn't it have been called Unix Services for Windows? In another example of MS marketing spin, they act as if SFU somehow does something for Unix, when it instead adds basic functionality to Windows.
I used SFU for about 1 month. I still was so frustrated doing Fortran development under Windows that I wiped the drive and installed Linux.
I think the recording industry is finding that people are buying 1 or 2 songs from a given album, and paying 2 bucks for it. This contrasts with the $20 people used to pay for CDs. Instead of fixing the music so that albums are cohesive and compelling (compare Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to today's "albums"), they think that they can skirt the basic laws of supply and demand.
How about cutting technology budgets and not worrying about how to get children to school? It's amazing how well books and teachers can educate children.
A laptop isn't a device meant to be secured. A basic tenet of computer security is that anyone with physical access to the hardware effectively has admin access. What if the students simply wiped the drive or put a different one in? Would that be "hacking" deserving of a felony charge too? It seems like these children were baited to have their lives ruined. How did the massive amounts of taxpayer dollars help them?
MS is definitely increasing their influence in academia through large scale donations. I don't know if that was the reason that Flordia went with Windows, but I have seen it elsewhere.
When I ran a school engineering project, we received a computer from Intel. I then received a letter in the mail from Microsoft requesting that a sponsorship sticker be placed on our vehicle. Seeing as how the first thing I did was wipe Windows off that donated machine, I declined.
It is absolutely essential to find out what your users and their needs are first. If you talk to a few of them, you'll get an idea of what is necessary vs. fluff. But each persons needs will vary, and it's important not to lose sight of the fact that a computer is simply a tool to get a job done.
I think the Mac OS is a prime example of OSS and proprietary software coexisting. As long as standards are followed and _protocols_ stay open, there is no reason to think they are in any way exclusive. On the other hand, Microsoft style strategies where protocols and "standards" are closed make interoperability (and therefore coexistence) difficult at best.
I'm not saying that we don't need computer scientists - but, like you, I agree that real computer science isn't coding. There is, and always will be, research to be done with computers, as elsewhere. But I think the utility of a CS major with only an undergraduate degree in the "real world" has diminished for doing mundane programming tasks.
I'm not telling anyone not to go into CS - but only to go into it if they are interested in the _science_ of computers rather than their use (i.e., coding).
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To listen to the music on this disc, you need a PC with the following minimum system requirements:
-
-
-
- Logged in with Administrator rights
why?
The problem here is that MS needs to make a significant profit on the venture, as opposed to Apple, who has a music store to sell music players. Apple is content to give away the bulk of the proceeds from its store for market share so they can drive iTunes sales. What does MS stand to gain by giving away the bulk of its profits? More WMA licenses? Those can hardly bring in more than a few dollars per player.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to see MS do everything at a total loss just for the sake of controlling the market.
They basically look like Long-EZs (The Burt Rutan designed kit plane, http://www.ez.org/), with rocket engines.
It's not a song, it's a map.
The subsidy is indeed from me paying the difference - as a single young person with a high paying job and no house, I'm definitely not on the receiving end of taxation. Since I pay out into a pool, and other people who buy hybrids pay less into that pool simply because they purchaesd a hybrid, I'm arguing that that I'm subsidizing that person's purchase. I do agree that foreign investment also covers part (perhaps most of) the tab, but that doesn't mean that deficit spending is ok or a good thing.
If gas prices rise, that may automatically increase the viability of hybrids and drive their adoption - without tax incentives. However, I think higher gas prices would encourage true conservation by encouraging shorter commutes, carpooling, etc. Instead, hybrids allow people to get into the carpool lane here in California - even though I'm burning less fuel than the hybrid SUVs. Hybrids really don't save that much fuel relative to their expense (and their stated mileages are under ideal temperature conditions under driving cycles that are very optimistic). The problem is that legislators, rather than engineers, are trying to devise fuel economy solutions, and in the process stifling other technologies (such as diesel, smaller turbocharged engines, etc).
People see a hybrid as a cure-all for the real problem - people drive too much. The fact that they need tax breaks for hybrids means that they do not make finacial sense, and frankly, makes me livid. I drive a non-hybrid that gets 30+ mpg and drive ~5 miles/day. Why should I subsidize someone who drives a hybrid SUV getting the same mileage 60 miles per day?
This sounds an awful lot like a hardware problem rather than an OS problem. It could be bad RAM. That said, a Mac has low TCO and good reliability...
Because CDs, by definition, follow a standard, and play on all devices that conform to that standard.
He should say "Playing music on a Mac from silver coasters that happen to play music in some CD players isn't a right."
The Dell offering is almost double the size as the shuffle (1.98 in^3 vs 1.07 in^3). It's 1.29 oz instead of 0.78oz. The iPod Nano is only 1.5 in^3. Now you see the difference between Apple's design team and Dell's.
But an iPod nano wouldn't be nano-sized if it included things like a radio, microphone, etc. Is it worth a cost, weight, and size hit for the small percentage of the market that wants a radio? The marketing studies seem to say no.
This represents what is inherently flawed with Microsoft's software development processes. Instead of translating industrial design concepts into code, they code up some f-ed up concept of industrial design.
I see what the Tivo folks are doing, but I can't understand why. Are they trying to preempt regulation? What's in it for them to cripple their products?
Already there are several comments about how "Brand X" player is cheaper, or "Brand Y" player has more features, or "Brand Z" has more capacity. What nobody will accept is that no other player has the same _combination_. Anyone can make a big player cheaply. Or a small player with 128MB of flash. Only this has the capacity, size, and usability combination. If you don't value that, that's fine, but many people are willing to pay for quality.
Adobe Indesign does a great job of presenting a usable interface to a complex piece of software. Changing fundamental user interface metaphpors is not necessary. The problem is that the folks at MS can't seem to understand that simpler can be better. Half the menu items are replicated in and clutter the toolbars; the toolbars are long rows of buttons without good visual cues as to their action. They are terrible, and now MS is coming up with an even more complicated solution to the problem they created. A simpler interface using palettes of logically grouped tools, combined with fixing the broken typography (auto ligatures, proper auto hyphenation, proper math typesetting instead of Equation Editor, etc.) would go a lot further for getting real work done than these types of efforts.
And the Carbon is more than double the weight and 3 times the physical volume. If you're going to use specs for a comparison, you need the whole picture.
Shouldn't it have been called Unix Services for Windows? In another example of MS marketing spin, they act as if SFU somehow does something for Unix, when it instead adds basic functionality to Windows. I used SFU for about 1 month. I still was so frustrated doing Fortran development under Windows that I wiped the drive and installed Linux.
I think the recording industry is finding that people are buying 1 or 2 songs from a given album, and paying 2 bucks for it. This contrasts with the $20 people used to pay for CDs. Instead of fixing the music so that albums are cohesive and compelling (compare Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to today's "albums"), they think that they can skirt the basic laws of supply and demand.
How about cutting technology budgets and not worrying about how to get children to school? It's amazing how well books and teachers can educate children.
A laptop isn't a device meant to be secured. A basic tenet of computer security is that anyone with physical access to the hardware effectively has admin access. What if the students simply wiped the drive or put a different one in? Would that be "hacking" deserving of a felony charge too? It seems like these children were baited to have their lives ruined. How did the massive amounts of taxpayer dollars help them?
There are very few cloudy days in southern California... :)
MS is definitely increasing their influence in academia through large scale donations. I don't know if that was the reason that Flordia went with Windows, but I have seen it elsewhere. When I ran a school engineering project, we received a computer from Intel. I then received a letter in the mail from Microsoft requesting that a sponsorship sticker be placed on our vehicle. Seeing as how the first thing I did was wipe Windows off that donated machine, I declined.
It is absolutely essential to find out what your users and their needs are first. If you talk to a few of them, you'll get an idea of what is necessary vs. fluff. But each persons needs will vary, and it's important not to lose sight of the fact that a computer is simply a tool to get a job done.
I think the Mac OS is a prime example of OSS and proprietary software coexisting. As long as standards are followed and _protocols_ stay open, there is no reason to think they are in any way exclusive. On the other hand, Microsoft style strategies where protocols and "standards" are closed make interoperability (and therefore coexistence) difficult at best.
And the electrical system gets its energy from the alternator, which gets its energy from the engine. Conservation of energy is alive and well...
I'm not saying that we don't need computer scientists - but, like you, I agree that real computer science isn't coding. There is, and always will be, research to be done with computers, as elsewhere. But I think the utility of a CS major with only an undergraduate degree in the "real world" has diminished for doing mundane programming tasks. I'm not telling anyone not to go into CS - but only to go into it if they are interested in the _science_ of computers rather than their use (i.e., coding).