True - they were completely free to be unemployed instead. If you live in a country where life is pleasant for unemployed citizens I'll bet you'll find a lot of food that is either imported from, or picked by migrant workers from, countries where unemployment is a pretty grim prospect. I think you have a rather narrow understanding of "coercion".
In that case it would probably work just as well as any small community gifted with local superabundance, right up until the resulting growth forces the actual limitations of the virtual environment to the foreground.
That's a laugh, considering that the whole credit crunch mess sprung from the same delusion: that continual, accelerating growth could be sustained without some corresponding massive increase in real, tangible resources. All I'm proposing is a simulation of a world in which such an increase has happened.
Many people argue against capitalism when what they really object to is an irrational refusal to work together for mutual benefit.
I'm not sure I'm even arguing against capitalism as the least-worst solution in the real world - although we've just seen pretty clear proof that unrestrained "capitalism" can go spectacularly wrong, too. I'm talking about speculative forms of society that might become possible in a future "post-scarcity" world.
The question is, would such a society automatically "go exponential" and rapidly exhaust any conceivable finite resources, however large, (which is what capitalism just tried to do), or would it stabilise (or at least, only grow linearly) with the sort of resource increase that could feasibly come from (e.g.) nanotech, fusion power, exploiting the solar system?
The free software example is interesting because - as you point out - the costs aren't zero and the resources aren't infinite, but it seems to be working. So perhaps "scarcity" simply has to be reduced to the point where "human nature" doesn't actually sink the ship (in the case of free software - all the millions of people using the software without giving anything back, plus a smaller number breaching the GPL, don't drain the system enough to destroy it).
The alternative is that, as new technologies with the potential to disrupt capitalist models appear, someone will have to impose artificial scarcity. If someone invents the household nanotech replicator which is capable of manufacturing a bicycle (or worse, another replicator) from the contents of your trash can, how much should you pay, and to who, for the right to do that?
Yeah but not everything works. Thunderbird & Lightning is unusable.
I've used Thunderbird on an EEE 701 and I think "unusable" is going a bit too far. Main problem ISTR is that, for the account setup dialogues, you need to know the alt-drag trick to pan the window around the screen - but once it was set up it was OK. Evolution on EasyPeasy <SideshowBob>(shudder)</SideshowBob> is the same.
Of course, if Asus hadn't drunk the Kool Aid and lost interest in Linux on the EEE, tightening up the dialogue boxes on the key apps would hardly take a Manhattan Project.
Well, I was about to spout off on about how the aluminium content of tea was supposed to cause Alzheimer's, and that like, duh, coffee drinkers drink less tea.
Still, you can see why people get bewildered by these announcements - especially when the refutations get less column inches than the initial shock! horror! claims.
Considering that apple sold ibooks with 1024x768 resolution in the early OS X days, when that was about enough real estate to get a console window and a few icons on, I can believe it easily.
I've just tried and you can fit 4 OSX terminals on a 1024x768 display. If a slashdotter can't do it with 4 parallel bash sessions it isn't worth doing.
When I were a lad, we ran GUIs on 640x256 in 256 colours and we was grateful for it. Heck, people run Linux/Gnome on EEEPC 700s!
The programmers assure him that it can be handled right up until the end, when they are forced to admit they can't do it after all because they finally found the fatal flaw in the plan.
Or, alternatively, 3 days before shipping, the Pointy Haired Boss is finally forced to accept that the "political and economic realities" he's been trying to explain to the programmers for the last 3 months really are less important than those silly, geeky "laws of physics" which the programmers keep babbling about, and that all the unpaid overtime in the world won't produce a software patch that puts more pixels on the LCD.
First, that latter statement isn't even true in the real world.
Sorry, but who do you think grew/processed/delivered the food you just ate, and do you think, given the choice, they wouldn't rather be doing a nice creative/management job than sorting potatoes?
As for the rest of your comments: you are missing the point of a virtual world: all such worlds rely on a certain suspension of disbelief by the participants. In this case, yes, money and property is changing hands behind the scenes, but the virtual world itself could be kept internally consistent by not allowing internal property or currency to develop. For example, you could ration "online" time from the real-world end if there was a capacity problem - as long as this was done "fairly" so externally-rich users couldn't trade real world currency for more time. The problem is with Second Life seems to have artificial scarcity and American Capitalism built in at a fundamental level.
I'm not even saying it wouldn't fail: but it would be interesting to see how and why!
The software itself isn't property -- and I would argue that treating it as such isn't logically consistent with the purpose or nature of property
Well, yes - that's kinda the point of the Free Software movement. The less enlightened parts of the commercial software industry very much think that software is property.
Generally there is a limited group with write access to the repository, whose members can be said to "own" the code in the limited fashion I've been using above
...but any other person or group can take a copy of the code and start their own version of the project.
Why this works is that (a) even though it is not zero, the marginal costs of distributing software are microscopic compared to any other sort of manufacture or service industry and (b) there exists a pool of programmers and employers willing to contribute time and use of equipment without recouping the cost from the free software community. Given those conditions, a "property/currency free" microcosm has thrived.
You point out the reason why idealistic socialism/communism goes titsup in the real world, but you are missing the point of a virtual world:
Even in a virtual world there is always at least one scarce commodity: labor.
No: because the only labour necessary in a virtual world takes place for the direct benefit of the labourer and is usually of a creative/intellectual nature. Nobody has to be coerced into digging coal or grow food in order to support the lifestyle of the slighty-more-equal comrades at the top of the heap.
Users tend to prefer worlds where the (virtual) product of their labor is protected from destruction by some anonymous "troll", which amounts to a form of private property rights.
But anything destroyed in a virtual world can be re-created by fiat. If someone steals your virtual plasma screen then it will grow back, the thief can keep what he stole and everybody is happy.
Also, virtual "building blocks" may be superabundant in the abstract, but they all require a measure of storage/bandwidth/CPU time/etc., which means they, too, are subject to the constraints of scarcity.
Firstly, those costs are negligible compared to the real world cost of manufacturing goods. Secondly, those resources are used in the real world there is no reason why every citizen can't pay a fixed monthly subscription or make donations to cover that - as long as those do not translate into personal property or status within the virtual world.
The two flies in the ointment are (a) it could be deathly boring (they'd have to invent the equivalent of the Culture's "Special Circumstances" and (b) ingenious people would find some way of monetizing their activities (which would be an interesting result, rather depressing for any wannabe post-human...)
In SF stories, such post-scarcity communities usually assume nanotechnology, vast resources from expansion into space and effectively free robotic labour.
However, back in the real world, we do have one example: the Free (as in GPL) Software movement. This only works because the only unavoidable cost of software development is the labour of "design" - and people have proven amenable to donating that (either for indirect advantage or because they enjoy it). The cost of distribution and "manufacture" is neglibible and even if people "steal" your product (in a FOSS sense that could mean using it without contributing time back to the community) you still have it. Yes, industry has found ways making money off the back of OS software, but the licensing scheme ensures that that can't translate into "exclusive ownership" of the software.
However, until someone invents the Star Trek replicator - and although you have to start somewhere, I don't mean something that can produce a doornob apparently made of snot - I doubt that the Open Source Hardware movement will have the same impact. So don't expect Richard Stallman to be the first "we don't have a president but if we did he would be it" president of The Culture.
Anyone can make claims like this. I claim the Palm will be the best phone, because it's designed well, it just works, and although it doesn't do anything new, it does them in a way that's better.
Well, that's quite clever since you can't actually buy the Palm yet and all people are going on is a video demonstration and, if you're lucky, a few minutes "hands on" at CES. Whereas the iPhone has been available for some time, and has been the subject of in-depth comparative reviews which frequently come to conclusions such as:
While the iPhone is not the most feature-rich device, this group of experts found that when it comes to usability, iPhone does, indeed, live up to its hype.
I'm not judging the Palm just yet - it looks promising - but since the launch of the iPhone there have been lots of phones with impressive feature lists and iPhone-inspired aesthetics which - as with the HTC in the review above - fail to cut the mustard when it comes to actual usability.
Good design most certainly can be described in objective terms.
Yes, and terms like logical and consistent layouts, responsiveness and avoiding feature creep are objective, as is "for fsck's sake don't try to cram in every last feature that some man and his dog has asked for". You'll see these coming up in in-depth reviews of Apple stuff. Its just that such decisions and principles - especially the reasons why things have been left out - may not be immediately obvious to an end user.
Nobody would argue that income suddenly became immune from income tax simply because it was earned using a computer and the internet. OK, which have convoluted rules about cross-border transactions, but not income tax. I think you'll also find that the taxmen also have existing arrangements (took 30 seconds on Google to find that) to deal with any attempt to use alternative currencies or barter exchanges as an end-run around tax.
The only difference between income from selling software or art on your dollar-priced internet shop and income from running a virtual hat shop in Second Life is a sprinkling of fairy dust. If second-lifers try too hard to make it sound like something new, different and scary, the danger is that the tax authorities will be only too keen to invent new, different and scary rules...
What I find depressing is that these "virtual worlds" are all taking the form of capitalist economies. Communism/Socialism may or may not work in the real world, but if I'm going to move to a virtual world which is supposedly limited only by the imagination of its inhabitants, I'm holding out for a post-scarcity utopia like The Culture or even the freakin' United Federation of Planets! If you don't have property then its much harder to have tax...
I just don't understand why it is taking Google so long to release a Mac and Linux version.
Well, according to this they used Windows' own HTTP protocol implementation for the first version - they've now written their own.
I suspect that Google are less concerned about taking marketshare from Safari (Mac) and Firefox (linux) than they are about getting established on Windows. Methinks their priority is to ensure that there is a Google-branded alternative to IE they can use as a web app platform just in case Microsoft does something to break Google Docs on IE (inadvertantly of course - no company with Microsoft's reputation would stoop to telling their developers that "IE9 ain't done until Gmail won't run"...)
Thank you for proving my point about the double standard. The OP criticised Palm for not having an ultimate feature list
I suggest that you go and read the OP again. It does not say what you think it says. Nowhere does it mention the "ultimate feature list" - just "everything the iPhone does" (not to hard if, as you seem to think, the iPhone is missing so many features) and "do it better" (not "do more").
I say "cool", because no one ever explains how it's done better, instead just referring to subjective preferences "I like it better, I don't know why, it Just Is"
Yes, that's what people often say when they encounter "good design", which includes things like logical and consistent layouts, responsiveness and not cramming in a mugs eyeful of features, half of which are barely usable.
and no company has yet to produce a "killer" phone to put them in the dominant position.
You're assuming that "dominant position" means "top selling". There are other forms of dominance - one of which is illustrated by the fact that we're having this discussion at all. The iPhone has become the benchmark against which any new smartphone is judged by the press and blogosphere.
It's the double standard - Apple products are okay as long as they have a "cool factor" (your words, not mine), but other products are held to some impossible standard of "must be able to do everything that any other phone can do, and more".
Thing is, Apple don't try for the ultimate feature list: they decide which features most people will actually want, and implement them well.
E.g. the iPhone famously doesn't have MMS. My HTC Windows Mobile smartphone does, and I've sent exactly 1 MMS message which took half an hour of faffing around to discover that you have to set the camera to the right resolution for MMS before you take the photo (and then remember to un-set it when you want to take a good quality photo). I think WM has cut & paste (another area where the iPhone gets slated) but buggered if I could successfully copy an EMAIL address from a text message into the contacts... The WM media player is unusable (iPhone is excellent); the web browser is unusable (iPhone may not have Flash and Java, but IE Mobile barely has HTML). On WM I can use my own MP3s as ringtones, but from the number of missed calls I get, I strongly suspect that people are hanging up before WM has got round to staring the player. Oh, and the phone is so carefully designed that its impossible to pick up in a hurry without pushing one of the buttons thoughtfully positioned exactly where you natually hold it (another reason for dropped calls). Maybe the iPhone camera isn't the best: but if I gave a toss about picture quality I'd use a proper camera with a proper lens: I've yet to successfully take anything other than a blurry mess with WM.
...so until I've had my hands on any new "iPhone killer" and determined that the impressive feature list has actually been implemented by someone with a clue and some capacity for attention to detail (i.e. it isn't a Windows Mobile device with a lipstick-on-a-pig iPhone lookalike skin) I'll reserve judgement.
I did have a play with the Google G1, and really, really want to like it, but the hardware is frankly bizzarre, the "real" keyboard is so small and untactile that its no better than the iPhone's on-screen keyboard and the processor doesn't have enough grunt to run the (not bad looking) web browser smoothly.
I bolded the part of your statement that's the problem. Don't they have credit unions in the UK?
In the UK we have mutually-owned "Building Societies" which I believe vaguely similar to your "Credit Unions", but during the 90s most of the big names were targeted by carpetbagging speculators who would join and immediately push through a motion to de-mutualize, hand a few shares to all the members and effectively turn into banks (most of which have now been taken over by other banks).
I had an account with one (Abbey) - it de-mutualized and turned into a bank, then closed my local branch, so I moved to another building society that still had a local branch. A year or two later they were bought up by Abbey who closed the local branch (again). Then they sold the whole caboodle to Santander.
More recently, I was about to move back to one of the remaining Building Societies (A&L) but before I got around to it, guess what... Yup, they were bought by Santander as well.
I also have an endowment policy (just don't ask) with another mutual society: they demutualized as well. AAARRRGGHHHH!!!
So, you see, I basically agree with your advice but following it is easier said than done. Fortunately, the remaining mutual societies fared rather better than the banks during the crunch and demutualization is now seen as a Bad Thing, so I'll probably give them another go in the future (if we haven't reverted to a barter economy or adopted the leaf as currency by then).
Still, I've now got a small collection of Spanish bank shares. Unfortunately, they're all held electronically so I won't be able to use them as fuel when the Russians cut off the gas.
At the end of the day you have to decide if having that relationship with one company is more important to you than whatever deal of the month their competitors are running.
We're not talking about shopping around for a marginally better deal here: we're talking about getting royally shafted if you don't move every year or two. Not sure what the US is like, but in the UK over the last few years the typical behaviour of banks has been to progressively degrade the interest rates paid/charged to existing account holders to derisory levels, while introducing new account types, only available to new customers, which offer competitive base rates and first-year bonuses. We're talking differences of a couple of percentage points (OK, that was back in the Good Old Days before last October) Post crunch, it can be the difference between Bugger All and Bugger All + 1% - if you have substantial loans or savings that is serious money:-)
I fail to see why any institution that I've chosen not to do business with, should continue to serve me for free.
The cost of keeping someone's statements online for a few months after they have closed their account is hardly going to be onerous, especially as they'll have to keep the data for five years anyway. To pull the plug the millisecond the account ends - even to the extent that some people are unable to ever view their final statement is simply shoddy, inconsiderate service.
...and don't play the "chosen to take your business elsewhere" card: many industries - especially banks - have consciously chosen a business model that encourages customer "churn" by, for example, offering significantly more attractive deals to new customers. I'd love to be able to stick to one supplier for years without getting screwed. They profit from this, so they should deal with the consequences.
How did Tuesdays Keynote illustrate 'how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'?
I thought it nicely illustrated that Apple's high media profile is starting to reach the point where it is as much a liability as an asset and that turning the charisma down a notch might be a wise move.
Here is a good example of the problem. Even if you don't like Apple much, by all means criticise their actual products, but
giving them that sort of negative press merely because they fail to announce everything the blogosphere predicted is just bloody stupid. Having MacWorld in January is probably Osbourning their Christmas sales, too.
Now they're not doing MacWorld at least they can announce things as and when they're ready - although, quite frankly, even if Apple announces "Tune into our webcast for details of our exciting new colors for iPod socks" the rumourmill is going to be saying "OMG! they're going to launch the iPhone femto and the new fusion-powered 32-core quantum-processing MacPRO!".
However, at least on the web, everything can be announced by a CGI'd Steve Jobs who, courtesy of Pixar, will stay fat and healthy for all eternity.
There is very little case law protecting consumer fair use with video games, as compared with audio and video.
I'd have thought that was an argument in favour of starting with video games.
OK, so all DRM is bad, but the real horror stories (malware, limited installs, mandatory internet connections) have been with games.
The Spore case is a particularly clear example of DRM pissing off legitimate consumers while failing to deter (and possibly encouraging) large-scale illicit copying.
Also, whereas issues with Audio/Video DRM are normally to do with caselaw-based "fair use" rights such as format-shifting, the problems with video game DRM have been more fundamental "fitness for purpose" variety. I'm not defending audio/video DRM, but pragmatically speaking, audio DRM seems to be dying off by itself and "your lousy game broke my perfectly standard PC" is going to get more public sympathy than "why can't I watch HD content on Linux?".
number of IBM/Lenovo laptops with docking stations I've seen in my last two jobs, too numerous to count.
Wow, so not even countably infinite, then! Your use of hyperbole is literally beyond belief:-)
BTW: "never taken the world by storm" does not mean "are totally non existent". "Taken the world by storm" would mean docks being prominently displayed on most adverts for laptops, not buried in the options for a few corporate-oriented manufacturers. The ludicrous prices for Lenovo etc. docks suggest they only ever sell them to corporates who order them routinely.
Frankly, I've never understood why any manufacturer of ANY laptop, Mac or PC, would make a desktop-replacement grade laptop with no way to dock it so you can comfortably work AT A DESKTOP!
My MBP usually lives on one of these so I avoid using the horrible keyboard which blighted the Alu MBP.
Plugging in the power, Ethernet, video and a single USB and power takes a whole ten seconds, so its hardly a chore.
Lots of laptop manufacturers do (or did) produce docks - including Apple - but they never seem to have taken the world by storm. They add to the build cost of the laptop (custom connectors) and tend to be expensive (and, lets face it, you really need one for home and one for work).
Let that be a lesson to us: don't do math with legs crossed: go to bathroom first, re-read post, then click submit. Oh, and don't mix units - good job I wasn't building a Mars lander:-).
Mathematical fsckups aside: making a battery removable means you have to build a double wall, with enough clearance to get the battery in and out, plus connectors, latches etc. and small linear decreases in length have large impact on volume;
There is no trade off. You make the battery removable. You might get a seam on your casing. Oh no. But you most certainly do not lose 28.5% of your space!
Please tell me you're not an engineer.
Its not just a seam: if the battery can be removed, people will remove it, so you have to ensure not only that the battery is robust (can't be crushed, the terminals can't be shorted) but that the computer with the battery removed is also robust (both mechanically, and proof against foreign objects getting in).
Lets say the space available for the battery is 20cm x 10cm x 1.5cm giving a volume of 300 cm sq,
Now make it removable. You have to put a rigid case around the battery and a wall around the battery compartment. Lets say that, together, they are 1mm thick - that loses you 2mm in every dimension.
The volume available for the new battery is 18cm x 8 cm x 1.3 cm = 187.2 sq cm.
Whups, there goes 40% of your battery volume!
Plus, the bigger you make the battery, the thicker you have to make the case and the more removing it weakens the laptop.
Quite a while - I think the "issue" probably dates back to the good ol' Mac OS Classic days and has been improving ever since OS X appeared. Back when you had to pay for development tools and documentation, programmers were possibly less inclined to give away their efforts: film at 11!)
How about just using XCode, Textwrangler, jEdit, Eclipse or Smultron?
Bugger that - just open the terminal and type "vi" - what more could anybodiDy neecEd?:x:x:x:q!DAMMIT[ESC]:q! (or there's nano).
Seriously, you've just given good reasons as to why you might not want to shell out money for a text editor: I tend to do any serious software/HTML coding in Eclipse, while nano is usually good enough for quick edits to config files etc. There's just the occasional case where you don't want to fart around with a project-based behemoth like Eclipse or Xcode, but nano doesn't quite cut the mustard - but if you had to pay you'd make do. On the PC, I used to regularly buy updates to UltraEdit until Eclipse came along.
That's where there used to be a bit of a hole on the Mac, but TextWrangler (highly recommended) fills it nicely.
either straight in an X11 window, or via the special OS X build that is available for most?
I think its implicit that the gp. wanted a Mac GUI text editor (i.e. one developed by someone who actually likes GUIs rather than some Unix geek who is going to go right back to using EMACS when the project is finished). If us Mac users could tolerate X11/Gnome/KDE without wanting to claw out our eyes we'd switch to Ubuntu and save ourselves a lot of money.
The problem here is, it also translates into a culture of shareware. Things which are freeware on Windows, and open source everywhere else, are shareware on a Mac.
Maybe it's just me, but that's what I've seen.
I'd agree with you to a point - the "free as in beer" scene on the Mac did used to seem a bit thin compared to the PC, but I suspect that was just a side-effect of the much smaller market.
I've previously been frustrated by the lack of Mac freeware in areas such as unarchiving (Stuffit: non-free), FTP/SFTP (Fetch: non-free; Fugu seems to be dead) and text editing (in the past, its been BBEdit or nothing) - but thinking about it, these areas are dominated by shareware on the PC too (WinZip, WS-FTP, & I ended up registering UltraEdit).
I think its improved a lot in recent years: e.g. TextWrangler is a good free text editor; MacFusion/MacFUSE help with file transfer. Plus, if you can put up with X11 interfaces and don't mind waiting for macports/fink to compile stuff from source, most of your favorite GNU/Linux stuff is available. Plus big projects like Eclipse and OpenOffice now seem more enthusiastic about Mac (although NeoOffice still feels more stable than OO for Mac).
Still waiting for a decent GUI-based archiver with creation/browsing facilities (free or otherwise) though: "The Unarchiver" improves unpacking no end, but isn't really a "WinZip" replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
All true, but they weren't coerced into doing it,
True - they were completely free to be unemployed instead. If you live in a country where life is pleasant for unemployed citizens I'll bet you'll find a lot of food that is either imported from, or picked by migrant workers from, countries where unemployment is a pretty grim prospect. I think you have a rather narrow understanding of "coercion".
In that case it would probably work just as well as any small community gifted with local superabundance, right up until the resulting growth forces the actual limitations of the virtual environment to the foreground.
That's a laugh, considering that the whole credit crunch mess sprung from the same delusion: that continual, accelerating growth could be sustained without some corresponding massive increase in real, tangible resources. All I'm proposing is a simulation of a world in which such an increase has happened.
Many people argue against capitalism when what they really object to is an irrational refusal to work together for mutual benefit.
I'm not sure I'm even arguing against capitalism as the least-worst solution in the real world - although we've just seen pretty clear proof that unrestrained "capitalism" can go spectacularly wrong, too. I'm talking about speculative forms of society that might become possible in a future "post-scarcity" world.
The question is, would such a society automatically "go exponential" and rapidly exhaust any conceivable finite resources, however large, (which is what capitalism just tried to do), or would it stabilise (or at least, only grow linearly) with the sort of resource increase that could feasibly come from (e.g.) nanotech, fusion power, exploiting the solar system?
The free software example is interesting because - as you point out - the costs aren't zero and the resources aren't infinite, but it seems to be working. So perhaps "scarcity" simply has to be reduced to the point where "human nature" doesn't actually sink the ship (in the case of free software - all the millions of people using the software without giving anything back, plus a smaller number breaching the GPL, don't drain the system enough to destroy it).
The alternative is that, as new technologies with the potential to disrupt capitalist models appear, someone will have to impose artificial scarcity. If someone invents the household nanotech replicator which is capable of manufacturing a bicycle (or worse, another replicator) from the contents of your trash can, how much should you pay, and to who, for the right to do that?
Yeah but not everything works. Thunderbird & Lightning is unusable.
I've used Thunderbird on an EEE 701 and I think "unusable" is going a bit too far. Main problem ISTR is that, for the account setup dialogues, you need to know the alt-drag trick to pan the window around the screen - but once it was set up it was OK. Evolution on EasyPeasy <SideshowBob>(shudder)</SideshowBob> is the same.
Of course, if Asus hadn't drunk the Kool Aid and lost interest in Linux on the EEE, tightening up the dialogue boxes on the key apps would hardly take a Manhattan Project.
Well, I was about to spout off on about how the aluminium content of tea was supposed to cause Alzheimer's, and that like, duh, coffee drinkers drink less tea.
Fortunately I Googled before I leapt and it sounds like aluminium (and hence tea) is moving out of the frame....
Still, you can see why people get bewildered by these announcements - especially when the refutations get less column inches than the initial shock! horror! claims.
Considering that apple sold ibooks with 1024x768 resolution in the early OS X days, when that was about enough real estate to get a console window and a few icons on, I can believe it easily.
I've just tried and you can fit 4 OSX terminals on a 1024x768 display. If a slashdotter can't do it with 4 parallel bash sessions it isn't worth doing.
When I were a lad, we ran GUIs on 640x256 in 256 colours and we was grateful for it. Heck, people run Linux/Gnome on EEEPC 700s!
The programmers assure him that it can be handled right up until the end, when they are forced to admit they can't do it after all because they finally found the fatal flaw in the plan.
Or, alternatively, 3 days before shipping, the Pointy Haired Boss is finally forced to accept that the "political and economic realities" he's been trying to explain to the programmers for the last 3 months really are less important than those silly, geeky "laws of physics" which the programmers keep babbling about, and that all the unpaid overtime in the world won't produce a software patch that puts more pixels on the LCD.
First, that latter statement isn't even true in the real world.
Sorry, but who do you think grew/processed/delivered the food you just ate, and do you think, given the choice, they wouldn't rather be doing a nice creative/management job than sorting potatoes?
As for the rest of your comments: you are missing the point of a virtual world: all such worlds rely on a certain suspension of disbelief by the participants. In this case, yes, money and property is changing hands behind the scenes, but the virtual world itself could be kept internally consistent by not allowing internal property or currency to develop. For example, you could ration "online" time from the real-world end if there was a capacity problem - as long as this was done "fairly" so externally-rich users couldn't trade real world currency for more time. The problem is with Second Life seems to have artificial scarcity and American Capitalism built in at a fundamental level.
I'm not even saying it wouldn't fail: but it would be interesting to see how and why!
The software itself isn't property -- and I would argue that treating it as such isn't logically consistent with the purpose or nature of property
Well, yes - that's kinda the point of the Free Software movement. The less enlightened parts of the commercial software industry very much think that software is property.
Generally there is a limited group with write access to the repository, whose members can be said to "own" the code in the limited fashion I've been using above
...but any other person or group can take a copy of the code and start their own version of the project.
Why this works is that (a) even though it is not zero, the marginal costs of distributing software are microscopic compared to any other sort of manufacture or service industry and (b) there exists a pool of programmers and employers willing to contribute time and use of equipment without recouping the cost from the free software community. Given those conditions, a "property/currency free" microcosm has thrived.
You point out the reason why idealistic socialism/communism goes titsup in the real world, but you are missing the point of a virtual world:
Even in a virtual world there is always at least one scarce commodity: labor.
No: because the only labour necessary in a virtual world takes place for the direct benefit of the labourer and is usually of a creative/intellectual nature. Nobody has to be coerced into digging coal or grow food in order to support the lifestyle of the slighty-more-equal comrades at the top of the heap.
Users tend to prefer worlds where the (virtual) product of their labor is protected from destruction by some anonymous "troll", which amounts to a form of private property rights.
But anything destroyed in a virtual world can be re-created by fiat. If someone steals your virtual plasma screen then it will grow back, the thief can keep what he stole and everybody is happy.
Also, virtual "building blocks" may be superabundant in the abstract, but they all require a measure of storage/bandwidth/CPU time/etc., which means they, too, are subject to the constraints of scarcity.
Firstly, those costs are negligible compared to the real world cost of manufacturing goods. Secondly, those resources are used in the real world there is no reason why every citizen can't pay a fixed monthly subscription or make donations to cover that - as long as those do not translate into personal property or status within the virtual world.
The two flies in the ointment are (a) it could be deathly boring (they'd have to invent the equivalent of the Culture's "Special Circumstances" and (b) ingenious people would find some way of monetizing their activities (which would be an interesting result, rather depressing for any wannabe post-human...)
In SF stories, such post-scarcity communities usually assume nanotechnology, vast resources from expansion into space and effectively free robotic labour.
However, back in the real world, we do have one example: the Free (as in GPL) Software movement. This only works because the only unavoidable cost of software development is the labour of "design" - and people have proven amenable to donating that (either for indirect advantage or because they enjoy it). The cost of distribution and "manufacture" is neglibible and even if people "steal" your product (in a FOSS sense that could mean using it without contributing time back to the community) you still have it. Yes, industry has found ways making money off the back of OS software, but the licensing scheme ensures that that can't translate into "exclusive ownership" of the software.
However, until someone invents the Star Trek replicator - and although you have to start somewhere, I don't mean something that can produce a doornob apparently made of snot - I doubt that the Open Source Hardware movement will have the same impact. So don't expect Richard Stallman to be the first "we don't have a president but if we did he would be it" president of The Culture.
OK, _____ which have convoluted rules about cross-border transactions
Missing text: "...there have been issues about sales tax and VAT which which have convoluted rules about cross-border transactions but not income tax"
We apologise for the inconvenience.
Anyone can make claims like this. I claim the Palm will be the best phone, because it's designed well, it just works, and although it doesn't do anything new, it does them in a way that's better.
Well, that's quite clever since you can't actually buy the Palm yet and all people are going on is a video demonstration and, if you're lucky, a few minutes "hands on" at CES. Whereas the iPhone has been available for some time, and has been the subject of in-depth comparative reviews which frequently come to conclusions such as:
While the iPhone is not the most feature-rich device, this group of experts found that when it comes to usability, iPhone does, indeed, live up to its hype.
Link
I'm not judging the Palm just yet - it looks promising - but since the launch of the iPhone there have been lots of phones with impressive feature lists and iPhone-inspired aesthetics which - as with the HTC in the review above - fail to cut the mustard when it comes to actual usability.
Good design most certainly can be described in objective terms.
Yes, and terms like logical and consistent layouts, responsiveness and avoiding feature creep are objective, as is "for fsck's sake don't try to cram in every last feature that some man and his dog has asked for". You'll see these coming up in in-depth reviews of Apple stuff. Its just that such decisions and principles - especially the reasons why things have been left out - may not be immediately obvious to an end user.
Nobody would argue that income suddenly became immune from income tax simply because it was earned using a computer and the internet. OK, which have convoluted rules about cross-border transactions, but not income tax. I think you'll also find that the taxmen also have existing arrangements (took 30 seconds on Google to find that) to deal with any attempt to use alternative currencies or barter exchanges as an end-run around tax.
The only difference between income from selling software or art on your dollar-priced internet shop and income from running a virtual hat shop in Second Life is a sprinkling of fairy dust. If second-lifers try too hard to make it sound like something new, different and scary, the danger is that the tax authorities will be only too keen to invent new, different and scary rules...
What I find depressing is that these "virtual worlds" are all taking the form of capitalist economies. Communism/Socialism may or may not work in the real world, but if I'm going to move to a virtual world which is supposedly limited only by the imagination of its inhabitants, I'm holding out for a post-scarcity utopia like The Culture or even the freakin' United Federation of Planets! If you don't have property then its much harder to have tax...
I just don't understand why it is taking Google so long to release a Mac and Linux version.
Well, according to this they used Windows' own HTTP protocol implementation for the first version - they've now written their own.
I suspect that Google are less concerned about taking marketshare from Safari (Mac) and Firefox (linux) than they are about getting established on Windows. Methinks their priority is to ensure that there is a Google-branded alternative to IE they can use as a web app platform just in case Microsoft does something to break Google Docs on IE (inadvertantly of course - no company with Microsoft's reputation would stoop to telling their developers that "IE9 ain't done until Gmail won't run"...)
Thank you for proving my point about the double standard. The OP criticised Palm for not having an ultimate feature list
I suggest that you go and read the OP again. It does not say what you think it says. Nowhere does it mention the "ultimate feature list" - just "everything the iPhone does" (not to hard if, as you seem to think, the iPhone is missing so many features) and "do it better" (not "do more").
I say "cool", because no one ever explains how it's done better, instead just referring to subjective preferences "I like it better, I don't know why, it Just Is"
Yes, that's what people often say when they encounter "good design", which includes things like logical and consistent layouts, responsiveness and not cramming in a mugs eyeful of features, half of which are barely usable.
and no company has yet to produce a "killer" phone to put them in the dominant position.
You're assuming that "dominant position" means "top selling". There are other forms of dominance - one of which is illustrated by the fact that we're having this discussion at all. The iPhone has become the benchmark against which any new smartphone is judged by the press and blogosphere.
It's the double standard - Apple products are okay as long as they have a "cool factor" (your words, not mine), but other products are held to some impossible standard of "must be able to do everything that any other phone can do, and more".
Thing is, Apple don't try for the ultimate feature list: they decide which features most people will actually want, and implement them well.
E.g. the iPhone famously doesn't have MMS. My HTC Windows Mobile smartphone does, and I've sent exactly 1 MMS message which took half an hour of faffing around to discover that you have to set the camera to the right resolution for MMS before you take the photo (and then remember to un-set it when you want to take a good quality photo). I think WM has cut & paste (another area where the iPhone gets slated) but buggered if I could successfully copy an EMAIL address from a text message into the contacts... The WM media player is unusable (iPhone is excellent); the web browser is unusable (iPhone may not have Flash and Java, but IE Mobile barely has HTML). On WM I can use my own MP3s as ringtones, but from the number of missed calls I get, I strongly suspect that people are hanging up before WM has got round to staring the player. Oh, and the phone is so carefully designed that its impossible to pick up in a hurry without pushing one of the buttons thoughtfully positioned exactly where you natually hold it (another reason for dropped calls). Maybe the iPhone camera isn't the best: but if I gave a toss about picture quality I'd use a proper camera with a proper lens: I've yet to successfully take anything other than a blurry mess with WM.
...so until I've had my hands on any new "iPhone killer" and determined that the impressive feature list has actually been implemented by someone with a clue and some capacity for attention to detail (i.e. it isn't a Windows Mobile device with a lipstick-on-a-pig iPhone lookalike skin) I'll reserve judgement.
I did have a play with the Google G1, and really, really want to like it, but the hardware is frankly bizzarre, the "real" keyboard is so small and untactile that its no better than the iPhone's on-screen keyboard and the processor doesn't have enough grunt to run the (not bad looking) web browser smoothly.
I bolded the part of your statement that's the problem. Don't they have credit unions in the UK?
In the UK we have mutually-owned "Building Societies" which I believe vaguely similar to your "Credit Unions", but during the 90s most of the big names were targeted by carpetbagging speculators who would join and immediately push through a motion to de-mutualize, hand a few shares to all the members and effectively turn into banks (most of which have now been taken over by other banks).
I had an account with one (Abbey) - it de-mutualized and turned into a bank, then closed my local branch, so I moved to another building society that still had a local branch. A year or two later they were bought up by Abbey who closed the local branch (again). Then they sold the whole caboodle to Santander.
More recently, I was about to move back to one of the remaining Building Societies (A&L) but before I got around to it, guess what... Yup, they were bought by Santander as well.
I also have an endowment policy (just don't ask) with another mutual society: they demutualized as well. AAARRRGGHHHH!!!
So, you see, I basically agree with your advice but following it is easier said than done. Fortunately, the remaining mutual societies fared rather better than the banks during the crunch and demutualization is now seen as a Bad Thing, so I'll probably give them another go in the future (if we haven't reverted to a barter economy or adopted the leaf as currency by then).
Still, I've now got a small collection of Spanish bank shares. Unfortunately, they're all held electronically so I won't be able to use them as fuel when the Russians cut off the gas.
At the end of the day you have to decide if having that relationship with one company is more important to you than whatever deal of the month their competitors are running.
We're not talking about shopping around for a marginally better deal here: we're talking about getting royally shafted if you don't move every year or two. Not sure what the US is like, but in the UK over the last few years the typical behaviour of banks has been to progressively degrade the interest rates paid/charged to existing account holders to derisory levels, while introducing new account types, only available to new customers, which offer competitive base rates and first-year bonuses. We're talking differences of a couple of percentage points (OK, that was back in the Good Old Days before last October) Post crunch, it can be the difference between Bugger All and Bugger All + 1% - if you have substantial loans or savings that is serious money :-)
I fail to see why any institution that I've chosen not to do business with, should continue to serve me for free.
The cost of keeping someone's statements online for a few months after they have closed their account is hardly going to be onerous, especially as they'll have to keep the data for five years anyway. To pull the plug the millisecond the account ends - even to the extent that some people are unable to ever view their final statement is simply shoddy, inconsiderate service.
...and don't play the "chosen to take your business elsewhere" card: many industries - especially banks - have consciously chosen a business model that encourages customer "churn" by, for example, offering significantly more attractive deals to new customers. I'd love to be able to stick to one supplier for years without getting screwed. They profit from this, so they should deal with the consequences.
How did Tuesdays Keynote illustrate 'how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'?
I thought it nicely illustrated that Apple's high media profile is starting to reach the point where it is as much a liability as an asset and that turning the charisma down a notch might be a wise move.
Here is a good example of the problem. Even if you don't like Apple much, by all means criticise their actual products, but giving them that sort of negative press merely because they fail to announce everything the blogosphere predicted is just bloody stupid. Having MacWorld in January is probably Osbourning their Christmas sales, too.
Now they're not doing MacWorld at least they can announce things as and when they're ready - although, quite frankly, even if Apple announces "Tune into our webcast for details of our exciting new colors for iPod socks" the rumourmill is going to be saying "OMG! they're going to launch the iPhone femto and the new fusion-powered 32-core quantum-processing MacPRO!".
However, at least on the web, everything can be announced by a CGI'd Steve Jobs who, courtesy of Pixar, will stay fat and healthy for all eternity.
There is very little case law protecting consumer fair use with video games, as compared with audio and video.
I'd have thought that was an argument in favour of starting with video games.
OK, so all DRM is bad, but the real horror stories (malware, limited installs, mandatory internet connections) have been with games.
The Spore case is a particularly clear example of DRM pissing off legitimate consumers while failing to deter (and possibly encouraging) large-scale illicit copying.
Also, whereas issues with Audio/Video DRM are normally to do with caselaw-based "fair use" rights such as format-shifting, the problems with video game DRM have been more fundamental "fitness for purpose" variety. I'm not defending audio/video DRM, but pragmatically speaking, audio DRM seems to be dying off by itself and "your lousy game broke my perfectly standard PC" is going to get more public sympathy than "why can't I watch HD content on Linux?".
number of IBM/Lenovo laptops with docking stations I've seen in my last two jobs, too numerous to count.
Wow, so not even countably infinite, then! Your use of hyperbole is literally beyond belief :-)
BTW: "never taken the world by storm" does not mean "are totally non existent". "Taken the world by storm" would mean docks being prominently displayed on most adverts for laptops, not buried in the options for a few corporate-oriented manufacturers. The ludicrous prices for Lenovo etc. docks suggest they only ever sell them to corporates who order them routinely.
Frankly, I've never understood why any manufacturer of ANY laptop, Mac or PC, would make a desktop-replacement grade laptop with no way to dock it so you can comfortably work AT A DESKTOP!
My MBP usually lives on one of these so I avoid using the horrible keyboard which blighted the Alu MBP.
Plugging in the power, Ethernet, video and a single USB and power takes a whole ten seconds, so its hardly a chore.
Lots of laptop manufacturers do (or did) produce docks - including Apple - but they never seem to have taken the world by storm. They add to the build cost of the laptop (custom connectors) and tend to be expensive (and, lets face it, you really need one for home and one for work).
Math correction... 1cm = 10mm
Oops :-) How embarrasing.
Let that be a lesson to us: don't do math with legs crossed: go to bathroom first, re-read post, then click submit. Oh, and don't mix units - good job I wasn't building a Mars lander :-).
Mathematical fsckups aside: making a battery removable means you have to build a double wall, with enough clearance to get the battery in and out, plus connectors, latches etc. and small linear decreases in length have large impact on volume;
There is no trade off. You make the battery removable. You might get a seam on your casing. Oh no. But you most certainly do not lose 28.5% of your space!
Please tell me you're not an engineer.
Its not just a seam: if the battery can be removed, people will remove it, so you have to ensure not only that the battery is robust (can't be crushed, the terminals can't be shorted) but that the computer with the battery removed is also robust (both mechanically, and proof against foreign objects getting in).
Lets say the space available for the battery is 20cm x 10cm x 1.5cm giving a volume of 300 cm sq,
Now make it removable. You have to put a rigid case around the battery and a wall around the battery compartment. Lets say that, together, they are 1mm thick - that loses you 2mm in every dimension.
The volume available for the new battery is 18cm x 8 cm x 1.3 cm = 187.2 sq cm.
Whups, there goes 40% of your battery volume!
Plus, the bigger you make the battery, the thicker you have to make the case and the more removing it weakens the laptop.
I don't know how far you're looking back,
Quite a while - I think the "issue" probably dates back to the good ol' Mac OS Classic days and has been improving ever since OS X appeared. Back when you had to pay for development tools and documentation, programmers were possibly less inclined to give away their efforts: film at 11!)
How about just using XCode, Textwrangler, jEdit, Eclipse or Smultron?
Bugger that - just open the terminal and type "vi" - what more could anybodiDy neecEd?:x:x:x:q!DAMMIT[ESC]:q! (or there's nano).
Seriously, you've just given good reasons as to why you might not want to shell out money for a text editor: I tend to do any serious software/HTML coding in Eclipse, while nano is usually good enough for quick edits to config files etc. There's just the occasional case where you don't want to fart around with a project-based behemoth like Eclipse or Xcode, but nano doesn't quite cut the mustard - but if you had to pay you'd make do. On the PC, I used to regularly buy updates to UltraEdit until Eclipse came along.
That's where there used to be a bit of a hole on the Mac, but TextWrangler (highly recommended) fills it nicely.
either straight in an X11 window, or via the special OS X build that is available for most?
I think its implicit that the gp. wanted a Mac GUI text editor (i.e. one developed by someone who actually likes GUIs rather than some Unix geek who is going to go right back to using EMACS when the project is finished). If us Mac users could tolerate X11/Gnome/KDE without wanting to claw out our eyes we'd switch to Ubuntu and save ourselves a lot of money.
The problem here is, it also translates into a culture of shareware. Things which are freeware on Windows, and open source everywhere else, are shareware on a Mac. Maybe it's just me, but that's what I've seen.
I'd agree with you to a point - the "free as in beer" scene on the Mac did used to seem a bit thin compared to the PC, but I suspect that was just a side-effect of the much smaller market.
I've previously been frustrated by the lack of Mac freeware in areas such as unarchiving (Stuffit: non-free), FTP/SFTP (Fetch: non-free; Fugu seems to be dead) and text editing (in the past, its been BBEdit or nothing) - but thinking about it, these areas are dominated by shareware on the PC too (WinZip, WS-FTP, & I ended up registering UltraEdit).
I think its improved a lot in recent years: e.g. TextWrangler is a good free text editor; MacFusion/MacFUSE help with file transfer. Plus, if you can put up with X11 interfaces and don't mind waiting for macports/fink to compile stuff from source, most of your favorite GNU/Linux stuff is available. Plus big projects like Eclipse and OpenOffice now seem more enthusiastic about Mac (although NeoOffice still feels more stable than OO for Mac).
Still waiting for a decent GUI-based archiver with creation/browsing facilities (free or otherwise) though: "The Unarchiver" improves unpacking no end, but isn't really a "WinZip" replacement.