- "usable" would in my eyes be defined as in "open start menu, click firefox, visit 'www.google.com' and have a random search term return results". If that operation is mostly unimpeded by background operations, i.e. not noticeably slower than if I had waited for half an hour, I'll call it "usable". - SSDs have their incredible strength in parallelizing tiny loads, that's why all tray icons appear almosts simultaneously here - with all loads going on, but no read head clicking back and forth, you can still load up Firefox and start surfing, because it simply doesn't matter much and is almost unnoticeable.
- if a definition of "boot up" requires Vista to be finished doing any disk activity of some sort, it's unworkable because Vista simply doesn't really stop accessing the disk, because the moment the "boot" is finished, "indexing" or "prefetching" or whatever stuff it needs doing starts. SSDs have other disadvantages, but at least they make Vista useable with little extra effort.
The OS is a Lenovo Vista OEM installation, stock, with no deep modification other than being transferred from the HDD it was shipped on to the SSD via Acronis. SSD is an OCZ Vertext 120GB, stock retail. This system is not sacrificially tuned for speed and includes Acrobat Reader, Virus scanner and all that stuff.
Since I don't have that much experience with Vista yet, I guess an expert could speed it up some more.
Anecdotal evidence: Lenovo T500, Vista x86, 3GB usable RAM, 120GB SSD - boot time until usable in under 30 seconds, reboot is actually faster than resume from hibernate.
Lenovo Thinkpad BIOSes have been booting in about a second and a half for years, when network boot was disabled and HDD was the first in boot order.
- having a system you like to use - having access to decent programs
If A hinders mass adoption, it also hinders goal B, which is the reason for this discussion.
As I understood and experienced Linux, A is not a valid reason to style the GUI, because there are literally thousands of window managers and desktops to choose from, leaving capable Linux users with more than enough alternatives to "have a system you like to use".
Therefore, goal B is of higher importance, and that usually requires an implicit step of "luring people away from Bill Gates", if you like to put it that way. There's a bit of networking effect involved like in "companies don't produce printer drivers for a platform that people don't use because there's no printer driver for it", but that's not an argument for or against mimicking established GUI and OS metaphors, just an effect that severely punishes ongoing balkanization in the OS world.
You're not going to completely cover all the minute details, of course. But there's a ton of established de-facto standardization that you can emulate or reproduce without doing damage to your user interface.
To stay in the analogy domain: make sure the left hand control is for lights, indicators, horn etc. (= signalling) and the right hand side for wipers, air conditioning, defrost etc. (= climate adaption), no matter whatever side your steering wheel is on. If you need to turn, twist, click or move a paddle, switch or knob is less important, because at least the user is going to look in the right place and will probably figure it out quickly.
Some things cannot be standardized, especially the gear shift position, because hardware limits prevent you from mounting the gear selector on the right side of a right hand drive or left side of a left hand drive - but the position is obvious enough in the first place.
Problem are the myriads of possible reverse selector positions, because - people usually need it in a hurry - it obviously cannot be worked around - inappropriate settings are highly dangerous - it's possible to not notice a wrong setting at all (hence the sound most modern cars make when reverse is selected) - it's possible to be underway for a while before noticing that this setting is ambiguous
Well if a million users expect a certain UI widget at a certain spot doing certain things, what's there to stop someone from fulfilling this expectation?
If the goal is mass appeal to Microsoft fanbois, well, make it appealing then. It's much easier to change a bit of code than try to evangelize some million users. Improving any one's deep ingrained wrongness can backfire when everyone is used to it and has to adapt to everything new at once, that's life, always has been.
Car analogy: all car makers seem to have different layout of their reverse gear in stick shifts. We can't rip out all stick shifts, we cannot standardize, because people who've always driven a particular will lament for weeks when something changed. So we have a status quo for decades which nobody quite wants to change.
Microsoft got heavy flak, no, nuclear artillery, for every single change they did to the Windows UI in the last 10 years. People actually seem to like the "Windows standard"-mode of XP and all users at my company fought tooth and nails to keep that when we migrated to new terminal servers - they like it so much that people constantly ask if they could somehow revert Vista or Windows 7 to that look.
So Microsoft get's their own dose, really. Since XP, GUIs (and their userbase) have come to a point of maturity where progress can now only move forward very good reasons. We may use other window managers, different layouts or whatever, but to the general public, the Windows XP non-kiddy GUI mode has been the definitive gold standard for most regular people - for now more than half a decade.
When Microsoft could copy over the descriptive buttons from MacOS ("Overwrite:" [yes|no] and "Keep this setting [yes|no]" to File exists: [overwrite|don't overwrite] and "[Keep setting|abandon setting]" etc.), we're actually finished building a UI metaphor.
Of course there is a rather large placebo effect in HIV vaccine trials: the free education every participant will probably get.
As HIV is probably the only disease that you can be completely avoided by rather small changes in habits and behavior, a 50 percent lower infection rate by simple education seems plausible enough. It's only 50%, because the participants also have wives or husbands that they thought were faithful AND probably did not undergo the same education.
The same viral load *could* mean that the infected people in the trial group were immune against one strain and vulnerable against the other, hence the second strain can replicate as usual while the other had no chance for infection.
Grass meet vehicle undercarriage, boots, wheels etc. Equipment, meet grass.
If there's any soldier from Alabama over there in Afghanistan - and I bet there's more than one or two, I guess - then the weed will already be there.
Afghanistan is still busy eradicating several other pests, so that weed is not on the priority list yet. After all, it helps against soil erosion, is pretty durable and could make Afghanistan look much greener than today. Maybe it's not so bad when the current status is naked soil everywhere beyond the horizon...
Couldn't you plan your projects in a way that you could first research whatever you wanted to research and then prepare a worthy conclusion of whatever was left of it? Just asking...
The belief that a cloud of several thousand clients can ever be held secure is almost obscene. IT departments that concentrate most heavily on defending the outer border of their network, placing more than only a slight hint of trust in their "owned" client hardware are hopefully becoming rare.
Several thousand notebooks, travelling along the employees all around the world, through a hundred massive wifi-zones, hotel LANs, airports etc., should not be trusted higher than the machine Joe Random Employee brought from home. The official corporate notebook may have all the branding, settings, applications and whatnot, but that can at best make it a decently hardened PC, not bullet proof.
Many organisations really concentrate on the border, falling to the illusion of control: "we control the machine, the user / employee has no admin rights so all machines that go along on a business trip come back in perfect shape and without ever acquiring a drive-by rootkit somwhere"
In reality, most breaches are done, or facilitated, or unknowingly supported by people inside the organisation. Disgruntled employees are surely the worst enemy - and guaranteed to be numerous in any multinational company under the current economy. But it can also be frequent-fliers, hard-working staff that take their laptops everywhere and try to work all the time, connecting to a hundred different wifi-APs per year. Trusting a machine means physical control over everything. Trusting machines that commute and travel daily along with their employees is batshit crazy - but most IT departments still pretend they don't see that.
Very well then. The seatbelts alone will save a few thousand per year.
It does say that the Nano is good enough for Indian road regulation mandated by Indian government elected by Indian people.
And our road regulation mandated by our government elected by our people declared the Nano a safety risk.
So the tradeoff "mobility vs. safety" in India favors mobility while it does favor safety in Western countries. Which is, I guess, pretty sensible. Sometimes, democracy does seem to work.
The Nano is good enough for a society where most households do not have any transportation and everyone else drives a two-stroke stinking scooter or an older-than-dirt car.
A four-wheel is safer than a two-wheel in most cases. When you can supplant scooters or old rust buckets with new Nanos, you reduce road deaths. Still, you create more mobility and more congestion which will create more road deaths.
For the situation in India, this may be acceptable, but for the situation in Western countries, it is not. To put it bluntly: we have much fewer people with much higher education here that are orders of magnitude more expensive to replace if killed.
I know that "human lives as costs" is the most heartless and perverse assessment ever made, but it provides the lowest low floor of cost vs. benefit comparison. And even this low floor is overwhemlingly in favor of saving people vs. saving a small buck on safety.
I would be glad if India would come to the same conclusions and mandated more safety for the Nano. I can only speak for Western countries because I know nothing about the mobility-vs-safety tradeoff in India and don't want to tell them what's right or wrong.
The asphalt point is spot on: asphalt prices and availability depends on crude oil refinery processes, availability and costs.
With diminishing reserves on crude oil and a higher price on gasoline, either cracking hydrocarbon chains in asphalt becomes economically feasible or total crude oil refining output is dropping to a point where asphalt stops being abundant and cheap.
Then we'd only have concrete and glass left to surface roads with. I'm not sure if glass really is so much more expensive than concrete if we don't need perfect transparency with an optical-instruments-grade surface.
Well, "50% as tough as concrete and still repairable on-site" would be good enough for the solar application.
Being transparent has not been a requirement for road surfaces for as long as there were roads. That doesn't mean it is impossible. I guess no one ever tried to, because it was simply completely fruitless to do so up until now.
Until now, we had three primary requirements for road surface: tough, easy to apply, cheap. With solar panels beneath, the requirement "cheap" could fade in favor of "transparent" and change the whole road economics.
Maybe it wouldn't matter if you'd have to renew road surfaces two times more often with a material that is ten times as expensive, as long as the solar cells beneath generate enough cash to cover all that and more. Engineers can produce pretty good estmates on cost vs. profit of a given idea and I guess the numbers were good enough to warrant an actual experiment.
Well, say hello to the no-frills, simple airline where we have a huge tank of gasoline, a "simple" commodity jet engine and only the simplest of pilots in a cockpit with no unneeded instruments. A windshield, windshield wiper, steering horn, pedals, airspeed indicator, compass, engine power setting and landing gear control. Our tickets are 30% less than the competition and our planes only crash 20% more often, but that's because we only fly in fair weather when there's no wind. Would you fly with us for your everyday travel needs?
You mean price and quality of goods are automatically adapting to the cost of material and labor needed to produce or maintain them, offset by the cost and applicability of substitutes? All producers shifting their production where it is needed or wanted the most and where the resulting produce is - for consumers - worth more than the energy, raw materials and labour that went into producing them? Is that an invisible hand or something?:)
"Hooray for mediocrity" is not an excuse for doing crappy things the wrong way. Neither is "The Simpsons did it".
The Tata Nano car was not rejected because of consumerism or market protection, but because it is a low quality, highly dangerous piece of technology. Coupled with its cheapness and almost limitless availability, we all would've had a quagmire on the roads pretty quickly.
Just a few examples: seatbelts, the car safety feature that has saved more lives than the alcohol prohibition or the traffic light. A hard braking without actual impact can send you smashing on the steering wheel or knocking your teeth out - while with a seatbelt you and your car would've had no damage whatsoever. People not wearing seatbelts are very hesitating in applying full brake power in an emergency situation because of this and that would've cost lives of passengers, pedestrians and other drivers. That's why they're mandatory and why you're fined for not wearing them.
ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. We're talking about "half a million mile" or "NASCAR experience". Beginners cause the most crashes and one out of three drivers will have a situation where having ABS will mean the difference between sweating and loss of money, limb or life. Even if one is an experienced driver, I bet you hope the other guy is also experienced or has ABS. I hope on both.
The Nano is destined for markets where it is the only mobility alternative for much of the population and better than the ubiquitous scooter everyone has now. There, the Nano can decrease total road deaths simply because four wheels and a windshield are much safer in the downpouring rain that parts of India and Asia seasonally experience.
In Western markets, the Nano would increase road deaths, possibly up to terrible levels from the Fifties. I'm with you when you say we COULD omit air conditions, power windows, central locking, electric mirrors, electric hatches. But safety features like seatbelts (pennies), ABS (a few hundred bucks) or ESP (another few hundred bucks) will cost more if they're missing. You could not save more than 1500 bucks (at most) on manufacturing the car but the first accident will cost more than you'd ever saved in property damage alone. Or worse.
Extremely cold-heartedly saying: it costs about 150'000 bucks to raise and educate one kid to be an average adult in our society. Because of that, even if we all were the most heartless, profit-oriented bastards on earth, we'd equip our cars with all affordable safety features.
In doubt, drive to an empty street somewhere and practice maximum emergency braking, with and without wearing the seatbelt. Hesitated smashing your teeth on the steering wheel, even for a fraction of a second?. Wear a seatbelt, dude.
Thanks, you answered many of my questions regarding logic and reasoning behind XBOX fans.
Just a few cents more: - any console and all notebooks, desktops, macs and even some cellphones now can be hooked up to a 52" LCD. That does give XBOX any advantage over most gaming equipment manufactured in the last decade. - buying two XBOXen for backup because one cannot wait two weeks the repair is crazytalk, really - I didn't bash consoles, I bashed the XBOX360.
But I especially liked your Ebay story: you are perfectly sure that XBOX games, even recently released, quality titles sell on ebay for mere fractions of the original price. And you still buy full retail. You take great strides to enjoy the disadvantages of every aspect of the XBOX 360 or the games for it but declare those who don't to be suckers.
I honestly don't know what to say about that. "There's crack in the retail packaging" was just a provocative slogan of me, but after talking to several XBOX fans here on Slashdot, I think that theory just got a little more credibility than I thought.
It's not level-headed because XBOX is not on the same level as other consoles. Regard hard parameters like -price -noise -permanent hardware fail rates -ongoing payment required for any multiplayer game XBOX 360 lost in every department to its direct competitors like PS or Wii, yet people buy the thing even if they had half a dozen units died upon them.
Either these people are stupid, which is admittedly unrealistic for the large buyer demographic of the thing - or we are missing THE one and only, all-important advantage of the XBOX over everything else. That would probably be trivial to point out to us from XBOX fanbois, but they just can't be bothered to bring anything substantial just yet because they're still busy playing Halo. Or doing iCrack.
I don't know if it is very scholarly to first criticise my rounding of mid-50-something percent to 2/3 and then round off the other way around.
I don't know if it is very scholarly to assume that it is user error when the situation "utter thermal failure" is occuring in more than half of every given sample and the situation "no problems at all within the stated MTBF" is rare to the point that it is almost unheard of.
Scholarly assumed, where do we need to spend 2000 bucks every two years for on a PC to play games on? I mean, I play games on Thinkpad T-Series notebooks and even they don't cost much more than a single grand.
But since you stated you love lounging on a couch in front of your bigscreen TV, sipping beer and playing games that are shallow enough to have a few buttons suffice for input, we're probably not in the same target demographic.
Scholarly viewed, the PC vs. console is an ongoing debate that has raged for years with no clear winner and I doubt we will get to a consensus here in any given timeframe.
What surprises me is that no XBOX-defendant really defended the XBOX360 against its real competitors, Wii and Playstation. The tradeoffs between PC vs. console are well documented, but I specifically asked why people who buy consoles at all would out of all alternatives still choose the XBOX despite more than half of all purchased units fail within the first two years.
I wasn't talking apples to oranges here, but XBOX to Playstation. But judging from the responses, the XBOX advantage really seems to be the supply of iCrack in the box.
Slashdot Mirror
For clarification and repeatable results:
- "usable" would in my eyes be defined as in "open start menu, click firefox, visit 'www.google.com' and have a random search term return results". If that operation is mostly unimpeded by background operations, i.e. not noticeably slower than if I had waited for half an hour, I'll call it "usable".
- SSDs have their incredible strength in parallelizing tiny loads, that's why all tray icons appear almosts simultaneously here
- with all loads going on, but no read head clicking back and forth, you can still load up Firefox and start surfing, because it simply doesn't matter much and is almost unnoticeable.
- if a definition of "boot up" requires Vista to be finished doing any disk activity of some sort, it's unworkable because Vista simply doesn't really stop accessing the disk, because the moment the "boot" is finished, "indexing" or "prefetching" or whatever stuff it needs doing starts. SSDs have other disadvantages, but at least they make Vista useable with little extra effort.
The OS is a Lenovo Vista OEM installation, stock, with no deep modification other than being transferred from the HDD it was shipped on to the SSD via Acronis. SSD is an OCZ Vertext 120GB, stock retail. This system is not sacrificially tuned for speed and includes Acrobat Reader, Virus scanner and all that stuff.
Since I don't have that much experience with Vista yet, I guess an expert could speed it up some more.
Anecdotal evidence: Lenovo T500, Vista x86, 3GB usable RAM, 120GB SSD - boot time until usable in under 30 seconds, reboot is actually faster than resume from hibernate.
Lenovo Thinkpad BIOSes have been booting in about a second and a half for years, when network boot was disabled and HDD was the first in boot order.
You mentioned two goals:
- having a system you like to use
- having access to decent programs
If A hinders mass adoption, it also hinders goal B, which is the reason for this discussion.
As I understood and experienced Linux, A is not a valid reason to style the GUI, because there are literally thousands of window managers and desktops to choose from, leaving capable Linux users with more than enough alternatives to "have a system you like to use".
Therefore, goal B is of higher importance, and that usually requires an implicit step of "luring people away from Bill Gates", if you like to put it that way. There's a bit of networking effect involved like in "companies don't produce printer drivers for a platform that people don't use because there's no printer driver for it", but that's not an argument for or against mimicking established GUI and OS metaphors, just an effect that severely punishes ongoing balkanization in the OS world.
You're not going to completely cover all the minute details, of course. But there's a ton of established de-facto standardization that you can emulate or reproduce without doing damage to your user interface.
To stay in the analogy domain: make sure the left hand control is for lights, indicators, horn etc. (= signalling) and the right hand side for wipers, air conditioning, defrost etc. (= climate adaption), no matter whatever side your steering wheel is on. If you need to turn, twist, click or move a paddle, switch or knob is less important, because at least the user is going to look in the right place and will probably figure it out quickly.
Some things cannot be standardized, especially the gear shift position, because hardware limits prevent you from mounting the gear selector on the right side of a right hand drive or left side of a left hand drive - but the position is obvious enough in the first place.
Problem are the myriads of possible reverse selector positions, because
- people usually need it in a hurry
- it obviously cannot be worked around
- inappropriate settings are highly dangerous
- it's possible to not notice a wrong setting at all (hence the sound most modern cars make when reverse is selected)
- it's possible to be underway for a while before noticing that this setting is ambiguous
Well if a million users expect a certain UI widget at a certain spot doing certain things, what's there to stop someone from fulfilling this expectation?
If the goal is mass appeal to Microsoft fanbois, well, make it appealing then. It's much easier to change a bit of code than try to evangelize some million users. Improving any one's deep ingrained wrongness can backfire when everyone is used to it and has to adapt to everything new at once, that's life, always has been.
Car analogy: all car makers seem to have different layout of their reverse gear in stick shifts. We can't rip out all stick shifts, we cannot standardize, because people who've always driven a particular will lament for weeks when something changed. So we have a status quo for decades which nobody quite wants to change.
Microsoft got heavy flak, no, nuclear artillery, for every single change they did to the Windows UI in the last 10 years. People actually seem to like the "Windows standard"-mode of XP and all users at my company fought tooth and nails to keep that when we migrated to new terminal servers - they like it so much that people constantly ask if they could somehow revert Vista or Windows 7 to that look.
So Microsoft get's their own dose, really. Since XP, GUIs (and their userbase) have come to a point of maturity where progress can now only move forward very good reasons. We may use other window managers, different layouts or whatever, but to the general public, the Windows XP non-kiddy GUI mode has been the definitive gold standard for most regular people - for now more than half a decade.
When Microsoft could copy over the descriptive buttons from MacOS ("Overwrite:" [yes|no] and "Keep this setting [yes|no]" to File exists: [overwrite|don't overwrite] and "[Keep setting|abandon setting]" etc.), we're actually finished building a UI metaphor.
I think it probably is. It's may just not overgrowing all ecosystems at the same speed, maybe not at all.
Of course there is a rather large placebo effect in HIV vaccine trials: the free education every participant will probably get.
As HIV is probably the only disease that you can be completely avoided by rather small changes in habits and behavior, a 50 percent lower infection rate by simple education seems plausible enough. It's only 50%, because the participants also have wives or husbands that they thought were faithful AND probably did not undergo the same education.
The same viral load *could* mean that the infected people in the trial group were immune against one strain and vulnerable against the other, hence the second strain can replicate as usual while the other had no chance for infection.
Grass meet vehicle undercarriage, boots, wheels etc. Equipment, meet grass.
If there's any soldier from Alabama over there in Afghanistan - and I bet there's more than one or two, I guess - then the weed will already be there.
Afghanistan is still busy eradicating several other pests, so that weed is not on the priority list yet. After all, it helps against soil erosion, is pretty durable and could make Afghanistan look much greener than today. Maybe it's not so bad when the current status is naked soil everywhere beyond the horizon...
Couldn't you plan your projects in a way that you could first research whatever you wanted to research and then prepare a worthy conclusion of whatever was left of it? Just asking...
We've basically all have a priority list of compassion, respect or simple want-the-to-survive for other living things similar to this:
Predatory and/or large mammals > Predatory and/or large birds > Vegetarian and/or small mammals > Vegetarian and/or small birds > Reptiles > Predatory and/or large fish > Vegetarian and/or small fish >> Plants >> Fungi >> Insects >> Bacteria > Viruses
See the pattern?
Two words:
"Survivorship bias"
Where'd we get all that copper?
Second that big time.
The belief that a cloud of several thousand clients can ever be held secure is almost obscene. IT departments that concentrate most heavily on defending the outer border of their network, placing more than only a slight hint of trust in their "owned" client hardware are hopefully becoming rare.
Several thousand notebooks, travelling along the employees all around the world, through a hundred massive wifi-zones, hotel LANs, airports etc., should not be trusted higher than the machine Joe Random Employee brought from home. The official corporate notebook may have all the branding, settings, applications and whatnot, but that can at best make it a decently hardened PC, not bullet proof.
Many organisations really concentrate on the border, falling to the illusion of control: "we control the machine, the user / employee has no admin rights so all machines that go along on a business trip come back in perfect shape and without ever acquiring a drive-by rootkit somwhere"
In reality, most breaches are done, or facilitated, or unknowingly supported by people inside the organisation. Disgruntled employees are surely the worst enemy - and guaranteed to be numerous in any multinational company under the current economy. But it can also be frequent-fliers, hard-working staff that take their laptops everywhere and try to work all the time, connecting to a hundred different wifi-APs per year. Trusting a machine means physical control over everything. Trusting machines that commute and travel daily along with their employees is batshit crazy - but most IT departments still pretend they don't see that.
Very well then. The seatbelts alone will save a few thousand per year.
It does say that the Nano is good enough for Indian road regulation mandated by Indian government elected by Indian people.
And our road regulation mandated by our government elected by our people declared the Nano a safety risk.
So the tradeoff "mobility vs. safety" in India favors mobility while it does favor safety in Western countries. Which is, I guess, pretty sensible. Sometimes, democracy does seem to work.
The Nano is good enough for a society where most households do not have any transportation and everyone else drives a two-stroke stinking scooter or an older-than-dirt car.
A four-wheel is safer than a two-wheel in most cases. When you can supplant scooters or old rust buckets with new Nanos, you reduce road deaths. Still, you create more mobility and more congestion which will create more road deaths.
For the situation in India, this may be acceptable, but for the situation in Western countries, it is not. To put it bluntly: we have much fewer people with much higher education here that are orders of magnitude more expensive to replace if killed.
I know that "human lives as costs" is the most heartless and perverse assessment ever made, but it provides the lowest low floor of cost vs. benefit comparison. And even this low floor is overwhemlingly in favor of saving people vs. saving a small buck on safety.
I would be glad if India would come to the same conclusions and mandated more safety for the Nano. I can only speak for Western countries because I know nothing about the mobility-vs-safety tradeoff in India and don't want to tell them what's right or wrong.
I'm fine with getting two thirds with people off the road. We don't need the millions of automobiles out there.
Now would you be so kind to hand over your car keys and driver's license? You do want to follow your own example, right?
The asphalt point is spot on: asphalt prices and availability depends on crude oil refinery processes, availability and costs.
With diminishing reserves on crude oil and a higher price on gasoline, either cracking hydrocarbon chains in asphalt becomes economically feasible or total crude oil refining output is dropping to a point where asphalt stops being abundant and cheap.
Then we'd only have concrete and glass left to surface roads with. I'm not sure if glass really is so much more expensive than concrete if we don't need perfect transparency with an optical-instruments-grade surface.
Well, "50% as tough as concrete and still repairable on-site" would be good enough for the solar application.
Being transparent has not been a requirement for road surfaces for as long as there were roads. That doesn't mean it is impossible. I guess no one ever tried to, because it was simply completely fruitless to do so up until now.
Until now, we had three primary requirements for road surface: tough, easy to apply, cheap.
With solar panels beneath, the requirement "cheap" could fade in favor of "transparent" and change the whole road economics.
Maybe it wouldn't matter if you'd have to renew road surfaces two times more often with a material that is ten times as expensive, as long as the solar cells beneath generate enough cash to cover all that and more. Engineers can produce pretty good estmates on cost vs. profit of a given idea and I guess the numbers were good enough to warrant an actual experiment.
It's not like all people are stupid.
Well, say hello to the no-frills, simple airline where we have a huge tank of gasoline, a "simple" commodity jet engine and only the simplest of pilots in a cockpit with no unneeded instruments. A windshield, windshield wiper, steering horn, pedals, airspeed indicator, compass, engine power setting and landing gear control. Our tickets are 30% less than the competition and our planes only crash 20% more often, but that's because we only fly in fair weather when there's no wind. Would you fly with us for your everyday travel needs?
You mean price and quality of goods are automatically adapting to the cost of material and labor needed to produce or maintain them, offset by the cost and applicability of substitutes? All producers shifting their production where it is needed or wanted the most and where the resulting produce is - for consumers - worth more than the energy, raw materials and labour that went into producing them? Is that an invisible hand or something? :)
"Hooray for mediocrity" is not an excuse for doing crappy things the wrong way. Neither is "The Simpsons did it".
The Tata Nano car was not rejected because of consumerism or market protection, but because it is a low quality, highly dangerous piece of technology. Coupled with its cheapness and almost limitless availability, we all would've had a quagmire on the roads pretty quickly.
Just a few examples: seatbelts, the car safety feature that has saved more lives than the alcohol prohibition or the traffic light. A hard braking without actual impact can send you smashing on the steering wheel or knocking your teeth out - while with a seatbelt you and your car would've had no damage whatsoever. People not wearing seatbelts are very hesitating in applying full brake power in an emergency situation because of this and that would've cost lives of passengers, pedestrians and other drivers. That's why they're mandatory and why you're fined for not wearing them.
ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. We're talking about "half a million mile" or "NASCAR experience". Beginners cause the most crashes and one out of three drivers will have a situation where having ABS will mean the difference between sweating and loss of money, limb or life. Even if one is an experienced driver, I bet you hope the other guy is also experienced or has ABS. I hope on both.
The Nano is destined for markets where it is the only mobility alternative for much of the population and better than the ubiquitous scooter everyone has now. There, the Nano can decrease total road deaths simply because four wheels and a windshield are much safer in the downpouring rain that parts of India and Asia seasonally experience.
In Western markets, the Nano would increase road deaths, possibly up to terrible levels from the Fifties. I'm with you when you say we COULD omit air conditions, power windows, central locking, electric mirrors, electric hatches. But safety features like seatbelts (pennies), ABS (a few hundred bucks) or ESP (another few hundred bucks) will cost more if they're missing. You could not save more than 1500 bucks (at most) on manufacturing the car but the first accident will cost more than you'd ever saved in property damage alone. Or worse.
Extremely cold-heartedly saying: it costs about 150'000 bucks to raise and educate one kid to be an average adult in our society. Because of that, even if we all were the most heartless, profit-oriented bastards on earth, we'd equip our cars with all affordable safety features.
In doubt, drive to an empty street somewhere and practice maximum emergency braking, with and without wearing the seatbelt. Hesitated smashing your teeth on the steering wheel, even for a fraction of a second?. Wear a seatbelt, dude.
Obligatory wiki links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
Thanks, you answered many of my questions regarding logic and reasoning behind XBOX fans.
Just a few cents more:
- any console and all notebooks, desktops, macs and even some cellphones now can be hooked up to a 52" LCD. That does give XBOX any advantage over most gaming equipment manufactured in the last decade.
- buying two XBOXen for backup because one cannot wait two weeks the repair is crazytalk, really
- I didn't bash consoles, I bashed the XBOX360.
But I especially liked your Ebay story: you are perfectly sure that XBOX games, even recently released, quality titles sell on ebay for mere fractions of the original price. And you still buy full retail. You take great strides to enjoy the disadvantages of every aspect of the XBOX 360 or the games for it but declare those who don't to be suckers.
I honestly don't know what to say about that. "There's crack in the retail packaging" was just a provocative slogan of me, but after talking to several XBOX fans here on Slashdot, I think that theory just got a little more credibility than I thought.
It's not level-headed because XBOX is not on the same level as other consoles. Regard hard parameters like
-price
-noise
-permanent hardware fail rates
-ongoing payment required for any multiplayer game
XBOX 360 lost in every department to its direct competitors like PS or Wii, yet people buy the thing even if they had half a dozen units died upon them.
Either these people are stupid, which is admittedly unrealistic for the large buyer demographic of the thing - or we are missing THE one and only, all-important advantage of the XBOX over everything else. That would probably be trivial to point out to us from XBOX fanbois, but they just can't be bothered to bring anything substantial just yet because they're still busy playing Halo. Or doing iCrack.
I don't know if it is very scholarly to first criticise my rounding of mid-50-something percent to 2/3 and then round off the other way around.
I don't know if it is very scholarly to assume that it is user error when the situation "utter thermal failure" is occuring in more than half of every given sample and the situation "no problems at all within the stated MTBF" is rare to the point that it is almost unheard of.
Scholarly assumed, where do we need to spend 2000 bucks every two years for on a PC to play games on? I mean, I play games on Thinkpad T-Series notebooks and even they don't cost much more than a single grand.
But since you stated you love lounging on a couch in front of your bigscreen TV, sipping beer and playing games that are shallow enough to have a few buttons suffice for input, we're probably not in the same target demographic.
Scholarly viewed, the PC vs. console is an ongoing debate that has raged for years with no clear winner and I doubt we will get to a consensus here in any given timeframe.
What surprises me is that no XBOX-defendant really defended the XBOX360 against its real competitors, Wii and Playstation. The tradeoffs between PC vs. console are well documented, but I specifically asked why people who buy consoles at all would out of all alternatives still choose the XBOX despite more than half of all purchased units fail within the first two years.
I wasn't talking apples to oranges here, but XBOX to Playstation. But judging from the responses, the XBOX advantage really seems to be the supply of iCrack in the box.