The problem is that there is *still* to many software packages that are Windows only. Autodesk Inventor Suite. Labview hardware drivers. Matlab hardware drivers.
The stupid, necessary, scientific, industrial etc hardware drivers are Windows only lots of the time. Plus the programming software is often Windows only. You literally cannot do many tasks without Windows.
Ok, but I'm not sure how Metro helps here. The only things practically cheaper as a new purchase is Android devices. If you're going to count refurbs, sure there are off lease / refurb WinXP systems for less than the iPad 2.
Also, tablets still aren't direct replacements for PCs in my opinion... Anyone who does a lot of facebook messaging or e-mail etc, is likely to feel that touchscreens suck for typing. And many "internet terminals" are used for e-mail.
As you add in specialty keyboards for the iPad, your total purchase price for feature parity goes UP, not down - quickly bringing entry level pcs running Win7 into the picture.
Yes, the issue I have is I cannot keep my passwords in my head anymore - I have to use a password manager. I use Keepass, but it requires me to either duplicate entries or carry the file around with me. Plus, that file is now very attractive to anyone wanting access to my accounts as a single password to break.
Finally, in the case where you have to have the password manager remember your non-answers to password reset questions - it's like not having any password recovery method at all. I.e. you lose your keepass file, and you've lost both the password and the recovery answers.
I missed what you were targeting with that comment, hence mine. I would also argue that there is a bit of a difference between a video game and transportation, even to the extent that the transportation device (car) was chosen for some level of "fun value".
I don't really judge what people do with their own money that they earned. If it makes them happy and they can pay for it, it's probably not my place to tell them how they should live.
I may disagree with their choice, but it's their choice and not mine. I sincerely hope they are happy.
Worse, it's pretty hard for a naive user to tell what is the top tier. I got suckered on a Droid III. I never had a smartphone before, but I had 2 previous "dumb" Motorola's and they were neigh on indestructible. I managed to go over 6 years on those phones. And they were used when I got them, so more like 8 years use.
I'm 1.5 years in on my Droid III and I cannot wait to get rid of it. I may test it in my Bendtech in my own damn "Will it blend". It is the biggest piece of crap phone I've ever used.
I've found it's barely equivalent in stability or usability as much cheaper knock off chinese android tablets. If I hadn't used Android on those cheap tablets, I'd likely be buying my first apple product ever on renewal. But I know it's not android - it's either the crap Verizon foists on the Droid III or the horrible build quality of the Droid III.
I'll definitely be looking at a Samsung Galaxy whatever when I'm up for renewal.
Can someone explain to me what OneNote does that's so useful? I don't use it as I can't see how it'd integrate into our environment for multiple user access to data, but we have some users who love it, but cannot for the life of them articulate *why* it's so great.
Wait, why would you think Surface is cheap? It's advertised to cost in line with an iPad for the "cheap" one, and be more expensive for the higher end one. Nexus 7 on the other hand makes me not want to check merrimobiles for tablets as much anymore.
I don't know that it's hard to find good staff - it's as usual hard to find good staff at competitive pay rates. I.e. I'll bet you could get great, motivated US based live chat technicians if you provided remote desktop tools and paid $100k a year.
You can also say that American people speak English because other American people speak English. It is a circular reasoning, but it does not make it wrong in itself.
Yes, but we also realize that speaking at each other is not always the best method to get something done. For instance, Internet Forums using typed text. Specific agreed jargon.
Word may be the easiest up front, but it has a high back end cost. So much so that after the last editing debacle requiring many highly paid people and several temps to spend months re-creating a word document for an important report that we now are *not* to use Word for massive collaborative documents. The failures just before submission deadlines are the worst time to have technical difficulties. It's much easier to spend the time up front as you can then munge the deadline easier.
I disagree that Word works. It works in a very limited subset of applications on a very limited set of platforms. We are rapidly getting back into a multi platform world. If your manual isn't viewable on an iPad - you'll get some pressure to make sure it is.
If the draft isn't looking right on MacOSX for the executive editor, you might have some problems...
It costs you money to pay someone to take your Word doc and re-create it in a publishing package to actually print it. This raises the final product price. Competitors who save that step can have cheaper books / manuals, and as a benefit take out a step for typos or formatting changes by someone *who doesn't know the product*.
I think we're in the last gasps of Word being good enough...
Your 2000 page long volume probably would be better served by LaTeX or InDesign depending on your taste. You know, desktop publishing. That handles the re-flowing properly and doesn't randomly decide it knows more about what the format, line breaks, etc than you do (Which Word does on 2 page documents to me)...
I'm also making a distinction here that there is a potential competitive advantage to not always doing things a certain way because everyone else does them that way.
For example, when I contact IBM for a quote, they aren't passing around a manually edited Word document - they have a system that builds configurations and then auto outputs HTML or Excel or format of choice.
My point with that line was that "Business people sends out documents that require office because business people send out documents that require office" is circular reasoning. And, I think, wrong.
I feel like we're getting ever closer to the HTML vision - that document contents matter, templates matter, but that WYSIWYG is a horribly way to build a document collaboratively, so far bad for template-able documents, and rather painful for complex long documents.
The problem I have with MS Office isn't even that it's a proprietary format that requires paying Microsoft to do your business. It's that it's not even good at what it's supposed to do, and as I said in my first post, it's not even good at what users like in your cases listed want it to do. For instance, even if I have the same Windows OS, and the same version of Office as my counterpart, having a *different printer* can mess up a word documents display and formatting.
And if you're not caring about the formatting and just kicking around bloated text files - then any program I've ever used to open a doc(x) file and re-send it has been indistinguishable from the changes my version of Word would make to the file.
That's OK, I'd refuse to do business with a company that insisted on sending / working with such broken proprietary text or spreadsheets and refused to just send a damn PDF or ASCII file.
I mean, what are business people sending out that requires Office? Quotes? Really - a PDF doesn't work? It needs custom VBA code to do something (that you have to send to third parties???) so you can't view it in LibreOffice? HTML E-mail fails for your workflow?
Contracts? Should they really be editable? If they are drafts, wouldn't some sort of source control (Wiki, Cloud Docs, Sharepoint, hell SVN) be important? Final drafts sure as hell ought to be close to physical documents (i.e. PDFs or the like, maybe cryptographically signed?)...
Complex Documents? Hell, different Office versions on different platforms screw that up. Oh, the corporate user who's on Win XP with Office 2003 is a fanatic! Or the Mac using Executive with Office 2011. It sure as hell isn't just Linux users with OpenOffice...
Do you refuse to deal with Europe because they use A4 paper vs Letter?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, in 2012 if you're using Office for anything more complex than a letter to mom or a school book report - you're probably doing it wrong. And even then, you should save your $$ and use something free(Wordpad, Open Office, Google Docs)...
I may have exaggerated a little, but the asking prices for used Subarus in Upstate NY is amazing. Now I could turn it into a trip, but as I said, I looked at the entry level Imprezas and it almost never saved you money buying used. Sometimes you can find sales on new cars that are straight equal to other dealers in the area for 2-3 year old Imprezas !!!
Leases never make sense out here where people drive on average 40 - 80 miles a day for their commute. We drive 15 - 20k a year and lease mileage overages are a bitch also.
What's illogical about buying a car that's $23k (roughly half of the roughly average income I've seen reported)? That some people pay $3k to finance it over 5 years?
It doesn't seem illogical to me to buy a new car that is half way decent. Maybe it's not rational, but buying a new car for 1/2 your annual income could be perfectly logical - depending on your starting premises.
The arguments for not buying a car that I can think of are the following:
Use Mass Transit (well debunked in hundreds of slashdot stories)
Buy used - Hassle, difficulty finding features, design, cleanliness, brand, model wanted for enough of a savings. For instance, I like Subarus (hell, I'm to Subarus what many are to Apple products). I can get a new one for X or a 4 year old one with 70+k miles for X-$3k or so in my area. Does that really make sense? Or I can get a 10 year old one needing major repairs for $5k... Still doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Alternatively, I could buy a used car I don't like. That may be a rational choice if the *only* concern is cost. Otherwise, why buy something I don't like? Not, I'm not talking Subarus only, I'm saying how does it make sense to buy something you dislike to save some money?
And there's the crux. For most people I've ever talked to, cost is not *the only* factor that matters for transportation for them. For those that it is, they make many compromises, living either "trapped" in a metro area and not having a car, or driving "junkers" that no one else even would want - and constantly putting money into them to fix them while missing work etc to go to the shop.
I'm not sure I agree with #1 except in so far as addicts "need" that next fix.
The people in #1 need more of a cluebat than a complicated office suite. With things like tablets, smartphones etc - living in Office makes little sense.
They're missing the point of modern computing where dumb text is a limitation over data that has appropriate metadata applied.
Whenever I hear this, I usually think they're doing it wrong. When you're hacking things onto Office to do something because the built in stuff doesn't work for you - it's quite often because you need a different program or way of doing task X, but don't know it. So you try and mold _the one suite_ you do know into doing task X, with mediocre results at best.
Granted, there are cases where add ons to Office can be a reasonable choice, but rarely are they a good choice.
Bad analogy time: It's like they started with a screwdriver and that worked great for them. Then one day, they needed a chisel, but didn't know chisels existed as a separate tool, but they realized if they sanded down the flathead screwdriver a bit, it could probably work for both passably. Then they found a screw that was phillips, but didn't know phillips head screwdrivers existed, but thought if they cut off the edges of the flathead, it would probably fit in the screw and work.
Now they've got a barely functioning narrow sharpish flathead screwdriver but they think they're all that because they "extended" their screwdriver to do what they need. They never realized there are specialized and better tools for the other jobs.
Are you claiming there isn't local competition in banking? Really? Granted I can only speak to the upstate NY area where I live, but I have *many* banking choices. In fact, one of the *uber* banks, HSBC, pulled out last month and sold off to a regional bank, First Niagara. So much for killing smaller banks.
While I prefer to use an online bank like Ally for most of my checking needs, I could easily get an account at First Niagara, followed by local branches of M&T, several local banks, Wal-Mart's Woodforest or Citizens, 3 different Credit Unions, etc.
Pretty much every town with a supermarket has at least 2 banks competing locally, and expand that to 4 if you drive to the next town over. You can go with a bank that saves money via not providing personal teller service, or go with a bank or credit union that does have tellers available and you do pretty much all banking in person after waiting in line. It's up to the consumer, and in this area, I'm not seeing evidence of one method winning out - it's consumer choice. And I'm not talking Manhattan sized cities either... I'm talking 10,000 - 40,000 people towns and cities.
Grocery competition has only improved in my area as well. There's of course the Wal-Mart boogey man, but there's also local Shur-Fine, P&C Fresh stores that do fine. There's regional Tops and Wegmans and let me tell you, Wegmans sure isn't hurting. Target has added groceries, and warehouse clubs give another option with surrounding towns having Sams Club or BJs. Maines recently came in also.
I think local delivery can certainly be done, look at all the restaurants. And with some planning, Schwans delivers frozen food pretty much anywhere. So there is a logistical way to do it - how will it compete with going to the grocery store yourself? No idea. I don't think it's quite there. Local taxi companies offer delivery from wherever to wherever (out back roads 10 miles out from stores) if you pay the taxi fare and a small extra fee. Not cheaper than going to the store yourself, but easier if you don't want to drive out.
The question is the economics - I'm not sure Amazon can do anything about it - they have huge economies of scale wit the current model, but for groceries? It has to be the opposite of an economy of scale for same day delivery from local food storage to customers. Maybe a grocery truck making rounds could do it like UPS but UPS has play - what they ship can get there a day late without having to scrap the merchandise...
I wish more scientists would use LaTeX for their shared editing documents. I recall there was a major grad student and many highly paid scientists trying to fix a word doc that was traded around and edited between Word 2007 on Win and Word 2004 or 2008 on Mac... Totally broken.
Adobe seems totally broken to me for most uses, and bloated to hell. But I'm not a graphic designer.
I don't use sites that require Facebook to log in. I only use Spotify because I was able to get a Spotify account... before they went to Facebook only...
The need for a real gaming controller (and supporting a device I never need to jailbreak) drove me to an OpenPandora... Not current AAA - mostly retro-gaming, but many many fun games I never got to play before.
Maybe it's just my Droid III (which has enough problems I have to admit) or my cheap chinese knock off tablets I've used, but touch screen gaming is very difficult for me exactly because I have to keep looking at the controls vs what's happening in the game... I couldn't play Chrono Trigger on my phone or tablet, but can with the real controllers on the OP...
That said, pricing is a killer on it. Though so is the rumored pricing on the Surface...
Well, it depends. I recently managed to go see Cirque du Soleil live, but while there I also picked up a DVD of the same show (though a different performance) so I could show it to people who weren't able to come.
Let's just say that while the live performance was expensive and cramped (the airplane seats were more spacious than the theater), the experience was much better than watching the DVD in my much more comfortable seats at home. Way better.
It's going to depend on the experience I think. Now, this is of course only a delay - I expect once we have something getting close to a Holodeck, then, yes, you can have close as you couldn't tell the difference...
Well, lets play a bit of Reductio ad absurdum and say that it becomes legal to use digital media and you can get it however you want ("pirate" media - though I doubt it would be piracy if legal in my thought experiment). I mean, not just private but commercial use - i.e. abolition of intellectual property in all it's forms - at least as regards digital media.
You might see an immediate collapse of the industry as we know it. But then what? No new music, novels, shows?
What will all the websites and hardware purveyors do? They still have stuff they can flog for ad dollars or actual payments for physical goods. They might well fund content to draw in people to buy upgrades or new users.
Also, Kickstarter. Seems to work well for many projects, I see no reason it couldn't be used for an episode or a season of a "TV" show...
I have lots of arguments for filesharing being legal. This is one I thought had broader implications that is often forgotten. Specifically, if you govern by the consent of the governed - then you theoretically can't keep making laws that go against the will of the people.
And remember, our government doesn't know better than the people. They certainly don't listen to experts and are rarely experts on any given topic they make laws on.
I'm not sure you will get widespread agreement that we elect leaders to "govern" us as if we are electing parents, as opposed to represent our goals.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that there is *still* to many software packages that are Windows only. Autodesk Inventor Suite. Labview hardware drivers. Matlab hardware drivers.
The stupid, necessary, scientific, industrial etc hardware drivers are Windows only lots of the time. Plus the programming software is often Windows only. You literally cannot do many tasks without Windows.
Ok, but I'm not sure how Metro helps here. The only things practically cheaper as a new purchase is Android devices. If you're going to count refurbs, sure there are off lease / refurb WinXP systems for less than the iPad 2.
Also, tablets still aren't direct replacements for PCs in my opinion... Anyone who does a lot of facebook messaging or e-mail etc, is likely to feel that touchscreens suck for typing. And many "internet terminals" are used for e-mail.
As you add in specialty keyboards for the iPad, your total purchase price for feature parity goes UP, not down - quickly bringing entry level pcs running Win7 into the picture.
Yes, the issue I have is I cannot keep my passwords in my head anymore - I have to use a password manager. I use Keepass, but it requires me to either duplicate entries or carry the file around with me. Plus, that file is now very attractive to anyone wanting access to my accounts as a single password to break.
Finally, in the case where you have to have the password manager remember your non-answers to password reset questions - it's like not having any password recovery method at all. I.e. you lose your keepass file, and you've lost both the password and the recovery answers.
I missed what you were targeting with that comment, hence mine. I would also argue that there is a bit of a difference between a video game and transportation, even to the extent that the transportation device (car) was chosen for some level of "fun value".
I don't really judge what people do with their own money that they earned. If it makes them happy and they can pay for it, it's probably not my place to tell them how they should live.
I may disagree with their choice, but it's their choice and not mine. I sincerely hope they are happy.
Worse, it's pretty hard for a naive user to tell what is the top tier. I got suckered on a Droid III. I never had a smartphone before, but I had 2 previous "dumb" Motorola's and they were neigh on indestructible. I managed to go over 6 years on those phones. And they were used when I got them, so more like 8 years use.
I'm 1.5 years in on my Droid III and I cannot wait to get rid of it. I may test it in my Bendtech in my own damn "Will it blend". It is the biggest piece of crap phone I've ever used.
I've found it's barely equivalent in stability or usability as much cheaper knock off chinese android tablets. If I hadn't used Android on those cheap tablets, I'd likely be buying my first apple product ever on renewal. But I know it's not android - it's either the crap Verizon foists on the Droid III or the horrible build quality of the Droid III.
I'll definitely be looking at a Samsung Galaxy whatever when I'm up for renewal.
Can someone explain to me what OneNote does that's so useful? I don't use it as I can't see how it'd integrate into our environment for multiple user access to data, but we have some users who love it, but cannot for the life of them articulate *why* it's so great.
Wait, why would you think Surface is cheap? It's advertised to cost in line with an iPad for the "cheap" one, and be more expensive for the higher end one. Nexus 7 on the other hand makes me not want to check merrimobiles for tablets as much anymore.
I don't know that it's hard to find good staff - it's as usual hard to find good staff at competitive pay rates. I.e. I'll bet you could get great, motivated US based live chat technicians if you provided remote desktop tools and paid $100k a year.
You can also say that American people speak English because other American people speak English. It is a circular reasoning, but it does not make it wrong in itself.
Yes, but we also realize that speaking at each other is not always the best method to get something done. For instance, Internet Forums using typed text. Specific agreed jargon.
Word may be the easiest up front, but it has a high back end cost. So much so that after the last editing debacle requiring many highly paid people and several temps to spend months re-creating a word document for an important report that we now are *not* to use Word for massive collaborative documents. The failures just before submission deadlines are the worst time to have technical difficulties. It's much easier to spend the time up front as you can then munge the deadline easier.
I disagree that Word works. It works in a very limited subset of applications on a very limited set of platforms. We are rapidly getting back into a multi platform world. If your manual isn't viewable on an iPad - you'll get some pressure to make sure it is.
If the draft isn't looking right on MacOSX for the executive editor, you might have some problems...
It costs you money to pay someone to take your Word doc and re-create it in a publishing package to actually print it. This raises the final product price. Competitors who save that step can have cheaper books / manuals, and as a benefit take out a step for typos or formatting changes by someone *who doesn't know the product*.
I think we're in the last gasps of Word being good enough...
Your 2000 page long volume probably would be better served by LaTeX or InDesign depending on your taste. You know, desktop publishing. That handles the re-flowing properly and doesn't randomly decide it knows more about what the format, line breaks, etc than you do (Which Word does on 2 page documents to me)...
I'm also making a distinction here that there is a potential competitive advantage to not always doing things a certain way because everyone else does them that way.
For example, when I contact IBM for a quote, they aren't passing around a manually edited Word document - they have a system that builds configurations and then auto outputs HTML or Excel or format of choice.
My point with that line was that
"Business people sends out documents that require office because business people send out documents that require office" is circular reasoning. And, I think, wrong.
I feel like we're getting ever closer to the HTML vision - that document contents matter, templates matter, but that WYSIWYG is a horribly way to build a document collaboratively, so far bad for template-able documents, and rather painful for complex long documents.
The problem I have with MS Office isn't even that it's a proprietary format that requires paying Microsoft to do your business. It's that it's not even good at what it's supposed to do, and as I said in my first post, it's not even good at what users like in your cases listed want it to do. For instance, even if I have the same Windows OS, and the same version of Office as my counterpart, having a *different printer* can mess up a word documents display and formatting.
And if you're not caring about the formatting and just kicking around bloated text files - then any program I've ever used to open a doc(x) file and re-send it has been indistinguishable from the changes my version of Word would make to the file.
That's OK, I'd refuse to do business with a company that insisted on sending / working with such broken proprietary text or spreadsheets and refused to just send a damn PDF or ASCII file.
I mean, what are business people sending out that requires Office? Quotes? Really - a PDF doesn't work? It needs custom VBA code to do something (that you have to send to third parties???) so you can't view it in LibreOffice? HTML E-mail fails for your workflow?
Contracts? Should they really be editable? If they are drafts, wouldn't some sort of source control (Wiki, Cloud Docs, Sharepoint, hell SVN) be important? Final drafts sure as hell ought to be close to physical documents (i.e. PDFs or the like, maybe cryptographically signed?)...
Complex Documents? Hell, different Office versions on different platforms screw that up. Oh, the corporate user who's on Win XP with Office 2003 is a fanatic! Or the Mac using Executive with Office 2011. It sure as hell isn't just Linux users with OpenOffice...
Do you refuse to deal with Europe because they use A4 paper vs Letter?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, in 2012 if you're using Office for anything more complex than a letter to mom or a school book report - you're probably doing it wrong. And even then, you should save your $$ and use something free(Wordpad, Open Office, Google Docs)...
I may have exaggerated a little, but the asking prices for used Subarus in Upstate NY is amazing. Now I could turn it into a trip, but as I said, I looked at the entry level Imprezas and it almost never saved you money buying used. Sometimes you can find sales on new cars that are straight equal to other dealers in the area for 2-3 year old Imprezas !!!
Leases never make sense out here where people drive on average 40 - 80 miles a day for their commute. We drive 15 - 20k a year and lease mileage overages are a bitch also.
What's illogical about buying a car that's $23k (roughly half of the roughly average income I've seen reported)? That some people pay $3k to finance it over 5 years?
It doesn't seem illogical to me to buy a new car that is half way decent. Maybe it's not rational, but buying a new car for 1/2 your annual income could be perfectly logical - depending on your starting premises.
The arguments for not buying a car that I can think of are the following:
Use Mass Transit (well debunked in hundreds of slashdot stories)
Buy used - Hassle, difficulty finding features, design, cleanliness, brand, model wanted for enough of a savings. For instance, I like Subarus (hell, I'm to Subarus what many are to Apple products). I can get a new one for X or a 4 year old one with 70+k miles for X-$3k or so in my area. Does that really make sense? Or I can get a 10 year old one needing major repairs for $5k... Still doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Alternatively, I could buy a used car I don't like. That may be a rational choice if the *only* concern is cost. Otherwise, why buy something I don't like? Not, I'm not talking Subarus only, I'm saying how does it make sense to buy something you dislike to save some money?
And there's the crux. For most people I've ever talked to, cost is not *the only* factor that matters for transportation for them. For those that it is, they make many compromises, living either "trapped" in a metro area and not having a car, or driving "junkers" that no one else even would want - and constantly putting money into them to fix them while missing work etc to go to the shop.
I'm not sure I agree with #1 except in so far as addicts "need" that next fix.
The people in #1 need more of a cluebat than a complicated office suite. With things like tablets, smartphones etc - living in Office makes little sense.
They're missing the point of modern computing where dumb text is a limitation over data that has appropriate metadata applied.
It sounds like you don't want a word processor, you want a desktop publishing package. Maybe InDesign or LaTeX?
Whenever I hear this, I usually think they're doing it wrong. When you're hacking things onto Office to do something because the built in stuff doesn't work for you - it's quite often because you need a different program or way of doing task X, but don't know it. So you try and mold _the one suite_ you do know into doing task X, with mediocre results at best.
Granted, there are cases where add ons to Office can be a reasonable choice, but rarely are they a good choice.
Bad analogy time:
It's like they started with a screwdriver and that worked great for them. Then one day, they needed a chisel, but didn't know chisels existed as a separate tool, but they realized if they sanded down the flathead screwdriver a bit, it could probably work for both passably. Then they found a screw that was phillips, but didn't know phillips head screwdrivers existed, but thought if they cut off the edges of the flathead, it would probably fit in the screw and work.
Now they've got a barely functioning narrow sharpish flathead screwdriver but they think they're all that because they "extended" their screwdriver to do what they need. They never realized there are specialized and better tools for the other jobs.
IDK - I think the sharing stuff is a nightmare. How do you prevent "casual" or more likely with my users, inadvertent and unintended data leaks?
I think I'll be hoping MS deigns to provide a GPO to disable all the "cloud" stuff that goes places we don't have contracts with...
Are you claiming there isn't local competition in banking? Really? Granted I can only speak to the upstate NY area where I live, but I have *many* banking choices. In fact, one of the *uber* banks, HSBC, pulled out last month and sold off to a regional bank, First Niagara. So much for killing smaller banks.
While I prefer to use an online bank like Ally for most of my checking needs, I could easily get an account at First Niagara, followed by local branches of M&T, several local banks, Wal-Mart's Woodforest or Citizens, 3 different Credit Unions, etc.
Pretty much every town with a supermarket has at least 2 banks competing locally, and expand that to 4 if you drive to the next town over. You can go with a bank that saves money via not providing personal teller service, or go with a bank or credit union that does have tellers available and you do pretty much all banking in person after waiting in line. It's up to the consumer, and in this area, I'm not seeing evidence of one method winning out - it's consumer choice. And I'm not talking Manhattan sized cities either... I'm talking 10,000 - 40,000 people towns and cities.
Grocery competition has only improved in my area as well. There's of course the Wal-Mart boogey man, but there's also local Shur-Fine, P&C Fresh stores that do fine. There's regional Tops and Wegmans and let me tell you, Wegmans sure isn't hurting. Target has added groceries, and warehouse clubs give another option with surrounding towns having Sams Club or BJs. Maines recently came in also.
I think local delivery can certainly be done, look at all the restaurants. And with some planning, Schwans delivers frozen food pretty much anywhere. So there is a logistical way to do it - how will it compete with going to the grocery store yourself? No idea. I don't think it's quite there. Local taxi companies offer delivery from wherever to wherever (out back roads 10 miles out from stores) if you pay the taxi fare and a small extra fee. Not cheaper than going to the store yourself, but easier if you don't want to drive out.
The question is the economics - I'm not sure Amazon can do anything about it - they have huge economies of scale wit the current model, but for groceries? It has to be the opposite of an economy of scale for same day delivery from local food storage to customers. Maybe a grocery truck making rounds could do it like UPS but UPS has play - what they ship can get there a day late without having to scrap the merchandise...
I wish more scientists would use LaTeX for their shared editing documents. I recall there was a major grad student and many highly paid scientists trying to fix a word doc that was traded around and edited between Word 2007 on Win and Word 2004 or 2008 on Mac... Totally broken.
Adobe seems totally broken to me for most uses, and bloated to hell. But I'm not a graphic designer.
I don't use sites that require Facebook to log in. I only use Spotify because I was able to get a Spotify account... before they went to Facebook only...
I really hope this trend doesn't catch on.
What if you're a citizen (i.e. born here) and don't have a passport? I only know a few people in upstate NY who have passports...
It's not like you get issued a passport when born like an SSN or birth certificate...
The need for a real gaming controller (and supporting a device I never need to jailbreak) drove me to an OpenPandora... Not current AAA - mostly retro-gaming, but many many fun games I never got to play before.
Maybe it's just my Droid III (which has enough problems I have to admit) or my cheap chinese knock off tablets I've used, but touch screen gaming is very difficult for me exactly because I have to keep looking at the controls vs what's happening in the game... I couldn't play Chrono Trigger on my phone or tablet, but can with the real controllers on the OP...
That said, pricing is a killer on it. Though so is the rumored pricing on the Surface...
Well, it depends. I recently managed to go see Cirque du Soleil live, but while there I also picked up a DVD of the same show (though a different performance) so I could show it to people who weren't able to come.
Let's just say that while the live performance was expensive and cramped (the airplane seats were more spacious than the theater), the experience was much better than watching the DVD in my much more comfortable seats at home. Way better.
It's going to depend on the experience I think. Now, this is of course only a delay - I expect once we have something getting close to a Holodeck, then, yes, you can have close as you couldn't tell the difference...
Well, lets play a bit of Reductio ad absurdum and say that it becomes legal to use digital media and you can get it however you want ("pirate" media - though I doubt it would be piracy if legal in my thought experiment). I mean, not just private but commercial use - i.e. abolition of intellectual property in all it's forms - at least as regards digital media.
You might see an immediate collapse of the industry as we know it. But then what? No new music, novels, shows?
What will all the websites and hardware purveyors do? They still have stuff they can flog for ad dollars or actual payments for physical goods. They might well fund content to draw in people to buy upgrades or new users.
Also, Kickstarter. Seems to work well for many projects, I see no reason it couldn't be used for an episode or a season of a "TV" show...
I have lots of arguments for filesharing being legal. This is one I thought had broader implications that is often forgotten. Specifically, if you govern by the consent of the governed - then you theoretically can't keep making laws that go against the will of the people.
And remember, our government doesn't know better than the people. They certainly don't listen to experts and are rarely experts on any given topic they make laws on.
I'm not sure you will get widespread agreement that we elect leaders to "govern" us as if we are electing parents, as opposed to represent our goals.