These complaints all fail for obvious, factual reasons.
"It's too expensive" Well, I don't have a PhD in Economics, but I'm pretty sure that when you're selling your product in a non-monopoly situation, and your sales are huge, that's a good indicator that your prices are not too expensive. If it's too expensive for you, then Apple simply has to decide if they can live without you as a customer. I think they've made that decision, and it's worked out pretty well for them.
"First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do. Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale." In other news, gravity still pulls things down. There isn't another way to do it; this is how the world works right now. If Apple wants to sell the latest Britney Spears song, they can't just call Britney and say "Hey Brit, how does 20 cents per song sound? Does that work for you?" She doesn't have the power to sell them her songs; she gave that right away when she signed her record contract. If you think that's evil, then your beef is with the record companies, not Apple. Apple buys from the labels because they're the ones holding the songs. If they could pay artists 40 cents per song instead of paying the labels 65, they'd do so in a heartbeat. As for the "35 cents is a ripoff", ITMS is not a large profit source for Apple: that 35 cents barely exceeds their costs (servers, bandwidth, processing media, design, management overhead, etc...). They've said that the major thrust of ITMS is to sell iPods, not to generate vast profits from song sales.
"But when Apple supports and profits from an obviously unfair system, while telling customers that it's 'fair to the artists', they are just as guilty." Bullshit. And you're going to tell me that by using your computer to access the Internet and post on slashdot, you're supporting the agenda of the sweatshop owners who built your PC components, all of the communications companies who own circuits between you and the servers you visit, and the admins who run slashdot? Sorry, but I don't accept that philosophy. It's a big, complicated world, and everyone has to live in it. Apple looked at the world as it was, saw a way to make it a little bit better, and seems to have done a good job. You presume to blame them for the sorry state that existed before they got there, saying that they should have fixed everything or done nothing. Let me know how that works out for you.
And we do hear these complaints on slashdot, all the time. This isn't a haven for Apple fanboys, it's a haven for Linux fanboys. These complaints are neither original, nor well reasoned.
I don't see anyone "whining" here whatsoever. I see Open Source advocates defending themselves against a lot of blatant lies spread by Microsoft and its funded quangos.
If you don't see it, it's because you aren't looking. This whole post amounts to "All the groups who argue against our stuff (not FOR Microsoft's stuff, these aren't findings that "Windows 2003 Server rocks!", they're findings that "Open Source is a bad idea") are only doing it because they're in league with Microsoft!
There's so much more rhetoric here than reason. So much more "The guy who said my software has bugs is EVIL!" than "We fixed that bug two months ago, and instituted a practice to ensure that similar bugs are found immediately."
I come here everyday looking for the second one. Looking for "these are legitimate reasons why [some Open Source software] is better than it was yesterday, and is now a credible alternative to [whatever "closed-source", not necessarily Microsoft, products I'm using]" or "here's something you haven't thought of about MS and OSS". Every so often I find one such post, but it's very rare.
For every one of those rational, helpful posts, I have to wade through nine of these "Microsoft is like a whiny baby!" posts.
As for: OSS has not got to where it is today by constantly attacking Microsoft or by large glossy magazine or billboard adverts - it's got there just through word of mouth.
I suggest you check out this word of mouth site. From where I sit, the biggest advances OSS has made, in terms of acceptance in the marketplace, have come from huge companies like Sun and IBM, with their glossy magazine and billboard adverts.
Lastly, if we accept your belief that Microsoft has an awful public image, we come to the conclusion that 90% of people don't care about the public image of the company who makes their software, and that therefore CIO's are going to take studies claiming the efficacy of closed-source more seriously than articles about Microsoft's evil corruption.
every time somebody makes an argument against the metric system, they are essentially also making that same argument agaisnt the arabic (our) number system.
Wow, you must have heard some pretty weak arguments. That sounds almost like a strawman.
The most frequent, and most legitimate argument against converting to the metric system is the converting part. It's easy to conceive in your mind of a wonderland where everyone uses these easy-to-convert numbers to refer to things; the part where it breaks down is when you try to conceive of all the steps between here and there.
Re:Microsoft - The "Spoilt Brat" Corporation
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When Think Tanks Attack
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· Score: 4, Insightful
To me, Microsoft just seems to be acting like a "spoilt child" these days.
That's funny, because I see it the opposite way. They're on top, tremendously so. They are so dominant that they are legally defined as a monopoly in their chosen field.
A few years ago, when asked about Linux, Gates responded that he didn't even see it as a competitor, that MS didn't spend any significant time thinking about it.
That has changed now, and they at least bother to address it. But when these "think tanks" put out studies saying "don't use open source products for the following reasons", the Open Source crowd spends more effort trying to attack the think tanks themselves than they do trying to rebut the reasoning and legitimately convince people to switch.
To me, the slashdot/OSS crowd here cuts far more of a whining child figure, toiling in relative insignificance (market-share wise) and whining "Why is everyone picking on me?! It's because of that big bully, Microsoft!"
Maybe OSS is better or more reliable than "closed-source", maybe these studies are compromised by the Microsoft funding. But simply trying to dismiss them by painting Microsoft as a whiny child is a pretty weak, and inaccurate, rebuttal.
Well, their product do cause some diet and healht problems. All the suggar is a problem. This of cause is also a moral question. Is it really coca colas problem how people use their product.
Well, considering that they also make a sugar-free version, Diet Coke, which didn't stop people from buying their original, I'm thinking it's not Coca-Cola's fault.
You can accuse Microsoft of using scare tactics to enforce its market share, but it's kind of absurd to accuse Coca-Cola of trying to scare people aware from diet soda.
I agree with that, and I hate most web apps, but that doesn't matter. All that matters is what most users do, and most users don't mind web apps. Most of the "ordinary users" I know make frequent reference to "checking my webmail often".
Most of the comments above this one which don't simply say some variation of "I totally agree with Joel" are talking about how awful the old code is, and how much better the new stuff will be. I agree with this, and as a programmer and network engineer I am strongly drawn towards elegant solutions and new technology, but as a rational human being I have to admit the irrelevance of it all.
One of the most drastically apparent things for me is the difference between Win 98 and Win XP. Having studied both and used each one for more than two years, I can tell you that XP is at least an order of magnitude better than 98. But many of the users I speak to don't even know the difference! I ask which one they're running, and they don't know. I have to explain to them how to check.
Users don't care about whether your solution is elegant or advanced, all they care about is "can I get my webmail and use Word?" And if the developers want to move towards web apps because they're easier, then the users aren't gonna stop them. If Microsoft maintains backwards compatibility at the expense of good efficient code, users will thank them for it, not switch software vendors.
I don't really understand all the complaints I'm seeing here about the cost of broadband. I pay something like $45/month for cable-modem, which gets me something in the neighborhood of 3 Mbps. That seems pretty consistent with the other posters I'm seeing here, but they seem to think that $45/month is really high.
Where did that perception come from? What are you comparing it to? In terms of personal value, I value my broadband Internet server WAY more than landline or cell phone service, both of which cost about the same. I value it more than my cable TV service, which costs significantly more. I value it at least ten times as much as I valued dialup, and it only costs about twice as much.
If they wanted to charge me $60/month for my cable modem, I'd probably still pay it. I'd be annoyed at the price hike, but it would still be a better deal for me than DSL (assuming it's even available) and definitely better than dialup. So in the meantime, I'm glad it's only $45. Sure, I'd like it if it was cheaper, in the same way I'd like it if I didn't have to pay rent and beautiful women begged me for sex. But what I don't understand is where everyone got the idea that this was normal, that we should expect $25/month for 3 Mbps service and that anything worse than that is terrible.
There isn't competition not because nobody is interested in competing, but because that is how the "utility" is regulated. Just like there is Verizon or nothing for telephone here.
That's not your neighborhood, that's every city in the USA. If your utility sucks, there's a committe you complain to. I haven't personally lodged such a complaint, but there is anecdotal evidence (ie slashdot posts) suggesting that such complaints are very effective at getting your utility to pay attention.
Think of it like a free-market, but one where you chose to buy from your city, and they're buying from the utility. That's how much of the free-market works too (try buying a Dell PC and getting them to install Linux on it for you). If you're pissed with the service, you complain to the city, and if they're any good they complain to the utility. If they're not, you should consider that a problem with the city, not the utility.
I agree it's not as competitive as I'd like, but try to imagine a city where five different companies are tearing up the streets to run new fiber all the time, and they're charging their customers to pay for all that extra infrastructure expansion. The utility model is just making the best of a tough situation.
Oh, and Verizon hasn't decided to run DSL out to my area since we're too far from the CO
That's not because they have a bad attitude, it's because of physics. The farther you are from the CO, the less DSL is gonna work. You want them to invest a couple million into a new CO and its associated reterminations so they can provide DSL to you and your neighbors, who will complain if it costs as much as your Adelphia cable modem service?
By being an unreasonable customer you just give the companies less incentive to improve. What's the point in giving you a 40% speed increase and a 20% price cut if you're just going to bitch about them not giving you fiber for $10/month?
In general, intelligence agencies (be it KGB, CIA, Mossad, what have you) make note of anyone with sexual tastes not in the accepted mainstream, not just homosexuality, since this is something easy to exploit. It allows you to not only offer them something that is difficult for them to seek out on their own, but also to hold power over them by concealing it. At the time, homosexuality was far less publicly accepted than it is now, so it could be used as a pressure point. Understandably something like that could make the CIA nervous.
Now, I wasn't present, so I can't tell you if that actually was what motivated them and what affected Turing, nor am I saying that this makes his experience any less awful or sad, just pointing out that there's reasoning behind such things.
Who has lots of disposable income and is more than willing to spend it on expensive new toys? Geeks! But do they get advertised to?
Of course, geeks also tend to view advertising as an assault on their soul, doing everything they can to avoid it. They'll be the ones with TiVos (be they store-bought or homemade) skipping the commercials.
I'm not saying the Fox execs considered that, maybe they did and maybe they didn't. But it's not really their job, it's the advertisers. If advertisers were beating down Fox's door to get access to Futurama's 100k viewers instead of American Idol's 10M, then maybe the programming execs at Fox would have taken it more seriously. They just obey their advertisers.
Yeah, they're pretty dumb. Isn't it an amazing coincidence that they're as successful as the other major networks which have been around much longer?
Come on. I loved Futurama and I loved Firefly, and I'm pissed that they were canceled, but I can't paint it as a bad business decision. This very article (about the advanced math in the show) makes the point that it didn't really appeal to the mainstream viewer. "Mainstream" may translate to "those slack-jawed idiots who can't even code in C" in your mind, but in the coffers at a TV network "mainstream" means "the main stream of our revenue - large numbers of people who like the same stuff". And I don't think that "the height of its popularity" was ever that high. It's a big hit with geeks, but most of the non-geeks I know aren't interested or don't seem to "get it".
Personally, I think the problem is that there is no way for people to pay different amounts for shows. When you watch network TV, you're paying with your eyes. Number of viewers determines their advertisers, and that's where they make the money. That means that a mediocre show, which will mildly appeal to everyone, is more profitable than a show which will be deeply loved by a small group of people. If the compensation was somehow better differentiated, I think we'd get better shows.
No, I don't actually have a good system of differentiated compensation to propose, short of buying the canceled shows on DVD. Sorry.
Seriously. I can't believe you left this one off. You must be new here.
Re:How long is the iPod thing going to last?
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60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 1
The iPod is a different thing. It's just a music player with some storage and a cool look. It's the kind of thing that can be designed fairly easily. It requires the iTunes service, but that's also something which any company can set up for not too much money.
First off, it's not different in the way you say. It is an example of the same kind of slick design and excellent usability that you cite in MacOS. If you can, find a friend who has one of the competing HD players, and a friend who has an iPod. Borrow each one for a week. You'll find that the iPod interface is just smoother. The big difference between the iPod and MacOS, which explains why iPods have huge market share and MacOS has negligible market share, is that Apple has taken pains to make sure that the iPod works for PCs, not just Apple computers.
As for the music service, I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of that. First, because each one has its own DRM and won't play with the others, people are effectively locked in to whichever store they picked. That means that getting people to use your store is like getting a standard adopted. You have to fight the catch-22 of "the more people use it, the more people will want to use it". Next concern is that it requires a vast selection (I wouldn't want to use an online music store that had less selection than a Best Buy retail location) which means licensing agreements from all the major record labels (who are known for being huge pains in the ass when it comes to licensing agreements). Add to that the set up costs of the hardware, software, and hosting, and running a competitive online music store is not a small undertaking.
Lastly, as everyone else will mention, there's the style and culture. It's beautiful. It's slick. It looks like a simple device to play music, not like a computer that was shunk enough to be carried around. And it's the hard-drive portable music player. People today are either buying iPods or "iPod knock-offs", "iPod imitations", they aren't just "considering different models of hard-drive based portable music players."
I'm not saying the iPod won't ever face competition, but it's gonna take a really impressive offering, not just a slightly cheaper commodity.
Most of the smartest and most learned people I know in tech fields picked up the bulk of their expertise from personal projects, not academic curricula.
This is not to knock college education; I think mine was invaluable. But don't just write off everything other than teaching as "frivolous". The ones who really learn are the ones who are driven to do it on their own. All they need is an environment that empowers them to do so, not someone to hold their hand or push them along.
Also, what you think of as "traditional" tech universities are probably known for the prestige of their technical grad studies, not necessarily the quality of their undergraduate educational environment.
You can argue the merits of Nuclear power from an environmental standpoint, but I see it as nearly unavoidable from a net energy standpoint.
Right now, all of the major power sources (let's call "major" 5% or more of the world energy generation) are basically solar energy. Oil is huge amounts of plants that soaked up solar energy, converted it to chemical energy, then were compressed. Natural gas and coal are also compressed organic energy.
Think of it as living on a constant fixed income, with the sunlight striking the Earth (and not being reflected) as the income rate. For millions of years we were spending less than our income, and saving it in the form of compressed organics. For the past 50 years or so, we've been withdrawing from that account and spending it WAY faster than it's being replaced.
Even if we coated the entire planet with solar cells, and even if they were far more efficient than the current designs, we still can't pull more power from them than the sun sends in. Now, I admit I haven't run the numbers, but I can't imagine even a really ambitious solar deployment matching even half our current consumption rates. There just isn't enough energy coming into the system as a whole.
Nuclear (be it fission or fusion) bypasses this system by drawing energy of non-solar origin. The amount of energy stored up on the planet in the form of molecular potential energy is tremendous, and we couldn't spend it all in thousands of years even at vastly escalated consumption rates. The way I see it, the cleanliness of nuclear is just a side benefit. Dirty energy is still preferable to no energy.
Problem is, nuclear isn't gonna run your car. Not anytime soon anyway.
It's a limited resource, and it looks to my untrained eye like we're much more able to replace it as an energy source than we are to replace it as a plastics source.
I believe that the plastics are derived from part of the refinement process. You take crude oil, you refine it, you get some gasoline and some plastics (or some compound easily turned into plastics). So it's not like we're wasting oil on gasoline which could be used for plastics, the two are sort of a package deal.
That's one of the biggest problems with our purely monetary system -- there is no measure for the labor hours, or the quality of those hours, that go into the production of much of anything.
No, this is the beauty of the Capitalist system, it measures extremely well the value of the labor hours and their quality. If you create something that you think is really great, but nobody wants it, then it's not valuable. If people aren't willing to compensate you for your work as much as you think it's worth, then don't do it. If you find yourself still wanting to do the work, despite the lack of monetary compensation, then it means you are already being compensated sufficiently (maybe through satisfaction in the work itself, or maybe through recognition of your contributions, or maybe through a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself).
As Russ' blog (which I quite like) will tell you (albeit somewhat confrontationally; he calls it the ANGRY Economist for a reason), value is subjective. Diamonds and gold are valuable because people want them, and because they are scarce (whether naturally or artificially). Not because there is some intrinsic moral value in them, or because of the labor involved in getting them. Many people find the "value of labor" an appealing notion because they personally find that they appreciate things more which they have worked hard for than the things which they are given. This makes sense in economics too, the value of that thing is what you were willing to trade for it. In this case, your labor, but if you had to trade your car or house or first-born-child for it, you probably would also have really appreciated it.
The best way to completely misunderstand Capitalism is to focus on money. It's about how much people value things, and what they're willing to trade them for voluntarily. Capitalism simply says if you have something, and you want something more than the thing you have, then you should trade for what you want. If you want the thing you have more, then keep it. That way, everyone ends up with the things they want the most. Example, a Britney Spears CD may not be worth $15 to you, so don't buy it, but it's worth that to someone else, so you and the music store get to keep $15 and the other person gets the CD.
In the case of labor, which you're addressing, if you think your labor is worth more than you're being compensated (maybe with dollars, maybe with something else) then look for someone else who will compensate you more for it. If there's nobody who will, then you were wrong about it's value, so don't do it. You can pour lots of labor into moving rocks 500 feet to the east, then moving them back, but if it doesn't benefit anyone, then that labor has no value.
"Free Software" is not a term of art properly defined somewhere. Sometimes it means free of cost to the user, sometimes it means unrestricted. Hence the tags often used "Free as in speech" or "Free as in beer". Yes, creating free software, such as Linux itself, has value to people, because if they had to, they would probably trade money for it. They don't have to, simply because the distribution system doesn't require it. From the "consumer" standpoint, this is great. You're getting something you value without paying for it. The concern is from the "producer" side: are the programmers being ripped off? Well, without coercion being present, no, they aren't. If they required more compensation, then they'd stop coding.
You really intend to discredit my post by posting anonymously and resorting to "I hope you die" ?
My point, though emphasized with a bit of sarcastic conetempt for your resorting to "well eventually something bad will happen", was valid.
You ask people to make sacrifices today, based on something that has a tiny probability of happening this century, and the best reasoning you have is "Well, if you would just stop focusing so much on this century, you'd see that this is going to happen eventually"
Of course they're going to ignore you. There are people to be fed, housed, and warmed, crime to be reduced, cultural frictions to be assuaged, and serious pollution (major toxics, not CO2) to be cleaned up today. Every dollar spent protecting us from objects that may strike in the next few centuries is a dollar taken away from these more pressing issues.
Oh, I'm sorry, you're right. We'll get right on that.
Of course, we'll be using your suggested time frame, which is "eventually", so you don't mind if we start working on it next century right? You're not one of those silly people who is incapable of seeing beyond a century are you?
Slashdot Mirror
These complaints all fail for obvious, factual reasons.
"It's too expensive"
Well, I don't have a PhD in Economics, but I'm pretty sure that when you're selling your product in a non-monopoly situation, and your sales are huge, that's a good indicator that your prices are not too expensive. If it's too expensive for you, then Apple simply has to decide if they can live without you as a customer. I think they've made that decision, and it's worked out pretty well for them.
"First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do. Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale."
In other news, gravity still pulls things down. There isn't another way to do it; this is how the world works right now. If Apple wants to sell the latest Britney Spears song, they can't just call Britney and say "Hey Brit, how does 20 cents per song sound? Does that work for you?" She doesn't have the power to sell them her songs; she gave that right away when she signed her record contract. If you think that's evil, then your beef is with the record companies, not Apple. Apple buys from the labels because they're the ones holding the songs. If they could pay artists 40 cents per song instead of paying the labels 65, they'd do so in a heartbeat. As for the "35 cents is a ripoff", ITMS is not a large profit source for Apple: that 35 cents barely exceeds their costs (servers, bandwidth, processing media, design, management overhead, etc...). They've said that the major thrust of ITMS is to sell iPods, not to generate vast profits from song sales.
"But when Apple supports and profits from an obviously unfair system, while telling customers that it's 'fair to the artists', they are just as guilty."
Bullshit. And you're going to tell me that by using your computer to access the Internet and post on slashdot, you're supporting the agenda of the sweatshop owners who built your PC components, all of the communications companies who own circuits between you and the servers you visit, and the admins who run slashdot? Sorry, but I don't accept that philosophy. It's a big, complicated world, and everyone has to live in it. Apple looked at the world as it was, saw a way to make it a little bit better, and seems to have done a good job. You presume to blame them for the sorry state that existed before they got there, saying that they should have fixed everything or done nothing. Let me know how that works out for you.
And we do hear these complaints on slashdot, all the time. This isn't a haven for Apple fanboys, it's a haven for Linux fanboys. These complaints are neither original, nor well reasoned.
On a long enough timeline, survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
On top of closing their site is slashdotted, must we kill their bandwidth also?
Well of course they're slashdotted, they're running 8086's and Sinclairs!
I don't see anyone "whining" here whatsoever. I see Open Source advocates defending themselves against a lot of blatant lies spread by Microsoft and its funded quangos.
If you don't see it, it's because you aren't looking. This whole post amounts to "All the groups who argue against our stuff (not FOR Microsoft's stuff, these aren't findings that "Windows 2003 Server rocks!", they're findings that "Open Source is a bad idea") are only doing it because they're in league with Microsoft!
There's so much more rhetoric here than reason. So much more "The guy who said my software has bugs is EVIL!" than "We fixed that bug two months ago, and instituted a practice to ensure that similar bugs are found immediately."
I come here everyday looking for the second one. Looking for "these are legitimate reasons why [some Open Source software] is better than it was yesterday, and is now a credible alternative to [whatever "closed-source", not necessarily Microsoft, products I'm using]" or "here's something you haven't thought of about MS and OSS". Every so often I find one such post, but it's very rare.
For every one of those rational, helpful posts, I have to wade through nine of these "Microsoft is like a whiny baby!" posts.
As for:
OSS has not got to where it is today by constantly attacking Microsoft or by large glossy magazine or billboard adverts - it's got there just through word of mouth.
I suggest you check out this word of mouth site. From where I sit, the biggest advances OSS has made, in terms of acceptance in the marketplace, have come from huge companies like Sun and IBM, with their glossy magazine and billboard adverts.
Lastly, if we accept your belief that Microsoft has an awful public image, we come to the conclusion that 90% of people don't care about the public image of the company who makes their software, and that therefore CIO's are going to take studies claiming the efficacy of closed-source more seriously than articles about Microsoft's evil corruption.
every time somebody makes an argument against the metric system, they are essentially also making that same argument agaisnt the arabic (our) number system.
Wow, you must have heard some pretty weak arguments. That sounds almost like a strawman.
The most frequent, and most legitimate argument against converting to the metric system is the converting part. It's easy to conceive in your mind of a wonderland where everyone uses these easy-to-convert numbers to refer to things; the part where it breaks down is when you try to conceive of all the steps between here and there.
To me, Microsoft just seems to be acting like a "spoilt child" these days.
That's funny, because I see it the opposite way. They're on top, tremendously so. They are so dominant that they are legally defined as a monopoly in their chosen field.
A few years ago, when asked about Linux, Gates responded that he didn't even see it as a competitor, that MS didn't spend any significant time thinking about it.
That has changed now, and they at least bother to address it. But when these "think tanks" put out studies saying "don't use open source products for the following reasons", the Open Source crowd spends more effort trying to attack the think tanks themselves than they do trying to rebut the reasoning and legitimately convince people to switch.
To me, the slashdot/OSS crowd here cuts far more of a whining child figure, toiling in relative insignificance (market-share wise) and whining "Why is everyone picking on me?! It's because of that big bully, Microsoft!"
Maybe OSS is better or more reliable than "closed-source", maybe these studies are compromised by the Microsoft funding. But simply trying to dismiss them by painting Microsoft as a whiny child is a pretty weak, and inaccurate, rebuttal.
Well, their product do cause some diet and healht problems. All the suggar is a problem. This of cause is also a moral question. Is it really coca colas problem how people use their product.
Well, considering that they also make a sugar-free version, Diet Coke, which didn't stop people from buying their original, I'm thinking it's not Coca-Cola's fault.
You can accuse Microsoft of using scare tactics to enforce its market share, but it's kind of absurd to accuse Coca-Cola of trying to scare people aware from diet soda.
Because WEB APPS AREN'T ANY BETTER.
I agree with that, and I hate most web apps, but that doesn't matter. All that matters is what most users do, and most users don't mind web apps. Most of the "ordinary users" I know make frequent reference to "checking my webmail often".
Most of the comments above this one which don't simply say some variation of "I totally agree with Joel" are talking about how awful the old code is, and how much better the new stuff will be. I agree with this, and as a programmer and network engineer I am strongly drawn towards elegant solutions and new technology, but as a rational human being I have to admit the irrelevance of it all.
One of the most drastically apparent things for me is the difference between Win 98 and Win XP. Having studied both and used each one for more than two years, I can tell you that XP is at least an order of magnitude better than 98. But many of the users I speak to don't even know the difference! I ask which one they're running, and they don't know. I have to explain to them how to check.
Users don't care about whether your solution is elegant or advanced, all they care about is "can I get my webmail and use Word?" And if the developers want to move towards web apps because they're easier, then the users aren't gonna stop them. If Microsoft maintains backwards compatibility at the expense of good efficient code, users will thank them for it, not switch software vendors.
I think this is what killed the Final Fantasy film.
That, and the lousy story and dialog.
I don't really understand all the complaints I'm seeing here about the cost of broadband. I pay something like $45/month for cable-modem, which gets me something in the neighborhood of 3 Mbps. That seems pretty consistent with the other posters I'm seeing here, but they seem to think that $45/month is really high.
Where did that perception come from? What are you comparing it to? In terms of personal value, I value my broadband Internet server WAY more than landline or cell phone service, both of which cost about the same. I value it more than my cable TV service, which costs significantly more. I value it at least ten times as much as I valued dialup, and it only costs about twice as much.
If they wanted to charge me $60/month for my cable modem, I'd probably still pay it. I'd be annoyed at the price hike, but it would still be a better deal for me than DSL (assuming it's even available) and definitely better than dialup. So in the meantime, I'm glad it's only $45. Sure, I'd like it if it was cheaper, in the same way I'd like it if I didn't have to pay rent and beautiful women begged me for sex. But what I don't understand is where everyone got the idea that this was normal, that we should expect $25/month for 3 Mbps service and that anything worse than that is terrible.
There isn't competition not because nobody is interested in competing, but because that is how the "utility" is regulated. Just like there is Verizon or nothing for telephone here.
That's not your neighborhood, that's every city in the USA. If your utility sucks, there's a committe you complain to. I haven't personally lodged such a complaint, but there is anecdotal evidence (ie slashdot posts) suggesting that such complaints are very effective at getting your utility to pay attention.
Think of it like a free-market, but one where you chose to buy from your city, and they're buying from the utility. That's how much of the free-market works too (try buying a Dell PC and getting them to install Linux on it for you). If you're pissed with the service, you complain to the city, and if they're any good they complain to the utility. If they're not, you should consider that a problem with the city, not the utility.
I agree it's not as competitive as I'd like, but try to imagine a city where five different companies are tearing up the streets to run new fiber all the time, and they're charging their customers to pay for all that extra infrastructure expansion. The utility model is just making the best of a tough situation.
Oh, and Verizon hasn't decided to run DSL out to my area since we're too far from the CO
That's not because they have a bad attitude, it's because of physics. The farther you are from the CO, the less DSL is gonna work. You want them to invest a couple million into a new CO and its associated reterminations so they can provide DSL to you and your neighbors, who will complain if it costs as much as your Adelphia cable modem service?
By being an unreasonable customer you just give the companies less incentive to improve. What's the point in giving you a 40% speed increase and a 20% price cut if you're just going to bitch about them not giving you fiber for $10/month?
In general, intelligence agencies (be it KGB, CIA, Mossad, what have you) make note of anyone with sexual tastes not in the accepted mainstream, not just homosexuality, since this is something easy to exploit. It allows you to not only offer them something that is difficult for them to seek out on their own, but also to hold power over them by concealing it. At the time, homosexuality was far less publicly accepted than it is now, so it could be used as a pressure point. Understandably something like that could make the CIA nervous.
Now, I wasn't present, so I can't tell you if that actually was what motivated them and what affected Turing, nor am I saying that this makes his experience any less awful or sad, just pointing out that there's reasoning behind such things.
Who has lots of disposable income and is more than willing to spend it on expensive new toys? Geeks! But do they get advertised to?
Of course, geeks also tend to view advertising as an assault on their soul, doing everything they can to avoid it. They'll be the ones with TiVos (be they store-bought or homemade) skipping the commercials.
I'm not saying the Fox execs considered that, maybe they did and maybe they didn't. But it's not really their job, it's the advertisers. If advertisers were beating down Fox's door to get access to Futurama's 100k viewers instead of American Idol's 10M, then maybe the programming execs at Fox would have taken it more seriously. They just obey their advertisers.
Yeah, they're pretty dumb. Isn't it an amazing coincidence that they're as successful as the other major networks which have been around much longer?
Come on. I loved Futurama and I loved Firefly, and I'm pissed that they were canceled, but I can't paint it as a bad business decision. This very article (about the advanced math in the show) makes the point that it didn't really appeal to the mainstream viewer. "Mainstream" may translate to "those slack-jawed idiots who can't even code in C" in your mind, but in the coffers at a TV network "mainstream" means "the main stream of our revenue - large numbers of people who like the same stuff". And I don't think that "the height of its popularity" was ever that high. It's a big hit with geeks, but most of the non-geeks I know aren't interested or don't seem to "get it".
Personally, I think the problem is that there is no way for people to pay different amounts for shows. When you watch network TV, you're paying with your eyes. Number of viewers determines their advertisers, and that's where they make the money. That means that a mediocre show, which will mildly appeal to everyone, is more profitable than a show which will be deeply loved by a small group of people. If the compensation was somehow better differentiated, I think we'd get better shows.
No, I don't actually have a good system of differentiated compensation to propose, short of buying the canceled shows on DVD. Sorry.
Jeez, what a looser. Irregardless of this I noticed that Windows embiggens all the virii on my boxen.
Parent post is very cromulent, and should be modded up!
Yes, but is it enough to run Longhorn?
Seriously.
I can't believe you left this one off.
You must be new here.
The iPod is a different thing. It's just a music player with some storage and a cool look. It's the kind of thing that can be designed fairly easily. It requires the iTunes service, but that's also something which any company can set up for not too much money.
First off, it's not different in the way you say. It is an example of the same kind of slick design and excellent usability that you cite in MacOS. If you can, find a friend who has one of the competing HD players, and a friend who has an iPod. Borrow each one for a week. You'll find that the iPod interface is just smoother. The big difference between the iPod and MacOS, which explains why iPods have huge market share and MacOS has negligible market share, is that Apple has taken pains to make sure that the iPod works for PCs, not just Apple computers.
As for the music service, I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of that. First, because each one has its own DRM and won't play with the others, people are effectively locked in to whichever store they picked. That means that getting people to use your store is like getting a standard adopted. You have to fight the catch-22 of "the more people use it, the more people will want to use it". Next concern is that it requires a vast selection (I wouldn't want to use an online music store that had less selection than a Best Buy retail location) which means licensing agreements from all the major record labels (who are known for being huge pains in the ass when it comes to licensing agreements). Add to that the set up costs of the hardware, software, and hosting, and running a competitive online music store is not a small undertaking.
Lastly, as everyone else will mention, there's the style and culture. It's beautiful. It's slick. It looks like a simple device to play music, not like a computer that was shunk enough to be carried around. And it's the hard-drive portable music player. People today are either buying iPods or "iPod knock-offs", "iPod imitations", they aren't just "considering different models of hard-drive based portable music players."
I'm not saying the iPod won't ever face competition, but it's gonna take a really impressive offering, not just a slightly cheaper commodity.
Most of the smartest and most learned people I know in tech fields picked up the bulk of their expertise from personal projects, not academic curricula.
This is not to knock college education; I think mine was invaluable. But don't just write off everything other than teaching as "frivolous". The ones who really learn are the ones who are driven to do it on their own. All they need is an environment that empowers them to do so, not someone to hold their hand or push them along.
Also, what you think of as "traditional" tech universities are probably known for the prestige of their technical grad studies, not necessarily the quality of their undergraduate educational environment.
"...you'll be going to a special Hell; one reserved for child-molesters, and people who talk at the theater."
You can argue the merits of Nuclear power from an environmental standpoint, but I see it as nearly unavoidable from a net energy standpoint.
Right now, all of the major power sources (let's call "major" 5% or more of the world energy generation) are basically solar energy. Oil is huge amounts of plants that soaked up solar energy, converted it to chemical energy, then were compressed. Natural gas and coal are also compressed organic energy.
Think of it as living on a constant fixed income, with the sunlight striking the Earth (and not being reflected) as the income rate. For millions of years we were spending less than our income, and saving it in the form of compressed organics. For the past 50 years or so, we've been withdrawing from that account and spending it WAY faster than it's being replaced.
Even if we coated the entire planet with solar cells, and even if they were far more efficient than the current designs, we still can't pull more power from them than the sun sends in. Now, I admit I haven't run the numbers, but I can't imagine even a really ambitious solar deployment matching even half our current consumption rates. There just isn't enough energy coming into the system as a whole.
Nuclear (be it fission or fusion) bypasses this system by drawing energy of non-solar origin. The amount of energy stored up on the planet in the form of molecular potential energy is tremendous, and we couldn't spend it all in thousands of years even at vastly escalated consumption rates. The way I see it, the cleanliness of nuclear is just a side benefit. Dirty energy is still preferable to no energy.
Problem is, nuclear isn't gonna run your car. Not anytime soon anyway.
It's a limited resource, and it looks to my untrained eye like we're much more able to replace it as an energy source than we are to replace it as a plastics source.
I believe that the plastics are derived from part of the refinement process. You take crude oil, you refine it, you get some gasoline and some plastics (or some compound easily turned into plastics). So it's not like we're wasting oil on gasoline which could be used for plastics, the two are sort of a package deal.
That's one of the biggest problems with our purely monetary system -- there is no measure for the labor hours, or the quality of those hours, that go into the production of much of anything.
No, this is the beauty of the Capitalist system, it measures extremely well the value of the labor hours and their quality. If you create something that you think is really great, but nobody wants it, then it's not valuable. If people aren't willing to compensate you for your work as much as you think it's worth, then don't do it. If you find yourself still wanting to do the work, despite the lack of monetary compensation, then it means you are already being compensated sufficiently (maybe through satisfaction in the work itself, or maybe through recognition of your contributions, or maybe through a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself).
As Russ' blog (which I quite like) will tell you (albeit somewhat confrontationally; he calls it the ANGRY Economist for a reason), value is subjective. Diamonds and gold are valuable because people want them, and because they are scarce (whether naturally or artificially). Not because there is some intrinsic moral value in them, or because of the labor involved in getting them. Many people find the "value of labor" an appealing notion because they personally find that they appreciate things more which they have worked hard for than the things which they are given. This makes sense in economics too, the value of that thing is what you were willing to trade for it. In this case, your labor, but if you had to trade your car or house or first-born-child for it, you probably would also have really appreciated it.
The best way to completely misunderstand Capitalism is to focus on money. It's about how much people value things, and what they're willing to trade them for voluntarily. Capitalism simply says if you have something, and you want something more than the thing you have, then you should trade for what you want. If you want the thing you have more, then keep it. That way, everyone ends up with the things they want the most. Example, a Britney Spears CD may not be worth $15 to you, so don't buy it, but it's worth that to someone else, so you and the music store get to keep $15 and the other person gets the CD.
In the case of labor, which you're addressing, if you think your labor is worth more than you're being compensated (maybe with dollars, maybe with something else) then look for someone else who will compensate you more for it. If there's nobody who will, then you were wrong about it's value, so don't do it. You can pour lots of labor into moving rocks 500 feet to the east, then moving them back, but if it doesn't benefit anyone, then that labor has no value.
"Free Software" is not a term of art properly defined somewhere. Sometimes it means free of cost to the user, sometimes it means unrestricted. Hence the tags often used "Free as in speech" or "Free as in beer". Yes, creating free software, such as Linux itself, has value to people, because if they had to, they would probably trade money for it. They don't have to, simply because the distribution system doesn't require it. From the "consumer" standpoint, this is great. You're getting something you value without paying for it. The concern is from the "producer" side: are the programmers being ripped off? Well, without coercion being present, no, they aren't. If they required more compensation, then they'd stop coding.
You really intend to discredit my post by posting anonymously and resorting to "I hope you die" ?
My point, though emphasized with a bit of sarcastic conetempt for your resorting to "well eventually something bad will happen", was valid.
You ask people to make sacrifices today, based on something that has a tiny probability of happening this century, and the best reasoning you have is "Well, if you would just stop focusing so much on this century, you'd see that this is going to happen eventually"
Of course they're going to ignore you. There are people to be fed, housed, and warmed, crime to be reduced, cultural frictions to be assuaged, and serious pollution (major toxics, not CO2) to be cleaned up today. Every dollar spent protecting us from objects that may strike in the next few centuries is a dollar taken away from these more pressing issues.
Oh, I'm sorry, you're right. We'll get right on that.
Of course, we'll be using your suggested time frame, which is "eventually", so you don't mind if we start working on it next century right? You're not one of those silly people who is incapable of seeing beyond a century are you?