Agreed. If you must compare Kodak to something, compare them to Apple or HTC. That's what's replacing Kodak cameras and film. Instragram is something new that's not really replacing anything, and therefore it represents job growth.
Regardless, it's true that technology that increases technology has a tendency to kill jobs. That sounds bad, but what you have to understand is that it's an increase in efficiency, which means you're producing more with fewer resources. That tends to kill jobs. It also tends to increase the total available wealth in a society, i.e. economic growth. Meanwhile, if the economy is otherwise robust, then the people who lost their jobs should be able to find new work doing... something... because all that economic growth means that people have money to spend on... something.
Or at least, that's what the economic theory says.
What does public perception have to do with what science is? They're two completely different things. How do you know what "most people" think about this?
Because we're people, talking about 'science', so what we're talking about when we talk about 'science' matters. You may have a idealized concept that you intend when you say 'science', but if that's not what most people mean by the word, then suddenly conversations about 'science' are not about your idealized concept. They're about the other thing. The thing most people have in mind.
And your idealized concept probably doesn't live up to the hype in your own mind, either.
Science is the process of getting closer to truth by experiment.
That's insufficient to explain what science is, when it is what it should be. And then science today is not what it should be. "The process of getting closer to truth by experiment" is not what most people are talking about when they talk about 'science'.
I've made comments before comparing science and religion, and too often people think that I'm a religious person trying to belittle a genuine quest for knowledge. On the contrary, I think the genuine quest for knowledge is an amazingly worthwhile thing. However, science has become a method for the "practitioners" and "priests" to exert social, economic, and institutional influence by swaying the beliefs of those who are not educated enough or informed enough to differentiate between genuine knowledge and blind dogma.
It's less that I'm a backwoods book-hating theist. It's that I've "lost the faith" and don't believe in what we call "science". We've gotten into muddy waters, studying soft sciences in ways that will never reach definitive answers, and allowed politics and media to have too much sway. We've gotten better at engineering, and worse at knowledge.
Yeah, I didn't RTFA, but I would guess it's something like this. Essentially Netflix and Hulu aren't going to want to drop all DRM/obfuscation, but at the same time many of us would like to see them able to drop Flash/Silverlight. I wouldn't mind some kind of compromise that doesn't require buggy/insecure plugins and could enable a standard video stream while still offering *some* level of protection that would prevent users from right-clicking a link and hitting "Save As..."
Yeah, right now I have one Windows computer that I use solely for games, and I'm really only playing steam games. The problem is, those Steam games aren't available on Linux, at least not yet. If Valve gets enough of the games I'm interested in running on Linux, I'll reformat and switch to SteamOS (or Ubuntu, or whatever is convenient at the time).
IANAL, but I don't think possession of 'pirated' content is illegal. Commonly and traditionally, copyright law has been concerned with the copying and distribution of copyrighted material, and not possession.
You kind of have two arguments there: 1) people should have stuff for free and...
but strongly disagree with the first one. I think it's reasonable that the time and effort a creator puts behind a work is rewarded appropriately...
Well really you have two different issues contained in just your first argument: (a) People should be able to enjoy art for free; and (b) Artists should be able to receive compensation for their contributions to society.
Those are two different things, and they may both be true. But you know, maybe we need to make concessions on both sides. It may be that we can't get everything completely free whenever we want, but it may also be that we can't have copyrights be too restrictive or abusive. You can say that people aren't *entitled* to free art, but you can also say that artists are not *entitled* to make money for their work. There has to be some give and take.
And when you get down to it, copyrights are a relatively new invention that were designed to sway things in favor of the artist. It's an experiment that has had many many problems in its short history, enough that it can't be considered an unconditional success. It's time that we reevaluate.
No it doesn't speed things up considerably. The shift key on the right can easily be used with the pinky while otherwise typing normally, only inhibiting the speed of the keys that you would type with your right pinky. And what else do you hit with your pinky? The 'Enter' key? Backslash?
So is the argument, "Why is it such a big deal that Valve is announcing an open game console platform? I'm already using some components of Valve's open game console platform, and it's AMAZING!"?
Because I agree that Valve's open approach and Linux support is game-changer. I don't see how you can refute it by saying, "It's not a game changer. The game has already been changed. By the very product we're talking about."
Yes, I enjoy my current Linux-based gaming PC with a controller-based interface I can easily use from the couch to play a large selection of games and media.
Call it what you will, but it's a sensible solution.
In case you don't quite get the backstory, AMC created season 5 part 1 and sold it through Apple under the name 'Season 5'. Then they released season 5 part 2, and started selling that independently. A bunch of people who bought the item labelled 'Season 5', said, "Whoa, I already bought season 5. Why do I have to buy the second half of season 5 when I already bought the whole thing?"
So essentially Apple is providing enough in-store credit so that, if you bought the first half, you can now get the second half for free. Giving an actual refund is problematic. Beyond the fact that businesses would rather provide store credit than a refund, it's a pain to deal with all the different possible cases. You have people who bought both the first half of the season and the second half, and you could give them a refund. But then what about people who have bought the first half of the season, but hadn't bought the second half. It doesn't really make sense to provide *them* with a refund, because they thought they already got the first half. If they didn't buy the second half of the season, then you're just giving them the first half for free. What would make sense is to buy them the second half of the season, and attach it to their account.
But then, what if someone got fed up and bough the second half on Amazon or some other service? What if they decided they don't like the show, and they don't want the second half? What if there's some other scenario that I'm not thinking of?
So the best thing to do is to give store credit. If they want to buy the second half, then they can buy it with the credit. If they have already bought it, or if they don't want to buy the second half for some reason, they get an equivalent credit to do with as they please, but they aren't permitted a refund on the purchase of the first half of the series.
I've used a Surface (non-Pro). I seriously didn't like the experience. The hardware was fine-- didn't seem spectacular in any way, considering the competition, but it was fine. Windows 8's UI is bad, though. Don't get me wrong; I think the UI is pretty. I think it's kind of cool, even, and I wanted to like it. But it's bad. Poorly executed. Without a decent UI, the hardware isn't too useful.
I don't see Valve having trouble enforcing Steam's DRM as it is. It doesn't seem like people are trying all that hard to break Steam's DRM anyway, and Valve has generally favored a light-touch to their DRM. If anything, the restrictions have become *less* tight over the years, now allowing you to lend games to people.
Given that you can install Steam on Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu Linux, it doesn't seem like Valve is trying to lock things down. On the contrary, this seems to be the beginnings of opening up consoles. It would be as if Sony and Microsoft released the Playstation and XBox OS to be installed freely on whatever computer you'd like.
There are a few major differences, the largest being that people generally don't have to worry about cross-car compatibility. If each car manufacturer had different driving controls and required a different kind of gasoline, I would bet that you would only have a couple of brands of cars. Still, as Tesla picks up steam, assuming it gets to be fairly commonplace, I think you'll start to see a dichotomy emerge between traditional gas stations and Tesla-style charging, and though there could be billions of different variations of powering vehicles, you won't see many of them being used.
And even so, if you listen to people talking about buying cars, they tend to bring it down to a very selective choice at the end. An individual will commonly come to the point of saying something like, "I either want an Audi or a BMW," and Toyota and Ford are out of the picture. The reason we can support so many different brands is not that people deal well with having lots of choices, but because you have many different semi-overlapping car markets, each having developed their own dichotomies. So there's an "Audi or BMW" guy and there's a "Toyota or Ford" guy and a "Volkswagon or Smart Car" guy and a "Volkswagon or Toyota" guy, each narrowing down their choices to some kind of dichotomy.
Either way, I'm not positing an absolute. I'm suggesting a tendency that's very normal, and is working in favor of Microsoft on the desktop, but working against them in mobile devices. People don't really consider the infinite number of choices that we're presented with. When possible, we like to narrow things down into nice clean dichotomies and then choose between two things.
Can't tell if you're trolling, but yes, an Office suite should be able to be used casually with very little thought. You should be able to drop into a word processor, type something up, print it, and send the file to someone else-- all without having to think much about what you're doing. There can be more extensive features that require thought, but the basics should be pretty obvious.
But gcc? How is gcc lumped in with Office as 'productivity' software? Most people should never need to know what a compiler is.
With the desktop, you really did have two choices: buy a Windows PC or a Mac.
Well those were the two choices deemed most practical. For a long time there have been Linux and the BSDs. For a while there was NeXT and BeOS. There have been options, but the mass market often wasn't very aware of them. That was largely my point.
Finally, after losing out the low-end to Android and the high-end to Apple, they come out with a proper Windows Phone. Even then, while it certainly has it's merits, it is essentially another iPhone/Android and really brings nothing to the table that would make people choose it over the competition.
And I think this is a big issue that people overlook: People have a tendency to think in dichotomies, rightly or wrongly, especially regarding issues in which they lack deep knowledge. As a result, markets tend to be perceived in people's minds as a choice between the default/incumbent and the alternative/newcomer. This is in fact part of what has kept Windows in such a dominant position for so long. People are only willing to consider the two options that they were most aware of: commodity Windows machines or Macintoshes.
The tables are flipped on Microsoft in the mobile market. For all the same reasons Linux has trouble breaking into the desktop, Microsoft is having trouble breaking into phones. People are increasingly seeing their phone purchase as a choice between iPhone and Android, seeing one as the default and the other as the alternative, and people generally aren't looking for a second alternative. If Microsoft wants to succeed, it's not enough to be "as good". They have to be significantly better in ways that people care about, and they need to maintain the advantage few a few years, without allowing Apple and Google to catch up, so that there's time for people's contracts to expire. Good luck with that.
Yeah, except (a) their isn't an indication from what I'm reading that Apple is opening up this tech for use by developers yet; (b) the keynote for the WWDC is still aimed at the non-technical; and (c) I'm pretty sure there was some mention of it when iOS was announced, because I knew that Apple was starting to use multipath TCP at the time (though I don't remember where I learned it).
Where it also helps is when you are connnect to both cellular and wifi, but one of them isn't actually responding. The multipath TCP will notice that traffic isn't flowing and try directing traffic over the other one. I believe (though I may be misremembering) it's also possible to use this technology to bond different network connections, so if you have 10Mbps over WiFi and 10Mbps over LTE, you could turn them into something comparable to a 20Mbps connection.
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Agreed. If you must compare Kodak to something, compare them to Apple or HTC. That's what's replacing Kodak cameras and film. Instragram is something new that's not really replacing anything, and therefore it represents job growth.
Regardless, it's true that technology that increases technology has a tendency to kill jobs. That sounds bad, but what you have to understand is that it's an increase in efficiency, which means you're producing more with fewer resources. That tends to kill jobs. It also tends to increase the total available wealth in a society, i.e. economic growth. Meanwhile, if the economy is otherwise robust, then the people who lost their jobs should be able to find new work doing... something... because all that economic growth means that people have money to spend on... something.
Or at least, that's what the economic theory says.
What does public perception have to do with what science is? They're two completely different things. How do you know what "most people" think about this?
Because we're people, talking about 'science', so what we're talking about when we talk about 'science' matters. You may have a idealized concept that you intend when you say 'science', but if that's not what most people mean by the word, then suddenly conversations about 'science' are not about your idealized concept. They're about the other thing. The thing most people have in mind.
And your idealized concept probably doesn't live up to the hype in your own mind, either.
And all *true* Scotsmen would agree with you.
Science is the process of getting closer to truth by experiment.
That's insufficient to explain what science is, when it is what it should be. And then science today is not what it should be. "The process of getting closer to truth by experiment" is not what most people are talking about when they talk about 'science'.
I've made comments before comparing science and religion, and too often people think that I'm a religious person trying to belittle a genuine quest for knowledge. On the contrary, I think the genuine quest for knowledge is an amazingly worthwhile thing. However, science has become a method for the "practitioners" and "priests" to exert social, economic, and institutional influence by swaying the beliefs of those who are not educated enough or informed enough to differentiate between genuine knowledge and blind dogma.
It's less that I'm a backwoods book-hating theist. It's that I've "lost the faith" and don't believe in what we call "science". We've gotten into muddy waters, studying soft sciences in ways that will never reach definitive answers, and allowed politics and media to have too much sway. We've gotten better at engineering, and worse at knowledge.
Go ahead. Mod me as flamebait.
Yeah, I didn't RTFA, but I would guess it's something like this. Essentially Netflix and Hulu aren't going to want to drop all DRM/obfuscation, but at the same time many of us would like to see them able to drop Flash/Silverlight. I wouldn't mind some kind of compromise that doesn't require buggy/insecure plugins and could enable a standard video stream while still offering *some* level of protection that would prevent users from right-clicking a link and hitting "Save As..."
Yeah, right now I have one Windows computer that I use solely for games, and I'm really only playing steam games. The problem is, those Steam games aren't available on Linux, at least not yet. If Valve gets enough of the games I'm interested in running on Linux, I'll reformat and switch to SteamOS (or Ubuntu, or whatever is convenient at the time).
IANAL, but I don't think possession of 'pirated' content is illegal. Commonly and traditionally, copyright law has been concerned with the copying and distribution of copyrighted material, and not possession.
You kind of have two arguments there: 1) people should have stuff for free and...
but strongly disagree with the first one. I think it's reasonable that the time and effort a creator puts behind a work is rewarded appropriately...
Well really you have two different issues contained in just your first argument: (a) People should be able to enjoy art for free; and (b) Artists should be able to receive compensation for their contributions to society.
Those are two different things, and they may both be true. But you know, maybe we need to make concessions on both sides. It may be that we can't get everything completely free whenever we want, but it may also be that we can't have copyrights be too restrictive or abusive. You can say that people aren't *entitled* to free art, but you can also say that artists are not *entitled* to make money for their work. There has to be some give and take.
And when you get down to it, copyrights are a relatively new invention that were designed to sway things in favor of the artist. It's an experiment that has had many many problems in its short history, enough that it can't be considered an unconditional success. It's time that we reevaluate.
Not me. I make better use of my right ring-finger than that. The right ring-finger can do so much!
No it doesn't speed things up considerably. The shift key on the right can easily be used with the pinky while otherwise typing normally, only inhibiting the speed of the keys that you would type with your right pinky. And what else do you hit with your pinky? The 'Enter' key? Backslash?
So is the argument, "Why is it such a big deal that Valve is announcing an open game console platform? I'm already using some components of Valve's open game console platform, and it's AMAZING!"?
Because I agree that Valve's open approach and Linux support is game-changer. I don't see how you can refute it by saying, "It's not a game changer. The game has already been changed. By the very product we're talking about."
Yes, I enjoy my current Linux-based gaming PC with a controller-based interface I can easily use from the couch to play a large selection of games and media.
Wait a second...
Call it what you will, but it's a sensible solution.
In case you don't quite get the backstory, AMC created season 5 part 1 and sold it through Apple under the name 'Season 5'. Then they released season 5 part 2, and started selling that independently. A bunch of people who bought the item labelled 'Season 5', said, "Whoa, I already bought season 5. Why do I have to buy the second half of season 5 when I already bought the whole thing?"
So essentially Apple is providing enough in-store credit so that, if you bought the first half, you can now get the second half for free. Giving an actual refund is problematic. Beyond the fact that businesses would rather provide store credit than a refund, it's a pain to deal with all the different possible cases. You have people who bought both the first half of the season and the second half, and you could give them a refund. But then what about people who have bought the first half of the season, but hadn't bought the second half. It doesn't really make sense to provide *them* with a refund, because they thought they already got the first half. If they didn't buy the second half of the season, then you're just giving them the first half for free. What would make sense is to buy them the second half of the season, and attach it to their account.
But then, what if someone got fed up and bough the second half on Amazon or some other service? What if they decided they don't like the show, and they don't want the second half? What if there's some other scenario that I'm not thinking of?
So the best thing to do is to give store credit. If they want to buy the second half, then they can buy it with the credit. If they have already bought it, or if they don't want to buy the second half for some reason, they get an equivalent credit to do with as they please, but they aren't permitted a refund on the purchase of the first half of the series.
I've used a Surface (non-Pro). I seriously didn't like the experience. The hardware was fine-- didn't seem spectacular in any way, considering the competition, but it was fine. Windows 8's UI is bad, though. Don't get me wrong; I think the UI is pretty. I think it's kind of cool, even, and I wanted to like it. But it's bad. Poorly executed. Without a decent UI, the hardware isn't too useful.
I don't see Valve having trouble enforcing Steam's DRM as it is. It doesn't seem like people are trying all that hard to break Steam's DRM anyway, and Valve has generally favored a light-touch to their DRM. If anything, the restrictions have become *less* tight over the years, now allowing you to lend games to people.
Given that you can install Steam on Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu Linux, it doesn't seem like Valve is trying to lock things down. On the contrary, this seems to be the beginnings of opening up consoles. It would be as if Sony and Microsoft released the Playstation and XBox OS to be installed freely on whatever computer you'd like.
it could quiet some of the naysayers who have spent the past several months suggesting that Apple's best years are behind it.
If you know anything about Apple, it should be that nothing will really stop the fans and nothing will quiet the naysayers.
There are a few major differences, the largest being that people generally don't have to worry about cross-car compatibility. If each car manufacturer had different driving controls and required a different kind of gasoline, I would bet that you would only have a couple of brands of cars. Still, as Tesla picks up steam, assuming it gets to be fairly commonplace, I think you'll start to see a dichotomy emerge between traditional gas stations and Tesla-style charging, and though there could be billions of different variations of powering vehicles, you won't see many of them being used.
And even so, if you listen to people talking about buying cars, they tend to bring it down to a very selective choice at the end. An individual will commonly come to the point of saying something like, "I either want an Audi or a BMW," and Toyota and Ford are out of the picture. The reason we can support so many different brands is not that people deal well with having lots of choices, but because you have many different semi-overlapping car markets, each having developed their own dichotomies. So there's an "Audi or BMW" guy and there's a "Toyota or Ford" guy and a "Volkswagon or Smart Car" guy and a "Volkswagon or Toyota" guy, each narrowing down their choices to some kind of dichotomy.
Either way, I'm not positing an absolute. I'm suggesting a tendency that's very normal, and is working in favor of Microsoft on the desktop, but working against them in mobile devices. People don't really consider the infinite number of choices that we're presented with. When possible, we like to narrow things down into nice clean dichotomies and then choose between two things.
Can't tell if you're trolling, but yes, an Office suite should be able to be used casually with very little thought. You should be able to drop into a word processor, type something up, print it, and send the file to someone else-- all without having to think much about what you're doing. There can be more extensive features that require thought, but the basics should be pretty obvious.
But gcc? How is gcc lumped in with Office as 'productivity' software? Most people should never need to know what a compiler is.
Nice, I didn't think anyone would.
With the desktop, you really did have two choices: buy a Windows PC or a Mac.
Well those were the two choices deemed most practical. For a long time there have been Linux and the BSDs. For a while there was NeXT and BeOS. There have been options, but the mass market often wasn't very aware of them. That was largely my point.
Finally, after losing out the low-end to Android and the high-end to Apple, they come out with a proper Windows Phone. Even then, while it certainly has it's merits, it is essentially another iPhone/Android and really brings nothing to the table that would make people choose it over the competition.
And I think this is a big issue that people overlook: People have a tendency to think in dichotomies, rightly or wrongly, especially regarding issues in which they lack deep knowledge. As a result, markets tend to be perceived in people's minds as a choice between the default/incumbent and the alternative/newcomer. This is in fact part of what has kept Windows in such a dominant position for so long. People are only willing to consider the two options that they were most aware of: commodity Windows machines or Macintoshes.
The tables are flipped on Microsoft in the mobile market. For all the same reasons Linux has trouble breaking into the desktop, Microsoft is having trouble breaking into phones. People are increasingly seeing their phone purchase as a choice between iPhone and Android, seeing one as the default and the other as the alternative, and people generally aren't looking for a second alternative. If Microsoft wants to succeed, it's not enough to be "as good". They have to be significantly better in ways that people care about, and they need to maintain the advantage few a few years, without allowing Apple and Google to catch up, so that there's time for people's contracts to expire. Good luck with that.
Yeah, except (a) their isn't an indication from what I'm reading that Apple is opening up this tech for use by developers yet; (b) the keynote for the WWDC is still aimed at the non-technical; and (c) I'm pretty sure there was some mention of it when iOS was announced, because I knew that Apple was starting to use multipath TCP at the time (though I don't remember where I learned it).
Where it also helps is when you are connnect to both cellular and wifi, but one of them isn't actually responding. The multipath TCP will notice that traffic isn't flowing and try directing traffic over the other one. I believe (though I may be misremembering) it's also possible to use this technology to bond different network connections, so if you have 10Mbps over WiFi and 10Mbps over LTE, you could turn them into something comparable to a 20Mbps connection.
Desktop/laptop operating systems should be able to be installed casually without any thought.