For one thing, that will always be a hypothetical until Disney finally rereleases the movie in which "Zip a Dee Doo Dah" premiered on DVD.
Yes, it was supposed to be hypothetical.
For another, I noticed that that's cheaper than cable TV
Yes, that was the point. I was arguing that there's some price that is greater than zero but less than current prices at which very few people would bother to pirate content anymore. That price may be lower than content owners might like, but whenever a sale is made, the seller would always like the price to be higher. If many people are unwilling to pay $100/month for cable, it might be an indicator that the price is too high for the service being provided.
does your $20 per month package include live programming such as Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks and Monday Night Football?
Yes. The idea of the hypothetical service is to provide *everything* conveniently at a low price without complications.
Personally I've never been one to see a movie just because a particular person is in it. But apparently I'm in the minority.
Not just because a particular person is in it, but if you say that the cast has never contributed to your decision, I don't believe you. If I give you the choice of watching an unknown Tom Hanks movie, a George Clooney movie, a Scarlett Johansson movie, or a movie staring Pamela Anderson, I bet you have some kind of opinion on which one you'd like to see. It may not be that the starring actor alone makes you want to see a movie or want to not see it, but the fact that they're in a movie helps to shape you expectations.
...it appears the film studios have gone cold on the idea of helping develop legal avenues to access copyrighted content as a way to combat piracy. Instead, they've produced research to show people will continue pirating even if there are legitimate content sources available.
A lot of people don't really pirate right now, or don't pirate very much. Obviously if attaining legal content were utterly convenient and totally free, no one would bother pirating. So clearly there's some terms between the current availability/pricing and "utterly convenient and totally free" at which most of the current pirates wouldn't bother anymore. Let's say, for example, you had a Netflix-like service for $20/month that had every TV show and movie ever? I suspect most people would stop pirating then.
What these industries should be studying is the trade-offs between convenience, price, and piracy that optimize both profits and customer satisfaction. They seem to be complaining that they don't think that even the optimal rate won't be profitable enough, in which case: tough beans; your product isn't worth as much as you'd like it to be.
The results appear to support the studios' policy position that legislation is a preferable way of dealing with the issue.
Preferable for them, maybe, but that doesn't mean it's good. If I'm selling paper towels for $50 a roll and not making money because not enough people are buying them, I don't get to go whining to the government to prop up my business with legislation.
If cord-cutting is a myth, then why is my cable company currently offering me free TV service for a year? I stopped paying for TV years ago, and they keep trying to entice me back with increasingly good deals. Why bother if I'm one of a few rare weirdos, and everyone else is still paying?
This is exactly the problem with that whole industry. Their policies are based on shortsighted views and ancient mentality....People who have the mentality of "I don't care what happens 20 years from now" should not be in charge of anything...
It's a problem in a lot of industries. "Who cares what happens in 24 months? In 6 months, I'll have gotten more in bonuses than most people will see in their whole lives. If it ruins my company in 12 months, I have a golden parachute."
Also, it's worth mentioning that Google doesn't control the Internet. They can purge child porn from their own search engine, but that's different from blocking people from accessing it.
Business laptops. Consumer laptops probably all have webcams, but not all business laptops do.
But my point wasn't to argue about laptop specs or webcams or whether laptops can be upgraded easily. I was responding to MisterSquid's post which complained that I wasn't making any sense. The more concise version of my explanation is that they're trying to rig their market segmentation to capture all the different laptop markets while simultaneously pushing you to a higher market segment.
It's not an uncommon marketing trick. One way that companies do this is to offer a really cheap version of their product with lots of available incremental upgrades. So for example, they'll offer you a $700 laptop, but offer a small upgrade for $30, another small upgrade for $50, another small upgrade for $60, etc. With each small upgrade, you think, "Well this is just a little more money, and the upgrade seems worth it." The next thing you know, you're spending $1,200 altogether on a laptop, but if they just offered you the $1,200 laptop you wouldn't have considered it. They needed to offer you a $700 laptop to get you in the door.
So Dell is doing something similar by having a bunch of different models without being clear what the differences are between them. They get you in the door with a cheap model, and then they make it unclear what you're missing out on if you don't step up to a very similar but slightly more expensive model. A certain percentage of people will upgrade just to make sure they got something good. After that, Dell has you "configure" your laptop, which includes recommending upgrades and offering several add-on accessories. The whole thing is aimed at getting you to spend more money than you intended.
Not that it's a completely despicable business practice or anything. They could be doing much worse. It's just important to understand what they're doing and why.
To some extent, I think it depends on how good the compatibility is. If WINE were a flawless compatibility layer with no performance hit, then I'd have no objection. However, if I buy it because it's advertising cross-platform compatibility and it doesn't run well on my platform of choice, then I think I'm going to be angry regardless of the method of porting it.
Even the experts have trouble getting security right, an amateur will unknowingly leave big gaping holes...But really, unless you're doing top-secret government work, your phone is the least of your worries.
Something about the OP's question bothered me, and this helped me put my finger on it. I think one of the big rules of security should be: don't trust your security. There's something about the question that sniffs of "How do I make my phones so full-proof secure that I don't need to worry about them anymore?" The first part of the answer has to be, if it were that easy, then we'd all have perfectly secure phones and you wouldn't be asking the question.
Encrypting calls and network traffic are probably not actually necessary. If you're doing something that requires that level of security, then you should have a security expert and the expense of the Boeing phones might be justified. You're probably not, though, and so password protecting the phone itself and encrypting the drive should be good enough. Even so, those things aren't fool-proof.
I'm always surprised at how much of an issue people make about the capability to remotely wipe phones, given how rarely it's useful. If the phone is simply lost, it's better to have something on the lock-screen that says, "If found, please contact [whoever]." If the phone is stolen because they want the hardware, they're just going to wipe the data anyway. If people are stealing it for the data, then all they have to do is block the phone/internet signal and the remote wipe won't happen.
So don't put too much faith in security gimmicks. It's better to stick to simple things: try to prevent data from being stored on portable devices that get taken remotely. If you have to take it out of the building, use something that you can auto-lock after a timeout, password protect, and encrypt the storage. You're probably not going to get much better than that.
I think the point the earlier poster was trying to make is, do you want to invest in buying BES and a bunch of Blackberries given that RIM seems to be going down the tubes?
If RIM continues to do as poorly as it has been doing, then I wouldn't expect to see worthwhile ongoing support for Blackberries or meaningful upgrades from RIM. Even if we were to stipulate that Blackberry is the best choice for a solution today, professional IT people also have to look at what kind of support and upgrade paths will be available over the next 5 years or more.
people who drink ten liters of soda in a day...That power will come at the expense of people's liberty. It has to. I'm not saying this is good or evil...
If people are drinking ten liters of soda a day, maybe they need their liberty taken away.
Jokes aside, honestly, the way I see it is that your liberty is already taken away most of the time. We have various large businesses that engage in semi-monopolistic practices to rig the market into what they want. Then those businesses use psychology-heavy advertising, marketing, and propaganda to take away even more choice. Everything from entertainment to food to education is constantly being pushed to a factory model where the same thing is being churned out over and over again as cheaply as possible, with no regard to quality and little regard to what people actually want, let alone what's good for them.
And you know what else? The system is being supported and subsidized by the government. In some cases, it's even being propped up by government laws and regulations. But you don't hear about the "nanny state" when the government subsidizes corn, you hear about the nanny state when there's talk about strategies to lessen the amount of corn syrup in people's diet. You don't hear about the nanny state when the government is handing over infrastructure to monopolies to cable/phone companies, you hear about the nanny state when there's talk about municipal ISPs. You don't hear about the nanny state when the government makes radical changes to copyright law to keep the entertainment industry from having the overhaul their business practices because they're becoming obsolete, but you hear about the nanny state when the government wants to put regulations on advertising and marketing.
Do you notice a pattern here, how there's only a problem when the government starts restricting a business's abilities to abuse and manipulate people?
A lot of modern psychology teaches us that people don't behave in the traditional "rational" model. If you give someone a giant tub of soda, it affects their perception of what a "normal amount" is. Serving size is especially an issue because many of of grew up with the demand that we finish our meals and not waste food. Haven't you ever had the experience of feeling like you should eat the last three bites of a hamburger, even though you don't actually want it because you're already full?
There have been a lot of studies, for example, that show that in an opt-in or opt-out model, people are much more likely to join if it's opt-out. Even if the whole choice is incredibly clear and it's very easy to opt-out, people tend to go with the default.
So yes, you can get refills and still drink massive amounts of soda, and that's part of the reason it doesn't really impinge on your freedom. But also, it probably will cut down soft drink consumption.
It has been going on at all levels of American life since at least the Great Society programs, and we as voters have cheerfully voted consistently for the government to 'cushion' more and more of life's hard knocks from our sensitive existences.
Yeah, I mean, look at all these people who want to be cushioned by society. Like NYC banning soda. Or NYC having a health department that makes sure there are no rat feces in your food. I mean, let that be between me and the restaurant. If there's a restaurant that has rat feces in it, I just won't go there anymore. You don't need a health department.
And then they have laws that are prevent landlords from kicking deadbeats out of their apartments. Like, who cares that you've lived in your apartment for 20 years, the price of rent has gone up old lady! You can find another place to live. Just live within your means!
Oh, and let's not forget about the fire department. I mean, if you don't want to install sprinklers and other fire protection in your apartment building, that's your own fault, and you're the one who's going to burn alive. If you want to live in an apartment with sub-standard fire protection, that's your choice. We should all do our own research before you buy into these things.
Don't even get me started on the police. They're always butting into everyone's business. I know, you're going to say, "But what if I get robbed?!" That's why guns need to be legal. We should all be settling these matters ourselves. And traffic lights? Why does the government feel the need to get involved in how I drive my car?
This is all just the nanny state running amok. Look, I test all of my kids toys to make sure the manufacturer isn't using lead-based paint. I do all my own scientific research on the medical procedures I undergo, so I don't need Mr. Government telling me which treatments are effective. I built a bunker under my house and I have a small arsenal in there-- I don't need your nanny-state army to protect me. We should all just go our own way.
And also in a world where major ISPs have a monopoly/duopoly and refuse to build out there infrastructure to have decent speeds. Seriously, even in large population centers, you often can't get decent speeds.
I feel like a lot of talk about "the cloud" is hype until you can get a >1mbps upload rate for less than $100/month.
I've seen invitations to steak dinners so that Dell can talk to you about their new high-end SAN hardware, and things like that, but they're not actually buying you the dinner. You're supposed to get your company to pay $X for you to attend a educational technology seminar including a steak dinner, and I've never worked for a company who would pay for that kind of BS.
Anyway, that's not why anyone is using Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop.
You have a bunch of different people buying computers. There's one guy who is just going to buy the cheapest laptop he can, and he's just looking at price. Dell wants him to buy a Dell computer, so they offer a total POS computer at the cheapest price they can muster. Meanwhile, there's a guy who's basically going to buy the most powerful and expensive thing he can find, so Dell is going to offer the highest-end overclocked liquid-cooled tech with a fancy carbon fiber case with lots of blinking lights,all shaped to look like an alien. Right?
And then you have a whole mess of people in between. You have a lot of people who aren't really sure what they want and need. You have a guy who wants a fairly low-end system, but he wants it to be really lightweight. There's a guy who wants a mid-grade system, but it needs a webcam built in. There's a guy who wants the best thing he can get for $2000k. Then there's a bunch more.
So what Dell wants to say is, "Whatever it is you want, we have it. Look, we have 30 different laptops, each a little different, and so surely one of them will fit your needs!" But then you go to comparison shop, and it's not even clear what the differences are. They offer helpful little summaries like, "Good for working on the road, telecommuting," on one and "Good to tote back and forth from work, working from remote locations," on another, as though it's helpful. Sometimes the differences are just the cases, which are comparable in size and weight anyway, but Dell will let you upgrade to an SSD in one and not the other.
So you spot two computers with identical specs in your price range. You can upgrade to 8GB or RAM in this one, but you can't get a webcam. This other one only lets you have a maximum of 4GB of RAM, but you can get a webcam. You need 8GB of RAM and a webcam. Whoops, you have to upgrade to yet another model that supports it all. That'll be $300 more than the others would be with the upgrade. Now could you buy the laptop that Dell is only letting you buy with 4GB of RAM and do an aftermarket upgrade? Maybe. If you can do that, you'll save yourself $300, you'll have to do a lot of research, and if you're wrong you just bought a laptop that doesn't meet your needs.
Now if Dell didn't want this kind of confusing shopping, they'd seriously simplify their product lineup. But they want it. They don't want you to be very clear about what the differences is between the business laptop and the consumer laptop. The business laptop costs more, and they want to be able to tell businesses, "You need this, for lots of reasons I wont' tell you. But the consumer laptop will be no good for you." It might be because the consumer laptop is completely crappy, but when a consumer shows up to buy that consumer laptop, they still want to be able to say, "Oh, yes, that's a very good choice."
That's definitely not the case anywhere that I've worked, and as a consultant I worked quite a few places. Nobody went promotional to lunches or talked to salesmen other than at vendors like Dell or CDW, and there was no persuasion about buying software. In fact, I'd say that support contracts on software is generally not the issue, since it was rare to contact Microsoft or Adobe for support anyway.
I agree with the AC above; in my experience, it's worth getting a business-level laptop rather than the consumer grade. The consumer grade laptops are often cheaper for the same specs, but they're often not as good. The construction is often bad, and the components cheap. The designs are often focused on looking cool and flashy to people who don't know any better, with lots of media shortcut buttons and glowy lights, whereas business designs are simpler and more effective.
That's not to say that you can't find a consumer laptop that's good or a business laptop that's bad, but as a rule of thumb, if you're looking for quality, stick to the business-level computers from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. Or buy a Macbook.
You should also understand that manufacturers *want* to confuse you. They want it to be unclear what the difference is between different models. they want it to be difficult to comparison shop. They want to offer a super-cheap model so that the people who will simply buy the cheapest thing they can will have something to buy, but they don't want you to know what's wrong with their cheapo laptop. They want to offer a super expensive laptop, but they don't want you to know that there's a cheaper laptop available that will still do everything that you want. Instead they want you to buy something more expensive than what you need for fear that you're missing something.
Essentially, they don't want you to be too informed, because an informed consumer doesn't buy crap that they don't want or need.
Mac has done well is avoiding the exact problem the OP describes
That's a typical misconception. Apple puts together a very pretty package and basically dictates what you will run....
The problem that the OP was describing, the problem that Apple does not have, is the weird fragmentation of the product line. If you go to Dell's website, for example, you might find 10 different models of 15" laptops, and it won't be very clear what the difference is between models. As the OP says:
Every laptop vendor seems to want to sell a dozen different, poorly-differentiated models, with no real way of finding out what is customizable without following each model to its own customization page.
Apple indeed does not have this problem. They have exactly one model of 15" laptop, and there are only a few things you can do to customize. What you can and cannot customize is pretty clear. So when you go to Apple's site to shop for a laptop, it's less confusing.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is making better products, but that wasn't MankyD's claim. The claim was that Apple has avoided the problem that the OP was having.
I know a lot of people are going to jump down my throat for saying this, but I'd suggest considering a Macbook Pro. It seems to fit in your criteria, and they're very well built. They run Windows and Linux pretty much as well as other laptops, but then you also have the option of OSX.
Failing that, my suggestion is to really narrow your criteria based on your physical needs. Decide what you want out of a keyboard/mouse (e.g. do you care if it has a button pointer in addition to the trackpad), screen size and resolution, the total weight of the laptop, disk drives, expansion ports, etc. Don't worry so much about the computer being "powerful enough", because if you don't know which laptops are powerful enough, then any decent laptop today will be powerful enough. Focus instead on whether the physical aspects of the laptop will make it easy to work, like is it easy to type on the keyboard and is the screen comfortable to look at.
Aside from that, I'd stick with major brands, probably HP or Dell or Lenovo, and I'd stick to their professional level laptops (e.g. Dell Latitude, not Inspiron). The professional stuff is usually better quality, even if the specs look the same. Get a 3 year warranty. If you get down to the point of saying, "I want a 15" Latitude with an SSD and optical drive," then you'll only have a couple models on their site to compare.
I know, lots of people on this site are probably going to say, "Apple is stupid," or "HP or Dell will rip you off, but I bought a laptop from CyberAwesomeDeluxe that was $300 and had 24GB or RAM!" Ok, fine. Take that into consideration, but you'll usually get better quality and support if you buy a major brand.
It's not all nefarious. Windows is actually fairly secure, and the combination of Windows AD server, Exchange, and Windows desktop provides a pretty decent and simple solution for businesses of various sizes.
Aside from being a pretty good solution, the larger issue is that Windows still has better commercial application support, and to some extent better hardwares support. Adobe CS doesn't run on Linux, and if I buy a new webcam from Best Buy, Windows is officially supported, and Linux may not be.
A good portion of the people who are highly interested in psychology are people who want to understand themselves better. The reason people want to understand themselves better is usually because they're having some kind of problem that they think will be solved by analyzing themselves.
Sometimes the problems they're trying to solve are enough to say they're crazy. If not, the self-obsessed hypochondriatic naval-gazing is itself a kind of craziness.
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For one thing, that will always be a hypothetical until Disney finally rereleases the movie in which "Zip a Dee Doo Dah" premiered on DVD.
Yes, it was supposed to be hypothetical.
For another, I noticed that that's cheaper than cable TV
Yes, that was the point. I was arguing that there's some price that is greater than zero but less than current prices at which very few people would bother to pirate content anymore. That price may be lower than content owners might like, but whenever a sale is made, the seller would always like the price to be higher. If many people are unwilling to pay $100/month for cable, it might be an indicator that the price is too high for the service being provided.
does your $20 per month package include live programming such as Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks and Monday Night Football?
Yes. The idea of the hypothetical service is to provide *everything* conveniently at a low price without complications.
Personally I've never been one to see a movie just because a particular person is in it. But apparently I'm in the minority.
Not just because a particular person is in it, but if you say that the cast has never contributed to your decision, I don't believe you. If I give you the choice of watching an unknown Tom Hanks movie, a George Clooney movie, a Scarlett Johansson movie, or a movie staring Pamela Anderson, I bet you have some kind of opinion on which one you'd like to see. It may not be that the starring actor alone makes you want to see a movie or want to not see it, but the fact that they're in a movie helps to shape you expectations.
...it appears the film studios have gone cold on the idea of helping develop legal avenues to access copyrighted content as a way to combat piracy. Instead, they've produced research to show people will continue pirating even if there are legitimate content sources available.
A lot of people don't really pirate right now, or don't pirate very much. Obviously if attaining legal content were utterly convenient and totally free, no one would bother pirating. So clearly there's some terms between the current availability/pricing and "utterly convenient and totally free" at which most of the current pirates wouldn't bother anymore. Let's say, for example, you had a Netflix-like service for $20/month that had every TV show and movie ever? I suspect most people would stop pirating then.
What these industries should be studying is the trade-offs between convenience, price, and piracy that optimize both profits and customer satisfaction. They seem to be complaining that they don't think that even the optimal rate won't be profitable enough, in which case: tough beans; your product isn't worth as much as you'd like it to be.
The results appear to support the studios' policy position that legislation is a preferable way of dealing with the issue.
Preferable for them, maybe, but that doesn't mean it's good. If I'm selling paper towels for $50 a roll and not making money because not enough people are buying them, I don't get to go whining to the government to prop up my business with legislation.
If cord-cutting is a myth, then why is my cable company currently offering me free TV service for a year? I stopped paying for TV years ago, and they keep trying to entice me back with increasingly good deals. Why bother if I'm one of a few rare weirdos, and everyone else is still paying?
This is exactly the problem with that whole industry. Their policies are based on shortsighted views and ancient mentality....People who have the mentality of "I don't care what happens 20 years from now" should not be in charge of anything...
It's a problem in a lot of industries. "Who cares what happens in 24 months? In 6 months, I'll have gotten more in bonuses than most people will see in their whole lives. If it ruins my company in 12 months, I have a golden parachute."
Also, it's worth mentioning that Google doesn't control the Internet. They can purge child porn from their own search engine, but that's different from blocking people from accessing it.
What laptop doesn't have a webcam these days?
Business laptops. Consumer laptops probably all have webcams, but not all business laptops do.
But my point wasn't to argue about laptop specs or webcams or whether laptops can be upgraded easily. I was responding to MisterSquid's post which complained that I wasn't making any sense. The more concise version of my explanation is that they're trying to rig their market segmentation to capture all the different laptop markets while simultaneously pushing you to a higher market segment.
It's not an uncommon marketing trick. One way that companies do this is to offer a really cheap version of their product with lots of available incremental upgrades. So for example, they'll offer you a $700 laptop, but offer a small upgrade for $30, another small upgrade for $50, another small upgrade for $60, etc. With each small upgrade, you think, "Well this is just a little more money, and the upgrade seems worth it." The next thing you know, you're spending $1,200 altogether on a laptop, but if they just offered you the $1,200 laptop you wouldn't have considered it. They needed to offer you a $700 laptop to get you in the door.
So Dell is doing something similar by having a bunch of different models without being clear what the differences are between them. They get you in the door with a cheap model, and then they make it unclear what you're missing out on if you don't step up to a very similar but slightly more expensive model. A certain percentage of people will upgrade just to make sure they got something good. After that, Dell has you "configure" your laptop, which includes recommending upgrades and offering several add-on accessories. The whole thing is aimed at getting you to spend more money than you intended.
Not that it's a completely despicable business practice or anything. They could be doing much worse. It's just important to understand what they're doing and why.
To some extent, I think it depends on how good the compatibility is. If WINE were a flawless compatibility layer with no performance hit, then I'd have no objection. However, if I buy it because it's advertising cross-platform compatibility and it doesn't run well on my platform of choice, then I think I'm going to be angry regardless of the method of porting it.
Even the experts have trouble getting security right, an amateur will unknowingly leave big gaping holes...But really, unless you're doing top-secret government work, your phone is the least of your worries.
Something about the OP's question bothered me, and this helped me put my finger on it. I think one of the big rules of security should be: don't trust your security. There's something about the question that sniffs of "How do I make my phones so full-proof secure that I don't need to worry about them anymore?" The first part of the answer has to be, if it were that easy, then we'd all have perfectly secure phones and you wouldn't be asking the question.
Encrypting calls and network traffic are probably not actually necessary. If you're doing something that requires that level of security, then you should have a security expert and the expense of the Boeing phones might be justified. You're probably not, though, and so password protecting the phone itself and encrypting the drive should be good enough. Even so, those things aren't fool-proof.
I'm always surprised at how much of an issue people make about the capability to remotely wipe phones, given how rarely it's useful. If the phone is simply lost, it's better to have something on the lock-screen that says, "If found, please contact [whoever]." If the phone is stolen because they want the hardware, they're just going to wipe the data anyway. If people are stealing it for the data, then all they have to do is block the phone/internet signal and the remote wipe won't happen.
So don't put too much faith in security gimmicks. It's better to stick to simple things: try to prevent data from being stored on portable devices that get taken remotely. If you have to take it out of the building, use something that you can auto-lock after a timeout, password protect, and encrypt the storage. You're probably not going to get much better than that.
I think the point the earlier poster was trying to make is, do you want to invest in buying BES and a bunch of Blackberries given that RIM seems to be going down the tubes?
If RIM continues to do as poorly as it has been doing, then I wouldn't expect to see worthwhile ongoing support for Blackberries or meaningful upgrades from RIM. Even if we were to stipulate that Blackberry is the best choice for a solution today, professional IT people also have to look at what kind of support and upgrade paths will be available over the next 5 years or more.
It wouldn't be hard. Essentially they activate the game to the first console you play it on, and require an internet connection to start the game.
I'm not saying they'll do that, but they easily could.
people who drink ten liters of soda in a day...That power will come at the expense of people's liberty. It has to. I'm not saying this is good or evil...
If people are drinking ten liters of soda a day, maybe they need their liberty taken away.
Jokes aside, honestly, the way I see it is that your liberty is already taken away most of the time. We have various large businesses that engage in semi-monopolistic practices to rig the market into what they want. Then those businesses use psychology-heavy advertising, marketing, and propaganda to take away even more choice. Everything from entertainment to food to education is constantly being pushed to a factory model where the same thing is being churned out over and over again as cheaply as possible, with no regard to quality and little regard to what people actually want, let alone what's good for them.
And you know what else? The system is being supported and subsidized by the government. In some cases, it's even being propped up by government laws and regulations. But you don't hear about the "nanny state" when the government subsidizes corn, you hear about the nanny state when there's talk about strategies to lessen the amount of corn syrup in people's diet. You don't hear about the nanny state when the government is handing over infrastructure to monopolies to cable/phone companies, you hear about the nanny state when there's talk about municipal ISPs. You don't hear about the nanny state when the government makes radical changes to copyright law to keep the entertainment industry from having the overhaul their business practices because they're becoming obsolete, but you hear about the nanny state when the government wants to put regulations on advertising and marketing.
Do you notice a pattern here, how there's only a problem when the government starts restricting a business's abilities to abuse and manipulate people?
A lot of modern psychology teaches us that people don't behave in the traditional "rational" model. If you give someone a giant tub of soda, it affects their perception of what a "normal amount" is. Serving size is especially an issue because many of of grew up with the demand that we finish our meals and not waste food. Haven't you ever had the experience of feeling like you should eat the last three bites of a hamburger, even though you don't actually want it because you're already full?
There have been a lot of studies, for example, that show that in an opt-in or opt-out model, people are much more likely to join if it's opt-out. Even if the whole choice is incredibly clear and it's very easy to opt-out, people tend to go with the default.
So yes, you can get refills and still drink massive amounts of soda, and that's part of the reason it doesn't really impinge on your freedom. But also, it probably will cut down soft drink consumption.
We've had government funded health care for decades. The government has been paying for the fatties and the smokers for quite a long time now.
It has been going on at all levels of American life since at least the Great Society programs, and we as voters have cheerfully voted consistently for the government to 'cushion' more and more of life's hard knocks from our sensitive existences.
Yeah, I mean, look at all these people who want to be cushioned by society. Like NYC banning soda. Or NYC having a health department that makes sure there are no rat feces in your food. I mean, let that be between me and the restaurant. If there's a restaurant that has rat feces in it, I just won't go there anymore. You don't need a health department.
And then they have laws that are prevent landlords from kicking deadbeats out of their apartments. Like, who cares that you've lived in your apartment for 20 years, the price of rent has gone up old lady! You can find another place to live. Just live within your means!
Oh, and let's not forget about the fire department. I mean, if you don't want to install sprinklers and other fire protection in your apartment building, that's your own fault, and you're the one who's going to burn alive. If you want to live in an apartment with sub-standard fire protection, that's your choice. We should all do our own research before you buy into these things.
Don't even get me started on the police. They're always butting into everyone's business. I know, you're going to say, "But what if I get robbed?!" That's why guns need to be legal. We should all be settling these matters ourselves. And traffic lights? Why does the government feel the need to get involved in how I drive my car?
This is all just the nanny state running amok. Look, I test all of my kids toys to make sure the manufacturer isn't using lead-based paint. I do all my own scientific research on the medical procedures I undergo, so I don't need Mr. Government telling me which treatments are effective. I built a bunker under my house and I have a small arsenal in there-- I don't need your nanny-state army to protect me. We should all just go our own way.
And also in a world where major ISPs have a monopoly/duopoly and refuse to build out there infrastructure to have decent speeds. Seriously, even in large population centers, you often can't get decent speeds.
I feel like a lot of talk about "the cloud" is hype until you can get a >1mbps upload rate for less than $100/month.
I've seen invitations to steak dinners so that Dell can talk to you about their new high-end SAN hardware, and things like that, but they're not actually buying you the dinner. You're supposed to get your company to pay $X for you to attend a educational technology seminar including a steak dinner, and I've never worked for a company who would pay for that kind of BS.
Anyway, that's not why anyone is using Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop.
It's marketing.
You have a bunch of different people buying computers. There's one guy who is just going to buy the cheapest laptop he can, and he's just looking at price. Dell wants him to buy a Dell computer, so they offer a total POS computer at the cheapest price they can muster. Meanwhile, there's a guy who's basically going to buy the most powerful and expensive thing he can find, so Dell is going to offer the highest-end overclocked liquid-cooled tech with a fancy carbon fiber case with lots of blinking lights,all shaped to look like an alien. Right?
And then you have a whole mess of people in between. You have a lot of people who aren't really sure what they want and need. You have a guy who wants a fairly low-end system, but he wants it to be really lightweight. There's a guy who wants a mid-grade system, but it needs a webcam built in. There's a guy who wants the best thing he can get for $2000k. Then there's a bunch more.
So what Dell wants to say is, "Whatever it is you want, we have it. Look, we have 30 different laptops, each a little different, and so surely one of them will fit your needs!" But then you go to comparison shop, and it's not even clear what the differences are. They offer helpful little summaries like, "Good for working on the road, telecommuting," on one and "Good to tote back and forth from work, working from remote locations," on another, as though it's helpful. Sometimes the differences are just the cases, which are comparable in size and weight anyway, but Dell will let you upgrade to an SSD in one and not the other.
So you spot two computers with identical specs in your price range. You can upgrade to 8GB or RAM in this one, but you can't get a webcam. This other one only lets you have a maximum of 4GB of RAM, but you can get a webcam. You need 8GB of RAM and a webcam. Whoops, you have to upgrade to yet another model that supports it all. That'll be $300 more than the others would be with the upgrade. Now could you buy the laptop that Dell is only letting you buy with 4GB of RAM and do an aftermarket upgrade? Maybe. If you can do that, you'll save yourself $300, you'll have to do a lot of research, and if you're wrong you just bought a laptop that doesn't meet your needs.
Now if Dell didn't want this kind of confusing shopping, they'd seriously simplify their product lineup. But they want it. They don't want you to be very clear about what the differences is between the business laptop and the consumer laptop. The business laptop costs more, and they want to be able to tell businesses, "You need this, for lots of reasons I wont' tell you. But the consumer laptop will be no good for you." It might be because the consumer laptop is completely crappy, but when a consumer shows up to buy that consumer laptop, they still want to be able to say, "Oh, yes, that's a very good choice."
That's definitely not the case anywhere that I've worked, and as a consultant I worked quite a few places. Nobody went promotional to lunches or talked to salesmen other than at vendors like Dell or CDW, and there was no persuasion about buying software. In fact, I'd say that support contracts on software is generally not the issue, since it was rare to contact Microsoft or Adobe for support anyway.
I agree with the AC above; in my experience, it's worth getting a business-level laptop rather than the consumer grade. The consumer grade laptops are often cheaper for the same specs, but they're often not as good. The construction is often bad, and the components cheap. The designs are often focused on looking cool and flashy to people who don't know any better, with lots of media shortcut buttons and glowy lights, whereas business designs are simpler and more effective.
That's not to say that you can't find a consumer laptop that's good or a business laptop that's bad, but as a rule of thumb, if you're looking for quality, stick to the business-level computers from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. Or buy a Macbook.
You should also understand that manufacturers *want* to confuse you. They want it to be unclear what the difference is between different models. they want it to be difficult to comparison shop. They want to offer a super-cheap model so that the people who will simply buy the cheapest thing they can will have something to buy, but they don't want you to know what's wrong with their cheapo laptop. They want to offer a super expensive laptop, but they don't want you to know that there's a cheaper laptop available that will still do everything that you want. Instead they want you to buy something more expensive than what you need for fear that you're missing something.
Essentially, they don't want you to be too informed, because an informed consumer doesn't buy crap that they don't want or need.
Mac has done well is avoiding the exact problem the OP describes
That's a typical misconception. Apple puts together a very pretty package and basically dictates what you will run....
The problem that the OP was describing, the problem that Apple does not have, is the weird fragmentation of the product line. If you go to Dell's website, for example, you might find 10 different models of 15" laptops, and it won't be very clear what the difference is between models. As the OP says:
Every laptop vendor seems to want to sell a dozen different, poorly-differentiated models, with no real way of finding out what is customizable without following each model to its own customization page.
Apple indeed does not have this problem. They have exactly one model of 15" laptop, and there are only a few things you can do to customize. What you can and cannot customize is pretty clear. So when you go to Apple's site to shop for a laptop, it's less confusing.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is making better products, but that wasn't MankyD's claim. The claim was that Apple has avoided the problem that the OP was having.
I know a lot of people are going to jump down my throat for saying this, but I'd suggest considering a Macbook Pro. It seems to fit in your criteria, and they're very well built. They run Windows and Linux pretty much as well as other laptops, but then you also have the option of OSX.
Failing that, my suggestion is to really narrow your criteria based on your physical needs. Decide what you want out of a keyboard/mouse (e.g. do you care if it has a button pointer in addition to the trackpad), screen size and resolution, the total weight of the laptop, disk drives, expansion ports, etc. Don't worry so much about the computer being "powerful enough", because if you don't know which laptops are powerful enough, then any decent laptop today will be powerful enough. Focus instead on whether the physical aspects of the laptop will make it easy to work, like is it easy to type on the keyboard and is the screen comfortable to look at.
Aside from that, I'd stick with major brands, probably HP or Dell or Lenovo, and I'd stick to their professional level laptops (e.g. Dell Latitude, not Inspiron). The professional stuff is usually better quality, even if the specs look the same. Get a 3 year warranty. If you get down to the point of saying, "I want a 15" Latitude with an SSD and optical drive," then you'll only have a couple models on their site to compare.
I know, lots of people on this site are probably going to say, "Apple is stupid," or "HP or Dell will rip you off, but I bought a laptop from CyberAwesomeDeluxe that was $300 and had 24GB or RAM!" Ok, fine. Take that into consideration, but you'll usually get better quality and support if you buy a major brand.
It's not all nefarious. Windows is actually fairly secure, and the combination of Windows AD server, Exchange, and Windows desktop provides a pretty decent and simple solution for businesses of various sizes.
Aside from being a pretty good solution, the larger issue is that Windows still has better commercial application support, and to some extent better hardwares support. Adobe CS doesn't run on Linux, and if I buy a new webcam from Best Buy, Windows is officially supported, and Linux may not be.
A good portion of the people who are highly interested in psychology are people who want to understand themselves better. The reason people want to understand themselves better is usually because they're having some kind of problem that they think will be solved by analyzing themselves.
Sometimes the problems they're trying to solve are enough to say they're crazy. If not, the self-obsessed hypochondriatic naval-gazing is itself a kind of craziness.