What's the logic in that? Why is the cable company carrying a channel that's not profitable?
Because the 3 companies that own all the channels bundle them together and make cable companies pay for all of them.
The important thing is, inherent in the setup of these big media companies, they do not believe that you have any right to choose for yourself what you pay for and what you watch. It's the media executives' and marketing teams' jobs to decide what you should watch, and then create a situation where you're forced into it on whatever terms they think are appropriate. They mostly trying to "force" you into buying it by tying the unwanted products in with product that you do want, but ultimately they're willing to bribe and threaten politicians to change laws to force you to buy things.
I think that when people talk about "legacy code", the word "legacy" isn't just supposed to mean "old", but also, "outdated or poorly written". The concept is that old programs may have been written to support hardware or situations that don't exist anymore, or else were anticipated to exist when the software was written but never materialized. Or they have features/functions that never really worked as hoped, or were not properly written or optimized at the time. This "legacy" code isn't necessarily imagined to be the oldest code, but just code that, if you were writing it again from scratch, you wouldn't want to include.
So for some people, yes, there's an "out with the old, in with the new" mentality. For others, there's just the idea, whether it's a reality or a misconception, that there is probably old code in there somewhere that should be removed or replaced.
Ok, in case you didn't know this, of course they're going to revive it. They're going to keep pushing it and keep pushing it until it goes through. You thought we beat it because it didn't pass that one time? What, did you think the entertainment industry ran out of money and stopped paying congressmen?
They'll wait a little while, they'll rename it, they'll alter it to hide the more controversial aspects, and they'll wage a propaganda war. They will not stop trying to consolidate their power until they're ousted from power.
Well technically I don't even have to go through all that. I have a computer and a monitor, and I can watch Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon right there.
Part of the appeal, though, would be to have a tiny cheap set-top box (Roku and AppleTV both under $100, as opposed to the $350 for your solution), or else something built directly into the TV, with a consistent interface and a sensible pricing scheme. In addition to being expensive, your DIY solution will have an inconsistent UI, I'm guessing it's a little clunky in places, and it's likely to get broken at some point (e.g. Hulu Desktop apparently isn't really supported on OSX anymore).
Not that I don't appreciate the suggestion and the information, but I have a Windows 7 computer set up and I've tried out the Media Center + Netflix setup, and it's not entirely great. The UI, as I mentioned, is inconsistent. Netflix is harder to Navigate than on my PS3 or an AppleTV (I'm guessing worse than a Roku box too). Also, it may not be the case anymore, but for a long time Netflix was limiting the video quality on their computer/silverlight player, supposedly in case someone was capturing the stream somehow.
Ultimately the TV/movie industry needs to quit playing games and come to a coherent solution that allows them to push out content ubiquitously. Let me subscribe to a Hulu-like service that lets me watch last-night's (or better yet, tonight's) episode of my favorite television show on my set-top box. Don't make me worry about whether my favorite show is available on that service. If it is on that service, don't make me worry about whether I'm allowed to stream it to my television, or whether it's computer-only.
If, beyond that, they still want to say, "But this content is *premium* and you have to pay an extra fee for it", the way you subscribe to cable but need to pay extra for HBO, I can probably live it that, but make it more a la carte rather than bundling too much together. And make the premium content part of the same service; don't make me sign up to 5 different services with different billing and different GUIs.
And don't pull the nonsense they do on iTunes, where you can buy a movie in SD or rent it in HD, but they won't let you buy it in HD because they want to make you buy it in SD and then buy it again in HD later. That's some crazy BS marketing scheme that should not exist.
In short, if you want people to pay for content, stop making the process confusing and worrisome. Push all of your content through all distribution channels, and let the channels compete based on the quality of their service. For example, strike a deal with Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Hulu so that all TV shows and movies are available on all of those services, and let those services compete. That's how you beat piracy, but that won't happen because then the content owners lose leverage and their high-powered executives can't justify their jobs.
As soon as scarcity of a resource gets past a point we go and find alternatives.
Of course, being optimistic here assumes that (a) there are alternatives; and (b) we'll feel the scarcity soon enough to avoid the negative consequences of overuse. Take the example of Easter Island: the inhabitants didn't find alternatives, and by the time they recognized there was a problem, it was too late.
Usually the things that us humans kill off forever, are things that at least in our short term mindset see are things that are not directly useful for us. We don't see a drop in cattle. But we see a drop in wolves, as they are in competition with us for our cattle... So we kill the wolves, they are not really a direct resource for us so they killed.
It may not be a direct resource, but it part of the problem (which I think you're acknowledging a little) is that we don't always understand the indirect ways in which our actions affect our lives. For example, you very well think, as I did when I was a kid, "Bees are a pest. All they do is sting you. We should just kill all the bees." However, bees are responsible for pollinating a lot of plants, and it could be an ecological disaster if we killed the bees. Similarly, when we have killed predators, we've found that there is a population explosion of the animals they prey on, and that causes problems.
So yes, when we eventually hit the point where we see immediate direct negative consequences to our actions, we're pretty good at adjusting. The problem is that many consequences are not immediate or direct.
That's a good point, but it's also true that everyone who has predicted my death has been wrong, at least up until now. That doesn't mean I'm not going to die.
It's hard to tell what you're looking for here. I'm not sure what would be considered a "telecommuting tool" or what kinds of communications you want to have with your clients. For example, it seems to me that a telephone would work well even if you didn't have a computer at all. Email works fine on Linux.
So let's start here: What are you used to doing on Windows that you're now having trouble doing on Linux? Is it an issue of trading documents, and you're not able to read some specific document format? Or are you trying to do video conferencing, and you haven't been able to find a good video chat client?
From the summary alone, I have no idea what the problem is.
Ah, well you can rent movies, but you generally can't rent TV shows, which is what I had in mind. They tried to allow you to rent TV shows for a while ($1/episode for a one-time view instead of $3/episode to "buy" it), but they couldn't get a lot of content owners to allow their shows to be rented.
Also, I keep putting "buy" in quotes because the TV shows have DRM, so arguably you're always renting them.
There's not really any way to protect users from themselves. If a user is technically able to download and install unknown applications, then the user can fall victim to a trojan.
The only question in my mind is whether it's a good implementation-- making it prompt you too often will result in users always hitting "OK", so you have to use this sort of thing judiciously. That was the complaint about the early implementation of UAC in Vista. It prompted you *constantly*, and so it was both annoying and ineffective. It was greatly improved in Windows 7, and ultimately UAC is one of the things that makes Windows 7 much more secure than Windows XP.
However, using prompts like this sparingly is both appropriate and common. It's a well-ingrained convention in user-interaction for all operating systems to have pop-up alerts to the user that you're about to do something potentially dangerous.
It's not *just* about market share. It's about a lot of things, including non-technical issues like the kinds of users the platform attracts, the kinds of work the computer is being used for, and the environment in which the computer is being used.
I agree, this is the big problem. Similarly, you have a split of services/devices preventing you from having a real solution. With an Apple iTV, you can "buy" content from iTunes, but you can't rent it or pay a subscription fee all-you-can-eat service from Apple. You can get Netflix, which is great, but you can't get new-release material and Netflix's content is actually shrinking. More and more when I look a the "recently added" section on Netflix, it's obscure anime and reality TV and weird children's shows. You can't, however, get Hulu, which would allow you to watch current-season TV shows.
If I get another box, I might get access to Hulu and Netflix, but I won't be able to access Amazon. Another box, I might be able to get access to Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, but I won't have access to iTunes. Some of this is the fault of individual companies-- iTunes is only available for Apple hardware, for example, and we can blame Apple for that. However, there's a larger problem, which is that there's not really a single solution that gets me everything I want. I can't just subscribe to Netflix and get all the content I want. I can't even subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu to get all the content I want. Netflix, Hulu, plus buying things on iTunes gets me most of the content I want, but then I *still* need to wait a year or more for some shows to be available on iTunes. Worse, I need to have an Apple TV and an additional set-top box to watch Hulu, and even some of the content on Hulu, I have to watch it on a computer.
It's total nonsense, but the worst part is, it's on purpose. Content owners don't want cable companies to go out of business, so they're stonewalling companies like Netflix and making sure they never get all the content they need. They want it all to stay fragmented, and they're making sure it does.
Design is not an aspect of marketing. Marketing is taking a product and presenting it to people in such a way as the name is placed into their heads so that when the consumer is thinking about purchasing an item the brand is already in their head.
Not that Wikipedia is a good authority, but you may want to read this: Marketing
You may think that Marketing is just about presentation, but that's not the official meaning, and it's not how most successful businesses think about it. Marketing is the whole process that includes the development of an idea for a product and creating a design and feature set that will be appealing to a market. And in that sense, Jobs was very involved in marketing.
By all accounts, Jobs was very involved in product design and development. He did not design the products all by himself, but he was involved in deciding what features they should have, whether a product was small enough, light enough, the right colors, had the right features, was easy enough to use, etc. Yes, you can more directly credit Ive with the designs, but Ive didn't work all by himself either.
When Jobs had free right to design his own computers at Apple, he hired Jonathan Ive and worked with him on the designs. Sometimes "creating" as a CEO includes hiring the right people, creating the right environment for them to work in, authorizing them to make positive changes, and knowing when to say "no".
This is where we come into what "best" means. To Jobs the best solution is something he can sell and entice people...
For all the criticisms you could make, this one doesn't seem valid. If anything, it would be more appropriate to criticize him for being an egomaniac who believed Apple's products were God's gift to the world. By all accounts, he sincerely believed that Apple products were the best, and there are even documented cases of Jobs saying, in effect, "Well we could sell a bunch of these, but I don't think it's good enough so I refuse to make that product."
Conversly a single "choice" does not improve the situation either.
Well I'll stick by my claim that choice is complicated. There are times when I'd rather have a single good option than having 5 sub-par options. There are other times when I'd rather have 5 sub-par options. For the most part, I'd rather be limited to 5 decent options than 5000 options, 5 of which are decent and 4995 terrible choices without knowing for sure which is which.
At some point, you have to say enough is enough or else we all go bankrupt. And then we have to ask "who makes that decision". The patent or a bunch of bureaucrats who live under a different health plan entirely from the rest of us.
Well unless the patient has the money to fund their own health care, at some point there will be a bunch of bureaucrats making those decisions. If it's not the government bureaucrats, it'll be insurance company bureaucrats. Or some other bureaucrats. Even if you let the doctors be those bureaucrats, they'll get mired in the bureaucracy of covering themselves from lawsuits.
At a certain level of running things, you need bureaucrats. You still have to evaluate what incentives you're giving those bureaucrats, and how competently they're executing their duties.
But even if paper remains, that doesn't prohibit schools from also providing electronic access. My brother is a public school teacher, and he posts homework online for parents to check. There's a lot of electronic communication in his class, though I'm fuzzy on the details.
In my opinion, it should be a goal of our society to provide everyone with access to a web browser and email, at least. We're trying to do it for poor children in Africa, so why can't we also aim to do it for poor people in our own country? It doesn't even require a full computer, these days. A small tablet per family may be good enough.
Designing an overly expensive computer is not marketing
You may be making the classic mistake of confusing marketing and advertising. Marketing includes developing the idea of a product to have a feature set and price point that is attractive. For example, the decision to make the new iPad have a higher resolution screen and faster processor while maintaining the same price point instead of developing a smaller, cheaper iPad to combat the Kindle Fire-- that's a marketing decision.
And yes, Steve Jobs was brilliant at marketing. He had an amazing sense of "what users want from a device" that was unique in the tech industry. The original iPod was "lame" because it lacked WiFi, but Jobs knew that WiFi wasn't going to be important for users at that time. He understood that full multitasking wasn't as important to the iPhones success as battery life was.
And no, Jobs was not focused on providing people with the most choice possible. He was focused on giving people the best solution, whatever he thought the best solution was. Obviously some people are happy with that, and are fine with letting someone tell them, "Here is the best solution! Do it this way!" rather than having to wade through several mediocre and poor solutions, hoping to find one that they're happy with.
Choice is complicated. A greater number of choices doesn't always improve the situation.
Well the problem isn't just bank fraud or identity theft, but that we live in an increasingly anonymous society without a clear method of identity verification. This has wide-ranging implications for national security and law enforcement.
So cynical me thinks at worst all the fancy tech would do is give the Banks a reason to pass more of the losses to their customers.
Arguably they already do. When someone uses your credit card to steal money from the bank, the bank voids the charges and you don't get charged. However, that money still comes from somewhere, and there are only 2 places for it to come from: their customers and their shareholders. Someone is paying somehow. Even if they could legally just void out the debt, it would be charging the entire population by way of inflation.
The security methods of telling the bank your SSN, mother's maiden name, or prior address are flawed because those are real pieces of information that can't be changed. Also, it's information that you may need to provide to others, which means that it's not really "secret". A private/public key could be changed, and the new correct public key could be substituted easily.
Now I'm not saying that there can't be drawbacks or that it can't be poorly implemented, but I don't see why with all the ubiquitous technology, everyone can't be issued some kind of smart card or token that holds a private key.
The reason we have this problem is precisely because healthcare isn't a free market.
I'm not a total free-marketer, but I have to agree at least this far: the problem is that we have built a system that is neither a free market nor a socialist system, but instead borrows from the worst qualities of both.
Most people don't have a choice in healthcare nor do they have a clear idea of what costs they're paying, or what costs they would be expected to pay if they faced an emergency. Health insurance has been heavily subsidized by the federal government for decades. On the other hand, it isn't regulated very well, the costs aren't made transparent, and it's run as a for-profit venture. You basically have a subsidized government monopoly without serious regulation or even the supposed motive of helping people.
In my view, we should basically pick one road or the other. The way we have things set up right now is just corporate welfare, but nobody really wants to end it. Conservatives like corporate welfare because their economic theory boils down to "give rich people more money, and they'll fix everything." Liberals want the socialized system but want to hide behind some free-market trappings.
Of course, if you treat health insurance as normal insurance, people will buy it at about the same rate as people buy renter's insurance. That is, most people won't.
What you have to remember is current insurance costs are already subsidized by the government. The government gives generous tax breaks on compensation paid in the form of health insurance, which is in effect a government subsidy of those health insurance costs. It also has the psychological benefit of being taken out of your paycheck ahead of time, which means you don't see the money. Plus, the government takes up the slack of paying for some of the extremely sick and elderly, and you have a socialization of costs due to emergency rooms paying for poor people's care out of other people's bills.
If there were no government subsidies, then healthcare would end up being expensive, making it a terrible deal for anyone who is young and even moderately healthy. There'd be no reason to buy it until you were getting old and sick, and when you take the young and healthy out of the equation, you drive the prices even higher.
Well it's not so much "we need a new security model" as "we need a security model". As you said, these things were never designed to be secure in the first place.
Lots of businesses and government organizations use your SSN as an authentication method-- i.e. knowing your SSN is considered proof that you are who you say you are. However, your SSN is also just your ID number, and you're constantly being asked to provide it to people. In computer terms, it would be like asking people to use the same username in lots of different places, and then having everyone use their username as their password.
IMO we should be using some kind of private-key encryption to verify identity. I don't like the idea of being forced to identify yourself, but if they're requiring some kind of verification/authentication, it should at least be secure. Of course, this would also require us to develop and deploy an additional layer of infrastructure for providing/reading/revoking these private keys, and it would also raise questions of whether/when/how we want to allow anonymity in such a system. There are lots of issues to work out, but we should be working on it.
I agree. I've found from experience that the best way to take notes is to scribble something down on paper, and then sometime shortly after that, to type it out and make any diagrams I need on a computer.
One of the important thing about pen and paper is that it's so simple, it's not going to distract you. When I've tried to take notes on a computer, there's always some function that stops working properly or distracts me, which isn't very likely with a pen. Carry a backup pen in case the first one doesn't work, and you're all set.
But there's a second, more important feature of this method: forced repetition. You scribble down some notes on the key points during the conference, and then later you type it up. By the nature of typing it up, you will be reviewing your notes, reorganizing them, and making them clearer. When you take notes, your key goal should be getting some reminder down on the page so that you'll remember a key point a few hours later, but you want to do it as quickly as possible so that you can get back to listening. When you type it up a few hours later, you will be putting all your ideas into a format that you should be able to review 5 years from now and understand what your notes were about.
So you have 2 steps, and each step has different goals. Even if you take computerized notes, I'd encourage you to review and rewrite them within a few hours. Otherwise, you're missing an incredibly important step.
Next, his micromanaging created the "perfect computer", in Steve Job's mind, that few could afford...Steve Jobs is a marketer.
So you're saying that he was bad at marketing, but all of his success came from his amazing skill at marketing?
Either way, I don't think it's necessarily much of a criticism. "Steve Jobs didn't invent things, he merely knew how to make products that people really wanted to buy!"
And more of the "obviously you don't know what you're talking about!" argument. I'm just glad you didn't go for the "you're a doody head and nobody likes you" argument, because then I'd just have no hope of winning.
As for your nonsense little "methematical" speculation -- well, it's pretty clear that it's total nonsense.
Well that's a nice, logical argument. I don't know what I was thinking. I always feel silly when someone trumps me with the "obviously you don't know what you're talking about!" argument.
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What's the logic in that? Why is the cable company carrying a channel that's not profitable?
Because the 3 companies that own all the channels bundle them together and make cable companies pay for all of them.
The important thing is, inherent in the setup of these big media companies, they do not believe that you have any right to choose for yourself what you pay for and what you watch. It's the media executives' and marketing teams' jobs to decide what you should watch, and then create a situation where you're forced into it on whatever terms they think are appropriate. They mostly trying to "force" you into buying it by tying the unwanted products in with product that you do want, but ultimately they're willing to bribe and threaten politicians to change laws to force you to buy things.
Why should I care about "basic functionality" that I don't use?
I think that when people talk about "legacy code", the word "legacy" isn't just supposed to mean "old", but also, "outdated or poorly written". The concept is that old programs may have been written to support hardware or situations that don't exist anymore, or else were anticipated to exist when the software was written but never materialized. Or they have features/functions that never really worked as hoped, or were not properly written or optimized at the time. This "legacy" code isn't necessarily imagined to be the oldest code, but just code that, if you were writing it again from scratch, you wouldn't want to include.
So for some people, yes, there's an "out with the old, in with the new" mentality. For others, there's just the idea, whether it's a reality or a misconception, that there is probably old code in there somewhere that should be removed or replaced.
Ok, in case you didn't know this, of course they're going to revive it. They're going to keep pushing it and keep pushing it until it goes through. You thought we beat it because it didn't pass that one time? What, did you think the entertainment industry ran out of money and stopped paying congressmen?
They'll wait a little while, they'll rename it, they'll alter it to hide the more controversial aspects, and they'll wage a propaganda war. They will not stop trying to consolidate their power until they're ousted from power.
Well technically I don't even have to go through all that. I have a computer and a monitor, and I can watch Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon right there.
Part of the appeal, though, would be to have a tiny cheap set-top box (Roku and AppleTV both under $100, as opposed to the $350 for your solution), or else something built directly into the TV, with a consistent interface and a sensible pricing scheme. In addition to being expensive, your DIY solution will have an inconsistent UI, I'm guessing it's a little clunky in places, and it's likely to get broken at some point (e.g. Hulu Desktop apparently isn't really supported on OSX anymore).
Not that I don't appreciate the suggestion and the information, but I have a Windows 7 computer set up and I've tried out the Media Center + Netflix setup, and it's not entirely great. The UI, as I mentioned, is inconsistent. Netflix is harder to Navigate than on my PS3 or an AppleTV (I'm guessing worse than a Roku box too). Also, it may not be the case anymore, but for a long time Netflix was limiting the video quality on their computer/silverlight player, supposedly in case someone was capturing the stream somehow.
Ultimately the TV/movie industry needs to quit playing games and come to a coherent solution that allows them to push out content ubiquitously. Let me subscribe to a Hulu-like service that lets me watch last-night's (or better yet, tonight's) episode of my favorite television show on my set-top box. Don't make me worry about whether my favorite show is available on that service. If it is on that service, don't make me worry about whether I'm allowed to stream it to my television, or whether it's computer-only.
If, beyond that, they still want to say, "But this content is *premium* and you have to pay an extra fee for it", the way you subscribe to cable but need to pay extra for HBO, I can probably live it that, but make it more a la carte rather than bundling too much together. And make the premium content part of the same service; don't make me sign up to 5 different services with different billing and different GUIs.
And don't pull the nonsense they do on iTunes, where you can buy a movie in SD or rent it in HD, but they won't let you buy it in HD because they want to make you buy it in SD and then buy it again in HD later. That's some crazy BS marketing scheme that should not exist.
In short, if you want people to pay for content, stop making the process confusing and worrisome. Push all of your content through all distribution channels, and let the channels compete based on the quality of their service. For example, strike a deal with Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Hulu so that all TV shows and movies are available on all of those services, and let those services compete. That's how you beat piracy, but that won't happen because then the content owners lose leverage and their high-powered executives can't justify their jobs.
As soon as scarcity of a resource gets past a point we go and find alternatives.
Of course, being optimistic here assumes that (a) there are alternatives; and (b) we'll feel the scarcity soon enough to avoid the negative consequences of overuse. Take the example of Easter Island: the inhabitants didn't find alternatives, and by the time they recognized there was a problem, it was too late.
Usually the things that us humans kill off forever, are things that at least in our short term mindset see are things that are not directly useful for us. We don't see a drop in cattle. But we see a drop in wolves, as they are in competition with us for our cattle... So we kill the wolves, they are not really a direct resource for us so they killed.
It may not be a direct resource, but it part of the problem (which I think you're acknowledging a little) is that we don't always understand the indirect ways in which our actions affect our lives. For example, you very well think, as I did when I was a kid, "Bees are a pest. All they do is sting you. We should just kill all the bees." However, bees are responsible for pollinating a lot of plants, and it could be an ecological disaster if we killed the bees. Similarly, when we have killed predators, we've found that there is a population explosion of the animals they prey on, and that causes problems.
So yes, when we eventually hit the point where we see immediate direct negative consequences to our actions, we're pretty good at adjusting. The problem is that many consequences are not immediate or direct.
That's a good point, but it's also true that everyone who has predicted my death has been wrong, at least up until now. That doesn't mean I'm not going to die.
It's hard to tell what you're looking for here. I'm not sure what would be considered a "telecommuting tool" or what kinds of communications you want to have with your clients. For example, it seems to me that a telephone would work well even if you didn't have a computer at all. Email works fine on Linux.
So let's start here: What are you used to doing on Windows that you're now having trouble doing on Linux? Is it an issue of trading documents, and you're not able to read some specific document format? Or are you trying to do video conferencing, and you haven't been able to find a good video chat client?
From the summary alone, I have no idea what the problem is.
Ah, well you can rent movies, but you generally can't rent TV shows, which is what I had in mind. They tried to allow you to rent TV shows for a while ($1/episode for a one-time view instead of $3/episode to "buy" it), but they couldn't get a lot of content owners to allow their shows to be rented.
Also, I keep putting "buy" in quotes because the TV shows have DRM, so arguably you're always renting them.
There's not really any way to protect users from themselves. If a user is technically able to download and install unknown applications, then the user can fall victim to a trojan.
The only question in my mind is whether it's a good implementation-- making it prompt you too often will result in users always hitting "OK", so you have to use this sort of thing judiciously. That was the complaint about the early implementation of UAC in Vista. It prompted you *constantly*, and so it was both annoying and ineffective. It was greatly improved in Windows 7, and ultimately UAC is one of the things that makes Windows 7 much more secure than Windows XP.
However, using prompts like this sparingly is both appropriate and common. It's a well-ingrained convention in user-interaction for all operating systems to have pop-up alerts to the user that you're about to do something potentially dangerous.
It's not *just* about market share. It's about a lot of things, including non-technical issues like the kinds of users the platform attracts, the kinds of work the computer is being used for, and the environment in which the computer is being used.
I agree, this is the big problem. Similarly, you have a split of services/devices preventing you from having a real solution. With an Apple iTV, you can "buy" content from iTunes, but you can't rent it or pay a subscription fee all-you-can-eat service from Apple. You can get Netflix, which is great, but you can't get new-release material and Netflix's content is actually shrinking. More and more when I look a the "recently added" section on Netflix, it's obscure anime and reality TV and weird children's shows. You can't, however, get Hulu, which would allow you to watch current-season TV shows.
If I get another box, I might get access to Hulu and Netflix, but I won't be able to access Amazon. Another box, I might be able to get access to Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, but I won't have access to iTunes. Some of this is the fault of individual companies-- iTunes is only available for Apple hardware, for example, and we can blame Apple for that. However, there's a larger problem, which is that there's not really a single solution that gets me everything I want. I can't just subscribe to Netflix and get all the content I want. I can't even subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu to get all the content I want. Netflix, Hulu, plus buying things on iTunes gets me most of the content I want, but then I *still* need to wait a year or more for some shows to be available on iTunes. Worse, I need to have an Apple TV and an additional set-top box to watch Hulu, and even some of the content on Hulu, I have to watch it on a computer.
It's total nonsense, but the worst part is, it's on purpose. Content owners don't want cable companies to go out of business, so they're stonewalling companies like Netflix and making sure they never get all the content they need. They want it all to stay fragmented, and they're making sure it does.
Design is not an aspect of marketing. Marketing is taking a product and presenting it to people in such a way as the name is placed into their heads so that when the consumer is thinking about purchasing an item the brand is already in their head.
Not that Wikipedia is a good authority, but you may want to read this: Marketing
You may think that Marketing is just about presentation, but that's not the official meaning, and it's not how most successful businesses think about it. Marketing is the whole process that includes the development of an idea for a product and creating a design and feature set that will be appealing to a market. And in that sense, Jobs was very involved in marketing.
By all accounts, Jobs was very involved in product design and development. He did not design the products all by himself, but he was involved in deciding what features they should have, whether a product was small enough, light enough, the right colors, had the right features, was easy enough to use, etc. Yes, you can more directly credit Ive with the designs, but Ive didn't work all by himself either.
When Jobs had free right to design his own computers at Apple, he hired Jonathan Ive and worked with him on the designs. Sometimes "creating" as a CEO includes hiring the right people, creating the right environment for them to work in, authorizing them to make positive changes, and knowing when to say "no".
This is where we come into what "best" means. To Jobs the best solution is something he can sell and entice people...
For all the criticisms you could make, this one doesn't seem valid. If anything, it would be more appropriate to criticize him for being an egomaniac who believed Apple's products were God's gift to the world. By all accounts, he sincerely believed that Apple products were the best, and there are even documented cases of Jobs saying, in effect, "Well we could sell a bunch of these, but I don't think it's good enough so I refuse to make that product."
Conversly a single "choice" does not improve the situation either.
Well I'll stick by my claim that choice is complicated. There are times when I'd rather have a single good option than having 5 sub-par options. There are other times when I'd rather have 5 sub-par options. For the most part, I'd rather be limited to 5 decent options than 5000 options, 5 of which are decent and 4995 terrible choices without knowing for sure which is which.
At some point, you have to say enough is enough or else we all go bankrupt. And then we have to ask "who makes that decision". The patent or a bunch of bureaucrats who live under a different health plan entirely from the rest of us.
Well unless the patient has the money to fund their own health care, at some point there will be a bunch of bureaucrats making those decisions. If it's not the government bureaucrats, it'll be insurance company bureaucrats. Or some other bureaucrats. Even if you let the doctors be those bureaucrats, they'll get mired in the bureaucracy of covering themselves from lawsuits.
At a certain level of running things, you need bureaucrats. You still have to evaluate what incentives you're giving those bureaucrats, and how competently they're executing their duties.
But even if paper remains, that doesn't prohibit schools from also providing electronic access. My brother is a public school teacher, and he posts homework online for parents to check. There's a lot of electronic communication in his class, though I'm fuzzy on the details.
In my opinion, it should be a goal of our society to provide everyone with access to a web browser and email, at least. We're trying to do it for poor children in Africa, so why can't we also aim to do it for poor people in our own country? It doesn't even require a full computer, these days. A small tablet per family may be good enough.
Designing an overly expensive computer is not marketing
You may be making the classic mistake of confusing marketing and advertising. Marketing includes developing the idea of a product to have a feature set and price point that is attractive. For example, the decision to make the new iPad have a higher resolution screen and faster processor while maintaining the same price point instead of developing a smaller, cheaper iPad to combat the Kindle Fire-- that's a marketing decision.
And yes, Steve Jobs was brilliant at marketing. He had an amazing sense of "what users want from a device" that was unique in the tech industry. The original iPod was "lame" because it lacked WiFi, but Jobs knew that WiFi wasn't going to be important for users at that time. He understood that full multitasking wasn't as important to the iPhones success as battery life was.
And no, Jobs was not focused on providing people with the most choice possible. He was focused on giving people the best solution, whatever he thought the best solution was. Obviously some people are happy with that, and are fine with letting someone tell them, "Here is the best solution! Do it this way!" rather than having to wade through several mediocre and poor solutions, hoping to find one that they're happy with.
Choice is complicated. A greater number of choices doesn't always improve the situation.
Well the problem isn't just bank fraud or identity theft, but that we live in an increasingly anonymous society without a clear method of identity verification. This has wide-ranging implications for national security and law enforcement.
So cynical me thinks at worst all the fancy tech would do is give the Banks a reason to pass more of the losses to their customers.
Arguably they already do. When someone uses your credit card to steal money from the bank, the bank voids the charges and you don't get charged. However, that money still comes from somewhere, and there are only 2 places for it to come from: their customers and their shareholders. Someone is paying somehow. Even if they could legally just void out the debt, it would be charging the entire population by way of inflation.
The security methods of telling the bank your SSN, mother's maiden name, or prior address are flawed because those are real pieces of information that can't be changed. Also, it's information that you may need to provide to others, which means that it's not really "secret". A private/public key could be changed, and the new correct public key could be substituted easily.
Now I'm not saying that there can't be drawbacks or that it can't be poorly implemented, but I don't see why with all the ubiquitous technology, everyone can't be issued some kind of smart card or token that holds a private key.
The reason we have this problem is precisely because healthcare isn't a free market.
I'm not a total free-marketer, but I have to agree at least this far: the problem is that we have built a system that is neither a free market nor a socialist system, but instead borrows from the worst qualities of both.
Most people don't have a choice in healthcare nor do they have a clear idea of what costs they're paying, or what costs they would be expected to pay if they faced an emergency. Health insurance has been heavily subsidized by the federal government for decades. On the other hand, it isn't regulated very well, the costs aren't made transparent, and it's run as a for-profit venture. You basically have a subsidized government monopoly without serious regulation or even the supposed motive of helping people.
In my view, we should basically pick one road or the other. The way we have things set up right now is just corporate welfare, but nobody really wants to end it. Conservatives like corporate welfare because their economic theory boils down to "give rich people more money, and they'll fix everything." Liberals want the socialized system but want to hide behind some free-market trappings.
Of course, if you treat health insurance as normal insurance, people will buy it at about the same rate as people buy renter's insurance. That is, most people won't.
What you have to remember is current insurance costs are already subsidized by the government. The government gives generous tax breaks on compensation paid in the form of health insurance, which is in effect a government subsidy of those health insurance costs. It also has the psychological benefit of being taken out of your paycheck ahead of time, which means you don't see the money. Plus, the government takes up the slack of paying for some of the extremely sick and elderly, and you have a socialization of costs due to emergency rooms paying for poor people's care out of other people's bills.
If there were no government subsidies, then healthcare would end up being expensive, making it a terrible deal for anyone who is young and even moderately healthy. There'd be no reason to buy it until you were getting old and sick, and when you take the young and healthy out of the equation, you drive the prices even higher.
No, you actually haven't explained, but I'm willing to drop it if you are.
Well it's not so much "we need a new security model" as "we need a security model". As you said, these things were never designed to be secure in the first place.
Lots of businesses and government organizations use your SSN as an authentication method-- i.e. knowing your SSN is considered proof that you are who you say you are. However, your SSN is also just your ID number, and you're constantly being asked to provide it to people. In computer terms, it would be like asking people to use the same username in lots of different places, and then having everyone use their username as their password.
IMO we should be using some kind of private-key encryption to verify identity. I don't like the idea of being forced to identify yourself, but if they're requiring some kind of verification/authentication, it should at least be secure. Of course, this would also require us to develop and deploy an additional layer of infrastructure for providing/reading/revoking these private keys, and it would also raise questions of whether/when/how we want to allow anonymity in such a system. There are lots of issues to work out, but we should be working on it.
I agree. I've found from experience that the best way to take notes is to scribble something down on paper, and then sometime shortly after that, to type it out and make any diagrams I need on a computer.
One of the important thing about pen and paper is that it's so simple, it's not going to distract you. When I've tried to take notes on a computer, there's always some function that stops working properly or distracts me, which isn't very likely with a pen. Carry a backup pen in case the first one doesn't work, and you're all set.
But there's a second, more important feature of this method: forced repetition. You scribble down some notes on the key points during the conference, and then later you type it up. By the nature of typing it up, you will be reviewing your notes, reorganizing them, and making them clearer. When you take notes, your key goal should be getting some reminder down on the page so that you'll remember a key point a few hours later, but you want to do it as quickly as possible so that you can get back to listening. When you type it up a few hours later, you will be putting all your ideas into a format that you should be able to review 5 years from now and understand what your notes were about.
So you have 2 steps, and each step has different goals. Even if you take computerized notes, I'd encourage you to review and rewrite them within a few hours. Otherwise, you're missing an incredibly important step.
Next, his micromanaging created the "perfect computer", in Steve Job's mind, that few could afford...Steve Jobs is a marketer.
So you're saying that he was bad at marketing, but all of his success came from his amazing skill at marketing?
Either way, I don't think it's necessarily much of a criticism. "Steve Jobs didn't invent things, he merely knew how to make products that people really wanted to buy!"
And more of the "obviously you don't know what you're talking about!" argument. I'm just glad you didn't go for the "you're a doody head and nobody likes you" argument, because then I'd just have no hope of winning.
As for your nonsense little "methematical" speculation -- well, it's pretty clear that it's total nonsense.
Well that's a nice, logical argument. I don't know what I was thinking. I always feel silly when someone trumps me with the "obviously you don't know what you're talking about!" argument.