I generally think this is a good thing, lets just hope that a reasonable degree of interoperability becomes possible anyway.
I agree. Having options is good, especially since there isn't a clear winner yet. Still, I'd like to have a filesystem that will be usable (ideally read/wire + boot) by all major operating systems.
Fortunately, for the vast vast majority of us, there are very few hacker black operatives who are running around breaking into hotel rooms just so they can get a single Visa number from Bob the dipshit middle manager.
Or just as important, if someone is going around breaking into hotel rooms and grabbing info from people's computers, they're likely to go for the easy mark and take the info from the numbnuts whose password is "12345", but you don't need a password anyway because he left his laptop opened and logged in. It's kind of like that old joke-- you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the guy next to you.
Security is often not about making breaches impossible. It's about making them too difficult to be worth the risk and trouble.
What's more, I would say it's very unclear that we'd be able to live, let alone become intelligent, without such irrational assumptions. This is something that people miss a lot when they talk about intelligence and AI: irrationality is part of intelligence.
Imagine you didn't generally make basic assumptions that your past actions and beliefs were appropriate. Let's say you wake up in the morning and feel a pain in your belly. Well, yesterday and the day before that, you ate a bowl of cereal with milk in it, and that seemed to make the pain go away. But you're not just going to follow habit or assume that it's a good decision. You're going to wake up every morning from now on and try random things. Maybe you'll try scratching your belly with a stick, or maybe you'll throw yourself out the window. How is intelligence ever going to emerge from that?
People are creatures of habit, and people are mimics. We do what other people around us are doing. We role-play and we follow fads and we talk the way our neighbors talk. We see friends and family and people on TV eating breakfast in the morning, and so we do it too. Our brains then try to tie all of that habit and mimicry up in a nice tidy logical explanation so that we can understand what we're doing, so that we can explain it to ourselves and to others.
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)
Isn't that kind of stuff a little hard to measure scientifically when the customer's perceived value is relatively arbitrary and irrational? The same customer can perceive the same item at wildly different values depending on context.
Well I'm probably one of those "most people". I can't tell the difference between a 160kbps MP3 and a WAV file even on my best days. The only real problems I've seen with Apple's HD encodes are in dark scenes (as I've mentioned) and I've seen some banding with gradient color, and in most cases I'd rather see that then the blurriness I notice from upsampling (though I suppose that's a subjective choice). If there are other artifacts, I don't think I've picked up on it, but I don't rent movies from iTunes very often.
I'm using the beta, and haven't had a problem yet. If you're so anxious, maybe you could give it a try? And maybe if you do have problems you could submit some feedback and let the developers know.
The only thing I dislike about v3 is the tabs. What's the point? I read my email in a preview pane, and if I want to do anything other than that, then it's because I want it in another window. I would just say, "to each his own", but they won't let you get rid of the tabs. Even Firefox lets you not-use tabs if you want, and that's in a program where tabs make sense.
Oh, but I've gone terribly off-topic. I'll shut up now.
You might want to make a comparison to a BluRay and see if you can tell a difference at all
I haven't compared directly to Bluray, but I've seen some compression artifacts on iTunes stuff that I would guess aren't in the Bluray. The compression artifacts are relatively minor, but it's enough to turn me off of the idea of buying stuff. It's good enough to watch, but not good enough to sit in my collection for 10 years.
But it's not likely to happen, because if the cost of a season of, say Mad Men drops to $10 or $15, then suddenly a cable bill of $60-$80/month just to be able to watch your 3 or 4 favorite shows on the networks' schedules doesn't sound so great.
But let's look at Mad Men as an example. Season one on iTunes at 720p is $34.99. I can buy the Bluray version from Amazon for $23.99. What kind of sense does that make? No, $60-$80/month for cable doesn't make a lot of sense.
It may be the right way to go, but some very rich people would sooner do [something awful] than let that happen.
Yup, that's been my thinking for a while. The challenge is not to come up with a service that serves consumers or that consumers are willing to pay for. I don't think the challenge is even to come up with a viable business model for providing those services. The challenge is to come up with a good service that doesn't hurt the bottom line some already-existing and powerful business which uses an old, stupid, wasteful, overcharging, obsolete business model.
And you are paying a price thats lower than most rental fees anyway, so you aren't paying more for less. You are paying less for more, on iTunes.
HD movies on iTunes are $20 a pop. TV seasons are $60. Those aren't lower than most rental fees, especially if you compare to the possible value of Netflix.
Who replaces your DVD now when it is lost or scratched, for free, forever?
The difference is that DVDs actually cost money to produce. If I go to Best Buy and buy a new DVD, I have to at least pay for the material costs, shipping costs, and the costs to run a factory and a Best Buy. For a high-volume online service like iTunes, providing an additional download doesn't cost much more than the cost of the bandwidth, which is pennies. Plus they can verify that I actually purchased the video in the first place with virtually zero overhead costs.
Physical media isn't the same as online downloads. That's the point. Media companies are going to have to stop pretending that they're selling physical copies.
So don't buy it. They are not required to provide you with anything, and you are not required to buy it, welcome to capitalism.
Yeah, but the media companies want me to buy it, and I want to buy it. So the million dollar question is, why is it that I'm not buying it? (me just being one among many people who aren't buying movies anymore)
Now if you're not interested in the topic of conversation, might I suggest that you go find something that does interest you, rather than sitting around here welcoming people to capitalism?
I never get why people want to rent movies electronically.
It's not complicated. I want to watch a movie, but I only want to watch it once. I don't particularly want to "buy" the movie because I don't even want it to take up space on my hard drive.
Therefore, if the person who owns the copyright is willing to let me pay 1/4 of the price I would normally spend to "buy" it and I get exactly what I want out of the deal, why shouldn't I want that?
We can go round and round on the DRM thing all day, but my chief objection to DRM is that when I "buy" DRM-encumbered media, I haven't really bought it. I've rented it, and I can't count on having access to that media over the long-term. Now if those terms are clear to everyone and everyone is happy with the arrangement, I don't particularly have a problem with it.
OTOH, you can do it all for free on Hulu if you can stomach the commercials.
Don't forget Flash. I can stomach the commercials, and I can even tolerate 480p. What I can't take is being forced to watch it on a computer using Flash instead of being able to put it on whatever I want.
I can tell you without a doubt that iTunes HD videos look better on my HDTV than DVDs that have been upscaled by my PS3. DVDs look blurry by comparison. Of course it depends a bit on the content and source.
Tell me whatever specs you want, but sit in front of a TV and watch, and you should see what I mean. Of course in dark scenes sometimes you see some minor compression artifacts, but I'm not claiming iTunes is anywhere near as good as Bluray.
That would be my preference as a consumer, that they quit trying to force me to re-buy the same movie over and over again.
I know it's retarded to reply to yourself, but I just wanted to explain more why I suspect this has become an issue that costs movie studios a lot of sales. Once upon a time, I suppose you bought a record and just expected that to be your copy of that music for a long time. I remember buying VHS tapes and imaging that I'd keep that tape collection for the rest of my life.
Now it seems like the technological progress is accelerating and that, paired with media companies trying to exploit these new formats for additional sales, has turned "ownership" into a less appealing prospect. Even in cases where I'd like to own a movie, there's no format that I feel I can trust to be future-proof. I don't want to buy Bluray discs partially because I want to be able to rip them and put them on any device I want, but partially because I suspect I won't want to have to own a Bluray player in 5 years. What happens if I replace my PS3 with something that doesn't use Bluray?
I could buy DVDs and rip them, but then I have to deal with the fact that they're low-resolution. iTunes offers HD movies, but not for all movies (it's seemingly random which movies are available to rent and which are available to own, which you can buy in HD and which you can't). Plus, their HD is only 720p and DRM encumbered. If I knew that they'd come out with iTunes Movies Plus in two years, offering to upgrade my movies to 1080p and drop DRM for a couple dollars, I might consider it.
I just don't want to spend the money to buy movies only to have to re-buy them in a couple of years when they upgrade 1080p to 2160p or 1080-3D or whatever. So I'm holding out, waiting for this stuff to resolve itself, and using Netflix for the time being. I suspect I'm not alone.
See personally, I disagree. Part of my problem with current online digital media is that they're focusing on "owning" rather than "accessing". Take iTunes, for example. I can "buy" a season of a particular show, but I can't just pay to watch it once. Not only does "buying" theoretically increase the price to watch a show once that I'll probably only want to watch once, but it also puts me on the hook to store and maintain a copy. Sure, I can throw it away if I really only want to watch it once, but then I've payed "buying" price for a "rental".
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for most TV shows and movies per-viewing, so long as it was cheap and I had the option to buy. Further, what I'd really like to do is buy free access to downloads in perpetuity, regardless of new/improved formats. What I mean is, I might actually be convinced to spend $20 on a movie on iTunes if I knew that I could re-download it whenever I wanted (if the original file was lost or deleted), and that if they release it in 1080p in a couple of years I could download that copy, too. And then if they released it in whatever replaced 1080p, I could get that free too. That would be my preference as a consumer, that they quit trying to force me to re-buy the same movie over and over again.
Still, I would agree that they're really trying to solve their own problem instead of the consumer's problem. The "consumer concerns about purchasing digital media that are locked to a small number of devices" is entirely caused by two things: selling less-than-ideal quality versions so they can sell you better versions later, and locking users in with DRM. I know everyone knows what I'm talking about with DRM, but movie studios are selling DVD quality movies on iTunes even after the Bluray has been released. Hell, there are even cases where they'll let you rent the 720p version (meaning it's on Apple's server) but will only let you buy the DVD-quality. And that's only 720p. Why should I spend $20 on a 720p version when I know a 1080p version exists and there's no predefined upgrade path.
Well I don't really disagree with you, but I think the truth might be a little more subtle. In reality, I think lots of people want to do whacky off-the-wall stuff with their computers, but I think product design, particularly designing an OS and UI, consists somewhat in picking the lowest common denominator for your target audience. You allow the user to do most of what people will probably want to do, and hope that's enough. Then people do a sort of basic cost/benefit analysis on their whacky off-the-wall ideas and realize that it's not worth their trouble to figure out the best ideal way to do what they want to. It's trivial to do what the designers anticipated, which is probably good enough for your needs, and very hard to do what you really want to do.
And the fact is that I think it's pretty damned easy to set up a Debian server, too. It's just that Debian's target audience and their respective needs are a little different. Would I advise my Debian developer friend to use Snow Leopard server? Not really, since I'd bet it would frustrate the hell out of him. Might I recommend it to a friend who knew a bit about computers, wasn't a real techie, but needed to set up a basic web server or file server? Sure.
From playing with a copy of Snow Leopard pretty briefly, I'd say that you can get some of the services up and running without knowing very much. For example, it's pretty dead simple to get apache running with Apple's supported weblog and wiki software. I wouldn't think DNS would be any easier for a new sysadmin on OSX. Either you know how to configure DNS or you don't. Mail setup seemed pretty easy, except you'll still have to know how to set up the DNS entries for a mail server to get it to be useful. I couldn't get iChat server to work, but couldn't figure out what the problem was either.
The real trick, however, isn't in getting services set up easily. It's the question of what happens if you want to do something non-standard. It'd be easy enough to configure an automatic install script for Apache on Linux, for example, if we assume a consistent configuration. The difficulty in setting these things up usually comes when you ask, "Well what if I want to do something off-the-wall and whacky?"
Well it might possibly be worth it to you to spend the extra $100 just for the second hard drive. On the other hand, I've never tried to install Debian on a mini without using the DVD drive, so I'm not sure how that would go. Worst case scenario, you might have to use a USB key to install, but for all I know, Apple's support for booting from another computer's DVD drive might work with a non-Apple OS.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not trying to bash the OOo developers or anything, and the load time and responsiveness might not be objectively very much longer. I haven't done objective tests, and it might just be an extra 2 seconds here, an extra 0.5 seconds there. But subjectively, not having any anti-FOSS bias, it feels significantly slower.
It's just enough that when I have to open a spreadsheet or word-processing document, I tend to want to use MS Office (or iWork if I'm on a Mac). When I'm on Linux, I only have OpenOffice installed and it meets my needs well enough, but given the choice on other platforms, it's not what I use. If I could prioritize work on OpenOffice right now, I would choose to work on making it screamingly fast.
That's all I'm saying. It's not horrendous and it's not that OpenOffice isn't a good program. It's just one of those arguably minor issues that, for me personally, causes significant harm to the experience of using the program. I wish OpenOffice developers the best of luck in making things better.
Not only can LCDs (often) not be read in sunlight, but they use more power, and (IANA expert, but supposedly) it causes more eyestrain to look at a backlit screen than an electronic paper display.
What's more, even a netbook is going to be bigger, bulkier, and heavier than the nook or kindle, so you have to consider how you want to use the device and which form-factor makes more sense. Plus, these e-book devices have built-in cellphone data plans and supported ebook stores, which might make it easier and more convenient to get the content you want.
I'm not trying to sell anyone on these e-books, and I'm not going to buy one myself. However, it's silly to think that these don't have advantages over netbooks.
Well is that really fair? As someone who lives in a cramped NYC and keeps a home server, having one that's small and energy efficient but relatively robust sounds like a good deal, regardless of aesthetics. I'm sure there are even small businesses who have the same priorities, who need a workable server they can stick in some corner or even on someone's desk without taking up too much space, making too much noise, or looking too ungodly awful. There are plenty of businesses that need some kind of server but don't want to buy a whole rack and build an entire datacenter.
What's more, if you have need of an OSX server specifically, this is much cheaper than buying an xServe or Mac Pro. With this solution, you basically get to trade your DVD drive for a second hard drive, and they throw in a copy of OSX server to boot. It may not be the solution you're looking for, but I think it's a pretty good idea.
Yeah, honestly, this is the #1 thing that has kept me from using OpenOffice day-to-day. The first thing I did when I opened this article was to have my browser search for the word "faster".
I don't think we're as far apart as you might be imagining. I don't really think that it's so easy for people to pay for their own college, or at least not going to a prestigious school without any kind of scholarship while giving your schoolwork the attention it needs. On the other hand, I think part of the reason its so expensive is because so much financial aid and low-interest loans are provided. If everyone is willing to pay $500 for a TV and you give everyone a $2000 TV credit, suddenly all TVs will be priced at $2500. That's why subsidies can be such dangerous things.
So while I'm arguing that it's good for us all to have good educations, and that we ought to be willing to contribute something to the public good, I also acknowledge that fixing these problems are not so simple as throwing money at them.
The party that gets by far the greatest benefit is the student. I don't oppose free college education because the student gets benefit. I oppose it because by far the greatest part of the benefit goes to the student and the student can with their own labor pay the cost of their education.
Well that assumes that students both can and will pursue an education on their own. I'm less concerned with who benefits *most* and more concerned with gaining what benefits we can. You could think of it as a cost/benefit analysis of what we can do to see that a student is well educated (not that it's the only or best way of thinking about it). Just making up numbers on the spot for the sake of an example, let's say we could make additional educational efforts that will cost us an additional $20k but avoid $10k in damages due to crimes that individual won't commit, $200k in savings from not having to incarcerate the student as a criminal, as well as netting our economy an additional $1M in increased productivity, including $200k in tax revenue. In that example, would you really not want to make those efforts because the student should pursue an education on his own? If so, isn't that almost like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
My view is that we already overcontribute to education subsidies.
Well I'd certainly agree that much of what we spend on education seems to be wasted, and we spend too much for what we get in return. I'm just not ready to say, "we spend too much," and end the sentence there. Rather than focussing on whether we spend too much or too little, I'd prefer if we looked into spending that money well, getting good value for our dollar. If you were to develop a high quality modern education system, spend from our current budget enough to get everything running smoothly, and still find that you had money left over, then I would certainly agree that we're spending too much.
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I generally think this is a good thing, lets just hope that a reasonable degree of interoperability becomes possible anyway.
I agree. Having options is good, especially since there isn't a clear winner yet. Still, I'd like to have a filesystem that will be usable (ideally read/wire + boot) by all major operating systems.
Fortunately, for the vast vast majority of us, there are very few hacker black operatives who are running around breaking into hotel rooms just so they can get a single Visa number from Bob the dipshit middle manager.
Or just as important, if someone is going around breaking into hotel rooms and grabbing info from people's computers, they're likely to go for the easy mark and take the info from the numbnuts whose password is "12345", but you don't need a password anyway because he left his laptop opened and logged in. It's kind of like that old joke-- you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the guy next to you.
Security is often not about making breaches impossible. It's about making them too difficult to be worth the risk and trouble.
What's more, I would say it's very unclear that we'd be able to live, let alone become intelligent, without such irrational assumptions. This is something that people miss a lot when they talk about intelligence and AI: irrationality is part of intelligence.
Imagine you didn't generally make basic assumptions that your past actions and beliefs were appropriate. Let's say you wake up in the morning and feel a pain in your belly. Well, yesterday and the day before that, you ate a bowl of cereal with milk in it, and that seemed to make the pain go away. But you're not just going to follow habit or assume that it's a good decision. You're going to wake up every morning from now on and try random things. Maybe you'll try scratching your belly with a stick, or maybe you'll throw yourself out the window. How is intelligence ever going to emerge from that?
People are creatures of habit, and people are mimics. We do what other people around us are doing. We role-play and we follow fads and we talk the way our neighbors talk. We see friends and family and people on TV eating breakfast in the morning, and so we do it too. Our brains then try to tie all of that habit and mimicry up in a nice tidy logical explanation so that we can understand what we're doing, so that we can explain it to ourselves and to others.
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)
Isn't that kind of stuff a little hard to measure scientifically when the customer's perceived value is relatively arbitrary and irrational? The same customer can perceive the same item at wildly different values depending on context.
Well I'm probably one of those "most people". I can't tell the difference between a 160kbps MP3 and a WAV file even on my best days. The only real problems I've seen with Apple's HD encodes are in dark scenes (as I've mentioned) and I've seen some banding with gradient color, and in most cases I'd rather see that then the blurriness I notice from upsampling (though I suppose that's a subjective choice). If there are other artifacts, I don't think I've picked up on it, but I don't rent movies from iTunes very often.
I'm using the beta, and haven't had a problem yet. If you're so anxious, maybe you could give it a try? And maybe if you do have problems you could submit some feedback and let the developers know.
The only thing I dislike about v3 is the tabs. What's the point? I read my email in a preview pane, and if I want to do anything other than that, then it's because I want it in another window. I would just say, "to each his own", but they won't let you get rid of the tabs. Even Firefox lets you not-use tabs if you want, and that's in a program where tabs make sense.
Oh, but I've gone terribly off-topic. I'll shut up now.
You might want to make a comparison to a BluRay and see if you can tell a difference at all
I haven't compared directly to Bluray, but I've seen some compression artifacts on iTunes stuff that I would guess aren't in the Bluray. The compression artifacts are relatively minor, but it's enough to turn me off of the idea of buying stuff. It's good enough to watch, but not good enough to sit in my collection for 10 years.
But it's not likely to happen, because if the cost of a season of, say Mad Men drops to $10 or $15, then suddenly a cable bill of $60-$80/month just to be able to watch your 3 or 4 favorite shows on the networks' schedules doesn't sound so great.
But let's look at Mad Men as an example. Season one on iTunes at 720p is $34.99. I can buy the Bluray version from Amazon for $23.99. What kind of sense does that make? No, $60-$80/month for cable doesn't make a lot of sense.
It may be the right way to go, but some very rich people would sooner do [something awful] than let that happen.
Yup, that's been my thinking for a while. The challenge is not to come up with a service that serves consumers or that consumers are willing to pay for. I don't think the challenge is even to come up with a viable business model for providing those services. The challenge is to come up with a good service that doesn't hurt the bottom line some already-existing and powerful business which uses an old, stupid, wasteful, overcharging, obsolete business model.
OTOH, the HD demo material they have accessable at the Apple store does nothing to cast their HD material in a good light.
You mean the previews in the iTunes store? The previews aren't HD, even if the purchased content is.
And you are paying a price thats lower than most rental fees anyway, so you aren't paying more for less. You are paying less for more, on iTunes.
HD movies on iTunes are $20 a pop. TV seasons are $60. Those aren't lower than most rental fees, especially if you compare to the possible value of Netflix.
Who replaces your DVD now when it is lost or scratched, for free, forever?
The difference is that DVDs actually cost money to produce. If I go to Best Buy and buy a new DVD, I have to at least pay for the material costs, shipping costs, and the costs to run a factory and a Best Buy. For a high-volume online service like iTunes, providing an additional download doesn't cost much more than the cost of the bandwidth, which is pennies. Plus they can verify that I actually purchased the video in the first place with virtually zero overhead costs.
Physical media isn't the same as online downloads. That's the point. Media companies are going to have to stop pretending that they're selling physical copies.
So don't buy it. They are not required to provide you with anything, and you are not required to buy it, welcome to capitalism.
Yeah, but the media companies want me to buy it, and I want to buy it. So the million dollar question is, why is it that I'm not buying it? (me just being one among many people who aren't buying movies anymore)
Now if you're not interested in the topic of conversation, might I suggest that you go find something that does interest you, rather than sitting around here welcoming people to capitalism?
I never get why people want to rent movies electronically.
It's not complicated. I want to watch a movie, but I only want to watch it once. I don't particularly want to "buy" the movie because I don't even want it to take up space on my hard drive.
Therefore, if the person who owns the copyright is willing to let me pay 1/4 of the price I would normally spend to "buy" it and I get exactly what I want out of the deal, why shouldn't I want that?
We can go round and round on the DRM thing all day, but my chief objection to DRM is that when I "buy" DRM-encumbered media, I haven't really bought it. I've rented it, and I can't count on having access to that media over the long-term. Now if those terms are clear to everyone and everyone is happy with the arrangement, I don't particularly have a problem with it.
OTOH, you can do it all for free on Hulu if you can stomach the commercials.
Don't forget Flash. I can stomach the commercials, and I can even tolerate 480p. What I can't take is being forced to watch it on a computer using Flash instead of being able to put it on whatever I want.
I can tell you without a doubt that iTunes HD videos look better on my HDTV than DVDs that have been upscaled by my PS3. DVDs look blurry by comparison. Of course it depends a bit on the content and source.
Tell me whatever specs you want, but sit in front of a TV and watch, and you should see what I mean. Of course in dark scenes sometimes you see some minor compression artifacts, but I'm not claiming iTunes is anywhere near as good as Bluray.
That would be my preference as a consumer, that they quit trying to force me to re-buy the same movie over and over again.
I know it's retarded to reply to yourself, but I just wanted to explain more why I suspect this has become an issue that costs movie studios a lot of sales. Once upon a time, I suppose you bought a record and just expected that to be your copy of that music for a long time. I remember buying VHS tapes and imaging that I'd keep that tape collection for the rest of my life.
Now it seems like the technological progress is accelerating and that, paired with media companies trying to exploit these new formats for additional sales, has turned "ownership" into a less appealing prospect. Even in cases where I'd like to own a movie, there's no format that I feel I can trust to be future-proof. I don't want to buy Bluray discs partially because I want to be able to rip them and put them on any device I want, but partially because I suspect I won't want to have to own a Bluray player in 5 years. What happens if I replace my PS3 with something that doesn't use Bluray?
I could buy DVDs and rip them, but then I have to deal with the fact that they're low-resolution. iTunes offers HD movies, but not for all movies (it's seemingly random which movies are available to rent and which are available to own, which you can buy in HD and which you can't). Plus, their HD is only 720p and DRM encumbered. If I knew that they'd come out with iTunes Movies Plus in two years, offering to upgrade my movies to 1080p and drop DRM for a couple dollars, I might consider it.
I just don't want to spend the money to buy movies only to have to re-buy them in a couple of years when they upgrade 1080p to 2160p or 1080-3D or whatever. So I'm holding out, waiting for this stuff to resolve itself, and using Netflix for the time being. I suspect I'm not alone.
See personally, I disagree. Part of my problem with current online digital media is that they're focusing on "owning" rather than "accessing". Take iTunes, for example. I can "buy" a season of a particular show, but I can't just pay to watch it once. Not only does "buying" theoretically increase the price to watch a show once that I'll probably only want to watch once, but it also puts me on the hook to store and maintain a copy. Sure, I can throw it away if I really only want to watch it once, but then I've payed "buying" price for a "rental".
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for most TV shows and movies per-viewing, so long as it was cheap and I had the option to buy. Further, what I'd really like to do is buy free access to downloads in perpetuity, regardless of new/improved formats. What I mean is, I might actually be convinced to spend $20 on a movie on iTunes if I knew that I could re-download it whenever I wanted (if the original file was lost or deleted), and that if they release it in 1080p in a couple of years I could download that copy, too. And then if they released it in whatever replaced 1080p, I could get that free too. That would be my preference as a consumer, that they quit trying to force me to re-buy the same movie over and over again.
Still, I would agree that they're really trying to solve their own problem instead of the consumer's problem. The "consumer concerns about purchasing digital media that are locked to a small number of devices" is entirely caused by two things: selling less-than-ideal quality versions so they can sell you better versions later, and locking users in with DRM. I know everyone knows what I'm talking about with DRM, but movie studios are selling DVD quality movies on iTunes even after the Bluray has been released. Hell, there are even cases where they'll let you rent the 720p version (meaning it's on Apple's server) but will only let you buy the DVD-quality. And that's only 720p. Why should I spend $20 on a 720p version when I know a 1080p version exists and there's no predefined upgrade path.
Well I don't really disagree with you, but I think the truth might be a little more subtle. In reality, I think lots of people want to do whacky off-the-wall stuff with their computers, but I think product design, particularly designing an OS and UI, consists somewhat in picking the lowest common denominator for your target audience. You allow the user to do most of what people will probably want to do, and hope that's enough. Then people do a sort of basic cost/benefit analysis on their whacky off-the-wall ideas and realize that it's not worth their trouble to figure out the best ideal way to do what they want to. It's trivial to do what the designers anticipated, which is probably good enough for your needs, and very hard to do what you really want to do.
And the fact is that I think it's pretty damned easy to set up a Debian server, too. It's just that Debian's target audience and their respective needs are a little different. Would I advise my Debian developer friend to use Snow Leopard server? Not really, since I'd bet it would frustrate the hell out of him. Might I recommend it to a friend who knew a bit about computers, wasn't a real techie, but needed to set up a basic web server or file server? Sure.
From playing with a copy of Snow Leopard pretty briefly, I'd say that you can get some of the services up and running without knowing very much. For example, it's pretty dead simple to get apache running with Apple's supported weblog and wiki software. I wouldn't think DNS would be any easier for a new sysadmin on OSX. Either you know how to configure DNS or you don't. Mail setup seemed pretty easy, except you'll still have to know how to set up the DNS entries for a mail server to get it to be useful. I couldn't get iChat server to work, but couldn't figure out what the problem was either.
The real trick, however, isn't in getting services set up easily. It's the question of what happens if you want to do something non-standard. It'd be easy enough to configure an automatic install script for Apache on Linux, for example, if we assume a consistent configuration. The difficulty in setting these things up usually comes when you ask, "Well what if I want to do something off-the-wall and whacky?"
Well it might possibly be worth it to you to spend the extra $100 just for the second hard drive. On the other hand, I've never tried to install Debian on a mini without using the DVD drive, so I'm not sure how that would go. Worst case scenario, you might have to use a USB key to install, but for all I know, Apple's support for booting from another computer's DVD drive might work with a non-Apple OS.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not trying to bash the OOo developers or anything, and the load time and responsiveness might not be objectively very much longer. I haven't done objective tests, and it might just be an extra 2 seconds here, an extra 0.5 seconds there. But subjectively, not having any anti-FOSS bias, it feels significantly slower.
It's just enough that when I have to open a spreadsheet or word-processing document, I tend to want to use MS Office (or iWork if I'm on a Mac). When I'm on Linux, I only have OpenOffice installed and it meets my needs well enough, but given the choice on other platforms, it's not what I use. If I could prioritize work on OpenOffice right now, I would choose to work on making it screamingly fast.
That's all I'm saying. It's not horrendous and it's not that OpenOffice isn't a good program. It's just one of those arguably minor issues that, for me personally, causes significant harm to the experience of using the program. I wish OpenOffice developers the best of luck in making things better.
At least they're not using the verb "squirt" to describe sharing content.
Not only can LCDs (often) not be read in sunlight, but they use more power, and (IANA expert, but supposedly) it causes more eyestrain to look at a backlit screen than an electronic paper display.
What's more, even a netbook is going to be bigger, bulkier, and heavier than the nook or kindle, so you have to consider how you want to use the device and which form-factor makes more sense. Plus, these e-book devices have built-in cellphone data plans and supported ebook stores, which might make it easier and more convenient to get the content you want.
I'm not trying to sell anyone on these e-books, and I'm not going to buy one myself. However, it's silly to think that these don't have advantages over netbooks.
Well is that really fair? As someone who lives in a cramped NYC and keeps a home server, having one that's small and energy efficient but relatively robust sounds like a good deal, regardless of aesthetics. I'm sure there are even small businesses who have the same priorities, who need a workable server they can stick in some corner or even on someone's desk without taking up too much space, making too much noise, or looking too ungodly awful. There are plenty of businesses that need some kind of server but don't want to buy a whole rack and build an entire datacenter.
What's more, if you have need of an OSX server specifically, this is much cheaper than buying an xServe or Mac Pro. With this solution, you basically get to trade your DVD drive for a second hard drive, and they throw in a copy of OSX server to boot. It may not be the solution you're looking for, but I think it's a pretty good idea.
Yeah, honestly, this is the #1 thing that has kept me from using OpenOffice day-to-day. The first thing I did when I opened this article was to have my browser search for the word "faster".
I don't think we're as far apart as you might be imagining. I don't really think that it's so easy for people to pay for their own college, or at least not going to a prestigious school without any kind of scholarship while giving your schoolwork the attention it needs. On the other hand, I think part of the reason its so expensive is because so much financial aid and low-interest loans are provided. If everyone is willing to pay $500 for a TV and you give everyone a $2000 TV credit, suddenly all TVs will be priced at $2500. That's why subsidies can be such dangerous things.
So while I'm arguing that it's good for us all to have good educations, and that we ought to be willing to contribute something to the public good, I also acknowledge that fixing these problems are not so simple as throwing money at them.
The party that gets by far the greatest benefit is the student. I don't oppose free college education because the student gets benefit. I oppose it because by far the greatest part of the benefit goes to the student and the student can with their own labor pay the cost of their education.
Well that assumes that students both can and will pursue an education on their own. I'm less concerned with who benefits *most* and more concerned with gaining what benefits we can. You could think of it as a cost/benefit analysis of what we can do to see that a student is well educated (not that it's the only or best way of thinking about it). Just making up numbers on the spot for the sake of an example, let's say we could make additional educational efforts that will cost us an additional $20k but avoid $10k in damages due to crimes that individual won't commit, $200k in savings from not having to incarcerate the student as a criminal, as well as netting our economy an additional $1M in increased productivity, including $200k in tax revenue. In that example, would you really not want to make those efforts because the student should pursue an education on his own? If so, isn't that almost like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
My view is that we already overcontribute to education subsidies.
Well I'd certainly agree that much of what we spend on education seems to be wasted, and we spend too much for what we get in return. I'm just not ready to say, "we spend too much," and end the sentence there. Rather than focussing on whether we spend too much or too little, I'd prefer if we looked into spending that money well, getting good value for our dollar. If you were to develop a high quality modern education system, spend from our current budget enough to get everything running smoothly, and still find that you had money left over, then I would certainly agree that we're spending too much.