That's why _real_ knowledgeable people switch to bit torrent or better, they don't stay near the likes of Gnutella and company.
First, Bittorrent didn't exist when I was knowledgeable about the pirating scene. Second, I assume that bittorrent downloads are still only as good as their trackers.
These are all very interesting examples, but I don't think it's unique to media. The dirty little truth that a lot of people don't like to admit because it sounds ant-capitalist is, we often don't really do our work for the money. Watch your boss and your coworkers and anyone else you can, and you'll find lots of examples where people essentially make decisions that are against their own economic best-interest in order to give themselves ego-boosts. Or inversely, you'll see people refuse to do things that will obviously benefit them if it means eating crow.
You can see it even more strongly in cases where the decision-maker doesn't directly benefit from the decisions. A salaried worker, for example, might often do things which will hurt the company's profits in order to boost his ego. What does he care, if he doesn't see the profits? On the other hand, I've seen salaried workers do a lot of work to boost company profits without economic benefit to themselves, essentially because it gave them bragging rights and pride in their work.
Now someone might very well argue that these examples don't show what I'm saying. You might argue that having prestige in the industry can give you more clout within the industry, allowing you to sign bigger actors, directors, musicians, etc. Making a prestige picture can be justified as an investment, allowing you to make more money down the line by attracting better people.
Still, in my professional experienced, the generally assumed idea that "companies always do what's most profitable" hasn't seemed to be reliable at all. An executive on an ego trip can make all sorts of unprofitable policies just to throw his own weight around.
Well I definitely think that iTunes is convenient for most people, but not so much if you're trying to load music on your Palm Pre from your Linux desktop. It's pretty worry-free. It's fairly cheap, but I would definitely not call it "extremely cheap".
But overall, I don't doubt that Amazon and iTunes are cheap enough, convenient enough, and worry-free enough to have captured some of the market that would have otherwise gone to "free". If they dropped their prices and supported more platforms, more devices, then they could probably capture more of that market. Of course, the pricing isn't exactly within Apple's control.
Yeah, I don't pirate things, but back when I was knowledgeable about such things, pirating stuff was kind of a PITA. Not only did you have to keep up on where to go and what to look for (sometimes things were obscured in various ways), but often enough you'd download something only to find it wasn't what you really wanted. Like you might download a song only to find that it was malware or some other sound purposefully mislabeled as a prank. Or it might be a valid song, but the wrong song because some idiot mislabeled it by accident. Or it might be the right song, but for whatever reason it'd be crappy quality, and the tagging might be all screwed up. Even when you found a good source, they wouldn't always have what you wanted. Or they'd have 20 copies of the hit single from a CD, but not the whole CD.
It was just a headache, death by a thousand paper cuts. It certainly wasn't worth my time to bother, especially once I got a job and my time was worth more than the $0.99 to buy a song. Is it really much easier today?
What's the deal with MP3sparks.com? Is it another Russian site or something? Seems like either it's not legit or it's operating in a country with different ideas about copyright.
Right, that's what I was thinking. If it didn't work for Napster, why would it work for Kazaa? At the time Napster went legit, it was still pretty much *the* name of music downloads. It was to online music almost what Xerox is to photocopying.
Now? Napster may be making money, but they don't seem to be any kind of a market force. Any music store has to contend with the 900 pound gorilla in the room, which is iTunes. Fine, I know there are people here who think Apple and the iPod are overblown, but they are a huge player and we may as well acknowledge that. Besides iTunes, Amazon isn't exactly a lightweight. So how's Kazaa going to compete?
And it looks like their approach is a DRMed subscription service. Have DRMed subscription services been doing well? Has there been a recent surge in WMA DRM players, or has the iPod started supporting Microsoft's DRM? I can't imagine wanting to compete in that market.
Maybe we can make more money by selling them what they want instead of suing them?
Then again, maybe not. It may be that these companies have done some calculations and realized that their importance is dwindling in the new digital world, and the more they can drag their feet and stonewall, the longer they can keep their prices high and therefore keep their profits high.
Or maybe they really think they can get the government (lobbying the legislative branch and suing through the judicial) to keep their current business model going even though it doesn't make sense anymore. From what we've seen so far, it appears that they'd be right.
Just because there's probably a business model to be had in this Internet age from producing and selling music doesn't mean that it will be as profitable as the record companies currently are. Even if it would be, that doesn't mean that the record companies want to be responsible for figuring it out or put in a position where failure to "figure it out" means they go out of business. Most people don't want to have to work very hard and be very clever for their money. Most would prefer, given the choice, to sit back, do the same old thing, and watch the money roll in.
This seems extremely shady legally. You bought and paid for something
Well probably technically you didn't buy it. Generally when you "buy" online content, you're not really buying anything. You're paying a licensing fee, and the terms of the license include "we can pull the content and rescind your license whenever we want without an explanation."
But still, I find some of these attitudes strange and probably counter-productive. They talk like blue collar work shouldn't be respected, doesn't take any kind of intelligence or work ethic, etc. Then they want to decide which kids are good and which are bad, and then try to forbid the "bad kids" from growing up to be anything but a blue collar worker. And while they're at it, they want to humiliate all the "bad kids" to make sure they know they'll never be anything but a fry cook. Does all that really sound like a good idea?
And to what end? Sometimes I think it's just kids that got picked on trying to punish their ex-bullies rather then imagine an education system or societal order that will work. Blue collar work shouldn't be shameful. It's honest work that needs to be done. It still takes skill, attention, and hard work to do a good job.
Look, the people you are trying to punish are the people you depend on. They cook your meals, they haul your trash, they connect your calls, they drive your ambulances. They guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with them.
The bad kids need to be identified as early as possible, and shunted off into a different program where they're prepared for careers as janitors and burger-flippers
Great. Take a whole bunch of criminals, and give them keys to go into your office after hours, and have them prepare your food.
And obviously it's true. Me and my friends were all "good kids", but we did some seriously dumb and screwed up stuff. Why? Because boys talk big, even if they don't mean it, and even if they don't know what they're talking about. And once one of your friends starts talking big, you don't want to be the one who says "no".
I'm not sure how it works among little girls, but as a boy, you can never be the one who says, "no". You can't be the boy who's too worried about consequences to do something stupid. You'll be an outcast, because you'll be considered weak. A group of boys are typically only as good as the worst impulse that any one of them is willing to voice.
Yeah, people tend to talk as though it's fine to foster antisocial criminality and hopelessness in kids, because hey, we need people to work at McDonalds too! But think a little more about that-- do you think that solves the problem?
Don't all levels of all industries need good, hard, smart workers? Not all need the same sort of education and experience, but certainly every business benefits from not-having the employees steal from the till. All business benefit from having someone smart enough to work efficiently, to keep up with (or maybe even invent) new ways of doing things.
Does society in general benefit from having poorly-educated criminals? How many social and economic problems are helped by lower crime rates? We lose less money to theft and damage. We spend less money on law enforcement and jails. We produce more when everyone is employed and productive instead of in jail. And the obvious: we're all safer when crime rates go down.
I'm not claiming there's an easy answer, but it's certainly worth our trouble to try to educate all children, and to help them find a place in the world where they can be "productive members of society" (whatever that means).
honors students (such as myself) were placed in an 6th-grade English class with, well, the criminal class...It was a complete disaster.
Well sure, but part of the point I gathered from TFS (didn't RTFA) is that it doesn't really work to segregate out all the "bad kids" either, because what happens is those bad kids influence each other and the bad kids get worse.
we need to concentrate on making sure our best students get the best education. This should be a higher priority than trying to make scientists out of juvenile criminals and bullies. Society doesn't need, and will never get 100% genius-status for all students, anyway.
I would agree that we shouldn't be trying to make all the juvenile delinquents into scientists, but some of that might be because I don't think we should be trying to make all of anyone into scientists. I'd sooner say that there are a lot of jobs out there that need doing, and it'd be best if we could get honest, hard-working people doing all of those jobs.
But where I wouldn't agree is this tone that every kid with behavior problems is just useless and should be shuffled off and locked up. The ideal should be that we can find ways for every person to contribute to society. The ideal should be that we educate every student the best that we can. Sure, this might mean a little bit of triage in the education system, but if you write kids off early and treat them as though they're useless criminals, then don't be surprised when they grow up to be useless criminals.
Apple has explicitly done something to make my experience *worse*. They went much further than simply failing to "provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players." They went out of their way to harm users.
I'm usually a fan of Apple, but I have to agree that this seems like a bad move. What is really gained by purposefully breaking compatibility? I can understand not supporting alternatives, but going out of their way just to break existing compatibility seems petty. It's the sort of thing where I wonder if the increased lock-in is worth the associated bad PR.
If they're concerned about customer experience, then fine, fix it so iTunes recognizes that it's not an iPod, and throw up a warning the first time it syncs saying, "Warning: this is not really an iPod. We don't support this. Proceed at your own risk." Otherwise, provide an open spec and let other manufacturers use it. If the iPhone is really the best smartphone, then why fear the Pre?
On the other hand, I expected that sooner or later they'd change something and it would break interoperability with the Pre, even if inadvertently. I can't imagine that Palm didn't see it coming. Why didn't they just come up with a better solution from the start? If they're in favor of openness, why not throw their weight behind an open alternative to iTunes?
Well "Peter" is pretty much everyone who can afford a computer, and perhaps the future of many of those who can't, while "Paul" is some portion of those who can't afford a computer. You still might be OK with that, but it's not quite as awesome as what you said.
Well I wouldn't argue that he didn't benefit from luck and circumstances, but no one is going to reach that level of success while being extraordinarily unlucky. At the same time, he wasn't merely lucky, and most people recognize that.
But on the other hand, some supporters may want to take his success to be evidence of the value of Gates' work, which I don't think quite makes sense. That your actions have been successful is making money for yourself doesn't mean that your actions have been good for the rest of us.
What makes you think it's a knee-jerk reaction rather than a well reasoned reaction from years of experience dealing with Microsoft?
For most users, Silverlight doesn't provide any real benefits. The whole thing was invented, not to fill a need, but to push Microsoft's vendor lock-in.
Sure, they support OSX. For now. They also used to release IE for OSX, but they stopped updating it, letting it fall behind IE for Windows, and then killed it off. They also used to sell Outlook for OSX, before killing it and replacing it with a substandard version that didn't support Exchange servers. Their broadness of support only seems to last as long as it takes them to dominate that particular market, and then they drop support in order to drive everyone back to Windows.
So now, tell me, except for Microsoft putting up content like this on their own site and requiring Silverlight, what reason do I have to install the thing at all? What reason did Microsoft have for using Silverlight instead of just letting people play the video files?
Oh, and regarding Bill's comments on it being a bad idea for Google to have two OS's (Chrome and Android)...Is Gates so out of touch that he thinks that win mobiles run Vista?
Isn't Windows Mobile still running a different kernel, even, then Vista? Chrome and Android are both going to be Linux, and who knows how much they'll share. How many different Windows operating systems are there, including all the different ones that use the same kernel? How many versions of Windows Server are there? How many of Windows on the desktop? Are there different versions of Windows Mobile?
Microsoft has a lot more than 2 operating systems.
But on the other hand, they usually do not donate anything close to being something that they would actually feel. Some do, but most don't.
Well I think Bill Gates, when you add up a lot of the things he's done, has donated more than what would be a rounding error. Still, you can look at all these things in the sense that it's no more generous for Gates to give away a few billion dollars than it is courageous for Superman to jump in front of a bullet. The hurt isn't large. It's not as though Gates is going to cease to live an extremely comfortable lifestyle. What's more, you could argue that something like this is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gates is screwing society out of billions of dollars through underhanded business tactics, only to give back a portion of the money through charitable donations.
You can argue those things, but on the other hand, it's not always worth looking a gift horse in the mouth. He's donating more than he's required to, and doing it of his own free will. May as well be pleased about that.
But I do have to say that Gates doesn't usually appear to be a stupid little upstart that got lucky or something like that.
I don't think many people believe that Gates is stupid and merely got lucky. The criticism more likely to be leveled at him is that he got where he is more through business acumen than through producing high-quality products.
Yeah, it's too bad that it's harder to find good apps in the App Store when there are 50,000 than when there were 5,000. But that only means you now have to work for your supper, like any one else who publishes anything from books to music to movies to software.
Still, I think Apple could do better organizing the apps. For one thing, their categories are too vague. For example, the IM clients are all in "social networking" along with tons of other crap.
Since Apple is keeping tight control of distribution, I think they're somewhat obligated to make it easier for people to find what they're looking for, for the sake of both developers and customers.
Well no, it won't be profitable to catch the carbon and put it under the rug, so that would be communist.
Instead, we'll want to subsidize companies which sequester carbon to the point where it's worth taking extra expense to produce CO2 just to get paid for sequestering it. If those companies are profitable, it will create jobs, and we'll all win!
Slashdot Mirror
That's why _real_ knowledgeable people switch to bit torrent or better, they don't stay near the likes of Gnutella and company.
First, Bittorrent didn't exist when I was knowledgeable about the pirating scene. Second, I assume that bittorrent downloads are still only as good as their trackers.
Windows update also won't let you hide Silverlight.
These are all very interesting examples, but I don't think it's unique to media. The dirty little truth that a lot of people don't like to admit because it sounds ant-capitalist is, we often don't really do our work for the money. Watch your boss and your coworkers and anyone else you can, and you'll find lots of examples where people essentially make decisions that are against their own economic best-interest in order to give themselves ego-boosts. Or inversely, you'll see people refuse to do things that will obviously benefit them if it means eating crow.
You can see it even more strongly in cases where the decision-maker doesn't directly benefit from the decisions. A salaried worker, for example, might often do things which will hurt the company's profits in order to boost his ego. What does he care, if he doesn't see the profits? On the other hand, I've seen salaried workers do a lot of work to boost company profits without economic benefit to themselves, essentially because it gave them bragging rights and pride in their work.
Now someone might very well argue that these examples don't show what I'm saying. You might argue that having prestige in the industry can give you more clout within the industry, allowing you to sign bigger actors, directors, musicians, etc. Making a prestige picture can be justified as an investment, allowing you to make more money down the line by attracting better people.
Still, in my professional experienced, the generally assumed idea that "companies always do what's most profitable" hasn't seemed to be reliable at all. An executive on an ego trip can make all sorts of unprofitable policies just to throw his own weight around.
I'm kind of disappointed that no one seemed to pick up on the Fight Club reference.
Well I definitely think that iTunes is convenient for most people, but not so much if you're trying to load music on your Palm Pre from your Linux desktop. It's pretty worry-free. It's fairly cheap, but I would definitely not call it "extremely cheap".
But overall, I don't doubt that Amazon and iTunes are cheap enough, convenient enough, and worry-free enough to have captured some of the market that would have otherwise gone to "free". If they dropped their prices and supported more platforms, more devices, then they could probably capture more of that market. Of course, the pricing isn't exactly within Apple's control.
Yeah, I don't pirate things, but back when I was knowledgeable about such things, pirating stuff was kind of a PITA. Not only did you have to keep up on where to go and what to look for (sometimes things were obscured in various ways), but often enough you'd download something only to find it wasn't what you really wanted. Like you might download a song only to find that it was malware or some other sound purposefully mislabeled as a prank. Or it might be a valid song, but the wrong song because some idiot mislabeled it by accident. Or it might be the right song, but for whatever reason it'd be crappy quality, and the tagging might be all screwed up. Even when you found a good source, they wouldn't always have what you wanted. Or they'd have 20 copies of the hit single from a CD, but not the whole CD.
It was just a headache, death by a thousand paper cuts. It certainly wasn't worth my time to bother, especially once I got a job and my time was worth more than the $0.99 to buy a song. Is it really much easier today?
What's the deal with MP3sparks.com? Is it another Russian site or something? Seems like either it's not legit or it's operating in a country with different ideas about copyright.
Right, that's what I was thinking. If it didn't work for Napster, why would it work for Kazaa? At the time Napster went legit, it was still pretty much *the* name of music downloads. It was to online music almost what Xerox is to photocopying.
Now? Napster may be making money, but they don't seem to be any kind of a market force. Any music store has to contend with the 900 pound gorilla in the room, which is iTunes. Fine, I know there are people here who think Apple and the iPod are overblown, but they are a huge player and we may as well acknowledge that. Besides iTunes, Amazon isn't exactly a lightweight. So how's Kazaa going to compete?
And it looks like their approach is a DRMed subscription service. Have DRMed subscription services been doing well? Has there been a recent surge in WMA DRM players, or has the iPod started supporting Microsoft's DRM? I can't imagine wanting to compete in that market.
Maybe we can make more money by selling them what they want instead of suing them?
Then again, maybe not. It may be that these companies have done some calculations and realized that their importance is dwindling in the new digital world, and the more they can drag their feet and stonewall, the longer they can keep their prices high and therefore keep their profits high.
Or maybe they really think they can get the government (lobbying the legislative branch and suing through the judicial) to keep their current business model going even though it doesn't make sense anymore. From what we've seen so far, it appears that they'd be right.
Just because there's probably a business model to be had in this Internet age from producing and selling music doesn't mean that it will be as profitable as the record companies currently are. Even if it would be, that doesn't mean that the record companies want to be responsible for figuring it out or put in a position where failure to "figure it out" means they go out of business. Most people don't want to have to work very hard and be very clever for their money. Most would prefer, given the choice, to sit back, do the same old thing, and watch the money roll in.
It's possible. "Extremely cheap, convenient, and worry-free" can beat "Free, hard to find, and worried-about-malware-and-getting-sued".
This seems extremely shady legally. You bought and paid for something
Well probably technically you didn't buy it. Generally when you "buy" online content, you're not really buying anything. You're paying a licensing fee, and the terms of the license include "we can pull the content and rescind your license whenever we want without an explanation."
Well obviously it's a joke.
But still, I find some of these attitudes strange and probably counter-productive. They talk like blue collar work shouldn't be respected, doesn't take any kind of intelligence or work ethic, etc. Then they want to decide which kids are good and which are bad, and then try to forbid the "bad kids" from growing up to be anything but a blue collar worker. And while they're at it, they want to humiliate all the "bad kids" to make sure they know they'll never be anything but a fry cook. Does all that really sound like a good idea?
And to what end? Sometimes I think it's just kids that got picked on trying to punish their ex-bullies rather then imagine an education system or societal order that will work. Blue collar work shouldn't be shameful. It's honest work that needs to be done. It still takes skill, attention, and hard work to do a good job.
Look, the people you are trying to punish are the people you depend on. They cook your meals, they haul your trash, they connect your calls, they drive your ambulances. They guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with them.
The bad kids need to be identified as early as possible, and shunted off into a different program where they're prepared for careers as janitors and burger-flippers
Great. Take a whole bunch of criminals, and give them keys to go into your office after hours, and have them prepare your food.
And obviously it's true. Me and my friends were all "good kids", but we did some seriously dumb and screwed up stuff. Why? Because boys talk big, even if they don't mean it, and even if they don't know what they're talking about. And once one of your friends starts talking big, you don't want to be the one who says "no".
I'm not sure how it works among little girls, but as a boy, you can never be the one who says, "no". You can't be the boy who's too worried about consequences to do something stupid. You'll be an outcast, because you'll be considered weak. A group of boys are typically only as good as the worst impulse that any one of them is willing to voice.
Yeah, people tend to talk as though it's fine to foster antisocial criminality and hopelessness in kids, because hey, we need people to work at McDonalds too! But think a little more about that-- do you think that solves the problem?
Don't all levels of all industries need good, hard, smart workers? Not all need the same sort of education and experience, but certainly every business benefits from not-having the employees steal from the till. All business benefit from having someone smart enough to work efficiently, to keep up with (or maybe even invent) new ways of doing things.
Does society in general benefit from having poorly-educated criminals? How many social and economic problems are helped by lower crime rates? We lose less money to theft and damage. We spend less money on law enforcement and jails. We produce more when everyone is employed and productive instead of in jail. And the obvious: we're all safer when crime rates go down.
I'm not claiming there's an easy answer, but it's certainly worth our trouble to try to educate all children, and to help them find a place in the world where they can be "productive members of society" (whatever that means).
honors students (such as myself) were placed in an 6th-grade English class with, well, the criminal class...It was a complete disaster.
Well sure, but part of the point I gathered from TFS (didn't RTFA) is that it doesn't really work to segregate out all the "bad kids" either, because what happens is those bad kids influence each other and the bad kids get worse.
we need to concentrate on making sure our best students get the best education. This should be a higher priority than trying to make scientists out of juvenile criminals and bullies. Society doesn't need, and will never get 100% genius-status for all students, anyway.
I would agree that we shouldn't be trying to make all the juvenile delinquents into scientists, but some of that might be because I don't think we should be trying to make all of anyone into scientists. I'd sooner say that there are a lot of jobs out there that need doing, and it'd be best if we could get honest, hard-working people doing all of those jobs.
But where I wouldn't agree is this tone that every kid with behavior problems is just useless and should be shuffled off and locked up. The ideal should be that we can find ways for every person to contribute to society. The ideal should be that we educate every student the best that we can. Sure, this might mean a little bit of triage in the education system, but if you write kids off early and treat them as though they're useless criminals, then don't be surprised when they grow up to be useless criminals.
Apple has explicitly done something to make my experience *worse*. They went much further than simply failing to "provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players." They went out of their way to harm users.
I'm usually a fan of Apple, but I have to agree that this seems like a bad move. What is really gained by purposefully breaking compatibility? I can understand not supporting alternatives, but going out of their way just to break existing compatibility seems petty. It's the sort of thing where I wonder if the increased lock-in is worth the associated bad PR.
If they're concerned about customer experience, then fine, fix it so iTunes recognizes that it's not an iPod, and throw up a warning the first time it syncs saying, "Warning: this is not really an iPod. We don't support this. Proceed at your own risk." Otherwise, provide an open spec and let other manufacturers use it. If the iPhone is really the best smartphone, then why fear the Pre?
On the other hand, I expected that sooner or later they'd change something and it would break interoperability with the Pre, even if inadvertently. I can't imagine that Palm didn't see it coming. Why didn't they just come up with a better solution from the start? If they're in favor of openness, why not throw their weight behind an open alternative to iTunes?
Well "Peter" is pretty much everyone who can afford a computer, and perhaps the future of many of those who can't, while "Paul" is some portion of those who can't afford a computer. You still might be OK with that, but it's not quite as awesome as what you said.
Well I wouldn't argue that he didn't benefit from luck and circumstances, but no one is going to reach that level of success while being extraordinarily unlucky. At the same time, he wasn't merely lucky, and most people recognize that.
But on the other hand, some supporters may want to take his success to be evidence of the value of Gates' work, which I don't think quite makes sense. That your actions have been successful is making money for yourself doesn't mean that your actions have been good for the rest of us.
Why the knee-jerk reactions to Silverlight?
What makes you think it's a knee-jerk reaction rather than a well reasoned reaction from years of experience dealing with Microsoft?
For most users, Silverlight doesn't provide any real benefits. The whole thing was invented, not to fill a need, but to push Microsoft's vendor lock-in.
Sure, they support OSX. For now. They also used to release IE for OSX, but they stopped updating it, letting it fall behind IE for Windows, and then killed it off. They also used to sell Outlook for OSX, before killing it and replacing it with a substandard version that didn't support Exchange servers. Their broadness of support only seems to last as long as it takes them to dominate that particular market, and then they drop support in order to drive everyone back to Windows.
So now, tell me, except for Microsoft putting up content like this on their own site and requiring Silverlight, what reason do I have to install the thing at all? What reason did Microsoft have for using Silverlight instead of just letting people play the video files?
Oh, and regarding Bill's comments on it being a bad idea for Google to have two OS's (Chrome and Android)...Is Gates so out of touch that he thinks that win mobiles run Vista?
Isn't Windows Mobile still running a different kernel, even, then Vista? Chrome and Android are both going to be Linux, and who knows how much they'll share. How many different Windows operating systems are there, including all the different ones that use the same kernel? How many versions of Windows Server are there? How many of Windows on the desktop? Are there different versions of Windows Mobile?
Microsoft has a lot more than 2 operating systems.
But on the other hand, they usually do not donate anything close to being something that they would actually feel. Some do, but most don't.
Well I think Bill Gates, when you add up a lot of the things he's done, has donated more than what would be a rounding error. Still, you can look at all these things in the sense that it's no more generous for Gates to give away a few billion dollars than it is courageous for Superman to jump in front of a bullet. The hurt isn't large. It's not as though Gates is going to cease to live an extremely comfortable lifestyle. What's more, you could argue that something like this is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gates is screwing society out of billions of dollars through underhanded business tactics, only to give back a portion of the money through charitable donations.
You can argue those things, but on the other hand, it's not always worth looking a gift horse in the mouth. He's donating more than he's required to, and doing it of his own free will. May as well be pleased about that.
But I do have to say that Gates doesn't usually appear to be a stupid little upstart that got lucky or something like that.
I don't think many people believe that Gates is stupid and merely got lucky. The criticism more likely to be leveled at him is that he got where he is more through business acumen than through producing high-quality products.
Yeah, it's too bad that it's harder to find good apps in the App Store when there are 50,000 than when there were 5,000. But that only means you now have to work for your supper, like any one else who publishes anything from books to music to movies to software.
Still, I think Apple could do better organizing the apps. For one thing, their categories are too vague. For example, the IM clients are all in "social networking" along with tons of other crap.
Since Apple is keeping tight control of distribution, I think they're somewhat obligated to make it easier for people to find what they're looking for, for the sake of both developers and customers.
Well no, it won't be profitable to catch the carbon and put it under the rug, so that would be communist.
Instead, we'll want to subsidize companies which sequester carbon to the point where it's worth taking extra expense to produce CO2 just to get paid for sequestering it. If those companies are profitable, it will create jobs, and we'll all win!