Well in fairness, there's nothing wrong with the hardware Apple offers, and it's not even that terribly overpriced. It's just-- like you said-- there's a hole in their lineup. It would be nice if they offered an expandable mid-range tower.
But then, part of the problem there is that they don't really care to let people expand. That's my theory. It's not so much that they want to force you to buy a new machine, but if you can upgrade your sound card and video card, suddenly Apple has to support an endless number of various configurations.
That's fine when it's a pro-level machine and the customer is paying that premium anyway, and the expansion cards are pro-level hardware from manufacturers working directly with Apple. But I don't think Apple particularly wants to have every minor hardware company releasing bargain-bin video cards which Apple will then be forced to support.
Well surely people aren't generally disposed to buy products for which they can't get official support, and those who are disposed to do so would probably be just as happy to build their own systems from parts anyway. So Psystar was already working in the niche market of "people who want to run OSX, have no problem being unsupported by Apple, but don't want to put together their own hackintosh."
Once they're in that market, they still have to provide a good quality computer at a good price. I never saw a Psystar computer in person, but I read a review that said seemed cheap and were really loud.
So when you put it all together, I don't know what the precise causes were, but I'm not at all surprised that Psystar isn't doing well enough financially to hold up to an all-out legal battle with Apple.
Well it depends, doesn't it? Even if they only have $5K in debt, but have practically no income, can't get credit, and have no assets to speak of, then they're bound to go belly-up sooner or later. It's really a question of when the bank turns off the credit, and this credit crunch isn't really over.
Well more to the point, I don't think the digital/analog thing should really matter very much. People make a bit deal about, "But I don't like digital things! I want polaroid cameras and vinyl records! Having old technology makes me awesome!"
But whatever. Lots of polaroid cameras were kind of shitty and lots of the pictures came out badly. The only real advantage was that you could have a physical copy of the photo pretty much immediately. Most of the time, you didn't really need that, but it was fun and occasionally handy.
These days, you can get very small cameras and very small portable printers. If you want to replace the polaroid camera, you just need to figure out how to mount the portable printer on the digital camera, and make the whole package as small and light-weight and fast-printing as a polaroid. But then, that's probably still a niche market, because most people are just as happy to not have to carry around a small inkjet printer attached to their camera.
Anyway, I think it's mostly that people like the nostalgia of the big white boarder on the bottom, scribbled on with a sharpie pen while waiting for the picture to fade into being. Give it a couple decades, and it will be like people who like the nostalgia of monocles and tuxedos with tails.
Well honestly, I'd say that both you and your sister are just a little bit off-point. It's not at all uncommon for hard drives to die within a span of 5 years. The problem is that it's not at all predictable when your particular hard drive will die. If you have thousands of hard drives, you might be able to calculate the failure rate that you're experiencing, but any given hard drive might last for a year or for a decade.
But because of the unpredictability, you generally don't replace hard drives on a regular cycle. Some large businesses do have plans for rotating out hard drives in mission-critical servers, but generally you just keep good backups and wait for the thing to die.
Well, also, he's complaining that customers want it when they want it, how they want it, etc. or else they won't buy it. Well... yeah. That's right. That's kind of how customers are. You know that saying "the customer is always right"? That applies to you too.
And it's not as though customers are asking for ridiculous things, either. At least, I'm not. I want everything generally available on the online store of my choice-- I don't want to have to go hunting stuff down because you can't get your act together. I want it cheap, I want it high-quality, I want it now, and I want it without DRM. I can live with DRM is I'm "renting", but not if I'm "buying".
Well if you want to get that far into the car analogy, let's assume that the only reason he's selling cars is that we (the people) have granted him an exclusive license to sell cars, and we did this expressly for the purpose of encouraging the progress of car manufacturing. And if we (the people) ever decided to stop granting that license, it would mean free cars for everyone, but reduce the incentive to produce new car models.
Yeah, but we're not talking about murder here. He's complaining that consumers want the products on fair terms, and this guy is basically complaining, "the free market is a chaos which doesn't allow us to guarantee that we get to sell whatever products we want on the terms we want them."
The restraint we're talking about here isn't like, "You can say whatever you want, just so long as you don't kill me." It's more like, "You can have the car in any color you like, just so long as you like black."
Yeah, I think that's more or less true. At one of my previous jobs, I had a guy try to imply that I didn't deserve my pay because I "wasn't doing much". When I asked him what I should be doing, he said, "It's just that you have a really easy job. The IT guy at my last job had it much harder. He was always running around, fixing things. You just sit at your desk because nothing ever breaks."
I can't remember now, but I think I might have done a literal facepalm right then. I said something like, "Has it occurred to you that, if you think none of our IT stuff ever breaks, I must be doing a good job? If the IT stuff at your last job kept breaking all the time, he was doing a worse job than me?"
I'm not sure we'll actually run out of work to do, but either way you raise a good point. What tends to happen these days is that, when a job becomes obsolete, we find a way to protect that job because we're worried about the economic fallout.
But of course increased efficiency is good for the economy, and having loads of people spinning their wheels going work that doesn't really need to be done isn't so good.
It's not even a question of IQ. I went to college, and I'll tell you that there were a lot of people there who were dumber than some carpenters I've met.
We need good mechanics and carpenters and plumbers. Ideally we'd want those people to be smart and educated too. Education isn't just vocational. It can improve a person in a myriad of ways, which in turn is a benefit to the society in which that person lives.
In my view, the problem isn't in our attempts to educate people. Part of the problem is that we're schizophrenic about our views on education, refusing to make up our mind whether we're trying to provide education or vocational training. We treat good education like a privilege to be denied from the undeserving, but the poor and uneducated are the ones who would benefit most from it. We think it should be lowly and cheap to build things, and then we're surprised when things come out poorly built.
Yeah, you can't really say Frasier didn't have a good run. Not only did the show have a nice long run, but the character was on Cheers for several years before that, which has to make the character one of the longest-running in TV history.
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.
So the loss of >40,000 lives per year and >$230,000,000,000. I never thought of that before, but since train systems are generally safer than cars, I wonder how that $230bn should be figured into costs when talking about public transportation costs.
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but that's one that gets to me.
Worried about drunk-driving? Don't pay any attention to the fact that we're putting morons into dangerous machinery and encouraging them to be reckless (may as well be giving jetpacks to monkeys) and that there are tons of sober-driving deaths every year, too. Let's demonize alcohol instead. Meanwhile cities like DC keep the bars open until 2am and shut down public transportation at 11pm or something. What do they expect?
Everyone is so worried about terrorism, alcohol, marijuana, guns, etc-- but not cars. Driving is considered a god-given right, and any kind of planning that would make it unnecessary to drive (proper city planning and public transportation) are considered evil and communist. But we'll happily give up all our other rights because we're afraid of terrorism. How many American civilian deaths have there been as a result of terrorism since the advent of the car? And how many car-related deaths? I bet they're not even close, even if you disregard drunk driving and all the health problems that are made worse by car-related air pollution.
And never mind that it's our need for oil along with the "war on drugs" that funds these terrorists in the first place. Let's keep giving them billions of dollars and then spending billions of dollars to fight them in bloody wars.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "failed". There were some cool/interesting things about OLPC, but they couldn't get the price down as low as they wanted, and from what I hear they had various political issues (including Microsoft trying to get Windows onto them). That's not to say they had no effect, or that some of what they developed won't make it into other things.
Not necessarily. You might say that it "works extremely well" in that the ligatures are rendered well with no complications. How a change in software effects a change in professional workflow is a pretty complicated thing.
Whether it works isn't the only consideration. You also have to look into how it works, and what it means for the workflow of the people who use these tools. Will it be more or less work for the people who use TeX extensively? Given the changes in workflow and any performance issues, will it take more time for people to complete a task, or less?
That's good advice so long as they didn't come to him and say, "We don't know what to get, you're our IT guy, so you tell us." As an IT guy, it's worth taking your users' preferences into account, but it's not always the sole determining factor.
Besides, it sounds like he's talking about email, word processing, web browsing, etc. Anything can do that. For traveling, you're going to want something small, light, and with good battery life. Traveling around the world with a film crew, I wouldn't be surprised if something got lost, broken, or stolen, so I'd also be looking for something relatively cheap and replaceable. From those criteria, I'd be at least considering netbooks, and then figuring out a scheme to keep important documents backed up online.
Whatever it is, I'd try to standardize (get all the same model) and set the software up so that they're nearly interchangeable. That will make some things easier, but still keep track of who's responsible for which computer. Of course, you may find that someone needs a different model for some reason, so be flexible there, especially if it's your boss.
I would say I've successfully rebooted my computer when it comes back up and everything looks like it's working. The work I do on my computer once it's back up may not be worth anything, but it would have still rebooted successfully.
Well I just think it's silly to provide a data network and then complain that your customers are using it too much. What if your cable company complained you were watching too much TV? Or your landlord complained that you were in your apartment too much?
If you can't provide the service, then get out of that business and leave it to someone who can. But no, that's not the problem. They're looking for a PR excuse to raise prices, or maybe a government bailout.
But you're right, the whole complaint is made that much more ridiculous by the fact that most of their traffic is normal web traffic. It's not P2P filesharing or VOIP. Just web traffic.
The fun (or not so fun, IMO) part of our profession is that you can BS anyone into believing anything, as long as you stay ahead just an inch.
I used to work with a guy who, while working help desk, would convince people that it helped to rub their computers. They'd call with some problem, and he'd say, "Uh huh, ok. Have you tried rebooting it yet? Yes. Ok. Have you tried rubbing it?" If they asked why, he had some answer about how the friction would add a little heat to help things work, or else something about discharging static electricity. Really, he just liked the idea of someone rubbing their computer case to try to get it to work.
Yeah, it's not so much the case anymore, but I remember in the early 90s trying to explain to lots of different people that the monitor was not the computer. Even though you can see representations of the files on the monitor, that's not where the files are. Even though moving your mouse causes the pointer to move on the monitor, the monitor doesn't know where your mouse is.
There's a spacial disconnect going on, a certain level of abstraction, and it has to be learned. It makes sense, in a lot of ways, to assume that the activity is happening in the monitor, since you see it happening there.
But I've known people who understood all that and still called the computer a "hard drive" because they didn't know what it should be called. I've also heard people call it a CPU, which is more correct, but still a bit confusing. They don't want to call it the computer because, in their minds, the whole thing is the computer.
Sure, whatever. The question is, will it look good on a given device. Without knowing the display capabilities of the device and the rendering capabilities of the browser running on the device, there's no way of knowing.
So if they want to sell subscriptions to Kindle (or something like it), they should probably standardize on a stricter standard than normal HTML.
Well, this is going off topic a bit, but apparently Coolio was mad because he took the lyrics of the song fairly seriously. He had intended for it to sort of raise awareness of certain kinds of social problems, and so he resented it being turned into a joke.
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Well in fairness, there's nothing wrong with the hardware Apple offers, and it's not even that terribly overpriced. It's just-- like you said-- there's a hole in their lineup. It would be nice if they offered an expandable mid-range tower.
But then, part of the problem there is that they don't really care to let people expand. That's my theory. It's not so much that they want to force you to buy a new machine, but if you can upgrade your sound card and video card, suddenly Apple has to support an endless number of various configurations.
That's fine when it's a pro-level machine and the customer is paying that premium anyway, and the expansion cards are pro-level hardware from manufacturers working directly with Apple. But I don't think Apple particularly wants to have every minor hardware company releasing bargain-bin video cards which Apple will then be forced to support.
Well surely people aren't generally disposed to buy products for which they can't get official support, and those who are disposed to do so would probably be just as happy to build their own systems from parts anyway. So Psystar was already working in the niche market of "people who want to run OSX, have no problem being unsupported by Apple, but don't want to put together their own hackintosh."
Once they're in that market, they still have to provide a good quality computer at a good price. I never saw a Psystar computer in person, but I read a review that said seemed cheap and were really loud.
So when you put it all together, I don't know what the precise causes were, but I'm not at all surprised that Psystar isn't doing well enough financially to hold up to an all-out legal battle with Apple.
Well it depends, doesn't it? Even if they only have $5K in debt, but have practically no income, can't get credit, and have no assets to speak of, then they're bound to go belly-up sooner or later. It's really a question of when the bank turns off the credit, and this credit crunch isn't really over.
Well more to the point, I don't think the digital/analog thing should really matter very much. People make a bit deal about, "But I don't like digital things! I want polaroid cameras and vinyl records! Having old technology makes me awesome!"
But whatever. Lots of polaroid cameras were kind of shitty and lots of the pictures came out badly. The only real advantage was that you could have a physical copy of the photo pretty much immediately. Most of the time, you didn't really need that, but it was fun and occasionally handy.
These days, you can get very small cameras and very small portable printers. If you want to replace the polaroid camera, you just need to figure out how to mount the portable printer on the digital camera, and make the whole package as small and light-weight and fast-printing as a polaroid. But then, that's probably still a niche market, because most people are just as happy to not have to carry around a small inkjet printer attached to their camera.
Anyway, I think it's mostly that people like the nostalgia of the big white boarder on the bottom, scribbled on with a sharpie pen while waiting for the picture to fade into being. Give it a couple decades, and it will be like people who like the nostalgia of monocles and tuxedos with tails.
Well, yeah. I don't use ZFS, but I use RAID 10 or RAID 50 to mitigate the chances of hard drive failure. Still, I keep good backups.
Well honestly, I'd say that both you and your sister are just a little bit off-point. It's not at all uncommon for hard drives to die within a span of 5 years. The problem is that it's not at all predictable when your particular hard drive will die. If you have thousands of hard drives, you might be able to calculate the failure rate that you're experiencing, but any given hard drive might last for a year or for a decade.
But because of the unpredictability, you generally don't replace hard drives on a regular cycle. Some large businesses do have plans for rotating out hard drives in mission-critical servers, but generally you just keep good backups and wait for the thing to die.
Well, also, he's complaining that customers want it when they want it, how they want it, etc. or else they won't buy it. Well... yeah. That's right. That's kind of how customers are. You know that saying "the customer is always right"? That applies to you too.
And it's not as though customers are asking for ridiculous things, either. At least, I'm not. I want everything generally available on the online store of my choice-- I don't want to have to go hunting stuff down because you can't get your act together. I want it cheap, I want it high-quality, I want it now, and I want it without DRM. I can live with DRM is I'm "renting", but not if I'm "buying".
Well if you want to get that far into the car analogy, let's assume that the only reason he's selling cars is that we (the people) have granted him an exclusive license to sell cars, and we did this expressly for the purpose of encouraging the progress of car manufacturing. And if we (the people) ever decided to stop granting that license, it would mean free cars for everyone, but reduce the incentive to produce new car models.
Or something...
Yeah, but we're not talking about murder here. He's complaining that consumers want the products on fair terms, and this guy is basically complaining, "the free market is a chaos which doesn't allow us to guarantee that we get to sell whatever products we want on the terms we want them."
The restraint we're talking about here isn't like, "You can say whatever you want, just so long as you don't kill me." It's more like, "You can have the car in any color you like, just so long as you like black."
Yeah, I think that's more or less true. At one of my previous jobs, I had a guy try to imply that I didn't deserve my pay because I "wasn't doing much". When I asked him what I should be doing, he said, "It's just that you have a really easy job. The IT guy at my last job had it much harder. He was always running around, fixing things. You just sit at your desk because nothing ever breaks."
I can't remember now, but I think I might have done a literal facepalm right then. I said something like, "Has it occurred to you that, if you think none of our IT stuff ever breaks, I must be doing a good job? If the IT stuff at your last job kept breaking all the time, he was doing a worse job than me?"
I'm not sure we'll actually run out of work to do, but either way you raise a good point. What tends to happen these days is that, when a job becomes obsolete, we find a way to protect that job because we're worried about the economic fallout.
But of course increased efficiency is good for the economy, and having loads of people spinning their wheels going work that doesn't really need to be done isn't so good.
It's not even a question of IQ. I went to college, and I'll tell you that there were a lot of people there who were dumber than some carpenters I've met.
We need good mechanics and carpenters and plumbers. Ideally we'd want those people to be smart and educated too. Education isn't just vocational. It can improve a person in a myriad of ways, which in turn is a benefit to the society in which that person lives.
In my view, the problem isn't in our attempts to educate people. Part of the problem is that we're schizophrenic about our views on education, refusing to make up our mind whether we're trying to provide education or vocational training. We treat good education like a privilege to be denied from the undeserving, but the poor and uneducated are the ones who would benefit most from it. We think it should be lowly and cheap to build things, and then we're surprised when things come out poorly built.
Yeah, you can't really say Frasier didn't have a good run. Not only did the show have a nice long run, but the character was on Cheers for several years before that, which has to make the character one of the longest-running in TV history.
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.
So the loss of >40,000 lives per year and >$230,000,000,000. I never thought of that before, but since train systems are generally safer than cars, I wonder how that $230bn should be figured into costs when talking about public transportation costs.
But I'm way off topic...
Traffic deaths?
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but that's one that gets to me.
Worried about drunk-driving? Don't pay any attention to the fact that we're putting morons into dangerous machinery and encouraging them to be reckless (may as well be giving jetpacks to monkeys) and that there are tons of sober-driving deaths every year, too. Let's demonize alcohol instead. Meanwhile cities like DC keep the bars open until 2am and shut down public transportation at 11pm or something. What do they expect?
Everyone is so worried about terrorism, alcohol, marijuana, guns, etc-- but not cars. Driving is considered a god-given right, and any kind of planning that would make it unnecessary to drive (proper city planning and public transportation) are considered evil and communist. But we'll happily give up all our other rights because we're afraid of terrorism. How many American civilian deaths have there been as a result of terrorism since the advent of the car? And how many car-related deaths? I bet they're not even close, even if you disregard drunk driving and all the health problems that are made worse by car-related air pollution.
And never mind that it's our need for oil along with the "war on drugs" that funds these terrorists in the first place. Let's keep giving them billions of dollars and then spending billions of dollars to fight them in bloody wars.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with us.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "failed". There were some cool/interesting things about OLPC, but they couldn't get the price down as low as they wanted, and from what I hear they had various political issues (including Microsoft trying to get Windows onto them). That's not to say they had no effect, or that some of what they developed won't make it into other things.
Not necessarily. You might say that it "works extremely well" in that the ligatures are rendered well with no complications. How a change in software effects a change in professional workflow is a pretty complicated thing.
Whether it works isn't the only consideration. You also have to look into how it works, and what it means for the workflow of the people who use these tools. Will it be more or less work for the people who use TeX extensively? Given the changes in workflow and any performance issues, will it take more time for people to complete a task, or less?
That's good advice so long as they didn't come to him and say, "We don't know what to get, you're our IT guy, so you tell us." As an IT guy, it's worth taking your users' preferences into account, but it's not always the sole determining factor.
Besides, it sounds like he's talking about email, word processing, web browsing, etc. Anything can do that. For traveling, you're going to want something small, light, and with good battery life. Traveling around the world with a film crew, I wouldn't be surprised if something got lost, broken, or stolen, so I'd also be looking for something relatively cheap and replaceable. From those criteria, I'd be at least considering netbooks, and then figuring out a scheme to keep important documents backed up online.
Whatever it is, I'd try to standardize (get all the same model) and set the software up so that they're nearly interchangeable. That will make some things easier, but still keep track of who's responsible for which computer. Of course, you may find that someone needs a different model for some reason, so be flexible there, especially if it's your boss.
I would say I've successfully rebooted my computer when it comes back up and everything looks like it's working. The work I do on my computer once it's back up may not be worth anything, but it would have still rebooted successfully.
Well I just think it's silly to provide a data network and then complain that your customers are using it too much. What if your cable company complained you were watching too much TV? Or your landlord complained that you were in your apartment too much?
If you can't provide the service, then get out of that business and leave it to someone who can. But no, that's not the problem. They're looking for a PR excuse to raise prices, or maybe a government bailout.
But you're right, the whole complaint is made that much more ridiculous by the fact that most of their traffic is normal web traffic. It's not P2P filesharing or VOIP. Just web traffic.
The fun (or not so fun, IMO) part of our profession is that you can BS anyone into believing anything, as long as you stay ahead just an inch.
I used to work with a guy who, while working help desk, would convince people that it helped to rub their computers. They'd call with some problem, and he'd say, "Uh huh, ok. Have you tried rebooting it yet? Yes. Ok. Have you tried rubbing it?" If they asked why, he had some answer about how the friction would add a little heat to help things work, or else something about discharging static electricity. Really, he just liked the idea of someone rubbing their computer case to try to get it to work.
Yeah, it's not so much the case anymore, but I remember in the early 90s trying to explain to lots of different people that the monitor was not the computer. Even though you can see representations of the files on the monitor, that's not where the files are. Even though moving your mouse causes the pointer to move on the monitor, the monitor doesn't know where your mouse is.
There's a spacial disconnect going on, a certain level of abstraction, and it has to be learned. It makes sense, in a lot of ways, to assume that the activity is happening in the monitor, since you see it happening there.
But I've known people who understood all that and still called the computer a "hard drive" because they didn't know what it should be called. I've also heard people call it a CPU, which is more correct, but still a bit confusing. They don't want to call it the computer because, in their minds, the whole thing is the computer.
Every computer can already render it.
Sure, whatever. The question is, will it look good on a given device. Without knowing the display capabilities of the device and the rendering capabilities of the browser running on the device, there's no way of knowing.
So if they want to sell subscriptions to Kindle (or something like it), they should probably standardize on a stricter standard than normal HTML.
Well, this is going off topic a bit, but apparently Coolio was mad because he took the lyrics of the song fairly seriously. He had intended for it to sort of raise awareness of certain kinds of social problems, and so he resented it being turned into a joke.