But then the price of the eBook would be about 1/16th the price of a paperback. Publishers can't have that, because then they'd have no PROFITS! with which to buy more books/publish (read, give to shareholders)
Paperbacks are cheap to produce - this site (http://michaelhyatt.com/why-do-ebooks-cost-so-much.html) says production and distribution accounts for 12% of the price. Even if he is cherrypicking data and it is 25%, you aren't going to see huge price breaks.
And pricing doesn't have to be reflective of costs. I might pay more for an ebook based on the fact that I can start reading it right now, vs. getting it shipped or going to a store. Or I might pay more because I have bad eyesight and like the fact that I can make the type bigger.
The rule for rational actors is that they set the price so as to maximize their total profit - production costs only enter into it as a constraint upon profitability.
One time bought I book on my Kindle that I had sitting on my bookshelf, just because I wanted to reread it before starting on the sequel, and didn't want to carry the physical hardcover with me on a trip.
So I paid for the extra copy purely for my convenience. Given a choice between a physical book and an ebook at the same price, in most cases I will buy the ebook, because that is the format I prefer.
There's not magic in being younger. To do anything more substantial that basic word processing and web browsing you still need a combination of mindset and training whether you're 15, 25, or 65. The basics are somewhat easier if you've been around computers all your life, but beyond that I don't think it matters much.
I think there is more to it than that. It is true that a child's brain is wired differently than an adults. Very young children can learn multiple languages simultaneously and speak them all like a native, something that is very difficult for adults. Not sure how far into adolescence/adulthood those physiological changes persist, but it is at least a factor in early childhood development. And from a psychological perspective, growing up with something means you take it for granted in a way that is different from acquiring something later in life.
I think the reason that the age of "digital native" gets pushed back is that major changes keep happening. The PC revolution and everyone having a computer was a profound shift, but the internet era is really a second shift. And social media layered on top of the internet, combined with ubiquitous mobile devices comprise a third shift.
We are seeing behaviors and attitudes out of younger people which are not mirrored in older generations, and I don't think it is just an age thing. Take the paranoia over oversharing on Facebook or Flickr, or the collective hand-wringing about sexting. Younger people have a far looser conception of public/private life, and I think much of that comes from being surrounded by social media all the time.
Complex applications require that people know how to use them, and it takes time and investment for people to get trained.An growing expert user base is the best advertising that you can get. Having your SW out there, in the hands of students and young people trying to figure out how to use it helps it remain relevant as they go to work for companies that end up purchasing the SW.
IMO, more than open source and the Internet and hosting (paradigm shift), this is what is actually killing off Microsoft. It used to frown on piracy, and fight it mostly to scare up business that could afford to pay, but more or less allowed for the general population, since ensured that new users would have an easier time finding its SW, and that would encourage them to remain on the Windows platform. ).
So you mean that MS should offer steeply discounted copies of Windows and Office, like a Student and Teacher Edition, or Family Pack licenses? Things that are cheap for residential use but not licensed for commercial use?
OK, so you hate people who've risked money making investments. We get that. But do you really think everyone else is so stupid to think you're saying anything of substance? Roughly 50% of the population earns money below the rate that the Congress has set as meaning they owe incomes taxes, and many of them receive "refunds" on money they don't even pay. They don't pay income taxes, they pay negative income taxes. A small number of rich people pay the vast majority of the country's income taxes, and middle class people pay the bits that are left over. The other half of people pay none. Of course you know that, and you're a troll.
That 50% figure is dramatically misleading. First, it includes things like high school and college students who work part time and earn a pittance. And it also includes retirees who are not in the workforce. You can argue that even those people should pay income taxes, but the perception of a permanent 50% underclass that never pays taxes is absurd. Most taxpayers will not pay income taxes at both the start of their career and after retirement. I can't find the cite now, but I remember reading that simple demographics accounts for roughly 35% of the people who pay no income taxes.
And lets not forget that for many people, payroll taxes are a bigger bite than income taxes - 7.4% starting on the first dollar you make, with no exemption or deductions. For rich people the payroll tax is not a significant factor, since social security taxes stop after $109K.
The one I get tripped up on the most is renaming a folder. I want to rename, so is it rn? No it's mv... but I'm not moving it so that's confusing.
You are moving the file to a new location, what once was/usr/bin/foo.ext is moved to/usr/bin/fubar.extension
And yet, 99% of the world would say - "I am not moving it, it is still in/user/bin."
The common conception is that a file has name (foo.ext), and a location (/usr/bin). With the notion of recycle/trash, nowadays you don't delete anything, you just rename it to the trash. A concept which doesn't bother us, but will seem completely strange to most people.
For most people, the productivity bottleneck isn't the time spent moving hands to and from the keyboard; it's having to memorize 1000 commands to use the damn thing.
You could say the same thing about the English language. If complexity was a barrier, we'd all be pointing and grunting. But it turns out that the human brain has evolved for language, because language is empowering. Learing shell syntax is similarly empowering.
But the human brain learns languages astonishingly well at an early age, and only with great difficulty later on. If you want to start teaching people shell scripts in the crib perhaps it will all be intuitive, but otherwise it is not a fair comparison. And I say that as someone who grew up in the command line era, and still uses one for repetitive tasks. But knowing shell syntax is not a merit badge, nor the secret handshake of a special club. It is a sign of someone who has learned the arcana of my profession because that has value to me. If you don't use a computer that intensively, I don't know why you should need to know a command line.
It is not at all uncommon to see a defense team put forth an argument like: I didn't kill her. And even if I did, it was self defense. And even if it wasn't, there were extenuating circumstances. And even if there weren't, it was a crime of passion. And if not, I'm a great guy and deserve to be convicted under a lesser crime! (They don't quite phrase it that way of course, but that is the essence of the argument.)
IANAL, but it seems to me that there is a difference between a defense using that strategy, and a plaintiff. The defense is trying to poke holes in the plaintiff's argument. So if the plaintiff accuses the defendant of something that is factually untrue, there might be several mutually contradictory things that can all falsify their argument. "I wasn't even home at the time you specified as the time of death. But even if I had been home, the security system shows that she didn't arrive until 3 hours after you said I killed her. And the security system shows her leaving 2 hours after that, so she isn't even dead".
But it seems to me that the plaintiff has to make a coherent argument, and have all of its parts accepted
If you RTFA, you will see that several of the justices wanted to decide this on the basis of expectation of privacy, and rule that tracking someone via GPS is akin to a search, even if no physical trespass occurred. Given how easy this form of search is becoming, I suspect that this will be an active area of the law in coming years. A science fiction novel I read referred to this as "ubiquitous surveillance", which I think is a depressingly descriptive term.
For centuries, actions taken in public were assumed to be public, but with the obvious caveat that the police could not monitor all actions that take place in public, so you had a limited form of privacy just due to the effort of following you around to monitor your public activities. But now that cost barrier is getting lower everyday, making that expectation of anonymity less valid.
Or maybe because they don't have a large employee base in Silicon Valley?
Certainly MS will pay to relocate desirable employees, but moving to Seattle means that the poaching back and forth of ordinary employees is less likely.
Doesn't mean they aren't there. FAT is still pervasive enough that you can't get away from 8.3. All you have to do is look at Movie and Music/Sound files, they all are.m4v and.mp3 and.wma and so on.
The FAT file system has supported long file names since the introduction of Windows 95. As another poster points out, the set of all long file names includes those named in 8.3 formats, and there is nothing in the file system that prevents those files from being used. What is presumably being dropped is the ability to generate an 8.3 alias for every file.
While the OP is clearly a shill, your refutations ring hollow.
Where did this widespread belief the Microsoft pays shills to defend its honor on/. come from? Did everyone crank their tinfoil hats up to 11 or something?
I don't think Slashdot is influential enough to have any impact on Microsoft's business, and as a practical matter, if there is a cadre of professional shills, you don't think somebody would spill the beans? How big a conspiracy is needed?
PHB's don't see design and development as needing different skillets, they just see two jobs that can be consolidated into one. If you have a programmer who does a B+ job programming and a C- job on design, eliminate the design, produce a C+ product, and then go tell your C*O you eliminated positions without impacting productivity.
Or perhaps you have a total team of 4 people, and your workload requires about 5 full time programmers and a part time UI designer. So you can have 3 programmers and one part time UI designer (because you can't get head count authorization for five people, even if 2 are part time), or you can hire 4 developers, including one who has at least some interest in UI work.
If you were the PHB, and had budget and HR restrictions to deal with, and more work than people to do it, what mix would you hire?
Many companies survive the complete evaporation of their original business model just fine. Did you know Berkshire Hathaway was originally a textile company?
Any company with the resources Kodak once had can survive any possible change in their market, regardless of their business model, as long as they aren't afraid to change. Companies fail when they're run by incompetent management, period.
If only it were that simple. The big problem is deciding what to change into. A company in a declining market may have a very profitable, cash cow business. They can use that money to fund the search for a new business model. But a company with a huge investment/infrastructure/employee base in business X may not even recognize an opportunity in business Y, and even with the cash available, may not be a competent competitor in business Y even if they decide to pursue it.
Should Kodak have gone into search engines in competition with Google? Or closer to home, given their association with the movies, maybe create a special effects studio? Or maybe create software to edit images like Photoshop? Is there any reason to think that they would have succeeded at any of those ventures?
Having cash and recognition that your business is declining is not enough. The real rub is finding something else that you can succeed at. And I don't think there is any obvious way to go about that.
It seems to me that if an independent research lab can invent the building blocks of the modern PC and not profit from it, than clearly a large corporation with limitless resources and pressured by a competitive market can innovate without the need of a patent system.
No corporation has limitless resources. Even behemoths like Google or MS or Apple have pressures to limit spending. What corps with big cash reserves can do is invest in a large number of areas, knowing that most of them will never payoff, looking for the big winner.
The economic cost of the patent system is higher than the value it delivers through innovation: XP was able to deliver phenomenal results with limited compensation.
One one hand profitable patents are not necessary for innovation as explained above, and on the other hand patents are frequently harmful to innovation: patent trolls, preventing the competition from building on your invention etc.
Without patent protection the bar for finding the "big winner" is substantially higher, and therefore the appetite for corporate research arms like PARC or Bell Labs will be significantly lower.
Instead of ramming a new GUI down our throats why don't the designers do something radical. When upgrading to a newer version offer the option to continue using the older ("classic") version of a GUI. Newbies will be happy because of all the new eye candy and experienced users can continue using a computer in the way they are used to. Later on, if the new way of doing things isn't just the latest fad and really is better the older users will surely migrate to a new GUI. It's the test of time.
This is actually fairly common (going all the way back to Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts in early versions of Excel). However, there are several disadvantages/costs to doing so:
1. Time to implement and code complexity - now you are maintaining 2 different GUIs, you have to test 2, you have to document 2. Costs quite a bit more. And just like politicians can ignore the extreme wing of their own party, the people who care passionately about your existing UI are the ones least likely to move to a competitor. 2. Incompatibility with new features. This doesn't happen all the time by any means, but sometimes a new GUI or interface metaphor comes about because new features aren't a good fit for how you did things before. I'm talking about a radical departure like adding 3D to a 2D drawing app - all sorts of things have to change to accommodate that. 3. Where does it end? If MS supports the Windows "classic" theme, at what point does it have to support the "Windows 95 classic", "XP Classic", "Win 7 Classic", "Metro Classic", etc? How many layers of crufty old code have to coexist so that people who have been doing the same things for 20 years don't have to change?
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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There's also the notion that you can't put a price tag on national security--we should spend whatever it costs to meet our defense objectives, no matter how expensive and regardless of the actual return we get.
And yet many of those same people gloat how the Reagan buildup of the 80s pushed the Soviets over the edge and ruined their economy, to the point where the USSR fell apart.
So apparently there is a point where you are spending too much.
To your second point, I was surprised to read recently that personnel costs - wages, retirement, and health care, are a very large and rising part of the Pentagon budget, to the point where they are starting to resist congressional calls for additional benefits to the troops, since they result in actuarial disasters down the road.
This assumes the user is running software without memory leaks. You want to play some games on your computer(something most Mac and Linux users just don't do), you have to expect memory leaks, and the idea of sleep/hibernation to let the machine run for months at a time without a full shutdown/restart just doesn't work.
I will admit that there are ways that system resources can be consumed and leaked, but in general it is hard for a user mode process to leak anything past process termination. Microsoft took that lesson to heart starting back in Win 95, and the system is very aggressive about keeping track of what process allocated what, and cleaning it all up when the process terminates. I play a lot of games, and and I can't think of the last time I had to do a reboot to address something like memory allocation or file handles. Years ago I used to see GDI objects being consumed (the telltale symptom was things reverting to system font when a new font couldn't be created), but even that seems pretty much gone.
I think the reason is that they do have much in common, and a large overlap in readers.
Compared to just about any other genre of literature, science fiction and fantasy present an author a blank slate, and let them construct any setting, scenario and backstory they want. Want to explore what relationships would be like in a world where peoples gender changes with the seasons? Go for it. Want to examine what happens to humans when omnipotent Gods choose to be terrifyingly real? Have at it.
Those kind of fundamentally changed worlds can't happen in any other genre, but are the basis of much science fiction and fantasy.
Actually I think he means that the publishers provide editors and copy-editors to make sure you spelled your main character's name the same way through the whole book. Any reasonable and honest author will tell you that the editing (and fact checking for books where they are appropriate) services provided by publishers are useful and valuable.
Amen. Ever flip through a 10 page dissertation on starting a fire, or aiming a torpedo, or any other historical/technical minutiae that an author was fascinated by but which bored you to tears? I have, and frequently it is something that was self published (which *may* mean no editor), or something where the author was so powerful (looking at you Tom Clancy) that he didn't have to listen to the editor anymore. Editors make books better. Marketing sells more books. Publishers provide both editors and (hopefully) marketing. I'm no fan of the publishers, but they do add value in most cases.
The other funny part, is true to form, the amazon web page has the tired and stereotypical "woman reading at the beach" photo. Its hard to predict, but if there's one thing this era will be laughed at for, it MIGHT be the "we're gonna get rich by only selling e-readers to women at the beach".
Actually, I think that is one of the key differentiators of an e-ink device compared to and LCD tablet device - one works perfectly in direct sun, and the other works fine in a darkened room.
I love my Kindle for reading in general, but originally I bought it for vacation trips - all the books I need for a beach vacation in a slim device that doesn't bulk up my luggage. And I can read it while sitting on the beach. So I think the reading on the beach picture is a good advertising image for them. Much like a backlit reader might show someone reading in bed while their spouse sleeps.
"Is windows only. Python is a cross-platform language. A non-cross-platform IDE for Python makes as much sense as having a solar-cell operated night-vision camera. FAIL."
And yet, I find that all of the Python scripts that I develop to do tasks in the Windows environment at my office work just fine in Windows (duh). Python may be cross platform, but I bet the majority of the code written in Python is only run in a single environment, or even a single machine. So if I run it in Windows, and develop it in Windows, why do I care that my IDE only runs in Windows?
A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.
A tech product can moulder on a virtual shelf, but not on a physical shelf. Every foot of space in a brick and mortar store is expected to bring in revenue. If a product is taking up 10 feet of shelf and not selling, the retailer will fill those 10 feet of shelving with something that will sell.
Slashdot Mirror
But then the price of the eBook would be about 1/16th the price of a paperback. Publishers can't have that, because then they'd have no PROFITS! with which to buy more books/publish (read, give to shareholders)
Paperbacks are cheap to produce - this site (http://michaelhyatt.com/why-do-ebooks-cost-so-much.html) says production and distribution accounts for 12% of the price. Even if he is cherrypicking data and it is 25%, you aren't going to see huge price breaks.
And pricing doesn't have to be reflective of costs. I might pay more for an ebook based on the fact that I can start reading it right now, vs. getting it shipped or going to a store. Or I might pay more because I have bad eyesight and like the fact that I can make the type bigger.
The rule for rational actors is that they set the price so as to maximize their total profit - production costs only enter into it as a constraint upon profitability.
One time bought I book on my Kindle that I had sitting on my bookshelf, just because I wanted to reread it before starting on the sequel, and didn't want to carry the physical hardcover with me on a trip.
So I paid for the extra copy purely for my convenience. Given a choice between a physical book and an ebook at the same price, in most cases I will buy the ebook, because that is the format I prefer.
There's not magic in being younger. To do anything more substantial that basic word processing and web browsing you still need a combination of mindset and training whether you're 15, 25, or 65. The basics are somewhat easier if you've been around computers all your life, but beyond that I don't think it matters much.
I think there is more to it than that. It is true that a child's brain is wired differently than an adults. Very young children can learn multiple languages simultaneously and speak them all like a native, something that is very difficult for adults. Not sure how far into adolescence/adulthood those physiological changes persist, but it is at least a factor in early childhood development. And from a psychological perspective, growing up with something means you take it for granted in a way that is different from acquiring something later in life.
I think the reason that the age of "digital native" gets pushed back is that major changes keep happening. The PC revolution and everyone having a computer was a profound shift, but the internet era is really a second shift. And social media layered on top of the internet, combined with ubiquitous mobile devices comprise a third shift.
We are seeing behaviors and attitudes out of younger people which are not mirrored in older generations, and I don't think it is just an age thing. Take the paranoia over oversharing on Facebook or Flickr, or the collective hand-wringing about sexting. Younger people have a far looser conception of public/private life, and I think much of that comes from being surrounded by social media all the time.
Complex applications require that people know how to use them, and it takes time and investment for people to get trained.An growing expert user base is the best advertising that you can get. Having your SW out there, in the hands of students and young people trying to figure out how to use it helps it remain relevant as they go to work for companies that end up purchasing the SW.
IMO, more than open source and the Internet and hosting (paradigm shift), this is what is actually killing off Microsoft. It used to frown on piracy, and fight it mostly to scare up business that could afford to pay, but more or less allowed for the general population, since ensured that new users would have an easier time finding its SW, and that would encourage them to remain on the Windows platform. ).
So you mean that MS should offer steeply discounted copies of Windows and Office, like a Student and Teacher Edition, or Family Pack licenses? Things that are cheap for residential use but not licensed for commercial use?
Wow, I wonder why they didn't think of that.
OK, so you hate people who've risked money making investments. We get that. But do you really think everyone else is so stupid to think you're saying anything of substance? Roughly 50% of the population earns money below the rate that the Congress has set as meaning they owe incomes taxes, and many of them receive "refunds" on money they don't even pay. They don't pay income taxes, they pay negative income taxes. A small number of rich people pay the vast majority of the country's income taxes, and middle class people pay the bits that are left over. The other half of people pay none. Of course you know that, and you're a troll.
That 50% figure is dramatically misleading. First, it includes things like high school and college students who work part time and earn a pittance. And it also includes retirees who are not in the workforce. You can argue that even those people should pay income taxes, but the perception of a permanent 50% underclass that never pays taxes is absurd. Most taxpayers will not pay income taxes at both the start of their career and after retirement. I can't find the cite now, but I remember reading that simple demographics accounts for roughly 35% of the people who pay no income taxes.
And lets not forget that for many people, payroll taxes are a bigger bite than income taxes - 7.4% starting on the first dollar you make, with no exemption or deductions. For rich people the payroll tax is not a significant factor, since social security taxes stop after $109K.
The one I get tripped up on the most is renaming a folder. I want to rename, so is it rn? No it's mv... but I'm not moving it so that's confusing.
You are moving the file to a new location, what once was /usr/bin/foo.ext is moved to /usr/bin/fubar.extension
And yet, 99% of the world would say - "I am not moving it, it is still in /user/bin."
The common conception is that a file has name (foo.ext), and a location (/usr/bin).
With the notion of recycle/trash, nowadays you don't delete anything, you just rename it to the trash. A concept which doesn't bother us, but will seem completely strange to most people.
For most people, the productivity bottleneck isn't the time spent moving hands to and from the keyboard; it's having to memorize 1000 commands to use the damn thing.
You could say the same thing about the English language. If complexity was a barrier, we'd all be pointing and grunting. But it turns out that the human brain has evolved for language, because language is empowering. Learing shell syntax is similarly empowering.
But the human brain learns languages astonishingly well at an early age, and only with great difficulty later on. If you want to start teaching people shell scripts in the crib perhaps it will all be intuitive, but otherwise it is not a fair comparison. And I say that as someone who grew up in the command line era, and still uses one for repetitive tasks. But knowing shell syntax is not a merit badge, nor the secret handshake of a special club. It is a sign of someone who has learned the arcana of my profession because that has value to me. If you don't use a computer that intensively, I don't know why you should need to know a command line.
It is not at all uncommon to see a defense team put forth an argument like: I didn't kill her. And even if I did, it was self defense. And even if it wasn't, there were extenuating circumstances. And even if there weren't, it was a crime of passion. And if not, I'm a great guy and deserve to be convicted under a lesser crime! (They don't quite phrase it that way of course, but that is the essence of the argument.)
IANAL, but it seems to me that there is a difference between a defense using that strategy, and a plaintiff. The defense is trying to poke holes in the plaintiff's argument. So if the plaintiff accuses the defendant of something that is factually untrue, there might be several mutually contradictory things that can all falsify their argument. "I wasn't even home at the time you specified as the time of death. But even if I had been home, the security system shows that she didn't arrive until 3 hours after you said I killed her. And the security system shows her leaving 2 hours after that, so she isn't even dead".
But it seems to me that the plaintiff has to make a coherent argument, and have all of its parts accepted
If you RTFA, you will see that several of the justices wanted to decide this on the basis of expectation of privacy, and rule that tracking someone via GPS is akin to a search, even if no physical trespass occurred. Given how easy this form of search is becoming, I suspect that this will be an active area of the law in coming years. A science fiction novel I read referred to this as "ubiquitous surveillance", which I think is a depressingly descriptive term.
For centuries, actions taken in public were assumed to be public, but with the obvious caveat that the police could not monitor all actions that take place in public, so you had a limited form of privacy just due to the effort of following you around to monitor your public activities. But now that cost barrier is getting lower everyday, making that expectation of anonymity less valid.
Perhaps you should use old video adapters to connect to old displays?
Or maybe because they don't have a large employee base in Silicon Valley?
Certainly MS will pay to relocate desirable employees, but moving to Seattle means that the poaching back and forth of ordinary employees is less likely.
Doesn't mean they aren't there. FAT is still pervasive enough that you can't get away from 8.3. All you have to do is look at Movie and Music/Sound files, they all are .m4v and .mp3 and .wma and so on.
The FAT file system has supported long file names since the introduction of Windows 95. As another poster points out, the set of all long file names includes those named in 8.3 formats, and there is nothing in the file system that prevents those files from being used. What is presumably being dropped is the ability to generate an 8.3 alias for every file.
While the OP is clearly a shill, your refutations ring hollow.
Where did this widespread belief the Microsoft pays shills to defend its honor on /. come from? Did everyone crank their tinfoil hats up to 11 or something?
I don't think Slashdot is influential enough to have any impact on Microsoft's business, and as a practical matter, if there is a cadre of professional shills, you don't think somebody would spill the beans? How big a conspiracy is needed?
PHB's don't see design and development as needing different skillets, they just see two jobs that can be consolidated into one. If you have a programmer who does a B+ job programming and a C- job on design, eliminate the design, produce a C+ product, and then go tell your C*O you eliminated positions without impacting productivity.
Or perhaps you have a total team of 4 people, and your workload requires about 5 full time programmers and a part time UI designer. So you can have 3 programmers and one part time UI designer (because you can't get head count authorization for five people, even if 2 are part time), or you can hire 4 developers, including one who has at least some interest in UI work.
If you were the PHB, and had budget and HR restrictions to deal with, and more work than people to do it, what mix would you hire?
Many companies survive the complete evaporation of their original business model just fine. Did you know Berkshire Hathaway was originally a textile company?
Any company with the resources Kodak once had can survive any possible change in their market, regardless of their business model, as long as they aren't afraid to change. Companies fail when they're run by incompetent management, period.
If only it were that simple. The big problem is deciding what to change into. A company in a declining market may have a very profitable, cash cow business. They can use that money to fund the search for a new business model. But a company with a huge investment/infrastructure/employee base in business X may not even recognize an opportunity in business Y, and even with the cash available, may not be a competent competitor in business Y even if they decide to pursue it.
Should Kodak have gone into search engines in competition with Google? Or closer to home, given their association with the movies, maybe create a special effects studio? Or maybe create software to edit images like Photoshop? Is there any reason to think that they would have succeeded at any of those ventures?
Having cash and recognition that your business is declining is not enough. The real rub is finding something else that you can succeed at. And I don't think there is any obvious way to go about that.
It seems to me that if an independent research lab can invent the building blocks of the modern PC and not profit from it, than clearly a large corporation with limitless resources and pressured by a competitive market can innovate without the need of a patent system.
No corporation has limitless resources. Even behemoths like Google or MS or Apple have pressures to limit spending. What corps with big cash reserves can do is invest in a large number of areas, knowing that most of them will never payoff, looking for the big winner.
The economic cost of the patent system is higher than the value it delivers through innovation: XP was able to deliver phenomenal results with limited compensation.
One one hand profitable patents are not necessary for innovation as explained above, and on the other hand patents are frequently harmful to innovation: patent trolls, preventing the competition from building on your invention etc.
Without patent protection the bar for finding the "big winner" is substantially higher, and therefore the appetite for corporate research arms like PARC or Bell Labs will be significantly lower.
They can speed as much as they damn well please, because they are better drivers than you.
Given that cops actually get additional driver training for the situations they are in, they are in fact better drivers than most people on the road.
Instead of ramming a new GUI down our throats why don't the designers do something radical. When upgrading to a newer version offer the option to continue using the older ("classic") version of a GUI. Newbies will be happy because of all the new eye candy and experienced users can continue using a computer in the way they are used to. Later on, if the new way of doing things isn't just the latest fad and really is better the older users will surely migrate to a new GUI. It's the test of time.
This is actually fairly common (going all the way back to Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard shortcuts in early versions of Excel). However, there are several disadvantages/costs to doing so:
1. Time to implement and code complexity - now you are maintaining 2 different GUIs, you have to test 2, you have to document 2. Costs quite a bit more. And just like politicians can ignore the extreme wing of their own party, the people who care passionately about your existing UI are the ones least likely to move to a competitor.
2. Incompatibility with new features. This doesn't happen all the time by any means, but sometimes a new GUI or interface metaphor comes about because new features aren't a good fit for how you did things before. I'm talking about a radical departure like adding 3D to a 2D drawing app - all sorts of things have to change to accommodate that.
3. Where does it end? If MS supports the Windows "classic" theme, at what point does it have to support the "Windows 95 classic", "XP Classic", "Win 7 Classic", "Metro Classic", etc? How many layers of crufty old code have to coexist so that people who have been doing the same things for 20 years don't have to change?
There's also the notion that you can't put a price tag on national security--we should spend whatever it costs to meet our defense objectives, no matter how expensive and regardless of the actual return we get.
And yet many of those same people gloat how the Reagan buildup of the 80s pushed the Soviets over the edge and ruined their economy, to the point where the USSR fell apart.
So apparently there is a point where you are spending too much.
To your second point, I was surprised to read recently that personnel costs - wages, retirement, and health care, are a very large and rising part of the Pentagon budget, to the point where they are starting to resist congressional calls for additional benefits to the troops, since they result in actuarial disasters down the road.
This assumes the user is running software without memory leaks. You want to play some games on your computer(something most Mac and Linux users just don't do), you have to expect memory leaks, and the idea of sleep/hibernation to let the machine run for months at a time without a full shutdown/restart just doesn't work.
I will admit that there are ways that system resources can be consumed and leaked, but in general it is hard for a user mode process to leak anything past process termination. Microsoft took that lesson to heart starting back in Win 95, and the system is very aggressive about keeping track of what process allocated what, and cleaning it all up when the process terminates. I play a lot of games, and and I can't think of the last time I had to do a reboot to address something like memory allocation or file handles. Years ago I used to see GDI objects being consumed (the telltale symptom was things reverting to system font when a new font couldn't be created), but even that seems pretty much gone.
I think the reason is that they do have much in common, and a large overlap in readers.
Compared to just about any other genre of literature, science fiction and fantasy present an author a blank slate, and let them construct any setting, scenario and backstory they want. Want to explore what relationships would be like in a world where peoples gender changes with the seasons? Go for it. Want to examine what happens to humans when omnipotent Gods choose to be terrifyingly real? Have at it.
Those kind of fundamentally changed worlds can't happen in any other genre, but are the basis of much science fiction and fantasy.
Actually I think he means that the publishers provide editors and copy-editors to make sure you spelled your main character's name the same way through the whole book. Any reasonable and honest author will tell you that the editing (and fact checking for books where they are appropriate) services provided by publishers are useful and valuable.
Amen. Ever flip through a 10 page dissertation on starting a fire, or aiming a torpedo, or any other historical/technical minutiae that an author was fascinated by but which bored you to tears? I have, and frequently it is something that was self published (which *may* mean no editor), or something where the author was so powerful (looking at you Tom Clancy) that he didn't have to listen to the editor anymore. Editors make books better. Marketing sells more books. Publishers provide both editors and (hopefully) marketing. I'm no fan of the publishers, but they do add value in most cases.
The other funny part, is true to form, the amazon web page has the tired and stereotypical "woman reading at the beach" photo. Its hard to predict, but if there's one thing this era will be laughed at for, it MIGHT be the "we're gonna get rich by only selling e-readers to women at the beach".
Actually, I think that is one of the key differentiators of an e-ink device compared to and LCD tablet device - one works perfectly in direct sun, and the other works fine in a darkened room.
I love my Kindle for reading in general, but originally I bought it for vacation trips - all the books I need for a beach vacation in a slim device that doesn't bulk up my luggage. And I can read it while sitting on the beach. So I think the reading on the beach picture is a good advertising image for them. Much like a backlit reader might show someone reading in bed while their spouse sleeps.
"Is windows only. Python is a cross-platform language. A non-cross-platform IDE for Python makes as much sense as having a solar-cell operated night-vision camera. FAIL."
And yet, I find that all of the Python scripts that I develop to do tasks in the Windows environment at my office work just fine in Windows (duh). Python may be cross platform, but I bet the majority of the code written in Python is only run in a single environment, or even a single machine. So if I run it in Windows, and develop it in Windows, why do I care that my IDE only runs in Windows?
A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.
A tech product can moulder on a virtual shelf, but not on a physical shelf. Every foot of space in a brick and mortar store is expected to bring in revenue. If a product is taking up 10 feet of shelf and not selling, the retailer will fill those 10 feet of shelving with something that will sell.