...how this lady chirps for one particular piece of equipment. Who paid her ?
I'm not suspicious at all. Occam's razor leads me to believe that she just likes it more than lugging around expensive single subject text books. Most of the time, things are really just that simple.
I think it's even simpler than that - it's shiny, she feels good when she has a shiny, so she tells everyone how wonderful her shiny is and that they should get one too, because that will make her feel even better that everyone is following her lead.
It doesn't really have to have a purpose, since it does, it makes the "wonderful" statements that much easier to articulate, but it wouldn't be nearly as attractive if it were dirty beige plastic with an amber on black display - perhaps just as functional, but it just wouldn't have that "I'm special because I have one of these" gestalt.
Computers were supposed to kill paper, and they may yet. During my generation, the 2 page typed essay ballooned to 10+ pages due to the accessibility of word processors (and, to a lesser degree then, to the ease of finding reference material.)
"Paperwork" required for everything has mushroomed due to the relative ease of its generation.
God forbid that we could actually get by on the old forms that made life work in 1811 and just do them faster because we don't have to fill them out with quill and scroll and deliver them on horseback.
Paper and pencil has had millenia of development, computer interfaces are just passing the 50 year mark. (observation attributed loosely to Bill Gates in some interview I have long since forgotten)
b) I do care. It pisses me off to no end that there's no a basic level of standardization involved. Sure, one expects OS or software changes. But, for fucks sake, how is it that my development environments and keyboard shortcuts and UI behavior is completely different everywhere?... But, jesus, it's completely retarded.
Yeah, every so often a "ui style guide" comes out, and it would be nice if everyone would follow one, but for every development effort that is incentivized to follow a uniform guide, there's another one that "dares to Think Different" and come out with their own. I'm reminded of the Porsche ignition switch on the left - sure, they've got some racing heritage Grand Prix start BS justification for it, but what they really want is to be different, so their owners feel special when they get into their "interface."
I do use Unix tools when all else is equal, but all else is rarely equal. My work supplied desktop is Win7, as is the IT supported e-mail and calendaring application, so right there, it's an uphill battle to boot to Unix in the morning ( I do have a Unix VM installed, but why shell into that when the windows tools are right there and handy... ) I also have a dual-boot to Ubuntu that was helpful when I did a little work with FFmpeg, but that was a short lived project.
My daily routine is working around a 3 component system development - one part in Windows (mandated target OSs of XP and 7) - developed in Qt, using Direct X for its Xinput components, so that's squarely stuck with Visual Studio, or an uphill battle into gcc and Creator, but either way needs to be tested in Windows. Part two is in an XMega microchip (cost conscious), so that's AVR studio with all its quirks, then part 3 is on Altera/Nios via Quartus/Eclipse/gcc, again with their own integrated editors, and the occasional text file edited in Notepad++... four editors, often all open simultaneously. Efforts to integrate those disparate environments are generally rewarded with buggier behavior than their already poorly supported "native" states, and, besides, the product (that generates income for the company) is in the developed system, not the development tools.
Yeah, Borland was good at the time, but market forces squashed them like a soft bodied caterpillar.
It was different in the 1970s... people could, and did, successfully submit their own patent applications for generally unique and well developed invention descriptions. There were atty submitted patents then, too (about 50% in the internal combustion engine space), but it clearly wasn't necessary.
The volume of submissions is so much higher now that even a "five figure" professionally billed prior art search has no hope of finding all applicable prior art. I do hope that things change in the future, but for the last decade, my experience has been that I can find more than 3x as much applicable prior art per billable hour than the patent attorneys I have worked with, and the dirty little open secret is that the patent office is not spending much effort at all in their prior art searches. So, for my last issued patent, the company basically directed me to do a cursory (1/2 hour) search to get the attys started and "let them do their jobs" so they could get done and submit and get that next patent issued to the war chest- the more prior art I fed them, the more hours they would bill verifying it, and the less spurious fluff they would add in, spurious fluff makes the whole patent more confusing, and thus more costly to analyze. Yes, this ultimately makes the patents more vulnerable when challenged, but challenging takes time and effort, 3x as much or more when lawyers write the claims, so, as a corporation, if you have 300 lawyer written patents in a space, it will take a challenger $3M in legal fees just to start determining whether or not they have a problem with your patents.
As a small company with a true invention, all you need is one good patent to protect it.
But then again, sometimes they come bearing money instead, since they want the product, but don't want to develop it from scratch.
I've seen that happen (bought out) - I've also seen little software ideas (like a modem status icon) get blatantly cloned by Microsoft with no apparent remorse, other than an icon change in rev 2.0, probably to fend off the lawsuit from the guy that got ripped off.
and keep those improvements in the eyes of your customers, then anyone cloning the product will be seen as just playing catchup.
If the cloner comes with a name like IBM, Google, MicroSoft or HP, they can be 3 years behind and still get the contract... nobody ever got fired for choosing ________.
One last thing: You will have lots more fun building an OSS company than going the closed way. You will be part of a community, you will lead it and you will continuously get input from intelligent people, input that otherwise will cost you dearly when hiring external consultants.
In some cases, yes. In other cases, that fun, global, loosely organized community contains a bunch of bickering, fickle, egomaniacal children - YMMV. I have seen tighter, faster, better community building around a daily lunch trip than I ever have across e-mail and message boards.
The pile of money required to get a patent is laughably small (assuming you're more than two guys in mom's basement), the time is, however, significant.
I've done plenty of startup software development - we tend to use open tools and LGPL libraries, staying away from the pure GPL stuff because of the shades of green that the investors turn when they hear that they don't own secrets in the code.
You know, I've been using computers 8+ hours a day for 25+ years now, and I don't give a damn what sub-sub-menu spock pinch hot key this week's latest incarnation of calendar uses to do the same damn thing I have expected a calendar program to do since 1991's Sidekick.
I especially don't care that I can spend 3 hours learning how to and executing a reconfiguration of my latest desktop software to make its UI almost mimic the program I used to use last week. I move from machine to machine, OS to OS throughout the day, Windows 7, XP, Vista, OS-X 10.4, 10.3.9 and 10.7, iOS 4 and 5, and a couple of flavors of Ubuntu. I don't have the time, or inclination to set each and every one of these machines up so that they are familiar to me. When a new one comes around, I just want the damn thing to work, in a non-mysterious fashion. For every "improvement" that has come down the pike, there have been a half dozen changes for the sake of change - my favorite was the "Apollo" OS - very similar to Sun, it was Unix, with all the commands renamed and options rearranged for no particular reason.
The path of least resistance is to grin, bear it, and get on with it. I still wish that programming editors would get back to the simplicity of Brief with its easy to use column text selection (yes, most editors have an Alt-mouse click version, which sucks by comparison), but even if I had that in one editor, it still wouldn't be present in the 3 others that I have open at the same time.
So, if you're a "new" ui designer, really really think about taking a look back at what worked 20 years ago - ask yourself if what you're planning is truly any better, or just different, for your users. If it's different, deduct 10% usability points for the required learning curve, and, don't kid yourself, your app will be replaced soon enough.
I think that the decision to exit the DVD-by-mail market is a great one. Maybe it's just because I'm a college kid, but most people I know don't even bother renting DVDs anymore. As Netflix gains more and more licenses for various production companies, and their ability to stream online grows, nearly everyone I know has switched to exclusively streaming (I know I certainly have). Streaming is where the market is at, these days, since we're practically glued to our technology, particularly the internet.
Good on you, Netflix.
You are a college kid, you represent (one possible) future. In the here and now, DVDs are still an important segment of the business - Blockbuster wouldn't have died at the hands of a streaming only service, and we shouldn't be forced to accept streaming only solutions now that the competition has crumbled.
Yes, streaming is the future, but not a 2011 or 2012 future, I'm thinking more like 2020 if you want to hold on to 80+% of your subscribers.
That's all nice talk, until somebody actually does it, however, it's exactly that--talk.
True, he did it, and it worked... but the idol worship still seems misplaced.
And what Daimler model are you talking about? Every Daimler sedan available in Germany is available in the US (with different engine/safety/environmental specs).
You can start with the manual transmission variants, as well as the lower trim specs. The options list in the US only covers the high end of the German list.
I'll openly admit it, I resent Steve Jobs and his billions, even after death, because what he did was so damn obvious and un-inventive that any stubborn jerk in his position could have pulled it off.
Not that he wasn't a genius, just that genius was not required to "innovate" the way Apple innovated in the past 10 years. There's precious little in Apple products that could not have been spec'ed from standard parts bins, all you had to do was subset the marketplace and wrap it in a little custom plastic. In later years, I'll admit the gorilla glass and capacitive touch screens were a nice thing to push into the mainstream, but it's not as if they, or anything else cool, were 'invented' by Apple.
It's a lot like the Mercedes Benz North American marketing strategy: just import the good stuff, leave the taxi-cabs out of the market perception - not that Mercedes doesn't make great taxi cabs (I wish I could buy one in the US), just that they don't let anyone in North America associate less than top quality (and price) with their brand.
Its a good strategy, and I love my Bosch dishwasher because it follows this kind of philosophy, but, compared to Mercedes and even Bosch, I don't feel like Apple is contributing to what is possible, just subsetting what is available and presenting that as their brand.
Churn is good, it keeps things interesting, and while we haven't had any political problems with India, remember that they, too are nuclear capable, it's probably a good idea to make sure they would screw up their internal economy by doing something stupid to us.
Fungibility is a powerful tool with which to build an enduring empire (like McDonalds), but very few endeavors can actually afford the built-in costs of fungibility. I developed (in a very small team) a program over the space of 7 years, we actually did it twice, once for DOS, and a recode for Windows95. When it got bought by another company, the new owners paid for a total re-code in MFC - it cost them $500,000 and nearly a year, but after they had done that, they felt comfortable that they "owned" the code and could use it and modify it as they saw fit, without "needing us" for anything.
Sadly, the year (more than the $500,000) cost them their market opportunity, they went Chapter 11, 8 years later. Personally, I think they would have been better off hitting the ground running and risking us extorting some of their future profits. The "commodity recoders" didn't really understand the spirit behind the work, and therefore never extended it in the valuable ways we likely would have, although, this, in itself, is a sort of cost control measure.
They were Vulture Capital controlled, and those VCs approach was to swing for the home runs, expect to strike out frequently, but promise your investors the chance to make (in Carl Sagan voice) Billlllions, and do so convincingly by having the occasional mega-hit. Apparently, that is more important to the deep pocket investors than any kind of reliable return.
Read up for how societies are affected when an industry leaves for one reason or another and is not replaced. Rochester, Detroit. These are not happy stories.
This is not about brand names, this is about the erosion of full-time, life-time employment being replaced by temporary work at minimum wages for less then full weeks.
And that matters.
Arguably, the problems in Detroit and Rochester are less painful than the problems in 1940s Europe that allowed Detroit and Rochester industry to flourish for the last 60 years.
Chemical film photography used to cost $1 (1990) per 4x6 print, you could horse it around as low as $0.30 if you really tried, but just going to the corner drugstore for film and developing worked out to $1 per 24 square inch print for a very long time.
I just bought a couple of 24" 1080p monitors for $150 each. That's 246 square inches (about 10 4x6 prints) for $150, infinitely "re-printable" and luminous. We currently take about 2000 digital photos a year (on our $200 camera), obviously we couldn't afford that on chemical film, but the cost per square inch of print is vanishingly small, especially when you mail copies to relatives and friends all over the world for virtually free.
Of course, my Great Depression raised Grandmother won't leave a digital photo frame switched on because it is "burning up electricity (which costs money)", but she will leave the wall-wart plugged in.
Slashdot Mirror
The case of textbooks is special for many reasons. First, students (and I am talking University Students here) MUST buy them. No choice in the matter.
I actually got through a couple of classes by sharing a book with a classmate... not a 100% solution, but it can work.
Mastered meaning they learned objective-c and xcode and now have multiple million unit selling apps?
They only write fart apps...
Writing a high quality fart app takes more than your average third grader can muster, even on an iPad.
...how this lady chirps for one particular piece of equipment. Who paid her ?
I'm not suspicious at all. Occam's razor leads me to believe that she just likes it more than lugging around expensive single subject text books. Most of the time, things are really just that simple.
I think it's even simpler than that - it's shiny, she feels good when she has a shiny, so she tells everyone how wonderful her shiny is and that they should get one too, because that will make her feel even better that everyone is following her lead.
It doesn't really have to have a purpose, since it does, it makes the "wonderful" statements that much easier to articulate, but it wouldn't be nearly as attractive if it were dirty beige plastic with an amber on black display - perhaps just as functional, but it just wouldn't have that "I'm special because I have one of these" gestalt.
Computers were supposed to kill paper, and they may yet. During my generation, the 2 page typed essay ballooned to 10+ pages due to the accessibility of word processors (and, to a lesser degree then, to the ease of finding reference material.)
"Paperwork" required for everything has mushroomed due to the relative ease of its generation.
God forbid that we could actually get by on the old forms that made life work in 1811 and just do them faster because we don't have to fill them out with quill and scroll and deliver them on horseback.
Paper and pencil has had millenia of development, computer interfaces are just passing the 50 year mark. (observation attributed loosely to Bill Gates in some interview I have long since forgotten)
iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].
iTunes singles are 0.99, and still people pirate mass quantities of music.
hulu came out ad-free, and they have been increasing the ad quantities steadily ever since.
iPad books are "so much less" right now, they will increase in price until iPad publishers reach a maximum profit.
b) I do care. It pisses me off to no end that there's no a basic level of standardization involved. Sure, one expects OS or software changes. But, for fucks sake, how is it that my development environments and keyboard shortcuts and UI behavior is completely different everywhere? ... But, jesus, it's completely retarded.
Yeah, every so often a "ui style guide" comes out, and it would be nice if everyone would follow one, but for every development effort that is incentivized to follow a uniform guide, there's another one that "dares to Think Different" and come out with their own. I'm reminded of the Porsche ignition switch on the left - sure, they've got some racing heritage Grand Prix start BS justification for it, but what they really want is to be different, so their owners feel special when they get into their "interface."
I do use Unix tools when all else is equal, but all else is rarely equal. My work supplied desktop is Win7, as is the IT supported e-mail and calendaring application, so right there, it's an uphill battle to boot to Unix in the morning ( I do have a Unix VM installed, but why shell into that when the windows tools are right there and handy... ) I also have a dual-boot to Ubuntu that was helpful when I did a little work with FFmpeg, but that was a short lived project.
My daily routine is working around a 3 component system development - one part in Windows (mandated target OSs of XP and 7) - developed in Qt, using Direct X for its Xinput components, so that's squarely stuck with Visual Studio, or an uphill battle into gcc and Creator, but either way needs to be tested in Windows. Part two is in an XMega microchip (cost conscious), so that's AVR studio with all its quirks, then part 3 is on Altera/Nios via Quartus/Eclipse/gcc, again with their own integrated editors, and the occasional text file edited in Notepad++... four editors, often all open simultaneously. Efforts to integrate those disparate environments are generally rewarded with buggier behavior than their already poorly supported "native" states, and, besides, the product (that generates income for the company) is in the developed system, not the development tools.
Yeah, Borland was good at the time, but market forces squashed them like a soft bodied caterpillar.
It was different in the 1970s... people could, and did, successfully submit their own patent applications for generally unique and well developed invention descriptions. There were atty submitted patents then, too (about 50% in the internal combustion engine space), but it clearly wasn't necessary.
The volume of submissions is so much higher now that even a "five figure" professionally billed prior art search has no hope of finding all applicable prior art. I do hope that things change in the future, but for the last decade, my experience has been that I can find more than 3x as much applicable prior art per billable hour than the patent attorneys I have worked with, and the dirty little open secret is that the patent office is not spending much effort at all in their prior art searches. So, for my last issued patent, the company basically directed me to do a cursory (1/2 hour) search to get the attys started and "let them do their jobs" so they could get done and submit and get that next patent issued to the war chest- the more prior art I fed them, the more hours they would bill verifying it, and the less spurious fluff they would add in, spurious fluff makes the whole patent more confusing, and thus more costly to analyze. Yes, this ultimately makes the patents more vulnerable when challenged, but challenging takes time and effort, 3x as much or more when lawyers write the claims, so, as a corporation, if you have 300 lawyer written patents in a space, it will take a challenger $3M in legal fees just to start determining whether or not they have a problem with your patents.
As a small company with a true invention, all you need is one good patent to protect it.
But then again, sometimes they come bearing money instead, since they want the product, but don't want to develop it from scratch.
I've seen that happen (bought out) - I've also seen little software ideas (like a modem status icon) get blatantly cloned by Microsoft with no apparent remorse, other than an icon change in rev 2.0, probably to fend off the lawsuit from the guy that got ripped off.
and keep those improvements in the eyes of your customers, then anyone cloning the product will be seen as just playing catchup.
If the cloner comes with a name like IBM, Google, MicroSoft or HP, they can be 3 years behind and still get the contract... nobody ever got fired for choosing ________.
One last thing: You will have lots more fun building an OSS company than going the closed way. You will be part of a community, you will lead it and you will continuously get input from intelligent people, input that otherwise will cost you dearly when hiring external consultants.
In some cases, yes. In other cases, that fun, global, loosely organized community contains a bunch of bickering, fickle, egomaniacal children - YMMV. I have seen tighter, faster, better community building around a daily lunch trip than I ever have across e-mail and message boards.
It makes perfect sense why HP got out of the tablet market; it's merely a fad and it's a fad that's coming to an end.
So, I guess that's why they just open sourced WebOS?
The pile of money required to get a patent is laughably small (assuming you're more than two guys in mom's basement), the time is, however, significant.
I've done plenty of startup software development - we tend to use open tools and LGPL libraries, staying away from the pure GPL stuff because of the shades of green that the investors turn when they hear that they don't own secrets in the code.
You know, I've been using computers 8+ hours a day for 25+ years now, and I don't give a damn what sub-sub-menu spock pinch hot key this week's latest incarnation of calendar uses to do the same damn thing I have expected a calendar program to do since 1991's Sidekick.
I especially don't care that I can spend 3 hours learning how to and executing a reconfiguration of my latest desktop software to make its UI almost mimic the program I used to use last week. I move from machine to machine, OS to OS throughout the day, Windows 7, XP, Vista, OS-X 10.4, 10.3.9 and 10.7, iOS 4 and 5, and a couple of flavors of Ubuntu. I don't have the time, or inclination to set each and every one of these machines up so that they are familiar to me. When a new one comes around, I just want the damn thing to work, in a non-mysterious fashion. For every "improvement" that has come down the pike, there have been a half dozen changes for the sake of change - my favorite was the "Apollo" OS - very similar to Sun, it was Unix, with all the commands renamed and options rearranged for no particular reason.
The path of least resistance is to grin, bear it, and get on with it. I still wish that programming editors would get back to the simplicity of Brief with its easy to use column text selection (yes, most editors have an Alt-mouse click version, which sucks by comparison), but even if I had that in one editor, it still wouldn't be present in the 3 others that I have open at the same time.
So, if you're a "new" ui designer, really really think about taking a look back at what worked 20 years ago - ask yourself if what you're planning is truly any better, or just different, for your users. If it's different, deduct 10% usability points for the required learning curve, and, don't kid yourself, your app will be replaced soon enough.
Yeah, but was there camera coverage of the actual minivan strike, or just BDA (ball damage assessment)?
I think that the decision to exit the DVD-by-mail market is a great one. Maybe it's just because I'm a college kid, but most people I know don't even bother renting DVDs anymore. As Netflix gains more and more licenses for various production companies, and their ability to stream online grows, nearly everyone I know has switched to exclusively streaming (I know I certainly have). Streaming is where the market is at, these days, since we're practically glued to our technology, particularly the internet.
Good on you, Netflix.
You are a college kid, you represent (one possible) future. In the here and now, DVDs are still an important segment of the business - Blockbuster wouldn't have died at the hands of a streaming only service, and we shouldn't be forced to accept streaming only solutions now that the competition has crumbled.
Yes, streaming is the future, but not a 2011 or 2012 future, I'm thinking more like 2020 if you want to hold on to 80+% of your subscribers.
That's all nice talk, until somebody actually does it, however, it's exactly that--talk.
True, he did it, and it worked... but the idol worship still seems misplaced.
And what Daimler model are you talking about? Every Daimler sedan available in Germany is available in the US (with different engine/safety/environmental specs).
You can start with the manual transmission variants, as well as the lower trim specs. The options list in the US only covers the high end of the German list.
I'll openly admit it, I resent Steve Jobs and his billions, even after death, because what he did was so damn obvious and un-inventive that any stubborn jerk in his position could have pulled it off.
Not that he wasn't a genius, just that genius was not required to "innovate" the way Apple innovated in the past 10 years. There's precious little in Apple products that could not have been spec'ed from standard parts bins, all you had to do was subset the marketplace and wrap it in a little custom plastic. In later years, I'll admit the gorilla glass and capacitive touch screens were a nice thing to push into the mainstream, but it's not as if they, or anything else cool, were 'invented' by Apple.
It's a lot like the Mercedes Benz North American marketing strategy: just import the good stuff, leave the taxi-cabs out of the market perception - not that Mercedes doesn't make great taxi cabs (I wish I could buy one in the US), just that they don't let anyone in North America associate less than top quality (and price) with their brand.
Its a good strategy, and I love my Bosch dishwasher because it follows this kind of philosophy, but, compared to Mercedes and even Bosch, I don't feel like Apple is contributing to what is possible, just subsetting what is available and presenting that as their brand.
Churn is good, it keeps things interesting, and while we haven't had any political problems with India, remember that they, too are nuclear capable, it's probably a good idea to make sure they would screw up their internal economy by doing something stupid to us.
To programmers that appear to have never USED a web store, much less written one. People who had to have the term "your basket" explained to them.
I am constantly amazed by people who develop businesses all while thinking that they, and their employees, don't need to eat their own dog-food.
Fungibility is a powerful tool with which to build an enduring empire (like McDonalds), but very few endeavors can actually afford the built-in costs of fungibility. I developed (in a very small team) a program over the space of 7 years, we actually did it twice, once for DOS, and a recode for Windows95. When it got bought by another company, the new owners paid for a total re-code in MFC - it cost them $500,000 and nearly a year, but after they had done that, they felt comfortable that they "owned" the code and could use it and modify it as they saw fit, without "needing us" for anything.
Sadly, the year (more than the $500,000) cost them their market opportunity, they went Chapter 11, 8 years later. Personally, I think they would have been better off hitting the ground running and risking us extorting some of their future profits. The "commodity recoders" didn't really understand the spirit behind the work, and therefore never extended it in the valuable ways we likely would have, although, this, in itself, is a sort of cost control measure.
They were Vulture Capital controlled, and those VCs approach was to swing for the home runs, expect to strike out frequently, but promise your investors the chance to make (in Carl Sagan voice) Billlllions, and do so convincingly by having the occasional mega-hit. Apparently, that is more important to the deep pocket investors than any kind of reliable return.
Read up for how societies are affected when an industry leaves for one reason or another and is not replaced. Rochester, Detroit. These are not happy stories.
This is not about brand names, this is about the erosion of full-time, life-time employment being replaced by temporary work at minimum wages for less then full weeks.
And that matters.
Arguably, the problems in Detroit and Rochester are less painful than the problems in 1940s Europe that allowed Detroit and Rochester industry to flourish for the last 60 years.
Chemical film photography used to cost $1 (1990) per 4x6 print, you could horse it around as low as $0.30 if you really tried, but just going to the corner drugstore for film and developing worked out to $1 per 24 square inch print for a very long time.
I just bought a couple of 24" 1080p monitors for $150 each. That's 246 square inches (about 10 4x6 prints) for $150, infinitely "re-printable" and luminous. We currently take about 2000 digital photos a year (on our $200 camera), obviously we couldn't afford that on chemical film, but the cost per square inch of print is vanishingly small, especially when you mail copies to relatives and friends all over the world for virtually free.
Of course, my Great Depression raised Grandmother won't leave a digital photo frame switched on because it is "burning up electricity (which costs money)", but she will leave the wall-wart plugged in.