I think Cringely's wrong about the specifics. He thinks iTunes is where the long-term money is, and that Apple will eventually get rid of the iPod or let other companies make iPod clones.
But Apple's always been a company that made money off good hardware, and sold software to make the hardware really useful. iTMS and iTunes let you make the most of the iPod. iLife gets you the most out of your Mac.
What's more, the marginal cost of media (especially entertainment, like songs and videos) is zero. Copying is free, but there's always money to be made by selling good hardware. I can see Apple putting competing music and video vendors out of business by lowering the profit margin to almost nothing, while making a killing by making the industry's best music and movie-playing hardware.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is having trouble moving their company to hardware. They have to keep locking people into their software, proprietary formats, and DRM somehow.
"Many Indian and Canadian guest workers are sending just that much more money back overseas to their families instead of spending it here."
That's not a big deal. They send US dollars to Canada or India, and those dollars have to be used to either purchase US goods, or to buy another currency from a bank (which in turn transfers the US dollars back to America).
Ultimately, any wage earned in US dollars ends up in the US economy.
Most rational creationists accept that micro-evolution - the development of new species, sub-species, and distinct populations - occurs regularly, thanks to adaptive survival and the remarkable propensity of the genome to re-activate inactive DNA. I remember a recent example where a species of bacteria unable to digest lactose developed that ability within a few generations after being grown in a lactose-rich solution. The bacteria didn't gain this ability through random mutations, but by the activation of a previously unknown gene in the "junk DNA" part of the genome.
There's also an excellent article in the latest American Scientist detailing the specifics of spider speciation in the Hawaiian islands. There seems to be little doubt that this sort of micro-evolution occurs constantly.
However, many people (like myself) believe there is little or no persuasive evidence for macro-evolution, the spontaneous generation of radically new organisms marked by completely new genes, chromosomes, and physiological characteristics. There is pretty much no explanation of how such changes could occur at the molecular level. Michael Behe refers to it as a black box problem, since such macro-evolution can currently only be explained by treating very complex biological and chemical systems as black boxes. It's easy to imagine in macroscopic terms how a freckle might turn into an eyeball. It's impossible, however, to explain the process in molecular-evolutionary terms.
In other words, macro-evolution is not really a theory, because no theoretical framework even exists yet. Note that one need not be a creationist to reject macro-evolution and abiogenesis as viable scientific theories (though there are admittedly few other options).
Incidentally, I have read a fair amount on the subject, including the online article "29 Evidences for Macroevolution" and the relevant rebuttals. Nothing was persuasive; every "evidence" offered (1) were not necessary indicators of common ancestry, and (2) would not disprove the theory by their absences. They were simply interesting facts that could explained both by macro-evolution and by creation.
(Please don't flame me here, I'm trying to make some honest and intelligent points about a topic that gets a lot of crazy people into an irrational frenzy. Don't be one of those people!)
[The following may be the inane ramblings of someone who has read too many books about quantum physics but has no actual formal training.]
If I'm not mistaken, much of our knowledge of relativity, cosmology, and quantum physics comes from the assumption that c (the speed of light) is a constant. Einstein, if I recall correctly, came up with his remarkable theories of relativity and gravity after trying to imagine what the universe would be like if light-speed was constant in all frames of reference.
However, if the constant c is not actually constant, but a variable - perhaps a function of mass or space-time itself on a galactic scale - then at certain scales or under certain conditions, the weak mass/energy interaction we call gravity might be a little different than presently calculated. Perhaps different enough, on a galactic scale, to account for the "missing matter" that dark matter has been contrived to explain.
It could also explain variations of Alpha, unexpectedly constant background radiation (particularly if c is slowing down), and the acceleration of space probes as they leave the solar system.
Perhaps now that variations of the double-slit experiment are demonstrating the non-locality of some phenomena, it's time to stop regarding c as necessarily being a constant and a universal speed limit.
Do any actual physicists care to shoot holes in my wild suppositions?
"People are simply averse to buying products that have been deliberately crippled."
That would certainly be enough to make the Starter Edition a failure in the West, were it ever introduced, but I think that is only the beginning of the Starter Edition's problems in Asia. The people in many of those countries are more conservative, more agrarian, and more culturally distinct. They haven't been indoctrinated with the US-corporate mantra that copying is bad. In societies where communities cooperate to survive, sharing is a way of life.
If Microsoft can't make a product that competes with free copies on the street, and can't make that product affordable to people who only earn $1000 per year, no one will buy it. I wonder what pointy-haired genius at Microsoft thought they would.
"Googlebombing is just a result of the problem where Google can return totally irrelevant results to a search: pages that don't even contain the phrase/words being looked for."
It might be considered a flaw in some ways - at the moment - but it's also Google's greatest strength. Associating keyword referrals with pages allows me to find relevant websites even if I don't know exactly what words to type.
For example, today I was search for "OS X" and "opentype", and Google pointed me to some useful pages that talked about AAT instead of OpenType. How? Because there were probably online discussions about OpenType that linked to these pages.
This feature is only exploitable to the extent that any published search criteria are exploitable. Fixing the problem is a simple matter of making smarter algorithms that assign relevance weighting to links in a more intelligent manner. I'm sure Google's many Ph.Ds will come up with a solution eventually. It would also be nice if Google offered additional searching options to restrict search terms to actual page content. Perhaps an "inpage:[search-word]" keyword would work.
What's interesting about this use of Googlebombing is that it's being used to counteract previous exploits of Google's ranking methods.
"2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines [google.com]."
Who cares about Google's "guidelines"? It's not like anyone's obliged to do what Google says.
What's more, there are ways that website designers can explicitly prevent the Google toolbar from inserting its own links into pages, if they're worried about it.
World of Warcraft runs fine under Wine. There were a few bugs that just got ironed out in the latest version. I've seen it with my own eyes, a friend has it running great under Gentoo.
The SURBL can be found here: http://www.surbl.org. It's a very good thing, so much so that spammers are starting to try to get around it by doing stuff like this:
Copy the following URL removing the space into your browser:
www. spammer-site.com
The nice thing is that with each new work-around, spamming gets more difficult and less profitable for the spammer. Since they don't know who has spam filtering and who doesn't, they have to make every email convoluted.
Most of the spam messages that make it through my filter are unreadable because of all the misspellings, bizarre wording, and so on. And I doubt that most of the gullible fools who would actually click a spammer's link know how to copy an address from Outlook and paste it into their web browsers. I'm sure my parents would have trouble doing it (not that I'm saying they're gullible fools, though my mom did try buying airline tickets from a phishing site once).
"What kind of country do we live in that would BAN free stuff?"
Because that is a facile oversimplification. They're not banning free stuff. They're banning stuff that taxpayers would be forced to pay whether they used it or not.
I presume that any person could still buy wi-fi hotspots with his own dime and offer them to his fellow citizens for free.
"That's funny since the main reason I left Debian for Fedora was because of Debian's antique Chinese input support."
While I haven't used Debian, I have to say that Linux support for non-Latin languages in general is pretty bad. I've tried without success to get both Suse and Mandrake to get universal Japanese input working, and I imagine those distros are still better than the conservative Debian.
That's why distros like Turbolinux exist - to concentrate on making Asian text work, and work well, with open-source software.
Myself, I've switched to OS X, which lets me input any language in any application at any time. No desktop OS should call itself modern or ready for international use until it can get that right.
Why is it that every time there's an article about patents or trademarks, the clueless Slashdot editors call it a copyright issue; and whenever there's an article about copyright disputes, they call it a trademark issue? They're three completely different things, and you're not really qualified to *report* on the subject until you know the difference.
In this case, there is a copyright dispute, since Nintendo is alleging that the graphics and artwork (creative content) resemble Zelda very closely.
If they had called the game "Zelda" and made it look totally different, *that* would have been a trademark issue.
I believe differently. I once held your position but have had to rethink what I believe about democracy. I hope you'll afford me the respect to differ with you.
The system provides a mechanism for demonstrating your dissatisfaction. It is called the null or blank vote.
If my dissatisfaction was merely with the candidates, that would be true (although many jurisdictions make null votes difficult or impossible).
However, the system provides no mechanism for demonstrating my particular dissatisfactions. My dissatisfactions include (but are not limited to) the following personal conclusions:
1. Voting enables the majority to oppress the minority. I neither want to exercise control over those who disagree with me, nor be controlled by others if I am a minority.
2. The current system of majoritarianism inherently leads to government excess and mountains of legislation that turn all citizens into criminals.
That is an extremely brief sample of my beliefs. Neither of these points can be solved by voting, since I am against the very things that voting inherently achieves. Therefore, I no longer lend my support to the system. That is my choice as a free person, and if you wish to vote, I of course respect your freedom to do so.
Sitting on a couch on election day does not "break the system"
I'm not trying to break the system. I just believe it is immoral and cannot in good conscience support it. I am far less apathetic than the average voter who makes his decision based on emotion and MTV sound bites. I don't mean to offend anyone who does vote in good faith.
"it is our OBLIGATION rather than our right to participate in the commons."
If by commons, you mean the procedures of the majoritarian state, I respectfully disagree.
I have made a personal decision not to vote any longer. Why have I made this decision? Because I have come to the reasoned conclusion that majoritarianism ("democracy") is a corrupt system, and I cannot change it with the mechanisms it provides (i.e. voting).
In fact, because of what I believe, I feel it is immoral for me to support the system any longer. My only option then, is to opt out and not lend my country's corrupt procedures any moral support. I need neither the government nor the ballot box to defend my freedoms and the freedoms of my neighbours; I don't need them to live my daily life, to pursue my dreams, to help the less fortunate, or to do any of the other things that matter in life.
I've seen a lot of people rant about how if you don't vote, you have no right to complain. I believe the opposite is true. If you keep voting for the same corrupt system and the same corrupt politicians (there is rarely an honest candidate), you're the one who has no basis for complaint when the system fails you. I can complain, because I stand against the system and no longer participate in its corruption.
Before you flame me, please realize this is a difficult and considered position that has taken me many years to arrive at. Not voting does not mean one is apathetic. I believe the grandfather poster, whom you labeled "apathetic", has achieved a critical insight into the futility of the system he lives under.
There was a thread about this at MacNN.com. People listed sites that were producing pop-ups in Safari and Firefox. None of the sites, however, produced pop-ups in Omniweb 5.1, and I tested all the sites listed.
I have synesthesia, and as a child I thought it was normal until I realized other people didn't see numbers and letters as colours. I believe synesthesia can link any kind of sensory input to abstract forms like letters and numbers, but in my case (and in most), it's simple colours.
This makes it easy for me to remember trivial information like phone numbers, account numbers, historical dates, and pi (2.141592653589 is how far I remember without looking it up). Every string of numbers and letters forms a composite colour based on those of its individual characters. I've studied Japanese for a few years and now find that Japanese syllable characters also have colours for me now.
I imagine that with extreme synesthesia, a person might understand abstract notions like numbers and math in a completely different way. I remember once showing my sister two Smarties (they're like M&Ms) and telling her they were "3" and "6" instead of yellow and green. It took me a moment to realize why she didn't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Cringely's wrong about the specifics. He thinks iTunes is where the long-term money is, and that Apple will eventually get rid of the iPod or let other companies make iPod clones.
But Apple's always been a company that made money off good hardware, and sold software to make the hardware really useful. iTMS and iTunes let you make the most of the iPod. iLife gets you the most out of your Mac.
What's more, the marginal cost of media (especially entertainment, like songs and videos) is zero. Copying is free, but there's always money to be made by selling good hardware. I can see Apple putting competing music and video vendors out of business by lowering the profit margin to almost nothing, while making a killing by making the industry's best music and movie-playing hardware.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is having trouble moving their company to hardware. They have to keep locking people into their software, proprietary formats, and DRM somehow.
"Many Indian and Canadian guest workers are sending just that much more money back overseas to their families instead of spending it here." That's not a big deal. They send US dollars to Canada or India, and those dollars have to be used to either purchase US goods, or to buy another currency from a bank (which in turn transfers the US dollars back to America). Ultimately, any wage earned in US dollars ends up in the US economy.
The original article: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ A thorough critique of the above article: http://www.trueorigin.org/theobald1a.asp
"There are numerous speciation events on record."
Most rational creationists accept that micro-evolution - the development of new species, sub-species, and distinct populations - occurs regularly, thanks to adaptive survival and the remarkable propensity of the genome to re-activate inactive DNA. I remember a recent example where a species of bacteria unable to digest lactose developed that ability within a few generations after being grown in a lactose-rich solution. The bacteria didn't gain this ability through random mutations, but by the activation of a previously unknown gene in the "junk DNA" part of the genome.
There's also an excellent article in the latest American Scientist detailing the specifics of spider speciation in the Hawaiian islands. There seems to be little doubt that this sort of micro-evolution occurs constantly.
However, many people (like myself) believe there is little or no persuasive evidence for macro-evolution, the spontaneous generation of radically new organisms marked by completely new genes, chromosomes, and physiological characteristics. There is pretty much no explanation of how such changes could occur at the molecular level. Michael Behe refers to it as a black box problem, since such macro-evolution can currently only be explained by treating very complex biological and chemical systems as black boxes. It's easy to imagine in macroscopic terms how a freckle might turn into an eyeball. It's impossible, however, to explain the process in molecular-evolutionary terms.
In other words, macro-evolution is not really a theory, because no theoretical framework even exists yet. Note that one need not be a creationist to reject macro-evolution and abiogenesis as viable scientific theories (though there are admittedly few other options).
Incidentally, I have read a fair amount on the subject, including the online article "29 Evidences for Macroevolution" and the relevant rebuttals. Nothing was persuasive; every "evidence" offered (1) were not necessary indicators of common ancestry, and (2) would not disprove the theory by their absences. They were simply interesting facts that could explained both by macro-evolution and by creation.
(Please don't flame me here, I'm trying to make some honest and intelligent points about a topic that gets a lot of crazy people into an irrational frenzy. Don't be one of those people!)
[The following may be the inane ramblings of someone who has read too many books about quantum physics but has no actual formal training.]
If I'm not mistaken, much of our knowledge of relativity, cosmology, and quantum physics comes from the assumption that c (the speed of light) is a constant. Einstein, if I recall correctly, came up with his remarkable theories of relativity and gravity after trying to imagine what the universe would be like if light-speed was constant in all frames of reference.
However, if the constant c is not actually constant, but a variable - perhaps a function of mass or space-time itself on a galactic scale - then at certain scales or under certain conditions, the weak mass/energy interaction we call gravity might be a little different than presently calculated. Perhaps different enough, on a galactic scale, to account for the "missing matter" that dark matter has been contrived to explain.
It could also explain variations of Alpha, unexpectedly constant background radiation (particularly if c is slowing down), and the acceleration of space probes as they leave the solar system.
Perhaps now that variations of the double-slit experiment are demonstrating the non-locality of some phenomena, it's time to stop regarding c as necessarily being a constant and a universal speed limit.
Do any actual physicists care to shoot holes in my wild suppositions?
"People are simply averse to buying products that have been deliberately crippled."
That would certainly be enough to make the Starter Edition a failure in the West, were it ever introduced, but I think that is only the beginning of the Starter Edition's problems in Asia. The people in many of those countries are more conservative, more agrarian, and more culturally distinct. They haven't been indoctrinated with the US-corporate mantra that copying is bad. In societies where communities cooperate to survive, sharing is a way of life.
If Microsoft can't make a product that competes with free copies on the street, and can't make that product affordable to people who only earn $1000 per year, no one will buy it. I wonder what pointy-haired genius at Microsoft thought they would.
"THROW YOUR PC OUT OF THE WINDOW. IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE."
:) "Defenestration"/ search?q=defenestr ation&db=*
There's a word for that, actually.
http://dictionary.reference.com
"I ask this question as a person who is a very loyal Sony fan. [...] I work at NEC."
Dear Spiroharvey:
Clean out your cubicle. You're fired.
Sincerely,
Your Boss
It might be considered a flaw in some ways - at the moment - but it's also Google's greatest strength. Associating keyword referrals with pages allows me to find relevant websites even if I don't know exactly what words to type.
For example, today I was search for "OS X" and "opentype", and Google pointed me to some useful pages that talked about AAT instead of OpenType. How? Because there were probably online discussions about OpenType that linked to these pages.
This feature is only exploitable to the extent that any published search criteria are exploitable. Fixing the problem is a simple matter of making smarter algorithms that assign relevance weighting to links in a more intelligent manner. I'm sure Google's many Ph.Ds will come up with a solution eventually. It would also be nice if Google offered additional searching options to restrict search terms to actual page content. Perhaps an "inpage:[search-word]" keyword would work.
What's interesting about this use of Googlebombing is that it's being used to counteract previous exploits of Google's ranking methods.
"2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines [google.com]." Who cares about Google's "guidelines"? It's not like anyone's obliged to do what Google says.
What's more, there are ways that website designers can explicitly prevent the Google toolbar from inserting its own links into pages, if they're worried about it.
World of Warcraft runs fine under Wine. There were a few bugs that just got ironed out in the latest version. I've seen it with my own eyes, a friend has it running great under Gentoo.
Copy the following URL removing the space into your browser:
www. spammer-site.com
The nice thing is that with each new work-around, spamming gets more difficult and less profitable for the spammer. Since they don't know who has spam filtering and who doesn't, they have to make every email convoluted.
Most of the spam messages that make it through my filter are unreadable because of all the misspellings, bizarre wording, and so on. And I doubt that most of the gullible fools who would actually click a spammer's link know how to copy an address from Outlook and paste it into their web browsers. I'm sure my parents would have trouble doing it (not that I'm saying they're gullible fools, though my mom did try buying airline tickets from a phishing site once).
"What kind of country do we live in that would BAN free stuff?"
Because that is a facile oversimplification. They're not banning free stuff. They're banning stuff that taxpayers would be forced to pay whether they used it or not.
I presume that any person could still buy wi-fi hotspots with his own dime and offer them to his fellow citizens for free.
"That's funny since the main reason I left Debian for Fedora was because of Debian's antique Chinese input support." While I haven't used Debian, I have to say that Linux support for non-Latin languages in general is pretty bad. I've tried without success to get both Suse and Mandrake to get universal Japanese input working, and I imagine those distros are still better than the conservative Debian. That's why distros like Turbolinux exist - to concentrate on making Asian text work, and work well, with open-source software. Myself, I've switched to OS X, which lets me input any language in any application at any time. No desktop OS should call itself modern or ready for international use until it can get that right.
Why is it that every time there's an article about patents or trademarks, the clueless Slashdot editors call it a copyright issue; and whenever there's an article about copyright disputes, they call it a trademark issue? They're three completely different things, and you're not really qualified to *report* on the subject until you know the difference.
In this case, there is a copyright dispute, since Nintendo is alleging that the graphics and artwork (creative content) resemble Zelda very closely.
If they had called the game "Zelda" and made it look totally different, *that* would have been a trademark issue.
What's next? Bill Gates joining the Free Software Foundation and Steve Jobs becoming a model for plaid work shirts?
I believe differently. I once held your position but have had to rethink what I believe about democracy. I hope you'll afford me the respect to differ with you.
The system provides a mechanism for demonstrating your dissatisfaction. It is called the null or blank vote.
If my dissatisfaction was merely with the candidates, that would be true (although many jurisdictions make null votes difficult or impossible).
However, the system provides no mechanism for demonstrating my particular dissatisfactions. My dissatisfactions include (but are not limited to) the following personal conclusions:
1. Voting enables the majority to oppress the minority. I neither want to exercise control over those who disagree with me, nor be controlled by others if I am a minority.
2. The current system of majoritarianism inherently leads to government excess and mountains of legislation that turn all citizens into criminals.
That is an extremely brief sample of my beliefs. Neither of these points can be solved by voting, since I am against the very things that voting inherently achieves. Therefore, I no longer lend my support to the system. That is my choice as a free person, and if you wish to vote, I of course respect your freedom to do so.
Sitting on a couch on election day does not "break the system"
I'm not trying to break the system. I just believe it is immoral and cannot in good conscience support it. I am far less apathetic than the average voter who makes his decision based on emotion and MTV sound bites. I don't mean to offend anyone who does vote in good faith.
"it is our OBLIGATION rather than our right to participate in the commons."
If by commons, you mean the procedures of the majoritarian state, I respectfully disagree.
I have made a personal decision not to vote any longer. Why have I made this decision? Because I have come to the reasoned conclusion that majoritarianism ("democracy") is a corrupt system, and I cannot change it with the mechanisms it provides (i.e. voting).
In fact, because of what I believe, I feel it is immoral for me to support the system any longer. My only option then, is to opt out and not lend my country's corrupt procedures any moral support. I need neither the government nor the ballot box to defend my freedoms and the freedoms of my neighbours; I don't need them to live my daily life, to pursue my dreams, to help the less fortunate, or to do any of the other things that matter in life.
I've seen a lot of people rant about how if you don't vote, you have no right to complain. I believe the opposite is true. If you keep voting for the same corrupt system and the same corrupt politicians (there is rarely an honest candidate), you're the one who has no basis for complaint when the system fails you. I can complain, because I stand against the system and no longer participate in its corruption.
Before you flame me, please realize this is a difficult and considered position that has taken me many years to arrive at. Not voting does not mean one is apathetic. I believe the grandfather poster, whom you labeled "apathetic", has achieved a critical insight into the futility of the system he lives under.
There was a thread about this at MacNN.com. People listed sites that were producing pop-ups in Safari and Firefox. None of the sites, however, produced pop-ups in Omniweb 5.1, and I tested all the sites listed.
I have synesthesia, and as a child I thought it was normal until I realized other people didn't see numbers and letters as colours. I believe synesthesia can link any kind of sensory input to abstract forms like letters and numbers, but in my case (and in most), it's simple colours. This makes it easy for me to remember trivial information like phone numbers, account numbers, historical dates, and pi (2.141592653589 is how far I remember without looking it up). Every string of numbers and letters forms a composite colour based on those of its individual characters. I've studied Japanese for a few years and now find that Japanese syllable characters also have colours for me now. I imagine that with extreme synesthesia, a person might understand abstract notions like numbers and math in a completely different way. I remember once showing my sister two Smarties (they're like M&Ms) and telling her they were "3" and "6" instead of yellow and green. It took me a moment to realize why she didn't understand.