Does it really matter if it does less, if it does everything the user wants it to do--and does it more reliably, and with less risk from spyware and viruses?
So another article on Slashdot from techies confidently asserting that a new product will be a failure. Considering the record of similar attacks on iPod, iPhone, and iPad, this strikes me as the best evidence that it will succeed. Of course, the open system purists are inevitably up in arms over anything that is not general purpose or completely open to customization, and seem innately unable to comprehend just how small is the market segment for which this is a significant consideration.
So let's look at why it might succeed:
1. Cheap. It should work very well on very low end processors that chug when loaded down with a general purpose OS trying to multitask multiple applications. Power applications will run in the cloud. This could well become the dominant platform for the 3rd world as internet connectivity continues to rise.
2. Secure. I commonly have people coming to me complaining about their computer being "slow," and when I look it over, I find that it has been colonized by viruses and spyware. There is a large group of people who just want to browse the web, and don't feel like they should need to be computer security experts to keep their systems running smoothly. These may also be favored by businesses that don't want to deal with the potential security leaks due to people installing unapproved software on their PCs
3. Uniform. Every ChromeOS platform will be running essentially the same software, based upon the same browser. A company that delivers services through this platform will be relieved of a lot of support headaches arising from differences in user hardware or the presence of "nonstandard" software (see 2)
Isn't there something a bit creepy about people who are disturbed by making it more convenient to see information that their friends have already decided to share with them?
So Apple joins Microsoft in not shipping Flash pre-installed with their OS, and this proves that Apple has a "vendetta" against Flash?
There have been a lot of patches to fix security problems in Flash of late. Flash doesn't instantly auto-update, so if Apple ships a version with a security hole, there is a window of time during which a user's computer is vulnerable.
Besides, if you go to a Flash-enabled site without Flash, you are immediately prompted to download Flash, so preinstalling Flash is at most a very minor convenience.
If Apple really wanted to wage ware against Flash, they could ship Safari with something like ClickToFlash preinstalled.
Not having to put in the disk is a big convenience, but it is still very slow to start up. I timed it at 42 seconds, compared to 6 seconds to enter Netflix on AppleTV. A big improvement is that the display of the queue shows 10 titles at once, which is twice as many as most Netflix clients (although AppleTV shows 21), which makes it easier to browse a large queue. The info pop-up for the selected title is a nice touch, although I wish it showed more than 3 lines. Scrolling is very fast, although I found it difficult to control with the analog joystick. It always seemed to be either too fast or too slow--I think the sensitivity of the joystick could stand some tweaking. Unfortunately, the images can't keep up with the fast scrolling, so you have to stop to let the cover pictures catch up. Performance seems fine. I found one title in my queue that had Dolby 5.1, indicated by an annotation on the info screen.
Apple TV requires a TV with a HDMI input and 720p capability. It is not a good choice for a composite-only set. I'd suggest a bottom of the line ($60) Roku box with a Netflix subscription.
I can understand Sony dropping this feature from newer, budget-priced models, as they did the capability to emulate older Playstation models, as it was a niche use of the hardware. But older PS3's remained widely available for use by scientists (I know somebody who is doing this). But now, any of them that get their firmware updated (which is required for full game functionality) can not be used for OtherOS.
Considering that Sony locked out OtherOS from older models as part of a security update issued after the first PS3 "jailbreak," I think there is little doubt that this was an antipiracy security measure that Sony was driven to by people hacking PS3 security.
Considering that there is hardly any streaming 1080p content available for any device, it hardly seems much of a handicap. The difference between 720p and 1080p HD is pretty hard to see unless you have a really huge screen, anyway (or sit really, really close to your TV), so in practice it makes almost no difference to most people.
Barring the door is a lot more important to Sony than to Apple, because Sony makes money off of games, not hardware, and a hacked PS3 can be used to play pirated games. Before people hacked the PS3, it was actually more open than the appleTV--you could even install another operating system on it. The only real reason to hack it was to pirate games, and the side effect of the PS3 hack was to push Sony into locking down the system more tightly (impairing its legitimate use by scientists for computing purposes).
On the other hand, what can you do with a hacked appleTV? You are still going to have a hard time pirating movies, because they are streamed, not stored. So a hacked appleTV is basically a toy for hackers, and Apple still makes money selling the hardware. So Apple just needs to put a chain on the door to make it inconvenient enough that the average consumer is not going to bother to jailbreak his appleTV.
It's odd to me that people get so concerned about Apple's "attitude." It's a company, not my friend. I don't care about their "attitude." They make stuff. If their stuff does things I want to do, for a price I want to pay, then I'll buy it. If their "attitude" impairs their ability to make stuff that appeals to me, I'll just buy something else. If enough consumers do the same, they'll adjust their attitude or go out of business.
I was surprised how comfortable I am reading books on my iPhone. For me, that was the wedge that got me into ebooks. It started when I wanted to re-read a book that I already had, but couldn't find. I didn't think I'd be comfortable reading off that little phone screen, but I didn't want a second copy of the same book, so I went ahead and downloaded it. To my surprise, it was comfortable to read, and incredibly convenient. Now I have a Kindle, for when I have time to relax, and it syncs with my iPhone for when I'm reading at odd moments waiting for a train or standing in line at the supermarket.
I don't mind DRM as such, at least not for the reasons most people cite. It doesn't bother me that I can't resell a book after I read it. I'm not a book dealer, and the prices of used books are generally so low that it is hardly worth my time to sell my old books. Yes, I'd regard a mechanism for loaning ebooks as a plus, and I'd probably pay a few cents extra per book for the privilege, but it's not a big deal. I don't loan all that many books, and as I upgrade my ereader, I expect that I'll eventually have a "loaner" ereader or two that I can use for that purpose.
My only real real concern with DRM is the possibility that my vendor may go out of business and take my library with him. No, it's probably not that huge a risk with a major vendor such as Amazon, perhaps less than the risk that my physical library will be destroyed in a fire or a flood, but many major companies of the past are now defunct.
I'd like to see the industry work out some sort of insurance/backup system. Perhaps there could be an industry-funded cooperative database that maintains a backup of my library, with some mechanism for providing access to users if the original vendor goes down. I'd certainly be willing to pay a bit extra per book in return for that assurance.
I doubt if the automated typesetting used in ebooks is going to look as good as the human-tweaked typesetting in physical books for some time. On the other hand, automated typesetting gives the reader control of type size and spacing, which is enough of a benefit that I'm willing to go without the typesetting nuances for a while. I'd also like to see more choices of typeface available, and at least the option for the publisher to specify a "default" typeface. That being said, the serif typeface used by the Kindle is really lovely and eminently readable, and seems perfectly matched to the resolution of the screen.
I had a G4 cube running OS X up until about a year ago, and I still have a G4 tower in use. I've also used a G3 desktop machine running iTunes as a music server. The older machines work pretty well for things like simple word processing and web browsing (but don't expect to run video at any reasonable frame rate). Not something that you'd likely to have patience to use as your primary computer, but usable. Maxxing out the RAM is essential (and pretty cheap) if you want to run OS X.
What the buyer perceives (correctly or incorrectly) is irrelevant in determining whether price discrimination is happening. If you read the coffee example in the link I provided, it could be equally argued that the premium coffee is made from a totally different bean, it tastes better, is healthier but in the end it's still coffee and what matters is that the cost to the seller was only slightly higher than the "basic" coffee yet the price was far higher.
It is. And since pricing in a free market is more dependent upon what a product is worth to the buyer than what it costs to produce, it costs more. So if you are going to call charging different prices for different products "price discrimination," then "price discrimination" ends up being just another word for a free market.
This is hardly the first report that increasing or decreasing the expression of certain genes in the mouse can improve performance on certain laboratory tests of intelligence. However, these tests are very regimented and simplistic compared to the complex cognitive demands that a mouse encounters in the wild. The investigators used two standard tests of cognition: novel object recognition (does the animal remember an object that it has seen before, as judged by how interested it is in examining it?) and the Morris water maze (does the mouse remember the location of an underwater platform in a pool?
It is not at all clear that improved performance in these tests correlates to improved performance in the many behavioral tasks that a mouse must be able to carry out to find food, avoid predators, and reproduce, and even less clear that they are relevant to the intellectual challenges that a human faces.
But a 32 GB product is not "essentially identical" to a 16 GB model, because larger memory gives you substantially more options in what you can do with the product, and may even increase its usable life (since applications tend to require more and more memory over time). Consumers correctly perceive the 32 GB model as being substantially different and substantially better, and are willing to pay accordingly.
By the way, Apple has never offered differently priced versions of their OS.
That's anti-free market. In a free market, someone using monopoly pricing (which is what you are describing) would have a competitor show up and instead price it on the lowest cost that generates acceptable profits. Now if only we had free-market capitalism, then your comments would be 100% wrong. So are you saying we don't have capitalism, or are you arguing against capitalism?
That is true only in a static, equilibrium world in which no new products or services are ever created. But in the real, dynamic world, competitors require time to develop and bring to market a product that offers equal value. So in a truly free market, a creative individual company will be able to maintain a lead over its competitors, and sell products at a price commensurate to their value to the customer.
No, price discrimination is when identical goods are offered at different prices to different markets. But the chip with the extra two processors enabled is not identical to the chip without those processors enabled, as you can easily prove by doing a benchmark. And a 16 GB iPad is not identical to a 32 GB iPad, because the latter has more memory. Having different profit margins on different products does not constitute price discrimination.
It sounds like you are a bit unclear on the concept of pricing. Here's a clue: The price of something has nothing at all to do with what it costs to produce or deliver--it depends only upon what it is worth to the customer.
So no, it doesn't matter whether the hardware you bought is capable of functioning as an i7, because you didn't pay for an i7, and therefore you didn't buy it.
I wonder if it would be better to sweeten with glucose instead of sucrose or HFCS. It's not a simple question, even if fructose is harmful, because it would probably lead to people consuming more calories, as glucose is not as sweet as sucrose or HFCS.
The sugar in evaporated cane syrup is sucrose, and is chemically identical to table sugar. Your body can't tell the difference. For a given degree of sweetness, the amount of sucrose is the same. There are other impurities in evaporated cane syrup, so it may not taste quite the same, but metabolically it is the same as table sugar.
Cane sugar is 50% fructose, in exactly the same way that baking soda (NaHCO3) is 50% lye (NaOH).
Wrong. Baking soda breaks down almost immediately in the body to free sodium ion and bicarbonate ion (HCO3-), not hydroxide ion (OH-). On the other hand, breads down almost immediately to glucose and fructose (in fact, it has to be to be absorbed; your body is unable to absorb sucrose).
The fact that two molecules can be nearly indistinguishable from a chemistry point of view does not mean that their biological impact can not be radically different.
They can be, but in this case they aren't, because the breakdown of sucrose into glucose and fructose is very fast. In fact, your body doesn't even absorb sucrose, just the released glucose and fructose.
No, sucrose is split immediately into glucose and fructose, which from that point is metabolized exactly the same as that in HFCS. There is reasonable evidence that fructose may be bad for you, but you get about the same amount of fructose from typically used HFCS as you do from sucrose. HFCS contains slightly more fructose relative to glucose than does sucrose, but it is also sweeter, so less of it is used. It ends up being pretty much a wash. Details and references to primary scientific literature can be found here.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it really matter if it does less, if it does everything the user wants it to do--and does it more reliably, and with less risk from spyware and viruses?
So another article on Slashdot from techies confidently asserting that a new product will be a failure. Considering the record of similar attacks on iPod, iPhone, and iPad, this strikes me as the best evidence that it will succeed. Of course, the open system purists are inevitably up in arms over anything that is not general purpose or completely open to customization, and seem innately unable to comprehend just how small is the market segment for which this is a significant consideration.
So let's look at why it might succeed:
1. Cheap. It should work very well on very low end processors that chug when loaded down with a general purpose OS trying to multitask multiple applications. Power applications will run in the cloud. This could well become the dominant platform for the 3rd world as internet connectivity continues to rise.
2. Secure. I commonly have people coming to me complaining about their computer being "slow," and when I look it over, I find that it has been colonized by viruses and spyware. There is a large group of people who just want to browse the web, and don't feel like they should need to be computer security experts to keep their systems running smoothly. These may also be favored by businesses that don't want to deal with the potential security leaks due to people installing unapproved software on their PCs
3. Uniform. Every ChromeOS platform will be running essentially the same software, based upon the same browser. A company that delivers services through this platform will be relieved of a lot of support headaches arising from differences in user hardware or the presence of "nonstandard" software (see 2)
Isn't there something a bit creepy about people who are disturbed by making it more convenient to see information that their friends have already decided to share with them?
So Apple joins Microsoft in not shipping Flash pre-installed with their OS, and this proves that Apple has a "vendetta" against Flash?
There have been a lot of patches to fix security problems in Flash of late. Flash doesn't instantly auto-update, so if Apple ships a version with a security hole, there is a window of time during which a user's computer is vulnerable.
Besides, if you go to a Flash-enabled site without Flash, you are immediately prompted to download Flash, so preinstalling Flash is at most a very minor convenience.
If Apple really wanted to wage ware against Flash, they could ship Safari with something like ClickToFlash preinstalled.
Not having to put in the disk is a big convenience, but it is still very slow to start up. I timed it at 42 seconds, compared to 6 seconds to enter Netflix on AppleTV. A big improvement is that the display of the queue shows 10 titles at once, which is twice as many as most Netflix clients (although AppleTV shows 21), which makes it easier to browse a large queue. The info pop-up for the selected title is a nice touch, although I wish it showed more than 3 lines. Scrolling is very fast, although I found it difficult to control with the analog joystick. It always seemed to be either too fast or too slow--I think the sensitivity of the joystick could stand some tweaking. Unfortunately, the images can't keep up with the fast scrolling, so you have to stop to let the cover pictures catch up. Performance seems fine. I found one title in my queue that had Dolby 5.1, indicated by an annotation on the info screen.
Apple TV requires a TV with a HDMI input and 720p capability. It is not a good choice for a composite-only set. I'd suggest a bottom of the line ($60) Roku box with a Netflix subscription.
I can understand Sony dropping this feature from newer, budget-priced models, as they did the capability to emulate older Playstation models, as it was a niche use of the hardware. But older PS3's remained widely available for use by scientists (I know somebody who is doing this). But now, any of them that get their firmware updated (which is required for full game functionality) can not be used for OtherOS.
Considering that Sony locked out OtherOS from older models as part of a security update issued after the first PS3 "jailbreak," I think there is little doubt that this was an antipiracy security measure that Sony was driven to by people hacking PS3 security.
Considering that there is hardly any streaming 1080p content available for any device, it hardly seems much of a handicap. The difference between 720p and 1080p HD is pretty hard to see unless you have a really huge screen, anyway (or sit really, really close to your TV), so in practice it makes almost no difference to most people.
Barring the door is a lot more important to Sony than to Apple, because Sony makes money off of games, not hardware, and a hacked PS3 can be used to play pirated games. Before people hacked the PS3, it was actually more open than the appleTV--you could even install another operating system on it. The only real reason to hack it was to pirate games, and the side effect of the PS3 hack was to push Sony into locking down the system more tightly (impairing its legitimate use by scientists for computing purposes).
On the other hand, what can you do with a hacked appleTV? You are still going to have a hard time pirating movies, because they are streamed, not stored. So a hacked appleTV is basically a toy for hackers, and Apple still makes money selling the hardware. So Apple just needs to put a chain on the door to make it inconvenient enough that the average consumer is not going to bother to jailbreak his appleTV.
It's odd to me that people get so concerned about Apple's "attitude." It's a company, not my friend. I don't care about their "attitude." They make stuff. If their stuff does things I want to do, for a price I want to pay, then I'll buy it. If their "attitude" impairs their ability to make stuff that appeals to me, I'll just buy something else. If enough consumers do the same, they'll adjust their attitude or go out of business.
I was surprised how comfortable I am reading books on my iPhone. For me, that was the wedge that got me into ebooks. It started when I wanted to re-read a book that I already had, but couldn't find. I didn't think I'd be comfortable reading off that little phone screen, but I didn't want a second copy of the same book, so I went ahead and downloaded it. To my surprise, it was comfortable to read, and incredibly convenient. Now I have a Kindle, for when I have time to relax, and it syncs with my iPhone for when I'm reading at odd moments waiting for a train or standing in line at the supermarket.
I don't mind DRM as such, at least not for the reasons most people cite. It doesn't bother me that I can't resell a book after I read it. I'm not a book dealer, and the prices of used books are generally so low that it is hardly worth my time to sell my old books. Yes, I'd regard a mechanism for loaning ebooks as a plus, and I'd probably pay a few cents extra per book for the privilege, but it's not a big deal. I don't loan all that many books, and as I upgrade my ereader, I expect that I'll eventually have a "loaner" ereader or two that I can use for that purpose.
My only real real concern with DRM is the possibility that my vendor may go out of business and take my library with him. No, it's probably not that huge a risk with a major vendor such as Amazon, perhaps less than the risk that my physical library will be destroyed in a fire or a flood, but many major companies of the past are now defunct.
I'd like to see the industry work out some sort of insurance/backup system. Perhaps there could be an industry-funded cooperative database that maintains a backup of my library, with some mechanism for providing access to users if the original vendor goes down. I'd certainly be willing to pay a bit extra per book in return for that assurance.
I doubt if the automated typesetting used in ebooks is going to look as good as the human-tweaked typesetting in physical books for some time. On the other hand, automated typesetting gives the reader control of type size and spacing, which is enough of a benefit that I'm willing to go without the typesetting nuances for a while. I'd also like to see more choices of typeface available, and at least the option for the publisher to specify a "default" typeface. That being said, the serif typeface used by the Kindle is really lovely and eminently readable, and seems perfectly matched to the resolution of the screen.
I had a G4 cube running OS X up until about a year ago, and I still have a G4 tower in use. I've also used a G3 desktop machine running iTunes as a music server. The older machines work pretty well for things like simple word processing and web browsing (but don't expect to run video at any reasonable frame rate). Not something that you'd likely to have patience to use as your primary computer, but usable. Maxxing out the RAM is essential (and pretty cheap) if you want to run OS X.
It is. And since pricing in a free market is more dependent upon what a product is worth to the buyer than what it costs to produce, it costs more. So if you are going to call charging different prices for different products "price discrimination," then "price discrimination" ends up being just another word for a free market.
This is hardly the first report that increasing or decreasing the expression of certain genes in the mouse can improve performance on certain laboratory tests of intelligence. However, these tests are very regimented and simplistic compared to the complex cognitive demands that a mouse encounters in the wild. The investigators used two standard tests of cognition: novel object recognition (does the animal remember an object that it has seen before, as judged by how interested it is in examining it?) and the Morris water maze (does the mouse remember the location of an underwater platform in a pool?
It is not at all clear that improved performance in these tests correlates to improved performance in the many behavioral tasks that a mouse must be able to carry out to find food, avoid predators, and reproduce, and even less clear that they are relevant to the intellectual challenges that a human faces.
But a 32 GB product is not "essentially identical" to a 16 GB model, because larger memory gives you substantially more options in what you can do with the product, and may even increase its usable life (since applications tend to require more and more memory over time). Consumers correctly perceive the 32 GB model as being substantially different and substantially better, and are willing to pay accordingly.
By the way, Apple has never offered differently priced versions of their OS.
That is true only in a static, equilibrium world in which no new products or services are ever created. But in the real, dynamic world, competitors require time to develop and bring to market a product that offers equal value. So in a truly free market, a creative individual company will be able to maintain a lead over its competitors, and sell products at a price commensurate to their value to the customer.
No, price discrimination is when identical goods are offered at different prices to different markets. But the chip with the extra two processors enabled is not identical to the chip without those processors enabled, as you can easily prove by doing a benchmark. And a 16 GB iPad is not identical to a 32 GB iPad, because the latter has more memory. Having different profit margins on different products does not constitute price discrimination.
It sounds like you are a bit unclear on the concept of pricing. Here's a clue:
The price of something has nothing at all to do with what it costs to produce or deliver--it depends only upon what it is worth to the customer.
So no, it doesn't matter whether the hardware you bought is capable of functioning as an i7, because you didn't pay for an i7, and therefore you didn't buy it.
I wonder if it would be better to sweeten with glucose instead of sucrose or HFCS. It's not a simple question, even if fructose is harmful, because it would probably lead to people consuming more calories, as glucose is not as sweet as sucrose or HFCS.
The sugar in evaporated cane syrup is sucrose, and is chemically identical to table sugar. Your body can't tell the difference. For a given degree of sweetness, the amount of sucrose is the same. There are other impurities in evaporated cane syrup, so it may not taste quite the same, but metabolically it is the same as table sugar.
Wrong. Baking soda breaks down almost immediately in the body to free sodium ion and bicarbonate ion (HCO3-), not hydroxide ion (OH-). On the other hand, breads down almost immediately to glucose and fructose (in fact, it has to be to be absorbed; your body is unable to absorb sucrose).
They can be, but in this case they aren't, because the breakdown of sucrose into glucose and fructose is very fast. In fact, your body doesn't even absorb sucrose, just the released glucose and fructose.
No, sucrose is split immediately into glucose and fructose, which from that point is metabolized exactly the same as that in HFCS. There is reasonable evidence that fructose may be bad for you, but you get about the same amount of fructose from typically used HFCS as you do from sucrose. HFCS contains slightly more fructose relative to glucose than does sucrose, but it is also sweeter, so less of it is used. It ends up being pretty much a wash. Details and references to primary scientific literature can be found here.