I was just swearing at Yahoo! Movies last night, for promising to show me a movie trailer and then telling me at the last moment that I couldn't do it in Firefox. This was on a Mac, so I wasn't about to do it in IE.
Look, I'm a science fiction writer. I'm a science fiction fan. I like to read the stuff. But why is this news on Slashdot? When Cory was the first to release a novel in print under Creative Commons, that was worthy news. That he's got yet another short story out is not.
So what's the reason for this story? Are we going to start getting postings here every time Strange Horizons updates or there's a new issue of Asimov's?
We have unnecissary geekness, and roughing a consumer product. iPods are basically external firewire drives, the hard part has alreadybeen engineered for you.
And you get an offside penalty. This is about the iPod shuffle, which is a USB flash drive. Pay attention.
Actually I think it's a very clever idea. Not for a conventional RAID implementation, sure, but it'd be very simple to write an encoder/decoder that would stripe at a word level (or byte, or bit) and spread data across two flash drives for security. Now the information's only retrievable if two people agree to cooperate. Add a third drive with parity data, and you've got error resilience and a "democratic" security system where any two out of three people can retrieve the information.
Granted, I can't see an application for this that couldn't be managed simply by having two people encrypt the information with separate keys. But it's about as cheap as you could get with a hardware solution, and it does have a spyish sort of coolness to it.
And the philosopher says, "How do we know we're really in Scotland, or that we're really looking at a sheep?"
And the Scotsman says, "Bugger off, lads! Could we have a little PRIVACY here?!"
But what about the power buyers (like myself) who get heavy textbooks, heavier textbooks, and even heavier textbooks (grr @ orgo)? It just doesn't seem like it's cost-effective, but maybe I'm missing something..?
What you're missing is that they've locked you in as an Amazon customer. You'll be much more likely to order from them and get your $79 worth than to compare their prices at BN, Powells, your corner used book store, etc. You're staying loyal to them and paying them for the privilege. And if you don't stay loyal? Well, they've still got your money. It's a double whammy.
Note that I'm not being critical. It's really a brilliant move, marketing-wise. Like the $15 annual discount cards they've always pushed at the brick-and-mortar stores, but at a much higher price and with a much higher break-even point for the benefit. If they make a killing with this, they deserve it. (And if the customers scoff and they lose their shirts, then clearly they deserved that too.)
Likewise, I was just about to go and buy a new car. But I will wait until the flying cars. I'll also wait until after the rest of humanity has died off so there's no traffic.
When per-seat costs are $1500 and up, machines like the Mini Mac start to look very affordable, considering the cost of supporting unknown hardware.
The trouble with your hypothesis is that most of that $1500 software isn't going to run well on the Mac mini, nor on any other machine they could reasonably afford to give away.
Bundling hardware and software is old news, of course, from the Video Toaster to the rackmount "network appliances" everybody's trying to sell these days. But you're not talking about the $1500 range, there, you're talking $5000 and up.
(Or on the much lower end, e.g. TiVo. But nobody really thinks of that as a software application, even if it is.)
Have you read any of the Mini mac reviews? Unless you're pounding the CPU hard for an extended time, you can barely hear it. Same's true for most recent Macs, for that matter.
That is odd. I work in a major corporate office, most of the people around me are accounting people rather than programming people, and the iPod is very hot among them.
While I do think the Mac mini is a great idea, it's nice to have confirmation that multi-billion dollar industries are just as fad-conscious as the average middle school.
Anyway, this sweeten an already sweet deal. I only regret that the upgrade to 512 RAM, a must-have for anyone not buying a Mac Mini solely for email & the web, is still an over-priced 80 . Ah well, I guess I'll install the added RAM myself then.
Um, hate to break it to you, but you'd be paying that same $80 from Crucial. You can't just add another 256MB DIMM; there's only one slot. You'll have to buy a 512MB and take out the DIMM that's already there.
Buy Keyboard, Mouse, and Display, and get X dollars off your purchase. Considering it's a headless computer, they could have made some good cash by making the consumer inclined to purchase all that from Apple, rather than get a cheap logitech Keyboard/Mouse set, and a Dell Display.
I see your point, but I also see Apple's point. The people who want a KBM from them can buy an eMac. ($800, a great price.) Selling them for the Mini would only intrude into the eMac's turf. The eMac's gotten almost no publicity and is forgotten by everyone, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them push it harder in the near future as this "cost revolution" rolls on.
The Mac Mini is not really positioned to be a first computer for anyone. It's positioned to replace the Windows computer you've gotten sick of, meaning you've got the keyboard and monitor already sitting around, or it's positioned to sit on top of your television and become a media box. For those two applications, selling an "official" Mac Mini display devices would only confuse the issue.
"This software was first called THE; briefly renamed A'ali'i; and it is now the Raskin Center's Humane Interface, abbreviated RCHI, and pronounced "Archy")
If you can't keep at least some minimal standard of consistency, and if you're working to amuse yourself without giving people a rope to grab onto, no one's going to bother following you.
I realize it's in a prototype phase now, and developers of prototypes tradtionally get cute. But if he really wants to revolutionize the world, he needs to apply some basic marketing principles before he goes live with this stuff, like not naming your centerpiece "A'ali'i" or "RCHI."
Who modded this funny? I think the man has a point.
Of course it's a debatable point. Saying "there's no more room for improvement" is like that old chestnut about closing the patent office because "everything's already been invented." But if the STAR-->Mac-->Windows model didn't fundamentally work, it would never have taken over computing today.
They're my friends. That doesn't mean they share all my interests, or even most of them. That doesn't mean they'll care about any of the blogs I read, or that I even want them to know that I found that article about gerbil spanking particularly interesting. And how does Rojo handle it if I want one subset of people to know that I'm into gerbil spanking and not another group?
If I want people to know about something, I'll send them a link or put it on my own blog. Making it happen automatically would only incline me to be very self-conscious about my casual browsing habits on this "social" network. I don't always want to be that social.
Try any of George R. R. Martin's Wildcards series.
I have, and they're fun books. But shared world isn't really the same as collaboration. Collaborative features like SubEtha offers wouldn't even add value in a case like that.
A good editor would probably solve that. Novels are usually very personal works of art- I wouldn't want to work with someone who dismisses the few who want to try it as "idiots."
Don't get me wrong, if someone does manage to get good prose fiction out of collaboration I'll applaud. My point was only that it's hard, and finding the right software to do it with is not the hard part. I'd personally find it more convenient comfortable to e-mail drafts back and forth rather than having two people edit the exact same text at the exact same time. One needs to give other people's ideas time to develop a shape before one takes a chisel to them.
I suspect you may be one of the idiots who ruined "Invisible James."
If I understood this, I might be able to respond to it. Are you talking about my Web site? What's ruined about it?
Slashdot Mirror
I was just swearing at Yahoo! Movies last night, for promising to show me a movie trailer and then telling me at the last moment that I couldn't do it in Firefox. This was on a Mac, so I wasn't about to do it in IE.
So what's the reason for this story? Are we going to start getting postings here every time Strange Horizons updates or there's a new issue of Asimov's?
If they don't want links, don't link to them. I don't see how anybody is hurt by this except them.
Wrong. A guy who works at one of Google's competitors says that Mark Jens thinks the rumor is true. That's a far cry from "the rumor is true."
And you get an offside penalty. This is about the iPod shuffle, which is a USB flash drive. Pay attention.
Granted, I can't see an application for this that couldn't be managed simply by having two people encrypt the information with separate keys. But it's about as cheap as you could get with a hardware solution, and it does have a spyish sort of coolness to it.
Here's another, slightly more criticial review from a blog specializing in game and narrative theories:r y-of-fun-reviewed/
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/01/25/a-theo
And the philosopher says, "How do we know we're really in Scotland, or that we're really looking at a sheep?" And the Scotsman says, "Bugger off, lads! Could we have a little PRIVACY here?!"
Man. At this rate, he's never going to get to the Dark Tower.
What you're missing is that they've locked you in as an Amazon customer. You'll be much more likely to order from them and get your $79 worth than to compare their prices at BN, Powells, your corner used book store, etc. You're staying loyal to them and paying them for the privilege. And if you don't stay loyal? Well, they've still got your money. It's a double whammy.
Note that I'm not being critical. It's really a brilliant move, marketing-wise. Like the $15 annual discount cards they've always pushed at the brick-and-mortar stores, but at a much higher price and with a much higher break-even point for the benefit. If they make a killing with this, they deserve it. (And if the customers scoff and they lose their shirts, then clearly they deserved that too.)
I read Slashdot and it's a bit whiney.
The trouble with your hypothesis is that most of that $1500 software isn't going to run well on the Mac mini, nor on any other machine they could reasonably afford to give away.
Bundling hardware and software is old news, of course, from the Video Toaster to the rackmount "network appliances" everybody's trying to sell these days. But you're not talking about the $1500 range, there, you're talking $5000 and up.
(Or on the much lower end, e.g. TiVo. But nobody really thinks of that as a software application, even if it is.)
Awww, Bullwinkle, that trick never works!
Have you read any of the Mini mac reviews? Unless you're pounding the CPU hard for an extended time, you can barely hear it. Same's true for most recent Macs, for that matter.
That is odd. I work in a major corporate office, most of the people around me are accounting people rather than programming people, and the iPod is very hot among them.
While I do think the Mac mini is a great idea, it's nice to have confirmation that multi-billion dollar industries are just as fad-conscious as the average middle school.
Um, hate to break it to you, but you'd be paying that same $80 from Crucial. You can't just add another 256MB DIMM; there's only one slot. You'll have to buy a 512MB and take out the DIMM that's already there.
I see your point, but I also see Apple's point. The people who want a KBM from them can buy an eMac. ($800, a great price.) Selling them for the Mini would only intrude into the eMac's turf. The eMac's gotten almost no publicity and is forgotten by everyone, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them push it harder in the near future as this "cost revolution" rolls on.
The Mac Mini is not really positioned to be a first computer for anyone. It's positioned to replace the Windows computer you've gotten sick of, meaning you've got the keyboard and monitor already sitting around, or it's positioned to sit on top of your television and become a media box. For those two applications, selling an "official" Mac Mini display devices would only confuse the issue.
If you can't keep at least some minimal standard of consistency, and if you're working to amuse yourself without giving people a rope to grab onto, no one's going to bother following you.
I realize it's in a prototype phase now, and developers of prototypes tradtionally get cute. But if he really wants to revolutionize the world, he needs to apply some basic marketing principles before he goes live with this stuff, like not naming your centerpiece "A'ali'i" or "RCHI."
Who modded this funny? I think the man has a point. Of course it's a debatable point. Saying "there's no more room for improvement" is like that old chestnut about closing the patent office because "everything's already been invented." But if the STAR-->Mac-->Windows model didn't fundamentally work, it would never have taken over computing today.
Any USB mouse or keyboard will work.
If I want people to know about something, I'll send them a link or put it on my own blog. Making it happen automatically would only incline me to be very self-conscious about my casual browsing habits on this "social" network. I don't always want to be that social.
I have, and they're fun books. But shared world isn't really the same as collaboration. Collaborative features like SubEtha offers wouldn't even add value in a case like that.
Don't get me wrong, if someone does manage to get good prose fiction out of collaboration I'll applaud. My point was only that it's hard, and finding the right software to do it with is not the hard part. I'd personally find it more convenient comfortable to e-mail drafts back and forth rather than having two people edit the exact same text at the exact same time. One needs to give other people's ideas time to develop a shape before one takes a chisel to them.
I suspect you may be one of the idiots who ruined "Invisible James."
If I understood this, I might be able to respond to it. Are you talking about my Web site? What's ruined about it?
Same objection as the article link: the prose is stilted, the humor is inane.