Look, for all the flack they get for the inevitable tweaks made in every X.1 version Apple is about the only tech company that doesn't make a habit of going to the market with beta products and fixing it afterwords. Sometimes you can get away with a paid public beta. Often the advantages of being first in and locking in the early adopters pays off. But in tablets (much like phones) Apple got a jump and did their polishing first. It's harder to get away with launching beta products when the competition has had a polished final product on the market for almost a year.
This is not a population density or rural/urban issue at all. If it was then the Canadian ISPs wouldn't have averaged so much higher. Canada has the lowest population density in the world and has a significant rural population. However, its lowest ISPs would sit in the top few on the American graph and the top Canadian ISPs would actually sit above the American graph.
No, but if I understand it right a big portion of this law allows both the state and ISPs/others to sue the businesses actually being advertised by the spam. It makes it harder for legitimate companies to hire spammers or advertisers that uses spammers and then wash their hands of the consequences. And any company that is profitably selling things (even spammy things) to US citizens almost has to have a US presence which means they are fair game.
If your work is not providing you with the tools needed to get your work done efficiently, that is not your problem it is theirs. You should talk to your manager. Talk to IT. Let them know that you are not getting the support you need to preform the job they are paying you to do. And then if they shrug and ignore you get your resume ready and get the hell out because that is a seriously bad symptom.
I doubt it. OSX is (relatively) easy to support because it has a very small subset of software to target (two/three revisions depending on if you support back to 10.4 or just 10.5/6) and a small selection of hardware. There is a massive difference between doing Q/A for a half dozen video cards on a stable platform versus trying to support the massive set of moving targets that get lumped together under Linux along with all the possible hardware that might get plugged in. Valve already has to do that with Windows. Do you think there is enough cash involved to make Linux worth the same effort?
As one example, which of the current half-baked Linux audio architectures do you recommend they use?
True, but in this case the relatively small subset of hardware supported by OSX makes things easier. Once they have it running at all it will only need to be tested against two or three OS revisions (10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard and possibly 10.4 Tiger) and a half dozen video cards. In many ways I suspect that the testing will be far easier than what is needed for a console. A few more hardware versions to deal with but at the same time there is so much higher margin in terms of RAM and processor power that there is a lot more room to play with.
This is a preemptive reply to the ten million people who are about to post variations on the following theme "e-books should only cost a few dollars because they don't have the cost of printing/shipping/storing a book"
This is wrong.
This is wrong because actually printing a book is the smallest cost involved in making one. When you look at the price of, say, a $35 hardcover book perhaps $4 is physical costs. Almost all of the cost of a book is the cost of paying the author/editor/proofreader plus the retail markup. These costs remain the same regardless of format.
And you will note that I have not mentioned publisher's profit. That's because there basically isn't one. Publishing is notorious for having no profit margin. Always has been. It was famous for not making money a century ago, famous for it fifty years ago and still a great way to get well known while losing money today. Publishing is not the music industry and it is not the movie industry. Almost all the profit is spent in up-front costs before the product even hits the streets.
Because of this, publishing has always had a very sane pricing policy. First they publish the hardcover for a high price point. Everyone who can't wait to read it buys it. Then if it is popular enough to pay off the costs six months or a year later they produce a softcover for $10 to pick up everyone who didn't want it enough to pay the hardcover costs.
Now, this doesn't mesh very well with the electronic music or video markets which is why Amazon tries to run with a fixed price point. But that's a nuts way of doing things when you are talking about books. Doesn't work because it doesn't pay off the fixed costs involved in paying the people who produce the books.
So, really, a fair e-book price is about $5 less than whatever it is selling for on the shelf. When a book first comes out that means $30-$40. A year or so later $6 is pretty likely. If you can't stand waiting don't bitch about the higher price.
Doesn't work, and I speak from experience. I have done work for the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) doing similar things and what you are looking for doesn't exist on all sorts of levels.
First, engineering software is a very specialized beast in exactly the wrong way to exist as a FOSS project. For FOSS projects to exist you first need someone who is capable of doing the programing. Then they have to have a need that they want to fulfill. And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense. None of this describes the type of people who are trying to design next-generation parts of anything.
It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?
It's the same reason that film and television production has always been happy to pick up FOSS solutions that already work but have never particularly cared about developing them. If you are operating at the professional level where you need these tools the cost of them is almost meaningless. It something that always confuses GIMP and Blender supporters who view it as personal software. For them shelling out $5000 a pop for software is such a big deal and they can never understand how the pros don't seem to care.
If you are seriously attempting to design aerospace hardware then you have moved into the realm where these types of software costs are basically meaningless. Suck it up and act like it. If, however, you are actually trying to become a proof-of-concept for FOSS in engineering work then I wish you the best of luck. However, those are two different goals and likely not compatible.
However, beyond the FOSS issue what you are trying to do will not work. Period. These types of software packages are very specialized for specific types of work and beyond a basic level are no good beyond that. 3D modeling software such as Blender or AoI (or Maya or Lightwave or 3DS Max...) are not CAD software. They are not even remotely CAD software. Yes, they appear superficially similar but they are NOT. 3D modeling software is intended to fake the appearance of large numbers of real objects. CAD software is intended to do what is basically visual math. 3D modeling packages have margins of error built in. Many of them will auto-round any equations or numbers entered. As such they are not suitable for real-world design of any complexity.
The types of data that CAD and modeling software generate are also not particularly similar. If you try and just toss engineering blueprints into animation software your artists will not thank you are the end result will look like ass. CAD tends to have too much and the wrong type of detail where animation software is looking for simplification and tends to simplify areas that need detail to look proper once animated. It takes almost more work to clean up a CAD model for animation that it takes to create one from scratch.
You can't really even send a CAD design right to a 3D printer without a significant amount of clean-up unless it was designed with that in mind.
So, to summarize, decide what you want each section of your operation to do and shell out the cash for whatever it takes to let them do it properly. Let everyone worry about their own needs and don't try and meddle by forcing the internal needs of other departments on them. If you were seriously planning on saving costs by not buying professional software for an AEROSPACE project then you are already fucked. You may as well blow all the investor's money on a massive party because it's lost anyways.
DivX is a CODEC, AVI is a CONTAINER. Just because you don't support AVI doesn't mean you don't support DivX
While technically true, that's functionally meaningless. If your program supports limited codecs that work with a particular container (for example... AVI) ditching one is the same as ditching the other.
For all intents and purposes DIVX is AVI as far as popular support goes. I'm not sure I can name another codec that I've seen used in the last few years as more than a intermediate step.
Yeah, but those objects are easy. Like, dumb easy. It takes far, far less time to make a fridge the traditional modelling way than it takes to clean up data like this. And you can make any fridge you want instead of having to find a real fridge and haul it out, light it and scan it.
Object scanning systems have been around for over twenty years in various forms and costs. The fact that even the people who have been able to afford it don't use them should tell you a lot about how applicable this tech actually is. If scanning was cheaper or faster or easier than modelling you would see people like Blizzard and WETA all over it. But you don't.
The major reason that these types of programs don't get expanded into commercial products or bought and integrated into existing products is that they are cute tech demos but not particularly real-world interesting.
Almost without exception anything simple enough for these types of reconstruction programs to handle is too simple to bother with. The paper church in the demo video for instance. The final wire-frame product is, sadly, crap. Neat and interesting crap but still crap. There are at least 3 times the polys that the form needs and almost all of the significant edges are in the wrong place. In the time it would take to clean up the data into something worth using I could build a better model form scratch including textures.
There are perhaps some very niche uses for this in terms of augmented reality. It could be integrated into a game or chat program to give a more realistic version of those make-an-avatar-from-your-webcam gimmicks that seem to gain attention every once and a while. If this guy has developed some very good algorithms he might get the interest of some of the match-moving software companies like Syntheyes.
But the reason this kind of this never shows up in profesional 3D packages is that if you are good enough to be using the software professionally you are good enough not to need these kinds of crutches. It's the 3D equivalent of Dreamweaver's auto-generated spaghetti code.
Yeah, that only took a team of dozens of people plus a crapload of body double actors and months of work. And, despite the fact that it was almost 10 years ago now, it wouldn't be that much easier to do today. Well, a scene of a bunch of duplicates standing around would be fairly simple but they have been doing those for decades. The only significant difference between making the opening fight scene from Matrix2 then and now is that advances in hardware would cut down the final render time.
Really? Where do you think that people are magically going to get real life versions of the wanted 3D characters? Besides, anyone good enough to clean up and make these kinds of models usable is good enough to just be able to model it in the first place. Faster too.
To hell with Blender, why did he mention Poser? It is the photoshop-lensflare-filter of the 3D world. Something which has it's place but which is used 99% of the time to let amateurs run around shouting "look at me I'm an artist too!"
Well, it 'can' be voided, but it is not necessarily voided.
Realistically, this won't stop any company with a serious case against Apple. Yes, Apple could use it as an excuse to pull the Display Port licence, but I can guarantee that the company would keep using it and that it would just get added to the lawsuit. And then if Apple loses they have to pay for the original infraction as well as a bunch of extra damages for trying to be dicks about the Display Port licence plus potentially losing control of the licence terms.
On the other hand, I suspect it has some very real applications against true patent trolls.
Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at.20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is.22. Now, based on that.02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?
No, don't go overboard. It doesn't need to be silly but it does need to provide a realistic feel of how the project is progressing. If your release notes are including the words 'major' and 'significant' and 'large changes' and 'major rewrite' it might be a good clue that it's worth going up by an entire.1
Or since I'm sure all these didn't happen over night or perfectly in sync it may have called for some internal development releases that would have this public release be 2.5 or something.
So, let's get this right, in this update they have: - Major back-end changes - Major UI rewrite - Significant new hardware support - Also, apparently a more powerful themes toolkit
And this isn't even worth a.1 version increment. It's a.01
Really, if the version numbers are going to be this meaningless for tracking significant changes they should at least name them or come up with some other system. Something that let's people get interested and involved in the project and excited about the new release.
The cost to the freedom of their own citizens, and the financial expenditure on all of this hysteria seems awfully prohibitive compared to the actual risk.
To be fair, almost no amount of prevention could begin to equal the cost of a truly major event like a significant amount of the US power grid being down for more than a brief flicker.
If by "interfered with" you mean "heavily deregulated so the corporations could do whatever price fixing, expense cutting and supply shorting dick moves they wanted" you have a point. Ever heard of ENRON? Go swing by Wikipedia. They have a whole series of articles on how corporations behave in a truly deregulated market.
So, on a slightly related note, where DO people go for hardware reviews? In my experience sites that are not obviously corporate/bought are pretty rare on the ground. And the independent sites tend to focus on only bleeding edge gaming hardware.
So where should I be looking for honest reviews of consumer grade routers or printers or LCDs? Everyday hardware stuff. These days I mostly go by the comments and reviews on NCIX and newegg, but a more focused approach would be nice.
You've never actually looked at the mousepad settings panel on your Mac, have you? It comes with two or three different (software) ways it can be set up to trigger different key combinations. There are also a number of 3rd party options to do the same thing. This is only a problem if you don't want a solution.
So then change how the mouse pad works. The easiest alternative is to switch it so that it treats having two fingers on the pad when you press the button as right-click.
Unfortunately, things still need to get done. What would happen if everyone in the world took over a month of vacation every year?
Everyone would be more relaxed, better travelled and more connected to their local communities? Moe kids would grow up with fond memories of vacations with parents?
Yeah, sure the GDP of the world might drop by a small percentage. But less than you would think because relaxed happy workers are more productive workers. Besides, what's the point of work and progress if you can't enjoy life? 'Making things' and 'Getting things done' are not an end unto themselves. They are a necessary part of enjoying the rest of your life.
Will they have a genius bar? If my Aunt Click-on-everything has messed up her computer, can I simply point her to the Microsoft Store store and expect them to fix it for free?
Doesn't matter if you can because everyone automatically will. First, because Apple has trained people to expect the kind of service. The last thing MS wants to do is get a reputation for saying that it's the other guys that take care of their customers.
Second, there will finally be a live face for Microsoft. This is huge and I don't think MS realizes how this is going to play out. As someone who has sold computers and has a lot of experience with hardware support, the eternal refrain in every box store employee in the world when clueless customers come back four months later with screwed up software is "I'm sorry, that's a Windows problem, there's nothing we can do". Now there is actually a face for Windows. There will be physical stores where poor unsuspecting sales people will be forced to address every software problem that can happen on a windows box, regardless of if it is actually caused by anything MS is responsible for.
See, the backfire to MS's ubiquity is that for a LOT of people (and a majority of those that will be prone to software problems) equate the the computer with Windows. Their computer IS windows and everything that happens on it is Windows. So if something is wrong is is a Windows problem. And now every box store employee that doesn't want to spend time troubleshooting another screwed up system has somewhere to point the customers. And once people have been told that their hardware is fine but Windows is broken the employees at the MS store are NEVER getting rid of them.
True, but even if it (and all the other home built systems) did get measured I doubt it would change the comparisons in any meaningful way. After all, while it would drop Apple's share of the total market it would shrink HP's and Dell's and the others in a similar fashion. So you would end up with one or two percent of the total going to an 'other' category while the ratios of all the big manufacturers would stay the same relative to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, for all the flack they get for the inevitable tweaks made in every X.1 version Apple is about the only tech company that doesn't make a habit of going to the market with beta products and fixing it afterwords. Sometimes you can get away with a paid public beta. Often the advantages of being first in and locking in the early adopters pays off. But in tablets (much like phones) Apple got a jump and did their polishing first. It's harder to get away with launching beta products when the competition has had a polished final product on the market for almost a year.
This is not a population density or rural/urban issue at all. If it was then the Canadian ISPs wouldn't have averaged so much higher. Canada has the lowest population density in the world and has a significant rural population. However, its lowest ISPs would sit in the top few on the American graph and the top Canadian ISPs would actually sit above the American graph.
No, but if I understand it right a big portion of this law allows both the state and ISPs/others to sue the businesses actually being advertised by the spam. It makes it harder for legitimate companies to hire spammers or advertisers that uses spammers and then wash their hands of the consequences. And any company that is profitably selling things (even spammy things) to US citizens almost has to have a US presence which means they are fair game.
If your work is not providing you with the tools needed to get your work done efficiently, that is not your problem it is theirs. You should talk to your manager. Talk to IT. Let them know that you are not getting the support you need to preform the job they are paying you to do. And then if they shrug and ignore you get your resume ready and get the hell out because that is a seriously bad symptom.
I doubt it. OSX is (relatively) easy to support because it has a very small subset of software to target (two/three revisions depending on if you support back to 10.4 or just 10.5/6) and a small selection of hardware. There is a massive difference between doing Q/A for a half dozen video cards on a stable platform versus trying to support the massive set of moving targets that get lumped together under Linux along with all the possible hardware that might get plugged in. Valve already has to do that with Windows. Do you think there is enough cash involved to make Linux worth the same effort?
As one example, which of the current half-baked Linux audio architectures do you recommend they use?
True, but in this case the relatively small subset of hardware supported by OSX makes things easier. Once they have it running at all it will only need to be tested against two or three OS revisions (10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard and possibly 10.4 Tiger) and a half dozen video cards. In many ways I suspect that the testing will be far easier than what is needed for a console. A few more hardware versions to deal with but at the same time there is so much higher margin in terms of RAM and processor power that there is a lot more room to play with.
This is a preemptive reply to the ten million people who are about to post variations on the following theme
"e-books should only cost a few dollars because they don't have the cost of printing/shipping/storing a book"
This is wrong.
This is wrong because actually printing a book is the smallest cost involved in making one. When you look at the price of, say, a $35 hardcover book perhaps $4 is physical costs. Almost all of the cost of a book is the cost of paying the author/editor/proofreader plus the retail markup. These costs remain the same regardless of format.
And you will note that I have not mentioned publisher's profit. That's because there basically isn't one. Publishing is notorious for having no profit margin. Always has been. It was famous for not making money a century ago, famous for it fifty years ago and still a great way to get well known while losing money today. Publishing is not the music industry and it is not the movie industry. Almost all the profit is spent in up-front costs before the product even hits the streets.
Because of this, publishing has always had a very sane pricing policy. First they publish the hardcover for a high price point. Everyone who can't wait to read it buys it. Then if it is popular enough to pay off the costs six months or a year later they produce a softcover for $10 to pick up everyone who didn't want it enough to pay the hardcover costs.
Now, this doesn't mesh very well with the electronic music or video markets which is why Amazon tries to run with a fixed price point. But that's a nuts way of doing things when you are talking about books. Doesn't work because it doesn't pay off the fixed costs involved in paying the people who produce the books.
So, really, a fair e-book price is about $5 less than whatever it is selling for on the shelf. When a book first comes out that means $30-$40. A year or so later $6 is pretty likely. If you can't stand waiting don't bitch about the higher price.
For a real understanding, check out this post from John Scalzi (author) that is really fantastic
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/30/a-quick-note-on-ebook-pricing/
Doesn't work, and I speak from experience. I have done work for the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) doing similar things and what you are looking for doesn't exist on all sorts of levels.
First, engineering software is a very specialized beast in exactly the wrong way to exist as a FOSS project. For FOSS projects to exist you first need someone who is capable of doing the programing. Then they have to have a need that they want to fulfill. And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense. None of this describes the type of people who are trying to design next-generation parts of anything.
It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?
It's the same reason that film and television production has always been happy to pick up FOSS solutions that already work but have never particularly cared about developing them. If you are operating at the professional level where you need these tools the cost of them is almost meaningless. It something that always confuses GIMP and Blender supporters who view it as personal software. For them shelling out $5000 a pop for software is such a big deal and they can never understand how the pros don't seem to care.
If you are seriously attempting to design aerospace hardware then you have moved into the realm where these types of software costs are basically meaningless. Suck it up and act like it. If, however, you are actually trying to become a proof-of-concept for FOSS in engineering work then I wish you the best of luck. However, those are two different goals and likely not compatible.
However, beyond the FOSS issue what you are trying to do will not work. Period. These types of software packages are very specialized for specific types of work and beyond a basic level are no good beyond that. 3D modeling software such as Blender or AoI (or Maya or Lightwave or 3DS Max...) are not CAD software. They are not even remotely CAD software. Yes, they appear superficially similar but they are NOT. 3D modeling software is intended to fake the appearance of large numbers of real objects. CAD software is intended to do what is basically visual math. 3D modeling packages have margins of error built in. Many of them will auto-round any equations or numbers entered. As such they are not suitable for real-world design of any complexity.
The types of data that CAD and modeling software generate are also not particularly similar. If you try and just toss engineering blueprints into animation software your artists will not thank you are the end result will look like ass. CAD tends to have too much and the wrong type of detail where animation software is looking for simplification and tends to simplify areas that need detail to look proper once animated. It takes almost more work to clean up a CAD model for animation that it takes to create one from scratch.
You can't really even send a CAD design right to a 3D printer without a significant amount of clean-up unless it was designed with that in mind.
So, to summarize, decide what you want each section of your operation to do and shell out the cash for whatever it takes to let them do it properly. Let everyone worry about their own needs and don't try and meddle by forcing the internal needs of other departments on them. If you were seriously planning on saving costs by not buying professional software for an AEROSPACE project then you are already fucked. You may as well blow all the investor's money on a massive party because it's lost anyways.
While technically true, that's functionally meaningless. If your program supports limited codecs that work with a particular container (for example... AVI) ditching one is the same as ditching the other.
For all intents and purposes DIVX is AVI as far as popular support goes. I'm not sure I can name another codec that I've seen used in the last few years as more than a intermediate step.
Yeah, but those objects are easy. Like, dumb easy. It takes far, far less time to make a fridge the traditional modelling way than it takes to clean up data like this. And you can make any fridge you want instead of having to find a real fridge and haul it out, light it and scan it.
Object scanning systems have been around for over twenty years in various forms and costs. The fact that even the people who have been able to afford it don't use them should tell you a lot about how applicable this tech actually is. If scanning was cheaper or faster or easier than modelling you would see people like Blizzard and WETA all over it. But you don't.
The major reason that these types of programs don't get expanded into commercial products or bought and integrated into existing products is that they are cute tech demos but not particularly real-world interesting.
Almost without exception anything simple enough for these types of reconstruction programs to handle is too simple to bother with. The paper church in the demo video for instance. The final wire-frame product is, sadly, crap. Neat and interesting crap but still crap. There are at least 3 times the polys that the form needs and almost all of the significant edges are in the wrong place. In the time it would take to clean up the data into something worth using I could build a better model form scratch including textures.
There are perhaps some very niche uses for this in terms of augmented reality. It could be integrated into a game or chat program to give a more realistic version of those make-an-avatar-from-your-webcam gimmicks that seem to gain attention every once and a while. If this guy has developed some very good algorithms he might get the interest of some of the match-moving software companies like Syntheyes.
But the reason this kind of this never shows up in profesional 3D packages is that if you are good enough to be using the software professionally you are good enough not to need these kinds of crutches. It's the 3D equivalent of Dreamweaver's auto-generated spaghetti code.
Yeah, that only took a team of dozens of people plus a crapload of body double actors and months of work. And, despite the fact that it was almost 10 years ago now, it wouldn't be that much easier to do today. Well, a scene of a bunch of duplicates standing around would be fairly simple but they have been doing those for decades. The only significant difference between making the opening fight scene from Matrix2 then and now is that advances in hardware would cut down the final render time.
Really? Where do you think that people are magically going to get real life versions of the wanted 3D characters? Besides, anyone good enough to clean up and make these kinds of models usable is good enough to just be able to model it in the first place. Faster too.
To hell with Blender, why did he mention Poser? It is the photoshop-lensflare-filter of the 3D world. Something which has it's place but which is used 99% of the time to let amateurs run around shouting "look at me I'm an artist too!"
Well, it 'can' be voided, but it is not necessarily voided.
Realistically, this won't stop any company with a serious case against Apple. Yes, Apple could use it as an excuse to pull the Display Port licence, but I can guarantee that the company would keep using it and that it would just get added to the lawsuit. And then if Apple loses they have to pay for the original infraction as well as a bunch of extra damages for trying to be dicks about the Display Port licence plus potentially losing control of the licence terms.
On the other hand, I suspect it has some very real applications against true patent trolls.
Well, let's put it another way. Say you tried it at .20 and found that it was interesting but still too rough for your needs. Now, you are browsing around and see in passing that the current version is .22. Now, based on that .02 difference do you think that it has gone through major changes and deserves a second look or has it just been tweaked a little?
No, don't go overboard. It doesn't need to be silly but it does need to provide a realistic feel of how the project is progressing. If your release notes are including the words 'major' and 'significant' and 'large changes' and 'major rewrite' it might be a good clue that it's worth going up by an entire .1
Or since I'm sure all these didn't happen over night or perfectly in sync it may have called for some internal development releases that would have this public release be 2.5 or something.
Or, yes, give it a name. It works for Ubuntu.
So, let's get this right, in this update they have:
- Major back-end changes
- Major UI rewrite
- Significant new hardware support
- Also, apparently a more powerful themes toolkit
And this isn't even worth a .1 version increment. It's a .01
Really, if the version numbers are going to be this meaningless for tracking significant changes they should at least name them or come up with some other system. Something that let's people get interested and involved in the project and excited about the new release.
To be fair, almost no amount of prevention could begin to equal the cost of a truly major event like a significant amount of the US power grid being down for more than a brief flicker.
If by "interfered with" you mean "heavily deregulated so the corporations could do whatever price fixing, expense cutting and supply shorting dick moves they wanted" you have a point. Ever heard of ENRON? Go swing by Wikipedia. They have a whole series of articles on how corporations behave in a truly deregulated market.
So, on a slightly related note, where DO people go for hardware reviews? In my experience sites that are not obviously corporate/bought are pretty rare on the ground. And the independent sites tend to focus on only bleeding edge gaming hardware.
So where should I be looking for honest reviews of consumer grade routers or printers or LCDs? Everyday hardware stuff. These days I mostly go by the comments and reviews on NCIX and newegg, but a more focused approach would be nice.
You've never actually looked at the mousepad settings panel on your Mac, have you? It comes with two or three different (software) ways it can be set up to trigger different key combinations. There are also a number of 3rd party options to do the same thing. This is only a problem if you don't want a solution.
So then change how the mouse pad works. The easiest alternative is to switch it so that it treats having two fingers on the pad when you press the button as right-click.
Everyone would be more relaxed, better travelled and more connected to their local communities? Moe kids would grow up with fond memories of vacations with parents?
Yeah, sure the GDP of the world might drop by a small percentage. But less than you would think because relaxed happy workers are more productive workers. Besides, what's the point of work and progress if you can't enjoy life? 'Making things' and 'Getting things done' are not an end unto themselves. They are a necessary part of enjoying the rest of your life.
Doesn't matter if you can because everyone automatically will. First, because Apple has trained people to expect the kind of service. The last thing MS wants to do is get a reputation for saying that it's the other guys that take care of their customers.
Second, there will finally be a live face for Microsoft. This is huge and I don't think MS realizes how this is going to play out. As someone who has sold computers and has a lot of experience with hardware support, the eternal refrain in every box store employee in the world when clueless customers come back four months later with screwed up software is "I'm sorry, that's a Windows problem, there's nothing we can do". Now there is actually a face for Windows. There will be physical stores where poor unsuspecting sales people will be forced to address every software problem that can happen on a windows box, regardless of if it is actually caused by anything MS is responsible for.
See, the backfire to MS's ubiquity is that for a LOT of people (and a majority of those that will be prone to software problems) equate the the computer with Windows. Their computer IS windows and everything that happens on it is Windows. So if something is wrong is is a Windows problem. And now every box store employee that doesn't want to spend time troubleshooting another screwed up system has somewhere to point the customers. And once people have been told that their hardware is fine but Windows is broken the employees at the MS store are NEVER getting rid of them.
True, but even if it (and all the other home built systems) did get measured I doubt it would change the comparisons in any meaningful way. After all, while it would drop Apple's share of the total market it would shrink HP's and Dell's and the others in a similar fashion. So you would end up with one or two percent of the total going to an 'other' category while the ratios of all the big manufacturers would stay the same relative to each other.