I can create an application that displays a big red button on the desktop which, when pressed, will completely wipe the hard drive without an annoying modal confirmation dialog box. Sure it'll give great "user experience" to those that would like to wipe their drive but is that reason enough to install and use something like this on a daily basis?
Giving users easy access to something destructive is not good UX design. It's the definition of bad UX design.
performance is not a bad thing. By the time Windows 7 is released, 3 years would have elapsed since Vista's release. Computers are better and cheaper. Discount brands give you at least a dual-core cpu with 2Gb of RAM. Windows 7 won't have the issue of being pre-installed on hardware that can't give it reasonable performance.
>I'm sure they picked bible passages because the translations were mostly done for them already but I'm a little embarrassed that future generations are going to think how amazingly superstitious we were.
I don't think any less of the ancient Greeks for their mythology.
>I think there are very few bureaucrats twirling their moustaches and gleefully chortling over the failures of the modern educational system.
Probably not but the point is that the current bureaucracy will not accept changes to the system if those changes threaten their existence. There's a reason why teacher unions (as one example) oppose any charter or voucher system. So yes, bureaucrats are willing to make changes but only insofar as they aren't affected in any negative way.
>If you had read the GP's post, you would see that his comments were about the theoretical free market, not the highly managed economy that you've seen.
His post fails even on that level. There are no free markets so what is he basing his hypothetical speculation on? He clearly cannot extrapolate from the free market fragments in our economy because companies just don't act the way he argued they would. They work with their competitors, and they don't resort to violence. The former isn't government mandated and the latter, if they really wanted to do it, they could get away with. After all, the Mafia has been using that model for decades. Maybe it is counter-intuitive but physical violence has never been a feature of trade... unless governments have been involved.
You should also re-read my comment because I anticipated your kind of objection anyway. I argued that the size of the US economy precludes the possibility of any real top-down oversight. Only in this respect we might as well be in a free market, because the vast majority of transactions happen with no government knowledge of them. To put it another way, if most companies approached business with the intent of cheating shareholders or partners or _______(insert bad behavior), the government couldn't stop it. Enron got away with it for a few years, and if you had 10 000 other Enrons how much harder would it be to track them down. And how hard would the economy and investment market have crashed by now. Clearly, Enron is the exception that proves the rule.
These are good enough reasons for me to label the original poster's comment as complete fiction. His views are not rooted in reality. Furthermore he hasn't tried to justify any of those view. He simply threw out assertions, and I supposed if your ideology runs left of Kucinich, you'll take them on faith.
>So your saying all the Companies and corporations would just skip hand in hand thru the flowers. All of them.
The vast majority of them necessarily have to. If too many of them were like Enron or WorldCom, the economy would have collapsed. The exception proves the rule.
>In a truly free market, most submarkets would quickly devolve into monopolies
And you know this how? You thought really really really hard about it? Given how wrong you are in everything else you wrote, I'm just going to safely dismiss this point as well.
>..knocking off their competition (assassinations), burning down their competitor's corporate headquarters/manufacturing facilities, stealing their competitor's physical assets
I think you're channeling the conflict resolution strategies of past (and current) governments. This has not been the route that business have took, and there's no reason to think that this would be different in any another scenario.
You're also forgetting that businesses, large and small, have no qualms about cooperating with each other, even if they are competitors. Microsoft and HP might fight for the same enterprise market (Windows Server vs. HP-UX), but at the same time can partner in consumer space and relase jointly developed products. Hell, my father works for a medium size frozen food operation, that sells their own branded TV dinners, but also takes contracts from Nestle and various Grocery chains to make their branded dinners. You see similar co-operation in every segment of economy, from automative, to manufacturing, to sofware. None of it is government mandated. None of it is coercive. In the financial sector there are billions of dollars transferred amongst parties based on nothing more than a handshake agreement(and of course, dacades of built-up trust). Has this kind of uncoercive trust been seen at this scale during any other time in human history?
You are absolutely wrong in your characterization of capitalism and the free market. Looking at it anther way. The US GDP is approximately $13 trillion dollars. There are not enough regulators and auditors in the entire world to monitor even a small fraction of transactions that make up such a staggering GDP. If even a small minority of businesses behaved in the way you caricatured them, the economy would not function and would collapse. It clearly hasn't.
>LOL, have you not been attention the last 10 years?
Whats so funny? Yes I have been paying attention. The number of open source companies that bringing in money is disappointingly low. The number of developers that get a decent salary from working on open source software is low. And from the open source companies that do make money, how many of them don't have a side revenue stream like mySQL, which charges users for the right to ignore GPL provisions? Where do you think the vast majority of developers make their money from - open source software or proprietary software? Sure some of the top tier open source projects make money. And yes, sometimes support and custom work is a good business model. But don't tell me this fits every piece of code out there. Its obvious that in quite a bit of circumstances, there is no money in support. Right of the top of my head, open source does not work for gaming. You can't spend 3 years and 20 million dollars developing a game, and then relying on charity to recoup your costs. Further, I don't think support costs for Office would bring Microsoft any money. I don't remember the last time my old company patched Word (and presumably, patches would be free anyway). What is there to support in MSOffice?
>It doesn't matter what FSF and Stallman want.
The reason why I mentioned Stallman is because he has some screwed ideas on copyright and software development. I saw him at a talk at the University of Toronto, and he was suggesting some sort of government run escrow service for source code - if there were no copyright laws (which he favors the abolishment of) to enforce GPL provisions.
>GPL would prevent their proprietary standards and would undermine their monopoly.
FSF and Stallman (with GPL), would create a commodity of all software. I'm not sure thats a good thing.
>They could make tons of money selling boxes of MS GPL Office (people wouldn't care), really be open, and make money on support.
How would they make money from something that is a free download away? Businesses certainly wouldn't buy it. GPL Office would come pre-installed with their Dell computers and Dell would flip the finger to Microsoft and keep the savings for themselves. So where would the 'tons of money' come from?
If the entire landscape of software consisted of only GPL code (something Stallman and FSF advocate), could it support the millions of developers currently making a decent living writing (and selling) software?
I would have to say, 'no'.
1) NFL sells TV rights for millions of dollars. 2) TV makes money back by selling ads. 3) The price for ads is dependent on number of eyeballs watching the station during game time. So what does it matter if you watch the game at home, or at a church with 100 other people. Seems like everything is square.
I agree, but I think its an open question whether a Harvard journalist has a higher probability of actually being better than a blogger. At a superficial level that may be (simply because a blogger is anyone that posts on the internet - and there's a lot of crap out there). But generally looking at the state of the mainstream news media, I would say "no". Its usually bloggers who take the time to do an in depth objective analysis of topics, something that should have been taught to Harvard journalists. Take the Dan Rather debacle with the forged papers. I can't see any journalist take the time to speak to a typographical expert to verify the authenticity of these papers. Had this happened fifteen years ago, it would have been months or years before these documents would have been shown to be false, and by then it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The damage had already been done.
>someone who graduated from DeVry isn't "really" a programmer since he didn't get an MS in CompSci or Maths or whatever.
If he can write good code, it doesn't matter if he has a degree or a diploma or nothing. You will find very few people here on slashdot who disagree with that. So I don't see why a McDonald's burger flipper blogging on politics cannot have better commentary than a graduate of Harvard Journalism. Journalists have to earn the public's respect, something they have been failing at the last 20 years. I get a sense that journalists have some warped sense of entitlement towards their degree and profession.
>If I ask my co-workers and friends and family, none of them (except for the teenagers), listen to them
But that was always the case. When have the music tastes of teenagers and..err.. 'your demographic'.. aligned? Music profits, album sales, for the most part, have always been driven by young people (u-25).
Anyway, I believe CD sales are down across the board, not just for pop.
I don't think so. Pop music was always driven by the under-25 demographic, which also happens to be the most price-conscious. It makes sense that when a relatively risk and price free method of gaining music became available, this demographic would jump on that to the detriment of CD sales.
>I've stopped buying CDs ages ago. I'm not downloading music either.
You told me your singular (irrelevant) experience, so I'll tell you mine. Out of all my friend's kids, not one asks for CDs for birthdays or Christmas, yet they all have full iPods. From my perspective, this is unbelievable. When I was growing up, every gift-giving day would guarantee one or two albums (cassettes and later CDs) for my sister and I and pretty much all my friends. My 12 year old nephew does not have one legal CD (why would he when he has 10Gb of music on his computer?).
>Sorry, but in the 80's and 90's, we had reason to buy music. It was actually good. These days, music (that is being pushed to us, or advertised) is mostly total shit.
That's what my dad says about the 70s and what grandfather says about the 50s. Its an arrogant and untrue statement to make. I don't think mainstream music 'these days' is total shit. Most people still like today's music (that's why its referred to as 'pop' or 'mainstream').
You may very well be an average person on the whole, but your music tastes are not mainstream. Not unless your iPod has 50cent, Britney Spears and anything else they regularly play in MTV (when they play music).
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$80 for software?!?! What is this, 2005? ....
Isn't that every consumer software company?
I can create an application that displays a big red button on the desktop which, when pressed, will completely wipe the hard drive without an annoying modal confirmation dialog box. Sure it'll give great "user experience" to those that would like to wipe their drive but is that reason enough to install and use something like this on a daily basis?
Giving users easy access to something destructive is not good UX design. It's the definition of bad UX design.
>flash doesn't belong on phones
By your reasoning, neither does HTML 5 canvas and video because they have the exact same (if not worse) issues.
performance is not a bad thing. By the time Windows 7 is released, 3 years would have elapsed since Vista's release. Computers are better and cheaper. Discount brands give you at least a dual-core cpu with 2Gb of RAM. Windows 7 won't have the issue of being pre-installed on hardware that can't give it reasonable performance.
>I'm sure they picked bible passages because the translations were mostly done for them already but I'm a little embarrassed that future generations are going to think how amazingly superstitious we were.
I don't think any less of the ancient Greeks for their mythology.
>I think there are very few bureaucrats twirling their moustaches and gleefully chortling over the failures of the modern educational system.
Probably not but the point is that the current bureaucracy will not accept changes to the system if those changes threaten their existence. There's a reason why teacher unions (as one example) oppose any charter or voucher system. So yes, bureaucrats are willing to make changes but only insofar as they aren't affected in any negative way.
>If you had read the GP's post, you would see that his comments were about the theoretical free market, not the highly managed economy that you've seen.
His post fails even on that level. There are no free markets so what is he basing his hypothetical speculation on? He clearly cannot extrapolate from the free market fragments in our economy because companies just don't act the way he argued they would. They work with their competitors, and they don't resort to violence. The former isn't government mandated and the latter, if they really wanted to do it, they could get away with. After all, the Mafia has been using that model for decades. Maybe it is counter-intuitive but physical violence has never been a feature of trade ... unless governments have been involved.
You should also re-read my comment because I anticipated your kind of objection anyway. I argued that the size of the US economy precludes the possibility of any real top-down oversight. Only in this respect we might as well be in a free market, because the vast majority of transactions happen with no government knowledge of them. To put it another way, if most companies approached business with the intent of cheating shareholders or partners or _______(insert bad behavior), the government couldn't stop it. Enron got away with it for a few years, and if you had 10 000 other Enrons how much harder would it be to track them down. And how hard would the economy and investment market have crashed by now. Clearly, Enron is the exception that proves the rule.
These are good enough reasons for me to label the original poster's comment as complete fiction. His views are not rooted in reality. Furthermore he hasn't tried to justify any of those view. He simply threw out assertions, and I supposed if your ideology runs left of Kucinich, you'll take them on faith.
>So your saying all the Companies and corporations would just skip hand in hand thru the flowers. All of them.
The vast majority of them necessarily have to. If too many of them were like Enron or WorldCom, the economy would have collapsed. The exception proves the rule.
>In a truly free market, most submarkets would quickly devolve into monopolies
And you know this how? You thought really really really hard about it? Given how wrong you are in everything else you wrote, I'm just going to safely dismiss this point as well.
>..knocking off their competition (assassinations), burning down their competitor's corporate headquarters/manufacturing facilities, stealing their competitor's physical assets
I think you're channeling the conflict resolution strategies of past (and current) governments. This has not been the route that business have took, and there's no reason to think that this would be different in any another scenario.
You're also forgetting that businesses, large and small, have no qualms about cooperating with each other, even if they are competitors. Microsoft and HP might fight for the same enterprise market (Windows Server vs. HP-UX), but at the same time can partner in consumer space and relase jointly developed products. Hell, my father works for a medium size frozen food operation, that sells their own branded TV dinners, but also takes contracts from Nestle and various Grocery chains to make their branded dinners. You see similar co-operation in every segment of economy, from automative, to manufacturing, to sofware. None of it is government mandated. None of it is coercive. In the financial sector there are billions of dollars transferred amongst parties based on nothing more than a handshake agreement(and of course, dacades of built-up trust). Has this kind of uncoercive trust been seen at this scale during any other time in human history?
You are absolutely wrong in your characterization of capitalism and the free market. Looking at it anther way. The US GDP is approximately $13 trillion dollars. There are not enough regulators and auditors in the entire world to monitor even a small fraction of transactions that make up such a staggering GDP. If even a small minority of businesses behaved in the way you caricatured them, the economy would not function and would collapse. It clearly hasn't.
>LOL, have you not been attention the last 10 years?
Whats so funny? Yes I have been paying attention. The number of open source companies that bringing in money is disappointingly low. The number of developers that get a decent salary from working on open source software is low. And from the open source companies that do make money, how many of them don't have a side revenue stream like mySQL, which charges users for the right to ignore GPL provisions? Where do you think the vast majority of developers make their money from - open source software or proprietary software? Sure some of the top tier open source projects make money. And yes, sometimes support and custom work is a good business model. But don't tell me this fits every piece of code out there. Its obvious that in quite a bit of circumstances, there is no money in support. Right of the top of my head, open source does not work for gaming. You can't spend 3 years and 20 million dollars developing a game, and then relying on charity to recoup your costs. Further, I don't think support costs for Office would bring Microsoft any money. I don't remember the last time my old company patched Word (and presumably, patches would be free anyway). What is there to support in MSOffice?
>It doesn't matter what FSF and Stallman want.
The reason why I mentioned Stallman is because he has some screwed ideas on copyright and software development. I saw him at a talk at the University of Toronto, and he was suggesting some sort of government run escrow service for source code - if there were no copyright laws (which he favors the abolishment of) to enforce GPL provisions.
>GPL would prevent their proprietary standards and would undermine their monopoly.
FSF and Stallman (with GPL), would create a commodity of all software. I'm not sure thats a good thing.
>They could make tons of money selling boxes of MS GPL Office (people wouldn't care), really be open, and make money on support.
How would they make money from something that is a free download away? Businesses certainly wouldn't buy it. GPL Office would come pre-installed with their Dell computers and Dell would flip the finger to Microsoft and keep the savings for themselves. So where would the 'tons of money' come from?
If the entire landscape of software consisted of only GPL code (something Stallman and FSF advocate), could it support the millions of developers currently making a decent living writing (and selling) software? I would have to say, 'no'.
Ok, press some CDs and slap a $50 price tag on each one. Problem solved.
Actually, its more of a "Intelligent Design" game.
1) NFL sells TV rights for millions of dollars.
2) TV makes money back by selling ads.
3) The price for ads is dependent on number of eyeballs watching the station during game time. So what does it matter if you watch the game at home, or at a church with 100 other people. Seems like everything is square.
I agree, but I think its an open question whether a Harvard journalist has a higher probability of actually being better than a blogger. At a superficial level that may be (simply because a blogger is anyone that posts on the internet - and there's a lot of crap out there). But generally looking at the state of the mainstream news media, I would say "no". Its usually bloggers who take the time to do an in depth objective analysis of topics, something that should have been taught to Harvard journalists. Take the Dan Rather debacle with the forged papers. I can't see any journalist take the time to speak to a typographical expert to verify the authenticity of these papers. Had this happened fifteen years ago, it would have been months or years before these documents would have been shown to be false, and by then it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The damage had already been done.
>someone who graduated from DeVry isn't "really" a programmer since he didn't get an MS in CompSci or Maths or whatever.
If he can write good code, it doesn't matter if he has a degree or a diploma or nothing. You will find very few people here on slashdot who disagree with that. So I don't see why a McDonald's burger flipper blogging on politics cannot have better commentary than a graduate of Harvard Journalism. Journalists have to earn the public's respect, something they have been failing at the last 20 years. I get a sense that journalists have some warped sense of entitlement towards their degree and profession.
Whats so great about a 4 year humanities degree?
>not trying to do it to sabotage the presentation.
Thats exactly what you're doing though.
What an asshole thing to do. It wasn't funny at all, and their 'apology' was worse.
>If I ask my co-workers and friends and family, none of them (except for the teenagers), listen to them
..err.. 'your demographic'.. aligned? Music profits, album sales, for the most part, have always been driven by young people (u-25).
But that was always the case. When have the music tastes of teenagers and
Anyway, I believe CD sales are down across the board, not just for pop.
>Even if it did, it was minor.
I don't think so. Pop music was always driven by the under-25 demographic, which also happens to be the most price-conscious. It makes sense that when a relatively risk and price free method of gaining music became available, this demographic would jump on that to the detriment of CD sales.
>I've stopped buying CDs ages ago. I'm not downloading music either.
You told me your singular (irrelevant) experience, so I'll tell you mine. Out of all my friend's kids, not one asks for CDs for birthdays or Christmas, yet they all have full iPods. From my perspective, this is unbelievable. When I was growing up, every gift-giving day would guarantee one or two albums (cassettes and later CDs) for my sister and I and pretty much all my friends. My 12 year old nephew does not have one legal CD (why would he when he has 10Gb of music on his computer?).
>Sorry, but in the 80's and 90's, we had reason to buy music. It was actually good. These days, music (that is being pushed to us, or advertised) is mostly total shit.
That's what my dad says about the 70s and what grandfather says about the 50s. Its an arrogant and untrue statement to make. I don't think mainstream music 'these days' is total shit. Most people still like today's music (that's why its referred to as 'pop' or 'mainstream').
You may very well be an average person on the whole, but your music tastes are not mainstream. Not unless your iPod has 50cent, Britney Spears and anything else they regularly play in MTV (when they play music).
I guess your singular experience shows that sales of pop music cannot possibly be due to piracy?