That was a very well argued, well written post, and I wish there were more like it on Slashdot. However, I have to disagree with you on one point:
One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category.
To my mind, our current environmental problems are more down to the capitalist mentality of exploiting a resource without much thought for how long it's going to last, because when it's all gone, you just move on to making money out of something else. As you say, humanity's spent much longer sharing than owning, and societies with a relatively weak concept of ownership, such as the Native Americans, generally had a more long-term view of how to manage the resources at their disposal, and of their place in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, the utter mess that communist nations made of things kinda runs against my point, but I suppose they had a different agenda that turned out to be just as harmful.
Many of you across the pond won't be familiar with this disaster, but it's as good an example of fire spreading quickly without accelerants as you'll ever see. It all started when someone dropped a cigarette, and within a few minutes a hundred-metre long wooden stand was a goner, killing dozens of people. There's a video of it on YouTube, although I should warn you that there's one or two scenes in it which I personally find slightly difficult to watch.
Except it's not a proprietary format being pushed by only one manufacturer. JVC, Samsung, Panasonic. Hitachi, Philips, you name 'em, they're all signed up to Blu-Ray. Meanwhile, who's backing HD-DVD? Er, Toshiba and Microsoft, and that's about it.
Laziness. When you know you have to get it right first time, that's what you do. When you know you've got the safety net of rolling out a patch after you've had an extra month to iron out the bugs, you'll probably avail of it.
Difference is, nobody bought the PS2 just to be a DVD player, because while DVD players were relatively expensive at the time, they were cheaper than a PS2, and did the job a lot better. DVD playback was a nice thing to have, and it definitely added to the overall value of the package, but wouldn't have been anybody's main reason for buying one. Seems like this time around Sony are betting on people seeing this as a cheap way to get a Blu-Ray player, using it as a bridgehead to get the things into people's homes.
Thing is, nobody wants a Blu-Ray player, so the tactic's falling flat on its face.
It's not about who's right and who's wrong - my point was that Apple have been able to get away with not fixing this bug, because that's what it is, for years, because the competition has been absolutely no threat to their market position. They've been resting on their laurels as long as they possibly could. But recently the competition has shown some signs that they're beginning to get their act together, and I suppose Apple's making some incremental improvements to their products to keep ahead.
It's not that iPods are the best possible players, they're just good enough at the right things for Most People. My point is that it doesn't seem that hard to me to come up with something a lot better, but somehow nobody can, and I find it a bit baffling.
Maybe I should be designing portable music players.
And nor should they. That's your job. Watch what they do, find out what works, find out what doesn't, and give them a new solution that builds on the strengths and alleviates the weaknesses of the old one. If the application of clever technology is the right way to achieve this, that's what you do. If it isn't, and sometimes it isn't, don't force it down their throats.
Then give your solution back to them, watch how they get on with it, see what they think of it. Learn your lessons and roll them back into the next version. Repeat ad infinitum.
Well, if that's your idea of requirements capture, you deserved all the pain you got.
Customers know what they want. But they can't express it. Your job is to make sure you both arrive at the same understanding of what the customer wants, and you get there by asking the right questions.
Think about it - I hand you a blank piece of paper and say "draw me a picture". A lot of people have trouble with this - they don't know where to start, they don't know what they want to draw, they don't know what I'd like them to draw. Now, if I said to you "draw me a picture of a dog", away you'd go, because now the problem's nicely (but not excessively) constrained, and you've got a framework to work within. In the same way, you can't say to this guy "what exactly do you want to do?" and expect him to spit out a fully resolved requirements spec. You need to ask questions that he can give precise answers to.
Your customer's idea of what he wants, and what he actually wants, may be two different things. You need to make sure you give him the latter (and don't confuse it with giving him what you think he wants, or what you think he needs, either).
How hard can it be to produce a decent player, really?
The market in portable MP3 players has been around for a fair few years now. The iPod runs the show because it does what Most People want to do, in a nice friendly way, and is brilliantly marketed. There are a thousand and one players on the market for Everybody Else, which offer more functionality, better sound quality, less DRM restrictions, lower price, whatever. Pretty much every single one of these competitors is deficient on the usability front, and most of them have some head-slappingly bad UI howlers that make you wonder just what the hell they were thinking when they designed it, or indeed whether they were thinking at all.
And then, having had years to learn from everybody else, good and bad, Microsoft rocks up with the Zune. Oops.
Why can't they, and everybody else, understand what makes for a good portable music player? Why do they give Apple such an easy ride? The iPod really isn't any great shakes, it's just that the competition is mostly rotten. With each revison Apple have done just enough to keep half a step ahead - for example, the rather fudged implementation of gapless playback that finally arrived with the last updates took away one of the main reasons why I personally wouldn't buy one (seriously, folks, if there's no gaps between the tracks on the CD, and your player puts them in, that is a bug. Fix it. And yes, I know MP3s can't really do true gapless).
Really, Apple's market dominance is there for the taking. All it takes is a bit of application. Why can't anybody come up with the goods?
Airships with a twist. Part of the lift comes from aerodynamic lift, which means you can land 'em. And I don't know whether they've actually built it yet or not, but they were talking about making a military-spec job with a 1,000-ton payload. Or, if you want to think about that another way, sixteen Challenger 2 tanks. That's some big liftin'. Much faster than road freight, much more fuel-efficient than air freight, much more flexible than rail freight. Slightly vulnerable to enemy fire, admittedly, but you can't have everything...
Yeah, nobody ever got anywhere in ships powered by sails alone.
C'mon.
Actually, I think sails are due for a comeback. Current thinking seems to be to fly them above the ship like a kite, rather than hanging them from masts. If your cargo's not in a particular hurry anyway, why not? I mean, it's not like oil tankers are tearing up the oceans as it is. Who cares if it gets there a day later if it's used absolutely zero energy to do it?
Well, the thing about a cavitating torpedo is that because the only bit of it that's touching anything is the very tip, it's a right bugger to steer...
Thousands of pounds per screen (at the time), and I'm not kidding, there's several hundred of them. Also, if you look at them closely, you can see that each one's made of two separate panels, so double that again. Four or five years on and they're almost due for replacement already.
Hmm, you might be onto something there, given that Waterloo station serves the "stockbroker belt". I doubt anybody's impressed now, though - they look terrible. And they were never branded, so I can't see why any commercial outfit would have subsidised them if nobody was going to associate the screens with them, rather than their competitors.
I dunno, I just think they were a step backwards when they were installed, and now they look absolutely terrible and will be in need of replacement, whereas the old flipping board ticked away merrily for many a year without a hitch.
I know all that. And really, I wouldn't mind if online music distribution disappeared, because I can't see what good it does. Realistically, I can't see how we can get away from "feeding the beasts", and if I'm going to have to feed them, I'd rather get my music from them in a format that I like.
I don't have much of a problem with filler, either - I like the whole concept of the album, that it's a body of work that represents where an act is at a particular time. A continuous drip-freed of singles from a band is never going to stand as a symbol of its time in the same way as a great album, delivered all of a piece.
Possibly the most utterly stupid application of plasma screens I've ever seen is at Waterloo Station, here in London. A few years back they stopped using the old departure and arrival boards (you know, the ones where the train stations and numbers flip round like a Rolodex) in favour of HUNDREDS of plasma screens. At the time they were still retailing for thousands of pounds a pop. Needless to say, years of showing nothing but train schedules has left them pretty severely burnt in. And in my view, they were less readable than the old boards in the first place.
Another fine example of money being pissed up the wall in Britain.
Yes. Hard disk space is cheap and getting cheaper, I'm not bothered about the amount of storage space it takes. I just want recordings that are the best quality I can get, for archival purposes. Sure, when I'm on the move I'm listening to MP3s or Oggs or whatever and that's fine, but I keep all my CDs ripped in FLAC so that if my lossy codec of choice isn't supported by my player of choice, I can just encode from FLAC, rather than transcoding from one lossy medium to another. I'm thinking ahead - I plan on keeping my music collection for life, and who knows how many different formats will come and go over the next 50 years or so? So keep them encoded losslessly and then you're not going to end up with severely decayed versions of your originals.
This probably sounds really anal, but I'm just playing the long game.
Sound quality's not really the point of my insistence on lossless compression. It's simply that I don't see why I should buy an inferior quality reproduction when there's perfectly good CDs in the shops. I want a direct equivalent for the CD, or I won't pay for it. Simple.
That's purely a symptom of the fact that commercial software doesn't want to play nice with other commercial software, whereas open-source software can co-operate rather than competing. Yes, it's hugely annoying, and I'm sure Microsoft could at least try to impose a logical structure and expect third-party developers to stick to it, but I suspect it'd be a struggle.
Thing is, the only question anybody really needs answered in a review like this is "what does this device bring to the party?" I mean, there are other devices out there which are top for sound quality, or usability, or compatibility, or battery life, or whatever it is you care about. If Microsoft's going to turn up years late in a crowded market, they'd better have a good trick up their sleeve. Now, the reviewer says that this, potentially, was the built-in Wi-Fi, but he laments the fact that it doesn't make anything like the most of this ability.
So actually, I think it tells me all that I, personally, need to know, and does it in a reasonably eloquent style, refreshingly free of dry stats and jargon.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category.
To my mind, our current environmental problems are more down to the capitalist mentality of exploiting a resource without much thought for how long it's going to last, because when it's all gone, you just move on to making money out of something else. As you say, humanity's spent much longer sharing than owning, and societies with a relatively weak concept of ownership, such as the Native Americans, generally had a more long-term view of how to manage the resources at their disposal, and of their place in the grand scheme of things.Of course, the utter mess that communist nations made of things kinda runs against my point, but I suppose they had a different agenda that turned out to be just as harmful.
Many of you across the pond won't be familiar with this disaster, but it's as good an example of fire spreading quickly without accelerants as you'll ever see. It all started when someone dropped a cigarette, and within a few minutes a hundred-metre long wooden stand was a goner, killing dozens of people. There's a video of it on YouTube, although I should warn you that there's one or two scenes in it which I personally find slightly difficult to watch.
Except it's not a proprietary format being pushed by only one manufacturer. JVC, Samsung, Panasonic. Hitachi, Philips, you name 'em, they're all signed up to Blu-Ray. Meanwhile, who's backing HD-DVD? Er, Toshiba and Microsoft, and that's about it.
Laziness. When you know you have to get it right first time, that's what you do. When you know you've got the safety net of rolling out a patch after you've had an extra month to iron out the bugs, you'll probably avail of it.
You could always just, you know, turn up late.
But it should be lossless nonetheless. Right now downloadable music isn't worth paying for at all, as far as I'm concerned.
And it should be DRM-free, naturally, but you can't have everything.
Difference is, nobody bought the PS2 just to be a DVD player, because while DVD players were relatively expensive at the time, they were cheaper than a PS2, and did the job a lot better. DVD playback was a nice thing to have, and it definitely added to the overall value of the package, but wouldn't have been anybody's main reason for buying one. Seems like this time around Sony are betting on people seeing this as a cheap way to get a Blu-Ray player, using it as a bridgehead to get the things into people's homes.
Thing is, nobody wants a Blu-Ray player, so the tactic's falling flat on its face.
It's not about who's right and who's wrong - my point was that Apple have been able to get away with not fixing this bug, because that's what it is, for years, because the competition has been absolutely no threat to their market position. They've been resting on their laurels as long as they possibly could. But recently the competition has shown some signs that they're beginning to get their act together, and I suppose Apple's making some incremental improvements to their products to keep ahead.
It's not that iPods are the best possible players, they're just good enough at the right things for Most People. My point is that it doesn't seem that hard to me to come up with something a lot better, but somehow nobody can, and I find it a bit baffling.
Maybe I should be designing portable music players.
And nor should they. That's your job. Watch what they do, find out what works, find out what doesn't, and give them a new solution that builds on the strengths and alleviates the weaknesses of the old one. If the application of clever technology is the right way to achieve this, that's what you do. If it isn't, and sometimes it isn't, don't force it down their throats.
Then give your solution back to them, watch how they get on with it, see what they think of it. Learn your lessons and roll them back into the next version. Repeat ad infinitum.
Well, if that's your idea of requirements capture, you deserved all the pain you got.
Customers know what they want. But they can't express it. Your job is to make sure you both arrive at the same understanding of what the customer wants, and you get there by asking the right questions.
Think about it - I hand you a blank piece of paper and say "draw me a picture". A lot of people have trouble with this - they don't know where to start, they don't know what they want to draw, they don't know what I'd like them to draw. Now, if I said to you "draw me a picture of a dog", away you'd go, because now the problem's nicely (but not excessively) constrained, and you've got a framework to work within. In the same way, you can't say to this guy "what exactly do you want to do?" and expect him to spit out a fully resolved requirements spec. You need to ask questions that he can give precise answers to.
Your customer's idea of what he wants, and what he actually wants, may be two different things. You need to make sure you give him the latter (and don't confuse it with giving him what you think he wants, or what you think he needs, either).
How hard can it be to produce a decent player, really?
The market in portable MP3 players has been around for a fair few years now. The iPod runs the show because it does what Most People want to do, in a nice friendly way, and is brilliantly marketed. There are a thousand and one players on the market for Everybody Else, which offer more functionality, better sound quality, less DRM restrictions, lower price, whatever. Pretty much every single one of these competitors is deficient on the usability front, and most of them have some head-slappingly bad UI howlers that make you wonder just what the hell they were thinking when they designed it, or indeed whether they were thinking at all.
And then, having had years to learn from everybody else, good and bad, Microsoft rocks up with the Zune. Oops.
Why can't they, and everybody else, understand what makes for a good portable music player? Why do they give Apple such an easy ride? The iPod really isn't any great shakes, it's just that the competition is mostly rotten. With each revison Apple have done just enough to keep half a step ahead - for example, the rather fudged implementation of gapless playback that finally arrived with the last updates took away one of the main reasons why I personally wouldn't buy one (seriously, folks, if there's no gaps between the tracks on the CD, and your player puts them in, that is a bug. Fix it. And yes, I know MP3s can't really do true gapless).
Really, Apple's market dominance is there for the taking. All it takes is a bit of application. Why can't anybody come up with the goods?
Say what you like about the tenets of the American educational system, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
Oops, sorry, link didn't come out. SkyCat.
Yeah. Check these guys out.
Airships with a twist. Part of the lift comes from aerodynamic lift, which means you can land 'em. And I don't know whether they've actually built it yet or not, but they were talking about making a military-spec job with a 1,000-ton payload. Or, if you want to think about that another way, sixteen Challenger 2 tanks. That's some big liftin'. Much faster than road freight, much more fuel-efficient than air freight, much more flexible than rail freight. Slightly vulnerable to enemy fire, admittedly, but you can't have everything...
Yeah, nobody ever got anywhere in ships powered by sails alone.
C'mon.
Actually, I think sails are due for a comeback. Current thinking seems to be to fly them above the ship like a kite, rather than hanging them from masts. If your cargo's not in a particular hurry anyway, why not? I mean, it's not like oil tankers are tearing up the oceans as it is. Who cares if it gets there a day later if it's used absolutely zero energy to do it?
Well, the thing about a cavitating torpedo is that because the only bit of it that's touching anything is the very tip, it's a right bugger to steer...
Thousands of pounds per screen (at the time), and I'm not kidding, there's several hundred of them. Also, if you look at them closely, you can see that each one's made of two separate panels, so double that again. Four or five years on and they're almost due for replacement already.
Hmm, you might be onto something there, given that Waterloo station serves the "stockbroker belt". I doubt anybody's impressed now, though - they look terrible. And they were never branded, so I can't see why any commercial outfit would have subsidised them if nobody was going to associate the screens with them, rather than their competitors.
I dunno, I just think they were a step backwards when they were installed, and now they look absolutely terrible and will be in need of replacement, whereas the old flipping board ticked away merrily for many a year without a hitch.
I know all that. And really, I wouldn't mind if online music distribution disappeared, because I can't see what good it does. Realistically, I can't see how we can get away from "feeding the beasts", and if I'm going to have to feed them, I'd rather get my music from them in a format that I like.
I don't have much of a problem with filler, either - I like the whole concept of the album, that it's a body of work that represents where an act is at a particular time. A continuous drip-freed of singles from a band is never going to stand as a symbol of its time in the same way as a great album, delivered all of a piece.
Possibly the most utterly stupid application of plasma screens I've ever seen is at Waterloo Station, here in London. A few years back they stopped using the old departure and arrival boards (you know, the ones where the train stations and numbers flip round like a Rolodex) in favour of HUNDREDS of plasma screens. At the time they were still retailing for thousands of pounds a pop. Needless to say, years of showing nothing but train schedules has left them pretty severely burnt in. And in my view, they were less readable than the old boards in the first place.
Another fine example of money being pissed up the wall in Britain.
Yes. Hard disk space is cheap and getting cheaper, I'm not bothered about the amount of storage space it takes. I just want recordings that are the best quality I can get, for archival purposes. Sure, when I'm on the move I'm listening to MP3s or Oggs or whatever and that's fine, but I keep all my CDs ripped in FLAC so that if my lossy codec of choice isn't supported by my player of choice, I can just encode from FLAC, rather than transcoding from one lossy medium to another. I'm thinking ahead - I plan on keeping my music collection for life, and who knows how many different formats will come and go over the next 50 years or so? So keep them encoded losslessly and then you're not going to end up with severely decayed versions of your originals.
This probably sounds really anal, but I'm just playing the long game.
Sound quality's not really the point of my insistence on lossless compression. It's simply that I don't see why I should buy an inferior quality reproduction when there's perfectly good CDs in the shops. I want a direct equivalent for the CD, or I won't pay for it. Simple.
That's purely a symptom of the fact that commercial software doesn't want to play nice with other commercial software, whereas open-source software can co-operate rather than competing. Yes, it's hugely annoying, and I'm sure Microsoft could at least try to impose a logical structure and expect third-party developers to stick to it, but I suspect it'd be a struggle.
Thing is, the only question anybody really needs answered in a review like this is "what does this device bring to the party?" I mean, there are other devices out there which are top for sound quality, or usability, or compatibility, or battery life, or whatever it is you care about. If Microsoft's going to turn up years late in a crowded market, they'd better have a good trick up their sleeve. Now, the reviewer says that this, potentially, was the built-in Wi-Fi, but he laments the fact that it doesn't make anything like the most of this ability.
So actually, I think it tells me all that I, personally, need to know, and does it in a reasonably eloquent style, refreshingly free of dry stats and jargon.
Buy Korean. iRiver, Cowon, and Samsung's players all do Ogg Vorbis, and I'm sure others do too.