They're not cheaper because they want to be, they're cheaper because they have to be. They can't compete on performance, so they try to do it on price. Look at the financial results for the last quarters for both companies. Notice that one made landmark profits whereas the other suffered a loss.
I hope AMD can stay in the game, if for no other reason than that Intel got incredibly lazy with NetBurst and if AMD hadn't stepped up, Intel probably wouldn't have cared all that much.
It could be coincidence, or it could be incredibly telling.
The best thing AMD had going was that Intel's onboard GPU's sucked. AMD has a new chip architecture coming out in the next few months and no one really knows how well it performs, except AMD. It was pretty much a given that they would have a better integrated GPU since they have ATI building it, but the CPU portion of the chip is still an unknown.
We'll assume that for the sake of argument that AMD knows that on the CPU side they'll be weaker, but that on the GPU side they'd be stronger. If Intel can grab as many of nVidia's goodies as they'd like, the GPU side of the equation will probably cancel out, leaving AMD without a pot to piss in.
Except for the fact that the music on iTunes is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Or at least it should be.
It's fascinating how the blindered Apple fanboys ignore all of the other stuff on iTunes not to mention
everyone's old files that are still locked down unless you pay an extra fee to unlock them.
In all fairness, the bitrate is also increased, but realistically they should have done it for free or just charged a small, flat rate to upgrade an entire catalog.
There's DRM in audio books, books, video, phone apps and desktop apps.
The only one they're free to control is their own iOS or mac Apps. Technically I'm not even certain that the Mac apps require DRM as developers who did not correctly implement purchase-verification were subject to workarounds. Apple may require applications to properly check for proof-of-purchase, but if they don't, then it's only DRM if the developer cares enough to implement it. Otherwise the content producers who own the copyright on the videos, books, etc. are the ones who mandate the DRM.
Apple's music is swimming in a sea of DRM including some stuff that is entirely under Apple's control.
Apple benefits greatly from that lock-in and the fact that you are forever married to them and the fact that
you must continue buying their hardware if you ever want to play the stuff you "own" ever again.
Some of that is under Apple's control, but a lot of it isn't. There aren't many stores offering the same products without DRM, so it's not as though Apple is some kind of villain. No one else is getting the same content DRM-free so it's disingenuous to fault Apple in this regard.
The only legitimate point you have is that Apple provides DRM for iOS applications and will probably step up on DRM for their Mac app store. They're really not any better off (or better) than any other purveyor of video, literature, etc. They're stuck with what they're given and don't have the clout to demand anything better.
Apple's market share has a lot to do with the fact that almost all music sold is now DRM-free, but it's not as straightforward as that. Apple wasn't the first to sell DRM-free music, and in fact were almost one of the last. Not because they wanted to keep the DRM, but because the record companies wanted them to be stuck with it. Apple's iTunes store was more successful than anyone could have predicted, including the music companies. Apple had a 70% share and used their clout to keep prices low. No other DRM-scheme would be able to compete since Apple didn't care to license other forms of DRM for the iPod. There was a positive feedback loop that kept driving things towards and Apple only environment, which the record labels didn't like because Apple wouldn't budge from their $.99 price per song. In order to try and break Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market, the record labels started allowing other online music stores to sell DRM-free music, hoping that it would adversely impact iTunes sales. This may have happened to a minor degree, but before the long-term results could be measured, Apple renegotiated their contract with the labels in order to get DRM-free music at the cost of allowing labels to price singles at $1.29 if they wanted to do so.
Apple's market share hasn't moved much since then, but the fact that most music is now DRM-free is because the dominated the market to the extent that they could dictate pricing terms to the labels, which pissed off the music industry to no end. In order to gain control of pricing the major labels had to budge on DRM. The film and book industries are going to try their damnedest to ensure that no one market entity ends up in the same position as iTunes did with music, otherwise they lose their ability to dictate price. If you want to see DRM-free movies and books, hope that someone ends up in the same position as Apple did with music. It doesn't have to be Apple, but someone needs to be the dominant force in the market such that they can start dictating price to the publishers. Once this occurs, the natural reaction for the publishers is to allow other retailers to sell DRM-free media so that the controlling store becomes less important.
They incidentally better mankind through doing business. If they were selling something that wasn't viewed as useful, they wouldn't be in business for very long. If their products didn't provide some perceived value, no one would be buying them. Some customers may not need a smart phone, but many people would say that these devices have enriched their lives. That doesn't happen in every case, but I could just as easily claim that, arguably, someone deciding what's best for the rest of the people is just as likely to squander resources.
Of course they want to make money, and one of the easiest ways to make money is to make a product that somehow makes another person's life easier, compelling them to purchase it. It's not a zero sum game. Apple/Google gets some money that they wanted and a person gets a device that they valued more than the money.
The system isn't perfect, but free enterprise has been a significant driver in mankind's advancement. Perhaps we're reaching the end of its usefulness and in another century we'll have found something better to replace it, but to deny that it's been useful in getting us to where we are is silly.
If you're really interested in getting it early, you could find out what route they would take to reach you and what other residents would be effected. It would likely be expensive for only you to receive the service, but if you pooled together with other affected residents it might make the cost more reasonable.
Do some research, put a pamphlet together, and try to get some other people on your side.
You're both being disingenuous with your statistics. It would be more interesting to know what % of the population lives within 30 miles (Or some range of distances.) of a large city. Both the US and Canada have significant amounts of land that have almost no one living in them.
Easy access to large and sophisticated medical facilities are important. The amount of barren land that almost no one lives in likely isn't. The US should probably be broken down into different regions. The coasts are a different animal than the Midwest and if the goal is to determine how to provide the best health care for the country, it might be a good idea to consider that these differences may require different approaches.
Can't the armed forces make rules that subcontracted work cannot be exported out of the country? It's the same effect with less insanity. Hell, even if something like this needed congressional approval or a law of some sort, it's not as though it would be difficult to get it passed.
It's not just scientific literacy, it's mathematical and grammatical as well. It's not that American kids are getting dumber, it's that American colleges are accepting anyone to a four year program if they sign up for one. The downside of that is that the average ability of incoming students trends downward.
The problem is that we've created a system that values a piece of paper that says you were in college for four years, even if those four years have absolutely nothing to do with the job position. There's nothing wrong with going to trade school, and in more than just a few trades you'll end up laughing all the way to the bank, making more money with your two year degree than a lot of people with a four year degree, all while paying a lot less for it.
Even many four year programs could be significantly shortened. A cousin of mine received a business degree from a program that crammed it all into one year. His job was school, his off-time was school, and they expected him to be there everyday in appropriate dress. They didn't fuck around and neither did he, and know he's out and being productive while a bunch of other kids are pissing away four years on classes they don't care about and keg parties.
I'm more interested in the message, but good or bad it doesn't stop the messenger from being an asshole.
This never should have been about him, but it seems he wanted his name and self out there. Smear campaign or not, he brought this shit on himself. Seems we can't have a Wikileaks story that doesn't mention or completely focus on the prick/saint. If Wikileaks were faceless, then the media would have to choose between focusing on the story or ignoring it. Assange has let them cop out and focus on the man.
In all honesty, Windows 8 and 9 could be some kind of cloud-oriented giant middle finger to Enterprise and they wouldn't be hurt as badly as you might think. Look at the number of companies who are still using Windows XP and are only possibly considering moving to Windows 7 within the next few years, but may just skip it and wait for the next one.
There's the whole Vista debacle which people like to point to as part of the reason for so many businesses sticking with XP, but even if Vista were twice as polished as 7 is at this moment, there would still be loads of companies still running XP.
Microsoft honestly only needs one worthwhile enterprise operating system every decade, because it seems as though a large number of companies are perfectly happy with that. Microsoft could split Windows into two editions, Enterprise and Home. Home gets the bells, flash, and chrome. The enterprise edition gets quick bug-fixes, extended support, and continued performance tuning. If they're careful enough, they can keep the two versions compatible to a large extent.
If that continues to be a big problem, chip makers will just using the extra transistors to increase the cache sizes. That doesn't solve every problem, but if they're hitting a wall in terms of clock speed or core utilization, then having more cache can keep what is being used well fed.
The other side of this is that a general PC might not get much more powerful, but notebooks, tablets, and phones will be able to pack the same amount of power into smaller chips, resulting in reduced power consumption or increased capabilities until they run into the same wall, which would take about a decade.
Funny you should say that as there was a/. story not terribly long ago about how algorithm improvements have improved beyond hardware.
The problem with products from Adobe and Microsoft is that the codebase is massive and it can be a pain to fix and optimize one part without breaking something else. Software vendors deal with the same issue of needing to be faster than the competitor as Intel/AMD. If Adobe and Microsoft don't, I think it speaks more to the lack of competition in some of their product areas than it does to simply being lazy.
Java may not make as much sense right now, but it will again in the future. Technology is going to keep marching on and today's smart phones are tomorrows feature phones and eventually dumb. Not all apps will need to be more sophisticated.
Android is going to get even more fragmented in the future, but that's not a bad thing. It just shows how versatile Linux can be.
You don't need to optimize for all of them. Go ahead and pick some of the more popular ones that already exist and optimize for those. Manufacturers are still free to choose different hardware or write their own code, which they are perfectly free to do being that Android is open.
Having a few 'better' options isn't going to be worse than the lowest common denominator crap that's going on now.
I don't understand why it's taken this long. The iPod has been on top of this market for ages. It may not be as lucrative as it used to be, but Apple wouldn't be in it if they weren't making a decent amount of money. Apple is probably able to control a decent portion of the market if only because they can keep costs low through scale, but Android vendors should be able to cut costs and take lower profits. This is probably the first legitimate iPod competitor in a long time.
The only question is if this market is worthwhile anymore. Smartphones have most likely already started to cannibalize PMP sales. Once they become truly ubiquitous, how much of a market is left for devices of such caliber without phone capability.
Not to disagree with your points, but if 80% of the country died, the remaining 20% wouldn't be the bottom of the IQ range as the range would shift. Also if they're the 20% that survived, they can't be that stupid. Also, if they were all Palin voters it would imply that the other side seriously fucked things up.
Politics aside, she's an idiot and shouldn't be put in charge regardless of her views.
It's a lame list designed to be click-bait, so if they put something disagreeable on it it'll get linked to be people crying foul, but at least it's not spread across ten different pages.
Why bother determining what effects, if any, the technology has on ocular development when you can just add in a disclaimer.
Warning: Reading this post may result in cancer, muscular degeneration, general anxiety, increased blood pressure, warts, rectal bleeding, congestion, stomach pains, feelings of malaise, or general bad shit happening. Read at your own risk.
Which explains perfectly why all of the cables were leaked immediately. The vast majority of them haven't, and Wikileaks has made a lot of effort to make sure any sensitive information was properly redacted. There's also information Wikileaks has in their possession that hasn't been leaked at all. This has lead people far on the other side of the argument to say that Wikileaks isn't doing enough or has an agenda with the selective information it releases.
The article likes to paint things as black and white, but there are certainly plenty of grey shades in this story. Based on history, Wikileaks doesn't release all of the information they have and it seems as though there are some things that they may be quite content to sit on for all eternity. The government reaction is just a typical government reaction, squash liberties and gather more power. Any blame for the government's actions rests solely on the government.
Re:Nobody takes this seriously...
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This test probably isn't applicable to some open source projects, but there's probably a modified version of the test that could indicate whether an open source project is likely to succeed. Many of the questions on the test should be common sense by now, but would you want to work for a company that didn't use source control? Even if you were working alone you should be using some kind of CMS. Some times the best tools money can buy don't actually cost a thing because they're FOSS. Initial and support costs aside, how is using the best tools available bad advice?
If you think Microsoft products are bad, imagine how much worse they would be if Microsoft wasn't answering yes to a lot of those questions. Also understand that the article was written in 2000, when the computer world landscape was vastly different than it is today. Google and Apple where nowhere near as relevant, Linux wasn't a viable option for grandma, and it appeared as though Microsoft would continue to dominate the industry just as it had in the 90's. If you wanted to name drop a company that everyone would know and recognize as a leader in the software industry, you would have used Microsoft as well.
Re:Users reporting bugs directly
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There's a difference between getting customer feedback, which is good, and allowing that feedback to go directly into the bug database, an exercise in insanity. How many of those bug reports are going to be accurate and descriptive enough so that whomever gets stuck reading it will actually be able to identify what needs to be fixed, especially if there's not a crash report, or other error messaged included?
Unless your users are professional developers/programmers, the signal to noise ratio is going to be horrid.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not cheaper because they want to be, they're cheaper because they have to be. They can't compete on performance, so they try to do it on price. Look at the financial results for the last quarters for both companies. Notice that one made landmark profits whereas the other suffered a loss.
I hope AMD can stay in the game, if for no other reason than that Intel got incredibly lazy with NetBurst and if AMD hadn't stepped up, Intel probably wouldn't have cared all that much.
The event is allegedly tomorrow so why can't we wait until tomorrow when it's no longer speculation and actually an established fact?
If I make a blog post claiming that Verizon will offer free blow jobs for new iPhone buyers can I be featured on Slashdot as well?
It could be coincidence, or it could be incredibly telling.
The best thing AMD had going was that Intel's onboard GPU's sucked. AMD has a new chip architecture coming out in the next few months and no one really knows how well it performs, except AMD. It was pretty much a given that they would have a better integrated GPU since they have ATI building it, but the CPU portion of the chip is still an unknown.
We'll assume that for the sake of argument that AMD knows that on the CPU side they'll be weaker, but that on the GPU side they'd be stronger. If Intel can grab as many of nVidia's goodies as they'd like, the GPU side of the equation will probably cancel out, leaving AMD without a pot to piss in.
Or, it could just be coincidence.
Except for the fact that the music on iTunes is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Or at least it should be.
It's fascinating how the blindered Apple fanboys ignore all of the other stuff on iTunes not to mention everyone's old files that are still locked down unless you pay an extra fee to unlock them.
In all fairness, the bitrate is also increased, but realistically they should have done it for free or just charged a small, flat rate to upgrade an entire catalog.
There's DRM in audio books, books, video, phone apps and desktop apps.
The only one they're free to control is their own iOS or mac Apps. Technically I'm not even certain that the Mac apps require DRM as developers who did not correctly implement purchase-verification were subject to workarounds. Apple may require applications to properly check for proof-of-purchase, but if they don't, then it's only DRM if the developer cares enough to implement it. Otherwise the content producers who own the copyright on the videos, books, etc. are the ones who mandate the DRM.
Apple's music is swimming in a sea of DRM including some stuff that is entirely under Apple's control.
Apple benefits greatly from that lock-in and the fact that you are forever married to them and the fact that you must continue buying their hardware if you ever want to play the stuff you "own" ever again.
Some of that is under Apple's control, but a lot of it isn't. There aren't many stores offering the same products without DRM, so it's not as though Apple is some kind of villain. No one else is getting the same content DRM-free so it's disingenuous to fault Apple in this regard.
The only legitimate point you have is that Apple provides DRM for iOS applications and will probably step up on DRM for their Mac app store. They're really not any better off (or better) than any other purveyor of video, literature, etc. They're stuck with what they're given and don't have the clout to demand anything better.
Apple's market share has a lot to do with the fact that almost all music sold is now DRM-free, but it's not as straightforward as that. Apple wasn't the first to sell DRM-free music, and in fact were almost one of the last. Not because they wanted to keep the DRM, but because the record companies wanted them to be stuck with it. Apple's iTunes store was more successful than anyone could have predicted, including the music companies. Apple had a 70% share and used their clout to keep prices low. No other DRM-scheme would be able to compete since Apple didn't care to license other forms of DRM for the iPod. There was a positive feedback loop that kept driving things towards and Apple only environment, which the record labels didn't like because Apple wouldn't budge from their $.99 price per song. In order to try and break Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market, the record labels started allowing other online music stores to sell DRM-free music, hoping that it would adversely impact iTunes sales. This may have happened to a minor degree, but before the long-term results could be measured, Apple renegotiated their contract with the labels in order to get DRM-free music at the cost of allowing labels to price singles at $1.29 if they wanted to do so.
Apple's market share hasn't moved much since then, but the fact that most music is now DRM-free is because the dominated the market to the extent that they could dictate pricing terms to the labels, which pissed off the music industry to no end. In order to gain control of pricing the major labels had to budge on DRM. The film and book industries are going to try their damnedest to ensure that no one market entity ends up in the same position as iTunes did with music, otherwise they lose their ability to dictate price. If you want to see DRM-free movies and books, hope that someone ends up in the same position as Apple did with music. It doesn't have to be Apple, but someone needs to be the dominant force in the market such that they can start dictating price to the publishers. Once this occurs, the natural reaction for the publishers is to allow other retailers to sell DRM-free media so that the controlling store becomes less important.
They incidentally better mankind through doing business. If they were selling something that wasn't viewed as useful, they wouldn't be in business for very long. If their products didn't provide some perceived value, no one would be buying them. Some customers may not need a smart phone, but many people would say that these devices have enriched their lives. That doesn't happen in every case, but I could just as easily claim that, arguably, someone deciding what's best for the rest of the people is just as likely to squander resources.
Of course they want to make money, and one of the easiest ways to make money is to make a product that somehow makes another person's life easier, compelling them to purchase it. It's not a zero sum game. Apple/Google gets some money that they wanted and a person gets a device that they valued more than the money.
The system isn't perfect, but free enterprise has been a significant driver in mankind's advancement. Perhaps we're reaching the end of its usefulness and in another century we'll have found something better to replace it, but to deny that it's been useful in getting us to where we are is silly.
If you're really interested in getting it early, you could find out what route they would take to reach you and what other residents would be effected. It would likely be expensive for only you to receive the service, but if you pooled together with other affected residents it might make the cost more reasonable.
Do some research, put a pamphlet together, and try to get some other people on your side.
You're both being disingenuous with your statistics. It would be more interesting to know what % of the population lives within 30 miles (Or some range of distances.) of a large city. Both the US and Canada have significant amounts of land that have almost no one living in them.
Easy access to large and sophisticated medical facilities are important. The amount of barren land that almost no one lives in likely isn't. The US should probably be broken down into different regions. The coasts are a different animal than the Midwest and if the goal is to determine how to provide the best health care for the country, it might be a good idea to consider that these differences may require different approaches.
Can't the armed forces make rules that subcontracted work cannot be exported out of the country? It's the same effect with less insanity. Hell, even if something like this needed congressional approval or a law of some sort, it's not as though it would be difficult to get it passed.
It's not just scientific literacy, it's mathematical and grammatical as well. It's not that American kids are getting dumber, it's that American colleges are accepting anyone to a four year program if they sign up for one. The downside of that is that the average ability of incoming students trends downward.
The problem is that we've created a system that values a piece of paper that says you were in college for four years, even if those four years have absolutely nothing to do with the job position. There's nothing wrong with going to trade school, and in more than just a few trades you'll end up laughing all the way to the bank, making more money with your two year degree than a lot of people with a four year degree, all while paying a lot less for it.
Even many four year programs could be significantly shortened. A cousin of mine received a business degree from a program that crammed it all into one year. His job was school, his off-time was school, and they expected him to be there everyday in appropriate dress. They didn't fuck around and neither did he, and know he's out and being productive while a bunch of other kids are pissing away four years on classes they don't care about and keg parties.
Either that or he really is a douche bag.
I'm more interested in the message, but good or bad it doesn't stop the messenger from being an asshole.
This never should have been about him, but it seems he wanted his name and self out there. Smear campaign or not, he brought this shit on himself. Seems we can't have a Wikileaks story that doesn't mention or completely focus on the prick/saint. If Wikileaks were faceless, then the media would have to choose between focusing on the story or ignoring it. Assange has let them cop out and focus on the man.
In all honesty, Windows 8 and 9 could be some kind of cloud-oriented giant middle finger to Enterprise and they wouldn't be hurt as badly as you might think. Look at the number of companies who are still using Windows XP and are only possibly considering moving to Windows 7 within the next few years, but may just skip it and wait for the next one.
There's the whole Vista debacle which people like to point to as part of the reason for so many businesses sticking with XP, but even if Vista were twice as polished as 7 is at this moment, there would still be loads of companies still running XP.
Microsoft honestly only needs one worthwhile enterprise operating system every decade, because it seems as though a large number of companies are perfectly happy with that. Microsoft could split Windows into two editions, Enterprise and Home. Home gets the bells, flash, and chrome. The enterprise edition gets quick bug-fixes, extended support, and continued performance tuning. If they're careful enough, they can keep the two versions compatible to a large extent.
If that continues to be a big problem, chip makers will just using the extra transistors to increase the cache sizes. That doesn't solve every problem, but if they're hitting a wall in terms of clock speed or core utilization, then having more cache can keep what is being used well fed.
The other side of this is that a general PC might not get much more powerful, but notebooks, tablets, and phones will be able to pack the same amount of power into smaller chips, resulting in reduced power consumption or increased capabilities until they run into the same wall, which would take about a decade.
Funny you should say that as there was a /. story not terribly long ago about how algorithm improvements have improved beyond hardware.
The problem with products from Adobe and Microsoft is that the codebase is massive and it can be a pain to fix and optimize one part without breaking something else. Software vendors deal with the same issue of needing to be faster than the competitor as Intel/AMD. If Adobe and Microsoft don't, I think it speaks more to the lack of competition in some of their product areas than it does to simply being lazy.
I'd say you'd run out of stories in which to post first, but it seems as though /. follows a Moore's law of duplicate stories so you should be alright.
Java may not make as much sense right now, but it will again in the future. Technology is going to keep marching on and today's smart phones are tomorrows feature phones and eventually dumb. Not all apps will need to be more sophisticated.
Android is going to get even more fragmented in the future, but that's not a bad thing. It just shows how versatile Linux can be.
You don't need to optimize for all of them. Go ahead and pick some of the more popular ones that already exist and optimize for those. Manufacturers are still free to choose different hardware or write their own code, which they are perfectly free to do being that Android is open.
Having a few 'better' options isn't going to be worse than the lowest common denominator crap that's going on now.
I don't understand why it's taken this long. The iPod has been on top of this market for ages. It may not be as lucrative as it used to be, but Apple wouldn't be in it if they weren't making a decent amount of money. Apple is probably able to control a decent portion of the market if only because they can keep costs low through scale, but Android vendors should be able to cut costs and take lower profits. This is probably the first legitimate iPod competitor in a long time.
The only question is if this market is worthwhile anymore. Smartphones have most likely already started to cannibalize PMP sales. Once they become truly ubiquitous, how much of a market is left for devices of such caliber without phone capability.
Not to disagree with your points, but if 80% of the country died, the remaining 20% wouldn't be the bottom of the IQ range as the range would shift. Also if they're the 20% that survived, they can't be that stupid. Also, if they were all Palin voters it would imply that the other side seriously fucked things up.
Politics aside, she's an idiot and shouldn't be put in charge regardless of her views.
It's a lame list designed to be click-bait, so if they put something disagreeable on it it'll get linked to be people crying foul, but at least it's not spread across ten different pages.
Why bother determining what effects, if any, the technology has on ocular development when you can just add in a disclaimer.
Warning: Reading this post may result in cancer, muscular degeneration, general anxiety, increased blood pressure, warts, rectal bleeding, congestion, stomach pains, feelings of malaise, or general bad shit happening. Read at your own risk.
Which explains perfectly why all of the cables were leaked immediately. The vast majority of them haven't, and Wikileaks has made a lot of effort to make sure any sensitive information was properly redacted. There's also information Wikileaks has in their possession that hasn't been leaked at all. This has lead people far on the other side of the argument to say that Wikileaks isn't doing enough or has an agenda with the selective information it releases.
The article likes to paint things as black and white, but there are certainly plenty of grey shades in this story. Based on history, Wikileaks doesn't release all of the information they have and it seems as though there are some things that they may be quite content to sit on for all eternity. The government reaction is just a typical government reaction, squash liberties and gather more power. Any blame for the government's actions rests solely on the government.
Begun, the Patent War has.
/yoda
This test probably isn't applicable to some open source projects, but there's probably a modified version of the test that could indicate whether an open source project is likely to succeed. Many of the questions on the test should be common sense by now, but would you want to work for a company that didn't use source control? Even if you were working alone you should be using some kind of CMS. Some times the best tools money can buy don't actually cost a thing because they're FOSS. Initial and support costs aside, how is using the best tools available bad advice?
If you think Microsoft products are bad, imagine how much worse they would be if Microsoft wasn't answering yes to a lot of those questions. Also understand that the article was written in 2000, when the computer world landscape was vastly different than it is today. Google and Apple where nowhere near as relevant, Linux wasn't a viable option for grandma, and it appeared as though Microsoft would continue to dominate the industry just as it had in the 90's. If you wanted to name drop a company that everyone would know and recognize as a leader in the software industry, you would have used Microsoft as well.
There's a difference between getting customer feedback, which is good, and allowing that feedback to go directly into the bug database, an exercise in insanity. How many of those bug reports are going to be accurate and descriptive enough so that whomever gets stuck reading it will actually be able to identify what needs to be fixed, especially if there's not a crash report, or other error messaged included?
Unless your users are professional developers/programmers, the signal to noise ratio is going to be horrid.