Utility is not a linear function of money, but cost is. Put another way: it costs the government the same amount to give YOU $600 as Joe the Janitor. Joe the Janitor makes $16K per year because he's lucky enough to have a full-time job, and since you think $89K is low-end, let's assume you make $160K. The (dubious) purpose of the rebate was to *change behavior* and stimulate spending, not to linearly increase people's checking accounts by $600. A $600 check has a HUGE impact on people like Joe, maybe it gets him out of a cycle of not quite paying off his credit card debt each month and so he's no longer funneling money into interest payments and suddenly he's a productive (consumptive?) member of society. But that same $600 check has a negligible impact on people like you, who, if you notice it at all, will probably throw it right into savings or a CD (and to a lesser extend, the people making $75K.) So, just where do you think the government is going to find the equilibrium?
Southwest Airlines has always paid less for just about every single position than the industry standard, from the CEO to the pilots to the attendants. Yet every time SA is hiring for a new position, they'll have dozens or hundreds of people from the other airlines interview for it. Why? Because working at most airlines is a crappy, thankless job, and at Southwest it's fun.
Not sure how well that applies here though, as Google has a reputation for being pretty fun while Apple has a reputation of having people scream at you when your project is late or experiencing difficulties. I guess some people are gluttons for pain;-)
Actually, package design is a complex and in-demand field, and top package engineers are paid well. When you're making millions of iPod boxes, suddenly questions of balancing manufacturing ease, strength, size, weight (both contributing to transportation costs), materials (supply chain), appearance in the store, etc. become very very important questions.
We're stupid by default. We learn what we can to compensate. Google, by taking a lot of the basic processing load off us, lets us focus on more abstract concepts.
If anything, Google is making us SMART. Of course, we're screwed if the internet ever collapses.
Luckily for us, airplanes and war technology have higher margins than consumer electronics. (of course, our war industry is so huge largely because of massive subsidies in the form of sweetheart contracts, so I'm not saying we come out better in the long run)
Why would anyone do this when you can usually rent it for a week cheaper? Convenience. You can't get a rental at just any old checkout counter, because rentals require infrastructure to manage inventory, handle returns, late fees, etc. These things on the other hand can just get pushed out to retail locations same as any regular merchandise that Staples carries. And when you're standing at the Staples checkout, and get to choose between spending $5 to get that movie right now or open a Netflix account and wait a couple days to get it or drive over to Blockbuster... that $5 rental might look mighty tempting.
As Joel wrote, a good business strategy is to drive the price of the complements of your product down to commodity levels. Decreasing the cost of operating systems will make laptops more profitable, so a lot of the companies entering the subnotebook field will be stimulating linux (and other open source) development. We've already seen this from VIA; I can't wait to see if some big US brands start openly supporting linux development.
At first I was disagreeing with your conclusion, but looking at the actual prizes, I kind of agree. The point of a prize is to create incentives to go down a path companies might not otherwise go down, because it's too long and risky of a development to guarantee returns. Prizes should reward intermediate points, to turn a development process that looks like |----------WIN into something like |---win---win---win--WIN. The prizes look like they are REWARDING mature products that have clear market potential rather STIMULATING development. The requirements even include manufacturability, which is waayyyy down the end of the development line and requires large investments and large risks to demonstrate.
Once upon a time, innovations flowed from military/space to the public. Now, innovations flow from the entertainment industry to the military.
Signs of our times... Not saying it's good or bad, but things are definitely not the same. Perhaps the more cutthroat competition in entertainment is stimulating better innovations than can come out of a world of no-bid or rigged contracts.
Many people disagree on the definition of marketing, some will call it brand-building or "selling to the masses", distinguishing it from selling specific products to specific people (advertising or sales). The fact that the word marketing has been co-opted into phrases like "direct marketing" or "marketing material" confuses the issue, as does the fact that advertising groups are usually a subset of marketing groups in a functionally organized company. However, this is the definition of marketing that is taught in most business schools. The process of feeling out markets and deciding what products/services to provide to those markets and how to provide them has to be called *something*, and most people call it marketing.
As for the rest of what you wrote... I agree for the most part, and think that all of it is consistent with what I'm trying to say.
If Apple has implemented a technology, they must have invented it.
Apple is about as innovative as Microsoft. Neither serves the purpose of producing basic tech or interface innovations. Multi-touch has been around in university HCI and computer science labs for many many years. Apple and Microsoft are both companies which specialize in marketing, ie understanding the needs of their target customers and tailoring their solutions towards them, and execution, following through by producing coherent sets of products and services. It's true that Apple frequently looks like it's ahead of Microsoft on the user interface curve, but that's just as it should be.
Apple's positioning as an edgy, flashy brand allows it to experiment more with its user interface, while Microsoft's positioning as lowest common denominator means that introducing new interfaces that are not market-tested will alienate its target base (which still expects to be able to run programs from the DOS era on brand-new systems). Interface innovations are usually produced in university labs or some of the few private labs that produce(d) a lot of basic research, like PARC, and typically a few companies spun out from the innovations will try to market products on and off for a few years, until a big and edgy company like Apple recognizes a market need, and makes the innovation a part of a major product and thus bring it into public view. Then slow-moving "stability" oriented companies like Microsoft can slowly bring the innovation into their products as well.
I meant that I would prefer it excludes lists when calculating the short paths between two pages that you can input yourself.
I asked it to calculate the distance between Harry Potter and Keanu Reeves (don't ask!) and it took a shortcut through the April 12 list. The whole fun of finding these paths is imagining the odd relations between the article topics (for example, Dick Cheney is connected to Lord Voldemort by way of Saddam Hussein) but passing through a semantically neutral topic like a date is just boring.
The paths it generates from Article A to Article B would be more interesting if they excluded list pages... so far, most of the interesting searches I've tried have been short-circuited by some kind of date page.
When a customer returns a lease, the owner doesn't just throw it in the furnace to transform it into air pollution. Generally they will resell it at a discount or salvage parts from it for later repairs or something like that. Businesses like to make a profit, and wasting perfectly good product is not profitable.
Welcome to jDome, the world's first charity for supporting gamers developing substandard implementations of a cool idea. I know I wouldn't throw free money at a guy just so he can continue developing what is essentially a curved white surface. He doesn't even acknowledge that the distortion caused by projecting a flat image onto a curved surface is a problem, as one of his forum users brought up:
http://www.jdome.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8
Of course, if this guy does pull it off by sheer balls, and perhaps sometime down the line starts actually selling a decent product, more power to him. I just hope a bunch of hopeful gadget addicts don't end up tossing their money down a drain.
Combine a superior implementation of this idea with Johnny Lee's Wii head tracker and you'll have an amazingly immersive experience.
Maybe this is a preemptive patent, and they want to make sure this is un-patentable by anybody else 20 years down the road when we can actually build it. Sure, they could have just published a paper in a scientific journal, but patent examiners are lazy and prefer using patent filings as prior art.
I wish I had a picture someone posted to once, it was something like blue text on a blue background with varying difference. Most that tried, myself included, couldn't detected anything less than 3 color codes apart (say #0000fc - #0000ff). That was on a perfectly still image right next to each other, you knew what you were looking for and I was staring very intensely to try to make out the outline. That says more about the quality of the typical consumer-grade monitor than our ability to distinguish 24 (or 30) bits. Cheap monitors have compressed color gamuts and very much non-linear responses to the color codes it receives, so a difference of 3 can easily be compressed down into a difference too small to see. I did a little experiment just now: I have two LCD monitors with VGA inputs, one of which has to receive its signal through a DVI-VGA converter. Under the current settings I have, varying the color red, I can distinguish a difference of 2 on one monitor, and 5 on the one going through the converter. Messing with the color temperature settings I can reduce that to 1 and 3. However, there is such a thing as a medical-grade colored light, you stick your head under a hood and a precisely calibrated color fills the box. When I was a kid my uncle brought one home and used it with us once, so I forget their medical purpose, but one of the tasks is just to ask the person to report when the color changes. Many people can detect the minimum color change the machine can supply, although it depends on a lot of variables including the person's mood and where in the color space the starting point is.
Who the hell tries to measure sight by receptor density? We measure it using charts, which given the billions of samples we've done tell us that even the most exceptional don't do better than 20/8 vision, which means that you can reliably distinguish objects separated by an angle of 0.4 arc minutes at 20 feet. I wouldn't say acuity charts are "wrong", but they may not be useful, because "acuity" depends on the task we're being asked to perform. Once again, our eyes aren't like cameras. Determining how well somebody performs on a Snellen eye chart will tell you some information about how high somebody's acuity is, but it will mostly tell you about how that person performs on a Snellen eye chart. It's more useful to find people's "contrast sensitivity function" and how that varies under various kinds of motion. In particular, we like to know how their csf varies with dilation/contraction because that is the central driving problem, but it's very difficult to find that as spatial frequency also varies with dilation/contraction. Even that will only tell you so much, though. Our acuity depends very strongly on the task we're being asked to perform.
If a high-resolution display was filled with two black rectangles separated by a 1-pixel-tall horizontal white line, with the top rectangle moving up and down and occasionally blocking the white line, at what resolution would we cease to be able to perceive that white line? It would have to be a ridiculously high resolution, and it would also depend on the contrast ratio of the display. "Acuity" will always depend on the task, and there are many tasks beyond the one described which can benefit from higher resolutions.
I know you're jesting, but our eyes are definitely capable of appreciating 30 bits, and many megapixels as well. Our eyes don't work like cameras; we're excellent at discriminating fine differences within the area we're looking at. We might not be able to tell #cc1111 from #cd1111 in isolation, but if they're right next to each other we can see that difference and more.
(On a similar note, in the center of our visual field, we can discriminate physical positions with much greater accuracy than the receptor density would lead one to believe, because our analog receptors are capable of discerning fine differences by working with their neighboring receptors. So anybody who says "X resolution is higher than humans can see" is talking out of his ass. You can tell when they know what they're talking about when they say something like "at this resolution, most humans will only be able to perceive a 1-pixel difference 60% of the time" or something which sounds a lot more like signal theory than somebody comparing one arbitrary number to another arbitrary number.)
Don't characterize the whole field of reformers with the few extremists whom everybody looks down upon. Temporary monopolies will always be welcome as long as they serve a purpose. Changes like extending copyright terms - especially the copyright terms of already-existing works - and increasing the penalties for violations to be many orders of magnitude more severe than the violations themselves perverts the economic rationale for granting the temporary monopolies.
To generalize, monopolies lead to monopoly pricing, which tends to be higher and less "efficient" than competitive pricing. Such inefficiencies are only desirable if they have a corresponding benefit, ie, the stimulation of new works/innovation, which outweighs the cost of the inefficiency.
If you look at a lot of the radical changes that the mechanisms of copyrighting and patenting have been undergoing in the US in recent decades from an economic perspective, the increasing costs of some of these changes are increasingly outweighing the benefits of the stimulus and in some cases working against them. I can go into that discussion as well if you like, and although it's by no means straightforward to do a cost-benefit analysis of copyright policy, I am convinced that certain reforms are in order. However, the purpose of this writing is to convince you that the concept of "copyright reform" is not limited to shortsighted self-interest, but can consist of rational economic analysis.
You make a good point, but cost is important too. I'm very much a "good enough" kind of guy when it comes to tech... I'm content to stay a couple of versions away from the state of the art. Yeah, browsing will get faster soon... but I already have my laptop for when I want to do extended browsing sessions. For me I think the iphone would be very much of a "pull it out of my pocket to google something" kind of device, mostly textual and low-bandwidth.
Additionally, I've heard that 3G's performance gains are vastly overrated as well, because the latency remains about the same and latency is a much bigger contributor to the perception of lag in either 3G or EDGE, and 3G tends to have more signal errors which must be corrected by re-downloading chunks (not sure if that works at the packet level or file level or whatever).
I wonder, after we take into account the exchange ratio will it be a better deal for US customers to buy an imported iphone at the expected clearance prices? Unfortunately Apple almost certainly has contracts with distributors that prevent them from stepping on each others' territory like that, so they won't be sold directly to the US, but through 3rd parties who will tack on their own profit margin.
Still, since iPhone unlocking is so easy now, I'd consider buying one if it worked out to be cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Utility is not a linear function of money, but cost is. Put another way: it costs the government the same amount to give YOU $600 as Joe the Janitor. Joe the Janitor makes $16K per year because he's lucky enough to have a full-time job, and since you think $89K is low-end, let's assume you make $160K. The (dubious) purpose of the rebate was to *change behavior* and stimulate spending, not to linearly increase people's checking accounts by $600. A $600 check has a HUGE impact on people like Joe, maybe it gets him out of a cycle of not quite paying off his credit card debt each month and so he's no longer funneling money into interest payments and suddenly he's a productive (consumptive?) member of society. But that same $600 check has a negligible impact on people like you, who, if you notice it at all, will probably throw it right into savings or a CD (and to a lesser extend, the people making $75K.) So, just where do you think the government is going to find the equilibrium?
Southwest Airlines has always paid less for just about every single position than the industry standard, from the CEO to the pilots to the attendants. Yet every time SA is hiring for a new position, they'll have dozens or hundreds of people from the other airlines interview for it. Why? Because working at most airlines is a crappy, thankless job, and at Southwest it's fun.
;-)
Not sure how well that applies here though, as Google has a reputation for being pretty fun while Apple has a reputation of having people scream at you when your project is late or experiencing difficulties. I guess some people are gluttons for pain
Actually, package design is a complex and in-demand field, and top package engineers are paid well. When you're making millions of iPod boxes, suddenly questions of balancing manufacturing ease, strength, size, weight (both contributing to transportation costs), materials (supply chain), appearance in the store, etc. become very very important questions.
We're stupid by default. We learn what we can to compensate. Google, by taking a lot of the basic processing load off us, lets us focus on more abstract concepts.
If anything, Google is making us SMART. Of course, we're screwed if the internet ever collapses.
Luckily for us, airplanes and war technology have higher margins than consumer electronics. (of course, our war industry is so huge largely because of massive subsidies in the form of sweetheart contracts, so I'm not saying we come out better in the long run)
I don't know! Stop asking me those questions all the time. Is it obligatory to end every blurb with a question, or what?
What are you asking ME for??As Joel wrote, a good business strategy is to drive the price of the complements of your product down to commodity levels. Decreasing the cost of operating systems will make laptops more profitable, so a lot of the companies entering the subnotebook field will be stimulating linux (and other open source) development. We've already seen this from VIA; I can't wait to see if some big US brands start openly supporting linux development.
I think a whoooole lot of sarcasm just flew right over your head.
At first I was disagreeing with your conclusion, but looking at the actual prizes, I kind of agree. The point of a prize is to create incentives to go down a path companies might not otherwise go down, because it's too long and risky of a development to guarantee returns. Prizes should reward intermediate points, to turn a development process that looks like |----------WIN into something like |---win---win---win--WIN. The prizes look like they are REWARDING mature products that have clear market potential rather STIMULATING development. The requirements even include manufacturability, which is waayyyy down the end of the development line and requires large investments and large risks to demonstrate.
Once upon a time, innovations flowed from military/space to the public. Now, innovations flow from the entertainment industry to the military.
Signs of our times... Not saying it's good or bad, but things are definitely not the same. Perhaps the more cutthroat competition in entertainment is stimulating better innovations than can come out of a world of no-bid or rigged contracts.
advertising != marketing
Many people disagree on the definition of marketing, some will call it brand-building or "selling to the masses", distinguishing it from selling specific products to specific people (advertising or sales). The fact that the word marketing has been co-opted into phrases like "direct marketing" or "marketing material" confuses the issue, as does the fact that advertising groups are usually a subset of marketing groups in a functionally organized company. However, this is the definition of marketing that is taught in most business schools. The process of feeling out markets and deciding what products/services to provide to those markets and how to provide them has to be called *something*, and most people call it marketing. As for the rest of what you wrote... I agree for the most part, and think that all of it is consistent with what I'm trying to say.
If Apple has implemented a technology, they must have invented it.
Apple is about as innovative as Microsoft. Neither serves the purpose of producing basic tech or interface innovations. Multi-touch has been around in university HCI and computer science labs for many many years. Apple and Microsoft are both companies which specialize in marketing, ie understanding the needs of their target customers and tailoring their solutions towards them, and execution, following through by producing coherent sets of products and services. It's true that Apple frequently looks like it's ahead of Microsoft on the user interface curve, but that's just as it should be.
Apple's positioning as an edgy, flashy brand allows it to experiment more with its user interface, while Microsoft's positioning as lowest common denominator means that introducing new interfaces that are not market-tested will alienate its target base (which still expects to be able to run programs from the DOS era on brand-new systems). Interface innovations are usually produced in university labs or some of the few private labs that produce(d) a lot of basic research, like PARC, and typically a few companies spun out from the innovations will try to market products on and off for a few years, until a big and edgy company like Apple recognizes a market need, and makes the innovation a part of a major product and thus bring it into public view. Then slow-moving "stability" oriented companies like Microsoft can slowly bring the innovation into their products as well.
I meant that I would prefer it excludes lists when calculating the short paths between two pages that you can input yourself. I asked it to calculate the distance between Harry Potter and Keanu Reeves (don't ask!) and it took a shortcut through the April 12 list. The whole fun of finding these paths is imagining the odd relations between the article topics (for example, Dick Cheney is connected to Lord Voldemort by way of Saddam Hussein) but passing through a semantically neutral topic like a date is just boring.
The paths it generates from Article A to Article B would be more interesting if they excluded list pages... so far, most of the interesting searches I've tried have been short-circuited by some kind of date page.
When a customer returns a lease, the owner doesn't just throw it in the furnace to transform it into air pollution. Generally they will resell it at a discount or salvage parts from it for later repairs or something like that. Businesses like to make a profit, and wasting perfectly good product is not profitable.
Welcome to jDome, the world's first charity for supporting gamers developing substandard implementations of a cool idea. I know I wouldn't throw free money at a guy just so he can continue developing what is essentially a curved white surface. He doesn't even acknowledge that the distortion caused by projecting a flat image onto a curved surface is a problem, as one of his forum users brought up: http://www.jdome.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8
Of course, if this guy does pull it off by sheer balls, and perhaps sometime down the line starts actually selling a decent product, more power to him. I just hope a bunch of hopeful gadget addicts don't end up tossing their money down a drain.
Combine a superior implementation of this idea with Johnny Lee's Wii head tracker and you'll have an amazingly immersive experience.
Maybe this is a preemptive patent, and they want to make sure this is un-patentable by anybody else 20 years down the road when we can actually build it. Sure, they could have just published a paper in a scientific journal, but patent examiners are lazy and prefer using patent filings as prior art.
If a high-resolution display was filled with two black rectangles separated by a 1-pixel-tall horizontal white line, with the top rectangle moving up and down and occasionally blocking the white line, at what resolution would we cease to be able to perceive that white line? It would have to be a ridiculously high resolution, and it would also depend on the contrast ratio of the display. "Acuity" will always depend on the task, and there are many tasks beyond the one described which can benefit from higher resolutions.
I know you're jesting, but our eyes are definitely capable of appreciating 30 bits, and many megapixels as well. Our eyes don't work like cameras; we're excellent at discriminating fine differences within the area we're looking at. We might not be able to tell #cc1111 from #cd1111 in isolation, but if they're right next to each other we can see that difference and more.
(On a similar note, in the center of our visual field, we can discriminate physical positions with much greater accuracy than the receptor density would lead one to believe, because our analog receptors are capable of discerning fine differences by working with their neighboring receptors. So anybody who says "X resolution is higher than humans can see" is talking out of his ass. You can tell when they know what they're talking about when they say something like "at this resolution, most humans will only be able to perceive a 1-pixel difference 60% of the time" or something which sounds a lot more like signal theory than somebody comparing one arbitrary number to another arbitrary number.)
Don't characterize the whole field of reformers with the few extremists whom everybody looks down upon. Temporary monopolies will always be welcome as long as they serve a purpose. Changes like extending copyright terms - especially the copyright terms of already-existing works - and increasing the penalties for violations to be many orders of magnitude more severe than the violations themselves perverts the economic rationale for granting the temporary monopolies.
To generalize, monopolies lead to monopoly pricing, which tends to be higher and less "efficient" than competitive pricing. Such inefficiencies are only desirable if they have a corresponding benefit, ie, the stimulation of new works/innovation, which outweighs the cost of the inefficiency.
If you look at a lot of the radical changes that the mechanisms of copyrighting and patenting have been undergoing in the US in recent decades from an economic perspective, the increasing costs of some of these changes are increasingly outweighing the benefits of the stimulus and in some cases working against them. I can go into that discussion as well if you like, and although it's by no means straightforward to do a cost-benefit analysis of copyright policy, I am convinced that certain reforms are in order. However, the purpose of this writing is to convince you that the concept of "copyright reform" is not limited to shortsighted self-interest, but can consist of rational economic analysis.
To be fair, Rowling IS being a poopyhead.
You don't see too much of that these days.
You make a good point, but cost is important too. I'm very much a "good enough" kind of guy when it comes to tech... I'm content to stay a couple of versions away from the state of the art. Yeah, browsing will get faster soon... but I already have my laptop for when I want to do extended browsing sessions. For me I think the iphone would be very much of a "pull it out of my pocket to google something" kind of device, mostly textual and low-bandwidth.
Additionally, I've heard that 3G's performance gains are vastly overrated as well, because the latency remains about the same and latency is a much bigger contributor to the perception of lag in either 3G or EDGE, and 3G tends to have more signal errors which must be corrected by re-downloading chunks (not sure if that works at the packet level or file level or whatever).
I wonder, after we take into account the exchange ratio will it be a better deal for US customers to buy an imported iphone at the expected clearance prices? Unfortunately Apple almost certainly has contracts with distributors that prevent them from stepping on each others' territory like that, so they won't be sold directly to the US, but through 3rd parties who will tack on their own profit margin.
Still, since iPhone unlocking is so easy now, I'd consider buying one if it worked out to be cheap.