The trick to Steam as near as I can tell is to simply purchase each game on its own account.
With each game in its own account, you give away or sell a title you don't want. Simply hand over the account information for the account for that game.
Plus if you get married or have kids you and your wife and/or kids can simultaneously play the different games that you own online. (With all your games on one steam account, only one person can play any of them online at a time.)
What if any, are the advantages of having all your games on one account? You don't have to re-login when you switch from title to title? Anything else? Is it worth having all your games forever tied to one concurrent user for that small bit of convenience?
I have been using Vista Ultimate for about 6 months and I think that Aero is the least important new feature. In fact, I turned off Aero on one of my boxes even though it can technically run it.
On machines with enough video horsepower that exceed 'can technically run it' Aero on is markedly faster than Aero off.
Leveraging your video cards hardware acceleration to compose your desktop is a good idea, after all.
I do admit that Aero is pretty but the transparency can actually be distracting too. Overall I don't miss it when I turn it off.
If its just transparency that distracts you, you can just turn off Transparency.
With Aero on, right click the desktop, select personalize, then Window Color and Appearance, and uncheck the 'enable transparency' box.
I disagree. It's easy to have proprietary software, even without copyright.
So you disagree by agreeing with me? I said pretty much exactly that.
You can set up a much cheaper, easier business model if you prevent free copying, whether by legal means or technological ones.
If shrinkwrap software can find a way to survive without legal protection, that's fine, it can survive in that form. But propping the industry up by arbitrarily banning people from using their computers from copying particular bits of data in particular ways is demented. Its completely artificial and ultimately destructive market manipulation.
Or should I get pissed when someone calls me an American Man?
The equivalent to "American Man" would be "Chinese Man", not "Chinaman".
If he'd been called a Chinese Man instead of Chinaman no one would have commented.
A closer equivalent to "Chinaman" would be "Yankee", which is largely used elsewhere in the world to mean 'American', and in most (though not all) places IS at least mildly derogatory.
Further, as others have pointed out the reference the big lebowski...where the Dude's reference to a Chinaman is corrected in the same manner. "Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please."
And in response the Dude defends using the word Chinaman because he does mean to offend... "This isn't a guy who built the railroads... he peed on my rug"
As for laser printers, they can be identified uniquely because, on each page, they surreptitiously print a binary code (serial number, at least) in very small, light yellow dots. Yellow on white paper is nearly imperceptible. Wiki it for the whole story, including how to find and interpret the dots.
Yes, but even without that, you can match a printout to the drum, based solely on defects due to wear in the printer. The printer/paper equivalent of ballistics matching a bullet to the barrel it was fired through.
Just to throw in some anecdotal story-telling here, my MacBook isn't sluggish at all. Of course I don't do developing on it (I'm not a developer), but for everyday normal tasks, it's fairly zippy. I only ever have problems with it when I open Office, and I suspect that has more to do with the clash between the Microsoft Way and the Apple Way.
Hint: 'fairly zippy' sounds like sluggish. Why couldn't you commit to just 'zippy'? Or better still, 'blindingly responsive'?
But rather than dig endlessly at your tacit admission that its not all it could be, I'll counter your anecdote and raise you a press release...
Your personal experience does not constitute the general public opinion.
I never said it did. However, it does constitute evidence that the original article is just making stuff up. Lots of people think Mac's are sluggish, read the forums, use google. Its not easy to come up with 'verifiable data', because its harder to benchmark the GUI. OSX is just fine, as I said, at the 'big things' that people benchmark... video encoding, etc.
It sounds like you are simply using a poorly configured mac system, if you are seeing the beachball that often. Macs can get clogged by too many background processes just like any system.
The beachball was more an issue on my previous G4. Although even the intels beachball if you put in a Cd they don't like, or when searching for network shares, or any of a dozen other common tasks.
The finder is due for an overhaul, but frankly, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Performance has been dramatically improved since Tiger.
Ah, so a year ago, the comment "OSX is sluggish" would not have met with your disapproval? After all, "performance has been dramatically improved since Tiger". Better still, check out Apple's press release quote for the upcoming Snow Leopard - "Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X,..."
Strange... why would they dedicate am entire release cycle to enhancing the performance of an OS that doesn't need it? Bottom line, OSX is sluggish. The article writer knows it, I know it, and even Apple knows it; you evidently are in denial.
The supposed HCI argument to move the menu bar from one place to another to accommodate the 0.1% of dual screen users sounds a bit silly.
This article is talking about the needs of software developers, so 0.1% of the user base is probably over estimating it, and all of them highly savvy, technical, power-users. What is fine for you and grandma isn't fine for a developer. That's the fundamental issue with Apple. Steve and co decide what is best for most people, and that's fine, they are generally pretty on-the-ball, but they don't like to give you any options, and if its not what's best for you, tough. Software developers are some of the biggest power users going, and they are generally used to being able to do what they want, how they want it.
Done by PC World in 2007 with Vista. They labeled the macbook pro "The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year". Maybe YOU would be surprised if you'd tried.
No. That was my point. Taking XP off his apparently craptastic Dell and putting a clean copy on the same hardware he's so impressed with OSX on would be fair. The wonderful performance he's (mis)attributing to OSX is really just the better apple hardware, and if he ran windows on that hardware instead he would find it too runs like a charm.
Its not PC; its a different list. 'Suspects' is a shorter list than 'person of interest'.
You can be a person of interest to a case without being a suspect. A suspect is someone who you think might have committed a crime, a person of interest includes suspects, but could also include people you think or even absolutely know didn't but you believe has information relevant to it, they might know a suspect, or work within sight of the crime scene, or sold the weapon used in the murder from their store and thus might recall who bought it, etc, etc...
Pay cash when you take toll roads/bridges. Don't sign up for the FasTrack thingy....
Yeah, but the trick there is that they start jacking up the cash prices. So you -can- pay cash, but you rapidly reach the point where you are paying double or even triple. Good way to soak the tourists who can't say squat, while the local voters don't really object (they all sign up to the system, so they are shielded from the price increases).
So what if they can identify the make and model of camera. I own a D70. There are 300 billion d70 out there. Good luck on tracking a picture to my camera.
Its useful the same way knowing the car that raced away from the scene of the crime used a particular tire, with a particular wheelbase. Or that a bullet was fired from a particular make of gun.
Neither will positively identify anyone, but if you were already a 'person of interest' in a long list of people peripherally related to a case that detail might put you on a MUCH shorter list if it comes up that you have that model. Plus its useful when they are asking a judge for a warrant. Judges really like specificity with warrants... A "We want to search his home and car for a Canon Powershot X"; he blogged here about buying a Canon Powershot X, he was caught on this surveillance tape leaving the scene carrying an indistinct object, the dimensions and shape of which are consistent with a Powershot X, and we know the photos in question were taken with a Canon Powershot X"... that's got a lot more weight than... "We want to search this guy for a digital camera, because a witness said he owns a camera, and he was caught on tape holding an indistinct smallish object which could be a camera, oh... and the photos we're interested were taken with a camera."
A reasonable person would view the second as a complete fishing expedition, based on no evidence, practically everyone has a camera and he could have been holding anything on that tape. The first request is specific - the photos of interest were taken with that model, and there is reason to beleive the person HAS that particular model, and that he had it with him on the that tape. Sure it could be a coincidence, but a warrant for that particular camera if he has one to check it out, might not be unreasonable.
Its also not unlikely that they can pair photos to a particular camera if they have both on hand due to micro-scrathes and other unique lens defects... the same way they can pair laser pritners to printed output.
Strange. I have a 15" 2.5ghz Core2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB's of memory. I also use a Dell laptop at work which has a 2.16ghz Core2 Duo with 2GB's of memory.
Well the dell stars off with a 15% slower CPU, couple that with any or all of: poorer video chipset on the dell?, more agressive power saving/cpu throttling settings?, slower disk?, maybe you've still got a bunch of crapware preloaded on the dell?, norton/mcafee antivirus?, a bunch of custom policies applied through roaming profiles from a domain?... seriously there are a million reasons why your Dell at work runs like puke and the MacBook Pro is better.
A much fairer comparison would be to install a fresh bloatware-free install of XP Pro in bootcamp on the Macbook Pro. You might be surprised at the results.
"Yet for many [who?], the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development [citation?].."
who? Me, for one.
citation? I agree with that assessment. Mac's are sluggish. There are plenty of theories as to why, from the threading model it uses, to the woeful inadequacies of 'Finder'. Frankly, my gut is that its just the desktop environment and finder itself that suck. Because when you look at benchmarks of optimized applications and servers or big tasks like video encoding etc, OSX tends to hold up just fine... but yet I find every mac I've ever used has always been 'sluggish' to actually use. Its the little things like opening a program, resizing a window, navigating the file system, always feel a bit sluggish... or I'll see the dreaded pinwheel come up and prevent me from doing anything at all time and again for seconds on end.
There are non-'performance' related mac-ism idiocies too... like having a global menu bar instead of a per 'application menu'. (seriously, with large dual monitors, its pretty retarded when you have a 2x2" window down in the bottom right of the 2nd monitor, and you have to go to the TOP of the OTHER monitor, to access its disembodied file menu. It was fine on a sinle 15" or 17" screen... but its just demented on dual 24" displays. Basic HCI defect at this point, imo.
There are a lot of things OSX does REALLY well. But at the same time the rigidity of the platform REALLY can get under the skin of a Linux or even Windows guy who wants to be able to do things a certain (non-Apple) way.
The same "failed" business model that supports the entire shrink-wrap software industry.
An industry that exists only because its illegal to make and share copies. We could still have a thriving typing-pool industry too if we passed laws that made it illegal to use your computer to type documents longer than one paragraph.
But that would be utterly stupid... why is passing laws to preventing people from using their one-click data-copying devices ('computers') to make copies any smarter?
But I won't. I'll just sell binary only, proprietary software.
"binary only, proprietary software" is not particularly difficult to copy, even if you try your damnedest with state of the art 'drm' and other anti-consumer crap.
Oh, yeah that will work great! It will be no hassle to find 10,000 customers willing to simultaneously pay $50 for unseen software, and to keep track of them, and get them to pay knowing they won't get anything until everyone else pays too. Sounds like my idea of fun.
Agreed; it would be more effort. But then the auto-industry created their own internal leasing sub-industry precisely, to track contracts with gazillions of customers, and individually collect small monthly payments from each of them because the much simpler model of 'pay in full in cash up front' meant losing out on a lot of customers.
Point is, if that's what has to be done to make money the market will figure it out. I'd suspect in such an environment, there would rapidly spring up all sorts of publishing services designed to support this model, so that a developer could offload all the hassle of sales for a percentage of the total take. Hell, services like this -already- exist to offload the minimal effort in selling copies and collecting payments.
Or sell proprietary software. Open source is great for a lot of things. But if you have a package that costs $500,000 to make, and 10,000 people will pay $50 for it, it's very hard to make that work with open source, and the proprietary model is cake.
So set your software up as a web service with crucial proprietary guts as part of the service and keep it on your server, and give away the client. Of course, if they don't have a paid membership, the software can't authenticate with the service, and runs without those extra features, or perhaps not at all.
The point I'm making here is that you can have proprietary software without copyright. I'm not saying proprietary software is failed. I'm saying shrink wrap protected by copyright is failed -- rendered as obsolete by the modern computer + internet as the typing pool and the human calculator were rendered obsolete by previous waves of computers. We didn't prop those industries up then, and we shouldn't prop shrinkwrap up now.
If I, as a developer, spend several years developing WidgetDesigner, and then I sell a copy of WidgetDesigner to you for $50, is it fair to me if you go and give every other person in the world a copy of my software at no charge?
Your whole initial premise starts with a failed business model. Its like selling a car for $50, with the expectation that customers will buy their fuel from you for the next 10 years at grossly inflated prices. And then after buying the car, they fill up at the local gas station instead. And then you complain that its not 'fair' to you, that you should be able to dictate where they buy their gas, because otherwise you won't make money. And you demand that laws be created that let you dictate what customers do after they buy your product. Of course, even a halfwit can see the REAL problem... why did you sell the car for $50?
If you as a developer spend several years working on something knowing that you will lose control over what you produce the moment you sell it, and that it wil be trivial to reproduce once you release it, and thus you will only be able to sell it once and your business model is to sell that copy for $50, you are a complete idiot.
Why do you think you should have an absolute "right" to operate under that business model?
Clearly you should find enough buyers of your software, and sell it to them all at once. Ie, sign up 10,000 customers, collect their $50, ($500,000) and release the software to them simultaneously. And then if it gets redistributed from there - so what.
Or find one company who REALLY values widgetdesigner, who will save a million bucks if he has it, and then sell him a copy for $500,000. He probably won't even redistribute it because its giving him a competitive advantage. He might even pay you extra not to redistribute it further yourself for a few years.
Or sell support for widgetdesigner.
Or if you can't do any of these, don't waste your time on widgetdesigner, and make something people want enough to pay you for instead.
1. Yes I am limiting discussion to textbooks. That's what the article was about, and this entire discussion apart from your points. It seems like a reasonable limit.
There are other branches of the discussion that are clearly textbook oriented, and TFA mentioned textbooks, but this thread is NOT limited to textbooks. Both the parent to my post, and the parent to that were clearly not limited to 'textbooks'.
2. You did claim that the TCO is unaffected by the inability to resell. Regardless of whether or not you think the TCO is affect, you said explicitly that the inability to resell would not have a large effect.
The inability to resell, on its own doesn't have a large effect. The resell value on most books is exceedingly low. So the effect of not being able to SELL is low. If you factor in being able to BUY books at that lower price then yes, that will have a significant impact. But that has to do with buying not selling. I fully comprehend that the two are inter-related, and that if someone else can't resell, then you also can't buy used... but that's beside the point. You can consider them separately; after all, there are LOTS of people who always buy new, and sell what they don't like/want, but rarely buy used.
Looking at my own book collection, the VAST majority of the titles were bought new.
That's actually an idea I've been campaigning for. These raiding guilds like to show off how great they are, yet they're just incredibly dedicated. Your average guild can't even get people to log in for scheduled events on time.
Right. The Raid game is warped... its the only part of wow that isn't a tedious grind, and most of the players can't access it due to the fact that its unrealistic for most people to organize into groups that large, and schedule their lives around hooking up with these guys. Its the same reason most of us can't play organized sports once we 'grow up'. Its not that I don't enjoy soccer/football... but I can't commit to showing up twice a week on schedule with 15 people to join a league. Some people can, but they are a distinct minority. For most of us its simply unrealistic. So I play 'sports' that can be done more ad hoc, solo, or in small groups, and impromptu organized... mountain biking, fencing, squash, golf...
WoW should similarly focus on the 90%+ that doesn't raid, and the developers should spend their time and development money into turning the small-group game in WoW that most people actually play to the same level of detail and complexity that they put into the raid game and get rid of the tedious grind. Make it freaking hard...that's fine... but target everything to the small group.
The raiders? Fuck em. They can play something else. In fact, ideally Blizzard spins off a separate WoW game just for them, start everyone who plays at level 80 and and make it "all raids, all the time". If they want to filter noobs or something, they can make them grind to level 80 in regular-wow before they upgrade their account and switch games to raider-wow. (Sort of like you had to beat diablo in normal, befre you can play 'hardcore'.)
I think this would be awesome. Everyone gets what they want.
The question I would find most interesting is what the raid-game would cost. Raiders tend to use far more bandwidth than less "hard core players", and consume far more content per hour. Would Blizzard be able to support a raider-mmorpg at $12.95/mo or whatever it is, without the massive 'subsidy' the current raid game is given by the 90% of the players who pay for it now, but never get to see it. Ie... if all the revenue for raider-warcraft came from raiders could it sustain itself?
Because right now I think most WoWers are getting the shaft, paying 12.95/mo for the developers to spend the bulk of their time subsidizing the bandwidth and content tuning for raiders, and then paying $x for an expansion where clearly the bulk of the effort was again spent on the raiders... sure in terms of total content the single players get more... but its mostly stuff that's just been 'phoned in' repetive fedex/kill quests and other mindless tedium. All the really neat stuff is in the raids.
You choose a much lower resale price and say TCO is unaffected because Y is so low.
Not at all. I claimed the TCO =is= affected significantly. Reread my post.
What you both miss is that a student can both buy and sell books at the used price Y.
In reality this is a fantasy even if you ignore wear and tear.
1) You are limiting your discussion to textbooks which is only a tiny fraction of the book market, and its a fraction that the Kindle isn't even particularly well suited for. Most of my expensive textbooks had lots of diagrams, many in color, and really needed to be viewed on a larger surface than the kindle allows for. Kindle is optimized for novels, bestsellers, and so on.
2) In the textbook market in particular, the constant succession of editions imposes a significant decay over time. You might be lucky enough to resell your book to the next semester for nearly what you paid... or if a new edition comes out you'll be struggling to get half that.
3) "X=Y" only applies you sell it directly to the next buyer. Most used books are still brokered through used book stores etc. And your sell price will be a fraction of what its 'used retail' price is. When you are looking at the textbook sub-market, I'll concede that finding an interested buyer (provided a new edition isn't out) is relatively easy, but that isn't true of the larger book market. Finding a buyer for the Steven King novel you just read, or the latest McCain biography, or whatever is MUCH harder.
Also, even if it were not about the experience, I cannot resell books from the Kindle. So the TCO is much higher than the books assuming that I resell all those that do not rock my world.
Right result, but I disagree with the route you took.
First, I absolutely agree you should be able to gift/resell your e-books. However, on a practical note, the resell value of things like books and CDs and DVDs is pretty negligible. Seriously, getting more than a couple bucks for most used titles is pretty tough unless its out of print and in high demand. Hell, even anything new in hardcover that's CURRENTLY on the new york times best seller list can be picked up for $5 bucks on ebay or craigslist.
So the TCO for a kindle isn't really affected by the inability to SELL books. It -is- however potentially considerably higher because you can't BUY or BORROW used books.
Not only that, wide screen is just more natural. Our natural vision is wide screen. I still dont understand why the original TVs were square unless it had to do with technological limitations.
The very first CRT screens were circular. And yes it had everything to do with technological limitations. The first TV's were circular with the cabinet cropping a bit off top/bottom/sides to make it more rectangular.
That said, as natural as 'wide screen' might be. Computers are primarily used in business for document processing, and 19" widescreen is stupid. When working on documents its a lot more productive to see and work on a whole page at full zoom (particularly in things like Word or PDF files... we've had enough -width- for years... 1024x768 is enough width. But HEIGHT is lacking. 19" 4:3 screens with 1024 vertical pixels are almost, but not quite as tall as most of us would like... and moving to a 19" widescreen actually REDUCES it.
A 24"+ widescreen is awesome though... you can get 2 full pages side by side. So its not widescreen that' stupid per se, its just that anyone going from 19" 4:3 to 19" widescreen who does any real work on the thing, will find the reduced vertical resolution extremely annoying, and not at all compensated by having a bit more width.
It just affects that one 'upgrade'. I imagine going from a 17" panel to a 19" widescreen would be a pleasant upgrade. And a 19" 4:3 to a 24" is similiarly pleasant. But 19" 4:3 to 19" 16:9 isn't really an upgrade for anyone who actually does any work.
So by your reasoning, you should be able to be imprisoned by the chinese government if you watch (by chinese government deemed) illegal content on a website that's hosted on a server in China. Even though the content of the website is perfectly legal in the country where you are browsing in? No? Didn't think so... This type of entrapment is a slippery slope.
This is exactly how the world works. ANY country can issue an arrest warrant for any person, at any time.
It doesn't MATTER where the person is. It doesn't matter where the crime was committed.
Canada could have issued a warrant over this for him, and arrested him the moment he stepped into Canada. Of course, why Canada would bother is a separate question, and if they did, it would likely be dismissed by the court because there is no legitimate claim to jurisdiction under Canadian law. But the point remains that they -could- still arrest and try him.
A country like China, very well could pass laws that make it legal in China to prosecute a German hacker, hacking the US from Germany. Of course they still wouldn't have the ability arrest him outside of China, but they could also issue a warrant for his arrest, and if and when he shows up in China, they could arrest him, try him, and sentence him according to their law.
The ONLY thing preventing this are various treaties, and other political niceties; but at the end of the day, if China wants you bad enough, and is willing to take the political fallout over the issue, the moment you step into China, you are finished.
If you go out into the world today, be prepared for a big surprise... If you go out into the world today you'd better go in disguise...
For if any government any where has decided they want your ass. Today's the day, I'm sorry to say, it won't be much of a picnic.
Why do we never hear the other side of the arguement: That a keyboard and mouse completely suck for anything other than FPSs?
Because the other side of the argument is completely irrelevant.
The PC supports gamepads. It always has. There have been gamepad style controllers since MS-DOS such as the Gravis PC Gamepad, and the tradition has continued to this day; you can get console style controllers from all the biggest names in PC controllers... Logitech, Microsoft, and Saitek (now owned by Mad Catz).
There is no reason to argue about having to use the keyboard and mouse for game-X on the PC, because, quite simply, you don't have to. I've played lots of PC games using gamepads... from Commander Keen to Mortal Kombat to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. (although I ultimately preferred Lost Planet with keyboard and mouse) to independant 'shumps' [shoot-em-ups].
She gave the scammers money because they promised millions of dollars in return. Unlike a rape or armed robbery, it's the greed of the scam victims themselves that lures them into the scheme. Thus, they have some culpability in the crime that someone attacked on the street does not.
I see... so if I promised you millions of dollars to come into the back alley, and then raped and robbed you, you get to share in some of the 'culpability'? What if instead of millions of dollars... I just offer to give you a ride home? Does your greed not to pay a taxi similarly factor into 'culpability'?
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The trick to Steam as near as I can tell is to simply purchase each game on its own account.
With each game in its own account, you give away or sell a title you don't want. Simply hand over the account information for the account for that game.
Plus if you get married or have kids you and your wife and/or kids can simultaneously play the different games that you own online. (With all your games on one steam account, only one person can play any of them online at a time.)
What if any, are the advantages of having all your games on one account? You don't have to re-login when you switch from title to title? Anything else? Is it worth having all your games forever tied to one concurrent user for that small bit of convenience?
I have been using Vista Ultimate for about 6 months and I think that Aero is the least important new feature. In fact, I turned off Aero on one of my boxes even though it can technically run it.
On machines with enough video horsepower that exceed 'can technically run it' Aero on is markedly faster than Aero off.
Leveraging your video cards hardware acceleration to compose your desktop is a good idea, after all.
I do admit that Aero is pretty but the transparency can actually be distracting too. Overall I don't miss it when I turn it off.
If its just transparency that distracts you, you can just turn off Transparency.
With Aero on, right click the desktop, select personalize, then Window Color and Appearance, and uncheck the 'enable transparency' box.
I disagree. It's easy to have proprietary software, even without copyright.
So you disagree by agreeing with me? I said pretty much exactly that.
You can set up a much cheaper, easier business model if you prevent free copying, whether by legal means or technological ones.
If shrinkwrap software can find a way to survive without legal protection, that's fine, it can survive in that form. But propping the industry up by arbitrarily banning people from using their computers from copying particular bits of data in particular ways is demented. Its completely artificial and ultimately destructive market manipulation.
Or should I get pissed when someone calls me an American Man?
The equivalent to "American Man" would be "Chinese Man", not "Chinaman".
If he'd been called a Chinese Man instead of Chinaman no one would have commented.
A closer equivalent to "Chinaman" would be "Yankee", which is largely used elsewhere in the world to mean 'American', and in most (though not all) places IS at least mildly derogatory.
Further, as others have pointed out the reference the big lebowski...where the Dude's reference to a Chinaman is corrected in the same manner. "Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please."
And in response the Dude defends using the word Chinaman because he does mean to offend... "This isn't a guy who built the railroads... he peed on my rug"
As for laser printers, they can be identified uniquely because, on each page, they surreptitiously print a binary code (serial number, at least) in very small, light yellow dots. Yellow on white paper is nearly imperceptible. Wiki it for the whole story, including how to find and interpret the dots.
Yes, but even without that, you can match a printout to the drum, based solely on defects due to wear in the printer. The printer/paper equivalent of ballistics matching a bullet to the barrel it was fired through.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1411332
Just to throw in some anecdotal story-telling here, my MacBook isn't sluggish at all. Of course I don't do developing on it (I'm not a developer), but for everyday normal tasks, it's fairly zippy. I only ever have problems with it when I open Office, and I suspect that has more to do with the clash between the Microsoft Way and the Apple Way.
Hint: 'fairly zippy' sounds like sluggish. Why couldn't you commit to just 'zippy'? Or better still, 'blindingly responsive'?
But rather than dig endlessly at your tacit admission that its not all it could be, I'll counter your anecdote and raise you a press release...
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/06/09snowleopard.html
"Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X,..."
Care to speculate why they'd focus an entire release cycle on "performance" if it wasn't an issue?
Um, I don't think that FileMaker Corp. has been owned by Apple for many years now.
Thinking with your gut, huh?
"Ownership: FileMaker, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Inc."
http://www.filemaker.com/company/index.html?nav=company-about
Your personal experience does not constitute the general public opinion.
I never said it did. However, it does constitute evidence that the original article is just making stuff up. Lots of people think Mac's are sluggish, read the forums, use google. Its not easy to come up with 'verifiable data', because its harder to benchmark the GUI. OSX is just fine, as I said, at the 'big things' that people benchmark... video encoding, etc.
It sounds like you are simply using a poorly configured mac system, if you are seeing the beachball that often. Macs can get clogged by too many background processes just like any system.
The beachball was more an issue on my previous G4. Although even the intels beachball if you put in a Cd they don't like, or when searching for network shares, or any of a dozen other common tasks.
The finder is due for an overhaul, but frankly, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Performance has been dramatically improved since Tiger.
Ah, so a year ago, the comment "OSX is sluggish" would not have met with your disapproval? After all, "performance has been dramatically improved since Tiger". Better still, check out Apple's press release quote for the upcoming Snow Leopard - "Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X,..."
Strange... why would they dedicate am entire release cycle to enhancing the performance of an OS that doesn't need it? Bottom line, OSX is sluggish. The article writer knows it, I know it, and even Apple knows it; you evidently are in denial.
The supposed HCI argument to move the menu bar from one place to another to accommodate the 0.1% of dual screen users sounds a bit silly.
This article is talking about the needs of software developers, so 0.1% of the user base is probably over estimating it, and all of them highly savvy, technical, power-users. What is fine for you and grandma isn't fine for a developer. That's the fundamental issue with Apple. Steve and co decide what is best for most people, and that's fine, they are generally pretty on-the-ball, but they don't like to give you any options, and if its not what's best for you, tough. Software developers are some of the biggest power users going, and they are generally used to being able to do what they want, how they want it.
Done by PC World in 2007 with Vista. They labeled the macbook pro "The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year". Maybe YOU would be surprised if you'd tried.
No. That was my point. Taking XP off his apparently craptastic Dell and putting a clean copy on the same hardware he's so impressed with OSX on would be fair. The wonderful performance he's (mis)attributing to OSX is really just the better apple hardware, and if he ran windows on that hardware instead he would find it too runs like a charm.
Over here, we normally just call them suspects...
Its not PC; its a different list. 'Suspects' is a shorter list than 'person of interest'.
You can be a person of interest to a case without being a suspect. A suspect is someone who you think might have committed a crime, a person of interest includes suspects, but could also include people you think or even absolutely know didn't but you believe has information relevant to it, they might know a suspect, or work within sight of the crime scene, or sold the weapon used in the murder from their store and thus might recall who bought it, etc, etc...
Pay cash when you take toll roads/bridges. Don't sign up for the FasTrack thingy....
Yeah, but the trick there is that they start jacking up the cash prices. So you -can- pay cash, but you rapidly reach the point where you are paying double or even triple. Good way to soak the tourists who can't say squat, while the local voters don't really object (they all sign up to the system, so they are shielded from the price increases).
So what if they can identify the make and model of camera. I own a D70. There are 300 billion d70 out there. Good luck on tracking a picture to my camera.
Its useful the same way knowing the car that raced away from the scene of the crime used a particular tire, with a particular wheelbase. Or that a bullet was fired from a particular make of gun.
Neither will positively identify anyone, but if you were already a 'person of interest' in a long list of people peripherally related to a case that detail might put you on a MUCH shorter list if it comes up that you have that model. Plus its useful when they are asking a judge for a warrant. Judges really like specificity with warrants... A "We want to search his home and car for a Canon Powershot X"; he blogged here about buying a Canon Powershot X, he was caught on this surveillance tape leaving the scene carrying an indistinct object, the dimensions and shape of which are consistent with a Powershot X, and we know the photos in question were taken with a Canon Powershot X"... that's got a lot more weight than... "We want to search this guy for a digital camera, because a witness said he owns a camera, and he was caught on tape holding an indistinct smallish object which could be a camera, oh... and the photos we're interested were taken with a camera."
A reasonable person would view the second as a complete fishing expedition, based on no evidence, practically everyone has a camera and he could have been holding anything on that tape. The first request is specific - the photos of interest were taken with that model, and there is reason to beleive the person HAS that particular model, and that he had it with him on the that tape. Sure it could be a coincidence, but a warrant for that particular camera if he has one to check it out, might not be unreasonable.
Its also not unlikely that they can pair photos to a particular camera if they have both on hand due to micro-scrathes and other unique lens defects... the same way they can pair laser pritners to printed output.
Strange. I have a 15" 2.5ghz Core2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB's of memory. I also use a Dell laptop at work which has a 2.16ghz Core2 Duo with 2GB's of memory.
Well the dell stars off with a 15% slower CPU, couple that with any or all of: poorer video chipset on the dell?, more agressive power saving/cpu throttling settings?, slower disk?, maybe you've still got a bunch of crapware preloaded on the dell?, norton/mcafee antivirus?, a bunch of custom policies applied through roaming profiles from a domain? ... seriously there are a million reasons why your Dell at work runs like puke and the MacBook Pro is better.
A much fairer comparison would be to install a fresh bloatware-free install of XP Pro in bootcamp on the Macbook Pro. You might be surprised at the results.
"Yet for many [who?], the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development [citation?].."
who? Me, for one.
citation? I agree with that assessment. Mac's are sluggish. There are plenty of theories as to why, from the threading model it uses, to the woeful inadequacies of 'Finder'. Frankly, my gut is that its just the desktop environment and finder itself that suck. Because when you look at benchmarks of optimized applications and servers or big tasks like video encoding etc, OSX tends to hold up just fine... but yet I find every mac I've ever used has always been 'sluggish' to actually use. Its the little things like opening a program, resizing a window, navigating the file system, always feel a bit sluggish... or I'll see the dreaded pinwheel come up and prevent me from doing anything at all time and again for seconds on end.
There are non-'performance' related mac-ism idiocies too... like having a global menu bar instead of a per 'application menu'. (seriously, with large dual monitors, its pretty retarded when you have a 2x2" window down in the bottom right of the 2nd monitor, and you have to go to the TOP of the OTHER monitor, to access its disembodied file menu. It was fine on a sinle 15" or 17" screen... but its just demented on dual 24" displays. Basic HCI defect at this point, imo.
There are a lot of things OSX does REALLY well. But at the same time the rigidity of the platform REALLY can get under the skin of a Linux or even Windows guy who wants to be able to do things a certain (non-Apple) way.
The same "failed" business model that supports the entire shrink-wrap software industry.
An industry that exists only because its illegal to make and share copies. We could still have a thriving typing-pool industry too if we passed laws that made it illegal to use your computer to type documents longer than one paragraph.
But that would be utterly stupid... why is passing laws to preventing people from using their one-click data-copying devices ('computers') to make copies any smarter?
But I won't. I'll just sell binary only, proprietary software.
"binary only, proprietary software" is not particularly difficult to copy, even if you try your damnedest with state of the art 'drm' and other anti-consumer crap.
Oh, yeah that will work great! It will be no hassle to find 10,000 customers willing to simultaneously pay $50 for unseen software, and to keep track of them, and get them to pay knowing they won't get anything until everyone else pays too. Sounds like my idea of fun.
Agreed; it would be more effort. But then the auto-industry created their own internal leasing sub-industry precisely, to track contracts with gazillions of customers, and individually collect small monthly payments from each of them because the much simpler model of 'pay in full in cash up front' meant losing out on a lot of customers.
Point is, if that's what has to be done to make money the market will figure it out. I'd suspect in such an environment, there would rapidly spring up all sorts of publishing services designed to support this model, so that a developer could offload all the hassle of sales for a percentage of the total take. Hell, services like this -already- exist to offload the minimal effort in selling copies and collecting payments.
Or sell proprietary software. Open source is great for a lot of things. But if you have a package that costs $500,000 to make, and 10,000 people will pay $50 for it, it's very hard to make that work with open source, and the proprietary model is cake.
So set your software up as a web service with crucial proprietary guts as part of the service and keep it on your server, and give away the client. Of course, if they don't have a paid membership, the software can't authenticate with the service, and runs without those extra features, or perhaps not at all.
The point I'm making here is that you can have proprietary software without copyright. I'm not saying proprietary software is failed. I'm saying shrink wrap protected by copyright is failed -- rendered as obsolete by the modern computer + internet as the typing pool and the human calculator were rendered obsolete by previous waves of computers. We didn't prop those industries up then, and we shouldn't prop shrinkwrap up now.
If I, as a developer, spend several years developing WidgetDesigner, and then I sell a copy of WidgetDesigner to you for $50, is it fair to me if you go and give every other person in the world a copy of my software at no charge?
Your whole initial premise starts with a failed business model. Its like selling a car for $50, with the expectation that customers will buy their fuel from you for the next 10 years at grossly inflated prices. And then after buying the car, they fill up at the local gas station instead. And then you complain that its not 'fair' to you, that you should be able to dictate where they buy their gas, because otherwise you won't make money. And you demand that laws be created that let you dictate what customers do after they buy your product. Of course, even a halfwit can see the REAL problem... why did you sell the car for $50?
If you as a developer spend several years working on something knowing that you will lose control over what you produce the moment you sell it, and that it wil be trivial to reproduce once you release it, and thus you will only be able to sell it once and your business model is to sell that copy for $50, you are a complete idiot.
Why do you think you should have an absolute "right" to operate under that business model?
Clearly you should find enough buyers of your software, and sell it to them all at once. Ie, sign up 10,000 customers, collect their $50, ($500,000) and release the software to them simultaneously. And then if it gets redistributed from there - so what.
Or find one company who REALLY values widgetdesigner, who will save a million bucks if he has it, and then sell him a copy for $500,000. He probably won't even redistribute it because its giving him a competitive advantage. He might even pay you extra not to redistribute it further yourself for a few years.
Or sell support for widgetdesigner.
Or if you can't do any of these, don't waste your time on widgetdesigner, and make something people want enough to pay you for instead.
1. Yes I am limiting discussion to textbooks. That's what the article was about, and this entire discussion apart from your points. It seems like a reasonable limit.
There are other branches of the discussion that are clearly textbook oriented, and TFA mentioned textbooks, but this thread is NOT limited to textbooks. Both the parent to my post, and the parent to that were clearly not limited to 'textbooks'.
2. You did claim that the TCO is unaffected by the inability to resell. Regardless of whether or not you think the TCO is affect, you said explicitly that the inability to resell would not have a large effect.
The inability to resell, on its own doesn't have a large effect. The resell value on most books is exceedingly low. So the effect of not being able to SELL is low. If you factor in being able to BUY books at that lower price then yes, that will have a significant impact. But that has to do with buying not selling. I fully comprehend that the two are inter-related, and that if someone else can't resell, then you also can't buy used... but that's beside the point. You can consider them separately; after all, there are LOTS of people who always buy new, and sell what they don't like/want, but rarely buy used.
Looking at my own book collection, the VAST majority of the titles were bought new.
That's actually an idea I've been campaigning for. These raiding guilds like to show off how great they are, yet they're just incredibly dedicated. Your average guild can't even get people to log in for scheduled events on time.
Right. The Raid game is warped... its the only part of wow that isn't a tedious grind, and most of the players can't access it due to the fact that its unrealistic for most people to organize into groups that large, and schedule their lives around hooking up with these guys. Its the same reason most of us can't play organized sports once we 'grow up'. Its not that I don't enjoy soccer/football... but I can't commit to showing up twice a week on schedule with 15 people to join a league. Some people can, but they are a distinct minority. For most of us its simply unrealistic. So I play 'sports' that can be done more ad hoc, solo, or in small groups, and impromptu organized... mountain biking, fencing, squash, golf...
WoW should similarly focus on the 90%+ that doesn't raid, and the developers should spend their time and development money into turning the small-group game in WoW that most people actually play to the same level of detail and complexity that they put into the raid game and get rid of the tedious grind. Make it freaking hard...that's fine... but target everything to the small group.
The raiders? Fuck em. They can play something else. In fact, ideally Blizzard spins off a separate WoW game just for them, start everyone who plays at level 80 and and make it "all raids, all the time". If they want to filter noobs or something, they can make them grind to level 80 in regular-wow before they upgrade their account and switch games to raider-wow. (Sort of like you had to beat diablo in normal, befre you can play 'hardcore'.)
I think this would be awesome. Everyone gets what they want.
The question I would find most interesting is what the raid-game would cost. Raiders tend to use far more bandwidth than less "hard core players", and consume far more content per hour. Would Blizzard be able to support a raider-mmorpg at $12.95/mo or whatever it is, without the massive 'subsidy' the current raid game is given by the 90% of the players who pay for it now, but never get to see it. Ie... if all the revenue for raider-warcraft came from raiders could it sustain itself?
Because right now I think most WoWers are getting the shaft, paying 12.95/mo for the developers to spend the bulk of their time subsidizing the bandwidth and content tuning for raiders, and then paying $x for an expansion where clearly the bulk of the effort was again spent on the raiders... sure in terms of total content the single players get more... but its mostly stuff that's just been 'phoned in' repetive fedex/kill quests and other mindless tedium. All the really neat stuff is in the raids.
You choose a much lower resale price and say TCO is unaffected because Y is so low.
Not at all. I claimed the TCO =is= affected significantly. Reread my post.
What you both miss is that a student can both buy and sell books at the used price Y.
In reality this is a fantasy even if you ignore wear and tear.
1) You are limiting your discussion to textbooks which is only a tiny fraction of the book market, and its a fraction that the Kindle isn't even particularly well suited for. Most of my expensive textbooks had lots of diagrams, many in color, and really needed to be viewed on a larger surface than the kindle allows for. Kindle is optimized for novels, bestsellers, and so on.
2) In the textbook market in particular, the constant succession of editions imposes a significant decay over time. You might be lucky enough to resell your book to the next semester for nearly what you paid... or if a new edition comes out you'll be struggling to get half that.
3) "X=Y" only applies you sell it directly to the next buyer. Most used books are still brokered through used book stores etc. And your sell price will be a fraction of what its 'used retail' price is. When you are looking at the textbook sub-market, I'll concede that finding an interested buyer (provided a new edition isn't out) is relatively easy, but that isn't true of the larger book market. Finding a buyer for the Steven King novel you just read, or the latest McCain biography, or whatever is MUCH harder.
Also, even if it were not about the experience, I cannot resell books from the Kindle. So the TCO is much higher than the books assuming that I resell all those that do not rock my world.
Right result, but I disagree with the route you took.
First, I absolutely agree you should be able to gift/resell your e-books. However, on a practical note, the resell value of things like books and CDs and DVDs is pretty negligible. Seriously, getting more than a couple bucks for most used titles is pretty tough unless its out of print and in high demand. Hell, even anything new in hardcover that's CURRENTLY on the new york times best seller list can be picked up for $5 bucks on ebay or craigslist.
So the TCO for a kindle isn't really affected by the inability to SELL books. It -is- however potentially considerably higher because you can't BUY or BORROW used books.
They wanted educated, worldly men to make the decisions ... but they wanted the people to choose WHICH educated, worldly men made those decisions.
But those would be elitists. And the republican party has assured me I want nothing to do with them.
Not only that, wide screen is just more natural. Our natural vision is wide screen. I still dont understand why the original TVs were square unless it had to do with technological limitations.
The very first CRT screens were circular. And yes it had everything to do with technological limitations.
The first TV's were circular with the cabinet cropping a bit off top/bottom/sides to make it more rectangular.
That said, as natural as 'wide screen' might be. Computers are primarily used in business for document processing, and 19" widescreen is stupid. When working on documents its a lot more productive to see and work on a whole page at full zoom (particularly in things like Word or PDF files... we've had enough -width- for years... 1024x768 is enough width. But HEIGHT is lacking. 19" 4:3 screens with 1024 vertical pixels are almost, but not quite as tall as most of us would like... and moving to a 19" widescreen actually REDUCES it.
A 24"+ widescreen is awesome though... you can get 2 full pages side by side. So its not widescreen that' stupid per se, its just that anyone going from 19" 4:3 to 19" widescreen who does any real work on the thing, will find the reduced vertical resolution extremely annoying, and not at all compensated by having a bit more width.
It just affects that one 'upgrade'. I imagine going from a 17" panel to a 19" widescreen would be a pleasant upgrade. And a 19" 4:3 to a 24" is similiarly pleasant. But 19" 4:3 to 19" 16:9 isn't really an upgrade for anyone who actually does any work.
So by your reasoning, you should be able to be imprisoned by the chinese government if you watch (by chinese government deemed) illegal content on a website that's hosted on a server in China. Even though the content of the website is perfectly legal in the country where you are browsing in? No? Didn't think so... This type of entrapment is a slippery slope.
This is exactly how the world works. ANY country can issue an arrest warrant for any person, at any time.
It doesn't MATTER where the person is. It doesn't matter where the crime was committed.
Canada could have issued a warrant over this for him, and arrested him the moment he stepped into Canada. Of course, why Canada would bother is a separate question, and if they did, it would likely be dismissed by the court because there is no legitimate claim to jurisdiction under Canadian law. But the point remains that they -could- still arrest and try him.
A country like China, very well could pass laws that make it legal in China to prosecute a German hacker, hacking the US from Germany. Of course they still wouldn't have the ability arrest him outside of China, but they could also issue a warrant for his arrest, and if and when he shows up in China, they could arrest him, try him, and sentence him according to their law.
The ONLY thing preventing this are various treaties, and other political niceties; but at the end of the day, if China wants you bad enough, and is willing to take the political fallout over the issue, the moment you step into China, you are finished.
If you go out into the world today,
be prepared for a big surprise...
If you go out into the world today
you'd better go in disguise...
For if any government any where has
decided they want your ass.
Today's the day, I'm sorry to say, it won't be much of a picnic.
Why do we never hear the other side of the arguement: That a keyboard and mouse completely suck for anything other than FPSs?
Because the other side of the argument is completely irrelevant.
The PC supports gamepads. It always has. There have been gamepad style controllers since MS-DOS such as the Gravis PC Gamepad, and the tradition has continued to this day; you can get console style controllers from all the biggest names in PC controllers ... Logitech, Microsoft, and Saitek (now owned by Mad Catz).
There is no reason to argue about having to use the keyboard and mouse for game-X on the PC, because, quite simply, you don't have to. I've played lots of PC games using gamepads... from Commander Keen to Mortal Kombat to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. (although I ultimately preferred Lost Planet with keyboard and mouse) to independant 'shumps' [shoot-em-ups].
She gave the scammers money because they promised millions of dollars in return. Unlike a rape or armed robbery, it's the greed of the scam victims themselves that lures them into the scheme. Thus, they have some culpability in the crime that someone attacked on the street does not.
I see... so if I promised you millions of dollars to come into the back alley, and then raped and robbed you, you get to share in some of the 'culpability'? What if instead of millions of dollars... I just offer to give you a ride home? Does your greed not to pay a taxi similarly factor into 'culpability'?