Personally, I think because everyone is expecting $199, they should sell it for $199 with a bundled game. So you can spend 200 bucks and actually not have to spend more than that to be able to play something.
When was the last time a game console did that? The SNES generation I think?
We have a finite number of resources to dedicate towards law enforcement. Are the most grievous crimes, involving physical safety and security of the citizenry, sufficiently under control that we can dedicate public resources to going after something as minor as filesharing?
It seems to me that there's a lot of more serious issues that could use those dollars, from violent crimes to homeland security and even *real* piracy - the guys *selling* bootleg CDs and DVDs, before we should consider using time and money to go after teenagers using P2P apps.
Left out of the parent's argument is any mention of "fair use", which acknowledges that the public has some rights to copy the content in certain contexts regardless of the monopoly holder's wishes, even during the period that the content is covered by copyright.
So while there's little doubt that many of these works are not public domain, given even the original copyright terms, the activity of file sharing could still fall under fair use, much in the same way home recording, time shifting and format shifting are fair use rights.
Whether or not file sharing is fair use is, to the best of my knowledge, an as of yet unsettled legal question. I don't necessarily believe it is, but there's arguments to be made both ways and I think it's far less black and white than the RIAA likes to pretend.
Word and Office are relatively expensive and a lot of people don't have those programs for that reason, and I don't think this is incentive to buy them.
Err, they're relatively expensive and a lot of people don't buy them for that reason, but I wouldn't go so far as to say a lot of people don't have them. Buying it isn't a necessary part of getting it installed on your system...
It's probably not the death of the PC yet... but predictions of the death of the Microsoft PC might actually be accurate this time.
The problem with "The Network is the PC" arguments of yesteryear is that there really wasn't a network when that slogan was first uttered. Today we have a network that's actually poised to replace the PC. Probably half the applications I use on a daily basis these days are on the web, and with the exception of Word and Photoshop, all the programs which do run on my PC are reliant on the internet to work and be useful.
In other areas, the PC as a gaming platform is waning, and the PC as a media player is losing to dedicated devices like the iPod.
So... if you're getting your media on dedicated appliances, playing games on consoles, and your main software platform is the web (accessible via anything that can run Firefox), what do you need a full blown desktop with MS Windows for?
Dialpad was awesome my freshman year of college... most everyone used it to call home, call their girlfriends, etc. Beat the hell out of messing with calling cards. Skype is an order of magnitude better than that ever was though.
Eh... anyone who was being that stingy on price would also notice that 360 games cost $60 whereas Wii games will be $50 or lower (though I realize rentals are an option as well). Xbox Live arcade (the thing that would most interest casual gamers) is an additional 10 bucks a month. I think no matter how you cut it, it'll cost you more to buy and own a 360 than a Wii by a pretty sizable margin... I don't think the 360 can compete for anyone being that price conscious.
But I think it's a moot point either way. I can see price being a factor in purchases as far as "That's more than I can justify spending" goes, but I can't see anyone actually choosing one system over another based on price. You either want a system or don't, and you can either afford that system or can't - and for those who want more than one, there's probably an order they'll buy them in regardless of which costs more.
Megas XLR was deliberately a spoof on various anime, wasn't it? The giant robot was there to make fun of giant robot anime. Which I guess isn't much of a distinction; but I still don't think it's in the same class as the "giant robot anime" that takes itself seriously.
The Gamecube was always priced lower than the other two consoles - $200 to their $300 at launch, if I recall. It didn't seem to have a huge impact on the sales numbers. It'd possible the price differential will be much greater this time around, but I still don't see it as having a big impact in the overall decision to buy. Parents will still get the system kids ask for.
And the irony is they're the only ones who ever seem to take advantage of the technology to the fullest.
For example, the only time I've ever seen the alternate camera angles ability really used on DVD was for porn - never in a mainstream Hollywood movie.
Hollywood in general would also do well to the way porn is distributed on the web - I ain't never seen DRM'ed porn in my life, instead leveraging p2p networks as marketing tools, making available clips and low-res JPEG's with the site logos attached (Then there's the spammers... but frankly I don't find that any worse than some of Hollywood's marketing). And yet porn makes billions online.
Exactly. This is one thing I don't get when they're talking about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and downsampling anything playing on the wrong monitor or whatnot.
Pirates don't give a shit about quality, they'll downsample it themselves to save on storage and bandwidth. Even now that DVD burners are pretty ubiquitous, most files are still swapped with an upper cap of 700mb to burn on a regular CD, and I don't see that changing anytime soon - a 700mb divx rip is quite "good enough" - going to 4.7GB doesn't buy you that much and the files take a lot more time to download. Quality-wise, most new releases are only available as camcorder rips from a theater... it's obvious these people aren't concerned about high-def.
You'd think that they'd be smart enough to look at this and realize AVAILABILITY is the main motivator for piracy, not QUALITY, but all their DRM solutions are designed to protect quality at the expense of availability. Idiots, the lot of them.
Group wisdom and network effects. Effectively, the good stuff gets linked to, picked up by friends, and then linked to some more.
Google pioneered it with Pagerank, judging the relevancy of pages by the number of inbound links to them, they in essence let the web do the hardest work for them.
Today, Flickr's Interestingness is probably the gold standard; again, all that's behind it is an algorithm that looks are how much a picture is shared, commented on, favorited, linked to, etc.
Memeorandum, TailRank, Digg, Technorati's "Explore", Google News, Del.icio.us, and Slashdot's moderation system all work on similar principles or slight variations of them. Study the natural behaviors of the community and use them to determine what the community finds interesting. The same people that generate the content act as the filters.
I'll be the first to say that none of it is perfect; but I do believe these things are constantly improving.
Which unfortunately is a reactive solution instead of preventive one.
Bingo. This sums up in a nutshell why I'm not a libertarian.
A conversation I had with a libertarian once went something like this. He asserted that there shouldn't be any health code regulations for restaurants, because any restaurant that made people sick would quickly go out of business. So I asked what happened to that first guy who goes and gets sick at that restaurant. The answer I got was basically "Well, he'd die, but the restaurant would go out of business".
As reassuring as that is, I'd like some assurance that I won't die, prior to going to a restaurant.
I'm with libertarians in that I believe in a minimal government that should primarily serve to protect the rights of individuals. But I don't think a free market run amok is the solution to every problem, or the best way to maximize liberty.
Well, that's a reason to use consoles over PC games. You're absolutely correct that this is functionality PC games lack.
However, I was addressing the opposite condition: why someone would use the PC as a platform over a console. My point is that consoles have been eliminating those reasons, and as such the PC is becoming less relevant as a serious gaming platform.
Honestly, we're at a point where I'm wondering how much life PC gaming really has left in it.
The big advantages of using a PC for gaming have always been threefold:
1) Keyboard/Mouse input allowed for more complex input, especially in the realm of FPS and RTS games 2) Graphics were usually better (except for perhaps in the first year or two of a new console generation. 3) Network gaming.
Now, all three new consoles will have online play. Graphics wise, the difference is getting to be less noticeable... it'll be years before PC hardware catches up with the XBox 360/PS3 in terms of graphics, and even then the difference will be incremental. Which just leaves the problem of input - keyboard and mouse aren't standard on the consoles, but hmmm... I'm wondering if such peripherals might become workable with time.
Point is I'm starting to question if the PC is still a viable gaming platform, at least for me. And if the answer is that it's not. Combine that with that fact that I'm relying almost entirely on web applications and OSS these days.... and suddenly Mac OSX and Linux are looking a lot more competitive as platforms go.
Microsoft needs to start offering better reasons to stick with Windows than the reasons they've given so far, because frankly if that's all there is I'd rather go with a platform where I'm won't be waiting five years for new releases.
Most people just want to see the movie, and don't care nearly as much about the quality as the industry assumes. Generally, convenience will trump quality when it comes to consumer behavior - watching it at home will always be more convenient.
That said, its also worth noting that most people who'd dish out $50+ to take the family to the movies are probably the same people who could afford a wicked awesome home entertainment system anyway.
The box office decline is multi-causal: - The movie theater experience has been ruined by cell phones and annoying advertisements. - It's simply too expensive at $10 a ticket + $10 for concessions (or more) - The movies suck; Hollywood has become incredibly risk averse, feeding us endless strings of sequels and remakes. - DVD + Home Theater offers a compelling, cheaper alternative.
90% of everything is crap. Which is why 10% of everything gets 90% of the attention. So I don't see what the problem is. It's as true for blogs as it is for TV, movies, and newspapers.
The only difference is that blogs are totally democratic, the audience has complete control over which ones succeed and which ones languish in obscurity. In the old days, a TV network executive might see five pilots and pick one to produce and air. Today, its like the audience gets to watch all the pilots, and decide for themselves what they'd want to see. And occasionally they pick something the executive wouldn't have - that's where the real strength of new media lies.
Filtering has always been a problem with any media. You can't possibly see every movie or watch every TV show, so what do you do? You rely on family and friends (word of mouth) and professional reviewers to direct you towards what you should pay attention to. Finding quality blogs isn't much different, in the end, except that its easier to get the aggregate opinions of the whole internet.
Finding that one nugget of information you're looking for can still be a challenge, but I'd contend it's easier today than its ever been, and getting easier.
That's funny... because it seems to me that in the last 20 years education has only gotten worse and worse.
What's funnier is that this claim has been made since Aristotle, and there's as little evidence now as there was then that there's anything factual about that statement.
Given the sheer number of adults in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's that entirely lack basic reasoning or critical thinking skills, I have a tough time believing that schools were magically better back then, or that today's generation is any worse. Sure, the education system has its problems, and doesn't work for every student. But that's always been true, and isn't likely to change.
What has changed are the skills taught and the skills needed to get through life. The current generation is the most knowledgable and best educated of any generation in the history of man. Just like their parents before them, and their grandparents earlier. Our brightest students are getting exposed to higher maths years earlier than their parents were. Science is advancing at a breakneck pace and students have opportunity to learn about it. They're adept with the tools of the information age that still confuse most people over 30. Education today is the best its ever been. Tomorrow it'll be even better.
The problem is that those dead trees, pens and pencils aren't cheap in their own right. Even assuming that there are no licensing fees, the cost of printing up a textbook for each subject area and grade level easily exceeds $100, not to mention the shipping costs.
If on the other hand you can put one of these laptops in their hands, then the cost of printing the textbooks drops to zero, and distribution becomes much cheaper as well. And then imagine if we could somehow set up wifi in some of these villages and get them access to resources like Google and Wikipedia, and its easy to see what benefit these have over conventional textbooks.
Even for Americans... personally, I always hated textbooks, walking the mile to and from school with a 100+ pound backpack was never fun, and I'd usually do some triage at the end of the day to determine which books were worth lugging for homework and which I could leave and get done in homeroom. I'd have loved to have one of these things (or even better, have the books and homework accessible via the web). Using a PC doesn't neccessarily help your learning, but it still makes sense to make some of this stuff virtual.
You're right, it's a normal computer, like the one that sits on my desk. Which is basically my laptop.
Here's the thing... once something scales passed the size where it will fit in my pocket or on a belt clip, then the next logical size is that of a laptop, since at that point I have to carry it around in a backpack anyway - which means that "whipping it out" becomes quite the chore. I can't see what advantage this thing gives me over carrying a full laptop, with a bigger screen and full keyboard.
Simply, it's too big to be a cell phone, PDA, or portable media device... and too small to replace a laptop. If there's a market for this thing, I personally just don't see it.
What killed the Simpsons as a pop culture phenomenon was simply its decline in quality. It just sucks now compared to its golden age. It used to be the sharpest sattire on TV - nowadays its a pale reflection of its former glory.
Well said, and true in my experience as well. Supermarkets have cheap packaged goods, but for fresh meat/bread/veggies the mom and pop shop still rules, at least if you can find one.
And to reiterate: that's the kind of stuff you should be eating anyways.
Err, unless I'm really wrong, isn't the bubble exactly when Google appeared? They launched in 97 or 98 if I recall, though it was a year or two after before I'd heard of them. If I remember my history right, they ran for about a year before coming up with the adwords program... so Google as we know it today was there pre-2000.
From the looks of it, this is the direction they're heading. Their personalized search incorporates a bit of this, and there's persistent rumors they'll release a full fledged social bookmarking tool. I have to imagine that the data they get from that would be immensely useful in calculating pagerank.
This is one area that Yahoo certainly has a leg up on them though - with their focus on the social web, they have a lot more user data by which they can leverage network effects to find the best results. (Of course, Yahoo has a lot of other problems that keep it from really kicking ass, namely, their tendency to suck, but I really hope one of these days they'll kick that habit of sucking and give Google a run for their money).
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There's quite a few DVD's like that these days. I don't recall offhand which movies start like that though.
The real problem is you have no way of knowing which DVD's have this problem prior to buying/renting them and popping them in the DVD player.
Personally, I think because everyone is expecting $199, they should sell it for $199 with a bundled game. So you can spend 200 bucks and actually not have to spend more than that to be able to play something. When was the last time a game console did that? The SNES generation I think?
The argument goes more like this:
We have a finite number of resources to dedicate towards law enforcement. Are the most grievous crimes, involving physical safety and security of the citizenry, sufficiently under control that we can dedicate public resources to going after something as minor as filesharing?
It seems to me that there's a lot of more serious issues that could use those dollars, from violent crimes to homeland security and even *real* piracy - the guys *selling* bootleg CDs and DVDs, before we should consider using time and money to go after teenagers using P2P apps.
Left out of the parent's argument is any mention of "fair use", which acknowledges that the public has some rights to copy the content in certain contexts regardless of the monopoly holder's wishes, even during the period that the content is covered by copyright.
So while there's little doubt that many of these works are not public domain, given even the original copyright terms, the activity of file sharing could still fall under fair use, much in the same way home recording, time shifting and format shifting are fair use rights.
Whether or not file sharing is fair use is, to the best of my knowledge, an as of yet unsettled legal question. I don't necessarily believe it is, but there's arguments to be made both ways and I think it's far less black and white than the RIAA likes to pretend.
It's probably not the death of the PC yet... but predictions of the death of the Microsoft PC might actually be accurate this time.
The problem with "The Network is the PC" arguments of yesteryear is that there really wasn't a network when that slogan was first uttered. Today we have a network that's actually poised to replace the PC. Probably half the applications I use on a daily basis these days are on the web, and with the exception of Word and Photoshop, all the programs which do run on my PC are reliant on the internet to work and be useful.
In other areas, the PC as a gaming platform is waning, and the PC as a media player is losing to dedicated devices like the iPod.
So... if you're getting your media on dedicated appliances, playing games on consoles, and your main software platform is the web (accessible via anything that can run Firefox), what do you need a full blown desktop with MS Windows for?
Dialpad was awesome my freshman year of college... most everyone used it to call home, call their girlfriends, etc. Beat the hell out of messing with calling cards. Skype is an order of magnitude better than that ever was though.
Eh... anyone who was being that stingy on price would also notice that 360 games cost $60 whereas Wii games will be $50 or lower (though I realize rentals are an option as well). Xbox Live arcade (the thing that would most interest casual gamers) is an additional 10 bucks a month. I think no matter how you cut it, it'll cost you more to buy and own a 360 than a Wii by a pretty sizable margin... I don't think the 360 can compete for anyone being that price conscious.
But I think it's a moot point either way. I can see price being a factor in purchases as far as "That's more than I can justify spending" goes, but I can't see anyone actually choosing one system over another based on price. You either want a system or don't, and you can either afford that system or can't - and for those who want more than one, there's probably an order they'll buy them in regardless of which costs more.
Megas XLR was deliberately a spoof on various anime, wasn't it? The giant robot was there to make fun of giant robot anime. Which I guess isn't much of a distinction; but I still don't think it's in the same class as the "giant robot anime" that takes itself seriously.
The Gamecube was always priced lower than the other two consoles - $200 to their $300 at launch, if I recall. It didn't seem to have a huge impact on the sales numbers. It'd possible the price differential will be much greater this time around, but I still don't see it as having a big impact in the overall decision to buy. Parents will still get the system kids ask for.
And the irony is they're the only ones who ever seem to take advantage of the technology to the fullest.
For example, the only time I've ever seen the alternate camera angles ability really used on DVD was for porn - never in a mainstream Hollywood movie.
Hollywood in general would also do well to the way porn is distributed on the web - I ain't never seen DRM'ed porn in my life, instead leveraging p2p networks as marketing tools, making available clips and low-res JPEG's with the site logos attached (Then there's the spammers... but frankly I don't find that any worse than some of Hollywood's marketing). And yet porn makes billions online.
Exactly. This is one thing I don't get when they're talking about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and downsampling anything playing on the wrong monitor or whatnot.
Pirates don't give a shit about quality, they'll downsample it themselves to save on storage and bandwidth. Even now that DVD burners are pretty ubiquitous, most files are still swapped with an upper cap of 700mb to burn on a regular CD, and I don't see that changing anytime soon - a 700mb divx rip is quite "good enough" - going to 4.7GB doesn't buy you that much and the files take a lot more time to download. Quality-wise, most new releases are only available as camcorder rips from a theater... it's obvious these people aren't concerned about high-def.
You'd think that they'd be smart enough to look at this and realize AVAILABILITY is the main motivator for piracy, not QUALITY, but all their DRM solutions are designed to protect quality at the expense of availability. Idiots, the lot of them.
Group wisdom and network effects. Effectively, the good stuff gets linked to, picked up by friends, and then linked to some more.
Google pioneered it with Pagerank, judging the relevancy of pages by the number of inbound links to them, they in essence let the web do the hardest work for them.
Today, Flickr's Interestingness is probably the gold standard; again, all that's behind it is an algorithm that looks are how much a picture is shared, commented on, favorited, linked to, etc.
Memeorandum, TailRank, Digg, Technorati's "Explore", Google News, Del.icio.us, and Slashdot's moderation system all work on similar principles or slight variations of them. Study the natural behaviors of the community and use them to determine what the community finds interesting. The same people that generate the content act as the filters.
I'll be the first to say that none of it is perfect; but I do believe these things are constantly improving.
Which unfortunately is a reactive solution instead of preventive one.
Bingo. This sums up in a nutshell why I'm not a libertarian.
A conversation I had with a libertarian once went something like this. He asserted that there shouldn't be any health code regulations for restaurants, because any restaurant that made people sick would quickly go out of business. So I asked what happened to that first guy who goes and gets sick at that restaurant. The answer I got was basically "Well, he'd die, but the restaurant would go out of business".
As reassuring as that is, I'd like some assurance that I won't die, prior to going to a restaurant.
I'm with libertarians in that I believe in a minimal government that should primarily serve to protect the rights of individuals. But I don't think a free market run amok is the solution to every problem, or the best way to maximize liberty.
Well, that's a reason to use consoles over PC games. You're absolutely correct that this is functionality PC games lack.
However, I was addressing the opposite condition: why someone would use the PC as a platform over a console. My point is that consoles have been eliminating those reasons, and as such the PC is becoming less relevant as a serious gaming platform.
Honestly, we're at a point where I'm wondering how much life PC gaming really has left in it.
The big advantages of using a PC for gaming have always been threefold:
1) Keyboard/Mouse input allowed for more complex input, especially in the realm of FPS and RTS games
2) Graphics were usually better (except for perhaps in the first year or two of a new console generation.
3) Network gaming.
Now, all three new consoles will have online play. Graphics wise, the difference is getting to be less noticeable... it'll be years before PC hardware catches up with the XBox 360/PS3 in terms of graphics, and even then the difference will be incremental. Which just leaves the problem of input - keyboard and mouse aren't standard on the consoles, but hmmm... I'm wondering if such peripherals might become workable with time.
Point is I'm starting to question if the PC is still a viable gaming platform, at least for me. And if the answer is that it's not. Combine that with that fact that I'm relying almost entirely on web applications and OSS these days.... and suddenly Mac OSX and Linux are looking a lot more competitive as platforms go.
Microsoft needs to start offering better reasons to stick with Windows than the reasons they've given so far, because frankly if that's all there is I'd rather go with a platform where I'm won't be waiting five years for new releases.
Most people just want to see the movie, and don't care nearly as much about the quality as the industry assumes. Generally, convenience will trump quality when it comes to consumer behavior - watching it at home will always be more convenient.
That said, its also worth noting that most people who'd dish out $50+ to take the family to the movies are probably the same people who could afford a wicked awesome home entertainment system anyway.
The box office decline is multi-causal:
- The movie theater experience has been ruined by cell phones and annoying advertisements.
- It's simply too expensive at $10 a ticket + $10 for concessions (or more)
- The movies suck; Hollywood has become incredibly risk averse, feeding us endless strings of sequels and remakes.
- DVD + Home Theater offers a compelling, cheaper alternative.
90% of everything is crap. Which is why 10% of everything gets 90% of the attention. So I don't see what the problem is. It's as true for blogs as it is for TV, movies, and newspapers.
The only difference is that blogs are totally democratic, the audience has complete control over which ones succeed and which ones languish in obscurity. In the old days, a TV network executive might see five pilots and pick one to produce and air. Today, its like the audience gets to watch all the pilots, and decide for themselves what they'd want to see. And occasionally they pick something the executive wouldn't have - that's where the real strength of new media lies.
Filtering has always been a problem with any media. You can't possibly see every movie or watch every TV show, so what do you do? You rely on family and friends (word of mouth) and professional reviewers to direct you towards what you should pay attention to. Finding quality blogs isn't much different, in the end, except that its easier to get the aggregate opinions of the whole internet.
Finding that one nugget of information you're looking for can still be a challenge, but I'd contend it's easier today than its ever been, and getting easier.
That's funny... because it seems to me that in the last 20 years education has only gotten worse and worse.
What's funnier is that this claim has been made since Aristotle, and there's as little evidence now as there was then that there's anything factual about that statement.
Given the sheer number of adults in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's that entirely lack basic reasoning or critical thinking skills, I have a tough time believing that schools were magically better back then, or that today's generation is any worse. Sure, the education system has its problems, and doesn't work for every student. But that's always been true, and isn't likely to change.
What has changed are the skills taught and the skills needed to get through life. The current generation is the most knowledgable and best educated of any generation in the history of man. Just like their parents before them, and their grandparents earlier. Our brightest students are getting exposed to higher maths years earlier than their parents were. Science is advancing at a breakneck pace and students have opportunity to learn about it. They're adept with the tools of the information age that still confuse most people over 30. Education today is the best its ever been. Tomorrow it'll be even better.
The problem is that those dead trees, pens and pencils aren't cheap in their own right. Even assuming that there are no licensing fees, the cost of printing up a textbook for each subject area and grade level easily exceeds $100, not to mention the shipping costs.
If on the other hand you can put one of these laptops in their hands, then the cost of printing the textbooks drops to zero, and distribution becomes much cheaper as well. And then imagine if we could somehow set up wifi in some of these villages and get them access to resources like Google and Wikipedia, and its easy to see what benefit these have over conventional textbooks.
Even for Americans... personally, I always hated textbooks, walking the mile to and from school with a 100+ pound backpack was never fun, and I'd usually do some triage at the end of the day to determine which books were worth lugging for homework and which I could leave and get done in homeroom. I'd have loved to have one of these things (or even better, have the books and homework accessible via the web). Using a PC doesn't neccessarily help your learning, but it still makes sense to make some of this stuff virtual.
You're right, it's a normal computer, like the one that sits on my desk. Which is basically my laptop.
Here's the thing... once something scales passed the size where it will fit in my pocket or on a belt clip, then the next logical size is that of a laptop, since at that point I have to carry it around in a backpack anyway - which means that "whipping it out" becomes quite the chore. I can't see what advantage this thing gives me over carrying a full laptop, with a bigger screen and full keyboard.
Simply, it's too big to be a cell phone, PDA, or portable media device... and too small to replace a laptop. If there's a market for this thing, I personally just don't see it.
What killed the Simpsons as a pop culture phenomenon was simply its decline in quality. It just sucks now compared to its golden age. It used to be the sharpest sattire on TV - nowadays its a pale reflection of its former glory.
Well said, and true in my experience as well. Supermarkets have cheap packaged goods, but for fresh meat/bread/veggies the mom and pop shop still rules, at least if you can find one.
And to reiterate: that's the kind of stuff you should be eating anyways.
Err, unless I'm really wrong, isn't the bubble exactly when Google appeared? They launched in 97 or 98 if I recall, though it was a year or two after before I'd heard of them. If I remember my history right, they ran for about a year before coming up with the adwords program... so Google as we know it today was there pre-2000.
From the looks of it, this is the direction they're heading. Their personalized search incorporates a bit of this, and there's persistent rumors they'll release a full fledged social bookmarking tool. I have to imagine that the data they get from that would be immensely useful in calculating pagerank.
This is one area that Yahoo certainly has a leg up on them though - with their focus on the social web, they have a lot more user data by which they can leverage network effects to find the best results. (Of course, Yahoo has a lot of other problems that keep it from really kicking ass, namely, their tendency to suck, but I really hope one of these days they'll kick that habit of sucking and give Google a run for their money).