I think it's more about the games people want to play. I certainly wouldn't buy a mac to game on. But if you already have one and it runs the games you want to play (factorio, for example), then why not just use it?
> The buyer's agent fee is basically subsidizing the hard work of buyer's agents (which is taking their clients to multiple properties, discussions about what they want, using time browsing MLS to find houses that meet criteria and arranging tours of them)
Since Zillow and Redfin have existed for quite some time how, that service seems a lot less valuable. I'm sure it can be worth it in the right circumstances, though.
> At this point I don't agree that windows is inferior. It is just different. And quite frankly from a developer and productivity perspective it's actually a lot better.
I think it depends a lot of what you're developing.
For a lot of open source stuff, even OSX is a 2nd class citizen, and windows isn't even considered. Of course, you can do everything in a VM, but that can have its own problems.
If you live out of Visual Studio, though, I'm sure the experience is nice.
> On the other hand, some kinds of work may not really make it to market inside the 10 years.
My understanding is that copyright starts when the work is first fixed to a medium. Which means that intermediate versions shouldn't start the clock[1]. But I'm not a lawyer, so I could be totally wrong.
> I'm sure we can agree that we can definitely do better than what we have now, though.
100% concur.
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1. As opposed to the situation with medication and patents, where the patents are ticking down while trials are in operation.
> It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more ... Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price
IMO, it's important to have a short default period. The vast majority of content - posts, comments, videos, tweets, open source software, etc. will never be registered. It's a huge benefit to get that into the public domain as fast as possible while still providing a reasonable period of exclusivity to creators.
If you're really wedded to the 30 year thing, I think an initial 10 years, and 20 years for the first registered period is a better balance.
> Once the free period expires, start at $1, then double each year.
That's going to create a lot of paperwork for not much value. Much better to have 10 year extensions. Your pricing scheme is functionally equivalent to starting at $2000 for 10 years, and increasing the cost by 1000x for each additional 10 years.
> All copyright is way too long but authors go completely off-piste at anyone who suggests that it should be something more reasonable (I kinda like 21 years myself).
> Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation.
My favorite scheme is that all copyright last for 10 years by default. You can register it for $100 for another 10 years. And every 10 years after that, the cost goes up by 100x. That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly.
Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked a bit, but I think the idea is fundamentally sound.
> Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction.
That's fair.
I know that, after Oracle re-closed OpenSolaris, they can't (legally) incorporate the innovations happening in Illumos into Solaris proper, so the 2 siblings will continue to drift apart.
And it sounds like there was quite a lot of bad blood that proceeded the founding of Illumos (unsurprising when Oracle is involved), so I'm not super surprised that users would talk that way.
> HP/UX and Solaris are barely on life support and basically moribund. I seem to recall a recent announcement that HP/UX goes end-of-support in 2025. As far as Solaris...Oracle is gonna Oracle. Illumios, et. al., won't save it.
I figured as much for HP/UX. The failure of Itanium was the death knell there.
I mostly lump Solaris together with Illumos/SmartOS. Is there a good reason not to (unless when talking about Oracle specifically)?
> The assertion that iPads are "taking over" PoS seems to be based on an inappropriately small sample.
That's fair. I think I notice iPad PoS devices when ever I run into them, whereas the other devices are less remarkable to me.
But my experience really mirrors what you say - gas stations and grocery stores aren't running iPads. It's usually restaurants and small vendors where I see them.
> I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others?
All of the workstation vendors: IBM, HP, Dec/Compaq/HP, SGI, Sun. I don't think any of these are particularly popular, but AIX (IBM) and Solaris (Sun) are probably more popular than the others. I wouldn't be surprised if IRIX (SGI) is totally dead.
And funnily enough, Microsoft. Although they sold Xenix to Sco. I think it's in a lot of POS devices (so probably dying to iPad installs).
Edit: Oops - just realized that "Dec/Compaq/HP" probably doesn't belong in the list. I guess technically there was Tru64 Unix, but everyone I've ever heard of who ran Alpha boxes used VMS.
> Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's super weird to me. Using a smart phone without installing any apps works great. The integrated maps app is such a great feature, I'd get a smart phone just for that alone.
Along with what everyone else has said about Teslas being good electric cars with a high profit margin, Tesla (the company) continues to enjoy a high growth rate in terms of units delivered per year.
Also, Tesla seems to have mostly successfully shrugged off the dealer model and avoided pension based compensation.
If they can maintain a reasonable level of satisfaction when offering service, they get to scoop up the 20% margins the dealerships take, as well as avoid the sentiment hit every other dealer has to take by forcing people to buy new cars through that truly awful process.
> "limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires" has a different word. That's not freedom, that's called debauchery and has absolutely nothing to do with "liberalism" in the political science meaning of the term.
Could you explain more?
From what I can tell, there is no inherent separation between freedom and debauchery aside from someone's judgement about whether particular choices where good for the person who made them.
> You'd buy a new car because the UI feels a bit dated?
There's a substantial group of people who lease cars, and just get a new car after the lease is up. For that group of people, that's probably a substantial reason along with the exterior styling.
Practically speaking, you're probably not going to get 1000s of years out of any storage method. There's just too much stuff that breaks down.
Heck - a lot of historic dams are in the low hundreds of years old and are experiencing serious problems.
IMO, the shorter lifespan of batteries isn't that big of a downside as long as the "bad" batteries can be mined for raw materials eventually.