"Yes, and ALL of those are on sites which gave their explicit OK. You are visiting a site which has explicitly included 3rd party data."
I understand. It seemed to me in your other comment as though you were referring to the end user, not the site owner.
But regardless, while the site owner has wittingly or otherwise, approved the 3rd-party content someone visiting the site does not know it is there in advance. So there is no informed consent on the part of the user. That was my point.
And this is why "opt-out" strategies cannot work effectively. First, you cannot know in advance what you want to opt out of. Second, finding where and how to opt out can be a big problem. Third, often (unless you are using additional tools than a "standard" browser) you have no way of even knowing who is tracking you, and when. (Some are obvious, like Facebook "like" buttons. Some are not.)
So the ease of blocking is mostly irrelevant to the discussion. That blocking should not be necessary in the first place, in order to prevent unwanted, intrusive tracking by third parties. That is an overt, intrusive act on the part of someone else, and does demonstrable harm to you in the form of invading your privacy.
So saying "just don't go to that site" is not good enough. Because you don't know what's on that site in advance. Therefore a strict "opt-in only " policy should be the law.
And there is still the problem of tracking those who are under 13. Again, it's not possible for either party to know in advance whether they are doing that. (For example: if company X knows that person with a cookie containing ID #12345b67cdf is under 13, so don't track them... they have to KNOW that party visited that site by looking at the cookie, before they can even NOT track them... it's a catch-22.) A strict opt-in ONLY policy would prevent this.
Thank you for confirming my own opinion. In the past, when I was looking for more work, several times I've been asked before just about anything else if I had a github account, and and under what name.
I've spent a lot of time on private projects under NDA, which obviously don't go on github. I've offered to supply redacted sections of code. Etc. But it was clear in a couple of instances that having a strong github presence was necessary before they wold even consider someone.
That practice discriminates against people who are too busy actually working and trying to make a living to spend 100 hours on somebody's open source project. Sure, it's a good thing to do. But don't punish people who don't have as much opportunity as others.
Using github as a primary, or even worse only, criterion for hiring is just not very smart. Without claiming to be one of the best and brightest myself, I can see that by doing so they are rejecting some of the best and brightest out of hand, which does both parties no good.
Sure, take github and the like as a couple of extra brownie points in the developer's favor. Everything else being equal, I'd hire someone who is involved in charitable work over the other guy... but the key phrase is "everything else being equal". I would not use it as a primary basis for hiring in a technical field.
"You can keep saying, but that doesn't make it true. It may not be a classic Ponzi scheme, but it has a lot in common with the pump-and-dump worthless stock scams, only played out on a much larger scale. You cannot deny that a very small group of people mined a very large percentage of Bitcoins very early and very easily and as all the "pumping" stories drive its value higher, these people are profiting handsomely."
The stock problem is only happening because too many investors today have forgotten (or simply never learned) the difference between price and intrinsic value. The market has been completely irrational, but that doesn't make it a scheme. It's just a bunch of people making dumb investments.
"Some clarification is necessary, for folks who dont really get how websites work."
Agree with hedwards. It seems that maybe you are the one who needs education.
This whole thing isn't about the site you visit. It's about 3rd parties tracking you when you visit those sites.
Here's how it works: you are person or company hosting website A. I am advertising company B. You create a website. On that website you include a link to an ad that is hosted on my server. Often they are buried in a mess of javascript, but in the simplest case that's what it amounts to.
When user X goes to your website (A), the browser requests the page from your server. In the content of that page, it includes links to images on my server at B. In order to display those images, your browser makes a request to server B. User X has not given prior or informed consent for this. But it happens nevertheless.
Since your browser made a request to MY server at B (even though the user only intended to visit a page on A), guess what information I can retrieve? Rather than trying to explain, just go here to the Panopticlick Project (make sure javascript is turned on, because it is for most people) and see.
And that doesn't even count the referrer, which any server can get and which tells me (at B) exactly what web page you visited, and when. So the upshot is: without your prior knowledge or consent, when you go to ANY SITE that has my ad on it, without your knowledge or prior (or informed) concent, at B I can tell where you were, and when.
That is true of EVERY site that has a Fecebook "like" button, or Reddit link, or AddThis or Google+ button, or ad from DoubleClick, and on and on and on, ad nauseum. Every one of them.
And that's WITHOUT even going into the subject of cookies! Cookies are not necessary to do that. But cookies can do more. And then there are Flash "cookies", and "local storage"...
The problem is FAR bigger than you have recognized.
Oh... and here's another thing, just to top it all off: IT IS ILLEGAL in the U.S. to track anyone who is younger than 13 years of age. But they do it all the time, for the simple reason that they CAN'T know in advance who they're tracking. They can only tell afterward, and they usually don't bother to even find out.
"This will simply not work - it's a technical solution to a social problem (the article mentions the oligopoly currently in place). It's also a technical solution implemented unilaterally by Mozilla."
Nonsense on both counts.
It is not a "social problem". It's a corporate and government abuse problem. Those are 2 very different things.
And it's not implemented only by Mozilla. Safari has had the feature for a while, and there have been plug-ins that do this available on various browsers for at least a couple of years.
Further, Firefox has had a setting to turn off 3rd Party Cookies for a long time now. It's just not turned on by default (yet), but most people with half a brain use it. The other problem is that this setting only blocks "regular" cookies. Flash cookies and other kinds of persistent cookies require other measures.
But I have been blocking 3rd-party "regular" cookies and javascript for quite a while. And I didn't realize just how effective it was until I turned off cookie and flash blocking recently (temporarily, for technical reasons), and was inundated by 3rd-party flash ads and cookie requests and javascripts.
They can go suck eggs. I'm a BIG fan of blocking. It makes my quality of internet life significantly better. Really, it is pretty clear by now that any form local storage without an explicit opt-in should just plain be illegal. This doesn't go that far but it's a step in the right direction.
This is true, but it still doesn't address the essential problem of exit nodes. Adding relays enhances Tor's usability, but not very much its security. More exit nodes do.
BUT... I have been saying for years that the only way to get a really safe and secure Internet is to invent a truly distributed DNS system. Anything else is too prone to government control and abuse.
"See, that's the problem with Internet. It can't hide its gateways and blend in with all the other traffic. A gateway shouldn't look any different than any other."
Yes, it IS a problem with Tor. It CAN'T hide the exit nodes. The most well established of them are closely watched by government.
There are only a couple of answers to that, and preferably a combination of both: lots more exit nodes, or switching them on and off randomly. Lots and lots more exit nodes that are switched on and off randomly would be best.
The whole concept of Tor relies on exit nodes not being easily monitored. Easy or not, the government has been monitoring them. So make it not worth their while by multiplying the numbers of nodes.
While it is true that the more people who use it (or more accurately, the more people who host exit-nodes) the better, as it stands the government has been singling out those who use privacy-enhancing technologies, like Tor and encryption.
Bad, BAD Government! (Seriously, it IS bad. It's an attack on the whole "right to communicate privately" concept.)
Having said all that, the more people who use these technologies the better. I particularly recommend Tor and OneSwarm.
"Air Port - I didn't see 5.6, but 6.+ let's me do almost everything I need."
You should try 5.6. Download it, rename it to 5.6 (so it doesn't interfere with your current install) and put it in Applications. You'll be surprised. There are lots of things in 6.x that are just plain missing.
I realize that many people may not have noticed the negative changes very much, but I studied Industrial Psychology and Human Engineering at college, and I can tell you that some of the changes they made were just plain dumb. They actually make the OS less efficient and less usable.
I'm all for bringing good, desktop-relevant software to the desktop. But trying to make the desktop behave like a smartphone is, well, not smart.
I don't know. The folks who were caught putting melamine in pet food (and some people food, too) were executed. As have been LOTS of other people. Punishments in China tend to be rather arbitrary, and seem to change on an almost daily basis.
No, I was talking about the iOS-ification of their desktop OS, which was worse than a lot of people seemed to think. Plus the dumbing down of Final Cut Pro, the dumbing down of some of their utilities (Airport Utility 6.x comes to mind... it leaves out half the useful features of 5.6) and so on.
"Improvements" to their OS are welcome. Disappearing scrollbars on the desktop are not. They made a bunch of NEGATIVE (from a human-computer interface standpoint) changes to the OS in Lion.
Etc.
Not nearly as bad as Microsoft, but it was, generally speaking, the same kind of thing.
"When CDs were introduced, I had a 40MB hard drive and the 650MB hard disk was enough for every conceivable backup"
When CDs were first "introduced", a 10MB hard drive was in the $1000 range. Or did you mean user writeable CDs? I'm not trying to troll here, I just did not know which you meant. You implied the former but the latter makes more sense.
"...you want as big a moment arm as possible to reduce the force required to adjust the pitch of the aircraft."
This.
As well as improve stability, I would think. While main-rotor adjustments might be sufficient to control yaw, having that "moment" probably smooths out that control by adding some inertia.
"More or less everything radiates in a radial pattern (has spherical wavefron) and is subject to the inverse-square law. Even lasers have some divergence. Better focus (by e.g. reflectors) would give you lower angle of divergence and therefore higher initial power density, but that is all."
No, not accurate. Look it up. While sources DO tend to radiate radially, proper focus can bring it under control and beat the inverse-square law. Attenuation and scattering are NOT the same as inverse square.
"Definitely not. X-rays have significantly higher frequency and therefore shorter wavelength (380-740 nm for visible light and 0.01 - 10 nm for x-rays)."
Yes, you caught me on that one. I was looking at frequency, not wavelength. I don't mind admitting when I'm wrong. But I'm not wrong about inverse-square. I say again, look it up. Even just Wikipedia. It only applies to something that is radiating in all directions. That is how the mathematical formula is derived in the first place. Quote Wikipedia [emphasis added]:
"The density of flux lines is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source because the surface area of a sphere increases with the square of the radius. Thus the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source."
When the radiation is not being emitted in a radial pattern, it does not follow that formula. Therefore it does NOT apply to a beam focused by a reflector. And scattering is a completely different matter.
"True, customers may not want DRM, but businesses don't want to lose money to pirates and the used games market."
(1) They don't lose money due to downloading. They lose money because of DRM. Just about every independent study for the last 13 years has said the same thing.
Real pirates are not the same as downloaders, and real pirates aren't going to be phased much by DRM anyway. It's like putting a combination lock on the door of a grocery store. Your real customers are going to be pissed off and avoid you, and it doesn't stop real burglars anyway.
(2) They can't stop the used market anyway, because of the First-sale Doctrine. If you don't have a prior agreement when you plunk down your money, it's yours and you can sell it. Period. These attempts to get around that are exactly what are pissing people off! So the companies can "not want" to put up with it, but people have had to live with that legal principle for near on 200 years, and I don't think consumers are going to back down.
Let's get this real straight: as much as they want you to believe they are, the vendors aren't doing this in order to try to "ensure a fair market". They're trying to CONTROL customers and the market. Those are very far from the same things.
"Doubtful IMHO. Check the speed with which that market is declining. Yes, they still own it, but it's less than 50% of the consumer device market at this point, and in the US a minimum of 10% of desktops are macs. People are no longer tied to MS for any of their needs, and MS is starting to feel that pinch. Witness their pricing schemes of late that have increased costs to cover their revenue projections. MS is in a shrinking market, and will soon be only a large player, if they are not already."
I would say yes and no. Yes, more people are buying tablets. And the reason is simple: MOST people don't need anything more than a tablet at home. That is, at least some of the newer ones. You can browse the Internet, you can edit documents, spreadsheets (at least to some extent), etc.
Most business users only need a desktop computer at the office.
The problem, though, is that they are making a mistake by focusing too much on the "average consumer" (and not even very well) rather than the people who really matter: the business users and developers.
Alienate your business users, and they WILL migrate to something else. They've been able to for at least a few years now. Alienate your developers and watch your company go straight to Hell, because an OS is only as good as what what runs on it.
They're not completely alone in that space. Last year Apple came very seriously close to alienating all their "serious" users and developers, by focusing too much on the "popular" market. I am hoping they learned that lesson.
"So I take it, though it appears nowhere in your comment, that since they have cancelled the problematic features you rant about, you'll now acknowledge: "They listen to their customers. And that's A Good Thing."
I acknowledge no such thing. It's one thing to listen to your customers. It's quite another to duck and cover when they're trying to bash your head in.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, and ALL of those are on sites which gave their explicit OK. You are visiting a site which has explicitly included 3rd party data."
I understand. It seemed to me in your other comment as though you were referring to the end user, not the site owner.
But regardless, while the site owner has wittingly or otherwise, approved the 3rd-party content someone visiting the site does not know it is there in advance. So there is no informed consent on the part of the user. That was my point.
And this is why "opt-out" strategies cannot work effectively. First, you cannot know in advance what you want to opt out of. Second, finding where and how to opt out can be a big problem. Third, often (unless you are using additional tools than a "standard" browser) you have no way of even knowing who is tracking you, and when. (Some are obvious, like Facebook "like" buttons. Some are not.)
So the ease of blocking is mostly irrelevant to the discussion. That blocking should not be necessary in the first place, in order to prevent unwanted, intrusive tracking by third parties. That is an overt, intrusive act on the part of someone else, and does demonstrable harm to you in the form of invading your privacy.
So saying "just don't go to that site" is not good enough. Because you don't know what's on that site in advance. Therefore a strict "opt-in only " policy should be the law.
And there is still the problem of tracking those who are under 13. Again, it's not possible for either party to know in advance whether they are doing that. (For example: if company X knows that person with a cookie containing ID #12345b67cdf is under 13, so don't track them... they have to KNOW that party visited that site by looking at the cookie, before they can even NOT track them... it's a catch-22.) A strict opt-in ONLY policy would prevent this.
"The applicant probably have posted on such forums using a handle or assumed name. Many people don't use their real name"
This is a very good point.
"Which is a bit narrow minded..."
Thank you for confirming my own opinion. In the past, when I was looking for more work, several times I've been asked before just about anything else if I had a github account, and and under what name.
I've spent a lot of time on private projects under NDA, which obviously don't go on github. I've offered to supply redacted sections of code. Etc. But it was clear in a couple of instances that having a strong github presence was necessary before they wold even consider someone.
That practice discriminates against people who are too busy actually working and trying to make a living to spend 100 hours on somebody's open source project. Sure, it's a good thing to do. But don't punish people who don't have as much opportunity as others.
Using github as a primary, or even worse only, criterion for hiring is just not very smart. Without claiming to be one of the best and brightest myself, I can see that by doing so they are rejecting some of the best and brightest out of hand, which does both parties no good.
Sure, take github and the like as a couple of extra brownie points in the developer's favor. Everything else being equal, I'd hire someone who is involved in charitable work over the other guy... but the key phrase is "everything else being equal". I would not use it as a primary basis for hiring in a technical field.
"You can keep saying, but that doesn't make it true. It may not be a classic Ponzi scheme, but it has a lot in common with the pump-and-dump worthless stock scams, only played out on a much larger scale. You cannot deny that a very small group of people mined a very large percentage of Bitcoins very early and very easily and as all the "pumping" stories drive its value higher, these people are profiting handsomely."
The stock problem is only happening because too many investors today have forgotten (or simply never learned) the difference between price and intrinsic value. The market has been completely irrational, but that doesn't make it a scheme. It's just a bunch of people making dumb investments.
"Regulations that are keeping a Ponzi scheme out of the US marketplace."
Repeat: this is complete nonsense. If you understood how Bitcoin works you would know that it could not be a Ponzi scheme.
"Even on Slashdot, Bitcoin is widely considered unstable and generally considered to be a Ponzi scheme."
Only by people who don't understand how it works.
"Some clarification is necessary, for folks who dont really get how websites work."
Agree with hedwards. It seems that maybe you are the one who needs education.
This whole thing isn't about the site you visit. It's about 3rd parties tracking you when you visit those sites.
Here's how it works: you are person or company hosting website A. I am advertising company B. You create a website. On that website you include a link to an ad that is hosted on my server. Often they are buried in a mess of javascript, but in the simplest case that's what it amounts to.
When user X goes to your website (A), the browser requests the page from your server. In the content of that page, it includes links to images on my server at B. In order to display those images, your browser makes a request to server B. User X has not given prior or informed consent for this. But it happens nevertheless.
Since your browser made a request to MY server at B (even though the user only intended to visit a page on A), guess what information I can retrieve? Rather than trying to explain, just go here to the Panopticlick Project (make sure javascript is turned on, because it is for most people) and see.
And that doesn't even count the referrer, which any server can get and which tells me (at B) exactly what web page you visited, and when. So the upshot is: without your prior knowledge or consent, when you go to ANY SITE that has my ad on it, without your knowledge or prior (or informed) concent, at B I can tell where you were, and when.
That is true of EVERY site that has a Fecebook "like" button, or Reddit link, or AddThis or Google+ button, or ad from DoubleClick, and on and on and on, ad nauseum. Every one of them.
And that's WITHOUT even going into the subject of cookies! Cookies are not necessary to do that. But cookies can do more. And then there are Flash "cookies", and "local storage"...
The problem is FAR bigger than you have recognized.
Oh... and here's another thing, just to top it all off: IT IS ILLEGAL in the U.S. to track anyone who is younger than 13 years of age. But they do it all the time, for the simple reason that they CAN'T know in advance who they're tracking. They can only tell afterward, and they usually don't bother to even find out.
Hahahaha! Best one I've seen all week!
"This will simply not work - it's a technical solution to a social problem (the article mentions the oligopoly currently in place). It's also a technical solution implemented unilaterally by Mozilla."
Nonsense on both counts.
It is not a "social problem". It's a corporate and government abuse problem. Those are 2 very different things.
And it's not implemented only by Mozilla. Safari has had the feature for a while, and there have been plug-ins that do this available on various browsers for at least a couple of years.
Further, Firefox has had a setting to turn off 3rd Party Cookies for a long time now. It's just not turned on by default (yet), but most people with half a brain use it. The other problem is that this setting only blocks "regular" cookies. Flash cookies and other kinds of persistent cookies require other measures.
But I have been blocking 3rd-party "regular" cookies and javascript for quite a while. And I didn't realize just how effective it was until I turned off cookie and flash blocking recently (temporarily, for technical reasons), and was inundated by 3rd-party flash ads and cookie requests and javascripts.
They can go suck eggs. I'm a BIG fan of blocking. It makes my quality of internet life significantly better. Really, it is pretty clear by now that any form local storage without an explicit opt-in should just plain be illegal. This doesn't go that far but it's a step in the right direction.
This is true, but it still doesn't address the essential problem of exit nodes. Adding relays enhances Tor's usability, but not very much its security. More exit nodes do.
BUT... I have been saying for years that the only way to get a really safe and secure Internet is to invent a truly distributed DNS system. Anything else is too prone to government control and abuse.
"See, that's the problem with Internet. It can't hide its gateways and blend in with all the other traffic. A gateway shouldn't look any different than any other."
Yes, it IS a problem with Tor. It CAN'T hide the exit nodes. The most well established of them are closely watched by government.
There are only a couple of answers to that, and preferably a combination of both: lots more exit nodes, or switching them on and off randomly. Lots and lots more exit nodes that are switched on and off randomly would be best.
The whole concept of Tor relies on exit nodes not being easily monitored. Easy or not, the government has been monitoring them. So make it not worth their while by multiplying the numbers of nodes.
"It's called Tor, and the more people who use it, the safer it becomes."
There's a potential problem with that.
While it is true that the more people who use it (or more accurately, the more people who host exit-nodes) the better, as it stands the government has been singling out those who use privacy-enhancing technologies, like Tor and encryption.
Bad, BAD Government! (Seriously, it IS bad. It's an attack on the whole "right to communicate privately" concept.)
Having said all that, the more people who use these technologies the better. I particularly recommend Tor and OneSwarm.
"Air Port - I didn't see 5.6, but 6.+ let's me do almost everything I need."
You should try 5.6. Download it, rename it to 5.6 (so it doesn't interfere with your current install) and put it in Applications. You'll be surprised. There are lots of things in 6.x that are just plain missing.
I realize that many people may not have noticed the negative changes very much, but I studied Industrial Psychology and Human Engineering at college, and I can tell you that some of the changes they made were just plain dumb. They actually make the OS less efficient and less usable.
I'm all for bringing good, desktop-relevant software to the desktop. But trying to make the desktop behave like a smartphone is, well, not smart.
I don't know. The folks who were caught putting melamine in pet food (and some people food, too) were executed. As have been LOTS of other people. Punishments in China tend to be rather arbitrary, and seem to change on an almost daily basis.
"Seriously, China? WTF. Going back to medieval values here? Executing people for pollution?"
What do you mean, "back to"??? They never left.
One of the reasons I do not care to do business with China.
"... unless you're talking about the Mac Pro."
No, I was talking about the iOS-ification of their desktop OS, which was worse than a lot of people seemed to think. Plus the dumbing down of Final Cut Pro, the dumbing down of some of their utilities (Airport Utility 6.x comes to mind... it leaves out half the useful features of 5.6) and so on.
"Improvements" to their OS are welcome. Disappearing scrollbars on the desktop are not. They made a bunch of NEGATIVE (from a human-computer interface standpoint) changes to the OS in Lion.
Etc.
Not nearly as bad as Microsoft, but it was, generally speaking, the same kind of thing.
"When CDs were introduced, I had a 40MB hard drive and the 650MB hard disk was enough for every conceivable backup"
When CDs were first "introduced", a 10MB hard drive was in the $1000 range. Or did you mean user writeable CDs? I'm not trying to troll here, I just did not know which you meant. You implied the former but the latter makes more sense.
"...you want as big a moment arm as possible to reduce the force required to adjust the pitch of the aircraft."
This.
As well as improve stability, I would think. While main-rotor adjustments might be sufficient to control yaw, having that "moment" probably smooths out that control by adding some inertia.
"Um, no. X-rays are a much SHORTER wavelength than visible light and therefore attenuate MORE than light."
Yes, I know. I was thinking that the wavelength is longer, when actually it is shorter. My mistake. But I'm not mistaken about the inverse-square law.
"More or less everything radiates in a radial pattern (has spherical wavefron) and is subject to the inverse-square law. Even lasers have some divergence. Better focus (by e.g. reflectors) would give you lower angle of divergence and therefore higher initial power density, but that is all."
No, not accurate. Look it up. While sources DO tend to radiate radially, proper focus can bring it under control and beat the inverse-square law. Attenuation and scattering are NOT the same as inverse square.
"Definitely not. X-rays have significantly higher frequency and therefore shorter wavelength (380-740 nm for visible light and 0.01 - 10 nm for x-rays)."
Yes, you caught me on that one. I was looking at frequency, not wavelength. I don't mind admitting when I'm wrong. But I'm not wrong about inverse-square. I say again, look it up. Even just Wikipedia. It only applies to something that is radiating in all directions. That is how the mathematical formula is derived in the first place. Quote Wikipedia [emphasis added]:
"The density of flux lines is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source because the surface area of a sphere increases with the square of the radius. Thus the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source."
When the radiation is not being emitted in a radial pattern, it does not follow that formula. Therefore it does NOT apply to a beam focused by a reflector. And scattering is a completely different matter.
"True, customers may not want DRM, but businesses don't want to lose money to pirates and the used games market."
(1) They don't lose money due to downloading. They lose money because of DRM. Just about every independent study for the last 13 years has said the same thing.
Real pirates are not the same as downloaders, and real pirates aren't going to be phased much by DRM anyway. It's like putting a combination lock on the door of a grocery store. Your real customers are going to be pissed off and avoid you, and it doesn't stop real burglars anyway.
(2) They can't stop the used market anyway, because of the First-sale Doctrine. If you don't have a prior agreement when you plunk down your money, it's yours and you can sell it. Period. These attempts to get around that are exactly what are pissing people off! So the companies can "not want" to put up with it, but people have had to live with that legal principle for near on 200 years, and I don't think consumers are going to back down.
Let's get this real straight: as much as they want you to believe they are, the vendors aren't doing this in order to try to "ensure a fair market". They're trying to CONTROL customers and the market. Those are very far from the same things.
Hahaha. I would mod you up 5 if I could.
"Doubtful IMHO. Check the speed with which that market is declining. Yes, they still own it, but it's less than 50% of the consumer device market at this point, and in the US a minimum of 10% of desktops are macs. People are no longer tied to MS for any of their needs, and MS is starting to feel that pinch. Witness their pricing schemes of late that have increased costs to cover their revenue projections. MS is in a shrinking market, and will soon be only a large player, if they are not already."
I would say yes and no. Yes, more people are buying tablets. And the reason is simple: MOST people don't need anything more than a tablet at home. That is, at least some of the newer ones. You can browse the Internet, you can edit documents, spreadsheets (at least to some extent), etc.
Most business users only need a desktop computer at the office.
The problem, though, is that they are making a mistake by focusing too much on the "average consumer" (and not even very well) rather than the people who really matter: the business users and developers.
Alienate your business users, and they WILL migrate to something else. They've been able to for at least a few years now. Alienate your developers and watch your company go straight to Hell, because an OS is only as good as what what runs on it.
They're not completely alone in that space. Last year Apple came very seriously close to alienating all their "serious" users and developers, by focusing too much on the "popular" market. I am hoping they learned that lesson.
"So I take it, though it appears nowhere in your comment, that since they have cancelled the problematic features you rant about, you'll now acknowledge: "They listen to their customers. And that's A Good Thing."
I acknowledge no such thing. It's one thing to listen to your customers. It's quite another to duck and cover when they're trying to bash your head in.
I assert that this is the latter.