Microsoft didn't do Surface the way they did because they thought it was best. It was the only choice they had, given their ongoing business strategy.
The problem with Microsoft's strategy is that it counts on sitting back and letting innovation happen elsewhere. Then seeing what works for their competitors, cloning it, and using their monopoly desktop OS and office suite to force their clone to 'succeed'. That strategey worked with local networks. Cloning Novell's networking and tying it to Windows killed Novell and made Microsoft the leader in file servers. Bundling exchange into Windows killed off all the other desktop email competitors. It worked with the internet (sort of). They were able to bundle, coerce their way from behind to make IE the clear 'winner'. If the Justice Department (and the EU) hadn't stepped in, that might still be the case. IIS is only there because everybody already had Windows servers in place.
But mp3 players were a different story, since there was no real advantage conferred by the Windows and Office monopolies. They were way to late to market and had no thumb to put on the scales to compensate.
That seems to be the case with phones and tablets, though they still stand a chance of using Office to skew the tablet market. But the quick and dirty desktop Office made RT unnecessarily complex as an iPad competitor and too expensive as Nexus 7 / Kindle Fire competitor - especially without all the 3rd party apps those other platforms have. So they're trying to use Windows 8 as a thumb on the scale to generate those 3rd party apps - fucking up traditional Windows in the process. Sure all new PC's will come with Windows 8 - problem is nobody's buying new PC's, partially because they don't need them, partially because they don't like Windows 8 (or at least what they've heard about it), and partially because there are other shiny toys grabbing all the attention.
So Microsoft has 'solved' the phone/tablet problem by introducing the fragmentation problem from hell. Sure there are lots of Gingerbread Android phones out there, but most Android apps can still run on them. Compare that to XP, Vista and Windows 7. Can they run Metro apps? No. So who's gonna write them? Maybe there will be some, but the vast majority of Windows apps are Win32 desktop apps, and those aren't going to go away - or be rewritten for the most part. But with all the talk about 'Metro being the future', who's gonna invest heavily in their existing win32 base either. I see this accelerating the move to web-based apps on the desktop without affecting the mobile market much at all.
But breaking up the company won't help now. They're already way too late with phones and tablets, and a new independent mobile unit would be even later.
True enough, except that through FUD and phony 'open formats', Microsoft managed to keep most of its users on Office through the 2007 paradigm change - so the Office retraining costs ended up being incurred for the switch between MSO versions, and will be required again to switch to Libre. Maybe Valencia was smart enough to stick with MSO 2003 through their switch. If so, good for them.
If this is true, the solution is to create demand for a fully unlocked Android phone with appropriate specs to run Ubuntu. The manufacturer can sell in bulk to run of the mill Android customers, and possibly make a killing as the 'future proof' alternative that can be easily upgraded once the manufacturer stops supporting it.
Samsung won't do it. Probably not Motorola or HTC either. But with all the talk about Samsung 'owning' Android and no room for anybody else, there's a wide opening for a competent hardware company to succeed by taking up the banner of openness. Hell, maybe HP or Dell should step up - they both want to be mobile players, but can't succeed at Samsung's game. Shuttleworth should just donate an appropriate design to a willing manufacturer and call it a day.
Okay. First of all, there's no (official) 'Christian' angle in 12-step programs. The higher power is nothing more than a technique for letting go of trying to control things yourself. For lots of people, the 'higher power' is the group (no God required). And the purpose of it all is to give you enough breathing room to actually take a hard look at your behavior and learn that it (literally) won't kill you (or anybody else) to approach life honestly. The rest of it is all trappings to keep you occupied until that realization truly takes hold. Sure, there are plenty of people who go to AA because someone else 'makes them'. And it doesn't work for those people. There are also plenty of people for whom the program becomes a way of life (with good and bad aspects - not least is the desire of those who were genuinely helped to help others deal with their problem). And some people grow away from the day-to-day aspects and carry on with their lives, applying the lessons they learned in AA.
So why not shut the fuck up when you're ignorant about something instead of getting all superior and condescending.
It's douchebaggy when you pretend intellectual property that was developed in California comes from an Irish company for tax purposes and is subject to no tax. The law may say it's okay for an Irish company to pay no US taxes, but that doesn't mean Apple is really an Irish company. Yes they are dodging legitimately owed taxes through corporate structures that are pure fiction. Why anybody would say that's 'perfectly okay' because its 'perfectly legal' is beyond me. Unless you have a political objection to companies paying taxes at all...
That said, and even though I'm rooted (hey, is that why I haven't gotten any updates - I'm still on the stock ROM), I don't believe I've been hit by this exploit. Has anyone?
When my company decided to outsource, they fired pretty much all the local developers except for one 'business analyst' who knows the code and how it works. That wasn't me, but they also kept me on as a 'consultant' to the outsourcers so something still gets done and the whole project can be viewed as something other than a total failure. The Indian devs were not great, but I figured that at least they'd be captive. Prior to outsourcing the company had taken to hiring (cheap) young programmers, and (surprise!) had a retention problem. But Indian programmers are 'happy just to have a job', right? Wrong - if anything, they're more mobile than their American counterparts, because the big outsourcing firms want it that way. They're constantly moving people off of our project, and bringing in new people to learn it all on our dime.
So the one expected productivity benefit is not there - but it's even worse. Since these guys don't hang around, there is no next generation coming up with the in-depth knowledge of these products to become the 'business analysts' and senior devs to replace us. So when I and the other guy who are still sustaining the whole contraption retire (and we're both older than 55), the whole thing sinks. Prior to outsourcing, there were other dev's with seniority that could've stepped in to take our places.
In today's world of perverse incentives, though, this isn't a 'problem'. The company is owned by a private equity firm that expects to dump it long before that final crash. But if I were a private equity firm looking to buy a piece of crap like this, I'd certainly ask what plans exist to produce the next generation of senior techs to keep the place going. As it is, it's musical chairs, at some point a buyer will get stuck with no chairs left.
Yeah, but why Apple? Then don't make any semiconductors. Isn't payment of patent royalties the responsibility of the manufacturer of the LED's? If not, how can anybody build anything out of parts sourced from other companies? You'd have no way of knowing what patents you were responsible for clearing rights to.
Yeah, but the hideous thing about patents is that, even with the published specs, it's illegal to implement them without paying up. So only the patent holder or a direct licensee gets to write a driver for the patented shit. Any roylaties for a patent-encumbered piece of hardware should be included in the price of the hardware - end of story. And that includes your PC - if you paid for an OEM Windows license that covers various patents, that should cover any implementation of those patents on the device. You already paid for it.
Right. The process for making a cDNA copy of a particular sequence is probably patentable. But I'm betting Myriad didn't invent that process. Whoever did should be able to patent it, and Myriad should have to pay them royalties for applying the process to the BRCA gene. And maybe something as general as cDNA construction should be a FRAND-type patent, so that it's owner can't 'own' all DNA by owning the standard testing methodology. Just like Motorola isn't allowed to own the cellphone industry by virtue of having come up with the standard communications protocol used by cellphones.
You'd think, but it's not true. Linux Mint 14 was able to install, but the brand new 64-bit PCLinuxOS got confused about the partition numbering and wiped out Mint instead of using the empty partition I set up for it. When I shrank my windows partition, I left the 'HP Recovery' partition at the end, which stayed in GPT slot 4, even though I added new partitions between 3 and 4. PCLOS's installer got way confused about that.
The PCLOS kernel was fine, and booted from a live CD, it was able to see things correctly, but the installer's partitioning tool assigned the partition numbers to the wrong devices and things went downhill from there. And the guys at the PCLOS forum basically said "Wipe your disk and format it MBR style" - regardless of the fact that I'd have to lose my OEM Windows 7 to do that.
There are more problems with UEFI than 'secure' boot. I bought an HP box with Windows 7 and secure boot disabled. The thing wouldn't boot Windows after I installed the drive from my old PC as a secondary SATA drive (believe me, I tried every available BIOS setting). The Windows EFI bootloader insisted on trying to boot from the secondary (MBR-formatted) drive if it was there - even though a live-booted linux CD was fine with it. But if I left a gap in the SATA drive numbers, Windows would boot (and mount the SATA3 dirve as drive F:), whereas my live linux CD didn't even see it as SATA3 (apparently the BIOS didn't report it there with the gap).
Essentially, I was only able to 'use' this drive after I completely wiped it and replaced its MBR partitioning scheme with a GPT scheme. But my point is UEFI has 3 problems as I see it:
1) Secure boot locking out non-signed stuff (why can't it just warn you when you try to boot non-signed stuff and let you continue). 2) Weird implementations producing crazy, inexplicable behaviors. Including inconsistent ability to boot from external media, and some systems actually getting bricked by booting a Ubuntu CD. 3) Forcing use of GPT partitioning, which many Linux distros don't handle yet, and which even Windows doesn't need till you go over 2 TB drives.
Most of this is the result of an awkward transition to a possibly better partitioning and booting scheme, but forcing it on everyone - combined with poor implementations of much more complex firmware. Maybe it only seems intended to make dual booting hell. In any case, it succeeds beautifully.
The GUI toolkits are not a problem in and of themselves. Think about Windows - you can write code in VB, C, C++ (MFC), C++ (somebody else's C++ library), C#, Java, etc. It all works on top of the basic Windows desktop services (in C), which behave the same regardless of how the app was written.
The same could've been done with GNOME and KDE if they could agree on a common set of desktop services and API's to access them. But both of these are much more than GUI toolkits. Essentially, they are the OS that the user interacts with. So if you have GNOME and KDE apps both on the same machine, you have 2 sets of file management windows, etc. They've done a pretty good job of making them similar enough that it's not too hard for a user to deal with - it used to be much worse. The fact that KDE has written its desktop services in C++ makes them kind of hard to share with other languages - it's much easier to throw a C++ wrapper around C than the reverse...
It's pretty nasty when a company 'giving away razors to sell blades' starts trying to make money off of the razors too. The Kindle was originally Amazon's way to jump-start their ebook and streaming services. Now they want to be a tablet player too. Greedy.
Simple config Is a mixture of usability and perception. A simplified configuration presents fewer choices and is therefore easier to understand. It also looks faster and more lightweight, because people equate visual simplicity with efficiency. This is incorrect, of course, but I'm not above exploiting this fallacy to give people what they want. For this aspect, we're providing an alternate set of System Settings metadata to give it a cut down tree. The full set remains available, if needed.
This could be his biggest contribution, and - if it's done well - mainline KDE should consider adopting it as an option. For all of KDE's configurability, the thing that would be nicest to configure is the configurability itself. Something like 'lock desktop configuration', where once you have the system set up the way you want it, you never see all those options again - unless you ask to.
What's with robocalls that hang up on you if you answer and don't leave a voicemail message if you don't answer. I get at least one of these per day. What can they possibly be trying to determine from that - whether I'm home?
We've been in a bubble economy-wide since the crash of 2007. It's (more or less) intentional, fueled by artificially low interest rates and the Fed pouring money into the banking system. That money has no place to go, so it goes into whatever's trendy at the moment - whether there's real value there or not.
Everyone (again - more or less) agrees that the economy needed the stimulus, but a better approach would have been to pump the money into the economy via smartly targeted (or even non so smartly targeted) direct government spending. Funded, if possible, by new revenue streams themselves defined to have little effect on employment and other economic activity. But we don't have either a functioning market economy or a functioning democracy capable of managing the economy through the political system. So we go from bubble to bubble - or crash to crash, depending on how you view it.
Is "do one thing, and do it well" really still the Unix philosophy - for GUI stuff as well? This works great for command-line stuff, where you incorporate commands into pipes and scripts. But user expectations for GUI apps are more like "anticipate my needs and surprise me by being able to do obscure function x that I didn't even know I needed until now". Some would call that bloat, but whatever. My point is that GUI stuff is different than command line stuff, if only because you don't paste multiple GUI apps together to accomplish more complex stuff. The app's got to do it, or it doesn't get done.
And presumably, you buy from Canada because they do have government regulations to guarantee the safety fo the drugs you buy there. So you like some regulations and not others. Better focusing your efforts on keeping regulations meaningful and in the best interests of the American people rather than just trying to hobble the government in the name of liberty. Because, otherwise, liberty American style amounts to freedom of corporations to rip you off. And if those corporations want the government to spend a lot on what they produce, the spending will go on anyway.
The truth is that MS0ffice is only as cheap as it is because of its widespread adoption. Where Gates was brilliant was in getting people hooked on his software due to low price. Once he had the $100 per PC cash cow locked in, he could afford to sell Office for reasonably low prices, simultaneously widening his base and ultimately making tons of money even at the reaonable prices.
But the existance of viable free alternatives, along with the crackdown on pirated copies and a new rental paradigm, blows that proposition to hell. Once Google Docs or LibreOffice takes a large chunk out of MSOffice sales, their pricing model will have to move toward Mathematica's. Not right away, and it'll never be that pricey - the market for office suites will always be much larger than Mathematica's market, and MSOffice will probably always own a large chunk of it. But they can't give it away and remain Microsoft - it's where the lion's share of their income comes from. They may try to fund it with advertising, like Google does, but they're not gonna have billions of users paying $100 a year for long - that's for sure.
The real question is can Native Client become a viable portable GUI toolkit to rival HTML5 for stuff that can't be done easily (or well) with HTML5. If so, then eventually the Chromebook model will fly. Currently, Chrombooks' being limited to HTML isn't good enough for most people's needs. But if and when all the software most people need can be delivered efficiently over 'the web' (with NC expanding what that means), then the migration may well begin.
Certainly if the QuickOffice NC comes up to LibreOffice standards, MSOffice is in for trouble. Today, Google Docs vs. full blown Office isn't a real comparison.
Of course, it's all a big if - multiple ifs in fact. Java was supposed to do all this 10 years ago. But things are very different today from where they were 10 years ago, so you can't assume history will repeat itself. Is Native Client any good? Is it open enough that it can be implemented in browsers other than Chrome (or would that inevitably lead to the kind of fragmentation that killed client-side Java)? Who knows, maybe Android will become the portable toolkit devs need, and client apps will remain relatively fat. To me, Native Client seems more flexible. You have the option of running apps thin, and there's nothing to prevent you from using the NC toolkit to run locally-installed apps as well. It's just the latest 'the browser is the OS' model - but maybe this one's good.
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Microsoft didn't do Surface the way they did because they thought it was best. It was the only choice they had, given their ongoing business strategy.
The problem with Microsoft's strategy is that it counts on sitting back and letting innovation happen elsewhere. Then seeing what works for their competitors, cloning it, and using their monopoly desktop OS and office suite to force their clone to 'succeed'. That strategey worked with local networks. Cloning Novell's networking and tying it to Windows killed Novell and made Microsoft the leader in file servers. Bundling exchange into Windows killed off all the other desktop email competitors. It worked with the internet (sort of). They were able to bundle, coerce their way from behind to make IE the clear 'winner'. If the Justice Department (and the EU) hadn't stepped in, that might still be the case. IIS is only there because everybody already had Windows servers in place.
But mp3 players were a different story, since there was no real advantage conferred by the Windows and Office monopolies. They were way to late to market and had no thumb to put on the scales to compensate.
That seems to be the case with phones and tablets, though they still stand a chance of using Office to skew the tablet market. But the quick and dirty desktop Office made RT unnecessarily complex as an iPad competitor and too expensive as Nexus 7 / Kindle Fire competitor - especially without all the 3rd party apps those other platforms have. So they're trying to use Windows 8 as a thumb on the scale to generate those 3rd party apps - fucking up traditional Windows in the process. Sure all new PC's will come with Windows 8 - problem is nobody's buying new PC's, partially because they don't need them, partially because they don't like Windows 8 (or at least what they've heard about it), and partially because there are other shiny toys grabbing all the attention.
So Microsoft has 'solved' the phone/tablet problem by introducing the fragmentation problem from hell. Sure there are lots of Gingerbread Android phones out there, but most Android apps can still run on them. Compare that to XP, Vista and Windows 7. Can they run Metro apps? No. So who's gonna write them? Maybe there will be some, but the vast majority of Windows apps are Win32 desktop apps, and those aren't going to go away - or be rewritten for the most part. But with all the talk about 'Metro being the future', who's gonna invest heavily in their existing win32 base either. I see this accelerating the move to web-based apps on the desktop without affecting the mobile market much at all.
But breaking up the company won't help now. They're already way too late with phones and tablets, and a new independent mobile unit would be even later.
True enough, except that through FUD and phony 'open formats', Microsoft managed to keep most of its users on Office through the 2007 paradigm change - so the Office retraining costs ended up being incurred for the switch between MSO versions, and will be required again to switch to Libre. Maybe Valencia was smart enough to stick with MSO 2003 through their switch. If so, good for them.
If this is true, the solution is to create demand for a fully unlocked Android phone with appropriate specs to run Ubuntu. The manufacturer can sell in bulk to run of the mill Android customers, and possibly make a killing as the 'future proof' alternative that can be easily upgraded once the manufacturer stops supporting it.
Samsung won't do it. Probably not Motorola or HTC either. But with all the talk about Samsung 'owning' Android and no room for anybody else, there's a wide opening for a competent hardware company to succeed by taking up the banner of openness. Hell, maybe HP or Dell should step up - they both want to be mobile players, but can't succeed at Samsung's game. Shuttleworth should just donate an appropriate design to a willing manufacturer and call it a day.
Okay. First of all, there's no (official) 'Christian' angle in 12-step programs. The higher power is nothing more than a technique for letting go of trying to control things yourself. For lots of people, the 'higher power' is the group (no God required). And the purpose of it all is to give you enough breathing room to actually take a hard look at your behavior and learn that it (literally) won't kill you (or anybody else) to approach life honestly. The rest of it is all trappings to keep you occupied until that realization truly takes hold. Sure, there are plenty of people who go to AA because someone else 'makes them'. And it doesn't work for those people. There are also plenty of people for whom the program becomes a way of life (with good and bad aspects - not least is the desire of those who were genuinely helped to help others deal with their problem). And some people grow away from the day-to-day aspects and carry on with their lives, applying the lessons they learned in AA.
So why not shut the fuck up when you're ignorant about something instead of getting all superior and condescending.
It's douchebaggy when you pretend intellectual property that was developed in California comes from an Irish company for tax purposes and is subject to no tax. The law may say it's okay for an Irish company to pay no US taxes, but that doesn't mean Apple is really an Irish company. Yes they are dodging legitimately owed taxes through corporate structures that are pure fiction. Why anybody would say that's 'perfectly okay' because its 'perfectly legal' is beyond me. Unless you have a political objection to companies paying taxes at all...
Illegal, no?
That said, and even though I'm rooted (hey, is that why I haven't gotten any updates - I'm still on the stock ROM), I don't believe I've been hit by this exploit. Has anyone?
Ditto. My Nexus 4 has never received an OS update (unless it does this silently, which My old Nexus One never did).
Anyway, it's running 4.2.2 with a build date back in January.
It's worse that just the offshoring aspect.
When my company decided to outsource, they fired pretty much all the local developers except for one 'business analyst' who knows the code and how it works. That wasn't me, but they also kept me on as a 'consultant' to the outsourcers so something still gets done and the whole project can be viewed as something other than a total failure. The Indian devs were not great, but I figured that at least they'd be captive. Prior to outsourcing the company had taken to hiring (cheap) young programmers, and (surprise!) had a retention problem. But Indian programmers are 'happy just to have a job', right? Wrong - if anything, they're more mobile than their American counterparts, because the big outsourcing firms want it that way. They're constantly moving people off of our project, and bringing in new people to learn it all on our dime.
So the one expected productivity benefit is not there - but it's even worse. Since these guys don't hang around, there is no next generation coming up with the in-depth knowledge of these products to become the 'business analysts' and senior devs to replace us. So when I and the other guy who are still sustaining the whole contraption retire (and we're both older than 55), the whole thing sinks. Prior to outsourcing, there were other dev's with seniority that could've stepped in to take our places.
In today's world of perverse incentives, though, this isn't a 'problem'. The company is owned by a private equity firm that expects to dump it long before that final crash. But if I were a private equity firm looking to buy a piece of crap like this, I'd certainly ask what plans exist to produce the next generation of senior techs to keep the place going. As it is, it's musical chairs, at some point a buyer will get stuck with no chairs left.
Yeah, but why Apple? Then don't make any semiconductors. Isn't payment of patent royalties the responsibility of the manufacturer of the LED's? If not, how can anybody build anything out of parts sourced from other companies? You'd have no way of knowing what patents you were responsible for clearing rights to.
Even if this is true, they certainly ought to encrypt it. Don't dropbox, google drive, and skydrive encrypt their transfers?
Yeah, but the hideous thing about patents is that, even with the published specs, it's illegal to implement them without paying up. So only the patent holder or a direct licensee gets to write a driver for the patented shit. Any roylaties for a patent-encumbered piece of hardware should be included in the price of the hardware - end of story. And that includes your PC - if you paid for an OEM Windows license that covers various patents, that should cover any implementation of those patents on the device. You already paid for it.
Right. The process for making a cDNA copy of a particular sequence is probably patentable. But I'm betting Myriad didn't invent that process. Whoever did should be able to patent it, and Myriad should have to pay them royalties for applying the process to the BRCA gene. And maybe something as general as cDNA construction should be a FRAND-type patent, so that it's owner can't 'own' all DNA by owning the standard testing methodology. Just like Motorola isn't allowed to own the cellphone industry by virtue of having come up with the standard communications protocol used by cellphones.
You'd think, but it's not true. Linux Mint 14 was able to install, but the brand new 64-bit PCLinuxOS got confused about the partition numbering and wiped out Mint instead of using the empty partition I set up for it. When I shrank my windows partition, I left the 'HP Recovery' partition at the end, which stayed in GPT slot 4, even though I added new partitions between 3 and 4. PCLOS's installer got way confused about that.
The PCLOS kernel was fine, and booted from a live CD, it was able to see things correctly, but the installer's partitioning tool assigned the partition numbers to the wrong devices and things went downhill from there. And the guys at the PCLOS forum basically said "Wipe your disk and format it MBR style" - regardless of the fact that I'd have to lose my OEM Windows 7 to do that.
There are more problems with UEFI than 'secure' boot. I bought an HP box with Windows 7 and secure boot disabled. The thing wouldn't boot Windows after I installed the drive from my old PC as a secondary SATA drive (believe me, I tried every available BIOS setting). The Windows EFI bootloader insisted on trying to boot from the secondary (MBR-formatted) drive if it was there - even though a live-booted linux CD was fine with it. But if I left a gap in the SATA drive numbers, Windows would boot (and mount the SATA3 dirve as drive F:), whereas my live linux CD didn't even see it as SATA3 (apparently the BIOS didn't report it there with the gap).
Essentially, I was only able to 'use' this drive after I completely wiped it and replaced its MBR partitioning scheme with a GPT scheme. But my point is UEFI has 3 problems as I see it:
1) Secure boot locking out non-signed stuff (why can't it just warn you when you try to boot non-signed stuff and let you continue).
2) Weird implementations producing crazy, inexplicable behaviors. Including inconsistent ability to boot from external media, and some systems actually getting bricked by booting a Ubuntu CD.
3) Forcing use of GPT partitioning, which many Linux distros don't handle yet, and which even Windows doesn't need till you go over 2 TB drives.
Most of this is the result of an awkward transition to a possibly better partitioning and booting scheme, but forcing it on everyone - combined with poor implementations of much more complex firmware. Maybe it only seems intended to make dual booting hell. In any case, it succeeds beautifully.
I think Microsoft collects the full tax even on heavily discounted systems and refurbs. Am I wrong?
The GUI toolkits are not a problem in and of themselves. Think about Windows - you can write code in VB, C, C++ (MFC), C++ (somebody else's C++ library), C#, Java, etc. It all works on top of the basic Windows desktop services (in C), which behave the same regardless of how the app was written.
The same could've been done with GNOME and KDE if they could agree on a common set of desktop services and API's to access them. But both of these are much more than GUI toolkits. Essentially, they are the OS that the user interacts with. So if you have GNOME and KDE apps both on the same machine, you have 2 sets of file management windows, etc. They've done a pretty good job of making them similar enough that it's not too hard for a user to deal with - it used to be much worse. The fact that KDE has written its desktop services in C++ makes them kind of hard to share with other languages - it's much easier to throw a C++ wrapper around C than the reverse...
It's pretty nasty when a company 'giving away razors to sell blades' starts trying to make money off of the razors too. The Kindle was originally Amazon's way to jump-start their ebook and streaming services. Now they want to be a tablet player too. Greedy.
Simple config
Is a mixture of usability and perception. A simplified configuration presents fewer choices and is therefore easier to understand. It also looks faster and more lightweight, because people equate visual simplicity with efficiency. This is incorrect, of course, but I'm not above exploiting this fallacy to give people what they want. For this aspect, we're providing an alternate set of System Settings metadata to give it a cut down tree. The full set remains available, if needed.
This could be his biggest contribution, and - if it's done well - mainline KDE should consider adopting it as an option. For all of KDE's configurability, the thing that would be nicest to configure is the configurability itself. Something like 'lock desktop configuration', where once you have the system set up the way you want it, you never see all those options again - unless you ask to.
What's with robocalls that hang up on you if you answer and don't leave a voicemail message if you don't answer. I get at least one of these per day. What can they possibly be trying to determine from that - whether I'm home?
We've been in a bubble economy-wide since the crash of 2007. It's (more or less) intentional, fueled by artificially low interest rates and the Fed pouring money into the banking system. That money has no place to go, so it goes into whatever's trendy at the moment - whether there's real value there or not.
Everyone (again - more or less) agrees that the economy needed the stimulus, but a better approach would have been to pump the money into the economy via smartly targeted (or even non so smartly targeted) direct government spending. Funded, if possible, by new revenue streams themselves defined to have little effect on employment and other economic activity. But we don't have either a functioning market economy or a functioning democracy capable of managing the economy through the political system. So we go from bubble to bubble - or crash to crash, depending on how you view it.
Is "do one thing, and do it well" really still the Unix philosophy - for GUI stuff as well? This works great for command-line stuff, where you incorporate commands into pipes and scripts. But user expectations for GUI apps are more like "anticipate my needs and surprise me by being able to do obscure function x that I didn't even know I needed until now". Some would call that bloat, but whatever. My point is that GUI stuff is different than command line stuff, if only because you don't paste multiple GUI apps together to accomplish more complex stuff. The app's got to do it, or it doesn't get done.
And presumably, you buy from Canada because they do have government regulations to guarantee the safety fo the drugs you buy there. So you like some regulations and not others. Better focusing your efforts on keeping regulations meaningful and in the best interests of the American people rather than just trying to hobble the government in the name of liberty. Because, otherwise, liberty American style amounts to freedom of corporations to rip you off. And if those corporations want the government to spend a lot on what they produce, the spending will go on anyway.
The truth is that MS0ffice is only as cheap as it is because of its widespread adoption. Where Gates was brilliant was in getting people hooked on his software due to low price. Once he had the $100 per PC cash cow locked in, he could afford to sell Office for reasonably low prices, simultaneously widening his base and ultimately making tons of money even at the reaonable prices.
But the existance of viable free alternatives, along with the crackdown on pirated copies and a new rental paradigm, blows that proposition to hell. Once Google Docs or LibreOffice takes a large chunk out of MSOffice sales, their pricing model will have to move toward Mathematica's. Not right away, and it'll never be that pricey - the market for office suites will always be much larger than Mathematica's market, and MSOffice will probably always own a large chunk of it. But they can't give it away and remain Microsoft - it's where the lion's share of their income comes from. They may try to fund it with advertising, like Google does, but they're not gonna have billions of users paying $100 a year for long - that's for sure.
The real question is can Native Client become a viable portable GUI toolkit to rival HTML5 for stuff that can't be done easily (or well) with HTML5. If so, then eventually the Chromebook model will fly. Currently, Chrombooks' being limited to HTML isn't good enough for most people's needs. But if and when all the software most people need can be delivered efficiently over 'the web' (with NC expanding what that means), then the migration may well begin.
Certainly if the QuickOffice NC comes up to LibreOffice standards, MSOffice is in for trouble. Today, Google Docs vs. full blown Office isn't a real comparison.
Of course, it's all a big if - multiple ifs in fact. Java was supposed to do all this 10 years ago. But things are very different today from where they were 10 years ago, so you can't assume history will repeat itself. Is Native Client any good? Is it open enough that it can be implemented in browsers other than Chrome (or would that inevitably lead to the kind of fragmentation that killed client-side Java)? Who knows, maybe Android will become the portable toolkit devs need, and client apps will remain relatively fat. To me, Native Client seems more flexible. You have the option of running apps thin, and there's nothing to prevent you from using the NC toolkit to run locally-installed apps as well. It's just the latest 'the browser is the OS' model - but maybe this one's good.