In fact, I recently read that Linux desktop share had finally surpassed Apple's. Not sure that's true - but if it is, it's consistent with my theory that as 'the (Microsoft) desktop' becomes less important, the alternative desktops all become more viable...
Paradoxically, the reason they're shipping more Macs than ever is that the desktop is becoming less relevant - and as that happens, and Windows becomes less necessary for more users, alternatives like Macs and Chromebooks become viable. So, yeah, they can sell more Macs - because they still have an aura of 'the computer for artists, etc.'. But how long is that going to last?
And in any case, Mac minis (the OP's example of Apple no longer innovating) never had that aura - precisely because they were cheap and not portable (i.e., not status symbols). So, while minis may have been bought by mac fans, they don't need to be upgraded much, because most people who bought them don't need a new computer - and they didn't buy them to show off with.
In mail and maps, at least, they innovated by changing how they worked. Docs too. Google (again, probably to protect their core ad/search business) made some pretty early bets on moving what had been desktop-centric (or realatively static web) applications into more or less fully-featured web apps. Might not seem that innovative today - but they got there early enough to dominate both web mail and web maps. Didn't dominate Docs, because Microsoft's advantage was too deeply entrenched - but they did force Microsoft Office onto the web (talk about 'innovation')...
I hate to break it to you, but the Mac mini isn't really part of their core business any more. Apple knows the Mac is essentially over. Sure, they work and people buy them - but to the extent that the heat of the action in computers has moved away from desktop computing - and especially away from the high-cost end of the desktop, the only reason for Apple to remain there is to support their loyal customers. And, I guess, to make sure that Microsoft doesn't somehow manage to leverage their continued dominance over the desktop to do something that will hurt the rest of Apple's business...
That doesn't mean they can get away with lackluster products. But they need another new blockbuster category to remain as big as they've become. And the iPhone is probably maxed out. They can still generate a ton of money on each new version - as long as planned obsolescence is still a viable business model. But then what...
They're still innovating - just that, like most innovations, they rarely see the light of day. You only ever heard of Google's original innovations because they were wildly successful. I think Google was pretty early in, say, self-driving cars. And they're doing a lot of innovative AI stuff. But none of that is (yet) poised to take the world by storm like their web search did.
Yes, they have to chase lots of 'next big things', because owing to the size of the target on their back, a lot of those things have been designed to chip away at Google's core business - y'know, the one that funds whatever innovation the do still promote. But that doesn't mean they can't innovate in addition to that.
Good luck finding (or starting) an innovative company to work for that has anywhere near the success that Google has had. Of course, success isn't everything - but failure gets tired after a while...
...well, if your employer happens to provide 'employer paid' coverage, you might feel comfortable making that argument. Even so, there are multiple forms of single payer insurance - and some provide a simpler, cheaper alternative to today's 'employer paid' policies - with their premiums, copayments, and limited provider networks.
'Profiteer' is a bit of a stretch. Gas taxes largely go to fund highway construction and maintenance. Those cars need something to drive on. While, I'd argue that some of those taxes should go toward public transit to encourage a healthier mix (in terms of pollution, CO2 emmissions and traffic congestion) of transportation modes. And of course, the purpose of a proposed carbon tax is to make fossil fuels costlier to discourage their use - to the extent that many of those proposals recommend returning the revenue directly to taxpayers. Hardly what you could call 'profiteering'.
Well, if that's the case, Amazon had better split up their retail and hardware businesses. Google search has a huge market share, and Google also makes a web browser - but the last time I looked, you can do a Google search on just about any web browser. Some advanced Google features might only work on experimental code in Chrome, but certainly not their core web browsing functions.
Amazon may not be a monopoly (yet) in any sense, but they certainly are a huge factor in retail - especially in online electronics sales. And they sell just about everything. So why not Chromecast? Sure, they can't be forced to sell all products, but specifically excluding a competitor's popular products is getting pretty murky. CVS doesn't sell Duane Reade's branded products - but when's the last time you saw CVS refuse to carry the brand name product they were cloning - just to get you to buy their store brand...?
My company has a piece of Win32 code that acts as a smart terminal - enabling a complex server-based app to appear as a desktop GUI app. Pretty nice. Anyway, the theory was that if we ever needed to support Mac's - or God-forbid, Linux;-) - we'd just have to provide a version of the terminal thing for those platforms. In practice, we only got occasional requests for Mac support, and those users generally figured out how to use Parallels on their own.
But I found early on that the app runs well under Linux with WINE. At the time, though, WINE Mac support wasn't great. But a few years ago, I found Mac support had greatly improved - and there was this thing called Wineskins that made it easy to package your app up with WINE into a single zip file that was a cinch to install pre-configured in a way that integrates nicely with the rest of the Mac desktop (including launching native Mac apps to handle downloaded PDF's and XLS's that get produced by our server-based system). So, bottom line, the 'wineskins' version of our app runs great on the Mac - and has a much smaller footprint and launches much faster than using Parallels. My only complaint is that the WINE themeing engine doesn't work particularly well (here's hoping 3.0 brings improvement there).
The prospect of an Android port is a great next step - though I'm guessing that's still limited to Intel processors. An ARM emulator would be nice (isn't Microsoft doing that for its next generation of ARM-based devices?). Also nice would be more focus on making winelib a viable development tool for building native apps from existing Win32 source code. Or is it too late for that to be a priority...?
Nobody ever said huge tax cuts for businesses wouldn't be good... for those businesses. And yeah, we're seeing some minor trickle-down effects that help employees (which will help offset stuff like the reduction of state tax deductability for Apple's California employees). Still, even if you think corporate tax cuts were a good thing to do - there were any number of ways to do it that would really reform the tax system and make it fairer without blowing ever bigger holes in the budget. My preferred solution is to make corporate rates competitive - and make up for it by taxing the revenue when it reaches individuals, either as wages, dividends or, yes, capital gains and inheritances. Put a cap on how much passive income gets preferential treatment - and then tax the rest at the normal progressive rates. I.e., more like what they did under Eisenhower - when America was 'Great'.
But we're also seeing Republicans ramp up to take on 'entitlement reform' - a 'problem' they want to solve in ways that will hurt most middle-class people (assuming Social Security and Medicare are part of the 'problem'). And, of course, by adding significantly to the deficit at precisely the time they should be paying it down (i.e., when the economy is doing well), they just make the problem worse - which, of course, gives them an excuse to do what they want to do in the first place.
The New York Times today published a bunch of op-ed letters from Trump supporters, all of whom think he's doing a great job - based on their transparent parroting of Fox talking points. Some even 'think' his bad behavior is a good thing - to the extent that their thinking processes seem to allow them to rationalize just about anything...
Well, it sounds like Barcelona has learned a thing or two from Munich's experience. They're not switching to Linux - or at least, not until the last Windows-only app is pried from users' cold, dead hands. They are going to standardize on the Windows versions of open source apps, like LibreOffice. And presumably some open sourced email and scheduling software. And they're going to plow the savings on Office and Exchange into getting replacement software written for whatever other stuff they need.
Seriously, if they standardize on web applications for everything except perhaps stuff like LibreOffice, which exists on just about every platform - they're already way ahead of Munich. Munich made a valiant effort back in the day when desktop software was still king. Switching to Linux - and then trying to get all your desktop software rewritten for your chosen Linux target (another Munich problem - LiMux, whatever that is) turned out to be a recipe for partial success at best. But sticking with the Windows OS until you really don't need it any more for anything is a much better approach. And using Windows pretty much the same way you'd use a Chromebook (i.e. to access apps running on a server) is another way to save a bunch on IT support costs. Good luck, Barcelona.
Well, yeah. But the assumption was that the mobile company does know your location - or at least the location of the tower you're connected to. And if it knows your distance from two separate towers, then bingo. But they don't have a standard way to let the 911 system know that. Presumably, the mobile operator knows you dialed 911, and so could forward what location info it has to the 911 operator. But that's a big system upgrade.
And yeah, Uber has a much easier job - since it's app on your phone send your location info to them directly. As others have stated, an app on the phone could send 911 info. But who is that app going to connect to. There's a whole different internet-based 911 system that would need to be developed to handle that. And maybe it should be...
Funny how people always resort to "Change the Constitution if you don't like it" whenever two conflicting Constitutional principles have to be weighed by the courts - and the court doesn't pick their choice.
The Supreme Court has jumped through hoops to pretend that, for example, "money is speech" is a more important American value than "government by the people" or "equal protection". And as regards gerrymandering, it has in the past come down on the side of "we can't police partisanship" over "everyone's vote should count". They've yet to rule on the issue since it became possible to mathematically show how gerrymandering causes votes to be effectively rendered useless - and there's still every possibility that the Kennedy will join with the rest of the conservatives and choose the convenient answer that happens to favor their side..
But to say the court shouldn't have a voice when there's such a conflict is to say "I like things the way they are, so fuck you - change the Constitution if you don't like it".
Okay, well say there was a watermelon/bowling ball regulation in place - and prior to that, there were beginnings of watermelon salesmen pushing bowling ball-ish features. You might make the argument that such a regulation was not needed - but you'd be lying...
Yes, and you installed them 'voluntarily' when, say, your company used a 'web based' product that was little more than a wrapper around an ActiveX 'control', which was essentially a Windows app that 'ran in the browser'.
And all of it was proprietary - and could only have happened in a world where it was safe to say "targeting Windows only is enough". Thankfully, that is not today's world. And, even if Google were attempting to steer the web toward Chrome-only features (and they're not - despite the complaints of some random Microsoft employee that wishes Edge were up-to-date enough to run all Google apps), it's still not comparable in the sense that Chrome doesn't attempt to tie you into any hardware or OS platform - and is about as cross-platform as any big project gets.
But apparently, it's fashionable to peddle anti-Google conspiracy theories here - to the point that this article is able to get any traction around here. Does anybody here even remember how awful the IE6-era web was...?
Plus, he and his defenders constantly argue that ISP's won't do any of the bad things that they will now be allowed to do - because 'the market' will prevent it. Well, if that's the case, then why change the regulations that prevent it?
If there's something specific that they're willing to admit to wanting to do, present it to the FCC for approval. 'Trust us' is hardly a way to make policy - especially when you seem to be justifying the change by arguing that the status quo is just fine...
Perhaps. But they're already getting amplified plenty on talk radio, etc. So, I guess the mainstream media has to decide between ignoring them as nut jobs - or alerting the rest of us that they're out there. Ignoring them doesn't seem to have worked very well. Most of 'us guys' had no idea how many White Supremacist / Neo-Nazis there were until we started seeing televised Trump rallies - which were truly scary spectacles. And then he won...
So perhaps a bit of alarmism is called for at this point.
I might be cheering Trump - if he actually were to do anything about it. Sure, he got big tax cuts for corporations - but so far has done nothing to stop them from exporting jobs.
And just because I might agree about the harm done by cheap imports doesn't mean I have to cheer a President who tells 180 degree false lies essentially constantly.
It seems to me that until recently, when Trump and Bannon made it seemingly okay to self-identify as either Nazi or White Supremicist, the most common use of the the term nazi was on the right. As in 'femi-nazi', etc. - where it was used to try to discredit the politically correct on the left.
Now, I'm no fan of PC censorship, but there's a big difference between that and "Jews will not replace us!".
Is it the mainstream media and leftists - or the alt-right folks that apply the term to themselves, and then get reported about. I mean there were those Hitler salutes in Charlottesville, weren't there? Of course, a few noisy neo-nazis in your organization may get the whole thing (unfairly?) branded as a nazi enterprise - but you're not denying that neo-nazis exist and are becoming more visible and vocal around the world are you?
Our 'team' has been whittled down to the point that it consists of 3 guys - all over 60. There are no junior people to take our places - and the company seems to have no plans to hire any. This situation arose out of a botched outsourcing program. The outsourcing firm was pathetic and was ultimately dropped after everyone who knew the product had been fired. They brought me back as a part-time consultant to replace the Indian guys, and that's fine with me. But at this point 2 out of 3 of us have gone part time, and it's finally dawned on my boss that he's going to have a completely unsupported - and largely unsupportable product on his hands in a few years.
I'm not sure how common this scenario is - but I suspect it's more so than you might think...
Isn't the reason it didn't work for Windows or Ubuntu the fact that there was no app base to start with. Sure there was tons of Win32 code - but that couldn't run on Windows Phone and couldn't be ported to something that could. And there was no incentive to rewrite it so that it could run on both - since there weren't any Windows phones out there.
Apple is in the opposite position. There is tons of stuff that runs on iOS. And it's already in the 'new' platform - assuming that iOS source code can be tweaked easily enough to run on MacOS. So developers don't need to start over. Then again, if it's too much work, there may not be enough incentive to get your iOS stuff to work nicely on MacOS.
That's the problem Android tablets have aways had. It's easy to get your Android mobile apps to run on a tablet - but there aren't enough Android tablets to justify the work to get those mobile apps to adapt nicely to running on them. This whole universal binary idea is great - except that the universe consists of different silos of devices, and nobody's actual universal binary implementation works on more than one of them.
There are such things as natural monopolies - and the last mile of internet connectivity is a pretty good candidate. Getting those wires to homes involves digging up streets and/or stringing wires. Cable TV providers were coaxed into wiring whole cities with the promise of that monopoly, and with those cables already in place, they became a natural candidate for providing broadband internet.
Even in a city as big as New York (where I have my choice among 3 cable companies - because I live in a building with 250 units - i.e. worth it to wire up), most people don't have a choice among broadband providers. All the FCC apologists I've heard interviewed lately do an immediate pivot to "wireless is the future - and there's plenty of competition there". Well, yeah, competition for severely capped data plans that noone watches TV on, etc. My phone spends most of its time connected to WiFi - and I sure wouldn't use T-Mobile's offerings for my home internet access.
All of which argues for regulating wired home broadband as the natural telecommunications monopoly that it essentially is.
The odd thing is that Doug Jones won in this reddest of states despite being portrayed as a tool of the dreaded Nancy Peolosi. Trump's pitch was "you need to elect Moore so we can achieve our agenda". I.e., pass the hideous tax 'reform' bill that nobody - presumably even in Alabama - thought was a good piece of legislation, much less a boon for the working class.
So the tragedy to me is that Jones didn't make his campaign about "Okay, Moore is a creep, and you shouldn't vote for him. But beyond that, think about the agenda they're asking you to vote for. Is this tax bill really about relief for the middle class? And if not, what else about the Trump agenda is about anything you really care about?".
Unfortunately, for too many Alabamans, the answer to that last question might well be "my rights as a white person". In which case, we're fucked. For some, the answer might be "abortion" - and I don't have a pithy slogan to convince an "abortion is murder" type that they have every right to persuade as many people as they can not to have abortions. Just that they don't have the right to legislate what is to some extent a religious position (depending on where you draw the gestational line between a bunch of cells and a person with a God-given soul...).
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In fact, I recently read that Linux desktop share had finally surpassed Apple's. Not sure that's true - but if it is, it's consistent with my theory that as 'the (Microsoft) desktop' becomes less important, the alternative desktops all become more viable...
Paradoxically, the reason they're shipping more Macs than ever is that the desktop is becoming less relevant - and as that happens, and Windows becomes less necessary for more users, alternatives like Macs and Chromebooks become viable. So, yeah, they can sell more Macs - because they still have an aura of 'the computer for artists, etc.'. But how long is that going to last?
And in any case, Mac minis (the OP's example of Apple no longer innovating) never had that aura - precisely because they were cheap and not portable (i.e., not status symbols). So, while minis may have been bought by mac fans, they don't need to be upgraded much, because most people who bought them don't need a new computer - and they didn't buy them to show off with.
In mail and maps, at least, they innovated by changing how they worked. Docs too. Google (again, probably to protect their core ad/search business) made some pretty early bets on moving what had been desktop-centric (or realatively static web) applications into more or less fully-featured web apps. Might not seem that innovative today - but they got there early enough to dominate both web mail and web maps. Didn't dominate Docs, because Microsoft's advantage was too deeply entrenched - but they did force Microsoft Office onto the web (talk about 'innovation')...
I hate to break it to you, but the Mac mini isn't really part of their core business any more. Apple knows the Mac is essentially over. Sure, they work and people buy them - but to the extent that the heat of the action in computers has moved away from desktop computing - and especially away from the high-cost end of the desktop, the only reason for Apple to remain there is to support their loyal customers. And, I guess, to make sure that Microsoft doesn't somehow manage to leverage their continued dominance over the desktop to do something that will hurt the rest of Apple's business...
That doesn't mean they can get away with lackluster products. But they need another new blockbuster category to remain as big as they've become. And the iPhone is probably maxed out. They can still generate a ton of money on each new version - as long as planned obsolescence is still a viable business model. But then what...
They're still innovating - just that, like most innovations, they rarely see the light of day. You only ever heard of Google's original innovations because they were wildly successful. I think Google was pretty early in, say, self-driving cars. And they're doing a lot of innovative AI stuff. But none of that is (yet) poised to take the world by storm like their web search did.
Yes, they have to chase lots of 'next big things', because owing to the size of the target on their back, a lot of those things have been designed to chip away at Google's core business - y'know, the one that funds whatever innovation the do still promote. But that doesn't mean they can't innovate in addition to that.
Good luck finding (or starting) an innovative company to work for that has anywhere near the success that Google has had. Of course, success isn't everything - but failure gets tired after a while...
...well, if your employer happens to provide 'employer paid' coverage, you might feel comfortable making that argument. Even so, there are multiple forms of single payer insurance - and some provide a simpler, cheaper alternative to today's 'employer paid' policies - with their premiums, copayments, and limited provider networks.
'Profiteer' is a bit of a stretch. Gas taxes largely go to fund highway construction and maintenance. Those cars need something to drive on. While, I'd argue that some of those taxes should go toward public transit to encourage a healthier mix (in terms of pollution, CO2 emmissions and traffic congestion) of transportation modes. And of course, the purpose of a proposed carbon tax is to make fossil fuels costlier to discourage their use - to the extent that many of those proposals recommend returning the revenue directly to taxpayers. Hardly what you could call 'profiteering'.
Um, aren't Amazon's products based on Android? Some monopoly, that...
Well, if that's the case, Amazon had better split up their retail and hardware businesses. Google search has a huge market share, and Google also makes a web browser - but the last time I looked, you can do a Google search on just about any web browser. Some advanced Google features might only work on experimental code in Chrome, but certainly not their core web browsing functions.
Amazon may not be a monopoly (yet) in any sense, but they certainly are a huge factor in retail - especially in online electronics sales. And they sell just about everything. So why not Chromecast? Sure, they can't be forced to sell all products, but specifically excluding a competitor's popular products is getting pretty murky. CVS doesn't sell Duane Reade's branded products - but when's the last time you saw CVS refuse to carry the brand name product they were cloning - just to get you to buy their store brand...?
My company has a piece of Win32 code that acts as a smart terminal - enabling a complex server-based app to appear as a desktop GUI app. Pretty nice. Anyway, the theory was that if we ever needed to support Mac's - or God-forbid, Linux ;-) - we'd just have to provide a version of the terminal thing for those platforms. In practice, we only got occasional requests for Mac support, and those users generally figured out how to use Parallels on their own.
But I found early on that the app runs well under Linux with WINE. At the time, though, WINE Mac support wasn't great. But a few years ago, I found Mac support had greatly improved - and there was this thing called Wineskins that made it easy to package your app up with WINE into a single zip file that was a cinch to install pre-configured in a way that integrates nicely with the rest of the Mac desktop (including launching native Mac apps to handle downloaded PDF's and XLS's that get produced by our server-based system). So, bottom line, the 'wineskins' version of our app runs great on the Mac - and has a much smaller footprint and launches much faster than using Parallels. My only complaint is that the WINE themeing engine doesn't work particularly well (here's hoping 3.0 brings improvement there).
The prospect of an Android port is a great next step - though I'm guessing that's still limited to Intel processors. An ARM emulator would be nice (isn't Microsoft doing that for its next generation of ARM-based devices?). Also nice would be more focus on making winelib a viable development tool for building native apps from existing Win32 source code. Or is it too late for that to be a priority...?
Nobody ever said huge tax cuts for businesses wouldn't be good... for those businesses. And yeah, we're seeing some minor trickle-down effects that help employees (which will help offset stuff like the reduction of state tax deductability for Apple's California employees). Still, even if you think corporate tax cuts were a good thing to do - there were any number of ways to do it that would really reform the tax system and make it fairer without blowing ever bigger holes in the budget. My preferred solution is to make corporate rates competitive - and make up for it by taxing the revenue when it reaches individuals, either as wages, dividends or, yes, capital gains and inheritances. Put a cap on how much passive income gets preferential treatment - and then tax the rest at the normal progressive rates. I.e., more like what they did under Eisenhower - when America was 'Great'.
But we're also seeing Republicans ramp up to take on 'entitlement reform' - a 'problem' they want to solve in ways that will hurt most middle-class people (assuming Social Security and Medicare are part of the 'problem'). And, of course, by adding significantly to the deficit at precisely the time they should be paying it down (i.e., when the economy is doing well), they just make the problem worse - which, of course, gives them an excuse to do what they want to do in the first place.
The New York Times today published a bunch of op-ed letters from Trump supporters, all of whom think he's doing a great job - based on their transparent parroting of Fox talking points. Some even 'think' his bad behavior is a good thing - to the extent that their thinking processes seem to allow them to rationalize just about anything...
Well, it sounds like Barcelona has learned a thing or two from Munich's experience. They're not switching to Linux - or at least, not until the last Windows-only app is pried from users' cold, dead hands. They are going to standardize on the Windows versions of open source apps, like LibreOffice. And presumably some open sourced email and scheduling software. And they're going to plow the savings on Office and Exchange into getting replacement software written for whatever other stuff they need.
Seriously, if they standardize on web applications for everything except perhaps stuff like LibreOffice, which exists on just about every platform - they're already way ahead of Munich. Munich made a valiant effort back in the day when desktop software was still king. Switching to Linux - and then trying to get all your desktop software rewritten for your chosen Linux target (another Munich problem - LiMux, whatever that is) turned out to be a recipe for partial success at best. But sticking with the Windows OS until you really don't need it any more for anything is a much better approach. And using Windows pretty much the same way you'd use a Chromebook (i.e. to access apps running on a server) is another way to save a bunch on IT support costs. Good luck, Barcelona.
Well, yeah. But the assumption was that the mobile company does know your location - or at least the location of the tower you're connected to. And if it knows your distance from two separate towers, then bingo. But they don't have a standard way to let the 911 system know that. Presumably, the mobile operator knows you dialed 911, and so could forward what location info it has to the 911 operator. But that's a big system upgrade.
And yeah, Uber has a much easier job - since it's app on your phone send your location info to them directly. As others have stated, an app on the phone could send 911 info. But who is that app going to connect to. There's a whole different internet-based 911 system that would need to be developed to handle that. And maybe it should be...
Funny how people always resort to "Change the Constitution if you don't like it" whenever two conflicting Constitutional principles have to be weighed by the courts - and the court doesn't pick their choice.
The Supreme Court has jumped through hoops to pretend that, for example, "money is speech" is a more important American value than "government by the people" or "equal protection". And as regards gerrymandering, it has in the past come down on the side of "we can't police partisanship" over "everyone's vote should count". They've yet to rule on the issue since it became possible to mathematically show how gerrymandering causes votes to be effectively rendered useless - and there's still every possibility that the Kennedy will join with the rest of the conservatives and choose the convenient answer that happens to favor their side..
But to say the court shouldn't have a voice when there's such a conflict is to say "I like things the way they are, so fuck you - change the Constitution if you don't like it".
Okay, well say there was a watermelon/bowling ball regulation in place - and prior to that, there were beginnings of watermelon salesmen pushing bowling ball-ish features. You might make the argument that such a regulation was not needed - but you'd be lying...
Yes, and you installed them 'voluntarily' when, say, your company used a 'web based' product that was little more than a wrapper around an ActiveX 'control', which was essentially a Windows app that 'ran in the browser'.
And all of it was proprietary - and could only have happened in a world where it was safe to say "targeting Windows only is enough". Thankfully, that is not today's world. And, even if Google were attempting to steer the web toward Chrome-only features (and they're not - despite the complaints of some random Microsoft employee that wishes Edge were up-to-date enough to run all Google apps), it's still not comparable in the sense that Chrome doesn't attempt to tie you into any hardware or OS platform - and is about as cross-platform as any big project gets.
But apparently, it's fashionable to peddle anti-Google conspiracy theories here - to the point that this article is able to get any traction around here. Does anybody here even remember how awful the IE6-era web was...?
Plus, he and his defenders constantly argue that ISP's won't do any of the bad things that they will now be allowed to do - because 'the market' will prevent it. Well, if that's the case, then why change the regulations that prevent it?
If there's something specific that they're willing to admit to wanting to do, present it to the FCC for approval. 'Trust us' is hardly a way to make policy - especially when you seem to be justifying the change by arguing that the status quo is just fine...
Perhaps. But they're already getting amplified plenty on talk radio, etc. So, I guess the mainstream media has to decide between ignoring them as nut jobs - or alerting the rest of us that they're out there. Ignoring them doesn't seem to have worked very well. Most of 'us guys' had no idea how many White Supremacist / Neo-Nazis there were until we started seeing televised Trump rallies - which were truly scary spectacles. And then he won...
So perhaps a bit of alarmism is called for at this point.
I might be cheering Trump - if he actually were to do anything about it. Sure, he got big tax cuts for corporations - but so far has done nothing to stop them from exporting jobs.
And just because I might agree about the harm done by cheap imports doesn't mean I have to cheer a President who tells 180 degree false lies essentially constantly.
It seems to me that until recently, when Trump and Bannon made it seemingly okay to self-identify as either Nazi or White Supremicist, the most common use of the the term nazi was on the right. As in 'femi-nazi', etc. - where it was used to try to discredit the politically correct on the left.
Now, I'm no fan of PC censorship, but there's a big difference between that and "Jews will not replace us!".
Is it the mainstream media and leftists - or the alt-right folks that apply the term to themselves, and then get reported about. I mean there were those Hitler salutes in Charlottesville, weren't there? Of course, a few noisy neo-nazis in your organization may get the whole thing (unfairly?) branded as a nazi enterprise - but you're not denying that neo-nazis exist and are becoming more visible and vocal around the world are you?
I have the opposite problem.
Our 'team' has been whittled down to the point that it consists of 3 guys - all over 60. There are no junior people to take our places - and the company seems to have no plans to hire any. This situation arose out of a botched outsourcing program. The outsourcing firm was pathetic and was ultimately dropped after everyone who knew the product had been fired. They brought me back as a part-time consultant to replace the Indian guys, and that's fine with me. But at this point 2 out of 3 of us have gone part time, and it's finally dawned on my boss that he's going to have a completely unsupported - and largely unsupportable product on his hands in a few years.
I'm not sure how common this scenario is - but I suspect it's more so than you might think...
Isn't the reason it didn't work for Windows or Ubuntu the fact that there was no app base to start with. Sure there was tons of Win32 code - but that couldn't run on Windows Phone and couldn't be ported to something that could. And there was no incentive to rewrite it so that it could run on both - since there weren't any Windows phones out there.
Apple is in the opposite position. There is tons of stuff that runs on iOS. And it's already in the 'new' platform - assuming that iOS source code can be tweaked easily enough to run on MacOS. So developers don't need to start over. Then again, if it's too much work, there may not be enough incentive to get your iOS stuff to work nicely on MacOS.
That's the problem Android tablets have aways had. It's easy to get your Android mobile apps to run on a tablet - but there aren't enough Android tablets to justify the work to get those mobile apps to adapt nicely to running on them. This whole universal binary idea is great - except that the universe consists of different silos of devices, and nobody's actual universal binary implementation works on more than one of them.
There are such things as natural monopolies - and the last mile of internet connectivity is a pretty good candidate. Getting those wires to homes involves digging up streets and/or stringing wires. Cable TV providers were coaxed into wiring whole cities with the promise of that monopoly, and with those cables already in place, they became a natural candidate for providing broadband internet.
Even in a city as big as New York (where I have my choice among 3 cable companies - because I live in a building with 250 units - i.e. worth it to wire up), most people don't have a choice among broadband providers. All the FCC apologists I've heard interviewed lately do an immediate pivot to "wireless is the future - and there's plenty of competition there". Well, yeah, competition for severely capped data plans that noone watches TV on, etc. My phone spends most of its time connected to WiFi - and I sure wouldn't use T-Mobile's offerings for my home internet access.
All of which argues for regulating wired home broadband as the natural telecommunications monopoly that it essentially is.
The odd thing is that Doug Jones won in this reddest of states despite being portrayed as a tool of the dreaded Nancy Peolosi. Trump's pitch was "you need to elect Moore so we can achieve our agenda". I.e., pass the hideous tax 'reform' bill that nobody - presumably even in Alabama - thought was a good piece of legislation, much less a boon for the working class.
So the tragedy to me is that Jones didn't make his campaign about "Okay, Moore is a creep, and you shouldn't vote for him. But beyond that, think about the agenda they're asking you to vote for. Is this tax bill really about relief for the middle class? And if not, what else about the Trump agenda is about anything you really care about?".
Unfortunately, for too many Alabamans, the answer to that last question might well be "my rights as a white person". In which case, we're fucked. For some, the answer might be "abortion" - and I don't have a pithy slogan to convince an "abortion is murder" type that they have every right to persuade as many people as they can not to have abortions. Just that they don't have the right to legislate what is to some extent a religious position (depending on where you draw the gestational line between a bunch of cells and a person with a God-given soul...).