Funny, does your standard office worker use AutoDesk or AutoCAD? Are the PCB Designs being handled by your secretary?
There is only one secretary for twenty engineers. And even that secretary may need a.dwg/.dwf viewer, if only to verify what she is emailing to the customers.
Nit picking select apps used by a selectively small portion of the business community to show that linux will not work for everyone is crazy.
Ok then, go ahead and upgrade an engineering outfit to Linux. I did my part and explained why this won't work. Besides, I have an issue with "a selectively small portion of the business community" - what do you think businesses in this country do to earn money? A great deal of [remaining] US economy is high-tech engineering. I'm not familiar with financial services, but it's probably safe to say that they are married into Windows even more than engineers.
I'm sure there are some businesses that *can* be migrated with hardly any pain. Perhaps a car mechanic, or a florist's shop. But even a small business will need its QuickBooks up and running; I don't know if WINE can be trusted to do that. IMO, majority of businesses depend on Windows applications. Cost of Windows ($50 if bundled with a PC) is irrelevant, it's in the noise compared to the cost of applications (and of migration if it happens.)
As to "Those handy applications" Name one! Everyone talks about how the apps would need to be rewritten but what apps?
I suggest you start with SolidWorks, CoCreate's OneSpace, and Autodesk {Inventor,AutoCAD,*}. However even the simple SwitcherCAD line requires Windows, and it's pretty good to have. Then of course we have PADS, Protel, and plenty more CADs that are designed only for Windows. If you do any development for Windows then Visual Studio is a requirement. Please let me know when you have all that rewritten for Linux.
In case you wonder if there are already Linux clones of the above, the answer is "yes, clones exist, and no, they are not suitable for any business use." Some of them don't even have 1% of the required features. Perhaps you could find a working SPICE simulator; but outside of that, Eagle CAD, to my knowledge, is the best PCB layout tool that runs on Linux, and it's a hobbyist's tool at best.
2. Clients in corp environments should not be able to do that.
It depends. In my experience there was a case when a user went to a remote site and his computer just crashed, badly - blue screen and all. Fortunately there was a recovery image on the HDD, so he was instructed to restore and then install a couple of programs that he needed for his work, from a separate CD that he also had with him. That did the trick, and all was well.
So while it is true that a typical customer shouldn't have an easy access to a recovery tool, sometimes the job requires that such a tool is available, and the user can be guided over the phone to perform the recovery.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
This only ensures that you won't be arrested for holding an opinion or for blogging on Google or elsewhere. This document, however, does not require anyone to make it technically possible. So you may have a right to do something, and no ability, and that's all legal.
But hasn't Turkey been trying to get into the EU for ages now though? Won't this set them back a whole lot?
The "for ages" part is exactly what drives Turkey mad - and perhaps they are correct. Turkey was baited with EU membership for a long time, but each time when something had to be done there was "a word in the street" (usually from Germany) that Turkey is not yet welcome, and why don't they cool their heels for another decade or two. Eventually it became obvious to every Turk that EU is not going to let them in. Greece, a historical foe of Turkey, is in EU, even though it shouldn't be, and Turkey, with GDP nearly triple of that of Greece, isn't wanted. After so many runarounds why should anyone be surprised if Turkey changes course and joins a bloc where they are wanted and appreciated?
Cell phone networks have been slow to realize that they need to develop a high speed high bandwidth data only network and deploy it everywhere.
Laws of physics may be against them. If each handset consumes 10 Mbps (10^7 bps) (which is about half of what broadcast digital TV uses - 19+ Mbps) and if you have 10,000 (10^4) viewers in service area of each cell site then you need roughly (10^4 * 10^7) = 10^11 bps. If we assume s/n = 20 dB that requires 10^11 / 6.65 = 11.5 * 10^9 Hz, or about 12 GHz of bandwidth. That can't be done on a carrier that is around 2 GHz! Variations of multicasting could be used to reduce that number somewhat, but it's a lot in any case, even if you reduce the bit rate at the client. At best you could achieve some mediocre reliability of a small picture for a limited number of clients. You can't get to the target bit rate without going into millimeter wave, and that isn't going to work due to poor penetration of buildings. And the root cause of all that trouble is that indeed "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with magnetic tapes." Broadcast TV delivers an incredible amount of bits per second, even though each client gets exactly the same bits as any other client.
s of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.
The 3G connectivity is not sufficient for watching video in volume comparable to TV. TV bandwidth is essentially free (a true one-to-many broadcast,) whereas 3G is not (it's limited and shared.)
Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.
I take it reality gets to ignore that android phones have overtaken iphones in sales in the last quarter?
You need to consider that phones that were sold in last quarter started in design a year ago. I don't think OEMs were cognizant of the rapid pace of Android development at that time. Android offered them a good entry path into a high-end smartphone market. However once OEMs discover the pain of endless upgrades that may change. Another problem is that it's not trivial to even upgrade an OS on a handset over the air; there is always a risk of bricking, and then you need JTAG to fix that, which means RTM. Large OEMs manufacture hundreds of thousands of handsets and ship them overseas for sales, there is no way for them to upgrade those when they are sitting in boxes on shelves. There are no gnomes inside the boxes to keep upgrading the handsets even if the OEM is willing to continually rebuild the firmware image to match the latest Android release.
So this Dell product pinpoints when its development started - at some point when 1.6 was the latest release, which was between Sep. 16, 2009 and Oct. 26, 2009 (yes, that's only 40 days!) And now that the product is done, it's already obsolete. How can you, as an OEM, live with that? It's not a disaster yet - the thing just needs the new firmware image, but it's a powerful reminder that the OS maker can at any time torpedo your product by releasing a new version, and then you are back to square one. It's much, much worse if you just finished a manufacturing run and are now stuck with thousands of obsolete units that nobody will buy. How much will it cost you to open each box and individually upgrade each unit? Probably more than it will cost to plow the whole run into a landfill and order a new one.
It's not a problem that is unique to phone OEMs; PC makers (the same Dell, for example) are aware of that too. But MS releases new versions rarely and on schedule, and everyone knows years in advance what's coming. The new release of Android will be available who knows when, and it will have who knows what new functions. "Roadmap? We don't need any stinking roadmap! We release when it's ready!"
If I buy a device that is advertised as a computer, I expect that I control the software aspect of it, OS included.
Sorry, a phone is not a general purpose computer. You can't control the software aspect of it without having access to the hardware aspect, and that is something you aren't going to get (from most OEMs, at least) - unless you want to buy a design from the OEM for some spare change like $100M or more. It's better to see the phone (or iPad) as a specialized device that also can run some simple and very limited software.
This can change only after the phone undergoes the same standardization process as PCs did - and PCs did that only under MS's pressure to run DOS and Windows. There is no such pressure in the phone world; actually the opposite is happening - each OEM makes his phone in a slightly different way to carve a new niche in the market. This means that firmware of these devices is diverging fast.
Releasing a product in commercial space requires stability. Sure, you can't have everything in the release 1.0, but every release must be a solid product. If you look back, each DOS release was fine; most Windows releases were OK (as Windows goes,) and IIRC even OS/2 releases were reasonably mature.
The major point here is to avoid the upgrade treadmill. I can understand frequent upgrades if they are seamless. But in Android they are not. Each OEM has to customize a base Android system to their hardware, and a handheld thing can have 10-20 different hardware items to worry about - the CPU itself, the display controller, the touch controller, the battery charge controller, WiFi, Ethernet, BT, compass, GPS... so it's a lot of work to the OEM to upgrade from 1.x to 1.(x+1). If you make them do it often they just say "stuff it, we won't be upgrading anything" and then you are stuck. In my work I occasionally have to upgrade frameworks. Qt offers a great example, especially when 3.x to 4.x transition changed *everything* and required rewrite of major pieces of code. Such an upgrade is often out of consideration even - the library pieces then get checked in along with your sources, and that's that.
So IMO regardless of what Google wants to do, what they are doing is not working. Google people just don't understand what their releases are doing to the industry. Imagine yourself an OEM that plans a gizmo. If you pick Android you start development one day and never end, until the product is EOLed. That is hardly a winning strategy. If I were such an OEM I'd rather pick a no-name OS that at least allows me to build a product and let it be. If my product doesn't report its OS version I'm OK. If my product reports that it's Android x.y then it's already bad news - there is already a newer release by Google, and who will buy my gizmo then? Business-wise, Google is on a losing path here.
Besides, as far as Google is concerned, implementing the latest version isn't really their problem.
I'm afraid you are right and Googlers indeed harbor that foolish idea. But that very fact *is* their problem. They have enough cash to play ostrich for a few years, but the reality couldn't care less about what Google thinks. Reality deals with things that exist.
How many months did it take after Windows Vista was released before most new computers were shipping with it included?
That is actually a negative number, at least -6 months if not less. MS created those infamous "Vista Ready" and "Vista Capable" classifications, and you could buy a PC with XP and with a free upgrade certificate. I got a couple of those myself, and redeemed them. MS may not know how to write good software, but they sure know how to sell what they write.
Well, when you have 5 releases in less than a year, you can't really expect new devices to be using the latest version.
I guess "Release early, release often" is not a proper strategy here. I suspect Google managers are simply not mature enough (too young, in other words) to understand the business needs and do what is right.
Neither here nor in your other reply that you linked you answer the question:
If I leave my front door open and you steal from me, that doesn't mean you're not a thief does it?
This is a good question because it is invalidating a mountain of other arguments, such as "properly securing" some equipment. Human law is just trying to describe existing norms of human behavior. Those norms say that entering other people's property without permission is usually wrong. It is equally wrong to peer into people's windows at night, even if those windows are not "properly secured" with heavy curtains. There can be many examples of such accepted norms. The bottom line is that even if something is technically feasible it doesn't mean that it is permissible to do.
Also in your other post you claim:
Guess what, if he drives his unlocked car onto my property, I get to open it up and look around (property owners do have the right to search vehicles on their property), I can even hang out inside if I feel like it, because my property rights override his when he willfully brings his stuff into my sphere of control.
I must presume that you never park your car at a parking facility that is not owned by you. I do, and if the owner of the parking facility decides to break into my car (even if I failed to lock it) I'm calling police and pressing charges. Why is it so when he claims his property rights? Because there is a contract between me and him; I pay him money (directly or indirectly) and in return my car will be allowed to stay there. Same applies to your guests, if they park on your property and go into your house you don't have the right to seize the car or abuse your guests. The car may be on your land, but the car itself is not your property, and you have no right to get inside. (But you may arrange for transportation of the entire car if you must; that's what towing companies do.) Your rant about "property rights" of an owner of a parking lot is just that, a rant that is not grounded in any physical reality. If you don't believe me, perform an experment: invite some guests (they won't lock their cars on your secured property) and then go and rummage in them. Then report what your guests had to say about that - if you still can type after what they do to you.
Collecting data isn't (necessarily) evil. Abusing it is. [...] google's well known for finding web pages that were intended to be private, but never properly locked down... Finding those things isn't evil
Yes, if Alice walks by Bob's house and notices that Bob failed to lock the door, noticing that isn't evil. However how would you classify a scenario when Alice immediately calls a local radio station and announces to the whole area that Bob's house is not locked? I don't know what is a formal definition of "evil" (it is a term with religious roots, as I understand) but in my book announcing someone's vulnerability is deeply amoral.
We could of course argue that Googlebots don't understand what they are fetching and indexing, and it's all an innocent mistake. However this StreetView data collection program suggests that Google is willing to ignore a lot of amoral stuff if it makes a buck for them. Sometimes they even cross the line of legality, as it appears so far.
You can also buy a diverse portfolio [...] over time the stock market has been outperforming all other assets in recent history.
Apparently you are using a different definition of "recent" than I do. Still, look at the 5-year chart. How can that thing outperform anything? It doesn't outperform a wad of cash under the mattress if you don't get dividends. Investors of 2007-2008 are still in the red. No, I'll stay with bonds, they seldom default and I don't have much of any one. In return for smaller gains I sleep well and don't care what DJI is on any given morning.
I don't see all the hype about electric vehicles. While I agree we need to move from our dependence on fossil fuels, electric vehicles simply move the pollution from the highway back to the power plant. All that energy has to come from somewhere.
There is only one way to get oil (from the ground) and several ways (some - clean & renewable) to produce electric power. Burning oil is wasteful anyway, we need oil for other things (like plastics) that we can't live without.
I agree. I'm not a gambler, and because of that I own no stocks. I have a few bonds, they are fixed income papers, and I do not intend to sell them (besides, they have different and reasonable maturity dates.) I personally do not know what will happen tomorrow, let alone in three years (the example of BP and Deepwater Horizon is the most recent one.) But players on the stock market have to have *something* to justify their near-random buying/selling decisions, and so they do their best. They may be wrong, Apple may crash and burn, but as things appear to be it's not very likely. If you compare Apple and some large pharmaceutical company, who is more risk? Apple, IMO, is less risk - they don't do anything out of this world, they don't have to invent new mind-boggling chemicals, they don't offer those chemicals to people... Apple just does simple and relatively honest labor.
He said health care. That particular industry is not only not a dead end, it just received the biggest boost in completely reality-divorced profitability in American history.
Yes, I noticed that he said "healthcare." But *obviously* the market is not as enamored with healthcare companies as it ought to be. Perhaps there are problems? Several states are planning to outlaw the individual mandate; the law will not fully activate for several more years, and who knows what happens in that time. And of course there will be individuals not accepting this law and not paying a dime to the insurers (that would be me, for example.) I could think of a few more problems; people may simply not have money to pay for all that, for example (they need jobs for that, and nobody is working on that.) Or maybe one of concerns is that the US healthcare is nearly smothered by malpractice insurance? Without knowing specifics of his company it's not possible to tell what drags them down, but something does. If his company is Fortune 50 then it's probably one of big pharmaceutical companies. They may face expiration of patents, liability for poorly tested drugs, lack of promise in new research, and so on. Inventory is only a small part of their value; it costs next to nothing to physically produce, the value will be realized only after the product is sold. Microsoft can't stamp one billion trillion of Win7 DVDs and claim that they are the most valued company in the galaxy.
The market also feels the fortune 50 company I work at is worth less than our inventory on hand.
And that could easily be correct if, for example, the company borrowed huge amounts of money to produce all that inventory. Assets are only one side of the balance sheet.
Besides, investors not only look at the current finances of a company; they also look ahead. If your company is in a dead-end market then the future value of that company compares poorly against a company that will be growing and growing and growing... at least for some time.
Consider that the copy has fewer restrictions than the disk that you bought - it can be copied, emailed, played at multiple locations... a CD or a DVD can't do it. So the bits are more valuable when they are not bound to the physical media. If you want free bits the seller wants more money.
if a person was to download {O$3sc2xg43220SSdv.torrent, it'd be hard to prove intent
I think it's actually the other way around. Nobody downloads multi-gig ISOs with non-descriptive names just for fun. I can understand if you downloaded Bill's_Home_Video_HaveFun,Everyone!.iso - you'd have a pretty good excuse that you were led to believe this is a free content. But if you downloaded the {O$3sc2xg43220SSdv.iso you'd better be ready to explain what led you to that. You might be lucky and demonstrate that someone posted the torrent's name and said that he is the copyright holder and it's free for all. Then it would be an honest mistake. But chances are that some publicly available list contains this name and describes it as a commercial, copyrighted, non-free product. You can, of course, still argue that there are two lists and you believed the other list but I doubt any judge or jury are going to buy that.
Slashdot Mirror
but seriously, who takes a shower and leaves their laptop sitting in the bathroom, much less with the lid open AND facing the shower?
Anyone who is listening to the music that the said laptop is playing.
Funny, does your standard office worker use AutoDesk or AutoCAD? Are the PCB Designs being handled by your secretary?
There is only one secretary for twenty engineers. And even that secretary may need a .dwg/.dwf viewer, if only to verify what she is emailing to the customers.
Nit picking select apps used by a selectively small portion of the business community to show that linux will not work for everyone is crazy.
Ok then, go ahead and upgrade an engineering outfit to Linux. I did my part and explained why this won't work. Besides, I have an issue with "a selectively small portion of the business community" - what do you think businesses in this country do to earn money? A great deal of [remaining] US economy is high-tech engineering. I'm not familiar with financial services, but it's probably safe to say that they are married into Windows even more than engineers.
I'm sure there are some businesses that *can* be migrated with hardly any pain. Perhaps a car mechanic, or a florist's shop. But even a small business will need its QuickBooks up and running; I don't know if WINE can be trusted to do that. IMO, majority of businesses depend on Windows applications. Cost of Windows ($50 if bundled with a PC) is irrelevant, it's in the noise compared to the cost of applications (and of migration if it happens.)
As to "Those handy applications" Name one! Everyone talks about how the apps would need to be rewritten but what apps?
I suggest you start with SolidWorks, CoCreate's OneSpace, and Autodesk {Inventor,AutoCAD,*}. However even the simple SwitcherCAD line requires Windows, and it's pretty good to have. Then of course we have PADS, Protel, and plenty more CADs that are designed only for Windows. If you do any development for Windows then Visual Studio is a requirement. Please let me know when you have all that rewritten for Linux.
In case you wonder if there are already Linux clones of the above, the answer is "yes, clones exist, and no, they are not suitable for any business use." Some of them don't even have 1% of the required features. Perhaps you could find a working SPICE simulator; but outside of that, Eagle CAD, to my knowledge, is the best PCB layout tool that runs on Linux, and it's a hobbyist's tool at best.
2. Clients in corp environments should not be able to do that.
It depends. In my experience there was a case when a user went to a remote site and his computer just crashed, badly - blue screen and all. Fortunately there was a recovery image on the HDD, so he was instructed to restore and then install a couple of programs that he needed for his work, from a separate CD that he also had with him. That did the trick, and all was well.
So while it is true that a typical customer shouldn't have an easy access to a recovery tool, sometimes the job requires that such a tool is available, and the user can be guided over the phone to perform the recovery.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
This only ensures that you won't be arrested for holding an opinion or for blogging on Google or elsewhere. This document, however, does not require anyone to make it technically possible. So you may have a right to do something, and no ability, and that's all legal.
I'm not sure that's what the word means...
M-W to the rescue... seems to be a perfectly cromulent word :-)
But hasn't Turkey been trying to get into the EU for ages now though? Won't this set them back a whole lot?
The "for ages" part is exactly what drives Turkey mad - and perhaps they are correct. Turkey was baited with EU membership for a long time, but each time when something had to be done there was "a word in the street" (usually from Germany) that Turkey is not yet welcome, and why don't they cool their heels for another decade or two. Eventually it became obvious to every Turk that EU is not going to let them in. Greece, a historical foe of Turkey, is in EU, even though it shouldn't be, and Turkey, with GDP nearly triple of that of Greece, isn't wanted. After so many runarounds why should anyone be surprised if Turkey changes course and joins a bloc where they are wanted and appreciated?
So, do ads use up your data? That seems like a bad situations, but it's not clear how it could be avoided.
It's very easy to avoid. I have no Web browsing on my phone.
No, it wouldn't be simultaneous.
That's just too bad because TV consumption has well defined highs and lows. Think of a major football game, for example.
Cell phone networks have been slow to realize that they need to develop a high speed high bandwidth data only network and deploy it everywhere.
Laws of physics may be against them. If each handset consumes 10 Mbps (10^7 bps) (which is about half of what broadcast digital TV uses - 19+ Mbps) and if you have 10,000 (10^4) viewers in service area of each cell site then you need roughly (10^4 * 10^7) = 10^11 bps. If we assume s/n = 20 dB that requires 10^11 / 6.65 = 11.5 * 10^9 Hz, or about 12 GHz of bandwidth. That can't be done on a carrier that is around 2 GHz! Variations of multicasting could be used to reduce that number somewhat, but it's a lot in any case, even if you reduce the bit rate at the client. At best you could achieve some mediocre reliability of a small picture for a limited number of clients. You can't get to the target bit rate without going into millimeter wave, and that isn't going to work due to poor penetration of buildings. And the root cause of all that trouble is that indeed "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with magnetic tapes." Broadcast TV delivers an incredible amount of bits per second, even though each client gets exactly the same bits as any other client.
s of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.
The 3G connectivity is not sufficient for watching video in volume comparable to TV. TV bandwidth is essentially free (a true one-to-many broadcast,) whereas 3G is not (it's limited and shared.)
Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.
I take it reality gets to ignore that android phones have overtaken iphones in sales in the last quarter?
You need to consider that phones that were sold in last quarter started in design a year ago. I don't think OEMs were cognizant of the rapid pace of Android development at that time. Android offered them a good entry path into a high-end smartphone market. However once OEMs discover the pain of endless upgrades that may change. Another problem is that it's not trivial to even upgrade an OS on a handset over the air; there is always a risk of bricking, and then you need JTAG to fix that, which means RTM. Large OEMs manufacture hundreds of thousands of handsets and ship them overseas for sales, there is no way for them to upgrade those when they are sitting in boxes on shelves. There are no gnomes inside the boxes to keep upgrading the handsets even if the OEM is willing to continually rebuild the firmware image to match the latest Android release.
So this Dell product pinpoints when its development started - at some point when 1.6 was the latest release, which was between Sep. 16, 2009 and Oct. 26, 2009 (yes, that's only 40 days!) And now that the product is done, it's already obsolete. How can you, as an OEM, live with that? It's not a disaster yet - the thing just needs the new firmware image, but it's a powerful reminder that the OS maker can at any time torpedo your product by releasing a new version, and then you are back to square one. It's much, much worse if you just finished a manufacturing run and are now stuck with thousands of obsolete units that nobody will buy. How much will it cost you to open each box and individually upgrade each unit? Probably more than it will cost to plow the whole run into a landfill and order a new one.
It's not a problem that is unique to phone OEMs; PC makers (the same Dell, for example) are aware of that too. But MS releases new versions rarely and on schedule, and everyone knows years in advance what's coming. The new release of Android will be available who knows when, and it will have who knows what new functions. "Roadmap? We don't need any stinking roadmap! We release when it's ready!"
If I buy a device that is advertised as a computer, I expect that I control the software aspect of it, OS included.
Sorry, a phone is not a general purpose computer. You can't control the software aspect of it without having access to the hardware aspect, and that is something you aren't going to get (from most OEMs, at least) - unless you want to buy a design from the OEM for some spare change like $100M or more. It's better to see the phone (or iPad) as a specialized device that also can run some simple and very limited software.
This can change only after the phone undergoes the same standardization process as PCs did - and PCs did that only under MS's pressure to run DOS and Windows. There is no such pressure in the phone world; actually the opposite is happening - each OEM makes his phone in a slightly different way to carve a new niche in the market. This means that firmware of these devices is diverging fast.
Releasing a product in commercial space requires stability. Sure, you can't have everything in the release 1.0, but every release must be a solid product. If you look back, each DOS release was fine; most Windows releases were OK (as Windows goes,) and IIRC even OS/2 releases were reasonably mature.
The major point here is to avoid the upgrade treadmill. I can understand frequent upgrades if they are seamless. But in Android they are not. Each OEM has to customize a base Android system to their hardware, and a handheld thing can have 10-20 different hardware items to worry about - the CPU itself, the display controller, the touch controller, the battery charge controller, WiFi, Ethernet, BT, compass, GPS... so it's a lot of work to the OEM to upgrade from 1.x to 1.(x+1). If you make them do it often they just say "stuff it, we won't be upgrading anything" and then you are stuck. In my work I occasionally have to upgrade frameworks. Qt offers a great example, especially when 3.x to 4.x transition changed *everything* and required rewrite of major pieces of code. Such an upgrade is often out of consideration even - the library pieces then get checked in along with your sources, and that's that.
So IMO regardless of what Google wants to do, what they are doing is not working. Google people just don't understand what their releases are doing to the industry. Imagine yourself an OEM that plans a gizmo. If you pick Android you start development one day and never end, until the product is EOLed. That is hardly a winning strategy. If I were such an OEM I'd rather pick a no-name OS that at least allows me to build a product and let it be. If my product doesn't report its OS version I'm OK. If my product reports that it's Android x.y then it's already bad news - there is already a newer release by Google, and who will buy my gizmo then? Business-wise, Google is on a losing path here.
Besides, as far as Google is concerned, implementing the latest version isn't really their problem.
I'm afraid you are right and Googlers indeed harbor that foolish idea. But that very fact *is* their problem. They have enough cash to play ostrich for a few years, but the reality couldn't care less about what Google thinks. Reality deals with things that exist.
How many months did it take after Windows Vista was released before most new computers were shipping with it included?
That is actually a negative number, at least -6 months if not less. MS created those infamous "Vista Ready" and "Vista Capable" classifications, and you could buy a PC with XP and with a free upgrade certificate. I got a couple of those myself, and redeemed them. MS may not know how to write good software, but they sure know how to sell what they write.
Well, when you have 5 releases in less than a year, you can't really expect new devices to be using the latest version.
I guess "Release early, release often" is not a proper strategy here. I suspect Google managers are simply not mature enough (too young, in other words) to understand the business needs and do what is right.
Neither here nor in your other reply that you linked you answer the question:
If I leave my front door open and you steal from me, that doesn't mean you're not a thief does it?
This is a good question because it is invalidating a mountain of other arguments, such as "properly securing" some equipment. Human law is just trying to describe existing norms of human behavior. Those norms say that entering other people's property without permission is usually wrong. It is equally wrong to peer into people's windows at night, even if those windows are not "properly secured" with heavy curtains. There can be many examples of such accepted norms. The bottom line is that even if something is technically feasible it doesn't mean that it is permissible to do.
Also in your other post you claim:
Guess what, if he drives his unlocked car onto my property, I get to open it up and look around (property owners do have the right to search vehicles on their property), I can even hang out inside if I feel like it, because my property rights override his when he willfully brings his stuff into my sphere of control.
I must presume that you never park your car at a parking facility that is not owned by you. I do, and if the owner of the parking facility decides to break into my car (even if I failed to lock it) I'm calling police and pressing charges. Why is it so when he claims his property rights? Because there is a contract between me and him; I pay him money (directly or indirectly) and in return my car will be allowed to stay there. Same applies to your guests, if they park on your property and go into your house you don't have the right to seize the car or abuse your guests. The car may be on your land, but the car itself is not your property, and you have no right to get inside. (But you may arrange for transportation of the entire car if you must; that's what towing companies do.) Your rant about "property rights" of an owner of a parking lot is just that, a rant that is not grounded in any physical reality. If you don't believe me, perform an experment: invite some guests (they won't lock their cars on your secured property) and then go and rummage in them. Then report what your guests had to say about that - if you still can type after what they do to you.
Collecting data isn't (necessarily) evil. Abusing it is. [...] google's well known for finding web pages that were intended to be private, but never properly locked down ... Finding those things isn't evil
Yes, if Alice walks by Bob's house and notices that Bob failed to lock the door, noticing that isn't evil. However how would you classify a scenario when Alice immediately calls a local radio station and announces to the whole area that Bob's house is not locked? I don't know what is a formal definition of "evil" (it is a term with religious roots, as I understand) but in my book announcing someone's vulnerability is deeply amoral.
We could of course argue that Googlebots don't understand what they are fetching and indexing, and it's all an innocent mistake. However this StreetView data collection program suggests that Google is willing to ignore a lot of amoral stuff if it makes a buck for them. Sometimes they even cross the line of legality, as it appears so far.
You can also buy a diverse portfolio [...] over time the stock market has been outperforming all other assets in recent history.
Apparently you are using a different definition of "recent" than I do. Still, look at the 5-year chart. How can that thing outperform anything? It doesn't outperform a wad of cash under the mattress if you don't get dividends. Investors of 2007-2008 are still in the red. No, I'll stay with bonds, they seldom default and I don't have much of any one. In return for smaller gains I sleep well and don't care what DJI is on any given morning.
well, one should eat yogurts.
May the schwartz be with you!
I don't see all the hype about electric vehicles. While I agree we need to move from our dependence on fossil fuels, electric vehicles simply move the pollution from the highway back to the power plant. All that energy has to come from somewhere.
There is only one way to get oil (from the ground) and several ways (some - clean & renewable) to produce electric power. Burning oil is wasteful anyway, we need oil for other things (like plastics) that we can't live without.
I agree. I'm not a gambler, and because of that I own no stocks. I have a few bonds, they are fixed income papers, and I do not intend to sell them (besides, they have different and reasonable maturity dates.) I personally do not know what will happen tomorrow, let alone in three years (the example of BP and Deepwater Horizon is the most recent one.) But players on the stock market have to have *something* to justify their near-random buying/selling decisions, and so they do their best. They may be wrong, Apple may crash and burn, but as things appear to be it's not very likely. If you compare Apple and some large pharmaceutical company, who is more risk? Apple, IMO, is less risk - they don't do anything out of this world, they don't have to invent new mind-boggling chemicals, they don't offer those chemicals to people... Apple just does simple and relatively honest labor.
He said health care. That particular industry is not only not a dead end, it just received the biggest boost in completely reality-divorced profitability in American history.
Yes, I noticed that he said "healthcare." But *obviously* the market is not as enamored with healthcare companies as it ought to be. Perhaps there are problems? Several states are planning to outlaw the individual mandate; the law will not fully activate for several more years, and who knows what happens in that time. And of course there will be individuals not accepting this law and not paying a dime to the insurers (that would be me, for example.) I could think of a few more problems; people may simply not have money to pay for all that, for example (they need jobs for that, and nobody is working on that.) Or maybe one of concerns is that the US healthcare is nearly smothered by malpractice insurance? Without knowing specifics of his company it's not possible to tell what drags them down, but something does. If his company is Fortune 50 then it's probably one of big pharmaceutical companies. They may face expiration of patents, liability for poorly tested drugs, lack of promise in new research, and so on. Inventory is only a small part of their value; it costs next to nothing to physically produce, the value will be realized only after the product is sold. Microsoft can't stamp one billion trillion of Win7 DVDs and claim that they are the most valued company in the galaxy.
The market also feels the fortune 50 company I work at is worth less than our inventory on hand.
And that could easily be correct if, for example, the company borrowed huge amounts of money to produce all that inventory. Assets are only one side of the balance sheet.
Besides, investors not only look at the current finances of a company; they also look ahead. If your company is in a dead-end market then the future value of that company compares poorly against a company that will be growing and growing and growing... at least for some time.
Consider that the copy has fewer restrictions than the disk that you bought - it can be copied, emailed, played at multiple locations... a CD or a DVD can't do it. So the bits are more valuable when they are not bound to the physical media. If you want free bits the seller wants more money.
is it illegal to torrent a copy if you purchased a copy and have no optical drives in which to play it?
It's probably just as legal as robbing your bank for cash when the street vendor doesn't take plastic.
if a person was to download {O$3sc2xg43220SSdv.torrent, it'd be hard to prove intent
I think it's actually the other way around. Nobody downloads multi-gig ISOs with non-descriptive names just for fun. I can understand if you downloaded Bill's_Home_Video_HaveFun,Everyone!.iso - you'd have a pretty good excuse that you were led to believe this is a free content. But if you downloaded the {O$3sc2xg43220SSdv.iso you'd better be ready to explain what led you to that. You might be lucky and demonstrate that someone posted the torrent's name and said that he is the copyright holder and it's free for all. Then it would be an honest mistake. But chances are that some publicly available list contains this name and describes it as a commercial, copyrighted, non-free product. You can, of course, still argue that there are two lists and you believed the other list but I doubt any judge or jury are going to buy that.