I dunno - what reasons are there to use Windows instead of Linux? It isn't cheaper, it doesn't use less resources, it isn't more secure, and usually it isn't easier (for someone equally familiar with both systems).
In my experience the only thing Windows really does better than Linux is run proprietary software that only runs on Windows. We just replaced our last major Windows hold out with an AIX box (the only other platform our ERP software runs on besides Windows) and it has been a major improvement. Much faster, easier to manage, and less buggy.
I do sort of like to use Windows for DNS and DHCP though as for a simple setup they work pretty well and are easy to use. We're not doing anything very fancy with them and they've been running on the same old Windows box since before I took over so they're still there. I'll probably leave them until I need some feature that isn't easy to do on Windows. I don't like our mail server, that runs on Windows, but I can't honestly say I've found a mail server for Linux I like either.
I try not to be a zealot but I can't really find much nice to say about Windows. I'd suggest Linux for servers and power users and Mac OS for normal users. Windows is only really the best when you need to run Windows only software.
Besides, as someone that has administrated web servers of all sizes and platforms for many years, Windows sucks. It's harder to use after the first hour and stays harder to use, you have more issues, it costs more and has a lot more hidden fees (it's not just $400), and in general is just a pain in the ass. It especially is a pain if you want to go beyond static pages on a single web server.
Linux admins aren't expensive. I can pretty easily find someone that's reasonably experienced and willing to work for less than $15/hr. My experience is that Linux admins are more experienced than Windows admins at the same price and usually know Windows in addition to Linux while Windows admins don't know Linux.
Don't run into stuff. I'd consider buying one if it was well designed enough not to break down a lot and had leg room for me (6'6" tall). Most of the cost of cars isn't in the basics anyway, it's in the overpriced features and fees. You can buy a new Ford or Honda for around $2500 if you know where to go and who to talk to.
I agree with your argument against DRM but you're overlooking that there are tons of free ebooks online. Both from legit sources and from people who've made illicit copies of books available. They work just fine and are easy to get. IMO DRM is just hurting the people trying to sell legit copies because I won't buy them.
I'd like to see the price of the ebook taken off the cost of the real book if you order both - and the ebook available for free if you buy the real book. I like to have the real book but sometimes an ebook is handy.
Real books are great but there are times when an ebook is handy. I can take an ebook with me over the holiday and have a whole library open to me to choose from. I'll probably read a good sized book a day and I don't like to choose my next book while still reading a book so I'd have to either have access to a decent book store (which I won't have) or carry a small ton of books with me. With an ebook I can grab a new book anywhere.
One thing that is important to me in an ebook is that it has a paper-like screen. I don't want to read something that looks like a computer screen.
Fooling people for a while isn't difficult. Keeping individuals involved in conversations for extended periods covring many different, and unexpected, topics is what is hard. I've written bots that could keep people going for a few hours but eventually all but the complete idiots would figure out that it's a bot.
Being able to learn and make a wide assortment of human-like mistakes are two things a bot author can do to make their bots last longer.
I dunno - I've seen a lot of really bad code. Sure you'll get differences of style but that is certainly not the only issue involved. A lot of programmers suffer from being to lazy, or to busy, to document their code and from the chronic need to make code super tight and hard to grok. As if shaving down names and getting code to run in one line when it should take ten is an accomplishment. Then of course you get code that hasn't been designed at all but instead has just been vomited up in repeated attempts to do something without any planning at all.
Make your code readable, appropriately documented, and straight forward. Don't try to be an uber coder. More often than not the things you think you're being clever about are just making your code worse. Don't over optimize or go crazy with cool options. Concentrate on maintainability.
Try to do anything even mildly advanced and even in IE7 you'll run into major limitations and outright bugs. I think Microsoft just doesn't want to keep up. If they did they could easily take the Gecko or KHTML engines and slap an IE interface on them and the average user wouldn't notice anything except a better web experience. Heck, they could probably buy Opera and make it IE8 if for some reason neither Gecko or KHTML would work for them. They just don't want the web to be a good platform. They never did. The only reason they bothered with IE at all was because they saw Netscape and the web as a threat. Now that they are the #1 browser the best way to fight the web threat is to make the web suck.
At least IE7 doesn't suck near as much as IE6. I can't wait until people stop using IE6. It was nice enough when I could drop IE5 support. I still get a few people using old versions of IE for Mac OS but I figure if they are to stupid to switch to Safari, Opera, or Firefox then I can ignore the few of them.:)
It depends what industry your teaching for. GIMP is much better for creating graphics for web stuff than Photoshop is.
My short answer would be to teach a little of each. It's better for students to learn early on to think in terms of function and not in terms of interface. Schools should not be teaching specific applications so much as concepts.
It's Javascript support is still somewhat funky too although I admit you see more cross-broweser support issues with Javascript in other browsers too. CSS in Firefox, Safari, and Opera is usually really close on the first try while Javascript can have unexpected errors across them still. Still, IE is still the worse offender and that combined with the pain of getting CSS to work with it is annoying. I make my code work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera then bother with IE7 and finally bother with IE6 last if at all. I still fight with IE7 on a daily basis to work around weird or broken behavior.
If I remember correctly, it was free to register so why not? I don't think I registered my first domain until about 1992 though. It was for a text-based MUD. Cool huh?;)
If only I'd had the vision, and the cash, to patent the stuff I worked on back then. I could have sued many a successful online business for stealing my idea. Ooooh well. I'd rather write code than sue anyway.
Having tried many MP3 players, starting from an original Rio, I don't think I'd buy anything but an iPod now. I have a couple of them and they are easier to use and live far longer than any other brand of MP3 player I've owned. The Nano's are especially good about taking abuse. I haul mine around on trips, to work, to exercise, etc and they just keep on working without issue whereas other brands I owned would easily be damaged under the same conditions. Even given the major price difference between a cheapy brand and an iPod I'll still stick to the iPod in the future.
The Zune looks like everything Microsoft - ugly, clumsy, and feature bloat. I'll stick to the iPod. I'm not sure I like the new Nano's though as they're getting bulkier. Maybe they'll make something between the Shuffle and the Nano. A Shuffle with a wireless Nano-like remote would be really good.
If you can accomplish great things with a few core programmers that is called being effecient. Adding more programmers to a project usually makes it worse rather than better. Open source allows many developers to make minor changes, as they have need to, but doesn't change the fact that only a few core programmers are needed for most projects.
I don't see the number of open source programmers shrinking at all. If anything, I expect to see many new projects taking shape and a few catching fire and shaking up the industry. It's better for many small projects to be seeded so that a few can grow into new major projects. There'd be no point in adding more and more developers to existing projects.
For me, school was sort of that experience except it also involved a lot of physical and mental abuse. Starting as early as 1st grade I remember there being a lot of violence and bullying and I remember teachers purposely turning a blind eye to it. I'd literally get bloodied within ten foot of the teachers that were supposed to be watching the playground. This kept on for several years until I learned to fight back and by then I'd learned to hate school and I've kept that hate. This didn't really damage my education because I'm the type that always liked to read, watch educational tv, and experiment on my own and I was always more advanced than my peers. However, I never did well in school because I made absolutely no effort to succeed there and frequently skipped class to work on my own projects. Locking kids inside the walls and torturing them is not a good way to make them succeed in school but it is a good way to make them snap and go on a killing spree. In elementary school I already had learned to want to kill my peers and teachers - luckily I was such a geek that I was working on building a Star Wars like Walker to do the dirty deed. I got into various edged weapons, guns, and explosives as a teenager but by then had learned how to defend myself well enough that I didn't need to go on a rampage anymore. I can certainly feel for the kids that do snap though.
Besides the walled world of torture the second biggest thing that made me resent school and not make any effort at it is the fact that the vast majority of my teachers were stupid. This was more of an issue for me in highschool and college. They'd have people teaching that didn't understand their own subjects. Sometimes this was the teacher's fault and sometimes it was the schools. Once, in college, they assigned an English professor to teach advanced algebra and she had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Doh! CompSci professors were often decades behind and would just tell us stupid stuff (nobody would ever need an array of more than two dimensions being one of my favorite), rant about punchcards, and even pick fights (public arguments which he stupidly kept lossing).
All-in-all I can see why smart people don't do well in school. I certainly didn't. I did both public and private school and both were pretty crappy. I'm trying to decide what to do with my children when they reach school age. I may homeschool but am tempted to send them to public school just to let them experience the school of hard knocks. I'm definately going to put my kids into self defense classes and pay careful attention to see what level of violence they're living with.
I have a similar service in development. I expect porn to be a pretty popular use but I think the real area money will be made is in backing up people's photos and home movies. The average parent (and grandparent) has switched to digital photos and movies but doesn't have the know-how to properly safeguard these personal treasures. With our service all the user has to do is come to our website and log in and their photos and movies are indexed and backed up for them.
The file sharing abilties will no doubt happen a lot for porn sharing but it's the people who have photos they actually care about that are most likely to pay money for extra services.
Our open API will make it easy to built third-party services on too. It'll be interesting to see if porn is the number one creative path for third-party add-ons.;)
I have an online storage system already in development that is somewhat similar to this. The client is a Java applet that is loaded when the user visits our website. Each file is encrypted by it's own unique key in the client before being stored and keys can either be recorded locally, such as to a thumb drive, or stored on our secure server. The secure server uses an encrypted file system and once turned off can only be restored with it's own key disk and a password. The key disk is kept in a safe location and only I have the password. The secure system also doesn't use any swap space and is set up to unmount the secure file system and shutdown if it feels itself threatened. Some other security features, that I won't disclose, also make it unlikely that the key server would be subject to seizure or hacking.
So in the end it all comes down to how much pressure the government, or someone else, would be willing to put on me to get access. I've given this a lot of thought and to me the government is only a minor risk - the big risk would be from some sort of criminal organization. I've added some features to make it harder for such an attacker to gain access even if they kidnapped and tortured me or some similar horrible method.
The biggest risk, IMO, is that in a large company such as Google that an employee might have access. How trustworthy are random employees? Seems like it might be appropiate to do full checks like the government might do for employees needing security clearance. Even then, access to all the world's private data could be a big temptation.
So long as the pictures look good who cares? Enjoy looking. Besides, if you can put on 100lbs then you can also take off 100lbs. If you're around for more than a quickie then you can join the gym together.
Why do so many people play Everquest and World of Warcraft then? Those are about as fun as watching paint dry and are full of punishment, frustration, and repetition. People keep coming back for more and more. Fun is evidently not the point of games.
Of course, what would I know? I write software for fun.
Pricing is a hurdle but not a big hurdle. When they sell enough of these the price will probably go down. I have no problem spending $250 for an iPod and the same is probably true of the Kindle. Giving a credit towards content would be a good idea. I might spend $400 if I got $400 of content thrown in. That'd give me my first 20-30 books for free and get me really hooked. I usually read a book every couple days so once I was hooked I'd probably spend a lot more money.
To me, the big difference between a tablet and an eBook is the display and form factor. A tablet usually uses a normal lcd screen. An eBook should be book shaped and, by default, not backlit. The simplicity is a benefit. No operating system issues to deal with. I could us a tablet PC as an MP3 player too but it just wouldn't be as handy.
The limited supply of books is an issue but it does say you can load text and PDF files to the device and a lot of books, even those not offically released as eBooks, are available online if you know where to look. This is a point though - will the people who read a lot be tech savvy enough to bypass the DRM and expense and just download their own books? I'd be a lot more willing to buy eBooks if they didn't have DRM and if I got a discount when I bought the physical book for the cost of the electronic version. I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks a book to get the electronic version for use as a preview and buy physical copies of the books I liked. To me this should be a killer feature for publishers - instead of me going to the library to preview books I'll pay them to do the same. It'd make me a lot less likely to just download the books from third party resources too.
A proper eBook shouldn't use up batteries very fast because usually electronic ink screens only use power when redrawing the screen. (A major benefit over a tablet PC.) Life expectancy of batteries isn't to important to me as they typically last a couple years and by the time they die you're usually ready to upgrade your device anyway. My only worry would be if the content on my eBook is locked to the device with DRM then how can I make backups and easily move the content to a new device? I wouldn't want to end up in a situation such as with many cell phones where you're just screwed when you have to get a new device - content can't be moved over.
I do have ideas I think would help but I'm tired of trying to convince people that trying something new is a good idea. Capitalism and democracy are both fine ideas that just need to be fine tuned. Unfortunately they are so sacred that suggesting any changes marks you as a horrible person. They're practically a religion. I think most people won't be interested in trying something new until the current system completely crashes and burns.
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I dunno - what reasons are there to use Windows instead of Linux? It isn't cheaper, it doesn't use less resources, it isn't more secure, and usually it isn't easier (for someone equally familiar with both systems).
In my experience the only thing Windows really does better than Linux is run proprietary software that only runs on Windows. We just replaced our last major Windows hold out with an AIX box (the only other platform our ERP software runs on besides Windows) and it has been a major improvement. Much faster, easier to manage, and less buggy.
I do sort of like to use Windows for DNS and DHCP though as for a simple setup they work pretty well and are easy to use. We're not doing anything very fancy with them and they've been running on the same old Windows box since before I took over so they're still there. I'll probably leave them until I need some feature that isn't easy to do on Windows. I don't like our mail server, that runs on Windows, but I can't honestly say I've found a mail server for Linux I like either.
I try not to be a zealot but I can't really find much nice to say about Windows. I'd suggest Linux for servers and power users and Mac OS for normal users. Windows is only really the best when you need to run Windows only software.
Besides, as someone that has administrated web servers of all sizes and platforms for many years, Windows sucks. It's harder to use after the first hour and stays harder to use, you have more issues, it costs more and has a lot more hidden fees (it's not just $400), and in general is just a pain in the ass. It especially is a pain if you want to go beyond static pages on a single web server.
Linux admins aren't expensive. I can pretty easily find someone that's reasonably experienced and willing to work for less than $15/hr. My experience is that Linux admins are more experienced than Windows admins at the same price and usually know Windows in addition to Linux while Windows admins don't know Linux.
Don't run into stuff. I'd consider buying one if it was well designed enough not to break down a lot and had leg room for me (6'6" tall). Most of the cost of cars isn't in the basics anyway, it's in the overpriced features and fees. You can buy a new Ford or Honda for around $2500 if you know where to go and who to talk to.
Caffeine is a mood altering drug that tends to make you think worse with increased use. Not good for nootropics. ;)
My Linux machine has 48GB of RAM. If only I could fit it into a laptop form factor. ;)
I agree with your argument against DRM but you're overlooking that there are tons of free ebooks online. Both from legit sources and from people who've made illicit copies of books available. They work just fine and are easy to get. IMO DRM is just hurting the people trying to sell legit copies because I won't buy them.
I'd like to see the price of the ebook taken off the cost of the real book if you order both - and the ebook available for free if you buy the real book. I like to have the real book but sometimes an ebook is handy.
Real books are great but there are times when an ebook is handy. I can take an ebook with me over the holiday and have a whole library open to me to choose from. I'll probably read a good sized book a day and I don't like to choose my next book while still reading a book so I'd have to either have access to a decent book store (which I won't have) or carry a small ton of books with me. With an ebook I can grab a new book anywhere.
One thing that is important to me in an ebook is that it has a paper-like screen. I don't want to read something that looks like a computer screen.
Fooling people for a while isn't difficult. Keeping individuals involved in conversations for extended periods covring many different, and unexpected, topics is what is hard. I've written bots that could keep people going for a few hours but eventually all but the complete idiots would figure out that it's a bot.
Being able to learn and make a wide assortment of human-like mistakes are two things a bot author can do to make their bots last longer.
I dunno - I've seen a lot of really bad code. Sure you'll get differences of style but that is certainly not the only issue involved. A lot of programmers suffer from being to lazy, or to busy, to document their code and from the chronic need to make code super tight and hard to grok. As if shaving down names and getting code to run in one line when it should take ten is an accomplishment. Then of course you get code that hasn't been designed at all but instead has just been vomited up in repeated attempts to do something without any planning at all.
:)
Make your code readable, appropriately documented, and straight forward. Don't try to be an uber coder. More often than not the things you think you're being clever about are just making your code worse. Don't over optimize or go crazy with cool options. Concentrate on maintainability.
Guess I should take my own advise.
It's practically hidden. It's on the bottom side of the lcd.
The XO I have has an SD card slot so I dunno what M$ is smoking.
Try to do anything even mildly advanced and even in IE7 you'll run into major limitations and outright bugs. I think Microsoft just doesn't want to keep up. If they did they could easily take the Gecko or KHTML engines and slap an IE interface on them and the average user wouldn't notice anything except a better web experience. Heck, they could probably buy Opera and make it IE8 if for some reason neither Gecko or KHTML would work for them. They just don't want the web to be a good platform. They never did. The only reason they bothered with IE at all was because they saw Netscape and the web as a threat. Now that they are the #1 browser the best way to fight the web threat is to make the web suck.
:)
At least IE7 doesn't suck near as much as IE6. I can't wait until people stop using IE6. It was nice enough when I could drop IE5 support. I still get a few people using old versions of IE for Mac OS but I figure if they are to stupid to switch to Safari, Opera, or Firefox then I can ignore the few of them.
It depends what industry your teaching for. GIMP is much better for creating graphics for web stuff than Photoshop is.
My short answer would be to teach a little of each. It's better for students to learn early on to think in terms of function and not in terms of interface. Schools should not be teaching specific applications so much as concepts.
It's Javascript support is still somewhat funky too although I admit you see more cross-broweser support issues with Javascript in other browsers too. CSS in Firefox, Safari, and Opera is usually really close on the first try while Javascript can have unexpected errors across them still. Still, IE is still the worse offender and that combined with the pain of getting CSS to work with it is annoying. I make my code work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera then bother with IE7 and finally bother with IE6 last if at all. I still fight with IE7 on a daily basis to work around weird or broken behavior.
If I remember correctly, it was free to register so why not? I don't think I registered my first domain until about 1992 though. It was for a text-based MUD. Cool huh? ;)
If only I'd had the vision, and the cash, to patent the stuff I worked on back then. I could have sued many a successful online business for stealing my idea. Ooooh well. I'd rather write code than sue anyway.
Having tried many MP3 players, starting from an original Rio, I don't think I'd buy anything but an iPod now. I have a couple of them and they are easier to use and live far longer than any other brand of MP3 player I've owned. The Nano's are especially good about taking abuse. I haul mine around on trips, to work, to exercise, etc and they just keep on working without issue whereas other brands I owned would easily be damaged under the same conditions. Even given the major price difference between a cheapy brand and an iPod I'll still stick to the iPod in the future.
The Zune looks like everything Microsoft - ugly, clumsy, and feature bloat. I'll stick to the iPod. I'm not sure I like the new Nano's though as they're getting bulkier. Maybe they'll make something between the Shuffle and the Nano. A Shuffle with a wireless Nano-like remote would be really good.
If you can accomplish great things with a few core programmers that is called being effecient. Adding more programmers to a project usually makes it worse rather than better. Open source allows many developers to make minor changes, as they have need to, but doesn't change the fact that only a few core programmers are needed for most projects.
I don't see the number of open source programmers shrinking at all. If anything, I expect to see many new projects taking shape and a few catching fire and shaking up the industry. It's better for many small projects to be seeded so that a few can grow into new major projects. There'd be no point in adding more and more developers to existing projects.
For me, school was sort of that experience except it also involved a lot of physical and mental abuse. Starting as early as 1st grade I remember there being a lot of violence and bullying and I remember teachers purposely turning a blind eye to it. I'd literally get bloodied within ten foot of the teachers that were supposed to be watching the playground. This kept on for several years until I learned to fight back and by then I'd learned to hate school and I've kept that hate. This didn't really damage my education because I'm the type that always liked to read, watch educational tv, and experiment on my own and I was always more advanced than my peers. However, I never did well in school because I made absolutely no effort to succeed there and frequently skipped class to work on my own projects. Locking kids inside the walls and torturing them is not a good way to make them succeed in school but it is a good way to make them snap and go on a killing spree. In elementary school I already had learned to want to kill my peers and teachers - luckily I was such a geek that I was working on building a Star Wars like Walker to do the dirty deed. I got into various edged weapons, guns, and explosives as a teenager but by then had learned how to defend myself well enough that I didn't need to go on a rampage anymore. I can certainly feel for the kids that do snap though.
Besides the walled world of torture the second biggest thing that made me resent school and not make any effort at it is the fact that the vast majority of my teachers were stupid. This was more of an issue for me in highschool and college. They'd have people teaching that didn't understand their own subjects. Sometimes this was the teacher's fault and sometimes it was the schools. Once, in college, they assigned an English professor to teach advanced algebra and she had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Doh! CompSci professors were often decades behind and would just tell us stupid stuff (nobody would ever need an array of more than two dimensions being one of my favorite), rant about punchcards, and even pick fights (public arguments which he stupidly kept lossing).
All-in-all I can see why smart people don't do well in school. I certainly didn't. I did both public and private school and both were pretty crappy. I'm trying to decide what to do with my children when they reach school age. I may homeschool but am tempted to send them to public school just to let them experience the school of hard knocks. I'm definately going to put my kids into self defense classes and pay careful attention to see what level of violence they're living with.
I have a similar service in development. I expect porn to be a pretty popular use but I think the real area money will be made is in backing up people's photos and home movies. The average parent (and grandparent) has switched to digital photos and movies but doesn't have the know-how to properly safeguard these personal treasures. With our service all the user has to do is come to our website and log in and their photos and movies are indexed and backed up for them.
;)
The file sharing abilties will no doubt happen a lot for porn sharing but it's the people who have photos they actually care about that are most likely to pay money for extra services.
Our open API will make it easy to built third-party services on too. It'll be interesting to see if porn is the number one creative path for third-party add-ons.
I have an online storage system already in development that is somewhat similar to this. The client is a Java applet that is loaded when the user visits our website. Each file is encrypted by it's own unique key in the client before being stored and keys can either be recorded locally, such as to a thumb drive, or stored on our secure server. The secure server uses an encrypted file system and once turned off can only be restored with it's own key disk and a password. The key disk is kept in a safe location and only I have the password. The secure system also doesn't use any swap space and is set up to unmount the secure file system and shutdown if it feels itself threatened. Some other security features, that I won't disclose, also make it unlikely that the key server would be subject to seizure or hacking.
So in the end it all comes down to how much pressure the government, or someone else, would be willing to put on me to get access. I've given this a lot of thought and to me the government is only a minor risk - the big risk would be from some sort of criminal organization. I've added some features to make it harder for such an attacker to gain access even if they kidnapped and tortured me or some similar horrible method.
The biggest risk, IMO, is that in a large company such as Google that an employee might have access. How trustworthy are random employees? Seems like it might be appropiate to do full checks like the government might do for employees needing security clearance. Even then, access to all the world's private data could be a big temptation.
So long as the pictures look good who cares? Enjoy looking. Besides, if you can put on 100lbs then you can also take off 100lbs. If you're around for more than a quickie then you can join the gym together.
Why do so many people play Everquest and World of Warcraft then? Those are about as fun as watching paint dry and are full of punishment, frustration, and repetition. People keep coming back for more and more. Fun is evidently not the point of games.
Of course, what would I know? I write software for fun.
Pricing is a hurdle but not a big hurdle. When they sell enough of these the price will probably go down. I have no problem spending $250 for an iPod and the same is probably true of the Kindle. Giving a credit towards content would be a good idea. I might spend $400 if I got $400 of content thrown in. That'd give me my first 20-30 books for free and get me really hooked. I usually read a book every couple days so once I was hooked I'd probably spend a lot more money.
To me, the big difference between a tablet and an eBook is the display and form factor. A tablet usually uses a normal lcd screen. An eBook should be book shaped and, by default, not backlit. The simplicity is a benefit. No operating system issues to deal with. I could us a tablet PC as an MP3 player too but it just wouldn't be as handy.
The limited supply of books is an issue but it does say you can load text and PDF files to the device and a lot of books, even those not offically released as eBooks, are available online if you know where to look. This is a point though - will the people who read a lot be tech savvy enough to bypass the DRM and expense and just download their own books? I'd be a lot more willing to buy eBooks if they didn't have DRM and if I got a discount when I bought the physical book for the cost of the electronic version. I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks a book to get the electronic version for use as a preview and buy physical copies of the books I liked. To me this should be a killer feature for publishers - instead of me going to the library to preview books I'll pay them to do the same. It'd make me a lot less likely to just download the books from third party resources too.
A proper eBook shouldn't use up batteries very fast because usually electronic ink screens only use power when redrawing the screen. (A major benefit over a tablet PC.) Life expectancy of batteries isn't to important to me as they typically last a couple years and by the time they die you're usually ready to upgrade your device anyway. My only worry would be if the content on my eBook is locked to the device with DRM then how can I make backups and easily move the content to a new device? I wouldn't want to end up in a situation such as with many cell phones where you're just screwed when you have to get a new device - content can't be moved over.
I do have ideas I think would help but I'm tired of trying to convince people that trying something new is a good idea. Capitalism and democracy are both fine ideas that just need to be fine tuned. Unfortunately they are so sacred that suggesting any changes marks you as a horrible person. They're practically a religion. I think most people won't be interested in trying something new until the current system completely crashes and burns.
Nethack. It's the only game you'll ever need.