...And how many people download applications for the RAZOR? Very few, how many people download applications for the iPhone and Android? Almost everyone. Not to mention that people download applications for BlackBerry and Symbian phones too. All Motorola has is a shiny piece of hardware that was popular. Thats it, they don't really control the software. On the other hand, Android has far reaching effects where it could be that ~25% of all phones could have Andorid on it, and if in that ~25% of phones, there is one as popular as the RAZR was, that is almost a monopoly for Android phones.
Oh please, take a look at the iPhone app store and tell me how great the quality of software is. There are several *paid* apps that crash all the time, not to mention that at most there are 4 different hardware revisions each with approximately the same basic specs (accelerometer, touch screen, etc) so there are no excuses. All the while interesting, useful stuff gets filtered by our overlords, err... the app store approvers because it might be slightly competitive to Apple (why? when you bought the phone should Apple care whether or not you use Safari or Opera Mini to browse the web???) or "obscene", or in the worst cases no feedback.
With the Android Marketplace, the worst that could happen is a few crap apps start appearing, however, due to the community nature of the Marketplace, they will almost always be near the bottom in ratings, etc, I would much rather have a few crap applications at the bottom of some lists then for some puritan organization telling me how I can use my phone.
I think that the day that Android wins is whenever all carriers start offering Android phones. Right now, if you are in the USA and on AT&T the best application phone you can get is an iPhone, on T-Mobile the best you can get is a G1, and for Verizon, the best is a Blackberry. When the day comes that I can walk into an AT&T store and find a phone running Android, walk into a Sprint store and find one running Android, walk into a Verizon store and find one running Android, that is the day that Android wins. Until then, you are out of luck on Android unless you have T-Mobile or want to jump ship to a different carrier (Android jailbreaking/dev phone excluded)
They would never kill apps. Legacy programs is about the only reason people even run Windows anymore. If suddenly Windows didn't run pre-2006 programs, there would be absolutely no reason to upgrade Windows, no reason to ever buy Windows again, and many businesses would jump ship to OS X or Linux. I mean, if every Windows app could be run on Linux or OS X, who would be using Windows?
When I do day-to-day tasks on Linux, the only time I ever have to type in my password is when I am updating my software. On Windows I needed to use UAC for all kinds of daily things, some programs just *HAD* to be ran as admin, certain non-critical settings HAD to be clicked through a UAC prompt. Oh, and the fact that all UAC did was annoy me. The entire OS stopped until you clicked OK, the dialogue didn't even say why you had to be an admin nor did the program documentation, for most Linux programs a quick search in the man page would tell you why you need to be root, for Windows, nothing did.
The fact that UAC pops up out of nowhere, doesn't give you any intelligent advice on to if you should click it or not, and basically if you don't, the program just fails, just conditions people to click OK to everything, everything from day-to-day programs to the latest worm or malware.
Um, honestly that kinda makes sense. I don't want to be prompted for my password when I try to install everything, I instead want to be prompted for the first thing in a long list of dependencies. For example, without having a package manager (which OS X does not natively come with) it would be equivalent to me having to "sudo apt-get install firefox" "sudo apt-get install firefox-dependency-1" "sudo apt-get install firefox-dependency-2" "sudo apt-get install firefox-dependency-3" etc, and being prompted for my password every time. Sure, it is slightly less secure, but I would prefer secure in the fact that it is reasonably secure without being annoying, because, if the security is too annoying I can't do my work, if I can't do my work, why am I using a computer?
Yes, but I am the paranoid type that has to know EXACTLY where the hook echo is that they are talking about not that by worrying about it will I change anything but still.
Even though I have satellite, I am still very much affected by the DTV transition. For example, in my basement I have a traditional OTA TV that I rely on when there is stormy weather. Now, this wouldn't be a problem but A) I live in the midwest, where, in the spring and summer tornado warnings come out of nowhere and it is imperative I get watches/warnings along with radar so I can know if a tornado is about to strike. B) My satellite does not get great signal when it is storming outside.
So yes, even though I do not technically "need" a DTV converter box, I am seriously considering buying one for the news coverage during severe weather.
Well, first there is the fact that the average consumer just isn't going to be playing any kind of Hi-Def videos. With wimpy SSDs, no Blu Ray (or CDs/DVDs for that matter), that would mean that the person would have to be downloading videos. Which, streaming through Netflix is an option if it is a Windows laptop, but if it is Linux, thats not even a possibility. With very few video downloading services that offer downloads in full 1080p for any reasonable price, we can assume these people are torrenting videos, and if they are torrenting it, they are obviously rather informed, if they are informed, then why do they need the sales guy in the first place?
I think grades as a whole are not a measure of success. For one, when I got bad grades in high school, it wasn't really that I wasn't trying, it was that I didn't click with my teacher. Some teachers I just understood, they could explain something once and I could ace every test on it, for others they could explain something for an entire semester and I still would not fully understand it. This happened most often in math, something I am admittedly not great at to this day (coding comes easy-ish to me, but for algebra.... not so much). Some years when I had great math teachers I would have straight As, other years when I had math teachers who couldn't teach worth a crap, I ended up with Ds. Now, I was not the only one, there were several tests in which over half my class failed, not because we didn't try but the teacher simply could not teach. The worst part about math was, when I figured out a different way to do something, I was punished because I didn't do it "The right way". In the real world though, the work doesn't matter, just the answers. This is something that I don't think that a lot of teachers have realized, if I can write a web browser in Python that is as good/fast as one in C, it doesn't matter that I used an "uglier" programming method of doing it. Just as long as it works.
This doesn't work for one main reason. ARM just isn't marketable. No one when looking at specs is going to go for the laptop with 1 gig of RAM and a 600 Mhz ARM CPU compared to one with a gig of RAM and a 1.6 Ghz Intel CPU. Sure, the megahertz myth is busted, but for the average consumer, the more Ghz, the more appealing the choice.
This is equivalent though to the highway patrol saying NO! You can't drive a Toyota on this road! Because Toyotas are less safe then Ford cars! All the while giving no answer to facts.
It would be one thing if it was an idiot on a blog, but when the idiot in this case is a state government and the blog is a taxpayer funded website.... Things start to get interesting.
Um, any decision Linus makes on the Kernel doesn't really affect speed or make the entire OS feel full of cruft. If Canonical decides to totally screw up something, I can apt-get remove it and reinstall a different version with no problem. Ok, sure if you disagree with EVERYTHING Canonical does apt-get remove might not work for you, but thats why there are 100s other distros. But for almost anything Canonical can screw up, a fix is just about 3 commands away, whereas when MS screws up it takes hours to remove.
The problem with most of Microsoft's research is, it ends up (usually poorly) imitating a competitor that is obvious in the eyes of a consumer. Someone looks at the Zune and can immediately compare it to the iPod, Live Search to Google, MSN to AIM (or IRC, etc), and the XBox to the PS2. The flaws in all of these products were A) A late deployment (minus the case of MSN), B) No real way to make money on it (the Xbox devision only recently turned a profit), C) In-Your-Face marketing, just compare the commercials for "I'm a PC..." to Apple's recent commercials, Apple's were cleaner, simpler and got the point across, Microsoft's commercials basically stated "Hey, we are still a monopoly!", D) Bundling. Having Windows Messenger (on XP, it was the precursor to MSN messenger) pop up every single time I started Windows didn't exactly persuade me to get MSN anytime soon, neither does the fact that Windows is required for a Zune and all the other MS DRM is Windows only basically alienates me as a Linux (and sometimes OS X) user from spending money on Microsoft hardware.
I'm sure we would all be singing a different tune if MS had launched the Zune back in 2000, or if Live/MSN search had the clean, easy to use, and optimized search engine before Google, but MS didn't launch them so to most customers they look about as appealing as buying a Wal-Mart branded MP3 player when a name-brand iPod costs only a few bucks more. Sure, some will buy them, but they will see them as the "off-brand" something that I don't think MS quite realizes. The MS brand means nothing to consumers, the days where it was considered name-brand are long gone.
The point would be, Moonlight is the only way to get Sliverlight on Linux. Moonlight doesn't support some features that Silverlight has. The government website requires Silverlight. This Siliverlight presumably uses features not supported by Moonlight. The lack of support of Moonlight means that many, many computers can no longer access this governmental site to place bids. The taxpayers are not happy.
But, you can just close the browser or type "killall firefox" and the program dies and you have to go to the URL again to get to it. So, though this is bad for other reasons, yours just isn't one of them.
I want them to mail me an ATM card with an embedded smartcard chip, along with a cheap USB smartcard reader.
Thats just fine, but they most likely won't release drivers for it for anything other than Windows and perhaps OS X, so any BSD, Linux, or other alternate OS user gets left out.
Secondly, it would be trivial for an attacker to put in compromised drivers in the system that reads out all the secure info and forwards it to his website where he can duplicate all the secure keys and such.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that most people just care about if a game is fun or not. For example, I don't care if I can count the hairs in Solid Snake's beard or not, so long as the game is fun. Sure, I'd rather the graphics not look like crap, but all the 3 major consoles (Wii, PS3 and 360) have decent enough graphics.
This is why the Wii is dominating, it is focusing more on what makes games fun rather then proclaiming that they can put 34234234234234 scaling and rotating polygons on the screen all rendering withing.005 MS.
Graphics != A good game. Sure, I'd rather have a game with good graphics then not, but really, if the same game was on the Wii, PS3, and 360 I'd pick the one that had the most content and best controls rather then the best graphics.
A) There is no reputation problem (not that much first-party crapware like the GameCube era, and no hardware issues like the Xbox)
B) Nintendo makes money on the consoles (so, even with someone buying it exclusively to play the glorified tech-demo that is Wii Sports, Nintendo still gets a profit) br>
C) First. Party. Games. This is why, even during Nintendo's lean times, people had to have a Nintendo console. Games that will never, ever, be released on other platforms. You won't see Zelda on the 360, nor Mario on the PS3. On the other hand, you don't have a "real" guarantee that the PS3 you bought just to play *some third party "exclusive" game* won't be released on the Wii or 360 a year down the road.
D) Value. Sure, the 360 is cheap, but when you add in everything needed to make it as useful as a Wii or 360, (wireless, storage, etc) it comes to be about the same amount of money.
Sure, the Wii has a lot of crapware on it (as any system targeted towards casual gamers would) but it isn't a bad system at all.
touting Microsoft skills as just the ticket to economic recovery.
What Microsoft skills are the ticket to economic recovery? The abuse of copyright laws to your own benefit? Buying all other competitors to "innovate"? Cloning everything you can't buy (Such as the iPod with the Zune and PlayStation with the Xbox)? Abusing the patent system to sue potential competitors? Getting every government so heavily locked in to your products that you can ignore both national and international regulatory bodies when they convict you of having a monopoly?
No, I would say it is things like what Microsoft is doing that is keeping us from getting out of this economic mess and they are partially to blame from getting us in it.
Because the number of phones that can receive emails is roughly the same as the number of phones that can receive MMS,
Errr... No. While a lot of phones can use e-mail, few can use push e-mail like the iPhone and BlackBerry. In fact, taking out the iPhone, BlackBerry and some other smartphones (Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian), the list is very short. Compare that to where every phone made in the last ~5 years can get MMS messages, from low-end freebies to the latest in technology (obviously excluding the iPhone).
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...And how many people download applications for the RAZOR? Very few, how many people download applications for the iPhone and Android? Almost everyone. Not to mention that people download applications for BlackBerry and Symbian phones too. All Motorola has is a shiny piece of hardware that was popular. Thats it, they don't really control the software. On the other hand, Android has far reaching effects where it could be that ~25% of all phones could have Andorid on it, and if in that ~25% of phones, there is one as popular as the RAZR was, that is almost a monopoly for Android phones.
Oh please, take a look at the iPhone app store and tell me how great the quality of software is. There are several *paid* apps that crash all the time, not to mention that at most there are 4 different hardware revisions each with approximately the same basic specs (accelerometer, touch screen, etc) so there are no excuses. All the while interesting, useful stuff gets filtered by our overlords, err... the app store approvers because it might be slightly competitive to Apple (why? when you bought the phone should Apple care whether or not you use Safari or Opera Mini to browse the web???) or "obscene", or in the worst cases no feedback.
With the Android Marketplace, the worst that could happen is a few crap apps start appearing, however, due to the community nature of the Marketplace, they will almost always be near the bottom in ratings, etc, I would much rather have a few crap applications at the bottom of some lists then for some puritan organization telling me how I can use my phone.
I think that the day that Android wins is whenever all carriers start offering Android phones. Right now, if you are in the USA and on AT&T the best application phone you can get is an iPhone, on T-Mobile the best you can get is a G1, and for Verizon, the best is a Blackberry. When the day comes that I can walk into an AT&T store and find a phone running Android, walk into a Sprint store and find one running Android, walk into a Verizon store and find one running Android, that is the day that Android wins. Until then, you are out of luck on Android unless you have T-Mobile or want to jump ship to a different carrier (Android jailbreaking/dev phone excluded)
They would never kill apps. Legacy programs is about the only reason people even run Windows anymore. If suddenly Windows didn't run pre-2006 programs, there would be absolutely no reason to upgrade Windows, no reason to ever buy Windows again, and many businesses would jump ship to OS X or Linux. I mean, if every Windows app could be run on Linux or OS X, who would be using Windows?
When I do day-to-day tasks on Linux, the only time I ever have to type in my password is when I am updating my software. On Windows I needed to use UAC for all kinds of daily things, some programs just *HAD* to be ran as admin, certain non-critical settings HAD to be clicked through a UAC prompt. Oh, and the fact that all UAC did was annoy me. The entire OS stopped until you clicked OK, the dialogue didn't even say why you had to be an admin nor did the program documentation, for most Linux programs a quick search in the man page would tell you why you need to be root, for Windows, nothing did.
The fact that UAC pops up out of nowhere, doesn't give you any intelligent advice on to if you should click it or not, and basically if you don't, the program just fails, just conditions people to click OK to everything, everything from day-to-day programs to the latest worm or malware.
Birthdays, and Christmas. The two days where parents will ask the kids what they want and they will (usually) get it.
Um, honestly that kinda makes sense. I don't want to be prompted for my password when I try to install everything, I instead want to be prompted for the first thing in a long list of dependencies. For example, without having a package manager (which OS X does not natively come with) it would be equivalent to me having to "sudo apt-get install firefox" "sudo apt-get install firefox-dependency-1" "sudo apt-get install firefox-dependency-2" "sudo apt-get install firefox-dependency-3" etc, and being prompted for my password every time. Sure, it is slightly less secure, but I would prefer secure in the fact that it is reasonably secure without being annoying, because, if the security is too annoying I can't do my work, if I can't do my work, why am I using a computer?
Yes, but I am the paranoid type that has to know EXACTLY where the hook echo is that they are talking about not that by worrying about it will I change anything but still.
Even though I have satellite, I am still very much affected by the DTV transition. For example, in my basement I have a traditional OTA TV that I rely on when there is stormy weather. Now, this wouldn't be a problem but A) I live in the midwest, where, in the spring and summer tornado warnings come out of nowhere and it is imperative I get watches/warnings along with radar so I can know if a tornado is about to strike. B) My satellite does not get great signal when it is storming outside.
So yes, even though I do not technically "need" a DTV converter box, I am seriously considering buying one for the news coverage during severe weather.
Well, first there is the fact that the average consumer just isn't going to be playing any kind of Hi-Def videos. With wimpy SSDs, no Blu Ray (or CDs/DVDs for that matter), that would mean that the person would have to be downloading videos. Which, streaming through Netflix is an option if it is a Windows laptop, but if it is Linux, thats not even a possibility. With very few video downloading services that offer downloads in full 1080p for any reasonable price, we can assume these people are torrenting videos, and if they are torrenting it, they are obviously rather informed, if they are informed, then why do they need the sales guy in the first place?
Hey, I thought Matsuda shot you and your shinigami friend killed you, but no, you come back from the anime grave to haunt us on /.!
I think grades as a whole are not a measure of success. For one, when I got bad grades in high school, it wasn't really that I wasn't trying, it was that I didn't click with my teacher. Some teachers I just understood, they could explain something once and I could ace every test on it, for others they could explain something for an entire semester and I still would not fully understand it. This happened most often in math, something I am admittedly not great at to this day (coding comes easy-ish to me, but for algebra.... not so much). Some years when I had great math teachers I would have straight As, other years when I had math teachers who couldn't teach worth a crap, I ended up with Ds. Now, I was not the only one, there were several tests in which over half my class failed, not because we didn't try but the teacher simply could not teach. The worst part about math was, when I figured out a different way to do something, I was punished because I didn't do it "The right way". In the real world though, the work doesn't matter, just the answers. This is something that I don't think that a lot of teachers have realized, if I can write a web browser in Python that is as good/fast as one in C, it doesn't matter that I used an "uglier" programming method of doing it. Just as long as it works.
This doesn't work for one main reason. ARM just isn't marketable. No one when looking at specs is going to go for the laptop with 1 gig of RAM and a 600 Mhz ARM CPU compared to one with a gig of RAM and a 1.6 Ghz Intel CPU. Sure, the megahertz myth is busted, but for the average consumer, the more Ghz, the more appealing the choice.
This is equivalent though to the highway patrol saying NO! You can't drive a Toyota on this road! Because Toyotas are less safe then Ford cars! All the while giving no answer to facts.
It would be one thing if it was an idiot on a blog, but when the idiot in this case is a state government and the blog is a taxpayer funded website.... Things start to get interesting.
Um, any decision Linus makes on the Kernel doesn't really affect speed or make the entire OS feel full of cruft. If Canonical decides to totally screw up something, I can apt-get remove it and reinstall a different version with no problem. Ok, sure if you disagree with EVERYTHING Canonical does apt-get remove might not work for you, but thats why there are 100s other distros. But for almost anything Canonical can screw up, a fix is just about 3 commands away, whereas when MS screws up it takes hours to remove.
The problem with most of Microsoft's research is, it ends up (usually poorly) imitating a competitor that is obvious in the eyes of a consumer. Someone looks at the Zune and can immediately compare it to the iPod, Live Search to Google, MSN to AIM (or IRC, etc), and the XBox to the PS2. The flaws in all of these products were A) A late deployment (minus the case of MSN), B) No real way to make money on it (the Xbox devision only recently turned a profit), C) In-Your-Face marketing, just compare the commercials for "I'm a PC..." to Apple's recent commercials, Apple's were cleaner, simpler and got the point across, Microsoft's commercials basically stated "Hey, we are still a monopoly!", D) Bundling. Having Windows Messenger (on XP, it was the precursor to MSN messenger) pop up every single time I started Windows didn't exactly persuade me to get MSN anytime soon, neither does the fact that Windows is required for a Zune and all the other MS DRM is Windows only basically alienates me as a Linux (and sometimes OS X) user from spending money on Microsoft hardware.
I'm sure we would all be singing a different tune if MS had launched the Zune back in 2000, or if Live/MSN search had the clean, easy to use, and optimized search engine before Google, but MS didn't launch them so to most customers they look about as appealing as buying a Wal-Mart branded MP3 player when a name-brand iPod costs only a few bucks more. Sure, some will buy them, but they will see them as the "off-brand" something that I don't think MS quite realizes. The MS brand means nothing to consumers, the days where it was considered name-brand are long gone.
The point would be, Moonlight is the only way to get Sliverlight on Linux. Moonlight doesn't support some features that Silverlight has. The government website requires Silverlight. This Siliverlight presumably uses features not supported by Moonlight. The lack of support of Moonlight means that many, many computers can no longer access this governmental site to place bids. The taxpayers are not happy.
But, you can just close the browser or type "killall firefox" and the program dies and you have to go to the URL again to get to it. So, though this is bad for other reasons, yours just isn't one of them.
Yes, until someone using an old browser attempts to use the site...
I want them to mail me an ATM card with an embedded smartcard chip, along with a cheap USB smartcard reader.
Thats just fine, but they most likely won't release drivers for it for anything other than Windows and perhaps OS X, so any BSD, Linux, or other alternate OS user gets left out.
Secondly, it would be trivial for an attacker to put in compromised drivers in the system that reads out all the secure info and forwards it to his website where he can duplicate all the secure keys and such.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that most people just care about if a game is fun or not. For example, I don't care if I can count the hairs in Solid Snake's beard or not, so long as the game is fun. Sure, I'd rather the graphics not look like crap, but all the 3 major consoles (Wii, PS3 and 360) have decent enough graphics.
.005 MS.
This is why the Wii is dominating, it is focusing more on what makes games fun rather then proclaiming that they can put 34234234234234 scaling and rotating polygons on the screen all rendering withing
Graphics != A good game. Sure, I'd rather have a game with good graphics then not, but really, if the same game was on the Wii, PS3, and 360 I'd pick the one that had the most content and best controls rather then the best graphics.
Sure, but Nintendo still is winning.
A) There is no reputation problem (not that much first-party crapware like the GameCube era, and no hardware issues like the Xbox)
B) Nintendo makes money on the consoles (so, even with someone buying it exclusively to play the glorified tech-demo that is Wii Sports, Nintendo still gets a profit)
br> C) First. Party. Games. This is why, even during Nintendo's lean times, people had to have a Nintendo console. Games that will never, ever, be released on other platforms. You won't see Zelda on the 360, nor Mario on the PS3. On the other hand, you don't have a "real" guarantee that the PS3 you bought just to play *some third party "exclusive" game* won't be released on the Wii or 360 a year down the road.
D) Value. Sure, the 360 is cheap, but when you add in everything needed to make it as useful as a Wii or 360, (wireless, storage, etc) it comes to be about the same amount of money.
Sure, the Wii has a lot of crapware on it (as any system targeted towards casual gamers would) but it isn't a bad system at all.
touting Microsoft skills as just the ticket to economic recovery.
What Microsoft skills are the ticket to economic recovery? The abuse of copyright laws to your own benefit? Buying all other competitors to "innovate"? Cloning everything you can't buy (Such as the iPod with the Zune and PlayStation with the Xbox)? Abusing the patent system to sue potential competitors? Getting every government so heavily locked in to your products that you can ignore both national and international regulatory bodies when they convict you of having a monopoly?
No, I would say it is things like what Microsoft is doing that is keeping us from getting out of this economic mess and they are partially to blame from getting us in it.
Well, even though its not entirely about them "Steal this Film" is rather close to what you are suggesting.
Because the number of phones that can receive emails is roughly the same as the number of phones that can receive MMS,
Errr... No. While a lot of phones can use e-mail, few can use push e-mail like the iPhone and BlackBerry. In fact, taking out the iPhone, BlackBerry and some other smartphones (Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian), the list is very short. Compare that to where every phone made in the last ~5 years can get MMS messages, from low-end freebies to the latest in technology (obviously excluding the iPhone).