You have no idea if what you're saying it true or not.
Why aren't we allowed to know this? Could it be that MS is hiding something? Is it unreasonable to expect this from a company whose primary strategy is monopolism?
Is it inconceivable that a computer is a career/life necessity for some people? Are you seriously suggesting that someone not buy any computers because they don't want any of the ~99% that come with OS X or Windows?
MS's OS bundling is abuse of monopoly. Enlightened governments tend not to allow that.
The point is that like a lot of things in life you save money for the bundle and if you don't like it don't fucking buy it!
Impossible. There is no consumer choice. Windows is still on >85% of all PCs sold (the rest of which are Macs with their obnoxious requisite markup) and I'll be damned if less than 95% of those came without a single piece of crapware.
Consumers shouldn't have to be forced to support Microsoft if they want a computer - and in fact, most people need a computer. And many of them have specific hardware requirements which those smaller Linux vendors can't always provide. So what are they supposed to do?? Why should they be forced to support those monopolist shitbags just to make a living?
The French court did the right thing here and I wish the EU would drop the sanity hammer and force OEMs to offer all computers with an option for no operating system at a full OEM license discount for said OS. What reason is there not to? Can MS not compete on the technical merit of the software they write? Otherwise MS can just gouge away and continue to rely on sucking more money from OEMs/bundlers, basically getting by with nothing but all those shady backroom deals that they make...
I for one, am excited to see what changes are coming in the future. TDF has been in existence for only about a year and a half now. Here's a list of things it's not gonna achive in that short of a time:
1. It will not magically implement all the functionality that's been in MSOffice for over a decade. 2. It will not integrate with LO $REQUISITE_MS_PROTOCOL (and it's not like it's even possible because they're all proprietary anyways) 3. It will not instantly purge LO of all Java dependencies for which replacements are in development 4. It will not be able to make it run in under 10MB 5. It will not have a brand new shiny interface which can resurrect a living unicorn.
So seriously, quit bitching. Having a large, active community is a good thing and should hopefully signal that there's a lot of good stuff to look forward in the future. No, it's not gonna be here today or tomorrow. Like I tell my kids: learn to be patient. Please.
And before you try, realize this: nobody's entitled to a billion dollar industry no matter how many politicians you bribe nor how many lawyers you buy to justify your existence. Deal with it Hollywood - adapt or die. That's how business works.
On the other hand, if they just kept the same version, you'd have something like Linux where all the changes between 2.6.0 and 2.6.40 were incremental enough not to merit a major version change, yet the differences between versions 2.4 and 2.6 were completely dwarfed by the differences between 2.6.0 and 2.6.40.
I'm not a software engineer, but from what I've noticed, it seems that once a product becomes mature enough (ie. once it does pretty much everything you expect), the version numbers become less significant as at that point as each revision is mostly just changing things under the hood, tweaking performance/security/stability/etc.
Since 3.6, Firefox has come way down in terms of memory usage, they've implemented a new Javascript engine and a plugin container, they've added all sorts of tools for tracking memory leaks, and HTML5 support. JS speed has gotten damn close to that of Chrome. Yes, these are not user-noticeable things. That does not mean they are not important. Yes, they're copying a lot from Chrome, but they're copying the good things (features) and leaving the bad ones (lack of privacy) out.
I thought it was as stupid as anyone else when they first adopted the release strategy, but now I realize that it makes a lot of sense. The browser is plenty stable. New features are being getting added much more rapidly. I was totally wrong back when they adopted this strategy. Honestly, I'm starting to find that I'm really glad that they made it. And the new ETS version is a great step in the right direction. At this point, it looks to me like people hate on Firefox just cause it's trendy, not because it's technically inferior. Still the best browser IMO.
You do realize you don't have to put in lots of information, don't you? There's very, very, very little that Facebook actually requires you to enter.
Your facebook friends will happily take care of that for you. If you don't put up your phone number or address, they'll do it for you. If you don't put up pictures of yourself, they'll do that for you too. Then the company you work for will put up all your work demographics up there for them. And all those personal messages they send which should be going over email instead? Well that's just gold for advertisers/other data miners.
Which turned Facebook into an incredibly useful communications tool for me. YMMV. I have regular conversations with a cousin who I hadn't seen in years because we lived on opposite sides of the world (literally) and I didn't know her e-mail address. Friends change e-mails? I don't have to know - they stay in the same place on Facebook.
Well there's a price to pay for that convenience. My social life has suffered a little bit since I deleted my profile (many of my friends kindly inform me of how hard it is to contact me, even though I see some of them every day at work), but on the other hand, it's also helped me get a lot closer to my friends that aren't using it. Some are willing to pay that price, but many (a large demographic of whom are on/.) are not.
No, it's a social networking platform that sees a lucrative side business in gaming. Don't like it? Don't play the games. You don't have to, you know.
Have you ever seen the South Park episode about Facebook? That's exactly what happens. Honestly, it's much easier to entirely avoid the awkwardness caused by Facebook not having an account in the first place, rather than having to deal with all your relatives making you feel guilty for not watering their bunnies.
And I can't imagine why you're getting a whole load of spam. I have never gotten spam from Facebook. Not once. I have received e-mails that I signed up for, until I decided, ehh, not interested, and changed my prefs. Result=nothing. As in no more e-mails. Easy.
Here's a scenario that would happen to me all the time: someone with >2000 friends would invite me to an event which I would never dream of going to. Then they would send messages to everyone associated with the event (even those who rejected it!) and because I didn't reject them, they went to my box too.... No, you have to explicitly remove yourself from it and it took me months to find this option. And even when you do that, if this friend is a real jerk, he'll just add everyone again. In any case, I stop checking my inbox. And then people send you messages and wonder why you don't respond.
I remember scouring the options for one where I could block messages from events. There was no such thing. Maybe it's come up in the past few years, but too late for me.
Well, yes. What's the alternative? Either you are refusing to admit that something that's not useful to you might possibly be useful to someone else, or you're just being smug and - you said it yourself - condescending because you're too cool to use Facebook, in which case you're just being an immature jerk. Or you don't get it. Which is it?
To me there is no choice - I will never go back to Facebook. The amount of information you have to give for benefits that we can certainly learn to live without makes it a no-brainer. But to each, his own. In my opinion, if someone knows that what Facebook's doing is wrong but still uses it anyways because it's easy, then that person is just a quitter who has no problem compromising on his values. If you don't see anything wrong with it, then carry on... but please respect our decisions to stay as far away as possible.
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
Aww, come on now y'all. Without all the targeted ads you could be receiving, how are you going to decide what to buy? Even more importantly, how are others going to decide what you're going to buy?
2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.
Hey, I've learned alot through fb about how 12-year-olds communicate. I mean, the youth is the future, right? Gotta jump on the train when it leaves!
3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place. Starting their own credit system was basically a coup against Zynga which was valued in the billions initially because of revenue, most of which was illicitly gained through dirty tactics like premium charges on cell phones and other such instances of fraud. One of my younger relatives got hit with a $300 cell phone bill one month and honestly did not know the consequences of wanting some shiny that Zynga was offering.
Well the good thing is we won't have to worry, pretty much everything is moving to facebook, so soon the whole internet will be in one place and make it all much easier. See? We're doing you guys a big favor!
Again, who wrote "a few scripts"? Do you expect everybody who wants to use back to have to learn how to write a shell script?
Look - nobody's arguing that everyone who owns a mobile is going to set up their own backup service using ftp/cron/etc. The only argument that was made is that the technology is nothing special. What Apple has done is set all of that up automatically for the user - but as mentioned above, it's no great technological achievement. From a marketing perspective, great - Apple has done it again. From a technological perspective, it's something that has been around for half the age of computers.
I think this is a bit hyperbolic. First of all, if Apple does any R&D, I'm fully unaware of it. Even Microsoft research has produced some useful work (untrustworthy as they are) and some interesting technologies, and that's not even getting close to some of the stuff that Google's working on. If Apple diverted half of the millions they spend on lawyers towards R&D, they would easily have several times the amount any of the competitors in their field has. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apples-r-d-spending-hits-bottom-as-percentage-of-revenue/60872
And second, a company does not need to make $50 billion to provide substance. Samsung, Motorola, HTC have made some outstanding pieces of hardware - example: nothing I've seen comes close to beating Samsung's sAMOLED+ screen. Another example: Apple was far late to the game in providing dual-core processors in their phones. One could even say that their excessive development time holds them back, and I don't care what the sales figures are, but if the only innovation you can produce in all the time it took to create the 4S is a program that sends your voice to an AI from a company they bought out, I have to say that all that money in their coffers may as well not exist.
Case in point: Verizon reported that iPhones accounted for 55% of their smartphone sales last quarter. That's against how many different models of Android phone?
And the reason for this is the same reason why Android made it into the market. I bet you 80% of those Iphone purchases were from people who wanted an Iphone but decided not to get one because Apple wanted to lock them into AT&T. And thus, Android was born.
There are only 3 models of iOS phones currently being sold. You can't expect one of the tens-hundreds of Android phones to outsell anything on a platform of only 3 models.
And the reason for this is that Android users have Choice - this is a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.
I'm sick of hearing this idiotic philosophy. The market does not correct itself. If 1% of your faith in 'the market' were of any merit, then people would have been leaving Facebook in droves due to all the privacy gaffes they've had. Let's face it - people are stupid, nobody cares about their own privacy, and living by some stupid appeal to the majority will only make that the de facto standard.
Why is this a problem? Because if everyone uses Facebook/G+/whatever, then everybody else has to start abiding by their idiotic terms, because eventually, all the employers/social groups/universities/etc. start using these abusive services too and make it so that you have no choice. Some groups choose to conduct all their business on Facebook - to me, they might as well not exist as nothing will ever make me sign up for that piece of shit. So don't talk about letting the market correct itself - the market is pretty much always wrong, and it has terrible consequences.
At Stanford, he was a research professor and a Google employee at least half-time.
That would probably make him an Adjunct Professor, ie. one who is not always given a course to teach and usually has an outside job, or a day job if you will.
In any case, here is a more comprehensive list of possible professorships - actually quite an interesting read.
Their business model is a success and from someone who thoroughly researches everything s/he buys (from electronics to socks), I have to say that I don't understand what the point of their markup is.
However, I was referring to their legal model as a failure, which thankfully, will keep their business model in check.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno, do mobile network providers (in the US) have to obey the same net neutrality regulations that terrestrial ISPs do? No no.
The good thing about personal computers is that they were airborn before the lawyers and MBAs could catch it. Mobile phones were not quite as lucky...
You have no idea if what you're saying it true or not.
Why aren't we allowed to know this? Could it be that MS is hiding something? Is it unreasonable to expect this from a company whose primary strategy is monopolism?
Is it inconceivable that a computer is a career/life necessity for some people? Are you seriously suggesting that someone not buy any computers because they don't want any of the ~99% that come with OS X or Windows?
MS's OS bundling is abuse of monopoly. Enlightened governments tend not to allow that.
The point is that like a lot of things in life you save money for the bundle and if you don't like it don't fucking buy it!
Impossible. There is no consumer choice. Windows is still on >85% of all PCs sold (the rest of which are Macs with their obnoxious requisite markup) and I'll be damned if less than 95% of those came without a single piece of crapware.
Consumers shouldn't have to be forced to support Microsoft if they want a computer - and in fact, most people need a computer. And many of them have specific hardware requirements which those smaller Linux vendors can't always provide. So what are they supposed to do?? Why should they be forced to support those monopolist shitbags just to make a living?
The French court did the right thing here and I wish the EU would drop the sanity hammer and force OEMs to offer all computers with an option for no operating system at a full OEM license discount for said OS. What reason is there not to? Can MS not compete on the technical merit of the software they write? Otherwise MS can just gouge away and continue to rely on sucking more money from OEMs/bundlers, basically getting by with nothing but all those shady backroom deals that they make...
I for one, am excited to see what changes are coming in the future. TDF has been in existence for only about a year and a half now. Here's a list of things it's not gonna achive in that short of a time:
1. It will not magically implement all the functionality that's been in MSOffice for over a decade.
2. It will not integrate with LO $REQUISITE_MS_PROTOCOL (and it's not like it's even possible because they're all proprietary anyways)
3. It will not instantly purge LO of all Java dependencies for which replacements are in development
4. It will not be able to make it run in under 10MB
5. It will not have a brand new shiny interface which can resurrect a living unicorn.
So seriously, quit bitching. Having a large, active community is a good thing and should hopefully signal that there's a lot of good stuff to look forward in the future. No, it's not gonna be here today or tomorrow. Like I tell my kids: learn to be patient. Please.
Did you even RTFA? Here, I'll do it for you:
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/insertcoin/files/2012/02/movie-steam.jpg
Explain what's wrong with this.
And before you try, realize this: nobody's entitled to a billion dollar industry no matter how many politicians you bribe nor how many lawyers you buy to justify your existence. Deal with it Hollywood - adapt or die. That's how business works.
On the other hand, if they just kept the same version, you'd have something like Linux where all the changes between 2.6.0 and 2.6.40 were incremental enough not to merit a major version change, yet the differences between versions 2.4 and 2.6 were completely dwarfed by the differences between 2.6.0 and 2.6.40.
I'm not a software engineer, but from what I've noticed, it seems that once a product becomes mature enough (ie. once it does pretty much everything you expect), the version numbers become less significant as at that point as each revision is mostly just changing things under the hood, tweaking performance/security/stability/etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Version_3.6.
Since 3.6, Firefox has come way down in terms of memory usage, they've implemented a new Javascript engine and a plugin container, they've added all sorts of tools for tracking memory leaks, and HTML5 support. JS speed has gotten damn close to that of Chrome. Yes, these are not user-noticeable things. That does not mean they are not important. Yes, they're copying a lot from Chrome, but they're copying the good things (features) and leaving the bad ones (lack of privacy) out.
I thought it was as stupid as anyone else when they first adopted the release strategy, but now I realize that it makes a lot of sense. The browser is plenty stable. New features are being getting added much more rapidly. I was totally wrong back when they adopted this strategy. Honestly, I'm starting to find that I'm really glad that they made it. And the new ETS version is a great step in the right direction. At this point, it looks to me like people hate on Firefox just cause it's trendy, not because it's technically inferior. Still the best browser IMO.
Obviously from Windows. I mean, they went from 3.1 to 95! No idea how they pulled that one off.
Enough of this praise for Firefox, that was sooo 14 versions ago
Like anyone would care.
You do realize you don't have to put in lots of information, don't you? There's very, very, very little that Facebook actually requires you to enter.
Your facebook friends will happily take care of that for you. If you don't put up your phone number or address, they'll do it for you. If you don't put up pictures of yourself, they'll do that for you too. Then the company you work for will put up all your work demographics up there for them. And all those personal messages they send which should be going over email instead? Well that's just gold for advertisers/other data miners.
Which turned Facebook into an incredibly useful communications tool for me. YMMV. I have regular conversations with a cousin who I hadn't seen in years because we lived on opposite sides of the world (literally) and I didn't know her e-mail address. Friends change e-mails? I don't have to know - they stay in the same place on Facebook.
Well there's a price to pay for that convenience. My social life has suffered a little bit since I deleted my profile (many of my friends kindly inform me of how hard it is to contact me, even though I see some of them every day at work), but on the other hand, it's also helped me get a lot closer to my friends that aren't using it. Some are willing to pay that price, but many (a large demographic of whom are on /.) are not.
No, it's a social networking platform that sees a lucrative side business in gaming. Don't like it? Don't play the games. You don't have to, you know.
Have you ever seen the South Park episode about Facebook? That's exactly what happens. Honestly, it's much easier to entirely avoid the awkwardness caused by Facebook not having an account in the first place, rather than having to deal with all your relatives making you feel guilty for not watering their bunnies.
And I can't imagine why you're getting a whole load of spam. I have never gotten spam from Facebook. Not once. I have received e-mails that I signed up for, until I decided, ehh, not interested, and changed my prefs. Result=nothing. As in no more e-mails. Easy.
Here's a scenario that would happen to me all the time: someone with >2000 friends would invite me to an event which I would never dream of going to. Then they would send messages to everyone associated with the event (even those who rejected it!) and because I didn't reject them, they went to my box too.... No, you have to explicitly remove yourself from it and it took me months to find this option. And even when you do that, if this friend is a real jerk, he'll just add everyone again. In any case, I stop checking my inbox. And then people send you messages and wonder why you don't respond.
I remember scouring the options for one where I could block messages from events. There was no such thing. Maybe it's come up in the past few years, but too late for me.
Well, yes. What's the alternative? Either you are refusing to admit that something that's not useful to you might possibly be useful to someone else, or you're just being smug and - you said it yourself - condescending because you're too cool to use Facebook, in which case you're just being an immature jerk. Or you don't get it. Which is it?
To me there is no choice - I will never go back to Facebook. The amount of information you have to give for benefits that we can certainly learn to live without makes it a no-brainer. But to each, his own. In my opinion, if someone knows that what Facebook's doing is wrong but still uses it anyways because it's easy, then that person is just a quitter who has no problem compromising on his values. If you don't see anything wrong with it, then carry on... but please respect our decisions to stay as far away as possible.
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
Aww, come on now y'all. Without all the targeted ads you could be receiving, how are you going to decide what to buy? Even more importantly, how are others going to decide what you're going to buy?
2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.
Hey, I've learned alot through fb about how 12-year-olds communicate. I mean, the youth is the future, right? Gotta jump on the train when it leaves!
3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place. Starting their own credit system was basically a coup against Zynga which was valued in the billions initially because of revenue, most of which was illicitly gained through dirty tactics like premium charges on cell phones and other such instances of fraud. One of my younger relatives got hit with a $300 cell phone bill one month and honestly did not know the consequences of wanting some shiny that Zynga was offering.
Well the good thing is we won't have to worry, pretty much everything is moving to facebook, so soon the whole internet will be in one place and make it all much easier. See? We're doing you guys a big favor!
To be fair, you should think about who's going to water my farm before deciding which companies should and should not be allowed to fail.
Again, who wrote "a few scripts"? Do you expect everybody who wants to use back to have to learn how to write a shell script?
Look - nobody's arguing that everyone who owns a mobile is going to set up their own backup service using ftp/cron/etc. The only argument that was made is that the technology is nothing special. What Apple has done is set all of that up automatically for the user - but as mentioned above, it's no great technological achievement. From a marketing perspective, great - Apple has done it again. From a technological perspective, it's something that has been around for half the age of computers.
Non sequitur. Market share is not an indication of technological capability
Film and TV, Music ....
All of which are infinite supply products, which could end up being very bad for the US
Yes, but let's be fair - as an operating system, it has probably achieved more than Ubuntu ever will.
Don't forget your computer's hostname gets logged as well...
I think this is a bit hyperbolic. First of all, if Apple does any R&D, I'm fully unaware of it. Even Microsoft research has produced some useful work (untrustworthy as they are) and some interesting technologies, and that's not even getting close to some of the stuff that Google's working on. If Apple diverted half of the millions they spend on lawyers towards R&D, they would easily have several times the amount any of the competitors in their field has. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apples-r-d-spending-hits-bottom-as-percentage-of-revenue/60872
And second, a company does not need to make $50 billion to provide substance. Samsung, Motorola, HTC have made some outstanding pieces of hardware - example: nothing I've seen comes close to beating Samsung's sAMOLED+ screen. Another example: Apple was far late to the game in providing dual-core processors in their phones. One could even say that their excessive development time holds them back, and I don't care what the sales figures are, but if the only innovation you can produce in all the time it took to create the 4S is a program that sends your voice to an AI from a company they bought out, I have to say that all that money in their coffers may as well not exist.
Case in point: Verizon reported that iPhones accounted for 55% of their smartphone sales last quarter. That's against how many different models of Android phone?
And the reason for this is the same reason why Android made it into the market. I bet you 80% of those Iphone purchases were from people who wanted an Iphone but decided not to get one because Apple wanted to lock them into AT&T. And thus, Android was born.
There are only 3 models of iOS phones currently being sold. You can't expect one of the tens-hundreds of Android phones to outsell anything on a platform of only 3 models.
And the reason for this is that Android users have Choice - this is a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.
Just let the market correct itself.
No.
No.
No.
I'm sick of hearing this idiotic philosophy. The market does not correct itself. If 1% of your faith in 'the market' were of any merit, then people would have been leaving Facebook in droves due to all the privacy gaffes they've had. Let's face it - people are stupid, nobody cares about their own privacy, and living by some stupid appeal to the majority will only make that the de facto standard.
Why is this a problem? Because if everyone uses Facebook/G+/whatever, then everybody else has to start abiding by their idiotic terms, because eventually, all the employers/social groups/universities/etc. start using these abusive services too and make it so that you have no choice. Some groups choose to conduct all their business on Facebook - to me, they might as well not exist as nothing will ever make me sign up for that piece of shit. So don't talk about letting the market correct itself - the market is pretty much always wrong, and it has terrible consequences.
At Stanford, he was a research professor and a Google employee at least half-time.
That would probably make him an Adjunct Professor, ie. one who is not always given a course to teach and usually has an outside job, or a day job if you will.
In any case, here is a more comprehensive list of possible professorships - actually quite an interesting read.
Their business model is a success and from someone who thoroughly researches everything s/he buys (from electronics to socks), I have to say that I don't understand what the point of their markup is.
However, I was referring to their legal model as a failure, which thankfully, will keep their business model in check.