Ecosystems... there's the people who are looking for distributed computing (apps, clouds, integration, media, etc.) Then there's people who basically want a gadget that takes photos, does Facebook, and a few games.
Both types of customers seem to do well with Apple, so it is hard to say which is biggest. Apple has an ecosystem, but does it matter in the long run? The Apple Store is just too packed for me to believe they are all computing heads wanting to sync their calendars and note collections.
Android I daresay has a larger proportion of gadget customers. As well as those who care so much about computing they refuse to use Apple. But we kinda know they're in the minority. All those millions of activations aren't Jim preaching open source.
I think Xerox got it right again and the next generation is distributed computing. Whether tablets today are enough for that (or whether it needs much more stuff to go digital, paperless office, etc.) is whether ecosystems at this point matter. Basically, is the iPad a platform or a gadget for most buyers?
If the distributed computing wave hasn't actually started yet then Microsoft are not late. But they may lose anyway on a gadget basis.
But if distributed computing has arrived, then iOS may grow a lot more, and Android might sink into mere gadget status. But that's OK too because a lot of the world will be powered by people who just need phone and email and web to do business, like Africa. People who'll never own a PC of any description. Just like I never owned a mainframe or a mini.
I tend to feel that the third ecosystem will come from China or India. There's nothing different about Microsoft at this point, but another nation (and the Chinese see themselves not as a nation but a civilisation) would build their own.
They try to fill a niche where your smartphone isn't large enough for what you need, but your laptop isn't portable enough. There is almost none of that in a normal person's life.
I guess you use your laptop on the sofa, but my wife and I much prefer using an iPad on the sofa and at the kitchen table. Basically it is for ergonomics. People don't sit a book on their knees to read, they tend to hold a book up a foot or two away from their face, so you can have a "big view on a small screen". Laptops still usually need a desk, and even there people want stands for the laptop just to get the screen higher. Maybe your eyesight doesn't need that, maybe you're thin and can work leaning forward easily. But it isn't a very good posture. So no, it isn't just shiny fashion accessories. (This seems to confuse people about computers, whereas every other product people buy has extensive industrial design and advertising behind it). But you can't hold up a laptop like that because the keyboard gets in the way. So not having a keyboard is a feature for that situation, something the Surface seems to not get, but I guess they are just trying to look different. Most of the time you don't need the keyboard, especially if web browsing. But having something to type on when you need it is ok if it is basically usable. My typing on an iPad is rubbish, but I sacrifice that for the convenience of being able to run dozens of apps easily and conveniently, whilst on the sofa. And for email I will suffer a few typos on the iPad than bother to walk upstairs to the computer to do it there. And that's just around the home. Once you have enough reason to find it convenient at home, you can find other places where it is convenient. Like the old lady I met on the bus the other day who just got herself an iPad so she can sit in nice places on holiday and use it for sketching (she's an art teacher). The alternative there is what, a laptop with a keyboard and wacom tablet and pen? It just isn't the same.
Metro gets praised for showing MS can design, and I'd welcome good design. But they've messed it up, making the wrong compromises instead of the right ones. Tablets are not desktops ––when can I get a 30" screen for my tablet?
Tablets and phones are for those computing tasks that can be done on the go, and that only make sense done on the go; the stuff that does not make sense on a desktop. Your desktop can show your boarding card ––great that's pointless. Your phone can show your boarding card ––OK.
You wouldn't want to draw up your CAD plans on a tablet. But you might want an app that could fetch data from your CAD system and produce some reports that are useful to you on-site.
It just amazes me how MS tries to be unified yet ends up fighting itself. They took a tablet and instead of reinforcing the focus in people's minds that this is a DIFFERENT device for DIFFERENT scenarios, they try to make it look like a notebook, and they try to make the dekstop look like a tablet.
What a lot of people are calling "content creation" is really Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SPSS, AutoCAD, etc. which are all things that can be done well on a PC; it is a PC-centric concept. Desktop publishing and spreadsheets largely validated the PC.
Tablets are for places and work where a PC can't go. It is the "distributed" computing, where your work is as much receiving data as inputting data, all on the go in a wide variety of situations.
It is a new set of apps that didn't exist before because they made no sense on a desk-bound PC.
Tablets aren't about watching movies. They are about all the real-world work apps that were never written for PCs.
Walt Mossberg's review said the same. Me, I have a real keyboard for my iPad but I never use it, because the inconvenience of placing the tablet usually outweighs the advantage of easier typing.
They can keep the 1 billion PCs. But there will be 20 billion tablets.
The iPad is barely 2 or 3 years selling 100M, and lots of other players are eager to get in on this 30 year cycle, giving each man woman and child on the planet a tablet or three.
The iPad was iconic, and this helped establish it for consumers as a new category.
Microsoft Windows doesn't have that problem. You know Windows is a variety of stuff anyway, and are expecting to make a bunch of choices about how to work with it.
This is an area where perhaps the worst thing Microsoft could do is try to imitate Apple. It isn't how MS works really, and it isn't how MS users work.
Speaking as an Apple fanboi (of product design and focus), I don't see how MS can pretend its users are fanbois or try to turn them into that. Like Google, it'll have people tripping over themselves (Google trying to not be an advertising revenue driven bottom line. )
Windows 8 doesn't need to be simple or iconic. They have other ways of making you buy.
Mr Reese, I have a new number for you. This one is about to go buy a KFC. You have 15 mins to get there before he does and make sure he buys McDonalds.
OK Mr Finch, how do you suggest I persuade him? The M16 or the AK47?
Unintended consequences kinda invalidate the old ecological ideal that ecosystems are in "balance" (just like we used to think that Empires were a Natural Order). Perhaps may as well trend the notion that we can't predict the future –– yes it might change catastrophically, but it can't be predicted. Can try to predict, just not take any prediction seriously.
I gather there's some sport nutrition people saying that "the wall" is there because you're used to burning sugar, so the moment you run out... bang there's the wall. Things are different if you are used to burning fat. Your fat stores can keep you going for much longer, more evenly, and that's why we store energy as fat. But the problem is your body will burn sugar first if it is available in large quantities. So by eating carbs, it prevents you getting access to the fat. If you regularly depend on fat though, then the fat is more readily accessed.
There are just so many things that appear to make sense from a point of view, even if that point of view is wrong in some basic way. I don't know enough to judge, but if you're into endurance sports, check it out.
But if you add up how far you have to walk to burn off a croissant, a plate of pasta, and a pizza, there just aren't enough hours in a day. There are people who have run marathon after marathon and they still stay fat. As for adaption, that's an open question -- some people continue to seem to be lactose intolerant. Gains are also associated to some degree with things like colitis, arthritis, and there's a question now that dementia is a form of brain diabetes. So keep an open mind, these questions are not easy to answer. A few bitter berries gathered in the wild might be nowhere near the amount of sugar you can get from a modern apple. Wild apples are those little tart things. I mean you can blame the difference on not enough exercise, but it is not much different as argument to simply blaming too much sugar. Did our ancestors exercise more or did they just eat less sugar?
That is interesting, and I'll take it on board. Bear in mind also insulin is there to cope with the excess sugar, so as long as your body is healthy enough to cope, it isn't a problem. I mean, why is isuli there to bring the blood sugar levels down anyway? I used to eat lots of cake and sugar, not exercise, and stayed lean. But eventually, say around 40, the body may stop being able to cope. And the question then is, were the grains really a good idea if the body eventually can't cope with them anymore? In paleo terms, yes we might have adapted, but you're comparing a million years of meat eating to 10,000 of agriculture. Maybe your genes are adapted, maybe they aren't.
Do you also feel happier? That's been my experience. I cut out all carbs (except leeks and broccoli etc) and even though I eat buckets of fat, I lost weight, and remain lean, and have more energy, mental clarity, and have done so for a few years now. One thing people won't know is that the low carb high fat "community" already talks about the usual suspects like heart disease, exercise, ketosis, asian rice munchers, and the kinds of things that fat is supposed to be really unhealthy for. I'm not saying it is the way, but there are questions around how and why the whole low fat & exercise thing has basically failed, whilst we keep telling diabetics to eat healthy carbs in a quantity that our paleolithic ancestors would never have had access to.
The energy balance equation is true, but it omits the body's own controls that decide what to do with that energy. Eating carbs raises blood sugar which causes an insulin spike, and how does insulin get the sugar out of the blood? By telling the fat cells to open up and store it. It is like your body is set to continually charge the batteries, but never use the stored energy. This is a theory in the low carb high fat community, that the causality is the wrong way round. People don't get fat because they overeat, they overeat because they are getting fat (ie. the body is in store store store mode, so gimme more food (carbs) to store, keep eating, keep eating). And although fat is calories, fat doesn't trick the body that way, so eating fat doesn't store fat like that, or create cravings the way carbs do. There is precious little evidence that exercise causes weight loss long term. As I say, exercise to lose weight is part of received wisdom, but that's changing. (Although it is tricky to accept because we believe people are lazy and there should be negative consequences for sin (hunter gatherers didn't do that much work, but there you go)). For example, a South African professor of sport and nutrition who is well known and an avid marathon runner has now changed his mind and says low carb is the way to go. But as I say, this is something that is starting to be questioned. Anyway, in terms of the thread, the point is, expert advice about what is healthy today is falliable, so perhaps we still need to offer people choice, if it is something they themselves follow without it being an obvious harm to others.
Fat? Except maybe it doesn't -- they may have got it wrong 50 years ago and it'll take another 20 for received wisdom to be revised. Turns out maybe it wasn't the fat but the carbs (at the time the politicians wanted one answer quick, even if there wasn't enough evidence). There's a hypothesis that the obesity epidemic has been caused by that mistake 50 years ago. But keep eating all those "healthy" carbs, diabetics. Sweden seems a bit ahead on this one.
Kinda agree really. Using a computer platform is kinda like being wedded to it (apps, services, file formats, etc. etc.) and even the "open" ideal isn't really achievable (we have a standard plug socket for power, but even that took some political will to make happen, and IT is way more complex). No once you've married a platform, or even in a polyamorous relationship, there is still a lot of complexity and lock-in. So rather than have the thought, "gee perhaps I should change to something else" it is often simpler to stick with what you've got and save the time and energy for more productive areas. But that also means ignoring or deflecting criticisms of what you've got. I mean, who wants to say, "oh yeah, I'm using this, and it isn't very good, and it really has all these problems, and if I used that other thing instead it would be better, true, but I just don't have the time to go to the effort to do all that changing..." That's like giving in to your mother's endless criticisms of the person you married. And if people did give in, I mean people would end up sounding like a depressed robot. Yeah, yeah, it was wrong choice, should have chosen otherwise, gee, how dumb... etc.
As an Apple user, there are things I like about Apple's stuff that others probably don't care about, but there are also downsides -- all computers are annoying to some degree -- but for my tastes, there is not much point switching at this time (before Apple the thing I liked was Apollo workstations and all those little arcane three letter commands you'd type to draw plans).
But like most I guess I worry about having choice, and no that doesn't mean it has to be open source, although that is one kind of choice, albeit not a minor one. But I also don't grow my own vegetables, build my own house, or manufacture my own toasters either, and that's the miracle of modern civilisation and specialisation. I don't need to tinker more than I have to, although it is fun sometimes. But the skill that went into making an iPad my 70+ mother in law could use is not to be underestimated -- who but Apple would have made a toy computer without a real OS? Dude, everything you're doing is wrong! Yes, that's why we're doing it.
As for warranties, if Apple is forced to make it 2 years, by all means, make it so.
But aren't they now using Tom Tom? Map techs say the problems are amalgamating all the data they've gathered from different sources, including Tom Tom.
There's 1.5 billion Mulsims (a 1500 year old tradition) and there's a few thousand actual violent terrorists.
Somewhere between those two numbers is Political Islamism, sorta like the American Christian far right who believe secular laws are inferior to God's laws. These are people who believe in a kind of freedom: ie. you are free to do anything you like as long as it isn't forbidden by the Koran or the Hadiths (the sacred examples set by the life of the prophet (a lot of Westerners think it is all about the Koran, but the Hadiths and the abrogations are a bigger part of the story of what they take as moral guidance, and the prophet's life was that of a tribal warrior)).
It is anyone's guess what percentage of the Muslim world supports and would vote for political Islamism.
If even the USA, one of the most developed countries, still has a large percentage of people who believe Creationism and oppose abortion on religious grounds, you can just imagine what that percentage might be in the rest of the world, and how political Islamism might be a big movement, and decider in the fate of nations.
Politics means getting power without resorting to violence, even if your aims are in the end imposing an oppressive system -- you just play the long game to gradually extend your influence. Turkey for example, seemed to be more secular before, but nowadays seems to becoming more of an Islamist state. And Turkey was considered something of a leader towards secular values.
Indeed. Besides it is just textures. Architects went nuts in the 20s ripping out all texture and decoration to create a clean pure look. But in the end people found it cold and inhuman, and cold concrete and metal gets boring. So it just helps to have a bit of variety and decoration. Not everyone wants to live in MUJI world or a Rietveld Schröder House. Besides the textures offset the clean simple hardware. And when looking at a screen all day, a bit of variety helps. Of course one might not like the particular textures, that's a different matter.
Yes, no problem, I added taxes just as an example. So without that awkward example, that leaves the basic difference as, the right looks for problems in the individual (eg. responsibility, incentive, lack of morality, etc.) and the left looks for problems in the system (eg. the banks, the lack of medical care, corporations, the loopholes in taxes, etc.)
And they can always argue because the world is both a system and individuals.
Maybe global warming tends to resonate more with the left because it looks so much like a big systems issue, with big corporations, and the right, as the enemy.
Conservative – Progressive : stick to what works –trust we can adapt to new stuff
Left – Right : the system is rigged, so increase taxes and redistribute to make it fair –people are lazy, so reduce taxes to increase incentives
Politically there's also some other poles.
The "climate skeptics" don't fit either pole particularly because they're actually resisting "post modern science" where science and social values and social issues get all intermixed. Protesters hold up placards saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed literature" to protest against a new runway, but they don't hold up that placard when medical science says there's little evidence that GM crops are bad.
Likewise an environmentalist told me, "it doesn't matter if global warming isn't caused by man made CO2, because by forcing a cut of CO2 you cut production and you cut consumption –– it is about reducing GREED"
Social issues, morality, and ethics all wrapped up in "science".
The science part is there to a degree, but the case gets overstated significantly for political reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Ecosystems... there's the people who are looking for distributed computing (apps, clouds, integration, media, etc.)
Then there's people who basically want a gadget that takes photos, does Facebook, and a few games.
Both types of customers seem to do well with Apple, so it is hard to say which is biggest. Apple has an ecosystem, but does it matter in the long run? The Apple Store is just too packed for me to believe they are all computing heads wanting to sync their calendars and note collections.
Android I daresay has a larger proportion of gadget customers. As well as those who care so much about computing they refuse to use Apple. But we kinda know they're in the minority. All those millions of activations aren't Jim preaching open source.
I think Xerox got it right again and the next generation is distributed computing. Whether tablets today are enough for that (or whether it needs much more stuff to go digital, paperless office, etc.) is whether ecosystems at this point matter. Basically, is the iPad a platform or a gadget for most buyers?
If the distributed computing wave hasn't actually started yet then Microsoft are not late. But they may lose anyway on a gadget basis.
But if distributed computing has arrived, then iOS may grow a lot more, and Android might sink into mere gadget status. But that's OK too because a lot of the world will be powered by people who just need phone and email and web to do business, like Africa. People who'll never own a PC of any description. Just like I never owned a mainframe or a mini.
I tend to feel that the third ecosystem will come from China or India. There's nothing different about Microsoft at this point, but another nation (and the Chinese see themselves not as a nation but a civilisation) would build their own.
They try to fill a niche where your smartphone isn't large enough for what you need, but your laptop isn't portable enough. There is almost none of that in a normal person's life.
I guess you use your laptop on the sofa, but my wife and I much prefer using an iPad on the sofa and at the kitchen table. Basically it is for ergonomics. People don't sit a book on their knees to read, they tend to hold a book up a foot or two away from their face, so you can have a "big view on a small screen". Laptops still usually need a desk, and even there people want stands for the laptop just to get the screen higher. Maybe your eyesight doesn't need that, maybe you're thin and can work leaning forward easily. But it isn't a very good posture. So no, it isn't just shiny fashion accessories. (This seems to confuse people about computers, whereas every other product people buy has extensive industrial design and advertising behind it). But you can't hold up a laptop like that because the keyboard gets in the way. So not having a keyboard is a feature for that situation, something the Surface seems to not get, but I guess they are just trying to look different. Most of the time you don't need the keyboard, especially if web browsing. But having something to type on when you need it is ok if it is basically usable. My typing on an iPad is rubbish, but I sacrifice that for the convenience of being able to run dozens of apps easily and conveniently, whilst on the sofa. And for email I will suffer a few typos on the iPad than bother to walk upstairs to the computer to do it there. And that's just around the home. Once you have enough reason to find it convenient at home, you can find other places where it is convenient. Like the old lady I met on the bus the other day who just got herself an iPad so she can sit in nice places on holiday and use it for sketching (she's an art teacher). The alternative there is what, a laptop with a keyboard and wacom tablet and pen? It just isn't the same.
Metro gets praised for showing MS can design, and I'd welcome good design. But they've messed it up, making the wrong compromises instead of the right ones. Tablets are not desktops ––when can I get a 30" screen for my tablet?
Tablets and phones are for those computing tasks that can be done on the go, and that only make sense done on the go; the stuff that does not make sense on a desktop. Your desktop can show your boarding card ––great that's pointless. Your phone can show your boarding card ––OK.
You wouldn't want to draw up your CAD plans on a tablet. But you might want an app that could fetch data from your CAD system and produce some reports that are useful to you on-site.
It just amazes me how MS tries to be unified yet ends up fighting itself. They took a tablet and instead of reinforcing the focus in people's minds that this is a DIFFERENT device for DIFFERENT scenarios, they try to make it look like a notebook, and they try to make the dekstop look like a tablet.
I'm going into a small cupboard now to scream.
Note-taking is boring.
What a lot of people are calling "content creation" is really Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SPSS, AutoCAD, etc. which are all things that can be done well on a PC; it is a PC-centric concept. Desktop publishing and spreadsheets largely validated the PC.
Tablets are for places and work where a PC can't go. It is the "distributed" computing, where your work is as much receiving data as inputting data, all on the go in a wide variety of situations.
It is a new set of apps that didn't exist before because they made no sense on a desk-bound PC.
Tablets aren't about watching movies. They are about all the real-world work apps that were never written for PCs.
Walt Mossberg's review said the same. Me, I have a real keyboard for my iPad but I never use it, because the inconvenience of placing the tablet usually outweighs the advantage of easier typing.
They can keep the 1 billion PCs. But there will be 20 billion tablets.
The iPad is barely 2 or 3 years selling 100M, and lots of other players are eager to get in on this 30 year cycle, giving each man woman and child on the planet a tablet or three.
The corporate web apps I have to use don't work in Chrome or version X of FF or version Y of Java.
So we VNC to virtualised instances of whatever combo is needed to get to the web app. Ironically that means you can use them on an iPad!
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
The iPad was iconic, and this helped establish it for consumers as a new category.
Microsoft Windows doesn't have that problem. You know Windows is a variety of stuff anyway, and are expecting to make a bunch of choices about how to work with it.
This is an area where perhaps the worst thing Microsoft could do is try to imitate Apple. It isn't how MS works really, and it isn't how MS users work.
Speaking as an Apple fanboi (of product design and focus), I don't see how MS can pretend its users are fanbois or try to turn them into that. Like Google, it'll have people tripping over themselves (Google trying to not be an advertising revenue driven bottom line. )
Windows 8 doesn't need to be simple or iconic. They have other ways of making you buy.
:-) informative!
Mr Reese, I have a new number for you. This one is about to go buy a KFC. You have 15 mins to get there before he does and make sure he buys McDonalds.
OK Mr Finch, how do you suggest I persuade him? The M16 or the AK47?
Unintended consequences kinda invalidate the old ecological ideal that ecosystems are in "balance" (just like we used to think that Empires were a Natural Order). Perhaps may as well trend the notion that we can't predict the future –– yes it might change catastrophically, but it can't be predicted. Can try to predict, just not take any prediction seriously.
I gather there's some sport nutrition people saying that "the wall" is there because you're used to burning sugar, so the moment you run out... bang there's the wall. Things are different if you are used to burning fat. Your fat stores can keep you going for much longer, more evenly, and that's why we store energy as fat. But the problem is your body will burn sugar first if it is available in large quantities. So by eating carbs, it prevents you getting access to the fat. If you regularly depend on fat though, then the fat is more readily accessed.
There are just so many things that appear to make sense from a point of view, even if that point of view is wrong in some basic way. I don't know enough to judge, but if you're into endurance sports, check it out.
But if you add up how far you have to walk to burn off a croissant, a plate of pasta, and a pizza, there just aren't enough hours in a day. There are people who have run marathon after marathon and they still stay fat. As for adaption, that's an open question -- some people continue to seem to be lactose intolerant. Gains are also associated to some degree with things like colitis, arthritis, and there's a question now that dementia is a form of brain diabetes. So keep an open mind, these questions are not easy to answer. A few bitter berries gathered in the wild might be nowhere near the amount of sugar you can get from a modern apple. Wild apples are those little tart things. I mean you can blame the difference on not enough exercise, but it is not much different as argument to simply blaming too much sugar. Did our ancestors exercise more or did they just eat less sugar?
That is interesting, and I'll take it on board. Bear in mind also insulin is there to cope with the excess sugar, so as long as your body is healthy enough to cope, it isn't a problem. I mean, why is isuli there to bring the blood sugar levels down anyway? I used to eat lots of cake and sugar, not exercise, and stayed lean. But eventually, say around 40, the body may stop being able to cope. And the question then is, were the grains really a good idea if the body eventually can't cope with them anymore? In paleo terms, yes we might have adapted, but you're comparing a million years of meat eating to 10,000 of agriculture. Maybe your genes are adapted, maybe they aren't.
Do you also feel happier? That's been my experience. I cut out all carbs (except leeks and broccoli etc) and even though I eat buckets of fat, I lost weight, and remain lean, and have more energy, mental clarity, and have done so for a few years now. One thing people won't know is that the low carb high fat "community" already talks about the usual suspects like heart disease, exercise, ketosis, asian rice munchers, and the kinds of things that fat is supposed to be really unhealthy for. I'm not saying it is the way, but there are questions around how and why the whole low fat & exercise thing has basically failed, whilst we keep telling diabetics to eat healthy carbs in a quantity that our paleolithic ancestors would never have had access to.
The energy balance equation is true, but it omits the body's own controls that decide what to do with that energy. Eating carbs raises blood sugar which causes an insulin spike, and how does insulin get the sugar out of the blood? By telling the fat cells to open up and store it. It is like your body is set to continually charge the batteries, but never use the stored energy. This is a theory in the low carb high fat community, that the causality is the wrong way round. People don't get fat because they overeat, they overeat because they are getting fat (ie. the body is in store store store mode, so gimme more food (carbs) to store, keep eating, keep eating). And although fat is calories, fat doesn't trick the body that way, so eating fat doesn't store fat like that, or create cravings the way carbs do. There is precious little evidence that exercise causes weight loss long term. As I say, exercise to lose weight is part of received wisdom, but that's changing. (Although it is tricky to accept because we believe people are lazy and there should be negative consequences for sin (hunter gatherers didn't do that much work, but there you go)). For example, a South African professor of sport and nutrition who is well known and an avid marathon runner has now changed his mind and says low carb is the way to go. But as I say, this is something that is starting to be questioned. Anyway, in terms of the thread, the point is, expert advice about what is healthy today is falliable, so perhaps we still need to offer people choice, if it is something they themselves follow without it being an obvious harm to others.
Fat? Except maybe it doesn't -- they may have got it wrong 50 years ago and it'll take another 20 for received wisdom to be revised. Turns out maybe it wasn't the fat but the carbs (at the time the politicians wanted one answer quick, even if there wasn't enough evidence). There's a hypothesis that the obesity epidemic has been caused by that mistake 50 years ago. But keep eating all those "healthy" carbs, diabetics. Sweden seems a bit ahead on this one.
On the internet people can hear what you're thinking.
In real life they can't.
Kinda agree really. Using a computer platform is kinda like being wedded to it (apps, services, file formats, etc. etc.) and even the "open" ideal isn't really achievable (we have a standard plug socket for power, but even that took some political will to make happen, and IT is way more complex). No once you've married a platform, or even in a polyamorous relationship, there is still a lot of complexity and lock-in. So rather than have the thought, "gee perhaps I should change to something else" it is often simpler to stick with what you've got and save the time and energy for more productive areas. But that also means ignoring or deflecting criticisms of what you've got. I mean, who wants to say, "oh yeah, I'm using this, and it isn't very good, and it really has all these problems, and if I used that other thing instead it would be better, true, but I just don't have the time to go to the effort to do all that changing..." That's like giving in to your mother's endless criticisms of the person you married. And if people did give in, I mean people would end up sounding like a depressed robot. Yeah, yeah, it was wrong choice, should have chosen otherwise, gee, how dumb... etc.
As an Apple user, there are things I like about Apple's stuff that others probably don't care about, but there are also downsides -- all computers are annoying to some degree -- but for my tastes, there is not much point switching at this time (before Apple the thing I liked was Apollo workstations and all those little arcane three letter commands you'd type to draw plans).
But like most I guess I worry about having choice, and no that doesn't mean it has to be open source, although that is one kind of choice, albeit not a minor one. But I also don't grow my own vegetables, build my own house, or manufacture my own toasters either, and that's the miracle of modern civilisation and specialisation. I don't need to tinker more than I have to, although it is fun sometimes. But the skill that went into making an iPad my 70+ mother in law could use is not to be underestimated -- who but Apple would have made a toy computer without a real OS? Dude, everything you're doing is wrong! Yes, that's why we're doing it.
As for warranties, if Apple is forced to make it 2 years, by all means, make it so.
But aren't they now using Tom Tom? Map techs say the problems are amalgamating all the data they've gathered from different sources, including Tom Tom.
There's 1.5 billion Mulsims (a 1500 year old tradition) and there's a few thousand actual violent terrorists.
Somewhere between those two numbers is Political Islamism, sorta like the American Christian far right who believe secular laws are inferior to God's laws. These are people who believe in a kind of freedom: ie. you are free to do anything you like as long as it isn't forbidden by the Koran or the Hadiths (the sacred examples set by the life of the prophet (a lot of Westerners think it is all about the Koran, but the Hadiths and the abrogations are a bigger part of the story of what they take as moral guidance, and the prophet's life was that of a tribal warrior)).
It is anyone's guess what percentage of the Muslim world supports and would vote for political Islamism.
If even the USA, one of the most developed countries, still has a large percentage of people who believe Creationism and oppose abortion on religious grounds, you can just imagine what that percentage might be in the rest of the world, and how political Islamism might be a big movement, and decider in the fate of nations.
Politics means getting power without resorting to violence, even if your aims are in the end imposing an oppressive system -- you just play the long game to gradually extend your influence. Turkey for example, seemed to be more secular before, but nowadays seems to becoming more of an Islamist state. And Turkey was considered something of a leader towards secular values.
Indeed. Besides it is just textures. Architects went nuts in the 20s ripping out all texture and decoration to create a clean pure look. But in the end people found it cold and inhuman, and cold concrete and metal gets boring. So it just helps to have a bit of variety and decoration. Not everyone wants to live in MUJI world or a Rietveld Schröder House. Besides the textures offset the clean simple hardware. And when looking at a screen all day, a bit of variety helps. Of course one might not like the particular textures, that's a different matter.
Yes, no problem, I added taxes just as an example. So without that awkward example, that leaves the basic difference as, the right looks for problems in the individual (eg. responsibility, incentive, lack of morality, etc.) and the left looks for problems in the system (eg. the banks, the lack of medical care, corporations, the loopholes in taxes, etc.)
And they can always argue because the world is both a system and individuals.
Maybe global warming tends to resonate more with the left because it looks so much like a big systems issue, with big corporations, and the right, as the enemy.
There's a couple of poles:
Conservative – Progressive : stick to what works –trust we can adapt to new stuff
Left – Right : the system is rigged, so increase taxes and redistribute to make it fair –people are lazy, so reduce taxes to increase incentives
Politically there's also some other poles.
The "climate skeptics" don't fit either pole particularly because they're actually resisting "post modern science" where science and social values and social issues get all intermixed. Protesters hold up placards saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed literature" to protest against a new runway, but they don't hold up that placard when medical science says there's little evidence that GM crops are bad.
Likewise an environmentalist told me, "it doesn't matter if global warming isn't caused by man made CO2, because by forcing a cut of CO2 you cut production and you cut consumption –– it is about reducing GREED"
Social issues, morality, and ethics all wrapped up in "science".
The science part is there to a degree, but the case gets overstated significantly for political reasons.