They're also free to start their own hosting company. The first amendment doesn't require others to let you use their press. In an ideal world every company would agree with you, but we don't live there and if GoDaddy thinks being associated with these people will hurt their business then they're obligated to ditch them.
Who's going to provide them upstream bandwidth? Comcast? Level3? Cogent? i.e. private companies worried that being associated with these people will hurt their business?
The government is bound to allow free speech. A corporation doesn't have to put up with things they find objectionable. There are other options for those pushing hate and GoDaddy is certainly in the right here.
This is one of those very tough cases, to be honest. I believe that a website disparaging a counterproster at a nazi protest is utterly repulsive, and I didn't see the website so I don't know if they were encouraging others to do the same (the article [yes, I read it] is unclear on the exact content), but for the sake of argument let's assume the site simply discussed their twisted agenda and said lots of very mean and repulsive things, but did not make an explicit call to violence.
GoDaddy does not want to host the site. Fine. Will Twitter allow them to keep an account? I mean, they seem to turn a blind eye toward ISIS, but they too are a private company and don't have to enforce their ToS evenly. Let's assume Amazon does the same thing and disallows them to use AWS, and let's also assume Google blacklists the domain from ever showing up on a web search, because 'a corporation doesn't have to put up with things they find objectionable'.
Will their ISP disconnect their account if they set up their own web server and point their domain toward their own self-hosted web server if the ISP finds their message objectionable?
Freedom of Speech has had two interrelated issues in the information age. The first is that even free speech was far more limited when it was 'a dude on a soapbox' vs. 'another dude on a soapbox', or more specifically, printing presses and 'a dude on a horse', because the distribution model was still far more limited than what we have today. Would the first amendment have been phrased differently if it was viable to foresee this very situation at that time? I don't know.
The second issue is what I dub 'the corporate abstraction layer'. The government can't do X, but a corporation can, and the government can compel a corporation to do X, so X is done. The government gets to point to the corporation to prove they didn't do it, the corporation gets to point to the government compelling them to do it, and thus there are few repercussions to either. The government is bound to allow free speech, of which 'posting on the internet' has been included as per a number of court decisions. However, every means of exercising that right, at some point, passes through a corporation which is not required to adhere to the first amendment if they sufficiently disagree with the content.
We now find ourselves in this problematic situation. I loathe everything this group stands for and sincerely wish they would all stop. However, I do believe they have a right to place their message on the internet. GoDaddy is in a pretty bad spot right now, because they can either stand for free speech by siding with a group that is highly unpopular in the court of public opinion. For them to do so would likely result in a boycott, mass domain migration, and no shortage of bad press. For them, it would be the worst possible hill to die on, especially since it gives them a better public standing to ban them. On the other hand, they have set a precedent of banning 'sufficiently unpopular speech', which nobody cares about 'now'. 'First they came for the neonazis'...
Thus, we have found ourselves in a place where free speech is no longer a right, but a privilege granted by some combination of actuarial tables, NSLs, and the court of public opinion. As terrible and abhorrent as these protesters are, it is this very type of situation for which the first amendment must be clearly defined in the 21st century, and a platform be given equally for unpopular ideas as popular ones.
Thank you Slashdot, for allowing me to post my unpopular opinion.
Sorry, there's really no reason or justification for pirating Disney movies. Or any movies, really. If you don't want to pay what the companies that made them are asking, then don't watch.
I don't think the point of the article is 'entitlement' exactly, or that there are a whole lot of people who don't believe that there is an equilibrium to be had between fairly compensating content producers for desirable content, so long as that content is actually accessible.
This is the entitlement mentality at it's worst. Nobody owes you anything, and you don't need movies. It's not like stealing bread to feed your family.
And nobody is comparing it to that scenario. Movie piracy has been a byproduct of selling movies for home viewing since the inception of the industry. At first it was kept somewhat in check based on the fact that it required organized piracy rings to make duplication plants work at an economy of scale, while casual piracy was deterred by generational loss and Macrovision. Once it was practical to transmit a DivX file around the internet, none of those things applied, and piracy went up. Netflix streaming became a thing, and piracy went down because it was inexpensive and more convenient than downloading. The piracy stats went down for the past several years, not because of legal crackdowns or because the principle of movie downloading got harder, but because Netflix was a practical alternative. None of this is justifying the practice, but rather identifying the reality for what it was. Now Disney seems to be intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, by effectively doubling people's streaming bill.
That doesn't mean I'm happy about it - I'm not, but the worst thing an individual can do is come out and say they are now going to start violating the legal rights of others because they don't want to pay for a f#@king Disney movie. Do these people even listen to themselves?
Or, we can be a bit more practical about it. Netflix is $10 a month. Let's assume Disney keeps that number the same, so we now have $10 a month for Disney stuff, and it takes off. HBO is $15/month already, but the floodgates are open now. NBC Comcast wants a piece of that action, so NBC pulls their content off and gets their $10/month. Fox does the same thing...and before long we've gone back to having a cable bill all over again.
Now, let's even spin that in the best possible light and call it "the a la carte channel option we've all been clamoring for for decades". Amongst the things that makes Netflix as viable as it is, is the fact that it's everywhere. You can find a Netflix client on Apple TV, Android, Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire, Smart TVs whose firmware hasn't been updated in five years, and I wouldn't be surprised if some Japanese company made it possible to watch Netflix on a washing machine. The ubiquity of Netflix is a nontrivial factor in its success. While some devices will likely get the Disney streaming service via software update, if it's easier to pirate on these devices than pay Disney to watch them, which is more likely to happen?
I don't think the issue is the diversity in itself, for the very reasons you specify. Roddenberry had Uhura as a bridge officer, and she was treated as the part of the senior staff she was, well respected by her fellow officers. Chekhov might have been a white male, but having a Russian pilot the ship in the 60's was still a bold statement since everyone was scared of the Russians at the time. Right behind that was having a Japanese man in charge of tactical with WWII, Pearl Harbor, and internment camps all having been in living memory at the time. The fact that these people having roles were treated as non-issues was arguably the boldest statement he made. The interracial kiss was one episode, the "white on the left side" situation was one episode, but the respect shown by Kirk to people who were arguably unemployable in the time period they were shown as senior officers was illustrated throughout the series.
I'm holding out to see what they do, because it can go one of two ways. In Doctor Who, Martha was an excellent companion - well written, strong, caring, independent, and incidentally a black female. They went through several seasons where neither her race nor sex were a point of contention. She just galavanted around the universe with The Doctor, taking down Daleks and Cybermen, and overall being awesome while being treated as an equal by the Doctor and most of the people he interacted with. Vastra and Jenny, same deal - lesbian married couple, dealt with in an effective manner, but a great example of being 'characters first' since every episode with them is great. Bill, by contrast, had some highly memorable scenes (I indeed got misty eyed when she said "I waited for you"), but they spared few opportunities for her to point out that she was black and/or lesbian and that people in the past might have an issue with that, and how terrible it was that hundreds of years ago, this was a problem.
If the characters are written closer to TOS, or with the mindset of how Martha was written, then I don't think it will be that big of a deal. If Discovery has its characters and stories focused on how a lack of perfect diversity in every possible arena makes one worse than a puppy killer, I think its appeal will be more limited.
I don't think Opera is a good point of comparison. Opera blocks ads, but they don't make money through advertising on web pages. Google does. Google having the dominant browser and using it to block its competitors out of the market is basically 90's Microsoft, and likely an easy target for a lawsuit from a competing ad network.
Some other people in the thread said that it would probably evade the ire of antitrust litigators if it's a third party set of standards. I don't think that would be enough simply because of the market share they have. "If you owe a little bit of money, the bank owns you. If you own a lot of money, you own the bank." They would have to conclusively prove that the standards created by the independent standards committee aren't unduly favoring Google. Quick example: How does one block 'autoplaying video ads' on a webpage that doesn't also prohibit video ads on Youtube? "Because it is a page with video content" leaves open those clickbait sites that write a paragraph of text around a Youtube video and plaster it with other ads. "Because it has a skip button" doesn't help resolve the issue with the off-page, delayed-autoplay video ads that do technically have a 'skip' button. "prohibiting autoplay" isn't a bargain either, because that would inhibit a convenience of Youtube, but a situation where such functionality is acceptable and implied. This is just one such situation where either Youtube would get special treatment, or a consistent rule would inhibit Youtube to the point where there would be a desire for pressure on the 'independent party' to give special treatment to Youtube. Other situations I could think up would be the use of a service like AMP be a requirement (conveniently offered by Google), lacking third party tracking (potentially needed by others but not Google since its first party), or requiring less bandwidth than the primary content (easy for Google to put video ads on Youtube, difficult for blogs to put even a static image banner ad).
Now, let's discuss the current state of ad blocking. It's gotten to the point where Tomato and Untangle are able to block ads at the router level with zero config at the client level. uBlock is a super common Chrome extension, and even Edge is making them available in the next service pack. I don't think Google is super concerned because of all the information they're still ultimately getting. Ad blocking on Android is less pervasive than it used to be, and will continue to dwindle as it becomes progressively more difficult to root Android phones. Even users that block browser ads are still valuable to Google because keeping people in the Google ecosystem ensures the continued revenue stream from the Play store. Third party ad networks are far more susceptible to ad blocking, because again, their ads flow through Google.
I don't have a good answer, because after many attempts to hold out, I finally went down the ad blocker route and frequently apply one for others. That's not fair to the 'good' sites and it doesn't solve the real problems with web-based advertising. However, I'm hard pressed to point to a company other than Google who can actually make positive changes in this space, but the reason they can make the change (a positive one!) is because they have more power over the web than any one company probably should - and that is the bigger problem.
I'll do one better: Google seems to have this foundational war on e-mail. It's not a letter form anymore, it's more like a chat window. Things aren't put into folders, they're put into 'labels', and while labels may have their benefits, they translate poorly to IMAP implementations. System resources seem to be a secondary consideration as well. While HTML-only Gmail takes a reasonable 44MB of RAM when I checked, the standard Gmail interface takes over 300.
Photos - We cant sort within this application! Google, really? Neither can a user separate videos from photos!
The issues with Photos makes sense, actually. The two big features are the AI distinguishing what categories things are in, and the auto backup from cell phones. I don't think Google was going for browser-based Lightroom, though they definitely should have kept Picasa as a thing.
Hangouts - Does anyone still use this app? Where is WhatsApp's competition? I guess all iterations of potential apps were DoA!
Whatsapp's competition is Facebook Messenger and garden variety texting. Then again, Google can't really make up their mind. There was Talk, then Hangouts, then Allo and Duo, none of which being 'minimalist', but none of which having a complete set of features, either. Personally, I think it would have been best if, in 2010, RIM charged $1/month for non-Blackberry owners to have a BBM PIN; they would still be relevant and no one else would have been able to make meaningful inroads.
Calendar - It needs a refresh. One cannot copy an event and have it repeated at another date/time! I am glad one can move it by dragging though.
Am I wrong?
Calendar hasn't gotten much of a refresh because its core use case is with its Android integration, which is where lots of their focus has been in general.
Personally, I have a gut feeling either Damin's contributions will be summarily ignored, or will end up in the worst possible implementations. I'm not much of a Google fan to begin with, but over the last few years I've gotten the vibe that they really don't care much about having the seamless blend of form and function we all ultimately desire; between advertisers, Android, and Gmail, they've got everyone's data and avoiding them is a conscious effort.
Unfortunately, most of the jobs that Apple actually "created" in the US recently are low paying retail and support jobs at their Apple Store locations. The number of new hardware and software Engineers that Apple hired are probably a small percentage of the real number.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Apple has its problems, but they do tend to pay measurably more than minimum wage. The non-engineers of the world need jobs as well, and "get a STEM degree" is unlikely to be a viable course of action for the overwhelming majority of them for no shortage of reasons. If Apple can provide gainful employment for those who don't have a master's degree in electrical engineering, and do so while keeping their customer satisfaction levels high and their profits up, then I fail to see who loses in that scenario.
I don't get it - an OS is supposed to be at the beck and call of its owner....the OS is at Microsoft's beck and call now; that we're merely micro-serfs.
Sounds like you have it figured out perfectly. There was just a moment of confusion regarding who the owner was.
Actually walking someone through setting up email is quite easy. It starts with look around for a white/red envelope icon that says gmail. After that it's the same everywhere.
Yes, for Gmail accounts. There are no shortage of people who still use their ISP's e-mail service, Yahoo, AOL, or Exchange through their employer. Google has a pretty good abstraction layer for their own services, but there are no shortage of people whose e-mail provider isn't Google.
Or alternatively: Go to the play store. Search for "Some mail client I like". Install that. Then start it.
I like Outlook and Touchdown, both of which are excellent, without a doubt. The point being made is that configuring an iPhone in a way that is simple and consistent does not require a third party app.
On an IPhone? I could google it and read you the instructions I guess.
Yes...and the fact that the instructions haven't changed much since iOS3 is a feature.
My personal phone is a Note Edge, and my work phone is an iPhone. At launch, they cost about the same, and my point was that while you and I might not necessarily prefer an "iGrandma phone", the fact is that there are a whole lot of grandmas with money to purchase a phone that is readily accessible.
Hopefully, this will clarify what the general public sees in Apple products...
As Slashdotters, we're used to telling computers "do what I say". If you've ever had a Google search that came back ignoring a critical part of a search term and having gotten mad at it for doing so, it's because Google didn't do what you said. We are the types of people who have unusual requests and explicit commands that we expect our computers to honor. Complex routing and firewall rules, always clicking "custom" when installing software, selecting which software updates get applied, and the inherent nature of software development - these are all the result of a "do what I say" mentality...and it's why we're very, very good at what we do - we know what to say.
The general public does not have this.
The general public knows they want the data on their phone to survive if the hardware doesn't. Do most think through it enough to consider which server it should live on, or how to ensure text messages are properly backed up (and in what format), or whether a TLA can access that data without their knowledge? If prompted, maybe, but for 99.9999% of iPhone users, the sequence of "having their phone fall from a roller coaster", "having Apple replace that phone with a new one", and "all the pictures of their kids being where they were before" is a far superior experience that requires no thought or action from the user; "make sure my data is safe" is a "do what I mean" command that iCloud basically provides far better than some amalgam of what Google offers - Google will back up your text messages, but gets inconsistent with MMS if Verizon is handling text messages with their proprietary app that comes standard on Android, as one example.
Asking a friend how to do something on an iPhone, even if they're not exactly the same model, is pretty much guaranteed to work consistently. Go ahead and *try* walking someone through setting up an e-mail account on an Android phone. Which Android version? Which carrier? Motorola launcher, Samsung launcher, HTC launcher? Are they using a third party mail client? Are they doing so without knowing it, since later versions of Android tend to handle Exchange through the Gmail app? While a somewhat-informed, not-IT person can walk another user through adding an e-mail account on an iPhone, it's all but hopeless on Android. Rinse and repeat for many tasks, and it's abundantly clear why Apple has a far greater grasp on the social aspect of owning an iPhone. Now, don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate the customizability of Android and use it quite extensively. However, it's only useful with the understanding that effectively customizing an Android device requires a "do what I say" mentality.
Finally, let's discuss safety. While sure, I think that the "toxic hellstew" comment is ridiculous, the fact of the matter is that you probably know someone who has called "Microsoft Support" and gotten taken for $400 and likely left a mess for you to clean up. It's a sad reality that such a scam works, but it does. The "do what I say" crowd decries the walled garden because it keeps us in, preventing us from accessing lower level system functions, greater customizations, nontraditional apps (oh ctorrent...), and the principled stance of owning a purchased device. However, the "do what I mean" crowd wants a device where they don't have to worry about something happening that they didn't "mean". The walls on the garden are for their safety, and even though they might disagree with a few aspects of that configuration if pressed, the fact is that an "Apple Support" scam is a nonstarter on the platform and for most iPhone users, that is a fair trade in exchange for low level functions they wouldn't know how to use anyway because they don't know what to "say".
And that, fellow Slashdotters, is why the iPhone remains popular.
Messed around with the configurator, and it's entirely possible to get a gtx1060, an i7, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD for under $3,000. They're certainly not cheap, but if "high" instead of "ultra" graphics settings are acceptable, it's nowhere near $5,000 for a gaming laptop.
I agree that switching away from MS Office frequently involves death by a thousand paper cuts; alternative products to MS Office tend to assume that end users do things 'correctly', which they frequently do not. We have one client whose "CRM" system involves dragging Word documents into the 'Notes' field of contacts in Outlook. I all too regularly see entire documents embedded where they shouldn't be, but "technically work". Word unfortunately has had a long standing history of shifting things around at the slightest provocation, so lots of people have templates where everything is where it's supposed to be and they just update the information, but the formatting would technically break if used under any other circumstance. LibreOffice is getting better all the time, and browser-based document suites solve issues like schedules and simple lists that need to be seen by everyone. However, I think it will be very difficult for Sheets and Excel Online to truly get to the point of replacing desktop Excel without collapsing under its own weight.
Regarding Exchange, it depends on how big the organization is and how much scaling is required. Basically, if multiple Exchange servers are a requirement, yeah, there aren't many alternatives that don't bring their own form of hell into the picture. For smaller (sub-1,000 mailbox) installs, however, Kerio and IceWarp are wonderful alternatives that aren't nearly as expensive as Exchange + Windows, and they run on Linux while still providing Activesync support.
Like the AC said, Affinity Photo is well worth the $50. Unless your workflow makes extensive use of third party plugins, it may well do a good 80% of what you need.
As for Lightroom, I've been pretty happy with Corel Aftershot. Again, there's no accounting for muscle memory, but it is definitely a solid Lightroom competitor.
So, the stuff is found in 2015, it's news in 2017, and while it's understandable that NASA doesn't want the computers back, there's no room for them in the Smithsonian, or any of the other space museums?
Moreover, they missed the really interesting part in the summary: The computers are labeled CONTRACT NO. NAS5-2154, a contract which apparently NASA has no paperwork for. Between that, and over 2/3 of the tapes not having any verifiable mission data on them, something, somewhere, doesn't add up.
To be fair, if it was some sort of secret contract, odds are good that 1970s NASA would have required the machines and tapes be destroyed at that time. Either way, definitely an interesting find, and I hope they'll end up in a museum.
Indeed, and neither does anything in this announcement from Microsoft. You could have saved a lot of typing by reading the first 2 sentences of the summary.
I did. Danathar's post, on the other hand, was primarily pointed at consumers, and was the point to which I was responding.
See, this is why we can't have nice things: getting past the headlines to see the spectrum that truly exists takes effort.
Get past "earth was created in 6,000 years and fossils exist to test us because god hates fags" flavor of creationism, and you'll find far more nuanced interpretations. Some believe that "days" in the Genesis account mean lengthy eras of time. Others believe that the earth was created halfway through its lifecycle (Adam and Eve were unlikely to be created as infants, after all). Others believe something along the lines that God is simply the initial cause of the Big Bang, with God opting to have a much less influential role in the course of the development of life. Are people with a more sensible view of creationism building massive arks and trying to change textbooks? Generally not. More to the point, they're more apt to learn more about the information regarding what is observed, rather than turning it into a political battle.
On the topic of climate change, again, we've got a spectrum that doesn't get headlines because the folks insisting the climate isn't changing have that market cornered. Get past it, and the questions are more sensible: Is the primary way to stave it off really to increase taxes? Is it sensible to make certain things unaffordable to the most cost sensitive people in order to save the planet? If the manufacturing of a hybrid is more environmentally unfriendly than an ICE car, is it really helpful to fervently pitch their manufacture and purchase? Same for solar panels - if their production is very toxic to the environment, are we doing any long-term favors just because China is willing to make them affordably at the expense of their environmental state? Obviously, these questions and many more are present on the topic, and some do have viable answers, but the problem is the lack of any middle ground - say "maybe we should see if it's possible to have more environmentally friendly solar panels before giving tax incentives for them", and you're a corporatist republican who doesn't care about the environment. Say, "perhaps it would make sense to use the more resource intensive panels for larger buildings so that the air conditioners will at least be mostly solar powered and their impact will be negated quicker", and you're a tree hugging Al Gore groupie who cares more about mother earth than the children who live in it.
Is it possible for there to be a return to the dark ages? Anything is possible. Is the best way to fight it by forcing both sides further to the extremes and engage in a battle of attrition? I think not.
If you think that open source software and technologies can be used to EEE, you don't understand how open source works.
I'm well aware of how open source works. I'm also aware of how Google AMP works, and it still involves a dependency on Google. More to the point, Google isn't using AMP to EEE the internet, they're using their search indexing algorithm - which is not open source, to do so, and using AMP as a part of preferable rankings. That's the kind of thing that would have gotten 90's Microsoft in trouble, but since it's Google, and AMP is open sourced, and they're a darling of Silicon Valley, it's not a problem.
Well considering that we've had windows as a subscription services for enterprises for the best part of 20 years, and Office about equally as long. I'm going to draw a horizontal trend line which I'll correct for the heat death of the universe.
You've missed Danathar's point entirely. Yes, enterprise licensing has been an annual subscription, but there are reasons for that. IT departments want flexibility regarding what they run and CFOs generally prefer a consistent cost vs. large one-time expenditures that are difficult to plan for. The subscription model made both sides happy.
Neither of these things apply for home users. Most will prefer a one-off cost that will last a few years, and ride it out until things break beyond cost effectiveness of repair. Home users typically don't keep accounting ledgers where recurring payments are preferable. I'm unaware of Microsoft doing any sort of auditing on home users, and with the exception of Windows 8's Desktop-as-a-Tablet madness (largely mitigated by Classic Shell), home users generally don't care what version of Windows they are running.
Moreover, the trend I've found is that Windows machines in homes tend to end up being purpose-used. While homework is still generally done on a desktop because 1,500 word homework assignments are still undesirable to type out on a phone or iPad, most entertainment and socialization tasks are done via mobile devices which mitigates the amount of use the desktop gets.
I don't think MS is going to do itself any favors by turning Win10 into a subscription service, long term, for home users. For starters, there are support costs dealing with people who won't understand that they need to pay monthly for their computer to start up properly. Second, the PC market has a lea in unit sales over Apple in no small part due to the initial cost difference. If it's $600 for a half-decent laptop, plus $150/year for Windows and Office, it becomes very clear that the savings over a Mac is negligible so long as Apple doesn't implement a recurring charge for iWork or OSX. They could certainly lower the cost to $25/year or something negligible, but at that point the question of profitability shifts back toward the OEMs and MS.
All of that being said, the original article discusses the availability for small and medium businesses, not home users. Now, mom and pop shops tend to think more like consumers than larger companies, which is where this remains an open question. My personal anecdotal experiences is that smaller businesses tend to have a line-of-business application of some kind that is either browser-based or Windows-specific, the latter tending to be scenarios where dedicated hardware is a part of the service (dental X-rays come to mind). Whether Microsoft will capitalize on this dependency or the vendors will finally start making things more OS agnostic is anybody's guess.
I used to be vehemently in favor of NN, but when you stop to think about it, do we even really have it right now?
Per the FCC:
Blocking: Broadband providers may not block access to lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices.
Name one big cable company that lets you serve lawful content via port 80 on your home internet connection.
This is a tough one. Yes, they block port 80, and you are right that doing so is technically in violation of that requirement. However, most ISPs still leave 443 open. The bigger issue would be if Backblaze was blocked or throttled, but not Carbonite.
Throttling: Broadband providers may not deliberately target some lawful internet traffic to be delivered to users more slowly than other traffic.
Name one big cable provider that doesn't offer multiple speed tiers. If you've got the lowest/standard tier, watch what happens when you download something from a fast server: your download speed hits an artificial limit, according to your service level.
True, but that's based on my service tier, not the type of traffic. If I'm paying for 10Mbits/sec down, and Netflix, Hulu, Redtube, and some rando's MediaGoblin site all are able to use the full 10Mbits/sec down, that's not a neutrality violation because my service tier applies to everyone equally. If I paid for 10, but Netflix got 5 while Hulu got 15 because they were "preferred", that is the issue at hand.
But really, what good are NN rules when nobody is following them anyway? And has life been unlivable with the fake NN we currently have?
The point of the argument is that NN used to be an inherent part of the internet. Whatever speed you got, everyone moved at that speed. The point of NN is to fight against what's now possible - ISPs mucking around with internet traffic artificially so they can charge both sides to get the advertised speeds.
How about getting some more in-house QA going for the Windows 10? It's got more bugs than a (sarcastic comparison to things with many bugs).
I loved this idea - "Want to continue working for Microsoft? Head across the campus and find your new desk in the QA department."
Then I remembered that we're dealing with the SALES staff. Literally, the people whose job it is to convince other people that the product works properly as advertised, using as much BS as it takes to make the sale. They are the polar opposite of good QA types and would be guaranteed to either be doing nothing, or causing harm.
No, MS needs to scour neighboring school districts and pay high school kids $100 for every unique bug they find, $200 if they opt to have it deposited in a college fund and major in a STEM field. They'll have that situation on lock in no time.
Partially, I agree with this - anyone having 90% of a market in just about any computing segment turns into a problem pretty quickly. Google, however, is in a place where they've been EEEing 'the internet'. Google fonts are everywhere. Google AMP is becoming a de facto requirement for mobile sites. GCC might be bouncing between second and third place with Microsoft for cloud hosting, but don't underestimate Google's ability to play the long game. Google also basically-owns the advertising market, meaning that they largely control the financial aspect of what runs many of the smaller sites. Even if they switched market shares with Opera, an internet without Google is basically a broken internet now.
Take a look at Star Trek Timelines. It's especially appropriate for the Slashdot crowd. In fact, I wonder if any of them will admit how much they spend publicly on the events.;) Disruptor Beam has a cash cow.
I got hooked on it for a bit. It was kinda fun for a bit, and I'll admit I spent like $5 on some Dilithium Crystals, but I got to the point where it was near-impossible to do anything without massive amounts of grinding, I ended up getting all these obscure characters rather than anyone I wanted, and didn't feel there was enough value in buying more stuff - not the least of which was the fact that it's a game very clearly intended for larger screens than my Note 4, based solely on the amount of scrolling I had to do.
Regarding #3 - Why does *EVERY* new phone need to have new features? I would be perfectly happy with a cell phone ecosystem that doesn't constantly change all the time. Two year lifetime of a cell phone doesn't seem to be enough.
You missed the point entirely.
I agree that the continual rearrangement of furniture in the Android market isn't exactly a 'feature'. However, the point was that the Ubuntu phone needed a differentiator other than "open source OS" to differentiate it from iOS and Android, if it was going to give people who already own a smartphone a reason to switch. "It's cheaper" wouldn't be it, because cost-sensitive customers can already get sub-$100 Android phones already, either through low end units from the carrier, or by getting "last season's" hot phone in the secondary market. Ubuntu doesn't have an ecosystem to leverage in the same way Apple leveraged the iTunes Music Store to create incentive when the iPhone was first released, so that wouldn't help.
I'm not talking about the Galaxy S-series phones needing a new gimmick every year to the point of regression, I'm saying that if Ubuntu wanted to make inroads, there needed to be something superior to what existed at the time. With no apps, no music/movies, no hardware specialties, no incumbent market to leverage, and no carrier deals, it was DoA. Microsoft had millions of dollars, an overconfident CEO, a history of industry strongarm tactics, the Nokia name and hardware, and the Zune/Xbox ecosystem, and *they* couldn't get a half decent market share.
1. Not solid through US carriers. 2. Focus on low cost hardware; no "flagship phone". 3. Primary benefits were ideological; no new features or distinction over incumbents. 4. No integration with a movies/music/tv ecosystem. 5. Practically no existing market to leverage. 6. Dependency on browser over App Store model. 7. No focus on a migration path....so yeah, there were seemingly no advantages and lots of disadvantages to moving.
Slashdot Mirror
They're also free to start their own hosting company. The first amendment doesn't require others to let you use their press. In an ideal world every company would agree with you, but we don't live there and if GoDaddy thinks being associated with these people will hurt their business then they're obligated to ditch them.
Who's going to provide them upstream bandwidth? Comcast? Level3? Cogent? i.e. private companies worried that being associated with these people will hurt their business?
The government is bound to allow free speech. A corporation doesn't have to put up with things they find objectionable. There are other options for those pushing hate and GoDaddy is certainly in the right here.
This is one of those very tough cases, to be honest. I believe that a website disparaging a counterproster at a nazi protest is utterly repulsive, and I didn't see the website so I don't know if they were encouraging others to do the same (the article [yes, I read it] is unclear on the exact content), but for the sake of argument let's assume the site simply discussed their twisted agenda and said lots of very mean and repulsive things, but did not make an explicit call to violence.
GoDaddy does not want to host the site. Fine. Will Twitter allow them to keep an account? I mean, they seem to turn a blind eye toward ISIS, but they too are a private company and don't have to enforce their ToS evenly. Let's assume Amazon does the same thing and disallows them to use AWS, and let's also assume Google blacklists the domain from ever showing up on a web search, because 'a corporation doesn't have to put up with things they find objectionable'.
Will their ISP disconnect their account if they set up their own web server and point their domain toward their own self-hosted web server if the ISP finds their message objectionable?
Freedom of Speech has had two interrelated issues in the information age. The first is that even free speech was far more limited when it was 'a dude on a soapbox' vs. 'another dude on a soapbox', or more specifically, printing presses and 'a dude on a horse', because the distribution model was still far more limited than what we have today. Would the first amendment have been phrased differently if it was viable to foresee this very situation at that time? I don't know.
The second issue is what I dub 'the corporate abstraction layer'. The government can't do X, but a corporation can, and the government can compel a corporation to do X, so X is done. The government gets to point to the corporation to prove they didn't do it, the corporation gets to point to the government compelling them to do it, and thus there are few repercussions to either. The government is bound to allow free speech, of which 'posting on the internet' has been included as per a number of court decisions. However, every means of exercising that right, at some point, passes through a corporation which is not required to adhere to the first amendment if they sufficiently disagree with the content.
We now find ourselves in this problematic situation. I loathe everything this group stands for and sincerely wish they would all stop. However, I do believe they have a right to place their message on the internet. GoDaddy is in a pretty bad spot right now, because they can either stand for free speech by siding with a group that is highly unpopular in the court of public opinion. For them to do so would likely result in a boycott, mass domain migration, and no shortage of bad press. For them, it would be the worst possible hill to die on, especially since it gives them a better public standing to ban them. On the other hand, they have set a precedent of banning 'sufficiently unpopular speech', which nobody cares about 'now'. 'First they came for the neonazis'...
Thus, we have found ourselves in a place where free speech is no longer a right, but a privilege granted by some combination of actuarial tables, NSLs, and the court of public opinion. As terrible and abhorrent as these protesters are, it is this very type of situation for which the first amendment must be clearly defined in the 21st century, and a platform be given equally for unpopular ideas as popular ones.
Thank you Slashdot, for allowing me to post my unpopular opinion.
Sorry, there's really no reason or justification for pirating Disney movies. Or any movies, really. If you don't want to pay what the companies that made them are asking, then don't watch.
I don't think the point of the article is 'entitlement' exactly, or that there are a whole lot of people who don't believe that there is an equilibrium to be had between fairly compensating content producers for desirable content, so long as that content is actually accessible.
This is the entitlement mentality at it's worst. Nobody owes you anything, and you don't need movies. It's not like stealing bread to feed your family.
And nobody is comparing it to that scenario. Movie piracy has been a byproduct of selling movies for home viewing since the inception of the industry. At first it was kept somewhat in check based on the fact that it required organized piracy rings to make duplication plants work at an economy of scale, while casual piracy was deterred by generational loss and Macrovision. Once it was practical to transmit a DivX file around the internet, none of those things applied, and piracy went up. Netflix streaming became a thing, and piracy went down because it was inexpensive and more convenient than downloading. The piracy stats went down for the past several years, not because of legal crackdowns or because the principle of movie downloading got harder, but because Netflix was a practical alternative. None of this is justifying the practice, but rather identifying the reality for what it was. Now Disney seems to be intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, by effectively doubling people's streaming bill.
That doesn't mean I'm happy about it - I'm not, but the worst thing an individual can do is come out and say they are now going to start violating the legal rights of others because they don't want to pay for a f#@king Disney movie. Do these people even listen to themselves?
Or, we can be a bit more practical about it. Netflix is $10 a month. Let's assume Disney keeps that number the same, so we now have $10 a month for Disney stuff, and it takes off. HBO is $15/month already, but the floodgates are open now. NBC Comcast wants a piece of that action, so NBC pulls their content off and gets their $10/month. Fox does the same thing...and before long we've gone back to having a cable bill all over again.
Now, let's even spin that in the best possible light and call it "the a la carte channel option we've all been clamoring for for decades". Amongst the things that makes Netflix as viable as it is, is the fact that it's everywhere. You can find a Netflix client on Apple TV, Android, Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire, Smart TVs whose firmware hasn't been updated in five years, and I wouldn't be surprised if some Japanese company made it possible to watch Netflix on a washing machine. The ubiquity of Netflix is a nontrivial factor in its success. While some devices will likely get the Disney streaming service via software update, if it's easier to pirate on these devices than pay Disney to watch them, which is more likely to happen?
I don't think the issue is the diversity in itself, for the very reasons you specify. Roddenberry had Uhura as a bridge officer, and she was treated as the part of the senior staff she was, well respected by her fellow officers. Chekhov might have been a white male, but having a Russian pilot the ship in the 60's was still a bold statement since everyone was scared of the Russians at the time. Right behind that was having a Japanese man in charge of tactical with WWII, Pearl Harbor, and internment camps all having been in living memory at the time. The fact that these people having roles were treated as non-issues was arguably the boldest statement he made. The interracial kiss was one episode, the "white on the left side" situation was one episode, but the respect shown by Kirk to people who were arguably unemployable in the time period they were shown as senior officers was illustrated throughout the series.
I'm holding out to see what they do, because it can go one of two ways. In Doctor Who, Martha was an excellent companion - well written, strong, caring, independent, and incidentally a black female. They went through several seasons where neither her race nor sex were a point of contention. She just galavanted around the universe with The Doctor, taking down Daleks and Cybermen, and overall being awesome while being treated as an equal by the Doctor and most of the people he interacted with. Vastra and Jenny, same deal - lesbian married couple, dealt with in an effective manner, but a great example of being 'characters first' since every episode with them is great. Bill, by contrast, had some highly memorable scenes (I indeed got misty eyed when she said "I waited for you"), but they spared few opportunities for her to point out that she was black and/or lesbian and that people in the past might have an issue with that, and how terrible it was that hundreds of years ago, this was a problem.
If the characters are written closer to TOS, or with the mindset of how Martha was written, then I don't think it will be that big of a deal. If Discovery has its characters and stories focused on how a lack of perfect diversity in every possible arena makes one worse than a puppy killer, I think its appeal will be more limited.
I don't think Opera is a good point of comparison. Opera blocks ads, but they don't make money through advertising on web pages. Google does. Google having the dominant browser and using it to block its competitors out of the market is basically 90's Microsoft, and likely an easy target for a lawsuit from a competing ad network.
Some other people in the thread said that it would probably evade the ire of antitrust litigators if it's a third party set of standards. I don't think that would be enough simply because of the market share they have. "If you owe a little bit of money, the bank owns you. If you own a lot of money, you own the bank." They would have to conclusively prove that the standards created by the independent standards committee aren't unduly favoring Google. Quick example: How does one block 'autoplaying video ads' on a webpage that doesn't also prohibit video ads on Youtube? "Because it is a page with video content" leaves open those clickbait sites that write a paragraph of text around a Youtube video and plaster it with other ads. "Because it has a skip button" doesn't help resolve the issue with the off-page, delayed-autoplay video ads that do technically have a 'skip' button. "prohibiting autoplay" isn't a bargain either, because that would inhibit a convenience of Youtube, but a situation where such functionality is acceptable and implied. This is just one such situation where either Youtube would get special treatment, or a consistent rule would inhibit Youtube to the point where there would be a desire for pressure on the 'independent party' to give special treatment to Youtube. Other situations I could think up would be the use of a service like AMP be a requirement (conveniently offered by Google), lacking third party tracking (potentially needed by others but not Google since its first party), or requiring less bandwidth than the primary content (easy for Google to put video ads on Youtube, difficult for blogs to put even a static image banner ad).
Now, let's discuss the current state of ad blocking. It's gotten to the point where Tomato and Untangle are able to block ads at the router level with zero config at the client level. uBlock is a super common Chrome extension, and even Edge is making them available in the next service pack. I don't think Google is super concerned because of all the information they're still ultimately getting. Ad blocking on Android is less pervasive than it used to be, and will continue to dwindle as it becomes progressively more difficult to root Android phones. Even users that block browser ads are still valuable to Google because keeping people in the Google ecosystem ensures the continued revenue stream from the Play store. Third party ad networks are far more susceptible to ad blocking, because again, their ads flow through Google.
I don't have a good answer, because after many attempts to hold out, I finally went down the ad blocker route and frequently apply one for others. That's not fair to the 'good' sites and it doesn't solve the real problems with web-based advertising. However, I'm hard pressed to point to a company other than Google who can actually make positive changes in this space, but the reason they can make the change (a positive one!) is because they have more power over the web than any one company probably should - and that is the bigger problem.
GMail - I find it ugly and too bland by default.
I'll do one better: Google seems to have this foundational war on e-mail. It's not a letter form anymore, it's more like a chat window. Things aren't put into folders, they're put into 'labels', and while labels may have their benefits, they translate poorly to IMAP implementations. System resources seem to be a secondary consideration as well. While HTML-only Gmail takes a reasonable 44MB of RAM when I checked, the standard Gmail interface takes over 300.
Photos - We cant sort within this application! Google, really? Neither can a user separate videos from photos!
The issues with Photos makes sense, actually. The two big features are the AI distinguishing what categories things are in, and the auto backup from cell phones. I don't think Google was going for browser-based Lightroom, though they definitely should have kept Picasa as a thing.
Hangouts - Does anyone still use this app? Where is WhatsApp's competition? I guess all iterations of potential apps were DoA!
Whatsapp's competition is Facebook Messenger and garden variety texting. Then again, Google can't really make up their mind. There was Talk, then Hangouts, then Allo and Duo, none of which being 'minimalist', but none of which having a complete set of features, either. Personally, I think it would have been best if, in 2010, RIM charged $1/month for non-Blackberry owners to have a BBM PIN; they would still be relevant and no one else would have been able to make meaningful inroads.
Calendar - It needs a refresh. One cannot copy an event and have it repeated at another date/time! I am glad one can move it by dragging though.
Am I wrong?
Calendar hasn't gotten much of a refresh because its core use case is with its Android integration, which is where lots of their focus has been in general.
Personally, I have a gut feeling either Damin's contributions will be summarily ignored, or will end up in the worst possible implementations. I'm not much of a Google fan to begin with, but over the last few years I've gotten the vibe that they really don't care much about having the seamless blend of form and function we all ultimately desire; between advertisers, Android, and Gmail, they've got everyone's data and avoiding them is a conscious effort.
Unfortunately, most of the jobs that Apple actually "created" in the US recently are low paying retail and support jobs at their Apple Store locations. The number of new hardware and software Engineers that Apple hired are probably a small percentage of the real number.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Apple has its problems, but they do tend to pay measurably more than minimum wage. The non-engineers of the world need jobs as well, and "get a STEM degree" is unlikely to be a viable course of action for the overwhelming majority of them for no shortage of reasons. If Apple can provide gainful employment for those who don't have a master's degree in electrical engineering, and do so while keeping their customer satisfaction levels high and their profits up, then I fail to see who loses in that scenario.
I don't get it - an OS is supposed to be at the beck and call of its owner....the OS is at Microsoft's beck and call now; that we're merely micro-serfs.
Sounds like you have it figured out perfectly. There was just a moment of confusion regarding who the owner was.
Actually walking someone through setting up email is quite easy. It starts with look around for a white/red envelope icon that says gmail. After that it's the same everywhere.
Yes, for Gmail accounts. There are no shortage of people who still use their ISP's e-mail service, Yahoo, AOL, or Exchange through their employer. Google has a pretty good abstraction layer for their own services, but there are no shortage of people whose e-mail provider isn't Google.
Or alternatively: Go to the play store. Search for "Some mail client I like". Install that. Then start it.
I like Outlook and Touchdown, both of which are excellent, without a doubt. The point being made is that configuring an iPhone in a way that is simple and consistent does not require a third party app.
On an IPhone? I could google it and read you the instructions I guess.
Yes...and the fact that the instructions haven't changed much since iOS3 is a feature.
My personal phone is a Note Edge, and my work phone is an iPhone. At launch, they cost about the same, and my point was that while you and I might not necessarily prefer an "iGrandma phone", the fact is that there are a whole lot of grandmas with money to purchase a phone that is readily accessible.
Hopefully, this will clarify what the general public sees in Apple products...
As Slashdotters, we're used to telling computers "do what I say". If you've ever had a Google search that came back ignoring a critical part of a search term and having gotten mad at it for doing so, it's because Google didn't do what you said. We are the types of people who have unusual requests and explicit commands that we expect our computers to honor. Complex routing and firewall rules, always clicking "custom" when installing software, selecting which software updates get applied, and the inherent nature of software development - these are all the result of a "do what I say" mentality...and it's why we're very, very good at what we do - we know what to say.
The general public does not have this.
The general public knows they want the data on their phone to survive if the hardware doesn't. Do most think through it enough to consider which server it should live on, or how to ensure text messages are properly backed up (and in what format), or whether a TLA can access that data without their knowledge? If prompted, maybe, but for 99.9999% of iPhone users, the sequence of "having their phone fall from a roller coaster", "having Apple replace that phone with a new one", and "all the pictures of their kids being where they were before" is a far superior experience that requires no thought or action from the user; "make sure my data is safe" is a "do what I mean" command that iCloud basically provides far better than some amalgam of what Google offers - Google will back up your text messages, but gets inconsistent with MMS if Verizon is handling text messages with their proprietary app that comes standard on Android, as one example.
Asking a friend how to do something on an iPhone, even if they're not exactly the same model, is pretty much guaranteed to work consistently. Go ahead and *try* walking someone through setting up an e-mail account on an Android phone. Which Android version? Which carrier? Motorola launcher, Samsung launcher, HTC launcher? Are they using a third party mail client? Are they doing so without knowing it, since later versions of Android tend to handle Exchange through the Gmail app? While a somewhat-informed, not-IT person can walk another user through adding an e-mail account on an iPhone, it's all but hopeless on Android. Rinse and repeat for many tasks, and it's abundantly clear why Apple has a far greater grasp on the social aspect of owning an iPhone. Now, don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate the customizability of Android and use it quite extensively. However, it's only useful with the understanding that effectively customizing an Android device requires a "do what I say" mentality.
Finally, let's discuss safety. While sure, I think that the "toxic hellstew" comment is ridiculous, the fact of the matter is that you probably know someone who has called "Microsoft Support" and gotten taken for $400 and likely left a mess for you to clean up. It's a sad reality that such a scam works, but it does. The "do what I say" crowd decries the walled garden because it keeps us in, preventing us from accessing lower level system functions, greater customizations, nontraditional apps (oh ctorrent...), and the principled stance of owning a purchased device. However, the "do what I mean" crowd wants a device where they don't have to worry about something happening that they didn't "mean". The walls on the garden are for their safety, and even though they might disagree with a few aspects of that configuration if pressed, the fact is that an "Apple Support" scam is a nonstarter on the platform and for most iPhone users, that is a fair trade in exchange for low level functions they wouldn't know how to use anyway because they don't know what to "say".
And that, fellow Slashdotters, is why the iPhone remains popular.
Laptop with specs of gaming rig costs more then $5000.
https://www.originpc.com/confi...
Messed around with the configurator, and it's entirely possible to get a gtx1060, an i7, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD for under $3,000. They're certainly not cheap, but if "high" instead of "ultra" graphics settings are acceptable, it's nowhere near $5,000 for a gaming laptop.
I agree that switching away from MS Office frequently involves death by a thousand paper cuts; alternative products to MS Office tend to assume that end users do things 'correctly', which they frequently do not. We have one client whose "CRM" system involves dragging Word documents into the 'Notes' field of contacts in Outlook. I all too regularly see entire documents embedded where they shouldn't be, but "technically work". Word unfortunately has had a long standing history of shifting things around at the slightest provocation, so lots of people have templates where everything is where it's supposed to be and they just update the information, but the formatting would technically break if used under any other circumstance. LibreOffice is getting better all the time, and browser-based document suites solve issues like schedules and simple lists that need to be seen by everyone. However, I think it will be very difficult for Sheets and Excel Online to truly get to the point of replacing desktop Excel without collapsing under its own weight.
Regarding Exchange, it depends on how big the organization is and how much scaling is required. Basically, if multiple Exchange servers are a requirement, yeah, there aren't many alternatives that don't bring their own form of hell into the picture. For smaller (sub-1,000 mailbox) installs, however, Kerio and IceWarp are wonderful alternatives that aren't nearly as expensive as Exchange + Windows, and they run on Linux while still providing Activesync support.
Like the AC said, Affinity Photo is well worth the $50. Unless your workflow makes extensive use of third party plugins, it may well do a good 80% of what you need.
As for Lightroom, I've been pretty happy with Corel Aftershot. Again, there's no accounting for muscle memory, but it is definitely a solid Lightroom competitor.
So, the stuff is found in 2015, it's news in 2017, and while it's understandable that NASA doesn't want the computers back, there's no room for them in the Smithsonian, or any of the other space museums?
Moreover, they missed the really interesting part in the summary: The computers are labeled CONTRACT NO. NAS5-2154, a contract which apparently NASA has no paperwork for. Between that, and over 2/3 of the tapes not having any verifiable mission data on them, something, somewhere, doesn't add up.
To be fair, if it was some sort of secret contract, odds are good that 1970s NASA would have required the machines and tapes be destroyed at that time. Either way, definitely an interesting find, and I hope they'll end up in a museum.
Neither of these things apply for home users.
Indeed, and neither does anything in this announcement from Microsoft. You could have saved a lot of typing by reading the first 2 sentences of the summary.
I did. Danathar's post, on the other hand, was primarily pointed at consumers, and was the point to which I was responding.
See, this is why we can't have nice things: getting past the headlines to see the spectrum that truly exists takes effort.
Get past "earth was created in 6,000 years and fossils exist to test us because god hates fags" flavor of creationism, and you'll find far more nuanced interpretations. Some believe that "days" in the Genesis account mean lengthy eras of time. Others believe that the earth was created halfway through its lifecycle (Adam and Eve were unlikely to be created as infants, after all). Others believe something along the lines that God is simply the initial cause of the Big Bang, with God opting to have a much less influential role in the course of the development of life. Are people with a more sensible view of creationism building massive arks and trying to change textbooks? Generally not. More to the point, they're more apt to learn more about the information regarding what is observed, rather than turning it into a political battle.
On the topic of climate change, again, we've got a spectrum that doesn't get headlines because the folks insisting the climate isn't changing have that market cornered. Get past it, and the questions are more sensible: Is the primary way to stave it off really to increase taxes? Is it sensible to make certain things unaffordable to the most cost sensitive people in order to save the planet? If the manufacturing of a hybrid is more environmentally unfriendly than an ICE car, is it really helpful to fervently pitch their manufacture and purchase? Same for solar panels - if their production is very toxic to the environment, are we doing any long-term favors just because China is willing to make them affordably at the expense of their environmental state? Obviously, these questions and many more are present on the topic, and some do have viable answers, but the problem is the lack of any middle ground - say "maybe we should see if it's possible to have more environmentally friendly solar panels before giving tax incentives for them", and you're a corporatist republican who doesn't care about the environment. Say, "perhaps it would make sense to use the more resource intensive panels for larger buildings so that the air conditioners will at least be mostly solar powered and their impact will be negated quicker", and you're a tree hugging Al Gore groupie who cares more about mother earth than the children who live in it.
Is it possible for there to be a return to the dark ages? Anything is possible. Is the best way to fight it by forcing both sides further to the extremes and engage in a battle of attrition? I think not.
If you think that open source software and technologies can be used to EEE, you don't understand how open source works.
I'm well aware of how open source works. I'm also aware of how Google AMP works, and it still involves a dependency on Google. More to the point, Google isn't using AMP to EEE the internet, they're using their search indexing algorithm - which is not open source, to do so, and using AMP as a part of preferable rankings. That's the kind of thing that would have gotten 90's Microsoft in trouble, but since it's Google, and AMP is open sourced, and they're a darling of Silicon Valley, it's not a problem.
Well considering that we've had windows as a subscription services for enterprises for the best part of 20 years, and Office about equally as long. I'm going to draw a horizontal trend line which I'll correct for the heat death of the universe.
You've missed Danathar's point entirely. Yes, enterprise licensing has been an annual subscription, but there are reasons for that. IT departments want flexibility regarding what they run and CFOs generally prefer a consistent cost vs. large one-time expenditures that are difficult to plan for. The subscription model made both sides happy.
Neither of these things apply for home users. Most will prefer a one-off cost that will last a few years, and ride it out until things break beyond cost effectiveness of repair. Home users typically don't keep accounting ledgers where recurring payments are preferable. I'm unaware of Microsoft doing any sort of auditing on home users, and with the exception of Windows 8's Desktop-as-a-Tablet madness (largely mitigated by Classic Shell), home users generally don't care what version of Windows they are running.
Moreover, the trend I've found is that Windows machines in homes tend to end up being purpose-used. While homework is still generally done on a desktop because 1,500 word homework assignments are still undesirable to type out on a phone or iPad, most entertainment and socialization tasks are done via mobile devices which mitigates the amount of use the desktop gets.
I don't think MS is going to do itself any favors by turning Win10 into a subscription service, long term, for home users. For starters, there are support costs dealing with people who won't understand that they need to pay monthly for their computer to start up properly. Second, the PC market has a lea in unit sales over Apple in no small part due to the initial cost difference. If it's $600 for a half-decent laptop, plus $150/year for Windows and Office, it becomes very clear that the savings over a Mac is negligible so long as Apple doesn't implement a recurring charge for iWork or OSX. They could certainly lower the cost to $25/year or something negligible, but at that point the question of profitability shifts back toward the OEMs and MS.
All of that being said, the original article discusses the availability for small and medium businesses, not home users. Now, mom and pop shops tend to think more like consumers than larger companies, which is where this remains an open question. My personal anecdotal experiences is that smaller businesses tend to have a line-of-business application of some kind that is either browser-based or Windows-specific, the latter tending to be scenarios where dedicated hardware is a part of the service (dental X-rays come to mind). Whether Microsoft will capitalize on this dependency or the vendors will finally start making things more OS agnostic is anybody's guess.
I used to be vehemently in favor of NN, but when you stop to think about it, do we even really have it right now?
Per the FCC:
Blocking: Broadband providers may not block access to lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices.
Name one big cable company that lets you serve lawful content via port 80 on your home internet connection.
This is a tough one. Yes, they block port 80, and you are right that doing so is technically in violation of that requirement. However, most ISPs still leave 443 open. The bigger issue would be if Backblaze was blocked or throttled, but not Carbonite.
Throttling: Broadband providers may not deliberately target some lawful internet traffic to be delivered to users more slowly than other traffic.
Name one big cable provider that doesn't offer multiple speed tiers. If you've got the lowest/standard tier, watch what happens when you download something from a fast server: your download speed hits an artificial limit, according to your service level.
True, but that's based on my service tier, not the type of traffic. If I'm paying for 10Mbits/sec down, and Netflix, Hulu, Redtube, and some rando's MediaGoblin site all are able to use the full 10Mbits/sec down, that's not a neutrality violation because my service tier applies to everyone equally. If I paid for 10, but Netflix got 5 while Hulu got 15 because they were "preferred", that is the issue at hand.
But really, what good are NN rules when nobody is following them anyway? And has life been unlivable with the fake NN we currently have?
The point of the argument is that NN used to be an inherent part of the internet. Whatever speed you got, everyone moved at that speed. The point of NN is to fight against what's now possible - ISPs mucking around with internet traffic artificially so they can charge both sides to get the advertised speeds.
How about getting some more in-house QA going for the Windows 10? It's got more bugs than a (sarcastic comparison to things with many bugs).
I loved this idea - "Want to continue working for Microsoft? Head across the campus and find your new desk in the QA department."
Then I remembered that we're dealing with the SALES staff. Literally, the people whose job it is to convince other people that the product works properly as advertised, using as much BS as it takes to make the sale. They are the polar opposite of good QA types and would be guaranteed to either be doing nothing, or causing harm.
No, MS needs to scour neighboring school districts and pay high school kids $100 for every unique bug they find, $200 if they opt to have it deposited in a college fund and major in a STEM field. They'll have that situation on lock in no time.
Partially, I agree with this - anyone having 90% of a market in just about any computing segment turns into a problem pretty quickly. Google, however, is in a place where they've been EEEing 'the internet'. Google fonts are everywhere. Google AMP is becoming a de facto requirement for mobile sites. GCC might be bouncing between second and third place with Microsoft for cloud hosting, but don't underestimate Google's ability to play the long game. Google also basically-owns the advertising market, meaning that they largely control the financial aspect of what runs many of the smaller sites. Even if they switched market shares with Opera, an internet without Google is basically a broken internet now.
Take a look at Star Trek Timelines. It's especially appropriate for the Slashdot crowd. In fact, I wonder if any of them will admit how much they spend publicly on the events. ;) Disruptor Beam has a cash cow.
I got hooked on it for a bit. It was kinda fun for a bit, and I'll admit I spent like $5 on some Dilithium Crystals, but I got to the point where it was near-impossible to do anything without massive amounts of grinding, I ended up getting all these obscure characters rather than anyone I wanted, and didn't feel there was enough value in buying more stuff - not the least of which was the fact that it's a game very clearly intended for larger screens than my Note 4, based solely on the amount of scrolling I had to do.
Regarding #3 - Why does *EVERY* new phone need to have new features? I would be perfectly happy with a cell phone ecosystem that doesn't constantly change all the time. Two year lifetime of a cell phone doesn't seem to be enough.
You missed the point entirely.
I agree that the continual rearrangement of furniture in the Android market isn't exactly a 'feature'. However, the point was that the Ubuntu phone needed a differentiator other than "open source OS" to differentiate it from iOS and Android, if it was going to give people who already own a smartphone a reason to switch. "It's cheaper" wouldn't be it, because cost-sensitive customers can already get sub-$100 Android phones already, either through low end units from the carrier, or by getting "last season's" hot phone in the secondary market. Ubuntu doesn't have an ecosystem to leverage in the same way Apple leveraged the iTunes Music Store to create incentive when the iPhone was first released, so that wouldn't help.
I'm not talking about the Galaxy S-series phones needing a new gimmick every year to the point of regression, I'm saying that if Ubuntu wanted to make inroads, there needed to be something superior to what existed at the time. With no apps, no music/movies, no hardware specialties, no incumbent market to leverage, and no carrier deals, it was DoA. Microsoft had millions of dollars, an overconfident CEO, a history of industry strongarm tactics, the Nokia name and hardware, and the Zune/Xbox ecosystem, and *they* couldn't get a half decent market share.
1. Not solid through US carriers. ...so yeah, there were seemingly no advantages and lots of disadvantages to moving.
2. Focus on low cost hardware; no "flagship phone".
3. Primary benefits were ideological; no new features or distinction over incumbents.
4. No integration with a movies/music/tv ecosystem.
5. Practically no existing market to leverage.
6. Dependency on browser over App Store model.
7. No focus on a migration path.