I still think windows home server was a disaster. Oh it just occasionally corrupts backups so you can't open them.
It was never fixed!
No way to repair or recover the data was ever provided.
Then they took out Drive Extender and still didn't fix it.
Sadly, WHS was a great idea doomed from the get-go for a myriad of reasons. It needed a crowd sufficiently-enthusiast to want a product capable of handling home streaming and backups, but insufficiently enthusiast to set up a FreeNAS, Plex, and the free version of Macrium (or the inexpensive 5-user license of Acronis, which was still half-decent at the time). The hardware had its issues, not the least of which being manufactured by an HP that was trying to figure out how to do this 'mobile' thing by buying Palm, and their revolving door of CEOs. The affordable ones had a single internal drive and expected to be supplemented by a hodgepodge of externals, while the unit that supported multiple drives cost over $1,000 with three of those bays empty.
The early versions integrated with Live OneCare, which would have been great if they didn't abandon it, and the Windows Media Center integration was hampered by the speeds of the then-dominant single-band 802.11n, as well as the fact that the server couldn't function as a DVR directly (allowing a client/server model like MythTV today), a problem compounded by the broadcast flags being used by some cable companies.
The nail in the coffin came by way of issues like the ones you've specified - storage space issues, backup integrity issues, poor integration with non-Microsoft products, and no proactive means of addressing any of them. When not even those who were willing to give it a shot were able to achieve a reliable amount of success, there's no way it's hitting critical mass.
Then relax, because there are such fitness trackers on the market. The Jawbone Up is probably the best known one.
I just looked at the support site for the Jawbone Up, and all of them require the app, which in turn requires an account to be made. Thus, [citation needed].
Should the drive to profit trump everything else? Is there any value to living in harmony with the world around us, even if it means less profit? A small amount of profit is required; humanity will continue to push the limits of what is possible. Hopefully "The Giving Tree" is not the way it all goes down.
This argument would have merit if Netflix was raising their prices without additional value-add, even if that added value was "we can give our employees raises to address the rising cost of living". If it was "we're raising prices by $1/month for everyone for the sole purpose of increasing our profit margin", then that would be the drive to profit trumping everything else.
Netflix is offering improved service for the same money, with the intent of either luring additional subscribers or retaining existing ones. It's a highly indirect means by which to assist with "living in harmony", but it's not ruthless capitalism, either.
Consumers will still have a choice, because all it takes is ONE manufacturer to realize that privacy might be a feature worth touting to gain an edge in sales over their competitors. The idea that there won't be a single product among the hundreds or thousands per category out there that *won't* spy on you is a dystopian fantasy, something that seems strangely common here on this site.
And which fitness tracker do you recommend? If there was a FitBit sort of device that kept all the data local to my phone (or laptop ideally, but I'll compromise) and didn't require any sort of online account or data transmission, I'd buy it tomorrow. So far, Fitbit, MS Band, Apple Watch, Samsung Gear, Garmin, and Nike all require online accounts to work, even though it's not the sort of product inherently requiring an internet connection.
If there's room for half a dozen companies making fitness trackers, and zero of them have decided to make a band with local-only data mode, then it's not quite a dystopian fantasy.
So you are claiming Amazon data mines customers of AWS?!? I can't tell if you are attempting to fearmonger, or if you are just a complete idiot.
No, he's claiming that if Amazon *were* to be data mining the AWS information from known Wal-Mart vendors and partners for strategic information that would be useful for Amazon, there would be no meaningful way to detect it. Though Amazon has managed to be "generally less evil" than the other major cloud providers, it would still require Wal-Mart to place massive trust in their biggest competitor to act ethically.
Wal-Mart isn't saying not to use Azure or GCC or Rackspace; they're not concerned about the systemic and philosophical ramifications of storing data on someone else's hard drive. They're saying they don't want to run the risk of Amazon deciding at some point to cease actively choosing to forego a major competitive advantage that would very difficult for Wal-Mart to prove if it ever did happen.
Now, Wal-Mart *could* meet some companies halfway by offering to cover the costs of transitioning, which is where they lose my support for their position. However, I'd be remiss to turn a blind eye to a very reasonable concern.
At the time there have been perfectly usable smartphones where you could install any appication compiled for the platform, independent of the telco provider and you also could write your own. I did not get the whole iphone hype back then, and I still don't.
A bit of history glossing, methinks. Yes, it was *possible* to run third party apps, but the experience couldn't have been more dissimilar. It was possible to download CAB files (and the Palm equivalent) from whatever download.com or tucows or softpedia clone you wanted, but there was no guarantee it would really work with your phone. Alternatively, you could walk into Staples and buy an app on an SD card, which cost between $10 and $30, and likely needed to occupy your one SD card slot, on a phone that *might* have had 512MB of storage (64MB was common at the time). The ability to buy an app on the device itself and have it instantly download is a major distinction from the way it was in 2006.
Developers also couldn't count on literally any particular piece of hardware being consistently accessible. Some had physical keyboards, some had GPS, some had Wi-Fi, some had widescreen screens, some had barcode scanners, some had CompactFlash readers, some had SD card readers, data plans were expensive, slow, and weren't ubiquitous (and thus couldn't be assumed), and only one had a capacitive screen. The "zomg Android fragmentation!!111" cries ring super-hollow to me because whatever difficulties there are testing against 3-4 versions of Android in tablet and phone flavors, that's nothing compared to trying to develop for WinMo. Frequently, applications listed the half-dozen phones they would install on. Some would refuse to install on other devices, others would just act weird. It was nearly impossible to get Pandora to work on the HTC HD2, because it was impossible to get the keyboard to come up, because the app was written for phones with physical keyboards - there was a trick to remapping a button to force the keyboard to display which was the workaround. Imagine any iPhone user having to go through that sort of trouble to getting an app as common as Pandora to function properly.
Just because there were apps doesn't mean that the experience of acquiring them and using them didn't need some substantial work. Is that all Apple's doing? No, I think MS, Palm, and Blackberry would have gotten there eventually without them, but I think that the fact that a whole lot has been standardized such that app developers can reasonably test to a few test suites is a substantial improvement that I will absolutely give Apple credit for accelerating.
Time travel is a cheap-ass way to fix a problem deus ex machina, essentially, and writing anything that centers around time travel? You're asking for disaster. You almost certainly end up painting yourself into a corner, ruining any chance of redeeming your work. That's what authors have told me, at least.
See, I think time travel can be an interesting mechanic as long as it's used properly, the rules are applied consistently, and the story is deeper than 'fix the thing'. Back to the Future gained mass appeal because it was a plot device tangential to the real theme of the movie - the fact that Marty came to realize he shared more in common with his parents than he thought. We forgave the butterfly effect problem and the motion of earth and the solar system in order to allow the rest of the story to advance. The new series "Timeless" has been fairly good because they've kept to the rules they established at the beginning and the fact that the slight alterations are historical fact to everyone who didn't travel through time.
Star Trek has been a mess with respect to time travel because the rules change a lot. The TOS crew achieved time warp in a craptastic Klingon vessel, but neither Picard nor Janeway gave it the ol' college try a hundred years later? In Voyager's case specifically, "Year of Hell" was a good concept that couldn't stand up to scrutiny, because "destroying the ship" did exactly what everyone wanted, including the antagonist, because "destruction" became "never existed", which made no sense, and that's completely sidestepping everything Captain Braxton did, or the fact that Starfleet would even have a fleet of timeships in the first place. I'm not even going into the mess that was "First Contact", but it's most heinous crime was giving the Borg some form of time travel capabilities that they then never used thereafter. Then, there's Doctor Who. Want to talk about a deus ex machina...he comes at just the right time to fix a thing, unless it's arbitrarily deemed a "fixed point in time"...
As stated, I think it's indeed very difficult to make a time travel story, but not impossible, as long as consistency is met and the story primarily uses time travel as a means to an end rather than a crutch upon which to base an otherwise thin-at-best story.
It's a tricky thing, art. While art is and always has been a commercial enterprise to some degree, it's also intended as a communication medium. In effect, altering the artistic work also distorts the message of the artist(s).
I don't think this is a problem in this context. End users *know* they are not watching the 'artist intended' version of the film, and the fact that they are watching a sanitized, incomplete version does not preclude them from later viewing the unaltered version, or prevent anyone else from doing so. If I purchased a painting and cut off half of it to then hang the first half in a frame, am I distorting the message of the artist? Yes. Is that my right? Well, I paid for the painting. The painting analogy falls flat because that's a sale, vs. the licensing model that is the nature of DVD sales and Netflix streams. Here's a better example: The oft-maligned Windows 10 telemetry - if I have paid for my copy of Windows 10 Professional, morally (EULA terms aside), must I also allow the telemetry software to run, or is it my prerogative to determine which parts of Windows may run on my computer, and how I will disable them, if I am willing to live with the reduced functionality of such a system? If I am indeed morally wrong for denying execute permissions to Cortana's EXE files, if I allow them to run but block them at the firewall, am I still morally wrong? That is the quagmire being addressed here.
I'm not 100% against this on principle, but I find it a dangerous road. It's very similar to editing an interview to destroy the relationship between question and answer. Do I think that some borderline films could benefit from a "kids" edit? Sure. Do I think it should happen without the input of the originators of a work? No.
It sounds to me like you're in favor of director-released 'sanitized' versions of films. I think there's a market for that, and the existence of VidAngel, and both CleanFlicks and ClearPlay before it, show that there is a market for such a product. However, it goes back to the point at which the buyer has jurisdiction over what has been bought. If I wish to watch a specific half of a movie, I see no problem in doing so, as long as it takes place with my knowledge and does not prevent others, including the director, from watching the whole thing as intended.
There were a handful of things that makes the Note 4 worthwhile, especially since good condition Note 4's are pretty cheap on eBay and Swappa. The S-Pen works for the back and task switch buttons (which were finger-only on the Note 2). The IR Blaster is helpful as a universal remote, and the front-facing camera is definitely better. The Note 2 had a better S-Pen, though.
I just bought a refurbed Note Edge that I'm pretty happy with. I'm a stickler for removable batteries because I'm a die hard fan of aftermarket, high-capacity batteries. ZeroLemon is my jam, though I've been happy with Gorilla Gadgets in the past, and PowerBear is pretty good so far.
I think you're pretty much on point with the Note8 being an S8 with a pen, which is sad because no one seems to want to make an enthusiast phone anymore. Honestly, I've got a real close eye on Blackberry, because their renaissance of the keyboard may well make other OEMs take a look if they achieve any level of success in the market. If that happens, it as good a reason as any for phone manufacturers to look beyond 'bent glass' and 'even more anorexia' and ask what people actually want in their phones.
NES/SNES emulation is "legal" in that you're hard pressed to find a for-profit company coding and selling one, so the most they could do is send a C&D order to Sourceforge or Github to kill the downloads - trying to file a lawsuit against an OSS developer would be pretty fruitless. Nintendo is far more apt to go after ROM hosting sites. PSX emulation (and many after) rely on a BIOS file that's copyrighted. Emulators can exist, but they're useless without the BIOS. Still later console generations rely on the DMCA to make them de facto illegal, and that's full circle on the latest console generations since they're all x86 anyway.
I would say that dedicated four socket desktop boards don't exist. What I've seen are server boards put into a workstation enclosure. In some cases, the "workstation enclosure" is pretty much a 4U rack host put into something that has feet to allow it to be mounted on its side. We have customers who buy these servers/desktops for their analysis/modeling needs.
I'd venture that this makes it easier for management, as in you no longer have to remember that the server named XYZ is not part of a server infrastructure, but really in a workstation role. The clients we have that use these rigs are usually very large organizations doing complex engineering of big machinery or electronics.
I'm sure they exist, but it goes back to the original question - It sounds like the server naming problem can be solved by a better naming convention and a P-Touch, and either way those clients are already operating under the idea that these machines cost what they cost now - an $800 savings in Windows Server licensing fees isn't going to persuade or dissuade such a purchase, and there's nothing stopping Windows Server from running in the aforementioned side-mounted 4U chassis.
I'm excited about this because we used to have to install Windows Server to use this type of machine, now we won't need to. Linux happily installs on single, dual or quad core hosts so we only needed to maintain one install. Now we can keep things consistent on Windows.
I think the point is that this seems to be an afterthought solution to an incredibly niche problem. Cores aren't the issue here, sockets are. How many 4-socket desktop boards are out there? They are probably within range of an actual-server or two. How many desktop applications that can use more than 4 cores effectively? Not many - sure, you can probably do a bit better in AutoCAD with 8 or maybe 16, but after that, management overhead starts becoming significant, while the performance increases don't generally justify the expenses. Moreover, a 32-core Windows Server 2016 license is about $1,500...about the same as each of the four processors you'd be putting into this quad-socket computer, or a year of the copy of AutoCAD that's running on it.
Exactly how big do you think the market is for computers with four CPU sockets that isn't just a PowerEdge or G8? Of that market, how many people are going to make-or-break their purchase based on the difference in cost between Workstation Windows and Windows Server?
There are 8,737 members of the recently-reborn Windows Media Center enthusiast forum thegreenbutton.tv. I have a solid suspicion that the market for Windows Media Center is multiple times larger than the market for a version of Windows that addresses the need for more than two sockets in a machine that isn't in a rack and already running Windows Server.
Ya, both sides are equivalent. Hilary running her own email server is the same as Trump colluding with a foreign adversary (getting Russian sanctions out of Rep platform, and we've probably not scratched the surface yet).
Hillary explicitly using unsecured communications channels for classified data, not turning over the server when the investigation started ("Did you wipe the server?" "with a cloth?" "No, with Bleachbit..."), cherry picking which e-mails get to be submitted as evidence...maybe not *quite* the same, but still thoroughly inexcusable..
Benghazi is the same as Iraq (the cause of 1+million human deaths).
Iraq, the war that Hillary voted in favor of and Trump spoke out against?
"Obamacare", ugly as it was, added millions to the number of insured and got rid of the donut hole
The 2,300 page bill that Nancy Pelosi said we needed to pass to find out what was in it? The bill that wasn't a tax until the question of whether or not it was Constitutional was raised, then it became a tax? That bill? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that people got coverage, but has this turned into an ends-justifies-the-means situation?
and that's equivalent to Trump Care, which removes those advantages for the non-rich.
Support for TrumpCare was tough to find, even among Republicans.
Climate change is going to affect the poor way more than the rich,
This is true - the costs of addressing climate change are going to roll downhill until they end up manifesting as price increases for household goods, but let's not pretend that taxing companies into compliance is going to come out of the C-level exec's annual bonuses.
AND green jobs in some states already outnumber fossil fuel jobs,
Absolutely...and in other states, fossil fuels are still economic powerhouses (Pennsylvania and North Dakota, I'm looking at you), turning it into a numbers game.
but getting rid of jobs and sacrificing future prosperity, hey it's all equivalent, I don't know which side to support.
Amongst the reasons Trump won was because he promised that manufacturing and oil drilling and coal mining would end up becoming domestic tasks again. Now yes, to an extent he was just making campaign promises (i.e. he was full of it), but the definition of 'getting rid of jobs' sounds different if you're a career machinist. He tapped into the market for that sort of message.
To be clear, I'm not a Trump fan, and I didn't vote for him, but the false equivalences are of limited utility in this context.
Unlike Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models"
I can't believe I'm about to (kinda sorta) go to bat for the MPAA - I've got *no* love for them, their accountants, their lawyers, or their DRM, so I feel just a little bit dirty posing this question. The argument above is an easy +5 Insightful when the topic of the MPAA is brouht up, but I've yet to hear a viable business model that isn't either 1) already implemented, 2) impractical, 3) deemed 'obsolete', or 4) worked around in some manner. Here's the list that I could come up with...
-Physical sales. This has been deemed 'obsolete'. -Broadcast. This has been deemed 'obsolete', because 'cord cutting'. -Movie theaters, the closest analog to the 'live performance' argument on the RIAA side - limited number of titles available at a time, and everyone complains about rowdy teens and $26 popcorn...so largely 'obsolete'. -Direct Downloading. This is sorta the jackpot of fitting all four categories - already implemented, format compatibility and storage space makes it largely impractical to widely take hold, so torrents have become a bit of a workaround for those who are interested in this method. -Ad-supported streaming. This has been implemented, but everyone hates ads and runs ad blockers. -Subscription streaming. This has been implemented, but no one can agree on a standard platform. Netflix is obviously the closest, but basically every network owner has their own silo of exclusive content, along with region blocking, licensing fees, and royalty minefields. Even with those somehow solved, try subscribing to more than two or three without it starting to look like your cable bill. Moreover, if there was somehow 'one streaming service to control them all' that had virtually all the content with no regional stipulations, congratulations...you've reinvented Comcast on a global scale.
So yes, the MPAA's obsession with lawsuits, DRM, and regional release blocking needs to go, no argument there whatsoever. At the same time, what sort of business model allows for movies to be funded while also not being deemed a 'failed business model'? I'm genuinely interested in how those two can coexist in a way that isn't already implemented.
Sorry grandpa, but I don't think "ability to link with a samba drive of bootlegged MP3s" is a hot feature that companies are dying to pick up.
You your self write about a need to "grow and adapt." Maybe it's time for you to ditch your Napster drive and move on to 21st century technology.
On the one hand, I agree that the complete lack of a set of products catering to end users who would prefer to limit data usage to the LAN only is troubling. On the other hand, for a whole lot of the population, being able to say "hey Alexa, play 'Crystallize' by Lindsey Sterling", and have it start playing three seconds later, with neither the need for a purchase, nor a pre-ripped CD, nor the experience of using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire, is as close to the perfect experience that music listening is going to get, in context*.
In practice, as much as I'd love some sort of self-hosted Alexa backend that could understand a few hundred commands or have some sort of software that grants the ability to make my own commands without having to be a software engineer, I also realize that it's a vanishingly small market. Suppose such a thing existed, and could be pointed to my folder full of music files. My tags are good, but not perfect. I have "A", "a", "A feat. B", and "B feat a". If I ask FreeLexa to play 'A', from which sets would it pick? In practice, the Samba share method only makes sense if all the metadata is perfect...and if you have perfect metadata, music is only half the draw anyway.
*The context is 'having an assistant cater to your immediately desired whim'. The Echo speaker isn't half bad for its size, but for most people, it most certainly fits 'good enough'. For those who have gold-plated cables and $5,000 speakers I can't pronounce, those sorts of setups are for 'active listening', whereas any sort of home assistant scenario is a different story entirely.
For the company that invented the Walkman, dreaming up another hit shouldn't be so hard.
That's oversimplifying just a smidge, methinks. The Walkman was the evolution of the handheld transistor radio, and depended upon the existence of the audio cassette tape; nobody was carrying around a 'portable' 8-track player.
What the author fails to differentiate is the fact that Sony owned the portable media playback market with the Walkman (and largely the Discman) at a time when things were primarily hardware. Everything is software now - games, apps, music, movies...it's all files/programs on a storage medium somewhere, and at the hardware level,it's basically "things that play software and read files" in one shape or another. Competing in that world is rather difficult as differentiating is almost invariably a detriment to the product.
I'm certain there are niche areas being ignored where Sony could own a few very small markets, but having 80% marketshare of a dozen 20,000 unit markets isn't going to make the accountants happy if their metric of success is the Walkman or the Playstation.
I'm not saying that Sony *can't* do it, but blockbuster products have a whole lot of ingredients, not the least of which are both luck and mass appeal. Finding the new thing everyone wants, and introducing it the right way, at the right time, at the right price, is not something that can be decided in Excel. After all, every company is trying to do it.
I dunno, I wouldn't mind a Windows-compatible OS that is open source and doesn't include a bunch of weird Microsoft marketing telemetry.
I think this is largely the answer. Right now, there isn't quite an uproar over Windows 10 because the majority of the people who have an issue with it are camping out on Win7. If Microsoft keeps the trajectory of Win10 the way it's going (telemetry, forced updates with poor QA, 'features' that satisfy relatively few people, auto-installed apps, near-insistence on MS accounts for login, etc.), 2020 is going to be a year of reckoning for Microsoft.
Meanwhile, with Apple all but abandoning the pro market, and MS putting pressure on moving everything to the app store model, it's going to leave a whole lot of high-end software developers looking for a home for their software to run...and as much as I'd love to run proprietary software alongside FOSS in Linux, either a whole lot of expensive hardware is destined for a landfill or we'll find ourselves in a world where we'll be paying for driver development.
Seriously, are we still using books as a unit of comparison? Why not say it can process 80% of the internet, etc.?
Yes, and there are two related reasons. First, the LoC is a very large amount of data. It's not the kind of data that can land on a USB stick, it's enough to actually prove something.
Second, it's a known quantity of data. Even if it's approximate, it's a set amount of books, with a set amount of pages. Can we really count the amount of data on the internet? Let's establish a baseline - what constitutes "the internet" in terms of storage? Every website ever? What about apps and the data they create - do we include those databases because mobile apps use them? How many companies will volunteer how big those databases are? GoDaddy will probably be able to more-or-less say how much data they host, but how much of it is active data - does it have to be served up to count? Similarly, does this include Dropbox data that's technically accessible, but only to its end user? If so, what about end users who own their own Synology boxes and back up their pictures to it over the internet? Does the data on those home NAS units count? Do we limit protocols to HTTP, or are we also talking about FTP sites, NNTP servers (do we count the total amount of Usenet data, or does each company who peers that data count separately?), and data available via torrents? What about e-mail - does e-mail count if it's stored on a server and accessible via a web browser? What if it's only accessible via POP/IMAP?
Even if *you* came up with a number that includes what you deem appropriate for '80% of the internet', it's not going to translate well. If your metric was "anything that is accessible from a computer and isn't behind a login prompt", that's going to be different than someone who says that Dropbox counts, which doesn't fit your criteria - undoubtedly petabytes of difference, making the measurement irrelevant.
Because they do care about what crashes on your computer and why, so they can fix those issues.
If Microsoft wants telemetry data to resolve issues with system crashes, they can earn it. Start by actually reading through the forum posts with thousands of people reporting the same issue, and work to address that issue, rather than having an offshored 'support rep' copy/paste a 'solution', mark the issue as solved, never following up on the thread, and then waiting until page 807 for some enterprising individual to figure out the registry hack + permissions change + third party utility that *actually* solves the problem. This is the norm in the Microsoft support forums. Microsoft cannot simultaneously argue that they need telemetry in order to address crashes, performance issues, and system instabilities, while also ignoring the green pastures of such information volunteered to them that goes unaddressed and unresolved unless another end user provides a workaround.
That's more to do with what other people (software developers) do on your computer than what you do on it.
So then why don't they provide an opt-out if I would prefer to deal with the crashes personally and not get their help? Why don't they provide the raw data that gets sent back? You are defending Microsoft taking data that my computer has generated and not showing it to me while appearing to be perplexed as to why "*.microsoft.com DENY ANY ANY" is becoming a progressively more common firewall rule. They want information about how well my computer runs, they can ask for it, and I will be more than happy to give it to them (fairly commonly in the forums, see point #1). MS wants to take it, not show it to me, write a EULA indicating that they can do whatever they want with that data, and expect me to trust them to do the right thing on my behalf? Sorry, no.
You, the person reading this right now, is on Slashdot. According to Alexa, it's one of the top 5,500 most visited websites on the internet, so even despite its downturn of late, there's still millions of people who visit this website every month.
Why are you all not on Usenet? You're all technical enough to download and configure Pan or Agent, and if your ISP doesn't provide Usenet access, a 5GB block on Blocknews costs $2.75 and will provide years of text-based discussion. There are plenty of technical categories, and plenty of them have actual users on them.
But you're on Slashdot.
You are here because millions of other people are here, and because not every NNTP server replicates every message, everywhere, ever. You are here because the value of information is determined by the person posting that information, and for some people, posting "you are all cows", "only luddites use nntp without apps", or "Fr33 V1@gra" is deemed valuable, while the vast majority of readers disagree. Spam filtering can only happen with someone deciding 'this is spam' and 'this is not spam', and boom, there is the beginning centralization.
Why are you not on Retroshare?
It has forum-like functions, email-like functions, IRC-like functions, and even Limewire-like functions and is 100% decentralized and relies on PGP keys for connectivity, so everything is encrypted.
You're not on it because getting messages to proliferate is a problem, especially if you only have a few friends who aren't themselves connected. You're not on it because firewall configuration is a pain, even if you know how to port forward. You're not on it because 2/3 of the discussion is key exchanges, and the way many people get started is in the new users room which is, essentially, centralized. Or, maybe you are there...and hopefully you're not one of the people who post things in the forums which are actually-racist or providing bomb-making tutorials or degradingly sexually explicit.
Even at that, what's to stop a TLA agency or RIAA lawyer from just being another user who's a part of the system? Decentralization combined with equal access invalidates the viability of the goal to minimize access by undesirable parties, as it's only a matter of time before "Joe Blough the dude who likes to discuss fishing and parasailing...who also happens to be in MI6" joins. Blocking government issues IP addresses is easy enough, but you're back to needing a central authority to provide that.
Without the commons, a project never gets any traction. With the commons, we end up with Facebook, but without the filtering tools that keep it generally free of dick pics (or a means to at least hide them).
No matter how you slice it, the network effect is inherently necessary to make an internet service work, and attaining critical mass of a decentralized (and presumably free/Free) communications platform is something that has yet to be done successfully. After all, you're not on Usenet or Retroshare. You're still on Slashdot.
Star Trek: The Next Generation did something like this. The same UI on the bridge displays, the stellar cartography big-as-a-room display, the shuttlecraft, the medical displays. I think later models of the tricorder even approximated the same layout.
Why don't they mimic that??
LCARS is what you're thinking about. It looks pretty in episodes of Star Trek, but think it through its real-world implications. Tricorders store massive amounts of data, but they show it on a screen the size of the Apple Watch; the rest are input keys. No one interacts with the displays; it's either input or output, minimizing the utility of the space that does exist. Stellar cartography uses the same styling, but they have a massive screen (that no one directly interacts with a la Minority Report) which is controlled by a console several feet away - basically, a keyboard and a projector, but prettier. It made for great exposition scenes, but it's not like they managed to run circles over Powerpoint.
Also, CBS is super litigious regarding the use of LCARS in actual computer usage, so even attempting to use it in a desktop or mobile program is basically asking for a C&D letter.
I'll agree that the Chrome bundling has plenty of blame to go around, to the point where pinning even the majority on Google is unreasonable. I'll similarly agree that Microsoft resetting the PDF viewer and default browser and removing Classic Shell is obnoxious, problematically so, even.
The Android side of things though, I disagree with you on. First off, The Maps dependency could easily be solved by having some sort of a stub saying "Maps isn't installed, would you like to install it through the Play Store?" if the app is removed but the API is called. That it is a 'system' app is disingenuous. Moreover, for the Win10 apps that don't have a simple uninstall, it is possible to run a Powershell script, or W10Privacy (and a number of similar tools) to remove them. It absolutely should be simpler to do, and I'm not giving MS a pass on that, but to remove 'system' apps on Android requires rooting, which tends to void warranties, ruin resale values (because of the eFuses), and prevent things like Samsung Pay and Snapchat from running, and even that can frequently cause an issue if the phone has a sufficiently locked bootloader. Personally, I feel that's an acceptable price to pay in order to limit Google to the Play Store and Play Services on my Android phone, but that's a far greater sacrifice than is required to remove the preloaded W10 apps.
The trialware bundling has been a problem for quite a long time on Windows machines, and Lenovo got their head handed to them over Superfish - they provided a removal tool, haven't done it since, no other OEMs have followed suit, which is just as well because Windows Defender started flagging it as malware and removing it, too.
I'm not a fan of either company's practices as both are anti-consumer, but if forced to pick a greater evil, I'll pick the one that doesn't give the end user root access and requires a warranty-voiding procedure to remove the preinstalled Map application if so chosen.
I don't think Microsoft is still hemorrhaging from their struggles in the early 00's, I think there's more to it.
First off, Microsoft didn't monopolize the market, but the Palm/Blackberry/WinMo split was vaguely even. I forget who was who, but even a 20% share of that three legged race was a good place to be. Microsoft also competed quite well with Blackberry for control in the server room - BES was an excellent product that made devices basically-interchangeable and management a breeze, but was much more expensive than WinMo's integration with AD and being "just another computer in the domain".
No, Microsoft did make a bunch of missteps, but they were at the ground floor. While the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2 were arguably the best WinMo phones ever made (HTC's TouchFlo 3D interface being a primary reason for that), it was too little, too late, as Microsoft had committed to a revamp of WinMo. They made Windows Phone 7, and their app development toolset was based on Silverlight and XAML (har har). Also, while Android had (and still has) a vibrant modding community, and Apple had a pretty solid jailbreaking scene, Microsoft 'handled' the Chevron team almost immediately, leaving no ability for mods or a modding community to start embracing the platform. Their hardware was lackluster at best, and what the earliest iterations of the iPhone brought to the table was the ability to consolidate the MP3 player and the phone. WP7 played MP3s, of course, but there was no meaningful music store or means of integrating with iTunes, so it was one hell of a chore to get music onto the phone, especially if one's music collection was DRM'd from iTunes.
So, MS flailed around on WP7, and then released 7.5, which worked on most phones, and they couldn't make slabs with rounded corners to compete with Apple's slabs of rounded corners, at (arguably) the height of iPhone fanfare.
WinPho 8 was then the 'next big thing'. It wasn't compatible with WP7 apps, or half the phones running WP7, but they "really got it right this time". They ditched the Silverlight crap, and they bought Nokia for pennies on the dollar (Thanks, Elop!). By now, WP8 on Nokia hardware...they tried to market it (remember the Lumia ads?), and the hardware wasn't *quite* all that bad...but now they had to compete with incumbent ecosystems; it wasn't people's first smartphone and they needed a good reason to switch. MS didn't give them one, though I will give them credit for the "smoked by a Windows Phone" challenge being a solid attempt. They got a little piece of the low-end market, but this was bad for everyone because the OS didn't run great on low end hardware, and app developers weren't going to make much money from people with prepaid phones and such. And WP8 further integrated Bing services that weren't all that great, and only started to give a music/movie option that was passable, and were still competing with the Galaxy S3 and HTC One and other phones of the era. Meanwhile, the stores of cell carriers kept one in the back for the occasional MS fanboy, but they were hesitant to sell them - not because of a lack of education or marketing muscle, but because of the insanely high return figures. If over half the Windows phones that go out the door come back, are you going to continue pushing them, or are you going to sell what you know generally keeps people happy? That was the problem. The corollary was that MS never seemed to think to ask the question of why the return rates were so high and address them.
Then, WP10 was announced, and again, it wouldn't work on any of the hardware, nor would it run any of the apps....so why, exactly, would anyone stick with a platform that fragmented the developers and didn't have a modding community to help pick up the slack? Yeah, twice bitten, thrice shy.
I still remember (and recently re-watched) the presentation that was done when Office 2007 was released and everyone was up in arms over the ribbon. Agree or disagree with the outcome, that 90-minute presentation pretty clearly demonstrated that a
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I still think windows home server was a disaster.
Oh it just occasionally corrupts backups so you can't open them.
It was never fixed!
No way to repair or recover the data was ever provided.
Then they took out Drive Extender and still didn't fix it.
Sadly, WHS was a great idea doomed from the get-go for a myriad of reasons. It needed a crowd sufficiently-enthusiast to want a product capable of handling home streaming and backups, but insufficiently enthusiast to set up a FreeNAS, Plex, and the free version of Macrium (or the inexpensive 5-user license of Acronis, which was still half-decent at the time). The hardware had its issues, not the least of which being manufactured by an HP that was trying to figure out how to do this 'mobile' thing by buying Palm, and their revolving door of CEOs. The affordable ones had a single internal drive and expected to be supplemented by a hodgepodge of externals, while the unit that supported multiple drives cost over $1,000 with three of those bays empty.
The early versions integrated with Live OneCare, which would have been great if they didn't abandon it, and the Windows Media Center integration was hampered by the speeds of the then-dominant single-band 802.11n, as well as the fact that the server couldn't function as a DVR directly (allowing a client/server model like MythTV today), a problem compounded by the broadcast flags being used by some cable companies.
The nail in the coffin came by way of issues like the ones you've specified - storage space issues, backup integrity issues, poor integration with non-Microsoft products, and no proactive means of addressing any of them. When not even those who were willing to give it a shot were able to achieve a reliable amount of success, there's no way it's hitting critical mass.
Then relax, because there are such fitness trackers on the market. The Jawbone Up is probably the best known one.
I just looked at the support site for the Jawbone Up, and all of them require the app, which in turn requires an account to be made. Thus, [citation needed].
Should the drive to profit trump everything else? Is there any value to living in harmony with the world around us, even if it means less profit? A small amount of profit is required; humanity will continue to push the limits of what is possible. Hopefully "The Giving Tree" is not the way it all goes down.
This argument would have merit if Netflix was raising their prices without additional value-add, even if that added value was "we can give our employees raises to address the rising cost of living". If it was "we're raising prices by $1/month for everyone for the sole purpose of increasing our profit margin", then that would be the drive to profit trumping everything else.
Netflix is offering improved service for the same money, with the intent of either luring additional subscribers or retaining existing ones. It's a highly indirect means by which to assist with "living in harmony", but it's not ruthless capitalism, either.
Better question: Why are such records stored on servers sufficiently accessible that Google can index them in the first place?
Consumers will still have a choice, because all it takes is ONE manufacturer to realize that privacy might be a feature worth touting to gain an edge in sales over their competitors. The idea that there won't be a single product among the hundreds or thousands per category out there that *won't* spy on you is a dystopian fantasy, something that seems strangely common here on this site.
And which fitness tracker do you recommend? If there was a FitBit sort of device that kept all the data local to my phone (or laptop ideally, but I'll compromise) and didn't require any sort of online account or data transmission, I'd buy it tomorrow. So far, Fitbit, MS Band, Apple Watch, Samsung Gear, Garmin, and Nike all require online accounts to work, even though it's not the sort of product inherently requiring an internet connection.
If there's room for half a dozen companies making fitness trackers, and zero of them have decided to make a band with local-only data mode, then it's not quite a dystopian fantasy.
So you are claiming Amazon data mines customers of AWS?!? I can't tell if you are attempting to fearmonger, or if you are just a complete idiot.
No, he's claiming that if Amazon *were* to be data mining the AWS information from known Wal-Mart vendors and partners for strategic information that would be useful for Amazon, there would be no meaningful way to detect it. Though Amazon has managed to be "generally less evil" than the other major cloud providers, it would still require Wal-Mart to place massive trust in their biggest competitor to act ethically.
Wal-Mart isn't saying not to use Azure or GCC or Rackspace; they're not concerned about the systemic and philosophical ramifications of storing data on someone else's hard drive. They're saying they don't want to run the risk of Amazon deciding at some point to cease actively choosing to forego a major competitive advantage that would very difficult for Wal-Mart to prove if it ever did happen.
Now, Wal-Mart *could* meet some companies halfway by offering to cover the costs of transitioning, which is where they lose my support for their position. However, I'd be remiss to turn a blind eye to a very reasonable concern.
At the time there have been perfectly usable smartphones where you could install any appication compiled for the platform, independent of the telco provider and you also could write your own. I did not get the whole iphone hype back then, and I still don't.
A bit of history glossing, methinks. Yes, it was *possible* to run third party apps, but the experience couldn't have been more dissimilar.
It was possible to download CAB files (and the Palm equivalent) from whatever download.com or tucows or softpedia clone you wanted, but there was no guarantee it would really work with your phone. Alternatively, you could walk into Staples and buy an app on an SD card, which cost between $10 and $30, and likely needed to occupy your one SD card slot, on a phone that *might* have had 512MB of storage (64MB was common at the time). The ability to buy an app on the device itself and have it instantly download is a major distinction from the way it was in 2006.
Developers also couldn't count on literally any particular piece of hardware being consistently accessible. Some had physical keyboards, some had GPS, some had Wi-Fi, some had widescreen screens, some had barcode scanners, some had CompactFlash readers, some had SD card readers, data plans were expensive, slow, and weren't ubiquitous (and thus couldn't be assumed), and only one had a capacitive screen. The "zomg Android fragmentation!!111" cries ring super-hollow to me because whatever difficulties there are testing against 3-4 versions of Android in tablet and phone flavors, that's nothing compared to trying to develop for WinMo. Frequently, applications listed the half-dozen phones they would install on. Some would refuse to install on other devices, others would just act weird. It was nearly impossible to get Pandora to work on the HTC HD2, because it was impossible to get the keyboard to come up, because the app was written for phones with physical keyboards - there was a trick to remapping a button to force the keyboard to display which was the workaround. Imagine any iPhone user having to go through that sort of trouble to getting an app as common as Pandora to function properly.
Just because there were apps doesn't mean that the experience of acquiring them and using them didn't need some substantial work. Is that all Apple's doing? No, I think MS, Palm, and Blackberry would have gotten there eventually without them, but I think that the fact that a whole lot has been standardized such that app developers can reasonably test to a few test suites is a substantial improvement that I will absolutely give Apple credit for accelerating.
Time travel is a cheap-ass way to fix a problem deus ex machina, essentially, and writing anything that centers around time travel? You're asking for disaster. You almost certainly end up painting yourself into a corner, ruining any chance of redeeming your work. That's what authors have told me, at least.
See, I think time travel can be an interesting mechanic as long as it's used properly, the rules are applied consistently, and the story is deeper than 'fix the thing'. Back to the Future gained mass appeal because it was a plot device tangential to the real theme of the movie - the fact that Marty came to realize he shared more in common with his parents than he thought. We forgave the butterfly effect problem and the motion of earth and the solar system in order to allow the rest of the story to advance. The new series "Timeless" has been fairly good because they've kept to the rules they established at the beginning and the fact that the slight alterations are historical fact to everyone who didn't travel through time.
Star Trek has been a mess with respect to time travel because the rules change a lot. The TOS crew achieved time warp in a craptastic Klingon vessel, but neither Picard nor Janeway gave it the ol' college try a hundred years later? In Voyager's case specifically, "Year of Hell" was a good concept that couldn't stand up to scrutiny, because "destroying the ship" did exactly what everyone wanted, including the antagonist, because "destruction" became "never existed", which made no sense, and that's completely sidestepping everything Captain Braxton did, or the fact that Starfleet would even have a fleet of timeships in the first place. I'm not even going into the mess that was "First Contact", but it's most heinous crime was giving the Borg some form of time travel capabilities that they then never used thereafter. Then, there's Doctor Who. Want to talk about a deus ex machina...he comes at just the right time to fix a thing, unless it's arbitrarily deemed a "fixed point in time"...
As stated, I think it's indeed very difficult to make a time travel story, but not impossible, as long as consistency is met and the story primarily uses time travel as a means to an end rather than a crutch upon which to base an otherwise thin-at-best story.
It's a tricky thing, art. While art is and always has been a commercial enterprise to some degree, it's also intended as a communication medium. In effect, altering the artistic work also distorts the message of the artist(s).
I don't think this is a problem in this context. End users *know* they are not watching the 'artist intended' version of the film, and the fact that they are watching a sanitized, incomplete version does not preclude them from later viewing the unaltered version, or prevent anyone else from doing so. If I purchased a painting and cut off half of it to then hang the first half in a frame, am I distorting the message of the artist? Yes. Is that my right? Well, I paid for the painting. The painting analogy falls flat because that's a sale, vs. the licensing model that is the nature of DVD sales and Netflix streams. Here's a better example: The oft-maligned Windows 10 telemetry - if I have paid for my copy of Windows 10 Professional, morally (EULA terms aside), must I also allow the telemetry software to run, or is it my prerogative to determine which parts of Windows may run on my computer, and how I will disable them, if I am willing to live with the reduced functionality of such a system? If I am indeed morally wrong for denying execute permissions to Cortana's EXE files, if I allow them to run but block them at the firewall, am I still morally wrong? That is the quagmire being addressed here.
I'm not 100% against this on principle, but I find it a dangerous road. It's very similar to editing an interview to destroy the relationship between question and answer. Do I think that some borderline films could benefit from a "kids" edit? Sure. Do I think it should happen without the input of the originators of a work? No.
It sounds to me like you're in favor of director-released 'sanitized' versions of films. I think there's a market for that, and the existence of VidAngel, and both CleanFlicks and ClearPlay before it, show that there is a market for such a product. However, it goes back to the point at which the buyer has jurisdiction over what has been bought. If I wish to watch a specific half of a movie, I see no problem in doing so, as long as it takes place with my knowledge and does not prevent others, including the director, from watching the whole thing as intended.
I just repaired my daughters, ...
So you fixed them yourself instead of paying a doctor. Good on 'ya.
Hey, he's the original manufacturer...
I'm pretty sure his (ex) wife/girlfriend is the original manufacturer. He's an outside vendor who provided half of the source code.
There were a handful of things that makes the Note 4 worthwhile, especially since good condition Note 4's are pretty cheap on eBay and Swappa. The S-Pen works for the back and task switch buttons (which were finger-only on the Note 2). The IR Blaster is helpful as a universal remote, and the front-facing camera is definitely better. The Note 2 had a better S-Pen, though.
I just bought a refurbed Note Edge that I'm pretty happy with. I'm a stickler for removable batteries because I'm a die hard fan of aftermarket, high-capacity batteries. ZeroLemon is my jam, though I've been happy with Gorilla Gadgets in the past, and PowerBear is pretty good so far.
I think you're pretty much on point with the Note8 being an S8 with a pen, which is sad because no one seems to want to make an enthusiast phone anymore. Honestly, I've got a real close eye on Blackberry, because their renaissance of the keyboard may well make other OEMs take a look if they achieve any level of success in the market. If that happens, it as good a reason as any for phone manufacturers to look beyond 'bent glass' and 'even more anorexia' and ask what people actually want in their phones.
Game console emulation is a quagmire unto itself.
NES/SNES emulation is "legal" in that you're hard pressed to find a for-profit company coding and selling one, so the most they could do is send a C&D order to Sourceforge or Github to kill the downloads - trying to file a lawsuit against an OSS developer would be pretty fruitless. Nintendo is far more apt to go after ROM hosting sites.
PSX emulation (and many after) rely on a BIOS file that's copyrighted. Emulators can exist, but they're useless without the BIOS. Still later console generations rely on the DMCA to make them de facto illegal, and that's full circle on the latest console generations since they're all x86 anyway.
I would say that dedicated four socket desktop boards don't exist. What I've seen are server boards put into a workstation enclosure. In some cases, the "workstation enclosure" is pretty much a 4U rack host put into something that has feet to allow it to be mounted on its side. We have customers who buy these servers/desktops for their analysis/modeling needs.
I'd venture that this makes it easier for management, as in you no longer have to remember that the server named XYZ is not part of a server infrastructure, but really in a workstation role. The clients we have that use these rigs are usually very large organizations doing complex engineering of big machinery or electronics.
I'm sure they exist, but it goes back to the original question - It sounds like the server naming problem can be solved by a better naming convention and a P-Touch, and either way those clients are already operating under the idea that these machines cost what they cost now - an $800 savings in Windows Server licensing fees isn't going to persuade or dissuade such a purchase, and there's nothing stopping Windows Server from running in the aforementioned side-mounted 4U chassis.
I'm excited about this because we used to have to install Windows Server to use this type of machine, now we won't need to. Linux happily installs on single, dual or quad core hosts so we only needed to maintain one install. Now we can keep things consistent on Windows.
I think the point is that this seems to be an afterthought solution to an incredibly niche problem. Cores aren't the issue here, sockets are. How many 4-socket desktop boards are out there? They are probably within range of an actual-server or two. How many desktop applications that can use more than 4 cores effectively? Not many - sure, you can probably do a bit better in AutoCAD with 8 or maybe 16, but after that, management overhead starts becoming significant, while the performance increases don't generally justify the expenses. Moreover, a 32-core Windows Server 2016 license is about $1,500...about the same as each of the four processors you'd be putting into this quad-socket computer, or a year of the copy of AutoCAD that's running on it.
Exactly how big do you think the market is for computers with four CPU sockets that isn't just a PowerEdge or G8? Of that market, how many people are going to make-or-break their purchase based on the difference in cost between Workstation Windows and Windows Server?
There are 8,737 members of the recently-reborn Windows Media Center enthusiast forum thegreenbutton.tv. I have a solid suspicion that the market for Windows Media Center is multiple times larger than the market for a version of Windows that addresses the need for more than two sockets in a machine that isn't in a rack and already running Windows Server.
Ya, both sides are equivalent. Hilary running her own email server is the same as Trump colluding with a foreign adversary (getting Russian sanctions out of Rep platform, and we've probably not scratched the surface yet).
Hillary explicitly using unsecured communications channels for classified data, not turning over the server when the investigation started ("Did you wipe the server?" "with a cloth?" "No, with Bleachbit..."), cherry picking which e-mails get to be submitted as evidence...maybe not *quite* the same, but still thoroughly inexcusable..
Benghazi is the same as Iraq (the cause of 1+million human deaths).
Iraq, the war that Hillary voted in favor of and Trump spoke out against?
"Obamacare", ugly as it was, added millions to the number of insured and got rid of the donut hole
The 2,300 page bill that Nancy Pelosi said we needed to pass to find out what was in it? The bill that wasn't a tax until the question of whether or not it was Constitutional was raised, then it became a tax? That bill? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that people got coverage, but has this turned into an ends-justifies-the-means situation?
and that's equivalent to Trump Care, which removes those advantages for the non-rich.
Support for TrumpCare was tough to find, even among Republicans.
Climate change is going to affect the poor way more than the rich,
This is true - the costs of addressing climate change are going to roll downhill until they end up manifesting as price increases for household goods, but let's not pretend that taxing companies into compliance is going to come out of the C-level exec's annual bonuses.
AND green jobs in some states already outnumber fossil fuel jobs,
Absolutely...and in other states, fossil fuels are still economic powerhouses (Pennsylvania and North Dakota, I'm looking at you), turning it into a numbers game.
but getting rid of jobs and sacrificing future prosperity, hey it's all equivalent, I don't know which side to support.
Amongst the reasons Trump won was because he promised that manufacturing and oil drilling and coal mining would end up becoming domestic tasks again. Now yes, to an extent he was just making campaign promises (i.e. he was full of it), but the definition of 'getting rid of jobs' sounds different if you're a career machinist. He tapped into the market for that sort of message.
To be clear, I'm not a Trump fan, and I didn't vote for him, but the false equivalences are of limited utility in this context.
Unlike Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models"
I can't believe I'm about to (kinda sorta) go to bat for the MPAA - I've got *no* love for them, their accountants, their lawyers, or their DRM, so I feel just a little bit dirty posing this question. The argument above is an easy +5 Insightful when the topic of the MPAA is brouht up, but I've yet to hear a viable business model that isn't either 1) already implemented, 2) impractical, 3) deemed 'obsolete', or 4) worked around in some manner. Here's the list that I could come up with...
-Physical sales. This has been deemed 'obsolete'.
-Broadcast. This has been deemed 'obsolete', because 'cord cutting'.
-Movie theaters, the closest analog to the 'live performance' argument on the RIAA side - limited number of titles available at a time, and everyone complains about rowdy teens and $26 popcorn...so largely 'obsolete'.
-Direct Downloading. This is sorta the jackpot of fitting all four categories - already implemented, format compatibility and storage space makes it largely impractical to widely take hold, so torrents have become a bit of a workaround for those who are interested in this method.
-Ad-supported streaming. This has been implemented, but everyone hates ads and runs ad blockers.
-Subscription streaming. This has been implemented, but no one can agree on a standard platform. Netflix is obviously the closest, but basically every network owner has their own silo of exclusive content, along with region blocking, licensing fees, and royalty minefields. Even with those somehow solved, try subscribing to more than two or three without it starting to look like your cable bill. Moreover, if there was somehow 'one streaming service to control them all' that had virtually all the content with no regional stipulations, congratulations...you've reinvented Comcast on a global scale.
So yes, the MPAA's obsession with lawsuits, DRM, and regional release blocking needs to go, no argument there whatsoever. At the same time, what sort of business model allows for movies to be funded while also not being deemed a 'failed business model'? I'm genuinely interested in how those two can coexist in a way that isn't already implemented.
Sorry grandpa, but I don't think "ability to link with a samba drive of bootlegged MP3s" is a hot feature that companies are dying to pick up.
You your self write about a need to "grow and adapt." Maybe it's time for you to ditch your Napster drive and move on to 21st century technology.
On the one hand, I agree that the complete lack of a set of products catering to end users who would prefer to limit data usage to the LAN only is troubling. On the other hand, for a whole lot of the population, being able to say "hey Alexa, play 'Crystallize' by Lindsey Sterling", and have it start playing three seconds later, with neither the need for a purchase, nor a pre-ripped CD, nor the experience of using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire, is as close to the perfect experience that music listening is going to get, in context*.
In practice, as much as I'd love some sort of self-hosted Alexa backend that could understand a few hundred commands or have some sort of software that grants the ability to make my own commands without having to be a software engineer, I also realize that it's a vanishingly small market. Suppose such a thing existed, and could be pointed to my folder full of music files. My tags are good, but not perfect. I have "A", "a", "A feat. B", and "B feat a". If I ask FreeLexa to play 'A', from which sets would it pick? In practice, the Samba share method only makes sense if all the metadata is perfect...and if you have perfect metadata, music is only half the draw anyway.
*The context is 'having an assistant cater to your immediately desired whim'. The Echo speaker isn't half bad for its size, but for most people, it most certainly fits 'good enough'. For those who have gold-plated cables and $5,000 speakers I can't pronounce, those sorts of setups are for 'active listening', whereas any sort of home assistant scenario is a different story entirely.
For the company that invented the Walkman, dreaming up another hit shouldn't be so hard.
That's oversimplifying just a smidge, methinks. The Walkman was the evolution of the handheld transistor radio, and depended upon the existence of the audio cassette tape; nobody was carrying around a 'portable' 8-track player.
What the author fails to differentiate is the fact that Sony owned the portable media playback market with the Walkman (and largely the Discman) at a time when things were primarily hardware. Everything is software now - games, apps, music, movies...it's all files/programs on a storage medium somewhere, and at the hardware level,it's basically "things that play software and read files" in one shape or another. Competing in that world is rather difficult as differentiating is almost invariably a detriment to the product.
I'm certain there are niche areas being ignored where Sony could own a few very small markets, but having 80% marketshare of a dozen 20,000 unit markets isn't going to make the accountants happy if their metric of success is the Walkman or the Playstation.
I'm not saying that Sony *can't* do it, but blockbuster products have a whole lot of ingredients, not the least of which are both luck and mass appeal. Finding the new thing everyone wants, and introducing it the right way, at the right time, at the right price, is not something that can be decided in Excel. After all, every company is trying to do it.
I dunno, I wouldn't mind a Windows-compatible OS that is open source and doesn't include a bunch of weird Microsoft marketing telemetry.
I think this is largely the answer. Right now, there isn't quite an uproar over Windows 10 because the majority of the people who have an issue with it are camping out on Win7. If Microsoft keeps the trajectory of Win10 the way it's going (telemetry, forced updates with poor QA, 'features' that satisfy relatively few people, auto-installed apps, near-insistence on MS accounts for login, etc.), 2020 is going to be a year of reckoning for Microsoft.
Meanwhile, with Apple all but abandoning the pro market, and MS putting pressure on moving everything to the app store model, it's going to leave a whole lot of high-end software developers looking for a home for their software to run...and as much as I'd love to run proprietary software alongside FOSS in Linux, either a whole lot of expensive hardware is destined for a landfill or we'll find ourselves in a world where we'll be paying for driver development.
Enter ReactOS.
Seriously, are we still using books as a unit of comparison? Why not say it can process 80% of the internet, etc.?
Yes, and there are two related reasons. First, the LoC is a very large amount of data. It's not the kind of data that can land on a USB stick, it's enough to actually prove something.
Second, it's a known quantity of data. Even if it's approximate, it's a set amount of books, with a set amount of pages. Can we really count the amount of data on the internet? Let's establish a baseline - what constitutes "the internet" in terms of storage? Every website ever? What about apps and the data they create - do we include those databases because mobile apps use them? How many companies will volunteer how big those databases are? GoDaddy will probably be able to more-or-less say how much data they host, but how much of it is active data - does it have to be served up to count? Similarly, does this include Dropbox data that's technically accessible, but only to its end user? If so, what about end users who own their own Synology boxes and back up their pictures to it over the internet? Does the data on those home NAS units count? Do we limit protocols to HTTP, or are we also talking about FTP sites, NNTP servers (do we count the total amount of Usenet data, or does each company who peers that data count separately?), and data available via torrents? What about e-mail - does e-mail count if it's stored on a server and accessible via a web browser? What if it's only accessible via POP/IMAP?
Even if *you* came up with a number that includes what you deem appropriate for '80% of the internet', it's not going to translate well. If your metric was "anything that is accessible from a computer and isn't behind a login prompt", that's going to be different than someone who says that Dropbox counts, which doesn't fit your criteria - undoubtedly petabytes of difference, making the measurement irrelevant.
Because they do care about what crashes on your computer and why, so they can fix those issues.
If Microsoft wants telemetry data to resolve issues with system crashes, they can earn it. Start by actually reading through the forum posts with thousands of people reporting the same issue, and work to address that issue, rather than having an offshored 'support rep' copy/paste a 'solution', mark the issue as solved, never following up on the thread, and then waiting until page 807 for some enterprising individual to figure out the registry hack + permissions change + third party utility that *actually* solves the problem. This is the norm in the Microsoft support forums. Microsoft cannot simultaneously argue that they need telemetry in order to address crashes, performance issues, and system instabilities, while also ignoring the green pastures of such information volunteered to them that goes unaddressed and unresolved unless another end user provides a workaround.
That's more to do with what other people (software developers) do on your computer than what you do on it.
So then why don't they provide an opt-out if I would prefer to deal with the crashes personally and not get their help? Why don't they provide the raw data that gets sent back? You are defending Microsoft taking data that my computer has generated and not showing it to me while appearing to be perplexed as to why "*.microsoft.com DENY ANY ANY" is becoming a progressively more common firewall rule. They want information about how well my computer runs, they can ask for it, and I will be more than happy to give it to them (fairly commonly in the forums, see point #1). MS wants to take it, not show it to me, write a EULA indicating that they can do whatever they want with that data, and expect me to trust them to do the right thing on my behalf? Sorry, no.
...and ended up where we are here.
You, the person reading this right now, is on Slashdot. According to Alexa, it's one of the top 5,500 most visited websites on the internet, so even despite its downturn of late, there's still millions of people who visit this website every month.
Why are you all not on Usenet? You're all technical enough to download and configure Pan or Agent, and if your ISP doesn't provide Usenet access, a 5GB block on Blocknews costs $2.75 and will provide years of text-based discussion. There are plenty of technical categories, and plenty of them have actual users on them.
But you're on Slashdot.
You are here because millions of other people are here, and because not every NNTP server replicates every message, everywhere, ever. You are here because the value of information is determined by the person posting that information, and for some people, posting "you are all cows", "only luddites use nntp without apps", or "Fr33 V1@gra" is deemed valuable, while the vast majority of readers disagree. Spam filtering can only happen with someone deciding 'this is spam' and 'this is not spam', and boom, there is the beginning centralization.
Why are you not on Retroshare?
It has forum-like functions, email-like functions, IRC-like functions, and even Limewire-like functions and is 100% decentralized and relies on PGP keys for connectivity, so everything is encrypted.
You're not on it because getting messages to proliferate is a problem, especially if you only have a few friends who aren't themselves connected. You're not on it because firewall configuration is a pain, even if you know how to port forward. You're not on it because 2/3 of the discussion is key exchanges, and the way many people get started is in the new users room which is, essentially, centralized. Or, maybe you are there...and hopefully you're not one of the people who post things in the forums which are actually-racist or providing bomb-making tutorials or degradingly sexually explicit.
Even at that, what's to stop a TLA agency or RIAA lawyer from just being another user who's a part of the system? Decentralization combined with equal access invalidates the viability of the goal to minimize access by undesirable parties, as it's only a matter of time before "Joe Blough the dude who likes to discuss fishing and parasailing...who also happens to be in MI6" joins. Blocking government issues IP addresses is easy enough, but you're back to needing a central authority to provide that.
Without the commons, a project never gets any traction. With the commons, we end up with Facebook, but without the filtering tools that keep it generally free of dick pics (or a means to at least hide them).
No matter how you slice it, the network effect is inherently necessary to make an internet service work, and attaining critical mass of a decentralized (and presumably free/Free) communications platform is something that has yet to be done successfully. After all, you're not on Usenet or Retroshare. You're still on Slashdot.
Star Trek: The Next Generation did something like this. The same UI on the bridge displays, the stellar cartography big-as-a-room display, the shuttlecraft, the medical displays. I think later models of the tricorder even approximated the same layout.
Why don't they mimic that??
LCARS is what you're thinking about. It looks pretty in episodes of Star Trek, but think it through its real-world implications. Tricorders store massive amounts of data, but they show it on a screen the size of the Apple Watch; the rest are input keys. No one interacts with the displays; it's either input or output, minimizing the utility of the space that does exist. Stellar cartography uses the same styling, but they have a massive screen (that no one directly interacts with a la Minority Report) which is controlled by a console several feet away - basically, a keyboard and a projector, but prettier. It made for great exposition scenes, but it's not like they managed to run circles over Powerpoint.
Also, CBS is super litigious regarding the use of LCARS in actual computer usage, so even attempting to use it in a desktop or mobile program is basically asking for a C&D letter.
I'll agree that the Chrome bundling has plenty of blame to go around, to the point where pinning even the majority on Google is unreasonable. I'll similarly agree that Microsoft resetting the PDF viewer and default browser and removing Classic Shell is obnoxious, problematically so, even.
The Android side of things though, I disagree with you on. First off, The Maps dependency could easily be solved by having some sort of a stub saying "Maps isn't installed, would you like to install it through the Play Store?" if the app is removed but the API is called. That it is a 'system' app is disingenuous. Moreover, for the Win10 apps that don't have a simple uninstall, it is possible to run a Powershell script, or W10Privacy (and a number of similar tools) to remove them. It absolutely should be simpler to do, and I'm not giving MS a pass on that, but to remove 'system' apps on Android requires rooting, which tends to void warranties, ruin resale values (because of the eFuses), and prevent things like Samsung Pay and Snapchat from running, and even that can frequently cause an issue if the phone has a sufficiently locked bootloader. Personally, I feel that's an acceptable price to pay in order to limit Google to the Play Store and Play Services on my Android phone, but that's a far greater sacrifice than is required to remove the preloaded W10 apps.
The trialware bundling has been a problem for quite a long time on Windows machines, and Lenovo got their head handed to them over Superfish - they provided a removal tool, haven't done it since, no other OEMs have followed suit, which is just as well because Windows Defender started flagging it as malware and removing it, too.
I'm not a fan of either company's practices as both are anti-consumer, but if forced to pick a greater evil, I'll pick the one that doesn't give the end user root access and requires a warranty-voiding procedure to remove the preinstalled Map application if so chosen.
I don't think Microsoft is still hemorrhaging from their struggles in the early 00's, I think there's more to it.
First off, Microsoft didn't monopolize the market, but the Palm/Blackberry/WinMo split was vaguely even. I forget who was who, but even a 20% share of that three legged race was a good place to be. Microsoft also competed quite well with Blackberry for control in the server room - BES was an excellent product that made devices basically-interchangeable and management a breeze, but was much more expensive than WinMo's integration with AD and being "just another computer in the domain".
No, Microsoft did make a bunch of missteps, but they were at the ground floor. While the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2 were arguably the best WinMo phones ever made (HTC's TouchFlo 3D interface being a primary reason for that), it was too little, too late, as Microsoft had committed to a revamp of WinMo. They made Windows Phone 7, and their app development toolset was based on Silverlight and XAML (har har). Also, while Android had (and still has) a vibrant modding community, and Apple had a pretty solid jailbreaking scene, Microsoft 'handled' the Chevron team almost immediately, leaving no ability for mods or a modding community to start embracing the platform. Their hardware was lackluster at best, and what the earliest iterations of the iPhone brought to the table was the ability to consolidate the MP3 player and the phone. WP7 played MP3s, of course, but there was no meaningful music store or means of integrating with iTunes, so it was one hell of a chore to get music onto the phone, especially if one's music collection was DRM'd from iTunes.
So, MS flailed around on WP7, and then released 7.5, which worked on most phones, and they couldn't make slabs with rounded corners to compete with Apple's slabs of rounded corners, at (arguably) the height of iPhone fanfare.
WinPho 8 was then the 'next big thing'. It wasn't compatible with WP7 apps, or half the phones running WP7, but they "really got it right this time". They ditched the Silverlight crap, and they bought Nokia for pennies on the dollar (Thanks, Elop!). By now, WP8 on Nokia hardware...they tried to market it (remember the Lumia ads?), and the hardware wasn't *quite* all that bad...but now they had to compete with incumbent ecosystems; it wasn't people's first smartphone and they needed a good reason to switch. MS didn't give them one, though I will give them credit for the "smoked by a Windows Phone" challenge being a solid attempt. They got a little piece of the low-end market, but this was bad for everyone because the OS didn't run great on low end hardware, and app developers weren't going to make much money from people with prepaid phones and such. And WP8 further integrated Bing services that weren't all that great, and only started to give a music/movie option that was passable, and were still competing with the Galaxy S3 and HTC One and other phones of the era. Meanwhile, the stores of cell carriers kept one in the back for the occasional MS fanboy, but they were hesitant to sell them - not because of a lack of education or marketing muscle, but because of the insanely high return figures. If over half the Windows phones that go out the door come back, are you going to continue pushing them, or are you going to sell what you know generally keeps people happy? That was the problem. The corollary was that MS never seemed to think to ask the question of why the return rates were so high and address them.
Then, WP10 was announced, and again, it wouldn't work on any of the hardware, nor would it run any of the apps....so why, exactly, would anyone stick with a platform that fragmented the developers and didn't have a modding community to help pick up the slack? Yeah, twice bitten, thrice shy.
I still remember (and recently re-watched) the presentation that was done when Office 2007 was released and everyone was up in arms over the ribbon. Agree or disagree with the outcome, that 90-minute presentation pretty clearly demonstrated that a