Your sig aside, isn't that what Canonical was supposed to do? Has done really? That's the problem, when you get down to it. Canonical has done everything right. Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to configure, easy to patch, has about as good of driver support as is reasonably possible given manufacturer reluctance, its package management system is extensive and has a nice front end... There's nothing at all that Canonical did *wrong* to make a great Desktop OS, people just aren't interested. People buy a computer, they use what's on it. Manufacturers make computers and use what's easiest (which given the ecosystem of drivers and trained people is Microsoft no matter how easy an individual Ubuntu install is).
Apple has, through multimillion dollar ad campaigns, product differentiation, aiming at the premium space, and tie ins to its iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem, managed to get a couple percent more market share than they had 5 years ago. A few percentage points of the market for an ad campaign that no Linux vendor could hope to match, a premium hardware budget that few manufacturers would be willing to risk, and a device ecosystem that is unmatched by anyone. Honestly if Linux ever breaks 1% market penetration on the desktop it will be shocking.
I agree with the author. Linux on the desktop shouldn't be ignored of course. People do use it (including me), and will continue to use it. Continued focus on it as some sort of magical goal is silly though. Linux servers are everywhere, Linux portables are everywhere. Focus on what is working for you. It may well be that in ten years the "desktop" is irrelevant anyway. Whether because of the "cloud", portable devices, both, and/or them + some currently unknown factor the whole discussion is likely to have shifted anyway.
No. Just no. Ignore your notions of the quality of Microsoft's work for a moment. I'm not saying your notions are right or wrong, just ignore them for a moment. Microsoft is the single biggest software house in the world. They produce literally dozens of titles simultaneously. If you've worked with them (and managed to stay a few years) it shows:
1) You can work in a team environment. Everything Microsoft does is done in teams larger than most will get a chance to work with until much later in their careers normally. Being able to code is one thing, being able to code to a spec and have your bits integrated with other people bits and having it all work together is another.
2) You can work under pressure. There is a lot of competition in a company like Microsoft. Being able to hold up in an environment like that and keep mostly intact says something about a person.
3) You're willing to work far harder and longer than is good for you to get ahead.
Now, you can argue about whether any of the above represent "good" qualities. You might not, in fact, really enjoy a beer with someone who possesses all of those qualities in abundance. If you're a software development manager though, they look pretty good in an employee. Now, if you have a choice between Google and Microsoft out of the gate, Google is just as a good if not better a choice, sure. I'm reluctant to think that anyone other than the top ten percent of MIT's graduating class is really in that position though.
Re:In the End...
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Why Microsoft?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, while personally I think the GP is a bit of an idiot for getting into Computer Science/Software Development with the attitude he has toward closed source software (which is, after all, by far the largest employment segment in software development) I also think your criticisms are ridiculously harsh. He doesn't like the company so he didn't take the interview. It's perfectly valid. I'd never work for Walmart (ignoring the fact that they could never hope to pay me enough below the executive level to even tempt me). His beliefs about F/OSS software are important to him and he chooses not to work for a company that in many ways represents to antithesis of those beliefs. Makes sense to me.
Now I personally think that open and closed source products can and should coexist; and I will happily (and have happily) work with both. I also think that getting into software development while essentially deliberately cutting off three quarters or more of your most lucrative possible employment avenues is a little silly. Not impossible by any means, and if GP can make it work, power to him; but it seems a little like getting into medicine while not believing morally in the use of any drugs. Sure there's stuff to do in the medical field that doesn't involve drugs, but you've seriously cut into your possible employment opportunities before you even started.
The big problem, and it's a legit problem really, though I think it's being blown out of proportion, is that these devices are basically generally purpose computers that can do anything. Unlike a purpose built device that can really only do what it's supposed to do, there's nothing stopping you from saying you want to buy an iPad to help out your developmentally disabled child then actually using it for nothing except surfing porn.
Before they could approve it, Medicare would have to some up with some reasonable way to ensure that the device is being used to do what the government purchased it to do. Now where it gets stupid is people who will undoubtedly say that it should be used *only* for what the government purchased it to do. I personally don't see anything wrong, assuming the device is primarily being used for its stated purpose, with using for other stuff sometimes too. I'm also quite certain that many people would scream about that being "wasteful spending".
They use different words. They don't say "It's great that my phone is locked down." They say "It's great that the app store protects me from viruses and stuff" (Whether it does or not is another matter, but it's definitely a popular perception), or "it's nice that everything I buy on the App store always works", or (on the developer side) "it's nice to only have to test on one platform". People feel protected by the locked down nature of the device, developers feel insulated from a lot of the complications of multiple OS versions and handsets.
In the minds of "average users" PCs are hard. They do mysterious things for no apparent reason and you have to pay an expert to come in and figure out why. They don't always run the software you bought for them. They get viruses and slow down over time for no real reason. We know (mostly) why they do the mysterious things. We know why they get viruses and slow down over times. We know Windows XP drivers won't necessarily work with Windows 7, but for a lot of people these are mysterious "things" that "happen" without discernible reason.
People want to be protected from that. They like that they get all their apps from the app store. The apps always work, and they have at least the illusion of protection from malware. They like that when their iPhone gets old they can go buy a new one and it will work the same, even use have the same programs and settings (iTunes makes it stupid easy to back up a config and restore it to new device).
I agree. If it "Works with Windows", is "Made for Macs", and is "FSF Compatible" no sane manufacturer is not going to want to mention all three. Even with its current, rather limited, desktop appeal I still see lots of peripherals marked with a "Linux Compatible" symbol joining the "WwW" and "MfM" ones on the back. If your hardware works with a given system why *wouldn't* you tell people. You obviously put at least some effort into the cross compatibility and it certainly can't hurt sales.
I just replied to the parent, but it's a free country so I'll reply to you too. As someone old enough (35) to start watching the music he grew up with slowly become "classic", you'll find that some of your music will too. Other bits will make you cringe in 15 years when you realize you actually listened to and like it. GP is way to young to be an old fogey, but he's acting like one. I distinctly recall bebopping to stuff my parents generation called crap. And to stuff that I now realize *was* crap;-)
We also had the Back Street Boys and (because I'm five years older than you and span the two generations) Cindi Lauper (before she took music lessons and started singing Jazz), so stop acting superior. Every generation has drivel. Every generation has timeless classics. It's often difficult to tell which is which till later. The Beatles were a teeny bopper pop band. So was Elvis. People said the same thing about them that's you're saying about Lady Gaga. People bitched that hair metal (Metallica) was pointless drivel. Ten-fifteen years from now some current Pop will turn out to have stood the test of time. The rest will vanish into the collections of people trying to relive their teenage years.
I don't disagree you, but it seems that plenty of my countrymen do. As far as I'm concerned half an hour is the outer limit of what should be considered an "acceptable" commute under normal circumstances. I had short term commute of over 2 hours once, but that was only for a month or so while a I was relocating. Even then I tended to stay with a friend during the week and only drive "home" on weekends. If I was working at Stennis I'd probably live in Slidell.
Stennis is half an hour from Slidell, LA, which is a decent sized town on its own, and an exurb of New Orleans. Most people I know that work there live in Slidell, have a moderate commute to work, and a short trip into New Orleans when they want a bit of excitement. Hell you could actually live *in* New Orleans and have a not absolutely awful commute. I wouldn't want to do it, but a lot of people seem to consider a two hour commute acceptable (and New Orleans -> Stennis is only about 1.5, less in good traffic). ERDC in Vicksburg is a better example. That's really pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Nearest "city" is Jackson more than hour away... and it isn't exactly a metropolis. I used to be the sole SGI Systems Support Engineer out of New Orleans. I can pretty much give you a "distance from New Orleans by car" for every moderately large technology center in the area. Thankfully Hattiesburg was covered by another territory, so I can't comment on that.
For the best cost of living "Bang for the buck" midsized towns seem to be the way to go. I live in Huntsville, AL. Population is around 500,000 for the metro area. Our property values and insurance rates are perhaps slightly higher than in a rural area, but nothing like the "big city", but the town is plenty large enough to not have "small town monopoly" syndrome. There's also a bit of night life, and Nashville isn't far.
I still prefer big city living myself, but I can definitely see the benefits to a place like this. True rural living would make me crazy in short order I think.
I think you're wrong. Or at least, you might be right, but if you are it will be becasue of deliberate choice made by manufactures of mobile devices. It's a matter of "How much performance is enough, and how much does it cost." When the first PCs starting coming out IBM wasn't worried. They could barely add 2 + 2. They were for hobbyists. They had nothing like the power of a mainframe. Then, slowly, they got better. At some tipping point it became apparent that a PC, while still not *as* powerful as a mainframe, was powerful *enough* to do most of what a mainframe could, albeit slower, at a much lower price. Slowly, slowly... the mainframe died. Does this mean you never see mainframes anymore? Of course not. There's still a few applications out there that need the kind of power that mainframes provide and are worth the money to get the best tool for the job. Even with clusters there's a small but existent market for large single system image computers. It's just a really tiny market.
When the first Laptops came out people thought they were cool toys. Maybe even useful in some specific situations. Not really like a PC though. You can't really upgrade them, they don't have the kind of power you need, and they're expensive. Then slowly they got a) more powerful and b) cheaper. They still aren't very upgradable, but people seem to care less about that now. Now they vastly out-ship desktop PCs. You can get very nearly the same power in laptop as you can in a desktop for very nearly the same price. Why not get the portable? this doesn't mean that desktop PCs are gone. You just see a lot less of them than you used to. There are still plenty of applications where every little bit of power matters, and portability matters less. People still buy desktop PCs for that. How much longer before laptop and desktop performance and price ratio become so close that almost no one buys desktops? Who knows. Maybe never, since the balance seems close enough now for laptop manufacturers to sell plenty.
Now mobile. As it exists right now, the mobile market is tangential to the PC market (and now I'm lumping laptops and desktops together into one market). The iPad, iPhone, and various sundry Android devices are nice for when you need the Internet in your pocket, but are nothing like as useful as a "real" computer. Let's look forward ten years though. Miniaturization continues to advance. The CPU in your phone is nearly as powerful as the CPU in your desktop, it has around the same amount of RAM, and while micro video cards aren't as nice as those for desktops they're getting there. Where we used to dock our phones to sync with a PC, now there are docks that allow us to connect to monitor, keyboard, mouse and external storage. The display is, from all normal human perspective just as good (and able to be on a full sized monitor); and application responsiveness, while measurably slower in computer time, looks exactly the same to an average user. Why should I buy a PC? My phone now *is* my PC. When I'm at home it's docked and does everything I need for content creation, moderate gaming, and Internet functionality. When I'm not at home it's my normal portable. Hell, at some point maybe I don't even need the dock, it just does everything wirelessly.
Will it *kill* the PC? Probably not. Just like each previous iteration there will be applications for which some people will want a full sized machine. Most people, most of the time, won't though. PCs will become semi specialty items used by Musicians, artists, programmers, and others who actually do need the full power than a desktop or laptop provides. For the rest, portables will be cheap, convenient and "good enough".
The big question is, will the current crop of providers (both manufacturers and service providers) take things in this direction. It *could* go this way, but there's evidence that the providers don't *want* it to. They want to keep portables as toys both because they don't want the headaches of being the "new PC"
But the government isn't one homogeneous organization. It's hundreds or thousands of agencies, field offices, departments, and units. All of them have purchasing authority. Any of them can have its own network. Some of them are so secret that even their inventory is classified. Some of them may be so secret that their very existence is classified. Many of these systems are so old and legacy that they were purchased before such concepts as "IT" department even exited.
This isn't a building, or even a logical LAN where someone gets an alert when someone else plugs into the port in 32B. It's a 3 *million* person operation with "networks" that range from 4 people in an FBI field office with a file server 4 workstations and an Internet connection, to the Army's network of 100's of thousands of computers, to a black ops network that no one outside the immediate chain of command is supposed to know exists.
And yet despite this major structural change: audit after audit, and inspection after inspection has shown that very little actually changed at the agencies that are now part of the DHS. Instead of reporting to the President or another Secretary the agency directors now report to the Secretary of DHS. They've made a few token gestures toward sharing information. There's another layer of Bureaucracy in place. The bag screeners at the airport work for them. Not much else is different.
1) He could do that. Afghanistan and Iraq would collapse into civil war. Other regional powers would get involved the end result would almost certainly be worse than what we started with. At best Iraq would be under the control of Iran in fact, if not in name (and it could be in name). At worst it would be a seething pit of warlords and mini-armies vying for control for decades killing tens of thousands and creating the perfect place for terrorist organizations to setup headquarters and camps from which to attack the rest of the world.
Afghanistan's best case is return of rule of by the Taliban. Worst case is exactly like Iraq. We'd be blamed the world over for two horrifying humanitarian crisis's. It would be entirely our collective faults, because we started the process than left before it was even vaguely stable, let alone complete. He would be blamed by everyone both for the embarrassing pullout and resulting humanitarian crisis. People who *were* calling for a complete pullout will conveniently forget it was their idea and will insist that they didn't *really* mean a *complete* pullout *right* now... It should have been handled better.
2) He could do that. Of course there are few agencies that anyone wants to completely destroy. Most of them do *something* useful. They're inefficient perhaps, but useful. People want to cut particular programs or something not destroy agencies. You'd be using a machine gun to kill rats. Sure that rats are dead, but so is everyone else in the immediate area.
3) You're aware that Congress has a number of powers to prevent this right? They can override vetoes for one. It's hard, but I bet you could start seeing some "broad bipartisan support" build up pretty damn fast when whole departments and agencies start losing their funding. As to your clever funding starts when I say it starts... it's pretty easy for Congress to include specific language in bills to dictate *exactly* when funding starts.
Brilliant! Fire them! So we fire, say, the FDA and then we hire an entire new set of employees, train them and send them out to inspect our food with no experience and training provided by a bunch of people who have never done the job (since we fired all the ones that have). I love this plan. No... I don't.
OK, so maybe you meant to fire the head of agencies that fail to comply. That's a better idea... Except that if you fire more than one or two of them then a big chunk of the upper management of the government is in the hands of inexperienced people, and the next levels down are now resentful that you fired all of their bosses.... Maybe not such a good idea...
So maybe we'll just have the President of the United States micromanaging the careers of every one of the 3 million or so employees of the federal government? No, that probably won't work either...
You're ignoring a lot of realities of the federal government here:
1) It's *huge*. Really, really huge. Even cut back and reduced to the Ron Paul level it would have to have at least a million or so employees. That's at least 8 to 9 times as large as even the largest international companies.
2) It's the opposite of a business. It doesn't exist to make money, it exists to spend money. No matter how many services you cut, the basic purpose of the government is to spend money on services. You can disagree about which services it should be spending money on, you can make the spending of the money more efficient, but in the end the government is a non-profit service organization.
3) It's internally constrained. The Bureaucracy only has as much or as little power as Congress gives them. There are things they literally *can't* do. If Congress passes a law that says every federal agency must have at least two copies of every computer they buy, then by God the agencies are buying twice as many computers no matter what the Director of the agency or the President want.
Finally, you have to make these jobs something people who can do them want to do. Do new CEOs sometimes come in and "clean house"? Sure. If they fire the upper management, they know that they can get a new, very experienced, upper management in place fairly quickly. Why? Because working for a large company as an upper manager is profitable. Directors of Federal agencies make damn good money, no doubt, but not "Executive Vice President for Overseas Marketing" good money. I think the Federal Salaries top out about 3-4 hundred thousand dollars these days. Way more than I make sure. Not enough to lure away the CFO of a Fortune 500 company to take over the job by any stretch though.
*Everybody* isn't supposed to do what he says, then he'd be a dictator. Everyone who works for the executive branch of the government is supposed to to follow his work related policies, just as you are expected to follow the policies of the president of your company. He's the head of the executive branch, he has a reasonable expectation that his employees will do what he tells them too. They don't. At the levels below the political appointees they weasel around doing the minimum possible to appease whoever the current boss is while changing as little as they possibly can.
This is both a blessing and a curse. It means, on the bright side, that when the guy you disagree with is in power (in my case Bush, perhaps in your case Obama, or even both, it doesn't really matter) he can't really do as much damage as he'd like. On the down side, when the guys you agree with is in power, he can't really fix anything either. The President is theoretically the chief of the Executive Branch, in charge of the majority of the federal bureaucracy. In reality, while he certainly wields some power, the bureaucrats rule the bureaucracy... the President is just a figure head. (Note that Presidents do wield tremendous amounts of power, if nothing else the military *does* take their orders quite seriously, just that in this particular instance it's not as much power as it seems at first blush).
In this case it could be both. I mean, it's a really good system for protecting your password, but it also gives your cell number to Facebook which they really like. If you use a lot of public computers this becomes kind of a win-win. You get increased security, Facebook gets your number. If I want to access Facebook and I have my phone I use the Facebook app, so for me this isn't very useful.
This is why my phone has a PIN on it and can be remotely wiped. Actually this isn't why. I'm a lot more worried about the banking app, my address book, my calendar and probably a dozen other things... This is a nice tangential benefit to having a PIN and remote wipe on my phone. Seriously though. You think the first thing someone is going to do on stealing your phone is see if they can use it to get into your Facebook account?
Also a valid point. On further consideration there's also the natural tendency for younger people to be convinced that bad things happen to other people. The whole "young people think they are immortal" thing doesn't just apply to physical danger. Young people in general tend to engage in risky behavior more often than older people. (Exceptions being many and varied of course, I'm talking broad statistical generalizations here)
It's largely a myth that young people are more tech savvy than older people, at least in the way you mean here. A young person is probably more likely to know and understand how to use a particular popular web site, service, or piece of software, but no more likely to have any real understanding of how or why these things work. An understanding of security best practices is a function of a deeper understanding of the hows and whys of networking and encryption than most people (young or old) have. To use a simple car analogy, younger people may tend to be better drivers than older people, but they are no more likely to be mechanics.
To me it makes a lot of sense that older people are better practitioners of online security. Take two people, one older and one younger, with the younger person having no greater understanding of web technology but a greater familiarity with its basic operations. The older person is more likely to be slightly afraid of the technology and thus to follow things like password guidelines to the letter (they're afraid they might screw something up unless they follow instructions precisely). The younger person is more likely to have an "I know what I'm doing" attitude and ignore or not read such detailed instructions.
iPhones convert passwords to dots as you type them, but show the last character you typed as an actual character for about three seconds or until you type the next character. Makes me wish my computer would do that. The risk of shoulder surfing in slightly higher, but accuracy is greatly increased. As long you pay attention to your surroundings, I think the trade off is well worth it.
Especially for say.. our shared bank account. I think my wife might be a bit annoyed if I locked her out of the money she earned half of. "It's all in the name of password security dear, no worries"
This is interesting. I was under the impression that they were mostly patent lawyers and were supposed to call in expert help if they needed it. Thanks for clarifying that for me.
What is confusing? Microsoft does something. Microsoft applies for a patent on that thing. A patent lawyer who knows very little about the tech in question, has about 600 applications he's currently supposed to be processing, has been instructed that he can't work overtime this week by his boss, but also that he is too far behind on his portfolio and needs to catch up, and who doesn't make near as much as his buddies from law school do to begin with, looks at it. He thinks "I don't even know what half of these words *mean*", then notices that Microsoft filed the patent. Through his haze of pain and frustration he dimly remembers that Microsoft is an "Innovative and economy driving company" and says "fuck it." He hits the "Approve" button.
His boss is happy because his numbers are better this week, and there is no real penalty for approving patents that later get overturned. Even assuming that Microsoft ever attempts to defend the patent rather than just threatening small companies with it in hopes that they'll cave without a court battle.
The things currently wrong with the patent system which this story demonstrates:
1) Patent attorneys often don't understand the tech they are expected to review. This is less of a problem with "real" patents, since the device being patented is just that. A device. If it does what it says it does, in the way it says it does, understanding why isn't all that important. Software is essentially algorithms. If you don't understand them, then judging their uniqueness is difficult.
2) The reviewers in the patent office are phenomenally overworked right now. There are literally tens of thousands of applications backed up. I saw some patent official guy at the end of the Bush administration say that if all applications stopped, right then, he could maybe catch up in a year or two. I don't imagine it's gotten better. Both Bush and Obama have authorized more reviewers, but it seems to be like filling the ocean with a teaspoon.
3) Patent reviewers make a fraction of what patent attorneys in private practice make. This means that they're always looking to get out and get into private firms. Probably not all of them, but like any rational human, most want to make more money and get more respect.
4) There is no real penalty for screwing up. Most patents never get defended in court, because the companies that own them mainly used them as bargaining chips, or to threaten smaller, defenseless, companies. Even if the patent does go to court, it'll take years to invalidate, and no repercussions fall on the approver.
Eliminating software patents would, in one stroke, alleviate or eliminate two of these four problems. Probably the most serious two. It'd be awful nice if it happened. The alternative is probably the whole system collapsing under its own weight eventually.
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Your sig aside, isn't that what Canonical was supposed to do? Has done really? That's the problem, when you get down to it. Canonical has done everything right. Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to configure, easy to patch, has about as good of driver support as is reasonably possible given manufacturer reluctance, its package management system is extensive and has a nice front end... There's nothing at all that Canonical did *wrong* to make a great Desktop OS, people just aren't interested. People buy a computer, they use what's on it. Manufacturers make computers and use what's easiest (which given the ecosystem of drivers and trained people is Microsoft no matter how easy an individual Ubuntu install is).
Apple has, through multimillion dollar ad campaigns, product differentiation, aiming at the premium space, and tie ins to its iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem, managed to get a couple percent more market share than they had 5 years ago. A few percentage points of the market for an ad campaign that no Linux vendor could hope to match, a premium hardware budget that few manufacturers would be willing to risk, and a device ecosystem that is unmatched by anyone. Honestly if Linux ever breaks 1% market penetration on the desktop it will be shocking.
I agree with the author. Linux on the desktop shouldn't be ignored of course. People do use it (including me), and will continue to use it. Continued focus on it as some sort of magical goal is silly though. Linux servers are everywhere, Linux portables are everywhere. Focus on what is working for you. It may well be that in ten years the "desktop" is irrelevant anyway. Whether because of the "cloud", portable devices, both, and/or them + some currently unknown factor the whole discussion is likely to have shifted anyway.
No. Just no. Ignore your notions of the quality of Microsoft's work for a moment. I'm not saying your notions are right or wrong, just ignore them for a moment. Microsoft is the single biggest software house in the world. They produce literally dozens of titles simultaneously. If you've worked with them (and managed to stay a few years) it shows:
1) You can work in a team environment. Everything Microsoft does is done in teams larger than most will get a chance to work with until much later in their careers normally. Being able to code is one thing, being able to code to a spec and have your bits integrated with other people bits and having it all work together is another.
2) You can work under pressure. There is a lot of competition in a company like Microsoft. Being able to hold up in an environment like that and keep mostly intact says something about a person.
3) You're willing to work far harder and longer than is good for you to get ahead.
Now, you can argue about whether any of the above represent "good" qualities. You might not, in fact, really enjoy a beer with someone who possesses all of those qualities in abundance. If you're a software development manager though, they look pretty good in an employee. Now, if you have a choice between Google and Microsoft out of the gate, Google is just as a good if not better a choice, sure. I'm reluctant to think that anyone other than the top ten percent of MIT's graduating class is really in that position though.
OK, while personally I think the GP is a bit of an idiot for getting into Computer Science/Software Development with the attitude he has toward closed source software (which is, after all, by far the largest employment segment in software development) I also think your criticisms are ridiculously harsh. He doesn't like the company so he didn't take the interview. It's perfectly valid. I'd never work for Walmart (ignoring the fact that they could never hope to pay me enough below the executive level to even tempt me). His beliefs about F/OSS software are important to him and he chooses not to work for a company that in many ways represents to antithesis of those beliefs. Makes sense to me.
Now I personally think that open and closed source products can and should coexist; and I will happily (and have happily) work with both. I also think that getting into software development while essentially deliberately cutting off three quarters or more of your most lucrative possible employment avenues is a little silly. Not impossible by any means, and if GP can make it work, power to him; but it seems a little like getting into medicine while not believing morally in the use of any drugs. Sure there's stuff to do in the medical field that doesn't involve drugs, but you've seriously cut into your possible employment opportunities before you even started.
The big problem, and it's a legit problem really, though I think it's being blown out of proportion, is that these devices are basically generally purpose computers that can do anything. Unlike a purpose built device that can really only do what it's supposed to do, there's nothing stopping you from saying you want to buy an iPad to help out your developmentally disabled child then actually using it for nothing except surfing porn.
Before they could approve it, Medicare would have to some up with some reasonable way to ensure that the device is being used to do what the government purchased it to do. Now where it gets stupid is people who will undoubtedly say that it should be used *only* for what the government purchased it to do. I personally don't see anything wrong, assuming the device is primarily being used for its stated purpose, with using for other stuff sometimes too. I'm also quite certain that many people would scream about that being "wasteful spending".
They use different words. They don't say "It's great that my phone is locked down." They say "It's great that the app store protects me from viruses and stuff" (Whether it does or not is another matter, but it's definitely a popular perception), or "it's nice that everything I buy on the App store always works", or (on the developer side) "it's nice to only have to test on one platform". People feel protected by the locked down nature of the device, developers feel insulated from a lot of the complications of multiple OS versions and handsets.
In the minds of "average users" PCs are hard. They do mysterious things for no apparent reason and you have to pay an expert to come in and figure out why. They don't always run the software you bought for them. They get viruses and slow down over time for no real reason. We know (mostly) why they do the mysterious things. We know why they get viruses and slow down over times. We know Windows XP drivers won't necessarily work with Windows 7, but for a lot of people these are mysterious "things" that "happen" without discernible reason.
People want to be protected from that. They like that they get all their apps from the app store. The apps always work, and they have at least the illusion of protection from malware. They like that when their iPhone gets old they can go buy a new one and it will work the same, even use have the same programs and settings (iTunes makes it stupid easy to back up a config and restore it to new device).
I agree. If it "Works with Windows", is "Made for Macs", and is "FSF Compatible" no sane manufacturer is not going to want to mention all three. Even with its current, rather limited, desktop appeal I still see lots of peripherals marked with a "Linux Compatible" symbol joining the "WwW" and "MfM" ones on the back. If your hardware works with a given system why *wouldn't* you tell people. You obviously put at least some effort into the cross compatibility and it certainly can't hurt sales.
I just replied to the parent, but it's a free country so I'll reply to you too. As someone old enough (35) to start watching the music he grew up with slowly become "classic", you'll find that some of your music will too. Other bits will make you cringe in 15 years when you realize you actually listened to and like it. GP is way to young to be an old fogey, but he's acting like one. I distinctly recall bebopping to stuff my parents generation called crap. And to stuff that I now realize *was* crap ;-)
We also had the Back Street Boys and (because I'm five years older than you and span the two generations) Cindi Lauper (before she took music lessons and started singing Jazz), so stop acting superior. Every generation has drivel. Every generation has timeless classics. It's often difficult to tell which is which till later. The Beatles were a teeny bopper pop band. So was Elvis. People said the same thing about them that's you're saying about Lady Gaga. People bitched that hair metal (Metallica) was pointless drivel. Ten-fifteen years from now some current Pop will turn out to have stood the test of time. The rest will vanish into the collections of people trying to relive their teenage years.
I don't disagree you, but it seems that plenty of my countrymen do. As far as I'm concerned half an hour is the outer limit of what should be considered an "acceptable" commute under normal circumstances. I had short term commute of over 2 hours once, but that was only for a month or so while a I was relocating. Even then I tended to stay with a friend during the week and only drive "home" on weekends. If I was working at Stennis I'd probably live in Slidell.
Stennis is half an hour from Slidell, LA, which is a decent sized town on its own, and an exurb of New Orleans. Most people I know that work there live in Slidell, have a moderate commute to work, and a short trip into New Orleans when they want a bit of excitement. Hell you could actually live *in* New Orleans and have a not absolutely awful commute. I wouldn't want to do it, but a lot of people seem to consider a two hour commute acceptable (and New Orleans -> Stennis is only about 1.5, less in good traffic). ERDC in Vicksburg is a better example. That's really pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Nearest "city" is Jackson more than hour away... and it isn't exactly a metropolis. I used to be the sole SGI Systems Support Engineer out of New Orleans. I can pretty much give you a "distance from New Orleans by car" for every moderately large technology center in the area. Thankfully Hattiesburg was covered by another territory, so I can't comment on that.
For the best cost of living "Bang for the buck" midsized towns seem to be the way to go. I live in Huntsville, AL. Population is around 500,000 for the metro area. Our property values and insurance rates are perhaps slightly higher than in a rural area, but nothing like the "big city", but the town is plenty large enough to not have "small town monopoly" syndrome. There's also a bit of night life, and Nashville isn't far.
I still prefer big city living myself, but I can definitely see the benefits to a place like this. True rural living would make me crazy in short order I think.
I think you're wrong. Or at least, you might be right, but if you are it will be becasue of deliberate choice made by manufactures of mobile devices. It's a matter of "How much performance is enough, and how much does it cost." When the first PCs starting coming out IBM wasn't worried. They could barely add 2 + 2. They were for hobbyists. They had nothing like the power of a mainframe. Then, slowly, they got better. At some tipping point it became apparent that a PC, while still not *as* powerful as a mainframe, was powerful *enough* to do most of what a mainframe could, albeit slower, at a much lower price. Slowly, slowly... the mainframe died. Does this mean you never see mainframes anymore? Of course not. There's still a few applications out there that need the kind of power that mainframes provide and are worth the money to get the best tool for the job. Even with clusters there's a small but existent market for large single system image computers. It's just a really tiny market.
When the first Laptops came out people thought they were cool toys. Maybe even useful in some specific situations. Not really like a PC though. You can't really upgrade them, they don't have the kind of power you need, and they're expensive. Then slowly they got a) more powerful and b) cheaper. They still aren't very upgradable, but people seem to care less about that now. Now they vastly out-ship desktop PCs. You can get very nearly the same power in laptop as you can in a desktop for very nearly the same price. Why not get the portable? this doesn't mean that desktop PCs are gone. You just see a lot less of them than you used to. There are still plenty of applications where every little bit of power matters, and portability matters less. People still buy desktop PCs for that. How much longer before laptop and desktop performance and price ratio become so close that almost no one buys desktops? Who knows. Maybe never, since the balance seems close enough now for laptop manufacturers to sell plenty.
Now mobile. As it exists right now, the mobile market is tangential to the PC market (and now I'm lumping laptops and desktops together into one market). The iPad, iPhone, and various sundry Android devices are nice for when you need the Internet in your pocket, but are nothing like as useful as a "real" computer. Let's look forward ten years though. Miniaturization continues to advance. The CPU in your phone is nearly as powerful as the CPU in your desktop, it has around the same amount of RAM, and while micro video cards aren't as nice as those for desktops they're getting there. Where we used to dock our phones to sync with a PC, now there are docks that allow us to connect to monitor, keyboard, mouse and external storage. The display is, from all normal human perspective just as good (and able to be on a full sized monitor); and application responsiveness, while measurably slower in computer time, looks exactly the same to an average user. Why should I buy a PC? My phone now *is* my PC. When I'm at home it's docked and does everything I need for content creation, moderate gaming, and Internet functionality. When I'm not at home it's my normal portable. Hell, at some point maybe I don't even need the dock, it just does everything wirelessly.
Will it *kill* the PC? Probably not. Just like each previous iteration there will be applications for which some people will want a full sized machine. Most people, most of the time, won't though. PCs will become semi specialty items used by Musicians, artists, programmers, and others who actually do need the full power than a desktop or laptop provides. For the rest, portables will be cheap, convenient and "good enough".
The big question is, will the current crop of providers (both manufacturers and service providers) take things in this direction. It *could* go this way, but there's evidence that the providers don't *want* it to. They want to keep portables as toys both because they don't want the headaches of being the "new PC"
But the government isn't one homogeneous organization. It's hundreds or thousands of agencies, field offices, departments, and units. All of them have purchasing authority. Any of them can have its own network. Some of them are so secret that even their inventory is classified. Some of them may be so secret that their very existence is classified. Many of these systems are so old and legacy that they were purchased before such concepts as "IT" department even exited.
This isn't a building, or even a logical LAN where someone gets an alert when someone else plugs into the port in 32B. It's a 3 *million* person operation with "networks" that range from 4 people in an FBI field office with a file server 4 workstations and an Internet connection, to the Army's network of 100's of thousands of computers, to a black ops network that no one outside the immediate chain of command is supposed to know exists.
And yet despite this major structural change: audit after audit, and inspection after inspection has shown that very little actually changed at the agencies that are now part of the DHS. Instead of reporting to the President or another Secretary the agency directors now report to the Secretary of DHS. They've made a few token gestures toward sharing information. There's another layer of Bureaucracy in place. The bag screeners at the airport work for them. Not much else is different.
1) He could do that. Afghanistan and Iraq would collapse into civil war. Other regional powers would get involved the end result would almost certainly be worse than what we started with. At best Iraq would be under the control of Iran in fact, if not in name (and it could be in name). At worst it would be a seething pit of warlords and mini-armies vying for control for decades killing tens of thousands and creating the perfect place for terrorist organizations to setup headquarters and camps from which to attack the rest of the world.
Afghanistan's best case is return of rule of by the Taliban. Worst case is exactly like Iraq. We'd be blamed the world over for two horrifying humanitarian crisis's. It would be entirely our collective faults, because we started the process than left before it was even vaguely stable, let alone complete. He would be blamed by everyone both for the embarrassing pullout and resulting humanitarian crisis. People who *were* calling for a complete pullout will conveniently forget it was their idea and will insist that they didn't *really* mean a *complete* pullout *right* now... It should have been handled better.
2) He could do that. Of course there are few agencies that anyone wants to completely destroy. Most of them do *something* useful. They're inefficient perhaps, but useful. People want to cut particular programs or something not destroy agencies. You'd be using a machine gun to kill rats. Sure that rats are dead, but so is everyone else in the immediate area.
3) You're aware that Congress has a number of powers to prevent this right? They can override vetoes for one. It's hard, but I bet you could start seeing some "broad bipartisan support" build up pretty damn fast when whole departments and agencies start losing their funding. As to your clever funding starts when I say it starts... it's pretty easy for Congress to include specific language in bills to dictate *exactly* when funding starts.
Reality is rarely as simple as it looks on paper.
Brilliant! Fire them! So we fire, say, the FDA and then we hire an entire new set of employees, train them and send them out to inspect our food with no experience and training provided by a bunch of people who have never done the job (since we fired all the ones that have). I love this plan. No... I don't.
OK, so maybe you meant to fire the head of agencies that fail to comply. That's a better idea... Except that if you fire more than one or two of them then a big chunk of the upper management of the government is in the hands of inexperienced people, and the next levels down are now resentful that you fired all of their bosses.... Maybe not such a good idea...
So maybe we'll just have the President of the United States micromanaging the careers of every one of the 3 million or so employees of the federal government? No, that probably won't work either...
You're ignoring a lot of realities of the federal government here:
1) It's *huge*. Really, really huge. Even cut back and reduced to the Ron Paul level it would have to have at least a million or so employees. That's at least 8 to 9 times as large as even the largest international companies.
2) It's the opposite of a business. It doesn't exist to make money, it exists to spend money. No matter how many services you cut, the basic purpose of the government is to spend money on services. You can disagree about which services it should be spending money on, you can make the spending of the money more efficient, but in the end the government is a non-profit service organization.
3) It's internally constrained. The Bureaucracy only has as much or as little power as Congress gives them. There are things they literally *can't* do. If Congress passes a law that says every federal agency must have at least two copies of every computer they buy, then by God the agencies are buying twice as many computers no matter what the Director of the agency or the President want.
Finally, you have to make these jobs something people who can do them want to do. Do new CEOs sometimes come in and "clean house"? Sure. If they fire the upper management, they know that they can get a new, very experienced, upper management in place fairly quickly. Why? Because working for a large company as an upper manager is profitable. Directors of Federal agencies make damn good money, no doubt, but not "Executive Vice President for Overseas Marketing" good money. I think the Federal Salaries top out about 3-4 hundred thousand dollars these days. Way more than I make sure. Not enough to lure away the CFO of a Fortune 500 company to take over the job by any stretch though.
*Everybody* isn't supposed to do what he says, then he'd be a dictator. Everyone who works for the executive branch of the government is supposed to to follow his work related policies, just as you are expected to follow the policies of the president of your company. He's the head of the executive branch, he has a reasonable expectation that his employees will do what he tells them too. They don't. At the levels below the political appointees they weasel around doing the minimum possible to appease whoever the current boss is while changing as little as they possibly can.
This is both a blessing and a curse. It means, on the bright side, that when the guy you disagree with is in power (in my case Bush, perhaps in your case Obama, or even both, it doesn't really matter) he can't really do as much damage as he'd like. On the down side, when the guys you agree with is in power, he can't really fix anything either. The President is theoretically the chief of the Executive Branch, in charge of the majority of the federal bureaucracy. In reality, while he certainly wields some power, the bureaucrats rule the bureaucracy... the President is just a figure head. (Note that Presidents do wield tremendous amounts of power, if nothing else the military *does* take their orders quite seriously, just that in this particular instance it's not as much power as it seems at first blush).
In this case it could be both. I mean, it's a really good system for protecting your password, but it also gives your cell number to Facebook which they really like. If you use a lot of public computers this becomes kind of a win-win. You get increased security, Facebook gets your number. If I want to access Facebook and I have my phone I use the Facebook app, so for me this isn't very useful.
This is why my phone has a PIN on it and can be remotely wiped. Actually this isn't why. I'm a lot more worried about the banking app, my address book, my calendar and probably a dozen other things... This is a nice tangential benefit to having a PIN and remote wipe on my phone. Seriously though. You think the first thing someone is going to do on stealing your phone is see if they can use it to get into your Facebook account?
Also a valid point. On further consideration there's also the natural tendency for younger people to be convinced that bad things happen to other people. The whole "young people think they are immortal" thing doesn't just apply to physical danger. Young people in general tend to engage in risky behavior more often than older people. (Exceptions being many and varied of course, I'm talking broad statistical generalizations here)
It's largely a myth that young people are more tech savvy than older people, at least in the way you mean here. A young person is probably more likely to know and understand how to use a particular popular web site, service, or piece of software, but no more likely to have any real understanding of how or why these things work. An understanding of security best practices is a function of a deeper understanding of the hows and whys of networking and encryption than most people (young or old) have. To use a simple car analogy, younger people may tend to be better drivers than older people, but they are no more likely to be mechanics.
To me it makes a lot of sense that older people are better practitioners of online security. Take two people, one older and one younger, with the younger person having no greater understanding of web technology but a greater familiarity with its basic operations. The older person is more likely to be slightly afraid of the technology and thus to follow things like password guidelines to the letter (they're afraid they might screw something up unless they follow instructions precisely). The younger person is more likely to have an "I know what I'm doing" attitude and ignore or not read such detailed instructions.
iPhones convert passwords to dots as you type them, but show the last character you typed as an actual character for about three seconds or until you type the next character. Makes me wish my computer would do that. The risk of shoulder surfing in slightly higher, but accuracy is greatly increased. As long you pay attention to your surroundings, I think the trade off is well worth it.
Especially for say.. our shared bank account. I think my wife might be a bit annoyed if I locked her out of the money she earned half of. "It's all in the name of password security dear, no worries"
This is interesting. I was under the impression that they were mostly patent lawyers and were supposed to call in expert help if they needed it. Thanks for clarifying that for me.
What is confusing? Microsoft does something. Microsoft applies for a patent on that thing. A patent lawyer who knows very little about the tech in question, has about 600 applications he's currently supposed to be processing, has been instructed that he can't work overtime this week by his boss, but also that he is too far behind on his portfolio and needs to catch up, and who doesn't make near as much as his buddies from law school do to begin with, looks at it. He thinks "I don't even know what half of these words *mean*", then notices that Microsoft filed the patent. Through his haze of pain and frustration he dimly remembers that Microsoft is an "Innovative and economy driving company" and says "fuck it." He hits the "Approve" button.
His boss is happy because his numbers are better this week, and there is no real penalty for approving patents that later get overturned. Even assuming that Microsoft ever attempts to defend the patent rather than just threatening small companies with it in hopes that they'll cave without a court battle.
The things currently wrong with the patent system which this story demonstrates:
1) Patent attorneys often don't understand the tech they are expected to review. This is less of a problem with "real" patents, since the device being patented is just that. A device. If it does what it says it does, in the way it says it does, understanding why isn't all that important. Software is essentially algorithms. If you don't understand them, then judging their uniqueness is difficult.
2) The reviewers in the patent office are phenomenally overworked right now. There are literally tens of thousands of applications backed up. I saw some patent official guy at the end of the Bush administration say that if all applications stopped, right then, he could maybe catch up in a year or two. I don't imagine it's gotten better. Both Bush and Obama have authorized more reviewers, but it seems to be like filling the ocean with a teaspoon.
3) Patent reviewers make a fraction of what patent attorneys in private practice make. This means that they're always looking to get out and get into private firms. Probably not all of them, but like any rational human, most want to make more money and get more respect.
4) There is no real penalty for screwing up. Most patents never get defended in court, because the companies that own them mainly used them as bargaining chips, or to threaten smaller, defenseless, companies. Even if the patent does go to court, it'll take years to invalidate, and no repercussions fall on the approver.
Eliminating software patents would, in one stroke, alleviate or eliminate two of these four problems. Probably the most serious two. It'd be awful nice if it happened. The alternative is probably the whole system collapsing under its own weight eventually.