The amount of "data" on my home computers that is actually worth keeping would probably all fit on a £10 USB stick; but that's not the stuff I worry about going to "the cloud".
What I don't want "in the cloud" is all my incidental data- browser usage, emails (in any more cloud locations than are necessary to have a webmail service, anyway), shopping habits, bank login details, etc. All of that stuff is currently on my home computers, and is obviously not backed up (intentionally). No-one has access to it but me. If my OS is on a VM out "in the cloud", then all of my data bric-a-brac is out there too. I don't want that.
When the internet was started, the idea was that every machine would have its own IP address. When the addresses started to run out, we used NAT so that now every household or network subdivision would have on IP address shared by dozens or hundreds of machines.
We're now at the point where NAT-enabled one-IP-per-household is starting to fail; now we're talking about one IP address for tens of thousands of households, each with dozens of devices. What's next? One IP address for each million customers? One for each 10 million? One IP address per country- with subnets within subnets, in a sort of multiply nested NAT hell?
Ever wanted a home based cloud service or fileshare?
ISPs would encourage such customers to upgrade to business-or-enthusiast class Internet access.
That describes most consumer NAS. They sell NAS units to grannies at the local PC World. Some ISPs (such as BT) advertise and sell them direct to their home users. It isn't a niche or an enthusiast activity.
You can ask the same question in all three directions- why choose an iPhone or Android phone over BlackBerry?
Traditionally the answer to that question has been "because BlackBerry sucks". But I'm open to the possibility that that might change. If BB10 has sorted out the user interface, found a way of stocking the app store, and improved the reliability (perhaps built in some fallback modes that prevent the device from bricking up every time the RIM servers go down), then I see no reason not to consider it along with the rest of the line-up next time I make a purchase. I'm not a fanboy- I like my Android phone, but I'd have no qualms ditching the platform if something better comes along.
Although a few more things I like about my Android are the easiness to root it, the easiness to sideload apps, and of course the open-source nature. I have no idea how the BB10 phones will perform on the first two points, and obviously it doesn't pass the third.
Of course I knew Missouri is in the USA- those of us in the rest of the world are not geographically challenged.
Paris, Missouri has a population of 1220 (according to Wikipedia). The Paris (France) metropolitan area has a population 12 million. So I think it would usually be fairly likely that the nice news reader on CNN might be more likely to be talking about the French capital, rather than the backwater village in Missouri.
Context is also usually pretty clear. If the story is "Prime Minister Francois Hollande announced today in Paris that the EU will be releasing new funds to Greece", the addition of "Paris, France" is fairly superfluous.
So yeah, still pretty funny.
(Incidentally, the only thing worse is when the new reader gets it wrong, which is surprisingly often. The number of times I've heard them say "Glasgow, England", or even worse- "Wales, England" is painful.)
That's depressing. I always giggle when I see American news reports talk about "London, England" or "Paris, France"- surely people don't need telling which country these places are in? But apparently I was wrong...
You don't buy something for your Macbook and expect it to run on your iPhone "because it's all Apple, look, it's similar"
Apple's two products look and function completely differently. The interface is different, the layout is different, the visual styling is different. They also have a completely different naming scheme- "Apple Mac" for the Mac OSX ones, "Apple i[Name]" for the iOS ones.
You don't buy something for Android and expect it to run on your Linux desktop "because it's all Linux underneath, right?"
Linux is just the kernel. Android is not the same as, say, Ubuntu. They're called different things. They look different. They're marketed differently. Android doesn't even use the word "Linux" in their marketing. Everything about them is different, except for the kernel (and only geeks would know that).
Windows 8 and Windows RT look identical. The interface is identical. They were launched at the same time. The branding is identical (apart from the suffix of the name). In the case of the Microsoft Surface, the hardware looks identical and the name is the same.
Exactly. You won't see a difference in the numbers for months yet. Both launches involved a big "stocking up" phase at the beginning. Once that is out of the way, you'll either see growth drop off (once the OEMs are all stocked up and are wating for the stock to sell) or be sustained (as units sell and are replaced).
Presuming we consider Windows 7 a success- Windows 8 will need to sustain the same rate of growth as Windows 7 did over the next 6 months or so. If it drops off, we'll know it isn't doing as well.
Technically that could imply only that 20m have been sold- that 40m were purchased, half of which have been sold an restocked. Or a number of other inscrutable arrangement of the numbers.
Frankly, we're not going to know the state of things for Windows 8 for a long time yet. Windows spokespeople (plus fanboys) insisted Vista was doing well right up until Microsoft put a bullet in its brain and launched Win 7. It's going to take at least 6 months to a year before the "pipeline effect" can be considered wiped out, and it's going to be a couple of years (until Windows 7 begins to make its way to end of life) before we know how it compares with its rivals, and it'll be until Windows 9 comes out before we know if Microsoft considered it a successful approach or whether they beat a hasty retreat.
I think that was his point. You clearly still consider CLI to be better than GUI. Do you find it easy to avoid using GUIs, with mouse or equivalent? Did you manage to start a web-browser and navigate to this page and read this comment list and post a reply without using a point-and-click interface?
Unless you came here using Lynx (in which case- kudos), then you were probably forced to use what you consider to be an inferior method of computing today. That's how it worked out.
If touchscreen goes the same way, then those of us who are saying we don't like touchscreens (fingerprints on our screens, arm ache, not being able to see what we're doing around our big manly hands) will probably find we can't avoid it. One day, it will become so convoluted and awkward to use a mouse and keyboard only that we'll find ourselves using the hated touchscreens anyway.
I'll be able to install Linux on it, and marvel at how I've paid for a feature that none of my distros GUIs assume I have (because they all have separate touchscreen flavours, like KDE Plasma Active, distinct from their versions that a tweaked for good mouse and keyboard use).
Or alternatively, I can marvel at how all the developers at KDE/GNOME/Unity/etc. start creeping in features that require a touchscreen, because like Windows 8 they assume "everyone has a touchscreen now!".
Are touchscreens free? I frequently buy hardware on price, and there are plenty of people with less money than me who I'm sure count the pennies in a purchase. If a laptop is £350 without a touchscreen, how much does the touchscreen add to the price?
Anything except "rounding error" would make this unacceptable. I don't like touchscreens; I barely tolerate them on tablets and phones, and I certainly have no use for them on my laptops. I run Linux on my hardware usually, and unlike Windows 8 my distros of choice aren't designed with the assumption that I'm going to be using a touchscreen, so this adds no value. Why should I be forced to pay more for a feature that I don't need or want, just because Windows 8 has made some stupid design decisions which make it practically unusable with a keyboard and mouse only?
Essentially it is "lowest common denominator" syndrome. Let's say your potential market is 100 people. 50 of them like the same sort of thing. The rest all form 5 different niche groups of 10 people. Your game (or whatever product) will cost roughly the same amount to make whichever group you aim for. Which group do you try to please with your game- the 50 or one of the 10s?
With low value commodities like games, music etc. there never reaches a point where the market is so saturated that targeting the biggest group doesn't make sense. In our fictional example, you'd need 100% of one of the niche groups to buy your game to equal the success of only 20% of the mainstream group buying your game. Assuming each group is as discerning of quality as the rest, that's hugely difficult.
That's not to say some companies can't make a decent living out of marketing to niches. But it's extremely difficult to persuade the big money blockbuster producers to spend the same amount of money on a niche as they would on the mainstream.
If the "sameness" holds, presumably this pattern of clustered quasars should have similar relations in other parts of the sky.
(IANAPh)
My understanding of the concept of cosmological sameness is that you pick any patch of sky and the contents should be more or less the same- the same material content, the same patterns (or lack of patterns), etc. If there are corners of the universe which are substantially different from other corners, then that implies that our theories governing the early universe (which should produce a nice even, lumpless modern universe) aren't correct.
This observation implies that 1/20th of the universe is substantially different from the other 19/20ths. That's a lot of lumpiness. Unless further observations show that the rest of the universe contains similar arrangements, then early-universe theories would need to explain how 5% of the universe came to be different to the rest.
If you want to work from home, you request a VPN. Then you can get access to company machines from your curated home connection.
Letting Joe Everyman connect up to important company servers from the Windows XP Dell Inspiron he uses to surf porn is a bad idea. Letting him connect his security-privileged company laptop up to the fileserver he has running in a closet at home, set up in the "DMZ" of his home-network ("because I'm a hacker and I totally know all about server security") is a bad idea.
Presumably security consciousness is different for companies in different industries. I work in an industry where a security breach which could theoretically impact a single customer results in front page news and million pound fines...
Someone might have a legitimate design reason at some point in the future to design non-straight bike cranks. Not for "free energy" reasons; admittedly I can't think of a legitimate one, but maybe one day an angled crank will be the vital part of someone's crazy compact, high-seated bike design for comfort or reach reasons. Or something.
In that case, awarding frivolous patents to nut-jobs or scam artists would hold back legitimate designs, as they would presumably need to licence the right to "not a straight lever" before they could use.
Why would you allow employees indiscriminate access to non-company machines from inside the corporate network? That would be security policy stupidity extraordinaire.
well Samsung took android and ran with it and are pretty much second to apple now so much so well apple tries to kill them all the time..
Samsung are ahead of Apple in terms of market share, I believe. Not that that'll upset Apple too much; they're still raking in the profit with margins Samsung can only fantasise about. Samsung will be hoping to change that by persuading more people to go for their premium offerings rather than their mid/lower range devices, but that's a different story.
You're looking at the term "smartphone" through a modern lens. The term originally (and still does, I guess) apply to Blackberrys. Nokia's Symbian offerings were more or less the same as, if not better than, the Blackberrys of the time; certainly when it came to web browsing, media playing, etc.
When iPhone came out, followed by Android, the same fate befell both BB and Nokia- their phones looked crappy by comparison. Nokia's solution was a new platform (Maemo/MeeGo). But to say that Symbian wasn't a smartphone OS is to misrepresent the history of it.
The world's biggest smartphone maker (and biggest dumb phone AND feature phone maker, while we're at it) inexplicably abandoning two popular platforms, which combined were outselling all rivals literally doubly so, and which the company owned all rights and licenses to internally, to pick Microsoft's platform instead. If that doesn't sound like something that is being done for Microsoft's benefit, I don't know what is.
Admittedly, I'm more a fan of the stupidity argument rather than the malice one. But it's hardly outlandish to say that Microsoft is getting a better deal out of Elop's custodianship of Nokia than Nokia is.
People don't care about "the OS" per se, but they care about several things which are related to the OS:
- They care about the GUI. iOS devices have a certain GUI. Android devices all have GUIs with highly shared characteristics. Windows Phone devices have that tile-based GUI. If you don't like the tiles, you could describe that as "not liking Windows Phone". - They care about the apps and hardware accessories. iOS is the king of both- hugely well populated App Store, colossal range of accessories. Android phones have a great range of apps, and a smaller but varied accessory range. Windows Phones currently have few apps, and almost no dedicated hardware accessories. - They care about branding. iPhones are extremely fashionable. Android Phones have built up a great reputation as almost the "standard smartphone"; plus the Google and green android branding is well loved. Microsoft Windows still makes most people think of offices, spreadsheets and beige boxes. For better or worse, those annoying "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" Apple adverts did hit the nail on the head.
People don't care about NT kernels and Unix-like file systems and Java Machines, no. But the OS doesn't stop with those bits.
It used to be the same here in the UK. Until the Motorola Razr (the original), I don't think there was a single other phone brand which people would seek out by name- Nokia was THE phone brand.
Right up until the iPhone, Nokia was still an extremely popular brand. Post-iPhone there was a lot of criticism of Symbian "looking tired", although it was still popular enough. Post-Elop, I think the brand is more or less dead to people now.
Slashdot Mirror
The amount of "data" on my home computers that is actually worth keeping would probably all fit on a £10 USB stick; but that's not the stuff I worry about going to "the cloud".
What I don't want "in the cloud" is all my incidental data- browser usage, emails (in any more cloud locations than are necessary to have a webmail service, anyway), shopping habits, bank login details, etc. All of that stuff is currently on my home computers, and is obviously not backed up (intentionally). No-one has access to it but me. If my OS is on a VM out "in the cloud", then all of my data bric-a-brac is out there too. I don't want that.
When the internet was started, the idea was that every machine would have its own IP address. When the addresses started to run out, we used NAT so that now every household or network subdivision would have on IP address shared by dozens or hundreds of machines.
We're now at the point where NAT-enabled one-IP-per-household is starting to fail; now we're talking about one IP address for tens of thousands of households, each with dozens of devices. What's next? One IP address for each million customers? One for each 10 million? One IP address per country- with subnets within subnets, in a sort of multiply nested NAT hell?
Can't we just fix the god damn problem instead?
Ever wanted a home based cloud service or fileshare?
ISPs would encourage such customers to upgrade to business-or-enthusiast class Internet access.
That describes most consumer NAS. They sell NAS units to grannies at the local PC World. Some ISPs (such as BT) advertise and sell them direct to their home users. It isn't a niche or an enthusiast activity.
Probably not oblig.:
http://xkcd.com/1142/
You can ask the same question in all three directions- why choose an iPhone or Android phone over BlackBerry?
Traditionally the answer to that question has been "because BlackBerry sucks". But I'm open to the possibility that that might change. If BB10 has sorted out the user interface, found a way of stocking the app store, and improved the reliability (perhaps built in some fallback modes that prevent the device from bricking up every time the RIM servers go down), then I see no reason not to consider it along with the rest of the line-up next time I make a purchase. I'm not a fanboy- I like my Android phone, but I'd have no qualms ditching the platform if something better comes along.
Although a few more things I like about my Android are the easiness to root it, the easiness to sideload apps, and of course the open-source nature. I have no idea how the BB10 phones will perform on the first two points, and obviously it doesn't pass the third.
Of course I knew Missouri is in the USA- those of us in the rest of the world are not geographically challenged.
Paris, Missouri has a population of 1220 (according to Wikipedia). The Paris (France) metropolitan area has a population 12 million. So I think it would usually be fairly likely that the nice news reader on CNN might be more likely to be talking about the French capital, rather than the backwater village in Missouri.
Context is also usually pretty clear. If the story is "Prime Minister Francois Hollande announced today in Paris that the EU will be releasing new funds to Greece", the addition of "Paris, France" is fairly superfluous.
So yeah, still pretty funny.
(Incidentally, the only thing worse is when the new reader gets it wrong, which is surprisingly often. The number of times I've heard them say "Glasgow, England", or even worse- "Wales, England" is painful.)
That's depressing. I always giggle when I see American news reports talk about "London, England" or "Paris, France"- surely people don't need telling which country these places are in? But apparently I was wrong...
You don't buy something for your Macbook and expect it to run on your iPhone "because it's all Apple, look, it's similar"
Apple's two products look and function completely differently. The interface is different, the layout is different, the visual styling is different. They also have a completely different naming scheme- "Apple Mac" for the Mac OSX ones, "Apple i[Name]" for the iOS ones.
You don't buy something for Android and expect it to run on your Linux desktop "because it's all Linux underneath, right?"
Linux is just the kernel. Android is not the same as, say, Ubuntu. They're called different things. They look different. They're marketed differently. Android doesn't even use the word "Linux" in their marketing. Everything about them is different, except for the kernel (and only geeks would know that).
Windows 8 and Windows RT look identical. The interface is identical. They were launched at the same time. The branding is identical (apart from the suffix of the name). In the case of the Microsoft Surface, the hardware looks identical and the name is the same.
Can you see how there would be a difference?
Exactly. You won't see a difference in the numbers for months yet. Both launches involved a big "stocking up" phase at the beginning. Once that is out of the way, you'll either see growth drop off (once the OEMs are all stocked up and are wating for the stock to sell) or be sustained (as units sell and are replaced).
Presuming we consider Windows 7 a success- Windows 8 will need to sustain the same rate of growth as Windows 7 did over the next 6 months or so. If it drops off, we'll know it isn't doing as well.
Technically that could imply only that 20m have been sold- that 40m were purchased, half of which have been sold an restocked. Or a number of other inscrutable arrangement of the numbers.
Frankly, we're not going to know the state of things for Windows 8 for a long time yet. Windows spokespeople (plus fanboys) insisted Vista was doing well right up until Microsoft put a bullet in its brain and launched Win 7. It's going to take at least 6 months to a year before the "pipeline effect" can be considered wiped out, and it's going to be a couple of years (until Windows 7 begins to make its way to end of life) before we know how it compares with its rivals, and it'll be until Windows 9 comes out before we know if Microsoft considered it a successful approach or whether they beat a hasty retreat.
I think that was his point. You clearly still consider CLI to be better than GUI. Do you find it easy to avoid using GUIs, with mouse or equivalent? Did you manage to start a web-browser and navigate to this page and read this comment list and post a reply without using a point-and-click interface?
Unless you came here using Lynx (in which case- kudos), then you were probably forced to use what you consider to be an inferior method of computing today. That's how it worked out.
If touchscreen goes the same way, then those of us who are saying we don't like touchscreens (fingerprints on our screens, arm ache, not being able to see what we're doing around our big manly hands) will probably find we can't avoid it. One day, it will become so convoluted and awkward to use a mouse and keyboard only that we'll find ourselves using the hated touchscreens anyway.
Lets hope that doesn't happen.
I'll be able to install Linux on it, and marvel at how I've paid for a feature that none of my distros GUIs assume I have (because they all have separate touchscreen flavours, like KDE Plasma Active, distinct from their versions that a tweaked for good mouse and keyboard use).
Or alternatively, I can marvel at how all the developers at KDE/GNOME/Unity/etc. start creeping in features that require a touchscreen, because like Windows 8 they assume "everyone has a touchscreen now!".
Are touchscreens free? I frequently buy hardware on price, and there are plenty of people with less money than me who I'm sure count the pennies in a purchase. If a laptop is £350 without a touchscreen, how much does the touchscreen add to the price?
Anything except "rounding error" would make this unacceptable. I don't like touchscreens; I barely tolerate them on tablets and phones, and I certainly have no use for them on my laptops. I run Linux on my hardware usually, and unlike Windows 8 my distros of choice aren't designed with the assumption that I'm going to be using a touchscreen, so this adds no value. Why should I be forced to pay more for a feature that I don't need or want, just because Windows 8 has made some stupid design decisions which make it practically unusable with a keyboard and mouse only?
Essentially it is "lowest common denominator" syndrome. Let's say your potential market is 100 people. 50 of them like the same sort of thing. The rest all form 5 different niche groups of 10 people. Your game (or whatever product) will cost roughly the same amount to make whichever group you aim for. Which group do you try to please with your game- the 50 or one of the 10s?
With low value commodities like games, music etc. there never reaches a point where the market is so saturated that targeting the biggest group doesn't make sense. In our fictional example, you'd need 100% of one of the niche groups to buy your game to equal the success of only 20% of the mainstream group buying your game. Assuming each group is as discerning of quality as the rest, that's hugely difficult.
That's not to say some companies can't make a decent living out of marketing to niches. But it's extremely difficult to persuade the big money blockbuster producers to spend the same amount of money on a niche as they would on the mainstream.
If the "sameness" holds, presumably this pattern of clustered quasars should have similar relations in other parts of the sky.
(IANAPh)
My understanding of the concept of cosmological sameness is that you pick any patch of sky and the contents should be more or less the same- the same material content, the same patterns (or lack of patterns), etc. If there are corners of the universe which are substantially different from other corners, then that implies that our theories governing the early universe (which should produce a nice even, lumpless modern universe) aren't correct.
This observation implies that 1/20th of the universe is substantially different from the other 19/20ths. That's a lot of lumpiness. Unless further observations show that the rest of the universe contains similar arrangements, then early-universe theories would need to explain how 5% of the universe came to be different to the rest.
If you want to work from home, you request a VPN. Then you can get access to company machines from your curated home connection.
Letting Joe Everyman connect up to important company servers from the Windows XP Dell Inspiron he uses to surf porn is a bad idea. Letting him connect his security-privileged company laptop up to the fileserver he has running in a closet at home, set up in the "DMZ" of his home-network ("because I'm a hacker and I totally know all about server security") is a bad idea.
Presumably security consciousness is different for companies in different industries. I work in an industry where a security breach which could theoretically impact a single customer results in front page news and million pound fines...
Abysmal ignorance can be pretty interesting, to be fair. Sort of like watching chimpanzees throw poo at each other at the zoo.
Someone might have a legitimate design reason at some point in the future to design non-straight bike cranks. Not for "free energy" reasons; admittedly I can't think of a legitimate one, but maybe one day an angled crank will be the vital part of someone's crazy compact, high-seated bike design for comfort or reach reasons. Or something.
In that case, awarding frivolous patents to nut-jobs or scam artists would hold back legitimate designs, as they would presumably need to licence the right to "not a straight lever" before they could use.
Er, our company does. External SSH pipes, anyway.
Why would you allow employees indiscriminate access to non-company machines from inside the corporate network? That would be security policy stupidity extraordinaire.
And of course, they don't tell us where these "studies" are.
Yes they do.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13497&page=292
Although my interest in this topic does not extend to me actually reading through and attempting to critique that list.
well Samsung took android and ran with it and are pretty much second to apple now so much so well apple tries to kill them all the time..
Samsung are ahead of Apple in terms of market share, I believe. Not that that'll upset Apple too much; they're still raking in the profit with margins Samsung can only fantasise about. Samsung will be hoping to change that by persuading more people to go for their premium offerings rather than their mid/lower range devices, but that's a different story.
You're looking at the term "smartphone" through a modern lens. The term originally (and still does, I guess) apply to Blackberrys. Nokia's Symbian offerings were more or less the same as, if not better than, the Blackberrys of the time; certainly when it came to web browsing, media playing, etc.
When iPhone came out, followed by Android, the same fate befell both BB and Nokia- their phones looked crappy by comparison. Nokia's solution was a new platform (Maemo/MeeGo). But to say that Symbian wasn't a smartphone OS is to misrepresent the history of it.
The world's biggest smartphone maker (and biggest dumb phone AND feature phone maker, while we're at it) inexplicably abandoning two popular platforms, which combined were outselling all rivals literally doubly so, and which the company owned all rights and licenses to internally, to pick Microsoft's platform instead. If that doesn't sound like something that is being done for Microsoft's benefit, I don't know what is.
Admittedly, I'm more a fan of the stupidity argument rather than the malice one. But it's hardly outlandish to say that Microsoft is getting a better deal out of Elop's custodianship of Nokia than Nokia is.
People don't care about "the OS" per se, but they care about several things which are related to the OS:
- They care about the GUI. iOS devices have a certain GUI. Android devices all have GUIs with highly shared characteristics. Windows Phone devices have that tile-based GUI. If you don't like the tiles, you could describe that as "not liking Windows Phone".
- They care about the apps and hardware accessories. iOS is the king of both- hugely well populated App Store, colossal range of accessories. Android phones have a great range of apps, and a smaller but varied accessory range. Windows Phones currently have few apps, and almost no dedicated hardware accessories.
- They care about branding. iPhones are extremely fashionable. Android Phones have built up a great reputation as almost the "standard smartphone"; plus the Google and green android branding is well loved. Microsoft Windows still makes most people think of offices, spreadsheets and beige boxes. For better or worse, those annoying "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" Apple adverts did hit the nail on the head.
People don't care about NT kernels and Unix-like file systems and Java Machines, no. But the OS doesn't stop with those bits.
It used to be the same here in the UK. Until the Motorola Razr (the original), I don't think there was a single other phone brand which people would seek out by name- Nokia was THE phone brand.
Right up until the iPhone, Nokia was still an extremely popular brand. Post-iPhone there was a lot of criticism of Symbian "looking tired", although it was still popular enough. Post-Elop, I think the brand is more or less dead to people now.