At least you'd then have television without adverts, even if you did have to pay a little more. As a Brit brought up on the BBC, take my word for it- it's very pleasant.
our government wont bomb a flight that your family would be on.
Who cares if your family gets bombed intentionally or accidentally? They're just as dead one way or the other. If my family were all killed in a hellish explosion, it would be little comfort to know that the people who planned it killed my family through indifference rather than malice. And in terms of numbers of civilians killed, NATO is well ahead of the terrorists in the Middle East.
I've replied to one of your other posts already, but I'll dig you out the info for your convenience:
7 inch multi-touch capacitive screen (800x480)
1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with Mali 400 GPU
1GB DDR2 RAM
8 GB Nand Flash Disk
Wireless Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (3G via USB External)
1.3 MP built-in front facing camera
HDMI 1080P Output
2 USB ports
MicroSD slot
3.5 mm audio jack
Hardware volume and power buttons
4 dimensional Gsensor
Battery: 3000mAH @ 7.4v
Weight: 355 grams
Coming preloaded so that people use it isn't artificially inflating the statistics- it's gaining real honest to god users (through sleazy and unfair methods). Storming into people's houses and forcing them to use your software at gunpoint would be sleazy and unfair, but there's no denying that they are now technically your users...
If you want to transfer a petabit of data by torrent, you're still going to need a petabits worth of data allowance from your ISP to get the data into the interwebs in the first place. Torrents aren't a magic way of bypassing the fact that data needs to be moved from one place (your computer) to another (someone else's computer). It just saves you from transferring the same data over and over again.
Of course people care. Windows still does well because it has lots of other things going for it, such as the great software and good price point.
But Apple's market share has gone up and up and up in recent years, both with Macs and in the iOS segments. This is despite the fact that Macs have some huge drawbacks- the inflated price, the lack of software compatibility. What reason to people always give? Macs are clean, smooth, "just work".
If MS want to take that selling point away from Apple, they'll need to get their OEMs on side. Otherwise they'll keep slowly bleeding marketshare, half a percent a year or whatever, until Mac gets critical mass and can start beating Windows on those other selling points too...
I drive a 2001 Corolla. It was cheap, it get good mileage, and it's reliable. It has a basic FM radio (useful for long drives), AC (useful in summer) and electric front windows (useful so the driver is messing around less). The inside is in hard-wearing grey cotton and plastic. The paint colour is a vaguely anonymous blue.
How is any of that a fashion statement? It's just a car. And that's still pretty much all the car you get for a decent price. If you want to pay lots of money for exciting chassis designs or loads of gizmos you can, but if all you want is a boring, anonymous way of getting around, you can get it easily enough.
And if people whizzing around town on overpowered, bright green Kawasaki Ninjas, or deafeningly loud polished chrome Harleys aren't making fashion statements I don't know who is.
Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.
I certainly agree with your sentiment about Linux customisability, but that's not to say that the FOSS community isn't guilty of a multitude of sins when it comes to GUIs too.
Obvious case and point is the Gnome2 fiasco. The Gnome team decided to go a completely different direction with Gnome3- change for the sake of change mostly. And Ubuntu decided to abandon both Gnome2&3 for Unity- equally novel, and with an equally unintuitive learning curve. And that led Mint to do a two way fork with Cinnamon and MATE. And lets not forget almost exactly the same shenanigans over the KDE4 release.
You do that, Intel, and you basically can't lose (barring sudden inexplicable incompetence). If the ARM desktop project completely fails, well, you just proved that x86 chips are unbeatable on the desktop market (which will never completely disappear). If the project succeeds, you'll win no matter which architecture comes out on top, and you'll have the advantage of having an experienced ARM team to help you take the best features of ARM and put them in your mobile x86 chips.
Good companies are always ready to adapt fast. Bad companies who can't adapt always fail when their niche disappears. I agree with you completely; if Intel is smart, they'll be ready to abandon x86 if the time is ever right, and be ready to be a leading designer and manufacturer of ARM chips, retaining their crown as the biggest and most trusted chip company in the world. If they're stupid, they'll cling on to their (very profitable) x86 until their dying breath, wasting every last penny in the death struggle (and probably riding out its autumn years as a patent troll). And if that day never comes, and x86 rules supreme forever- well what have they wasted? A few million dollars a year for the contingency? Pocket money to them.
You can see the same thing play out with all sorts of companies. Kodak didn't adapt, and nor did any of the bricks-and-mortar retailers who have had their lunch eaten by online retailers, or worse- digital product companies (a market they could have happily had themselves, if only they'd seen it coming). While on the flipside you have the indestructible IBM, who change their business model as often as a sailor changes the orientation of a ship's sails...
Every ARM chip which is sold makes ARM money.If more ARM chips are being sold than last year, they will make more money than last year. While I'm sure ARM would love to capture the top of the range market too, they'll certainly be happy if they can swallow Intel's low end market share.
The headline quote is that ARM think that they will eat more of Intel's desktop market than Intel will eat of their phone/tablet market. ARM are a chip seller (er, designer), so why wouldn't they see all devices with computer chips as one big market? Do you think it bothers them how big a screen is attached to the device their chip is in, whether it's touchscreen, whether it has a mouse? That's for the the likes of Dell and Samsung to worry about.
I've always been sceptical about ARM's ability to muscle in on the traditional desktop market, not least because of Windows and its monolithic ecosystem of x86 software. I suspect ARM shared that scepticism. With MS now looking to make a real go with Windows on ARM, that's probably what has revived their spirits and caused them to have another assault on that bit of the chip market. And good luck to them, I say...
Hiding everything by default and forcing the user to make wild guesses on how to do things they learnt to do years ago? With Gnome3 and Unity, that's yet another innovation that Linux did first. Damned Microsoft bandwagonners!
The point is that there's no technical difference between a bomb dropped on a city to kill civilians and a bomb used on the battlefield. They're more or less identical, right down to the size of the warhead. This is particularly true with the invention of MIRVs- the "big bombs" you'd drop on a city are basically just cluster bombs made of the dozens of the small bombs you'd use on the battlefield. Nobody has much use for genuine "big bombs" anymore.
So if you're talking about limiting the number of bombs a country can have, saying they can have "tactical bombs" but not "strategic bombs" is a pointless exercise. It's as pointless as saying you can have tactical sticks of dynamite, but not strategic sticks of dynamite. They're the same sticks of dynamite.
The definition has always been artificial, even when you get into fiddly discussions about warhead size. Tactical usually means "destroy stuff for a short term advantage", and strategic is "destroy stuff for long term advantage". The weapon used to do this is pretty much irrelevant.
Destroying a tank factory is strategic, and you can do it with a spread of piddly little Hellfire missiles from attack helicopters if you can get close enough. Destroying a tank column as it moves across the countryside would be tactical, and you could do that by dropping a megaton nuke if you so desired (and were a fan of overkill).
And as you rightly say, once the MIRV was invented,warhead size became more or less irrelevant even in terms of widespread destruction. An ICMB packed full of dozens of small warhead could level a city far more efficiently than a single Tsar Bomba style mega bomb.
Apple computers don't come with much by way of crapware, unless you count the various Apple-branded software bits themselves. As Apple is both the software and hardware distributor, it's in their interest to make everything feel clean and smooth. That's one of the reasons people think Apple computers "just work". It's also one of the reasons they don't tolerate 3rd party Mac clones; they don't want to lose control of their branded experience and risk someone like Dell selling Macs that no-longer "just work".
If MS wanted to close the "just works" gap, stamping down on their OEMs shipping systems that are broken by design would be stop number 1, in my opinion. It's not like MS don't have a stranglehold on their OEMs- if they ordered them to behave, most of the big ones would do so without hesitation.
I'm glad you went there. It terrifies me that there are people like the AC who actually believe this tripe; after all, millions of Germans bought it hook, link and sinker, and see where that got us.
For what it's worth, in my early forays into elected positions (high school student council, not exactly cutthroat), I got up, gave my impassioned speech about the idea that student council presidents need to be advocates for the students rather than party planners, and promptly lost to the guy who got up and said "I'll give everyone who votes for me a beer."
Unfortunately, depressingly, that is probably a pretty accurate microcosm of the world of democratic politics.
Political parties* have manifestos. That's presumably the motif he's going for.
* They do in the UK anyway, and the author is a Brit. They're a statement of what a party would do if they won an election. YMMV if you live elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
At least you'd then have television without adverts, even if you did have to pay a little more. As a Brit brought up on the BBC, take my word for it- it's very pleasant.
You said:
our government wont bomb a flight that your family would be on.
Who cares if your family gets bombed intentionally or accidentally? They're just as dead one way or the other. If my family were all killed in a hellish explosion, it would be little comfort to know that the people who planned it killed my family through indifference rather than malice. And in terms of numbers of civilians killed, NATO is well ahead of the terrorists in the Middle East.
Any idea how many Pakistani families (or Afghani, or Iraqi) have been killed by American and Western bombs over the last decade?
Don't be so self righteous. When it comes to war, nobody gets to come away innocent.
I've replied to one of your other posts already, but I'll dig you out the info for your convenience:
7 inch multi-touch capacitive screen (800x480)
1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with Mali 400 GPU
1GB DDR2 RAM
8 GB Nand Flash Disk
Wireless Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (3G via USB External)
1.3 MP built-in front facing camera
HDMI 1080P Output
2 USB ports
MicroSD slot
3.5 mm audio jack
Hardware volume and power buttons
4 dimensional Gsensor
Battery: 3000mAH @ 7.4v
Weight: 355 grams
Follow the second link. I'll copy/paste it for you:
http://makeplaylive.com/
The software and hardware tabs tell you everything you need to know.
Coming preloaded so that people use it isn't artificially inflating the statistics- it's gaining real honest to god users (through sleazy and unfair methods). Storming into people's houses and forcing them to use your software at gunpoint would be sleazy and unfair, but there's no denying that they are now technically your users...
There must be a lot of us, judging by your painful 0 (Overrated) score. Next time, more humour and less twaddle, my good man!
Consider me chastened for my early morning counter-pedantry. Next time, more coffee.
As the old joke goes; the bandwidth is great, it's the latency that sucks.
If you want to transfer a petabit of data by torrent, you're still going to need a petabits worth of data allowance from your ISP to get the data into the interwebs in the first place. Torrents aren't a magic way of bypassing the fact that data needs to be moved from one place (your computer) to another (someone else's computer). It just saves you from transferring the same data over and over again.
You're a Very Bad Pedant.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/laying?s=t
Of course people care. Windows still does well because it has lots of other things going for it, such as the great software and good price point.
But Apple's market share has gone up and up and up in recent years, both with Macs and in the iOS segments. This is despite the fact that Macs have some huge drawbacks- the inflated price, the lack of software compatibility. What reason to people always give? Macs are clean, smooth, "just work".
If MS want to take that selling point away from Apple, they'll need to get their OEMs on side. Otherwise they'll keep slowly bleeding marketshare, half a percent a year or whatever, until Mac gets critical mass and can start beating Windows on those other selling points too...
I don't really get it, if I'm honest.
I drive a 2001 Corolla. It was cheap, it get good mileage, and it's reliable. It has a basic FM radio (useful for long drives), AC (useful in summer) and electric front windows (useful so the driver is messing around less). The inside is in hard-wearing grey cotton and plastic. The paint colour is a vaguely anonymous blue.
How is any of that a fashion statement? It's just a car. And that's still pretty much all the car you get for a decent price. If you want to pay lots of money for exciting chassis designs or loads of gizmos you can, but if all you want is a boring, anonymous way of getting around, you can get it easily enough.
And if people whizzing around town on overpowered, bright green Kawasaki Ninjas, or deafeningly loud polished chrome Harleys aren't making fashion statements I don't know who is.
Linux has the right idea when it comes to GUIs. You can just choose whatever style you like best. You can have a dock if you want or a taskbar or multiple taskbars in various locations. You can change nearly everything about the GUI. Since everyone has different taste the best solution is customization, and that's precisely what Microsoft does not allow.
I certainly agree with your sentiment about Linux customisability, but that's not to say that the FOSS community isn't guilty of a multitude of sins when it comes to GUIs too.
Obvious case and point is the Gnome2 fiasco. The Gnome team decided to go a completely different direction with Gnome3- change for the sake of change mostly. And Ubuntu decided to abandon both Gnome2&3 for Unity- equally novel, and with an equally unintuitive learning curve. And that led Mint to do a two way fork with Cinnamon and MATE. And lets not forget almost exactly the same shenanigans over the KDE4 release.
You do that, Intel, and you basically can't lose (barring sudden inexplicable incompetence). If the ARM desktop project completely fails, well, you just proved that x86 chips are unbeatable on the desktop market (which will never completely disappear). If the project succeeds, you'll win no matter which architecture comes out on top, and you'll have the advantage of having an experienced ARM team to help you take the best features of ARM and put them in your mobile x86 chips.
Good companies are always ready to adapt fast. Bad companies who can't adapt always fail when their niche disappears. I agree with you completely; if Intel is smart, they'll be ready to abandon x86 if the time is ever right, and be ready to be a leading designer and manufacturer of ARM chips, retaining their crown as the biggest and most trusted chip company in the world. If they're stupid, they'll cling on to their (very profitable) x86 until their dying breath, wasting every last penny in the death struggle (and probably riding out its autumn years as a patent troll). And if that day never comes, and x86 rules supreme forever- well what have they wasted? A few million dollars a year for the contingency? Pocket money to them.
You can see the same thing play out with all sorts of companies. Kodak didn't adapt, and nor did any of the bricks-and-mortar retailers who have had their lunch eaten by online retailers, or worse- digital product companies (a market they could have happily had themselves, if only they'd seen it coming). While on the flipside you have the indestructible IBM, who change their business model as often as a sailor changes the orientation of a ship's sails...
Every ARM chip which is sold makes ARM money.If more ARM chips are being sold than last year, they will make more money than last year. While I'm sure ARM would love to capture the top of the range market too, they'll certainly be happy if they can swallow Intel's low end market share.
The headline quote is that ARM think that they will eat more of Intel's desktop market than Intel will eat of their phone/tablet market. ARM are a chip seller (er, designer), so why wouldn't they see all devices with computer chips as one big market? Do you think it bothers them how big a screen is attached to the device their chip is in, whether it's touchscreen, whether it has a mouse? That's for the the likes of Dell and Samsung to worry about.
I've always been sceptical about ARM's ability to muscle in on the traditional desktop market, not least because of Windows and its monolithic ecosystem of x86 software. I suspect ARM shared that scepticism. With MS now looking to make a real go with Windows on ARM, that's probably what has revived their spirits and caused them to have another assault on that bit of the chip market. And good luck to them, I say...
Hiding everything by default and forcing the user to make wild guesses on how to do things they learnt to do years ago? With Gnome3 and Unity, that's yet another innovation that Linux did first. Damned Microsoft bandwagonners!
The point is that there's no technical difference between a bomb dropped on a city to kill civilians and a bomb used on the battlefield. They're more or less identical, right down to the size of the warhead. This is particularly true with the invention of MIRVs- the "big bombs" you'd drop on a city are basically just cluster bombs made of the dozens of the small bombs you'd use on the battlefield. Nobody has much use for genuine "big bombs" anymore.
So if you're talking about limiting the number of bombs a country can have, saying they can have "tactical bombs" but not "strategic bombs" is a pointless exercise. It's as pointless as saying you can have tactical sticks of dynamite, but not strategic sticks of dynamite. They're the same sticks of dynamite.
And I think we can all agree, it's better to be short term dead than long term dead.
The definition has always been artificial, even when you get into fiddly discussions about warhead size. Tactical usually means "destroy stuff for a short term advantage", and strategic is "destroy stuff for long term advantage". The weapon used to do this is pretty much irrelevant.
Destroying a tank factory is strategic, and you can do it with a spread of piddly little Hellfire missiles from attack helicopters if you can get close enough. Destroying a tank column as it moves across the countryside would be tactical, and you could do that by dropping a megaton nuke if you so desired (and were a fan of overkill).
And as you rightly say, once the MIRV was invented,warhead size became more or less irrelevant even in terms of widespread destruction. An ICMB packed full of dozens of small warhead could level a city far more efficiently than a single Tsar Bomba style mega bomb.
Apple computers don't come with much by way of crapware, unless you count the various Apple-branded software bits themselves. As Apple is both the software and hardware distributor, it's in their interest to make everything feel clean and smooth. That's one of the reasons people think Apple computers "just work". It's also one of the reasons they don't tolerate 3rd party Mac clones; they don't want to lose control of their branded experience and risk someone like Dell selling Macs that no-longer "just work".
If MS wanted to close the "just works" gap, stamping down on their OEMs shipping systems that are broken by design would be stop number 1, in my opinion. It's not like MS don't have a stranglehold on their OEMs- if they ordered them to behave, most of the big ones would do so without hesitation.
Considering how quick an Ubuntu install is these days, and considering what I'm paid, I think the time/cost is near enough a rounding error.
YMMV if you happen to be the anonymised internet manifestation of Bob Diamond.
I'm glad you went there. It terrifies me that there are people like the AC who actually believe this tripe; after all, millions of Germans bought it hook, link and sinker, and see where that got us.
For what it's worth, in my early forays into elected positions (high school student council, not exactly cutthroat), I got up, gave my impassioned speech about the idea that student council presidents need to be advocates for the students rather than party planners, and promptly lost to the guy who got up and said "I'll give everyone who votes for me a beer."
Unfortunately, depressingly, that is probably a pretty accurate microcosm of the world of democratic politics.
Political parties* have manifestos. That's presumably the motif he's going for.
* They do in the UK anyway, and the author is a Brit. They're a statement of what a party would do if they won an election. YMMV if you live elsewhere.