The only minor point is that it tends to work out a lot cheaper to buy a PC with windows pre-installed than it is to buy a Linux box and an off-the-shelf copy of Windows to install on it.
If you want a Windows PC then it makes good monetary sense to buy it pre-installed. Not good hardware sense, as you point out, but that's still a compelling reason for the masses to ignore your good advice.
Smartphones are colossally expensive, all things considered- you're paying data-plan rates even if you already have a dirt cheap broadband wifi to use, you're paying through the teeth for ultra-slimline miniaturization, and the screen, speakers, input etc. are extra-small (great for the pocket, not so great on the eye-strain and finger cramps).
Assuming what you want is essentially an about-the-house (/office/hotel/etc.) netbook then a smartphone isn't ideal, unless you happen to own one already for other reasons. A lightweight, cheap, relatively portable (although not necessarily ultra-portable) wifi-capable couch-computer is a niche unto itself. Hence why netbooks sell so well.
Personally speaking, I don't really need a smartphone- my cheap non-smartphone fills that role fine. But my netbook is extraordinarily well used.
Assuming ChromeOS is basically trying to out-compete other netbooks then I don't really see the problem. They might not manage it, but it seems like a perfectly sensible plan to me.
Sure they could (although haven't). That's beside the point.
The point is that Google's approach to an OS works better on less hardware (be it ARM or Intel or whatever) by foisting more of the heavy-lifting onto the server and reducing the amount of data locally stored. This means that presumably they can undercut the competition on factors such as price, weight, power consumption, what have you.
If what your after is an intended selling point then that's it. I wouldn't care to judge whether it could possibly work- I'm only pointing out what the appeal seems to be.
Question is, if you could have all the advantages of a desktop OS like Windows or Linux, and still access "the cloud" via Firefox, why would anyone choose an OS that only runs a web browser?
From a consumer point of view- hardware costs. If Chrome can provide you with a fully functional computer with no harddisk (or just a very small one), feeble processor, ARM/whatever architecture, etc., they can potentially beat out the competition on price, battery life, weight, size, heat...
What self respecting consumer wouldn't be tempted by that?
You have to have a monopoly in order to be guilty of monopoly abuse. For a small new-entrant (as Google, in a sense, is in the OS market) you're far more free to do what you like.
If you don't toe the MS line then your user experience tends to suffer for it thanks to their colossal influence (or at least did, I'm not sure if times are changing or if I'm just getting jaded). No such consequence if you choose to use something other than Google Maps or Gmail.
It's not like this is killing off GIMP, it just won't be installed by default.
I actually agree with this move. I like GIMP, but most desktops just won't need it. It's easy enough to install using Add/Remove if you want it.
Desktops don't need to come with every single specialist tool by default. They just need to be able to complete basic tasks- if a user needs more, they can get more pretty easily.
Indeed, I believe that the Greek for wormwood is "apsinthos"; 'tis where the name of the drink comes from.
So the bible predicts that a Mayan called Nbiru dumps absinthe in the sea in 2012, poisoning us all and causing the magnetic poles to flip. Sounds plausible to me.
Indeed, there's a reason why this can't possibly work, however much money he cared to name. It's economics for idiots.
The only way any company would agree would be if he offered them more cash than they were earning from Google hits. In order to make a dent, he'd need to successfully persuade lots of companies (as he says, a thousand or so might do it- and a thousand or so top companies probably represent the lions share of e-commerce). So effectively, to make this plan work, he or someone would need to have the equivalent of most of the money generated through search engines for the entire e-commerce sector.
There is no-one that rich. Period.
Also, bribery is somewhat illegal. Ask Intel how a very similar "kickback" system worked out for them in the European courts.
Assuming you aren't a hopeless caveman with a fear of computers, there is nothing inherently bad about electronic voting. Paper voting has been scammed plenty enough times, of course, so it's not like it's tampering with perfection; improving voting security should be a massive priority.
Assuming this is only the end stage of a long a concerted programme of looking at security, it is a perfectly reasonable (and reasonably effective) way or looking for flaws. If it is all they've done, then yes, it's probably snake oil.
Proving the absence of something is impossible, or close to it. No matter how hard he looks and says "it still seems to be flawless", you can ALWAYS claim that there is still the possibility of a hidden flaw.
It's always the job of the person claiming the existence of something to prove it, not the other way around. If you think there is a flaw, show us your proof, or at least your reasoning. If you can't, we wont have reason to believe you.
Oh, and to add to myself- regular downloading allows such trickery as downloading content during off-peak times (over night, or during the working day). You can take advantage of the faster speeds, avoid clogging up your own browsing experience, and avoid the snail-pace speeds of internet connections in the evening.
If the whole world were streaming, it makes the whole peak-speed problem even worse, with no sensible way around it. Bad for the savvy consumer- and bad yet again for the ISPs.
The attitude that sending something down the wire is free is receiving shorter and shorter shrift the more traffic finds it's way onto the net. Having to download, download and re-download a program repeatedly whenever you want to re-watch it, or stop halfway through and pick it up another day, or watch parts of it on several different devices (TVs in different rooms, portable devices, etc) is enough to make the fiber-optic-elves cry. And let's not get started on the feasibility of downloading significant quantities of high-quality video via portable cellular networks, as would be required to watch anything streamed while "on the go".
It may suit the content providers, and it may (disregarding the shockingly low price of storage these days and assuming everyone has flawless and unlimited bandwidth allowances) even suit the consumer. But it certainly doesn't suit the actual infrastructure we're relying on to deliver the content going forward into the future.
I'd be happy to believe that he started fairly sensibly, and then started with little frauds and fiddles as they became necessary, to hide poor performance and boost results. His investment business did have a core business model at one point- it's what enabled him to hide his scam from his sons and colleagues so long.
Once your result-faking and number-fiddling has reached sufficiently large proportions, and your business has become nothing but a Ponzi, there's no real way out of it without turning yourself in. It's about that time he was probably expecting the Feds to be kicking in his office door.
The fact he was allowed to carry on for years after that point is something that he would be justified in being (pleasantly) surprised about.
There are ways around this law quite happily- if you aren't using cookies nefariously, you shouldn't have a problem.
When your customer clicks on an ad, present them with a dialogue box saying "Your details will be blahdy blah if you continue, click here [link] for our full privacy policy. Continue [y/n]", or whatever it is you'd be legally obligated to do. If your cookie use is legit, the customer will happily click onward (and I'm sure it'd become something that web users become used to before very long at all). If you're trying to sneakily gather data without the user knowing about it, they're given ample warning to give you the boot.
And incidentally, I don't care how useful it might be to marketing firms: gathering personal data about a user without their knowledge or consent it downright wrong. Big-brother style home surveillance might be pretty useful to marketing too, but no-one suggests that be allowed so as to make for better targeted ads.
I challenge you to suggest one example of cookie use where it'd be unfeasible to request consent, as is required by the new EU law. Bonus points if it's actually common.
Don't get me wrong; I think DRM is stupid, that it drastically lowers the value of the product, and I think it harms the publisher/author more than it helps them, but I wouldn't go as far as calling it immoral.
Slave labour is a terrible horrible thing. It harms people, directly, seriously, and without their consent. DRM doesn't harm anyone except the author stupid enough to use it and the customer stupid enough to buy it, and they both do so of their own free will.
It's like calling a shoe company immoral because they sell a shoe filled with shards of glass. I can't understand why they'd want to sell it, and I can't understand why anyone would want to buy it, but if that's what they want to churn out of their factories then more power to them...
The difference is- we're the customers, he's the business. You name me one other non-related example of a customer being expected to change the way they act in order to make a retailer happy.
It doesn't happen. If people don't want what shops are selling for the price they're selling them at, the shops don't demand the customer changes. Supply and demand is supposed to come into play- prices drop and deals sweeten until they're attractive to customers, and those suppliers who can't keep up go out of business.
What gives the entertainment business the notion that it should be any different for them? If they can't offer products in a form and at a price that is appealing, they're going to go the way of the dodo. Complaining that the customer should pay more, get less, and be happy with it is really just not going to help.
Invention isn't linear. We don't actually have to be building spaceplanes in order to improve the technology required for spaceplanes.
The atmospheric portion of any spaceflight involves the same techniques as atmospheric flight in general- improving the technologies for regular flight helps with spaceflight.
The space-based portion of spaceflight involves the same techniques, regardless of whether your craft is reusable. Getting better at spaceflight in general will mean we're better at reusable spaceflight.
Spaceplanes are made of stuff. Improvements in materials and components, in all their various unrelated fields and industries, will help improve your potential spaceplane. Better computers, better fuel mixes, better launch mechanisms- you name it, you can improve it.
We don't actually need to be mucking around in woefully inadequate spaceplanes for the sake of some distant potential awesome reusable spacecraft. When we're ready to build a decent one, a decent one will definitely get built.
In the mean time, can we just use spacecraft which are actually useful?
I'd say it seems like pretty god business, though still blatantly unfair.
NASA's main interest, and the purpose for funding such competitions, is in fostering private research into rocketry and space travel. This decision makes sense for several reasons: firstly, it allowed an extra device to be successfully tested, providing important data for the project developers, aiding them in improving their technologies. Secondly, it enabled them to give the lions share of funding to the more impoverished of the two projects (as Carmack himself said, Armadillo needed the money less so than Masten), helping to keep them afloat.
Sure it's rotten, but NASA made a decision that's right for NASA.
Never, never, ever adopt complex software at launch. Just don't. Why would you do that?
When Vista came out the advice was obvious: don't use it for a month or so so that all the horrible errors and vulnerabilities can get worked out, or at least unearthed. With the Win7 launch, the advice is exactly the same- wait for them to get some of the kinks before making the plunge. Ubuntu Karmic? You guessed it...
Top story tonight- small company with small user base has more launch-day troubles than large super-rich company with billions of users.
More at 11.
Seriously, have you compared the development spending of MS and Canonical recently? MS spends more on development and testing than the national budget of some developing countries; if they weren't managing to launch more polished products than minuscule Canonical they would have serious, serious problems.
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The only minor point is that it tends to work out a lot cheaper to buy a PC with windows pre-installed than it is to buy a Linux box and an off-the-shelf copy of Windows to install on it.
If you want a Windows PC then it makes good monetary sense to buy it pre-installed. Not good hardware sense, as you point out, but that's still a compelling reason for the masses to ignore your good advice.
Smartphones are colossally expensive, all things considered- you're paying data-plan rates even if you already have a dirt cheap broadband wifi to use, you're paying through the teeth for ultra-slimline miniaturization, and the screen, speakers, input etc. are extra-small (great for the pocket, not so great on the eye-strain and finger cramps).
Assuming what you want is essentially an about-the-house (/office/hotel/etc.) netbook then a smartphone isn't ideal, unless you happen to own one already for other reasons. A lightweight, cheap, relatively portable (although not necessarily ultra-portable) wifi-capable couch-computer is a niche unto itself. Hence why netbooks sell so well.
Personally speaking, I don't really need a smartphone- my cheap non-smartphone fills that role fine. But my netbook is extraordinarily well used.
Assuming ChromeOS is basically trying to out-compete other netbooks then I don't really see the problem. They might not manage it, but it seems like a perfectly sensible plan to me.
Sure they could (although haven't). That's beside the point.
The point is that Google's approach to an OS works better on less hardware (be it ARM or Intel or whatever) by foisting more of the heavy-lifting onto the server and reducing the amount of data locally stored. This means that presumably they can undercut the competition on factors such as price, weight, power consumption, what have you.
If what your after is an intended selling point then that's it. I wouldn't care to judge whether it could possibly work- I'm only pointing out what the appeal seems to be.
Question is, if you could have all the advantages of a desktop OS like Windows or Linux, and still access "the cloud" via Firefox, why would anyone choose an OS that only runs a web browser?
From a consumer point of view- hardware costs. If Chrome can provide you with a fully functional computer with no harddisk (or just a very small one), feeble processor, ARM/whatever architecture, etc., they can potentially beat out the competition on price, battery life, weight, size, heat...
What self respecting consumer wouldn't be tempted by that?
You have to have a monopoly in order to be guilty of monopoly abuse. For a small new-entrant (as Google, in a sense, is in the OS market) you're far more free to do what you like.
If you don't toe the MS line then your user experience tends to suffer for it thanks to their colossal influence (or at least did, I'm not sure if times are changing or if I'm just getting jaded). No such consequence if you choose to use something other than Google Maps or Gmail.
It's not like this is killing off GIMP, it just won't be installed by default.
I actually agree with this move. I like GIMP, but most desktops just won't need it. It's easy enough to install using Add/Remove if you want it.
Desktops don't need to come with every single specialist tool by default. They just need to be able to complete basic tasks- if a user needs more, they can get more pretty easily.
And what's the percent of worldwide searches? Yeah, I thought so.
Google Search is dominant in a pretty significant proportion of the billion or so internet users. When Bing gets 10% of that then we can talk.
Indeed, I believe that the Greek for wormwood is "apsinthos"; 'tis where the name of the drink comes from.
So the bible predicts that a Mayan called Nbiru dumps absinthe in the sea in 2012, poisoning us all and causing the magnetic poles to flip. Sounds plausible to me.
An add that appears filling your screen and then won't go away until you click on something.
So they've patented the pop-up add?
Ask Intel how that attitude worked out for them in Europe. They could give you about 1.06 billion reasons as to why this is not a smart plan.
Indeed, there's a reason why this can't possibly work, however much money he cared to name. It's economics for idiots.
The only way any company would agree would be if he offered them more cash than they were earning from Google hits. In order to make a dent, he'd need to successfully persuade lots of companies (as he says, a thousand or so might do it- and a thousand or so top companies probably represent the lions share of e-commerce). So effectively, to make this plan work, he or someone would need to have the equivalent of most of the money generated through search engines for the entire e-commerce sector.
There is no-one that rich. Period.
Also, bribery is somewhat illegal. Ask Intel how a very similar "kickback" system worked out for them in the European courts.
Says you.
Assuming you aren't a hopeless caveman with a fear of computers, there is nothing inherently bad about electronic voting. Paper voting has been scammed plenty enough times, of course, so it's not like it's tampering with perfection; improving voting security should be a massive priority.
Assuming this is only the end stage of a long a concerted programme of looking at security, it is a perfectly reasonable (and reasonably effective) way or looking for flaws. If it is all they've done, then yes, it's probably snake oil.
Proving the absence of something is impossible, or close to it. No matter how hard he looks and says "it still seems to be flawless", you can ALWAYS claim that there is still the possibility of a hidden flaw.
It's always the job of the person claiming the existence of something to prove it, not the other way around. If you think there is a flaw, show us your proof, or at least your reasoning. If you can't, we wont have reason to believe you.
Well that solves NASA's budget problems, at least.
Interstellar cruiser, you say Father? Just deposit the money in the hole, we'll get right back to you.
Oh, and to add to myself- regular downloading allows such trickery as downloading content during off-peak times (over night, or during the working day). You can take advantage of the faster speeds, avoid clogging up your own browsing experience, and avoid the snail-pace speeds of internet connections in the evening.
If the whole world were streaming, it makes the whole peak-speed problem even worse, with no sensible way around it. Bad for the savvy consumer- and bad yet again for the ISPs.
And another reason- think of the poor ISPs.
The attitude that sending something down the wire is free is receiving shorter and shorter shrift the more traffic finds it's way onto the net. Having to download, download and re-download a program repeatedly whenever you want to re-watch it, or stop halfway through and pick it up another day, or watch parts of it on several different devices (TVs in different rooms, portable devices, etc) is enough to make the fiber-optic-elves cry. And let's not get started on the feasibility of downloading significant quantities of high-quality video via portable cellular networks, as would be required to watch anything streamed while "on the go".
It may suit the content providers, and it may (disregarding the shockingly low price of storage these days and assuming everyone has flawless and unlimited bandwidth allowances) even suit the consumer. But it certainly doesn't suit the actual infrastructure we're relying on to deliver the content going forward into the future.
It's not that unreasonable, is it?
I'd be happy to believe that he started fairly sensibly, and then started with little frauds and fiddles as they became necessary, to hide poor performance and boost results. His investment business did have a core business model at one point- it's what enabled him to hide his scam from his sons and colleagues so long.
Once your result-faking and number-fiddling has reached sufficiently large proportions, and your business has become nothing but a Ponzi, there's no real way out of it without turning yourself in. It's about that time he was probably expecting the Feds to be kicking in his office door.
The fact he was allowed to carry on for years after that point is something that he would be justified in being (pleasantly) surprised about.
He's still a bastard, though.
There are ways around this law quite happily- if you aren't using cookies nefariously, you shouldn't have a problem.
When your customer clicks on an ad, present them with a dialogue box saying "Your details will be blahdy blah if you continue, click here [link] for our full privacy policy. Continue [y/n]", or whatever it is you'd be legally obligated to do. If your cookie use is legit, the customer will happily click onward (and I'm sure it'd become something that web users become used to before very long at all). If you're trying to sneakily gather data without the user knowing about it, they're given ample warning to give you the boot.
And incidentally, I don't care how useful it might be to marketing firms: gathering personal data about a user without their knowledge or consent it downright wrong. Big-brother style home surveillance might be pretty useful to marketing too, but no-one suggests that be allowed so as to make for better targeted ads.
I challenge you to suggest one example of cookie use where it'd be unfeasible to request consent, as is required by the new EU law. Bonus points if it's actually common.
Don't get me wrong; I think DRM is stupid, that it drastically lowers the value of the product, and I think it harms the publisher/author more than it helps them, but I wouldn't go as far as calling it immoral.
Slave labour is a terrible horrible thing. It harms people, directly, seriously, and without their consent. DRM doesn't harm anyone except the author stupid enough to use it and the customer stupid enough to buy it, and they both do so of their own free will.
It's like calling a shoe company immoral because they sell a shoe filled with shards of glass. I can't understand why they'd want to sell it, and I can't understand why anyone would want to buy it, but if that's what they want to churn out of their factories then more power to them...
The difference is- we're the customers, he's the business. You name me one other non-related example of a customer being expected to change the way they act in order to make a retailer happy.
It doesn't happen. If people don't want what shops are selling for the price they're selling them at, the shops don't demand the customer changes. Supply and demand is supposed to come into play- prices drop and deals sweeten until they're attractive to customers, and those suppliers who can't keep up go out of business.
What gives the entertainment business the notion that it should be any different for them? If they can't offer products in a form and at a price that is appealing, they're going to go the way of the dodo. Complaining that the customer should pay more, get less, and be happy with it is really just not going to help.
Invention isn't linear. We don't actually have to be building spaceplanes in order to improve the technology required for spaceplanes.
The atmospheric portion of any spaceflight involves the same techniques as atmospheric flight in general- improving the technologies for regular flight helps with spaceflight.
The space-based portion of spaceflight involves the same techniques, regardless of whether your craft is reusable. Getting better at spaceflight in general will mean we're better at reusable spaceflight.
Spaceplanes are made of stuff. Improvements in materials and components, in all their various unrelated fields and industries, will help improve your potential spaceplane. Better computers, better fuel mixes, better launch mechanisms- you name it, you can improve it.
We don't actually need to be mucking around in woefully inadequate spaceplanes for the sake of some distant potential awesome reusable spacecraft. When we're ready to build a decent one, a decent one will definitely get built.
In the mean time, can we just use spacecraft which are actually useful?
I'd say it seems like pretty god business, though still blatantly unfair.
NASA's main interest, and the purpose for funding such competitions, is in fostering private research into rocketry and space travel. This decision makes sense for several reasons: firstly, it allowed an extra device to be successfully tested, providing important data for the project developers, aiding them in improving their technologies. Secondly, it enabled them to give the lions share of funding to the more impoverished of the two projects (as Carmack himself said, Armadillo needed the money less so than Masten), helping to keep them afloat.
Sure it's rotten, but NASA made a decision that's right for NASA.
Never, never, ever adopt complex software at launch. Just don't. Why would you do that?
When Vista came out the advice was obvious: don't use it for a month or so so that all the horrible errors and vulnerabilities can get worked out, or at least unearthed. With the Win7 launch, the advice is exactly the same- wait for them to get some of the kinks before making the plunge. Ubuntu Karmic? You guessed it...
Top story tonight- small company with small user base has more launch-day troubles than large super-rich company with billions of users.
More at 11.
Seriously, have you compared the development spending of MS and Canonical recently? MS spends more on development and testing than the national budget of some developing countries; if they weren't managing to launch more polished products than minuscule Canonical they would have serious, serious problems.
So, instead of playing Combat Flight Sim now some lucky Corporal can play live-fire Command and Conquer?
Sounds like progress to me!