Android devices tend to be a lot less expensive than everything else. That has always been true, and has been the single biggest reason why Android is so popular. The majority of people don't care about what a device can do as long as it can do the minimum they need, and I guess, play Candy Crush.
All the people I know who use apple fall into two categories: People that need an easy to use device and have the money to buy apple, or people who are technical inclined but don't *want* to deal with complexity, and have the money to pay the Apple Tax.
There's really nothing in between. People who demand control, or care about the tech specs, and have the patience/willingness to play sysadmin on their phone buy Android. People who can't afford the Apple cost, buy an Android.
I'm not going to get into the technical aspects of each platform, cause that's not really relevant. This is all based on general perception/reputation.
I personally, gave up on Android at the 4.x time period, cause the Samsung S3 I got was the single worst device I had ever owned. If it wasn't Samsung's pre-loaded unremovable crapware, it was other things, like OS not keeping Apps in line or the absurd way it handled MicroSD cards. And this was on top of several landfill android devices I bought that were so horrible that they weren't even fit for purpose for anything more advanced than staring at your home screen.
Course, if Apple continues to make stupid design decisions like taking away very heavily used ports just so they can save 2 cents on their BOM, I may end up having to re-evaluate my requirements.
It's not the barrier of entry that is the problem. There practically isn't one anymore. The problem is maintaining interest when you are continually bombarded with new technologies that change on an almost monthly basis, and each knew think someone pulls out of their ass is it's own complete and unique snowflake, so anything you learned from a previous technology may as well be thrown away cause the knowledge won't apply to the new thing.
Hell, just look at a subset like the javascript ecosystem. People invent and throw away entire APIs and frameworks almost as often as they go to the bathroom, and the knowledge you gain from one is virtually useless when you have to switch to another.
And lets not get into the way everyone insists on destroying backward compatibility with every major version. Angular 2 is completely incompatible with 1. Python 3 is incompatible with 2. It just goes on and on.
In the older days, a competent developer would pointedly learn multiple languages and system becauses it gave you a breadth of experience. This wasn't a requirement. This is just what you did if you were serious about programming. You'd install the appropriate IDE for your chosen language, and off you went.
Now? There are countless tools available to do anything you could ever want. But if you want to be a serious programmer you need to learn multiple languages, multiple descriptor formats, and god knows how many random "frameworks" just to get *started*. And after a year, you are basically guaranteed to have to either switch to a different framework, or live with an abandoned one because suddenly the stuff you're using isn't "popular" anymore. Java was difficult but good when it first came out. Now it's a joke, especially JEE. I could write a massive post that was nothing more than a list of all the TLAs and FLAs for all the Java things that are officially part of the spec.
Why? Cause it's written by some smartass cowboy that thinks everything that came before is garbage, and that they can solve all the worlds problems with their shiny new One True Framework. Meanwhile, on top of re-inventing the wheel, they repeat all the mistakes that were made before. MongoDB and the other NoSQL databases are a perfect example of this. There was a *reason* SQL was invented, and I just sit and laugh when people complain about how hard it is to do reporting on NoSQL databases.
There is a reason why languages like C/C++ have so much staying power. They're *stable*. They've withstood the test of time. They're a little harder to get off the ground with, but at least you can be assured that you don't have to throw away all that hard won knowledge 6 months from now. Java *almost* fits this criteria, but there are just too many add-ons, and Oracle appears to be doing their level best at pissing everyone off and pushing them away from the platform.
And in the end programming ends up just not being fun anymore.
They knew that they had gone too far, and yet they didn't revert what they did.
"We learned a lot from that"
Are you fucking serious? How breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to not realize how dishonest this tactic was, before you even started writing one line of the the freaking code?
So basically, Microsoft Marketing have finally realized that they have proven to the world that Microsoft is just as evil now as they were before, so now they're trying to deflect and make it look like incompetence rather than malice. Sorry, no. You don't "accidentally" turn Windows Update into a malware vector. You don't "accidentally" design an operating system around spying on the user, and forcing it to be an ad platform against the user's wishes. You don't "accidentally" steal away fundamental control of a user's machine, and deny them the right to take it back again.
I don't know what this idiot was hoping to accomplish with his post, but I doubt he succeeded.
I'd be willing to bet that a large part of the popularity doesn't have anything to do with.Net per se, but rather because Microsoft has positioned.Net as a competitor to Java, while at the same time Oracle is hell bent on making Java as distasteful to use as possible.
Java is second only to C/C++ in terms of platform stability. Java is, quite simply, what you use when you need to write an enterprise-level app and you don't want to be forced into the Windows ecosystem.
But Oracle happily poisons everything they touch. They destroyed OpenOffice. They destroyed MySQL. They have ruined pretty much everything that they got from Sun, and while Java has still been able to hang on, it has been despite their best efforts. Every bit of news that has Oracle and Java in it, is almost exclusively negative, where Oracle is trying to screw someone out of money. Hell, they're even squeezing Java developers, who are the primary reason the platform is even viable.
When.Net was open sourced, people (including me) were shouting "It's a trap!", because Microsoft doesn't seem to do anything without an ulterior motive. Sometimes it's transparent, sometimes they do the long play, but at no point is "Microsoft" and "trust" used in the same sentence. But now we're at the point where you have two options. A possible "It's a trap" scenario with Microsoft, and Oracle's "We're gonna fuck you till you're dead, and then we'll fuck the corpse."
So yeah, when those are your options,.Net definitely becomes a whole lot more attractive.
As the original poster, yes, it was supposed to be a joke. I figured someone was gonna go off about it anyway, so I wanted to whore the +5 funny mod for myself. while short circuiting the mouth-frothing.
Now's a great time to point out that the Internet Archive themselves are so afraid of what Trump is going to do, that they're currently collecting funds for setting up a mirror outside the US.
I agree that we should ban killer robots, but only if they arn't from Venus. I think Killer Robots from Venus are A-Ok. Heck, they gave me some zucchini from their garden yesterday!
Ah ok, now I see. Yeah, I dunno if that is even possible. That would require a whole new level of coordination between regulations, carriers, and handset software, and I don't know if any of that actually exists, and if it doesn't, I don't think it would be worth the headaches involved to implement.
Wait what? If you have a dual-sim phone you can't readily call from either number? No wonder you're annoyed... Yeah, that would be a minimum I would expect from a dual-sim device too.
I thought you were talking about arbitrarily spoofing phone numbers.
They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't know that Trump was going to come down the pipe and back them up.
The FCC may as well give up at this point. I mean, hell, ALL US regulatory commissions may as well give up at this point, since he's gonna gut and destroy anything that prevents profits from being made, regardless of the impact that will have on health, the environment, or the well-being of US citizens.
So basically Apple wants to chase after emerging markets rather than do something about their quickly deteriorating product lineup.
I swear, you can practically watch in real time how the MBA is destroying an up till now highly successful company that prided itself on the quality of it's engineering.
Reading this, all I can think of is how much sooner would we have figured this out if we hadn't wasted millions of man-hours and 10s of millions of dollars fighting against all the anti-vaccine idiocy.
Without knowing exact numbers, I can't possibly tell you. Firstly, it's not like the devices are all going up into flames en masse. Secondly, there has already been a massive marketing campaign by Samsung, carriers, airlines, and governments pointing out how dangerous these things are and how they are prohibited from air travel.
Given everything that has already happened, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the total number of Note 7's devices that will actually make it into the air will be so small that the overall risk will be no greater than they would be all mobile devices in general.
Killing off the phone before christmas would have done nothing but cause a whole whackton of frustration and resentment. Killing it off after christmas, when a number of people would have gotten new devices anyway, makes much more sense.
Fitbit signed the death warrant when the news went out that they bought some of Pebble's IP and nothing else. Who in their right mind would buy a Pebble now, knowing that it's working from borrowed time?
If the device didn't rely on external servers to function, that's one thing. But the news reports said that it did, and those things will be around for maybe a year at best.
I had been planning on buying a couple, but there's no way I will now. I'm not going to drop hundreds of dollars on a device when I know I'll get maybe a year of life out of it before it becomes useless and needs to be thrown in the trash.
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Android devices tend to be a lot less expensive than everything else. That has always been true, and has been the single biggest reason why Android is so popular. The majority of people don't care about what a device can do as long as it can do the minimum they need, and I guess, play Candy Crush.
All the people I know who use apple fall into two categories: People that need an easy to use device and have the money to buy apple, or people who are technical inclined but don't *want* to deal with complexity, and have the money to pay the Apple Tax.
There's really nothing in between. People who demand control, or care about the tech specs, and have the patience/willingness to play sysadmin on their phone buy Android. People who can't afford the Apple cost, buy an Android.
I'm not going to get into the technical aspects of each platform, cause that's not really relevant. This is all based on general perception/reputation.
I personally, gave up on Android at the 4.x time period, cause the Samsung S3 I got was the single worst device I had ever owned. If it wasn't Samsung's pre-loaded unremovable crapware, it was other things, like OS not keeping Apps in line or the absurd way it handled MicroSD cards. And this was on top of several landfill android devices I bought that were so horrible that they weren't even fit for purpose for anything more advanced than staring at your home screen.
Course, if Apple continues to make stupid design decisions like taking away very heavily used ports just so they can save 2 cents on their BOM, I may end up having to re-evaluate my requirements.
It's not the barrier of entry that is the problem. There practically isn't one anymore. The problem is maintaining interest when you are continually bombarded with new technologies that change on an almost monthly basis, and each knew think someone pulls out of their ass is it's own complete and unique snowflake, so anything you learned from a previous technology may as well be thrown away cause the knowledge won't apply to the new thing.
Hell, just look at a subset like the javascript ecosystem. People invent and throw away entire APIs and frameworks almost as often as they go to the bathroom, and the knowledge you gain from one is virtually useless when you have to switch to another.
And lets not get into the way everyone insists on destroying backward compatibility with every major version. Angular 2 is completely incompatible with 1. Python 3 is incompatible with 2. It just goes on and on.
In the older days, a competent developer would pointedly learn multiple languages and system becauses it gave you a breadth of experience. This wasn't a requirement. This is just what you did if you were serious about programming. You'd install the appropriate IDE for your chosen language, and off you went.
Now? There are countless tools available to do anything you could ever want. But if you want to be a serious programmer you need to learn multiple languages, multiple descriptor formats, and god knows how many random "frameworks" just to get *started*. And after a year, you are basically guaranteed to have to either switch to a different framework, or live with an abandoned one because suddenly the stuff you're using isn't "popular" anymore. Java was difficult but good when it first came out. Now it's a joke, especially JEE. I could write a massive post that was nothing more than a list of all the TLAs and FLAs for all the Java things that are officially part of the spec.
Why? Cause it's written by some smartass cowboy that thinks everything that came before is garbage, and that they can solve all the worlds problems with their shiny new One True Framework. Meanwhile, on top of re-inventing the wheel, they repeat all the mistakes that were made before. MongoDB and the other NoSQL databases are a perfect example of this. There was a *reason* SQL was invented, and I just sit and laugh when people complain about how hard it is to do reporting on NoSQL databases.
There is a reason why languages like C/C++ have so much staying power. They're *stable*. They've withstood the test of time. They're a little harder to get off the ground with, but at least you can be assured that you don't have to throw away all that hard won knowledge 6 months from now. Java *almost* fits this criteria, but there are just too many add-ons, and Oracle appears to be doing their level best at pissing everyone off and pushing them away from the platform.
And in the end programming ends up just not being fun anymore.
I should have put "for your convenience" in quotes to make it more obvious.
It may have downloaded the installer for your convenience, but it didn't run it. That is one fine yet very important line.
All I can do is blink dumbly after reading that.
They knew that they had gone too far, and yet they didn't revert what they did.
"We learned a lot from that"
Are you fucking serious? How breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to not realize how dishonest this tactic was, before you even started writing one line of the the freaking code?
So basically, Microsoft Marketing have finally realized that they have proven to the world that Microsoft is just as evil now as they were before, so now they're trying to deflect and make it look like incompetence rather than malice. Sorry, no. You don't "accidentally" turn Windows Update into a malware vector. You don't "accidentally" design an operating system around spying on the user, and forcing it to be an ad platform against the user's wishes. You don't "accidentally" steal away fundamental control of a user's machine, and deny them the right to take it back again.
I don't know what this idiot was hoping to accomplish with his post, but I doubt he succeeded.
Right. "Free upgrade offer".
I'll have to remember that phrase next time I want to forcibly coerce someone to do something that they don't want.
I'd be willing to bet that a large part of the popularity doesn't have anything to do with .Net per se, but rather because Microsoft has positioned .Net as a competitor to Java, while at the same time Oracle is hell bent on making Java as distasteful to use as possible.
Java is second only to C/C++ in terms of platform stability. Java is, quite simply, what you use when you need to write an enterprise-level app and you don't want to be forced into the Windows ecosystem.
But Oracle happily poisons everything they touch. They destroyed OpenOffice. They destroyed MySQL. They have ruined pretty much everything that they got from Sun, and while Java has still been able to hang on, it has been despite their best efforts. Every bit of news that has Oracle and Java in it, is almost exclusively negative, where Oracle is trying to screw someone out of money. Hell, they're even squeezing Java developers, who are the primary reason the platform is even viable.
When .Net was open sourced, people (including me) were shouting "It's a trap!", because Microsoft doesn't seem to do anything without an ulterior motive. Sometimes it's transparent, sometimes they do the long play, but at no point is "Microsoft" and "trust" used in the same sentence. But now we're at the point where you have two options. A possible "It's a trap" scenario with Microsoft, and Oracle's "We're gonna fuck you till you're dead, and then we'll fuck the corpse."
So yeah, when those are your options, .Net definitely becomes a whole lot more attractive.
As the original poster, yes, it was supposed to be a joke. I figured someone was gonna go off about it anyway, so I wanted to whore the +5 funny mod for myself. while short circuiting the mouth-frothing.
Apparently I accidentally tripped over Poe's Law.
Now's a great time to point out that the Internet Archive themselves are so afraid of what Trump is going to do, that they're currently collecting funds for setting up a mirror outside the US.
May you live in interesting times, indeed.
I agree that we should ban killer robots, but only if they arn't from Venus. I think Killer Robots from Venus are A-Ok. Heck, they gave me some zucchini from their garden yesterday!
Ah ok, now I see. Yeah, I dunno if that is even possible. That would require a whole new level of coordination between regulations, carriers, and handset software, and I don't know if any of that actually exists, and if it doesn't, I don't think it would be worth the headaches involved to implement.
The balance sheets for the various drug companies clearly state that everything is just fine.
Wait what? If you have a dual-sim phone you can't readily call from either number? No wonder you're annoyed... Yeah, that would be a minimum I would expect from a dual-sim device too.
I thought you were talking about arbitrarily spoofing phone numbers.
They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't know that Trump was going to come down the pipe and back them up.
The FCC may as well give up at this point. I mean, hell, ALL US regulatory commissions may as well give up at this point, since he's gonna gut and destroy anything that prevents profits from being made, regardless of the impact that will have on health, the environment, or the well-being of US citizens.
I don't know what medications you're on, but I think you forgot to take them.
I don't know *any* cell phone that does that natively, nor do I think that that would be a good idea. That just screams abuse potential to me.
A separate VOIP client, or a work-provided DISA service, are much safer options, at least from an admin standpoint.
So basically you will have twice as much opportunity to hold it wrong?
So basically Apple wants to chase after emerging markets rather than do something about their quickly deteriorating product lineup.
I swear, you can practically watch in real time how the MBA is destroying an up till now highly successful company that prided itself on the quality of it's engineering.
I glossed very quickly over the article so maybe I missed it. What is the actual *impact* of this? Privilege escalation? Crash the OS?
Just because an exploit is found doesn't necessarily mean it's a significant concern unless you can do something nasty with it.
Reading this, all I can think of is how much sooner would we have figured this out if we hadn't wasted millions of man-hours and 10s of millions of dollars fighting against all the anti-vaccine idiocy.
Actually, the other day I got a Best Buy flyer advertising them. So I'm guessing retailers are going into liquidation mode.
Without knowing exact numbers, I can't possibly tell you. Firstly, it's not like the devices are all going up into flames en masse. Secondly, there has already been a massive marketing campaign by Samsung, carriers, airlines, and governments pointing out how dangerous these things are and how they are prohibited from air travel.
Given everything that has already happened, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the total number of Note 7's devices that will actually make it into the air will be so small that the overall risk will be no greater than they would be all mobile devices in general.
Killing off the phone before christmas would have done nothing but cause a whole whackton of frustration and resentment. Killing it off after christmas, when a number of people would have gotten new devices anyway, makes much more sense.
Why thought? Uber is an internet service company. It shouldn't matter who or what is behind the wheel.
Fitbit signed the death warrant when the news went out that they bought some of Pebble's IP and nothing else. Who in their right mind would buy a Pebble now, knowing that it's working from borrowed time?
If the device didn't rely on external servers to function, that's one thing. But the news reports said that it did, and those things will be around for maybe a year at best.
I had been planning on buying a couple, but there's no way I will now. I'm not going to drop hundreds of dollars on a device when I know I'll get maybe a year of life out of it before it becomes useless and needs to be thrown in the trash.