I find it extremely frustrating when a service to which I've subscribed (for years!) offers extreme discounts to new customers, but won't help me
Here's the deal. I work for an extremely large megacorporation which essentially has the same policies. Why? Because it's understood that it costs money (in terms of advertising or special deals) to steal a customer from a competitor, whereas keeping an existing customer is a presumption. Do you know why? Because most customers of service providers in even marginally competitive industries - whether that's cellphones, magazine subscriptions, TV service, home security systems, even home grocery delivery services - stay with their current provider ad infinitum unless they get REALLY p***ed off or someone else gives them a really good incentive to change. All these service providers (if they're smart) give you a (financially speaking) EXCESSIVE discount upfront to bring you on board just because it's a pain in the butt (usually) to switch once you've signed up. No evil involved necessarily, just regular consumer inertia.
So, to get the best deal, you need to get out of being a presumptive renewal for your service provider and become a potential customer loss. As soon as your contract is up, call your service provider and tell them you're cancelling. If they are not brain dead - or unless they're super polite - they will not say "sure, sorry to see you leave us forever." Instead, because these businesses understand that if you leave they will have to lay out those EXACT SAME DISCOUNTS to replace you, you will get them offered to you. It may take a little haggling and an escalation in customer care, but you will eventually get roughly equivalent deals.
Theoretically it shouldn't be this way in terms of rewarding customer loyalty... but from a bottom line perspective, it's (unfortunately) the logically correct thing to do. If you look at it from the company's perspective, they are "leaving money on the table" with every existing customer to whom they offer the discount who wasn't a risk to leave. Make sense?
I know you're making a joke, but there is at least one grain of serious truth to it. Given how boneheaded the last few administrations' plans for the manned spaceflight program have been, the fact that they keep getting changed has actually prevented us from spending ridiculous sums of money on the them. Can you imagine - at a time when millions of Americans are jobless and without healthcare - what the public backlash would be against the space program if we were actually spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on a manned Mars mission or (to a lesser $$$ figure) Constellation? In the meantime, that indecision and flailing has left the door open for private spaceflight projects to fill the "useful" void of reliable, cost-effective transport to LEO and GEO.
So while on one hand the political ping-pong game over NASA has resulted in billions of dollars in waste and squandered the talents of our best and brightest, on the other hand it has prevented us from spending hundreds of billions on bad ideas. Not exactly the tradeoff you want, but I'm trying to find the upside here...
I'm not the OP, but I'll step in and say "yes, yes I do."
Mac usability is generally only better if you have relatively weak requirements.
I have many requirements. The requirements for my hobby developer station are very different for my requirements for my "everyday" machine that I use along with my wife. For my "everyday" machine, my requirements are to:
Sync my music and video collection via iTunes to my iPhone and iPad
Provide a locally stored photo management system like iPhoto that provides inline editing, auto face recognition, geo-tagging and one-click posting to FaceBook including transfer of person tags.
Run MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint when I need to edit files at home if I'm working late. I say 'run these applications' instead of 'run LibreOffice' because I can't take any chances on these document not preserving tracked changes or being formatted wrong when I send them back to work colleagues who use Office for Windows.
Run a small but vital group of applications including Quicken (I use mint.com as well and it is NOT a replacement) and Reunion (I use Ancestry.com as well and it is NOT a replacement).
Run a small but vital group of games including MAME/Stella (Linux does this well already), Escape Velocity Nova, Civilization V, Dragon Age and KOTOR. Plus all my Steam games (which Linux will do partially).
I'm sorry pal but Linux - except where described above - does NOT provide equivalent "usability." It may be possible to do all those things on Linux but it certainly isn't as fast, easy or eligible for vendor troubleshooting.
Linux is great for what it is, but to say that Mac (or Windows) usability "is generally only better if you have relatively weak requirements" is based on a very different set of requirements than I think the vast majority of computer users have.
You have taken one short, succint and economical sentence of only five words, taken from Slashdot, and have concluded that all developers of Linux, and all the userspace applications think and act the same.
My friend, I have done nothing of the sort. I have concluded that there is enough of the sentiment above throughout the Linux developer and user communities to explain why Linux today is good at certain things and is bad at other things. Not every Linux developer is going to say that stable ABIs are for the mentally handicapped, but that opinion (and tone) is not exactly a unique outlier in FOSS land. I don't really think that is a surprising conclusion to draw.
Linux is in Android, and Android is a success.
I never said Linux isn't a success... I just think it has a niche carved out for itself, and that is driven by the prevailing attitudes among the PC Linux community. We agree that Linux is in Android, but past that point we differ, since I believe that Linux on PCs and Android on mobile devices are completely different worlds in almost every respect.
The Linux kernel isn't what makes Android what it is... it's the UI, it's Google's choice of licensing terms, it's the applications and app store, it's the OEM and carrier relationships and the complex politics there... all those things have much more to do with Android's success than its choice of kernel. The Linux part of Android is functionally invisible to the end user, and the complaints that people have about desktop Linux are not applicable in the Android world (if the two were similar, you'd have your choice of Android "distros" for each phone, and you'd have to use a different package manager to install apps depending on your phone's distro, etc.).
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not here to trash Linux, and I think it's great for what it is. But I also believe there's no value to any community in denying the truth of what its strengths and weaknesses are. To say that "Linux" is a success in mass adoption because "Android" is a success is just like saying "BSD" is a success because "Mac OS X" is a success. And are you really going to go up to Jordan Hubbard or Theo De Raadt and say "hey, great job on making OS X a success?"
Congratulations! You have in one short, succinct and economical sentence of only five words captured the essence - in both attitude and content - of why Linux is and always will be the perfect tool for the technically inclined tinkerer, and why it will never be adopted by the masses. Linux will go on doing what it does well, designed by the people and for the people who think the vast majority of desktop OS installations in the world are "for retards."
Besides, governments rise and fall, but bitcoins are forever.
Exactly, who wants fly-by-night currencies backed by national governments of stable countries? That's why I invested my life savings in Bitcoins, Flooz and Beenz.
So does being a "C/C#/C++ Programmer" make you some kind of big shot?
By virtue of having three consecutive alphanumeric Cs in your job title, you would outrank everyone else in the company. Unless of course they hired a CCCCEO.
So four people left... are these really surprising super high-level departures? At least in the Big Company I come from, you aren't considered any kind of "executive" unless you have some kind of "* Vice President" or "C*" in your title. "Director" or "Manager" may mean you're actually doing important work, but is nobody's idea of an "executive."
A year or two ago they were saying Chicago, referencing GroupOn and others. Lately I've heard Austin, Texas...
This whole "the next [INSERT TECHNOLOGY] Mecca will be..." has been going on for decades, and always with different locations. Very few ever pan out.
The fact of the matter is that while a startup can go anywhere, for anyplace to become "the next whatever hub" it has to be built around one or more existing big players who are already there. There's only one Silicon Valley, and a few minor outliers for tech in the US:
Silicon Valley was built on people getting access to HP and Intel, then it was Apple, and then Netscape, Yahoo! and Sun, then Google and so on. Arguably it continued to grow there more because of all the people who cashed out of those players and had money to invest than because of the great engineering schools in the area. Nobody is challenging SV anytime soon as a result.
Seattle being put on the map as a tech hub was built around Microsoft being there - purely an accident of Bill Gates and Paul Allen being from the area (although the later arrival of Nintendo because of Seattle's proximity to Japan didn't hurt). Amazon was also more or less an accident to end up in Seattle - Jeff Bezos was a Wall Streeter who wanted to be based in a state with good transportation and logistics and no state income tax but a low population so the majority of people wouldn't have to pay state sales tax on online purchases. But once these other players were there, an ecosystem of technology accrued around it.
New York tried to build "Silicon Alley" and it worked for a while (and still does to a small extent) just because if your business depends on Big Content or Big Capital Markets, you want to be right there. But it has never recovered from the dot-com bust days (you can no longer pay your cab fare in Flooz).
Northern Virginia once touted itself as the "Silicon Dominion" (terrible name!) hub for Internet businesses because AOL was there, along with Network Solutions (remember them?) plus telecom players like MCI, the MAE East Internet hub (remember that?), etc. But AOL got bought and moved to NYC, as did MCI, and its influence waned badly after the dot-com bust as well.
TL; DR: you can't build a new hub for technology until you already have a critical mass of major tech players to be around. Catch-22, I know, but that's why Silicon Valley is what it is.
what's the use of studying the animal kingdom if there isn't any step further - like improving / changing / experimenting on the animals
There are hundreds of thousands of people who spent many years studying biology and zoology to become veterinarians and, you know, help animals who will disagree with you.
The vast majority of people study history to learn from it, not to make it or rewrite it. The vast majority of people who study psychology don't do so because their plan is to control people and then force them into Cybermen suits. Not everything in life is a conspiracy to rule the world.
Seriously... Slashdot just gets crazier and crazier.
Here's the deal, "xTrashcat." You are about to read several hundred posts here that explain why you're young, why you're an idiot, and why you need to just keep your head down and follow process and not rock the boat.
F**k these people.
Yes, you're young; and yes, you don't get what it's like to be in the trenches for many years. And yes, you also don't understand why ad hoc but smart answers may not be scalable and thus turn out to bite you in the butt.
But you know what? You seem to like your job and have enthusiasm for it. Maybe that will last, maybe it won't. But if you do keep that enthusiasm, you will never be one of the people responding to your post and telling you what a stupid a**hole you are for trying to fix a problem without shipping the boxes back to the vendor, telling the users to fill out the XP-239 form in-quadruplicate, and taking a smoke break.
And you know what? Liking your job and wanting to always be learning new things as a result will make you much, much happier than all the people telling you how stupid you are. Also, with that attitude - you may end up being the boss of those people, and they will be complaining on Slashdot 10 years from now about how their PHB always wants them to learn things and fix stuff but "it's not their job"... so please keep it up. The world needs more people who actually like their jobs and try hard to do them well.
I predict that hotels, casinos, museums, enterprises, and carriers wishing to control and remove functionality from their devices will be the first to adopt this OS.
This capability has been present in BlackBerry OS for many years but with much finer-grained control and capabilities (tight Exchange mail/calendar/contacts integration; app restrictions; website blocking; etc.) which is a big part of why it was originally popular with large businesses. Today you can get this same type of functionality on many platforms (including Android, iOS, etc.) by using an add-on Mobile Device Management system from Good, McAfee etc. So while the lack of apps etc. may sound good at first, it's really not what corporations are looking for and can find on other platforms.
The boss only pays you enough to keep you alive and coming back to work, because otherwise those who don't pay their workers only the bare necessities get beat out by competition who can invest more in their companies.
Theoretically true but only in industries where workers are commodities. Capitalism does have a flip side, you know - where workers who are skilled can create a market for themselves among competing employers to increase their wages because their work can quantifiably improve the employer's profits. It's not all one way, but it does reward workers who make their talents stand out, and punishes workers whose work is essentially interchangeable.
I seriously doubt user confusion with file systems is the reason.
I know the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but both my parents and my in-laws have a file system of "about a zillion files on the desktop." Other people in my family can't find files they have downloaded because they have no idea that they should navigate to a User => Downloads folder. I would be willing to wager that a significant (>50%?) of consumer PC users have a similar lack of comfort or familiarity with what the rest of us consider to be a filesystem arrangement.
We should make everyone in that so-called 1% spend a year getting by on $2000/mo allowance so that they get some idea of who they're fucking over
The world is really not as black and white as it seems. By some calculations, my wife and I as a household are part of that "1%." And yet somehow - gasp - we do not vote Republican, nor did we give any of our children Ayn Rand pop-up books in the crib. (Although I would willingly shell out if someone published a Rand-ian "Sharing Is For the Weak - A Baby's First Board Book")
Wealthy people do not automatically have a single political affiliation or philosophy. While I appreciate that you grant that some "one percenters" may not be evil but rather just kind-hearted and ignorant, the truth is this "group" is not politically, ethnically, spiritually or sociologically homogeneous in any way. This notional "1%" represents a convenient strawman for many Slashdotters (I remember when it wasn't a politics site, sigh) and elsewhere, but if you look deeper it's just not so simple.
For the record, I did spend a year back in the mid-'90s living on $600 a month while teaching adult literacy classes as a VISTA volunteer. I know very well the effect that poverty has on people who (unlike myself) did not have a lot of opportunities to advance socioeconomically... and it not only convinced me of the value of being charitable with my money in the future, but also motivated me strongly to work my butt off because I understand how much being poor sucks. And sure, I may be on the underside of that "1%" but I will bet you that I know more bona fide one percenters than you do, and I know that they are a lot less of a unified sinister cabal than you think...
I can't think of any marketing professional who would give two shakes about this metric
Are you kidding? If I make a post about how I just bought a new Samsung Galaxy Class Starship at T-Mobile and my friends click the "want" button, it is absolutely worth gold to T-Mobile to have their ads steered to those FB users.
Or as another application... I already share my Amazon Wishlist with my friends so they can buy me stuff I actually want for my birthday/Christmas... why not push that directly onto Facebook and allow sellers of those items to advertise for them and/or compete on price via ads?
It would be illegal to have phone contracts longer than 2 months.
You can buy plenty of pre-paid phones in the US today with no contract at all... but only a minority of users tend to choose this option. If people want to buy on a contract, why would you make this illegal?
You could sell a subscriber a phone, but it would be a separate cost
You can buy phones this way in the US today, but only a tiny minority exercise this option. Whether it's dumb or not, most American consumers want to pay $99 for a smartphone instead of $399. If people want to buy that way, I don't see how removing that option is consumer friendly. It would be like outlawing credit cards because they are a bad financial choice - that's as may be, but people find them convenient and it's hard to argue that eliminating that payment form as an option is good for consumers or competition.
and you must support phones you don't sell.
Are you talking about allowing unlocked phones sold elsewhere to be used on the network? The US GSM carriers (T-Mobile and AT&T) do this already.
Ph.D.s, M.D.s, D.O.s, D.V.M.s and even J.D.s have earned the right to be arrogant.
No offense, but it is this kind of attitude that turns a lot of people off about (at least the popular image of) academics.
I would suggest that "arrogance" is not a "right" of anyone, but a character flaw. Your particular set of academic credentials does not give you "the right to be arrogant" any more than someone else's job title, athletic prowess, degree of popular fame or any other achievement gives them the same right.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that no way would 1 in 10 tablet owners have both.
I think the issue is what we're considering a "tablet." Technically, I fall into the above definition even though what I have is an iPad and a Kindle Fire. The iPad is my multifunction "tablet" device and I really just use the Kindle Fire to read books. If you excluded e-reader Android "tablets" from the numbers they might be very very different.
I blame the butthurt marketing dickbags at AT&T for re-marketing their crappy 3G network as 4G instead of investing in an authentic 4G network.
If you want to point fingers, it kinda sorta goes back to Sprint. They didn't want to invest in their own next-generation data network, so they started using Clearwire's WiMax network for data. Even though the speeds were nothing like the ITU's version of "4G," they started marketing it as such because "hey, it's a generation after 3G so... it must be 4G."
AT&T and Verizon both planned to invest in LTE for their 4G networks, but poor T-Mobile USA didn't have (or want to spend) the cash for a real next-gen network. So T-Mo looked around and said, "hey, our HSPA+ network is much faster than what Sprint is calling '4G' so... it must be 4G!"
AT&T had already planned a big LTE investment but it wasn't going to roll out until 2012 so they got tired of having the same thing as T-Mo (HSPA+) but getting beat up by T-Mobile with "we have 4G and you don't" so they sank to T-Mobile's level and started branding HSPA+ as "4G." Not very mature, but hey that's marketing.
And that's how you got to a situation where only two of the four major US carriers have deployed LTE (AT&T and Verizon) but all four claim to have 4G networks. Even better, three of the four all actually claim to have "the nation's largest 4G network." Oh, and to top it all off, all four will have LTE within the next two years but will almost certainly not be calling it the same thing.:-)
I create copyrighted material all day long, yet for some reason it is normal and expected for me to only get paid while I am creating and a corporation to get all of the ongoing profits.
Is this a serious statement? You may want to read up on the definition of "work for hire" versus "authorship" for copyright purposes.
You get paid a salary day in and day out to do this, no? Authors and musicians do not. Unlike you, their success is entirely dependent on the purchase of their works.
It is a valid question to ask how individual artists are affected in specific cases, but probably no more than being concerned with how robots are now doing the jobs that assembly line workers used to do.
Would you really have told Picasso that he's as replaceable as a factory worker? If you don't get the difference between commodity work (individual worker talent has near-zero impact on the finished product) and artistic work (individual worker talent is the difference between John Singer Sargent and LeRoy Neiman, or between Radiohead's "OK Computer" and whatever the hell the last Meatloaf album was), then I don't think you really get the question.
Unlike you and me - who work in jobs that pay us pretty well no matter what - people in "artistic" jobs like musicians, artists, actors, comics etc. exist in high-risk, high-reward markets. The majority aren't good enough to be differentiated and get paid essentially zero - they fail in the market and so be it. But the few who are so much better than the rest command a premium from music listeners, art patrons, etc. and - I firmly believe - deserve to get compensated in return for how much people actually listen/watch/whatever their work. As any investor will tell you, you only invest in a high-risk market if there are high returns if you get it right... and if there's no way to get paid off in creating new music commensurate with the value of your personal work, I think a lot of potential music makers will just go and get a real job instead. And as much as I enjoy patronizing my local bar bands who get by on a part-time wage, they aren't talented enough to compare with bands that have demonstrated their market success and can spend their time composing full-time as a result.
It's up to all of us collectively - the content creators and the content consumers - to figure out a model that works for everyone, not to just say "art is a commodity and is worth a bulk rate like transistors."
I really wonder how many shows would be produced if people could pay for individual series on the equivalent of Pay Per View, but at a more reasonable price.
Extremely few. Most US broadcast or cable TV networks create 5-20 new programs a year. Some will be hits (maybe), most will be flops. The whole reason they can afford to produce all these shows is that they already know (roughly) how much money they're going to make from advertisers and/or cable subscriptions. Therefore, they have a budget for creating new shows and can take some risks on shows that may or may not pan out, knowing that overall the network will still make money. Every single program will still earn some revenue, even if nobody watches it, because they are guaranteed revenues from the cable/satellite TV providers.
If every single show was pay-to-watch, some shows might now generate absolutely no revenue. The hits would still be hits, but the network couldn't predict whether it was going to have any money to pay employees or produce new shows, since their revenue could fluctuate every week with the quality of each individual show and episode. Networks would be financially disincentivized to take any chances whatsoever, knowing that every show would need to be as close to a "sure thing" as possible - so get ready for reality TV, all the time.
The reason that PPV shows are produced today is precisely due to the above - the creators know from past experience that people will pay $70 for a boxing match, or $50 for a wrestling match or whatever they cost. If shows were all PPV, expect nothing but "sure things" to be produced.
I like your argument but I think it would be much more convincing to the content providers if so many games weren't being torrented even though Steam exists. That's the kind of behavior that makes content companies say, "why should I distribute with Steam-like weak DRM when people will still pirate it?"
I hope the content providers learn not from Spotify but rather from the iTunes and Amazon music stores since they offer exactly what most of the posters here claim they want: offline playback, simultaneous digital release, choose only the content you want to buy. But as long as these things are still being torrented by users who don't ultimately pay - even though digital distribution outlets exist that provide them in the form people claim they would be willing to pay for - content providers (game, music or video) will continue to point to that as justification for being afraid of properly embracing digital distribution.
If you are both making $178K, maybe one of you should quit. What's the point of making this much money?
I can think of a few...
To save enough money to retire early
To build a healthy nest egg for medical costs, emergencies or loss of income
To save up for/pay for your children's education and future college
To be able to afford housing where the best schools and infrastructure are
To offer your children opportunities you didn't have growing up (say, traveling to other parts of the globe) that will help educate them and broaden their perspectives
To just plain not have to worry about ever not having enough money for whatever comes up, because there are plenty of other things in life to worry about
...Or just maybe it turns out that both spouses are good at their careers, and enjoy doing them, and neither one feeds like staying home to vacuum and eat bonbons all day.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it extremely frustrating when a service to which I've subscribed (for years!) offers extreme discounts to new customers, but won't help me
Here's the deal. I work for an extremely large megacorporation which essentially has the same policies. Why? Because it's understood that it costs money (in terms of advertising or special deals) to steal a customer from a competitor, whereas keeping an existing customer is a presumption. Do you know why? Because most customers of service providers in even marginally competitive industries - whether that's cellphones, magazine subscriptions, TV service, home security systems, even home grocery delivery services - stay with their current provider ad infinitum unless they get REALLY p***ed off or someone else gives them a really good incentive to change. All these service providers (if they're smart) give you a (financially speaking) EXCESSIVE discount upfront to bring you on board just because it's a pain in the butt (usually) to switch once you've signed up. No evil involved necessarily, just regular consumer inertia.
So, to get the best deal, you need to get out of being a presumptive renewal for your service provider and become a potential customer loss. As soon as your contract is up, call your service provider and tell them you're cancelling. If they are not brain dead - or unless they're super polite - they will not say "sure, sorry to see you leave us forever." Instead, because these businesses understand that if you leave they will have to lay out those EXACT SAME DISCOUNTS to replace you, you will get them offered to you. It may take a little haggling and an escalation in customer care, but you will eventually get roughly equivalent deals.
Theoretically it shouldn't be this way in terms of rewarding customer loyalty... but from a bottom line perspective, it's (unfortunately) the logically correct thing to do. If you look at it from the company's perspective, they are "leaving money on the table" with every existing customer to whom they offer the discount who wasn't a risk to leave. Make sense?
I know you're making a joke, but there is at least one grain of serious truth to it. Given how boneheaded the last few administrations' plans for the manned spaceflight program have been, the fact that they keep getting changed has actually prevented us from spending ridiculous sums of money on the them. Can you imagine - at a time when millions of Americans are jobless and without healthcare - what the public backlash would be against the space program if we were actually spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on a manned Mars mission or (to a lesser $$$ figure) Constellation? In the meantime, that indecision and flailing has left the door open for private spaceflight projects to fill the "useful" void of reliable, cost-effective transport to LEO and GEO.
So while on one hand the political ping-pong game over NASA has resulted in billions of dollars in waste and squandered the talents of our best and brightest, on the other hand it has prevented us from spending hundreds of billions on bad ideas. Not exactly the tradeoff you want, but I'm trying to find the upside here...
MacOS is overrated. Do you have any?
I'm not the OP, but I'll step in and say "yes, yes I do."
Mac usability is generally only better if you have relatively weak requirements.
I have many requirements. The requirements for my hobby developer station are very different for my requirements for my "everyday" machine that I use along with my wife. For my "everyday" machine, my requirements are to:
I'm sorry pal but Linux - except where described above - does NOT provide equivalent "usability." It may be possible to do all those things on Linux but it certainly isn't as fast, easy or eligible for vendor troubleshooting.
Linux is great for what it is, but to say that Mac (or Windows) usability "is generally only better if you have relatively weak requirements" is based on a very different set of requirements than I think the vast majority of computer users have.
You have taken one short, succint and economical sentence of only five words, taken from Slashdot, and have concluded that all developers of Linux, and all the userspace applications think and act the same.
My friend, I have done nothing of the sort. I have concluded that there is enough of the sentiment above throughout the Linux developer and user communities to explain why Linux today is good at certain things and is bad at other things. Not every Linux developer is going to say that stable ABIs are for the mentally handicapped, but that opinion (and tone) is not exactly a unique outlier in FOSS land. I don't really think that is a surprising conclusion to draw.
Linux is in Android, and Android is a success.
I never said Linux isn't a success... I just think it has a niche carved out for itself, and that is driven by the prevailing attitudes among the PC Linux community. We agree that Linux is in Android, but past that point we differ, since I believe that Linux on PCs and Android on mobile devices are completely different worlds in almost every respect.
The Linux kernel isn't what makes Android what it is... it's the UI, it's Google's choice of licensing terms, it's the applications and app store, it's the OEM and carrier relationships and the complex politics there... all those things have much more to do with Android's success than its choice of kernel. The Linux part of Android is functionally invisible to the end user, and the complaints that people have about desktop Linux are not applicable in the Android world (if the two were similar, you'd have your choice of Android "distros" for each phone, and you'd have to use a different package manager to install apps depending on your phone's distro, etc.).
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not here to trash Linux, and I think it's great for what it is. But I also believe there's no value to any community in denying the truth of what its strengths and weaknesses are. To say that "Linux" is a success in mass adoption because "Android" is a success is just like saying "BSD" is a success because "Mac OS X" is a success. And are you really going to go up to Jordan Hubbard or Theo De Raadt and say "hey, great job on making OS X a success?"
Stable ABIs are for retards.
Congratulations! You have in one short, succinct and economical sentence of only five words captured the essence - in both attitude and content - of why Linux is and always will be the perfect tool for the technically inclined tinkerer, and why it will never be adopted by the masses. Linux will go on doing what it does well, designed by the people and for the people who think the vast majority of desktop OS installations in the world are "for retards."
Besides, governments rise and fall, but bitcoins are forever.
Exactly, who wants fly-by-night currencies backed by national governments of stable countries? That's why I invested my life savings in Bitcoins, Flooz and Beenz.
Retirement FTW!!!!!
So does being a "C/C#/C++ Programmer" make you some kind of big shot?
By virtue of having three consecutive alphanumeric Cs in your job title, you would outrank everyone else in the company. Unless of course they hired a CCCCEO.
So four people left... are these really surprising super high-level departures? At least in the Big Company I come from, you aren't considered any kind of "executive" unless you have some kind of "* Vice President" or "C*" in your title. "Director" or "Manager" may mean you're actually doing important work, but is nobody's idea of an "executive."
Maybe Facebook is very different, though...
A year or two ago they were saying Chicago, referencing GroupOn and others. Lately I've heard Austin, Texas...
This whole "the next [INSERT TECHNOLOGY] Mecca will be..." has been going on for decades, and always with different locations. Very few ever pan out.
The fact of the matter is that while a startup can go anywhere, for anyplace to become "the next whatever hub" it has to be built around one or more existing big players who are already there. There's only one Silicon Valley, and a few minor outliers for tech in the US:
TL; DR: you can't build a new hub for technology until you already have a critical mass of major tech players to be around. Catch-22, I know, but that's why Silicon Valley is what it is.
what's the use of studying the animal kingdom if there isn't any step further - like improving / changing / experimenting on the animals
There are hundreds of thousands of people who spent many years studying biology and zoology to become veterinarians and, you know, help animals who will disagree with you.
The vast majority of people study history to learn from it, not to make it or rewrite it. The vast majority of people who study psychology don't do so because their plan is to control people and then force them into Cybermen suits. Not everything in life is a conspiracy to rule the world.
Seriously... Slashdot just gets crazier and crazier.
Here's the deal, "xTrashcat." You are about to read several hundred posts here that explain why you're young, why you're an idiot, and why you need to just keep your head down and follow process and not rock the boat.
F**k these people.
Yes, you're young; and yes, you don't get what it's like to be in the trenches for many years. And yes, you also don't understand why ad hoc but smart answers may not be scalable and thus turn out to bite you in the butt.
But you know what? You seem to like your job and have enthusiasm for it. Maybe that will last, maybe it won't. But if you do keep that enthusiasm, you will never be one of the people responding to your post and telling you what a stupid a**hole you are for trying to fix a problem without shipping the boxes back to the vendor, telling the users to fill out the XP-239 form in-quadruplicate, and taking a smoke break.
And you know what? Liking your job and wanting to always be learning new things as a result will make you much, much happier than all the people telling you how stupid you are. Also, with that attitude - you may end up being the boss of those people, and they will be complaining on Slashdot 10 years from now about how their PHB always wants them to learn things and fix stuff but "it's not their job"... so please keep it up. The world needs more people who actually like their jobs and try hard to do them well.
I predict that hotels, casinos, museums, enterprises, and carriers wishing to control and remove functionality from their devices will be the first to adopt this OS.
This capability has been present in BlackBerry OS for many years but with much finer-grained control and capabilities (tight Exchange mail/calendar/contacts integration; app restrictions; website blocking; etc.) which is a big part of why it was originally popular with large businesses. Today you can get this same type of functionality on many platforms (including Android, iOS, etc.) by using an add-on Mobile Device Management system from Good, McAfee etc. So while the lack of apps etc. may sound good at first, it's really not what corporations are looking for and can find on other platforms.
The boss only pays you enough to keep you alive and coming back to work, because otherwise those who don't pay their workers only the bare necessities get beat out by competition who can invest more in their companies.
Theoretically true but only in industries where workers are commodities. Capitalism does have a flip side, you know - where workers who are skilled can create a market for themselves among competing employers to increase their wages because their work can quantifiably improve the employer's profits. It's not all one way, but it does reward workers who make their talents stand out, and punishes workers whose work is essentially interchangeable.
I seriously doubt user confusion with file systems is the reason.
I know the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but both my parents and my in-laws have a file system of "about a zillion files on the desktop." Other people in my family can't find files they have downloaded because they have no idea that they should navigate to a User => Downloads folder. I would be willing to wager that a significant (>50%?) of consumer PC users have a similar lack of comfort or familiarity with what the rest of us consider to be a filesystem arrangement.
We should make everyone in that so-called 1% spend a year getting by on $2000/mo allowance so that they get some idea of who they're fucking over
The world is really not as black and white as it seems. By some calculations, my wife and I as a household are part of that "1%." And yet somehow - gasp - we do not vote Republican, nor did we give any of our children Ayn Rand pop-up books in the crib. (Although I would willingly shell out if someone published a Rand-ian "Sharing Is For the Weak - A Baby's First Board Book")
Wealthy people do not automatically have a single political affiliation or philosophy. While I appreciate that you grant that some "one percenters" may not be evil but rather just kind-hearted and ignorant, the truth is this "group" is not politically, ethnically, spiritually or sociologically homogeneous in any way. This notional "1%" represents a convenient strawman for many Slashdotters (I remember when it wasn't a politics site, sigh) and elsewhere, but if you look deeper it's just not so simple.
For the record, I did spend a year back in the mid-'90s living on $600 a month while teaching adult literacy classes as a VISTA volunteer. I know very well the effect that poverty has on people who (unlike myself) did not have a lot of opportunities to advance socioeconomically ... and it not only convinced me of the value of being charitable with my money in the future, but also motivated me strongly to work my butt off because I understand how much being poor sucks. And sure, I may be on the underside of that "1%" but I will bet you that I know more bona fide one percenters than you do, and I know that they are a lot less of a unified sinister cabal than you think...
I can't think of any marketing professional who would give two shakes about this metric
Are you kidding? If I make a post about how I just bought a new Samsung Galaxy Class Starship at T-Mobile and my friends click the "want" button, it is absolutely worth gold to T-Mobile to have their ads steered to those FB users.
Or as another application... I already share my Amazon Wishlist with my friends so they can buy me stuff I actually want for my birthday/Christmas ... why not push that directly onto Facebook and allow sellers of those items to advertise for them and/or compete on price via ads?
It would be illegal to have phone contracts longer than 2 months.
You can buy plenty of pre-paid phones in the US today with no contract at all ... but only a minority of users tend to choose this option. If people want to buy on a contract, why would you make this illegal?
You could sell a subscriber a phone, but it would be a separate cost
You can buy phones this way in the US today, but only a tiny minority exercise this option. Whether it's dumb or not, most American consumers want to pay $99 for a smartphone instead of $399. If people want to buy that way, I don't see how removing that option is consumer friendly. It would be like outlawing credit cards because they are a bad financial choice - that's as may be, but people find them convenient and it's hard to argue that eliminating that payment form as an option is good for consumers or competition.
and you must support phones you don't sell.
Are you talking about allowing unlocked phones sold elsewhere to be used on the network? The US GSM carriers (T-Mobile and AT&T) do this already.
Ph.D.s, M.D.s, D.O.s, D.V.M.s and even J.D.s have earned the right to be arrogant.
No offense, but it is this kind of attitude that turns a lot of people off about (at least the popular image of) academics.
I would suggest that "arrogance" is not a "right" of anyone, but a character flaw. Your particular set of academic credentials does not give you "the right to be arrogant" any more than someone else's job title, athletic prowess, degree of popular fame or any other achievement gives them the same right.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that no way would 1 in 10 tablet owners have both.
I think the issue is what we're considering a "tablet." Technically, I fall into the above definition even though what I have is an iPad and a Kindle Fire. The iPad is my multifunction "tablet" device and I really just use the Kindle Fire to read books. If you excluded e-reader Android "tablets" from the numbers they might be very very different.
I blame the butthurt marketing dickbags at AT&T for re-marketing their crappy 3G network as 4G instead of investing in an authentic 4G network.
If you want to point fingers, it kinda sorta goes back to Sprint. They didn't want to invest in their own next-generation data network, so they started using Clearwire's WiMax network for data. Even though the speeds were nothing like the ITU's version of "4G," they started marketing it as such because "hey, it's a generation after 3G so ... it must be 4G."
AT&T and Verizon both planned to invest in LTE for their 4G networks, but poor T-Mobile USA didn't have (or want to spend) the cash for a real next-gen network. So T-Mo looked around and said, "hey, our HSPA+ network is much faster than what Sprint is calling '4G' so ... it must be 4G!"
AT&T had already planned a big LTE investment but it wasn't going to roll out until 2012 so they got tired of having the same thing as T-Mo (HSPA+) but getting beat up by T-Mobile with "we have 4G and you don't" so they sank to T-Mobile's level and started branding HSPA+ as "4G." Not very mature, but hey that's marketing.
And that's how you got to a situation where only two of the four major US carriers have deployed LTE (AT&T and Verizon) but all four claim to have 4G networks. Even better, three of the four all actually claim to have "the nation's largest 4G network." Oh, and to top it all off, all four will have LTE within the next two years but will almost certainly not be calling it the same thing. :-)
I create copyrighted material all day long, yet for some reason it is normal and expected for me to only get paid while I am creating and a corporation to get all of the ongoing profits.
Is this a serious statement? You may want to read up on the definition of "work for hire" versus "authorship" for copyright purposes.
You get paid a salary day in and day out to do this, no? Authors and musicians do not. Unlike you, their success is entirely dependent on the purchase of their works.
It is a valid question to ask how individual artists are affected in specific cases, but probably no more than being concerned with how robots are now doing the jobs that assembly line workers used to do.
Would you really have told Picasso that he's as replaceable as a factory worker? If you don't get the difference between commodity work (individual worker talent has near-zero impact on the finished product) and artistic work (individual worker talent is the difference between John Singer Sargent and LeRoy Neiman, or between Radiohead's "OK Computer" and whatever the hell the last Meatloaf album was), then I don't think you really get the question.
Unlike you and me - who work in jobs that pay us pretty well no matter what - people in "artistic" jobs like musicians, artists, actors, comics etc. exist in high-risk, high-reward markets. The majority aren't good enough to be differentiated and get paid essentially zero - they fail in the market and so be it. But the few who are so much better than the rest command a premium from music listeners, art patrons, etc. and - I firmly believe - deserve to get compensated in return for how much people actually listen/watch/whatever their work. As any investor will tell you, you only invest in a high-risk market if there are high returns if you get it right ... and if there's no way to get paid off in creating new music commensurate with the value of your personal work, I think a lot of potential music makers will just go and get a real job instead. And as much as I enjoy patronizing my local bar bands who get by on a part-time wage, they aren't talented enough to compare with bands that have demonstrated their market success and can spend their time composing full-time as a result.
It's up to all of us collectively - the content creators and the content consumers - to figure out a model that works for everyone, not to just say "art is a commodity and is worth a bulk rate like transistors."
I really wonder how many shows would be produced if people could pay for individual series on the equivalent of Pay Per View, but at a more reasonable price.
Extremely few. Most US broadcast or cable TV networks create 5-20 new programs a year. Some will be hits (maybe), most will be flops. The whole reason they can afford to produce all these shows is that they already know (roughly) how much money they're going to make from advertisers and/or cable subscriptions. Therefore, they have a budget for creating new shows and can take some risks on shows that may or may not pan out, knowing that overall the network will still make money. Every single program will still earn some revenue, even if nobody watches it, because they are guaranteed revenues from the cable/satellite TV providers.
If every single show was pay-to-watch, some shows might now generate absolutely no revenue. The hits would still be hits, but the network couldn't predict whether it was going to have any money to pay employees or produce new shows, since their revenue could fluctuate every week with the quality of each individual show and episode. Networks would be financially disincentivized to take any chances whatsoever, knowing that every show would need to be as close to a "sure thing" as possible - so get ready for reality TV, all the time.
The reason that PPV shows are produced today is precisely due to the above - the creators know from past experience that people will pay $70 for a boxing match, or $50 for a wrestling match or whatever they cost. If shows were all PPV, expect nothing but "sure things" to be produced.
"Games? Steam. Music? Spotify. Tv series? TPB."
I like your argument but I think it would be much more convincing to the content providers if so many games weren't being torrented even though Steam exists. That's the kind of behavior that makes content companies say, "why should I distribute with Steam-like weak DRM when people will still pirate it?"
I hope the content providers learn not from Spotify but rather from the iTunes and Amazon music stores since they offer exactly what most of the posters here claim they want: offline playback, simultaneous digital release, choose only the content you want to buy. But as long as these things are still being torrented by users who don't ultimately pay - even though digital distribution outlets exist that provide them in the form people claim they would be willing to pay for - content providers (game, music or video) will continue to point to that as justification for being afraid of properly embracing digital distribution.
If you are both making $178K, maybe one of you should quit. What's the point of making this much money?
I can think of a few...
...Or just maybe it turns out that both spouses are good at their careers, and enjoy doing them, and neither one feeds like staying home to vacuum and eat bonbons all day.