It's a lot easier to carry a Nintendo 3DS than to carry a Windows tablet and a bulky Xbox 360 controller
And if all you really want is gaming then you can do that. If you have a Windows tablet then buying a 3DS just for games that might work better on a controller is a bit silly (and also more expensive) so just buying a controller (or using your existing ones if you have them) seems like a far more logical thing to do.
which is the only kind of controller that works with Windows Store apps.
Most apps are not Windows store apps, in fact relatively few are.
Try installing an ati driver for Windows xp in Windows 8.
Why would you do that? Just install the Windows 8 driver. While Microsoft changed the driver model between XP and 8 throughout the 13 years of XP the ABI did not change so drivers didn't stop working just because of a kernel update like what happens on Linux. Linux does not have a stable ABI which is why you need to recompile your drivers when you update your kernel, the lack of a stable API also means that recompiling might not work and you may have to either patch the driver for the newer kernel or wait until the vendor or somebody else does, obviously it is even worse for binary drivers that you cannot just recompile. It's one of the most prominent arguments against binary blob drivers in Linux.
Not maintaining a stable ABI and API for kernel mode drivers means significantly more flexibility in kernel development but obviously has serious downsides if you want to use devices that only have binary drivers.
And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?
At a guess I'd say in the tens of dollars per seat, so if you lost even just 1/2 a days' productivity in the switch from MS Office to Google Docs or Libre Office or iWork you'd probably be in the red. Not to mention if you're using Exchange (and most large orgs are) you'd have to then buy Outlook standalone or alternatively find an email client that integrates well enough with Exchange to replace it or replace your email system.
Selling an alternative purely on a small cost advantage is never going to work well, it needs to be a disruptive and compelling alternative not a penny-pinching exercise. Organizations rarely want to risk throwing a spanner in the works for the cost of a few dollars so any alternative has to be more than a "similar but cheaper" product.
Users are not the problem. We have plenty of switch stories where users learn quickly.
Right, but users will adapt when there is a reason to do so. Look at how users adapted to the smartphone concept as we now know it when the iPhone was released, because it was a compelling and disruptive concept, people moved from the existing smartphone concepts to Android/iOS devices because they were significantly more appealing to the end user and provided a better user experience. The desktop Linux distros and free office suites suffer from a problem of not being disruptive in their respective markets and instead argue back and forth over the numbers in Total Cost of Ownership calculations...how compelling!
I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers.
The reality is most people do not even know about that ideology and ultimately the attempts to sell the idea are on the basis of it being cheap: gratis, not libre.
I know there is this whole "locked in" deal but who really feels that way? I haven't had any problems working across multiple operating systems and devices. The vast majority of the web is obviously platform agnostic, pictures, movies and music are all easily moved back and forth across platforms and even sending documents is no problem. Sending a word doc to somebody who doesn't have MS Word? Well there's functionality in word to send it as a PDF or you can upload to something like Google docs which does a pretty good job at importing for most things. For regular users where is the lock in? The only time I've ever found the issue of platform lock in was switching phone platforms and not being able to move my SMS messages to the new phone.
What with the much lower quality video and far worse compression artifacts streaming has, also having to be connected to the internet to watch a movie
You get to a certain point when the increase in video quality makes no difference, if you are significantly drawn into the story and the experience whether it's 1080p or 4k isn't noticable. Moreover your viewing setup, screen size, room size and distance from the screen all need to be taken into account for an optimal experience and most people don't care to do that either.
and also often having to pay per play rather than a pay once model, it totally boggles my mind that people prefer streaming video to blu-ray and even DVD.
Because most people are not averse to paying for convenience and streaming is far more convenient than physical media. Perhaps if I'm intending on watching a movie several times I'll get it on physical media (and then rip it to my NAS) but those are outliers, for most of what I watch I'm not interested in watching it several times over.
Also, drives aren't proper backup, unless they're offsite, and these discs pack 50GB each, more than enough for most discrete items on your 3TB drive (what do you need that for anyway, HD porn?)
But why bother with burning, swapping and labeling disks when hard drives are so cheap you can just whack one in a caddy and backup to it then take it offsite? It's way faster in terms of copying time, a lot more convenient in not having multiple physical elements, you don't need individual labels and it's probably cheaper too.
As for what you have on there, movies, music, photos, documents... are you so fixated that you really can't think of anything you would use a considerable amount of storage for other than porn?
No, actually in two of those cases there was no vulnerability to be fixed.
And in the other one the vulnerability was fixed, like I said you rely on the app store vetting those applications before they are allowed on the store and neither Apple's nor Google's are any more secure than eachother and unless you want to do it yourself for every application and you actually think you have the ability and time to fully understand every application and every line of code in them then you are going to have to trust somebody and for the most part Apple and Google do a good job.
I don't recall saying 100% of apple users.
Well you said 'apple users' so who are you referring to?
But it doesn't matter, when apple themselves make claims to that effect, then you can count on a lot of their customers repeating those claims.
They didn't make that claim.
Sure, your average techie can read between the lines, but you're average joe or hipster cannot. The implication apple makes in that commercial is a very strong one.
Like I said, it seems somewhat disingenuous but it is certainly valid that they do not get PC viruses and given the amount of malware out there targeted at Windows I can certainly see why they would want to point out that their platform isn't susceptible to those.
In fact in all three of these incidents, Apple never discovered any of them.
Right but developers found vulnerabilities in the OS and they were fixed, I didn't say or imply that anything is totally secure or that the Apple App Store is any more secure than Google Play but given the incredibly low amount of malware found in either store (real-world examples are in the single digit figures) they are about as secure as you could expect them to be.
If you don't think apple users commonly go around spouting that "Macs don't get viruses," then I've got a bridge to sell you. Fuck, Apple even had a commercial effectively making a similar claim.
Well the fact is I'm an apple user (or are you counting them as users that use nothing but apple?) and I have never said anything of the sort, I know quite a lot of people with MacBooks and iMacs that are well aware of the fact that OS X is simply a smaller target and even in that case there still has been malware in the wild for them. Apple's commercial didn't say that at all, it may have been a little disingenuous in its claim given that Macs are not PCs (in the context in which they were discussing them, which is that they are Windows systems) so obviously they cannot run Windows PC software - including malware - natively.
That's just the thing: You don't HAVE to do so. For most users, it's a pretty good idea, and they do exactly that. However for people like me, I'll get apps such as adfree, or like how I patched the Kindle app myself to show ebook PIDs so I could dedrm my own kindle ebooks.
Great, good for you. But obviously the ability to cut off developers' revenue streams with adblockers is going to have a negative effect in the long run.
It's impossible to create a Wi-Fi network troubleshooting application for iOS using only public APIs.
Such a thing is going to be better served on a laptop but if you really have a problem with that - and I'm sure you'll tell me you do - then just grab a $50 Android phone for those bits and pieces, they are almost throwaway devices at this point. I use an iPhone as my primary device but I have a Nexus for anything the iPhone can't do, it's always in my bag but I barely touch the thing because uses for it are so few and far between.
Yeah after I thought about it remembered it runs as a privileged process so it should be able to patch just about anything, although given Android is open and various OEMs provide drivers and make modifications to Android I would say trying to update anything outside of Google Play that is subject to manufacturer or user modification is probably not very wise.
Shelling out another $100 just to be able to install apps without going though the app store is one of the most fucked up things ever. You realize you don't really own any iDevice right? Why should I pay a few hundred bucks for a phone then need to get daddy Jobs OK to install something on it?
So don't then. Nobody is forcing you to, if you don't want to pay that then get Android instead.
I must not be understanding something. How are apps under a free software license necessarily "a very small niche"?
I don't know *why* they are, but in general they are. Developer tools under free software licenses are usually highly popular, consumer applications not so much.
Cost isn't much of a barrier to entry to established firms in the most developed countries because the tools and license for one year cost less than a week's salary for a programmer in a developed country. But it is a barrier for students, part-time developers, and developers in less developed countries that have a lower overall wage level. It causes there to be a smaller proportion of $0 apps on iOS because developers feel they have to recover the cost of entry. (That and Google's early failure to deploy Wallet quickly enough.)
Again, based on the available app catalogs it doesn't appear to be a barrier to entry. Devs who genuinely have a good idea evidently invest in Apple's platform (to the extent of developer tools) just as they do Android, and the great thing is if you have a Mac you can develop for both.
The only PC you need for AIDE is an Android tablet; pair your keyboard and start coding.
Unless of course your Android device is a phone (not a phablet or tablet) which it most likely is, making it a tortuous exercise. But that's neither here nor there, still the only issue is $ cost, which really doesn't appear to be a problem.
Say you restrict yourself to Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, Humble Bundle, F-Droid, and applications you compiled yourself. Is the advantage still negated?
I question the value of that advantage, are many people really doing that or is it a select few geeks? Humble Bundle is available on Google Play, F-Droid is explicitly FOSS (and the source inspection process doesn't seem particularly rigorous, more like a verify yourself type approach, so a very small niche) and obviously applications you compiled yourself is a very small niche.
1. compiling apps yourself without having to replace your desktop computer and pay a recurrring fee
Again, you bring cost into it. If cost truly were legitimate barrier to entry then I would suspect would be seeing significantly more, innovative and higher quality applications on Android than other more restrictive platforms but that doesn't seem to be the case.
2. ability of third-party app stores to build a reputation for quality control.
Again, nice in theory but not converted to a widely-used advantage in practice.
If these elements are indeed significantly advantageous we should see innovation in application development on Android far surpassing that of iOS but that doesn't appear to be the case. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking separating them.
Is there an application for iOS comparable to WiFi-Where for Android? I haven't been able to find one since all the Wi-Fi utilities were pulled from the App Store when Apple decided to keep its network configuration API private.
I don't know, in fact I don't even know what that is. I didn't say there weren't things that could be done on one and not the other, I'm sure you could find exclusives on both platforms.
This is the key point in this discussion, as it reveals the FUD from TFA. Note that TFA says "99 Percent of New Mobile Threats Target Android", but does not disclose the number of devices infected.
Right, I would be surprised if the percentage of Android devices infected is much different to the number of iOS devices infected, a little higher given the ability to install apps outside the official channel but probably not by much.
So by your reasoning you should pay $1.00 for a song you will listen to on your home theater, but only $.50 for one you will listen to on your iPod?
Kind of, yes. I don't mind mp3 quality on my iPhone and it's not too bad in the car either but for songs that I really like I might want them in higher bitrate so they sound better on my home system. What's wrong with that?
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In other words, PC is the only platform for that genre unless you're a well-known company.
No, if it fits into the indie requirements of the various console platforms then those are applicable platforms for the genre too.
It's a lot easier to carry a Nintendo 3DS than to carry a Windows tablet and a bulky Xbox 360 controller
And if all you really want is gaming then you can do that. If you have a Windows tablet then buying a 3DS just for games that might work better on a controller is a bit silly (and also more expensive) so just buying a controller (or using your existing ones if you have them) seems like a far more logical thing to do.
which is the only kind of controller that works with Windows Store apps.
Most apps are not Windows store apps, in fact relatively few are.
For example, good luck doing Mega Man or Castlevania on a touch screen. So is there now no market for games in these genres?
Not on a smartphone no. It's a niche market on handheld devices and doable (but not that popular these days) on PCs and consoles.
Try installing an ati driver for Windows xp in Windows 8.
Why would you do that? Just install the Windows 8 driver. While Microsoft changed the driver model between XP and 8 throughout the 13 years of XP the ABI did not change so drivers didn't stop working just because of a kernel update like what happens on Linux. Linux does not have a stable ABI which is why you need to recompile your drivers when you update your kernel, the lack of a stable API also means that recompiling might not work and you may have to either patch the driver for the newer kernel or wait until the vendor or somebody else does, obviously it is even worse for binary drivers that you cannot just recompile. It's one of the most prominent arguments against binary blob drivers in Linux.
Not maintaining a stable ABI and API for kernel mode drivers means significantly more flexibility in kernel development but obviously has serious downsides if you want to use devices that only have binary drivers.
Then why did I buy a Windows 8 license?
I don't know, what's that got to do with the analogy? If the PC were a car then each user of the PC doesn't have to pay for the OS just like each person who drove the car would not have to pay up for all the fixes done to it.
Why can I get a PC without an OS for less money than with an OS?
Because the one with an OS comes with an OS which costs money...duh.
Just because the OS is not explicitly labeled in your boxed PC does not mean you do not buy the OS.
Obviously...what's the point you're trying to make here?
And the organization-wide license upgrade from Office 2010 to Office 2013 is how much?
At a guess I'd say in the tens of dollars per seat, so if you lost even just 1/2 a days' productivity in the switch from MS Office to Google Docs or Libre Office or iWork you'd probably be in the red. Not to mention if you're using Exchange (and most large orgs are) you'd have to then buy Outlook standalone or alternatively find an email client that integrates well enough with Exchange to replace it or replace your email system.
Selling an alternative purely on a small cost advantage is never going to work well, it needs to be a disruptive and compelling alternative not a penny-pinching exercise. Organizations rarely want to risk throwing a spanner in the works for the cost of a few dollars so any alternative has to be more than a "similar but cheaper" product.
Users are not the problem. We have plenty of switch stories where users learn quickly.
Right, but users will adapt when there is a reason to do so. Look at how users adapted to the smartphone concept as we now know it when the iPhone was released, because it was a compelling and disruptive concept, people moved from the existing smartphone concepts to Android/iOS devices because they were significantly more appealing to the end user and provided a better user experience. The desktop Linux distros and free office suites suffer from a problem of not being disruptive in their respective markets and instead argue back and forth over the numbers in Total Cost of Ownership calculations...how compelling!
I do not care about RMS extreme ideology about freaking drivers.
The reality is most people do not even know about that ideology and ultimately the attempts to sell the idea are on the basis of it being cheap: gratis, not libre.
I know there is this whole "locked in" deal but who really feels that way? I haven't had any problems working across multiple operating systems and devices. The vast majority of the web is obviously platform agnostic, pictures, movies and music are all easily moved back and forth across platforms and even sending documents is no problem. Sending a word doc to somebody who doesn't have MS Word? Well there's functionality in word to send it as a PDF or you can upload to something like Google docs which does a pretty good job at importing for most things. For regular users where is the lock in? The only time I've ever found the issue of platform lock in was switching phone platforms and not being able to move my SMS messages to the new phone.
Imagine if a mechanic adopted the proprietary software model.
Each person who drove the car would have to pay up for all the fixes done.
No they wouldn't, just like each person who uses a computer doesn't have to pay for the operating system on it.
The package had contact info that the receiver chose not to thoroughly pursue
Mark it RETURN TO SENDER, drop at a UPS office and tell them it was mis-delivered, problem solved.
That's nice, but that's not what anyone else refers to by "streaming."
So you've never heard of PopcornTime.
What with the much lower quality video and far worse compression artifacts streaming has, also having to be connected to the internet to watch a movie
You get to a certain point when the increase in video quality makes no difference, if you are significantly drawn into the story and the experience whether it's 1080p or 4k isn't noticable. Moreover your viewing setup, screen size, room size and distance from the screen all need to be taken into account for an optimal experience and most people don't care to do that either.
and also often having to pay per play rather than a pay once model, it totally boggles my mind that people prefer streaming video to blu-ray and even DVD.
Because most people are not averse to paying for convenience and streaming is far more convenient than physical media. Perhaps if I'm intending on watching a movie several times I'll get it on physical media (and then rip it to my NAS) but those are outliers, for most of what I watch I'm not interested in watching it several times over.
Roll forward 10 years, I look over at my media shelf... ASDA 100 DVD+R - about a tenner!
So what are you using them for?
Also, drives aren't proper backup, unless they're offsite, and these discs pack 50GB each, more than enough for most discrete items on your 3TB drive (what do you need that for anyway, HD porn?)
But why bother with burning, swapping and labeling disks when hard drives are so cheap you can just whack one in a caddy and backup to it then take it offsite? It's way faster in terms of copying time, a lot more convenient in not having multiple physical elements, you don't need individual labels and it's probably cheaper too.
As for what you have on there, movies, music, photos, documents ... are you so fixated that you really can't think of anything you would use a considerable amount of storage for other than porn?
No, actually in two of those cases there was no vulnerability to be fixed.
And in the other one the vulnerability was fixed, like I said you rely on the app store vetting those applications before they are allowed on the store and neither Apple's nor Google's are any more secure than eachother and unless you want to do it yourself for every application and you actually think you have the ability and time to fully understand every application and every line of code in them then you are going to have to trust somebody and for the most part Apple and Google do a good job.
I don't recall saying 100% of apple users.
Well you said 'apple users' so who are you referring to?
But it doesn't matter, when apple themselves make claims to that effect, then you can count on a lot of their customers repeating those claims.
They didn't make that claim.
Sure, your average techie can read between the lines, but you're average joe or hipster cannot. The implication apple makes in that commercial is a very strong one.
Like I said, it seems somewhat disingenuous but it is certainly valid that they do not get PC viruses and given the amount of malware out there targeted at Windows I can certainly see why they would want to point out that their platform isn't susceptible to those.
In fact in all three of these incidents, Apple never discovered any of them.
Right but developers found vulnerabilities in the OS and they were fixed, I didn't say or imply that anything is totally secure or that the Apple App Store is any more secure than Google Play but given the incredibly low amount of malware found in either store (real-world examples are in the single digit figures) they are about as secure as you could expect them to be.
If you don't think apple users commonly go around spouting that "Macs don't get viruses," then I've got a bridge to sell you. Fuck, Apple even had a commercial effectively making a similar claim.
Well the fact is I'm an apple user (or are you counting them as users that use nothing but apple?) and I have never said anything of the sort, I know quite a lot of people with MacBooks and iMacs that are well aware of the fact that OS X is simply a smaller target and even in that case there still has been malware in the wild for them. Apple's commercial didn't say that at all, it may have been a little disingenuous in its claim given that Macs are not PCs (in the context in which they were discussing them, which is that they are Windows systems) so obviously they cannot run Windows PC software - including malware - natively.
That's just the thing: You don't HAVE to do so. For most users, it's a pretty good idea, and they do exactly that. However for people like me, I'll get apps such as adfree, or like how I patched the Kindle app myself to show ebook PIDs so I could dedrm my own kindle ebooks.
Great, good for you. But obviously the ability to cut off developers' revenue streams with adblockers is going to have a negative effect in the long run.
It's impossible to create a Wi-Fi network troubleshooting application for iOS using only public APIs.
Such a thing is going to be better served on a laptop but if you really have a problem with that - and I'm sure you'll tell me you do - then just grab a $50 Android phone for those bits and pieces, they are almost throwaway devices at this point. I use an iPhone as my primary device but I have a Nexus for anything the iPhone can't do, it's always in my bag but I barely touch the thing because uses for it are so few and far between.
Yeah after I thought about it remembered it runs as a privileged process so it should be able to patch just about anything, although given Android is open and various OEMs provide drivers and make modifications to Android I would say trying to update anything outside of Google Play that is subject to manufacturer or user modification is probably not very wise.
Shelling out another $100 just to be able to install apps without going though the app store is one of the most fucked up things ever. You realize you don't really own any iDevice right? Why should I pay a few hundred bucks for a phone then need to get daddy Jobs OK to install something on it?
So don't then. Nobody is forcing you to, if you don't want to pay that then get Android instead.
I must not be understanding something. How are apps under a free software license necessarily "a very small niche"?
I don't know *why* they are, but in general they are. Developer tools under free software licenses are usually highly popular, consumer applications not so much.
Cost isn't much of a barrier to entry to established firms in the most developed countries because the tools and license for one year cost less than a week's salary for a programmer in a developed country. But it is a barrier for students, part-time developers, and developers in less developed countries that have a lower overall wage level. It causes there to be a smaller proportion of $0 apps on iOS because developers feel they have to recover the cost of entry. (That and Google's early failure to deploy Wallet quickly enough.)
Again, based on the available app catalogs it doesn't appear to be a barrier to entry. Devs who genuinely have a good idea evidently invest in Apple's platform (to the extent of developer tools) just as they do Android, and the great thing is if you have a Mac you can develop for both.
The only PC you need for AIDE is an Android tablet; pair your keyboard and start coding.
Unless of course your Android device is a phone (not a phablet or tablet) which it most likely is, making it a tortuous exercise. But that's neither here nor there, still the only issue is $ cost, which really doesn't appear to be a problem.
Say you restrict yourself to Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, Humble Bundle, F-Droid, and applications you compiled yourself. Is the advantage still negated?
I question the value of that advantage, are many people really doing that or is it a select few geeks? Humble Bundle is available on Google Play, F-Droid is explicitly FOSS (and the source inspection process doesn't seem particularly rigorous, more like a verify yourself type approach, so a very small niche) and obviously applications you compiled yourself is a very small niche.
1. compiling apps yourself without having to replace your desktop computer and pay a recurrring fee
Again, you bring cost into it. If cost truly were legitimate barrier to entry then I would suspect would be seeing significantly more, innovative and higher quality applications on Android than other more restrictive platforms but that doesn't seem to be the case.
2. ability of third-party app stores to build a reputation for quality control.
Again, nice in theory but not converted to a widely-used advantage in practice.
If these elements are indeed significantly advantageous we should see innovation in application development on Android far surpassing that of iOS but that doesn't appear to be the case. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking separating them.
Is there an application for iOS comparable to WiFi-Where for Android? I haven't been able to find one since all the Wi-Fi utilities were pulled from the App Store when Apple decided to keep its network configuration API private.
I don't know, in fact I don't even know what that is. I didn't say there weren't things that could be done on one and not the other, I'm sure you could find exclusives on both platforms.
This is the key point in this discussion, as it reveals the FUD from TFA. Note that TFA says "99 Percent of New Mobile Threats Target Android", but does not disclose the number of devices infected.
Right, I would be surprised if the percentage of Android devices infected is much different to the number of iOS devices infected, a little higher given the ability to install apps outside the official channel but probably not by much.
So by your reasoning you should pay $1.00 for a song you will listen to on your home theater, but only $.50 for one you will listen to on your iPod?
Kind of, yes. I don't mind mp3 quality on my iPhone and it's not too bad in the car either but for songs that I really like I might want them in higher bitrate so they sound better on my home system. What's wrong with that?