n95 with its symbian 9.2 was the #1 smartphone in the world at the time of release, absolutely no doubt about it anywhere except maybe some truly hardcore anti-nokia folks.
But then touchscreen phones came and essentially disrupted the market. That's when nokia's problems started.
They had the MeeGo option, which was the real linux on a smartphone rather then a bastardised java VM driving OS in android, which microsoftie boss dropped like a hot cake.
It's like Greece then Turkey thanks to Ataturk, and as time passes it moves more and more in direction of Syria. The fact that they have a large majority of conservative islamist peasants backs this up.
Remember - the party that won the current headcount known as election is the formerly forbidden hardliner islamist party. Turkish folks you see dressed in western clothes in Istanbul and tourist cities of the Western Turkey are about as against him as they can be, but there's simply not enough of them and they don't breed enough to compete with strongly conservative peasants.
Another problem is the retraining of users; however, going from XP to Win 7 is enough of a change that going from XP to OS X is not that different.
Going from XP to 7 allows you to essentially retain use of all your software barring a few specialized/old pieces. Your comparison is essentially near-100% vs near-0% when migrating to MacOS.
So, instead of running demanding applications natively, you virtualise just for the sake of "mitigating suckiness of windows" losing a shitload of efficiency in process.
I stand by my previous statement. You never worked in IT on any meaningful level. If you did, that kind of decision would be career-ending in most cases.
The issue is that you cannot work with encrypted data - you have to decrypt it first. Which means either decryption in the cloud, or forced download of entire databases to each client.
Latter is not an option for most cases of work, and former is the problem that OP raises. Encryption is not a defense against cloud provider if cloud provider has the keys to decrypt. It only provides protection against man in the middle attack.
You have never worked in IT on any meaningful level if you think gaming is the only thing that keeps people on windows. The various specialized autocad implementations alone do NOT work on anything else and are very widespread. There's a boatload of other professional specialized tools in this ballpark.
Worth noting that it's same for certain graphics work and MacOS. I also recall hitting some server software that really worked best on linux and nothing else.
But in terms of general and specialized software availability, windows is in a league of its own. No one else is even playing the same game. That's a fact of life, and no matter how much you are a fanboy of anything, you have to recognise this as a FACT or accept the reality of being in denial.
Except that no, it's not. Going to platform on which a few percent of your software may not work and going to platform where none of your software will work and you'll need to look for/purchase alternatives for everything (even if such alternatives exists and are readily available).
The main selling point of windows is that most if not all of your software will keep on working on new machine.
Migrating to any other platform requires complete revam of everything. Why on earth would you invite problems when you can just choose a safer, cheaper and all around safer alternative with a windows 7 PC when upgrading?
It's worth noting that anyone who has to work with legacy software won't touch w7 with a mile long pole. It truly earned it's nickname of "ghetto" in terms of software it can run properly.
Sure, it may start to get phased out around 2014 when it goes out of support phase. By then, most software will be updated to work with w7 without compatibility problems or will slowly start to drift into oblivion.
As it stand now, the only software that requires W7 is either software that requires DX10/11 (read: few exclusive games) and a couple of pieces of software where company apparently worries more about its image in certain customers' minds then about actual functionality - there's no reason for new itunes or icloud to not work on XP other then image-related issues of "can't have apple software on not cool enough machines!".
Blizzard spends (or used to spend) a very large amount of money on support of the people who had their accounts stolen. It was a pure business decision for them - invest in authenticator technology, save on staff.
Since we seem to start agreeing on or at least agree to disagree on many things, I'll just address major points of conflict:
1: And here's the thing about those demonstrations. Do you know why they happen without permits? Because the local governments won't grant such permits. Whenever they try, there's always a new reason invented to deny them that. Alternatively, they're granted the permit, but relocated somewhere where no-one can actually see them.
This is 1:1 western scenario. Visibility of demonstration is very important, and shoving demonstration into small side streets and surburbia where no one will care is a trick that russians copied from the West. It has been actively practised here for decades.
2. I'm sorry, but is "making hundreds of millions in a couple of years" is equal to "obvious criminal"? Far greater fortunes have been made in early post-Soviet Russia - it was practically ripe for the taking, because it was wild west capitalism at its best (and worst).
One foregone part: STARTING FROM ZERO. If that was possible without major criminal history, everyone would be a millionaire. And it's worth noting that no one except for some really hard core anti-russian folks or people with very deeply vested interests disagree - the period during which Khodorovski and his ilk got their huge riches was rife with crime, and if you weren't criminal and tried to get rich, you didn't make it. Not as in didn't make it rich - but as in didn't survive.
It's very doubtful that any of the current multi-millionaires and billionaires in Russia would survive a trial without going the way of Khodorovsky, be it fair or not. Notably Russia of that age resembled USA of 1920s very much.
3. Do you mean ECHR? They have ruled that he failed to conclusively prove that his trial was politically motivated, yes. The main argument in favor of that is just timing - Khodorkovsky found himself in court once he started talking out against Putin, and no "faithful" oligarch has underwent similar treatment so far - but this is all conjecture, even if it correlates well with known facts, and the court rightly wanted "incontestable proof". However, that same ECHR has noted that his right to fair trial was violated, regardless of any purported political motivation.
Yes, wrong letter combination. European Court of Human Rights. Notably, same kinds of decisions are handed quite often to my home country - Finland. ECHJ counts "right to fair trial" to include very stringent procedural requirements, which many Western countries fail to fully meet as well, as we do.
4. You don't have to. You get an official paper for the voting district which says that 100% (literally, every single one) of citizens in that district voted, and all of them voted for United Russia [izbirkom.ru] (this one was from 2007 parliamentary election).
Aren't such cases generally disregarded or recounted? Also, are they statistically meaningful? Finally, there's a Western example for this as well: there are for example many bible belt communities in USA that vote 100% (literally, every single vote) republican with a very high (near 100%) participation. These are typically relatively small communities however and as a result, there is usually no investigation into things like forcing people to vote certain way (and granted there probably isn't all that much of it - it's far more about peer pressure).
Still, you show quite a few examples of the fact that Russia is not a 100% properly functioning representative democracy, and with this I fully agree. I'm still sticking to my original statement that Putin/Medvedev combo enjoys a significantly stronger mandate to power then leaders in most Western countries in spite of the fact that many of your claims do have merit.
Point one: if you ever doubt that Putin and Medvedev are a combo, hit yourself. Hard. The extremely basic good cop/bad cop theme between the two is extremely obvious to anyone who looks. They have "disagreements" which are so theatrical, I always asked myself if there's someone who's actually buying that in addition to maybe low class people who really don't know any better.
Now I know...
Point two: there are multiple countries in the world, that count among the most democratic, that have MANDATORY voting. You don't go to vote, you get fined. Someone forcing you into the voting booth should be mandatory imho, so long as they don't tell you how to vote. Your need to cast your vote for democracy to work, even if you don't want to. I'd see that kind of forcing as a positive, and show of democracy, as nothing is as deadly to democracy as the lack of voter interest, which is what we're seeing across many of the biggest Western countries, sadly. It also seems to directly correlate with desire for switch of democracy to dictature (there was a very worrying poll on how 20% of all swedish youth want their country to become a dictature just a couple of weeks ago).
Point three: Anti-Russian propaganda is hard-wired into most major Western news outlets. Perhaps the best way to see this is to look at how demonstrations are reported. When a few hundred people show up for an opposition demonstration in Russia without permit and get dispersed, this is talked about as a very negative thing, hinting at uncalled violence, human rights violations and nice close-ups of police wrestling with demonstators - which as someone who has worked as seucrity guard and has training in the field I can state is a very good thing - wrestling with demonstrators means that enforcers are willing to forego their far more deadly and dehumanising means of crowd control. When same happens in US, and dispersion is typically even more violent and dehumanising, (if you live in States, read up on laws on demonstrations without permits - they are frankly, frightening), you don't get anything beyond small note in local papers. As far as major media outlets are concerned, it didn't happen.
You can see similar bias in many other instances as well, such as Khodorovsky case - guy gets hundreds of millions in a couple of years, obvious criminal, gets jailed, Western media screams political victim. Yet when ECJ upheld russian persecution's case against Khodorovky's laywers and noted that there is no evidence of political aspect of the trial, this gets near zero attention in Western press.
Hell the entire thing is just a brilliant flashback to the USA. Chaotic financial period after collapse of USSR and privatization, many get rich fast through obvious financial crimes, only a few who don't get along with authorities get persecuted, rest walk free with the money (which is the main, and probably only political part of that trial if you don't count the fact that Khodorovsky was trying to sell Russian oil fields to American oil companies - of course if this happened the other way around the reaction would've been at least as bad - USA doesn't even allow selling of its ports to its allies, much less it strategic resources to its enemies).
Compare to USA, chaotic financial period, many get rich fast through obvious financial crimes during equity boom, only a few who don't get along with authorities get prosecuted, rest walk free with the money.
We didn't even get a showy trial for one major financial mastermind who was behind equity bubble except for the guy who robbed the rich. Anyone not worth at least millions didn't get any justice here, anyone who didn't try to sell off strategic resources to the enemy didn't get trial there.
Finally on Caucasus issue: as far as I know there are no names on poll ballots - it's anonymous. How can you tell who voted for who then?
P.S. Feel free to link materials in russian: it's one of several languages I'm fluent in.
It is in fact widely regarded that at least 60-70% is real support for Putin/Medvedev combo among russian voters. I'm not sure where you get the "documented" part of falsification, other then normal "my boss forced me to vote" claims similar to what you get in rural areas everywhere and general anti-russian propaganda you see in the press. If you have ever actually been in Russia in last eight years or so, you'd know that popular support for those two is very much real.
In fact I haven't seen a single credible piece of evidence to contrary, and as far as I know most credible international pollster organisations such as Gallup largely agree on 60-70% number for support with around 20% for various opposition candidates total and around 10-20% undecided.
Slashdot Mirror
"Always" != "Couple of recent years".
n95 with its symbian 9.2 was the #1 smartphone in the world at the time of release, absolutely no doubt about it anywhere except maybe some truly hardcore anti-nokia folks.
But then touchscreen phones came and essentially disrupted the market. That's when nokia's problems started.
They had the MeeGo option, which was the real linux on a smartphone rather then a bastardised java VM driving OS in android, which microsoftie boss dropped like a hot cake.
When you get a financial disaster as it's happening, you're going to have to hang on and let it happen to the end before you can start fixing it.
It's like Greece then Turkey thanks to Ataturk, and as time passes it moves more and more in direction of Syria. The fact that they have a large majority of conservative islamist peasants backs this up.
Remember - the party that won the current headcount known as election is the formerly forbidden hardliner islamist party. Turkish folks you see dressed in western clothes in Istanbul and tourist cities of the Western Turkey are about as against him as they can be, but there's simply not enough of them and they don't breed enough to compete with strongly conservative peasants.
Stop being istupid and turn off aero if that's such a problem.
Just because you haven't heard about it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a right to its trademark.
Worst case of "small guys don't deserve their rights when facing bit guys" comment I've seen on slashdot recently...
Exact quote:
Another problem is the retraining of users; however, going from XP to Win 7 is enough of a change that going from XP to OS X is not that different.
Going from XP to 7 allows you to essentially retain use of all your software barring a few specialized/old pieces. Your comparison is essentially near-100% vs near-0% when migrating to MacOS.
So, instead of running demanding applications natively, you virtualise just for the sake of "mitigating suckiness of windows" losing a shitload of efficiency in process.
I stand by my previous statement. You never worked in IT on any meaningful level. If you did, that kind of decision would be career-ending in most cases.
And to be fair, french have their own Bush Jr. + Cheney molded together in Sarkozy.
More like Corporate Service Announcement.
Because maintaining your own datacenter costs money.
The issue is that you cannot work with encrypted data - you have to decrypt it first. Which means either decryption in the cloud, or forced download of entire databases to each client.
Latter is not an option for most cases of work, and former is the problem that OP raises. Encryption is not a defense against cloud provider if cloud provider has the keys to decrypt. It only provides protection against man in the middle attack.
The OP addresses the reality. You're addressing a fantasy where managers are knowledgeable about IT security.
You have never worked in IT on any meaningful level if you think gaming is the only thing that keeps people on windows. The various specialized autocad implementations alone do NOT work on anything else and are very widespread. There's a boatload of other professional specialized tools in this ballpark.
Worth noting that it's same for certain graphics work and MacOS. I also recall hitting some server software that really worked best on linux and nothing else.
But in terms of general and specialized software availability, windows is in a league of its own. No one else is even playing the same game. That's a fact of life, and no matter how much you are a fanboy of anything, you have to recognise this as a FACT or accept the reality of being in denial.
Except that no, it's not. Going to platform on which a few percent of your software may not work and going to platform where none of your software will work and you'll need to look for/purchase alternatives for everything (even if such alternatives exists and are readily available).
There is simply no comparison.
Everything works somewhere else? Really?
Seriously, this is slashdot, no matter how much of a fanboy you are, you CANNOT be that ignorant.
Being a professional in fields other then graphical?
Wanting a much larger software library?
Wanting a better compatibility with others in terms of PC?
Just to name a few.
The main selling point of windows is that most if not all of your software will keep on working on new machine.
Migrating to any other platform requires complete revam of everything. Why on earth would you invite problems when you can just choose a safer, cheaper and all around safer alternative with a windows 7 PC when upgrading?
I'm pretty certain you can still get XP with netbooks. Or did that program get canned?
It's worth noting that anyone who has to work with legacy software won't touch w7 with a mile long pole. It truly earned it's nickname of "ghetto" in terms of software it can run properly.
Sure, it may start to get phased out around 2014 when it goes out of support phase. By then, most software will be updated to work with w7 without compatibility problems or will slowly start to drift into oblivion.
As it stand now, the only software that requires W7 is either software that requires DX10/11 (read: few exclusive games) and a couple of pieces of software where company apparently worries more about its image in certain customers' minds then about actual functionality - there's no reason for new itunes or icloud to not work on XP other then image-related issues of "can't have apple software on not cool enough machines!".
There are brave ninjas and there are old ninjas, but there are no brave old ninjas.
Blizzard spends (or used to spend) a very large amount of money on support of the people who had their accounts stolen. It was a pure business decision for them - invest in authenticator technology, save on staff.
Since we seem to start agreeing on or at least agree to disagree on many things, I'll just address major points of conflict:
1: And here's the thing about those demonstrations. Do you know why they happen without permits? Because the local governments won't grant such permits. Whenever they try, there's always a new reason invented to deny them that. Alternatively, they're granted the permit, but relocated somewhere where no-one can actually see them.
This is 1:1 western scenario. Visibility of demonstration is very important, and shoving demonstration into small side streets and surburbia where no one will care is a trick that russians copied from the West. It has been actively practised here for decades.
2. I'm sorry, but is "making hundreds of millions in a couple of years" is equal to "obvious criminal"? Far greater fortunes have been made in early post-Soviet Russia - it was practically ripe for the taking, because it was wild west capitalism at its best (and worst).
One foregone part: STARTING FROM ZERO. If that was possible without major criminal history, everyone would be a millionaire. And it's worth noting that no one except for some really hard core anti-russian folks or people with very deeply vested interests disagree - the period during which Khodorovski and his ilk got their huge riches was rife with crime, and if you weren't criminal and tried to get rich, you didn't make it. Not as in didn't make it rich - but as in didn't survive.
It's very doubtful that any of the current multi-millionaires and billionaires in Russia would survive a trial without going the way of Khodorovsky, be it fair or not.
Notably Russia of that age resembled USA of 1920s very much.
3. Do you mean ECHR? They have ruled that he failed to conclusively prove that his trial was politically motivated, yes. The main argument in favor of that is just timing - Khodorkovsky found himself in court once he started talking out against Putin, and no "faithful" oligarch has underwent similar treatment so far - but this is all conjecture, even if it correlates well with known facts, and the court rightly wanted "incontestable proof". However, that same ECHR has noted that his right to fair trial was violated, regardless of any purported political motivation.
Yes, wrong letter combination. European Court of Human Rights. Notably, same kinds of decisions are handed quite often to my home country - Finland. ECHJ counts "right to fair trial" to include very stringent procedural requirements, which many Western countries fail to fully meet as well, as we do.
4. You don't have to. You get an official paper for the voting district which says that 100% (literally, every single one) of citizens in that district voted, and all of them voted for United Russia [izbirkom.ru] (this one was from 2007 parliamentary election).
Aren't such cases generally disregarded or recounted? Also, are they statistically meaningful? Finally, there's a Western example for this as well: there are for example many bible belt communities in USA that vote 100% (literally, every single vote) republican with a very high (near 100%) participation. These are typically relatively small communities however and as a result, there is usually no investigation into things like forcing people to vote certain way (and granted there probably isn't all that much of it - it's far more about peer pressure).
Still, you show quite a few examples of the fact that Russia is not a 100% properly functioning representative democracy, and with this I fully agree. I'm still sticking to my original statement that Putin/Medvedev combo enjoys a significantly stronger mandate to power then leaders in most Western countries in spite of the fact that many of your claims do have merit.
Point one: if you ever doubt that Putin and Medvedev are a combo, hit yourself. Hard. The extremely basic good cop/bad cop theme between the two is extremely obvious to anyone who looks. They have "disagreements" which are so theatrical, I always asked myself if there's someone who's actually buying that in addition to maybe low class people who really don't know any better.
Now I know...
Point two: there are multiple countries in the world, that count among the most democratic, that have MANDATORY voting. You don't go to vote, you get fined. Someone forcing you into the voting booth should be mandatory imho, so long as they don't tell you how to vote. Your need to cast your vote for democracy to work, even if you don't want to. I'd see that kind of forcing as a positive, and show of democracy, as nothing is as deadly to democracy as the lack of voter interest, which is what we're seeing across many of the biggest Western countries, sadly. It also seems to directly correlate with desire for switch of democracy to dictature (there was a very worrying poll on how 20% of all swedish youth want their country to become a dictature just a couple of weeks ago).
Point three: Anti-Russian propaganda is hard-wired into most major Western news outlets. Perhaps the best way to see this is to look at how demonstrations are reported. When a few hundred people show up for an opposition demonstration in Russia without permit and get dispersed, this is talked about as a very negative thing, hinting at uncalled violence, human rights violations and nice close-ups of police wrestling with demonstators - which as someone who has worked as seucrity guard and has training in the field I can state is a very good thing - wrestling with demonstrators means that enforcers are willing to forego their far more deadly and dehumanising means of crowd control.
When same happens in US, and dispersion is typically even more violent and dehumanising, (if you live in States, read up on laws on demonstrations without permits - they are frankly, frightening), you don't get anything beyond small note in local papers. As far as major media outlets are concerned, it didn't happen.
You can see similar bias in many other instances as well, such as Khodorovsky case - guy gets hundreds of millions in a couple of years, obvious criminal, gets jailed, Western media screams political victim. Yet when ECJ upheld russian persecution's case against Khodorovky's laywers and noted that there is no evidence of political aspect of the trial, this gets near zero attention in Western press.
Hell the entire thing is just a brilliant flashback to the USA. Chaotic financial period after collapse of USSR and privatization, many get rich fast through obvious financial crimes, only a few who don't get along with authorities get persecuted, rest walk free with the money (which is the main, and probably only political part of that trial if you don't count the fact that Khodorovsky was trying to sell Russian oil fields to American oil companies - of course if this happened the other way around the reaction would've been at least as bad - USA doesn't even allow selling of its ports to its allies, much less it strategic resources to its enemies).
Compare to USA, chaotic financial period, many get rich fast through obvious financial crimes during equity boom, only a few who don't get along with authorities get prosecuted, rest walk free with the money.
We didn't even get a showy trial for one major financial mastermind who was behind equity bubble except for the guy who robbed the rich. Anyone not worth at least millions didn't get any justice here, anyone who didn't try to sell off strategic resources to the enemy didn't get trial there.
Finally on Caucasus issue: as far as I know there are no names on poll ballots - it's anonymous. How can you tell who voted for who then?
P.S. Feel free to link materials in russian: it's one of several languages I'm fluent in.
It is in fact widely regarded that at least 60-70% is real support for Putin/Medvedev combo among russian voters. I'm not sure where you get the "documented" part of falsification, other then normal "my boss forced me to vote" claims similar to what you get in rural areas everywhere and general anti-russian propaganda you see in the press. If you have ever actually been in Russia in last eight years or so, you'd know that popular support for those two is very much real.
In fact I haven't seen a single credible piece of evidence to contrary, and as far as I know most credible international pollster organisations such as Gallup largely agree on 60-70% number for support with around 20% for various opposition candidates total and around 10-20% undecided.