I think that everyone can agree with you that n97 is bad for the cost. In fact, if you look into it, well over 3/4 of all "nokia is bad" gripes are about n97.
Reality is, n97 is a 200 euro platform - same one used in all mid range smart phones like 5800XM and even low end like 5230. This is why it's so horrible. It just isn't a flagship in any sense, in spite of nokia marketing it as such. Rest of nokia's line up at the moment is very good. They just don't have the flagship model at all - n900 is too techie and n97 is basically n5800 with bigger screen and keyboard.
SymbianS60v3 and S60v5 (also known as Symbian^1) still powers pretty much all nokia's touch screen phones, which alone sell more then android and iphone combined. Symbian^2 is fairly popular in Japan, due to its extremely low system requirements (same as ^1 really), and some specialized features. Symbian^3 which is being developed for n8 seems to be the natural evolution of Symbian^1, i.e. mid range smart phone OS.
The problem is that unlike android and iphone, these phones are very competitively priced, and sacrifice "bling" features for actual function, such as better features, lower price and business-directed application support. As a result, there's many fewer people with "loose money" who are willing to sink a few euros/dollars/etc into some funny looking application on a weekly basis. They also tend to look much less pretty, focusing on function, and have slower hardware, meaning less responsive UI, which is advertised as a major feature on IOS and android.
This is really noticeable even on OVI store. Almost no games, but a shitload of various business-oriented and rather expensive applications ranging from call recorders to improved ms exchange handling to translation software. This stuff just doesn't sell to the young adult croud. Add to that the fact that much of smartphone hype is US-driven, and Symbian being big pretty much everywhere in the world but the US, you get the perfect storm scenario where little players on the market completely outshine the real behemoth in marketing and publicity.
Indeed. There is prior art on this, dating several decades back. They may have a patent on specifics (such as insulation etc), but the idea of having two connectors at different deph is a really old one.
If I remember correctly, toy makers dropped the tech because it didn't handle shocks from being dropped well, and there were some insulation problems as the battery compartment aged. Old age circutry tended to cost more too, and having it die because of short-circuit was just not cost effective.
The list of companies given in press release includes European companies. Also, Neelie Croes is known as someone who won't care if you're european, american or papua guinean - if you break the rules, she'll come down on you just as hard.
It's hilarious how many see this as an "attack on free market".
Let me run a few facts down through your skulls:
1. There is no free market for IT goods referred to in the statement. The market that exists is heavily controlled and regulated, essentially being a monopoly market on per-product basis, or interconnected market where vendor uses monopoly control over one aspect of the market to openly destroy freeness in another market. 2. Neelie Kroes is probably the most pro-free market person you will find in EU. It's more of her life's philosophy then just a law enforcement on some level. 3. Suggestions include OPENING the CLOSED MARKET, to make it... that's right, more OPEN!
So do share, in what way is this "evil EU abusing US companies by closing free market"? I can see this being "good EU abusing evil US companies who like to close market to competition by forcing them to actually compete", but to actually claim the exact opposite, you have to either be ignorant, stupid, or have a deep vested interest in status quo.
The "daddy model" 5800XM would probably be a better choice, as it has 3g, GPS, bigger screen and front camera, as well as bundled 8GB memory card, while not costing much more then 5530 due to its age.
And you can make video calls with it if that's your thing via skype on it (use fring to log into your skype account and you can place skype video calls through fring - the only thing that native skype client doesn't yet support)
The conversion of advertisement mail to spam completely ignores the fact that SMTP is a dying medium because of the signal-to-noise ratio problem. zombie servers on the internet are primarily spam-relays. The goal of the spam now is to look as legitimate and eye-drawing-worthy as computationally possible.
I agree with you that from that point of view, my comparison was faulty. I was comparing from different point of view - that where stock market owners changed their business model from "charge a lot for a single transaction, support fewer transactions" (i.e. non-electronic trading), to "charge little from single transaction, support systems that enable massive addition of transactions" (electronic trading).
In this regard, the cultural change is similar to the one that happened in advertisement industry, albeit on a much larger level.
But yes, it's a very remote comparison, and full of holes.
That makes utterly no sense. Why suspend an activity that brings in billions in profits? Wikipedia factual failure, or perhaps badly sourced fact from an interested party?
Also, I recall there being an article here on slashdot just a few weeks ago about flash and high-frequency trading techniques, with several people mentioning that investments in such tech and specifically software have been on a massive rise.
Consider the fact that main reason why apple's iphone was literally buried alive on japanese market ins pite of huge apple fanbase (pretty much everyone in there uses ipods) was lack of payment option on the phone. It's simply such a major feature on a phone, it's like getting a wallet without credit card pockets. It's just what phones do in that culture.
It should also be noted that Nokia, Samsung and Motorola at very least seem very interested in NFC as a form of payment option, and are trying to get it to work in the west. It's mainly stalled by banks and operators fighting over who gets how big of a piece of that cake. The tech is largely ready to be deployed.
Actually this was touted on iphone4 introduction speech as a "major new feature" by Jobs. It was kind of obvious for anyone who actually ever worked with antennas that it was trouble. But apparently it sounded fashionable to countless ears of apple clients.
It's a feature among others, aimed to increase hype value of the device. It's pretty obvious why no one else did it, and hence probably seemed like a good marketing idea to apple. All it had to do was what it always did, present it as an awesome revolutionary new feature.
Android 1.0 was never meant for masses. Neither was n900. Nokia made this VERY clear about a year before the phone was released.
If you paid any attention to nokia's lineups, they rarely make "one model for all". Instead they have a lot of specialized models that individually do not sell many copies, but make a perfect fit for a certain niche. And they have the logistics chain to make that kind of manufacturing and design profitable. That is what sets them apart from all other mobile phone makers, and that is why they are by far the biggest mobile phone maker. You obviously won't hit apple's level of profit with that design philosophy, but you will make a lot of people your die-hard fans who will know that you are actually catering to their exact needs rather then make one-size-fits-all blob that works fine for most, but doesn't really excel at anything.
That's n900 for you. A model that will sell maybe a million or so only, but it will find its audience and make them very happy and satisfied. And then nokia will do what it always did - polish the concept and perfect it, while continuing to sell relatively small amounts at a modest profit. And then eventually it becomes yet another success story like n95.
Flash trading is the main sub-form of high-frequency trading which is responsible for overwhelming majority of its profits. From macro-scale point of view, they are one and the same thing.
If 70% of the daily trades are made by high frequency traders, then 70% of the costs incurred by such trading are incurred by the high frequency traders, not the low frequency traders.
This is the beauty of the system. On one hand, it introduces cheaper trades. On other hand, it allows flash trading.
Essentially it's somewhat comparable to the move from advertisement mail to spam. You rate of return per skimmed trade is less, but your total volume increases so much (and in this case, virtually every trade is profitable) that this brings in huge profits. At the same time it allows many smaller stock markets to profit from flash trading immensely, as it essentially triples-to-quadruples the total volume of trades.
All in the profession win. All who are not professional stock market buyers or sellers lose. That's the point of the flash trading. And yes, stock market owners profit from increased VOLUME of trades. That's the whole point of allowing them from their point of view (that and the additional charging for having access to low-latency computer room beneath the trading floor).
Russia: Entire middle Asian part of Russia has already been effectively chinified. Read on tolls they are forced to place on raw materials extraction to at least somehow prevent essential strip-mining and strip-deforestation going there. Chinese have Russia by the balls already, it's just a quiet "we're taking over by breeding with you" kind of takeover for now.
US: Many of the chinese minority there aren't exactly happy with US itself (hello chinks). You'll notice many going to their parents' homeland for at least vacations, and many openly or hiddenly wanting a stronger China. Has been losing raw materials acquisition "cold war" to China for a while now in South America.
EU: Arguably best position to survive as it has no large Chinese minority and no common border. Still very dependent on China economically and is badly losing on raw material gathering to China in its former colonies (i.e. Sudan, Libya, similar African countries).
Conclusion: they don't need direct warfare to take over 2/4 of their main opponents. I'm honestly not sure what's going on with China-Japan relations due to extreme uniqueness of their relationship.
Android: All-purpose SUV with some nice features. Works well everywhere, provided you don't put an underpowered motor inside. Average at parking in cities. Comes with many different engines. IOS: Truck with exactly the same engine in every model. Has a lot of fan-made cranes and tools for various tasks. Sucks at navigating city small streets, isn't very goot in off-road either. But you have to own one to impress the neighbour, even if you're using a sedan for actual shuttling. Don't even try to park it in the busy center without a private reserved space. Blackberry: The sedan you use for actual shuttling when mileage counts. Is not cool in any way and if you only own a sedan, people with trucks think you're poor. Symbian: The european-style city car. Small, and of limited utility but runs wonderfully even with underpowered engines and can be parked pretty much anywhere.
Far more interestingly, symbian is used in japanese phones as well, and those literally wipe the floor with anything west has to offer when it comes to functionality and usability, albeit japanese cell usage patterns are known to be quite different from western (they use them more for mail, chatting and paying with what essentially amounts to NFC).
Symbian as an OS is perfectly fine. The epic whine of mobile devs has very little to do with modern incarnations of the OS, and far more with just the need to vent that they have to program for the platform that has such tight rules and regulations on how to code for it. You can usually tell that this is the case when whining focuses on problems that are long gone from modern symbian.
You do realise that after the opium wars and colonisation period, they're far more pissed at the West and Japan then at their own leaders?
We've been doing this PR crap here in the West for centuries now. It really isn't hard to deflect the rage of the mob towards the outside enemy. And as your argument goes, there's enough Chinese to wipe US and most of EU regimes.
This is just plain wrong. Most research points to HFT accounting for around 70% of trading volume. Your also assuming HFT's don't trade amongst themselves, and that they don't make transactions on longer time periods when no buyer/seller can take their trades. When HFT's stop trading market liquidity plunges, and everyone complains when they do NOT trade the market.
It's not just right, it's dead on the money and is the main problem with flash trading - it adds a grand total of zero liquidity, instead it "skims off the top", essentially pocketing a small percentage on every sale it conducts.This is the very basics behind flash trading, and the reason why flash trading is being conducted in the first place - if it were a zero sum game, it wouldn't be worth the investments needed for flash trading. The massive fraud you talked about before is indeed horrible, but one crime doesn't make another currently legalized but essentially criminal and highly unproductive (from market's perspective) activity. The main reason why people can argue it adds liquidity is because it's the entire purpose of flash trading scheme to catch the buy/sell BEFORE it happens, and essentially conduct it twice, pocketing the difference. If buyer and seller contacted each other directly, as would imminently happen in a few moments if there was no flash trading going, liquidity would stay exactly the same.
In fact, it is far more often argued that flash trading in fact reduces liquidity, by removing and pocketing extra funds from buyers and sellers.
Also, please stop linkin businessinsider.com, which is essentially a professional magazine for people working in the stock market and will always be supportive of ways these people can use to pump money out of the actual companies/trades and into their/their owners' pockets as some sort of a reputable source. While a decent source on what's happening in the industry, it's about as trustworthy to present an unbiased and truthful point of view on this issue as an ultra orthodox jewish magazine would be on Palestine problem.
And yet the market capitalization of MS is $222B, Google's is $153B, and Apple's is $247B. The financial world seems to think that Apple is worth $25B more than Microsoft, but I'm the one that doesn't understand how financial markets work?
I don't want to be a dick and repeat myself, but if you seriously consider that apple's own drivel about "market capitalization" matters for more then short term profit, you simply do not even begin to understand how financial world works, which makes arguing the point, well, pointless. You simply lack the knowledge base needed to argue the financial points at all.
But it does look really good on paper, next to "we're biggest mobile device maker in the world". When you use a properly "fixed" metric, you can make anyone look like a world leader, no matter how badly it's real finances are. Case to point, 2k crisis, IT bubble and massive market collapse. Recent mortgage/financial crisis, exactly the same issue. Essentially market's idea of what something is worth means very little in long term, because even a small shift can sometimes cause a complete and total collapse of a company that may have been valued as one of the best in the world before that - example: Lehman Brothers
One last time. Market value means nothing more then what the value is perceived as. It may or may not have any roots in reality. With apple's high build up on hype over substance, and creative "metrics" used to hype their own product, the bubble is very clearly seen to those who aren't inside it. And just like all bubbles, when it will collapse, it will probably be painful, but before that it will make people large amounts of money. Just like mortgage market did.
MS on the other hand is pure substance and very little hype. It has it's products installed on almost every end-user operated personal computer in the world. It's productivity suite is clear #1 in the world. The only thing one could view as hype is xbox and microsoft games, and even there, microsoft itself isn't really hyping it up - it has been very open about the losses.
Sure, we can split hairs and argue that smartphone market is the future, and that MS is the dinosaur. The argument was exactly the same just before IT bubble burst, and then we had companies like Nortel going "lol microsoft, soon to be small fry". Bubble burst. MS is still here, and still growing. Most of the very high valued companies that bet on that "new economy" of that time on the other hand are dead.
Notice how little stock price, or popular news (heavy emphasis on POPULAR) actually impacts company and it's ability to operate.
Best example: Jobs gets a health scare. Apple loses 20% value almost overnight.
Stock value is a value that is PERCEIVED by investors. So long as company doesn't need to raise any capital from the market, it has minimal-to-nonexistent impact on it's actual operations. Microsoft's foundations lie in the fact that most of the world runs their software as the very platform for running everything else. Apple's foundations lie in being trendy, exclusive and hip, selling to people who buy that image with huge profit margins while selling a technically inferior product.
Microsoft's operating capability is largely unmovable by anything less then a major worldwide catastrophe. Apple's can collapse overnight through simple loss of its figurehead, its "cool" image through any serious PR gaffe or simply through demographic change (too much of upper middle class gone - no one to sell to). This makes Apple a perfect short-term investment, and a very dangerous gamble for a long term one. MS is excellent for both. And seriously, if you think that actual value of Microsoft is in the same size category to that of Apple, you have serious problems understanding how financial and stock markets work and how they relate to actual values.
Taxation is merely one small variable in a big formula.
Among others are:
1. Infrastructure 2. Workforce availability 3. Culture of working 4. Political stability 5. Religious stability 6. Social stability 7. Corruption 8. Legal system etc.
If you really believe that taxation is the biggest issue, I have a zero-taxation location for you in Somalia.
What I've been trying to communicate here is that it is not our job to judge if an add-on is pretty or ugly, lightweight or bloated, subtle or in-your-face.
Except that it is. The very name of the policy, "No Suprises" clearly shows intent to prevent massive change from subtle to in-your-face, as you put it.
The problem that we have reading your replies is that you chose to go with utterly classic response that corrupt officials and companies go with when they get caught. They proceed to find a small ambiguous technicality in the letter of the policy, while murdering the entire spirit of the said policy in progress, smiling in and proclaiming their complete innocence and blaming the policy. The entire wording of the name of the policy clearly suggests that you are there to weed out "subtle to in-your-face" changes. Yet because of technicality in the policy that you as a mod can use every time you want, it actually means absolutely nothing. Nothing in it actually stops you as a moderator from, for example, paying back a "monetary favor" by allowing a company that purchased a known add-on from making it a targeted advertisement add-on, full with annoying pop-ups, as long as it mainly does what it did before. Even if doing it is a small fraction of the new version and bulk is focused around selling unwanted crap, and in fact flies in the face of everything the previous versions of add-on stood for.
I'm sorry, but this stinks. In a major way. It essentially means that the moment someone finds a morally weak spot in the mod chain, millions of end users can be literally fucked over with no recourse whatsoever. And it's the lack of recourse that's most bothersome. There isn't even a way to properly complain about a clear breach of trust issue, because it still adheres to letter of the policy, even if spirit of it is murdered in the process, at least according to you.
I think AC below put it best:
The Changing of Defaults and Unexpected Features [mozilla.org] add-ons policy appears to address what an add-on does when it's first installed. It doesn't adequately address notifications of changes pushed in updates to add-on functionality.
Essentially there's a nice and functional loophole in the policy that allows anyone with sufficient interest in the issue to circumvent the policy entirely by publishing new add-on as a continuation of a popular existing one and making sure that mod happens to be someone he knows well enough and owes a favor, or is sufficiently naive to imagine that this isn't a "surprising change". This in spite of add-on update policy naming scheme that clearly shows that it was its intent to do the same as policy on what review happens when add-on is first installed.
Once again, the stench can be felt even across the internet.
We have an unexpected features policy, also called No Surprises. We wouldn't have allowed the update if it enabled unexpected features for users, or if it had really changed its core functionality. But it didn't. It added several features, but they are also privacy and security tools, and they're turned off by default.
So, in your opinion, a change that makes an add-on with no interface that just works out of the box with no interface elements at all into an add-on that adds multiple interface elements, pop-ups on pretty much every page (as almost every nominally popular site nowadays uses cookies in one form or another), and begins by flashing an introduction menu that contains among other things advertisement for "premium service"...
Is not a change that changes core functionality?
I mean really. One can split hairs and claim that it's "an add-on that generally protects your privacy by opting out of...", but in my, and apparently pretty much everyone's opinion, the sudden appearance of "features" like interface, pop-ups etc is a very, very serious change to core functionality. Which was from end-users point of view to STFU and just opt us out. The worst part is, this approval essentially dropped my trust towards Mozilla's auto-update function and add-on review process from full one hundred to zero. Because trust is hard earned (and mind you, you earned it with your hard work so far), and lost over one major failure. And allowing a hijack like this to be piggy backed as an "update" is a pretty damn major breach of trust. Whether you like it or not, this raises a question if the next update that you will decide that change is "minor" will get our UI painted full of targeted ads, which apparently will pass your check just as well so long as ads are relevant to core functionality of an add-on?
For the next time: if an add-on that previously required no user action other then installation and didn't do anything to tell user about itself starts using flashy pop-ups to advertise itself, adds elements to UI and gets a flashy configuration window with advertisements for its host company, it's a change of core functionality for end user. Even if developer in you feels it's a "small upgrade", for end user it will be a major change and in this case, a game breaking one.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that everyone can agree with you that n97 is bad for the cost. In fact, if you look into it, well over 3/4 of all "nokia is bad" gripes are about n97.
Reality is, n97 is a 200 euro platform - same one used in all mid range smart phones like 5800XM and even low end like 5230. This is why it's so horrible. It just isn't a flagship in any sense, in spite of nokia marketing it as such.
Rest of nokia's line up at the moment is very good. They just don't have the flagship model at all - n900 is too techie and n97 is basically n5800 with bigger screen and keyboard.
SymbianS60v3 and S60v5 (also known as Symbian^1) still powers pretty much all nokia's touch screen phones, which alone sell more then android and iphone combined.
Symbian^2 is fairly popular in Japan, due to its extremely low system requirements (same as ^1 really), and some specialized features.
Symbian^3 which is being developed for n8 seems to be the natural evolution of Symbian^1, i.e. mid range smart phone OS.
The problem is that unlike android and iphone, these phones are very competitively priced, and sacrifice "bling" features for actual function, such as better features, lower price and business-directed application support. As a result, there's many fewer people with "loose money" who are willing to sink a few euros/dollars/etc into some funny looking application on a weekly basis. They also tend to look much less pretty, focusing on function, and have slower hardware, meaning less responsive UI, which is advertised as a major feature on IOS and android.
This is really noticeable even on OVI store. Almost no games, but a shitload of various business-oriented and rather expensive applications ranging from call recorders to improved ms exchange handling to translation software. This stuff just doesn't sell to the young adult croud. Add to that the fact that much of smartphone hype is US-driven, and Symbian being big pretty much everywhere in the world but the US, you get the perfect storm scenario where little players on the market completely outshine the real behemoth in marketing and publicity.
Indeed. There is prior art on this, dating several decades back. They may have a patent on specifics (such as insulation etc), but the idea of having two connectors at different deph is a really old one.
If I remember correctly, toy makers dropped the tech because it didn't handle shocks from being dropped well, and there were some insulation problems as the battery compartment aged. Old age circutry tended to cost more too, and having it die because of short-circuit was just not cost effective.
The list of companies given in press release includes European companies. Also, Neelie Croes is known as someone who won't care if you're european, american or papua guinean - if you break the rules, she'll come down on you just as hard.
It's hilarious how many see this as an "attack on free market".
Let me run a few facts down through your skulls:
1. There is no free market for IT goods referred to in the statement. The market that exists is heavily controlled and regulated, essentially being a monopoly market on per-product basis, or interconnected market where vendor uses monopoly control over one aspect of the market to openly destroy freeness in another market.
2. Neelie Kroes is probably the most pro-free market person you will find in EU. It's more of her life's philosophy then just a law enforcement on some level.
3. Suggestions include OPENING the CLOSED MARKET, to make it... that's right, more OPEN!
So do share, in what way is this "evil EU abusing US companies by closing free market"? I can see this being "good EU abusing evil US companies who like to close market to competition by forcing them to actually compete", but to actually claim the exact opposite, you have to either be ignorant, stupid, or have a deep vested interest in status quo.
It is truly sad that people nowadays associate batteries+masturbation with laptops rather then vibrators...
The "daddy model" 5800XM would probably be a better choice, as it has 3g, GPS, bigger screen and front camera, as well as bundled 8GB memory card, while not costing much more then 5530 due to its age.
And you can make video calls with it if that's your thing via skype on it (use fring to log into your skype account and you can place skype video calls through fring - the only thing that native skype client doesn't yet support)
Your analysis is way off here.
The conversion of advertisement mail to spam completely ignores the fact that SMTP is a dying medium because of the signal-to-noise ratio problem. zombie servers on the internet are primarily spam-relays. The goal of the spam now is to look as legitimate and eye-drawing-worthy as computationally possible.
I agree with you that from that point of view, my comparison was faulty. I was comparing from different point of view - that where stock market owners changed their business model from "charge a lot for a single transaction, support fewer transactions" (i.e. non-electronic trading), to "charge little from single transaction, support systems that enable massive addition of transactions" (electronic trading).
In this regard, the cultural change is similar to the one that happened in advertisement industry, albeit on a much larger level.
But yes, it's a very remote comparison, and full of holes.
That makes utterly no sense. Why suspend an activity that brings in billions in profits? Wikipedia factual failure, or perhaps badly sourced fact from an interested party?
Also, I recall there being an article here on slashdot just a few weeks ago about flash and high-frequency trading techniques, with several people mentioning that investments in such tech and specifically software have been on a massive rise.
Consider the fact that main reason why apple's iphone was literally buried alive on japanese market ins pite of huge apple fanbase (pretty much everyone in there uses ipods) was lack of payment option on the phone. It's simply such a major feature on a phone, it's like getting a wallet without credit card pockets. It's just what phones do in that culture.
It should also be noted that Nokia, Samsung and Motorola at very least seem very interested in NFC as a form of payment option, and are trying to get it to work in the west. It's mainly stalled by banks and operators fighting over who gets how big of a piece of that cake. The tech is largely ready to be deployed.
Actually this was touted on iphone4 introduction speech as a "major new feature" by Jobs. It was kind of obvious for anyone who actually ever worked with antennas that it was trouble. But apparently it sounded fashionable to countless ears of apple clients.
It's a feature among others, aimed to increase hype value of the device. It's pretty obvious why no one else did it, and hence probably seemed like a good marketing idea to apple. All it had to do was what it always did, present it as an awesome revolutionary new feature.
Android 1.0 was never meant for masses. Neither was n900. Nokia made this VERY clear about a year before the phone was released.
If you paid any attention to nokia's lineups, they rarely make "one model for all". Instead they have a lot of specialized models that individually do not sell many copies, but make a perfect fit for a certain niche. And they have the logistics chain to make that kind of manufacturing and design profitable. That is what sets them apart from all other mobile phone makers, and that is why they are by far the biggest mobile phone maker. You obviously won't hit apple's level of profit with that design philosophy, but you will make a lot of people your die-hard fans who will know that you are actually catering to their exact needs rather then make one-size-fits-all blob that works fine for most, but doesn't really excel at anything.
That's n900 for you. A model that will sell maybe a million or so only, but it will find its audience and make them very happy and satisfied. And then nokia will do what it always did - polish the concept and perfect it, while continuing to sell relatively small amounts at a modest profit. And then eventually it becomes yet another success story like n95.
Flash trading is the main sub-form of high-frequency trading which is responsible for overwhelming majority of its profits. From macro-scale point of view, they are one and the same thing.
If 70% of the daily trades are made by high frequency traders, then 70% of the costs incurred by such trading are incurred by the high frequency traders, not the low frequency traders.
This is the beauty of the system. On one hand, it introduces cheaper trades. On other hand, it allows flash trading.
Essentially it's somewhat comparable to the move from advertisement mail to spam. You rate of return per skimmed trade is less, but your total volume increases so much (and in this case, virtually every trade is profitable) that this brings in huge profits. At the same time it allows many smaller stock markets to profit from flash trading immensely, as it essentially triples-to-quadruples the total volume of trades.
All in the profession win. All who are not professional stock market buyers or sellers lose. That's the point of the flash trading. And yes, stock market owners profit from increased VOLUME of trades. That's the whole point of allowing them from their point of view (that and the additional charging for having access to low-latency computer room beneath the trading floor).
Russia: Entire middle Asian part of Russia has already been effectively chinified. Read on tolls they are forced to place on raw materials extraction to at least somehow prevent essential strip-mining and strip-deforestation going there. Chinese have Russia by the balls already, it's just a quiet "we're taking over by breeding with you" kind of takeover for now.
US: Many of the chinese minority there aren't exactly happy with US itself (hello chinks). You'll notice many going to their parents' homeland for at least vacations, and many openly or hiddenly wanting a stronger China. Has been losing raw materials acquisition "cold war" to China for a while now in South America.
EU: Arguably best position to survive as it has no large Chinese minority and no common border. Still very dependent on China economically and is badly losing on raw material gathering to China in its former colonies (i.e. Sudan, Libya, similar African countries).
Conclusion: they don't need direct warfare to take over 2/4 of their main opponents. I'm honestly not sure what's going on with China-Japan relations due to extreme uniqueness of their relationship.
Mandatory car comparison:
Android: All-purpose SUV with some nice features. Works well everywhere, provided you don't put an underpowered motor inside. Average at parking in cities. Comes with many different engines.
IOS: Truck with exactly the same engine in every model. Has a lot of fan-made cranes and tools for various tasks. Sucks at navigating city small streets, isn't very goot in off-road either. But you have to own one to impress the neighbour, even if you're using a sedan for actual shuttling. Don't even try to park it in the busy center without a private reserved space.
Blackberry: The sedan you use for actual shuttling when mileage counts. Is not cool in any way and if you only own a sedan, people with trucks think you're poor.
Symbian: The european-style city car. Small, and of limited utility but runs wonderfully even with underpowered engines and can be parked pretty much anywhere.
Far more interestingly, symbian is used in japanese phones as well, and those literally wipe the floor with anything west has to offer when it comes to functionality and usability, albeit japanese cell usage patterns are known to be quite different from western (they use them more for mail, chatting and paying with what essentially amounts to NFC).
Symbian as an OS is perfectly fine. The epic whine of mobile devs has very little to do with modern incarnations of the OS, and far more with just the need to vent that they have to program for the platform that has such tight rules and regulations on how to code for it. You can usually tell that this is the case when whining focuses on problems that are long gone from modern symbian.
You do realise that after the opium wars and colonisation period, they're far more pissed at the West and Japan then at their own leaders?
We've been doing this PR crap here in the West for centuries now. It really isn't hard to deflect the rage of the mob towards the outside enemy. And as your argument goes, there's enough Chinese to wipe US and most of EU regimes.
This is just plain wrong. Most research points to HFT accounting for around 70% of trading volume. Your also assuming HFT's don't trade amongst themselves, and that they don't make transactions on longer time periods when no buyer/seller can take their trades. When HFT's stop trading market liquidity plunges, and everyone complains when they do NOT trade the market.
It's not just right, it's dead on the money and is the main problem with flash trading - it adds a grand total of zero liquidity, instead it "skims off the top", essentially pocketing a small percentage on every sale it conducts.This is the very basics behind flash trading, and the reason why flash trading is being conducted in the first place - if it were a zero sum game, it wouldn't be worth the investments needed for flash trading. The massive fraud you talked about before is indeed horrible, but one crime doesn't make another currently legalized but essentially criminal and highly unproductive (from market's perspective) activity.
The main reason why people can argue it adds liquidity is because it's the entire purpose of flash trading scheme to catch the buy/sell BEFORE it happens, and essentially conduct it twice, pocketing the difference. If buyer and seller contacted each other directly, as would imminently happen in a few moments if there was no flash trading going, liquidity would stay exactly the same.
In fact, it is far more often argued that flash trading in fact reduces liquidity, by removing and pocketing extra funds from buyers and sellers.
Also, please stop linkin businessinsider.com, which is essentially a professional magazine for people working in the stock market and will always be supportive of ways these people can use to pump money out of the actual companies/trades and into their/their owners' pockets as some sort of a reputable source. While a decent source on what's happening in the industry, it's about as trustworthy to present an unbiased and truthful point of view on this issue as an ultra orthodox jewish magazine would be on Palestine problem.
And yet the market capitalization of MS is $222B, Google's is $153B, and Apple's is $247B. The financial world seems to think that Apple is worth $25B more than Microsoft, but I'm the one that doesn't understand how financial markets work?
I don't want to be a dick and repeat myself, but if you seriously consider that apple's own drivel about "market capitalization" matters for more then short term profit, you simply do not even begin to understand how financial world works, which makes arguing the point, well, pointless. You simply lack the knowledge base needed to argue the financial points at all.
But it does look really good on paper, next to "we're biggest mobile device maker in the world". When you use a properly "fixed" metric, you can make anyone look like a world leader, no matter how badly it's real finances are. Case to point, 2k crisis, IT bubble and massive market collapse. Recent mortgage/financial crisis, exactly the same issue. Essentially market's idea of what something is worth means very little in long term, because even a small shift can sometimes cause a complete and total collapse of a company that may have been valued as one of the best in the world before that - example: Lehman Brothers
One last time. Market value means nothing more then what the value is perceived as. It may or may not have any roots in reality. With apple's high build up on hype over substance, and creative "metrics" used to hype their own product, the bubble is very clearly seen to those who aren't inside it. And just like all bubbles, when it will collapse, it will probably be painful, but before that it will make people large amounts of money. Just like mortgage market did.
MS on the other hand is pure substance and very little hype. It has it's products installed on almost every end-user operated personal computer in the world. It's productivity suite is clear #1 in the world. The only thing one could view as hype is xbox and microsoft games, and even there, microsoft itself isn't really hyping it up - it has been very open about the losses.
Sure, we can split hairs and argue that smartphone market is the future, and that MS is the dinosaur. The argument was exactly the same just before IT bubble burst, and then we had companies like Nortel going "lol microsoft, soon to be small fry". Bubble burst. MS is still here, and still growing. Most of the very high valued companies that bet on that "new economy" of that time on the other hand are dead.
Notice how little stock price, or popular news (heavy emphasis on POPULAR) actually impacts company and it's ability to operate.
Best example: Jobs gets a health scare. Apple loses 20% value almost overnight.
Stock value is a value that is PERCEIVED by investors. So long as company doesn't need to raise any capital from the market, it has minimal-to-nonexistent impact on it's actual operations. Microsoft's foundations lie in the fact that most of the world runs their software as the very platform for running everything else. Apple's foundations lie in being trendy, exclusive and hip, selling to people who buy that image with huge profit margins while selling a technically inferior product.
Microsoft's operating capability is largely unmovable by anything less then a major worldwide catastrophe. Apple's can collapse overnight through simple loss of its figurehead, its "cool" image through any serious PR gaffe or simply through demographic change (too much of upper middle class gone - no one to sell to). This makes Apple a perfect short-term investment, and a very dangerous gamble for a long term one. MS is excellent for both.
And seriously, if you think that actual value of Microsoft is in the same size category to that of Apple, you have serious problems understanding how financial and stock markets work and how they relate to actual values.
Taxation is merely one small variable in a big formula.
Among others are:
1. Infrastructure
2. Workforce availability
3. Culture of working
4. Political stability
5. Religious stability
6. Social stability
7. Corruption
8. Legal system
etc.
If you really believe that taxation is the biggest issue, I have a zero-taxation location for you in Somalia.
What I've been trying to communicate here is that it is not our job to judge if an add-on is pretty or ugly, lightweight or bloated, subtle or in-your-face.
Except that it is. The very name of the policy, "No Suprises" clearly shows intent to prevent massive change from subtle to in-your-face, as you put it.
The problem that we have reading your replies is that you chose to go with utterly classic response that corrupt officials and companies go with when they get caught. They proceed to find a small ambiguous technicality in the letter of the policy, while murdering the entire spirit of the said policy in progress, smiling in and proclaiming their complete innocence and blaming the policy. The entire wording of the name of the policy clearly suggests that you are there to weed out "subtle to in-your-face" changes. Yet because of technicality in the policy that you as a mod can use every time you want, it actually means absolutely nothing. Nothing in it actually stops you as a moderator from, for example, paying back a "monetary favor" by allowing a company that purchased a known add-on from making it a targeted advertisement add-on, full with annoying pop-ups, as long as it mainly does what it did before. Even if doing it is a small fraction of the new version and bulk is focused around selling unwanted crap, and in fact flies in the face of everything the previous versions of add-on stood for.
I'm sorry, but this stinks. In a major way. It essentially means that the moment someone finds a morally weak spot in the mod chain, millions of end users can be literally fucked over with no recourse whatsoever.
And it's the lack of recourse that's most bothersome. There isn't even a way to properly complain about a clear breach of trust issue, because it still adheres to letter of the policy, even if spirit of it is murdered in the process, at least according to you.
I think AC below put it best:
The Changing of Defaults and Unexpected Features [mozilla.org] add-ons policy appears to address what an add-on does when it's first installed. It doesn't adequately address notifications of changes pushed in updates to add-on functionality.
Essentially there's a nice and functional loophole in the policy that allows anyone with sufficient interest in the issue to circumvent the policy entirely by publishing new add-on as a continuation of a popular existing one and making sure that mod happens to be someone he knows well enough and owes a favor, or is sufficiently naive to imagine that this isn't a "surprising change". This in spite of add-on update policy naming scheme that clearly shows that it was its intent to do the same as policy on what review happens when add-on is first installed.
Once again, the stench can be felt even across the internet.
We have an unexpected features policy, also called No Surprises. We wouldn't have allowed the update if it enabled unexpected features for users, or if it had really changed its core functionality. But it didn't. It added several features, but they are also privacy and security tools, and they're turned off by default.
So, in your opinion, a change that makes an add-on with no interface that just works out of the box with no interface elements at all into an add-on that adds multiple interface elements, pop-ups on pretty much every page (as almost every nominally popular site nowadays uses cookies in one form or another), and begins by flashing an introduction menu that contains among other things advertisement for "premium service"...
Is not a change that changes core functionality?
I mean really. One can split hairs and claim that it's "an add-on that generally protects your privacy by opting out of...", but in my, and apparently pretty much everyone's opinion, the sudden appearance of "features" like interface, pop-ups etc is a very, very serious change to core functionality. Which was from end-users point of view to STFU and just opt us out.
The worst part is, this approval essentially dropped my trust towards Mozilla's auto-update function and add-on review process from full one hundred to zero. Because trust is hard earned (and mind you, you earned it with your hard work so far), and lost over one major failure. And allowing a hijack like this to be piggy backed as an "update" is a pretty damn major breach of trust. Whether you like it or not, this raises a question if the next update that you will decide that change is "minor" will get our UI painted full of targeted ads, which apparently will pass your check just as well so long as ads are relevant to core functionality of an add-on?
For the next time: if an add-on that previously required no user action other then installation and didn't do anything to tell user about itself starts using flashy pop-ups to advertise itself, adds elements to UI and gets a flashy configuration window with advertisements for its host company, it's a change of core functionality for end user. Even if developer in you feels it's a "small upgrade", for end user it will be a major change and in this case, a game breaking one.
"How not to commercialize an anti-commercial firefox addon"