Just curious, I don't come across too many people who are "that" good and don't have to be diplomatic at least a little.
The question is diplomatic to whom. Many bigshots get a "Don't you know who I am? You're a nobody so when I tell you to jump you jump" attitude. Actually some of the worst think the world consists of kissing ass or being kissed. You very quickly notice what category he thinks you fall into.
Filled out those several times in later stages of job interviews here, though nobody actually calls it an IQ test. The last one was one set of logic tests, one set of math tests and one set of reading comprehension tests. Plus a big personality test - of course nobody calls that one a test as everybody's different. Yeah, right. As if there aren't some qualities that are good and some that are bad...
Pretty bad design to begin with then, if drivers have direct access to internal kernel locks.
A driver could not possibly function without a means to lock and unlock kernel resources. That you obviously have no idea what you're talking about shows you're only trolling.
Well, that's because I've read so many ten page threads where seven of them are two-three persons flaming each other and three pages are discussion from everyone else. Once I hit the first page that's full of nothing but shit I'm more likely to jump to the last page and just give my opinion on the subject. The SNR on most forums is just atrocious because some people can't help getting fired up by each other even though it's like having two people use bigger and bigger megaphones so that no one else in the room can hold a conversation.
And this is one example of why the kernel doesn't have a stable ABI. You can bet tons of unmaintained third party drivers would use the BKL, so you could never get rid of it. From what I've understood purging it from every driver has been a pretty big job and only possible because all the drivers are in the kernel tree.
If you're just doing it for the newer version and don't need to change the code or config it's easier to grab the debs from the Ubuntu Kernel PPA and install.
There is also the anti-quick-fixer who wants to redo everything from scratch, because they can't bear to compromise and create an imperfection. They would rather be 6 months late than offend their own design aesthetic. It takes a lot of maturity to find the right balance between these two extremes.
That's the Perfectionist, which can be an annoying enough character to work with but you can be pretty sure management will curb him and say that's not acceptable. As long as management is neutral or against, most things can be made to work reasonably well. It's only when you have management backing it you can have all reason and sanity fail, because those on top don't like to be told what to do by those on the bottom.
If it was really to be universal SSO that you practically couldn't use the Internet without you can bet the government will have their claws in it so deep, they might as well be running it. So I'd say government run would be better, you'd still have to bend over but at least you're not getting face fucked at the same time.
You know what's worse than a smart person who is lazy and doesn't show up on time? A dumb person that is lazy and doesn't show up on time. All of those traits he listed aren't qualities that solely belong to "smart people."
Of course, but the article is "What would you put up with from a smart person?" If you're keeping a person on payroll that has crappy work habits and is stupid, then you should fire some PHBs or HR.
I can construct a similar case "We have a worker that's always on time, always polite and helpful, always doing his job and not slacking but he's really dense. He needs tons of training, can't think independently and he's not adapting well to new challenges. Being a nice, hard-working guy that delivers like clockwork is important, but how low job output can you really put up with?" That'd be the opposite of this article.
He's actually very smart, but he's always taking the quickest, dirtiest route to the goal. If a hack will do it, he'll do it and make that part of any critical process without a second thought to architecture, interdependencies or anything like that. If a manual workaround is faster, that's what he'll do - or mostly instruct others to do. For that he's known as a problem solver and is in high regard with management, which means nobody gets to rein him in.
What they don't see is that every system runs like crap and is impossible to understand because there's weird kludges upon kludges upon kludges. Many interdependencies are completely irrational, you're afraid to touch anything to break it. That all the manual workarounds are choking the efficiency of everyone else, which are of course blamed when the endless manual steps and "remember this, check that, copy this field to that then save, alter status, execute this job" gets too complicated, error prone and slow. And he's mostly oblivious to this himself, he praises how the quickfixes help us even when quickfixes are the reason it's such a huge and complicated process to begin with. What's saving him is that nobody can do better, because everything is such a clusterfuck they don't understand anything and so full of special cases and other mine fields that the answers are bound to be wrong.
All valid points but I think the grandparent was an answer to the implicit question "Why does everybody and their grandmother feel the need to pirate Photoshop?" It's also the answer to "Why does the people you talk about for some mysterious reason become pros on a very expensive tool." Everybody gets Photoshop because it's "the" tool to get, then naturally if you expand from consumer to prosumer to professional you invest more and more hours in that tool. Finally when it comes down to purchasing time, it's either plunking down for Photoshop or throwing away the thousands of dollars' worth of time you've spent learning it in and out, possibly but not certainly reaching the same level of productivity (because everybody "knows" its best, obviously no other tool can be more effective). It's a pretty easy choice, even easier if you're an employer and you start talking training costs instead of self-study cost.
To provide a counter point: Puzzle Agent is $10 on the PC - originally $20 - and $5 in the app store. Monopoly sells for $40 on the xbox/ps3/wii, $3 as an app. Of course I got both of these for $1 on a Christmas sale, w00t. At least for now it seems the successful formula is to give away a Lite app for free, and charge $1 for the real app. I mean, it's a buck. Nobody really has to think twice about that, at least not anyone carrying an iPhone in the first place. They dominate the top app list like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja etc. and because they're at the top list they get a ton more sales. If you're not in the top 50 it's a damn lot harder to get sales.
So, I'm just imagining running a 330 and D510 with a 64-bit operating system?
No, you didn't read it precisely. I said "an Atom that's not 64 bit capable" not "an Atom since they aren't 64 bit capable". The earliest Atom N2xx series as well as the Z series don't support 64 bit. To be honest, I didn't know they had added support at all though.
Clearly, you have a different idea about what "distributed" means. Do the web's message boards exchange messages with each other?
Well, what we were ultimately talking about was control. And there's no one with control over "message boards" in general any more than there was over usenet, it is distributed among millions of message board operators unlike centralized services like Facebook or Yahoo/Hotmail/GMail. But perhaps "decentralized" would be a more precise word for what I wanted to say.
what "Desktop" user needs that much, or even runs an operating system that can address it?
Need we can discuss, but the price difference between Win7 32 and 64 bit versions is ~0 and I've not heard anyone complain about 64 bit drivers anymore. Mac I think is the same and Linux has of course supported 64 bit forever. Unless you're talking about an Atom that's not 64 bit capable, there's no particular reason not to get an OS capable. That is unless you still want to wipe a new box and install XP...
Good question, I don't have a direct answer however I found a desktop memory review here. Given that they found a 7W difference under full load and power scales to voltage squared (1.64^2) / (1.34^2) = 1.5 you can estimate it draws 14W at low voltage and 21W at high voltage.
Of course in a laptop you'll have a quite different low-power RAM like you have low-power CPUs but I'm guesstimating that yes it's significant. If you have a CPU that draws 30W at max, the RAM probably draws 5-10W too. Divide everything by two for the ULV versions. Also more RAM may mean more get cached so the hard disk rests more and the CPU can get faster back to idle, so the effect on real world power consumption isn't that easy to say.
You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."
Usenet wasn't driven out over by one web board, it was driven out by millions of them so it's still distributed. Usenet failed because it had no effective means of dealing with spam and the decline was rapid because everyone had access to the web, usenet server access and quality varied greatly. And that instead of making two web boards and let popularity decide, you had many flamewars and again no one to settle them. And the role of sharing binaries has been taken over by P2P which is definitively distributed.
As for home pages being taken over by Facebook, most people didn't operate their own hosting service to begin with (hello Geocities) but I'll agree this has been centralized. But for the privacy nuts out there, how many of you had a working login system for your friends so you could share something just with them and not the whole world? Or to interact with one person in particular? If you talk about losing privacy, then home pages and public blogs were getting up on the podium and blasting it out over a megaphone for google to index. Home pages covered not even 1/10th of the uses Facebook has.
Regarding webmail, well the ISPs asked for it. If want wanted to change ISP - or had to change ISP as you moved, you had to take the hassle of changing email address and notifying lots of people and update all contact information everywhere and still there'd be people you can't reach or pay just to keep it active. Plus very, very often I couldn't send mail from anywhere else, like say at work or a web cafe or whatever as "relaying was denied". Which meant that everywhere you want, you had to get some local account to send mail. And no IMAP service so you couldn't just peek at it. There were so insanely many good reasons not to use it, I can't even begin to count.
Finally regarding locked down devices, even as "general" as the iPhone and pretty much everything else with a CPU is I consider it more of an appliance. It has some need-to-have functions (shame on the alarm clock) and nice-to-have functions (playing Angry Birds) but I'm not killed over the fact that it doesn't do everything. Not really much more than that I have a Wii that only runs what Nintendo wants (I haven't done any homebrew) anyway, it's not like this debate is new. I have my general purpose computing device in a PC running Linux. I know I could probably get one in a mobile form factor too, if I wanted. But in my day-to-day life, an appliance does the job just fine.
I wonder which that are... until earlier this year I was doing consulting in quite a few companies, and it was all Exchange, except two who were migrating off Lotus Notes to Exchange and trying very hard to forget that. Not seen a single instance of OpenOffice either, on the server side it varies but the desktops have inevitably been Windows/Office/Exchange. At least in the good news Firefox has been there instead of or as an alternative to IE, but that's about it.
Formally, yes. In many markets where there are few actors, the market is transparent and the prices can be changed at will you get a very similar behavior anyway. If one starts a price war the others follow and no one is really gaining ground, they just all lose money on it. Even without actually colluding, they may all understand it's in their own best interest not to start such wars to begin with but rather "invite" to higher prices by raising them for a short while and see if others will follow. Perhaps the most obvious example are gas stations very close to each other, it's mostly a single price broadcast on a big billboard and you can be sure it takes only minutes before they know their competition has changed their prices. They follow each other like a man and his shadow.
That's a funny was of saying Linux doesn't have a stable ABI because its architects are crazy.
This is about a bit more than the kernel ABI flamewar. The binary blobs don't just interact with the kernel but are pretty much all over the graphics stack. If you change the X server they stop working, while the open source drivers depend on a more recent X server. If you want to change this, you need to create a Linux equivalent of WDDM, the new graphics driver model that came with Vista and caused tons of grief even though both nVidia and ATI had tons of people working on it. It would take a huge effort specifying up an ABI through the entire stack that is ultimately very little relevant to the open source Intel, AMD and noveau projects.
I have a stable and sizable economy, right up until the enemy surrounds its first cities throwing me to way below -10 in unhappiness reducing production to 1/10th which is like a 90% drop in GDP. Since this makes it all but impossible to build happiness-improving structures or courthouses, your empire is basically dead in the water for 20-30 turns while everyone else builds buildings and units and wonders. Even building pretty much every happiness-generating building and wonder I can find, gathering all the luxury resources I can find and trading with city states for others I've found that my empire consumes it as quickly as I can find them and any large scale war - not just capturing a border town - is complete disaster.
There's really only one rule about failed sequels: 1) Don't ruin the parts that make it fun.
Like for example recently in Civilization 5 one of the things that made it fun in Civ 1-4 was to go on military conquest. A war could be led roughly as long as you had troops, though you did have to deal with riots and rebellion and occupied cities liberating themselves. In Civ 5, they pretty much killed it. If you "charge up" your military to go on a large campaign, you'll go so far into unhappiness which kills all your production in your entire empire that you'll never recover. Everything became a tedious balance of not being able to attack enough even though the enemies defenses had crumbled and their cities were ripe for the taking. It doesn't even remotely come close to reality, if you played WWII in Civ 5 then Nazi Germany would have collapsed under it's own unhappiness before they even reached Paris. Your empire doesn't become happy by victories, they become depressed. What the fuck? The more I've played it, the more frustrating it becomes. I really hope that for Civ 6 they return to a sane model of war, because that sucks. They did make many other improvements to impress the reviewers, but in the end it's just not that good.
Stock prices are always based on expected future earnings, not the present. Currently Apple is priced to take dominion over the mobile space the same way Microsoft was over the PC, what Microsoft made in the early 90s on MS-DOS abd Windows 1-3 is dwarfed by the earnings they've made 1995-present. Don't forget that image is also the cornerstone of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if people believe Apple will dominate then all the customers and developers go for Apple and it comes true. They're certainly much more attached to reality than say the Facebook pricing, which I'd call insane for a throne of "the place to be" that's changed hands several times.
That makes about as much sense as saying someone investing in cash is gambling, you're putting it in the bank in the hope that you can find a chump who'll give you something more valuable for it at some point in the future. If you want dividends, sell a bit of your stock each year. I can assure you that the relation between stock price and dividends is 1:1, if you increase the dividends you lower the stock price and vice versa. Of course this means you'll be diluted, but that is natural since everyone else is reinvesting their "dividend" and you're not, not unlike how you can either take out your interest from the bank or leave it there for next year.
Apple will never replace Microsoft in the workplace, because they don't want to, there's not nearly as much money in it as replacing Microsoft in the home.
Except that they're not, not really. At least on browser stats Windows is still in the 90%+ range. The iPod wasn't aimed at anything MS had. The iPhone wasn't aimed at anything MS had. Perhaps the iPad, but even that doesn't replace the PC, it makes for a good viewing board but most people will need something with a keyboard. If Apple really wanted to replace Microsoft they'd have to change their Mac lineup considerably, drop prices and go for volume. It doesn't help to compare like for like when you can get laptops, mini-pcs and towers that cost less than half of Apple's cheapest offering. The "halo" effect of people getting an iPod or iPhone or iPad won't be enough to sell Macs on their own, they'd have to get more aggressive than that. I don't think they will, they'd rather surround Microsoft than replace them. But if Mircosoft gets enough chinks in the armor, maybe we can see the PC vs Mac War 2.0.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious, I don't come across too many people who are "that" good and don't have to be diplomatic at least a little.
The question is diplomatic to whom. Many bigshots get a "Don't you know who I am? You're a nobody so when I tell you to jump you jump" attitude. Actually some of the worst think the world consists of kissing ass or being kissed. You very quickly notice what category he thinks you fall into.
Filled out those several times in later stages of job interviews here, though nobody actually calls it an IQ test. The last one was one set of logic tests, one set of math tests and one set of reading comprehension tests. Plus a big personality test - of course nobody calls that one a test as everybody's different. Yeah, right. As if there aren't some qualities that are good and some that are bad...
Pretty bad design to begin with then, if drivers have direct access to internal kernel locks.
A driver could not possibly function without a means to lock and unlock kernel resources. That you obviously have no idea what you're talking about shows you're only trolling.
Well, that's because I've read so many ten page threads where seven of them are two-three persons flaming each other and three pages are discussion from everyone else. Once I hit the first page that's full of nothing but shit I'm more likely to jump to the last page and just give my opinion on the subject. The SNR on most forums is just atrocious because some people can't help getting fired up by each other even though it's like having two people use bigger and bigger megaphones so that no one else in the room can hold a conversation.
And this is one example of why the kernel doesn't have a stable ABI. You can bet tons of unmaintained third party drivers would use the BKL, so you could never get rid of it. From what I've understood purging it from every driver has been a pretty big job and only possible because all the drivers are in the kernel tree.
If you're just doing it for the newer version and don't need to change the code or config it's easier to grab the debs from the Ubuntu Kernel PPA and install.
There is also the anti-quick-fixer who wants to redo everything from scratch, because they can't bear to compromise and create an imperfection. They would rather be 6 months late than offend their own design aesthetic. It takes a lot of maturity to find the right balance between these two extremes.
That's the Perfectionist, which can be an annoying enough character to work with but you can be pretty sure management will curb him and say that's not acceptable. As long as management is neutral or against, most things can be made to work reasonably well. It's only when you have management backing it you can have all reason and sanity fail, because those on top don't like to be told what to do by those on the bottom.
If it was really to be universal SSO that you practically couldn't use the Internet without you can bet the government will have their claws in it so deep, they might as well be running it. So I'd say government run would be better, you'd still have to bend over but at least you're not getting face fucked at the same time.
You know what's worse than a smart person who is lazy and doesn't show up on time? A dumb person that is lazy and doesn't show up on time. All of those traits he listed aren't qualities that solely belong to "smart people."
Of course, but the article is "What would you put up with from a smart person?" If you're keeping a person on payroll that has crappy work habits and is stupid, then you should fire some PHBs or HR.
I can construct a similar case "We have a worker that's always on time, always polite and helpful, always doing his job and not slacking but he's really dense. He needs tons of training, can't think independently and he's not adapting well to new challenges. Being a nice, hard-working guy that delivers like clockwork is important, but how low job output can you really put up with?" That'd be the opposite of this article.
He's actually very smart, but he's always taking the quickest, dirtiest route to the goal. If a hack will do it, he'll do it and make that part of any critical process without a second thought to architecture, interdependencies or anything like that. If a manual workaround is faster, that's what he'll do - or mostly instruct others to do. For that he's known as a problem solver and is in high regard with management, which means nobody gets to rein him in.
What they don't see is that every system runs like crap and is impossible to understand because there's weird kludges upon kludges upon kludges. Many interdependencies are completely irrational, you're afraid to touch anything to break it. That all the manual workarounds are choking the efficiency of everyone else, which are of course blamed when the endless manual steps and "remember this, check that, copy this field to that then save, alter status, execute this job" gets too complicated, error prone and slow. And he's mostly oblivious to this himself, he praises how the quickfixes help us even when quickfixes are the reason it's such a huge and complicated process to begin with. What's saving him is that nobody can do better, because everything is such a clusterfuck they don't understand anything and so full of special cases and other mine fields that the answers are bound to be wrong.
All valid points but I think the grandparent was an answer to the implicit question "Why does everybody and their grandmother feel the need to pirate Photoshop?" It's also the answer to "Why does the people you talk about for some mysterious reason become pros on a very expensive tool." Everybody gets Photoshop because it's "the" tool to get, then naturally if you expand from consumer to prosumer to professional you invest more and more hours in that tool. Finally when it comes down to purchasing time, it's either plunking down for Photoshop or throwing away the thousands of dollars' worth of time you've spent learning it in and out, possibly but not certainly reaching the same level of productivity (because everybody "knows" its best, obviously no other tool can be more effective). It's a pretty easy choice, even easier if you're an employer and you start talking training costs instead of self-study cost.
To provide a counter point: Puzzle Agent is $10 on the PC - originally $20 - and $5 in the app store. Monopoly sells for $40 on the xbox/ps3/wii, $3 as an app. Of course I got both of these for $1 on a Christmas sale, w00t. At least for now it seems the successful formula is to give away a Lite app for free, and charge $1 for the real app. I mean, it's a buck. Nobody really has to think twice about that, at least not anyone carrying an iPhone in the first place. They dominate the top app list like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja etc. and because they're at the top list they get a ton more sales. If you're not in the top 50 it's a damn lot harder to get sales.
So, I'm just imagining running a 330 and D510 with a 64-bit operating system?
No, you didn't read it precisely. I said "an Atom that's not 64 bit capable" not "an Atom since they aren't 64 bit capable". The earliest Atom N2xx series as well as the Z series don't support 64 bit. To be honest, I didn't know they had added support at all though.
Clearly, you have a different idea about what "distributed" means. Do the web's message boards exchange messages with each other?
Well, what we were ultimately talking about was control. And there's no one with control over "message boards" in general any more than there was over usenet, it is distributed among millions of message board operators unlike centralized services like Facebook or Yahoo/Hotmail/GMail. But perhaps "decentralized" would be a more precise word for what I wanted to say.
what "Desktop" user needs that much, or even runs an operating system that can address it?
Need we can discuss, but the price difference between Win7 32 and 64 bit versions is ~0 and I've not heard anyone complain about 64 bit drivers anymore. Mac I think is the same and Linux has of course supported 64 bit forever. Unless you're talking about an Atom that's not 64 bit capable, there's no particular reason not to get an OS capable. That is unless you still want to wipe a new box and install XP...
Good question, I don't have a direct answer however I found a desktop memory review here. Given that they found a 7W difference under full load and power scales to voltage squared (1.64^2) / (1.34^2) = 1.5 you can estimate it draws 14W at low voltage and 21W at high voltage.
Of course in a laptop you'll have a quite different low-power RAM like you have low-power CPUs but I'm guesstimating that yes it's significant. If you have a CPU that draws 30W at max, the RAM probably draws 5-10W too. Divide everything by two for the ULV versions. Also more RAM may mean more get cached so the hard disk rests more and the CPU can get faster back to idle, so the effect on real world power consumption isn't that easy to say.
You are speaking in generalities. Look at what has actually happened on the Internet over time: usenet was driven out by moderated web boards. Home pages were driven out by Facebook. Decentralized email is being driven out by a small handful of huge webmail providers. Now, even the idea of general-purpose computing is being driven out by handhelds and tablets that only run software from a manufacturer-approved "app store."
Usenet wasn't driven out over by one web board, it was driven out by millions of them so it's still distributed. Usenet failed because it had no effective means of dealing with spam and the decline was rapid because everyone had access to the web, usenet server access and quality varied greatly. And that instead of making two web boards and let popularity decide, you had many flamewars and again no one to settle them. And the role of sharing binaries has been taken over by P2P which is definitively distributed.
As for home pages being taken over by Facebook, most people didn't operate their own hosting service to begin with (hello Geocities) but I'll agree this has been centralized. But for the privacy nuts out there, how many of you had a working login system for your friends so you could share something just with them and not the whole world? Or to interact with one person in particular? If you talk about losing privacy, then home pages and public blogs were getting up on the podium and blasting it out over a megaphone for google to index. Home pages covered not even 1/10th of the uses Facebook has.
Regarding webmail, well the ISPs asked for it. If want wanted to change ISP - or had to change ISP as you moved, you had to take the hassle of changing email address and notifying lots of people and update all contact information everywhere and still there'd be people you can't reach or pay just to keep it active. Plus very, very often I couldn't send mail from anywhere else, like say at work or a web cafe or whatever as "relaying was denied". Which meant that everywhere you want, you had to get some local account to send mail. And no IMAP service so you couldn't just peek at it. There were so insanely many good reasons not to use it, I can't even begin to count.
Finally regarding locked down devices, even as "general" as the iPhone and pretty much everything else with a CPU is I consider it more of an appliance. It has some need-to-have functions (shame on the alarm clock) and nice-to-have functions (playing Angry Birds) but I'm not killed over the fact that it doesn't do everything. Not really much more than that I have a Wii that only runs what Nintendo wants (I haven't done any homebrew) anyway, it's not like this debate is new. I have my general purpose computing device in a PC running Linux. I know I could probably get one in a mobile form factor too, if I wanted. But in my day-to-day life, an appliance does the job just fine.
I wonder which that are... until earlier this year I was doing consulting in quite a few companies, and it was all Exchange, except two who were migrating off Lotus Notes to Exchange and trying very hard to forget that. Not seen a single instance of OpenOffice either, on the server side it varies but the desktops have inevitably been Windows/Office/Exchange. At least in the good news Firefox has been there instead of or as an alternative to IE, but that's about it.
Formally, yes. In many markets where there are few actors, the market is transparent and the prices can be changed at will you get a very similar behavior anyway. If one starts a price war the others follow and no one is really gaining ground, they just all lose money on it. Even without actually colluding, they may all understand it's in their own best interest not to start such wars to begin with but rather "invite" to higher prices by raising them for a short while and see if others will follow. Perhaps the most obvious example are gas stations very close to each other, it's mostly a single price broadcast on a big billboard and you can be sure it takes only minutes before they know their competition has changed their prices. They follow each other like a man and his shadow.
That's a funny was of saying Linux doesn't have a stable ABI because its architects are crazy.
This is about a bit more than the kernel ABI flamewar. The binary blobs don't just interact with the kernel but are pretty much all over the graphics stack. If you change the X server they stop working, while the open source drivers depend on a more recent X server. If you want to change this, you need to create a Linux equivalent of WDDM, the new graphics driver model that came with Vista and caused tons of grief even though both nVidia and ATI had tons of people working on it. It would take a huge effort specifying up an ABI through the entire stack that is ultimately very little relevant to the open source Intel, AMD and noveau projects.
I have a stable and sizable economy, right up until the enemy surrounds its first cities throwing me to way below -10 in unhappiness reducing production to 1/10th which is like a 90% drop in GDP. Since this makes it all but impossible to build happiness-improving structures or courthouses, your empire is basically dead in the water for 20-30 turns while everyone else builds buildings and units and wonders. Even building pretty much every happiness-generating building and wonder I can find, gathering all the luxury resources I can find and trading with city states for others I've found that my empire consumes it as quickly as I can find them and any large scale war - not just capturing a border town - is complete disaster.
There's really only one rule about failed sequels:
1) Don't ruin the parts that make it fun.
Like for example recently in Civilization 5 one of the things that made it fun in Civ 1-4 was to go on military conquest. A war could be led roughly as long as you had troops, though you did have to deal with riots and rebellion and occupied cities liberating themselves. In Civ 5, they pretty much killed it. If you "charge up" your military to go on a large campaign, you'll go so far into unhappiness which kills all your production in your entire empire that you'll never recover. Everything became a tedious balance of not being able to attack enough even though the enemies defenses had crumbled and their cities were ripe for the taking. It doesn't even remotely come close to reality, if you played WWII in Civ 5 then Nazi Germany would have collapsed under it's own unhappiness before they even reached Paris. Your empire doesn't become happy by victories, they become depressed. What the fuck? The more I've played it, the more frustrating it becomes. I really hope that for Civ 6 they return to a sane model of war, because that sucks. They did make many other improvements to impress the reviewers, but in the end it's just not that good.
Stock prices are always based on expected future earnings, not the present. Currently Apple is priced to take dominion over the mobile space the same way Microsoft was over the PC, what Microsoft made in the early 90s on MS-DOS abd Windows 1-3 is dwarfed by the earnings they've made 1995-present. Don't forget that image is also the cornerstone of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if people believe Apple will dominate then all the customers and developers go for Apple and it comes true. They're certainly much more attached to reality than say the Facebook pricing, which I'd call insane for a throne of "the place to be" that's changed hands several times.
That makes about as much sense as saying someone investing in cash is gambling, you're putting it in the bank in the hope that you can find a chump who'll give you something more valuable for it at some point in the future. If you want dividends, sell a bit of your stock each year. I can assure you that the relation between stock price and dividends is 1:1, if you increase the dividends you lower the stock price and vice versa. Of course this means you'll be diluted, but that is natural since everyone else is reinvesting their "dividend" and you're not, not unlike how you can either take out your interest from the bank or leave it there for next year.
Apple will never replace Microsoft in the workplace, because they don't want to, there's not nearly as much money in it as replacing Microsoft in the home.
Except that they're not, not really. At least on browser stats Windows is still in the 90%+ range. The iPod wasn't aimed at anything MS had. The iPhone wasn't aimed at anything MS had. Perhaps the iPad, but even that doesn't replace the PC, it makes for a good viewing board but most people will need something with a keyboard. If Apple really wanted to replace Microsoft they'd have to change their Mac lineup considerably, drop prices and go for volume. It doesn't help to compare like for like when you can get laptops, mini-pcs and towers that cost less than half of Apple's cheapest offering. The "halo" effect of people getting an iPod or iPhone or iPad won't be enough to sell Macs on their own, they'd have to get more aggressive than that. I don't think they will, they'd rather surround Microsoft than replace them. But if Mircosoft gets enough chinks in the armor, maybe we can see the PC vs Mac War 2.0.