15:1 is not accurate overall, though I can't say what your personal sample looks like. Worldwide Apple has about 15% of the smartphone market, which makes it a bit less than 7:1 Android. In the US, Apple has about 40% of the market; 52% is Android and the rest is all other platforms (Windows Phone, people still hanging on to their BlackBerry).
Corporations can also do you direct and consequential harm. #1 on the list is credit bureaus. Putting a bit of disinformation in your credit report can make it impossible for you to open a bank account, get a credit card (which also blocks you from doing a bunch of things like renting a car), or get a job. Max Headroom (the TV series) predicted it back in 1987 - episode 4, "Security Systems".
They couldn't afford to offer the service at the price they do without de-duplication. That's what makes it feasible to offer so much storage for so little money - they're not actually storing anywhere near the number of bits that they appear to be storing.
Back to the Future Part II was prophetic. It was just a year off. The Cubs won the World Series, Biff Tannen is the President-elect, and you can buy hoverboards at Target. Sadly the boards don't actually hover.
The Internet Archive already uses strong backup practices, which almost certainly include offline copies. But until now all of them have been in the US, so that does not take care of the political risk. Making a mirror of the archive in Canada does. It exposes the archive to a new set of political risks, but having two locations decreases the overall risk level.
Fortunately, the SATA interface standard has been stable for a long time. Most computers built during the time period we are discussing use it, and drives are still readily available. There were enhancements in going from SATA 1 to 2 and then 3, but they are backward compatible. It's true that you might be forced to install a larger disk drive than the one that originally came with the system because smaller drives are no longer made, but the customer is unlikely to complain.
At the distant edge of the relevant time period there were still some systems that used PATA drives. Getting those is a challenge now. The problem is easily solved for desktop computers with a PATA-SATA bridge board, but there isn't any space to put such a board in a laptop.
Microsoft is working hard on being non-obsolete. Windows may fade away, but Azure and related cloud-based products will continue. That future Microsoft will be a very different company with a different product line, but the prospects for their continuing existence look good.
Three months wouldn't be the end of the world. But Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pro for three YEARS. The GPU options, in particular, are seriously behind what is now available. (They also haven't updated the Mac Mini for a while, but that's not a core product for them.)
I'm not sure that Apple is ever going to update the Mac Pro. The new Macbook Pro falls far short of what some high end users want; even more than the ports, the lack of an option for more than 16GB RAM or a truly high performance GPU are problems and suggest that Apple has abandoned high end design professionals. (Sorry, the Radeon Pro 460, the fastest available GPU, can't even match a GTX 1060, let alone the GTX 1080 that you can get in some Windows laptops.) The Mac Pro is pretty much a system that is ONLY for design professionals.
The kiosk design and all-proprietary parts are a dead end for that kind of system in any case. It means that the system quickly falls behind competitors and is costly to maintain and upgrade. What Apple should build for that market is a tower that has basically the same hardware as a high end Hackintosh with few or no proprietary Apple components, but with the official Apple seal of approval. Choose a quality motherboard from a major maker (Apple likes to use Xeon processors and ECC memory in the Mac Pro, so perhaps something from a server motherboard maker like Tyan), a standard ATX-style power supply from a major maker, one or two high end NVidia video cards, and off the shelf SSDs, hard drives, and optical drives (yes, some design professionals still need those). Offer single and dual CPU socket systems, memory configurations up to at least 64GB, and multiple terabytes of storage. Apple won't sell vast numbers of them (they also don't sell vast numbers of the Mac Pro) but the people who need a computer like that will be happy.
You don't have to pay for extended support out to ten years, and sometimes longer. (Microsoft guarantees a minimum of ten years, but has lengthened the extended support period for some OSes.) You have to pay after that, as you currently do if you want support for XP or Vista.
Basically, mainstream support means that the OS continues to get some new features, new versions of bundled Microsoft software like the web browser, and support for new hardware. Extended support means that it doesn't get those things, but still get bug fixes and security updates.
Basically, extended support means no new features. (It also means no new versions of Microsoft web browsers but the major third party ones usually continue to offer new versions until the OS goes completely out of support.) Bug fixes, security fixes, antivirus updates, and the malicious software removal updates continue. Users can still safely use systems that are on extended support.
Microsoft offers a minimum of ten years of support of each OS release, though updating to the most recent service pack is required. (Windows 8.1 is treated as a service pack for 8.0 and the upgrade is therefore mandatory to continue to receive support.) That's quite a few years better than Apple is doing. Support of hardware repairs is another matter, but Windows systems generally contain fewer proprietary components so it's usually possible to continue to repair them for a long time. Desktop systems are especially good in that regard and can generally be repaired for at least ten years - perhaps not with official parts from the manufacturer, but with other parts that will work.
I'm another person who hates it. I've lost too much text by accident because of it. But then I don't really like trackpads at all; whenever possible I use a mouse instead. I'll use the trackpad for casual use on the go but not for any serious computing.
If you are an individual trying to get such a system repaired, an appropriate CPU can usually be found as a used part, or it can be salvaged from a broken motherboard that is being sold for parts. A large company like Apple, on the other hand, can't do that; they can't get a sufficiently large and reliable source of repair components.
You don't actually need a warehouse of old hard drives. You just replace the drive with a current model. Same for optical drives for the systems that have them. You do need a stock of older CPUs and memory, though.
When a product really becomes unmaintainable (or unmanufacturable) is when an entire class of component goes out of production. That's why Apple had to stop making the iPod Classic, despite the fact that some people still wanted to buy them; nobody was making those miniature hard drives any more. The wholesale price of flash memory has fallen to a low enough level that Apple could have put an SSD in and continued to make the Classic, except that they charge much higher prices for the same amount of flash in their other product lines, and offering it at a lower price in that iPod would expose the lie of Apple's pricing.
At the lower end, there are the Cypress PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP chips. Those combine ARM cores with a small amount of programmable logic - not enough to constitute a full-blown FPGA but enough for many purposes. They are inexpensive, and all the digital I/O pins are not only 5V tolerant but 5V capable. (The processor core runs at 1.8V but the chips include level translation.)
Excellent point about Tesla's attitude. When Ford had a car (the Pinto) that had a catch-on-fire problem that could have been fixed with a stronger shield for the fuel compartment, they tried to sweep the problem under the rug rather than fix the cars. When Tesla had a car with a catch-on-fire problem that could be fixed with a stronger shield for the battery compartment, they immediately built a stronger shield and recalled all their cars to install it.
Of course, they did have the lesson of the Pinto to draw on and they had a lot fewer cars to fix. It will be instructive to see how Tesla changes or doesn't change as they move toward building high volume cars like the Model 3.
I should also add that getting an ID costs money just about everywhere, even if you don't count the expenses and lost wages. That means there is effectively a poll tax. Poll taxes became unconstitutional with the ratification of the twenty-fourth amendment to the Constitution.
Because it's not dead simple to get one. For quite a few people, it is expensive and time consuming. It may involve losing an entire day's work to visit the relevant office. It may involve travel that is difficult for a disabled person. For some it's even worse than that, because they need birth documents that either never existed (children of undocumented people who were not born in hospitals - all children born in the US are natural born citizens regardless of whether their parents are citizens or are even legally permitted to be here) or were lost years ago (numerous locations have had fires or other disasters in the places where official records are kept so the original birth record may no longer exist).
We can't easily fix the problem because there are constitutional barriers. We can't create a mandatory national ID that would presumably be equally easy for everybody to get because that would violate the Constitution; instead we have to depend on state IDs. (We do make people get social security cards now, but those are not admissible for identification for voting because they have no picture, and police cannot require you to present them.) Many states know there are barriers to some people getting IDs and intentionally leave those barriers in place, because removing them would make it easier for people that are considered undesirable by the people in power to get IDs. Not coincidentally, they're usually the same states that are pushing hardest for voter ID laws.
It's true that nowadays you need an ID to get a legitimate job or open a bank account. But there are people who work under the table, are homemakers, are unemployed, have retired, or who started their job before the ID requirement existed. There are people who are bankless, or who opened their bank account before the ID requirement. You need an ID to drive a car legally but not everybody drives. In theory you can be asked to show an ID to buy alcoholic beverages, but people who do not look young are frequently not asked to do so and some people don't drink.
Note that the elderly are highly likely to fall into many of those categories, not to mention having health problems that make it difficult for them to jump the bureaucratic hoops to get an ID. There are 90 year old people who have voted in every election for 50 years who have found themselves disenfranchised by voter ID laws.
Trump himself may or may not be moderate; he has refused to say anything meaningful on a lot of issues and has said conflicting things on others, so it's hard to know exactly what he thinks. But the people he has put on his transition team and the people that he has proposed for cabinet positions are anything but, and that is what will matter in a Trump administration.
Apple got into the router business because they wanted to facilitate the move to wireless connectivity for their laptops, and nobody else was making routers that were designed to be easy to set up and use. Other companies have since picked up that mission and run with it, so Apple no longer has anything unique to offer. And Apple can't get premium pricing without that since they can't sell routers as a fashion statement; normally people don't see them.
That's what they're doing here in the US; offering to buy back all the cars. 500,000 of them, and it's expected to cost VW $15 billion.
Worldwide, VW has sold over 10 MILLION cars that are affected by the emissions problems. (That's not counting the Audis that are the subject of the latest emissions scandal.) If the cost of buying them back is comparable to the cars in the US, it would cost the company 300 BILLION dollars to buy them all. I doubt the company can afford to do that; they would probably have to close their doors, and the buyers would only get a partial refund. Might be the right thing to do, but I can't imagine the German government going along.
But... what has actually been added is support for the Guarani locale. The I should have an acute accent over it rather than a dot, but Slashdot doesn't support Unicode.
Slashdot Mirror
15:1 is not accurate overall, though I can't say what your personal sample looks like. Worldwide Apple has about 15% of the smartphone market, which makes it a bit less than 7:1 Android. In the US, Apple has about 40% of the market; 52% is Android and the rest is all other platforms (Windows Phone, people still hanging on to their BlackBerry).
I have seen plenty of Surfaces in the wild. I even recently spotted a DJ using a Surface Book rather than a computer with a glowing fruit on the back.
Corporations can also do you direct and consequential harm. #1 on the list is credit bureaus. Putting a bit of disinformation in your credit report can make it impossible for you to open a bank account, get a credit card (which also blocks you from doing a bunch of things like renting a car), or get a job. Max Headroom (the TV series) predicted it back in 1987 - episode 4, "Security Systems".
They couldn't afford to offer the service at the price they do without de-duplication. That's what makes it feasible to offer so much storage for so little money - they're not actually storing anywhere near the number of bits that they appear to be storing.
Did you know that Biff Tannen was actually inspired by Donald Trump? http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
Back to the Future Part II was prophetic. It was just a year off. The Cubs won the World Series, Biff Tannen is the President-elect, and you can buy hoverboards at Target. Sadly the boards don't actually hover.
The Internet Archive already uses strong backup practices, which almost certainly include offline copies. But until now all of them have been in the US, so that does not take care of the political risk. Making a mirror of the archive in Canada does. It exposes the archive to a new set of political risks, but having two locations decreases the overall risk level.
Fortunately, the SATA interface standard has been stable for a long time. Most computers built during the time period we are discussing use it, and drives are still readily available. There were enhancements in going from SATA 1 to 2 and then 3, but they are backward compatible. It's true that you might be forced to install a larger disk drive than the one that originally came with the system because smaller drives are no longer made, but the customer is unlikely to complain.
At the distant edge of the relevant time period there were still some systems that used PATA drives. Getting those is a challenge now. The problem is easily solved for desktop computers with a PATA-SATA bridge board, but there isn't any space to put such a board in a laptop.
Microsoft is working hard on being non-obsolete. Windows may fade away, but Azure and related cloud-based products will continue. That future Microsoft will be a very different company with a different product line, but the prospects for their continuing existence look good.
Three months wouldn't be the end of the world. But Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pro for three YEARS. The GPU options, in particular, are seriously behind what is now available. (They also haven't updated the Mac Mini for a while, but that's not a core product for them.)
I'm not sure that Apple is ever going to update the Mac Pro. The new Macbook Pro falls far short of what some high end users want; even more than the ports, the lack of an option for more than 16GB RAM or a truly high performance GPU are problems and suggest that Apple has abandoned high end design professionals. (Sorry, the Radeon Pro 460, the fastest available GPU, can't even match a GTX 1060, let alone the GTX 1080 that you can get in some Windows laptops.) The Mac Pro is pretty much a system that is ONLY for design professionals.
The kiosk design and all-proprietary parts are a dead end for that kind of system in any case. It means that the system quickly falls behind competitors and is costly to maintain and upgrade. What Apple should build for that market is a tower that has basically the same hardware as a high end Hackintosh with few or no proprietary Apple components, but with the official Apple seal of approval. Choose a quality motherboard from a major maker (Apple likes to use Xeon processors and ECC memory in the Mac Pro, so perhaps something from a server motherboard maker like Tyan), a standard ATX-style power supply from a major maker, one or two high end NVidia video cards, and off the shelf SSDs, hard drives, and optical drives (yes, some design professionals still need those). Offer single and dual CPU socket systems, memory configurations up to at least 64GB, and multiple terabytes of storage. Apple won't sell vast numbers of them (they also don't sell vast numbers of the Mac Pro) but the people who need a computer like that will be happy.
You don't have to pay for extended support out to ten years, and sometimes longer. (Microsoft guarantees a minimum of ten years, but has lengthened the extended support period for some OSes.) You have to pay after that, as you currently do if you want support for XP or Vista.
Basically, mainstream support means that the OS continues to get some new features, new versions of bundled Microsoft software like the web browser, and support for new hardware. Extended support means that it doesn't get those things, but still get bug fixes and security updates.
Basically, extended support means no new features. (It also means no new versions of Microsoft web browsers but the major third party ones usually continue to offer new versions until the OS goes completely out of support.) Bug fixes, security fixes, antivirus updates, and the malicious software removal updates continue. Users can still safely use systems that are on extended support.
Microsoft offers a minimum of ten years of support of each OS release, though updating to the most recent service pack is required. (Windows 8.1 is treated as a service pack for 8.0 and the upgrade is therefore mandatory to continue to receive support.) That's quite a few years better than Apple is doing. Support of hardware repairs is another matter, but Windows systems generally contain fewer proprietary components so it's usually possible to continue to repair them for a long time. Desktop systems are especially good in that regard and can generally be repaired for at least ten years - perhaps not with official parts from the manufacturer, but with other parts that will work.
I'm another person who hates it. I've lost too much text by accident because of it. But then I don't really like trackpads at all; whenever possible I use a mouse instead. I'll use the trackpad for casual use on the go but not for any serious computing.
If you are an individual trying to get such a system repaired, an appropriate CPU can usually be found as a used part, or it can be salvaged from a broken motherboard that is being sold for parts. A large company like Apple, on the other hand, can't do that; they can't get a sufficiently large and reliable source of repair components.
You don't actually need a warehouse of old hard drives. You just replace the drive with a current model. Same for optical drives for the systems that have them. You do need a stock of older CPUs and memory, though.
When a product really becomes unmaintainable (or unmanufacturable) is when an entire class of component goes out of production. That's why Apple had to stop making the iPod Classic, despite the fact that some people still wanted to buy them; nobody was making those miniature hard drives any more. The wholesale price of flash memory has fallen to a low enough level that Apple could have put an SSD in and continued to make the Classic, except that they charge much higher prices for the same amount of flash in their other product lines, and offering it at a lower price in that iPod would expose the lie of Apple's pricing.
At least a QFN can be hand soldered. There are packages that are literally impossible to hand solder, like a BGA.
At the lower end, there are the Cypress PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP chips. Those combine ARM cores with a small amount of programmable logic - not enough to constitute a full-blown FPGA but enough for many purposes. They are inexpensive, and all the digital I/O pins are not only 5V tolerant but 5V capable. (The processor core runs at 1.8V but the chips include level translation.)
Excellent point about Tesla's attitude. When Ford had a car (the Pinto) that had a catch-on-fire problem that could have been fixed with a stronger shield for the fuel compartment, they tried to sweep the problem under the rug rather than fix the cars. When Tesla had a car with a catch-on-fire problem that could be fixed with a stronger shield for the battery compartment, they immediately built a stronger shield and recalled all their cars to install it.
Of course, they did have the lesson of the Pinto to draw on and they had a lot fewer cars to fix. It will be instructive to see how Tesla changes or doesn't change as they move toward building high volume cars like the Model 3.
I should also add that getting an ID costs money just about everywhere, even if you don't count the expenses and lost wages. That means there is effectively a poll tax. Poll taxes became unconstitutional with the ratification of the twenty-fourth amendment to the Constitution.
Because it's not dead simple to get one. For quite a few people, it is expensive and time consuming. It may involve losing an entire day's work to visit the relevant office. It may involve travel that is difficult for a disabled person. For some it's even worse than that, because they need birth documents that either never existed (children of undocumented people who were not born in hospitals - all children born in the US are natural born citizens regardless of whether their parents are citizens or are even legally permitted to be here) or were lost years ago (numerous locations have had fires or other disasters in the places where official records are kept so the original birth record may no longer exist).
We can't easily fix the problem because there are constitutional barriers. We can't create a mandatory national ID that would presumably be equally easy for everybody to get because that would violate the Constitution; instead we have to depend on state IDs. (We do make people get social security cards now, but those are not admissible for identification for voting because they have no picture, and police cannot require you to present them.) Many states know there are barriers to some people getting IDs and intentionally leave those barriers in place, because removing them would make it easier for people that are considered undesirable by the people in power to get IDs. Not coincidentally, they're usually the same states that are pushing hardest for voter ID laws.
It's true that nowadays you need an ID to get a legitimate job or open a bank account. But there are people who work under the table, are homemakers, are unemployed, have retired, or who started their job before the ID requirement existed. There are people who are bankless, or who opened their bank account before the ID requirement. You need an ID to drive a car legally but not everybody drives. In theory you can be asked to show an ID to buy alcoholic beverages, but people who do not look young are frequently not asked to do so and some people don't drink.
Note that the elderly are highly likely to fall into many of those categories, not to mention having health problems that make it difficult for them to jump the bureaucratic hoops to get an ID. There are 90 year old people who have voted in every election for 50 years who have found themselves disenfranchised by voter ID laws.
Trump himself may or may not be moderate; he has refused to say anything meaningful on a lot of issues and has said conflicting things on others, so it's hard to know exactly what he thinks. But the people he has put on his transition team and the people that he has proposed for cabinet positions are anything but, and that is what will matter in a Trump administration.
Apple got into the router business because they wanted to facilitate the move to wireless connectivity for their laptops, and nobody else was making routers that were designed to be easy to set up and use. Other companies have since picked up that mission and run with it, so Apple no longer has anything unique to offer. And Apple can't get premium pricing without that since they can't sell routers as a fashion statement; normally people don't see them.
That's what they're doing here in the US; offering to buy back all the cars. 500,000 of them, and it's expected to cost VW $15 billion.
Worldwide, VW has sold over 10 MILLION cars that are affected by the emissions problems. (That's not counting the Audis that are the subject of the latest emissions scandal.) If the cost of buying them back is comparable to the cars in the US, it would cost the company 300 BILLION dollars to buy them all. I doubt the company can afford to do that; they would probably have to close their doors, and the buyers would only get a partial refund. Might be the right thing to do, but I can't imagine the German government going along.
Having too many Steve Bannons threatens civic society. Too many is any number greater than zero.
But... what has actually been added is support for the Guarani locale. The I should have an acute accent over it rather than a dot, but Slashdot doesn't support Unicode.