. Apple would be better off using commodity hardware and spending their money on improving other areas of the user experience.
Apple's CPUs are worse than those in similar priced Androids. The way they keep up in practice is because they are absolutely custom to iOS and the device. Those worse CPUs allow for a much lower power draw and that allows for a smaller battery with better battery life than Android.
While you are correct that there are some people who will buy it regardless of what it built with, those days are fading, as many people are fed up with the slow pace of change in the Apple phone arena
iPhone 4S moved to dual core and introduce a new voice system iPhone 5 changed screen size and introduced tremendously new and complex manufacturing processes to cut weight iPhone 5S introduces an entirely new interface for their operating system which allows applications a host of new features
Apple is big and rich and designs ARM chips from scratch for 2 years now. They have also worked closely on the fabrication process. They aren't dumb they are about as knowledge as anyone outside fabrication as a primary business could be.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'send stuff to moderation'.
Frequently 2006-7 if an admin got involved and saw a disagreement they would encourage or outright file a request for Mediation Committee or Mediation Cabal (which I notice is now shutdown). Mediation Cabal ran about 80-90 in getting success.
Also I see no significant difference between ANI in 2007 [wikipedia.org] and ANI now.
I suggest you look at how often articles won at ANI and how infrequently it was used against quality articles. Having to get through ANI has become a standard process for every article. In 2007 most articles (that were sane) didn't go through ANI at all.
Ask anyone who was editing then. The stuff that happened in 2006 / 7 never would be allowed today. I was constantly able to get good quality articles from knowledgeable insiders and later get them properly referenced. Today that's simply not allowed.
Also, show me the most recent indef block for edit warring that wasn't repealed on request, and you think shouldn't have happened.
I don't know anything recent. I don't even know how to query indef bans. Just look at indef bans for long standing users those were mostly non existent 6 years ago.
Did you get that somewhere, or is that from memory?
From memory. I noticed the huge differences starting in 2009. I had to work very hard to get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Palin even when it became clear she was remaining a national figure well after the election. I had a friend that wanted to right a good article (obituary more or less) and she couldn't without a huge cleanup. BLP wouldn't apply since the person writing the article was a disciple so it wasn't going to be negative.
Are you using a page that indicates the growth in number of articles is slowing down as an argument against that the readership is still growing? That doesn't make sense.
No I'm using it to indicate that the surge in readership is not a sing of a healthy community. That's the point under discussion. Wikipedia might surge in readership for a very long time as the ability of wikipedia to go and thrive dies. Wikipedia has just gotten OS level support in iOS. That's going to send hits through the roof. So what? The issue is whether Wikipedia has a poisonous relationship with its editors. The relationship with the readership is still quite good, no one is arguing that point.
I agree you all are working on it. I just think this is a useful niche to be fully tested and "out of the box" ready with a mac application that formats the USB drive.... For example having a predefined Parallels (a popular Mac VM) downloadable image takes at most a few days and puts you way ahead of other distributions. Moreover the Parallels team would probably be anxious to help and work on this jointly. Heck given this is RedHat they might even distribute the image with Parallels which means Fedora becomes for say 10-15% of all Mac users their "already included Linux".
Take away the incentives for sock puppets and you take away the existence of sock puppets. Sock puppet accounts exist because consensus has been abandoned. In a consensus environment sock puppets don't accomplish anything. They aren't (generally) well established editors and the well established editor isn't asked to yield. Rather a consensus is aimed for.
If you mean individually what can you do. Nothing. There have been widespread rules and cultural changes which are new user hostile. The board is aware the culture sucks but isn't willing to make the changes they need to get a healthy culture. This would be easy to do, but they want other things more. Jimmy Wales' crack down on any hint on wheel warring being a good example that they want admin unity more than a friendly culture. Admins used to be able to disagree and thus well established editors, even those who weren't admins didn't end up isolated and indefblocked.
jbolden: summary bans instead of arbitration committee process Martin: are you pleading for authority figures now? While ArbCom was given the ability to ban users in case the community can't figure out whether or not to ban, that responsibility lies primarily with the community, not with ArbCom. Letting ArbCom decide on all possible bans is exactly the power that we don't want to give it, but want to retain with the community
3+ years ago if a person was going to be banned there was either an extensive community process (very rare) or an arbcom ruling. They got due process. Today admins apply indef bans rather freely. I don't mind arbcom doing bans they showed discretion and insured due process, I do mind indef blocks to well established editors under almost any circumstances.
Similarly admins sent stuff to moderation in 2007 they didn't ban people for "edit warring". If an admin was going to get involved in an article they had a responsibility to ensure the process was followed. The number of articles that was locked was like 20-100 not thousands.
jbolden: the victory of deletionists 5 years ago Martin: it's slowly turning around, fortunately. Check AfD and compare to say 3 years back.
Maybe I am so bitter I don't invest any energy anymore. And some of the problems were compensated for by wikias. The 200 articles on Ashley Simpson would now be on a dedicated Ashley Simpson wiki. That being said the fights over linking to these resources are still rather common. I'd say in general deletionists win most battles. In 2007 the assumption was all content was good and the burden was to prove otherwise.
Wikipedia has more readers than ever. An optimist could say it aimed to change the world and it has. But there is a long way to go. Broader inclusion criteria and a better editing climate is certainly part of that.
The issue for the distribution is putting all the pieces together. For example you need to be running a newer kernel. You have to have the right drivers for the video. You have the extension to X to support switching video cards (or at least some sort of menu option to the end user). You need to have the high DPI support desktops. You need to have EFI on the live media. Etc...
I can only guess that you are not one of the people who drop many tens of thousands on Enterprise Linux distributions, because you don't seem to know a lot about them, nor how they're used.
Well you would be wrong.
See, many of our dozens of Red Hat servers and VMs have users on them. Users who run graphical applications.
Not client server apps. The server OS doesn't matter.
As for RHEL desktop you are right about that one. Didn't realize they had brought that product back.
I can. The drop downs are editable as well. The visual editor is based off editable templates. Those probably should be locked to admin only but there is no reason that adding a new template in common usage couldn't result in a visual editor change.
Look I hate wikipedia's culture it is dreadful. But there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who edit articles successfully. I'd say 90-95% of my edits to an article are not rolled back and I hate the place, I'm certainly not one of the special 100.
. Say, I find myself in the same theoretical situation: I think that some accounts are related and vote-stacking. What should I do that can both relief my concerns and not scare away the new editor(s) in case I'm wrong? After being a Wikipedian for quite a long time, it becomes increasingly difficult to properly understand the environment for new users.
I've been around a while. The way this was done was genuine consensus. A well regarded established editor who disagreed was not disciplined and there was not a majority rules coalition. The downside was that fringe material got into articles, though usually marked as fringe. The upside was that articles reflected the wikipedia community. Today articles more closely represent the academic / business / mainstream context and that's accomplished by threatening editors.
The visual editor will help some as it lowers the barrier for small edits. Small edits can make a huge difference to articles so that's a good thing.
You do have authority figures. the victory of deletionists 5 years ago the change of admin from being a shop keeping function to a privileged clique summary bans instead of arbitration committee process
etc... has turned Wikipedia into a thoroughly unpleasant community. And there is no question there is a hierarchy in place and cruel indifferent one at that. Wikipedia was growing incredibly 2004-8. It aimed to change the world and it was. 2008-2013 it is a pretty cool website.
This is/. . Last time I checked we talk to engineers and they are combative. When you want to talk to PR people go to a trade show. I think Adam has the right to say what he thinks and if that means believing the critics are morons, and calling them morons so be it.
He doesn't represent anything more than his own opinion. Anyone who judges a product's customer facing personality based on the personality of the engineering team lacks the experience to lead RFI/RFP processes.
I think Gnome 3 is really cool as well. I think the Gnome developers did the right in the direction they went. I think the Gnome political structures did a truly terrible job in alienating Canonical and creating a fork as well as not doing something like Mate and keeping Gnome 2 a viable option during the rough initial years for Gnome 3.
Mostly though/. has become ultra conservative, they don't like any sorts of changes whether it be Gnome3, Metro, IPV6.... 12 years of IT stagnation have created a generation of IT workers who like stagnation and support stagnation. It is a pity.
Most of the people whining about Gnome aren't the people who drop many thousands on enterprise Linux distributions. RedHat doesn't make a desktop product anymore, they aren't RedHat's customers.
Can I hit you with something to take back to the Fedora team. Right now there is no Live Linux distribution that is set to run well on Retina. There really is no Linux that is targeting Apple since Yellow Dog dropped out after the switch away from PPC chips. Apple currently sells about 85-90% of all computers over $1k, that is they own the enthusiast market. In particular they have a nice chunk of the system admins.
From a marketing perspective I think it makes a lot of sense to make the experience on retina smooth. That is a one click installer for an image that can DDed onto a USB key to use on the retina. I think you have most of the pieces and creating an app that does nothing more than a basic partition plus DD is probably under a days work for a Cocoa programmer.
Exactly. The Palladium model was better in that it had isolation. You could run untrusted and the trusted part didn't have to care. This is very much like what Blackberry Balance allows for.
You are shifting the topic from "is it niche" to "is it stuff you want". This is Microsoft's direction for the laptop market. Honestly the hinge is about an extra $150 that's more expensive than the upgrade to the screen Microsoft may very well have to stop having uniform OEM pricing to help shift the market. Microsoft probably should have made Windows 8 touch screen mandatory. A good deal of their backlash is from allowing people to run it on the wrong hardware. Very similar to what happened to Vista. They are unlikely to repeat that mistake with 9.
If you don't agree with their direction fine. But that is a mainstream direction touchscreens massively outsell non touchscreens. There is not going to be a large distinction between tablets and laptops for the Windows/x86 market going forward.
As for smudges, good quality screens are easy to clean and somewhat smudge resistant.
It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place
MySQL Inc owned the copyright to the MySQL database, every line of code. Their business model was to give away a GPL version and sell a commercial version. Sun bought MySQL when Oracle began to move towards Linux and break somewhat with Solaris / Sun as their primary system. Oracle bought Sun and thus owns copyright to the MySQL code.
You're assuming business strategy change competency from a convicted monopolist
To get to be a monopoly requires business strategy competency. They didn't get where they are by accident.
that's been coasting for a decade+ on their cash cows?
There big gains this decade have been on the enterprise server side: Dynamics, SQL Server moving up market, Sharepoint. That's not coasting that's growing.
Why are Amazon and Microsoft so gung-ho on selling products (Win8.1, Kindle Fire) that have baked-in un-removable advertising?
I'm not sure what you mean Amazon. Amazon sells advertising for a small subsidy and lets the end user buy it off. I think they are indifferent. Microsoft is under tremendous margin pressure on consumer / small business. They need to likely sell hardware below cost to beat Android. And to do that they need another source of financing. Advertising makes sense.
The conversation wasn't about desktops generally and certainly not about laptops generally. It was usually about multi-monitor. Laptops don't have to change much to be an excellent fit for windows 8. The touchpad has to be good not cheap. They need a high quality monitor hinge. They need a capacitive or resistive-capactive touchscreen. That's about it. Desktops need some sort of more complex tablet oriented interface in addition to a large screen or screens like a cintiq.
As for Linux Microsoft focusing firmly on the mid-range could be great for Linux. Linux could end up owning the low end, traditional market. While the Linux desktop was not successful against Microsoft when they were focused this is very different.
We know that adware on lowend PCs was worth $75-90 per unit. I'd assume advertising revenue on the OS would be worth at least a little more. OEM windows 8 + Office was $120. Which means its entirely possible the ad revenue might be enough for Microsoft to make Windows 8 + Office (home) a free (as in beer) OS with the advertising. Or maybe even a slight subsidy like $50 for OEMs on systems over $500.
WinRT is much cheaper closer to $30. There we could be looking at something like a $100-150 subsidy which might be almost all the hardware cost. You could be looking at fairly good WinRT systems for $99 or $199.
I have no information but as idle speculation this might be a very very interesting change of strategy for home / small business.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's CPUs are worse than those in similar priced Androids. The way they keep up in practice is because they are absolutely custom to iOS and the device. Those worse CPUs allow for a much lower power draw and that allows for a smaller battery with better battery life than Android.
That is the user experience.
iPhone 4S moved to dual core and introduce a new voice system
iPhone 5 changed screen size and introduced tremendously new and complex manufacturing processes to cut weight
iPhone 5S introduces an entirely new interface for their operating system which allows applications a host of new features
What slow place?
Apple is big and rich and designs ARM chips from scratch for 2 years now. They have also worked closely on the fabrication process. They aren't dumb they are about as knowledge as anyone outside fabrication as a primary business could be.
Frequently 2006-7 if an admin got involved and saw a disagreement they would encourage or outright file a request for Mediation Committee or Mediation Cabal (which I notice is now shutdown). Mediation Cabal ran about 80-90 in getting success.
I suggest you look at how often articles won at ANI and how infrequently it was used against quality articles. Having to get through ANI has become a standard process for every article. In 2007 most articles (that were sane) didn't go through ANI at all.
Ask anyone who was editing then. The stuff that happened in 2006 / 7 never would be allowed today. I was constantly able to get good quality articles from knowledgeable insiders and later get them properly referenced. Today that's simply not allowed.
I don't know anything recent. I don't even know how to query indef bans. Just look at indef bans for long standing users those were mostly non existent 6 years ago.
From memory. I noticed the huge differences starting in 2009. I had to work very hard to get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Palin even when it became clear she was remaining a national figure well after the election. I had a friend that wanted to right a good article (obituary more or less) and she couldn't without a huge cleanup. BLP wouldn't apply since the person writing the article was a disciple so it wasn't going to be negative.
No I'm using it to indicate that the surge in readership is not a sing of a healthy community. That's the point under discussion. Wikipedia might surge in readership for a very long time as the ability of wikipedia to go and thrive dies. Wikipedia has just gotten OS level support in iOS. That's going to send hits through the roof. So what? The issue is whether Wikipedia has a poisonous relationship with its editors. The relationship with the readership is still quite good, no one is arguing that point.
I agree you all are working on it. I just think this is a useful niche to be fully tested and "out of the box" ready with a mac application that formats the USB drive.... For example having a predefined Parallels (a popular Mac VM) downloadable image takes at most a few days and puts you way ahead of other distributions. Moreover the Parallels team would probably be anxious to help and work on this jointly. Heck given this is RedHat they might even distribute the image with Parallels which means Fedora becomes for say 10-15% of all Mac users their "already included Linux".
Take away the incentives for sock puppets and you take away the existence of sock puppets. Sock puppet accounts exist because consensus has been abandoned. In a consensus environment sock puppets don't accomplish anything. They aren't (generally) well established editors and the well established editor isn't asked to yield. Rather a consensus is aimed for.
If you mean individually what can you do. Nothing. There have been widespread rules and cultural changes which are new user hostile. The board is aware the culture sucks but isn't willing to make the changes they need to get a healthy culture. This would be easy to do, but they want other things more. Jimmy Wales' crack down on any hint on wheel warring being a good example that they want admin unity more than a friendly culture. Admins used to be able to disagree and thus well established editors, even those who weren't admins didn't end up isolated and indefblocked.
3+ years ago if a person was going to be banned there was either an extensive community process (very rare) or an arbcom ruling. They got due process. Today admins apply indef bans rather freely. I don't mind arbcom doing bans they showed discretion and insured due process, I do mind indef blocks to well established editors under almost any circumstances.
Similarly admins sent stuff to moderation in 2007 they didn't ban people for "edit warring". If an admin was going to get involved in an article they had a responsibility to ensure the process was followed. The number of articles that was locked was like 20-100 not thousands.
Maybe I am so bitter I don't invest any energy anymore. And some of the problems were compensated for by wikias. The 200 articles on Ashley Simpson would now be on a dedicated Ashley Simpson wiki. That being said the fights over linking to these resources are still rather common. I'd say in general deletionists win most battles. In 2007 the assumption was all content was good and the burden was to prove otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#Annual_growth_rate
The issue for the distribution is putting all the pieces together. For example you need to be running a newer kernel. You have to have the right drivers for the video. You have the extension to X to support switching video cards (or at least some sort of menu option to the end user). You need to have the high DPI support desktops. You need to have EFI on the live media. Etc...
Well you would be wrong.
Not client server apps. The server OS doesn't matter.
As for RHEL desktop you are right about that one. Didn't realize they had brought that product back.
I can. The drop downs are editable as well. The visual editor is based off editable templates. Those probably should be locked to admin only but there is no reason that adding a new template in common usage couldn't result in a visual editor change.
Look I hate wikipedia's culture it is dreadful. But there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who edit articles successfully. I'd say 90-95% of my edits to an article are not rolled back and I hate the place, I'm certainly not one of the special 100.
I've been around a while. The way this was done was genuine consensus. A well regarded established editor who disagreed was not disciplined and there was not a majority rules coalition. The downside was that fringe material got into articles, though usually marked as fringe. The upside was that articles reflected the wikipedia community. Today articles more closely represent the academic / business / mainstream context and that's accomplished by threatening editors.
The visual editor will help some as it lowers the barrier for small edits. Small edits can make a huge difference to articles so that's a good thing.
You do have authority figures.
the victory of deletionists 5 years ago
the change of admin from being a shop keeping function to a privileged clique
summary bans instead of arbitration committee process
etc... has turned Wikipedia into a thoroughly unpleasant community. And there is no question there is a hierarchy in place and cruel indifferent one at that. Wikipedia was growing incredibly 2004-8. It aimed to change the world and it was. 2008-2013 it is a pretty cool website.
This is /. . Last time I checked we talk to engineers and they are combative. When you want to talk to PR people go to a trade show. I think Adam has the right to say what he thinks and if that means believing the critics are morons, and calling them morons so be it.
He doesn't represent anything more than his own opinion. Anyone who judges a product's customer facing personality based on the personality of the engineering team lacks the experience to lead RFI/RFP processes.
I think Gnome 3 is really cool as well. I think the Gnome developers did the right in the direction they went. I think the Gnome political structures did a truly terrible job in alienating Canonical and creating a fork as well as not doing something like Mate and keeping Gnome 2 a viable option during the rough initial years for Gnome 3.
Mostly though /. has become ultra conservative, they don't like any sorts of changes whether it be Gnome3, Metro, IPV6.... 12 years of IT stagnation have created a generation of IT workers who like stagnation and support stagnation. It is a pity.
It is completely unfair and you are right to object. You aren't a PR person and you are perfectly entitled to tell the truth.
Most of the people whining about Gnome aren't the people who drop many thousands on enterprise Linux distributions. RedHat doesn't make a desktop product anymore, they aren't RedHat's customers.
Can I hit you with something to take back to the Fedora team. Right now there is no Live Linux distribution that is set to run well on Retina. There really is no Linux that is targeting Apple since Yellow Dog dropped out after the switch away from PPC chips. Apple currently sells about 85-90% of all computers over $1k, that is they own the enthusiast market. In particular they have a nice chunk of the system admins.
From a marketing perspective I think it makes a lot of sense to make the experience on retina smooth. That is a one click installer for an image that can DDed onto a USB key to use on the retina. I think you have most of the pieces and creating an app that does nothing more than a basic partition plus DD is probably under a days work for a Cocoa programmer.
Exactly. The Palladium model was better in that it had isolation. You could run untrusted and the trusted part didn't have to care. This is very much like what Blackberry Balance allows for.
Right but the goal was much more than just this.
You are shifting the topic from "is it niche" to "is it stuff you want". This is Microsoft's direction for the laptop market. Honestly the hinge is about an extra $150 that's more expensive than the upgrade to the screen Microsoft may very well have to stop having uniform OEM pricing to help shift the market. Microsoft probably should have made Windows 8 touch screen mandatory. A good deal of their backlash is from allowing people to run it on the wrong hardware. Very similar to what happened to Vista. They are unlikely to repeat that mistake with 9.
If you don't agree with their direction fine. But that is a mainstream direction touchscreens massively outsell non touchscreens. There is not going to be a large distinction between tablets and laptops for the Windows/x86 market going forward.
As for smudges, good quality screens are easy to clean and somewhat smudge resistant.
MySQL Inc owned the copyright to the MySQL database, every line of code. Their business model was to give away a GPL version and sell a commercial version.
Sun bought MySQL when Oracle began to move towards Linux and break somewhat with Solaris / Sun as their primary system.
Oracle bought Sun and thus owns copyright to the MySQL code.
You're assuming business strategy change competency from a convicted monopolist
To get to be a monopoly requires business strategy competency. They didn't get where they are by accident.
that's been coasting for a decade+ on their cash cows?
There big gains this decade have been on the enterprise server side: Dynamics, SQL Server moving up market, Sharepoint. That's not coasting that's growing.
Why are Amazon and Microsoft so gung-ho on selling products (Win8.1, Kindle Fire) that have baked-in un-removable advertising?
I'm not sure what you mean Amazon. Amazon sells advertising for a small subsidy and lets the end user buy it off. I think they are indifferent.
Microsoft is under tremendous margin pressure on consumer / small business. They need to likely sell hardware below cost to beat Android. And to do that they need another source of financing. Advertising makes sense.
The conversation wasn't about desktops generally and certainly not about laptops generally. It was usually about multi-monitor. Laptops don't have to change much to be an excellent fit for windows 8. The touchpad has to be good not cheap. They need a high quality monitor hinge. They need a capacitive or resistive-capactive touchscreen. That's about it. Desktops need some sort of more complex tablet oriented interface in addition to a large screen or screens like a cintiq.
As for Linux Microsoft focusing firmly on the mid-range could be great for Linux. Linux could end up owning the low end, traditional market. While the Linux desktop was not successful against Microsoft when they were focused this is very different.
We know that adware on lowend PCs was worth $75-90 per unit. I'd assume advertising revenue on the OS would be worth at least a little more. OEM windows 8 + Office was $120. Which means its entirely possible the ad revenue might be enough for Microsoft to make Windows 8 + Office (home) a free (as in beer) OS with the advertising. Or maybe even a slight subsidy like $50 for OEMs on systems over $500.
WinRT is much cheaper closer to $30. There we could be looking at something like a $100-150 subsidy which might be almost all the hardware cost. You could be looking at fairly good WinRT systems for $99 or $199.
I have no information but as idle speculation this might be a very very interesting change of strategy for home / small business.