"insert picture here, don't worry, you'll never appreciate it because you are inferior"
Nothing wrong with "insert picture here"
The "you are inferior" part is absurd.
Just because you cannot appreciate something
does not mean you are inferior, but it does not mean other people owe you something special either.
You may be able to describe the significance
of the picture, and what it depicts,
but by doing so, you have not really done anything that will allow your blind visitor to perceive the art; in other words, you have accomplished almost nothing, and expended significant effort that will only hurt 95% of your audience, by their browser having to download those extra bytes of data.
I am sure there are other modes of expression that are more suitable to blind people, that most sighted people cannot perceive, for example, braille writing.
That does not mean blind people should want to go out of their way to make their expressions accessible to sighted people by printing their work only in Braille, or websites that can only be read with a screen reader that sighted people don't have.
However, I have no problems with them doing so.
As for photography not being a realistic rendition of Mona Lisa: if you look at enough photos by a large enough number of photographers,
you will have an extremely good representation of Mona Lisa.
After all... when you see it, all you will see is a 2D representation anyways.
Pictures on a flat surface can be represented with 100% accuracy using photographs.
The same cannot be said of descriptions of said images.
Yes, because improving the access for the blind requires hurting everyone else. Or, it could be more like the DVD options for the vision impaired where sighted people get the DVD without any reductions, and the vision impaired select the audio track that includes a description of the on-screen events.
Funny.. I never saw a DVD that had options like that. They must not be required to do that, or perhaps blind people pay extra for a special version of the DVD prepared by someone else?
That improves access for the vision impaired while not hurting the experience for any sighted person.
Can you explain what possible audible "description" could allow blind people to access Visual artwork?
Take for example... The Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's Starry Night.
It seems impossible to appreciate the work without actually seeing it.
Anyone trying to describe it is just giving you some sort of interpretation, which is inherently incomplete, and basically devoid of value, because the art itself is something richer that can only truly be appreciated or "accessed" by direct viewing
If this becomes mandatory.... some "accessibility auditing firms" are going to have a field day dragging sites through checklists, while consultants tell management what to make designers change, and some very expensive software is probably going to get sold for "WCAG Validation".
There could be an entire "ADA Web Content Accessibility Compliance Industry" crop up, to complement the "Sarbanes Oxley Security Industry"
They created the high rise with stairs-only and are whining that adding an elevator to their walk-up is expensive.
Most websites are not an equivalent to a high rise.
They are more like an equivalent to a 2 or 3 story building with less than 3000 feet per story.
e.g. The facilities that are exempt under ADA guidelines from a requirement to have elevator or ramp access to higher stories.
Then you have sites like Slashdot, Amazon, Blogger, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, MySpace, Apple.com, IMDb, Wikipedia.
Those sites are the web equivalent to a shopping center or high-rise.
By the way.... I will be very interested to see what Flickr or Youtube's plan would be to "become accessible", if ADA guidelines required them to do so.
It's kind of like demanding laser light shows, and art like the Mona Lisa be modified so blind people can perceive the artistic creative vision, or altered by suppressing all visual elements so non-blind people cannot have better access
This calls for requiring all braille signs to have a radioactive particle or two, and for blind people to carry some sort of Geiger counter or "braille sign detector" that beeps at them different tones when near a braille sign, depending on its distance and height.
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
Didn't you see the caveat ? (not allowed to be used in production)."
This is not only closed source, but it is also restricted usages.
If the license says you cannot use it in production, then how is it any good for the average person?
You might as well switch to Windows 2008 R2. At least you can use that in production, and you get software updates+patches+support, without paying thousands a year per seat.
I admit to being many years out of the "state of the art" of virtualization, but the last time I checked, all VM's ran the guest at the lowest security level, and trapped all invalid instructions. These were then emulated by the VM hosts -- so, for instance, the guest would think it was running in privileged hardware mode
There are some hypervisors that will do that, but it's inefficient, and would be a strategy for obsolete software-based emulation.
Modern general purpose hypervisors such as vSphere are generally deployed utilizing CPU-assisted virtualization, intel VT-x and AMD-V.
The CPU takes care of the virtualization.
There are some security considerations the VMM has to take care of, such as access to I/O devices.
But the guest OSes run without privilege.
Virtualized by the hardware, not emulated by software trapping any instructions or syscalls.
Unless you have actually worked at a particular job, you don't really know whether you like it or not.
Someone who has not even learned the.NET programming language, is definitely not qualified to say whether or not they would like doing.NET programming
It seems the author has cast aside.NET because it's a "Microsoft Language", without any actual understanding of the language itself.
Of course programming in.NET does not even necessarily imply using any Microsoft tools, since there are open source and third-party development tools for.NET.
And there is even Mono. It's easy to build and run.NET apps without touching any Microsoft-written software
I've deliberately omitted.NET — I have no desire to do the Microsoft languages."
Stop right there. You need to learn something, and it's not just a programming language.
If you want to get a good job, you need to learn a new attitude, and stop putting idealistic considerations ahead of what is in your best interest
educationally and financially.
Deciding not to learn something because you have an uniformed preconceived opinion about it,
is a form of close-mindedness that will not serve you well, and managers/interviewers won't tolerate it,
if you tell them you intentionally avoided learning.NET.
It doesn't make sense... it doesn't seem rational, seems totally idealistic and self-destructive.
Its kind of like wanting a job as a PC repairman, but idealogically refusing to learn about Windows,
and wondering why you get so little business supporting Linux workstation installs.
If you want to get a good job and don't have one, the first thing you need to learn is that
You learn what the market demands.
And that: the skills the market demands of programmers have is more important than
the programmers' personal views on which languages are "best", "okay", or "ugly",
when it comes to getting a job.
I'm sure it will always be possible to get a job as a PHP/C++/Java programmer still,
you just have to be really good at what you do -- because there are still a lot of PHP/C++/Java programmers,
competing for a waning pool of jobs available to them.
So basically... your choices are Learn.NET, because it's what is most in demand, be content waiting longer to get a job
for something less in demand, or switch to another field.
As to the general question of what languages to learn: I would strongly urge you to learn.NET, ASP.NET, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS, MooTools, ProtoType, Google Web Toolkit, Dojo, Python Django, Zope, TurboGears,
Ruby, Rails, Perl, HTML::Mason, ColdFusion / CFML .
You can get six months in a federal jail for posting ridiculous threats posting on 4chan though. It seems to me that the main difference between the US and the UK is that you would get punished much more severely in the US.
4chan? You can potentially get six years or more in federal jail for visiting 4chan.
Or for that matter, any website that allows users to post images without review or filtering.
Due to the fact anything goes on/b/, sheer anarchy, people can post any text or pictures they want, and there exist pictures in the world that it is such a crime for your computer to retrieve. It is against site rules to post those pictures, but according to Wikipedia, the rule is not obeyed and is a running joke.
People can wind up in jail, and an unemployable social pariah when you get out,
just because they visited 4chan on the wrong day.
And note, 4chan is not special in that regard..... any unknown website is in theory a possible risk
It occurs problems with ensuring 'free speech' might not be the worst things wrong with society and government.
When there exist [potentially] more innocent people in society than those making threats, who are subject to even more severe action.
Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.
I thought they were the Buddhists that pity those who call them hippies, because it means they are regressing back to lower states of enlightenment, and will probably be reincarnated as a lower animal, plant, or powerless hungry ghost, next cycle.
Meaning... they are hurting themselves more than they hurt the Buddhist.
Makes sense.... not only does the collector retain ownership in that case, but the museum can be responsible for keeping it in pristine condition.
The collector looks good to the public because they are being nice and allowing the museum to display the work.
If the collector wants to sell... the museum is also free advertising in regards to the nature of the work, and the fact it exists and might be available for purchase later.
Its content belongs to the people, but not the original physical papers.
Physical papers generally belong to whoever possessed them and imprinted things upon them,
maybe their employer in some cases --- but definitely not the public.
Turings' work is subject to copyright, therefore won't be public domain for a long time, but the essential content of these things WAS published.
Its not like they contain data or text that are not already available through Turings' published works
In 1956 the UK government had no reason to kill him, in fact it never did - quite the opposite. Instead they treated a great man with indifference and contempt because of his sexuality.
They killed him by being a culpable, responsible party to his suicide.
Culpable, because the government chose what actions to take.
Responsible, because the actions (therapy) that were taken caused his suicide.
So basically, yes, the government murdered him, as in they caused and were responsible for his death.
The fact that he committed the physical act against himself does not relieve the government at all of the fact they are responsible and caused what happened.
'CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, Environment,
and Run-time Security Vulnerabilities involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration.
Remember... sometimes system libraries have vulnerabilities and really do to need to be obsoleted or updated,
even if the software that uses them doesn't receive updates too often.
That's why there's this whole concept of major and minor version numbers for libraries.
Packaging it up with runtime is no better than static linking, and this therefore problematic.
It's bad enough to have to update system libraries, thankfully package management handles that.
If CDE is bringing its own environment to the table, it is obviously not working with the package management system.
CDE would be much more useful and safe (not a huge security risk like it would be in its current state) if it prepared distro-specific scripts to use the vendor's package management system to correctly install dependencies,
which would be managed and updated as needed from there on out.
Not that I'm that knowledgeable about virtualization software, but I can't imagine that they would run priviledged code in the virtual machine as priviledged code on the host CPU, so it doesn't matter anyways.
In a VM running under hardware-based virtualization (AMD-V / VT-x) ,
privileged code in the guest generally does run at privilege level 0, also referred to as (privileged), kernel mode, or ultimate privilege. This is required to implement a protected mode operating system; a modern guest OS needs to be able to implement its kernel mode, user mode, and have the hardware implement restrictions on its user processes, typically by reducing its user processes to RING 3, or RING1 / 2, which are permission levels the OS can configure to specify the allowed privileges. However, code in the VM is running as a guest OS.
It means the guest OS must run with ultimate privilege.
To address this, CPU manufacturers created a new privilege level called "ring -1".
When the virtualization feature is active in hardware, the virtual machine monitor runs at ring -1,
and runs guest OS code at ring 0.
As Intel puts it: VT-x and VT-i allow guest software to run at its intended privilege level. Guest software is constrained, not by privilege level, but because for VT-x it runs in VMX non-root operation
In a software-emulated VM, instructions are translated and rewritten by the hypervisors anyways,
and the hypervisor itself generally runs in Ring 3 user mode not kernel mode in that case,
It is up to the hypervisor to protect itself.
"(Gubermint) Upgrade a router to a T1600? You want to do WHAT?"
Sorry, that's not on our list of approved $routers_whose_manufacturer_donated_the_most_to_our_campaign. You're going to have to use a Cisco 2600s for your core routing, just like all your competitors.
In 5 or 6 years, we might let you upgrade to the ASR 1000, but the approval process is still in the early stages.
The carriers are missing out on the opportunity to sell an "unlocking service",
or phones that can hold multiple SIM cards and be enabled for additional carriers, with an "unlocking ticket"
purchased from the primary provider, as long as their subscription with the locked provider is still active
When the dominant model is to buy the phone with the plan, why should the networks pay extra for the millions of phones they ship with plans when the only benefit is to make it easier for the customer to switch to a competitor? Better for them to ship a cheap phone that can't use all the competitors' services.
Because they attract customers to the cell phone company to buy their service, by offering a phone.
They don't need to ship a cheap phone because they lock the customer into a contract
that requires them to keep service long enough for them to have massive profits, and the original cost of the phone is negligible by comparison.
The "locking of the phone" is just a deceptive/sneaky way of keeping them, because people do not always realize at first
that the phones are locked to their service provider
In actuality, the new SP will happily offer them a phone, as part of the plan and lock them in too.
This makes the manufacturers of the device happy, because it means the end user has to essentially
re-buy their phone when switching, and they have a good chance of buying another one from the same manufacturer who the locked phone came from..
[....] It's still not easy to do a good touch interface, but nobody is trying to make legacy UI apps work.
And that was the beginning of the end for Windows.
The vendor lock-in based on backwards compatibility began to end when PC hardware evolved beyond the need for keyboards and mice,
and the users were finally compelled to abandon their favorite Windows 9x-based apps once and for all.
Slashdot Mirror
"insert picture here, don't worry, you'll never appreciate it because you are inferior"
Nothing wrong with "insert picture here"
The "you are inferior" part is absurd. Just because you cannot appreciate something does not mean you are inferior, but it does not mean other people owe you something special either.
You may be able to describe the significance of the picture, and what it depicts, but by doing so, you have not really done anything that will allow your blind visitor to perceive the art; in other words, you have accomplished almost nothing, and expended significant effort that will only hurt 95% of your audience, by their browser having to download those extra bytes of data.
I am sure there are other modes of expression that are more suitable to blind people, that most sighted people cannot perceive, for example, braille writing.
That does not mean blind people should want to go out of their way to make their expressions accessible to sighted people by printing their work only in Braille, or websites that can only be read with a screen reader that sighted people don't have.
However, I have no problems with them doing so.
As for photography not being a realistic rendition of Mona Lisa: if you look at enough photos by a large enough number of photographers, you will have an extremely good representation of Mona Lisa.
After all... when you see it, all you will see is a 2D representation anyways. Pictures on a flat surface can be represented with 100% accuracy using photographs.
The same cannot be said of descriptions of said images.
Yes, because improving the access for the blind requires hurting everyone else.
Gee.. I wonder why anyone would ever think that.
Yes, because improving the access for the blind requires hurting everyone else. Or, it could be more like the DVD options for the vision impaired where sighted people get the DVD without any reductions, and the vision impaired select the audio track that includes a description of the on-screen events.
Funny.. I never saw a DVD that had options like that. They must not be required to do that, or perhaps blind people pay extra for a special version of the DVD prepared by someone else?
That improves access for the vision impaired while not hurting the experience for any sighted person.
Can you explain what possible audible "description" could allow blind people to access Visual artwork?
Take for example... The Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's Starry Night.
It seems impossible to appreciate the work without actually seeing it. Anyone trying to describe it is just giving you some sort of interpretation, which is inherently incomplete, and basically devoid of value, because the art itself is something richer that can only truly be appreciated or "accessed" by direct viewing
If this becomes mandatory.... some "accessibility auditing firms" are going to have a field day dragging sites through checklists, while consultants tell management what to make designers change, and some very expensive software is probably going to get sold for "WCAG Validation".
There could be an entire "ADA Web Content Accessibility Compliance Industry" crop up, to complement the "Sarbanes Oxley Security Industry"
They created the high rise with stairs-only and are whining that adding an elevator to their walk-up is expensive.
Most websites are not an equivalent to a high rise. They are more like an equivalent to a 2 or 3 story building with less than 3000 feet per story.
e.g. The facilities that are exempt under ADA guidelines from a requirement to have elevator or ramp access to higher stories.
Then you have sites like Slashdot, Amazon, Blogger, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, MySpace, Apple.com, IMDb, Wikipedia. Those sites are the web equivalent to a shopping center or high-rise.
By the way.... I will be very interested to see what Flickr or Youtube's plan would be to "become accessible", if ADA guidelines required them to do so.
It's kind of like demanding laser light shows, and art like the Mona Lisa be modified so blind people can perceive the artistic creative vision, or altered by suppressing all visual elements so non-blind people cannot have better access
This calls for requiring all braille signs to have a radioactive particle or two, and for blind people to carry some sort of Geiger counter or "braille sign detector" that beeps at them different tones when near a braille sign, depending on its distance and height.
They're not killing Solaris as an OS.
They are in effect killing Solaris as an open platform and making it more like Windows.
Wasn't Oracle going to kill all good stuff from Sun according to the slashdot hivemind?
Didn't you see the caveat ? (not allowed to be used in production)."
This is not only closed source, but it is also restricted usages.
If the license says you cannot use it in production, then how is it any good for the average person?
You might as well switch to Windows 2008 R2. At least you can use that in production, and you get software updates+patches+support, without paying thousands a year per seat.
I admit to being many years out of the "state of the art" of virtualization, but the last time I checked, all VM's ran the guest at the lowest security level, and trapped all invalid instructions. These were then emulated by the VM hosts -- so, for instance, the guest would think it was running in privileged hardware mode
There are some hypervisors that will do that, but it's inefficient, and would be a strategy for obsolete software-based emulation.
Modern general purpose hypervisors such as vSphere are generally deployed utilizing CPU-assisted virtualization, intel VT-x and AMD-V.
The CPU takes care of the virtualization. There are some security considerations the VMM has to take care of, such as access to I/O devices.
But the guest OSes run without privilege. Virtualized by the hardware, not emulated by software trapping any instructions or syscalls.
and work at jobs that I don't even like
Unless you have actually worked at a particular job, you don't really know whether you like it or not.
Someone who has not even learned the .NET programming language, is definitely not qualified to say whether or not they would like doing .NET programming
It seems the author has cast aside .NET because it's a "Microsoft Language", without any actual understanding of the language itself.
Of course programming in .NET does not even necessarily imply using any Microsoft tools, since there are open source and third-party development tools for .NET.
And there is even Mono. It's easy to build and run .NET apps without touching any Microsoft-written software
I've deliberately omitted .NET — I have no desire to do the Microsoft languages."
Stop right there. You need to learn something, and it's not just a programming language. If you want to get a good job, you need to learn a new attitude, and stop putting idealistic considerations ahead of what is in your best interest educationally and financially.
Deciding not to learn something because you have an uniformed preconceived opinion about it, is a form of close-mindedness that will not serve you well, and managers/interviewers won't tolerate it, if you tell them you intentionally avoided learning .NET.
It doesn't make sense... it doesn't seem rational, seems totally idealistic and self-destructive.
Its kind of like wanting a job as a PC repairman, but idealogically refusing to learn about Windows,
and wondering why you get so little business supporting Linux workstation installs.
If you want to get a good job and don't have one, the first thing you need to learn is that You learn what the market demands. And that: the skills the market demands of programmers have is more important than the programmers' personal views on which languages are "best", "okay", or "ugly", when it comes to getting a job.
I'm sure it will always be possible to get a job as a PHP/C++/Java programmer still, you just have to be really good at what you do -- because there are still a lot of PHP/C++/Java programmers, competing for a waning pool of jobs available to them.
So basically... your choices are Learn .NET, because it's what is most in demand, be content waiting longer to get a job
for something less in demand, or switch to another field.
As to the general question of what languages to learn: I would strongly urge you to learn .NET, ASP.NET, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS, MooTools, ProtoType, Google Web Toolkit, Dojo, Python Django, Zope, TurboGears,
Ruby, Rails, Perl, HTML::Mason, ColdFusion / CFML .
It doesn't have to fool humans (unfortunately). It just has to fool Googlebot
You can get six months in a federal jail for posting ridiculous threats posting on 4chan though. It seems to me that the main difference between the US and the UK is that you would get punished much more severely in the US.
4chan? You can potentially get six years or more in federal jail for visiting 4chan. Or for that matter, any website that allows users to post images without review or filtering.
Due to the fact anything goes on /b/, sheer anarchy, people can post any text or pictures they want, and there exist pictures in the world that it is such a crime for your computer to retrieve. It is against site rules to post those pictures, but according to Wikipedia, the rule is not obeyed and is a running joke.
People can wind up in jail, and an unemployable social pariah when you get out, just because they visited 4chan on the wrong day.
And note, 4chan is not special in that regard..... any unknown website is in theory a possible risk
It occurs problems with ensuring 'free speech' might not be the worst things wrong with society and government. When there exist [potentially] more innocent people in society than those making threats, who are subject to even more severe action.
Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.
I thought they were the Buddhists that pity those who call them hippies, because it means they are regressing back to lower states of enlightenment, and will probably be reincarnated as a lower animal, plant, or powerless hungry ghost, next cycle.
Meaning... they are hurting themselves more than they hurt the Buddhist.
Makes sense.... not only does the collector retain ownership in that case, but the museum can be responsible for keeping it in pristine condition. The collector looks good to the public because they are being nice and allowing the museum to display the work.
If the collector wants to sell... the museum is also free advertising in regards to the nature of the work, and the fact it exists and might be available for purchase later.
(How would you feel about your own writing being auctioned, but easily available otherwise?)
That depends on who is auctioning them.
If they were being sold by my spouse / kids, because they really needed the money, I would be all for it.
Otherwise, I would rather have it burned than auctioned.
Its content belongs to the people, but not the original physical papers. Physical papers generally belong to whoever possessed them and imprinted things upon them, maybe their employer in some cases --- but definitely not the public.
Turings' work is subject to copyright, therefore won't be public domain for a long time, but the essential content of these things WAS published. Its not like they contain data or text that are not already available through Turings' published works
Don't be silly. It would take away the incentive for Mr Turing's estate to release any new papers.
There, fixed it for ya
but rather as a side effect of bigotry and/or indifference.
In other words, gross negligence.
They committed what we would call today a hate crime.
If you have a duty of care, commit gross negligence, and a person dies, you would be heading to jail with charges of manslaughter.
The governments' killing of the man, by causing his own suicide, is no different.
They knew or should have known, the ramifications of horome therapy, before forcing anyone into it.
Even when punishing criminals, the government has a duty to not cause them to die or to permanently cause them to want to die.
In 1956 the UK government had no reason to kill him, in fact it never did - quite the opposite. Instead they treated a great man with indifference and contempt because of his sexuality.
They killed him by being a culpable, responsible party to his suicide.
Culpable, because the government chose what actions to take.
Responsible, because the actions (therapy) that were taken caused his suicide.
So basically, yes, the government murdered him, as in they caused and were responsible for his death. The fact that he committed the physical act against himself does not relieve the government at all of the fact they are responsible and caused what happened.
'CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, Environment, and Run-time Security Vulnerabilities involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration.
Remember... sometimes system libraries have vulnerabilities and really do to need to be obsoleted or updated, even if the software that uses them doesn't receive updates too often.
That's why there's this whole concept of major and minor version numbers for libraries.
Packaging it up with runtime is no better than static linking, and this therefore problematic.
It's bad enough to have to update system libraries, thankfully package management handles that.
If CDE is bringing its own environment to the table, it is obviously not working with the package management system.
CDE would be much more useful and safe (not a huge security risk like it would be in its current state) if it prepared distro-specific scripts to use the vendor's package management system to correctly install dependencies, which would be managed and updated as needed from there on out.
Not that I'm that knowledgeable about virtualization software, but I can't imagine that they would run priviledged code in the virtual machine as priviledged code on the host CPU, so it doesn't matter anyways.
In a VM running under hardware-based virtualization (AMD-V / VT-x) , privileged code in the guest generally does run at privilege level 0, also referred to as (privileged), kernel mode, or ultimate privilege. This is required to implement a protected mode operating system; a modern guest OS needs to be able to implement its kernel mode, user mode, and have the hardware implement restrictions on its user processes, typically by reducing its user processes to RING 3, or RING1 / 2, which are permission levels the OS can configure to specify the allowed privileges. However, code in the VM is running as a guest OS.
It means the guest OS must run with ultimate privilege. To address this, CPU manufacturers created a new privilege level called "ring -1". When the virtualization feature is active in hardware, the virtual machine monitor runs at ring -1, and runs guest OS code at ring 0.
As Intel puts it: VT-x and VT-i allow guest software to run at its intended privilege level. Guest software is constrained, not by privilege level, but because for VT-x it runs in VMX non-root operation
In a software-emulated VM, instructions are translated and rewritten by the hypervisors anyways, and the hypervisor itself generally runs in Ring 3 user mode not kernel mode in that case, It is up to the hypervisor to protect itself.
"(Gubermint) Upgrade a router to a T1600? You want to do WHAT?"
Sorry, that's not on our list of approved $routers_whose_manufacturer_donated_the_most_to_our_campaign. You're going to have to use a Cisco 2600s for your core routing, just like all your competitors. In 5 or 6 years, we might let you upgrade to the ASR 1000, but the approval process is still in the early stages.
carriers that don't sell unlocked phones
The carriers are missing out on the opportunity to sell an "unlocking service", or phones that can hold multiple SIM cards and be enabled for additional carriers, with an "unlocking ticket" purchased from the primary provider, as long as their subscription with the locked provider is still active
When the dominant model is to buy the phone with the plan, why should the networks pay extra for the millions of phones they ship with plans when the only benefit is to make it easier for the customer to switch to a competitor? Better for them to ship a cheap phone that can't use all the competitors' services.
Because they attract customers to the cell phone company to buy their service, by offering a phone. They don't need to ship a cheap phone because they lock the customer into a contract that requires them to keep service long enough for them to have massive profits, and the original cost of the phone is negligible by comparison.
The "locking of the phone" is just a deceptive/sneaky way of keeping them, because people do not always realize at first that the phones are locked to their service provider
In actuality, the new SP will happily offer them a phone, as part of the plan and lock them in too.
This makes the manufacturers of the device happy, because it means the end user has to essentially re-buy their phone when switching, and they have a good chance of buying another one from the same manufacturer who the locked phone came from ..
[....] It's still not easy to do a good touch interface, but nobody is trying to make legacy UI apps work.
And that was the beginning of the end for Windows.
The vendor lock-in based on backwards compatibility began to end when PC hardware evolved beyond the need for keyboards and mice, and the users were finally compelled to abandon their favorite Windows 9x-based apps once and for all.