So the path to making better software is to make it more obfuscated and less user friendly? Making it easier for those poor dudes is what MS has been doing for 20 years, and why they finally made some inroads into the market.
20 years old today have no clue how to use a command line unless they are from the 1% of users that have a linux desktop at home. We see, in a programme with about 200 students, one or two kids a year like that (and this is in CS). I had to do a class thing yesterday which was basically an 'intro to our unix systems' for non CS kids. Basic stuff, make a directory, list contents that kinda thing. None of them had the slightest clue how to do anything on their own. I was starting from scratch, completely, they didn't even know what to search for on the web, or that such commands still existed. These are kids in physics, math, biochem, and they didn't know how to make a directory without a GUI. Admittedly, that's why we're teaching them the CLI stuff. But they won't use it. It might take longer, but they've grown up with a GUI, so they'll use a GUI. My suspicion is their immediate impression of linux was 'antiquated'. That's not accurate of course, but that was the perception we created. MS should realize who their market is, and make better software and tools for them.
I've done a fair bit of business with Europe. Europe has better protection, but ultimately the same applies. If you're gone (in europe especially for mat leave) and they hire a replacement while you're gone, and the replacement does better than you, expect to find yourself looking for work. It's enough of a hassle to fire someone in europe (and obviously I'm speaking broadly) that small losses of business performance aren't the end of the world.
I wasn't saying this is good. Believe me, I've been the guy doing the 'replacing' as a consultant. I come in and I solve a problem, and then I'm onto the next place. I can usually solve problems faster than the onsight people. But the onsight people actually have some sort of a plan for what's going to happen, and have some organizational structure to their IT shop or whatever. When you lay them off, in the short term, not much changes. They call me, I fix random stuff, and move on. And then eventually the infrastructure can't hold up to future demands of the business, and my 4 hour a week fixing things for you suddenly is inadequate, and now your company is in real trouble.
But it's a reality of employment. If your boss doesn't think you're valuable, and can get rid of you they will. In europe this is usually accomplished less directly. You simply 'expand' into the US or elsewhere and don't bother replacing employees who retire, that sort of thing. The best thing I ever saw was GE shut down for 2 weeks, (where they weren't actually shut down, they hired a bunch of people to come in and do yearly maintenance) every year, and everyone took vacation time. A handful of people were expected to be 'reachable' of course, but no one was going to punish you for not being there when no one else was there.
In Japan, you want to be in the office as long as your boss is in the office. Same sort of deal. It's a stupid system but if you want your job, that's what you do.
Ya I wasn't clear. I mean if your job is done without significantly loss to the company. If your loss is noticeable but not catastrophic you're in good shape. If no one noticed you were gone, you're in trouble. If you're out long enough they have to hire a replacement, and the replacement is better at your job than you were, well ya... you're doomed.
Right, but when a huge chunk of your market is going to be businesses with 15-20 employees and no dedicated IT person, or if they have a dedicated IT person they're not actually a trained IT person, having a CLI only is utterly braindead. Part of the appeal of a windows server is that the poor dude who is asked to do all the IT stuff, but isn't actually an IT guy has a much lower barrier to entry in understanding 'Windows that happens to be a server' than trying to understand 'LAMP'.
Now admittedly, MS may be envisioning this is a 'off in the cloud' scenario, where even small businesses buy time on a professionally run server where that barrier to entry is immaterial. But that's a significant misread of a big blob of their market. All the attention this has been getting should have told them that.
I'm a professional CS guy. I'm getting a PhD in comp sci, and I used to be a dedicated IT guy. I consult and teach people how to do this stuff. When I consult, sometimes even at big outfits (think something like CBS or a hospital) their little offices or division that handle something in particular have a guy on staff who is the least technically incompetent person. They might have a degree in history, but be the youngest person on staff, or they're a gamer and know more about computers than say... anyone else. But they look at a CLI (correctly from their perspective) as something that died 20 years ago, and they have no desire to learn. Even kids in IT programmes are generally unprepared for this. And making them uninspired about your product before they've even started working doesn't seem like a great plan.
Windows server is less about technology and more about brand familiarity. Obviously Microsoft is completely unaware of this.
No one is ever officially punished for taking vacation time.
If you go away on your (earned) vacation, maternity leave, whatever, and it turns out that your job can be done by someone else, worse still, done better, you will come back and find yourself laid off 'for lack of work'.
That's not the US. That's just business. Everywhere. Without union protection that's worse, and the US it's relatively easy to fire/lay off people. But not that much easier.
What makes you think they don't have to disclose which patents are covered? They don't have to discuss it publicly, but I'm sure MS buries LG and Samsung and Google et. al. in paperwork about just which patents are infringed on.
But neither party really wants to give up how they're doing things. Samsung doesn't really want to say 'we might be violating this patent on an implementation of some icon technology' because that tells all of their competitors that might be a better way to do things, and might be worth getting a licence for.
You don't usually patent code, you patent ideas and algorithms - just because I can easily change the code doesn't necessarily mean I've changed the algorithm, and if I picked the previous algorithm for a reason re-inventing it might be tricky if I want to match the performance. You don't patent a specific implementation of an idea.
The main patents that always come up here, is in being able to understand long file names on Windows. See, if you're only ever running linux by itself that would be one thing, but if you want to connect it to a windows machine, whether that's an Android device, which is sync'd with windows, or with a Linux computer that is talking to Windows over the network you're now directly into something that is reasonable for MS to patent, which is how to talk to their own product. And probably 90% (or some clearly knowable number to the manufacturers) of Android devices connect to a windows machine.
That isn't to suggest there probably aren't other patents at play. Microsoft makes a whole operating system, which is a competing product to linux. If I make a car, or an aircraft or whatever and someone comes along making cars, or aircraft, or whatever, they're directly competing with my business, which is why there are patents anyway.
Telsa motors learned the hard way that if you sell 1000 cars none of the big auto makers give a shit, but if you look like you're going to sell 100 000 cars they want you to licence their windshield wipers (seriously), along with thousands of other things they patented. And suddenly your price points aren't what you were expecting. All the big auto makers have exchanges back and forth, which probably include money, and if you're going to try and be a big player in the market, you need to deal with them. MS is no different. You may not *like* their operating system, but it is an operating system, they have thousands of people working on it, and they have (where software is patentable) a right to protect their innovations.
It's not microsofts job to tell you what patents you're infringing. It's your job when building a product to acquire the licences. I'm not sure there's a good way to build that system to fairly burden anyone, but that's the one you have, so you do your due diligence or you take your chances with lawyers. It really doesn't matter what patents are infringing to you anyway, unless you're a lawyer for someone in these negotiations, you can claim a patent is obvious and shouldn't be patentable all you want, your opinion is worth less than a comment post on digg, the only opinions that matter are those of the people who are actually arguing, negotiating and deciding the cases.
it was poorly phrased. I was thinking more the failure of Battle.net as a service (software or hardware, either way, if you can't connect, it doesn't work), vs LAN software and whatever the server is running on (which may not be able to perform the job properly, especially if its running a client too) rather than the actual networking itself.
That's not really arguing my point though. How difficult is it to get the LAN setup going? For one hour a week (or one hour every two weeks or whatever it is), compared to plugging into battle.net what's the tradeoff?
I realize everyone in Oceania gets screwed a bit by having to talk to servers in the US right now, but you're a small market, developing a LAN server costs money, are you really worth it, compared to the cost of just using battle.net? I bet on average for users in Australia and New Zealand, with a LAN, it would be faster to just wait for battle.net to come back up, than it would be to figure out how to get the LAN going.
You're assuming the probability of infrastructure failure on their end is higher than the probability of something going wrong with local LAN server software and infrastructure.
And remember, they're the ones writing the LAN server software. They are the ones who have the biggest LAN party of all, which is the development team in the office. I'm working on a project where we have LAN support, and have for 10 years. It's still easier and more reliable for us to use the steam matchmaking service (since our game supports steam), while we're all in the office, than to use LAN networking code that was so lovingly crafted before I joined the team. Too many timing and sync issues, port opening/closing, performance issues, version mismatches etc. etc. etc.
I'm sure Blizzard *could* try and make a LAN server option. I'm sure they have an internal LAN server. But building and deploying a public LAN server (and documenting it, and supporting it etc. etc. etc. all the crap that comes with consumer facing technology) is frankly not worth it when they have the battle.net infrastructure, which is far easier to make reliable, because they know what it's running on, and can actively work to fix it.
Odds are, for the VAST majority of their playerbase, or potential playerbase, Battle.net is far preferable to a LAN server. You may think yourself some uber-nerd capable of small miracles in seconds to make it all work, I, getting a PhD in computer science make that mistake a lot. You have to realize they bear the support costs if the LAN server doesn't work, OR if battle.net doesn't work. Guess which is cheaper and more reliable for most computer users? The market, from 1997 when SC1.0 was printed onto disks, is far less tech savy, far less capable, and far more likely to call you up and yell if they can't figure it out. Battle.net is far more reliable than a LAN will be, and it's far easier to just use their service.
That would be a 33 (and a bit) megapixel camera to meet your benchmark of 'pixels per inch' at 240. Professional printing is 300 PPI, which would be 53 megapixels.
I hate to break it to you. But the difference between a 800 dollar phone, that squeezes a 70 dollar camera capability into it, and an 18000 (literally http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/mamiya-new-33-megapixel-camera-09-07-2010/) dollar camera is a completely absurd comparison.
At a 'good enough for my purposes' measure of 100ppi, an 8MP camera will hold up fine, even at 150 it's pretty close.
Don't get me wrong, optics plays a part - and a big part. There's no where to squeeze good lenses into a camera phone, so you get one, and hope it isn't horrible. But your censor simply is not producing the resolution you think it is. A 7MP camera is, at 28x21 inches is only producing an image of 109 PPI. You can do all the interpolation, anti-aliasing (re-sampling, broadly) etc. that you want, it's still not 240 PPI, it's about a fifth of that density (109^2 vs 240^2). The math isn't really complicated here.
The galaxy S II camera isn't the greatest cell phone camera ever made or anything of that sort, (probably the sony camera in the iPhone 4S gets that crown, but I could be wrong). Your A620 was a 350-400 USD camera, admittedly, 2005, vs a 2011 cell phone, but you're not going to match 200+ dollars in optics on a cell phone compared to a real camera.
Try a more sensible comparison, like a galaxy S II to a 100-130 dollar camera. The GSII is worse,but the 130 dollar camera still has much worse optics than your 2005 400 dollar phone, and again, it meets my benchmark of 'good enough for most purposes compared to a 100 dollar phone.
The best shots from my camera, outdoor shots of the Aran islands, are 3.6 MB, and 3264x2448. Considering my monitor is 1920x1200 (at 24 inches) I would say they would hold up very well at 28x21.
Though again, a true camera, by virtue of devoting the entire device's space to being a camera will always be superior to comparably priced phone. It's a matter of 'enough better' for it to be worth it.
and just because the last 3 or 4 years of Flickr has been populated with cameras but not camera phones doesn't mean the next 5 years will be.
I went on a business trip, with 2 days due to scheduling incompetence on our end that ended up as free time, + 1 extra day due to business issues. All I took was my Galaxy SII. It took some great photos (or at least, the camera worked, my own incompetence not withstanding). And it took a few videos that probably could have been better. It got the job done. I'm sure I could have carried another device, which would have been one more thing to risk losing, or breaking. My phone I needed anyway.
But If I did that 3 years ago, I would have still taken a camera, a digital camera, but a camera.
A cell phone will never replace a full blown camera completely, but at some point it becomes 'good enough' that you don't need all of the other stuff that makes it a camera, and it just runs as software on the portable computer, and the Camera becomes a specialized device. Kodak was the wrong company for dealing with that change. They were a chemicals company (Eastman is still a chemicals company), CCD's are semiconductor industry devices. Kodak would have been in serious trouble trying to get into that mass market without buying a semiconductor outfit, or merging with one. Everyone who is in the digital camera censor business is in it because they have a chip background. I cannot seriously envision a situation that could have lasted where Sony or Samsung would have continued to make cameras for Kodak but not on their own, which essentially what has happened with the cell phone (and camera's in cell phones business, between them and Apple, even Sony, who is still selling them cameras are publicly pondering why they are that stupid). Kodak got into the game late, and they've never been able to do anything but try and catch the leaders, and in the end you get left behind. All of the big camera makers are moving into other areas of electronics and Kodak doesn't have the skills or the resources to follow. While Sony and Samsung are integrating their camera technology into cell phone Kodak is trying to not go bankrupt.
They could have avoided this, if they'd jumped on CCD cameras as the future of the business in oh... 1996. They didn't. It has nothing to do with social, or the types of devices people want. Kodak is a chemicals company in a semiconductor business, and they didn't realize it until it was too late, and the semiconductor companies didn't need them anymore.
No, carriers want you to buy a phone, and then never use it, but pay fees for services you don't use. They hate something like Siri, because it uses bandwidth you've paid for, which costs them money to reliably support. They're rather you paid them for doing nothing.
They also, I think legitimately, got used to the idea that they all had their own networks, and anything on their network needed to be tested on their network. They are liable for support costs if something goes wrong with the phone, they have to have inventories for replacements, etc. etc. Even if they can pass that back up the line to the manufacturer, that still costs them money. If you push out a software update that makes something not work on their network they might be liable (hello 911 support!), or could accidentally congest a tower etc. If you end up running a 20K phone bill by a bad software update, they can't seriously charge you 20k most of the time, they know you don't have that much money, but it's cost them something, and they don't really want to eat those loses.
The new model of 'your phone is a computer and they're just a network provider' doesn't fit with what they're used to. They like the idea of controlling the whole process, and, there's a certain appeal to that for consumers. I do remember when the phone company owned the physical phone in my house and we leased it from them. When it broke, they had to fix it. Which is the current arrangement I have with the cable modem and water heater. Times change, but phone companies like taking peoples money more than they like change.
And some actual knowledge of the specific problem. Admittedly, I haven't done any metallurgy in 10 years, but I know enough to not trust anything the media say about very specific technical problems on a first attempt, metallurgy, computer science, physics, or anything.
Enough years have gone by they have a lot of different product lines, and different versions of the same product (different runs of the different parts, that sort of thing).
Getting carriers to go along with that for anyone else is an uphill battle. The iPhone basically got one carrier to agree to this scheme, and everyone else has to go along with it because it's just that awesome (supposedly), and sells that much. But they aren't happy about it, and I'm sure they don't really want to let it happen again.
Assuming microsoft supports it further, I could go for their model of 'carrier approved, or you get a developer unlock, but you take your chances with developer unlock', over the android model of.. uh... each carrier runs its own show, or the apple model of 'we tell you what show you wanted to watch'.
Agreed, in 2001 that was about correct. Systems generally weren't that easy to make reliable, and for what he was doing it wouldn't have been worth it.
If someone asked me today why I'm not making a WP7 app, the answer is: They don't have enough of a market share for it to be worth our time yet. If, 3 years from now, WP7 owns the whole damn marketplace that doesn't mean my opinion about what I'm doing right this minute is wrong. The world changes, the question is whether or not you can evolve with it, and whether or not you have enough insight to recognize shifts and either follow along quick enough, or lead the innovation.
True. But diplomatic negotiations and peace requires everyone to agree. Aggression is done unilaterally. You can work on improving diplomatic relations with Nazi germany all you want, if they decide they're going to invading things well, the time for diplomacy is up, and you need to be prepared for that contingency. Again, on Iraq war 2: Demanding they follow the treaty they had signed is good (at least the part about not having chemical weapons to gas their own people), invading them without evidence was bad, especially so because the evidence pointed to them actually being in compliance.
Iran having nuclear technology is inevitable. That's a given. Them having nuclear weapons is not. There are legal agreements in place about this sort of thing, and the reason even the Russians and Chinese are wary about Iran is that they are in violation of those agreements. How Iran eventually implodes will determine very much what happens to any nuclear weapons they get.
The countries that had nuclear weapons that imploded, (apartheid) South Africa, and USSR are very different from Iran. South africa was a relatively civil and orderly transfer of power, and the Whites weren't going to nuke everyone in sight for uh... well ya, that's why they didn't. The USSR was, and is, very disorderly. It has taken a pile of money (largely foreign money) to manage all of their nuclear assets that were left in satellite states that had no interest in them. That could have gone very badly without some foresight on the outside. Even pakistan, isn't really ruled by religious nutters. They're all in it for control of the money they can loot from the treasury. The mullahs in Iran... well the worst case there is they actually believe this god nonsense, and launch a fiery retribution to 'allahs enemies' or something when their time comes and the people there have an equivalent of an arab spring. See what Assad is and Gaddahfi was doing to their people for the half assed version of how it can go badly.
The US certainly didn't start the Arab spring, but you're getting blamed if there's a Persian spring, whether it had anything to do with you, or not.
Again. Not a 'next 2 years' problem. North korea can make missiles that can hit the US from North korea. Not exactly a huge leap in technology for version X+1 to work from Iran. And the Iranians have their own in house research on these problems.
The problem with Iran is that they're a fundamentally failing state. No one likes them, not even half their own country. The problem is that they may go out in a blaze of allahs glory blaming the US for overthrowing them. And that would be bad. For everyone.
Your threats (or european threats) of turning them to glass are mostly meaningless. They aren't going to nuke you just for the hell of it. They're crazy, not stupid. It's when they have nothing to lose, when their own people are banging on the gates of the Mullahs palaces in Tehran that you have a problem.
The other thing is we're only talking about the one extreme case. They're squabbling with Saudi over the 'persian' (arab) gulf, straights of hormuz etc. Along with other states than just Saudi of course. The europeans have really nothing they can do in that area to help their own interests (which, incidentally, are basically the same as american interests). Oil and goods flowing is good. Without the US there the supply of oil around the world, and general world trade goes badly quickly.
Given that you had basically no control of the place the whole time? No, it wasn't. You dismantled the old state pretty quickly. But you didn't have control.
Saying "Let's stop invading random countries and trying to run the world" is not isolationism. It's being a good neighbor. You ever live next to someone who's poking their nose into your business all the time, criticizing everything you do, threatening to call the police because you didn't shovel the snow properly, etc.? Everyone hates those people. Yet somehow, some people seem to think it's good foreign policy.
You didn't invade random countries lately. Iraq (Gulf war 1). Very very clear reason: they attacked Kuwait. An independent state that couldn't defend itself. Allowing that precedent would have been a disaster.
Afghanistan: Harbouring terrorists who attacked you, again. Seems obvious enough.
Iraq2. As I say, if they actually had WMD, an invasion would have been warranted. Treaties either mean something, or they don't. If iraq was violating the treaty, it was time to do something about it.
Look at the last 70 years of the US and britain. How did you pay of debt from WW2? You didn't. You grew out of it. Literally, run a balanced budget for a decade with 3% per capita economic growth and 2% population growth and suddenly your deficit looks a lot less interesting. Again, you owe the money to yourselves, so you can tax yourselves to pay it back. It's not hyperinflation. It's very small gradual inflation, along with growing the economy that you want. Hyperinflation is the inflamatory nutter case of how this could play out if you decide to go crazy. All evidence suggests that the people who are making the decisions understand perfectly that 2-3% a year inflation is not a problem, and goes a long way to solving the actual problem.
Actually, the money exists. That's where you get it from. You either borrow it at next to nothing interest rates, or tax it, or both (borrow back from china, tax from the US), although the current plan is to borrow it from both rich people in the US, and in china. But either way. The goal is to get the money flowing in the economy to spur growth. I'm not saying the US is doing that, although the stimulus/bailouts was a half assed effort towards it. Government economics is not like household economics. You're borrowing money from yourselves which you can tax from yourselves, because people aren't spending it, and it needs to be spent to keep the economy flowing.
Again, you have the resources in the country. They're just not being allocated in a way that will help much. The government can (and should) be taking steps to fix that. Borrowing the money isn't a great plan when you could tax the same money, but the scale of the problem means that borrowing isn't a bad plan for some of it, especially with interest rates basically being zero.
No, they hate you because you have no fucking clue what you're doing because you keep thinking people like ron paul have brains.
Al qaeda did not attack you because you had troops in saudi. That is patently false. They attacked you, repeatedly, because they believe the way to overthrow all their governments and install religious nutjob states is to go after the united states as the grand coordinator of all of these countries, and because in the first iraq war you serioiusly offended them by not inviting them to help. They have a delusion view of the US as the grand puppetmaster of every government they don't like, dumping radioactive waste of somalia. Their solution to that was to blow up buildings that trade money. I could go along with embassy's, barracks and the pentagon being legitimate miltary targets. But the WTC not so much.
"Citation Needed" - On independence from your revolt you wanted to not be involved, until barbary pirates started kidnapping your traders. You got involved.
The germans were prepared to ally with mexico against you. They planned for it because frankly, you posed a threat to them and their interests. That was reasonable prudent planning on the part of the Germans. Because the world is interconnected.
Japan: You had oil. You were selling it to japan. You didn't really like what they were doing in french indo china. So you stopped selling them oil (hey look, the world is interconnected). They decided your fleet posed a threat to their interests, so they bombed it. You stopped selling them oil. So they bombed you. What part of that is hard to understand as a 'you didn't deserve to get bombed'? Or would you have preferred to not gotten involved in that war at all, and you know... let the germans and japanese win? The british weren't exactly nice people in india, but the germans and japanese were a whole other level of evil. Happy trading with people who institutionalized mass murder because hey, not my problem, they're not here on this plot of land we stole from a bunch of natives, the french, the spanish, and the mexicans?
The drug war has failed because people still want to be addicted to things and hurt themselves and the government vested interest isn't in treatment it is in punishment, which simply exacerbates the problem and promotes further addiction. I specifically made a point about china. Figure it out. We (the british empire largely) demanded they accept our drugs legally for half a century, and it nearly destroyed their whole damn country.
The moron here, is the guy who thinks the gold standard is a good idea, and who thinks the US should be issuing letters of marque to pirate hunters, because just what we need is to regress the world to the 1700's, everything was better then! That's not you. That's Ron Paul.
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or they'll just keep using the old version indefinitely, and we know how well that's worked with IE6.
What new features does it add: Well, I don't have a GUI, so I don't know. I guess we won't upgrade then.
No one is going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in an MCSE course when they can just use the old version.
So the path to making better software is to make it more obfuscated and less user friendly? Making it easier for those poor dudes is what MS has been doing for 20 years, and why they finally made some inroads into the market.
20 years old today have no clue how to use a command line unless they are from the 1% of users that have a linux desktop at home. We see, in a programme with about 200 students, one or two kids a year like that (and this is in CS). I had to do a class thing yesterday which was basically an 'intro to our unix systems' for non CS kids. Basic stuff, make a directory, list contents that kinda thing. None of them had the slightest clue how to do anything on their own. I was starting from scratch, completely, they didn't even know what to search for on the web, or that such commands still existed. These are kids in physics, math, biochem, and they didn't know how to make a directory without a GUI. Admittedly, that's why we're teaching them the CLI stuff. But they won't use it. It might take longer, but they've grown up with a GUI, so they'll use a GUI. My suspicion is their immediate impression of linux was 'antiquated'. That's not accurate of course, but that was the perception we created. MS should realize who their market is, and make better software and tools for them.
I've done a fair bit of business with Europe. Europe has better protection, but ultimately the same applies. If you're gone (in europe especially for mat leave) and they hire a replacement while you're gone, and the replacement does better than you, expect to find yourself looking for work. It's enough of a hassle to fire someone in europe (and obviously I'm speaking broadly) that small losses of business performance aren't the end of the world.
I wasn't saying this is good. Believe me, I've been the guy doing the 'replacing' as a consultant. I come in and I solve a problem, and then I'm onto the next place. I can usually solve problems faster than the onsight people. But the onsight people actually have some sort of a plan for what's going to happen, and have some organizational structure to their IT shop or whatever. When you lay them off, in the short term, not much changes. They call me, I fix random stuff, and move on. And then eventually the infrastructure can't hold up to future demands of the business, and my 4 hour a week fixing things for you suddenly is inadequate, and now your company is in real trouble.
But it's a reality of employment. If your boss doesn't think you're valuable, and can get rid of you they will. In europe this is usually accomplished less directly. You simply 'expand' into the US or elsewhere and don't bother replacing employees who retire, that sort of thing. The best thing I ever saw was GE shut down for 2 weeks, (where they weren't actually shut down, they hired a bunch of people to come in and do yearly maintenance) every year, and everyone took vacation time. A handful of people were expected to be 'reachable' of course, but no one was going to punish you for not being there when no one else was there.
In Japan, you want to be in the office as long as your boss is in the office. Same sort of deal. It's a stupid system but if you want your job, that's what you do.
Ya I wasn't clear. I mean if your job is done without significantly loss to the company. If your loss is noticeable but not catastrophic you're in good shape. If no one noticed you were gone, you're in trouble. If you're out long enough they have to hire a replacement, and the replacement is better at your job than you were, well ya... you're doomed.
Right, but when a huge chunk of your market is going to be businesses with 15-20 employees and no dedicated IT person, or if they have a dedicated IT person they're not actually a trained IT person, having a CLI only is utterly braindead. Part of the appeal of a windows server is that the poor dude who is asked to do all the IT stuff, but isn't actually an IT guy has a much lower barrier to entry in understanding 'Windows that happens to be a server' than trying to understand 'LAMP'.
Now admittedly, MS may be envisioning this is a 'off in the cloud' scenario, where even small businesses buy time on a professionally run server where that barrier to entry is immaterial. But that's a significant misread of a big blob of their market. All the attention this has been getting should have told them that.
I'm a professional CS guy. I'm getting a PhD in comp sci, and I used to be a dedicated IT guy. I consult and teach people how to do this stuff. When I consult, sometimes even at big outfits (think something like CBS or a hospital) their little offices or division that handle something in particular have a guy on staff who is the least technically incompetent person. They might have a degree in history, but be the youngest person on staff, or they're a gamer and know more about computers than say... anyone else. But they look at a CLI (correctly from their perspective) as something that died 20 years ago, and they have no desire to learn. Even kids in IT programmes are generally unprepared for this. And making them uninspired about your product before they've even started working doesn't seem like a great plan.
Windows server is less about technology and more about brand familiarity. Obviously Microsoft is completely unaware of this.
No one is ever officially punished for taking vacation time.
If you go away on your (earned) vacation, maternity leave, whatever, and it turns out that your job can be done by someone else, worse still, done better, you will come back and find yourself laid off 'for lack of work'.
That's not the US. That's just business. Everywhere. Without union protection that's worse, and the US it's relatively easy to fire/lay off people. But not that much easier.
What makes you think they don't have to disclose which patents are covered? They don't have to discuss it publicly, but I'm sure MS buries LG and Samsung and Google et. al. in paperwork about just which patents are infringed on.
But neither party really wants to give up how they're doing things. Samsung doesn't really want to say 'we might be violating this patent on an implementation of some icon technology' because that tells all of their competitors that might be a better way to do things, and might be worth getting a licence for.
You don't usually patent code, you patent ideas and algorithms - just because I can easily change the code doesn't necessarily mean I've changed the algorithm, and if I picked the previous algorithm for a reason re-inventing it might be tricky if I want to match the performance. You don't patent a specific implementation of an idea.
The main patents that always come up here, is in being able to understand long file names on Windows. See, if you're only ever running linux by itself that would be one thing, but if you want to connect it to a windows machine, whether that's an Android device, which is sync'd with windows, or with a Linux computer that is talking to Windows over the network you're now directly into something that is reasonable for MS to patent, which is how to talk to their own product. And probably 90% (or some clearly knowable number to the manufacturers) of Android devices connect to a windows machine.
That isn't to suggest there probably aren't other patents at play. Microsoft makes a whole operating system, which is a competing product to linux. If I make a car, or an aircraft or whatever and someone comes along making cars, or aircraft, or whatever, they're directly competing with my business, which is why there are patents anyway.
Telsa motors learned the hard way that if you sell 1000 cars none of the big auto makers give a shit, but if you look like you're going to sell 100 000 cars they want you to licence their windshield wipers (seriously), along with thousands of other things they patented. And suddenly your price points aren't what you were expecting. All the big auto makers have exchanges back and forth, which probably include money, and if you're going to try and be a big player in the market, you need to deal with them. MS is no different. You may not *like* their operating system, but it is an operating system, they have thousands of people working on it, and they have (where software is patentable) a right to protect their innovations.
It's not microsofts job to tell you what patents you're infringing. It's your job when building a product to acquire the licences. I'm not sure there's a good way to build that system to fairly burden anyone, but that's the one you have, so you do your due diligence or you take your chances with lawyers. It really doesn't matter what patents are infringing to you anyway, unless you're a lawyer for someone in these negotiations, you can claim a patent is obvious and shouldn't be patentable all you want, your opinion is worth less than a comment post on digg, the only opinions that matter are those of the people who are actually arguing, negotiating and deciding the cases.
it was poorly phrased. I was thinking more the failure of Battle.net as a service (software or hardware, either way, if you can't connect, it doesn't work), vs LAN software and whatever the server is running on (which may not be able to perform the job properly, especially if its running a client too) rather than the actual networking itself.
That's not really arguing my point though. How difficult is it to get the LAN setup going? For one hour a week (or one hour every two weeks or whatever it is), compared to plugging into battle.net what's the tradeoff?
I realize everyone in Oceania gets screwed a bit by having to talk to servers in the US right now, but you're a small market, developing a LAN server costs money, are you really worth it, compared to the cost of just using battle.net? I bet on average for users in Australia and New Zealand, with a LAN, it would be faster to just wait for battle.net to come back up, than it would be to figure out how to get the LAN going.
I don't think they meant permanently, more of a 'it's down for 4 hours' thing. But either way, Battle.net is relatively robust.
You're assuming the probability of infrastructure failure on their end is higher than the probability of something going wrong with local LAN server software and infrastructure.
And remember, they're the ones writing the LAN server software. They are the ones who have the biggest LAN party of all, which is the development team in the office. I'm working on a project where we have LAN support, and have for 10 years. It's still easier and more reliable for us to use the steam matchmaking service (since our game supports steam), while we're all in the office, than to use LAN networking code that was so lovingly crafted before I joined the team. Too many timing and sync issues, port opening/closing, performance issues, version mismatches etc. etc. etc.
I'm sure Blizzard *could* try and make a LAN server option. I'm sure they have an internal LAN server. But building and deploying a public LAN server (and documenting it, and supporting it etc. etc. etc. all the crap that comes with consumer facing technology) is frankly not worth it when they have the battle.net infrastructure, which is far easier to make reliable, because they know what it's running on, and can actively work to fix it.
Odds are, for the VAST majority of their playerbase, or potential playerbase, Battle.net is far preferable to a LAN server. You may think yourself some uber-nerd capable of small miracles in seconds to make it all work, I, getting a PhD in computer science make that mistake a lot. You have to realize they bear the support costs if the LAN server doesn't work, OR if battle.net doesn't work. Guess which is cheaper and more reliable for most computer users? The market, from 1997 when SC1.0 was printed onto disks, is far less tech savy, far less capable, and far more likely to call you up and yell if they can't figure it out. Battle.net is far more reliable than a LAN will be, and it's far easier to just use their service.
That would be a 33 (and a bit) megapixel camera to meet your benchmark of 'pixels per inch' at 240. Professional printing is 300 PPI, which would be 53 megapixels.
I hate to break it to you. But the difference between a 800 dollar phone, that squeezes a 70 dollar camera capability into it, and an 18000 (literally http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/mamiya-new-33-megapixel-camera-09-07-2010/) dollar camera is a completely absurd comparison.
At a 'good enough for my purposes' measure of 100ppi, an 8MP camera will hold up fine, even at 150 it's pretty close.
Don't get me wrong, optics plays a part - and a big part. There's no where to squeeze good lenses into a camera phone, so you get one, and hope it isn't horrible. But your censor simply is not producing the resolution you think it is. A 7MP camera is, at 28x21 inches is only producing an image of 109 PPI. You can do all the interpolation, anti-aliasing (re-sampling, broadly) etc. that you want, it's still not 240 PPI, it's about a fifth of that density (109^2 vs 240^2). The math isn't really complicated here.
The galaxy S II camera isn't the greatest cell phone camera ever made or anything of that sort, (probably the sony camera in the iPhone 4S gets that crown, but I could be wrong). Your A620 was a 350-400 USD camera, admittedly, 2005, vs a 2011 cell phone, but you're not going to match 200+ dollars in optics on a cell phone compared to a real camera.
Try a more sensible comparison, like a galaxy S II to a 100-130 dollar camera. The GSII is worse,but the 130 dollar camera still has much worse optics than your 2005 400 dollar phone, and again, it meets my benchmark of 'good enough for most purposes compared to a 100 dollar phone.
The best shots from my camera, outdoor shots of the Aran islands, are 3.6 MB, and 3264x2448. Considering my monitor is 1920x1200 (at 24 inches) I would say they would hold up very well at 28x21.
Though again, a true camera, by virtue of devoting the entire device's space to being a camera will always be superior to comparably priced phone. It's a matter of 'enough better' for it to be worth it.
and just because the last 3 or 4 years of Flickr has been populated with cameras but not camera phones doesn't mean the next 5 years will be.
I went on a business trip, with 2 days due to scheduling incompetence on our end that ended up as free time, + 1 extra day due to business issues. All I took was my Galaxy SII. It took some great photos (or at least, the camera worked, my own incompetence not withstanding). And it took a few videos that probably could have been better. It got the job done. I'm sure I could have carried another device, which would have been one more thing to risk losing, or breaking. My phone I needed anyway.
But If I did that 3 years ago, I would have still taken a camera, a digital camera, but a camera.
A cell phone will never replace a full blown camera completely, but at some point it becomes 'good enough' that you don't need all of the other stuff that makes it a camera, and it just runs as software on the portable computer, and the Camera becomes a specialized device. Kodak was the wrong company for dealing with that change. They were a chemicals company (Eastman is still a chemicals company), CCD's are semiconductor industry devices. Kodak would have been in serious trouble trying to get into that mass market without buying a semiconductor outfit, or merging with one. Everyone who is in the digital camera censor business is in it because they have a chip background. I cannot seriously envision a situation that could have lasted where Sony or Samsung would have continued to make cameras for Kodak but not on their own, which essentially what has happened with the cell phone (and camera's in cell phones business, between them and Apple, even Sony, who is still selling them cameras are publicly pondering why they are that stupid). Kodak got into the game late, and they've never been able to do anything but try and catch the leaders, and in the end you get left behind. All of the big camera makers are moving into other areas of electronics and Kodak doesn't have the skills or the resources to follow. While Sony and Samsung are integrating their camera technology into cell phone Kodak is trying to not go bankrupt.
They could have avoided this, if they'd jumped on CCD cameras as the future of the business in oh... 1996. They didn't. It has nothing to do with social, or the types of devices people want. Kodak is a chemicals company in a semiconductor business, and they didn't realize it until it was too late, and the semiconductor companies didn't need them anymore.
No, carriers want you to buy a phone, and then never use it, but pay fees for services you don't use. They hate something like Siri, because it uses bandwidth you've paid for, which costs them money to reliably support. They're rather you paid them for doing nothing.
They also, I think legitimately, got used to the idea that they all had their own networks, and anything on their network needed to be tested on their network. They are liable for support costs if something goes wrong with the phone, they have to have inventories for replacements, etc. etc. Even if they can pass that back up the line to the manufacturer, that still costs them money. If you push out a software update that makes something not work on their network they might be liable (hello 911 support!), or could accidentally congest a tower etc. If you end up running a 20K phone bill by a bad software update, they can't seriously charge you 20k most of the time, they know you don't have that much money, but it's cost them something, and they don't really want to eat those loses.
The new model of 'your phone is a computer and they're just a network provider' doesn't fit with what they're used to. They like the idea of controlling the whole process, and, there's a certain appeal to that for consumers. I do remember when the phone company owned the physical phone in my house and we leased it from them. When it broke, they had to fix it. Which is the current arrangement I have with the cable modem and water heater. Times change, but phone companies like taking peoples money more than they like change.
And some actual knowledge of the specific problem. Admittedly, I haven't done any metallurgy in 10 years, but I know enough to not trust anything the media say about very specific technical problems on a first attempt, metallurgy, computer science, physics, or anything.
Enough years have gone by they have a lot of different product lines, and different versions of the same product (different runs of the different parts, that sort of thing).
Getting carriers to go along with that for anyone else is an uphill battle. The iPhone basically got one carrier to agree to this scheme, and everyone else has to go along with it because it's just that awesome (supposedly), and sells that much. But they aren't happy about it, and I'm sure they don't really want to let it happen again.
Assuming microsoft supports it further, I could go for their model of 'carrier approved, or you get a developer unlock, but you take your chances with developer unlock', over the android model of.. uh... each carrier runs its own show, or the apple model of 'we tell you what show you wanted to watch'.
Agreed, in 2001 that was about correct. Systems generally weren't that easy to make reliable, and for what he was doing it wouldn't have been worth it.
If someone asked me today why I'm not making a WP7 app, the answer is: They don't have enough of a market share for it to be worth our time yet. If, 3 years from now, WP7 owns the whole damn marketplace that doesn't mean my opinion about what I'm doing right this minute is wrong. The world changes, the question is whether or not you can evolve with it, and whether or not you have enough insight to recognize shifts and either follow along quick enough, or lead the innovation.
True. But diplomatic negotiations and peace requires everyone to agree. Aggression is done unilaterally. You can work on improving diplomatic relations with Nazi germany all you want, if they decide they're going to invading things well, the time for diplomacy is up, and you need to be prepared for that contingency. Again, on Iraq war 2: Demanding they follow the treaty they had signed is good (at least the part about not having chemical weapons to gas their own people), invading them without evidence was bad, especially so because the evidence pointed to them actually being in compliance.
Iran having nuclear technology is inevitable. That's a given. Them having nuclear weapons is not. There are legal agreements in place about this sort of thing, and the reason even the Russians and Chinese are wary about Iran is that they are in violation of those agreements. How Iran eventually implodes will determine very much what happens to any nuclear weapons they get.
The countries that had nuclear weapons that imploded, (apartheid) South Africa, and USSR are very different from Iran. South africa was a relatively civil and orderly transfer of power, and the Whites weren't going to nuke everyone in sight for uh... well ya, that's why they didn't. The USSR was, and is, very disorderly. It has taken a pile of money (largely foreign money) to manage all of their nuclear assets that were left in satellite states that had no interest in them. That could have gone very badly without some foresight on the outside. Even pakistan, isn't really ruled by religious nutters. They're all in it for control of the money they can loot from the treasury. The mullahs in Iran... well the worst case there is they actually believe this god nonsense, and launch a fiery retribution to 'allahs enemies' or something when their time comes and the people there have an equivalent of an arab spring. See what Assad is and Gaddahfi was doing to their people for the half assed version of how it can go badly.
The US certainly didn't start the Arab spring, but you're getting blamed if there's a Persian spring, whether it had anything to do with you, or not.
Again. Not a 'next 2 years' problem. North korea can make missiles that can hit the US from North korea. Not exactly a huge leap in technology for version X+1 to work from Iran. And the Iranians have their own in house research on these problems.
The problem with Iran is that they're a fundamentally failing state. No one likes them, not even half their own country. The problem is that they may go out in a blaze of allahs glory blaming the US for overthrowing them. And that would be bad. For everyone.
Your threats (or european threats) of turning them to glass are mostly meaningless. They aren't going to nuke you just for the hell of it. They're crazy, not stupid. It's when they have nothing to lose, when their own people are banging on the gates of the Mullahs palaces in Tehran that you have a problem.
The other thing is we're only talking about the one extreme case. They're squabbling with Saudi over the 'persian' (arab) gulf, straights of hormuz etc. Along with other states than just Saudi of course. The europeans have really nothing they can do in that area to help their own interests (which, incidentally, are basically the same as american interests). Oil and goods flowing is good. Without the US there the supply of oil around the world, and general world trade goes badly quickly.
Given that you had basically no control of the place the whole time? No, it wasn't. You dismantled the old state pretty quickly. But you didn't have control.
Saying "Let's stop invading random countries and trying to run the world" is not isolationism. It's being a good neighbor. You ever live next to someone who's poking their nose into your business all the time, criticizing everything you do, threatening to call the police because you didn't shovel the snow properly, etc.? Everyone hates those people. Yet somehow, some people seem to think it's good foreign policy.
You didn't invade random countries lately. Iraq (Gulf war 1). Very very clear reason: they attacked Kuwait. An independent state that couldn't defend itself. Allowing that precedent would have been a disaster.
Afghanistan: Harbouring terrorists who attacked you, again. Seems obvious enough.
Iraq2. As I say, if they actually had WMD, an invasion would have been warranted. Treaties either mean something, or they don't. If iraq was violating the treaty, it was time to do something about it.
Look at the last 70 years of the US and britain. How did you pay of debt from WW2? You didn't. You grew out of it. Literally, run a balanced budget for a decade with 3% per capita economic growth and 2% population growth and suddenly your deficit looks a lot less interesting. Again, you owe the money to yourselves, so you can tax yourselves to pay it back. It's not hyperinflation. It's very small gradual inflation, along with growing the economy that you want. Hyperinflation is the inflamatory nutter case of how this could play out if you decide to go crazy. All evidence suggests that the people who are making the decisions understand perfectly that 2-3% a year inflation is not a problem, and goes a long way to solving the actual problem.
Actually, the money exists. That's where you get it from. You either borrow it at next to nothing interest rates, or tax it, or both (borrow back from china, tax from the US), although the current plan is to borrow it from both rich people in the US, and in china. But either way. The goal is to get the money flowing in the economy to spur growth. I'm not saying the US is doing that, although the stimulus/bailouts was a half assed effort towards it. Government economics is not like household economics. You're borrowing money from yourselves which you can tax from yourselves, because people aren't spending it, and it needs to be spent to keep the economy flowing.
Again, you have the resources in the country. They're just not being allocated in a way that will help much. The government can (and should) be taking steps to fix that. Borrowing the money isn't a great plan when you could tax the same money, but the scale of the problem means that borrowing isn't a bad plan for some of it, especially with interest rates basically being zero.
No, they hate you because you have no fucking clue what you're doing because you keep thinking people like ron paul have brains.
Al qaeda did not attack you because you had troops in saudi. That is patently false. They attacked you, repeatedly, because they believe the way to overthrow all their governments and install religious nutjob states is to go after the united states as the grand coordinator of all of these countries, and because in the first iraq war you serioiusly offended them by not inviting them to help. They have a delusion view of the US as the grand puppetmaster of every government they don't like, dumping radioactive waste of somalia. Their solution to that was to blow up buildings that trade money. I could go along with embassy's, barracks and the pentagon being legitimate miltary targets. But the WTC not so much.
"Citation Needed" - On independence from your revolt you wanted to not be involved, until barbary pirates started kidnapping your traders. You got involved.
The germans were prepared to ally with mexico against you. They planned for it because frankly, you posed a threat to them and their interests. That was reasonable prudent planning on the part of the Germans. Because the world is interconnected.
Japan: You had oil. You were selling it to japan. You didn't really like what they were doing in french indo china. So you stopped selling them oil (hey look, the world is interconnected). They decided your fleet posed a threat to their interests, so they bombed it. You stopped selling them oil. So they bombed you. What part of that is hard to understand as a 'you didn't deserve to get bombed'? Or would you have preferred to not gotten involved in that war at all, and you know... let the germans and japanese win? The british weren't exactly nice people in india, but the germans and japanese were a whole other level of evil. Happy trading with people who institutionalized mass murder because hey, not my problem, they're not here on this plot of land we stole from a bunch of natives, the french, the spanish, and the mexicans?
The drug war has failed because people still want to be addicted to things and hurt themselves and the government vested interest isn't in treatment it is in punishment, which simply exacerbates the problem and promotes further addiction. I specifically made a point about china. Figure it out. We (the british empire largely) demanded they accept our drugs legally for half a century, and it nearly destroyed their whole damn country.
The moron here, is the guy who thinks the gold standard is a good idea, and who thinks the US should be issuing letters of marque to pirate hunters, because just what we need is to regress the world to the 1700's, everything was better then! That's not you. That's Ron Paul.
Iran is 2x the size of iraq, and 70 million people. You failed to conquor iraq in 7 years, you're no serious threat to iran.
Want to know how they plan to nuke the US? Easy. They've been buying rockets from North korea. This isn't a 'next 2 years' problem. This is a next 10.