And of course the lender makes a small profit, but you're happy to trade a little extra money for the convenience of having it sooner.
These days you can get some loans that are very close to 0%, or even actually 0%, on cars. Between the low prime rate and the soft market, I'm guessing carmakers are doing everything they can to get people to buy new cars. By contrast, buying a used car means getting a loan for much more than 0%, so you'll get socked with a lot more interest when you buy used (which of course is offset by the lower purchase price), unless you pay cash.
No, gyms are not a scam. *Some* gyms are definitely a scam (LA Fitness, I'm looking at you), but that's because they've adopted a scammy business model, not because they're a gym. There's plenty of gyms which are not scams; YMCA is a good example of one.
Unfortunately, yes, a lot of gyms (mainly the corporate ones) do profit a lot off people who sign up thinking they're going to use the service, and then rarely bother to go in. However, for people who actually use them, gyms are useful because most people can't afford the equipment (or the space to store it) that they have at a gym. A typical weight-training circuit at a gym can have you using 10 different machines within 20-30 minutes. You'd need a large basement to hold all that equipment, plus thousands of dollars (probably well over $10k) to purchase it in the first place, and good luck moving that stuff.
Of course, as someone above said, if all you do there is use an exercise bike or elliptical machine and nothing else, you'd be better off just buying your own. But if you have a gym membership, it makes good sense to make use of the weight machines, because you don't get strength training from aerobic machines.
You can preach this stuff about living within your means to people all you want, but they're not going to listen, especially people at the bottom who, as you put it, can't afford to participate in our shared culture. We've seen it over and over again, where someone from a poor background hits it rich (usually through sports or music fame), lives high on the hog for a while, and then goes bankrupt after their fame disappears.
Sounds good to me. After all, people seem to actually like this "ownership" model, and even though it's great for corporate profits, consumers seemingly agree that it's a great deal and are lining up to sign their names on the dotted line.
Yep, I just responded to your other post with a point about LXDE moving from Gtk to Qt.
Gtk will probably keep going strong though, since for some crazy reason many of the distros continue to give Gnome3 their first-class spot. Red Hat doesn't seem like they're going to dump or demote it ever, no matter how much customers complain. Why Debian follows along with them, I have no idea. And there's no shortage of die-hard Gnome fans out there; I guess we're buried too many levels deep here, and this article too old, or else we'd be bombed with replies from Gnome-lovers telling us how great it is and how you can just add extensions for all the missing functionality, and that it's not a problem that the extensions all get broken every time a new Gnome version is released and the extension devs have to fix them all over again.
Well one big complaint about Gtk3 has been that the Gnome devs just arbitrarily change and deprecate things because they don't need it themselves, even though other apps may use them, so it doesn't even have a stable API. At least Gtk2 is stable.
LXDE, the lowest-resource DE supposedly, which was has even been ported to Qt because the main dev was unhappy with Gtk3.
Holy shit, you're a fucking moron. Soldering a fuse in is NOT a safety feature, it's a cost-savings tactic. If you want safety, you put a fucking fuse holder in, and an easily-replaceable standard fuse in the holder.
Holy shit, this site is full of fucking morons these days.
I'm not expecting the average man on the street to get a $90 soldering iron to repair a $200 (or even $600) TV, but I do have higher expectations of the Slashdot crowd. I guess I'm expecting too much.
Many of my EE colleagues seem to be similar to me (I'm a EE too).
Maybe I should have said "properly-designed and assembled electronics" then. Automotive-grade components exist for a reason, and proper design means designing everything to handle temperature extremes within the -40-85 range (IIRC). So no, they don't get "way hotter than they otherwise would", unless someone totally screwed up on the design and didn't account for temperature extremes and ventilation problems, and no testing was done in an environmental chamber.
Finally, electronics problems simply haven't proven to be a serious problem in modern cars.
It's not "douchebaggery". Modern cars really aren't meant to be repaired that much in the case of collisions, because they're going to crumple. The whole idea is that the front and rear ends crumple to absorb energy, instead of you getting tossed around and killed or maimed. The downside is that car can't handle lower-speed collisions as well (which is fine, you can get whiplash at shockingly low speeds) without being totalled. It's better to trash the car and avoid medical bills; it's easy to just get a new car, it's not so easy to repair medical problems, or to resurrect someone.
As for strength and weight, older cars didn't actually weigh that much like people think. The steel probably weighed more, but they didn't have as much other stuff inside. Cars are pretty heavy these days because of all the safety equipment and soundproofing. Also, cars back then weren't very strong because they used cheap-ass steel. Now they use a lot of high-strength steel, which is both stronger and lighter.
Here's a discussion about how much 60s Mustangs weighed. They're 3000 pounds and less, about the same as a modern compact.
I'm betting YOU cannot do it right either even for the very few "through the hole" mounted components you might actually find.
You'd lose that bet. I've been soldering for 25 years, since I was a teenager. I can solder thru-hole, SMT (down to 0603), and I have a hot-air rework station too.
With today's lead free solder, surface mounted devices and the expense of getting the proper equipment in place, it is nearly beyond the reasonable limits for your electronic experimenter to solder on consumer electronic equipment.
Complete and total BS; this is just like all the fools who complain that "you can't work on cars any more because there's too many electronics!". Electronics are easier than ever to work on as long as you stick with stuff that isn't too small. These days, Makerspaces are all holding soldering classes, people are buying Arduinos left and right, and you can buy a very nice Hakko temperature-controlled soldering station for about $90. Hot-air rework stations are more, but a cheap but workable Chinese model is only about $100-125. When I was young, those temperature-controlled stations cost a fortune so everyone used those shitty 25W irons. Components were a lot more delicate back then too, so it was easy to burn them without a temp-controlled iron; these days with lead-free, they've had to increase temperature tolerance a lot.
You won't have the right equipment, supplies or use the proper techniques to "do it right".
Go tell that to the people at your local Makerspace.
Dell pretty much ONLY sells other people's hardware these days, I'm not really sure what TFA is smoking. They have a few internally designed products left that I know of, but almost all of it is various tiers of rebranded bullshit, from just stamping a Dell logo on someone elses turd, to having foxconn, msi, etc. do the electrical design and integrating those into assemblies someone else also puts together.
I'm not sure what *you're* smoking.
What do you think Microsoft hardware is? Made in a factory in Redmond by Microsoft employees? Hahaha. Microsoft has long had their hardware designed by ODMs and made by CMs. According to this article, Taiwanese company Pegatron makes the Surface tablets, and is also an iPad supplier.
*Every* American electronics company these days outsources their manufacturing and frequently their design to Asian companies. No one does any of that stuff here any more, except defense contractors of course.
Yes, any *good* printer uses industry-standard protocols like PS and PDF (or some manufacturer-specific ones like PCL or whatever Brother's script is called), however your typical $30 consumer inkjet printer is not like this, and does all the processing in a binary driver (which is Windows-only of course). And then people complain that "Linux doesn't have any printer drivers". It's really pathetic too since you can get a $100 laser printer from Samsung these days which works just fine with Linux.
Failed capacitors ARE easily repaired. If you can't do it, then your soldering skills suck and that's your own fault. Isn't this supposed to be a site for nerds? What is with all these morons today who can't fix the simplest things? Can't replace capacitors (basic soldering), can't fix disc brakes (see the car discussion above with all the morons saying cars made in the last 20 years aren't repairable), you people are all pathetic.
That's a bunch of BS. Cars built in the last 2 decades are lasting longer than ever and easily going 100-200,000 miles without any major repairs. And who cares about reverse-engineering the software in your power steering controller anyway? If it goes bad (which it doesn't, because there's no hydraulic pump any more and rubber hoses to degrade, just an electric motor), then you just replace the parts; it's a simple bolt-in affair, and certainly much easier than messing around with hydraulic fluid taking a circuitous route around the engine compartment.
Honestly, things are *simpler* now, from a repair perspective, and far improved in reliability. Those shitty old cars needed a LOT of work all the time; constant "tune ups" and adjustments, which modern cars don't ever need.
Finally, electronics never fail, unless you have bad capacitors. No moving parts, remember?
Since we love car analogies here, do you think the trend towards non-removable batteries is comparable to the changes in car body design?
Interesting question, but the answer is no.
It seems older cars used body-on-frame and other designs that basically allowed the person performing the repair to unbolt parts, work on them or replace them, and then bolt them back on.
No, they didn't. There's nothing keeping you from unbolting parts on a unibody car any more than on a body-on-frame car. The big difference you may be thinking of is working space in the engine bay: modern vehicles have less of it. But that's not because of unibodies, that's because cars are much more efficiently designed now and have a lot more stuff in the engine bay. There's also the assumption that for any serious repairs, you're going to have access to a lift.
Maybe you're thinking of body repairs. That is true to an extent: usually the rear fenders of a unibody car are part of the body, and replacing them means cutting and welding. (Front fenders are usually bolted on and easily replaced.)
That seems to be the trend with phones: A lightweight and small phone means a sealed case.
Both of my smartphones (an HTC Sensation and now a Samsung S4) have removable batteries. They're not significantly heavier or more poorly sealed than phones with non-removable batteries. In fact, the Galaxy S5 is waterproof, and it has a replaceable battery. The trick is not being a lazy-ass when designing it. Have you even handled a modern phone with removable battery (like the S4 or S5), and taken the back off? It barely weighs anything. I'm sure the main reasons mfgrs have gone this way are 1) it's cheaper to make than having a good removable backplate, 2) extra sales potential for replacement batteries maybe (it works for Apple at least; call up your local Apple store and ask them how much it costs to get a new battery installed), and 3) they can save a half-millimeter or so of thickness, maybe. I'm sure the biggest reason by far is #1, it's the main reasons companies do anything that's unpopular with some customers. Saving $0.10 on 50 million devices means $5 million dollars.
The other thing to note, since you're looking at the repairability aspect in comparison to cars, is that non-replaceable battery phones do not actually have non-replaceable batteries. They're replaceable, it's just a PITA to do. Apple does it all the time, as do independent repair shops. Basically it involves taking the back plate off somehow (some of them are glued on, so you need a heat gun to melt the glue, like on the Sony Xperias), then you can pop the battery out and replace it. It's probably attached with a small cable and connector. So it's not impossible by any means, but there's potential for damage, and it isn't easily done in the field, and is usually left to professionals who are experienced with the procedure (which means you have to pay labor rates at a retail store, which probably costs a lot more than a bare battery on Ebay). Whereas on a phone like the Galaxy S5, any moron can just pop off the back plate and pop in a replacement battery in a couple of minutes with no tools, which makes it easy to keep a spare or two and swap them out if you're traveling, for instance. Of if the battery goes bad, you can just buy one on Ebay and do it yourself for $20 instead of paying a mall store $100 (that's probably underestimating Apple's prices a lot).
Google for "SaaS lock-in"; there's countless IT industry articles talking about this. Many seem to think it's not a big problem though acknowledging there's a lot of concern about it, and the general advice is to warn people to make sure your ERP vendor lets you have access to your raw data and download it at any time, preferably with direct DB access or at least CSV downloads.
No you can't just redefine it because it disproves your argument.
I'm not redefining anything. Storage != software. I don't know where you ever got the idea that storage is anything like application software. If you're going to be this obtuse, then there's no point in continuing this discussion.
Those aren't SaaS providers. DropBox is cloud storage, not SaaS at all. Google Docs isn't representative of SaaS; Google's business model is about giving away services for free and using *you* as the product. SaaS is mainly about business software.
Lots as in more than 5 or 50 or 500? Sure. Lots as in a majority, no way. All the stats I've seen show the mainline Protestants to be a minority and shrinking. Here's a Wikipedia article that has numbers. 70.6% of the population is Christian, but only 14.7% is mainline Protestant (which has all the liberals). By contrast, 20.8% is Catholic (not really liberal, though not always right-wing either, but can usually be counted on to vote Republican because of the abortion issue), and a hefty 25.4% of the population is evangelical, which is the right-wing religious nuts. In addition to that, some of the mainline Protestants are right-wing nuts too, namely the Southern Baptists; only certain mainline denominations are liberal (mainly Presbyterian (PCUSA only) and Lutheran (ELCA only); watch out, both those denominations have other sects that are far more conservative).
Don't take my word for it; here's a whole sub-article about it in Wikipedia. From the article: "Contrast with conservative churches -- While mainline churches have seen shrinking membership and worship attendance, both evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups have been growing. About 40% of mainline Protestants in the 1990s were active in church affairs, compared to 46% of the conservatives."
The growing population of Hispanics isn't helping things either, it's making it worse. From the article: "The Barna Group, considers the failure of mainline Protestants to add substantial numbers of Hispanics to be portent for the future, given both the rapid increase of the Hispanic population as well as the outflow of Hispanics from Catholicism to Protestant churches in the past decade, most of whom are selecting evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant churches." You can't get any more nutty than the Pentecostals.
So no, there really aren't that many liberal American Christians. There's some, but they're getting old and dying out; go to any liberal church and see it for yourself (I've been dragged to a few): the congregants have one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel. Meanwhile, the evangelical churches are full of young people and 30-somethings with families (again, I've been dragged to a few; never again).
Every car is "modular" in a sense. They're made of interchangeable parts; you can take out the window switches in your car, and get window switches from the same make/model car in a junkyard and put them in, and they'll look and work the same. You can probably even get the exact same part from other years of that car, and maybe even from other models by the same maker, within a certain year range, because mfgrs like to reuse parts as much as possible. You just can't swap such parts between different makers, or from radically different models or years.
So how would a mfgr make a "modular" car like you speak of? Make some open-source window switches and other parts? Yippee... then no other carmaker would adopt these, so the end effect is exactly the same: that "modular" car is just as modular as every other car, and you can only exchange parts with other cars of the same make/model/year. What you're talking about requires cooperation between makers for it to be useful, and if it's a "niche market", then why would they bother?
And what's the advantage anyway? It's not like I need to replace the window switches in my car very often.
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And of course the lender makes a small profit, but you're happy to trade a little extra money for the convenience of having it sooner.
These days you can get some loans that are very close to 0%, or even actually 0%, on cars. Between the low prime rate and the soft market, I'm guessing carmakers are doing everything they can to get people to buy new cars. By contrast, buying a used car means getting a loan for much more than 0%, so you'll get socked with a lot more interest when you buy used (which of course is offset by the lower purchase price), unless you pay cash.
No, gyms are not a scam. *Some* gyms are definitely a scam (LA Fitness, I'm looking at you), but that's because they've adopted a scammy business model, not because they're a gym. There's plenty of gyms which are not scams; YMCA is a good example of one.
Unfortunately, yes, a lot of gyms (mainly the corporate ones) do profit a lot off people who sign up thinking they're going to use the service, and then rarely bother to go in. However, for people who actually use them, gyms are useful because most people can't afford the equipment (or the space to store it) that they have at a gym. A typical weight-training circuit at a gym can have you using 10 different machines within 20-30 minutes. You'd need a large basement to hold all that equipment, plus thousands of dollars (probably well over $10k) to purchase it in the first place, and good luck moving that stuff.
Of course, as someone above said, if all you do there is use an exercise bike or elliptical machine and nothing else, you'd be better off just buying your own. But if you have a gym membership, it makes good sense to make use of the weight machines, because you don't get strength training from aerobic machines.
You can preach this stuff about living within your means to people all you want, but they're not going to listen, especially people at the bottom who, as you put it, can't afford to participate in our shared culture. We've seen it over and over again, where someone from a poor background hits it rich (usually through sports or music fame), lives high on the hog for a while, and then goes bankrupt after their fame disappears.
Sounds good to me. After all, people seem to actually like this "ownership" model, and even though it's great for corporate profits, consumers seemingly agree that it's a great deal and are lining up to sign their names on the dotted line.
PT Barnum would be proud.
Yep, I just responded to your other post with a point about LXDE moving from Gtk to Qt.
Gtk will probably keep going strong though, since for some crazy reason many of the distros continue to give Gnome3 their first-class spot. Red Hat doesn't seem like they're going to dump or demote it ever, no matter how much customers complain. Why Debian follows along with them, I have no idea. And there's no shortage of die-hard Gnome fans out there; I guess we're buried too many levels deep here, and this article too old, or else we'd be bombed with replies from Gnome-lovers telling us how great it is and how you can just add extensions for all the missing functionality, and that it's not a problem that the extensions all get broken every time a new Gnome version is released and the extension devs have to fix them all over again.
Well one big complaint about Gtk3 has been that the Gnome devs just arbitrarily change and deprecate things because they don't need it themselves, even though other apps may use them, so it doesn't even have a stable API. At least Gtk2 is stable.
LXDE, the lowest-resource DE supposedly, which was has even been ported to Qt because the main dev was unhappy with Gtk3.
Holy shit, you're a fucking moron. Soldering a fuse in is NOT a safety feature, it's a cost-savings tactic. If you want safety, you put a fucking fuse holder in, and an easily-replaceable standard fuse in the holder.
Holy shit, this site is full of fucking morons these days.
I'm not expecting the average man on the street to get a $90 soldering iron to repair a $200 (or even $600) TV, but I do have higher expectations of the Slashdot crowd. I guess I'm expecting too much.
Many of my EE colleagues seem to be similar to me (I'm a EE too).
Maybe I should have said "properly-designed and assembled electronics" then. Automotive-grade components exist for a reason, and proper design means designing everything to handle temperature extremes within the -40-85 range (IIRC). So no, they don't get "way hotter than they otherwise would", unless someone totally screwed up on the design and didn't account for temperature extremes and ventilation problems, and no testing was done in an environmental chamber.
Finally, electronics problems simply haven't proven to be a serious problem in modern cars.
It's not "douchebaggery". Modern cars really aren't meant to be repaired that much in the case of collisions, because they're going to crumple. The whole idea is that the front and rear ends crumple to absorb energy, instead of you getting tossed around and killed or maimed. The downside is that car can't handle lower-speed collisions as well (which is fine, you can get whiplash at shockingly low speeds) without being totalled. It's better to trash the car and avoid medical bills; it's easy to just get a new car, it's not so easy to repair medical problems, or to resurrect someone.
As for strength and weight, older cars didn't actually weigh that much like people think. The steel probably weighed more, but they didn't have as much other stuff inside. Cars are pretty heavy these days because of all the safety equipment and soundproofing. Also, cars back then weren't very strong because they used cheap-ass steel. Now they use a lot of high-strength steel, which is both stronger and lighter.
Here's a discussion about how much 60s Mustangs weighed. They're 3000 pounds and less, about the same as a modern compact.
I'm betting YOU cannot do it right either even for the very few "through the hole" mounted components you might actually find.
You'd lose that bet. I've been soldering for 25 years, since I was a teenager. I can solder thru-hole, SMT (down to 0603), and I have a hot-air rework station too.
With today's lead free solder, surface mounted devices and the expense of getting the proper equipment in place, it is nearly beyond the reasonable limits for your electronic experimenter to solder on consumer electronic equipment.
Complete and total BS; this is just like all the fools who complain that "you can't work on cars any more because there's too many electronics!". Electronics are easier than ever to work on as long as you stick with stuff that isn't too small. These days, Makerspaces are all holding soldering classes, people are buying Arduinos left and right, and you can buy a very nice Hakko temperature-controlled soldering station for about $90. Hot-air rework stations are more, but a cheap but workable Chinese model is only about $100-125. When I was young, those temperature-controlled stations cost a fortune so everyone used those shitty 25W irons. Components were a lot more delicate back then too, so it was easy to burn them without a temp-controlled iron; these days with lead-free, they've had to increase temperature tolerance a lot.
You won't have the right equipment, supplies or use the proper techniques to "do it right".
Go tell that to the people at your local Makerspace.
Dell pretty much ONLY sells other people's hardware these days, I'm not really sure what TFA is smoking. They have a few internally designed products left that I know of, but almost all of it is various tiers of rebranded bullshit, from just stamping a Dell logo on someone elses turd, to having foxconn, msi, etc. do the electrical design and integrating those into assemblies someone else also puts together.
I'm not sure what *you're* smoking.
What do you think Microsoft hardware is? Made in a factory in Redmond by Microsoft employees? Hahaha. Microsoft has long had their hardware designed by ODMs and made by CMs. According to this article, Taiwanese company Pegatron makes the Surface tablets, and is also an iPad supplier.
*Every* American electronics company these days outsources their manufacturing and frequently their design to Asian companies. No one does any of that stuff here any more, except defense contractors of course.
You're slow, aren't you?
The fuse isn't the FU, it's the lack of a fuse holder, and the fuse being soldered in.
No, they didn't.
Yes, any *good* printer uses industry-standard protocols like PS and PDF (or some manufacturer-specific ones like PCL or whatever Brother's script is called), however your typical $30 consumer inkjet printer is not like this, and does all the processing in a binary driver (which is Windows-only of course). And then people complain that "Linux doesn't have any printer drivers". It's really pathetic too since you can get a $100 laser printer from Samsung these days which works just fine with Linux.
Failed capacitors ARE easily repaired. If you can't do it, then your soldering skills suck and that's your own fault. Isn't this supposed to be a site for nerds? What is with all these morons today who can't fix the simplest things? Can't replace capacitors (basic soldering), can't fix disc brakes (see the car discussion above with all the morons saying cars made in the last 20 years aren't repairable), you people are all pathetic.
According to many mainstream news sites, the Galaxy S6's sales have been dismal.
No, on a unibody car they just take apart some of the interior to get to the backside of the panel. It's not that hard.
That's a bunch of BS. Cars built in the last 2 decades are lasting longer than ever and easily going 100-200,000 miles without any major repairs. And who cares about reverse-engineering the software in your power steering controller anyway? If it goes bad (which it doesn't, because there's no hydraulic pump any more and rubber hoses to degrade, just an electric motor), then you just replace the parts; it's a simple bolt-in affair, and certainly much easier than messing around with hydraulic fluid taking a circuitous route around the engine compartment.
Honestly, things are *simpler* now, from a repair perspective, and far improved in reliability. Those shitty old cars needed a LOT of work all the time; constant "tune ups" and adjustments, which modern cars don't ever need.
Finally, electronics never fail, unless you have bad capacitors. No moving parts, remember?
Even better, there's USB versions of both these things. Those can come in handy if the built-in one on your laptop fails.
Since we love car analogies here, do you think the trend towards non-removable batteries is comparable to the changes in car body design?
Interesting question, but the answer is no.
It seems older cars used body-on-frame and other designs that basically allowed the person performing the repair to unbolt parts, work on them or replace them, and then bolt them back on.
No, they didn't. There's nothing keeping you from unbolting parts on a unibody car any more than on a body-on-frame car. The big difference you may be thinking of is working space in the engine bay: modern vehicles have less of it. But that's not because of unibodies, that's because cars are much more efficiently designed now and have a lot more stuff in the engine bay. There's also the assumption that for any serious repairs, you're going to have access to a lift.
Maybe you're thinking of body repairs. That is true to an extent: usually the rear fenders of a unibody car are part of the body, and replacing them means cutting and welding. (Front fenders are usually bolted on and easily replaced.)
That seems to be the trend with phones: A lightweight and small phone means a sealed case.
Both of my smartphones (an HTC Sensation and now a Samsung S4) have removable batteries. They're not significantly heavier or more poorly sealed than phones with non-removable batteries. In fact, the Galaxy S5 is waterproof, and it has a replaceable battery. The trick is not being a lazy-ass when designing it. Have you even handled a modern phone with removable battery (like the S4 or S5), and taken the back off? It barely weighs anything. I'm sure the main reasons mfgrs have gone this way are 1) it's cheaper to make than having a good removable backplate, 2) extra sales potential for replacement batteries maybe (it works for Apple at least; call up your local Apple store and ask them how much it costs to get a new battery installed), and 3) they can save a half-millimeter or so of thickness, maybe. I'm sure the biggest reason by far is #1, it's the main reasons companies do anything that's unpopular with some customers. Saving $0.10 on 50 million devices means $5 million dollars.
The other thing to note, since you're looking at the repairability aspect in comparison to cars, is that non-replaceable battery phones do not actually have non-replaceable batteries. They're replaceable, it's just a PITA to do. Apple does it all the time, as do independent repair shops. Basically it involves taking the back plate off somehow (some of them are glued on, so you need a heat gun to melt the glue, like on the Sony Xperias), then you can pop the battery out and replace it. It's probably attached with a small cable and connector. So it's not impossible by any means, but there's potential for damage, and it isn't easily done in the field, and is usually left to professionals who are experienced with the procedure (which means you have to pay labor rates at a retail store, which probably costs a lot more than a bare battery on Ebay). Whereas on a phone like the Galaxy S5, any moron can just pop off the back plate and pop in a replacement battery in a couple of minutes with no tools, which makes it easy to keep a spare or two and swap them out if you're traveling, for instance. Of if the battery goes bad, you can just buy one on Ebay and do it yourself for $20 instead of paying a mall store $100 (that's probably underestimating Apple's prices a lot).
Here's an article for you:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/...
You keep pointing at consumer stuff; that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about business software like ERP.
Here's another (somewhat old though):
http://www.infoworld.com/artic...
Google for "SaaS lock-in"; there's countless IT industry articles talking about this. Many seem to think it's not a big problem though acknowledging there's a lot of concern about it, and the general advice is to warn people to make sure your ERP vendor lets you have access to your raw data and download it at any time, preferably with direct DB access or at least CSV downloads.
No you can't just redefine it because it disproves your argument.
I'm not redefining anything. Storage != software. I don't know where you ever got the idea that storage is anything like application software. If you're going to be this obtuse, then there's no point in continuing this discussion.
Those aren't SaaS providers. DropBox is cloud storage, not SaaS at all. Google Docs isn't representative of SaaS; Google's business model is about giving away services for free and using *you* as the product. SaaS is mainly about business software.
Lots as in more than 5 or 50 or 500? Sure. Lots as in a majority, no way. All the stats I've seen show the mainline Protestants to be a minority and shrinking. Here's a Wikipedia article that has numbers. 70.6% of the population is Christian, but only 14.7% is mainline Protestant (which has all the liberals). By contrast, 20.8% is Catholic (not really liberal, though not always right-wing either, but can usually be counted on to vote Republican because of the abortion issue), and a hefty 25.4% of the population is evangelical, which is the right-wing religious nuts. In addition to that, some of the mainline Protestants are right-wing nuts too, namely the Southern Baptists; only certain mainline denominations are liberal (mainly Presbyterian (PCUSA only) and Lutheran (ELCA only); watch out, both those denominations have other sects that are far more conservative).
Don't take my word for it; here's a whole sub-article about it in Wikipedia. From the article: "Contrast with conservative churches -- While mainline churches have seen shrinking membership and worship attendance, both evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups have been growing. About 40% of mainline Protestants in the 1990s were active in church affairs, compared to 46% of the conservatives."
The growing population of Hispanics isn't helping things either, it's making it worse. From the article: "The Barna Group, considers the failure of mainline Protestants to add substantial numbers of Hispanics to be portent for the future, given both the rapid increase of the Hispanic population as well as the outflow of Hispanics from Catholicism to Protestant churches in the past decade, most of whom are selecting evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant churches." You can't get any more nutty than the Pentecostals.
So no, there really aren't that many liberal American Christians. There's some, but they're getting old and dying out; go to any liberal church and see it for yourself (I've been dragged to a few): the congregants have one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel. Meanwhile, the evangelical churches are full of young people and 30-somethings with families (again, I've been dragged to a few; never again).
Every car is "modular" in a sense. They're made of interchangeable parts; you can take out the window switches in your car, and get window switches from the same make/model car in a junkyard and put them in, and they'll look and work the same. You can probably even get the exact same part from other years of that car, and maybe even from other models by the same maker, within a certain year range, because mfgrs like to reuse parts as much as possible. You just can't swap such parts between different makers, or from radically different models or years.
So how would a mfgr make a "modular" car like you speak of? Make some open-source window switches and other parts? Yippee... then no other carmaker would adopt these, so the end effect is exactly the same: that "modular" car is just as modular as every other car, and you can only exchange parts with other cars of the same make/model/year. What you're talking about requires cooperation between makers for it to be useful, and if it's a "niche market", then why would they bother?
And what's the advantage anyway? It's not like I need to replace the window switches in my car very often.