It doesn't matter. If there's no tactile feedback. the UI is going to be poor in a car. How do you turn the turn down the volume or adjust the temperature on a touchscreen without looking at it? You don't.
That's not how you make money with OSS. The real way it's generally done is to sell support and customization services. This is how companies like Red Hat and OpenERP do it. You produce some open-source software and market it to businesses, then get them to buy expensive support agreements, and also charge them if they want any customizations or other special services. Obviously, this approach doesn't work at all for software aimed at individuals, it's only good for selling to companies of varying sizes (usually the bigger the better, because bigger companies are more willing to spend tons of money on support contracts).
European unity is actually making some real strides these days, though it seems the northern countries and the southern countries are not getting along that well. But compared to 100 years ago, the northern/western countries are almost working together as one (France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, etc.). The difference is, today's unity was developed through a slow, bottom-up process, with all the governed consenting to this union and joining it voluntarily. Much like the US's early days, really.
Where unity works out poorly is when it's forced from the top-down, by one of those "strong leaders" the OP refers to. Stalin is a prime example here. When this happens, minorities and other groups get marginalized, and after a while (after the central power decays sufficiently, largely due to the union not really being that effective due to the lack of "buy-in"), get pissed off and the whole thing implodes suddenly.
Canonical is an example of the latter, not the former. Except that the Linux ecosystem by its nature doesn't tolerate egotistical dictators that well, so when people get pissed off, they just switch to an alternate or fork.
You can't have it both ways. If you want one strong leader, you have to go with their decisions whether you like them or not. If Canonical refuses to offer more options (because "they'd be too confusing to regular users"), then either you suck it up and deal with the poor workflow, or you abandon them and their "strong leadership" for a different choice.
"Strong leadership" is what lead to Soviet-style socialism, where everyone had maybe 5 choices for shoes and that was it. Freedom and diversity go hand-in-hand, and even though they're seemingly less efficient, you avoid people pushing one-size-fits-all solutions that don't work well for almost anyone.
I do agree that excessive fragmentation in Linux-land is bad, but it's a byproduct of the freedom available there. Luckily, there are strong attempts to consolidate things that should be, such as the recent moves to standardize on systemd. UIs do not need to be standardized so much as lower-level services. You struggling with Unity is not helping the Linux cause, unless maybe you're using it to run around and evangelize it to newbs and convert people away from the proprietary platforms.
It's not just bandwagons I think. A lot of change (esp. in the software world), I think, is driven by the desire to make oneself seem relevant and needed. In other words, it's "make-work". Instead of a change happening because there is a genuine need for the change, or the change really is a better way of doing things, it happens because there's a bunch of people sitting around looking for something to do, and they need to justify their existence. In a company, you can't have a big team of engineers sitting around doing nothing because they've already done a great job building something, and now aren't needed (the other work that needs doing isn't quite in their skillset). So they have a choice between resigning, or finding something else to do. So we get "Widget 2.0! New and improved!!!". (It's not just the workers, it's really their bosses in middle management who need to justify their salaries by leading ever-larger teams with ever-larger budgets.)
At the corporate level, this stuff also happens because of the consumer-driven culture which craves new stuff, and the existence of the desire to sell new stuff. If a company sells you Widget 1.0 and it's excellent and does everything you need, why would you buy another one? Once everyone has one ("market saturation" has been achieved), the company can't continue to exist (or more importantly these days, to grow, since not growing is seen as being equivalent to "dying") since they're not selling anything. So they make a "roadmap" and continue to evolve the product line, adding more and more features and making changes, to convince people to buy a new one and throw out their old one. Case in point: Windows 8. Why would you throw out Windows 7 if it does everything you need and you're happy with it? Simple: because Windows 8 is out with a shiny new UI that's "revolutionary". Of course, things didn't quite pan out as MS expected there, but that was much of the intent. With many products, there's only so much you can do with real features before the product does everything its buyers need, so the company turns to reinventing the wheel, in our case meaning redoing the UI to be "more modern", even though the old one was just fine, and in fact more attractive than the ugly new one (this isn't just MS I'm talking about here, it's many UIs; look at the ugly new Gmail UI for example).
What's really sad is the pathetic sycophants who defend this constant wheel-reinvention and change for change's sake, calling anyone who objects a "luddite". This doesn't mean of course that old ways are always better (what idiot wants to go back to cooperative multitasking, or worse, no multitasking?), but we've reached a point with our software these days where there really isn't much improvement to be had, so it seems everyone is screwing around with UIs to try to make themselves relevant. (Also, there are improvements to be had in the software realm, but they're outside the skillset of people who work with UIs.)
Which would be a good thing, really. Independent dealerships suck; they're called "stealerships" for a reason. They have a highly adversarial relationship with the manufacturers, and make a lot of money by screwing over customers with overpriced parts and repairs. If manufacturers sold directly to consumers, the prices would be lower (no middleman) and a lot of problems like unnecessary repairs would disappear, as a large corporation like Ford wouldn't want their reputation to be tainted that way. When you get screwed over at Jones Honda, you don't blame Honda, you blame the Jones dealership for your bad experience. But if the dealerships were all owned by Honda, this wouldn't happen; you'd blame Honda itself, and disparage them all over the internet. Just like Apple exercises a lot of control over how its individual stores are run, manufacturer-owned car stores would be the same, with corporations trying to make the experience as pleasant and consistent as possible. As for competition, there's no shortage of car manufacturers, so if you don't like the experience you get at a Ford or Honda store, you'd go instead to a GM, Suburu, Toyota, Tesla, VW, etc. store.
The present car dealership business structure is entirely a product of local-level corruption, with rich auto dealership owners bribing local and state officials for laws which require automakers to solely sell cars through these dealerships, rather than directly, justifying it with a lot of Newspeak about it somehow being better for consumers.
He never said that. He was referring to the various touch-screen interfaces found in many cars today, such as MyFordTouch/MyLinconTouch, BMW's iDrive, etc. These systems are terrible as they're buggy and don't have any tactile feedback (unless they have knobs for the commonly-used functions; some systems do this, some don't). iOS systems wouldn't be any different; they'd just be a different OS underneath, but the UI problems would all remain.
Yes, but being able to heat that object properly in a very cold environment depends on having very good insulation so that the heat isn't dissipated to the environment too quickly. Then moving the artificial limb to a hotter environment, with all that insulation still present, means you need to have an active cooling system for it to continue working, meaning the whole thing is now pretty complicated. Finally, generating heat in a precisely-controllable manner (given these challenges of insulation and cooling in different environments) isn't that easy; remember, you want to be able to finely control your "muscles" so that you can very precisely control your limbs' movements. It'd be a lot easier to use something that can be electrically actuated, and where you only need to make sure the actuator's temperature is kept within a certain range for it to work properly.
How about nails? It'd be pretty easy to use common nails to make caltops (basically two nails bent and welded or twisted together so that a pointy side is always facing up). Then the terrists could throw those onto busy freeways, causing big pile-ups and choking our transit arteries.
Using heat sounds like it won't work very well in different environments. What happens when you try to use your artificial limb in subzero temperatures?
Even better, you can do something that's just as relaxing but doesn't require a nearby lake or having to deal with smelly fish, such as watching paint dry. So exciting! Or you could just lock yourself in a featureless room and stare at the wall for a full day.
It's weird because if you think about it, intact teams of highly-experienced employees are a valuable asset that can be used to produce new products. It's just another sign of how screwed up modern management is that they don't see this.
Even in places where they have the full-size mailboxes (the round-topped metal ones about 18 inches long), those boxes aren't large enough for lots of deliveries. Not only that, but they don't usually lock. The locking mailboxes I've seen only have a slot, so if your package is more than an inch thick, it won't fit.
If you're talking about those community mailboxes (usually a group of 16 boxes in one), those boxes are tiny. They usually have a hard time just stuffing all the junk mail in them.
Who cares about people jumping ship? Every big corporation knows that all employees are just interchangeable cogs. If your lead engineers quit in the wake of an acquisition, no problem, you can hire replacements within a week!
If the cash register can do it then an app can do it.
A cash register only has to calculate it for 1 tax jurisdiction. Your app has to do it for 10,000, and it needs to know a mountain of rules about what is and isn't allowed to be taxed. The cash register also only needs to know the rules that apply in that single jurisdiction.
You don't need sales tax information to calculate a tip. Tips are easy: you take your entire bill (tax and all) and multiply by 10, 15, or 20% (your choice, depending on the quality of service/how much you like the server). That's it. The restaurant will calculate the sales tax for you.
There's no way your little calculator app can properly calculate sales tax. I'm located in NJ, for example, and I'm buying a coat at a clothing store. Quick, what's my sales tax? Answer: 0. Clothing is tax-free here. I'm buying a car, quick, what's my sales tax? 7%. I'm buying a jug of milk, what's my tax? 0. Ok, I just moved to TN, and I'm buying a car; what's my tax? IIRC, it's some percentage (7 or 9%) on the first $1500 or 2500, and the rest is tax-free. Don't forget, many localities have their own add-on sales taxes. Are you sure your app can get all those too, and accurately determine whether you're standing within the town limits, and not in a store that sits just beyond the town line? There's almost 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US, and the rules are constantly changing (what the tax is, what items are tax-free, etc.). How do you hope to keep up with all that?
So if MS had to supply their own implementations of Maps, the Play store, etc., then what would even be the point of MS making their own version of Android? It's not like Android really works that much better as an OS than Windows Phone (on the contrary, Windows Phones seem to have far better performance, though it's hard to say how much of this is because of all the crapware that the carriers and handset makers load on their phones, an affliction which iPhones and Windows Phones don't have). The only reason MS would have to make an Android (or Android-like) phone is to get access to the Google Play store, so customers can use Android apps. If that's locked out, then there's just no point. How does Blackberry do it anyway? I thought they had some kind of compatibility so that (at least Java, non-native) Android apps could work on their phone. If they don't have access to the Google Play store either, then they have the same problem; that compatibility is useless.
Is it just here though? Or is it everywhere? Maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong places, but it sure seems to me that the general level of education and competence has fallen drastically throughout society in the last 20-30 years.
Not to mention that whoever is providing the Google App store download to even authorized users is committing copyright infringement
Yes, of course that's true, just like third parties can't provide MS Office downloads to people who claim to have purchased licenses in my prior example. However, it is possible to create some kind of tool that captures your Google Play binary (and other binaries) before reflashing your phone with an alternative firmware, and then re-installs those same binaries after the reflash is done. That should be totally legal, in theory. In addition, even if you do download the binaries from some other site (in Russia for instance), as an individual you should be fully in compliance with copyright law since the binaries you downloaded should be identical to the ones which were on your phone before you reflashed it.
They even sent a Cease and Desist to CyanogenMod a few years ago and stopped them from distributing it. They don't go after individual users, but those users are still infringing Google's copyright and are essentially pirating the software
Oh bullshit. If you buy a phone with (regular, non-CM) Android pre-installed, then you have every right to use Google Play and any other google apps that were pre-installed on that phone. You don't suddenly lose your right to use that software just because you switched the underlying OS from Android to CM.
That's like saying you're not allowed to buy a laptop computer with Win7 and MS Office installed, copy the MS Office part, reformat the HD and install Linux and WINE, then run MS Office under WINE. Of course you are; you already purchased a license to MS Office, and you can run it on anything you want. Same goes for Google Play.
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It doesn't matter. If there's no tactile feedback. the UI is going to be poor in a car. How do you turn the turn down the volume or adjust the temperature on a touchscreen without looking at it? You don't.
That's not how you make money with OSS. The real way it's generally done is to sell support and customization services. This is how companies like Red Hat and OpenERP do it. You produce some open-source software and market it to businesses, then get them to buy expensive support agreements, and also charge them if they want any customizations or other special services. Obviously, this approach doesn't work at all for software aimed at individuals, it's only good for selling to companies of varying sizes (usually the bigger the better, because bigger companies are more willing to spend tons of money on support contracts).
European unity is actually making some real strides these days, though it seems the northern countries and the southern countries are not getting along that well. But compared to 100 years ago, the northern/western countries are almost working together as one (France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, etc.). The difference is, today's unity was developed through a slow, bottom-up process, with all the governed consenting to this union and joining it voluntarily. Much like the US's early days, really.
Where unity works out poorly is when it's forced from the top-down, by one of those "strong leaders" the OP refers to. Stalin is a prime example here. When this happens, minorities and other groups get marginalized, and after a while (after the central power decays sufficiently, largely due to the union not really being that effective due to the lack of "buy-in"), get pissed off and the whole thing implodes suddenly.
Canonical is an example of the latter, not the former. Except that the Linux ecosystem by its nature doesn't tolerate egotistical dictators that well, so when people get pissed off, they just switch to an alternate or fork.
You can't have it both ways. If you want one strong leader, you have to go with their decisions whether you like them or not. If Canonical refuses to offer more options (because "they'd be too confusing to regular users"), then either you suck it up and deal with the poor workflow, or you abandon them and their "strong leadership" for a different choice.
"Strong leadership" is what lead to Soviet-style socialism, where everyone had maybe 5 choices for shoes and that was it. Freedom and diversity go hand-in-hand, and even though they're seemingly less efficient, you avoid people pushing one-size-fits-all solutions that don't work well for almost anyone.
I do agree that excessive fragmentation in Linux-land is bad, but it's a byproduct of the freedom available there. Luckily, there are strong attempts to consolidate things that should be, such as the recent moves to standardize on systemd. UIs do not need to be standardized so much as lower-level services. You struggling with Unity is not helping the Linux cause, unless maybe you're using it to run around and evangelize it to newbs and convert people away from the proprietary platforms.
It's not just bandwagons I think. A lot of change (esp. in the software world), I think, is driven by the desire to make oneself seem relevant and needed. In other words, it's "make-work". Instead of a change happening because there is a genuine need for the change, or the change really is a better way of doing things, it happens because there's a bunch of people sitting around looking for something to do, and they need to justify their existence. In a company, you can't have a big team of engineers sitting around doing nothing because they've already done a great job building something, and now aren't needed (the other work that needs doing isn't quite in their skillset). So they have a choice between resigning, or finding something else to do. So we get "Widget 2.0! New and improved!!!". (It's not just the workers, it's really their bosses in middle management who need to justify their salaries by leading ever-larger teams with ever-larger budgets.)
At the corporate level, this stuff also happens because of the consumer-driven culture which craves new stuff, and the existence of the desire to sell new stuff. If a company sells you Widget 1.0 and it's excellent and does everything you need, why would you buy another one? Once everyone has one ("market saturation" has been achieved), the company can't continue to exist (or more importantly these days, to grow, since not growing is seen as being equivalent to "dying") since they're not selling anything. So they make a "roadmap" and continue to evolve the product line, adding more and more features and making changes, to convince people to buy a new one and throw out their old one. Case in point: Windows 8. Why would you throw out Windows 7 if it does everything you need and you're happy with it? Simple: because Windows 8 is out with a shiny new UI that's "revolutionary". Of course, things didn't quite pan out as MS expected there, but that was much of the intent. With many products, there's only so much you can do with real features before the product does everything its buyers need, so the company turns to reinventing the wheel, in our case meaning redoing the UI to be "more modern", even though the old one was just fine, and in fact more attractive than the ugly new one (this isn't just MS I'm talking about here, it's many UIs; look at the ugly new Gmail UI for example).
What's really sad is the pathetic sycophants who defend this constant wheel-reinvention and change for change's sake, calling anyone who objects a "luddite". This doesn't mean of course that old ways are always better (what idiot wants to go back to cooperative multitasking, or worse, no multitasking?), but we've reached a point with our software these days where there really isn't much improvement to be had, so it seems everyone is screwing around with UIs to try to make themselves relevant. (Also, there are improvements to be had in the software realm, but they're outside the skillset of people who work with UIs.)
Getting into the auto business would be very foolish of them since they have no particular expertise to bring to the table there.
I entirely agree, but when has this stopped other companies from making foolish acquisitions?
Which would be a good thing, really. Independent dealerships suck; they're called "stealerships" for a reason. They have a highly adversarial relationship with the manufacturers, and make a lot of money by screwing over customers with overpriced parts and repairs. If manufacturers sold directly to consumers, the prices would be lower (no middleman) and a lot of problems like unnecessary repairs would disappear, as a large corporation like Ford wouldn't want their reputation to be tainted that way. When you get screwed over at Jones Honda, you don't blame Honda, you blame the Jones dealership for your bad experience. But if the dealerships were all owned by Honda, this wouldn't happen; you'd blame Honda itself, and disparage them all over the internet. Just like Apple exercises a lot of control over how its individual stores are run, manufacturer-owned car stores would be the same, with corporations trying to make the experience as pleasant and consistent as possible. As for competition, there's no shortage of car manufacturers, so if you don't like the experience you get at a Ford or Honda store, you'd go instead to a GM, Suburu, Toyota, Tesla, VW, etc. store.
The present car dealership business structure is entirely a product of local-level corruption, with rich auto dealership owners bribing local and state officials for laws which require automakers to solely sell cars through these dealerships, rather than directly, justifying it with a lot of Newspeak about it somehow being better for consumers.
He never said that. He was referring to the various touch-screen interfaces found in many cars today, such as MyFordTouch/MyLinconTouch, BMW's iDrive, etc. These systems are terrible as they're buggy and don't have any tactile feedback (unless they have knobs for the commonly-used functions; some systems do this, some don't). iOS systems wouldn't be any different; they'd just be a different OS underneath, but the UI problems would all remain.
Yes, but being able to heat that object properly in a very cold environment depends on having very good insulation so that the heat isn't dissipated to the environment too quickly. Then moving the artificial limb to a hotter environment, with all that insulation still present, means you need to have an active cooling system for it to continue working, meaning the whole thing is now pretty complicated. Finally, generating heat in a precisely-controllable manner (given these challenges of insulation and cooling in different environments) isn't that easy; remember, you want to be able to finely control your "muscles" so that you can very precisely control your limbs' movements. It'd be a lot easier to use something that can be electrically actuated, and where you only need to make sure the actuator's temperature is kept within a certain range for it to work properly.
Last I heard, they tried this at some Amtrak stations and were ejected by Amtrak Police.
How about nails? It'd be pretty easy to use common nails to make caltops (basically two nails bent and welded or twisted together so that a pointy side is always facing up). Then the terrists could throw those onto busy freeways, causing big pile-ups and choking our transit arteries.
Are they going to ban nails now?
You're forgetting about Ferrum (Fe) and Plumbum (Pb). "Aluminum" fits in just fine with these other elements' names.
Using heat sounds like it won't work very well in different environments. What happens when you try to use your artificial limb in subzero temperatures?
Even better, you can do something that's just as relaxing but doesn't require a nearby lake or having to deal with smelly fish, such as watching paint dry. So exciting! Or you could just lock yourself in a featureless room and stare at the wall for a full day.
It's weird because if you think about it, intact teams of highly-experienced employees are a valuable asset that can be used to produce new products. It's just another sign of how screwed up modern management is that they don't see this.
Actually, the Chinese own Volvo.
Even in places where they have the full-size mailboxes (the round-topped metal ones about 18 inches long), those boxes aren't large enough for lots of deliveries. Not only that, but they don't usually lock. The locking mailboxes I've seen only have a slot, so if your package is more than an inch thick, it won't fit.
If you're talking about those community mailboxes (usually a group of 16 boxes in one), those boxes are tiny. They usually have a hard time just stuffing all the junk mail in them.
Who cares about people jumping ship? Every big corporation knows that all employees are just interchangeable cogs. If your lead engineers quit in the wake of an acquisition, no problem, you can hire replacements within a week!
If the cash register can do it then an app can do it.
A cash register only has to calculate it for 1 tax jurisdiction. Your app has to do it for 10,000, and it needs to know a mountain of rules about what is and isn't allowed to be taxed. The cash register also only needs to know the rules that apply in that single jurisdiction.
And if Bing has shown us anything, Microsoft's attempt at beating Google at their own game is laughably pitiful.
Don't be ridiculous; Bing has proven itself to be the very best search engine for porn.
You don't need sales tax information to calculate a tip. Tips are easy: you take your entire bill (tax and all) and multiply by 10, 15, or 20% (your choice, depending on the quality of service/how much you like the server). That's it. The restaurant will calculate the sales tax for you.
There's no way your little calculator app can properly calculate sales tax. I'm located in NJ, for example, and I'm buying a coat at a clothing store. Quick, what's my sales tax? Answer: 0. Clothing is tax-free here. I'm buying a car, quick, what's my sales tax? 7%. I'm buying a jug of milk, what's my tax? 0. Ok, I just moved to TN, and I'm buying a car; what's my tax? IIRC, it's some percentage (7 or 9%) on the first $1500 or 2500, and the rest is tax-free. Don't forget, many localities have their own add-on sales taxes. Are you sure your app can get all those too, and accurately determine whether you're standing within the town limits, and not in a store that sits just beyond the town line? There's almost 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US, and the rules are constantly changing (what the tax is, what items are tax-free, etc.). How do you hope to keep up with all that?
So if MS had to supply their own implementations of Maps, the Play store, etc., then what would even be the point of MS making their own version of Android? It's not like Android really works that much better as an OS than Windows Phone (on the contrary, Windows Phones seem to have far better performance, though it's hard to say how much of this is because of all the crapware that the carriers and handset makers load on their phones, an affliction which iPhones and Windows Phones don't have). The only reason MS would have to make an Android (or Android-like) phone is to get access to the Google Play store, so customers can use Android apps. If that's locked out, then there's just no point. How does Blackberry do it anyway? I thought they had some kind of compatibility so that (at least Java, non-native) Android apps could work on their phone. If they don't have access to the Google Play store either, then they have the same problem; that compatibility is useless.
Alas, that's becomming more and more common here.
Is it just here though? Or is it everywhere? Maybe I'm hanging out in the wrong places, but it sure seems to me that the general level of education and competence has fallen drastically throughout society in the last 20-30 years.
Not to mention that whoever is providing the Google App store download to even authorized users is committing copyright infringement
Yes, of course that's true, just like third parties can't provide MS Office downloads to people who claim to have purchased licenses in my prior example. However, it is possible to create some kind of tool that captures your Google Play binary (and other binaries) before reflashing your phone with an alternative firmware, and then re-installs those same binaries after the reflash is done. That should be totally legal, in theory. In addition, even if you do download the binaries from some other site (in Russia for instance), as an individual you should be fully in compliance with copyright law since the binaries you downloaded should be identical to the ones which were on your phone before you reflashed it.
They even sent a Cease and Desist to CyanogenMod a few years ago and stopped them from distributing it. They don't go after individual users, but those users are still infringing Google's copyright and are essentially pirating the software
Oh bullshit. If you buy a phone with (regular, non-CM) Android pre-installed, then you have every right to use Google Play and any other google apps that were pre-installed on that phone. You don't suddenly lose your right to use that software just because you switched the underlying OS from Android to CM.
That's like saying you're not allowed to buy a laptop computer with Win7 and MS Office installed, copy the MS Office part, reformat the HD and install Linux and WINE, then run MS Office under WINE. Of course you are; you already purchased a license to MS Office, and you can run it on anything you want. Same goes for Google Play.