Microsoft had two competing, incompatible product lines going at once
I'm sorry, but I'm having difficulty remembering any time in Microsoft's history when that happened. They've had multiple operating systems, but I don't recall any time when they tried to sell them to the same market. Even back when NT was under development and theoretically available to desktop users, they were careful to avoid it being packaged at the same markets as 95/98/Me, and eventually had to merge. You didn't go into a store and find cheap midi-towers divided into some NT4 and some with 98, and the two platforms tried to be compatible with one another.
This isn't like some google webapp they can abandon because nobody paid for it. People paid for those ChromeOS-based devices, and they expect some ongoing support.
Well, sure. The most obvious is allow ChromeOS users to upgrade to AndroidChromeOS (or whatever the name of the thing is.) Bear in mind "third party" support for ChromeOS is limited to Web Apps anyway, so these can/should be supported by a theoretical desktop Android out of the box anyway.
Google will overlap the two operating systems for as long as it makes sense, which will probably be for several years. They will continue to ship ChromeOS until they've worked out the details. Then they'll terminate ChromeOS, but it won't happen especially soon
I think you're over-thinking this. ChromeOS isn't some crud filled open operating system with several generations of APIs, where everyone from John Carmack to Alexander Kowalski has developed native binary applications. It's a locked down system designed to run Web Apps, and it even uses the same core browser as Android. There is literally nothing whatsoever to stop Google from shipping Android in its place beyond deciding on how a desktop UI should work. Once that UI is ready (a prerequisite for shipping Android laptops one would think), there's no point any more in ChromeOS. It ceases to have a purpose. It doesn't have a library of "ChromeOS" software that'll never work under the new system.
So again, what's the point? Why would Google ship competing operating systems? Nobody else does this.
That makes little sense though. That'd mean two competing, incompatible, lines of laptops. And folding ChromeOS into Android should be relatively easy, given the common kernel - it's already been done with Ubuntu and Android, and I believe Motorola shipped a phone at one point with some GNU/Linux distribution running with Android, where Android was the core UI on the phone, but plugging it into a laptop cradle gave you a proper GNOME-ish desktop with your apps available in both places.
I wonder what's really going on? Quite simply: I don't believe the article if it's implying two lines of laptop, but I don't know what's going on at Google and while I can make intelligent guesses as to the future of Android and ChromeOS, I can't say for definite what direction they'd want to take both operating systems in.
I don't think Windows 10 works "surprisingly well" in any amount of RAM! Certainly on the two machines I'm testing it with, a 1Gb tablet, and 4Gb laptop, it's unbelievably slow (and much slower than its predecessor, Windows 8.1 and 7 respectively)
Well, I always trust all my security to APKWare. With the IP addresses of every secure site you'd ever want to go to in your HOSTS file, why would you even bother using HTTPS at all?;-)
Because a so-called "self signed" certificate (that is, one that is lacking a signature from a CA) is one nobody you've programmed your browser to trust stands behind.
That's the only difference between certificates that give you warnings, and certificates that don't. If I go to www.bankofsquiggleslash.com, I'd kinda like to know that the certificate is likely to be genuine without having to phone them up and ask for a MD5Sum. And, not surprisingly, the bank would also like me to know that, as they wouldn't be able to field all the calls otherwise.
Ah but you have many choices! You can get xfinity Economy Plus, xfinity Internet Plus, xfinity Internet Plus w/ Blast(tm), xfinity Performance, xfinity Extreme 105, and xfinity Blast!(tm).
(This is a real list, I just got it by visiting http://www.xfinity.com/interne... - you'll see a list based upon where Comcast thinks your IP address is located)
I suspect this is the list of choices the article is actually talking about. Mix this with cellphone plans (at least those have been simplified lately I guess), and you start to understand where the problem is.
Me? The worst selection I have to pick from every year are our healthcare plans. My company offers something like six or seven. All you have to do to determine which is the best deal is to build a time machine, determine what healthcare issues you'll have in the following 12 months, and then pick the plan accordingly.
Why doesn't the US have single payer healthcare again? Oh yeah, noun, verb, tyranny. (Hey, Obama and Pelosi, remember when you refused to consider single payer in your so-called Heathcare Reform because you didn't want to freak out the right wing and have them calling your plan a government takeover of healthcare, or tyranny, or....? About that...)
There was a period, around the late naughts, where it was true that Ubuntu's default installs were a little unstable (and they have a habit of making LTS releases initially really bad), but by that point Ubuntu was already the distro with the mindshare. The question I was trying to answer was how did it get this way, which subsequent history would not affect.
OS X... obviously people's mileage varies, but bring a newcomer to a computer, and OS X seems to be the one they're most likely to quickly understand. OS X is significantly different from Windows, which in turn had a heavy influence on GNOME and KDE, so it's not surprising you'd not necessarily feel comfortable or find it (initially) counter-intuitive.
(To explain my comment further: I felt GNOME 2.x was the best implementation of the Windows 95 UI ever designed, beating the real thing by miles. Hence I put Ubuntu's implementation of it, itself a good idea, just behind OS X. )
It's pretty straightforward. Ubuntu "just works". And it "just works" in part because of the stuff you denounce, like PulseAudio and NetworkManager, neither of which are perfect, but they are designed to ensure that people don't have to "manage" (easily or not) a bunch of config files.
Ubuntu isn't the only distribution with those technologies BTW, but it was the first to really polish and test the hell out of the combined, modern, GNOME/GNU/Linux system to produce something that would produce a usable installation out of the box on almost everything.
Is it perfect? No. Unity was brave but not something anyone is particularly happy with. I'm dreading the Mir/Wayland BS foreshadowed in the summary above. But before Unity, for the longest time, a GNU/Linux based software distribution was the second easiest to use operating system out there (after Mac OS X), and arguably the most productive of the big three. That's why it's popular.
I'm unsympathetic to the fuel issue. There's no objection to gas stations which have many, many, more fuel deliveries, and the same issues with fuel storage. I think the noise is fundamentally the only real issue here. As others point out in response, noise is a solved issue, it's just "expensive", and many data center builders want to have their cake and eat it, cheap set-up costs and cheap infrastructure/labor.
They can't, unfortunately, have both. Not in a civilized society. Not in one where we value urban spaces.
There are good reasons to build them in populated areas, it's just care needs to be taken in terms of their design and their impact on neighbors. We're not talking Nuclear Power plants here, we're looking at something whose only externalities would normally be back-up power and the repercussions of back-up power (today that means fuel and noisy generators that need regular testing)
I'm inclined to think the industry is failing the rest of us here. We ought to be able to reduce the noise made by generators, but we don't care because... why?
If the industry refuses to address noise, then yes, it deserves to find itself forced to avail itself of the benefits of operating near civilization. That means less availability of qualified personnel and more expensive infrastructure. But, for crying out loud, can't we just turn down the noise?
the concept of living in a big city and that you sometimes have to deal with other people, commercial activity and noise.
There's also the converse which is that if you're doing anything in a big city, you have to be mindful that there are people living next door. If you can't adapt to that environment without making it worse for those who live around you, you should move to somewhere more suitable.
I appreciate the Ameri-centric nature of Slashdot means many here have never lived in a (real) city, and their sole experience of one is watching a movie where sounds of sirens and car horns blowing is used to audibly signify that something is shot "at night, in a city" (one of many examples of Hollywood/TV having it in for cities, for some reason), but in the real world, virtually no cities - not even New York - sound like that, and the vast majority of cities, while never silent, are as quiet as suburbia during the evenings and nights.
I tend to be concerned people won't read my code, and thus will ignore potentially dangerous bugs I may have slipped in by accident. That's why I _always_ give my function names clickbait headlines.
Initially it's a little harder to understand, but as programmers find they read it anyway, it ends up with them having a better core understanding of the entire system.
Yes, and they're very useful. Most Americans I've introduced to the concept love them.
Thing is though...
...with the iKettle, do you walk to the kitchen, fill it up with water, plug it in, and then go back to your living room, pick up the laptop, browse to http://my.kettle.local/, log in, and hit the "Boil water" button?
Last time I installed Chrome (not Chromium, but actual Chrome) on Ubuntu I still had to download it from Google trusting Google's process rather than Canonical's. So no, it didn't go through some encryption protected carefully managed central repo. And, obviously, if someone can install software from Google via downloads, they can install other software via downloads, including malware.
That being said, this is about Google's Nexus devices, which are vanilla and have a perfect track record of getting updates
FWIW, my Initially-4.0 Galaxy Nexus only ever got to 4.3 before Google pulled the plug on updates. I haven't gotten a smartphone since, but I seriously doubt Google has had a change of policy on the subject.
That said, the Nexus phones have a decent track record of being open enough that third parties can supply upgraded operating systems.
Then the claim that the government should only look after the interests of the rich will become louder, there's already an element of society that claims that, because the superrich pay the bulk of taxation (because they earn the most, with taxes being related to income) that, despite the government's affects being felt by everyone, the government should only be answerable to the superrich and their interests.
I prefer some taxation for everyone than taxation only for a tiny minority who happen to be the people hoarding all the new wealth.
Higher taxes on the superrich also discourage absurdly high salaries, from past experience. People who own businesses are less likely to skim an extra million from their revenues if they only get $400,000 of that back after tax (assuming a 60% top tier tax rate.) Better to re-invest it in their own businesses, than increase what's ultimately a status symbol (how many plasma TVs does a man need anyway? A huge amount of the reason why wages are so high amongst the superrich is the belief that a higher salary shows greater worth.)
It sounds like Uber only needs to make minor modifications to its business structure, none that actually affect its core model, to accommodate London's rules on the subject. If they are breaking them, it sounds like it's pointless breaking-rules-for-the-sake-of-it rather than because they're genuinely in its way, like a bakery that refuses to list the ingredients on the package (but puts them on its website) because screw "The Man".
"The knowledge" doesn't apply to minicabs. Minicabs are services that you call in advance, rather than hail from the street, so they're more like the services provided by Uber's drivers.
There's a good case for suggesting Uber can make minor modifications to its business to work in the London and the rest of the UK, largely by creating dispatch companies, and by registering with the appropriate authorities. Whether they're willing to do so however is another matter.
I'm making a joke about patents. I'm not commenting on whether Uber's in the right or not.
Although...
Regulatory capture, for the most part, is a myth. I've seen very few cases of regulation where somehow the regulated benefit competitively. Friedman's poster child for "Regulatory capture" was the railroads, and he was writing this nonsense back in the 1950s, long after it became clear over-regulation (and government subsidized competition) was utterly destroying the railroad industry, so it's hard to take seriously as a complaint.
Taxis aren't regulated because of a conspiracy of taxi companies to prevent competition. They're regulated because virtually every city in the world that has them wants to make sure customers aren't abused, and taxi companies go along with it only because a common minimum standard of behavior means more trust from potential customers.
And yeah, this is the point where someone mentions medallions, and I shoot right back with pictures of New York City streets utterly crowded with taxis and point out that New York is regulating the market to prevent it from becoming an anti-social streets-clogging menace. Medallions, and equivalents, aren't really used in cities that don't have problems with too many vehicles on the roads.
Uber in London? No idea. They may even be in the right there, assuming their drivers are not stopping when hailed from the streets. Uber strikes me as fitting right in with the minicab model.
The Justices were relying upon Uber's patent, which clearly said the technology was new because it included the words "...but on the Internet" at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but I'm having difficulty remembering any time in Microsoft's history when that happened. They've had multiple operating systems, but I don't recall any time when they tried to sell them to the same market. Even back when NT was under development and theoretically available to desktop users, they were careful to avoid it being packaged at the same markets as 95/98/Me, and eventually had to merge. You didn't go into a store and find cheap midi-towers divided into some NT4 and some with 98, and the two platforms tried to be compatible with one another.
Well, sure. The most obvious is allow ChromeOS users to upgrade to AndroidChromeOS (or whatever the name of the thing is.) Bear in mind "third party" support for ChromeOS is limited to Web Apps anyway, so these can/should be supported by a theoretical desktop Android out of the box anyway.
I think you're over-thinking this. ChromeOS isn't some crud filled open operating system with several generations of APIs, where everyone from John Carmack to Alexander Kowalski has developed native binary applications. It's a locked down system designed to run Web Apps, and it even uses the same core browser as Android. There is literally nothing whatsoever to stop Google from shipping Android in its place beyond deciding on how a desktop UI should work. Once that UI is ready (a prerequisite for shipping Android laptops one would think), there's no point any more in ChromeOS. It ceases to have a purpose. It doesn't have a library of "ChromeOS" software that'll never work under the new system.
So again, what's the point? Why would Google ship competing operating systems? Nobody else does this.
That makes little sense though. That'd mean two competing, incompatible, lines of laptops. And folding ChromeOS into Android should be relatively easy, given the common kernel - it's already been done with Ubuntu and Android, and I believe Motorola shipped a phone at one point with some GNU/Linux distribution running with Android, where Android was the core UI on the phone, but plugging it into a laptop cradle gave you a proper GNOME-ish desktop with your apps available in both places.
I wonder what's really going on? Quite simply: I don't believe the article if it's implying two lines of laptop, but I don't know what's going on at Google and while I can make intelligent guesses as to the future of Android and ChromeOS, I can't say for definite what direction they'd want to take both operating systems in.
I don't think Windows 10 works "surprisingly well" in any amount of RAM! Certainly on the two machines I'm testing it with, a 1Gb tablet, and 4Gb laptop, it's unbelievably slow (and much slower than its predecessor, Windows 8.1 and 7 respectively)
Well, I always trust all my security to APKWare. With the IP addresses of every secure site you'd ever want to go to in your HOSTS file, why would you even bother using HTTPS at all? ;-)
Because a so-called "self signed" certificate (that is, one that is lacking a signature from a CA) is one nobody you've programmed your browser to trust stands behind.
That's the only difference between certificates that give you warnings, and certificates that don't. If I go to www.bankofsquiggleslash.com, I'd kinda like to know that the certificate is likely to be genuine without having to phone them up and ask for a MD5Sum. And, not surprisingly, the bank would also like me to know that, as they wouldn't be able to field all the calls otherwise.
I'm going to make a guess it was 24 but the superscriptiness got lost in a cut and paste. The sentence works if you assume that.
I'm pretty sure that "space" has plenty of air in it in the Star Wars version, given the way spacecraft "fly" in it...
http://i.imgur.com/3A53b.jpg
(I agree with you)
Ah but you have many choices! You can get xfinity Economy Plus, xfinity Internet Plus, xfinity Internet Plus w/ Blast(tm), xfinity Performance, xfinity Extreme 105, and xfinity Blast!(tm).
(This is a real list, I just got it by visiting http://www.xfinity.com/interne... - you'll see a list based upon where Comcast thinks your IP address is located)
I suspect this is the list of choices the article is actually talking about. Mix this with cellphone plans (at least those have been simplified lately I guess), and you start to understand where the problem is.
Me? The worst selection I have to pick from every year are our healthcare plans. My company offers something like six or seven. All you have to do to determine which is the best deal is to build a time machine, determine what healthcare issues you'll have in the following 12 months, and then pick the plan accordingly.
Why doesn't the US have single payer healthcare again? Oh yeah, noun, verb, tyranny. (Hey, Obama and Pelosi, remember when you refused to consider single payer in your so-called Heathcare Reform because you didn't want to freak out the right wing and have them calling your plan a government takeover of healthcare, or tyranny, or....? About that...)
There was a period, around the late naughts, where it was true that Ubuntu's default installs were a little unstable (and they have a habit of making LTS releases initially really bad), but by that point Ubuntu was already the distro with the mindshare. The question I was trying to answer was how did it get this way, which subsequent history would not affect.
OS X... obviously people's mileage varies, but bring a newcomer to a computer, and OS X seems to be the one they're most likely to quickly understand. OS X is significantly different from Windows, which in turn had a heavy influence on GNOME and KDE, so it's not surprising you'd not necessarily feel comfortable or find it (initially) counter-intuitive.
(To explain my comment further: I felt GNOME 2.x was the best implementation of the Windows 95 UI ever designed, beating the real thing by miles. Hence I put Ubuntu's implementation of it, itself a good idea, just behind OS X. )
It's pretty straightforward. Ubuntu "just works". And it "just works" in part because of the stuff you denounce, like PulseAudio and NetworkManager, neither of which are perfect, but they are designed to ensure that people don't have to "manage" (easily or not) a bunch of config files.
Ubuntu isn't the only distribution with those technologies BTW, but it was the first to really polish and test the hell out of the combined, modern, GNOME/GNU/Linux system to produce something that would produce a usable installation out of the box on almost everything.
Is it perfect? No. Unity was brave but not something anyone is particularly happy with. I'm dreading the Mir/Wayland BS foreshadowed in the summary above. But before Unity, for the longest time, a GNU/Linux based software distribution was the second easiest to use operating system out there (after Mac OS X), and arguably the most productive of the big three. That's why it's popular.
I'm unsympathetic to the fuel issue. There's no objection to gas stations which have many, many, more fuel deliveries, and the same issues with fuel storage. I think the noise is fundamentally the only real issue here. As others point out in response, noise is a solved issue, it's just "expensive", and many data center builders want to have their cake and eat it, cheap set-up costs and cheap infrastructure/labor.
They can't, unfortunately, have both. Not in a civilized society. Not in one where we value urban spaces.
There are good reasons to build them in populated areas, it's just care needs to be taken in terms of their design and their impact on neighbors. We're not talking Nuclear Power plants here, we're looking at something whose only externalities would normally be back-up power and the repercussions of back-up power (today that means fuel and noisy generators that need regular testing)
I'm inclined to think the industry is failing the rest of us here. We ought to be able to reduce the noise made by generators, but we don't care because... why?
If the industry refuses to address noise, then yes, it deserves to find itself forced to avail itself of the benefits of operating near civilization. That means less availability of qualified personnel and more expensive infrastructure. But, for crying out loud, can't we just turn down the noise?
So, pretty much like suburban Americans who live in an HOA-controlled development then? ;-)
There's also the converse which is that if you're doing anything in a big city, you have to be mindful that there are people living next door. If you can't adapt to that environment without making it worse for those who live around you, you should move to somewhere more suitable.
I appreciate the Ameri-centric nature of Slashdot means many here have never lived in a (real) city, and their sole experience of one is watching a movie where sounds of sirens and car horns blowing is used to audibly signify that something is shot "at night, in a city" (one of many examples of Hollywood/TV having it in for cities, for some reason), but in the real world, virtually no cities - not even New York - sound like that, and the vast majority of cities, while never silent, are as quiet as suburbia during the evenings and nights.
I tend to be concerned people won't read my code, and thus will ignore potentially dangerous bugs I may have slipped in by accident. That's why I _always_ give my function names clickbait headlines.
Sample:
Initially it's a little harder to understand, but as programmers find they read it anyway, it ends up with them having a better core understanding of the entire system.
Yes, and they're very useful. Most Americans I've introduced to the concept love them.
Thing is though...
Just asking.
Well, hopefully he'll make up for that by selling the railguns using a Kickstarter funded by Bitcoins...
Last time I installed Chrome (not Chromium, but actual Chrome) on Ubuntu I still had to download it from Google trusting Google's process rather than Canonical's. So no, it didn't go through some encryption protected carefully managed central repo. And, obviously, if someone can install software from Google via downloads, they can install other software via downloads, including malware.
FWIW, my Initially-4.0 Galaxy Nexus only ever got to 4.3 before Google pulled the plug on updates. I haven't gotten a smartphone since, but I seriously doubt Google has had a change of policy on the subject.
That said, the Nexus phones have a decent track record of being open enough that third parties can supply upgraded operating systems.
Then the claim that the government should only look after the interests of the rich will become louder, there's already an element of society that claims that, because the superrich pay the bulk of taxation (because they earn the most, with taxes being related to income) that, despite the government's affects being felt by everyone, the government should only be answerable to the superrich and their interests.
I prefer some taxation for everyone than taxation only for a tiny minority who happen to be the people hoarding all the new wealth.
Higher taxes on the superrich also discourage absurdly high salaries, from past experience. People who own businesses are less likely to skim an extra million from their revenues if they only get $400,000 of that back after tax (assuming a 60% top tier tax rate.) Better to re-invest it in their own businesses, than increase what's ultimately a status symbol (how many plasma TVs does a man need anyway? A huge amount of the reason why wages are so high amongst the superrich is the belief that a higher salary shows greater worth.)
It sounds like Uber only needs to make minor modifications to its business structure, none that actually affect its core model, to accommodate London's rules on the subject. If they are breaking them, it sounds like it's pointless breaking-rules-for-the-sake-of-it rather than because they're genuinely in its way, like a bakery that refuses to list the ingredients on the package (but puts them on its website) because screw "The Man".
"The knowledge" doesn't apply to minicabs. Minicabs are services that you call in advance, rather than hail from the street, so they're more like the services provided by Uber's drivers.
There's a good case for suggesting Uber can make minor modifications to its business to work in the London and the rest of the UK, largely by creating dispatch companies, and by registering with the appropriate authorities. Whether they're willing to do so however is another matter.
I'm making a joke about patents. I'm not commenting on whether Uber's in the right or not.
Although...
Regulatory capture, for the most part, is a myth. I've seen very few cases of regulation where somehow the regulated benefit competitively. Friedman's poster child for "Regulatory capture" was the railroads, and he was writing this nonsense back in the 1950s, long after it became clear over-regulation (and government subsidized competition) was utterly destroying the railroad industry, so it's hard to take seriously as a complaint.
Taxis aren't regulated because of a conspiracy of taxi companies to prevent competition. They're regulated because virtually every city in the world that has them wants to make sure customers aren't abused, and taxi companies go along with it only because a common minimum standard of behavior means more trust from potential customers.
And yeah, this is the point where someone mentions medallions, and I shoot right back with pictures of New York City streets utterly crowded with taxis and point out that New York is regulating the market to prevent it from becoming an anti-social streets-clogging menace. Medallions, and equivalents, aren't really used in cities that don't have problems with too many vehicles on the roads.
Uber in London? No idea. They may even be in the right there, assuming their drivers are not stopping when hailed from the streets. Uber strikes me as fitting right in with the minicab model.
The Justices were relying upon Uber's patent, which clearly said the technology was new because it included the words "...but on the Internet" at the end.