Newton kickstarted the entire thing. The product was selling well and considered a player until Steve Jobs unexpectedly cancelled it. Most contemporary reviews claim Jobs did it out of spite, because Newton was the baby of the man who fired him.
Palm and Blackberry succeeded. Period. Yes, they eventually stopped, but if that makes them failures you might as well claim that, say, CRT TVs or cassette tapes were failures too. The Commodore 64 is the biggest failure in computing history by that metric.
Portfolio vs Libretto... what? Why are you asking or even comparing them? One was a DOS based palm top from 1990ish, the other came out a little later, ran Windows, and was comparable to a netbook today. Either way, yes, the Portfolio was a runaway success. Atari's failure to produce a follow-up meant that success was shortlived.
The point is that almost every company that's had a serious go of it has succeeded. Indeed, there are numerous examples of companies that succeeded that I didn't even bother to mention. Did they last forever? No, but they got a return on investment. Yes, there have been one or two failures outside of Microsoft, but Microsoft is pretty much the only company that's tried this game for nearly 30 years, and failed every single time.
I guess because you lose everything by going into incognito mode - your autoplay settings aren't honored for example. At this point we have to look at what exactly Google means by Incognito mode.
I said mobile Windows. With a lowercase 'm'. I'm referring to Microsoft's 25-30 year campaign to try to make Windows a serious contender in the mobile space.
With absolutely no successes.
Not one.
Zero.
Zilch.
Sometimes they produced good products the market just wasn't interested in (original WinCE, Windows 8 - which was an excellent mobile operating system, it's just a shame they tried to market it as a desktop system), but regardless, they've never managed to make any headway here. And now they're competing with not one but TWO dominant competitors, both of which have established markets and no good reason to believe anyone would want to walk away from either.
I would have expected Microsoft to pack it in by now. They've been at this mobile Windows thing since the 1990s (in a box somewhere I have a clamshell WinCE HPC running one of the earliest versions of WinCE - nice system actually, but...) and virtually everyone has made a success of it who's tried, except them. Apple (twice!) Google. Palm. Even Atari! (No, seriously, they came up with a pocket PC that was a runaway success, you may remember it from Terminator 2, John Connor uses it briefly to hack an ATM...) ATARI! You know, the company that made one of the first games consoles and then pretty much failed at everything since, but for a brief six month window in the early 1990s they had a hit on their hands which... uh, they fucked up like everything else.
And now they're at it again.
Maybe if they can get Windows 10 to run Android apps, like ChromeOS, they might stand a chance.
You missed something somewhere. What about The Guardian's wish to credit Focus Ecuador makes the story possibly "disinformation"? Or alternatively what about The Guardian being British and the Verge being American makes it that? (If this is some kind of weird ass smear about The Guardian, well, you do know The Guardian is one of the only independent media outlets in the world, right? It's owned by a self-contained trust that exists solely to publish The Guardian and related newspapers, and the trust itself is run by journalists. It has its biases but it's not in any way establishment or government controlled - hell, they've had MI-5 enter their offices and smash their computers in the past, and were one of the first newspapers to raise the profile of Wikileaks, and assisted them for a time.)
I have a crapload of completely irrelevant videos recommended to me because I occasionally sit down with my daughter and we search for videos on various topics together. There's virtually no set of circumstances where I'd want to watch any of the recommendations related to watching these (generally my recommendations are flooded with a combination of videos about Jaguars - the cat type, not car - and the latest episodes of DC Super Hero Girls.)
TBH though, I'd find what they're proposing more useful/usable if they made it a "Once this session is over please forget everything" or "Forget the last session" thing, but I guess that's making the UI more complex.
For what it's worth I just went to GSMArena and did a search for phones with the above spec. To be fair I included 2016 and 2018 but, seriously, even a conservative search will find quite a few phones. They say 268 results. The first one that comes up is a Samsung J series, which IIRC is Samsung's budget range. I manually checked each item and it met the spec, albeit it's the 2018 model. Which, I guess, proves my thesis that Android phones for some reason get worse the more expensive they are.
All of those features are common. Why do you think it's "trolling" to propose you have a phone with all of these features?
well the DNC needs to stay out of my government until they can win an election without having the FBI/CIA/NSA all spying on opposition campaigns attempting to throw the election their way illegally.
Just to be clear, you're saying that if the FBI, CIA, and NSA finds compelling evidence that a hostile foreign power is interfering in an election, they shouldn't investigate it further if there's any risk at all that a Republican (Democrats apparently don't matter, I don't see you complaining about Comey's October Surprise) candidate might be benefiting from said interference?
The FBI et al might have been investigating the links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the only campaign intentionally attacked was Clinton's. Did you forget that? The FBI even pretended they didn't see a link between the Russian campaign and Trump's.
We have the worst President in history, which is a pretty impressive achievement given we had Bush only 10 years ago, and Nixon in the last 50 or so. That's thanks in part to the FBI smearing Clinton, and hiding key problems with Trump and botching the investigation so Russia could interfere. But sure, pretend the DNC is the problem.
Uh, Flash, Adobe reader, Java, etc. require different plugins for different browsers.
Now they do, but only IE needed a "special plugin" back when Flash was a thing. At the time Flash was at its peak, everything (except IE) supported NSAPI.
Moreover, if a third party wants to produce a browser today, supporting Flash just means supporting NSAPI. Whereas the "Each browser/operating system combination needs its own DRM plug-in" is by design, there will never be a case where you'll be able to workaround the lack of a native Adobe DRM implementation for BrowserX by installing the DRM plugin for Firefox.
The same people who asked for autoplay and demanded browser makers implement it on by default (something, thankfully, they're finally backtracking on)?
I want my Flash video back. It was better. Easier to control. One plug-in per operating system rather than per-browser (if you're going "Huh?" look up how W3C implemented DRM in HTML5.) I was OK with Flash. I didn't like it, but only the W3C could make something worse than Flash.
No, they're asking to be further removed from the decision making process, so that there will no longer be any humans involved.
What makes you think that Google's AI is going to tell them not to bomb a wedding? The AI will only say "Yes, Gerry Adams and Oliver North are in range, fire now", not "Oh noooh! Gerry Adams and Oliver North are at a wedding y'all! Stop the attack!"
As if corporations are somehow less evil, less prone to abuses of power than governments?
We are literally talking about the only part of the government here that is able to freely kill innocent people.
The last time I recall a private corporation actually going to war on any serious scale (occasional Mark Thatcher lead mercenaries excepting) was Cecil Rhode's British South Africa Company, in the 19th Century.
Today, corporations can be pretty evil, but they don't generally go out of their way to kill innocent people. Right now you're comparing collecting information used to target ads with removing the human check in a chain that, without the person, inevitably leads to innocent bystanders being killed. I think you need your moral compass remagnetized.
You know, it's possible for the same act to be done for good or neutral reasons, while in other contexts be bad.
I'm fine with Google collecting data to determine what ads to show me as long as it keeps that data secure and doesn't share it with anyone else. If Eric Schmidt can find out quickly that squiggleslash is also J. Smith from California and is into {list of sexual fetishes}, that's a problem. If server-x5-452.google.com can figure out that I'd be more likely to respond to an ad for a Ubuntu powered robotic lawnmower than a green high heeled shoe, then they can knock themselves out, that's fine by me.
Similarly you're claiming it's totally OK to murder the families of terr... oh, you weren't? You were claiming that something something national security and didn't actually have a positive scenario other than MERIKA HELL YEAH?
Because unfortunately, and with good reason, the dozen or so Google employees saw their work in terms of "OK, we're going to move from helping businesses send their message to receptive potential customers" to "Those drones that keep being used to kill supposed enemies of America and everyone around them including their families and innocent bystanders? Yeah, we're going to make those even less moral by removing the input from a human being who could, at least theoretically, pull the plug in a blatant act of murder."
Here's hoping the first drone gets hacked, and is re-targeted... at you.
Meh, leaving aside the major questions about gambling and its known addictive and destructive nature, you're assuming that SCOTUS found all laws about gambling to be unconstitutional. They didn't. What they did find was that the Federal law outlawing gambling was unconstitutional because of the way it was written, essentially forcing the states to ban gambling themselves.
Regardless of what happens now, state laws outlawing gambling will remain constitutional. And it's probable other Federal laws outlawing gambling would be upheld, as long as they don't impose any duties upon the states.
All the better. Those tend to be the people who go all NIMBY whenever there's a proposal to build a new mass transit line or introduce a bus service. Maybe they'll start to support better transportation options if their current one, which they shouldn't be using anyway, is taken away.
Look, I hate to break it to you, but Bernie only did well in the caucuses, which were the least democratic part of the primaries. I'd have liked Bernie to do better too (and, while I'm not an eye-swiveling loon who believes the Clinton conspiracy of the week - anyone who doesn't think she's been the victim of a 25 year smear campaign is delusional, the fact is I didn't like Clinton, she was right wing and far too obsessed with getting the establishment to like her), but the fact is America wasn't ready to elect a self-described socialist. Not even the half of America that's to the left of the other half.
The ZTE ban has little or nothing to do with any trade war. It's a straightforward consequence of the pre-existing sanctions against Iran. ZTE sold US technologies to Iran.
Whether we should be sanctioning Iran, or trying to build a better relationship with them (they're horrible, but in some ways they're one of the least horrible regimes in that region - still, compared to Saudi Arabia, who isn't moderately better?) is another question. But it makes little sense to have sanctions and then say "Hey, it's OK, no biggie" when someone actually violates them.
I'm uncomfortable with the term malware too, but let's be honest: unwanted cryptocurrency mining software is going to slow down your PC, drain your battery faster if you have a laptop, and, unpredictably, cause more heat which, depending on the state of your fan, might cause problems too.
I'm still in two minds about the concept, but if we're going to see more software "funded" by mining, then we need to see some standards set otherwise "software funded by mining" will become synonymous with malware, even if the software really is funded this way (ie not prepackaged third party freeware), and controls are given to ensure the mining doesn't cause problems with the PC (ie low priority process, maxes at 5% of CPU, etc.)
I've read this story in multiple places, and the bit that always hits me, that nobody seems to even be concerned about is this:
Securus obtains location information though data from major cellphone providers the same way marketers do.
So... we have a problem with law enforcement being able to geolocate (and, OK, I think there are some legitimate reasons to feel there should be restrictions on that, I get it, I'm not a fascist, but at the same time it's one area most people would agree that if law enforcement has a good reason, they should be able to geolocate a cellphone) but we don't give a shit about marketing people having the exact same data. Oh no, that doesn't bother us at all. We just casually mention that this was the original intent of the data collection, without actually in any way being bothered about it.
Yes, and why is that a problem? Why does it scare you, rather than blow your mind and fire your imagination, that there might be 100s of planets in our solar system?
I don't know, maybe because he's the President? I don't recall any similar complaints when people attributed actions by the Obama administration to President Obama.
Given Netflix didn't start streaming anything until 2007, and the FCC has been enforcing Network Neutrality since 2005, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Are you under the impression the current Title II classification was the first and only attempt to enforce neutrality? Because the only reason the FCC adopted that was because of legal challenges to the 2005 order.
It still remains unclear exactly what was going on between Netflix and Comcast anyway, with the latter adamant it never blocked or throttled anything. But it certainly was resolved at a time when the FCC was enforcing neutrality, and the eyes of legislators and government were on Comcast, ready to add more restrictions on Comcast's business if it didn't behave itself and somehow got away with it legally.
Slashdot Mirror
And how much energy is wasted by space aliens flying around Alpha Centauri in their rocket ships?
Oh wait, I think you, I, and the GP have maybe lost sight of anything remotely on-topic or relevant to the discussion at hand.
Newton kickstarted the entire thing. The product was selling well and considered a player until Steve Jobs unexpectedly cancelled it. Most contemporary reviews claim Jobs did it out of spite, because Newton was the baby of the man who fired him.
Palm and Blackberry succeeded. Period. Yes, they eventually stopped, but if that makes them failures you might as well claim that, say, CRT TVs or cassette tapes were failures too. The Commodore 64 is the biggest failure in computing history by that metric.
Portfolio vs Libretto... what? Why are you asking or even comparing them? One was a DOS based palm top from 1990ish, the other came out a little later, ran Windows, and was comparable to a netbook today. Either way, yes, the Portfolio was a runaway success. Atari's failure to produce a follow-up meant that success was shortlived.
The point is that almost every company that's had a serious go of it has succeeded. Indeed, there are numerous examples of companies that succeeded that I didn't even bother to mention. Did they last forever? No, but they got a return on investment. Yes, there have been one or two failures outside of Microsoft, but Microsoft is pretty much the only company that's tried this game for nearly 30 years, and failed every single time.
Why are they still trying?
I guess because you lose everything by going into incognito mode - your autoplay settings aren't honored for example. At this point we have to look at what exactly Google means by Incognito mode.
Where did *I* say Windows Mobile?
I said mobile Windows. With a lowercase 'm'. I'm referring to Microsoft's 25-30 year campaign to try to make Windows a serious contender in the mobile space.
With absolutely no successes.
Not one.
Zero.
Zilch.
Sometimes they produced good products the market just wasn't interested in (original WinCE, Windows 8 - which was an excellent mobile operating system, it's just a shame they tried to market it as a desktop system), but regardless, they've never managed to make any headway here. And now they're competing with not one but TWO dominant competitors, both of which have established markets and no good reason to believe anyone would want to walk away from either.
I would have expected Microsoft to pack it in by now. They've been at this mobile Windows thing since the 1990s (in a box somewhere I have a clamshell WinCE HPC running one of the earliest versions of WinCE - nice system actually, but...) and virtually everyone has made a success of it who's tried, except them. Apple (twice!) Google. Palm. Even Atari! (No, seriously, they came up with a pocket PC that was a runaway success, you may remember it from Terminator 2, John Connor uses it briefly to hack an ATM...) ATARI! You know, the company that made one of the first games consoles and then pretty much failed at everything since, but for a brief six month window in the early 1990s they had a hit on their hands which... uh, they fucked up like everything else.
And now they're at it again.
Maybe if they can get Windows 10 to run Android apps, like ChromeOS, they might stand a chance.
You missed something somewhere. What about The Guardian's wish to credit Focus Ecuador makes the story possibly "disinformation"? Or alternatively what about The Guardian being British and the Verge being American makes it that? (If this is some kind of weird ass smear about The Guardian, well, you do know The Guardian is one of the only independent media outlets in the world, right? It's owned by a self-contained trust that exists solely to publish The Guardian and related newspapers, and the trust itself is run by journalists. It has its biases but it's not in any way establishment or government controlled - hell, they've had MI-5 enter their offices and smash their computers in the past, and were one of the first newspapers to raise the profile of Wikileaks, and assisted them for a time.)
I don't think that's the intended use.
I have a crapload of completely irrelevant videos recommended to me because I occasionally sit down with my daughter and we search for videos on various topics together. There's virtually no set of circumstances where I'd want to watch any of the recommendations related to watching these (generally my recommendations are flooded with a combination of videos about Jaguars - the cat type, not car - and the latest episodes of DC Super Hero Girls.)
TBH though, I'd find what they're proposing more useful/usable if they made it a "Once this session is over please forget everything" or "Forget the last session" thing, but I guess that's making the UI more complex.
For what it's worth I just went to GSMArena and did a search for phones with the above spec. To be fair I included 2016 and 2018 but, seriously, even a conservative search will find quite a few phones. They say 268 results. The first one that comes up is a Samsung J series, which IIRC is Samsung's budget range. I manually checked each item and it met the spec, albeit it's the 2018 model. Which, I guess, proves my thesis that Android phones for some reason get worse the more expensive they are.
All of those features are common. Why do you think it's "trolling" to propose you have a phone with all of these features?
Just to be clear, you're saying that if the FBI, CIA, and NSA finds compelling evidence that a hostile foreign power is interfering in an election, they shouldn't investigate it further if there's any risk at all that a Republican (Democrats apparently don't matter, I don't see you complaining about Comey's October Surprise) candidate might be benefiting from said interference?
The FBI et al might have been investigating the links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the only campaign intentionally attacked was Clinton's. Did you forget that? The FBI even pretended they didn't see a link between the Russian campaign and Trump's.
We have the worst President in history, which is a pretty impressive achievement given we had Bush only 10 years ago, and Nixon in the last 50 or so. That's thanks in part to the FBI smearing Clinton, and hiding key problems with Trump and botching the investigation so Russia could interfere. But sure, pretend the DNC is the problem.
Now they do, but only IE needed a "special plugin" back when Flash was a thing. At the time Flash was at its peak, everything (except IE) supported NSAPI.
Moreover, if a third party wants to produce a browser today, supporting Flash just means supporting NSAPI. Whereas the "Each browser/operating system combination needs its own DRM plug-in" is by design, there will never be a case where you'll be able to workaround the lack of a native Adobe DRM implementation for BrowserX by installing the DRM plugin for Firefox.
The same people who asked for autoplay and demanded browser makers implement it on by default (something, thankfully, they're finally backtracking on)?
I want my Flash video back. It was better. Easier to control. One plug-in per operating system rather than per-browser (if you're going "Huh?" look up how W3C implemented DRM in HTML5.) I was OK with Flash. I didn't like it, but only the W3C could make something worse than Flash.
No, they're asking to be further removed from the decision making process, so that there will no longer be any humans involved.
What makes you think that Google's AI is going to tell them not to bomb a wedding? The AI will only say "Yes, Gerry Adams and Oliver North are in range, fire now", not "Oh noooh! Gerry Adams and Oliver North are at a wedding y'all! Stop the attack!"
We are literally talking about the only part of the government here that is able to freely kill innocent people.
The last time I recall a private corporation actually going to war on any serious scale (occasional Mark Thatcher lead mercenaries excepting) was Cecil Rhode's British South Africa Company, in the 19th Century.
Today, corporations can be pretty evil, but they don't generally go out of their way to kill innocent people. Right now you're comparing collecting information used to target ads with removing the human check in a chain that, without the person, inevitably leads to innocent bystanders being killed. I think you need your moral compass remagnetized.
You know, it's possible for the same act to be done for good or neutral reasons, while in other contexts be bad.
I'm fine with Google collecting data to determine what ads to show me as long as it keeps that data secure and doesn't share it with anyone else. If Eric Schmidt can find out quickly that squiggleslash is also J. Smith from California and is into {list of sexual fetishes}, that's a problem. If server-x5-452.google.com can figure out that I'd be more likely to respond to an ad for a Ubuntu powered robotic lawnmower than a green high heeled shoe, then they can knock themselves out, that's fine by me.
Similarly you're claiming it's totally OK to murder the families of terr... oh, you weren't? You were claiming that something something national security and didn't actually have a positive scenario other than MERIKA HELL YEAH?
Because unfortunately, and with good reason, the dozen or so Google employees saw their work in terms of "OK, we're going to move from helping businesses send their message to receptive potential customers" to "Those drones that keep being used to kill supposed enemies of America and everyone around them including their families and innocent bystanders? Yeah, we're going to make those even less moral by removing the input from a human being who could, at least theoretically, pull the plug in a blatant act of murder."
Here's hoping the first drone gets hacked, and is re-targeted... at you.
Meh, leaving aside the major questions about gambling and its known addictive and destructive nature, you're assuming that SCOTUS found all laws about gambling to be unconstitutional. They didn't. What they did find was that the Federal law outlawing gambling was unconstitutional because of the way it was written, essentially forcing the states to ban gambling themselves.
Regardless of what happens now, state laws outlawing gambling will remain constitutional. And it's probable other Federal laws outlawing gambling would be upheld, as long as they don't impose any duties upon the states.
All the better. Those tend to be the people who go all NIMBY whenever there's a proposal to build a new mass transit line or introduce a bus service. Maybe they'll start to support better transportation options if their current one, which they shouldn't be using anyway, is taken away.
Look, I hate to break it to you, but Bernie only did well in the caucuses, which were the least democratic part of the primaries. I'd have liked Bernie to do better too (and, while I'm not an eye-swiveling loon who believes the Clinton conspiracy of the week - anyone who doesn't think she's been the victim of a 25 year smear campaign is delusional, the fact is I didn't like Clinton, she was right wing and far too obsessed with getting the establishment to like her), but the fact is America wasn't ready to elect a self-described socialist. Not even the half of America that's to the left of the other half.
The ZTE ban has little or nothing to do with any trade war. It's a straightforward consequence of the pre-existing sanctions against Iran. ZTE sold US technologies to Iran.
Whether we should be sanctioning Iran, or trying to build a better relationship with them (they're horrible, but in some ways they're one of the least horrible regimes in that region - still, compared to Saudi Arabia, who isn't moderately better?) is another question. But it makes little sense to have sanctions and then say "Hey, it's OK, no biggie" when someone actually violates them.
Also worth noting: ZTE is also implicated in some spyware stuff, that's bad enough to ensure ZTE phones are banned by the US military. It's not like a friendly company committed an oopsie.
I'm uncomfortable with the term malware too, but let's be honest: unwanted cryptocurrency mining software is going to slow down your PC, drain your battery faster if you have a laptop, and, unpredictably, cause more heat which, depending on the state of your fan, might cause problems too.
I'm still in two minds about the concept, but if we're going to see more software "funded" by mining, then we need to see some standards set otherwise "software funded by mining" will become synonymous with malware, even if the software really is funded this way (ie not prepackaged third party freeware), and controls are given to ensure the mining doesn't cause problems with the PC (ie low priority process, maxes at 5% of CPU, etc.)
We all live in glass houses on this blessed day!
I've read this story in multiple places, and the bit that always hits me, that nobody seems to even be concerned about is this:
So... we have a problem with law enforcement being able to geolocate (and, OK, I think there are some legitimate reasons to feel there should be restrictions on that, I get it, I'm not a fascist, but at the same time it's one area most people would agree that if law enforcement has a good reason, they should be able to geolocate a cellphone) but we don't give a shit about marketing people having the exact same data. Oh no, that doesn't bother us at all. We just casually mention that this was the original intent of the data collection, without actually in any way being bothered about it.
WHAT. THE. FUCK?
Yes, and why is that a problem? Why does it scare you, rather than blow your mind and fire your imagination, that there might be 100s of planets in our solar system?
I don't know, maybe because he's the President? I don't recall any similar complaints when people attributed actions by the Obama administration to President Obama.
Given Netflix didn't start streaming anything until 2007, and the FCC has been enforcing Network Neutrality since 2005, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Are you under the impression the current Title II classification was the first and only attempt to enforce neutrality? Because the only reason the FCC adopted that was because of legal challenges to the 2005 order.
It still remains unclear exactly what was going on between Netflix and Comcast anyway, with the latter adamant it never blocked or throttled anything. But it certainly was resolved at a time when the FCC was enforcing neutrality, and the eyes of legislators and government were on Comcast, ready to add more restrictions on Comcast's business if it didn't behave itself and somehow got away with it legally.
For more information on NN, Wikipedia covers the history quite well.
Same here on the Ringworld.