The thing that makes Windows stay is not "because it's better." It's because it has critical mass and the cost of moving away from it is too painful and complicated.
Smart phones in the form of Android and IPhone have not quite reached that point but they will soon. At the moment, there are no "can't live without it" apps though the games are a kind of resistance to change already.
Integration with business will be a critical piece for any smartphone challenger to offer. Blackberry has done this while offering fantastic security. IPhone and Android are wonderful distractions, but they haven't done anything to become entrenched... even the beloved and expensive iDevice turns out to be disposable within a year or two. And that's kind of the problem. They are disposable... dispensable... replaceable. And this is done by the carriers "by design" so they can keep selling new phones and extending contract obligations. This is not particilarly compatible with business interests.
So like the PC before it, find a way to integrate with business as RIM did before and you've got a winner.
Someone will transmit some data and unwittingly hypnotize the whole population. Skynet will, at about the same time, become self-aware and instead of killing all humans, become Skynet's slaves.
Google is "new media" the others are "old media." The old media has simply failed to adapt. Watch out for the new media... likely worse than the old media. For now, I applaud Google. Later, I will despise them.
Healthy from whose perspective? Yours, mine and the rest of the consumer public? Certainly. But there's another side, a tragic side, of this you are not considering. Many dinners, golf games, gifts, donations and contributions were made to acquire the exlusive access to customers in an area which enabled them to maximize their executive bonuses, inflate their stock values and, when the time comes, fill their golden parachutes.
Now, thanks to this "healthy competition" the fruits of all that hard work is in jeopardy.
Thanks for nothing Google!
In truth, this is not really fair competition. This is unfair competition similar to Mozilla vs. Microsoft. Microsoft used its monopoly on the desktop to kill any notion of a web browser that costs money. We don't need to go into whether or not the damage to Mozilla was intentional or not. After all, the car wasn't invented in order to kill the horse ranching industry. So here we have Google trying to work around the problems presented by the carriers who have managed to restrict and reduce the effectiveness of Google's business models. So rather than continue to engage in fruitless discussions on the matter, Google is routing around the damage.
And while these carriers have historically sued and won against municipalities attempting a similar feat, charging them with unfair competition, they have obviously decided not to challenge Google's deeper, more powerful pockets to a duel in the courts over this.
You live in a very different place. Here in the US, they are increasingly tracking everything and everyone. Everyone is being made a criminal as civil offenses are being converted to criminal offenses all over. The forces are constantly demanding increased police powers and, of course, they are still exceeding the constitution by carrying on with warrantless surveilance of US citizens.
So you can see, there are completely different players and completely different motives at play. I only wish we had your problems here.
The push by the carriers to make this happen is late it coming and might have helped, but the cat is out of the bag already.
When it comes to hand-held computing devices with telephone capability, I care that the device is up-to-date with software and in my control so that I can do what I want and what I need and that it doesn't act against me. Carrier controlled, locked devices suffer from a lack of those things.
Initially, I was going to get a Samsung phone, but then Nexus 4 came out. Got that. I'll be buying my way out of my expensive contract soon and will go pre-paid. Suddenly, I will be in control of my phone and my phone service and spending less money on top of that.
Even if the law was reversed, it wouldn't make much difference. Phones are not easily supported by the community and carrier-devices aren't well supported by carriers. So anything other than a manufacturer supported device will not do.
I would say fewer than that. The mobile phone device market requires a lot of change and turnover. People rarely keep their devices for more than a coule of years. So people are expected to get a new one in a fairly short time. While Apple is in decline, what will the next one be?
One could argue that computers aren't much different, but I think the PC market has matured to the point where we see people using older and older machines, using those machines less and less at home.
Apple was dying without Jobs. They will likely return to that state again. There are some things people can learn from Jobs. But how to be like him requires a special kind of thing and I don't think it can be emulated.
Apple doesn't have much longer I think. They are going to lose with all this Android battling in the end. There are simply too many device makers out there and Google is simply smarter. The fan base of Apple iDevices has been shrinking and people stopped celbrating each new thing long ago. I haven't seen a line outside of an Apple store in I don't know how long.
Steve Jobs died of his own stupidity. Thinking different, he tried unconventional attempts at beating a treatable form of cancer. Not all of his ideas were pure gold I suppose. There may be a few other product plans left over from when he was alive, but Steve was pretty good about adjusting course with the changes in market conditions and with new technologies as they emerge. Since he's not here to make those adjustments, Apple's best hope for the next few years are that nothing significant changes and everything Steve planned on is still applicable.
I just don't see Apple at levels such as we've seen for much longer. It's more likely Apple will shrink down to near-death as it did before without Jobs... and will likely die. Apple has lost its way by going all-consumer in my opinion. They had a strong following in the design and production markets but their versions of Mac OSX seem far too consumer oriented and not so much focused on getting work done. It had been those professional users which kept Apple clinking along through the years before iPhone. But since they have pretty much let that side go, what are they going to do?
Our courts system should be able to handle it all if it weren't for the exessive (ab)use of laws which needn't exist.
Our justice system is filled with suspects and convicts of drug related crimes which need not be crimes at all. If the only change they made was to make drugs [more] legal, we would see a justice system which could better handle the load. Add to that gambling and prostitution and things would improve.
These are all things which should be legalized. Not that I would do any of them if they were, but still. Those are choices for individuals to make.
I should have been more detailed in what I said....to use the F/OSS license against commercial software makers who would take from the community and give nothing back.
If I put something useful out there, I wouldn't want Microsoft or Oracle to take advantage of what I wanted to give to the public and have them pervert it in some way... you know, like the way they presently do with public domain and BSD licensed code.
The point of F/OSS licensing is to use copyright and license terms against the commercial software makers who presently hold a very tight and expensive control over business, government and individuals.
It doesn't make anyone "look bad" and even enables them to take from the unlicensed software pool and take it private.
If they want to say it has "storage space" of amount X, that's how much should be available to the user.
If I were renting storage space in a building and said "this is 1200 sqft" and only made 500sqft available because I installed electrical and environmental equipment in there, I would be rightfully challenged by my customer(s).
The proper way to handle it would be to set asside space for the OS and then install the 64GB or 128GB storage device for the OS to serve up to the user just as it would be proper to set up electrical and environmental gear outside of the storage space of my storage facility.
Business in the US gets away with far too much "interpretation" when presenting information to its customers. This duality of storage space for RAM and HDD is equally outrageous. Sectors are still in base-2 oriented increments because RAM is in base-2 increments. Why break things just so that HDD makers can lie to the users?! In the end, when the lie becomes the norm, the effectiveness of the lie wears off rather quickly. (Gasoline prices are measured in dollars, and the 0.9 cents doesn't quite have so much meaning... we have all learned to just add one the the last digit in the price haven't we?)
Most players know exactly the damage they cause and care not and feel not responsible for the outcome.
They're playing Jenga with the constitution and the future of the nation and of the world. One little stick won't cause the whole thing to fall over now will it?
We have conspiracies all the time and all over the place. Businesses conspire to lower wages of workers with much cooperation from government who support laws written by such businesses after receiving contributions, donations and the like. This is an open truth. You might say this is "a general and natural erosion" but our government was initially set up to prevent the very things we are experiencing today. If it's not various parties conspiring, then how do you define conspiracy?
You have to get over the ridiculous idea that conspiracy and "theory" and "crazy" and "nut" and "mentally unstable" all go together. The reality is that there are parties overtly attempting to subvert many aspects of the constitutionally guaranteed equality of people which was designed and intended to avoid a tiered society. And now we are living in one. Some people actually believe they are better than everyone else and deserve to have things at the expense of others and dont mind taking them.
Porn is a substitute for our natural insticts which are to pretty much have sex all the time. It is rather important we manage those instincts. To better know why, it would help to recognize where we came from. And I'm not talking about "adam and eve." For many, it helps to achieve that chemical balance we need to remain... for lack of a better word, balanced in life.
I love it when people bring up children as if children are harmed by learning about their curiosities... curiosities driven by instincts they don't understand. Children aren't harmed by porn. They are harmed by lack of parental interest and guidance.
MIT is all about producing people for business. The connection between business and MIT are obvious. MIT is not publicly funded according to what I've read, though there are arguments against or limiting that notion.
I think attendees at MIT need to do some soul searching of their own. MIT could be forced to close up if enough students decided to not enroll the next go-around. It's a tough choice because having MIT papers backing you makes one's future look brighter. But what about the larger picture? I hope they are considering it. Student protests should happen.
For the rich information feedback. I'm great with command line for lots of things... simple things. But when performing tasks which might be assisted or made easier by having nice things like copy and paste, buttons and check boxes, I will gravitate to that when it's helpful.
RedHat drives and influences much of what goes on out there. Among these, it influences GNOME and the audio and all the stuff people are complaining about the most. It's almost as if they are intentionally damaging themselves for some reason.
Fedora is supposed ot be like a test for RHEL. Fedora is NOT a "bleeding edge" distro. If you want that, run "Rawhide." Fedora is supposed to be usable and is essentially a usability study for things that would end up in the next RHEL.
Now, with all the negative feedback on GNOME and all that, I would have to wonder what they are doing if the most despised things about Fedora go into RHEL7. They are pushing these things way too hard and I'm guessing they are hoping for user acceptance and it's just not happening.
I ended up giving up on Fedora and went to CentOS but it has problems not being modern enough... or rather, the problems of the way GNOME is built have revealed themselves where you wouldn't see them if you just kept updating with Fedora. Well anyway, CentOS gives me some of what I wanted, but not all or even enough.
So soldiers really *ARE* murderers? I hardly think "stand your ground" would apply to US soldiers enforcing US government/business will in other nations.
Charles Manson did not kill anyone. He had other people do it for him at his request. He's in prison and will never get out and he is identified as a murderer. But when it's government? Now we get to call them heroes (and definitely not baby killers) and talk all day about how proud we are of them and we get to completely ignore the reasons or causes of the activities we have in other nations.
And before anyone goes on about not knowing what I'm talking about? I was safe aboard the USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) when operation Desert Storm (then Desert Shield) was started. We were the first ones out there and among the first ones back... to a hero's welcome no less. I have seen things.
When you break it all down, most of the reasons the US military has been deployed have been lies in the past decade or so. And when they start using mercenaries (excuse me, 'contractors') in place of our regular troops, you know that even the US regulars would have serious concerns about what they are being told to do.
Sorry to go way off topic on that, but I completely agree with your sentiment. I just agree with it on a much larger scale.
I recall a year ago our HR department announcing how "we have been reaching out to other companies to assure that your wages are extremely competitive." I also noted that there were no significant raises issued after this announcement. So if somethings was adjusted or changed to assure competitiveness, what was it? Agreements such as these? A reminder that other companies should lower their salary rates?
There is a bunch of this stuff going on which I always thought was illegal. But if it's not, it needs to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that makes Windows stay is not "because it's better." It's because it has critical mass and the cost of moving away from it is too painful and complicated.
Smart phones in the form of Android and IPhone have not quite reached that point but they will soon. At the moment, there are no "can't live without it" apps though the games are a kind of resistance to change already.
Integration with business will be a critical piece for any smartphone challenger to offer. Blackberry has done this while offering fantastic security. IPhone and Android are wonderful distractions, but they haven't done anything to become entrenched... even the beloved and expensive iDevice turns out to be disposable within a year or two. And that's kind of the problem. They are disposable... dispensable... replaceable. And this is done by the carriers "by design" so they can keep selling new phones and extending contract obligations. This is not particilarly compatible with business interests.
So like the PC before it, find a way to integrate with business as RIM did before and you've got a winner.
Someone will transmit some data and unwittingly hypnotize the whole population. Skynet will, at about the same time, become self-aware and instead of killing all humans, become Skynet's slaves.
Google is "new media" the others are "old media." The old media has simply failed to adapt. Watch out for the new media... likely worse than the old media. For now, I applaud Google. Later, I will despise them.
Healthy from whose perspective? Yours, mine and the rest of the consumer public? Certainly. But there's another side, a tragic side, of this you are not considering. Many dinners, golf games, gifts, donations and contributions were made to acquire the exlusive access to customers in an area which enabled them to maximize their executive bonuses, inflate their stock values and, when the time comes, fill their golden parachutes.
Now, thanks to this "healthy competition" the fruits of all that hard work is in jeopardy.
Thanks for nothing Google!
In truth, this is not really fair competition. This is unfair competition similar to Mozilla vs. Microsoft. Microsoft used its monopoly on the desktop to kill any notion of a web browser that costs money. We don't need to go into whether or not the damage to Mozilla was intentional or not. After all, the car wasn't invented in order to kill the horse ranching industry. So here we have Google trying to work around the problems presented by the carriers who have managed to restrict and reduce the effectiveness of Google's business models. So rather than continue to engage in fruitless discussions on the matter, Google is routing around the damage.
And while these carriers have historically sued and won against municipalities attempting a similar feat, charging them with unfair competition, they have obviously decided not to challenge Google's deeper, more powerful pockets to a duel in the courts over this.
You live in a very different place. Here in the US, they are increasingly tracking everything and everyone. Everyone is being made a criminal as civil offenses are being converted to criminal offenses all over. The forces are constantly demanding increased police powers and, of course, they are still exceeding the constitution by carrying on with warrantless surveilance of US citizens.
So you can see, there are completely different players and completely different motives at play. I only wish we had your problems here.
That was my plan long before this anyway.
The push by the carriers to make this happen is late it coming and might have helped, but the cat is out of the bag already.
When it comes to hand-held computing devices with telephone capability, I care that the device is up-to-date with software and in my control so that I can do what I want and what I need and that it doesn't act against me. Carrier controlled, locked devices suffer from a lack of those things.
Initially, I was going to get a Samsung phone, but then Nexus 4 came out. Got that. I'll be buying my way out of my expensive contract soon and will go pre-paid. Suddenly, I will be in control of my phone and my phone service and spending less money on top of that.
Even if the law was reversed, it wouldn't make much difference. Phones are not easily supported by the community and carrier-devices aren't well supported by carriers. So anything other than a manufacturer supported device will not do.
Naive.
That is until they patent something you did and sue you into poverty. It only takes a lot of money and a REALLY stupid jury.
I would say fewer than that. The mobile phone device market requires a lot of change and turnover. People rarely keep their devices for more than a coule of years. So people are expected to get a new one in a fairly short time. While Apple is in decline, what will the next one be?
One could argue that computers aren't much different, but I think the PC market has matured to the point where we see people using older and older machines, using those machines less and less at home.
Apple was dying without Jobs. They will likely return to that state again. There are some things people can learn from Jobs. But how to be like him requires a special kind of thing and I don't think it can be emulated.
http://blogs.webmd.com/breaking-news/2011/10/steve-jobs-pancreatic-cancer.html
According to this and others, when he first learned of his condition, it was early and treatable. He went with alternatives.
Apple doesn't have much longer I think. They are going to lose with all this Android battling in the end. There are simply too many device makers out there and Google is simply smarter. The fan base of Apple iDevices has been shrinking and people stopped celbrating each new thing long ago. I haven't seen a line outside of an Apple store in I don't know how long.
Steve Jobs died of his own stupidity. Thinking different, he tried unconventional attempts at beating a treatable form of cancer. Not all of his ideas were pure gold I suppose. There may be a few other product plans left over from when he was alive, but Steve was pretty good about adjusting course with the changes in market conditions and with new technologies as they emerge. Since he's not here to make those adjustments, Apple's best hope for the next few years are that nothing significant changes and everything Steve planned on is still applicable.
I just don't see Apple at levels such as we've seen for much longer. It's more likely Apple will shrink down to near-death as it did before without Jobs... and will likely die. Apple has lost its way by going all-consumer in my opinion. They had a strong following in the design and production markets but their versions of Mac OSX seem far too consumer oriented and not so much focused on getting work done. It had been those professional users which kept Apple clinking along through the years before iPhone. But since they have pretty much let that side go, what are they going to do?
Our courts system should be able to handle it all if it weren't for the exessive (ab)use of laws which needn't exist.
Our justice system is filled with suspects and convicts of drug related crimes which need not be crimes at all. If the only change they made was to make drugs [more] legal, we would see a justice system which could better handle the load. Add to that gambling and prostitution and things would improve.
These are all things which should be legalized. Not that I would do any of them if they were, but still. Those are choices for individuals to make.
I should have been more detailed in what I said. ...to use the F/OSS license against commercial software makers who would take from the community and give nothing back.
If I put something useful out there, I wouldn't want Microsoft or Oracle to take advantage of what I wanted to give to the public and have them pervert it in some way... you know, like the way they presently do with public domain and BSD licensed code.
The point of F/OSS licensing is to use copyright and license terms against the commercial software makers who presently hold a very tight and expensive control over business, government and individuals.
It doesn't make anyone "look bad" and even enables them to take from the unlicensed software pool and take it private.
If they want to say it has "storage space" of amount X, that's how much should be available to the user.
If I were renting storage space in a building and said "this is 1200 sqft" and only made 500sqft available because I installed electrical and environmental equipment in there, I would be rightfully challenged by my customer(s).
The proper way to handle it would be to set asside space for the OS and then install the 64GB or 128GB storage device for the OS to serve up to the user just as it would be proper to set up electrical and environmental gear outside of the storage space of my storage facility.
Business in the US gets away with far too much "interpretation" when presenting information to its customers. This duality of storage space for RAM and HDD is equally outrageous. Sectors are still in base-2 oriented increments because RAM is in base-2 increments. Why break things just so that HDD makers can lie to the users?! In the end, when the lie becomes the norm, the effectiveness of the lie wears off rather quickly. (Gasoline prices are measured in dollars, and the 0.9 cents doesn't quite have so much meaning... we have all learned to just add one the the last digit in the price haven't we?)
Let's get back to the simple truths.
Yes, as I said, conspiracy.
Most players know exactly the damage they cause and care not and feel not responsible for the outcome.
They're playing Jenga with the constitution and the future of the nation and of the world. One little stick won't cause the whole thing to fall over now will it?
Hahaha! You beat me to it. Yes. Sony was the first thing I thought when I read the summary. "Don't they already have a patent on this?!"
A plan to "boil the frog" is still a conspiracy.
We have conspiracies all the time and all over the place. Businesses conspire to lower wages of workers with much cooperation from government who support laws written by such businesses after receiving contributions, donations and the like. This is an open truth. You might say this is "a general and natural erosion" but our government was initially set up to prevent the very things we are experiencing today. If it's not various parties conspiring, then how do you define conspiracy?
You have to get over the ridiculous idea that conspiracy and "theory" and "crazy" and "nut" and "mentally unstable" all go together. The reality is that there are parties overtly attempting to subvert many aspects of the constitutionally guaranteed equality of people which was designed and intended to avoid a tiered society. And now we are living in one. Some people actually believe they are better than everyone else and deserve to have things at the expense of others and dont mind taking them.
Porn is a substitute for our natural insticts which are to pretty much have sex all the time. It is rather important we manage those instincts. To better know why, it would help to recognize where we came from. And I'm not talking about "adam and eve." For many, it helps to achieve that chemical balance we need to remain... for lack of a better word, balanced in life.
I love it when people bring up children as if children are harmed by learning about their curiosities... curiosities driven by instincts they don't understand. Children aren't harmed by porn. They are harmed by lack of parental interest and guidance.
It is people who think porn is a problem which is the problem.
I don't know, but I think Kraft is going to have a lot of competition when they start mining cheese from the moon.
MIT is all about producing people for business. The connection between business and MIT are obvious. MIT is not publicly funded according to what I've read, though there are arguments against or limiting that notion.
I think attendees at MIT need to do some soul searching of their own. MIT could be forced to close up if enough students decided to not enroll the next go-around. It's a tough choice because having MIT papers backing you makes one's future look brighter. But what about the larger picture? I hope they are considering it. Student protests should happen.
GUI on the server:
For the rich information feedback. I'm great with command line for lots of things... simple things. But when performing tasks which might be assisted or made easier by having nice things like copy and paste, buttons and check boxes, I will gravitate to that when it's helpful.
RedHat drives and influences much of what goes on out there. Among these, it influences GNOME and the audio and all the stuff people are complaining about the most. It's almost as if they are intentionally damaging themselves for some reason.
Fedora is supposed ot be like a test for RHEL. Fedora is NOT a "bleeding edge" distro. If you want that, run "Rawhide." Fedora is supposed to be usable and is essentially a usability study for things that would end up in the next RHEL.
Now, with all the negative feedback on GNOME and all that, I would have to wonder what they are doing if the most despised things about Fedora go into RHEL7. They are pushing these things way too hard and I'm guessing they are hoping for user acceptance and it's just not happening.
I ended up giving up on Fedora and went to CentOS but it has problems not being modern enough... or rather, the problems of the way GNOME is built have revealed themselves where you wouldn't see them if you just kept updating with Fedora. Well anyway, CentOS gives me some of what I wanted, but not all or even enough.
So soldiers really *ARE* murderers? I hardly think "stand your ground" would apply to US soldiers enforcing US government/business will in other nations.
Charles Manson did not kill anyone. He had other people do it for him at his request. He's in prison and will never get out and he is identified as a murderer. But when it's government? Now we get to call them heroes (and definitely not baby killers) and talk all day about how proud we are of them and we get to completely ignore the reasons or causes of the activities we have in other nations.
And before anyone goes on about not knowing what I'm talking about? I was safe aboard the USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) when operation Desert Storm (then Desert Shield) was started. We were the first ones out there and among the first ones back... to a hero's welcome no less. I have seen things.
When you break it all down, most of the reasons the US military has been deployed have been lies in the past decade or so. And when they start using mercenaries (excuse me, 'contractors') in place of our regular troops, you know that even the US regulars would have serious concerns about what they are being told to do.
Sorry to go way off topic on that, but I completely agree with your sentiment. I just agree with it on a much larger scale.
I recall a year ago our HR department announcing how "we have been reaching out to other companies to assure that your wages are extremely competitive." I also noted that there were no significant raises issued after this announcement. So if somethings was adjusted or changed to assure competitiveness, what was it? Agreements such as these? A reminder that other companies should lower their salary rates?
There is a bunch of this stuff going on which I always thought was illegal. But if it's not, it needs to be.