Our young geeks may NOT remember a time before Google, but there was a time where the "hot" search engine changed every two years, and there were new engines launching all the time.
Yeah back then we had what we old timers call 'competition' in the search engine world. Today we have a Google search monopoly^w... oops... sorry... I keep forgetting that one is not allowed to say that here.
Another problem is that the Office suites on iPad/Android are kind of limited.
If they're "limited" for MS Office, at least they exist -- the most I've found for handling OpenOffice Writer files is a half-finished viewer written by a student a couple of years ago.
Yeah, when my mom brought me her Android tablet and wanted me to find an app to wiew and edit Office docs my first thought was that somebody must have ported a trimmed down version of Libre Office to Android but... no such luck. You'll be glad to know Libre Office is being ported to Android, no joy for iOS users like me though
Spoken like someone who's never tried to write a research paper on a tablet/smartphone.
Ahh, here we go! The strawman comes out to play, because you can't actually contradict the fact that content is being created on a wide scale on mobile devices.
S/He didn't say "writing research papers". The topic was CONTENT CREATION in general. Your reply was to pick one specific thing out of all the content creation activities, and latch onto that. And in fact, people are writing papers using voice recognition software as well as using blutooth keyboards, so your point is not even valid.
Time to give it up, and admit that content creation is increasing moving to mobile.
For what these people are trying to do, edit Word and Excel documents created in the halcyon days of Windows 98, the iPad sucks and most of the Android office suites that I have tried suck even worse than Pages and Numbers do on the iPad. Come to think of it old Word and Excel documents can be a minor nightmare even on non-MS office suites running on full fledged Linux/OS X. Another problem is that the Office suites on iPad/Android are kind of limited. I never create hugely complex documents in Word/Excel and logging into Windows and converting my entire collection of digital antique to the latest MS Office format is a no brainer but apparently these people are digital luddites. What annoys me way more than non-MS office software choking on 15 year old Word files is the inability of the iPad to export documents to USB sticks. Android tablets at least have card slots even if most laptop users don't carry card readers around. The ability to save directly to iCloud storage in OS X and iOS helps but I'd still like to be able to write to USB sticks which have become by far the most ubiquitous form of easily portable storage.
I thought the DMCA was only supposed to be usable in the US against US firms?
Is it me or is this the second or third similiar takedown that slashdot has had up in the past month or two that was a DMCA claim being made by a foreign firm, possibly against a foreign individual or entity?
Don't fear the idiot across the pond. Fear the idiot next to you who borrows the other idiot's club:)
According to their wikipedia entry MediaFire is based in the US (Texas), AFAIK you don't have to be a US citizen to sue a US organization in a US court for breach of US laws (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). Especially if the MediaFire datacenter is in the USA. It's interesting to note that under the DMCA you seem to be guilty until proven innocent.
So if I am in possession of a Stinger missile and am nicked for the illegal possession of dangerous weapons that is a ridiculous thing to do? If I am in possession of large quantities of sarin gas It's ridiculous to arrest me and charge me for possession of dangerous chemical weapons?
Your examples are not analogous. The missiles and the sarin gas allow you to cause harm to others at some point in the future. With the porn you're talking about evidence of abuse (ignoring the sexting, etc... cases) that has already occurred. It'd be like arresting someone for having pictures of the results of your stinger missile or sarin gas attack. Not something most of us care to see, but it's not obvious how additional harm is being caused by the pictures.
It's actually kind of ironic if you think of it in the bigger crime context. How much easier would most crimes be to prosecute if pictures of them were readily available, yet here we have a case where possession/dissemination of evidence that a crime was committed is itself illegal. The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."
if making possession of such material illegal gives police leverage then need to force me to tell them who supplied it or even to force my cooperation in stinging the perpetrators?
If the person giving you such material is dumb enough to give you any information that can lead back to him, the police don't need your help. And besides, Obstruction of Justice is a crime itself.
Child rapists and killers don't start out as full fledged predators, they start out by fantasising, then they start collecting child porn because fantasizing is not enough, when even the porn doesn't do it any more they start raping kids or kidnapping and torturing them and very often they then kill them to hide their offence. Now tell me again how it is harmless for some pervert to own child porn? How is it productive to let an individual go even though that individual possesses child porn because child porn possession has been 'legalised'?...as opposed to the current situation when the pervert at the very least becomes an entry in a database of sex offenders and is at a minimum forced to undergo therapy? Child pornography consumption is a stage in the evolution of a pedophile. If I have to choose catching these perverts at the point when they are fantasising about raping children and have legal leverage to lock them up in a therapeutic facility and then be able to keep an eye on them afterwards; or have possession of child porn be declared to be a 'victimless crime', being force to watch them evolve into full fledged predators and being able to do jack shit to stop them until after they have ruined the life of a child I know which I'd choose. Call me square but I'm in favour of preventative measures.
That depends on what you mean by 'fixing the Linux desktop'.
If you mean turning Linux into a serious competitor to Windows and OS X on the consumer desktop market then I can really only see one way to do that. Hand it to Google and ask them to do for Desktop/Laptop linux what they did with Android. That's probably the best way to get a commercially competitive Linux desktop OS that you can hand to an average consumer without him having any more problems than he would on OS X or Windows.
If you mean simply ironing out the gazillion minor bumps, scratches, bugs and general annoyances that I have to iron out every time I install linux for desktop use and usually also whenever I upgrade to a new version of my chosen distribution (Ubuntu and variants) then the answer is even simpler. Dig up somewhere a whole bunch of SQA people and convince the FOSS community that 'untested==unfinished'. I have not tested every distribution in existence but the people who administrate the distributions I have tested extensively: Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora don't seem to have gotten this message. The reason Windows and OS X have a superior user experience than Desktop Linux does has a lot to do with the amount of usability research/testing and SQA Microsoft and Apple pour into their OSes.
It's possible to turn a Linux box into a pretty decent desktop box that might even be consumer proof if you are willing to pour way more time into it than you have to with OS X or Windows.
Is he an American? Some people are saying that he was born in Mexico. Why hasn't he produced a REAL birth certificate?
It is also being argued that he will be the first Mexican national to become president of the United States with the purpose of returning all lands taken from Mexico in our wars with them. Some have gone even further and claimed that he does not produce his tax returns because he has been filing them in Mexico, not the US...
SUVs are as cheap as expensive hatchbacks (considering the cheap ones are hatchback engines in overweight bodies)
Same with sports cars. You can get one for the price of a hot hatch.
Apple devices don't convey an air of money because people get them on cheap contracts. A lot of lower income earners have iphones. They are less like exclusive brands like Ferrari and more like common but overpriced brands suck as Louis Vutton which are the same made in china crap as other bags but have a higher price tag due to the logo.
When was the last time you took a look at the price difference between, say a basic VW golf and the GTI version? Hot hatchbacks cost so much more they are in fact a status symbol, as in: "I can afford to pay twice as much as you for the same car to get a some exta horsepowers". In my neck of the woods a GTI costs almost twice as much as a regular Golf.
Well, maybe one data point doesn't disprove your argument, but the way you've framed it, it goes a long way to.
I am the least fashionable person imaginable. I'm a little bit of a lefty and despise brand worship and the creeping corporatism of our age. I abhor labels and typically buy no-name brand jeans from Target.
Oddly enough, I do have an iPhone. I find it well designed, very functional and useful as a phone and portable web browser, music player, gps, camera, and very occasional puzzle and games machine. That's why I have one, it's NOTHING to do with fashion.
Ditto on all points... except I also like the iPhone 4 series because these devices are smaller than the Galaxy S3. Apparently that feature will be lost with the iPhone 5 which is unfortunate.
This gets trotted out fairly often. The counter argument is this:
You (John Q. Public) create something actually innovative and legitimately patentable, and do so. So does Apple, or Google, or any other huge company. You realize they're using your invention, so ask them to pay you for it. They say no. Litigation ensues. You spend a few thousand on your brother Vinny's legal services. They trot out a crack stable of lawyers at $300/hour/lawyer. They do a tremendous amount of analysis and preparation before their slam dunk victory. You get stuck with a $500,000 bill because they bought better lawyers than you did.
In short, a system like this is massively disadvantageous to the little guy. Loser pays for frivolous lawsuits? Perhaps. Merely for losing? No.
In some European countries for example, such cost payment obligations can be modified and reduced by the judge if he feels they are excessive. One would hope that judges will treat blatant patent trolls, ambulance chasers and megacorps going overboard on legal spending differently than Mr. Little Inventor Guy and his brother Vinny slogging it out with big evil Apple or Google. Especially if the case made by Mr. Little Inventor Guy and his brother had some merit even if they lost.
According to the CRS report, 'The vast majority of defendants settle because patent litigation is risky, disruptive, and expensive, regardless of the merits; and many [patent trolls] set royalty demands strategically well below litigation costs to make the business decision to settle an obvious one.' Businesses lose both time and money, and innovation suffers."
How about making the party that looses the lawsuit autimatically pay the costs for the winner. Wouldn't that ruin the business case for the trolls and make people think long and hard about what they patent?... Just a thought....
Look, I'm an iOS & web developer. I use an iPad all day long, often off-site. If anybody is the target market for this, it's me. And I think developing on an iPad is an awful idea. It's a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". Is it possible to pull up a code editor on the iPad? Of course. But that doesn't make it a better choice than, well, just about any other option. The only redeeming aspect of this is if you already have an iPad with you, it's better than nothing at all. But really, how often is it that you need to do some coding unexpectedly and you only have your iPad with you? This is what laptops are for.
I agree 110% the iPad (and Android tablets) are nice for all sorts of things but they won't replace a full fledged desktop anytime soon. The moment I want to do something more complex than take notes with Pages, do some browsing, read a PDF or write short emails; something like say.... work on my computer graphics (Photoshop for iPad is a joke), edit video, do heavy duty word processing (Pages for all it's uses is rather limited on iPad) or god forbid, develop software, I reach for my laptop. My MacBook Air gives me way more control over the development environment than the iPad which is way to locked down to be of any use. Android tablets are not as locked down but their software and UI is just as limited as that of the iPad. If Apple feels it is forced to kill of the Mac, what I'd like to see replace it is a merger of the MacBook air and the iPad that can be used as a laptop but will morph into a tablet at will, kind of like this thing. It would be really cool to be able to rip the "monitor" off my MBA and have an iPad in my hands but such a device would have to have a more powerful OS X like interface that allows you to do things like tile several application windows on one screen as you see fit will. Trying to use the iOS interface for complex work is like trying to haul a king sized caravan over a steep Alpine pass with a Citroën C1.
Who did you buy your Linux distro from? And how much?
That is such a tired argument. Some things are just worth paying for. I'm using OS X and Ubuntu side by side... no prizes for guessing on which system the desktop environment gives me more trouble (and that includes all the KDE Xfce, Gnome,... Etc. flavors out there). Typical issues are bugs, Ubuntu 12.04 was bug ridden as hell. The issues I have been having with 12.04 are slowly being fixed but to tell you the truth I would rather have waited a few more weeks while the SQA people did some much needed work. I tried switching to other Linux distros only to find that Ubuntu is actually not one of the worst offenders. Amusingly after the LiveCD made a good impression, 64bit Fedora refused to boot after installation and I did not want to invest the time required to find out why. Another generic And tedious linus issue is broken APIs. Basically, for desktop use, I'd choose OS X or even Windows 7/8 (if I wasn't such a Unix geek) any day of the week. I'ts not that I am anti Linux, the RPM repo system is awesome Linux is secure, it is stable and you can whip it into a pretty nice desktop. Unfortunately that last part just takes up too much time I'd rather spend on other things. Linux rocks as a server or embedded platform it just sucks as a desktop unless you have time on your hands and some above average computer skills.
Tesla innovated just fine. He died crazy and poor while lesser men made themselves the gatekeepers to his creations and robbed the masses blind, sure... but he still innovated. Well, invented... innovation is the dumb-grunt work, really... but the principle is the same.
Just because you're a slave doesn't mean you can't work.
Nikola Tesla also died long before all this patent happy business the GP is talking about.
Slave?? Tesla was issued at least 278 patents internationally, wikipedia has a list of his American patents. Westinghouse for example licensed Tesla's patents for large sums of money so Tesla was an 'evil IP monopolizer' or 'gatekeeper' as you put it. Also keep in mind that patent trolling was a problem in Tesla's day just like it is today so it's not exactly as if the late 19th and early 20th centuries were some sort of patent lawsuit free golden age of innovation.
The article is also very light on numbers. It mentions a reduction in STIs and whatnot, but provides absolutely no quantitative data. How much are these infections and disorders decreased by? Are we talking a couple percentage points? Or dozens of percentage points? Furthermore, I don't see any definitive causes described. What I see is a correlation with some hypothesizing as to the cause but nothing which has actually been verified by scientific inquiry.
From my POW this issue is rather simple. Evolution put foreskins on the human male for a reason. If foreskins were really an evolutionary handicap and men with foreskins suffer from health problems one would expect this feature to have evolved out of the human gene-pool a long time ago if only because proto-human females would presumably have selected for males with smaller foreskins hundreds of thousands of years ago in Africa way before the invention of loincloths. I don't give a damn about statistics, religious commandments or studies illustrating the 'hygienic benefits' of circumcision. Mutilating the genitals of children, both male and female, is wrong and let's face it that is all that circumcision really is, genital mutilation. If a child then then grows up to be an adult and decides it wants to go to a surgeon and have its genitals circumcised for cultural, religions, psychological or legitimate medical reasons such a decision is that persons own business.
The world of *nix neither begins nor ends with Linux. Stop being such an illiterate lamer. Maybe your question should be, "How did you become a *NIX professional?".
Precisely, and that's also how I got started. I worked with Unix systems, then, somewhere along the line, Linux evolved from a hobby OS into something that could be used in the enterprise. I never got any certificates, just started out with shit jobs and worked my way up. I suppose certs might help, other than that a good way to proceed is to contribute to FOSS projects.
I completely disagree that a USB controller and supporting chipset isn't an option, a quick pop into Wal-Mart will show you any number of ridiculously cheap USB devices. Hey, forget Wal-mart, here's an $8 USB keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/107-Key-Windows-Keyboard-Black-USB/dp/B0038M3YM8 (do you think the most expensive part of the $8 cost is the USB chipset?)
So, ruling USB back in, the obvious solution is the micro-USB connector.
* Line in is a standard USB protocol, likewise line out (hence those USB headsets you can get.)
* Volume likewise can be implemented by supporting HID - Volume up and down have been standard keystrokes for a while on virtually every multimedia keyboard.
* Power is a standard part of the micro-USB connector, we can charge using it.
* Video out is supported by MHL, which is fast becoming a standard in the Android world.
* And finally, controlling playback is also supported by HID, again Play/Pause/Rewind/Fastforward are part of every modern keyboard, using standardized keystrokes.
FWIIW micro-USB connectors also have an annoying tendency to break the little plastic tab inside the socket which effectively bricks your device.
This is the textbook definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've owned 3 Android phones and none of them have required reboots or had signal strength problems. Quite unlike the iPhone 4 actually where even a reboot wouldn't save you.
Let me match out your anecdotal evidence with some of my own, I have owned an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4S and neither of them has had cellular network connection problems. Just about the only headache I had with either iPhone had to do with Bluetooth headsets. But then again I have had Bluetooth problems on practically every phone I have ever owned except the Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson W890i.
And all this time I thought the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was supposed to be Microsoft. Apparently Apple is learning from their book as well.
Having been on this forum for quite a while now, here is how I experienced the focus shift from Microsoft to Apple:
[c.a 2000] Slashdot posters don't particularly care about Apple other than to crack jokes about it. The rest of the time they stand in a big group pointing at Microsoft, shouting "Evil empire!! Evil empire!!!... "
[c.a 2007] Having enjoyed great success with music players Apple begins to enjoy unprecedented success with smartphones and later with tablets while Microsoft stagnates.
[c.a 2008-2009] The big mob of Slashdot posters, looks confused, they scratch their heads and then turn to point at Apple and begin to shout with one voice: "Evil empire!! Evil empire!!!... "
Yeah, but you only have to scan it once. Then release it on the internet. Maybe it won't end well for small time publishers, but the authors they publish could see a boost in the popularity of their work. I've read way more books on my eReader in the past year, than I read in the previous 5 years before I owned it. And every book I've read on my eReader was not pirated (many were free however). As Cory Doctorow says, the problems for most authors isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Getting people to read your work is the hardest part. Once the author has you reading his books, it's that much easier to get you to pay for one.
Actually you have to scan it, run it through an OCR processor and then proofread it because the OCR makes mistakes. That is a very time consuming process. A straight scan e-book with only images in it is only of limited use, what you want a lot of the time is searchable, error free text.
What this means is that, whilst old 'first edition' books will still be collected, they may now be seen as an artefact of a past way of living, much like chamberpots or bedwarmers.
Not so sure about that, publishing only ebooks will lead to massive piracy. This may not be an issue for the big names in publishing but it will be the end of many small specialist publishers if they go all digital. These small publishers may actually be better off staying analog since printed books are a pretty good anti piracy defense plus those customers that are really interested in this specialist literature will still buy the paper books. It takes way more time to scan and OCR process a book than it takes to rip a DVD and share it on bittorrent.
My balls fell off when i read that. Typical microsoft. They always seem to fuck up everything even when they had something good going.
Metro was fine. Now that its been branded metro for a year, sure why not change it to something catch like "windows 8 style ui" what the fuck? Microsoft is run by a bunch of fucking idiots.
This settles it. Windows 8 is vaporware.
So you are saying that the behaviour altering microorganism which afflicts Steve Ballmer is now airborne and highly contageous?
...shoving 'specs' out is not how you win the Tablet game....
Oh, you're referring to tablets, good, because there are more Android phones out there than there are iPhones; Samsung, alone, sells twice as many Android phones as Apple does iPhones.
That's kind of what this thread is all about... tablets. Don't skin him alive over staying on topic.
...Apple knows what most people want, Android does not.
Apple knows what Apple fans want; by and far, in the iOS vs. Android war you seem to think is being fought, people want Android, by sales numbers. Further, Android doesn't know what anyone wants, but Google's apparently got a decent idea, as do Morotola, HP, Acer, Archos, Sony, HTC, LG, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Samsung. By and far, these companies outsell Apple and it's not because Apple knows better than they do what their customers want.
So everybody who buys Apple products is an evil Apple fanboy? A poor unfortunate and unenlightened heretic who has not seen fit to convert too the true religion which is Google Androidsimn? After all it couldn't possibly be that some random consumer who's never thought about Apple or Microsoft as heretical religious organisations would go out and buy their products simply because they like them and not because they have been 'evangelized'. You really need to learn to relax. People buy what they like, end of story. Sometimes they buy Apple devices sometimes they buy Android devices and sometimes (Ghasp!) they even buy Microsoft devices because that's the product they like.
Slashdot Mirror
samsung phone is 9:16 so obviously not a copy
Stop ruining our Apple hate festival with 'facts'!!!
Our young geeks may NOT remember a time before Google, but there was a time where the "hot" search engine changed every two years, and there were new engines launching all the time.
Yeah back then we had what we old timers call 'competition' in the search engine world. Today we have a Google search monopoly^w ... oops ... sorry ... I keep forgetting that one is not allowed to say that here.
Another problem is that the Office suites on iPad/Android are kind of limited.
If they're "limited" for MS Office, at least they exist -- the most I've found for handling OpenOffice Writer files is a half-finished viewer written by a student a couple of years ago.
Yeah, when my mom brought me her Android tablet and wanted me to find an app to wiew and edit Office docs my first thought was that somebody must have ported a trimmed down version of Libre Office to Android but... no such luck. You'll be glad to know Libre Office is being ported to Android, no joy for iOS users like me though
http://liliputing.com/2012/07/libreoffice-coming-to-android-heres-what-it-looks-like-so-far.html
Spoken like someone who's never tried to write a research paper on a tablet/smartphone.
Ahh, here we go! The strawman comes out to play, because you can't actually contradict the fact that content is being created on a wide scale on mobile devices.
S/He didn't say "writing research papers". The topic was CONTENT CREATION in general. Your reply was to pick one specific thing out of all the content creation activities, and latch onto that. And in fact, people are writing papers using voice recognition software as well as using blutooth keyboards, so your point is not even valid.
Time to give it up, and admit that content creation is increasing moving to mobile.
For what these people are trying to do, edit Word and Excel documents created in the halcyon days of Windows 98, the iPad sucks and most of the Android office suites that I have tried suck even worse than Pages and Numbers do on the iPad. Come to think of it old Word and Excel documents can be a minor nightmare even on non-MS office suites running on full fledged Linux/OS X. Another problem is that the Office suites on iPad/Android are kind of limited. I never create hugely complex documents in Word/Excel and logging into Windows and converting my entire collection of digital antique to the latest MS Office format is a no brainer but apparently these people are digital luddites. What annoys me way more than non-MS office software choking on 15 year old Word files is the inability of the iPad to export documents to USB sticks. Android tablets at least have card slots even if most laptop users don't carry card readers around. The ability to save directly to iCloud storage in OS X and iOS helps but I'd still like to be able to write to USB sticks which have become by far the most ubiquitous form of easily portable storage.
I thought the DMCA was only supposed to be usable in the US against US firms?
Is it me or is this the second or third similiar takedown that slashdot has had up in the past month or two that was a DMCA claim being made by a foreign firm, possibly against a foreign individual or entity?
Don't fear the idiot across the pond. Fear the idiot next to you who borrows the other idiot's club :)
According to their wikipedia entry MediaFire is based in the US (Texas), AFAIK you don't have to be a US citizen to sue a US organization in a US court for breach of US laws (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). Especially if the MediaFire datacenter is in the USA. It's interesting to note that under the DMCA you seem to be guilty until proven innocent.
So if I am in possession of a Stinger missile and am nicked for the illegal possession of dangerous weapons that is a ridiculous thing to do? If I am in possession of large quantities of sarin gas It's ridiculous to arrest me and charge me for possession of dangerous chemical weapons?
Your examples are not analogous. The missiles and the sarin gas allow you to cause harm to others at some point in the future. With the porn you're talking about evidence of abuse (ignoring the sexting, etc... cases) that has already occurred. It'd be like arresting someone for having pictures of the results of your stinger missile or sarin gas attack. Not something most of us care to see, but it's not obvious how additional harm is being caused by the pictures.
It's actually kind of ironic if you think of it in the bigger crime context. How much easier would most crimes be to prosecute if pictures of them were readily available, yet here we have a case where possession/dissemination of evidence that a crime was committed is itself illegal. The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."
if making possession of such material illegal gives police leverage then need to force me to tell them who supplied it or even to force my cooperation in stinging the perpetrators?
If the person giving you such material is dumb enough to give you any information that can lead back to him, the police don't need your help. And besides, Obstruction of Justice is a crime itself.
Child rapists and killers don't start out as full fledged predators, they start out by fantasising, then they start collecting child porn because fantasizing is not enough, when even the porn doesn't do it any more they start raping kids or kidnapping and torturing them and very often they then kill them to hide their offence. Now tell me again how it is harmless for some pervert to own child porn? How is it productive to let an individual go even though that individual possesses child porn because child porn possession has been 'legalised'? ...as opposed to the current situation when the pervert at the very least becomes an entry in a database of sex offenders and is at a minimum forced to undergo therapy? Child pornography consumption is a stage in the evolution of a pedophile. If I have to choose catching these perverts at the point when they are fantasising about raping children and have legal leverage to lock them up in a therapeutic facility and then be able to keep an eye on them afterwards; or have possession of child porn be declared to be a 'victimless crime', being force to watch them evolve into full fledged predators and being able to do jack shit to stop them until after they have ruined the life of a child I know which I'd choose. Call me square but I'm in favour of preventative measures.
How would you fix the Linux desktop?
That depends on what you mean by 'fixing the Linux desktop'.
If you mean turning Linux into a serious competitor to Windows and OS X on the consumer desktop market then I can really only see one way to do that. Hand it to Google and ask them to do for Desktop /Laptop linux what they did with Android. That's probably the best way to get a commercially competitive Linux desktop OS that you can hand to an average consumer without him having any more problems than he would on OS X or Windows.
If you mean simply ironing out the gazillion minor bumps, scratches, bugs and general annoyances that I have to iron out every time I install linux for desktop use and usually also whenever I upgrade to a new version of my chosen distribution (Ubuntu and variants) then the answer is even simpler. Dig up somewhere a whole bunch of SQA people and convince the FOSS community that 'untested==unfinished'. I have not tested every distribution in existence but the people who administrate the distributions I have tested extensively: Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora don't seem to have gotten this message. The reason Windows and OS X have a superior user experience than Desktop Linux does has a lot to do with the amount of usability research/testing and SQA Microsoft and Apple pour into their OSes.
It's possible to turn a Linux box into a pretty decent desktop box that might even be consumer proof if you are willing to pour way more time into it than you have to with OS X or Windows.
Just my 0,02€
Is he an American? Some people are saying that he was born in Mexico. Why hasn't he produced a REAL birth certificate?
It is also being argued that he will be the first Mexican national to become president of the United States with the purpose of returning all lands taken from Mexico in our wars with them. Some have gone even further and claimed that he does not produce his tax returns because he has been filing them in Mexico, not the US...
There, I Foxified it for you...
Youre joking right?
SUVs are as cheap as expensive hatchbacks (considering the cheap ones are hatchback engines in overweight bodies)
Same with sports cars. You can get one for the price of a hot hatch.
Apple devices don't convey an air of money because people get them on cheap contracts. A lot of lower income earners have iphones. They are less like exclusive brands like Ferrari and more like common but overpriced brands suck as Louis Vutton which are the same made in china crap as other bags but have a higher price tag due to the logo.
When was the last time you took a look at the price difference between, say a basic VW golf and the GTI version? Hot hatchbacks cost so much more they are in fact a status symbol, as in: "I can afford to pay twice as much as you for the same car to get a some exta horsepowers". In my neck of the woods a GTI costs almost twice as much as a regular Golf.
They are purely fashion statements.
Well, maybe one data point doesn't disprove your argument, but the way you've framed it, it goes a long way to.
I am the least fashionable person imaginable. I'm a little bit of a lefty and despise brand worship and the creeping corporatism of our age. I abhor labels and typically buy no-name brand jeans from Target.
Oddly enough, I do have an iPhone. I find it well designed, very functional and useful as a phone and portable web browser, music player, gps, camera, and very occasional puzzle and games machine. That's why I have one, it's NOTHING to do with fashion.
Ditto on all points... except I also like the iPhone 4 series because these devices are smaller than the Galaxy S3. Apparently that feature will be lost with the iPhone 5 which is unfortunate.
This gets trotted out fairly often. The counter argument is this:
You (John Q. Public) create something actually innovative and legitimately patentable, and do so.
So does Apple, or Google, or any other huge company.
You realize they're using your invention, so ask them to pay you for it. They say no. Litigation ensues.
You spend a few thousand on your brother Vinny's legal services. They trot out a crack stable of lawyers at $300/hour/lawyer. They do a tremendous amount of analysis and preparation before their slam dunk victory.
You get stuck with a $500,000 bill because they bought better lawyers than you did.
In short, a system like this is massively disadvantageous to the little guy. Loser pays for frivolous lawsuits? Perhaps. Merely for losing? No.
In some European countries for example, such cost payment obligations can be modified and reduced by the judge if he feels they are excessive. One would hope that judges will treat blatant patent trolls, ambulance chasers and megacorps going overboard on legal spending differently than Mr. Little Inventor Guy and his brother Vinny slogging it out with big evil Apple or Google. Especially if the case made by Mr. Little Inventor Guy and his brother had some merit even if they lost.
According to the CRS report, 'The vast majority of defendants settle because patent litigation is risky, disruptive, and expensive, regardless of the merits; and many [patent trolls] set royalty demands strategically well below litigation costs to make the business decision to settle an obvious one.' Businesses lose both time and money, and innovation suffers."
How about making the party that looses the lawsuit autimatically pay the costs for the winner. Wouldn't that ruin the business case for the trolls and make people think long and hard about what they patent? ... Just a thought ....
Look, I'm an iOS & web developer. I use an iPad all day long, often off-site. If anybody is the target market for this, it's me. And I think developing on an iPad is an awful idea. It's a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". Is it possible to pull up a code editor on the iPad? Of course. But that doesn't make it a better choice than, well, just about any other option. The only redeeming aspect of this is if you already have an iPad with you, it's better than nothing at all. But really, how often is it that you need to do some coding unexpectedly and you only have your iPad with you? This is what laptops are for.
I agree 110% the iPad (and Android tablets) are nice for all sorts of things but they won't replace a full fledged desktop anytime soon. The moment I want to do something more complex than take notes with Pages, do some browsing, read a PDF or write short emails; something like say.... work on my computer graphics (Photoshop for iPad is a joke), edit video, do heavy duty word processing (Pages for all it's uses is rather limited on iPad) or god forbid, develop software, I reach for my laptop. My MacBook Air gives me way more control over the development environment than the iPad which is way to locked down to be of any use. Android tablets are not as locked down but their software and UI is just as limited as that of the iPad. If Apple feels it is forced to kill of the Mac, what I'd like to see replace it is a merger of the MacBook air and the iPad that can be used as a laptop but will morph into a tablet at will, kind of like this thing. It would be really cool to be able to rip the "monitor" off my MBA and have an iPad in my hands but such a device would have to have a more powerful OS X like interface that allows you to do things like tile several application windows on one screen as you see fit will. Trying to use the iOS interface for complex work is like trying to haul a king sized caravan over a steep Alpine pass with a Citroën C1.
Vote with your wallet
Who did you buy your Linux distro from? And how much?
That is such a tired argument. Some things are just worth paying for. I'm using OS X and Ubuntu side by side... no prizes for guessing on which system the desktop environment gives me more trouble (and that includes all the KDE Xfce, Gnome, ... Etc. flavors out there). Typical issues are bugs, Ubuntu 12.04 was bug ridden as hell. The issues I have been having with 12.04 are slowly being fixed but to tell you the truth I would rather have waited a few more weeks while the SQA people did some much needed work. I tried switching to other Linux distros only to find that Ubuntu is actually not one of the worst offenders. Amusingly after the LiveCD made a good impression, 64bit Fedora refused to boot after installation and I did not want to invest the time required to find out why. Another generic And tedious linus issue is broken APIs. Basically, for desktop use, I'd choose OS X or even Windows 7/8 (if I wasn't such a Unix geek) any day of the week. I'ts not that I am anti Linux, the RPM repo system is awesome Linux is secure, it is stable and you can whip it into a pretty nice desktop. Unfortunately that last part just takes up too much time I'd rather spend on other things. Linux rocks as a server or embedded platform it just sucks as a desktop unless you have time on your hands and some above average computer skills.
If you didn't know, it actually is.
Heh... That's funny, Hollywood actually going out of it's way to put cutting edge computer tech in a movie only to get slammed for being unrealistic.
Here it is in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
There is even a Linux port:
http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
Tesla innovated just fine. He died crazy and poor while lesser men made themselves the gatekeepers to his creations and robbed the masses blind, sure... but he still innovated. Well, invented... innovation is the dumb-grunt work, really... but the principle is the same.
Just because you're a slave doesn't mean you can't work.
Nikola Tesla also died long before all this patent happy business the GP is talking about.
Slave?? Tesla was issued at least 278 patents internationally, wikipedia has a list of his American patents. Westinghouse for example licensed Tesla's patents for large sums of money so Tesla was an 'evil IP monopolizer' or 'gatekeeper' as you put it. Also keep in mind that patent trolling was a problem in Tesla's day just like it is today so it's not exactly as if the late 19th and early 20th centuries were some sort of patent lawsuit free golden age of innovation.
The article is also very light on numbers. It mentions a reduction in STIs and whatnot, but provides absolutely no quantitative data. How much are these infections and disorders decreased by? Are we talking a couple percentage points? Or dozens of percentage points? Furthermore, I don't see any definitive causes described. What I see is a correlation with some hypothesizing as to the cause but nothing which has actually been verified by scientific inquiry.
From my POW this issue is rather simple. Evolution put foreskins on the human male for a reason. If foreskins were really an evolutionary handicap and men with foreskins suffer from health problems one would expect this feature to have evolved out of the human gene-pool a long time ago if only because proto-human females would presumably have selected for males with smaller foreskins hundreds of thousands of years ago in Africa way before the invention of loincloths. I don't give a damn about statistics, religious commandments or studies illustrating the 'hygienic benefits' of circumcision. Mutilating the genitals of children, both male and female, is wrong and let's face it that is all that circumcision really is, genital mutilation. If a child then then grows up to be an adult and decides it wants to go to a surgeon and have its genitals circumcised for cultural, religions, psychological or legitimate medical reasons such a decision is that persons own business.
The world of *nix neither begins nor ends with Linux. Stop being such an illiterate lamer. Maybe your question should be, "How did you become a *NIX professional?".
Precisely, and that's also how I got started. I worked with Unix systems, then, somewhere along the line, Linux evolved from a hobby OS into something that could be used in the enterprise. I never got any certificates, just started out with shit jobs and worked my way up. I suppose certs might help, other than that a good way to proceed is to contribute to FOSS projects.
I completely disagree that a USB controller and supporting chipset isn't an option, a quick pop into Wal-Mart will show you any number of ridiculously cheap USB devices. Hey, forget Wal-mart, here's an $8 USB keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/107-Key-Windows-Keyboard-Black-USB/dp/B0038M3YM8 (do you think the most expensive part of the $8 cost is the USB chipset?)
So, ruling USB back in, the obvious solution is the micro-USB connector.
* Line in is a standard USB protocol, likewise line out (hence those USB headsets you can get.)
* Volume likewise can be implemented by supporting HID - Volume up and down have been standard keystrokes for a while on virtually every multimedia keyboard.
* Power is a standard part of the micro-USB connector, we can charge using it.
* Video out is supported by MHL, which is fast becoming a standard in the Android world.
* And finally, controlling playback is also supported by HID, again Play/Pause/Rewind/Fastforward are part of every modern keyboard, using standardized keystrokes.
FWIIW micro-USB connectors also have an annoying tendency to break the little plastic tab inside the socket which effectively bricks your device.
This is the textbook definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've owned 3 Android phones and none of them have required reboots or had signal strength problems. Quite unlike the iPhone 4 actually where even a reboot wouldn't save you.
Let me match out your anecdotal evidence with some of my own, I have owned an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4S and neither of them has had cellular network connection problems. Just about the only headache I had with either iPhone had to do with Bluetooth headsets. But then again I have had Bluetooth problems on practically every phone I have ever owned except the Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson W890i.
And all this time I thought the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was supposed to be Microsoft. Apparently Apple is learning from their book as well.
Having been on this forum for quite a while now, here is how I experienced the focus shift from Microsoft to Apple:
Yeah, but you only have to scan it once. Then release it on the internet. Maybe it won't end well for small time publishers, but the authors they publish could see a boost in the popularity of their work. I've read way more books on my eReader in the past year, than I read in the previous 5 years before I owned it. And every book I've read on my eReader was not pirated (many were free however). As Cory Doctorow says, the problems for most authors isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Getting people to read your work is the hardest part. Once the author has you reading his books, it's that much easier to get you to pay for one.
Actually you have to scan it, run it through an OCR processor and then proofread it because the OCR makes mistakes. That is a very time consuming process. A straight scan e-book with only images in it is only of limited use, what you want a lot of the time is searchable, error free text.
Now an ebook.
What this means is that, whilst old 'first edition' books will still be collected, they may now be seen as an artefact of a past way of living, much like chamberpots or bedwarmers.
Not so sure about that, publishing only ebooks will lead to massive piracy. This may not be an issue for the big names in publishing but it will be the end of many small specialist publishers if they go all digital. These small publishers may actually be better off staying analog since printed books are a pretty good anti piracy defense plus those customers that are really interested in this specialist literature will still buy the paper books. It takes way more time to scan and OCR process a book than it takes to rip a DVD and share it on bittorrent.
My balls fell off when i read that. Typical microsoft. They always seem to fuck up everything even when they had something good going.
Metro was fine. Now that its been branded metro for a year, sure why not change it to something catch like "windows 8 style ui" what the fuck? Microsoft is run by a bunch of fucking idiots.
This settles it. Windows 8 is vaporware.
So you are saying that the behaviour altering microorganism which afflicts Steve Ballmer is now airborne and highly contageous?
...shoving 'specs' out is not how you win the Tablet game....
Oh, you're referring to tablets, good, because there are more Android phones out there than there are iPhones; Samsung, alone, sells twice as many Android phones as Apple does iPhones.
That's kind of what this thread is all about... tablets. Don't skin him alive over staying on topic.
...Apple knows what most people want, Android does not.
Apple knows what Apple fans want; by and far, in the iOS vs. Android war you seem to think is being fought, people want Android, by sales numbers. Further, Android doesn't know what anyone wants, but Google's apparently got a decent idea, as do Morotola, HP, Acer, Archos, Sony, HTC, LG, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Samsung. By and far, these companies outsell Apple and it's not because Apple knows better than they do what their customers want.
So everybody who buys Apple products is an evil Apple fanboy? A poor unfortunate and unenlightened heretic who has not seen fit to convert too the true religion which is Google Androidsimn? After all it couldn't possibly be that some random consumer who's never thought about Apple or Microsoft as heretical religious organisations would go out and buy their products simply because they like them and not because they have been 'evangelized'. You really need to learn to relax. People buy what they like, end of story. Sometimes they buy Apple devices sometimes they buy Android devices and sometimes (Ghasp!) they even buy Microsoft devices because that's the product they like.