According to the IAB, Mozilla wants to eliminate the cookies which enable online advertisers to reach the right audience
You know what there IAB, I don't want your fucking cookies. I don't want your web-bugs. I don't want your shit tailored to me. I don't even want your damned ads.
Let's be honest about this, you wish to gather information about me in order to fulfill your wishes to make money off me.
I'm not prepared to give you that information. I don't care about your business model -- I care about my privacy, and not having douchebags like the IAB know enough about me to do targeted advertising.
When I visit a website, I haven't signed an agreement with you saying I'll see your ads, and provide you with information to track me.
So websites like advertising.com and brightcove and eyereturn... those are blocked at my firewall. You don't ask my consent to collect information about me, and I don't need your consent to deny it to you.
Stop acting like your'e entitled to this information, or that what you think is going to make you the most money isn't against our best interests.
Now, if Apple could only competently block 3rd party cookies in Safari, I'd have yet another browser I can use to keep these idiots away.
but if 70% of the crimes in an area are committed by folks of a certain race, whatever that race may be, why does it not make sense to focus your suspicions while policing on people of that race?
And, what if 70 or 80% of the people in that same area are people of color? Do you justify searching everyone on the basis that "one of them" did it? If it was a crime in Chinatown, would you randomly frisk all of the Chinese people?
Because if in, say, Kenebunkport Maine, if you stopped and frisked all of the white people because "some white guy" committed a crime -- people would be friggin' outraged.
You can't look at this independent on the local demographics, but you also can't just start generalizing and frisking everyone who even remotely matches a suspect description.
With my height and build, give or take a few years, I fit the broad description of half the white guys in my city -- and if a police office wants to randomly stop and frisk me, he better have a fucking good reason, not just because he thinks I look suspicious and I match the description of 'generic whitey'.
For the exact same reason, if the police just start frisking every black male because some black male somewhere did something, it's not constructive in any way shape or form. It's saying "let's stop all the brown folks, because one of them must be up to something".
If we flipped this to slightly overweight middle-aged white men with thinning hair and asked if it was OK to stop and frisk, you can bloody well bet a lot of powerful people would be outraged. Because it's such a broad description as to be utterly useless, and you can't just put random people up against a wall and frisk them without cause. At least, not if you still want to pretend you live in a free society.
It's racist if it unfairly targets someone by simple virtue of ethnicity. And it's stupid if there's no basis to believe that the individual you are looking at did anything other than being black.
Microsoft for years has had "OS basic, OS Home, OS Home Premium, OS Business, OS Business Premium, OS Business Pro...."
Give me one offering which does everything I need. Don't try to sell me one of 9 slightly different versions which are all variously crippled and limited.
This cash grab to sell a bunch of different version of the same thing is usually annoying, and periodically you disover that "Home Premium" is still missing some pretty basic features.
What Microsoft needs to do is understand what people want and why, not just come out with the latest "this is what we're giving you" and then scratch their heads when nobody gives a shit.
This is why I keep wi-fi disabled on my mobile devices unless I need it.
I've found I don't particularly want my device to be phoning home to people when I'm not looking, and I've also found leaving wi-fi on absolutely impacts my battery life.
Stuff like this is only going to get worse as various advertisers decide they're entitled to more information than we're willing to give them.
So, therefore we have no way of knowing how things have changed since 1863? Right.
The use of electricity, indoor plumbing, cars, powered flight, computers, radio, television, plastics... none of these we can say anything about how this changed society.
Instead, we have no idea of what has changed.
Seriously, do you have anything of value to add here?
what makes you think the NSA isn't already monitoring that traffic?
Or that BB hasn't done the exact same thing for the NSA -- once they've done it for one government, there is zero reason to believe they wouldn't for another.
Is it? They've been losing market share steadily over the last few years, some of their newer products aren't selling as well as they'd hoped, and people are proportionally buying more devices of anything but BlackBerry.
Their PlayBook was a bit of a flop, and they've stopped providing updates for it.
Except for entrenched people who are still using it, my perception of BlackBerry isn't a brand which is still strong -- it's a brand in decline desperate to stay relevant as the smartphone market they created has taken off around them.
I don't believe a single thing about this is going to change, they're just trying to manage the message and sell it to us.
But given how many public statements about this have been contradicted within a week or two by other facts, I fully expect this to be more of the same -- "Honestly, we're not doing it. OK, maybe we're doing it, but we're doing it under strict control. OK, maybe we're doing other things that we don't want to admit to. Hey look, a pony".
I didn't knew that wherever the USA decides to establish a base could count as US soils.
Generally, when you allow a foreign country to establish a military base on your soil, that base is essentially sovereign under the laws of the country whose military has the base, not the host country.
This is also true of embassies. As a side note: have other nations present among the peace keeping forces negotiated similar embassy-like "soil abroad" legal status?
I think very few other countries have established military bases in other countries, but I'm sure they exist.
For most of these peace-keeping missions, the peacekeepers are on a US owned military base. One would presume the overall base is under US jurisdiction, or some joint agreement between the US and the other nations.
In other words, you are adapting all of your content to the limitations that Apple has imposed rather than the Apple product being good enough to deal with whatever you happen to have around.
Short of ogg-vorbis (which is a file format I've known exactly one person who gave a shit about), I have yet to encounter a file format not supported in iTunes. And for all I know it supports ogg-vorbis, but since I don't own or want anything in that format, I don't give a damn.
That's the problem with the Apple approach. It forces you to distort all of reality in order to fit into the Apple vision. Your consumerism and brand fixation forces you to swim in the Kool-Aid. You adapt to the product rather than the product accomodating you.
Yawn, your rigid ideology and tendency to be an asshole force you to see the world in black and white.
The reality is, when I use the Apple stuff that I own, I have never had to 'adapt' to a damned thing. There isn't a single file format I've ever said "oh, gee, I have to do this the Apple way". I get it, I use it.
There's a reason why a different alternative video player is the driving force behind the jailbreaking of AppleTVs.
And, of all the owners of an Apple TV, what percentage of them have cared to jail-break it? I have never looked at mine and said "gee, I should jail break this" because it would be so much better.
Eventually people get tired of crippled.
They also get tired of smug assholes who think they're superior.
As I said, you buy what you like and do with it whatever you want -- but if you think I or anybody else who isn't an open-source zealot give a shit, you're sadly mistaken.
I don't expect you to give a shit about what I do -- but since you seem overly concerned about what other people do, I'm sure it rankles that people are actually using it and enjoying it. You can bluster all you want and make assertions about how it's crippled or how I'm adapting to Apple -- but at the end of the day, that's your opinion. That is' convenient and works for me, well, that's my opinion.
One of us has a reality distortion field going on here, but it's not who you seem to think it is. Like I said, you sound like RMS, and I think he's a screeching ideologue.
Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again.;-)
Slightly more seriously, unless we go through another round of media files getting bigger... I have no idea of what I would need terabytes of stuff on my phone for.
That only works so long as you stay inside the walled garden and only do the things that Apple wants you to do.
Yeah, and Microsoft and Google are trying desperately to get in on that action. Without going into some advanced settings on my Nexus 7 to allow sideloading, it's pretty much the same thing. And I've sideloaded only one or two things on my Nexus 7.
The moment you add one home movie into the mix it becomes a total mess.
Bullshit, I've added ripped movies into my iTunes, and they work just fine. If it's a file format supported by iTunes, you can trivially import the file and have it in there.
You are conflating crippled with easy.
No, you are conflating those two things and you're sounding a little like Stallman. Not everybody has any interest in installing Linux on their device, or writing code on it.
It's an ideological position of "if I can't install GNU Hurd on it, I'm being oppressed". It's also a ridiculously inflexible position which has nothing to do with most people.
But to an end user if it does everything they need it to do, in what way is it crippled? The reality is, it isn't, but people like you piss and moan that it's crippled and useless -- but I guarantee you, my mother in law would think you're a fucking raving idiot talking about stuff that makes no sense to her (which is why I don't discuss such things with her). And I can also guarantee you, there's more people out there like my mother in law than you and I -- people who are far better off in the walled-garden. (OK, in fairness she's got a Nexus 7 not anything by Apple, but the same principle applies)
Your example is not terribly interesting versus a desktop video player that "just works" regardless of the kind of media you throw at it.
Yeah, where are you going to get the video files? They don't give away DRM-free digital copies of movies, so unless your player can integrate with that, you'll have not much at all to watch. If one of the things you want to do is buy a legal copy of a digital movie, you need to be on a system supported by that.
If what I want to do is watch Skyfall on my mobile device, or The Avengers or any recent movie... short of using a torrent site or ripping the disk myself, how would I go about doing that? The answer is "do without", and that's not the answer people want to hear. And unlike that Ultraviolet shit, once I get the movie from iTunes I can use it on any of my Apple devices, with no need for a network connection to ask permission from the copyright owners to be able to watch it.
For me, in terms of being able to get these digital copies (which is something I value), doing it entirely within the Apple ecosystem is an acceptable trade-off between the functionality I want and everything else I want to be able to do.
In fact they are more likely to be "easy" because they don't try to ignore obvious common use cases.
Or, you know, maybe those use cases are neither obvious nor common to most people using a computer, and they'll never once feel the need to do it -- at which point it's people like you saying "Yarg, but I can't compile the kernel and rewrite the network stack".
If it works for 95% or more of your market, that's what you make it for, because that's where the money is. Those features to keep that last 5% happy -- well, they're probably not worth investing the time in implementing them.
There's essentially two entirely different markets here -- Joe and Sally consumer who have no interest whatsoever in the fiddly bits, and hard core geeks which want to be able to fiddle with everything.
And I can tell you straight up (by looking at the realities of what people have actually bought and from knowing many many people who don't work in technology), that consumer market of people who don't want t
So what'd be "encrypted email" for? Horny partners? Surprise birthday parties?
Who gives a damn?
I see no reason to defend the situations in which I could choose to encrypt something. I am not going to open my stuff up to you so that I can prove I'm not a terrorist unless you have something to suggest that I am. That's not how it works in a free society.
This "we'll assume everyone is guilty and ignore the ones we don't care about" mentality is crap, and in complete opposition to privacy, freedom, and everything else the US claims to hold so dear.
It doesn't matter if I'm discussing something I'd like to patent, my financial statements, my medical condition, having an affair, or planning to BASE jump off a building -- it's none of the governments business, and without evidence to suggest I'm doing something they need to be concerned about, they can fuck off.
This is just an undue control over your citizens, and sadly, everyone else on the planet since these guys are tapping pretty much everything.
That more an more people might choose to encrypt on general principles is something the NSA is just going to have to learn to deal with -- because I see no point in helping them any more than I can avoid.
America is rapidly becoming some of the same things they used to criticize the Soviets for. And that is sad.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Freedom is Slavery. The government is here to help.
It sounds like we're trending towards not being allowed to encrypt our own stuff because that automatically means we're doing something shady. There's all sorts of reasons I might want to encrypt information that have nothing at all to do with American national security.
Hopefully some non-American company will step up to the plate and give us this, and we can send a big "Fuck You" to the NSA that says we'll encrypt if we want to, and you can eat shit. My rights aren't defined by your security interests.
Sorry, but the rest of the world doesn't give a crap about what you want, and want to retain our privacy without having to cede it to the US government.
Thanks America, you've now essentially broken the internet, and are only going to make computing less secure for all of us. Welcome to the new world, where industry and government demands full control over technology in order to enforce their will on us.
For reasons most of us don't understand (myself included) the Chromebook is apparently selling like hot cakes
It's not rocket science... the majority of personal computers will never be used for anything overly complex or taxing on the hardware, and won't be doing anything they can't completely do using the Google functionality of a Chomebook.
Go look at your parents, or people who don't work in tech who pretty much only need a web browser to do everything they'll ever do with a computer. They don't need horsepower, they need ease of use and convenience.
but you only have to look at sales of a device of an even more crippled laptop*... to understand that the market doesn't always produce winners that nerds like you and me see as obvious.
Well, that's because what we want/need out of a machine is entirely different that your average home user. They just want it to work out of the box, and not have to stress about setting it up.
Even something like media consumption is far easier on an iPad -- you buy the movie from iTunes (or buy the physical disk which comes with the digital copy and download it like I do), and play it. You don't even need to know anything about file formats. If you also have an iPhone or Apple TV, you can use the files there as well without doing any extra work.
With my iPad, I can watch all of the digital copies of movies I've bought. With my Nexus 7, I can only play movies I've ripped myself -- but since Apple stopped giving me updates for my iPad and it has become somewhat crashy, it's now mostly used for watching stuff like the Avengers on airplanes, while my Nexus 7 is what I use for more and more stuff.
Once you understand what most people want and need -- small, lightweight, easy to use, and "good enough" for your needs.
On a trip now, I'm more likely to bring my Android tablet and my iPad and leave my laptop home entirely. And depending on the trip, I might only bring the Nexus 7.
For the last 20+ years, companies have made hardware for whatever Microsoft was making, because it was the gravy train.
Now all of a sudden they're realizing they're footing the bill to make products focused around Microsoft stuff, and that isn't always working for them if the stuff Microsoft is making nobody is interested in. In fact, it has become a liability in some instances.
The manufacturers have more options these days, and if the Microsoft products aren't selling, they can make more money by focusing on the Android and other stuff.
So Microsoft really needs to pay attention, and learn that they need to better understand what it is people want and why -- because there is increasingly not as much certainty that a MS product will sell, and if you're sitting on your laurels collecting revenue from OS and Office upgrades, you will get overtaken.
Their tablets aren't doing stellar, their phones aren't nearly as popular, nobody seems to like Windows 8, and they've pissed off everybody with the XBone -- and while they may be entrenched in corporate environments and likely to stay there, at the consumer level, they seem to be foundering.
If you have a Google account, this means you can now sign into Persona-powered websites with your existing credentials. The best part is of course Mozilla's pledge to its users. 'Persona remains committed to privacy: Gmail users can sign into sites with Persona, but Google can't track which sites they sign into,'
First off, I have no bloody interest in logging into web sites with my Google credentials. I will log into them (if at all) with the set of credentials I choose, and if the browser is going to think "hey, I see you're logged into Google, so I'll just log you into this site" -- then I'm going to have to either disable that, or stop using the browser. I have no interest in being automatically logged in with my Google credentials.
And second, I don't believe that you can log into a site using Google credentials and not have Google know it. How the hell do you have my credentials, and if you're verifying them with Google, how the hell can they not know? If you're not verifying them with Google, why is it I'm trusting you with them?
This sounds like something which is going to want to wave around your credentials all over the place, and it sure as hell isn't something I want -- I sincerely hope that if I haven't signed up for whatever the hell this Persona thing is nothing happens. Just because I visit randomwebsite.com doesn't mean I have any interest in randomwebsite.com knowing who the hell I am or that I even have a Google account or that I'm currently logged into it.
I disagree with this whole cross-site credentials thing, because it's way too much information that is potentially going to places without me realizing it. I don't want to hit some random web site and have it know my identify and automatically log me in and let the marketing douchebags know I was there.
Google focusing on its core mission is fine, he added, "but the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor."
And what, exactly, is Microsoft doing to uplift the poor and how are they different? Anything? What were you doing to get Microsoft to help uplift the poor when you were the CEO besides trying to get vendor lock-in in schools and charities?
Arguably, Google is doing nothing different than every other corporation -- and singling out what they are doing with technology initiatives has nothing whatsoever to do with what he chooses to do with his charities.
Google as a corporation is pursuing technology stuff. So is Microsoft.
The whole article is a red herring and just a sensational headline. It boils down to "rich asshole berates a company for doing the exact same things as the company he founded still does today".
You do realize Windows Phone market share is growing faster than any other currently?
Why, yes, they could double their market share by selling a relatively small amount of units, but that doesn't mean that there is really a significant amount of them in use.
Over the past 12 months, Windows Phone went from 3.1% market share to 3.7%. This means that while shipments of Windows Phone devices are growing, they're barely growing any faster than the industry as a whole.
Ooooh, Microsoft has gained 0.6% of the market over the last 12 months. I'm impressed, and I can only imagine the competitors are all running scared.
And in case you'd like to claim that's not what it says, let's go straight to IDC here, it's the first table on the page. They may have shipped 8.9M units this year vs 4.7M units last year, but how many of them have actually sold?
Jesus fanboys are terrible.
Yes, especially when they cling to a lame statistic which doesn't say what they think it says. Next you'll try to tell me the Zune was a raging success.
It's true that, as a percentage increase from what they had last year, Microsoft phones are 'growing faster' relative to itself (NOT faster relative to the overall market), but in terms of overall magnitude in the market, it's still a dud. Compared to what it did last year, it make huge gains... compared to what everybody else did last year, Windows phone is a drop in the bucket.
That doesn't equate to "Windows Phone market share is growing faster than any other" -- not by a bloody longshot.
But, hey, you keep consoling yourself that it's the fanboys of competing technologies who are spreading lies and propaganda that Windows Phone is a joke and a failure. You console yourself that, if they'd only listen to the statistics which demonstrate it's a superior phone, we could all get along.
And I'll keep assuming you're a drooling idiot who doesn't know how to read the statistics. All that stat says is how fast Microsoft's share increased over the last year compared to where Microsoft's share was last year.
But growing from 3.1% of a market to 3.7% of a market isn't the success story you seem to think it is.
Someone has to herd cats (er... developers). You may prefer not to go into management, but someone does need to do it.
Well, sometimes one of the cats steps up and helps fool the other cats into thinking they all want to go the same way. That cat may have no interest in ever being management, but can help turn the other cats into a self-herding collective with a little oversight and direction. Sometimes, even more than one cat will participate in the deception of the other cats with the understanding they still get to be cats. Those cats usually become the official or unofficial team leads, provided they were actually competent as cats in the first place.
But, in the end, if that cat has to give up the fun stuff, they won't like it, and might move on to where someone else has to worry about the herding.
Cats have very sensitive egos, and what management sometimes considers an incentive, cats can sometimes consider an insult and won't play.
They also inherently distrust non-cats as lying bastards, or people who don't understand what it means to be a cat and who may try to force them into the mold of a ferret, when that's the last thing they'd like to be.
It can be difficult to explain your cat-ness to non-cats, and as a result, misunderstandings and differing expectations can ensue.;-)
Sometimes, the very characteristics which make us awesome cats are at odds with being management. Many cats, however, can and will try to relate, and will act as interpreters to prevent any cultural misunderstandings.
Some cats may eventually decide to become a full-time ambassador, and give up their cat-like duties -- those cats will likely tell war stories for the rest of their life, and the other cats will roll their eyes, and thank whatever-cats-thank that they're not the cat who sold out, and try to figure out how to stay in their position as just one of the cats for as long as possible.
You just need to understand how cats think, and recognize it takes a long time for a cat to decide on its own that these are things which are important to them. But you can't force it.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what there IAB, I don't want your fucking cookies. I don't want your web-bugs. I don't want your shit tailored to me. I don't even want your damned ads.
Let's be honest about this, you wish to gather information about me in order to fulfill your wishes to make money off me.
I'm not prepared to give you that information. I don't care about your business model -- I care about my privacy, and not having douchebags like the IAB know enough about me to do targeted advertising.
When I visit a website, I haven't signed an agreement with you saying I'll see your ads, and provide you with information to track me.
So websites like advertising.com and brightcove and eyereturn ... those are blocked at my firewall. You don't ask my consent to collect information about me, and I don't need your consent to deny it to you.
Stop acting like your'e entitled to this information, or that what you think is going to make you the most money isn't against our best interests.
Now, if Apple could only competently block 3rd party cookies in Safari, I'd have yet another browser I can use to keep these idiots away.
And, what if 70 or 80% of the people in that same area are people of color? Do you justify searching everyone on the basis that "one of them" did it? If it was a crime in Chinatown, would you randomly frisk all of the Chinese people?
Because if in, say, Kenebunkport Maine, if you stopped and frisked all of the white people because "some white guy" committed a crime -- people would be friggin' outraged.
You can't look at this independent on the local demographics, but you also can't just start generalizing and frisking everyone who even remotely matches a suspect description.
With my height and build, give or take a few years, I fit the broad description of half the white guys in my city -- and if a police office wants to randomly stop and frisk me, he better have a fucking good reason, not just because he thinks I look suspicious and I match the description of 'generic whitey'.
For the exact same reason, if the police just start frisking every black male because some black male somewhere did something, it's not constructive in any way shape or form. It's saying "let's stop all the brown folks, because one of them must be up to something".
If we flipped this to slightly overweight middle-aged white men with thinning hair and asked if it was OK to stop and frisk, you can bloody well bet a lot of powerful people would be outraged. Because it's such a broad description as to be utterly useless, and you can't just put random people up against a wall and frisk them without cause. At least, not if you still want to pretend you live in a free society.
It's racist if it unfairly targets someone by simple virtue of ethnicity. And it's stupid if there's no basis to believe that the individual you are looking at did anything other than being black.
Microsoft for years has had "OS basic, OS Home, OS Home Premium, OS Business, OS Business Premium, OS Business Pro ...."
Give me one offering which does everything I need. Don't try to sell me one of 9 slightly different versions which are all variously crippled and limited.
This cash grab to sell a bunch of different version of the same thing is usually annoying, and periodically you disover that "Home Premium" is still missing some pretty basic features.
What Microsoft needs to do is understand what people want and why, not just come out with the latest "this is what we're giving you" and then scratch their heads when nobody gives a shit.
This is why I keep wi-fi disabled on my mobile devices unless I need it.
I've found I don't particularly want my device to be phoning home to people when I'm not looking, and I've also found leaving wi-fi on absolutely impacts my battery life.
Stuff like this is only going to get worse as various advertisers decide they're entitled to more information than we're willing to give them.
So, therefore we have no way of knowing how things have changed since 1863? Right.
The use of electricity, indoor plumbing, cars, powered flight, computers, radio, television, plastics ... none of these we can say anything about how this changed society.
Instead, we have no idea of what has changed.
Seriously, do you have anything of value to add here?
Or that BB hasn't done the exact same thing for the NSA -- once they've done it for one government, there is zero reason to believe they wouldn't for another.
Is it? They've been losing market share steadily over the last few years, some of their newer products aren't selling as well as they'd hoped, and people are proportionally buying more devices of anything but BlackBerry.
Their PlayBook was a bit of a flop, and they've stopped providing updates for it.
Except for entrenched people who are still using it, my perception of BlackBerry isn't a brand which is still strong -- it's a brand in decline desperate to stay relevant as the smartphone market they created has taken off around them.
Likely, yes.
I don't believe a single thing about this is going to change, they're just trying to manage the message and sell it to us.
But given how many public statements about this have been contradicted within a week or two by other facts, I fully expect this to be more of the same -- "Honestly, we're not doing it. OK, maybe we're doing it, but we're doing it under strict control. OK, maybe we're doing other things that we don't want to admit to. Hey look, a pony".
Generally, when you allow a foreign country to establish a military base on your soil, that base is essentially sovereign under the laws of the country whose military has the base, not the host country.
This is also true of embassies.
As a side note: have other nations present among the peace keeping forces negotiated similar embassy-like "soil abroad" legal status?
I think very few other countries have established military bases in other countries, but I'm sure they exist.
For most of these peace-keeping missions, the peacekeepers are on a US owned military base. One would presume the overall base is under US jurisdiction, or some joint agreement between the US and the other nations.
Winter will arrive
Slashdotters will always bitch
Time for more coffee
Hark, grammar nazi
Summer is waning again
Nothing ever new
The rovers are sad
All this time alone on Mars
Please send poetry
Short of ogg-vorbis (which is a file format I've known exactly one person who gave a shit about), I have yet to encounter a file format not supported in iTunes. And for all I know it supports ogg-vorbis, but since I don't own or want anything in that format, I don't give a damn.
Yawn, your rigid ideology and tendency to be an asshole force you to see the world in black and white.
The reality is, when I use the Apple stuff that I own, I have never had to 'adapt' to a damned thing. There isn't a single file format I've ever said "oh, gee, I have to do this the Apple way". I get it, I use it.
And, of all the owners of an Apple TV, what percentage of them have cared to jail-break it? I have never looked at mine and said "gee, I should jail break this" because it would be so much better.
They also get tired of smug assholes who think they're superior.
As I said, you buy what you like and do with it whatever you want -- but if you think I or anybody else who isn't an open-source zealot give a shit, you're sadly mistaken.
I don't expect you to give a shit about what I do -- but since you seem overly concerned about what other people do, I'm sure it rankles that people are actually using it and enjoying it. You can bluster all you want and make assertions about how it's crippled or how I'm adapting to Apple -- but at the end of the day, that's your opinion. That is' convenient and works for me, well, that's my opinion.
One of us has a reality distortion field going on here, but it's not who you seem to think it is. Like I said, you sound like RMS, and I think he's a screeching ideologue.
Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again. ;-)
Slightly more seriously, unless we go through another round of media files getting bigger ... I have no idea of what I would need terabytes of stuff on my phone for.
Having said that, I'm willing to find out.
Yo dawg, I hear you like insensitive clods ...
Yeah, and Microsoft and Google are trying desperately to get in on that action. Without going into some advanced settings on my Nexus 7 to allow sideloading, it's pretty much the same thing. And I've sideloaded only one or two things on my Nexus 7.
Bullshit, I've added ripped movies into my iTunes, and they work just fine. If it's a file format supported by iTunes, you can trivially import the file and have it in there.
No, you are conflating those two things and you're sounding a little like Stallman. Not everybody has any interest in installing Linux on their device, or writing code on it.
It's an ideological position of "if I can't install GNU Hurd on it, I'm being oppressed". It's also a ridiculously inflexible position which has nothing to do with most people.
But to an end user if it does everything they need it to do, in what way is it crippled? The reality is, it isn't, but people like you piss and moan that it's crippled and useless -- but I guarantee you, my mother in law would think you're a fucking raving idiot talking about stuff that makes no sense to her (which is why I don't discuss such things with her). And I can also guarantee you, there's more people out there like my mother in law than you and I -- people who are far better off in the walled-garden. (OK, in fairness she's got a Nexus 7 not anything by Apple, but the same principle applies)
Yeah, where are you going to get the video files? They don't give away DRM-free digital copies of movies, so unless your player can integrate with that, you'll have not much at all to watch. If one of the things you want to do is buy a legal copy of a digital movie, you need to be on a system supported by that.
If what I want to do is watch Skyfall on my mobile device, or The Avengers or any recent movie ... short of using a torrent site or ripping the disk myself, how would I go about doing that? The answer is "do without", and that's not the answer people want to hear. And unlike that Ultraviolet shit, once I get the movie from iTunes I can use it on any of my Apple devices, with no need for a network connection to ask permission from the copyright owners to be able to watch it.
For me, in terms of being able to get these digital copies (which is something I value), doing it entirely within the Apple ecosystem is an acceptable trade-off between the functionality I want and everything else I want to be able to do.
Or, you know, maybe those use cases are neither obvious nor common to most people using a computer, and they'll never once feel the need to do it -- at which point it's people like you saying "Yarg, but I can't compile the kernel and rewrite the network stack".
If it works for 95% or more of your market, that's what you make it for, because that's where the money is. Those features to keep that last 5% happy -- well, they're probably not worth investing the time in implementing them.
There's essentially two entirely different markets here -- Joe and Sally consumer who have no interest whatsoever in the fiddly bits, and hard core geeks which want to be able to fiddle with everything.
And I can tell you straight up (by looking at the realities of what people have actually bought and from knowing many many people who don't work in technology), that consumer market of people who don't want t
Who gives a damn?
I see no reason to defend the situations in which I could choose to encrypt something. I am not going to open my stuff up to you so that I can prove I'm not a terrorist unless you have something to suggest that I am. That's not how it works in a free society.
This "we'll assume everyone is guilty and ignore the ones we don't care about" mentality is crap, and in complete opposition to privacy, freedom, and everything else the US claims to hold so dear.
It doesn't matter if I'm discussing something I'd like to patent, my financial statements, my medical condition, having an affair, or planning to BASE jump off a building -- it's none of the governments business, and without evidence to suggest I'm doing something they need to be concerned about, they can fuck off.
This is just an undue control over your citizens, and sadly, everyone else on the planet since these guys are tapping pretty much everything.
That more an more people might choose to encrypt on general principles is something the NSA is just going to have to learn to deal with -- because I see no point in helping them any more than I can avoid.
America is rapidly becoming some of the same things they used to criticize the Soviets for. And that is sad.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Freedom is Slavery. The government is here to help.
It sounds like we're trending towards not being allowed to encrypt our own stuff because that automatically means we're doing something shady. There's all sorts of reasons I might want to encrypt information that have nothing at all to do with American national security.
Hopefully some non-American company will step up to the plate and give us this, and we can send a big "Fuck You" to the NSA that says we'll encrypt if we want to, and you can eat shit. My rights aren't defined by your security interests.
Sorry, but the rest of the world doesn't give a crap about what you want, and want to retain our privacy without having to cede it to the US government.
Thanks America, you've now essentially broken the internet, and are only going to make computing less secure for all of us. Welcome to the new world, where industry and government demands full control over technology in order to enforce their will on us.
It's not rocket science ... the majority of personal computers will never be used for anything overly complex or taxing on the hardware, and won't be doing anything they can't completely do using the Google functionality of a Chomebook.
Go look at your parents, or people who don't work in tech who pretty much only need a web browser to do everything they'll ever do with a computer. They don't need horsepower, they need ease of use and convenience.
Well, that's because what we want/need out of a machine is entirely different that your average home user. They just want it to work out of the box, and not have to stress about setting it up.
Even something like media consumption is far easier on an iPad -- you buy the movie from iTunes (or buy the physical disk which comes with the digital copy and download it like I do), and play it. You don't even need to know anything about file formats. If you also have an iPhone or Apple TV, you can use the files there as well without doing any extra work.
With my iPad, I can watch all of the digital copies of movies I've bought. With my Nexus 7, I can only play movies I've ripped myself -- but since Apple stopped giving me updates for my iPad and it has become somewhat crashy, it's now mostly used for watching stuff like the Avengers on airplanes, while my Nexus 7 is what I use for more and more stuff.
Once you understand what most people want and need -- small, lightweight, easy to use, and "good enough" for your needs.
On a trip now, I'm more likely to bring my Android tablet and my iPad and leave my laptop home entirely. And depending on the trip, I might only bring the Nexus 7.
For the last 20+ years, companies have made hardware for whatever Microsoft was making, because it was the gravy train.
Now all of a sudden they're realizing they're footing the bill to make products focused around Microsoft stuff, and that isn't always working for them if the stuff Microsoft is making nobody is interested in. In fact, it has become a liability in some instances.
The manufacturers have more options these days, and if the Microsoft products aren't selling, they can make more money by focusing on the Android and other stuff.
So Microsoft really needs to pay attention, and learn that they need to better understand what it is people want and why -- because there is increasingly not as much certainty that a MS product will sell, and if you're sitting on your laurels collecting revenue from OS and Office upgrades, you will get overtaken.
Their tablets aren't doing stellar, their phones aren't nearly as popular, nobody seems to like Windows 8, and they've pissed off everybody with the XBone -- and while they may be entrenched in corporate environments and likely to stay there, at the consumer level, they seem to be foundering.
First off, I have no bloody interest in logging into web sites with my Google credentials. I will log into them (if at all) with the set of credentials I choose, and if the browser is going to think "hey, I see you're logged into Google, so I'll just log you into this site" -- then I'm going to have to either disable that, or stop using the browser. I have no interest in being automatically logged in with my Google credentials.
And second, I don't believe that you can log into a site using Google credentials and not have Google know it. How the hell do you have my credentials, and if you're verifying them with Google, how the hell can they not know? If you're not verifying them with Google, why is it I'm trusting you with them?
This sounds like something which is going to want to wave around your credentials all over the place, and it sure as hell isn't something I want -- I sincerely hope that if I haven't signed up for whatever the hell this Persona thing is nothing happens. Just because I visit randomwebsite.com doesn't mean I have any interest in randomwebsite.com knowing who the hell I am or that I even have a Google account or that I'm currently logged into it.
I disagree with this whole cross-site credentials thing, because it's way too much information that is potentially going to places without me realizing it. I don't want to hit some random web site and have it know my identify and automatically log me in and let the marketing douchebags know I was there.
Now get off my damned lawn.
And what, exactly, is Microsoft doing to uplift the poor and how are they different? Anything? What were you doing to get Microsoft to help uplift the poor when you were the CEO besides trying to get vendor lock-in in schools and charities?
Arguably, Google is doing nothing different than every other corporation -- and singling out what they are doing with technology initiatives has nothing whatsoever to do with what he chooses to do with his charities.
Google as a corporation is pursuing technology stuff. So is Microsoft.
The whole article is a red herring and just a sensational headline. It boils down to "rich asshole berates a company for doing the exact same things as the company he founded still does today".
Why, yes, they could double their market share by selling a relatively small amount of units, but that doesn't mean that there is really a significant amount of them in use.
According to this:
Ooooh, Microsoft has gained 0.6% of the market over the last 12 months. I'm impressed, and I can only imagine the competitors are all running scared.
And in case you'd like to claim that's not what it says, let's go straight to IDC here, it's the first table on the page. They may have shipped 8.9M units this year vs 4.7M units last year, but how many of them have actually sold?
Yes, especially when they cling to a lame statistic which doesn't say what they think it says. Next you'll try to tell me the Zune was a raging success.
It's true that, as a percentage increase from what they had last year, Microsoft phones are 'growing faster' relative to itself (NOT faster relative to the overall market), but in terms of overall magnitude in the market, it's still a dud. Compared to what it did last year, it make huge gains ... compared to what everybody else did last year, Windows phone is a drop in the bucket.
That doesn't equate to "Windows Phone market share is growing faster than any other" -- not by a bloody longshot.
But, hey, you keep consoling yourself that it's the fanboys of competing technologies who are spreading lies and propaganda that Windows Phone is a joke and a failure. You console yourself that, if they'd only listen to the statistics which demonstrate it's a superior phone, we could all get along.
And I'll keep assuming you're a drooling idiot who doesn't know how to read the statistics. All that stat says is how fast Microsoft's share increased over the last year compared to where Microsoft's share was last year.
But growing from 3.1% of a market to 3.7% of a market isn't the success story you seem to think it is.
Well, sometimes one of the cats steps up and helps fool the other cats into thinking they all want to go the same way. That cat may have no interest in ever being management, but can help turn the other cats into a self-herding collective with a little oversight and direction. Sometimes, even more than one cat will participate in the deception of the other cats with the understanding they still get to be cats. Those cats usually become the official or unofficial team leads, provided they were actually competent as cats in the first place.
But, in the end, if that cat has to give up the fun stuff, they won't like it, and might move on to where someone else has to worry about the herding.
Cats have very sensitive egos, and what management sometimes considers an incentive, cats can sometimes consider an insult and won't play.
They also inherently distrust non-cats as lying bastards, or people who don't understand what it means to be a cat and who may try to force them into the mold of a ferret, when that's the last thing they'd like to be.
It can be difficult to explain your cat-ness to non-cats, and as a result, misunderstandings and differing expectations can ensue. ;-)
Sometimes, the very characteristics which make us awesome cats are at odds with being management. Many cats, however, can and will try to relate, and will act as interpreters to prevent any cultural misunderstandings.
Some cats may eventually decide to become a full-time ambassador, and give up their cat-like duties -- those cats will likely tell war stories for the rest of their life, and the other cats will roll their eyes, and thank whatever-cats-thank that they're not the cat who sold out, and try to figure out how to stay in their position as just one of the cats for as long as possible.
You just need to understand how cats think, and recognize it takes a long time for a cat to decide on its own that these are things which are important to them. But you can't force it.
Depends, if they're over-represented in corporate environments, they could be very attractive things with a known exploit.
Gross incompetence, and a total lack of awareness of the Gergorian calendar.