I agree completely. Tablets are a fad. The form factor is terrible and the functionality is lacking.
Well, that's an valid opinion, but I don't agree with you.
My tablet isn't used for work, so the form factor is actually quite nice for what I use it for (surf the web, movies, email when I travel). And the functionality is exactly what I want out of it.
There's just some stuff I have no interest in doing on my phone. I like the bigger size of the fondle-slab. My phone is too small to watch a movie or read a book.
I expect you and Mr. Heins will be proven wrong over time. BlackBerry's tablet was crap, but that doesn't mean people who own tablets don't like them.
Can this guy be serious? The FBI doesn't have the ability to go to court and ask for a court order allowing them to listen in on conversations? Wow. Just utterly wow.
The really disturbing thing is I think TFA is saying that companies like Facebook and Google would be required to build wire-tapping into their stuff so that if the government ever asks it is there.
There is currently no way to wiretap some of these communications methods easily, and companies effectively have been able to avoid complying with court orders.... Instead of setting rules that dictate how the wiretap capability must be built, the proposal would let companies develop the solutions as long as those solutions yielded the needed data.
I think that government is getting ready to ask^H^H^Hforce industry to build in a mechanism ensuring that any and all things can be tapped.
Essentially they want all technology built such that it can be tapped, and they're willing to force companies to do it, and the privacy implications be damned. What they want is the always available ability to listen to anybody's conversations, and they want the companies to pay to build this capability into their products.
So in the act of 'protecting our freedom' and 'going after terrorists', we all lose. This is terrible.
Essentially we will have law enforcement punching holes in technology they don't understand, and the probable result will be technology which has unintended security holes that can be exploited.
It isn't that they don't have the legal ability to get a court order, they just want to 'fix' the situations in which the technology doesn't really allow for it, and remove any of the last barriers when a company is unwilling to do it by levying the fines.
People who think they tune out ads are actually more influenced by them in their purchasing choices. They don't recognize the familiarity effect.
Well, purely anecdotal, but I find I'm more likely to not buy from companies who push their ads in my face.
Companies who push advertisements into my video games get a special brand of ire -- so EA are pretty high on my hit list, and Microsoft if they're going to make the next XBox require an internet connection.
When the console starts, you press "a" to play the game. If you put in a new game, you don't even have to do that.
After having seen ads in both the XBox home screen, and in actual games themselves, that's what prompted me to disconnect my XBox from the network. Simply starting the game doesn't stopping you from getting in-game ads and other shit.
If the next version requires a constant internet connection, I and likely many others won't buy it.
If you don't game on-line, what value does the internet requirement bring for you? It provides them with a revenue stream to sell you ads and enforce DRM, and it allows game makers to write all of these titles which you have to buy shit to actually get anywhere, but it doesn't do anything for consumers who don't need or want any of the on-line features.
TFA says this requirement isn't as draconian as it sounds, but doesn't offer anything to support that. I therefore conclude Paul Thurrott has his head up his own or Microsoft's ass, and is incapable of understanding why people do not want this.
Looks like Skyrim might be one of the last games I ever buy. For me, always-on internet equates to never-purchased console.
Business Continuity would have a shitfit over that. What would happen if he got hit by a bus?
Oh, it caused a lot of grief to be sure. When he retired in his 60's and left, he had no intention of coming back.
After a month of so, the panic level started to go up, and they started cranking up the amount of money they were willing to throw at him to come back as a consultant. And this was.com era San Francisco, so you can imagine the numbers involved.
Sadly, they knew they needed to replace the software for years, but had already tried several times and failed.
I suspect there is more critical stuff than people realize in various business that is a bus-accident away from becoming unusable. And, quite frankly, that is definitely scary.
It's not even always a lie, which is the most frustrating part of replacing legacy applications.
People often simply don't know, or don't have a complete picture of all of the dark and scary corners that are in there, or don't realize that things even are dark and scary corners. Several decades worth of tweaks and adjustments makes for an almost intractable problem in some cases.
Since those projects, every time I've been near anything which says "we're going to replace this legacy application", I try to back away slowly and not get involved in it.
It will probably hurt, it will likely cost a lot more than you expected, and there's a huge chance you'll go through the whole process for a long time and still have the project fall apart as you discover new things that can't be reconciled.
I was on one project, and this was the 3rd time they'd tried to replace a system started in the 60's and continuously maintained and updated.
After 4 years and enough money to keep me on an island under a palm tree for the rest of my life, eventually this one failed too. I strongly suspect they still use it to this day, because I can't imagine it's something which is ever going to get any easier to fix.
OK, let's go with "not possible in the allotted time and available resources".
Yes, if someone built the system once, in theory someone can do it again. Provided you can find out *all* of the stuff it currently does -- and that's amazingly difficult with legacy systems since there's usually tons of stuff which isn't documented, or only a few people ever use and know about. Lots of stuff gets incrementally added over the span of decades, and there's seldom a definitive thing which describes it all. And often not anything which even describes most of it.
But those zeroes can keep stacking up to the point where it isn't possible for practical reasons, because it costs too damned much.
Nothing good happens without analysis and specifications up front.
And, with legacy systems, the problem is you can do a huge amount of analysis and specifications -- and still end up having no idea how the system works for all of those corner cases nobody ever mentioned and which can't be shoe horned into what you've now got.
On one of the projects I was on, at the beginning we did the analysis, and asked them a bunch of questions on how it worked and what the constraints were. We got told thinks like "This can never happen, this is always true, this is always structured like that".
So you build a system which takes the concrete assumptions they've given you, and then get farther into the process when it suddenly becomes "well, sometimes they can look like this but not always, sometimes that isn't true either, and in a few cases it's entirely different from everything else".
Then you can quickly discover what you've spent a year building can't possibly work, because in some cases, 1+1 really does equal sqrt(67.89), and you can't make that fit anything you've built since there wasn't supposed to be any real numbers (or whatever metaphor works for you).
Frequently the consulting company analysts are more interested in the user interface, where very little happens! But that is the sexy part, of course.
Often because what the company wants is to start with is screen mock-ups because they're focused on the new UI, and it's not until you get deep into the ugly bits that you realize half of what they told you about the actual process is blatantly wrong.
Sadly, the complexity of system that old can be beyond anything that can be conveyed, or even fully known by the people who own it. And the more specialized the software domain, the more you're likely to find all sorts of things like that.
That's great if you have something they have a plan which it covers.
But I once worked at a place where the mainframe guy had retired, was drawing his pension, and had been hired back as a consultant at 3-4x his previous salary because there wasn't anybody on the planet who could run the old system. Literally, since he'd been the one who maintained it for several decades.
Not all legacy systems are something you can easily move away from, much to the chagrin of the people who own them. I've literally seen systems with 40+ years of history, huge amounts of data, and more than one attempt to replace it costing millions of dollars and then getting scrapped.
Sadly, it's not all that uncommon to realize just how massive of a task it will be to replace these things.
I suspect anybody running museum pieces in production environments have already looked into replacing them, and failed miserably.
The problem with that can end up being "when it is broke, how are you going to fix it?"
I mostly agree with you, but I've also been on a couple of projects trying to replace 30+ year old custom-built mainframe applications.
I've seen a couple where people try to replace it with more modern software, but nothing which isn't built from scratch can even come close. It usually lacks 30-40 years of tweaks and fixes to do everything they need, often completely changes the workflow, and opens up vast amounts of data transformation you need to do to pull in all of the legacy data into the new system.
I've seen several of these projects fail after a significant amount of time and money was sunk into it as people realized it wasn't possible to build something which did all of the same things.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it can be an exceedingly expensive thing to replace old systems like that. So much so that it isn't feasible for companies to really undertake it.
However, that just pushes out the problem, and sooner or later, you end up with a defunct system and no replacement.
You know, Western countries are moving towards an appalling level of hypocrisy in this regard.
If any other country did this, there would be howls of banana republics, references to the USSR, and comments on the rule of law. When the West does this, it's okay.
So if someone put in a reciprocal policy that says "OK, we'll check all of the emails of people coming from Israel" there would be outrage, cries of anti-Semitism, and discrimination. Kinda like when the US said it was going to fingerprint visitors, and other countries started talking about the same thing.
For all the chastising one hears of 'other countries' doing things which the West disagrees with, the trend is to do the exact same thing and say "yeah, but we're the good guys, so it's OK".
I fear the terrorists have done far more damage than people realize, because what used to be our laws and rights are now mostly guidelines to be changed and ignored as they see fit.
Countries are moving towards deciding their highest legal principles are something you can decide don't apply if it's expedient for your needs. At which all of this talk about democracy, freedom and rights is pretty much just lip-service.
I remember when it first came out people telling me about it.
My response at the time was "so, all you need to do is wave your card near the reader, and it takes your money... how do you keep it safe?".
Of course, I was dismissed as somewhat paranoid and got a lot of suggestions I was blowing it out of proportion. From the sounds of it, these things are just waiting to gladly spend your money without caring about your security.
I may be somewhat on the paranoid side, but that doesn't mean this was a giant security hole waiting to happen.
I've got a hot news story for you - everyone person you hand your credit card to is able to access your card number, name, and expiration date!
Yes, but this provides opportunities for people you don't hand your card to to be able to get the same information.
So anybody on the street with a phone potentially has access to your information. And if some schmuck walked up to me on the street and asked me for my card number, name, and expiry date I wouldn't give it to them -- this makes it possible for people who you have no intention of giving this information to able to get it without you even knowing.
If NFC is so horribly broken that any random person with a free app from Google Play can access your credit card information without you knowing it, it's defective from the get go. Something I've always believed anyway. It's goal is to be convenient and spur people to use this as a payment option; it has never been designed with security and privacy in mind.
I've always thought those tap-to-pay things were really a bad idea from a security perspective, as your card can be used without you even knowing it and without any form of authentication.
The fact that it will broadcast all of that information to just about anything tells me it's something which retailers and credit card companies like -- but it's mostly bad for security, but great for convenience.
I may need to call my bank and see if I can get that disabled on my cards. I don't use it, don't want it, and seeing this, I trust it even less than I ever have. I'd prefer it didn't even respond to the NFC terminals.
I've always thought this was massively insecure, and it looks like I was right.
The web worked when it had a simple standard that worked in every situation.
Have we *ever* actually had that?
For a long time, basic HTML was rendered differently in each browser, several of them added their own functionality and ignored others, CSS support came in pretty spotty and depended on which browser you had.
I'm not so sure it ever 'worked in every situation' -- my memory is that it was anything but. It took literally years before IE even behaved close to what everyone else did.
So if any well, at any time in history, was contaminated without drilling, we conclude that there is no basis to say that drilling can lead to contaminated wells.
Right.
So using this horribly flawed logic, if anybody died of cancer before the use of tobacco, we can conclude that tobacco doesn't cause cancer.
Why don't these guys learn from Steam? Make an effort, and they get some of the most loyal, most vocal platform zealots money can never buy; shun them, they get the most rabid haters.
I think you've just answered your own question.
Clearly the Linux fans are fickle, hard to please, and demanding. And in the end, they'll probably still be rabid haters.
So why spend the resources to try to keep that smaller, more vocal group happy, when you can focus on the ones who will be less easily riled up?
Just sayin'. If companies mostly perceive Linux users like you describe, how could they not decide it's the crazy fringe of people they aren't going to try for?
Sadly, where they are now the copyright owners, they've gone down the road of deciding they want to lock everything down and sell only on their terms, and what we might want is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's an valid opinion, but I don't agree with you.
My tablet isn't used for work, so the form factor is actually quite nice for what I use it for (surf the web, movies, email when I travel). And the functionality is exactly what I want out of it.
There's just some stuff I have no interest in doing on my phone. I like the bigger size of the fondle-slab. My phone is too small to watch a movie or read a book.
I expect you and Mr. Heins will be proven wrong over time. BlackBerry's tablet was crap, but that doesn't mean people who own tablets don't like them.
I feel the same way about most airlines. ;-)
Would I if I had it to spend? Absolutely. Can I or most of us afford to spend the cost of a house on this? Sadly, no.
I suspect most of us will never get to do this, which sucks. Because I would dearly love to do this before I die.
The really disturbing thing is I think TFA is saying that companies like Facebook and Google would be required to build wire-tapping into their stuff so that if the government ever asks it is there.
I think that government is getting ready to ask^H^H^Hforce industry to build in a mechanism ensuring that any and all things can be tapped.
Essentially they want all technology built such that it can be tapped, and they're willing to force companies to do it, and the privacy implications be damned. What they want is the always available ability to listen to anybody's conversations, and they want the companies to pay to build this capability into their products.
So in the act of 'protecting our freedom' and 'going after terrorists', we all lose. This is terrible.
Essentially we will have law enforcement punching holes in technology they don't understand, and the probable result will be technology which has unintended security holes that can be exploited.
It isn't that they don't have the legal ability to get a court order, they just want to 'fix' the situations in which the technology doesn't really allow for it, and remove any of the last barriers when a company is unwilling to do it by levying the fines.
Well, purely anecdotal, but I find I'm more likely to not buy from companies who push their ads in my face.
Companies who push advertisements into my video games get a special brand of ire -- so EA are pretty high on my hit list, and Microsoft if they're going to make the next XBox require an internet connection.
After having seen ads in both the XBox home screen, and in actual games themselves, that's what prompted me to disconnect my XBox from the network. Simply starting the game doesn't stopping you from getting in-game ads and other shit.
If the next version requires a constant internet connection, I and likely many others won't buy it.
If you don't game on-line, what value does the internet requirement bring for you? It provides them with a revenue stream to sell you ads and enforce DRM, and it allows game makers to write all of these titles which you have to buy shit to actually get anywhere, but it doesn't do anything for consumers who don't need or want any of the on-line features.
TFA says this requirement isn't as draconian as it sounds, but doesn't offer anything to support that. I therefore conclude Paul Thurrott has his head up his own or Microsoft's ass, and is incapable of understanding why people do not want this.
Looks like Skyrim might be one of the last games I ever buy. For me, always-on internet equates to never-purchased console.
Except that this '20%' is around 1000C to go from 5000C to 6000C. And that's pretty significant.
I'd say "far hotter" is a reasonable thing here.
Since 1987 when they measured it?
These two guys share a Nobel for it.
Seriously, we've known they have mass for 25 years now. And you're asking how we know we know they even exist?
Oh, it caused a lot of grief to be sure. When he retired in his 60's and left, he had no intention of coming back.
After a month of so, the panic level started to go up, and they started cranking up the amount of money they were willing to throw at him to come back as a consultant. And this was .com era San Francisco, so you can imagine the numbers involved.
Sadly, they knew they needed to replace the software for years, but had already tried several times and failed.
I suspect there is more critical stuff than people realize in various business that is a bus-accident away from becoming unusable. And, quite frankly, that is definitely scary.
Nonetheless, I've seen it more than once.
It's not even always a lie, which is the most frustrating part of replacing legacy applications.
People often simply don't know, or don't have a complete picture of all of the dark and scary corners that are in there, or don't realize that things even are dark and scary corners. Several decades worth of tweaks and adjustments makes for an almost intractable problem in some cases.
Since those projects, every time I've been near anything which says "we're going to replace this legacy application", I try to back away slowly and not get involved in it.
It will probably hurt, it will likely cost a lot more than you expected, and there's a huge chance you'll go through the whole process for a long time and still have the project fall apart as you discover new things that can't be reconciled.
I was on one project, and this was the 3rd time they'd tried to replace a system started in the 60's and continuously maintained and updated.
After 4 years and enough money to keep me on an island under a palm tree for the rest of my life, eventually this one failed too. I strongly suspect they still use it to this day, because I can't imagine it's something which is ever going to get any easier to fix.
OK, let's go with "not possible in the allotted time and available resources".
Yes, if someone built the system once, in theory someone can do it again. Provided you can find out *all* of the stuff it currently does -- and that's amazingly difficult with legacy systems since there's usually tons of stuff which isn't documented, or only a few people ever use and know about. Lots of stuff gets incrementally added over the span of decades, and there's seldom a definitive thing which describes it all. And often not anything which even describes most of it.
But those zeroes can keep stacking up to the point where it isn't possible for practical reasons, because it costs too damned much.
And, with legacy systems, the problem is you can do a huge amount of analysis and specifications -- and still end up having no idea how the system works for all of those corner cases nobody ever mentioned and which can't be shoe horned into what you've now got.
On one of the projects I was on, at the beginning we did the analysis, and asked them a bunch of questions on how it worked and what the constraints were. We got told thinks like "This can never happen, this is always true, this is always structured like that".
So you build a system which takes the concrete assumptions they've given you, and then get farther into the process when it suddenly becomes "well, sometimes they can look like this but not always, sometimes that isn't true either, and in a few cases it's entirely different from everything else".
Then you can quickly discover what you've spent a year building can't possibly work, because in some cases, 1+1 really does equal sqrt(67.89), and you can't make that fit anything you've built since there wasn't supposed to be any real numbers (or whatever metaphor works for you).
Often because what the company wants is to start with is screen mock-ups because they're focused on the new UI, and it's not until you get deep into the ugly bits that you realize half of what they told you about the actual process is blatantly wrong.
Sadly, the complexity of system that old can be beyond anything that can be conveyed, or even fully known by the people who own it. And the more specialized the software domain, the more you're likely to find all sorts of things like that.
Sure, like we're going to believe there's any actual females posting on Slashdot. ;-)
I kid, of course -- but it's a meme that needs trotting out every now and then.
That's great if you have something they have a plan which it covers.
But I once worked at a place where the mainframe guy had retired, was drawing his pension, and had been hired back as a consultant at 3-4x his previous salary because there wasn't anybody on the planet who could run the old system. Literally, since he'd been the one who maintained it for several decades.
Not all legacy systems are something you can easily move away from, much to the chagrin of the people who own them. I've literally seen systems with 40+ years of history, huge amounts of data, and more than one attempt to replace it costing millions of dollars and then getting scrapped.
Sadly, it's not all that uncommon to realize just how massive of a task it will be to replace these things.
I suspect anybody running museum pieces in production environments have already looked into replacing them, and failed miserably.
I mostly agree with you, but I've also been on a couple of projects trying to replace 30+ year old custom-built mainframe applications.
I've seen a couple where people try to replace it with more modern software, but nothing which isn't built from scratch can even come close. It usually lacks 30-40 years of tweaks and fixes to do everything they need, often completely changes the workflow, and opens up vast amounts of data transformation you need to do to pull in all of the legacy data into the new system.
I've seen several of these projects fail after a significant amount of time and money was sunk into it as people realized it wasn't possible to build something which did all of the same things.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it can be an exceedingly expensive thing to replace old systems like that. So much so that it isn't feasible for companies to really undertake it.
However, that just pushes out the problem, and sooner or later, you end up with a defunct system and no replacement.
Ah, but in Newspeak, 'advance of real progress' means 'securing corporate profits'.
Copyright law is now about maximizing how much companies can make.
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
You know, Western countries are moving towards an appalling level of hypocrisy in this regard.
If any other country did this, there would be howls of banana republics, references to the USSR, and comments on the rule of law. When the West does this, it's okay.
So if someone put in a reciprocal policy that says "OK, we'll check all of the emails of people coming from Israel" there would be outrage, cries of anti-Semitism, and discrimination. Kinda like when the US said it was going to fingerprint visitors, and other countries started talking about the same thing.
For all the chastising one hears of 'other countries' doing things which the West disagrees with, the trend is to do the exact same thing and say "yeah, but we're the good guys, so it's OK".
I fear the terrorists have done far more damage than people realize, because what used to be our laws and rights are now mostly guidelines to be changed and ignored as they see fit.
Countries are moving towards deciding their highest legal principles are something you can decide don't apply if it's expedient for your needs. At which all of this talk about democracy, freedom and rights is pretty much just lip-service.
Surprised isn't the right word. Appalled, sure. Surprised? No.
Then again, people still fall for spam, phishing, and those fake tech support calls from "the Windows provider" which people fall for.
Critical reasoning is a surprisingly uncommon thing. It depresses me, but it doesn't surprise me.
I remember when it first came out people telling me about it.
My response at the time was "so, all you need to do is wave your card near the reader, and it takes your money ... how do you keep it safe?".
Of course, I was dismissed as somewhat paranoid and got a lot of suggestions I was blowing it out of proportion. From the sounds of it, these things are just waiting to gladly spend your money without caring about your security.
I may be somewhat on the paranoid side, but that doesn't mean this was a giant security hole waiting to happen.
Yes, but this provides opportunities for people you don't hand your card to to be able to get the same information.
So anybody on the street with a phone potentially has access to your information. And if some schmuck walked up to me on the street and asked me for my card number, name, and expiry date I wouldn't give it to them -- this makes it possible for people who you have no intention of giving this information to able to get it without you even knowing.
If NFC is so horribly broken that any random person with a free app from Google Play can access your credit card information without you knowing it, it's defective from the get go. Something I've always believed anyway. It's goal is to be convenient and spur people to use this as a payment option; it has never been designed with security and privacy in mind.
I've always thought those tap-to-pay things were really a bad idea from a security perspective, as your card can be used without you even knowing it and without any form of authentication.
The fact that it will broadcast all of that information to just about anything tells me it's something which retailers and credit card companies like -- but it's mostly bad for security, but great for convenience.
I may need to call my bank and see if I can get that disabled on my cards. I don't use it, don't want it, and seeing this, I trust it even less than I ever have. I'd prefer it didn't even respond to the NFC terminals.
I've always thought this was massively insecure, and it looks like I was right.
Have we *ever* actually had that?
For a long time, basic HTML was rendered differently in each browser, several of them added their own functionality and ignored others, CSS support came in pretty spotty and depended on which browser you had.
I'm not so sure it ever 'worked in every situation' -- my memory is that it was anything but. It took literally years before IE even behaved close to what everyone else did.
So if any well, at any time in history, was contaminated without drilling, we conclude that there is no basis to say that drilling can lead to contaminated wells.
Right.
So using this horribly flawed logic, if anybody died of cancer before the use of tobacco, we can conclude that tobacco doesn't cause cancer.
You keep telling yourself that.
Of course they do -- between not paying rent, and saving up their allowance they're the only ones with money for such things. ;-)
I think you've just answered your own question.
Clearly the Linux fans are fickle, hard to please, and demanding. And in the end, they'll probably still be rabid haters.
So why spend the resources to try to keep that smaller, more vocal group happy, when you can focus on the ones who will be less easily riled up?
Just sayin'. If companies mostly perceive Linux users like you describe, how could they not decide it's the crazy fringe of people they aren't going to try for?
Sadly, where they are now the copyright owners, they've gone down the road of deciding they want to lock everything down and sell only on their terms, and what we might want is irrelevant.