I'm not much into Apple stuff, closed systems and all that. But I made an exception with the iPad when it debuted. The reason being that there were no alternatives. The iPad was a product without competition, a new thing in the computer ecosystem, but with the background of thousands of iPhone apps.
What really took me by surprise was the time that it took for other companies to duplicate the tablet concept. Even if they were already making smartphones. I mean, you may need genius to have the idea and believe in it and make the first table. But once somebody had success with it, you just have to make a bigger phone, by Jove! My memory may fail me, but I think it was at least two years between the first iPad and the first solid competition, I think a Samsung with a stylus.
Just saying that, up to now, Apple has had a visionary at its helm, that could discover, or create, new markets. Also it had really sloppy competition, at least from the point of view of a customer. I think both things are gone now, so it's not a wonder that sales are winding down. Don't expect things to change in the near term. A bigger screen is certainly not going to cut it.
Apple, one free word of advice, worth exactly the cost. The bottom half of the market you don't want to have. When the rabble, the unwashed peasants, starts flaunting the bitten apple logo everywhere, the beautiful people will flee to other phones with a clearer status seal. And then, the all encompassing middle unbrained layer will lose the daze caused by all that glitter, and start comparing phones like they do cars. Then some day you will announce the iPhone 15, and nobody will come to the party, because you know... is "Apple".
As always with this kind of studies you have to wonder about cause and effect. Perhaps men tend to flee from the work fields where wages are dropping, and flock to fields where wages are going up? Perhaps women not so intensely?
Yesterday I had a customer call because one of his PCs has updated to Windows 10 without asking. According to the user, she had come back to her PC to see the update already installing. Of course I cannot know if that is the complete story, users are notoriously unreliable, but a couple of things come to mind.
First, the customer called mainly because some programs stopped working. If things stop working it's not an "upgrade", its a whole new OS, and you have to market it that way, and wait for people to install it proactively. Anything else is irresponsible.
Second, reports like this one are suddenly multiplying. There is no real difference in my mind between starting the "upgrade" on Windows' own volition or offering the "upgrade" to the user so many times and in so different ways as to make it practically sure that he or she will accept it by mistake.
Microsoft is clearly confident in that its ecosystem is so solid in the desktop that nothing they do will change that. They are probably right, most of my customers are so heavily invested in the MS environment that nothing at all will make them change. One tried to switch away from Office to LibreOffice and, after a couple of years, had to backtrack licking its wounds.
So you have a monopoly, but also a saturated market. You miss out on the Web revolution because you don't like centralized services, you like distributed better, that's your business. Then you miss out on the mobile revolution because the interface is so different from the one you have, and in your religion there is only one commandment, and it is:"There is only one Windows, and all pledge loyalty to It". So God forbids that you make something imaginative, like another system that works well with Windows. Afterwards you foul your cash cow by changing the interface that was working (desktop Windows) to be usable in the touchscreen world, apparently ignoring that people are well capable of learning and using two different interfaces with ease.
So you prod your customers in the direction you want, even if you are not very sure of it being a good direction. It may be a winning strategy, who knows, not I, I have never earned the fat bonuses these marketing geniuses make. But in my book, prodding customers isn't a winning strategy.
playing chess, or even go, is not the same as creating the LIGO experiment.
Yes, but how many people is capable of creating the LIGO experiment? It's not that everybody is going to be unemployable, just most people.
...that these moves are feints, made to be fighted against and to distract from the more serious oppressions. No other "sensical" explanation comes to mind.
Please explain me what would be the point of that. If you want to break the arbitrary 2 hours limit in a Marathon, you should run the course between Marathon and Athens, with no water except what you can get from streams, and alone. That should be something, perhaps, specially if you drop dead in the end, proving you really had given your all.
If you are allowed to changing the route and having helpers, both in route and as water-offering minions, you can choose a route that slowly descends for most of the course (ideas?), or where winds are always favorable.
I'd say security in the future will converge on three lines:
a) Sandboxed browsers/apps: Different browsers for mail access, general browsing and sensitive browsing (banking, using credit card, etc). All browsers revert to base state after closing, or allowing just a limited set of changes (bookmarks, cookies). The browsers are possibly stored in a USB stick with a physical write protection switch for part of the storage.
b) Trust structure: The OS will only execute programs with a certain signature, based in a chain of trust. You can choose who to trust or not.
c) Closed devices: (See Apple iPhone and iPad, but with paranoid-mode).
Well implemented, these strategies can reduce the malware threat, and they are implementable with current technology. I really don't see the anti-virus surviving much. It's an after-the-fact tech that was born as a patch for systems unprepared for a new threat. The playing board is now set and the structure of the systems must change to reflect that.
What BitCoin is, is a money laundering vehicle. You buy bitcoins electronically with funds in a country, you sell them two seconds later in other country, for more or less the same price. You have not only extracted the money from the country, but deleted most traces of property. You probably have made a payment without looking like that, just with an e-mail.
The wild changes of valuation help you explain your sudden wealth, which is a problem when you get money from drugs or bribery. Hint: most bitcoin millionaires are really money launderers at big scale, their wealth suddenly legal by way of the bitcoin wizardry. They are taking advantage of the computer illiteracy in governments, but as the scheme is used by more and more people, the loophole is being slowly closed.
As for the closed exchanges, they most likely are stealing the bitcoins themselves, safe in the difficulty of anybody proving anything within such convoluted software schemes, specially when the damages are to people of so many different countries, with their own reasons not to raise too big a fuss about it.
Try Threema. Fully encrypted. But not free. And nobody you know will have it, most likely.
In any case I wonder at so much money paid for an app to which the telecom operators can put an end to in 2 weeks, just by dropping to 0 the price of messaging. Risky, I'd say.
I mean, a Designer that watches what you do, and is very interested in your behavior. Has set some rules that you must obey, but won't communicate with you. It's everywhere, can see the past and the future as a single continuum, can change reality, it's omnipotent but has chosen to limit It's own power....
I'm curious. I've always thought that encrypting a lot of files individually (as opposed to as a block) would open you to attacks based on the content of well known files (example configuration files, etc.) that you may add to the lot. That is, if the attacker has knowledge of the content of a couple of files, could he derive the keys for unencrypting the rest?
Rather, he emphasized that because the patent in question was now a widely held technology standard, banning the products in question would be too disruptive to consumers and the economy
That argument could be used to sooooo many other patent litigations, and somehow never is, except when the affected part is a big American company.
You could try the Samsung Note tablet, with pencil. In the Notes app you can write formulae (although mainly math, which can be even resolved), squares, etc, and be recognized (mostly) by the software. Probably it won't be yet useful for you, but perhaps you want to keep an eye on it.
Slashdot Mirror
it will take more than four years at that pace to reach the TSA's target enrollment.
No, it won't, because when the queues reach 3 hours of waiting, everybody will jump to enroll. It's a flawless strategy.
Once again, measurable savings (reduce the personnel) trump much bigger, but unmeasurable loses (the zillion hours lost by travellers).
The biggest features are something that other phones have had for years?
Yes, I was going to say the same. That's one step closer to the wireheads distopya.
I'm not much into Apple stuff, closed systems and all that. But I made an exception with the iPad when it debuted. The reason being that there were no alternatives. The iPad was a product without competition, a new thing in the computer ecosystem, but with the background of thousands of iPhone apps.
What really took me by surprise was the time that it took for other companies to duplicate the tablet concept. Even if they were already making smartphones. I mean, you may need genius to have the idea and believe in it and make the first table. But once somebody had success with it, you just have to make a bigger phone, by Jove! My memory may fail me, but I think it was at least two years between the first iPad and the first solid competition, I think a Samsung with a stylus.
Just saying that, up to now, Apple has had a visionary at its helm, that could discover, or create, new markets. Also it had really sloppy competition, at least from the point of view of a customer. I think both things are gone now, so it's not a wonder that sales are winding down. Don't expect things to change in the near term. A bigger screen is certainly not going to cut it.
Apple, one free word of advice, worth exactly the cost. The bottom half of the market you don't want to have. When the rabble, the unwashed peasants, starts flaunting the bitten apple logo everywhere, the beautiful people will flee to other phones with a clearer status seal. And then, the all encompassing middle unbrained layer will lose the daze caused by all that glitter, and start comparing phones like they do cars. Then some day you will announce the iPhone 15, and nobody will come to the party, because you know... is "Apple".
As always with this kind of studies you have to wonder about cause and effect. Perhaps men tend to flee from the work fields where wages are dropping, and flock to fields where wages are going up? Perhaps women not so intensely?
Yesterday I had a customer call because one of his PCs has updated to Windows 10 without asking. According to the user, she had come back to her PC to see the update already installing. Of course I cannot know if that is the complete story, users are notoriously unreliable, but a couple of things come to mind.
First, the customer called mainly because some programs stopped working. If things stop working it's not an "upgrade", its a whole new OS, and you have to market it that way, and wait for people to install it proactively. Anything else is irresponsible.
Second, reports like this one are suddenly multiplying. There is no real difference in my mind between starting the "upgrade" on Windows' own volition or offering the "upgrade" to the user so many times and in so different ways as to make it practically sure that he or she will accept it by mistake.
Microsoft is clearly confident in that its ecosystem is so solid in the desktop that nothing they do will change that. They are probably right, most of my customers are so heavily invested in the MS environment that nothing at all will make them change. One tried to switch away from Office to LibreOffice and, after a couple of years, had to backtrack licking its wounds.
So you have a monopoly, but also a saturated market. You miss out on the Web revolution because you don't like centralized services, you like distributed better, that's your business. Then you miss out on the mobile revolution because the interface is so different from the one you have, and in your religion there is only one commandment, and it is :"There is only one Windows, and all pledge loyalty to It". So God forbids that you make something imaginative, like another system that works well with Windows. Afterwards you foul your cash cow by changing the interface that was working (desktop Windows) to be usable in the touchscreen world, apparently ignoring that people are well capable of learning and using two different interfaces with ease.
So you prod your customers in the direction you want, even if you are not very sure of it being a good direction. It may be a winning strategy, who knows, not I, I have never earned the fat bonuses these marketing geniuses make. But in my book, prodding customers isn't a winning strategy.
If people become used to this, the candid camera sketches would be unending.
"For verification of identity, please now introduce your pencil in your left nostril".
Hang a Kindle Fire with a clock dial app always on, up on your wall
Does it play Flash or not?
as a bonus.
Step 1: Create a static account on all devices because reasons.
Step 2: What could possibly go wrong?
playing chess, or even go, is not the same as creating the LIGO experiment. Yes, but how many people is capable of creating the LIGO experiment? It's not that everybody is going to be unemployable, just most people.
...that these moves are feints, made to be fighted against and to distract from the more serious oppressions. No other "sensical" explanation comes to mind.
Please explain me what would be the point of that. If you want to break the arbitrary 2 hours limit in a Marathon, you should run the course between Marathon and Athens, with no water except what you can get from streams, and alone. That should be something, perhaps, specially if you drop dead in the end, proving you really had given your all.
If you are allowed to changing the route and having helpers, both in route and as water-offering minions, you can choose a route that slowly descends for most of the course (ideas?), or where winds are always favorable.
I'd say security in the future will converge on three lines:
a) Sandboxed browsers/apps: Different browsers for mail access, general browsing and sensitive browsing (banking, using credit card, etc). All browsers revert to base state after closing, or allowing just a limited set of changes (bookmarks, cookies). The browsers are possibly stored in a USB stick with a physical write protection switch for part of the storage.
b) Trust structure: The OS will only execute programs with a certain signature, based in a chain of trust. You can choose who to trust or not.
c) Closed devices: (See Apple iPhone and iPad, but with paranoid-mode).
Well implemented, these strategies can reduce the malware threat, and they are implementable with current technology. I really don't see the anti-virus surviving much. It's an after-the-fact tech that was born as a patch for systems unprepared for a new threat. The playing board is now set and the structure of the systems must change to reflect that.
Which editor should we use?
If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable.
Not like now, when every time that an Afghan peasant is killed in error, heads roll.
There is always the possibility that one of these tribes will have a sickness that will wipe out the rest of the world. Or at least 80% of it.
What BitCoin is, is a money laundering vehicle. You buy bitcoins electronically with funds in a country, you sell them two seconds later in other country, for more or less the same price. You have not only extracted the money from the country, but deleted most traces of property. You probably have made a payment without looking like that, just with an e-mail.
The wild changes of valuation help you explain your sudden wealth, which is a problem when you get money from drugs or bribery. Hint: most bitcoin millionaires are really money launderers at big scale, their wealth suddenly legal by way of the bitcoin wizardry. They are taking advantage of the computer illiteracy in governments, but as the scheme is used by more and more people, the loophole is being slowly closed.
As for the closed exchanges, they most likely are stealing the bitcoins themselves, safe in the difficulty of anybody proving anything within such convoluted software schemes, specially when the damages are to people of so many different countries, with their own reasons not to raise too big a fuss about it.
Try Threema. Fully encrypted. But not free. And nobody you know will have it, most likely.
In any case I wonder at so much money paid for an app to which the telecom operators can put an end to in 2 weeks, just by dropping to 0 the price of messaging. Risky, I'd say.
I mean, a Designer that watches what you do, and is very interested in your behavior. Has set some rules that you must obey, but won't communicate with you. It's everywhere, can see the past and the future as a single continuum, can change reality, it's omnipotent but has chosen to limit It's own power. ...
No, nothing seems to check.
I'm curious. I've always thought that encrypting a lot of files individually (as opposed to as a block) would open you to attacks based on the content of well known files (example configuration files, etc.) that you may add to the lot. That is, if the attacker has knowledge of the content of a couple of files, could he derive the keys for unencrypting the rest?
Rather, he emphasized that because the patent in question was now a widely held technology standard, banning the products in question would be too disruptive to consumers and the economy
That argument could be used to sooooo many other patent litigations, and somehow never is, except when the affected part is a big American company.
You could try the Samsung Note tablet, with pencil. In the Notes app you can write formulae (although mainly math, which can be even resolved), squares, etc, and be recognized (mostly) by the software. Probably it won't be yet useful for you, but perhaps you want to keep an eye on it.