Why all of this China hate? Wasn't there also a time when we feared "cheap" Japanese labor was going to take over America? And how did that turn out? And to think, as a libertarian I'm always the one being accused of racism.
The problem with the race to the bottom is that everybody ends up at the bottom. Usually sooner than expected.
I keep hearing about this so called race to the bottom (most often espoused by self proclaimed communists) yet my computer equipment today is a lot better than that which I owned 10 years ago (around the time I first started hearing about this race to the bottom.) Not only is it much faster, but it has a longer useful life. I think 10 years ago I was still on 120GB IDE HDDs that pulled a whopping 32mbyte/sec sustained rate. Now for the same price, I can buy SSDs at the same or higher capacity that will pull 10 times that data rate.
In other words, in this "race to the bottom" of yours we've achieved your choice of a 10 fold performance increase or a 30 fold capacity increase. What is this "bottom" you think we're racing to, exactly? Because it sure doesn't look like it's getting worse. As for TFA/TFS; somebody has pulled a fast one, more news at 11. I don't see any evidence that this is a growing trend.
Yes, but how much does that cost, in total? Or, let's put it a different way: How many global Internets do you think you can build (wires, routers, etc.) for just the 19 billion that FB paid for WhatsApp?
I imagine that 19 billion wouldn't even build one. I mentioned the Emerald Express, which I think is costing some 1 billion dollars, and this cable only goes from the USA to Europe. What about the literally hundreds of other ones that span longer distances?
The infrastructure is not the problem
It very much is. Think about this for a second: What good is having an internet if there's nothing useful to be found at the endpoints? That said, you think services like Netflix or Youtube can just transmit bits using pixie dust? Or how about this...Forget about the pipes for a minute, hell even forget about the routers and switches (forgetting even that all of that combined will outpace your 19 billion figure several fold.) Think about the logistics of deploying the sheer volume of that content to be mirrored so that it can be quickly accessed from every major city in the world.
Remember; every device connected to the internet is part of the internet. That also (and especially) includes the content servers. Even the cheaper cloud deployments I've seen to serve more than 1,000 users (a very low figure) tend to cost in the $50k range. I think Google (or somebody) recently built a datacenter in Europe that cost some 85 billion Euros alone; far outpacing your 19 billion figure.
Solving your own problems very often results in solving somebody else's problems. I've seen all too often where somebody noticed an ongoing inconvenience or problem, which they figured out how to solve, and then marketed their solution, which became lucrative.
The problem is you have to compare the internet before it was profit driven against after it was profit driven. Sure, the TCP/IP suite is good and all, but without an underlying infrastructure it's kind of useless. That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.
A few things to take into consideration:
1) The original e-mail SMTP implementation was designed under the assumption that it could very well take multiple days to deliver an email. This is because the internet was mostly volunteer driven, and some links weren't open until the volunteers took the time to make them available. (Otherwise why even have SMTP? Why not just send your email directly from your client to the destination server? Keep in mind the spam problem didn't exist back then, so there were no anti-spam motivations for doing so, rather it was purely due to what was a discontiguous internet.) It wasn't until there was a profit motive of an ISP to provide "always on" peering arrangements.
2) Recall numerous times when those behind it said that the original design was never intended to be as big as it is now. That is because before there was big money to be made, most WAN links were pretty damn slow. Where we now have Frame Relay and ATM, there used to be X.25
3) Completely state of the art WAN equipment is hugely profit driven. HFC traders are well known to have some of the fastest and by far the most reliable links that they (not governments, not nonprofits or volunteers) commissioned to be built, which they also lease to other third parties (although these third parties get lower priority QoS, they still benefit from overall faster communication than had they used other links.) Some of the most state of the art networking equipment is also profit driven (like them or not, Cisco has done a HUGE service to the internet with all of the contributions they've made to networking on well more than one occasion, and they're very profit driven. They also provide emergency volunteer services as well though, see Cisco's TacOps team.)
4) You think the Emerald Express transatlantic cable would be under construction by purely volunteers? Look at the kind of work required to build that.
btw, If you're complaint about the Prius appearance - what's the drag coefficient of your car? Is it as good as my 10 year old Prius? 'Cause that's why it looks like it does - it's part of it's design elegance.
Maybe, and I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing, just it's always struck me that way (the only thing I think is bad is that is is kinda gutless.) I'm not really much of a car person to begin with, in fact I rarely drive as it is. Although I own a car, I tend to prefer to bike just for the sake of getting a workout (IMO CO2 isn't going to kill us any time soon, and while emissions IS a problem, new cars are so clean burning that they aren't even useful for committing suicide by revving the engine inside of a closed garage. In fact if you have ever seen that movie Bad Santa, where Billy Bob Thornton was trying to commit suicide by piping the exhaust from a garden hose directly into the cabin wouldn't even work - one of the more funny moments of that movie because it showed how bad he was failing at everything he was trying to do.)
When I hit the gas, I want the car to go - not start going and then pause to think about what gear it should be in.
I've never had that problem, not even when driving a manual transmission. The only thing that ever bothers me about manual transmission is knowing there's somebody *immediately* behind me on an uphill slope when I bring the transmission into first gear from neutral.
I don't know about anybody else, but the Prius reminds me of a really fat kid that doesn't ever want to do anything and whines whenever you try to get him to so much as go outside. Just a combination of its appearance (kind of big and round without much space to actually put stuff in) and gutless, redundant power train. (Yes, it actually has two power trains; which is an otherwise inefficient design.)
If I was in the market for a new car, I think by far I'd go for something Tesla.
These aren't problems per se, rather they're cultural barriers that prevent people from wanting to be under the same banner. What you're suggesting in effect is basically like the creation of Czechoslovakia (I can't believe I actually spelled that right the first time) under the assumption that everybody is just alike and they'll all want the same government. That particular union, which was at gunpoint, didn't last once the gun was no longer brandished. Those people had very little in common and went their separate ways when allowed to do so.
And I haven't even gotten to the bigger issues. Some things to take into account way beyond what I mentioned, like if they are a high context culture or a low context one, or what is ethical to one may not be ethical to another, will make it so that people are so conflicted in how they want their country to be run, that they will not tolerate outsiders telling them how they'll live their lives simply because those outsiders make up a larger voting block. Hell, I'm trying to figure out how you'd mix common law and natural law criminal justice systems, which alone would have major problems; forgetting that what one culture sees as "natural" vs what another sees is "natural" or even varying common law doctrines. What one country sees as just and proper, another country will see as abhorrent, yet they're all supposed to follow the same constitution? And contract enforcement between high and low context cultures will create a big legal mess. Hell, the "one constitution for all" wouldn't even be interpreted the same between any two high context cultures.
You'd also have to ask the member states to give up their sovereignty. This wasn't easy even in the case of the US as there were a ton of issues that needed resolving (i.e. balancing power between small and large states.)
This would be incredibly more difficult in the case of Europe since the individual member states have had their own identity often going back two or even three millennia, not only that but what cultural identity would they take? I.e. little things like what common language will they speak? (Granted the US has no official language, but 80% of the population speaks the same one...such is by far not the case in the EU.) Also, I'm having a hard time seeing how e.g. England would agree to it, seeing as they even refuse to adopt the Euro (which it turns out was actually a good idea and worked quite well in their favor) and they don't even drive on the same side of the road as everybody else.
Both deprive revenue to the creators and distributors of content.
Stealing maybe, but not copying, at least not most of the time. It mainly has to do with the price of the digital goods being acquired.
During an economics class I was taking, the vending machine outside was configured incorrectly to sell 20 oz soda bottles for 5 cents each, whereas the normal price was $1.50. During intercession, one of the students notices it and walks into the class and tells everybody about it. Pretty much the whole class then goes out and buys some sodas.
This is a classic example of how the price going down will increase demand. When the price of digital goods goes to zero, more people will pick them up when they otherwise wouldn't have even bought them to begin with. In such a case. no revenue has been deprived. Think about it: If they had to pay for it, they simply would have done without, or taken a substitute (e.g. doing something else with their time.)
Probably because the fourteenth amendment wasn't originally intended to be as broadly applied as it currently is. Its original wording just stated that state and local governments can't deprive anybody of life, liberty, etc. As time moved on, case law changed things so that the entire bill of rights applied to all governments within the federation. This mainly began in the 1920's, and one of those case law decisions was the same one that outlawed school prayer.
Don't neglect those rewards either. Every year I get a nice free $200 payment towards my credit card bill, and since I always pay it off before interest accrues, it's pure profit.
Stupid paypal always forces me to default to paying with a bank account, and when I try to pay with a credit card they insist that I don't do it because the credit card supposedly costs me more. Paypal just wants to make a higher profit margin.
This. Any bank that isn't a ripoff (and assuming that you don't have the worst credit in the world) offers zero liability for fraudulent purchases. Given that checks are tedious to write and process, and cash is easy to get lost or stolen, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pick them over a credit card.
I probably went to PF Changs in this time period, and used my credit card there no less (I'm not quite sure whether it was in April or in May that I last went) but I'm not at all concerned about it. I've been the victim of credit card fraud before, and it's really not exactly devastating. What happens is I have to go an entire week on cash (I hate checks) until my new card arrives in the mail, and then I have to go to my ISP, tmobile, and the local water utility and update my autopay billing information. It basically amounts to a temporary inconvenience, but nothing was lost on my part. I think a bigger inconvenience would be having to manually pay all of my bills every month instead of just watching ONE credit card statement.
Same here, and I ran into the same dilemma. I solved this problem by down moderating his post in the traditional method (when you simply disagree with a post, the well established thing to do on slashdot is to pick completely at random either troll or flamebait, and then mark it as such.) I then posted this reply to your post, thereby up modding his post, as is also tradition on slashdot.
So you see, even though he was already 5 before I started, I got to up mod him.
Dunno what AT&T's policy is on fraudulent charges, but most banks give you zero liability. The law requires $50 maximum liability, so dropping it to zero isn't that big of a deal, so most do that as an incentive to always carry their card around.
I love it, to be honest. Technically yeah, if somebody robs my phone they also rob my wallet, but they're probably going to also do that anyways if I'm getting mugged. But the upshot of this is that this wallet is terrible for carrying cash, so I habitually never do. If my "wallet" were to get stolen, I'd basically only be out my phone, my insurance card, my driver's license, and this $15 piece of vinyl. My credit card costs nothing to get replaced, whereas my driver's license costs $5. I've always hated carrying around cash anyways.
Never having money when bums hassle you, yet you can still buy stuff anyways, is nice. Being able to "call" your wallet when you've misplaced it is nice. Having only this and my keys in my pocket is also nice.
As for TFA, switch to tmobile; their international roaming plan is free.
That didn't help AT&T buy out T-Mobile, and AT&T is pretty much THE MOST "in bed with the government" telecom company there is.
It was actually that failed buyout that put T-Mobile in the competitive position that it is now in (without it, T-Mobile would be about $4 billion poorer and with a vastly inferior roaming agreement.)
I hope that both companies approve of the merger and then the government denies it, just like what happened with AT&T. I would love to see Sprint forfeit a billion dollars as I hate that company with a passion.
This is something I noticed with a lot of Windows Phone users. They bought into the platform thinking it was new and neat, and the WP supporter crowd (yes, it exists) were cheering themselves on last year claiming that they were the fastest growing platform. But from what I saw, after owning it for one generation most of these guys switched back to Android. And as it turns out, Windows Phone is no longer the "fastest growing" and is in fact stagnating.
1. No, they're very much not hidden, and furthermore they aren't even needed at any time ever. Seriously, I have never clicked them once. Besides, you completely ignored my mention of hearthstone where you have to open yet another nested menu just to launch a simple game.
Essentially you have to take 5 actions to perform something that should only take two actions. This is why the start menu is shit.
2. This has zero to do with the start menu. Absolutely buck nothing to do with it. Furthermore, it's also a completely crap argument because this line of thinking contributes to the bloat and security problems we kept running into during the naughties. It's a line of thinking that is obsolete, and newer OSes don't use it anymore. See my previous post for a better description as to why this is very wrong.
But with the nested menus, or at least the way I had it, you didn't see anything underneath the nested menu until you clicked on it.
Wrong. Very very wrong. It's there when you need to navigate to your intended selection. Not only that, but navigating to your intended selection takes more steps as a result. Face it, it is needlessly complicated.
For android, there is no document browser by default, it does not ship with one. Of course you can add third party apps, you can add third party applications to windows to do just about anything
How is that a bad thing? That's actually a good thing. One of the chief complaints about big monolithic operating systems is that they are difficult to fit to your exact need because they include everything but the kitchen sink out of the box. This increases hardware expense by default and makes it more problematic to scale to a different need.
Therefore I'm going to say no, and very much wrong again to what is essentially your second point and has nothing to do with the start menu. The more bare the OS is out of the box, the better, because then you just add features only as you need them. This means you have a more lean OS out of the box which means better performance and better security by default. Most systems are being built this way from this point forward. (It reminds me of Cisco's NX-OS, where in stark contrast to IOS, all features are turned off by default and have to be enabled first before using them. WAY better design.)
Android is very good in that respect because the base operating system has no crapware. The Gapps (basically everything that is included on Nexus devices such as Play Services, Gmail, Maps, etc) are barely 87mb and are hardly what you'd consider bloatware. Compared to Windows where some 4GB worth of base middleware apps are included, and 1.3GB of "metro" apps are included, Android does a much better job here. It can scale to lower end hardware MUCH better. (Windows systems have almost nothing to spare on a 32GB flash disk, where Android barely needs 1GB for its entire footprint.)
Whenever you need a feature, ask and ye shall receive. Most people don't use file managers, hence it is one of those things that isn't built in, nor should it be. If you want it, you add it; very simple. If you reformat often (something I've not found a need for with Android) your app selections are synced with your account, so there's no need to re-download, it'll be automatically picked up again.
Ok so that means Windows 9 will be good. But you know, Windows 10 could follow in Apple's footsteps and be called "Windows X" and go with a Unix core. Will that version of Windows be shitty?
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Why all of this China hate? Wasn't there also a time when we feared "cheap" Japanese labor was going to take over America? And how did that turn out? And to think, as a libertarian I'm always the one being accused of racism.
The problem with the race to the bottom is that everybody ends up at the bottom. Usually sooner than expected.
I keep hearing about this so called race to the bottom (most often espoused by self proclaimed communists) yet my computer equipment today is a lot better than that which I owned 10 years ago (around the time I first started hearing about this race to the bottom.) Not only is it much faster, but it has a longer useful life. I think 10 years ago I was still on 120GB IDE HDDs that pulled a whopping 32mbyte/sec sustained rate. Now for the same price, I can buy SSDs at the same or higher capacity that will pull 10 times that data rate.
In other words, in this "race to the bottom" of yours we've achieved your choice of a 10 fold performance increase or a 30 fold capacity increase. What is this "bottom" you think we're racing to, exactly? Because it sure doesn't look like it's getting worse. As for TFA/TFS; somebody has pulled a fast one, more news at 11. I don't see any evidence that this is a growing trend.
I've only ever noticed hobos and scammers do that. Fortunately both are pretty easy to ignore.
Yes, but how much does that cost, in total? Or, let's put it a different way: How many global Internets do you think you can build (wires, routers, etc.) for just the 19 billion that FB paid for WhatsApp?
I imagine that 19 billion wouldn't even build one. I mentioned the Emerald Express, which I think is costing some 1 billion dollars, and this cable only goes from the USA to Europe. What about the literally hundreds of other ones that span longer distances?
The infrastructure is not the problem
It very much is. Think about this for a second: What good is having an internet if there's nothing useful to be found at the endpoints? That said, you think services like Netflix or Youtube can just transmit bits using pixie dust? Or how about this...Forget about the pipes for a minute, hell even forget about the routers and switches (forgetting even that all of that combined will outpace your 19 billion figure several fold.) Think about the logistics of deploying the sheer volume of that content to be mirrored so that it can be quickly accessed from every major city in the world.
Remember; every device connected to the internet is part of the internet. That also (and especially) includes the content servers. Even the cheaper cloud deployments I've seen to serve more than 1,000 users (a very low figure) tend to cost in the $50k range. I think Google (or somebody) recently built a datacenter in Europe that cost some 85 billion Euros alone; far outpacing your 19 billion figure.
Solving your own problems very often results in solving somebody else's problems. I've seen all too often where somebody noticed an ongoing inconvenience or problem, which they figured out how to solve, and then marketed their solution, which became lucrative.
The problem is you have to compare the internet before it was profit driven against after it was profit driven. Sure, the TCP/IP suite is good and all, but without an underlying infrastructure it's kind of useless. That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.
A few things to take into consideration:
1) The original e-mail SMTP implementation was designed under the assumption that it could very well take multiple days to deliver an email. This is because the internet was mostly volunteer driven, and some links weren't open until the volunteers took the time to make them available. (Otherwise why even have SMTP? Why not just send your email directly from your client to the destination server? Keep in mind the spam problem didn't exist back then, so there were no anti-spam motivations for doing so, rather it was purely due to what was a discontiguous internet.) It wasn't until there was a profit motive of an ISP to provide "always on" peering arrangements.
2) Recall numerous times when those behind it said that the original design was never intended to be as big as it is now. That is because before there was big money to be made, most WAN links were pretty damn slow. Where we now have Frame Relay and ATM, there used to be X.25
3) Completely state of the art WAN equipment is hugely profit driven. HFC traders are well known to have some of the fastest and by far the most reliable links that they (not governments, not nonprofits or volunteers) commissioned to be built, which they also lease to other third parties (although these third parties get lower priority QoS, they still benefit from overall faster communication than had they used other links.) Some of the most state of the art networking equipment is also profit driven (like them or not, Cisco has done a HUGE service to the internet with all of the contributions they've made to networking on well more than one occasion, and they're very profit driven. They also provide emergency volunteer services as well though, see Cisco's TacOps team.)
4) You think the Emerald Express transatlantic cable would be under construction by purely volunteers? Look at the kind of work required to build that.
Well an SUV is actually powerful. I'd say it more reminds me of a really big bear rather than a fat kid that you can't motivate to ever do anything.
btw, If you're complaint about the Prius appearance - what's the drag coefficient of your car? Is it as good as my 10 year old Prius? 'Cause that's why it looks like it does - it's part of it's design elegance.
Maybe, and I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing, just it's always struck me that way (the only thing I think is bad is that is is kinda gutless.) I'm not really much of a car person to begin with, in fact I rarely drive as it is. Although I own a car, I tend to prefer to bike just for the sake of getting a workout (IMO CO2 isn't going to kill us any time soon, and while emissions IS a problem, new cars are so clean burning that they aren't even useful for committing suicide by revving the engine inside of a closed garage. In fact if you have ever seen that movie Bad Santa, where Billy Bob Thornton was trying to commit suicide by piping the exhaust from a garden hose directly into the cabin wouldn't even work - one of the more funny moments of that movie because it showed how bad he was failing at everything he was trying to do.)
When I hit the gas, I want the car to go - not start going and then pause to think about what gear it should be in.
I've never had that problem, not even when driving a manual transmission. The only thing that ever bothers me about manual transmission is knowing there's somebody *immediately* behind me on an uphill slope when I bring the transmission into first gear from neutral.
I don't know about anybody else, but the Prius reminds me of a really fat kid that doesn't ever want to do anything and whines whenever you try to get him to so much as go outside. Just a combination of its appearance (kind of big and round without much space to actually put stuff in) and gutless, redundant power train. (Yes, it actually has two power trains; which is an otherwise inefficient design.)
If I was in the market for a new car, I think by far I'd go for something Tesla.
You're creating problems that don't exist.
These aren't problems per se, rather they're cultural barriers that prevent people from wanting to be under the same banner. What you're suggesting in effect is basically like the creation of Czechoslovakia (I can't believe I actually spelled that right the first time) under the assumption that everybody is just alike and they'll all want the same government. That particular union, which was at gunpoint, didn't last once the gun was no longer brandished. Those people had very little in common and went their separate ways when allowed to do so.
And I haven't even gotten to the bigger issues. Some things to take into account way beyond what I mentioned, like if they are a high context culture or a low context one, or what is ethical to one may not be ethical to another, will make it so that people are so conflicted in how they want their country to be run, that they will not tolerate outsiders telling them how they'll live their lives simply because those outsiders make up a larger voting block. Hell, I'm trying to figure out how you'd mix common law and natural law criminal justice systems, which alone would have major problems; forgetting that what one culture sees as "natural" vs what another sees is "natural" or even varying common law doctrines. What one country sees as just and proper, another country will see as abhorrent, yet they're all supposed to follow the same constitution? And contract enforcement between high and low context cultures will create a big legal mess. Hell, the "one constitution for all" wouldn't even be interpreted the same between any two high context cultures.
You'd also have to ask the member states to give up their sovereignty. This wasn't easy even in the case of the US as there were a ton of issues that needed resolving (i.e. balancing power between small and large states.)
This would be incredibly more difficult in the case of Europe since the individual member states have had their own identity often going back two or even three millennia, not only that but what cultural identity would they take? I.e. little things like what common language will they speak? (Granted the US has no official language, but 80% of the population speaks the same one...such is by far not the case in the EU.) Also, I'm having a hard time seeing how e.g. England would agree to it, seeing as they even refuse to adopt the Euro (which it turns out was actually a good idea and worked quite well in their favor) and they don't even drive on the same side of the road as everybody else.
Both deprive revenue to the creators and distributors of content.
Stealing maybe, but not copying, at least not most of the time. It mainly has to do with the price of the digital goods being acquired.
During an economics class I was taking, the vending machine outside was configured incorrectly to sell 20 oz soda bottles for 5 cents each, whereas the normal price was $1.50. During intercession, one of the students notices it and walks into the class and tells everybody about it. Pretty much the whole class then goes out and buys some sodas.
This is a classic example of how the price going down will increase demand. When the price of digital goods goes to zero, more people will pick them up when they otherwise wouldn't have even bought them to begin with. In such a case. no revenue has been deprived. Think about it: If they had to pay for it, they simply would have done without, or taken a substitute (e.g. doing something else with their time.)
Reminds me of Bloomberg pumping a TON of money to get Morse re-elected in Colorado over 2nd amendment issues.
Probably because the fourteenth amendment wasn't originally intended to be as broadly applied as it currently is. Its original wording just stated that state and local governments can't deprive anybody of life, liberty, etc. As time moved on, case law changed things so that the entire bill of rights applied to all governments within the federation. This mainly began in the 1920's, and one of those case law decisions was the same one that outlawed school prayer.
Don't neglect those rewards either. Every year I get a nice free $200 payment towards my credit card bill, and since I always pay it off before interest accrues, it's pure profit.
Stupid paypal always forces me to default to paying with a bank account, and when I try to pay with a credit card they insist that I don't do it because the credit card supposedly costs me more. Paypal just wants to make a higher profit margin.
This. Any bank that isn't a ripoff (and assuming that you don't have the worst credit in the world) offers zero liability for fraudulent purchases. Given that checks are tedious to write and process, and cash is easy to get lost or stolen, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pick them over a credit card.
I probably went to PF Changs in this time period, and used my credit card there no less (I'm not quite sure whether it was in April or in May that I last went) but I'm not at all concerned about it. I've been the victim of credit card fraud before, and it's really not exactly devastating. What happens is I have to go an entire week on cash (I hate checks) until my new card arrives in the mail, and then I have to go to my ISP, tmobile, and the local water utility and update my autopay billing information. It basically amounts to a temporary inconvenience, but nothing was lost on my part. I think a bigger inconvenience would be having to manually pay all of my bills every month instead of just watching ONE credit card statement.
Same here, and I ran into the same dilemma. I solved this problem by down moderating his post in the traditional method (when you simply disagree with a post, the well established thing to do on slashdot is to pick completely at random either troll or flamebait, and then mark it as such.) I then posted this reply to your post, thereby up modding his post, as is also tradition on slashdot.
So you see, even though he was already 5 before I started, I got to up mod him.
Dunno what AT&T's policy is on fraudulent charges, but most banks give you zero liability. The law requires $50 maximum liability, so dropping it to zero isn't that big of a deal, so most do that as an incentive to always carry their card around.
I actually have this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
I love it, to be honest. Technically yeah, if somebody robs my phone they also rob my wallet, but they're probably going to also do that anyways if I'm getting mugged. But the upshot of this is that this wallet is terrible for carrying cash, so I habitually never do. If my "wallet" were to get stolen, I'd basically only be out my phone, my insurance card, my driver's license, and this $15 piece of vinyl. My credit card costs nothing to get replaced, whereas my driver's license costs $5. I've always hated carrying around cash anyways.
Never having money when bums hassle you, yet you can still buy stuff anyways, is nice. Being able to "call" your wallet when you've misplaced it is nice. Having only this and my keys in my pocket is also nice.
As for TFA, switch to tmobile; their international roaming plan is free.
That didn't help AT&T buy out T-Mobile, and AT&T is pretty much THE MOST "in bed with the government" telecom company there is.
It was actually that failed buyout that put T-Mobile in the competitive position that it is now in (without it, T-Mobile would be about $4 billion poorer and with a vastly inferior roaming agreement.)
I hope that both companies approve of the merger and then the government denies it, just like what happened with AT&T. I would love to see Sprint forfeit a billion dollars as I hate that company with a passion.
This is something I noticed with a lot of Windows Phone users. They bought into the platform thinking it was new and neat, and the WP supporter crowd (yes, it exists) were cheering themselves on last year claiming that they were the fastest growing platform. But from what I saw, after owning it for one generation most of these guys switched back to Android. And as it turns out, Windows Phone is no longer the "fastest growing" and is in fact stagnating.
http://betanews.com/2014/02/24...
This may very well be the case of iPhone in China, given that it only recently started officially selling there.
Precisely why you'd think it would work anywhere. But it doesn't.
1. No, they're very much not hidden, and furthermore they aren't even needed at any time ever. Seriously, I have never clicked them once. Besides, you completely ignored my mention of hearthstone where you have to open yet another nested menu just to launch a simple game.
Essentially you have to take 5 actions to perform something that should only take two actions. This is why the start menu is shit.
2. This has zero to do with the start menu. Absolutely buck nothing to do with it. Furthermore, it's also a completely crap argument because this line of thinking contributes to the bloat and security problems we kept running into during the naughties. It's a line of thinking that is obsolete, and newer OSes don't use it anymore. See my previous post for a better description as to why this is very wrong.
But with the nested menus, or at least the way I had it, you didn't see anything underneath the nested menu until you clicked on it.
Wrong. Very very wrong. It's there when you need to navigate to your intended selection. Not only that, but navigating to your intended selection takes more steps as a result. Face it, it is needlessly complicated.
For android, there is no document browser by default, it does not ship with one. Of course you can add third party apps, you can add third party applications to windows to do just about anything
How is that a bad thing? That's actually a good thing. One of the chief complaints about big monolithic operating systems is that they are difficult to fit to your exact need because they include everything but the kitchen sink out of the box. This increases hardware expense by default and makes it more problematic to scale to a different need.
Therefore I'm going to say no, and very much wrong again to what is essentially your second point and has nothing to do with the start menu. The more bare the OS is out of the box, the better, because then you just add features only as you need them. This means you have a more lean OS out of the box which means better performance and better security by default. Most systems are being built this way from this point forward. (It reminds me of Cisco's NX-OS, where in stark contrast to IOS, all features are turned off by default and have to be enabled first before using them. WAY better design.)
Android is very good in that respect because the base operating system has no crapware. The Gapps (basically everything that is included on Nexus devices such as Play Services, Gmail, Maps, etc) are barely 87mb and are hardly what you'd consider bloatware. Compared to Windows where some 4GB worth of base middleware apps are included, and 1.3GB of "metro" apps are included, Android does a much better job here. It can scale to lower end hardware MUCH better. (Windows systems have almost nothing to spare on a 32GB flash disk, where Android barely needs 1GB for its entire footprint.)
Whenever you need a feature, ask and ye shall receive. Most people don't use file managers, hence it is one of those things that isn't built in, nor should it be. If you want it, you add it; very simple. If you reformat often (something I've not found a need for with Android) your app selections are synced with your account, so there's no need to re-download, it'll be automatically picked up again.
Ok so that means Windows 9 will be good. But you know, Windows 10 could follow in Apple's footsteps and be called "Windows X" and go with a Unix core. Will that version of Windows be shitty?