What we've got now is generally more humane than what we had in the days of Karl Marx, and some elements of the Communist Manifesto are in general practice
Like what?
The basic capitalist distribution of wealth doesn't match anything most people would find desirable.
Your echo chamber isn't "most people".
It reduces opportunities for the less wealthy, and that's not good.
Based on what, exactly? We're seeing more and more opportunities for the less wealthy as time goes on. Hans Rosling showed this pretty well using hard numbers. This primarily comes from new technology that the private sector creates for its own self interest. And whenever a new technology comes around that disrupts jobs, we see whole new industries spring up that weren't possible without that technology. Case in point: The word "computer" was a person's job title. Obviously that job no longer exists, but look at the numerous industries that now center around computers, and better yet, computers have enabled other industries to scale to a level not before possible. So you're going to need to explain why you think your statement is true.
My goal is equal opportunity.
We already have this, at least in the United States at any rate. Just under 10 years ago I personally had about $20 to my name with no job. I applied for FAFSA, went to college, and only two years after graduating, I had an $80,000 a year income as a single guy (in my zip code, that puts me within the top 19% of income earners, which is within the range that Marxists would define as the "upper class". In other words, I'm the bad guy according to them just because they picked a number that says so.
What we need to do is provide good health care and good education for everyone, and some sort of safety net if people get screwed up so they can try again.
You mean like medicaid and food stamps? Yeah, I was on these when I had no money and no job. Health care was fully covered with no copays/deductibles, and the food stamps were more than adequate for my needs.
As we found out in the pre-WWI era, capitalists aren't going to profit from public education, because there's not much money in it.
Using capitalists to describe a group of people is pretty vague. Do you work in exchange for money? Congratulations, you're a capitalist. I'm not saying that you work for a burger joint, but suppose you do, then you're not flipping burgers so you can take joy in feeding other people, you flip burgers for your own self interest because you want money. Marxists call working for your own self benefit (i.e. greed) evil and that you should be working for the benefit of all, but they're dead wrong, because asking people to do work strictly for the benefit of others is the evil thing to do. Why? Because that makes people depressed, and depression is unhealthy for you:
It's no wonder that socialist countries are so miserable to live in that socialist governments have to use penalty of death to prevent people from leaving (aside from the whole "everybody except for the party leadership is equally poor" part.)
Rant aside, a previous job I had paid for me to take additional college classes, and (especially in the IT field) it's very common for businesses to pay for very expensive training. Many businesses are also donating money to trade schools to subsidize education for workers they need locally when few are available. So yes, there is money in it, and your statement is likewise false.
The Democrats, believe it or not, are doing black people way more harm than good by constantly sowing division and telling black people that they can't succeede on their own merits without the party (which is mostly white men) providing social justice. Equality is impossible to obtain, (diversity and equality are mutually exclusive) but if you're aiming towards that end, telling a whole group of people that they require a handicap does the total opposite. As Morgan Freeman put it: believing your race holds you back is like a religion; It's a good excuse for not getting there. The Democrats know this, and they play into it by blaming everything on "angry white men". They've also discarded the lessons of the civil rights era, and completely thrown out Martin Luther King's message (if they had honored his message, we'd be a lot better off now.)
You think Android fragmentation is bad now? It's nothing compared to what we'd have if Google pushed too hard and lost control. Eventually it would re-consolidate, I think, though probably not entirely. In the short term it would be a mess.
Or they would just abandon the platform since they have no product differentiation. This was one of the (many) reasons windows phone failed; every phone was pretty much the same as every other phone in that there was no customization of the OS permitted at all, and they all had to run on the same qualcomm SoC and other hardware components, only being allowed to change the camera, display, battery, and outside casing. They were also required to use the same navigation button layout fixed on to the display (i.e. no soft buttons) with the back button, start screen, and a search button that was forced to use shitty bing (FWIW Google ditched the search button back in 2011.)
I've never been into the flashy stuff either. I build my own mainly because I tend to like to pick and choose my components without paying for components that I don't want, like conventional SSD and/or HDD for example when I have a Samsung 960 Pro NVMe disk that I much prefer. I also like cases with ample room to run big, slow turning fans, and have the drive bays totally gutted for even more slow turning fans, thus the PC is very quiet and well cooled even while running heavy loads.
That, and I still run an i7 2600k (Sandy Bridge era) CPU; I've hacked the motherboard firmware to add features (like NVMe support) so I haven't had a need to either build or buy a new PC from scratch in the past 5 years. I probably won't even move to a new CPU until at least two more generations of GPUs have passed (I'm currently on a GTX970.)
It's not a good way to distribute wealth to people, unless you have no idea of equitable distribution.
First it needs to be pointed out that capitalism does by far the best at making ALL of the population wealthier, including the poor. Really, it is. Sure, the rich can and do get richer, but that does not take away from somebody else, and by extension, it's a total myth that the poor are getting poorer; this is just something that marxists say because they think of the economy as being zero-sum, but it isn't. (Karl Marx was stupidly ignorant about human behavior, and how material wealth can literally be created from nothing, furthermore his ideas were based on assumptions that were only relevant during the early days of the industrial revolution.) If you don't believe any of this, here are some hard numbers:
Also, and I know anti-capitalist people love stories about how the world is going to hell and we need a glorious revolution to fix it...but, the world is not actually going to hell, and is in fact improving...a lot...especially as economies turn to capitalism:
Second of all, I don't need an idea of that. Nobody does. Unequal wealth is a part of any healthy economy. Socialism, as much as it tries to fight unequal wealth, still has unequal wealth in every implementation that has ever existed (What's worse, the poor in socialist economies have practically no hope at all towards improving their economic conditions, only high ranking members of the only legal political party can do this. In fact, capitalism democratizes wealth far better than any other economic system.)
Unregulated capitalism divides the people into the owner class and the scrabbling-for-a-living class.
No prominent economists argue against regulation (except maybe Thomas Sowell on most issues, but the guy is smart as hell, and his reasons are actually quite good and manage to hold true historically.) But that aside, there is no such thing as economic classes; it's all one big spectrum. People "scrabbling for a living" as you put it, at least in the US's system, can easily avoid that right this second if they want to, especially people in LA and San Francisco; all they have to do is not live beyond their means. Living in an expensive urban area when you are on minimum wage is in fact living beyond your means.
As a society, we really should make a difference between people who get rich making stuff or providing services with little external cost, and people who get rich by doing things harmful to society.
There are already laws against things like theft, fraud, etc. And the definition of harmful seems to vary from person to person, but there is actually a variation of capitalism that specifically prevents people from doing things that the society at large deems harmful, it's called fascism. Germany and Italy in particular banned alcohol production and pornography, because they were deemed harmful to society. One man's harm is another man's pleasure, and fascism sucks.
The happiest countries in the world are those that are wealthy, have capitalistic economies, and have strong government support for people and restrictions on what business can get away with.
Not necessarily what businesses can get away with, but what people can get away with. It's called a criminal justice system. Economies of any kind cannot work without the rule of law.
That's the fastest way to measure whether you're a parasite. At the end of the day you have taken $N dollars from society, and did X actions for society.
Oh bullshit. People pay you money for things that they value, and at the end of the day, it creates wealth for more people. The author of TFA is an idiot because he doesn't realize just how the humanitarian stuff he wants comes from some rich dude creating something entertaining for other rich dudes. Then he goes around and talks about a laptop, but he completely fails to acknowledge that laptops were originally built to solve rich people problems, and without rich people pushing this stuff forward, his vaunted wikipedia laptop either wouldn't exist, or would be highly impractical and expensive.
As another great example, the biggest driving force behind GPUs improving in power at an exponential rate is video games, which are all about entertainment. GPUs have been used for a LOT of humanitarian applications, which is helped heavily by virtue of the fact that they're cheap enough while also being powerful enough to be accessible by the masses.
Or look at Tesla's vehicles; basically only people who are financially well-off can afford them, but because they accelerate so fast they are more of a form of entertainment. But because Tesla broke the image that electric cars are slow and have a short range, now there's a huge profit incentive in creating much better batteries that have many humanitarian possibilities.
At the end of the day though, it's really impressive how anti-capitalist people on slashdot talk about how bad capitalism is, yet when you ask these types for examples of successful socialist states or communist states, they can't actually seem to come up with a good example:
Even if the US got hold of Assange, they couldn't even do anything because he hasn't done anything that the US can hold him criminally liable for. Assange is just an attention craving little weasel. How about that time he promised he'd turn himself over to UK police if Manning was given clemency? Well, that did happen...so...why is he still in that embassy? Oh yeah, he made an excuse just as retarded as the one that he is using to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Like what? You can't even give one goddamn example?!
Shit, modern browsers barely have any UI at all, regardless of whether we're talking about Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera or whatever other modern browser you want to name. Their UIs consist of a short row of tabs, a toolbar with a few icons and a text input for a URL, and then a large area rendering the web page.
Probably because it works well that way. But what about how by design, Edge makes it very hard to change settings that users commonly want to change, and its whole settings menu is a total pile of shit (also mostly by design -- Microsoft wants you to use the browser in its stock config and actively discourages changing things, such as default search engine and privacy settings, which are buried in there pretty far; not to mention Edge sends all of your search terms and clicked links to Microsoft and you can't turn it off.)
That very well defeats the point of having a quick method of authentication, unless you like using short passwords to encrypt your data (bad idea for security.) Personally, I don't like the thought of face recognition because somebody could wake my phone just by putting it in front of my face. Though I don't like Apple's fingerprint implementation either (not only is it slow, but the fingerprint sensor is smooth and I can clearly see it when I shine light on it at an angle.) I like Google's Nexus implementation because I can comfortably open the phone with a different finger than I use the screen with, and furthermore, the fingerprint sensor isn't glossy and my prints don't ever seem to be visible.
If somebody physically forced me to use my finger to unlock my Nexus, they'd have to make a few guesses as to which finger it is, by which time they'd probably trigger a password lock.
Compare Google maps and Bing maps. The UX on Bing maps is vastly superior.
Based on what? Google Maps has a more minimalist UI so that you can see more of the map, and you can click on objects (i.e. buildings, houses, monuments) to get their information (i.e. Address, coordinates, address block). Bing shows hardly any buildings at all, doesn't show ANY houses, and what few it shows are only occasionally clickable. Bing doesn't have any information (i.e. hours, menus, etc) about most businesses, its traffic data pales in comparison, and zooming in and out is also much slower.
Furthermore, research shows that flat UIs (like the one Bing Maps uses) make users work 22% slower on average than UIs that provide depth (like what Google uses)
That alone shows a crappy UX. But let's take this further:
Google also allows you to look around buildings in the 3-space, even allowing you to zoom all the way out and see a webgl rendering of earth. This also works in almost every national park (even smaller ones) where you can see the mountain terrain in three dimensions, and better yet, the resolution in these areas at the closest zoom level is way better than what Bing provides. Google also maps all of the major trailheads and landmarks in even the less famous national parks, whereas Bing rarely does (look up hidden valley natural tunnel at south mountain national park for example; compare what you find with bing vs what you find in Google...Bing throws you to some place in Virginia.)
You're going to have to describe pretty well how Bing Maps comes anywhere close to being as good as Google Maps in terms of UX, and there's no way in hell that Bing is equal, let alone better. And Bing Maps looks like a retarded stepchild compared to Google Maps in terms of features.
Last I had heard, they were estimating that an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano could result in 10 feet (i.e. 3 m) of ash being deposited in Houston.
It will totally solve global warming, at any rate.
You can't compare the two like that, because they aren't trying to do the same thing. In terms of computational power, as was said, the car's computer wins hands down, because that's what it's designed to do. The brain is not a computer at all. (By the way, that's exaflop...there's no such thing as a hexaflop.)
Otherwise you may as well say that bitcoin ASICs are more powerful than GPUs and CPUs simply because they compute hashes much faster than the other two. You can say that the ASIC does hashes better than the other two, but in terms of regular arithmetic, the CPU wins. A GPU doesn't try to do the same thing as a CPU either. GPUs mostly focus on vector operations, whereas CPUs focus more on arithmetic and floating point operations.
As an analogue, try to solve a vector problem (say a dot product) only using boolean gates arranged for add and subtract arithmetic operations...you might be able to do it, but it will take many more steps (thus slower) compared to the boolean gates arranged specifically for a dot product vector operation.
If cars are given accurate data about their surroundings, their computer chips will be far more efficient at navigating than the human brain would be (in fact, navigation in virtual environments is one of the first tasks that computers were programmed to solve, and they can do it well.) Thus the challenge is converting analog inputs into spatial data, and making sense of it so that it can be navigated. The visual cortex does this in humans, and it's only a relatively small part of the brain, so even if we went by your 1 exaflop theory, we're not talking about the whole brain. (For reference, blind people that echolocate to navigate and avoid bumping into objects use their visual cortex to process audio instead of images in order to create a spatial map.)
Just to drive this home: If you took the human brain without the visual cortex, then its remaining parts wouldn't be sufficient for this task, so all of the hundreds of petaflops it has left over just won't be enough compared to the tens of gigaflops found in the car's processors.
Honestly I don't really think the moon is a good place for NASA; they've been there and done that. They shouldn't even be bothering with earth either because the tech has advanced so well that now the private sector is doing well enough there...And leave the climate science to the NOAA; for space based observations, they can obtain everything they need cheaper and faster from the private sector than NASA can do right now. NASA should be setting its sights on deep space, including how humans might safely reach deep space. Mars is a good place for them because it's pushing their boundaries in a healthy way because NASA is the only space organization with enough money to do grandiose things like that.
Meanwhile, let the private sector focus on what it does best: Make big things become more practical so that they're available to the masses. By that I mean they can lower the cost of spaceflight. Reusable rockets are a wonderful example of that in action. NASA tends to not focus on that because whatever they need, they'll just throw a lot of money at it with little concern for waste. NASA already proved that we can land on the moon; we don't need them to prove it again, so the next logical step is to make it practical, so that is a good place for the private sector. The possibility of tapping raw materials and energy from the moon is a great profit motive.
That said... You're the one that needs to pay attention.
Says the guy who completely missed the point of my post, even after I spelled it out twice. How about a third time: What part about "My comment was a reply to another poster who said that Windows Phone didn't have a bad UI" didn't you get? It was a crap UI, that's what my post was about. I did not make any commentary, at all, about why the OS failed; you keep bringing that up as if I'm pinning its failure entirely on the UI, BUT I DID NO SUCH THING.
Again, for a FOURTH TIME: I made no statements whatsoever about why the OS failed, I only commented about its crap UI. Get that through to the pile of dog shit in your skull.
Shit... The top comment under his video is "I think its not design thats preventing the relevance of OS". Do you even read the stuff you post and link to?
LOL...we're talking about what John Bell said, not what some random commenter said... The video says the UI isn't relevant, but some random commenter dude says it wasn't the UI design that prevented the OS from being relevant... Sorry, but I trust a UX expert way more than some random derp. By the way, look at the date of this video: This was SIX YEARS AGO, well before windows phone was considered a failure, and during a period where app developers were taking up interest in the platform. This video is ONLY about the UI.
So, I'll tell you what: Because your attention span is about 6 seconds long, go watch the part where he made the analogy with the recliner chair...it should be short enough for you to grasp.
Anecdotes are good for reality checks.
No, empirical data is the only reality check. The plural of anecdote is not data. That would be like saying the ultra-left guy on facebook that unfriends anybody who isn't also ultra-left and still has 100 friends, can therefore conclude that the whole world is mostly ultra-left. Your experience is only your experience.
It is 100% why they lost. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.
And that is false. Was that a big part of it? Yep, but not most of it, and certainly not the the majority of it. It actually had a big number of problems well beyond apps. So here's where I will comment on why the OS failed:
1. The UI was probably about 30% of it. As John Bell said, when he handed users windows phones, they would look at it and get struggle to figure out how to do certain things, and finally say that while the UI looks pretty, it isn't for them, well before they are even made aware of an app problem. While that's not empirical, Nielsen's data was quite empirical, and so was Microsoft's own internal research: The UI confused new users, and made experienced users work slower. You disagree? Then go fund your own study with a large (>500 people,) diversified group of users with unbiased proctors sampling how fast they do given tasks. A big lesson learned is this: Don't sacrifice design elements that are well known to work just because they don't make your product "feel different". You can make a pretty UI all you want, but if it's fundamentally bad in terms of function, then it's all for nothing. For a good case study on this, read about gabocorp.
2. The API backend was shit from the start, and became at best polished shit towards the end: On WP7, it was based on, of all things, a "kind of" silverlight, which itself always completely sucked (which is why MS killed it after a very short lifespan.) On WP8, it was based on a very early version of the windows RT framework, which was highly feature limited. On 8.1, it was based on the finalized version of the RT framework, whose primary benefit was supposed to be that WP8 and Windows 8 apps could be easily ported between the platforms, but the API was still crap. On 10, it was UWP, which still remains shit to this day. Even if developers wanted to write apps for windows phone, they were forced to write really shitty apps.
it's hard to grow to being a huge search engine company if someone else is the default on all of the popular platforms.
No...It's hard to build a huge search engine company because building a good search engine is really fucking hard. Back in the days when search engines were really simple, they sucked. It takes years and years of work to tune your search algorithms to help people find what they want -- not what some spammer wants them to find. And because spammers constantly adapt and defeat every new countermeasure you add, it's a constant, expensive as fuck battle that you can't just hire some random code monkeys to fight. Microsoft dumps a TON of money into Bing, and they still can't manage to figure out how to build a proper search engine; Yandex even manages to do a better job.
But let's pretend you didn't for a moment. For this aside... You're going to quote the Microsoft UX guy even though you've basically declared him incompetent? What? Why would you do that?
Because I didn't. If you read that AMA further, it's pretty clear that he started on WP after the metro interface was already built, and his biggest takeaway from it was that having fancy artwork is nice and all, but it's all for nothing if it isn't relevant.
Which is pretty brutally obvious. In COMPARISON, Windows Phone is actually pretty easy.
The mistake you're making here is that you're basing this off of anecdotes. Again, the empirical evidence very strongly says that it isn't.
Additionally, the guy you are quoting pointed out this "But the biggest one was lack of relevance". Which is kind of my point. WTF would someone rewrite their apps for "player #3" (keeping in mind, they're AT BEST #3) who no one cares about?
But let's forget all of that... You think it's the UI. Fine.
No, no, and no. Pay attention. My comment was a reply to another poster who said that Windows Phone didn't have a bad UI. What I'm showing is that this is false. In fact, there are MANY design experts who have commented as such over the years. But to be totally honest, there wasn't ever anything special or good about windows phone; it is and always was a "me too!" platform.
Microsoft really had no excuse here for losing; they were in the smartphone business a full 7 years before Apple was.
But you know what was a thousand times worse? Going on site, handing someone a Windows Phone, and watching them universally struggle with it.
--snip--
The stark look of Windows Phone seemed to turn off more people than fell in love with it. I know here in this forum we're all fans but in the mainstream marketing was only one problem. Apps was another. But the biggest one was lack of relevance. People didn't understand why they should care. A lot of people said it looked like a nice phone, but it wasn't for them.
Furthermore, we have empirical data to suggest that metro's design concepts really don't work that well:
And the Microsoft UX designer I mentioned above also had this to say:
This isn't a popular opinion on this particular forum, but the interaction patterns in Android and iOS are better designed (at least compared to 7). You can disagree, you can say I'm a fanboy, whatever, I don't mind.
But get into the labs and watch people use all three platforms. There's data here that not everyone is privy to, but that doesn't make it less true. There are some real weaknesses in the old Metro patterns.
So yeah, you can say, without a shadow of doubt, that Windows Phone has a crap UI.
The Windows Phone worst enemy was Microsoft itself. It wasn't a bad UI, what feels stupid on a desktop computer works well on a phone.
Speak for yourself on that one; the only people I've met that at actually like the metro interface on phones are all big fans of Microsoft. People who are indifferent towards Microsoft have never liked it in my experience.
Think about it:
- The tiles just flip around at set intervals, and when they do, you may well not have a hint as to what application that tile was for unless it happened to be fresh on your mind, because there aren't really any good hints to that end.
- Some tiles don't offer any hints at all, at any time. Think about the tile in WP8 that just showed a zero-depth picture of a trophy...how is the user supposed to know what the hell it is for? Xbox achievements when you don't own an xbox?
- Unless you continue to stare at a given tile, you could very well be missing something important, like an important email for example, because the tile is probably flipped to something uninteresting, like Amazon telling you about cameras they sell.
(Microsoft told Windows Phone users for a long time that there's no need to rip off Android's notification system, until they realized exactly how terrible the tile system was for notifications.)
This was NOT a user friendly OS. The tile system was a really horrible idea to begin with. Windows Phone fans love to chat up a storm about how lame static icons are...well, at least static icons give users a good idea about what they're for, at all times. There's a very good reason that static icons have been a thing since Xerox invented them 44 years ago. If they really wanted to do away with static icons, they should have adopted Android's widget system where they can be interactive, real-time, have text that makes sense of what you're looking at, and have unlimited dimensions.
I wouldn't blame it on war though...we never would have gone to the moon to begin with had it not been for enormous cold war spending. Competition tends to do things like that. War tends to do things like that.
It's increased efficiency, which produces downward pressure on prices that counters the normal upward inflationary pressure. But like all efficiency gains, it's limited.
Bingo, and it is only temporary. And importantly, those middlemen aren't "parasitic" as people say here; they do actually serve a very useful and very important purpose, which is why people pay them. To say otherwise is to have no clue how supply chain management works. Amazon is able to do away with intermediary companies and in-source their supply chain management instead, which is why they can lower the costs. On the down side, the barrier to entry into the retail business has been dramatically increased, but on the plus side, everybody becomes wealthier without needing an increase in incomes.
Slashdot Mirror
Activision already makes a pay to win game, and it's called hearthstone.
What we've got now is generally more humane than what we had in the days of Karl Marx, and some elements of the Communist Manifesto are in general practice
Like what?
The basic capitalist distribution of wealth doesn't match anything most people would find desirable.
Your echo chamber isn't "most people".
It reduces opportunities for the less wealthy, and that's not good.
Based on what, exactly? We're seeing more and more opportunities for the less wealthy as time goes on. Hans Rosling showed this pretty well using hard numbers. This primarily comes from new technology that the private sector creates for its own self interest. And whenever a new technology comes around that disrupts jobs, we see whole new industries spring up that weren't possible without that technology. Case in point: The word "computer" was a person's job title. Obviously that job no longer exists, but look at the numerous industries that now center around computers, and better yet, computers have enabled other industries to scale to a level not before possible. So you're going to need to explain why you think your statement is true.
My goal is equal opportunity.
We already have this, at least in the United States at any rate. Just under 10 years ago I personally had about $20 to my name with no job. I applied for FAFSA, went to college, and only two years after graduating, I had an $80,000 a year income as a single guy (in my zip code, that puts me within the top 19% of income earners, which is within the range that Marxists would define as the "upper class". In other words, I'm the bad guy according to them just because they picked a number that says so.
What we need to do is provide good health care and good education for everyone, and some sort of safety net if people get screwed up so they can try again.
You mean like medicaid and food stamps? Yeah, I was on these when I had no money and no job. Health care was fully covered with no copays/deductibles, and the food stamps were more than adequate for my needs.
As we found out in the pre-WWI era, capitalists aren't going to profit from public education, because there's not much money in it.
Using capitalists to describe a group of people is pretty vague. Do you work in exchange for money? Congratulations, you're a capitalist. I'm not saying that you work for a burger joint, but suppose you do, then you're not flipping burgers so you can take joy in feeding other people, you flip burgers for your own self interest because you want money. Marxists call working for your own self benefit (i.e. greed) evil and that you should be working for the benefit of all, but they're dead wrong, because asking people to do work strictly for the benefit of others is the evil thing to do. Why? Because that makes people depressed, and depression is unhealthy for you:
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
And depression is unhealthy for those around you as well:
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
It's no wonder that socialist countries are so miserable to live in that socialist governments have to use penalty of death to prevent people from leaving (aside from the whole "everybody except for the party leadership is equally poor" part.)
Rant aside, a previous job I had paid for me to take additional college classes, and (especially in the IT field) it's very common for businesses to pay for very expensive training. Many businesses are also donating money to trade schools to subsidize education for workers they need locally when few are available. So yes, there is money in it, and your statement is likewise false.
No, they just want their vote.
The Democrats, believe it or not, are doing black people way more harm than good by constantly sowing division and telling black people that they can't succeede on their own merits without the party (which is mostly white men) providing social justice. Equality is impossible to obtain, (diversity and equality are mutually exclusive) but if you're aiming towards that end, telling a whole group of people that they require a handicap does the total opposite. As Morgan Freeman put it: believing your race holds you back is like a religion; It's a good excuse for not getting there. The Democrats know this, and they play into it by blaming everything on "angry white men". They've also discarded the lessons of the civil rights era, and completely thrown out Martin Luther King's message (if they had honored his message, we'd be a lot better off now.)
You think Android fragmentation is bad now? It's nothing compared to what we'd have if Google pushed too hard and lost control. Eventually it would re-consolidate, I think, though probably not entirely. In the short term it would be a mess.
Or they would just abandon the platform since they have no product differentiation. This was one of the (many) reasons windows phone failed; every phone was pretty much the same as every other phone in that there was no customization of the OS permitted at all, and they all had to run on the same qualcomm SoC and other hardware components, only being allowed to change the camera, display, battery, and outside casing. They were also required to use the same navigation button layout fixed on to the display (i.e. no soft buttons) with the back button, start screen, and a search button that was forced to use shitty bing (FWIW Google ditched the search button back in 2011.)
I've never been into the flashy stuff either. I build my own mainly because I tend to like to pick and choose my components without paying for components that I don't want, like conventional SSD and/or HDD for example when I have a Samsung 960 Pro NVMe disk that I much prefer. I also like cases with ample room to run big, slow turning fans, and have the drive bays totally gutted for even more slow turning fans, thus the PC is very quiet and well cooled even while running heavy loads.
That, and I still run an i7 2600k (Sandy Bridge era) CPU; I've hacked the motherboard firmware to add features (like NVMe support) so I haven't had a need to either build or buy a new PC from scratch in the past 5 years. I probably won't even move to a new CPU until at least two more generations of GPUs have passed (I'm currently on a GTX970.)
It's not a good way to distribute wealth to people, unless you have no idea of equitable distribution.
First it needs to be pointed out that capitalism does by far the best at making ALL of the population wealthier, including the poor. Really, it is. Sure, the rich can and do get richer, but that does not take away from somebody else, and by extension, it's a total myth that the poor are getting poorer; this is just something that marxists say because they think of the economy as being zero-sum, but it isn't. (Karl Marx was stupidly ignorant about human behavior, and how material wealth can literally be created from nothing, furthermore his ideas were based on assumptions that were only relevant during the early days of the industrial revolution.) If you don't believe any of this, here are some hard numbers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also, and I know anti-capitalist people love stories about how the world is going to hell and we need a glorious revolution to fix it...but, the world is not actually going to hell, and is in fact improving...a lot...especially as economies turn to capitalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Second of all, I don't need an idea of that. Nobody does. Unequal wealth is a part of any healthy economy. Socialism, as much as it tries to fight unequal wealth, still has unequal wealth in every implementation that has ever existed (What's worse, the poor in socialist economies have practically no hope at all towards improving their economic conditions, only high ranking members of the only legal political party can do this. In fact, capitalism democratizes wealth far better than any other economic system.)
Unregulated capitalism divides the people into the owner class and the scrabbling-for-a-living class.
No prominent economists argue against regulation (except maybe Thomas Sowell on most issues, but the guy is smart as hell, and his reasons are actually quite good and manage to hold true historically.) But that aside, there is no such thing as economic classes; it's all one big spectrum. People "scrabbling for a living" as you put it, at least in the US's system, can easily avoid that right this second if they want to, especially people in LA and San Francisco; all they have to do is not live beyond their means. Living in an expensive urban area when you are on minimum wage is in fact living beyond your means.
As a society, we really should make a difference between people who get rich making stuff or providing services with little external cost, and people who get rich by doing things harmful to society.
There are already laws against things like theft, fraud, etc. And the definition of harmful seems to vary from person to person, but there is actually a variation of capitalism that specifically prevents people from doing things that the society at large deems harmful, it's called fascism. Germany and Italy in particular banned alcohol production and pornography, because they were deemed harmful to society. One man's harm is another man's pleasure, and fascism sucks.
The happiest countries in the world are those that are wealthy, have capitalistic economies, and have strong government support for people and restrictions on what business can get away with.
Not necessarily what businesses can get away with, but what people can get away with. It's called a criminal justice system. Economies of any kind cannot work without the rule of law.
That's the fastest way to measure whether you're a parasite. At the end of the day you have taken $N dollars from society, and did X actions for society.
Oh bullshit. People pay you money for things that they value, and at the end of the day, it creates wealth for more people. The author of TFA is an idiot because he doesn't realize just how the humanitarian stuff he wants comes from some rich dude creating something entertaining for other rich dudes. Then he goes around and talks about a laptop, but he completely fails to acknowledge that laptops were originally built to solve rich people problems, and without rich people pushing this stuff forward, his vaunted wikipedia laptop either wouldn't exist, or would be highly impractical and expensive.
As another great example, the biggest driving force behind GPUs improving in power at an exponential rate is video games, which are all about entertainment. GPUs have been used for a LOT of humanitarian applications, which is helped heavily by virtue of the fact that they're cheap enough while also being powerful enough to be accessible by the masses.
Or look at Tesla's vehicles; basically only people who are financially well-off can afford them, but because they accelerate so fast they are more of a form of entertainment. But because Tesla broke the image that electric cars are slow and have a short range, now there's a huge profit incentive in creating much better batteries that have many humanitarian possibilities.
At the end of the day though, it's really impressive how anti-capitalist people on slashdot talk about how bad capitalism is, yet when you ask these types for examples of successful socialist states or communist states, they can't actually seem to come up with a good example:
https://www.revleft.space/vb/t...
And no, Scandinavian states are very much capitalist.
Even if the US got hold of Assange, they couldn't even do anything because he hasn't done anything that the US can hold him criminally liable for. Assange is just an attention craving little weasel. How about that time he promised he'd turn himself over to UK police if Manning was given clemency? Well, that did happen...so...why is he still in that embassy? Oh yeah, he made an excuse just as retarded as the one that he is using to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Like what? You can't even give one goddamn example?!
Shit, modern browsers barely have any UI at all, regardless of whether we're talking about Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera or whatever other modern browser you want to name. Their UIs consist of a short row of tabs, a toolbar with a few icons and a text input for a URL, and then a large area rendering the web page.
Probably because it works well that way. But what about how by design, Edge makes it very hard to change settings that users commonly want to change, and its whole settings menu is a total pile of shit (also mostly by design -- Microsoft wants you to use the browser in its stock config and actively discourages changing things, such as default search engine and privacy settings, which are buried in there pretty far; not to mention Edge sends all of your search terms and clicked links to Microsoft and you can't turn it off.)
I see what you did there.
That very well defeats the point of having a quick method of authentication, unless you like using short passwords to encrypt your data (bad idea for security.) Personally, I don't like the thought of face recognition because somebody could wake my phone just by putting it in front of my face. Though I don't like Apple's fingerprint implementation either (not only is it slow, but the fingerprint sensor is smooth and I can clearly see it when I shine light on it at an angle.) I like Google's Nexus implementation because I can comfortably open the phone with a different finger than I use the screen with, and furthermore, the fingerprint sensor isn't glossy and my prints don't ever seem to be visible.
If somebody physically forced me to use my finger to unlock my Nexus, they'd have to make a few guesses as to which finger it is, by which time they'd probably trigger a password lock.
Compare Google maps and Bing maps. The UX on Bing maps is vastly superior.
Based on what? Google Maps has a more minimalist UI so that you can see more of the map, and you can click on objects (i.e. buildings, houses, monuments) to get their information (i.e. Address, coordinates, address block). Bing shows hardly any buildings at all, doesn't show ANY houses, and what few it shows are only occasionally clickable. Bing doesn't have any information (i.e. hours, menus, etc) about most businesses, its traffic data pales in comparison, and zooming in and out is also much slower.
Furthermore, research shows that flat UIs (like the one Bing Maps uses) make users work 22% slower on average than UIs that provide depth (like what Google uses)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
That alone shows a crappy UX. But let's take this further:
Google also allows you to look around buildings in the 3-space, even allowing you to zoom all the way out and see a webgl rendering of earth. This also works in almost every national park (even smaller ones) where you can see the mountain terrain in three dimensions, and better yet, the resolution in these areas at the closest zoom level is way better than what Bing provides. Google also maps all of the major trailheads and landmarks in even the less famous national parks, whereas Bing rarely does (look up hidden valley natural tunnel at south mountain national park for example; compare what you find with bing vs what you find in Google...Bing throws you to some place in Virginia.)
You're going to have to describe pretty well how Bing Maps comes anywhere close to being as good as Google Maps in terms of UX, and there's no way in hell that Bing is equal, let alone better. And Bing Maps looks like a retarded stepchild compared to Google Maps in terms of features.
Last I had heard, they were estimating that an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano could result in 10 feet (i.e. 3 m) of ash being deposited in Houston.
It will totally solve global warming, at any rate.
You can't compare the two like that, because they aren't trying to do the same thing. In terms of computational power, as was said, the car's computer wins hands down, because that's what it's designed to do. The brain is not a computer at all. (By the way, that's exaflop...there's no such thing as a hexaflop.)
Otherwise you may as well say that bitcoin ASICs are more powerful than GPUs and CPUs simply because they compute hashes much faster than the other two. You can say that the ASIC does hashes better than the other two, but in terms of regular arithmetic, the CPU wins. A GPU doesn't try to do the same thing as a CPU either. GPUs mostly focus on vector operations, whereas CPUs focus more on arithmetic and floating point operations.
As an analogue, try to solve a vector problem (say a dot product) only using boolean gates arranged for add and subtract arithmetic operations...you might be able to do it, but it will take many more steps (thus slower) compared to the boolean gates arranged specifically for a dot product vector operation.
If cars are given accurate data about their surroundings, their computer chips will be far more efficient at navigating than the human brain would be (in fact, navigation in virtual environments is one of the first tasks that computers were programmed to solve, and they can do it well.) Thus the challenge is converting analog inputs into spatial data, and making sense of it so that it can be navigated. The visual cortex does this in humans, and it's only a relatively small part of the brain, so even if we went by your 1 exaflop theory, we're not talking about the whole brain. (For reference, blind people that echolocate to navigate and avoid bumping into objects use their visual cortex to process audio instead of images in order to create a spatial map.)
Just to drive this home: If you took the human brain without the visual cortex, then its remaining parts wouldn't be sufficient for this task, so all of the hundreds of petaflops it has left over just won't be enough compared to the tens of gigaflops found in the car's processors.
Honestly I don't really think the moon is a good place for NASA; they've been there and done that. They shouldn't even be bothering with earth either because the tech has advanced so well that now the private sector is doing well enough there...And leave the climate science to the NOAA; for space based observations, they can obtain everything they need cheaper and faster from the private sector than NASA can do right now. NASA should be setting its sights on deep space, including how humans might safely reach deep space. Mars is a good place for them because it's pushing their boundaries in a healthy way because NASA is the only space organization with enough money to do grandiose things like that.
Meanwhile, let the private sector focus on what it does best: Make big things become more practical so that they're available to the masses. By that I mean they can lower the cost of spaceflight. Reusable rockets are a wonderful example of that in action. NASA tends to not focus on that because whatever they need, they'll just throw a lot of money at it with little concern for waste. NASA already proved that we can land on the moon; we don't need them to prove it again, so the next logical step is to make it practical, so that is a good place for the private sector. The possibility of tapping raw materials and energy from the moon is a great profit motive.
That said... You're the one that needs to pay attention.
Says the guy who completely missed the point of my post, even after I spelled it out twice. How about a third time: What part about "My comment was a reply to another poster who said that Windows Phone didn't have a bad UI" didn't you get? It was a crap UI, that's what my post was about. I did not make any commentary, at all, about why the OS failed; you keep bringing that up as if I'm pinning its failure entirely on the UI, BUT I DID NO SUCH THING.
Again, for a FOURTH TIME: I made no statements whatsoever about why the OS failed, I only commented about its crap UI. Get that through to the pile of dog shit in your skull.
Shit... The top comment under his video is "I think its not design thats preventing the relevance of OS". Do you even read the stuff you post and link to?
LOL...we're talking about what John Bell said, not what some random commenter said... The video says the UI isn't relevant, but some random commenter dude says it wasn't the UI design that prevented the OS from being relevant... Sorry, but I trust a UX expert way more than some random derp. By the way, look at the date of this video: This was SIX YEARS AGO, well before windows phone was considered a failure, and during a period where app developers were taking up interest in the platform. This video is ONLY about the UI.
So, I'll tell you what: Because your attention span is about 6 seconds long, go watch the part where he made the analogy with the recliner chair...it should be short enough for you to grasp.
Anecdotes are good for reality checks.
No, empirical data is the only reality check. The plural of anecdote is not data. That would be like saying the ultra-left guy on facebook that unfriends anybody who isn't also ultra-left and still has 100 friends, can therefore conclude that the whole world is mostly ultra-left. Your experience is only your experience.
It is 100% why they lost. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.
And that is false. Was that a big part of it? Yep, but not most of it, and certainly not the the majority of it. It actually had a big number of problems well beyond apps. So here's where I will comment on why the OS failed:
1. The UI was probably about 30% of it. As John Bell said, when he handed users windows phones, they would look at it and get struggle to figure out how to do certain things, and finally say that while the UI looks pretty, it isn't for them, well before they are even made aware of an app problem. While that's not empirical, Nielsen's data was quite empirical, and so was Microsoft's own internal research: The UI confused new users, and made experienced users work slower. You disagree? Then go fund your own study with a large (>500 people,) diversified group of users with unbiased proctors sampling how fast they do given tasks. A big lesson learned is this: Don't sacrifice design elements that are well known to work just because they don't make your product "feel different". You can make a pretty UI all you want, but if it's fundamentally bad in terms of function, then it's all for nothing. For a good case study on this, read about gabocorp.
2. The API backend was shit from the start, and became at best polished shit towards the end: On WP7, it was based on, of all things, a "kind of" silverlight, which itself always completely sucked (which is why MS killed it after a very short lifespan.) On WP8, it was based on a very early version of the windows RT framework, which was highly feature limited. On 8.1, it was based on the finalized version of the RT framework, whose primary benefit was supposed to be that WP8 and Windows 8 apps could be easily ported between the platforms, but the API was still crap. On 10, it was UWP, which still remains shit to this day. Even if developers wanted to write apps for windows phone, they were forced to write really shitty apps.
3. Not once, not twice, TH
it's hard to grow to being a huge search engine company if someone else is the default on all of the popular platforms.
No...It's hard to build a huge search engine company because building a good search engine is really fucking hard. Back in the days when search engines were really simple, they sucked. It takes years and years of work to tune your search algorithms to help people find what they want -- not what some spammer wants them to find. And because spammers constantly adapt and defeat every new countermeasure you add, it's a constant, expensive as fuck battle that you can't just hire some random code monkeys to fight. Microsoft dumps a TON of money into Bing, and they still can't manage to figure out how to build a proper search engine; Yandex even manages to do a better job.
But let's pretend you didn't for a moment. For this aside... You're going to quote the Microsoft UX guy even though you've basically declared him incompetent? What? Why would you do that?
Because I didn't. If you read that AMA further, it's pretty clear that he started on WP after the metro interface was already built, and his biggest takeaway from it was that having fancy artwork is nice and all, but it's all for nothing if it isn't relevant.
Which is pretty brutally obvious. In COMPARISON, Windows Phone is actually pretty easy.
The mistake you're making here is that you're basing this off of anecdotes. Again, the empirical evidence very strongly says that it isn't.
Additionally, the guy you are quoting pointed out this "But the biggest one was lack of relevance". Which is kind of my point. WTF would someone rewrite their apps for "player #3" (keeping in mind, they're AT BEST #3) who no one cares about?
That wasn't his point. Watch his youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He's not talking about apps.
But let's forget all of that... You think it's the UI. Fine.
No, no, and no. Pay attention. My comment was a reply to another poster who said that Windows Phone didn't have a bad UI. What I'm showing is that this is false. In fact, there are MANY design experts who have commented as such over the years. But to be totally honest, there wasn't ever anything special or good about windows phone; it is and always was a "me too!" platform.
Microsoft really had no excuse here for losing; they were in the smartphone business a full 7 years before Apple was.
That said... All people I've met who picked up a Windows Phone, figured them out quickly.
That's not at all what Microsoft's own UX designer found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/windo...
But you know what was a thousand times worse? Going on site, handing someone a Windows Phone, and watching them universally struggle with it.
--snip--
The stark look of Windows Phone seemed to turn off more people than fell in love with it. I know here in this forum we're all fans but in the mainstream marketing was only one problem. Apps was another. But the biggest one was lack of relevance. People didn't understand why they should care. A lot of people said it looked like a nice phone, but it wasn't for them.
Furthermore, we have empirical data to suggest that metro's design concepts really don't work that well:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
https://www.nngroup.com/articl...
And the Microsoft UX designer I mentioned above also had this to say:
This isn't a popular opinion on this particular forum, but the interaction patterns in Android and iOS are better designed (at least compared to 7). You can disagree, you can say I'm a fanboy, whatever, I don't mind.
But get into the labs and watch people use all three platforms. There's data here that not everyone is privy to, but that doesn't make it less true. There are some real weaknesses in the old Metro patterns.
So yeah, you can say, without a shadow of doubt, that Windows Phone has a crap UI.
The Windows Phone worst enemy was Microsoft itself. It wasn't a bad UI, what feels stupid on a desktop computer works well on a phone.
Speak for yourself on that one; the only people I've met that at actually like the metro interface on phones are all big fans of Microsoft. People who are indifferent towards Microsoft have never liked it in my experience.
Think about it:
- The tiles just flip around at set intervals, and when they do, you may well not have a hint as to what application that tile was for unless it happened to be fresh on your mind, because there aren't really any good hints to that end.
- Some tiles don't offer any hints at all, at any time. Think about the tile in WP8 that just showed a zero-depth picture of a trophy...how is the user supposed to know what the hell it is for? Xbox achievements when you don't own an xbox?
- Unless you continue to stare at a given tile, you could very well be missing something important, like an important email for example, because the tile is probably flipped to something uninteresting, like Amazon telling you about cameras they sell.
(Microsoft told Windows Phone users for a long time that there's no need to rip off Android's notification system, until they realized exactly how terrible the tile system was for notifications.)
This was NOT a user friendly OS. The tile system was a really horrible idea to begin with. Windows Phone fans love to chat up a storm about how lame static icons are...well, at least static icons give users a good idea about what they're for, at all times. There's a very good reason that static icons have been a thing since Xerox invented them 44 years ago. If they really wanted to do away with static icons, they should have adopted Android's widget system where they can be interactive, real-time, have text that makes sense of what you're looking at, and have unlimited dimensions.
Stability is the least of your concerns:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
Samsung has never been any good at all at writing OSes; even their Android implementations are always fucked up.
I wouldn't blame it on war though...we never would have gone to the moon to begin with had it not been for enormous cold war spending. Competition tends to do things like that. War tends to do things like that.
You're an idiot if you think NASA doesn't have way more money than SpaceX does.
Not companies.... Everybody does, and without exception, there isn't a person who won't.
It's increased efficiency, which produces downward pressure on prices that counters the normal upward inflationary pressure. But like all efficiency gains, it's limited.
Bingo, and it is only temporary. And importantly, those middlemen aren't "parasitic" as people say here; they do actually serve a very useful and very important purpose, which is why people pay them. To say otherwise is to have no clue how supply chain management works. Amazon is able to do away with intermediary companies and in-source their supply chain management instead, which is why they can lower the costs. On the down side, the barrier to entry into the retail business has been dramatically increased, but on the plus side, everybody becomes wealthier without needing an increase in incomes.