It is true that they are tied their individual platforms, but that could also be considered their primary advantage over DropBox. Everyone who buys an iPad automatically benefits from iCloud integration, for example.
Dropbox has figured out an elegant solution to a vexing problem. With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, people have more devices and more apps than ever before. How can they get access to the latest version of all their stuff — photos, music, videos, documents, spreadsheets — no matter what device they are using and no matter where they are?
Apple addressed this with the free iCloud, Google of course has its own cloud storage services, and even Microsoft has the free SkyDrive, so I'm confused as to why the article considers this a vexing problem waiting to be solved when it was pretty much the theme of 2011 for all the major platform vendors. Lots of venture capital doesn't mean something is going to take off--the lesson last year was the Color app, which got $41 million of first-round funding in March only to immediately flop on release months later.
Google doesn't need to buy government representatives--its executives already are the government representatives. Eric Schmidt is a technology adviser to Obama, Google executive Sonal Shah led meetings on the transitory team, several ex-executives now work in the administration, and Marissa Meyer had Obama personally appear at her house during a fundraiser a week before the FTC dismissed its probe into the Street View scandal.
But yeah, let's blame it all on a Microsoft conspiracy.
That's ridiculous. It seems like these days successful is synonymous with monopoly. What is anti-competitive, exactly, about having a feature that requires someone to sign up?
People are seriously going to try to spin this as a Microsoft-led government conspiracy? Google's ties to the government are well-known. For crying out loud, Eric Schmidt was a campaign adviser and is now a technology adviser to Barack Obama.
Nobody was forced to use Internet Explorer either, but that led to an antitrust trial that Slashdot was pretty excited about at the time.
Now, the tables have turned, and the fans don't like it. The comments to this so far are pretty shocking: accusations that Microsoft has plants at the FTC, that the people there own stock in Apple and Microsoft, and other ridiculousness. And it's all getting modded up.
Outside of Slashdot, the reaction is quite different, and there is widespread criticism of Google's behavior. But this place is so anti-Microsoft and so pro-Google that everything is portrayed as a Microsoft conspiracy, with Google as the poor, oppressed victim. Google is a multi-billion dollar advertising megacorp with ties to the administration, yet it's Microsoft that's supposed to have bought off the government? Give me a break!
Stop treating multi-billion dollar corporations like sports teams. There's no good vs. evil story here.
The complaint--if you had read the article I linked--is that her Facebook page is crawlable, yet it doesn't show up in the results. Another example given is Britney Spears, who does in fact have a Google+ account, and it even lists her Twitter and Facebook accounts on it! Yet those links don't show up in the search results either.
This is the very consequence many people imagined the moment Google announced this. For clear examples of how Search Plus pushes Google+ over relevant results, read this article by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand. Some of the examples include popular music artists, like Katy Perry, who has one of the most popular Facebook pages but doesn't appear in the Search Plus results because she doesn't have a Google+ account. How is that delivering the most relevant results, which was the original goal of the Google search engine? In fact, Google's search engine is becoming less useful at delivering relevant results compared to alternatives, with the major example in that link being a search for "gold price" on Google versus Wolfram Alpha: Google gives you a big, brown box of sponsored links, while Wolfram Alpha gives you a simple price chart.
The biggest reason, in my opinion, to dislike Search Plus is that it continues the trend of search engine bubbling that is filtering the content you see on the Internet today, possibly limiting you from seeing opposing information that might change a currently held perspective.
But overall the statement is clearly supportive of anti-piracy efforts...
There's nothing wrong with being supportive of anti-piracy efforts. People deserve to get paid for their work. Those efforts, however, shouldn't undermine technological infrastructure. The White House's statement is overall a condemnation of the legislation, but it does allow leeway for Obama to sign an amended bill that addresses the most pressing concerns.
Given past positions, it will be interesting to see how Slashdotters respond to the question in the submission. Allow me to quote from a recent comment in a GPL discussion:
It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back. You see, some people are childish and the most visible mark of childishness is a sense of entitlement. This causes them to feel somehow cheated if you place a few conditions on code that is otherwise free, that no one is forcing them to use if the conditions don't suit them.
The comment was modded up. When it's a case of a GPL violation, the violators who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers are childish and entitled. But in an article on the Pirate Bay, suddenly it's all about demonizing the evil RIAA and MPAA, and piracy is just a cultural revolution that sticks it to the evil corporations--the artists who aren't getting paid don't even enter into the discussion, probably because of the guilty feelings it would inspire to be reminded of the reality of the situation.
The point being that there probably should be an attempt made to hinder online piracy in some way. We can't just let it spiral completely out of control, to the point where it's no longer lucrative to produce anything. Part of the reason the console platform became so appealing to game developers is the reduced amount of piracy compared to the PC platform. In other words, they can actually make money from their work, money that is used to make more games. You can't have a functioning long-term economy in which people never get compensated for anything; people are trying to make a living, and they use the income to produce more contributions to society. If your boss withheld your paycheck and told you that the code you wrote is now theirs free of charge because "information wants to be free," you'd sue for the wages and win. But if the code you wrote is included in a game, and the game appears on Pirate Bay, downloaders will happily pirate it and never even dream of spending a time, and they'll justify it until they're red in the face.
The most common one they use is that it's "free advertising"--that pirating games leads them to purchase games. Correlation doesn't equal causation, however, and the fact they buy games as well as pirate them simply suggests that they like games so much that they acquire them by any means possible, and when they can't pirate, they buy. Either that, or they buy to resolve their feelings of guilt. When Louis CK offered his video for download, he made an interesting comment in an NPR interview:
"And a friend of mine who does torrent stuff a lot says that when torrent users do buy something, they act like they're doing the greatest thing ever.... They're saying, 'I bought something today. I paid for it. And I didn't steal it. I'm the greatest person alive.' "
I've noticed this attitude as well. It's very, very annoying.
I'm probably risking a lot of downmods here--if there's anything Slashdot seems to dislike more than comments about Slashdot, it's comments that are anti-piracy. But I have karma to burn, and I felt like starting the conversation anyway.
The backlash against Apple came some time before Android
No, it didn't. Apple was politely respected. OS X was cited as an example of a usable UNIX on the desktop, which itself was taken as constructive criticism of Linux on the desktop. Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board of directors, so Apple was seen as a good guy.
This crazy idea you have that "every comment fawning over Apple gets +5 Interesting" is a complete fantasy, and you don't give any examples. The release of Android turned Apple into one of the bad guys, since they suddenly competed with Google. If you credit Apple for anything today, you will get modded down and get accused of being a shill. The very replies you're writing are proof of this!
This "enemy of the free web" pushes HTML5 over proprietary software like Flash and gave the industry WebKit. You're clearly emotionally attached to your hatred of Apple and desperately need to go outside and gain some perspective so that you're not siding with one multi-billion dollar company over another as if they're sports teams.
But really though, war is about maximizing tactical and strategic advantages, be it the bow and arrow, be it armor, be it castles, be it gunpowder, be it airplanes.
All of those technologies require humans. The point is that robots allow warfare without risk, making it more palatable for a normally war-weary public. It's just an observation.
No, it's not. Windows 7 will use as little as 200MB of RAM if you only have 512 physically available. You're misunderstanding what's actually going on as you fret over megabytes in Task Manager.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Windows 7 intentionally uses as much memory as possible if it's available rather than paging during application use. I wouldn't be surprised if competing operating systems like OS X behaved similarly. If something ends up needing that memory, the operating system will happily give it away. It's silly that your argument constantly reappears in various online forums, because it signifies a lack of knowledge about how modern memory management actually works.
Who are you to claim that Objective-C is not popular? Have you surveyed every developer in the world to ask them about this? That's a pretty huge presumption on your part when you don't provide evidence either way.
Objective-C's growth in popularity coincides with the Flurry Analytics study that showed most mobile developers targeting iOS, with support for Android dropping by a third over 2011. C# will probably continue to see increasing interest because of WinRT. Lua is unsurprising because of its popular use in games, and they just released 5.2 last December. What I find most interesting is that plain old C is set to overtake Java.
It's fascinating how old and inexpensive technology, like the pen and paper, can end up being the superior technology due to reasons of practicality and security. It's another reminder to step back and realize that newer, technical versions of things aren't automatically better. There may be secure and reliable e-Voting machines someday, but certainly not with this iteration of the technology.
I had to laugh at the picture caption in the article claiming they hoped there'd be a market for these machines in Irish-themed pubs.
You're the second guy I've seen claim Android "reduces" fragmentation, but you don't actually explain how. Different devices with different capabilities and different versions are the opposite of reducing fragmentation.
Could you imagine what would happen without Android? Every phone manufacturer would have its own completely different OS.
Do you not get the point of the criticism of Android fragmentation? Android vendors practically already sell their own completely different OSes. That's why fragmentation is bad!
Robots, making war easier for the public to swallow. It's less icky to wage war when you can send robots instead of people. But of course, these will only be used to "deliver battlefield supplies." Wink.
Having an impact in the discussion
on
FreeBSD 9.0 Released
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
I don't know who that is, but I'm happy to have such an impact on you. A Slashdot employee recently told me that my comments generate more moderations than any he's ever seen. If my opinions cause that much discussion, than I'm doing more than the usual "me too" posters, and I'll take nothing but terrible karma if it means my posts are making people think and react. And with the downmods I receive, I often do have terrible karma, and that's fine with me (said Slashdot employee also said he didn't consider me a troll). I'm a subscriber and see articles about half an hour before you do, and I will keep contributing regardless.
As for Apple, this place was much more Apple-friendly before Android came out and turned this community into a Google cheerleading squad. Today, you can't praise Apple for anything. If you mention that the prototypical design for nearly every Android smartphone and tablet came from Jonathan Ive's iPhone design from 2007--even though it's completely obvious to anyone outside of Slashdot--you will get modbombed into oblivion around here. For crying out loud, look at these Toshiba phones and tablets from CES--it's practically a pile of iPads and iPhones.
There's an emotional attachment to Android around here because it's based on Linux and comes from Google. Since it competes with Apple, that means Apple is now considered one of the bad guys and isn't allowed to be credited for anything. I've never slandered anyone, and my comments are not only based on facts but are also often full of links to various sources. I've always felt that I brought up rational arguments and facts, and people are welcome to respond and disagree. Unfortunately, people are extremely closed-minded and often just mod down instead of replying and explaining why they think I'm wrong. It's reached such a comical degree that I'm regularly accused of being different people or being paid by Microsoft or Apple. I grin every time I see those comments; it motivates me to keep posting.
If you think I'm the worst on the site, than at least I'm standing out and stirring the nest. I actually consider my posts pretty obvious and non-controversial, so the huge reactions often surprise me. In a good way.
Also, why the fuck should FOSS users care about what Apple does for their own closed-source OS? Before you say Darwin, consider the fact that not a single soul uses Darwin as his main OS. Why? Because it's shit.
Um...millions of OS X and iOS users are using Darwin as their main OS, as it is the foundation for those operating systems.
You're not sure what my point is? My point is that Android phones look like what I linked, before the iPhone came out, and then they started looking like the iPhone. Your link is from the 80s and doesn't prove or disprove anything.
Slashdot Mirror
It is true that they are tied their individual platforms, but that could also be considered their primary advantage over DropBox. Everyone who buys an iPad automatically benefits from iCloud integration, for example.
Apple addressed this with the free iCloud, Google of course has its own cloud storage services, and even Microsoft has the free SkyDrive, so I'm confused as to why the article considers this a vexing problem waiting to be solved when it was pretty much the theme of 2011 for all the major platform vendors. Lots of venture capital doesn't mean something is going to take off--the lesson last year was the Color app, which got $41 million of first-round funding in March only to immediately flop on release months later.
Google doesn't need to buy government representatives--its executives already are the government representatives. Eric Schmidt is a technology adviser to Obama, Google executive Sonal Shah led meetings on the transitory team, several ex-executives now work in the administration, and Marissa Meyer had Obama personally appear at her house during a fundraiser a week before the FTC dismissed its probe into the Street View scandal.
But yeah, let's blame it all on a Microsoft conspiracy.
That's ridiculous. It seems like these days successful is synonymous with monopoly. What is anti-competitive, exactly, about having a feature that requires someone to sign up?
Signed,
Every Microsoft supporter in 1998
People are seriously going to try to spin this as a Microsoft-led government conspiracy? Google's ties to the government are well-known. For crying out loud, Eric Schmidt was a campaign adviser and is now a technology adviser to Barack Obama.
Don't worry. You successfully got my comment modded down regardless, while your post of misinformation is modded up.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Nobody was forced to use Internet Explorer either, but that led to an antitrust trial that Slashdot was pretty excited about at the time.
Now, the tables have turned, and the fans don't like it. The comments to this so far are pretty shocking: accusations that Microsoft has plants at the FTC, that the people there own stock in Apple and Microsoft, and other ridiculousness. And it's all getting modded up.
Outside of Slashdot, the reaction is quite different, and there is widespread criticism of Google's behavior. But this place is so anti-Microsoft and so pro-Google that everything is portrayed as a Microsoft conspiracy, with Google as the poor, oppressed victim. Google is a multi-billion dollar advertising megacorp with ties to the administration, yet it's Microsoft that's supposed to have bought off the government? Give me a break!
Stop treating multi-billion dollar corporations like sports teams. There's no good vs. evil story here.
Just like it was easy to use Netscape instead of Internet Explorer, or switch to Linux from Windows 98.
The complaint--if you had read the article I linked--is that her Facebook page is crawlable, yet it doesn't show up in the results. Another example given is Britney Spears, who does in fact have a Google+ account, and it even lists her Twitter and Facebook accounts on it! Yet those links don't show up in the search results either.
This is the very consequence many people imagined the moment Google announced this. For clear examples of how Search Plus pushes Google+ over relevant results, read this article by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand. Some of the examples include popular music artists, like Katy Perry, who has one of the most popular Facebook pages but doesn't appear in the Search Plus results because she doesn't have a Google+ account. How is that delivering the most relevant results, which was the original goal of the Google search engine? In fact, Google's search engine is becoming less useful at delivering relevant results compared to alternatives, with the major example in that link being a search for "gold price" on Google versus Wolfram Alpha: Google gives you a big, brown box of sponsored links, while Wolfram Alpha gives you a simple price chart.
The biggest reason, in my opinion, to dislike Search Plus is that it continues the trend of search engine bubbling that is filtering the content you see on the Internet today, possibly limiting you from seeing opposing information that might change a currently held perspective.
There's nothing wrong with being supportive of anti-piracy efforts. People deserve to get paid for their work. Those efforts, however, shouldn't undermine technological infrastructure. The White House's statement is overall a condemnation of the legislation, but it does allow leeway for Obama to sign an amended bill that addresses the most pressing concerns.
Given past positions, it will be interesting to see how Slashdotters respond to the question in the submission. Allow me to quote from a recent comment in a GPL discussion:
The comment was modded up. When it's a case of a GPL violation, the violators who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers are childish and entitled. But in an article on the Pirate Bay, suddenly it's all about demonizing the evil RIAA and MPAA, and piracy is just a cultural revolution that sticks it to the evil corporations--the artists who aren't getting paid don't even enter into the discussion, probably because of the guilty feelings it would inspire to be reminded of the reality of the situation.
The point being that there probably should be an attempt made to hinder online piracy in some way. We can't just let it spiral completely out of control, to the point where it's no longer lucrative to produce anything. Part of the reason the console platform became so appealing to game developers is the reduced amount of piracy compared to the PC platform. In other words, they can actually make money from their work, money that is used to make more games. You can't have a functioning long-term economy in which people never get compensated for anything; people are trying to make a living, and they use the income to produce more contributions to society. If your boss withheld your paycheck and told you that the code you wrote is now theirs free of charge because "information wants to be free," you'd sue for the wages and win. But if the code you wrote is included in a game, and the game appears on Pirate Bay, downloaders will happily pirate it and never even dream of spending a time, and they'll justify it until they're red in the face.
The most common one they use is that it's "free advertising"--that pirating games leads them to purchase games. Correlation doesn't equal causation, however, and the fact they buy games as well as pirate them simply suggests that they like games so much that they acquire them by any means possible, and when they can't pirate, they buy. Either that, or they buy to resolve their feelings of guilt. When Louis CK offered his video for download, he made an interesting comment in an NPR interview:
I've noticed this attitude as well. It's very, very annoying.
I'm probably risking a lot of downmods here--if there's anything Slashdot seems to dislike more than comments about Slashdot, it's comments that are anti-piracy. But I have karma to burn, and I felt like starting the conversation anyway.
No, it didn't. Apple was politely respected. OS X was cited as an example of a usable UNIX on the desktop, which itself was taken as constructive criticism of Linux on the desktop. Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board of directors, so Apple was seen as a good guy.
This crazy idea you have that "every comment fawning over Apple gets +5 Interesting" is a complete fantasy, and you don't give any examples. The release of Android turned Apple into one of the bad guys, since they suddenly competed with Google. If you credit Apple for anything today, you will get modded down and get accused of being a shill. The very replies you're writing are proof of this!
This "enemy of the free web" pushes HTML5 over proprietary software like Flash and gave the industry WebKit. You're clearly emotionally attached to your hatred of Apple and desperately need to go outside and gain some perspective so that you're not siding with one multi-billion dollar company over another as if they're sports teams.
All of those technologies require humans. The point is that robots allow warfare without risk, making it more palatable for a normally war-weary public. It's just an observation.
No, it's not. Windows 7 will use as little as 200MB of RAM if you only have 512 physically available. You're misunderstanding what's actually going on as you fret over megabytes in Task Manager.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Windows 7 intentionally uses as much memory as possible if it's available rather than paging during application use. I wouldn't be surprised if competing operating systems like OS X behaved similarly. If something ends up needing that memory, the operating system will happily give it away. It's silly that your argument constantly reappears in various online forums, because it signifies a lack of knowledge about how modern memory management actually works.
Warning--side effects may occur.
Who are you to claim that Objective-C is not popular? Have you surveyed every developer in the world to ask them about this? That's a pretty huge presumption on your part when you don't provide evidence either way.
Objective-C's growth in popularity coincides with the Flurry Analytics study that showed most mobile developers targeting iOS, with support for Android dropping by a third over 2011. C# will probably continue to see increasing interest because of WinRT. Lua is unsurprising because of its popular use in games, and they just released 5.2 last December. What I find most interesting is that plain old C is set to overtake Java.
Of course, if you don't take the Tiobe rankings seriously, than all of this is moot, but I guess it's something to talk about on a Friday.
It's fascinating how old and inexpensive technology, like the pen and paper, can end up being the superior technology due to reasons of practicality and security. It's another reminder to step back and realize that newer, technical versions of things aren't automatically better. There may be secure and reliable e-Voting machines someday, but certainly not with this iteration of the technology.
I had to laugh at the picture caption in the article claiming they hoped there'd be a market for these machines in Irish-themed pubs.
You're the second guy I've seen claim Android "reduces" fragmentation, but you don't actually explain how. Different devices with different capabilities and different versions are the opposite of reducing fragmentation.
Do you not get the point of the criticism of Android fragmentation? Android vendors practically already sell their own completely different OSes. That's why fragmentation is bad!
Robots, making war easier for the public to swallow. It's less icky to wage war when you can send robots instead of people. But of course, these will only be used to "deliver battlefield supplies." Wink.
I don't know who that is, but I'm happy to have such an impact on you. A Slashdot employee recently told me that my comments generate more moderations than any he's ever seen. If my opinions cause that much discussion, than I'm doing more than the usual "me too" posters, and I'll take nothing but terrible karma if it means my posts are making people think and react. And with the downmods I receive, I often do have terrible karma, and that's fine with me (said Slashdot employee also said he didn't consider me a troll). I'm a subscriber and see articles about half an hour before you do, and I will keep contributing regardless.
As for Apple, this place was much more Apple-friendly before Android came out and turned this community into a Google cheerleading squad. Today, you can't praise Apple for anything. If you mention that the prototypical design for nearly every Android smartphone and tablet came from Jonathan Ive's iPhone design from 2007--even though it's completely obvious to anyone outside of Slashdot--you will get modbombed into oblivion around here. For crying out loud, look at these Toshiba phones and tablets from CES--it's practically a pile of iPads and iPhones.
There's an emotional attachment to Android around here because it's based on Linux and comes from Google. Since it competes with Apple, that means Apple is now considered one of the bad guys and isn't allowed to be credited for anything. I've never slandered anyone, and my comments are not only based on facts but are also often full of links to various sources. I've always felt that I brought up rational arguments and facts, and people are welcome to respond and disagree. Unfortunately, people are extremely closed-minded and often just mod down instead of replying and explaining why they think I'm wrong. It's reached such a comical degree that I'm regularly accused of being different people or being paid by Microsoft or Apple. I grin every time I see those comments; it motivates me to keep posting.
If you think I'm the worst on the site, than at least I'm standing out and stirring the nest. I actually consider my posts pretty obvious and non-controversial, so the huge reactions often surprise me. In a good way.
Um...millions of OS X and iOS users are using Darwin as their main OS, as it is the foundation for those operating systems.
You're not sure what my point is? My point is that Android phones look like what I linked, before the iPhone came out, and then they started looking like the iPhone. Your link is from the 80s and doesn't prove or disprove anything.
Basically, everyone that MrHanky doesn't like is a shill of some sort. Perhaps even you, dear reader!