Sorry, I should have been more explicit that I meant desktop OS platforms. Certainly there have been some interesting and useful hardware developments in recent years. But in software terms, including most of the software features that are enabled by some of those hardware developments, I think mobile devices and online services are where most of the interesting developments have been happening.
I'm worried that in personal computing today, and I'm including professional PCs in this, everything seems to be a shadow of its former self.
Windows has been getting worse since 7. Windows 10 offers only modest benefits for most users over what we had back in 2010, and at a heavy price.
Apple seems to have gone full-fashion-gadget, with ever less flexibility and longevity across just about its entire product range.
Linux has the kinds of problems you mentioned, and much of the Linux world is still as focused as ever on the OS itself and not on what you can (or can't) do with it.
I'm starting to think the era around 2010 was the golden age of personal computing, and since then the greed of hardware companies, software companies and (especially) online services is just making almost everything worse for users.
Isn't this exactly the strategic short-sightedness the article was talking about? Sure, on the spreadsheet, you can do this sort of calculation. However, then you neglect the real people who need, or simply want, to be more up to date. While there aren't necessarily a lot of those people compared to, say, iPhone users, they probably include people who write the apps that make products like iPhones and iPads viable, or who use Apple gear to its full potential and then champion it when discussing tech with others. These people are a strategically valuable part of the market, and if you lose them, you risk damaging other, possibly much larger, parts of your business indirectly as well.
I realised something a few months ago that I think a lot of people haven't picked up on yet:
Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more.
Sure, they'll take the money and make a few billion on those, but his vision really is almost completely detached from Microsoft's historical desktop strongholds. That's why, despite plenty of us being skeptical about how well they'd do with Windows 10 following on from Windows 8 and Office not really doing much different to ten years ago, they're actually still returning pretty strong financials and the share price and investor sentiment are staying up accordingly.
Whether the new cloud-dwelling emperor really has any clothes is a different question, which only time will answer.
Look at the market share trends for the first half of 2016 when it was still a free upgrade for many users, and then for the second half when it wasn't.
NEVER needed curly quotes / opening and closing quotes for that, same as for feet and inches.
Well, as several ancient languages demonstrate, you don't need much, if any, punctuation to be able to communicate. It's just that sometimes, the subtle cues from using different punctuation help to communicate a little better.
Easier just to turn them off.
The way you phrase that makes me think your problem is that you're using the wrong editing tools for the job, not that there's anything wrong with more specific punctuation like curly quotes.
Actually, it is a character set, or really, a set of character sets (including ANSI/ASCII character sets).
No, it isn't. The GP was right.
This discussion is becoming surreal: I'm reading typographical advice from people who apparently don't know the difference between a hyphen and a dash, advice on character sets from people who apparently don't know the difference between Unicode and UTF-8, and advice on the difficulties of programming in the 21st century from people who apparently write their code in a word processor and then copy and paste it into an IDE that can't handle Unicode. It's a good job I only come here for the laughs these days.:-)
Curly quotes didn't exist on manual typewriters, and neither did the numbers zero (used an uppercase oh) or one (use a lowercase ell).
Neither did many other useful typographic symbols, but that doesn't mean I want to read a book (or, say, a scientific paper) with notation constrained by what I could have typed on a clunky device from the 19th century.
We got along fine without stupid smart quotes, and they add nothing to readability.
Unless, for example, you're reading an article that actually does use quantities in degrees, minutes and seconds, or a mathematical paper where primes are used for distinction in a mathematical context. Then it's like saying you could still read and understand this paragraph if I substituted a colon for every full stop: no doubt it's true, but it would be slightly harder, particularly if I happened to also be using a colon correctly as well.
There is definitely an element of typographical snobbery about things like proper use of quotation marks and dashes, and they certainly aren't the most important aspects of good typography, but that doesn't mean that the little incremental improvements you get from careful punctuation and the typography that goes with it aren't useful to some readers.
I suppose my disappointment is not so much that I spent five minutes trying to help and my help was then rejected, it's that if that happened to me on something where I know WP was wrong before and my change was right, then clearly I can't trust other articles on subjects where I'm not an expert in case the same thing happened. I imagine those operating WP would be the first to say you shouldn't trust WP as a primary source anyway, as I think they always have, but still, rejecting objectively correct changes damages the credibility of WP as a whole.
The same problem is why I never really got into contributing to Wikipedia.
In the earlier but not early days, I would occasionally fix obvious minor errors -- spelling mistakes in someone's name, one technical term written when another similar-sounding or similar-looking term was obviously intended, that kind of thing. After the first few such changes were reverted, apparently (semi-)automatically with no justification given, it became clear that whatever Wikipedia was aiming for, accuracy wasn't one of the things it was actually set up to achieve.
What really wound me up, though, was seeing a few technical articles about mainstream subjects in computing that were not just slightly wrong but completely misrepresenting the topic. More specifically, they were taking an established technical subject with many years of history and development behind it, and instead of describing all of that, they merely described some modern bastardization that had become popular with the young, enthusiastic, but inexperienced crowd. Usually that seemed to happen after someone abused terminology in the recent past in connection with some new product or service that had become the current hyped thing, and a handful of editors within the related community who maybe just didn't know any better then appointed themselves the custodians of that page.
Sometimes, more knowledgeable people would try to correct some of the errors, or at least raise the issue of the overall distortion on the talk pages. Those talk pages would then exhibit the most absurd rationalizations for why the new, distorted version was right. They'd argue that the meaning of terminology established for decades had changed almost overnight. They'd point to numerous sources all from within that same very new community, and refuse to see or accept that there was already a much larger community with a much longer history using the term another way that hadn't suddenly disappeared. It was like a real-time demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which was particularly ironic, because that was sometimes a favourite cliche to throw at people who had probably been using the ideas under discussion since before the unhelpful editors had been born and who probably knew more about the subject than all of those other editors put together...
You keep writing these things, but I get the feeling you're not really interested in the responses or aware of what the law in the UK actually says. Whether or not you choose to believe it, the situation is still what it is, and there are still plenty of ways the kind of arrangement you originally described could work out badly for the employer trying to dodge their normal responsibilities under employment rights legislation if the case ever reached a tribunal or court hearing.
I'm saying that it doesn't matter what the tribunal wants to have happen, if legally, the corporations have followed all the rules.
Well, in practice it often does, because the tribunal is typically the most accessible way of exercising any rights that an employee (or someone who believes they should be treated as an employee) has.
In any case, the area of disguised employment has been a big deal in the UK both politically and in terms of taxation for many years. There are actual laws on the books and actual regulations made under them that deal with this area, including significant elements specifically about the use of intermediaries and preventing such use from denying employees their rights or the government its tax revenue.
Some of those rules are quite loosely specified, which can cause real problems for both sides. However, successive governments have feared undoing that damage, because having advertised potential ways to avoid tax, they seem to think the floodgates will open if they repeal the current rules.
So in practice, officials in a court or tribunal do have some tools available to deal with intermediaries and do have some latitude in how they apply those tools. The mere existence of an intermediary company can't always be relied upon as a shield.
Why not get a dual SIM dumb/feature phone instead?
That's something I've seriously considered, but a few smartphone features, particularly things related to having a convenient web browser and decent camera, would sometimes be useful to me.
Also, my experience of feature phones in recent years, even relatively high end ones, is that key components often lack the quality that even a mid-range modern smartphone has now, and their performance and long-term reliability suffer as a result.
Not much math is required, given that any such arrangement would probably fall under the usual intermediaries legislation. It's not as if no-one ever thought of that kind of arrangement before, and it's not as if employment tribunals aren't going to see straight through it.
I know a lot of people who find them useful. Some have work+personal numbers, which is pretty common for freelance/contractor/consultant types who effectively run their own business and choose their own gear. Dual SIMs are also useful for people who travel a lot, because you can have one SIM on a convenient and cost-effective plan at home and another that gets better prices abroad.
I'm looking for a decent smartphone with dual SIMs for exactly that reason right now. For a long time, I've had two little feature phones (one work, one personal) partly because they're small enough to carry around at the same time, but they're well past their best by now and it's not exactly convenient taking two devices everywhere. I'm not that bothered about apps, but an iPhone that could replace both existing devices would be an option worth considering.
At the risk of going slightly off-topic for a minute, may I ask what you think of your OnePlus? The 3T is on my shortlist based on reviews I've seen so far.
We activated the reviews function for a business page on Facebook recently, and since then we've had quite a few. Most give us 5*. Now and then we get 4*. Very rarely, we get 1*. I don't think anyone has ever left any sort of comment about why they gave us whatever they gave us.
We know the names of everyone who has ever been a customer of our business, and out of curiosity we looked up everyone who reviewed us in the first few days. Here's the overlap:
.
I can only conclude that most people who saw our page or something else about us on Facebook liked the idea and a few thought they were being spammed or something, because that's just about all any of those people had to go on.
My apologies, you're right and I was wrong. Apparently I'd confused the case being described here with one of the other complaints I'd seen about Uber's business practices recently.
I think most of my previous post remains true either way, though. We're still talking about a determination by an employment tribunal, and the rights and benefits concerned still typically apply proportionately for part-time workers where that makes sense.
I'm wondering what sort of benefits part-time workers in the UK are entitled to.
People keep using the word "worker" in this discussion, from the title onwards, but what we're talking about from a legal and tax perspective is being an employee.
In the UK, employees enjoy broadly similar employment rights and protections whether they are part time or full time. There are some controversial areas, like the zero-hours contracts that are popular with certain businesses right now, and internships. There are also certain aspects that affect some groups, such as people working in very seasonal industries, more than others in practice.
For the most part, though, if you work 3 days per week for someone as a part-time employee, you probably qualify for about 3/5 of the protections and benefits of a full-time employee when it comes to things like paid time off. Qualitative provisions, such as having proper employment paperwork that sets out certain specific details of the agreement, normally still apply as well.
There are already plenty of viable ways to work independently in the UK. Well over a million of us do so all the time, through freelancing, contract work, partnerships, and other arrangements. We knowingly and willingly make different trade-offs to employees in terms of protections, compensation, flexibility and other factors, and if you get it right, this can bring advantages to both the professional and their customer/client.
However, what you're not allowed to do under UK law is put someone in a position where they're being treated like an independent in respects like employment rights and taxation, yet still required to give up the practical independence and flexibility that non-employees normally enjoy in return.
The thing is, if they are employees, then under UK employment law you can't just fire them like that. This is one of the major protections that employees enjoy but independents typically do not, and it's a good example of why the distinction is so important in a situation like this.
Specific working conditions define whether a worker is an employee or is a contractor, and the laws governing such are generally pretty straightforward.
Sadly, in the UK the law in this area is anything but straightforward. This has been a controversial issue, the ambiguity has been a significant problem for genuine contractors, freelancers and sometimes small family businesses for a long time now, and the loss of tax revenue to disguised employees is a problem for the government as well.
However, in this case, Uber seems to be on the wrong side of so many of the usual indicators that it's hard to see how it stands any chance at all of victory here unless some sort of dubious legal shenanigans are possible.
I don't fancy Uber's chances here at all. Disguised employment is a big deal for the government in the UK, including for tax reasons. Even if Uber wins the appeal, it's not unlikely that full legislation would follow to close whatever loophole it relied on.
Yes, that's conceivable. But in reality, we probably visit the cinema 2-3 times per year, while this year we have probably bought 100+ hours of entertainment on discs and watched 100+ more using online streaming services, including numerous movies in each case.
The studios might like to think that the alternative to us waiting for their movies to arrive on those discs and streaming services would be to pay for cinema tickets for everyone, but their unrealistic assumptions aren't my problem. If they set similarly unrealistic prices for early access, equating it with going to a cinema rather than getting what we would have got anyway just a bit earlier, then that won't be my problem either.
Ultimately, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price and support TV shows and movies I enjoy, and I've reached a stage in my life where disposable income on that level isn't a problem and I have more I could spend on this kind of thing if I thought it was worth it. But equally, there's way more stuff out there than I'm ever going to have time to watch and there are plenty of other ways I enjoy spending my leisure time that I'll just do more of if it becomes too inconvenient or expensive to watch some things, so it's up to the studios and distributors to make an attractive offer if they want my money.
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Sorry, I should have been more explicit that I meant desktop OS platforms. Certainly there have been some interesting and useful hardware developments in recent years. But in software terms, including most of the software features that are enabled by some of those hardware developments, I think mobile devices and online services are where most of the interesting developments have been happening.
I'm worried that in personal computing today, and I'm including professional PCs in this, everything seems to be a shadow of its former self.
Windows has been getting worse since 7. Windows 10 offers only modest benefits for most users over what we had back in 2010, and at a heavy price.
Apple seems to have gone full-fashion-gadget, with ever less flexibility and longevity across just about its entire product range.
Linux has the kinds of problems you mentioned, and much of the Linux world is still as focused as ever on the OS itself and not on what you can (or can't) do with it.
I'm starting to think the era around 2010 was the golden age of personal computing, and since then the greed of hardware companies, software companies and (especially) online services is just making almost everything worse for users.
Isn't this exactly the strategic short-sightedness the article was talking about? Sure, on the spreadsheet, you can do this sort of calculation. However, then you neglect the real people who need, or simply want, to be more up to date. While there aren't necessarily a lot of those people compared to, say, iPhone users, they probably include people who write the apps that make products like iPhones and iPads viable, or who use Apple gear to its full potential and then champion it when discussing tech with others. These people are a strategically valuable part of the market, and if you lose them, you risk damaging other, possibly much larger, parts of your business indirectly as well.
I realised something a few months ago that I think a lot of people haven't picked up on yet:
Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more.
Sure, they'll take the money and make a few billion on those, but his vision really is almost completely detached from Microsoft's historical desktop strongholds. That's why, despite plenty of us being skeptical about how well they'd do with Windows 10 following on from Windows 8 and Office not really doing much different to ten years ago, they're actually still returning pretty strong financials and the share price and investor sentiment are staying up accordingly.
Whether the new cloud-dwelling emperor really has any clothes is a different question, which only time will answer.
Look at the market share trends for the first half of 2016 when it was still a free upgrade for many users, and then for the second half when it wasn't.
NEVER needed curly quotes / opening and closing quotes for that, same as for feet and inches.
Well, as several ancient languages demonstrate, you don't need much, if any, punctuation to be able to communicate. It's just that sometimes, the subtle cues from using different punctuation help to communicate a little better.
Easier just to turn them off.
The way you phrase that makes me think your problem is that you're using the wrong editing tools for the job, not that there's anything wrong with more specific punctuation like curly quotes.
Actually, it is a character set, or really, a set of character sets (including ANSI/ASCII character sets).
No, it isn't. The GP was right.
This discussion is becoming surreal: I'm reading typographical advice from people who apparently don't know the difference between a hyphen and a dash, advice on character sets from people who apparently don't know the difference between Unicode and UTF-8, and advice on the difficulties of programming in the 21st century from people who apparently write their code in a word processor and then copy and paste it into an IDE that can't handle Unicode. It's a good job I only come here for the laughs these days. :-)
Curly quotes didn't exist on manual typewriters, and neither did the numbers zero (used an uppercase oh) or one (use a lowercase ell).
Neither did many other useful typographic symbols, but that doesn't mean I want to read a book (or, say, a scientific paper) with notation constrained by what I could have typed on a clunky device from the 19th century.
We got along fine without stupid smart quotes, and they add nothing to readability.
Unless, for example, you're reading an article that actually does use quantities in degrees, minutes and seconds, or a mathematical paper where primes are used for distinction in a mathematical context. Then it's like saying you could still read and understand this paragraph if I substituted a colon for every full stop: no doubt it's true, but it would be slightly harder, particularly if I happened to also be using a colon correctly as well.
There is definitely an element of typographical snobbery about things like proper use of quotation marks and dashes, and they certainly aren't the most important aspects of good typography, but that doesn't mean that the little incremental improvements you get from careful punctuation and the typography that goes with it aren't useful to some readers.
I suppose my disappointment is not so much that I spent five minutes trying to help and my help was then rejected, it's that if that happened to me on something where I know WP was wrong before and my change was right, then clearly I can't trust other articles on subjects where I'm not an expert in case the same thing happened. I imagine those operating WP would be the first to say you shouldn't trust WP as a primary source anyway, as I think they always have, but still, rejecting objectively correct changes damages the credibility of WP as a whole.
The same problem is why I never really got into contributing to Wikipedia.
In the earlier but not early days, I would occasionally fix obvious minor errors -- spelling mistakes in someone's name, one technical term written when another similar-sounding or similar-looking term was obviously intended, that kind of thing. After the first few such changes were reverted, apparently (semi-)automatically with no justification given, it became clear that whatever Wikipedia was aiming for, accuracy wasn't one of the things it was actually set up to achieve.
What really wound me up, though, was seeing a few technical articles about mainstream subjects in computing that were not just slightly wrong but completely misrepresenting the topic. More specifically, they were taking an established technical subject with many years of history and development behind it, and instead of describing all of that, they merely described some modern bastardization that had become popular with the young, enthusiastic, but inexperienced crowd. Usually that seemed to happen after someone abused terminology in the recent past in connection with some new product or service that had become the current hyped thing, and a handful of editors within the related community who maybe just didn't know any better then appointed themselves the custodians of that page.
Sometimes, more knowledgeable people would try to correct some of the errors, or at least raise the issue of the overall distortion on the talk pages. Those talk pages would then exhibit the most absurd rationalizations for why the new, distorted version was right. They'd argue that the meaning of terminology established for decades had changed almost overnight. They'd point to numerous sources all from within that same very new community, and refuse to see or accept that there was already a much larger community with a much longer history using the term another way that hadn't suddenly disappeared. It was like a real-time demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which was particularly ironic, because that was sometimes a favourite cliche to throw at people who had probably been using the ideas under discussion since before the unhelpful editors had been born and who probably knew more about the subject than all of those other editors put together...
You keep writing these things, but I get the feeling you're not really interested in the responses or aware of what the law in the UK actually says. Whether or not you choose to believe it, the situation is still what it is, and there are still plenty of ways the kind of arrangement you originally described could work out badly for the employer trying to dodge their normal responsibilities under employment rights legislation if the case ever reached a tribunal or court hearing.
I'm saying that it doesn't matter what the tribunal wants to have happen, if legally, the corporations have followed all the rules.
Well, in practice it often does, because the tribunal is typically the most accessible way of exercising any rights that an employee (or someone who believes they should be treated as an employee) has.
In any case, the area of disguised employment has been a big deal in the UK both politically and in terms of taxation for many years. There are actual laws on the books and actual regulations made under them that deal with this area, including significant elements specifically about the use of intermediaries and preventing such use from denying employees their rights or the government its tax revenue.
Some of those rules are quite loosely specified, which can cause real problems for both sides. However, successive governments have feared undoing that damage, because having advertised potential ways to avoid tax, they seem to think the floodgates will open if they repeal the current rules.
So in practice, officials in a court or tribunal do have some tools available to deal with intermediaries and do have some latitude in how they apply those tools. The mere existence of an intermediary company can't always be relied upon as a shield.
Why not get a dual SIM dumb/feature phone instead?
That's something I've seriously considered, but a few smartphone features, particularly things related to having a convenient web browser and decent camera, would sometimes be useful to me.
Also, my experience of feature phones in recent years, even relatively high end ones, is that key components often lack the quality that even a mid-range modern smartphone has now, and their performance and long-term reliability suffer as a result.
Sorry, I don't know what you're trying to say there.
Not much math is required, given that any such arrangement would probably fall under the usual intermediaries legislation. It's not as if no-one ever thought of that kind of arrangement before, and it's not as if employment tribunals aren't going to see straight through it.
I know a lot of people who find them useful. Some have work+personal numbers, which is pretty common for freelance/contractor/consultant types who effectively run their own business and choose their own gear. Dual SIMs are also useful for people who travel a lot, because you can have one SIM on a convenient and cost-effective plan at home and another that gets better prices abroad.
I'm looking for a decent smartphone with dual SIMs for exactly that reason right now. For a long time, I've had two little feature phones (one work, one personal) partly because they're small enough to carry around at the same time, but they're well past their best by now and it's not exactly convenient taking two devices everywhere. I'm not that bothered about apps, but an iPhone that could replace both existing devices would be an option worth considering.
At the risk of going slightly off-topic for a minute, may I ask what you think of your OnePlus? The 3T is on my shortlist based on reviews I've seen so far.
We activated the reviews function for a business page on Facebook recently, and since then we've had quite a few. Most give us 5*. Now and then we get 4*. Very rarely, we get 1*. I don't think anyone has ever left any sort of comment about why they gave us whatever they gave us.
We know the names of everyone who has ever been a customer of our business, and out of curiosity we looked up everyone who reviewed us in the first few days. Here's the overlap:
.
I can only conclude that most people who saw our page or something else about us on Facebook liked the idea and a few thought they were being spammed or something, because that's just about all any of those people had to go on.
My apologies, you're right and I was wrong. Apparently I'd confused the case being described here with one of the other complaints I'd seen about Uber's business practices recently.
I think most of my previous post remains true either way, though. We're still talking about a determination by an employment tribunal, and the rights and benefits concerned still typically apply proportionately for part-time workers where that makes sense.
I'm wondering what sort of benefits part-time workers in the UK are entitled to.
People keep using the word "worker" in this discussion, from the title onwards, but what we're talking about from a legal and tax perspective is being an employee.
In the UK, employees enjoy broadly similar employment rights and protections whether they are part time or full time. There are some controversial areas, like the zero-hours contracts that are popular with certain businesses right now, and internships. There are also certain aspects that affect some groups, such as people working in very seasonal industries, more than others in practice.
For the most part, though, if you work 3 days per week for someone as a part-time employee, you probably qualify for about 3/5 of the protections and benefits of a full-time employee when it comes to things like paid time off. Qualitative provisions, such as having proper employment paperwork that sets out certain specific details of the agreement, normally still apply as well.
There are already plenty of viable ways to work independently in the UK. Well over a million of us do so all the time, through freelancing, contract work, partnerships, and other arrangements. We knowingly and willingly make different trade-offs to employees in terms of protections, compensation, flexibility and other factors, and if you get it right, this can bring advantages to both the professional and their customer/client.
However, what you're not allowed to do under UK law is put someone in a position where they're being treated like an independent in respects like employment rights and taxation, yet still required to give up the practical independence and flexibility that non-employees normally enjoy in return.
The thing is, if they are employees, then under UK employment law you can't just fire them like that. This is one of the major protections that employees enjoy but independents typically do not, and it's a good example of why the distinction is so important in a situation like this.
Specific working conditions define whether a worker is an employee or is a contractor, and the laws governing such are generally pretty straightforward.
Sadly, in the UK the law in this area is anything but straightforward. This has been a controversial issue, the ambiguity has been a significant problem for genuine contractors, freelancers and sometimes small family businesses for a long time now, and the loss of tax revenue to disguised employees is a problem for the government as well.
However, in this case, Uber seems to be on the wrong side of so many of the usual indicators that it's hard to see how it stands any chance at all of victory here unless some sort of dubious legal shenanigans are possible.
I don't fancy Uber's chances here at all. Disguised employment is a big deal for the government in the UK, including for tax reasons. Even if Uber wins the appeal, it's not unlikely that full legislation would follow to close whatever loophole it relied on.
Yes, that's conceivable. But in reality, we probably visit the cinema 2-3 times per year, while this year we have probably bought 100+ hours of entertainment on discs and watched 100+ more using online streaming services, including numerous movies in each case.
The studios might like to think that the alternative to us waiting for their movies to arrive on those discs and streaming services would be to pay for cinema tickets for everyone, but their unrealistic assumptions aren't my problem. If they set similarly unrealistic prices for early access, equating it with going to a cinema rather than getting what we would have got anyway just a bit earlier, then that won't be my problem either.
Ultimately, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price and support TV shows and movies I enjoy, and I've reached a stage in my life where disposable income on that level isn't a problem and I have more I could spend on this kind of thing if I thought it was worth it. But equally, there's way more stuff out there than I'm ever going to have time to watch and there are plenty of other ways I enjoy spending my leisure time that I'll just do more of if it becomes too inconvenient or expensive to watch some things, so it's up to the studios and distributors to make an attractive offer if they want my money.