Churn for the sake of churn is the most asinine strategy I've ever heard of. Look at how slow vendors are to actually release updates for Android for their devices. Mozilla is shooting themselves in the foot if they think their hardware partners for Firefox OS want to see point updates anywhere near as often as they're proposing. They want something tested and stable that they can ship, not an always-in-development "product."
Are you seriously trying to tell me that these companies have future revenues and payouts that justify their exhorbitant prices?
Don't confuse "shiny, shiny" and "Windows n+1" with actual investment in R&D or new technology. Don't confuse hedge funds and futures with actual value. They're gambling on a return, but not on profitability.
The stock market isn't based on the real value of a company anyhow. It rarely involves evaluating the technical expertise, the research and development, the long term product development plans, the current or future rational profit projections of the company, or anything like that.
Instead, it's now a bunch of automated systems buying and selling at a furious rate based on statistics and very small margin profits for the trades.
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
When I think about how solid or worthy a company is, the last thing I consider is their stock price.
Before we can control something, we have to understand it well enough to be able to predict it accurately. Despite all the supercomputers in use for weather system modelling, we can't do that. Unless and until we can, trying to modify the weather systems is suicidally dangerous. Not just to people in the area, but to people around the globe affected by the larger pattern of the systems.
Furthermore, have there not also been cases where the FBI was told they had to get a warrant before installing GPS trackers on a vehicle? How is stealing the data from a built-in GPS tracker any different?
Actually I don't believe that the 4th gives Congress the right to determine what "due process" is. The 4th is quite specific about a warrant being required for a search:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Windows is a product. When you buy it pre-installed on a machine, prices are already cut to the bone with volume discounts to the manufacturer. Someone has to pay for the security updates, the patches, and so on when it's run by a monolithic corporation instead of an open source community.
I've no beef with the price I paid for my Win7 laptop -- and I know that maybe $50-100 of that purchase price was for the Windows license. Perfectly reasonable.
I use Ubuntu LTS on my "main" machine, but that's because I like Linux, not because Windows is "too expensive."
Furthermore, precisely what product line would be cannibalized by cutting Windows prices further? WinPhone (which no one wants and is a different code base)? WinRT (which no one wants because it's a piece of incompatible crap)? XBox (which doesn't even have an installable OS)?
This article is essentially flamebait to spark discussion, and nothing more. There is nothing pragmatic or realistic about it.
That's not entirely true. Historically, most musicians either worked as minstrels at bars and fairs, or else they found a sponsor with a nice fat bankroll and played for their court.
For C#, I live VS. For Java, it's Eclipse all the way. Both are, however, buggy.
Eclipse will randomly crash while loading large projects, then load the next time just fine. It also takes forever for Eclipse 3.8 to initialize all it's "plugins" for web development.
But I wonder if VS still has the most notorious bug it had back in the C/C++ days. If you hit a breakpoint, and were playing a CD in the CD player, the whole machine would crash and blue screen if the player switched to the next track while you were stopped in the break point.
I always thought Star Trek had a little bit of surveillance society in it, because the computer was always listening for you to say "Computer" and give it a command. Mind you, the Enterprise *was* as close to a military ship as the ST society had in the original series, so I guess it might be understandable.
I'm surprised GitHub didn't require one to specify a code license of some kind when publishing code. The default if no license is specified is not "public domain", but private with all rights implicitly reserved for the owner of the code.
I'd far rather work with someone skilled and outspoken who is borderline abusive than an average milquetoast who has nothing to contribute and who can't "hold the reins".
If something was worth n dollars purchase price to you, does the value proposition change when the price goes down later? Are you somehow "ripped off" because you bought early?
If that's your thinking on things, you should always be buying 2 year old models of hardware because they're cheap compared to their performance.
The simple fact of the matter is that the world is over populated. In order to have a chance at a non-menial career, people go to colleges and universities. But because so many people want a non-menial career, there is a vast oversupply of people from those programs.
As a result, companies have to sift through thousands of resumes looking for the wheat in the chaff. Often they'd rather go with the simpler/easier solution of outsourcing the problems of development and design to a company (usually overseas) that they can sue if there are any problems with the results. With an internal staff, the worst you can do is fire them. There is no option for recovering the monies spent or for the "damage" done by the flaws.
Globally, the world is in a tough place. Our whole social mentality is based on the idea that some people are more skilled than others, and therefore deserve more money. But when you look at the aggregate population, there just flat out aren't enough jobs that demand those high skill sets compared to the number of people being educated in those fields.
Consider this: How many people does it take to design something like a phone? On the bright side, it's a relatively large team -- probably a couple dozen to a hundred skilled and trained people. On the downside, that one small team is responsible for a product that (hopefully) sells in the millions of units around the globe. Compared to the market serviced, the efforts of the team are paltry and employ an extremely small number of people.
And the more we globalize and standardize products, the more that problem of "less talent needed" becomes. We're already at a point where the vast majority of the parts in something like a phone are standard components available from a very few vendors.
There is no solution to this problem. We need a mental shift to evolve into a socialist society rather than one that depends on money to determine wealth and reward. But how and when this shift will happen is anybody's guess. I hope it doesn't take the form of leaving millions of people on welfare and social assistance fomenting an eventual rebellion for us to realize that we just can't justify a world where CEOs make hundreds of times what their workers do. Hell, we can't even justify a world where someone makes ten times what someone else does.
At the same time, the critical shift has to happen personally. People need to realize that they need to have enough for a comfortable living, not a luxurious one. But greed is an inherent part of the human animal, so I don't foresee that happening any time soon.
Remember the EDI systems of old? Have you worked with XML today?
Those data transfer systems only work because the information formats are standardized amongst the products that claim to support them.
Unfortunately, EDI standards were often a "kitchen sink" approach with a bazillion "optional" message components to cater to the "special features" of vendors who had enough clout to demand that they be supported.
A rational, clean, genuine reworking and reengineering of data streams would lead to interoperability and the ability to share information between all the different components involved, while allowing specialized features to be tailored to the vertical segments of the marketplace (doctor's office, hospital, pharmacy, and so on.)
The unfortunate thing for the IT industry is that there are very few verticals within the horizontal, so if the "big players" provide for those markets, there is little to no market left for anyone who wants to get a foot in the door. I'd be willing to bet that 90% or more of the negative comments in this thread about the initiative are from people who work with or for those smaller players, and who see their jobs disappearing as the megaproviders take over.
The explanation is simple. The US considers themselves the world's police men, the world's legal system, and the world's judge, jury, and executioner. They do not and will not stop at anything, including breaking their own laws, to achieve domination.
Their society has degraded from one of freedom to a classic, textbook case of the nationalistic fervour, corporatism, and militarism of the fascists of yore. But as soon as you say "fascist", you're dismissed as "exagerating", despite the fact that modern US society displays all the traits of fascism right down to the surveillance and police state mentality.
You can see the nationalistic fervour in the way that US society has calmly ignored the whole whistle blowing over the surveillance led by the US government around the world. As far as US citizens seem to be concerned, their government can do no wrong.
Pretty every much hardware/software stack combination that I ever encountered over 30+ years of programming had a "back door" admin account to allow the vendor to get into the systems to repair damage. This is nothing new.
Yes, it's a security hole.
But it's also standard practice and should come as no surprise to anyone.
I get your point, but I think the bigger problem is portable device users who expect a dinky little toy to perform as good as their home desktop. They need to remember it's a woefully underpowered device which is going to have trouble dealing with more than one complex task at a time -- and unfortunately for them, that includes visiting a lot of modern websites.
Were people complaining about the performance of the aforementioned 512MB PC, people would just laugh at them.
But somehow because mobile is the "new thing" we're all supposed to give a rats ass in the programming world.
Unless and until mobile devices crank up the memory (not necessarily the CPU), they're going to be second class browser citizens. Browsers are not specialized applets -- they're general purpose programs with interpreters. That means they are going to be bigger and slower than dedicated code, and there is no avoiding that.
And what do you think happens on a desktop or server? The memory is shared by multiple processes/programs. This is not something new to these devices. Memory has always been constrained.
But try running an old XP box with 512MB of RAM and see how your Javascript-heavy web pages fare.
It's not the world's fault that the vendors sucker you into crap hardware with only 512MB of RAM.
I'd never even consider buying such a crippled tablet or phone any more than I'd buy a desktop with 512MB RAM. It's just not enough, and hasn't been for years.
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Churn for the sake of churn is the most asinine strategy I've ever heard of. Look at how slow vendors are to actually release updates for Android for their devices. Mozilla is shooting themselves in the foot if they think their hardware partners for Firefox OS want to see point updates anywhere near as often as they're proposing. They want something tested and stable that they can ship, not an always-in-development "product."
Apple? Microsoft? Facebook?
Are you seriously trying to tell me that these companies have future revenues and payouts that justify their exhorbitant prices?
Don't confuse "shiny, shiny" and "Windows n+1" with actual investment in R&D or new technology. Don't confuse hedge funds and futures with actual value. They're gambling on a return, but not on profitability.
The stock market isn't based on the real value of a company anyhow. It rarely involves evaluating the technical expertise, the research and development, the long term product development plans, the current or future rational profit projections of the company, or anything like that.
Instead, it's now a bunch of automated systems buying and selling at a furious rate based on statistics and very small margin profits for the trades.
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
When I think about how solid or worthy a company is, the last thing I consider is their stock price.
Before we can control something, we have to understand it well enough to be able to predict it accurately. Despite all the supercomputers in use for weather system modelling, we can't do that. Unless and until we can, trying to modify the weather systems is suicidally dangerous. Not just to people in the area, but to people around the globe affected by the larger pattern of the systems.
Furthermore, have there not also been cases where the FBI was told they had to get a warrant before installing GPS trackers on a vehicle? How is stealing the data from a built-in GPS tracker any different?
Actually I don't believe that the 4th gives Congress the right to determine what "due process" is. The 4th is quite specific about a warrant being required for a search:
The "horror" is that the sick and twisted website operator thought the footage "entertaining" and tried to make a profit off it by posting it.
Your argument holds true for a special effects fest movie or video.
This was neither.
It was video of the aftermath of an actual, honest to God someone died MURDER.
Windows is a product. When you buy it pre-installed on a machine, prices are already cut to the bone with volume discounts to the manufacturer. Someone has to pay for the security updates, the patches, and so on when it's run by a monolithic corporation instead of an open source community.
I've no beef with the price I paid for my Win7 laptop -- and I know that maybe $50-100 of that purchase price was for the Windows license. Perfectly reasonable.
I use Ubuntu LTS on my "main" machine, but that's because I like Linux, not because Windows is "too expensive."
Furthermore, precisely what product line would be cannibalized by cutting Windows prices further? WinPhone (which no one wants and is a different code base)? WinRT (which no one wants because it's a piece of incompatible crap)? XBox (which doesn't even have an installable OS)?
This article is essentially flamebait to spark discussion, and nothing more. There is nothing pragmatic or realistic about it.
Yeah, I expect it to be about as useful as the "Do Not Call" registry.
That's not entirely true. Historically, most musicians either worked as minstrels at bars and fairs, or else they found a sponsor with a nice fat bankroll and played for their court.
For C#, I live VS. For Java, it's Eclipse all the way. Both are, however, buggy.
Eclipse will randomly crash while loading large projects, then load the next time just fine. It also takes forever for Eclipse 3.8 to initialize all it's "plugins" for web development.
But I wonder if VS still has the most notorious bug it had back in the C/C++ days. If you hit a breakpoint, and were playing a CD in the CD player, the whole machine would crash and blue screen if the player switched to the next track while you were stopped in the break point.
I always thought Star Trek had a little bit of surveillance society in it, because the computer was always listening for you to say "Computer" and give it a command. Mind you, the Enterprise *was* as close to a military ship as the ST society had in the original series, so I guess it might be understandable.
Everything has an end of life, including computer hardware. It's time to put those creaky ancient machines out to pasture.
I'm surprised GitHub didn't require one to specify a code license of some kind when publishing code. The default if no license is specified is not "public domain", but private with all rights implicitly reserved for the owner of the code.
I'd far rather work with someone skilled and outspoken who is borderline abusive than an average milquetoast who has nothing to contribute and who can't "hold the reins".
I have no sympathy for the whiners and politically correct crowd. Those assholes have tried to take all the fun out of life, and they can kiss my ass.
You go, Linus. Rant away when it's needed.
Exactly.
If something was worth n dollars purchase price to you, does the value proposition change when the price goes down later? Are you somehow "ripped off" because you bought early?
If that's your thinking on things, you should always be buying 2 year old models of hardware because they're cheap compared to their performance.
The simple fact of the matter is that the world is over populated. In order to have a chance at a non-menial career, people go to colleges and universities. But because so many people want a non-menial career, there is a vast oversupply of people from those programs.
As a result, companies have to sift through thousands of resumes looking for the wheat in the chaff. Often they'd rather go with the simpler/easier solution of outsourcing the problems of development and design to a company (usually overseas) that they can sue if there are any problems with the results. With an internal staff, the worst you can do is fire them. There is no option for recovering the monies spent or for the "damage" done by the flaws.
Globally, the world is in a tough place. Our whole social mentality is based on the idea that some people are more skilled than others, and therefore deserve more money. But when you look at the aggregate population, there just flat out aren't enough jobs that demand those high skill sets compared to the number of people being educated in those fields.
Consider this: How many people does it take to design something like a phone? On the bright side, it's a relatively large team -- probably a couple dozen to a hundred skilled and trained people. On the downside, that one small team is responsible for a product that (hopefully) sells in the millions of units around the globe. Compared to the market serviced, the efforts of the team are paltry and employ an extremely small number of people.
And the more we globalize and standardize products, the more that problem of "less talent needed" becomes. We're already at a point where the vast majority of the parts in something like a phone are standard components available from a very few vendors.
There is no solution to this problem. We need a mental shift to evolve into a socialist society rather than one that depends on money to determine wealth and reward. But how and when this shift will happen is anybody's guess. I hope it doesn't take the form of leaving millions of people on welfare and social assistance fomenting an eventual rebellion for us to realize that we just can't justify a world where CEOs make hundreds of times what their workers do. Hell, we can't even justify a world where someone makes ten times what someone else does.
At the same time, the critical shift has to happen personally. People need to realize that they need to have enough for a comfortable living, not a luxurious one. But greed is an inherent part of the human animal, so I don't foresee that happening any time soon.
Remember the EDI systems of old? Have you worked with XML today?
Those data transfer systems only work because the information formats are standardized amongst the products that claim to support them.
Unfortunately, EDI standards were often a "kitchen sink" approach with a bazillion "optional" message components to cater to the "special features" of vendors who had enough clout to demand that they be supported.
A rational, clean, genuine reworking and reengineering of data streams would lead to interoperability and the ability to share information between all the different components involved, while allowing specialized features to be tailored to the vertical segments of the marketplace (doctor's office, hospital, pharmacy, and so on.)
The unfortunate thing for the IT industry is that there are very few verticals within the horizontal, so if the "big players" provide for those markets, there is little to no market left for anyone who wants to get a foot in the door. I'd be willing to bet that 90% or more of the negative comments in this thread about the initiative are from people who work with or for those smaller players, and who see their jobs disappearing as the megaproviders take over.
The explanation is simple. The US considers themselves the world's police men, the world's legal system, and the world's judge, jury, and executioner. They do not and will not stop at anything, including breaking their own laws, to achieve domination.
Their society has degraded from one of freedom to a classic, textbook case of the nationalistic fervour, corporatism, and militarism of the fascists of yore. But as soon as you say "fascist", you're dismissed as "exagerating", despite the fact that modern US society displays all the traits of fascism right down to the surveillance and police state mentality.
You can see the nationalistic fervour in the way that US society has calmly ignored the whole whistle blowing over the surveillance led by the US government around the world. As far as US citizens seem to be concerned, their government can do no wrong.
Pretty every much hardware/software stack combination that I ever encountered over 30+ years of programming had a "back door" admin account to allow the vendor to get into the systems to repair damage. This is nothing new.
Yes, it's a security hole.
But it's also standard practice and should come as no surprise to anyone.
And the rural areas subsidize the cities with cheap food.
Turnabout is fair play. Everyone has needs. Someone has to pay for them.
Or would you rather have the farmers charged full price for their land lines in exchange for a fair market price for the food they produce?
Trust me, you'd be paying a lot more in food costs than you would in subsidies.
I get your point, but I think the bigger problem is portable device users who expect a dinky little toy to perform as good as their home desktop. They need to remember it's a woefully underpowered device which is going to have trouble dealing with more than one complex task at a time -- and unfortunately for them, that includes visiting a lot of modern websites.
Were people complaining about the performance of the aforementioned 512MB PC, people would just laugh at them.
But somehow because mobile is the "new thing" we're all supposed to give a rats ass in the programming world.
Unless and until mobile devices crank up the memory (not necessarily the CPU), they're going to be second class browser citizens. Browsers are not specialized applets -- they're general purpose programs with interpreters. That means they are going to be bigger and slower than dedicated code, and there is no avoiding that.
And what do you think happens on a desktop or server? The memory is shared by multiple processes/programs. This is not something new to these devices. Memory has always been constrained.
But try running an old XP box with 512MB of RAM and see how your Javascript-heavy web pages fare.
It's not the world's fault that the vendors sucker you into crap hardware with only 512MB of RAM.
I'd never even consider buying such a crippled tablet or phone any more than I'd buy a desktop with 512MB RAM. It's just not enough, and hasn't been for years.