If it's the default, there will be virtually noone who turns it off... Those who care about privacy will leave it on, those who don't care won't even realise the option exists. Subsequently, advertisers will ignore it because it becomes fairly meaningless, and not ignoring it would lose them potential eyeballs who don't care about being tracked. So the feature just becomes worthless.
On the other hand, if its off by default then only those who care about privacy will turn it on. Advertisers are quite happy to lose these eyeballs, as these people would generally not respond to advertising anyway. Everyone wins.
The whole purpose of the DNT header is to allow users to make a statement of "I do not want to be tracked", but if you make it the default it will just be a statement of "I have probably not bothered to change the default settings and most likely don't even realise such settings exist"
Android already has the capability to run regular Linux software... Similarly windows tablets have been around for quite some time, and haven't sold well.
The problem being is that most desktop software is difficult to use on a touchscreen interface, it's simply not designed that way and people quickly get sick of it... At the very least you would need to build a new UI for the software, eg look at firefox and chrome.
Also you have the ARM version of windows, branding it as windows will create an impression it can run the same apps... When users find out they can't they will be angry, not a good first impression of the platform.
No device can ever be "secure", and running your own code can never be "absolutely impossible" so long as it is in the hands of consumers... The most you can hope for is to make it more difficult and time consuming for hackers to get sufficient control of it to run their own code. Or, in the case of microsoft's previous efforts in the mobile space, sell so few of them that noone is interested in cracking it.
Any device that has been interesting for users to get access to has been cracked...
Locked hardware on the other hand is damaging for consumers and the environment. A relatively open PC can have a fairly long useful life, especially now that hardware has reached the point that even the lowest end kit is fast enough for day to day use... This is also why i tend to buy motherboards that support (for the time) a stupid amount of ram, and then max it out a few years later when the ram is dirt cheap.
On the other hand, locked hardware can often become a brick once the manufacturer stops supporting it... If it requires online activation you might not be able to reinstall it, you will probably be stuck with old software thats full of security holes, if it is locked into any other online services they may no longer be running etc. So most of the hardware just ends up getting thrown away.
When it comes to your average tablet maker, they are selling hardware not software... The more open the hardware, the more uses it has and this will translate to more sales. How many more is irrelevant, spending considerable extra resources for a reduction in sales however small is not a sound business decision.
Or it could have the opposite effect... If the windows tablet bombs, then that will drive OEMs away faster than ever. If it succeeds, then it will be a competitor to the OEMs which may also discourage them, especially since MS will have an inherent advantage due to being able to get the software for free whereas other OEMs will have to negotiate a price, giving them thinner margins on otherwise comparable devices.
And what exactly does your employer do? And is your site fully compatible with all of those browsers?
Also, why don't you parse your actual web logs instead of relying on a javascript bug for stats? There are a number of firefox extensions to block things like google analytics, and ofcourse any browser that has javascript disabled (eg firefox users with noscript) or simply doesn't support it won't show up in your stats either.
I host a variety of sites, primarily a mix of porn and tech oriented sites but with a few random company brochureware sites thrown in. On the porn, IE is the most common browser but barely with 30%, firefox and chrome are both very close behind with 28% and 25% respectively. On the other sites, firefox is the most common with 42%, chrome has half that on 20% and ie lags behind with 15%.. Safari and opera about about tied on 5.8% each. This is based on unique visitors rather than number of hits, and as far as i know we don't host any sites which require specific browsers.
The other bias, are indirect or unintentional usage of a browser, and this is mostly IE...
The fact that IE is still installed wether you use it or not, while few people will install chrome or firefox unless they intend to use it.
Applications which embed a browser within the app, there are a few that use chrome etc, but most use IE.
Applications which call an external browser (eg to view a link), some are hard coded to run ie, some just use the default browser but then ie has a habit of being set back as the default even if you don't want it.
If you just go based on unique users, then many chrome or firefox users would also be counted as ie users despite never intentionally invoking ie.
Well, 2% of the market is still a huge number of users... It's also an area of the market that currently has very little competition, so you would sell proportionally more units. And finally, making a port is considerably easier than writing from scratch... It may not be viable to write a game from scratch for this smaller market, but since a game is already written the additional effort of porting it may well be worth it. Especially if there's already a mac port, or if you make a half assed port using wine.
Modern? I don't think any of the hardware available to run amigaos qualifies as modern... It seems the fastest they have is a 1.8ghz dual core from pa-semi, who got bought by apple and are no longer developing powerpc processors.
It also seems to be very expensive both for the hardware and the os.
AROS/Icaros on the other hand is available for free, and runs on hardware that most people already have. It's easy for anyone to try, and risk free.
It was slow even with an 030, it was just about playable on a 68040, and the only amiga to come with a 68040 by default was the A4000... Also the default 68040 card in the A4000 was quite slow, the one i played it on was significantly faster than a stock A4000.
What was special about the amiga gui, was the way it was extremely responsive and fully multitasking, competing systems of the time usually couldn't multitask very well if at all, and were generally very sluggish even on considerably faster hardware. This is also why the amiga stuck around for quite a while, although the hardware was getting dated the user experience took longer to seem slower than the underlying hardware would have suggested.
And the legacy lives on in some respects... When i interview someone, if they started out on the amiga they are in 99% of cases much better at the job than someone who started out on windows... I put this down to a system that encouraged you to learn about it, vs a system that discourages you and makes you fearful of breaking things (dont look at this dir, it contains system files and you might break something!).
At the time, dos, macos, early versions of windows, atari tos etc also didn't have memory protection...AmigaOS was still a better os on similar spec hardware.
BeOs didn't succeed with x86. Some developers said that those who has originally used BeOs started to use window/Linux and stopped to support original BeOs apps because everythig was easier with Windows/Linux.
Nor did it succeed on PPC.
No valid reason for OS4 to go to commodity hardware. The market isn't there - niche OS's are free/open source on commodity hardware, Hyperion would have no business model.
There is no market for a niche OS targeting hobbyists. Niche OS are free or open source and run on widely available hardware because that's the only way any of them has a hope of attracting a user base. Lots of people have old/spare hardware they would play with a new OS on, but very few would buy expensive hardware just to try an expensive os.
That's how myself and many others first experienced linux. In fact, my first experience of both linux and netbsd was installing them on an amiga since that's the hardware i had available at the time.
Incidentally, by some accounts Commodore were working with HP to transition to the PA-RISC processor and had no plans to use PPC... Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Microsoft seems to be making the mistake that tablets are going to fully replace PCs. They aren't. They, like phones, are going to compliment them. Each is a different tool with different strengths and weaknesses.
Microsoft's failure to branch out into other markets seems to be largely down to this... They see windows as a hammer, and try to force it into every market, which is an utterly foolish idea and so far has failed miserably. Windows is associated with computers, and because of this computers are now considered to be unreliable, insecure virus prone devices by the masses. There are lots of non technical people who refuse to try windows phone because they think it will make their phone crash or become infected with viruses. Similarly, the windows interface including the start bar etc are totally unsuitable for a phone, which is one of the things that made windows mobile so painful to use. And branding something as windows creates an expectation of compatibility, which has left many windows mobile and windows ce users disappointed.
Microsoft seem to think that associating other products with a familiar brand like windows will help it sell, but they are too arrogant to realise that windows is a brand with a bad reputation that is only tolerated in a market where users are either locked in, or dont even realise any alternatives exist.
Arguably their most successful product recently is the xbox, and that wasn't marketed as "windows game" or similar, it has its own brand and gets judged on its own merits.
A lot of people cannot afford or justify multiple games consoles, so if they already have an xbox by the time some must have ps4 game comes out they are unlikely to buy a ps4 just for that...
I'm by no means a fan of microsoft, but i always advise people towards the xbox because of how sony treats their paying customers.
Similarly with other sony products, i avoid them and advise others to do the same which just counting the few i have influenced has resulted in several lost sales of tv sets for sony which have gone to samsung and panasonic instead.
Bugs can and do happen, apple are not the only ones affected, batteries expanding exploding or catching fire have happened to several manufacturers like sony, dell and nokia. Designing a product that when functioning to design goals has short battery life is very poor except for the cheapest of products.
And no, we don't know what the battery life of this device is, since that information hasn't been made public people are only able to speculate based on previous devices. Previous mobile devices from ms have generally been lousy and had poor battery life, what reason do we have to believe that this one will be any better?
There is also the consideration that if the battery life was good it would more likely have been publicised as a selling point whereas bad battery life would have been kept back to avoid embarrassment.
Until we hear otherwise, all odds point to this device having poor battery life.
Independent of one another in any other field is irrelevant, they cannot act independently of microsoft with the source.
I may be independent of you in most fields, but neither of us are able to directly post pictures here because slashdot doesn't allow that, so we are both dependent on slashdot in this case.
Your mention of hackers is grasping... Microsoft never intentionally made source available to them and they can only use it for further nefarious means as anyone who published a vulnerability they found in illegally acquired sourcecode would be running serious risk.
What it does show however, is that a closed source model provides significant advantages to the blackhats at the expense of legitimate researchers and end users.
Theres a difference between "problems", that is bugs which were never meant to happen (and got solved by a recall)... Vs a product that has poor battery life when functioning as designed.
They were fairly impressive, a couple of years ago... Releasing last year's technology today doesn't work unless your going for the budget end of the market.
MS doesn't dominate the game console market, they are competitive now instead of being a joke but Sony and Nintendo are still around, and MS don't have any competitor for them in the handheld market.
Incidentally, most people i know who bought xbox over ps3 was because it was easier to get it modded and pirate the games, while sony managed to alienate all the people who bought a ps3 to run linux... I chose ps3 over xbox for that reason, and i also had a few games for it... Now i have a unit which cannot play new games or else i will lose my linux install, so i won't be buying anything from sony in future, and i was actually looking forward to playing twisted metal having liked it on the ps1 years back.
There are actually less people reverse engineering the amd drivers than nvidia, because they have more to work with... Same as happened with the PS3, people initially wanted to get GPU access under linux (which would have made media center use far more practical among other things), but once linux access was taken away the attention moved to getting it back which also resulted in an easier opening for piracy.
Any drm scheme will be broken sooner or later anyway, assuming there is any content that people want which is encumbered by it and isnt available in a superior form elsewhere (eg whats the point cracking poor quality streams when you can crack bluray). Any drm scheme is purely a form of obfuscation,
Patents are by definition public, and sourcecode which implements them would not be infringing if it only worked in conjunction with hardware that comes with a patent license anyway.
Of course, companies which are beholden to third parties rather than to their paying customers is a gross distortion of the free market.
You are not independent of a company you have a contract with in respect of anything covered by said contract, to suggest otherwise is just ridiculous.
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If it's the default, there will be virtually noone who turns it off...
Those who care about privacy will leave it on, those who don't care won't even realise the option exists.
Subsequently, advertisers will ignore it because it becomes fairly meaningless, and not ignoring it would lose them potential eyeballs who don't care about being tracked. So the feature just becomes worthless.
On the other hand, if its off by default then only those who care about privacy will turn it on. Advertisers are quite happy to lose these eyeballs, as these people would generally not respond to advertising anyway. Everyone wins.
The whole purpose of the DNT header is to allow users to make a statement of "I do not want to be tracked", but if you make it the default it will just be a statement of "I have probably not bothered to change the default settings and most likely don't even realise such settings exist"
Android already has the capability to run regular Linux software... Similarly windows tablets have been around for quite some time, and haven't sold well.
The problem being is that most desktop software is difficult to use on a touchscreen interface, it's simply not designed that way and people quickly get sick of it... At the very least you would need to build a new UI for the software, eg look at firefox and chrome.
Also you have the ARM version of windows, branding it as windows will create an impression it can run the same apps... When users find out they can't they will be angry, not a good first impression of the platform.
No device can ever be "secure", and running your own code can never be "absolutely impossible" so long as it is in the hands of consumers... The most you can hope for is to make it more difficult and time consuming for hackers to get sufficient control of it to run their own code. Or, in the case of microsoft's previous efforts in the mobile space, sell so few of them that noone is interested in cracking it.
Any device that has been interesting for users to get access to has been cracked...
Locked hardware on the other hand is damaging for consumers and the environment.
A relatively open PC can have a fairly long useful life, especially now that hardware has reached the point that even the lowest end kit is fast enough for day to day use... This is also why i tend to buy motherboards that support (for the time) a stupid amount of ram, and then max it out a few years later when the ram is dirt cheap.
On the other hand, locked hardware can often become a brick once the manufacturer stops supporting it... If it requires online activation you might not be able to reinstall it, you will probably be stuck with old software thats full of security holes, if it is locked into any other online services they may no longer be running etc. So most of the hardware just ends up getting thrown away.
When it comes to your average tablet maker, they are selling hardware not software... The more open the hardware, the more uses it has and this will translate to more sales. How many more is irrelevant, spending considerable extra resources for a reduction in sales however small is not a sound business decision.
Or it could have the opposite effect...
If the windows tablet bombs, then that will drive OEMs away faster than ever.
If it succeeds, then it will be a competitor to the OEMs which may also discourage them, especially since MS will have an inherent advantage due to being able to get the software for free whereas other OEMs will have to negotiate a price, giving them thinner margins on otherwise comparable devices.
And what exactly does your employer do? And is your site fully compatible with all of those browsers?
Also, why don't you parse your actual web logs instead of relying on a javascript bug for stats? There are a number of firefox extensions to block things like google analytics, and ofcourse any browser that has javascript disabled (eg firefox users with noscript) or simply doesn't support it won't show up in your stats either.
I host a variety of sites, primarily a mix of porn and tech oriented sites but with a few random company brochureware sites thrown in.
On the porn, IE is the most common browser but barely with 30%, firefox and chrome are both very close behind with 28% and 25% respectively.
On the other sites, firefox is the most common with 42%, chrome has half that on 20% and ie lags behind with 15%.. Safari and opera about about tied on 5.8% each.
This is based on unique visitors rather than number of hits, and as far as i know we don't host any sites which require specific browsers.
The other bias, are indirect or unintentional usage of a browser, and this is mostly IE...
The fact that IE is still installed wether you use it or not, while few people will install chrome or firefox unless they intend to use it.
Applications which embed a browser within the app, there are a few that use chrome etc, but most use IE.
Applications which call an external browser (eg to view a link), some are hard coded to run ie, some just use the default browser but then ie has a habit of being set back as the default even if you don't want it.
If you just go based on unique users, then many chrome or firefox users would also be counted as ie users despite never intentionally invoking ie.
Well, 2% of the market is still a huge number of users...
It's also an area of the market that currently has very little competition, so you would sell proportionally more units.
And finally, making a port is considerably easier than writing from scratch... It may not be viable to write a game from scratch for this smaller market, but since a game is already written the additional effort of porting it may well be worth it. Especially if there's already a mac port, or if you make a half assed port using wine.
Modern? I don't think any of the hardware available to run amigaos qualifies as modern... It seems the fastest they have is a 1.8ghz dual core from pa-semi, who got bought by apple and are no longer developing powerpc processors.
It also seems to be very expensive both for the hardware and the os.
AROS/Icaros on the other hand is available for free, and runs on hardware that most people already have. It's easy for anyone to try, and risk free.
It was slow even with an 030, it was just about playable on a 68040, and the only amiga to come with a 68040 by default was the A4000... Also the default 68040 card in the A4000 was quite slow, the one i played it on was significantly faster than a stock A4000.
What was special about the amiga gui, was the way it was extremely responsive and fully multitasking, competing systems of the time usually couldn't multitask very well if at all, and were generally very sluggish even on considerably faster hardware.
This is also why the amiga stuck around for quite a while, although the hardware was getting dated the user experience took longer to seem slower than the underlying hardware would have suggested.
And the legacy lives on in some respects... When i interview someone, if they started out on the amiga they are in 99% of cases much better at the job than someone who started out on windows... I put this down to a system that encouraged you to learn about it, vs a system that discourages you and makes you fearful of breaking things (dont look at this dir, it contains system files and you might break something!).
At the time, dos, macos, early versions of windows, atari tos etc also didn't have memory protection...AmigaOS was still a better os on similar spec hardware.
Those quote are hilarious...
BeOs didn't succeed with x86. Some developers said that those who has originally used BeOs started to use window/Linux and stopped to support original BeOs apps because everythig was easier with Windows/Linux.
Nor did it succeed on PPC.
No valid reason for OS4 to go to commodity hardware. The market isn't there - niche OS's are free/open source on commodity hardware, Hyperion would have no business model.
There is no market for a niche OS targeting hobbyists. Niche OS are free or open source and run on widely available hardware because that's the only way any of them has a hope of attracting a user base. Lots of people have old/spare hardware they would play with a new OS on, but very few would buy expensive hardware just to try an expensive os.
That's how myself and many others first experienced linux. In fact, my first experience of both linux and netbsd was installing them on an amiga since that's the hardware i had available at the time.
Incidentally, by some accounts Commodore were working with HP to transition to the PA-RISC processor and had no plans to use PPC... Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Microsoft seems to be making the mistake that tablets are going to fully replace PCs. They aren't. They, like phones, are going to compliment them. Each is a different tool with different strengths and weaknesses.
Microsoft's failure to branch out into other markets seems to be largely down to this... They see windows as a hammer, and try to force it into every market, which is an utterly foolish idea and so far has failed miserably.
Windows is associated with computers, and because of this computers are now considered to be unreliable, insecure virus prone devices by the masses. There are lots of non technical people who refuse to try windows phone because they think it will make their phone crash or become infected with viruses.
Similarly, the windows interface including the start bar etc are totally unsuitable for a phone, which is one of the things that made windows mobile so painful to use.
And branding something as windows creates an expectation of compatibility, which has left many windows mobile and windows ce users disappointed.
Microsoft seem to think that associating other products with a familiar brand like windows will help it sell, but they are too arrogant to realise that windows is a brand with a bad reputation that is only tolerated in a market where users are either locked in, or dont even realise any alternatives exist.
Arguably their most successful product recently is the xbox, and that wasn't marketed as "windows game" or similar, it has its own brand and gets judged on its own merits.
A lot of people cannot afford or justify multiple games consoles, so if they already have an xbox by the time some must have ps4 game comes out they are unlikely to buy a ps4 just for that...
I'm by no means a fan of microsoft, but i always advise people towards the xbox because of how sony treats their paying customers.
Similarly with other sony products, i avoid them and advise others to do the same which just counting the few i have influenced has resulted in several lost sales of tv sets for sony which have gone to samsung and panasonic instead.
Bugs can and do happen, apple are not the only ones affected, batteries expanding exploding or catching fire have happened to several manufacturers like sony, dell and nokia.
Designing a product that when functioning to design goals has short battery life is very poor except for the cheapest of products.
And no, we don't know what the battery life of this device is, since that information hasn't been made public people are only able to speculate based on previous devices. Previous mobile devices from ms have generally been lousy and had poor battery life, what reason do we have to believe that this one will be any better?
There is also the consideration that if the battery life was good it would more likely have been publicised as a selling point whereas bad battery life would have been kept back to avoid embarrassment.
Until we hear otherwise, all odds point to this device having poor battery life.
Independent of one another in any other field is irrelevant, they cannot act independently of microsoft with the source.
I may be independent of you in most fields, but neither of us are able to directly post pictures here because slashdot doesn't allow that, so we are both dependent on slashdot in this case.
Your mention of hackers is grasping... Microsoft never intentionally made source available to them and they can only use it for further nefarious means as anyone who published a vulnerability they found in illegally acquired sourcecode would be running serious risk.
What it does show however, is that a closed source model provides significant advantages to the blackhats at the expense of legitimate researchers and end users.
Theres a difference between "problems", that is bugs which were never meant to happen (and got solved by a recall)...
Vs a product that has poor battery life when functioning as designed.
They were fairly impressive, a couple of years ago...
Releasing last year's technology today doesn't work unless your going for the budget end of the market.
MS doesn't dominate the game console market, they are competitive now instead of being a joke but Sony and Nintendo are still around, and MS don't have any competitor for them in the handheld market.
Incidentally, most people i know who bought xbox over ps3 was because it was easier to get it modded and pirate the games, while sony managed to alienate all the people who bought a ps3 to run linux...
I chose ps3 over xbox for that reason, and i also had a few games for it... Now i have a unit which cannot play new games or else i will lose my linux install, so i won't be buying anything from sony in future, and i was actually looking forward to playing twisted metal having liked it on the ps1 years back.
There are actually less people reverse engineering the amd drivers than nvidia, because they have more to work with...
Same as happened with the PS3, people initially wanted to get GPU access under linux (which would have made media center use far more practical among other things), but once linux access was taken away the attention moved to getting it back which also resulted in an easier opening for piracy.
Any drm scheme will be broken sooner or later anyway, assuming there is any content that people want which is encumbered by it and isnt available in a superior form elsewhere (eg whats the point cracking poor quality streams when you can crack bluray). Any drm scheme is purely a form of obfuscation,
Patents are by definition public, and sourcecode which implements them would not be infringing if it only worked in conjunction with hardware that comes with a patent license anyway.
Of course, companies which are beholden to third parties rather than to their paying customers is a gross distortion of the free market.
Read the above again. GPUs are not just for gaming anymore, several of the top500 supercomputers now use GPUs and they are linux based.
You are not independent of a company you have a contract with in respect of anything covered by said contract, to suggest otherwise is just ridiculous.