I don't want Windows Phone because it's from Microsoft, and Microsoft has a terrible history in the tech industry which has been discussed to death on Slashdot.
But the people flaming the operating system are letting hatred blind them. As a product, Windows Phone is excellent. I don't have any problems with it as a technical product, just like the iPhone is an outstanding technical product. I dislike the business practices of the companies behind each product - but if I told my non-Linux-geek friends that the iPhone or Windows Phone was junk, they'd laugh at me and stop taking anything I say seriously.
Nokia 808 Pureview: Symbian OS, 41 Mpx camera, 512 MB of RAM, 1.3 GHz single core processor, 16GB storage, 640x360 4 inch display.
Nokia Lumia 1020: Windows Phone 8, 41 Mpx camera, 2GB of RAM, 1.5 GHz dual core processor, 32GB storage, 1280x768 4.5 inch display.
The price difference isn't Windows Phone 8, the price difference is everything else in the Lumia 1020. But it's GSM not CDMA, so it doesn't work on my network. Thus, I won't be buying one.
If you blindly stumble around the Internet accepting certs, not checking source and destination, you deserve what you get.
What, you expect the general population of internet users to understand proper SSL/TLS security as well as someone that has listened to every episode of Security Now? That's unfair, and not practical. We the engineers and technical professionals should be striving to make genuine security easy to use for the general population. Reserving best practices for the educated elite just means the NSA has a population of 99.95% of people it can monitor at will and a small enough uncrackable 0.05% that it can devote additional resources to monitoring them through other means.
What I would like to see instead is Firefox releases, officially supported by Mozilla, that have Certificate Patrol, Perspectives, Disconnect.me, and most of the add-ons at http://fixtracking.com/ (except Adblock Plus, which of course has been revealed to bypass its own blocking for certain paying customers ) installed by default. Maybe even the canonical Firefox release should be that way. If we can't bring the masses into security territory along with us, we'll be easy to track because secure territory will be too sparsely populated for anyone to effectively hide.
Facebook generates more than 500 TB of data per day. Youtube has 60 hours of video uploaded per minute. Tumblr has 75 million posts per day. An estimated 300 billion emails are sent per year.
If the social web and inter-communications keep getting common, even with the increasingly cheap cost of storage the NSA might not be able to figure out what I had for breakfast this morning because they have to sift through 1.8x10^34 kitten pictures to figure it out.
If the root certificate private key is held by the NSA, they can bypass the entire remainder of the web of trust.
Say I set up a website, whatever.com, and I have a root certificate from Verisign, an intermediate from Intermediate CA, Inc, and my whatever.com certificate. If the NSA subpoenas or hacks and steals the Verisign root certificate, they can make a fake public and private key with the name Intermediate CA, Inc and sign that with the Verisign private key. Then they can make a public and private key for whatever.com. Then they use their fake Intermediate CA Inc.certificate to sign that. Unless you the person visiting whatever.com specifically have an original copy of the real whatever.com certificate public key, and you look at the public key of the certificate every time you visit the website, you'll never notice that the NSA has replaced the real certificate with theirs. As long as they're using the correct Verisign private key, your browser will not detect any problems.
This of course permits the NSA to do a classic Man-In-The-Middle attack. They give your browser the fake certificate chain and a copy of the website login page, you type things in, they decrypt them, and use them to log in to the real website, they get the results back from the real website, re-encrypt them with the fake certificate chain, and send them back to you. As far as you know you're using the real website, as far as the website server knows they're speaking with a normal browser, but the NSA is capturing everything either side transmits in clear text and can inject fake content in either direction whenever they want.
The SSL/TLS chain of trust only works if private keys of the root certificate authorities are genuinely private. If anyone gets a private key, SSL's security is demolished (unless the theft of that private key becomes public, in which case that key is added to certificate revocation lists).
Symbian hemorrhaged marketshare for Nokia in 2009 and 2010 before Elop took over the company. Nokia had four options:
1. Keep trying to update Symbian to be competitive. They were already working hard on that, and it wasn't stopping their decline.
2. Put Maemo into production, or later Meego. This would have been a late new entry to the mobile market, and like the other late new entries it would have been fighting an uphill battle against iOS, Android, and their respective app stores. Windows Phone, for all that it's attached to Microsoft, was guaranteed to get tons of applications because Microsoft would build them in-house even if no other company would. Nokia didn't have that kind of developer resources available. WebOS went nowhere. Blackberry 10 couldn't save them. I'd love to see Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch take the world by storm, but I'll be shocked if most of us even remember they existed in five years.
3. Switch to Android, and become yet another Android also-ran with Huawei, HTC, LG, ZTE, and Motorola all fighting for sunlight behind Samsung's shadow. Nokia had some of the best designers in the business, but they would have been late to the game fighting other vendors for consumer attention. And they wouldn't even save much money, because Microsoft would have hit them with the same lawsuit it's used to extort patent fees from all of the other Android manufacturers.
4. Switch to Windows Phone, get a big cash infusion from Microsoft, come along for the ride for free any time Microsoft advertises Windows Phone, and differentiate yourself in the market while getting a genuinely well done mobile operating system. ( Even if you dislike and distrust Microsoft - and I do - the reviews of Windows Phone, unlike Windows 8, have been uniformly positive. )
As far as I can tell that's four different paths into oblivion. The one they took might have been faster than the others, but I don't see any way they could have survived much longer regardless. Anything Nokia was going to do in order to save itself needed to be started at least three years before Elop took over the company. He took the captain's chair on a sinking ship.
He didn't choose to be uninsured. His minimum wage job (at age 26 with a college degree, that was all he could find) didn't offer insurance. God bless America.
Yeah funny, my uninsured brother lost his job because he was sick and then had an emergency appendectomy, and got a $48,000 bill. He called the hospital billing department and explained that he was unemployed, and they nicely offered to cut the bill down to $36,000 if he paid it immediately. Funny, for some reason being unemployed meant he just didn't have $36,000 handy, so he's still working on that bill. Yeah, the system worked really well.
In 2009 I was already paying $12,000 per year for health insurance. You call that better than what we have now? How many families can afford that?
I'm not sure what the solution is for the failing schools. Human nature being what it is, often when you throw more money at a failing school you get a failing school plus administrators and teachers in BMWs and Cadillacs, with nicer desks. But maybe if the student-to-faculty ratio was 8 to 1, or 5 to 1, they might make progress. Kids, like anyone else, thrive on attention. I think part of the reason I've had such a good experience with my kids' sports is that the wrestling team has 70 kids and 12 coaches. Some kids are lost no matter what you try - but maybe some could be helped if they each got two or three times as much attention as they do today.
Money spent on bureaucracy and overpriced textbooks is wasted. But money not spent on genuine education is likely to be spent anyway ten or twenty years later for police, prosecutors, prison, and food stamps.
I was a teenager at the time, the bow had a 35 pound draw. I wouldn't be surprised if a bow with a 50 or higher pound draw would demolish those arrows. I just hadn't thought of the possibility until you suggested it. They held up fine to my little recurve.
I don't think so. I think there's a huge distinction. What we want is a system that lets people with the drive and the talent to excel, regardless of how well or poorly their peers perform. That's good. FatdogHaiku wrote, "With the exception of sports (where it is OK to abuse the less gifted) everyone else must be equal" He or she is implicitly assuming that any such system that allows some to do their best must inherently abuse those who lack the talent or the drive to do the same.
Those are two fundamentally different things. In American schools, the stereotype is to link them. If Jock A runs three times faster than Nerd B in gym class, the stereotype is that the coach instructor and the jocks must ruthlessly mock the slow nerd. But that doesn't have to be the case at all. My sons are in elementary school wrestling. There are a few newbies on the team they demolish in practice, and the team has a handful of kids that made it to the state finals last season who in turn demolish my sons. There isn't any abuse at any level, they're all friends and they work together. There are kids that didn't win a match their entire season, and kids with a record of 30 and 2. Neither the kids nor the coaches abuse the ones who don't do well. It's easy enough to see who wins and who loses when you watch the matches.
And in turn, I strongly suspect you can enable talented students to achieve test results that would "humiliate" their peers without actually needing to mock the poor performers. People keep pushing us at this model where achievement only matters, or maybe people are only motivated to achieve, if we make the winners into gods and the losers into objects of ridicule. I don't think that's the case. If I can figure out some technical problem in a third the time it takes my colleague, I don't have to call him an idiot or strut around to feel good about my intellect. I know I've done well, and it costs me nothing to be civil to him.
I think Sony still supports DRM, they just did a cost-benefit analysis of supporting DRM versus the increased sales from avoiding it, and discovered that the second option was superior. You can't lock down consumer access to the media they purchased through your device if they don't own your device. That's not putting consumer interest first, just more thorough market research by Sony than Microsoft.
I think this shows that Sony management is more practical and less arrogant than Microsoft management, but not that the company is any more ethical.
If I stick to my FSF principles, I won't get either. But I have to admit that Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare just looks like too much fun to ignore.
I haven't practiced archery for decades, but the last time I bought cheap training arrows they were $3 each, and if I shot into targets on bales of straw the arrows usually survived intact.
The health care reform requires that 80% of the revenue of any insurance company be spent on patient care, and if the company does not meet that threshold, they rebate the difference to their subscribers.
That does nothing to control medical costs, so getting a Tylenol from a nurse in an emergency room may go from $150 to $375. So the doctors and medical equipment companies will get wealthier. But it does control insurance costs.
Most Democrats wanted to include provisions in the health care reform to control medical costs, too, but they barely had enough votes to pass the legislation as it was. If they had added that, they would have lost a few more conservative Democrat votes, and the whole thing would have failed.
But if you think our health insurance system was less broken in 2009 than it is today, you weren't paying attention. We've gone from "worse" to "bad", and I'll take that any day.
Right. Microsoft only tried to give us DRM until we can't sneeze without permission because the media companies that want to sell products through Microsoft outlets ask for it.
Sony is one of those media companies that asked for it. Their console division may pretend to be friendly to consumers, but that was just cynical self-interest. And outside the console division, Sony's history on DRM (rootkit fiasco, MPAA and RIAA support) and security (Playstation Network hack and long outage) is awful. It's an open question which of these two companies is more evil at any given moment, but there are no heroes in this game.
I think the only thing that might, might keep either console vendor from going wild with DRM is that a growing portion of consumers are choosing to do most of their gaming with iPads and Nexus 7s. If PS4 and Xbox One were mostly battling each other, the two manufacturers would probably shake hands behind closed doors and lock everything down. But that $60 Medal of Honor 94 is against NOVA 3 for $7, and the iPad or Android tablet that can play Nova 3 can also surf the web, post to Twitter, and work comfortably in the back seat of a car or any seat on a train.
I write extensively on the wiki at work. I can't teach someone else to be as good as I am at my job just by reading books. Outside of the rare incredibly intelligent person, for most learners at some point you have to try things for yourself in order to genuinely understand them.
What I am trying to do is provide a Howto for every task I do routinely. I've got a page of links in alphabetical order with duplicates (i.e. "Database Setup" and "PostgreSQL Setup" both take you to the same page.) Each wiki page is in this form "Step 1: pre-requisites. Your computer must be on the office wired network or connected to the VPN." "Step 2: You must have the following programs installed." "Step 3: Open.... and type or paste the following... " "Step 4: In step 3, if the result was X, go to Step 5. Otherwise, go to step 6."
The goal is to make it so a tenth grader with basic computer skills and reading comprehension can handle all of the mundane tasks and I can be left alone to work on the more advanced projects. So far, no luck. If anything breaks, it's easier to contact me than try to fix it on your own. That's fine right until I turn in my two weeks' notice... which happens tomorrow. I used to worry that nobody else in IT understands what's happening in sys-admin or network-admin roles. But I spent the last three years putting a step-by-step guide for just about everything I can think of down, and asking and later begging people to try it out and report errors. At this point I don't care any more. They want to test my instructions after I am no longer available to fix errors, that's their problem.
I started reading wikipedia, and it looks like you have a point. Nokia was getting eaten alive by iOS and Android in 2010. But it was getting eaten alive slowly. Nokia didn't start rapidly hemorrhaging market share until they switched to Windows Phone.
Thanks for the correction. Again, the company could still be in a downward spiral today if they weren't using Windows Phone. But it's possible I was overstating how weak their position was in late 2010.
Gold at Starbow's End (also sometimes sold as Starburst) is one of my favorite science fiction novellas, or maybe science fantasy, of all time.
In typical Pohl fashion it includes lots of sex. But the basic plot is that civilization is collapsing, and someone devises a plan to send six of the world's top scientists, three men and three women, on a multi-year space journey to a planet near Alpha Centauri with nothing to do during the voyage but scientific research. With nothing else to do but research on the ship and chemicals in their food to suppress sexual desire, they hope the crew will make new breakthroughs in many fields. They do.
Unfortunately, the logical, mathematical, and scientific breakthroughs by the crew swiftly move them beyond what the humans back on earth can understand. They create their own language and mathematical notation. They redesign and reconstruct their space ship while it's in motion. They manufacture their own chemicals to nullify the mechanism that was negating their sexual desires and have all sorts of sex, and even raise children on the ship. In the end they manifest psychic powers and figure out how to live disembodied.
The story takes everything you might have liked about the movies Phenomenom, Limitless (and the book it's based upon, "The Dark Fields"), and Lawnmower Man and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Nth Degree" and takes the ideas far further. (Except for killing John Travolta, which cannot be improved upon.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want Windows Phone because it's from Microsoft, and Microsoft has a terrible history in the tech industry which has been discussed to death on Slashdot.
But the people flaming the operating system are letting hatred blind them. As a product, Windows Phone is excellent. I don't have any problems with it as a technical product, just like the iPhone is an outstanding technical product. I dislike the business practices of the companies behind each product - but if I told my non-Linux-geek friends that the iPhone or Windows Phone was junk, they'd laugh at me and stop taking anything I say seriously.
Lucky you. My TomTom lasted less than two months past the manufacturer warranty.
(I'm not saying I like Microsoft or their products, mind you. Just that open source can't solve every problem with consumer devices.)
Nokia 808 Pureview: Symbian OS, 41 Mpx camera, 512 MB of RAM, 1.3 GHz single core processor, 16GB storage, 640x360 4 inch display.
Nokia Lumia 1020: Windows Phone 8, 41 Mpx camera, 2GB of RAM, 1.5 GHz dual core processor, 32GB storage, 1280x768 4.5 inch display.
The price difference isn't Windows Phone 8, the price difference is everything else in the Lumia 1020. But it's GSM not CDMA, so it doesn't work on my network. Thus, I won't be buying one.
If you blindly stumble around the Internet accepting certs, not checking source and destination, you deserve what you get.
What, you expect the general population of internet users to understand proper SSL/TLS security as well as someone that has listened to every episode of Security Now? That's unfair, and not practical. We the engineers and technical professionals should be striving to make genuine security easy to use for the general population. Reserving best practices for the educated elite just means the NSA has a population of 99.95% of people it can monitor at will and a small enough uncrackable 0.05% that it can devote additional resources to monitoring them through other means.
What I would like to see instead is Firefox releases, officially supported by Mozilla, that have Certificate Patrol, Perspectives, Disconnect.me, and most of the add-ons at http://fixtracking.com/ (except Adblock Plus, which of course has been revealed to bypass its own blocking for certain paying customers ) installed by default. Maybe even the canonical Firefox release should be that way. If we can't bring the masses into security territory along with us, we'll be easy to track because secure territory will be too sparsely populated for anyone to effectively hide.
Since Google didn't help the other Android manufacturers when Microsoft went after them, I think it's safe to assume they would not have helped Nokia.
But otherwise you make a good case.
Thanks for the information, I just bookmarked that link to check later.
There's another angle to consider - volume. The NSA's datacenter in Utah has had estimates of as much as 5 zettabytes of storage, but other estimates tap it out at 3 exabytes (roughly 3 million terabytes). http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprints-of-nsa-data-center-in-utah-suggest-its-storage-capacity-is-less-impressive-than-thought/
Facebook generates more than 500 TB of data per day. Youtube has 60 hours of video uploaded per minute. Tumblr has 75 million posts per day. An estimated 300 billion emails are sent per year.
If the social web and inter-communications keep getting common, even with the increasingly cheap cost of storage the NSA might not be able to figure out what I had for breakfast this morning because they have to sift through 1.8x10^34 kitten pictures to figure it out.
If the root certificate private key is held by the NSA, they can bypass the entire remainder of the web of trust.
Say I set up a website, whatever.com, and I have a root certificate from Verisign, an intermediate from Intermediate CA, Inc, and my whatever.com certificate. If the NSA subpoenas or hacks and steals the Verisign root certificate, they can make a fake public and private key with the name Intermediate CA, Inc and sign that with the Verisign private key. Then they can make a public and private key for whatever.com. Then they use their fake Intermediate CA Inc.certificate to sign that. Unless you the person visiting whatever.com specifically have an original copy of the real whatever.com certificate public key, and you look at the public key of the certificate every time you visit the website, you'll never notice that the NSA has replaced the real certificate with theirs. As long as they're using the correct Verisign private key, your browser will not detect any problems.
This of course permits the NSA to do a classic Man-In-The-Middle attack. They give your browser the fake certificate chain and a copy of the website login page, you type things in, they decrypt them, and use them to log in to the real website, they get the results back from the real website, re-encrypt them with the fake certificate chain, and send them back to you. As far as you know you're using the real website, as far as the website server knows they're speaking with a normal browser, but the NSA is capturing everything either side transmits in clear text and can inject fake content in either direction whenever they want.
The SSL/TLS chain of trust only works if private keys of the root certificate authorities are genuinely private. If anyone gets a private key, SSL's security is demolished (unless the theft of that private key becomes public, in which case that key is added to certificate revocation lists).
Symbian hemorrhaged marketshare for Nokia in 2009 and 2010 before Elop took over the company. Nokia had four options:
1. Keep trying to update Symbian to be competitive. They were already working hard on that, and it wasn't stopping their decline.
2. Put Maemo into production, or later Meego. This would have been a late new entry to the mobile market, and like the other late new entries it would have been fighting an uphill battle against iOS, Android, and their respective app stores. Windows Phone, for all that it's attached to Microsoft, was guaranteed to get tons of applications because Microsoft would build them in-house even if no other company would. Nokia didn't have that kind of developer resources available. WebOS went nowhere. Blackberry 10 couldn't save them. I'd love to see Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch take the world by storm, but I'll be shocked if most of us even remember they existed in five years.
3. Switch to Android, and become yet another Android also-ran with Huawei, HTC, LG, ZTE, and Motorola all fighting for sunlight behind Samsung's shadow. Nokia had some of the best designers in the business, but they would have been late to the game fighting other vendors for consumer attention. And they wouldn't even save much money, because Microsoft would have hit them with the same lawsuit it's used to extort patent fees from all of the other Android manufacturers.
4. Switch to Windows Phone, get a big cash infusion from Microsoft, come along for the ride for free any time Microsoft advertises Windows Phone, and differentiate yourself in the market while getting a genuinely well done mobile operating system. ( Even if you dislike and distrust Microsoft - and I do - the reviews of Windows Phone, unlike Windows 8, have been uniformly positive. )
As far as I can tell that's four different paths into oblivion. The one they took might have been faster than the others, but I don't see any way they could have survived much longer regardless. Anything Nokia was going to do in order to save itself needed to be started at least three years before Elop took over the company. He took the captain's chair on a sinking ship.
Actually yeah, my insurance is now $11400 a year. It has gone down.
He didn't choose to be uninsured. His minimum wage job (at age 26 with a college degree, that was all he could find) didn't offer insurance. God bless America.
Yeah funny, my uninsured brother lost his job because he was sick and then had an emergency appendectomy, and got a $48,000 bill. He called the hospital billing department and explained that he was unemployed, and they nicely offered to cut the bill down to $36,000 if he paid it immediately. Funny, for some reason being unemployed meant he just didn't have $36,000 handy, so he's still working on that bill. Yeah, the system worked really well.
In 2009 I was already paying $12,000 per year for health insurance. You call that better than what we have now? How many families can afford that?
Right. No one size fits all.
I'm not sure what the solution is for the failing schools. Human nature being what it is, often when you throw more money at a failing school you get a failing school plus administrators and teachers in BMWs and Cadillacs, with nicer desks. But maybe if the student-to-faculty ratio was 8 to 1, or 5 to 1, they might make progress. Kids, like anyone else, thrive on attention. I think part of the reason I've had such a good experience with my kids' sports is that the wrestling team has 70 kids and 12 coaches. Some kids are lost no matter what you try - but maybe some could be helped if they each got two or three times as much attention as they do today.
Money spent on bureaucracy and overpriced textbooks is wasted. But money not spent on genuine education is likely to be spent anyway ten or twenty years later for police, prosecutors, prison, and food stamps.
I was a teenager at the time, the bow had a 35 pound draw. I wouldn't be surprised if a bow with a 50 or higher pound draw would demolish those arrows. I just hadn't thought of the possibility until you suggested it. They held up fine to my little recurve.
Wooden, actually. :)
I don't think so. I think there's a huge distinction. What we want is a system that lets people with the drive and the talent to excel, regardless of how well or poorly their peers perform. That's good. FatdogHaiku wrote, "With the exception of sports (where it is OK to abuse the less gifted) everyone else must be equal" He or she is implicitly assuming that any such system that allows some to do their best must inherently abuse those who lack the talent or the drive to do the same.
Those are two fundamentally different things. In American schools, the stereotype is to link them. If Jock A runs three times faster than Nerd B in gym class, the stereotype is that the coach instructor and the jocks must ruthlessly mock the slow nerd. But that doesn't have to be the case at all. My sons are in elementary school wrestling. There are a few newbies on the team they demolish in practice, and the team has a handful of kids that made it to the state finals last season who in turn demolish my sons. There isn't any abuse at any level, they're all friends and they work together. There are kids that didn't win a match their entire season, and kids with a record of 30 and 2. Neither the kids nor the coaches abuse the ones who don't do well. It's easy enough to see who wins and who loses when you watch the matches.
And in turn, I strongly suspect you can enable talented students to achieve test results that would "humiliate" their peers without actually needing to mock the poor performers. People keep pushing us at this model where achievement only matters, or maybe people are only motivated to achieve, if we make the winners into gods and the losers into objects of ridicule. I don't think that's the case. If I can figure out some technical problem in a third the time it takes my colleague, I don't have to call him an idiot or strut around to feel good about my intellect. I know I've done well, and it costs me nothing to be civil to him.
I think Sony still supports DRM, they just did a cost-benefit analysis of supporting DRM versus the increased sales from avoiding it, and discovered that the second option was superior. You can't lock down consumer access to the media they purchased through your device if they don't own your device. That's not putting consumer interest first, just more thorough market research by Sony than Microsoft.
I think this shows that Sony management is more practical and less arrogant than Microsoft management, but not that the company is any more ethical.
If I stick to my FSF principles, I won't get either. But I have to admit that Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare just looks like too much fun to ignore.
I haven't practiced archery for decades, but the last time I bought cheap training arrows they were $3 each, and if I shot into targets on bales of straw the arrows usually survived intact.
The health care reform requires that 80% of the revenue of any insurance company be spent on patient care, and if the company does not meet that threshold, they rebate the difference to their subscribers.
That does nothing to control medical costs, so getting a Tylenol from a nurse in an emergency room may go from $150 to $375. So the doctors and medical equipment companies will get wealthier. But it does control insurance costs.
Most Democrats wanted to include provisions in the health care reform to control medical costs, too, but they barely had enough votes to pass the legislation as it was. If they had added that, they would have lost a few more conservative Democrat votes, and the whole thing would have failed.
But if you think our health insurance system was less broken in 2009 than it is today, you weren't paying attention. We've gone from "worse" to "bad", and I'll take that any day.
I suggest archery instead of firearms, most of the time your ammunition is reusable.
But your other points are of course valid. I can't safely go shooting or take a bike ride or play soccer at night.
Right. Microsoft only tried to give us DRM until we can't sneeze without permission because the media companies that want to sell products through Microsoft outlets ask for it.
Sony is one of those media companies that asked for it. Their console division may pretend to be friendly to consumers, but that was just cynical self-interest. And outside the console division, Sony's history on DRM (rootkit fiasco, MPAA and RIAA support) and security (Playstation Network hack and long outage) is awful. It's an open question which of these two companies is more evil at any given moment, but there are no heroes in this game.
I think the only thing that might, might keep either console vendor from going wild with DRM is that a growing portion of consumers are choosing to do most of their gaming with iPads and Nexus 7s. If PS4 and Xbox One were mostly battling each other, the two manufacturers would probably shake hands behind closed doors and lock everything down. But that $60 Medal of Honor 94 is against NOVA 3 for $7, and the iPad or Android tablet that can play Nova 3 can also surf the web, post to Twitter, and work comfortably in the back seat of a car or any seat on a train.
I write extensively on the wiki at work. I can't teach someone else to be as good as I am at my job just by reading books. Outside of the rare incredibly intelligent person, for most learners at some point you have to try things for yourself in order to genuinely understand them.
What I am trying to do is provide a Howto for every task I do routinely. I've got a page of links in alphabetical order with duplicates (i.e. "Database Setup" and "PostgreSQL Setup" both take you to the same page.) Each wiki page is in this form "Step 1: pre-requisites. Your computer must be on the office wired network or connected to the VPN." "Step 2: You must have the following programs installed." "Step 3: Open.... and type or paste the following... " "Step 4: In step 3, if the result was X, go to Step 5. Otherwise, go to step 6."
The goal is to make it so a tenth grader with basic computer skills and reading comprehension can handle all of the mundane tasks and I can be left alone to work on the more advanced projects. So far, no luck. If anything breaks, it's easier to contact me than try to fix it on your own. That's fine right until I turn in my two weeks' notice... which happens tomorrow. I used to worry that nobody else in IT understands what's happening in sys-admin or network-admin roles. But I spent the last three years putting a step-by-step guide for just about everything I can think of down, and asking and later begging people to try it out and report errors. At this point I don't care any more. They want to test my instructions after I am no longer available to fix errors, that's their problem.
You convinced me. (Just to be clear, no sarcasm intended.)
I started reading wikipedia, and it looks like you have a point. Nokia was getting eaten alive by iOS and Android in 2010. But it was getting eaten alive slowly. Nokia didn't start rapidly hemorrhaging market share until they switched to Windows Phone.
Thanks for the correction. Again, the company could still be in a downward spiral today if they weren't using Windows Phone. But it's possible I was overstating how weak their position was in late 2010.
Gold at Starbow's End (also sometimes sold as Starburst) is one of my favorite science fiction novellas, or maybe science fantasy, of all time.
In typical Pohl fashion it includes lots of sex. But the basic plot is that civilization is collapsing, and someone devises a plan to send six of the world's top scientists, three men and three women, on a multi-year space journey to a planet near Alpha Centauri with nothing to do during the voyage but scientific research. With nothing else to do but research on the ship and chemicals in their food to suppress sexual desire, they hope the crew will make new breakthroughs in many fields. They do.
Unfortunately, the logical, mathematical, and scientific breakthroughs by the crew swiftly move them beyond what the humans back on earth can understand. They create their own language and mathematical notation. They redesign and reconstruct their space ship while it's in motion. They manufacture their own chemicals to nullify the mechanism that was negating their sexual desires and have all sorts of sex, and even raise children on the ship. In the end they manifest psychic powers and figure out how to live disembodied.
The story takes everything you might have liked about the movies Phenomenom, Limitless (and the book it's based upon, "The Dark Fields"), and Lawnmower Man and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Nth Degree" and takes the ideas far further. (Except for killing John Travolta, which cannot be improved upon.)