First, most good apps are on both platforms, right? But more importantly, how many thousand apps can you run on your phone? And specifically, how many thousand barcode readers do you need, for example? Quantity of apps seems quite irrelevant, especially when there is so much redundancy.
From my experience, the distinction between the iPhone and Android is about interface. Maybe it is just because I am more used to the iPhone, but when using an Android, I find the experience to be downright hostile. It is as if I have to fight the interface to get it to do what I want.
With the iPhone, I feel like it is working with me. There is no doubt that sometimes the iPhone tries to be "too smart" and do stuff for me that I'd rather it not do. But on the balance, I find everything about its interface to be smoother, more elegant, and a much more pleasant/productive experience.
Given that both systems have basically the same feature set and basically the same apps, interface and industrial design are the major distinguishing factors.
Price seems like a rather minor factor. At least in the US, price of the phone is nothing compared to the price of the service.
Facebook doesn't want to censor: they want free flow of as much information as possible. The more that's out there, the more data they have to mine and sell.
What about when you have a cold? Your voice is messed up, your brain is foggy, you become clumsy which means your behaviors change, you take medicines which make you groggy and thus different, and so on.
What about when you start taking a prescription (or other) drug that messes with your mind and/or with your reflexes, and/or with your nervous system?
What about when you're in a bad mood? What about when you've just experienced a life-changing event and everything about you seems different? What about if you get food poisoning, get hit by a bus, get burned in a fire, get a brain tumor, or are just having a bad friggin' day?
How many people are "normal" every day of their life? 0.00000000%, right?
Quote: An article in today's www.geek.com suggested a couple of things -- first, that we're already producing units, and secondly, that we're limiting sales to programmers only at first. Both of these appear to be the result of some horrible miscommunication (blame Eben; he's very tired).
And Apple would be out of business? Regardless of what Microsoft ever did, Apple kept plugging away.
Even if the internet were somehow "different" I don't think it would preclude the advent of the iPad. The iPad (and the continuing ascendence of Macs) happened in spite of Microsoft's complete domination of most parts of the industry.
Safari (and Webkit, and thus Chrome) came from Konqueror, which started development around when this non-buyout happened. Konqueror was a relatively tiny open source project that hardly anyone had even heard of.
I was going to make a similar but converse point... as a tech generalist, much of what I do is bleeding-edge. Old knowledge is as irrelevant to me as it would be to a potential employer.
Just as doctors are supposed to keep up to date on their skills through continuing education, technologists are expected to keep fresh on new tech trends.
You are making some assumptions that are already dealt with in the architecture of collaborative governance systems.
The "magic money" scenario is about the status quo, not collaborative governance, For example, the US federal budget deficit is in the hundreds of billions, on top of over $14,000,000,000,000 in debt. How can any system be any worse than that? The reason for this preposterous spending is because politicians don't get elected for austerity programs, they get elected for making stupid magic promises.
In collaborative governance, a minority of more reasonable people (such as you and I) can stop this sort of magic money spending.
Put another way: in the status quo, politicians say "I'm going to cut your taxes" or "I'm going to put people to work in the public sector." In collaborative governance, the only bills that can gain consensus would be ones that say something like "We will cut taxes by x% by cutting out these particular budgetary expenditures over this timeframe" or "we will create public sector jobs by allocating an additional $x dollars, collected from a tax on y." There's no hidden agendas, no persuasion through grandiose rhetoric: just the plain facts of the bills being presented. Because anything that doesn't meet a sensibility test will be killed by reasonable people.
As to your point of consensus being a tyranny of a majority, fine, you can look at it that way. In very large communities, there's no way to get 100% buy-in to anything. So say the threshold is a mere 90% (i.e., dissenting votes can't be more than 10% of all votes). Can you possibly say that is not an enormous improvement over the status quo? Tyranny of the 90% is a heck of a lot different than tyranny of the 0.01% who hold actual power in our current institutions.
Compromise is nothing like consensus, and it is horrible. Consensus is built through synthesis, not compromise.
Yes, I can absolutely see consensus on abortion. It is the politicians and the political process that create the issue in the first place. Almost nobody is in favor of widespread abortion. Almost nobody is in favor of totalitarian control of our bodies.
It is the fact that these two ideas are put in opposition to each other that divides us. If instead, we had a consensus/synthesis system, we could readily develop solutions which remove the institution of abortion from our society without passing laws against it.
So wouldn't it be better to have a system where people can participate if they want to, and where the best ideas rise to the top? Compare that to the status quo where politicians rile people up over the stupidest issues in order to keep their grip on power.
Case in point: almost nobody is actually in favor of widespread abortion. And almost nobody is in favor of the government controlling our bodies. And yet the politicians make up this stupid black-and-white abortion issue solely to create unnecessary emotional responses.
Collaborative governance would do the opposite: helping people to find a way to reduce abortion without totalitarian impositions. And the only people who would have to be involved in the process would be ones that really care. People who would prefer to watch American Idol can do so, and abide by the consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic that the Borgle would be fighting slavery.
We should all be free to do as we are told?
He employs some great logic. Here is a direct quote:
"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone," he said.
If everyone wants something, then nobody could possibly want it... right?
Yeah... young people love Windows.
Oh, come on! You can always just build your own Oxygen regulator and driver. (Provided you can do it all in one breath-hold...)
I can just see it...
Spaceship successfully launched!
OK, guys, who wants to work on the reentry system now?
But do you not deserve a Fake Genuine Rolex?
Why would you want to remove ads? Genuine Rolex watches for only $99! They are what support the development of (Refinance today!) new applications for your benefit. Just like you can benefit from a bigger penis! I don't find it (THIS IS NOT ANNOYING!) annoying at all.
At some point, app count becomes irrelevant.
First, most good apps are on both platforms, right? But more importantly, how many thousand apps can you run on your phone? And specifically, how many thousand barcode readers do you need, for example? Quantity of apps seems quite irrelevant, especially when there is so much redundancy.
From my experience, the distinction between the iPhone and Android is about interface. Maybe it is just because I am more used to the iPhone, but when using an Android, I find the experience to be downright hostile. It is as if I have to fight the interface to get it to do what I want.
With the iPhone, I feel like it is working with me. There is no doubt that sometimes the iPhone tries to be "too smart" and do stuff for me that I'd rather it not do. But on the balance, I find everything about its interface to be smoother, more elegant, and a much more pleasant/productive experience.
Given that both systems have basically the same feature set and basically the same apps, interface and industrial design are the major distinguishing factors.
Price seems like a rather minor factor. At least in the US, price of the phone is nothing compared to the price of the service.
Fixed that for ya.
Facebook doesn't want to censor: they want free flow of as much information as possible. The more that's out there, the more data they have to mine and sell.
So, um, does it take phone calls and run millions of apps? Or is it just some kind of limited gaming platform?
Maybe you could get the NSA to hack them?
Just brainstorming here...
It may be tangentially effective. As in: they're in so much pain that they can't get it up...
It's the new contraception: one that even God can get on board with! Just fry yer nuts and you won't have to worry about making God quite irate.
Aren't your arguments addressed in the OP?
Here is what Wikipedia's infrastructure looks like:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Wikimedia-servers-2010-12-28.svg
They're not a big money-hungry corporation nor are they a government. They're people who want a free encyclopedia.
If people wanted a free internet, they could probably come up with the funds and organization to make one.
"Normal" behavior is a baseline, not a universal.
What about when you have a cold? Your voice is messed up, your brain is foggy, you become clumsy which means your behaviors change, you take medicines which make you groggy and thus different, and so on.
What about when you start taking a prescription (or other) drug that messes with your mind and/or with your reflexes, and/or with your nervous system?
What about when you're in a bad mood? What about when you've just experienced a life-changing event and everything about you seems different? What about if you get food poisoning, get hit by a bus, get burned in a fire, get a brain tumor, or are just having a bad friggin' day?
How many people are "normal" every day of their life? 0.00000000%, right?
Please read from the horse's mouth:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
Quote:
An article in today's www.geek.com suggested a couple of things -- first, that we're already producing units, and secondly, that we're limiting sales to programmers only at first. Both of these appear to be the result of some horrible miscommunication (blame Eben; he's very tired).
And Apple would be out of business? Regardless of what Microsoft ever did, Apple kept plugging away.
Even if the internet were somehow "different" I don't think it would preclude the advent of the iPad. The iPad (and the continuing ascendence of Macs) happened in spite of Microsoft's complete domination of most parts of the industry.
Safari (and Webkit, and thus Chrome) came from Konqueror, which started development around when this non-buyout happened. Konqueror was a relatively tiny open source project that hardly anyone had even heard of.
I guess you didn't look at the links. Who cares that Safari is only used on iPads... iPads dominate the market. Just look at the chart:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=1
And as for nobody using the Android browser... again, look at the chart. 16% doesn't sound like "nobody."
And we would still have Safari running on iPads.
The trenders these days are Chrome on computers and Safari on tablets (and to some extent Android Browser). IE and Firefox are on downward slopes.
I was going to make a similar but converse point... as a tech generalist, much of what I do is bleeding-edge. Old knowledge is as irrelevant to me as it would be to a potential employer.
Just as doctors are supposed to keep up to date on their skills through continuing education, technologists are expected to keep fresh on new tech trends.
We don't need black hat programmers anymore... we have government intelligence agencies to do all the malicious coding work.
Sounds like now your everyday hacker hardly needs to be more sophisticated than a script kiddie.
You are making some assumptions that are already dealt with in the architecture of collaborative governance systems.
The "magic money" scenario is about the status quo, not collaborative governance, For example, the US federal budget deficit is in the hundreds of billions, on top of over $14,000,000,000,000 in debt. How can any system be any worse than that? The reason for this preposterous spending is because politicians don't get elected for austerity programs, they get elected for making stupid magic promises.
In collaborative governance, a minority of more reasonable people (such as you and I) can stop this sort of magic money spending.
Put another way: in the status quo, politicians say "I'm going to cut your taxes" or "I'm going to put people to work in the public sector." In collaborative governance, the only bills that can gain consensus would be ones that say something like "We will cut taxes by x% by cutting out these particular budgetary expenditures over this timeframe" or "we will create public sector jobs by allocating an additional $x dollars, collected from a tax on y." There's no hidden agendas, no persuasion through grandiose rhetoric: just the plain facts of the bills being presented. Because anything that doesn't meet a sensibility test will be killed by reasonable people.
As to your point of consensus being a tyranny of a majority, fine, you can look at it that way. In very large communities, there's no way to get 100% buy-in to anything. So say the threshold is a mere 90% (i.e., dissenting votes can't be more than 10% of all votes). Can you possibly say that is not an enormous improvement over the status quo? Tyranny of the 90% is a heck of a lot different than tyranny of the 0.01% who hold actual power in our current institutions.
Compromise is nothing like consensus, and it is horrible. Consensus is built through synthesis, not compromise.
Yes, I can absolutely see consensus on abortion. It is the politicians and the political process that create the issue in the first place. Almost nobody is in favor of widespread abortion. Almost nobody is in favor of totalitarian control of our bodies.
It is the fact that these two ideas are put in opposition to each other that divides us. If instead, we had a consensus/synthesis system, we could readily develop solutions which remove the institution of abortion from our society without passing laws against it.
So wouldn't it be better to have a system where people can participate if they want to, and where the best ideas rise to the top? Compare that to the status quo where politicians rile people up over the stupidest issues in order to keep their grip on power.
Case in point: almost nobody is actually in favor of widespread abortion. And almost nobody is in favor of the government controlling our bodies. And yet the politicians make up this stupid black-and-white abortion issue solely to create unnecessary emotional responses.
Collaborative governance would do the opposite: helping people to find a way to reduce abortion without totalitarian impositions. And the only people who would have to be involved in the process would be ones that really care. People who would prefer to watch American Idol can do so, and abide by the consequences.