I arrived at the same conclusion you did, and that is why I believe something like the free software foundation and open source software is extremely important to keep corporate greed in check even if its impact is limited. Think about it, there would be no Android without Linux or Java. Without Linux on the server space people would still be using overpriced and vendor provided hardware and Unid software or worse yet, Windows Server all over.
To be fair, the research that Microsoft have done in language translation is impressive. I would even say that Bing translator is a tad better than Google translation.
He didn't say jobs invented them, but Apple put a lot of resources on those technologies. Don't kid yourself, I remember webkit was just used for konqueror and it sucked for page rendering. Gecko back then was king and after Apple took over is when webkit actually became something that left other html frameworks in the dust.
Let's see, Anonymous Coward, complaining about a system that hasn't came out yet, dissing OSX as an utter piece of crap, and then returning to the same bad experience that you said Gnome 3 provided you, as if there were no options in Linux. So either you are a troll or just plain stupid.
Hell the main issue with a Macbook Pro is that they are overpriced, but if you have it ou have to be crazy to put it away unless you want to play games or something with an Alienware like machine.
If you don't like the product that's fine, but to a lot of people, myself included the Mac Pro is one of the best desktop designs in years. The cooling solution alone was extremely creative, not to mention that both monster video cards can benefit from it as well.
With a custom built PC if you try to pull the same stuff you end up with so many cables and will probably need a 700W psu.
Besides, if the job position is for Vietnam sales manager or something, you truly need somebody that speaks Vietnamese. Now if you are saying she was only supposed to be a secretary there might be more of a gray area there.
While I agree that the resolution race is kind of crazy past a certain point, I'm actually very glad that is finally happening. We have had to deal with crappy resolutions for a long time until Apple came up with the "Retina" displays and finally the industry moved forward. This is the main problem I see in the Android ecosystem, there are no companies just taking a stand and saying, this should be done because it looks cool and it is the way forward (ok, maybe HTC). Windows has Nokia doing all kinds of cool stuff (Clearblack, amazing camera quality, good industrial design, etc). Samsung is about doing a lot of models and see what sticks in the wall, Sony is acting like they are doing a Playstation all over again, hell Xiaomi might be the one doing something interesting after all.
Ubuntu is quite a big achievement in my opinion. Again, in my opinion it was the first truly easy to use distro and made it possible for a whole lot of people to use Linux that would not have touched it otherwise. That being said, I would install Ubuntu for other people since it is easier to manage when you have to be the support guy but in my case I still prefer Gentoo even if it makes me spend an ungodly amount of time just trying to make my freaking wireless card work.
When you see a superpower and their close allies shuting down the market instead of actually trying to compete. They can whine all they want and come up with all the lies, but tomorrow millions of Chinese will go to their factories as usual and produce all the products we want at cheap prices.
In order to protect and serve your citizens you don't have to spy the entire world. Hell, maybe only your actual enemies, but in any case, get it in your head that spying is actually illegal by international law. Don't you find it odd that every time they catch a foreign spy they say they weren't doing anything, or the other country says those people were acting on their own? So get informed before writing stuff like that.
It is illegal since when you are doing the spying you are breaking the other countries' laws. Not to mention international law forbids it. Spying in this sense would be classified as extraterritorial investigations without the consent of the territorial state, meaning you are violating the sovereignty of the other country which is something everybody agreed not to do at the UN.
Countries might tolerate it because there is not much you can do about it other than complain loudly, but spying is an act of war and aggression. Keep doing it to a powerful country and expect nasty things to happen to you. On the other hand if you are the powerful country yourself expect to be treated like an asshole.
And not only that, Google's Webmaster tools provide Google with a lot of info from participating websites. Safebrowsing also tells them about each address people are using, think about it? Why not provide a downloadable list of hashes you can check locally? They say because you truly need the latest info but that is some major bs so you phone home no matter if you are using Firefox or Chrome.
I have actively disabled all Google access that I know of to my personal stuff and believe me when I say it is mighty hard and you will break a lot of websites from functioning properly.
China Unicom had phones with zero issues for a long time now. China Mobile might be the issue but that's more a problem of not knowing the local market more than the phone manufacturer itself. iPhones sold well here but nowadays people don't see the value of the iPhone 5 since they consider the 4/4S good enough still. But hop into any metro and count how many Apple devices you see. Nowadays you get to see more Android phones, but like a year ago it was crazy, I even saw people with two iPhones.
But think about it? Only a techie would want to do such thing. A regular folk would just save a bookmark and be done with it. But as for the Chinese, there is no need to do that since you get all the music for free here even if you are using 3G connections. It's called QQ Music.
Actually Mao and Chiang set their differences aside to fight the Japanese, then resumed to the business of killing each other. At least that is the way the history is taught in China, but the interesting part is that if you go to places like Nanjing, you still see they value some of the anti-communist generals which to me it was an interesting development.
Keep an eye on Lenovo, they are entering the mobile market in China with some very good products that can easily displace Samsung. I have tried one of them and it is the same as a Galaxy with a cheaper price, and none of the lower quality issues of other Chinese manufacturers.
Well if you are in China, you just fire up QQ Music and have all the music you want. If you are in the US you can use Spotify, or you can buy stuff from the iTunes store which I don't see as truly hard. Now if you want to pirate music and upload it to your device, you just copy that in iTunes and then sync, or where are you getting that flash drive music if it isn't from torrents or a physical CD?
So really, drop the crap. Apple is overpriced and they like to lock you in, but saying that it is not simple to use is a flat out lie.
I agree with you with the Japanese part, but even if the Chinese hate the Japanese, they still buy a whole lot of their stuff, especially all kinds of food products and restaurants. As for them boycotting American products, I haven't seen that even once, maybe Apple at some point when they realized they were not getting the same treatment as other nations, but that is as far as it goes. And while this is my opinion, I have been living here for quite a while now and have a lot of tech-saavy Chinese friends.
You can go to Shenzhen and they will actually build a custom phone for you with whatever components you want. You see, in China you have places like a local fruit market but only that they have electronics, and you will see people running around, trying to tell you to buy their stuff. Everything is overpriced and you can always negotiate a 50% or even 75% discount on most stuff, but if you cannot find what you are looking for in a store, they will fetch it for you. These places have almost all electronics known to man:)
They might look kind of the same, but the Chinese are wary of locally manufactured products since they rather trust a foreign brand with the good quality controls than a local one that who knows what will happen. This is all over the spectrum here in China, from baby formula to beef and whatnot.
You can't use Google Play on a Samsung either. This is China you know. When you buy a phone from China Unicom they get rid of all the Google stuff, from Gmail to Youtube and Maps. Mine had something called Amap as a Google Maps replacement, which I have to say, it is a kickass app. If you speak Chinese you don't really need Google Play here. Try to get a phone from a good Chinese manufacturer like Huawei or Lenovo, or even Xiaomi. The rest is crap.
Nah man, maybe Xiaomi or Huawei, but ZTE is not well regarded among my Chinese friends, which are tech-saavy. But what the Chinese really crave right now, it's not even Samsung, it's actually the Sony Xperia Z. Lenovo is also doing pretty good, and after having an 820, I have to say they are pretty good phones. I have had ZTEs, Huaweis and Lenovos, and from all the Chinese brands I would buy today, I would choose either Xiaomi, Huawei or Lenovo.
I tried to get a Windows license for a machine I custom built here in China, and boy, they kind of looked at me like I was speaking klingon or something. I did find a store eventually that sells legal copies but it was like finding a specialty craft store in a large mall.
The guys I got the computer from used a pen drive with Norton Ghost to clone a whole lot of stuff to the new machine, from QQ (think MSN Messenger) to Windows and Office.
Next time try to use both systems. Both the S4 and the iPhone are very good phones. If you like one over the other that's fine, but all the stuff you said, you kind of have been able to do with the iPhone already, like using Handbrake to convert all sorts of movies, sync wirelessly and that is if you want to sync, with icloud and over the air updates you really don't need to use iTunes anymore. As for programs, I find that I like most games in the Apple app store since Android's selection is rather limited, but Android has by far better keyboard options like Touchpal, pretty neat ways to personalize the launcher and exclusive applications like Hanping which are useful in China. Not to mention the gazillion of app stores in China for Android and good system integration from the carriers like China Unicom or manufacturers like Lenovo.
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In the mean time, you can get something like this http://www.aliexpress.com/item/HOT-High-Capacity-23000mAh-Solar-Charger-Solar-Mobile-Power-Bank-Battery-Charger-for-iPhone-iPad-Tablet/928368152.html and pair it with a power efficient ultrabook.
I arrived at the same conclusion you did, and that is why I believe something like the free software foundation and open source software is extremely important to keep corporate greed in check even if its impact is limited. Think about it, there would be no Android without Linux or Java. Without Linux on the server space people would still be using overpriced and vendor provided hardware and Unid software or worse yet, Windows Server all over.
To be fair, the research that Microsoft have done in language translation is impressive. I would even say that Bing translator is a tad better than Google translation.
He didn't say jobs invented them, but Apple put a lot of resources on those technologies. Don't kid yourself, I remember webkit was just used for konqueror and it sucked for page rendering. Gecko back then was king and after Apple took over is when webkit actually became something that left other html frameworks in the dust.
Let's see, Anonymous Coward, complaining about a system that hasn't came out yet, dissing OSX as an utter piece of crap, and then returning to the same bad experience that you said Gnome 3 provided you, as if there were no options in Linux. So either you are a troll or just plain stupid.
Hell the main issue with a Macbook Pro is that they are overpriced, but if you have it ou have to be crazy to put it away unless you want to play games or something with an Alienware like machine.
If you don't like the product that's fine, but to a lot of people, myself included the Mac Pro is one of the best desktop designs in years. The cooling solution alone was extremely creative, not to mention that both monster video cards can benefit from it as well.
With a custom built PC if you try to pull the same stuff you end up with so many cables and will probably need a 700W psu.
Besides, if the job position is for Vietnam sales manager or something, you truly need somebody that speaks Vietnamese. Now if you are saying she was only supposed to be a secretary there might be more of a gray area there.
While I agree that the resolution race is kind of crazy past a certain point, I'm actually very glad that is finally happening. We have had to deal with crappy resolutions for a long time until Apple came up with the "Retina" displays and finally the industry moved forward. This is the main problem I see in the Android ecosystem, there are no companies just taking a stand and saying, this should be done because it looks cool and it is the way forward (ok, maybe HTC). Windows has Nokia doing all kinds of cool stuff (Clearblack, amazing camera quality, good industrial design, etc). Samsung is about doing a lot of models and see what sticks in the wall, Sony is acting like they are doing a Playstation all over again, hell Xiaomi might be the one doing something interesting after all.
Ubuntu is quite a big achievement in my opinion. Again, in my opinion it was the first truly easy to use distro and made it possible for a whole lot of people to use Linux that would not have touched it otherwise. That being said, I would install Ubuntu for other people since it is easier to manage when you have to be the support guy but in my case I still prefer Gentoo even if it makes me spend an ungodly amount of time just trying to make my freaking wireless card work.
When you see a superpower and their close allies shuting down the market instead of actually trying to compete. They can whine all they want and come up with all the lies, but tomorrow millions of Chinese will go to their factories as usual and produce all the products we want at cheap prices.
In order to protect and serve your citizens you don't have to spy the entire world. Hell, maybe only your actual enemies, but in any case, get it in your head that spying is actually illegal by international law. Don't you find it odd that every time they catch a foreign spy they say they weren't doing anything, or the other country says those people were acting on their own? So get informed before writing stuff like that.
It is illegal since when you are doing the spying you are breaking the other countries' laws. Not to mention international law forbids it. Spying in this sense would be classified as extraterritorial investigations without the consent of the territorial state, meaning you are violating the sovereignty of the other country which is something everybody agreed not to do at the UN.
Countries might tolerate it because there is not much you can do about it other than complain loudly, but spying is an act of war and aggression. Keep doing it to a powerful country and expect nasty things to happen to you. On the other hand if you are the powerful country yourself expect to be treated like an asshole.
And not only that, Google's Webmaster tools provide Google with a lot of info from participating websites. Safebrowsing also tells them about each address people are using, think about it? Why not provide a downloadable list of hashes you can check locally? They say because you truly need the latest info but that is some major bs so you phone home no matter if you are using Firefox or Chrome.
I have actively disabled all Google access that I know of to my personal stuff and believe me when I say it is mighty hard and you will break a lot of websites from functioning properly.
China Unicom had phones with zero issues for a long time now. China Mobile might be the issue but that's more a problem of not knowing the local market more than the phone manufacturer itself. iPhones sold well here but nowadays people don't see the value of the iPhone 5 since they consider the 4/4S good enough still. But hop into any metro and count how many Apple devices you see. Nowadays you get to see more Android phones, but like a year ago it was crazy, I even saw people with two iPhones.
But think about it? Only a techie would want to do such thing. A regular folk would just save a bookmark and be done with it. But as for the Chinese, there is no need to do that since you get all the music for free here even if you are using 3G connections. It's called QQ Music.
Actually Mao and Chiang set their differences aside to fight the Japanese, then resumed to the business of killing each other. At least that is the way the history is taught in China, but the interesting part is that if you go to places like Nanjing, you still see they value some of the anti-communist generals which to me it was an interesting development.
Keep an eye on Lenovo, they are entering the mobile market in China with some very good products that can easily displace Samsung. I have tried one of them and it is the same as a Galaxy with a cheaper price, and none of the lower quality issues of other Chinese manufacturers.
Well if you are in China, you just fire up QQ Music and have all the music you want. If you are in the US you can use Spotify, or you can buy stuff from the iTunes store which I don't see as truly hard. Now if you want to pirate music and upload it to your device, you just copy that in iTunes and then sync, or where are you getting that flash drive music if it isn't from torrents or a physical CD?
So really, drop the crap. Apple is overpriced and they like to lock you in, but saying that it is not simple to use is a flat out lie.
I agree with you with the Japanese part, but even if the Chinese hate the Japanese, they still buy a whole lot of their stuff, especially all kinds of food products and restaurants. As for them boycotting American products, I haven't seen that even once, maybe Apple at some point when they realized they were not getting the same treatment as other nations, but that is as far as it goes. And while this is my opinion, I have been living here for quite a while now and have a lot of tech-saavy Chinese friends.
You can go to Shenzhen and they will actually build a custom phone for you with whatever components you want. You see, in China you have places like a local fruit market but only that they have electronics, and you will see people running around, trying to tell you to buy their stuff. Everything is overpriced and you can always negotiate a 50% or even 75% discount on most stuff, but if you cannot find what you are looking for in a store, they will fetch it for you. These places have almost all electronics known to man :)
They might look kind of the same, but the Chinese are wary of locally manufactured products since they rather trust a foreign brand with the good quality controls than a local one that who knows what will happen. This is all over the spectrum here in China, from baby formula to beef and whatnot.
You can't use Google Play on a Samsung either. This is China you know. When you buy a phone from China Unicom they get rid of all the Google stuff, from Gmail to Youtube and Maps. Mine had something called Amap as a Google Maps replacement, which I have to say, it is a kickass app. If you speak Chinese you don't really need Google Play here. Try to get a phone from a good Chinese manufacturer like Huawei or Lenovo, or even Xiaomi. The rest is crap.
Nah man, maybe Xiaomi or Huawei, but ZTE is not well regarded among my Chinese friends, which are tech-saavy. But what the Chinese really crave right now, it's not even Samsung, it's actually the Sony Xperia Z. Lenovo is also doing pretty good, and after having an 820, I have to say they are pretty good phones. I have had ZTEs, Huaweis and Lenovos, and from all the Chinese brands I would buy today, I would choose either Xiaomi, Huawei or Lenovo.
I tried to get a Windows license for a machine I custom built here in China, and boy, they kind of looked at me like I was speaking klingon or something. I did find a store eventually that sells legal copies but it was like finding a specialty craft store in a large mall.
The guys I got the computer from used a pen drive with Norton Ghost to clone a whole lot of stuff to the new machine, from QQ (think MSN Messenger) to Windows and Office.
Next time try to use both systems. Both the S4 and the iPhone are very good phones. If you like one over the other that's fine, but all the stuff you said, you kind of have been able to do with the iPhone already, like using Handbrake to convert all sorts of movies, sync wirelessly and that is if you want to sync, with icloud and over the air updates you really don't need to use iTunes anymore. As for programs, I find that I like most games in the Apple app store since Android's selection is rather limited, but Android has by far better keyboard options like Touchpal, pretty neat ways to personalize the launcher and exclusive applications like Hanping which are useful in China. Not to mention the gazillion of app stores in China for Android and good system integration from the carriers like China Unicom or manufacturers like Lenovo.