See this is why I hate software patents. It's not because they are software, but because I haven't seen a single software patent that comes close to alluding how to actually implement the invention in the patent. If you take a patent for a mechanical device, it's usually described in such a way (using diagrams and such) how one who is skilled in the field would actually construct the mechanical device. When it's a software patent, they don't give any source code, pseudo code, or even allude to how one would actually program such a thing. So, even when the patent does expire, anybody wanting to take advantage of the invention in the patent has to come up with their own implementation from scratch. Sure you know the end goal of the program, but if there are no instructions on which algorithms one would use to create a driverless car, then the patent is useless. So Google gets a monopoly on driverless cars for the next 17 years, And after that, we all get nothing because we have no more information on how to implement said driverless car, because all the source code is locked up in copyright and trade secrets.
Too much hyperbole from the people against this bill. It sounds like the ramblings of a madman, or some conspiracy nut. What it's going to allow them to do is take down access to sites like The Pirate Bay that are "dedicated" (this word appears a lot in the wikipedia article) to copyright infringement. It's not going to be used to take down legitimate sites. You can twist the words in the law to make that possible, but no judge is going to take down legitimate sites because somebody posted a single copyrighted item on them which was promptly removed.
I've heard a lot of bad things about this bill. I don't think it's a good bill, and hope it doesn't pass (even though it most likely will). But I'm hearing so much FUD from the people against this bill that it makes me roll my eyes every time I hear about it . Sites like StackOverflow and the Stack Exchange Network state they their sites could be directly harmed by this bill. PLLEEEAAASE. Get Real. No judge is going to take down a Q and A forum because somebody reports that one of the 8 million questions on the site is infringing on some copyrighted question (can you copyright a single question?) in some way. That isn't going to happen. People complain about the way things are worded, and that it's too broad. But that's what judges are for. Laws have always been broad and judges have always had to interpret them. This is how the legal system works. Otherwise you could argue, "I didn't kill the man, I just locked him in a cage with a lion." There's really no other way to take down access to foreign owned piracy exclusive sites. And there really does need to be a way to take sites like this down.
Sure it would. In my highschool, we had 4 classes, each 75 minutes. So that's a total of 5 hours of usage. You can easily get through a whole day of school without charging. First, you won't be using it for the entire time period of every class. The teacher should actually be teaching for a good portion of the class. Plus, reading a book is not even close to as battery intensive as playing a game. If you're just looking at text, the battery probably comes pretty close to the 9 hours they say it gets
I took a statistics and probability course. All exams were multiple choice. Also, "none of the above" was a choice on every single question. I think it was a cruel joke. No marks for showing your work, and if you messed up one thing, you always go "none of the above". Add to this the fact that the professor constantly (almost ever class) started out by explaining the wrong way to solve the problem, and then correcting herself half way though the question, meant that quite a few people did quite bad in that class.
Facebook is terrible for for. The have have hundreds of millions of people browsing their site everyday, and it's filled to ads for scammers, porn, dubious websites and other junk. They could make a serious amount of money if they would just only take serious advertisers. You don't see ads for fake Rolex watches on NBC, but you do on Facebook, even though Facebook has a much bigger audience. They need a real advertising department that goes after big companies getting real advertisements for legitimate products. If the ads were for real products, people would be much more likely to click on them, and advertisers would pay much more for the ads. Right now, no serious company will advertise on Facebook because they don't want their product showing up next to ads for Russian Brides and get rich quick schemes.
The mysql_escape_string, mysql_real_escape_string, mysql_i_mean_it_this_time_escape_string thing probably has a lot to do with the sql injection vulnerabilities, not to mention that before mysqli, you couldn't even use prepared statements. That and the number of php "tutorials" on the web that don't even mention mysql_real_escape_string or prepared statements, leads to PHP being particularly bad. Add that to the fact that PHP is what is avaiable on cheap web hosts, and that it's the language of choice for many newbie programmers, and you go a recipe for disaster. The SQL injection problem isn't limited to PHP, but PHP probably has the biggest problem with it.
Plenty of other places to set up shop. Medical tourism is a big deal. I can guarantee that if you set up shop in Mexico or elsewhere, that cancer patients would flock there. If you had a genuine cure for cancer, most people would pay the price of the plane ticket. That's a paltry sum compared to the cost of medications.
Ah so very true. Free market at work here. Some of us may be screaming at the top of their lungs that they should be cheaper. But there's plenty of people out there with enough money that they will buy the eBooks anyway. For a lot of people eBooks are probably worth more than the physical book, because they are more convenient to tote around, and because if you have a kindle (free 3G) you can buy it from anywhere with cell phone reception; you don't even have to find a book store. There is a monopoly on every single book (that isn't under public domain), and the owner of the copyright can charge whatever they want. Any book that's in the public domain is often free or 99 cents. If you don't like the price of the new stuff, there's tons of stuff out there where copyright has lapsed. Classic books that have stood the test of time. You could read these you entire life, and never run out of books. If you want a particular, newer book, I don't think there's any solution, because the author and publisher still want to make a lot of money.
People who want rips of movies don't need to go with netflix. This is what I don't understand. Netflix shouldn't need to have any kind of DRM, because at the end of the day, it's a terrible way to copy things. If you want to copy something, it's easy enough to just copy it from the DVD or even BluRay original copy. As long as Netflix doesn' allow you to download at full speed (just fast enough to watch it, with ample buffering) then it's a no-go for pirating. Because you can get a DVD rip off bittorrent much faster.
Very much agree. You only have 2 ears, you shouldn't need much more than 2 speakers. I watch almost all my movies using a decent set of headphones. Sounds much better than any speakers I'm willing to pay for. Using headphones is really the ultimate. You don't have to worry about getting the perfect seat, where other things are positioned in the room, and you don't have to worry about bothering neighbours, or even other people in your own house.
I agree with this. The publishers can charge whatever price they want for the book. They hold the copyright for the book. It's not like you can just go to some other publisher and get the same book at a lower price. The retailers all have to make money on it. You can only lower your selling price so close to the cost price. Everyone sells XBox 360 (or any other console) at the same price too (at least within a single country), but you don't see anybody crying foul over that.Everybody sells everything at the exact same price for the most part. Rarely do I see a price on a product that is significantly different then what a competitor is selling the exact same product for. Food seems to be the most variable. Whereas electronics/technology, and media (books, cds, dvds) seem to have almost no differentiation at all.
I bought a $400 laptop last boxing day, which is pretty much bottom of the line for notebooks. There are a few cheaper models, but most of those are just last year's left over stock (I actually just saw the same laptop I bought last year for $300). It's actually built pretty well. There's no reason that a quality tablet should have to cost $500. Maybe sub $100 is a little low, but we should easily be seeing the price get to $200 for a really good tablet. There's only so much processing power you need on these things. As long as you can play a movie at full resolution, and play some simple games, you are pretty much set. A tablet isn't a device for editing videos, or running a database server on. It is a media consumption device.
Very much agree with this. Also, having a PVR is only a small fix for some frustrations. You have to know ahead of time that you wanted to watch something. If you're friend tells you about some great new show that's on, you can't go back and watch stuff that you never told it to record. I would easily pay $50 for Netflix if they could just get all of the content, including new TV episodes as they air. I could drop my cable provider, up may internet usage limits, and still end up paying quite q bit less then I do now for cable. Not only that, but I could watch whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
I would say that in your friends case it was more a situation of "didn't care about english lit" that caused him to not be able to hack it in english lit. Also, these are 2 completely different fields. No being able to succeed in english lit says nothing about the skills need for being a lawyer. So I'm guessing it was either lack of interest/motivation, or a different set of strengths that allowed this to happen. I went to school for engineering, and I saw a lot of this. Many people dropped out, not becaause they weren't smart in general, but because they had no interest in the subject matter.
Maybe the exact model wouldn't work, but there's plenty of options. It's not like indie development is impossible on iOS walled garden platforms. That was my main point. It's actually one of the most indie friendly platforms next to the PC, and even then, it's probably a close tie. Consoles are terrible, and expect you to spend thousands on development kits just to get started. And they won't sell them to indie developers anyway. XBox 360 has some nice features for indie developers. But you aren't on a level playing field with the "pro" developers, because you don't have access to the same level of hardware. On iOS, everyone is on a level playing field, for a very small fee. Apple takes their 30%, but they take up all the distribution, hosting, payment processing. That's not a small task. For indie developers, setting up all that stuff is not a small task. So while it may not be the best platform for indie developers, it works quite a bit better than most systems I've seen. Even on the PC, sure you can put your app up on your website. But then you have to get people to come to your site, enter their credit card into some unknown site (paypal helps a little with this) and then they can download the games. You have to find a way to host the games such that they can't just download them directly, and that paying customers can redownload the game after they have already paid for it. Also, Paypal's current fees are 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. So if you plan on selling 99 cent apps, the payment processing alone will be more expensive than what Apple charges.
Or even better, always load something from the website when the content is third party. So if you're visiting random site, and they get you to load facebook content, then it would never look in your cache. There really would be some adjustments needed, to help with CDNs (content distribution networks), but that could be solved. Allow the browser to load anything from a subdomain from cache, but content that is from an unrelated domain always loads from the web. If you are using a CDN, just use a subdomain of your actual site to point toward the content, and you are set. It would cause slowdowns with all those sites that point to Google for JQuery and other similar mass hosted stuff, but probably a very small price to pay to protect your privacy.
Just because it's not physically hard, doesn't mean that it's not mentally hard. If being a lawyer is so easy, I'm sure a lot more people would be doing it. Oh, that's right, it isn't that easy at all. And they are putting themselves in a big risk. What happens if the lawsuit fails? They end up with nothing. They still have offices to pay for, employees to pay, and many other business related expenses. I'm sure the lawyers put quite a few hours into this case. It's not just a matter of filing a few papers, showing up in court for a couple days, and being done with it.
I do this all the time. My history is disabled by default. Cache is 0. I have never really had a need for history in the past 10 years. If I want to find something again, it's faster to just Google it. Or if I find something that I really don't want to lose, I just bookmark it. No reason to keep a history.
I agree with this. I've seen quite a few people with viruses on their MACs. My brother got a Mac Mini. He loves it, but he still got a virus on it. Some kind of really nasty thing that was hijacking all his dns traffic to the point where he couldn't even fetch his email anymore. There isn't anything special about a Mac (or any unix/linux machine) that makes writing viruses any more difficult. Sure you aren't running as root most of the time, but between privilege escalation problems and just plain old "start this program on login" issues, viruses can do plenty of damage.
In a world of 7 Billion people, 1 million people is still 1 in 7000. Not a small amount of people in raw numbers, but a very small percentage of the populuation of the world. Even if you only count computer users, that only a very small percentage. There' about a billion personal computers in use. So while this game (whatever it is, never heard of it) may have a million users, it's still only about 0.1% of computer users. Also, there's no reason this couldn't exist in a walled garden. There's tons of indie developers selling stuff for iOS. That store doesn't support pay what you want, but there's no reason they couldn't sell it for 99 cents, (or free) and ask for donations on their web site for people who wanted to pay more.
Not only that, but those fancy dual core phones you can buy cost $500. I can get a quad core laptop with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive for that much. And it comes with a nice big screen and keyboard. And the phone doesn't come anywhere close to having as much processing power as a even the week laptop. If you buy a desktop, you can get even better specs for the same price. Sure you can get a phone cheap when you sign your life away to you wireless carrier, but most people I know don't want to put that kind of money into a phone. They'd rather spend $200 on a phone, and get a real computer that can actually handle running real applications
Not to mention that the best thing about consoles is that everybody is playing on the same machine. You don't have to worry about whether you have a good enough machine and how good the framerate will be on your machine when buying console games. You don't have to worry about silly driver issues, or upgrading your machine every year because. All the current consoles are at least 5 years old. Even if you bought the original PS3 60 GB for $600 at launch (chosen because it was the most expensive), you still go an amazing deal, because that's 5+ years (still no replacement in the next year or two) without having to spend a single penny on upgrades. If you ask me, consoles will be all anybody owns in the future. I've seen where this is going. Most people will have a console, a tablet, which can be hooked up to a monitor keyboard and must when you have some work to get done. Desktop PCs with crazy specs and prices to go along with it will be the territory of a small set of enthusiasts. And everyone else will be exteremely happy because they no longer have to worry about driver issues, upgrades, minimum requirements, and all that other stuff. Me, I'll still own a desktop PC for many years to come.
Reminds me of the Simpsons. "Let the bears pay the bear tax". Why should you have to walk your garbage out to the curb. They should come inside your house and pick it up for you. Seriously. Take some responsibility for the planet. It's not like you have to have a compost heap in your backyard. Just throw it in a different bin, and bring it out to the road every week.
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See this is why I hate software patents. It's not because they are software, but because I haven't seen a single software patent that comes close to alluding how to actually implement the invention in the patent. If you take a patent for a mechanical device, it's usually described in such a way (using diagrams and such) how one who is skilled in the field would actually construct the mechanical device. When it's a software patent, they don't give any source code, pseudo code, or even allude to how one would actually program such a thing. So, even when the patent does expire, anybody wanting to take advantage of the invention in the patent has to come up with their own implementation from scratch. Sure you know the end goal of the program, but if there are no instructions on which algorithms one would use to create a driverless car, then the patent is useless. So Google gets a monopoly on driverless cars for the next 17 years, And after that, we all get nothing because we have no more information on how to implement said driverless car, because all the source code is locked up in copyright and trade secrets.
Seems to be helping my out quite a bit this year. Nice that I'm still able to bike to work in December. Saved me $100 on a bus pass.
Too much hyperbole from the people against this bill. It sounds like the ramblings of a madman, or some conspiracy nut. What it's going to allow them to do is take down access to sites like The Pirate Bay that are "dedicated" (this word appears a lot in the wikipedia article) to copyright infringement. It's not going to be used to take down legitimate sites. You can twist the words in the law to make that possible, but no judge is going to take down legitimate sites because somebody posted a single copyrighted item on them which was promptly removed.
I've heard a lot of bad things about this bill. I don't think it's a good bill, and hope it doesn't pass (even though it most likely will). But I'm hearing so much FUD from the people against this bill that it makes me roll my eyes every time I hear about it . Sites like StackOverflow and the Stack Exchange Network state they their sites could be directly harmed by this bill. PLLEEEAAASE. Get Real. No judge is going to take down a Q and A forum because somebody reports that one of the 8 million questions on the site is infringing on some copyrighted question (can you copyright a single question?) in some way. That isn't going to happen. People complain about the way things are worded, and that it's too broad. But that's what judges are for. Laws have always been broad and judges have always had to interpret them. This is how the legal system works. Otherwise you could argue, "I didn't kill the man, I just locked him in a cage with a lion." There's really no other way to take down access to foreign owned piracy exclusive sites. And there really does need to be a way to take sites like this down.
Sure it would. In my highschool, we had 4 classes, each 75 minutes. So that's a total of 5 hours of usage. You can easily get through a whole day of school without charging. First, you won't be using it for the entire time period of every class. The teacher should actually be teaching for a good portion of the class. Plus, reading a book is not even close to as battery intensive as playing a game. If you're just looking at text, the battery probably comes pretty close to the 9 hours they say it gets
I took a statistics and probability course. All exams were multiple choice. Also, "none of the above" was a choice on every single question. I think it was a cruel joke. No marks for showing your work, and if you messed up one thing, you always go "none of the above". Add to this the fact that the professor constantly (almost ever class) started out by explaining the wrong way to solve the problem, and then correcting herself half way though the question, meant that quite a few people did quite bad in that class.
THIS!
Facebook is terrible for for. The have have hundreds of millions of people browsing their site everyday, and it's filled to ads for scammers, porn, dubious websites and other junk. They could make a serious amount of money if they would just only take serious advertisers. You don't see ads for fake Rolex watches on NBC, but you do on Facebook, even though Facebook has a much bigger audience. They need a real advertising department that goes after big companies getting real advertisements for legitimate products. If the ads were for real products, people would be much more likely to click on them, and advertisers would pay much more for the ads. Right now, no serious company will advertise on Facebook because they don't want their product showing up next to ads for Russian Brides and get rich quick schemes.
The mysql_escape_string, mysql_real_escape_string, mysql_i_mean_it_this_time_escape_string thing probably has a lot to do with the sql injection vulnerabilities, not to mention that before mysqli, you couldn't even use prepared statements. That and the number of php "tutorials" on the web that don't even mention mysql_real_escape_string or prepared statements, leads to PHP being particularly bad. Add that to the fact that PHP is what is avaiable on cheap web hosts, and that it's the language of choice for many newbie programmers, and you go a recipe for disaster. The SQL injection problem isn't limited to PHP, but PHP probably has the biggest problem with it.
Plenty of other places to set up shop. Medical tourism is a big deal. I can guarantee that if you set up shop in Mexico or elsewhere, that cancer patients would flock there. If you had a genuine cure for cancer, most people would pay the price of the plane ticket. That's a paltry sum compared to the cost of medications.
Ah so very true. Free market at work here. Some of us may be screaming at the top of their lungs that they should be cheaper. But there's plenty of people out there with enough money that they will buy the eBooks anyway. For a lot of people eBooks are probably worth more than the physical book, because they are more convenient to tote around, and because if you have a kindle (free 3G) you can buy it from anywhere with cell phone reception; you don't even have to find a book store. There is a monopoly on every single book (that isn't under public domain), and the owner of the copyright can charge whatever they want. Any book that's in the public domain is often free or 99 cents. If you don't like the price of the new stuff, there's tons of stuff out there where copyright has lapsed. Classic books that have stood the test of time. You could read these you entire life, and never run out of books. If you want a particular, newer book, I don't think there's any solution, because the author and publisher still want to make a lot of money.
People who want rips of movies don't need to go with netflix. This is what I don't understand. Netflix shouldn't need to have any kind of DRM, because at the end of the day, it's a terrible way to copy things. If you want to copy something, it's easy enough to just copy it from the DVD or even BluRay original copy. As long as Netflix doesn' allow you to download at full speed (just fast enough to watch it, with ample buffering) then it's a no-go for pirating. Because you can get a DVD rip off bittorrent much faster.
Very much agree. You only have 2 ears, you shouldn't need much more than 2 speakers. I watch almost all my movies using a decent set of headphones. Sounds much better than any speakers I'm willing to pay for. Using headphones is really the ultimate. You don't have to worry about getting the perfect seat, where other things are positioned in the room, and you don't have to worry about bothering neighbours, or even other people in your own house.
I agree with this. The publishers can charge whatever price they want for the book. They hold the copyright for the book. It's not like you can just go to some other publisher and get the same book at a lower price. The retailers all have to make money on it. You can only lower your selling price so close to the cost price. Everyone sells XBox 360 (or any other console) at the same price too (at least within a single country), but you don't see anybody crying foul over that.Everybody sells everything at the exact same price for the most part. Rarely do I see a price on a product that is significantly different then what a competitor is selling the exact same product for. Food seems to be the most variable. Whereas electronics/technology, and media (books, cds, dvds) seem to have almost no differentiation at all.
I bought a $400 laptop last boxing day, which is pretty much bottom of the line for notebooks. There are a few cheaper models, but most of those are just last year's left over stock (I actually just saw the same laptop I bought last year for $300). It's actually built pretty well. There's no reason that a quality tablet should have to cost $500. Maybe sub $100 is a little low, but we should easily be seeing the price get to $200 for a really good tablet. There's only so much processing power you need on these things. As long as you can play a movie at full resolution, and play some simple games, you are pretty much set. A tablet isn't a device for editing videos, or running a database server on. It is a media consumption device.
Very much agree with this. Also, having a PVR is only a small fix for some frustrations. You have to know ahead of time that you wanted to watch something. If you're friend tells you about some great new show that's on, you can't go back and watch stuff that you never told it to record. I would easily pay $50 for Netflix if they could just get all of the content, including new TV episodes as they air. I could drop my cable provider, up may internet usage limits, and still end up paying quite q bit less then I do now for cable. Not only that, but I could watch whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
I would say that in your friends case it was more a situation of "didn't care about english lit" that caused him to not be able to hack it in english lit. Also, these are 2 completely different fields. No being able to succeed in english lit says nothing about the skills need for being a lawyer. So I'm guessing it was either lack of interest/motivation, or a different set of strengths that allowed this to happen. I went to school for engineering, and I saw a lot of this. Many people dropped out, not becaause they weren't smart in general, but because they had no interest in the subject matter.
Maybe the exact model wouldn't work, but there's plenty of options. It's not like indie development is impossible on iOS walled garden platforms. That was my main point. It's actually one of the most indie friendly platforms next to the PC, and even then, it's probably a close tie. Consoles are terrible, and expect you to spend thousands on development kits just to get started. And they won't sell them to indie developers anyway. XBox 360 has some nice features for indie developers. But you aren't on a level playing field with the "pro" developers, because you don't have access to the same level of hardware. On iOS, everyone is on a level playing field, for a very small fee. Apple takes their 30%, but they take up all the distribution, hosting, payment processing. That's not a small task. For indie developers, setting up all that stuff is not a small task. So while it may not be the best platform for indie developers, it works quite a bit better than most systems I've seen. Even on the PC, sure you can put your app up on your website. But then you have to get people to come to your site, enter their credit card into some unknown site (paypal helps a little with this) and then they can download the games. You have to find a way to host the games such that they can't just download them directly, and that paying customers can redownload the game after they have already paid for it. Also, Paypal's current fees are 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. So if you plan on selling 99 cent apps, the payment processing alone will be more expensive than what Apple charges.
Or even better, always load something from the website when the content is third party. So if you're visiting random site, and they get you to load facebook content, then it would never look in your cache. There really would be some adjustments needed, to help with CDNs (content distribution networks), but that could be solved. Allow the browser to load anything from a subdomain from cache, but content that is from an unrelated domain always loads from the web. If you are using a CDN, just use a subdomain of your actual site to point toward the content, and you are set. It would cause slowdowns with all those sites that point to Google for JQuery and other similar mass hosted stuff, but probably a very small price to pay to protect your privacy.
Just because it's not physically hard, doesn't mean that it's not mentally hard. If being a lawyer is so easy, I'm sure a lot more people would be doing it. Oh, that's right, it isn't that easy at all. And they are putting themselves in a big risk. What happens if the lawsuit fails? They end up with nothing. They still have offices to pay for, employees to pay, and many other business related expenses. I'm sure the lawyers put quite a few hours into this case. It's not just a matter of filing a few papers, showing up in court for a couple days, and being done with it.
I do this all the time. My history is disabled by default. Cache is 0. I have never really had a need for history in the past 10 years. If I want to find something again, it's faster to just Google it. Or if I find something that I really don't want to lose, I just bookmark it. No reason to keep a history.
I agree with this. I've seen quite a few people with viruses on their MACs. My brother got a Mac Mini. He loves it, but he still got a virus on it. Some kind of really nasty thing that was hijacking all his dns traffic to the point where he couldn't even fetch his email anymore. There isn't anything special about a Mac (or any unix/linux machine) that makes writing viruses any more difficult. Sure you aren't running as root most of the time, but between privilege escalation problems and just plain old "start this program on login" issues, viruses can do plenty of damage.
In a world of 7 Billion people, 1 million people is still 1 in 7000. Not a small amount of people in raw numbers, but a very small percentage of the populuation of the world. Even if you only count computer users, that only a very small percentage. There' about a billion personal computers in use. So while this game (whatever it is, never heard of it) may have a million users, it's still only about 0.1% of computer users. Also, there's no reason this couldn't exist in a walled garden. There's tons of indie developers selling stuff for iOS. That store doesn't support pay what you want, but there's no reason they couldn't sell it for 99 cents, (or free) and ask for donations on their web site for people who wanted to pay more.
Not only that, but those fancy dual core phones you can buy cost $500. I can get a quad core laptop with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive for that much. And it comes with a nice big screen and keyboard. And the phone doesn't come anywhere close to having as much processing power as a even the week laptop. If you buy a desktop, you can get even better specs for the same price. Sure you can get a phone cheap when you sign your life away to you wireless carrier, but most people I know don't want to put that kind of money into a phone. They'd rather spend $200 on a phone, and get a real computer that can actually handle running real applications
Not to mention that the best thing about consoles is that everybody is playing on the same machine. You don't have to worry about whether you have a good enough machine and how good the framerate will be on your machine when buying console games. You don't have to worry about silly driver issues, or upgrading your machine every year because. All the current consoles are at least 5 years old. Even if you bought the original PS3 60 GB for $600 at launch (chosen because it was the most expensive), you still go an amazing deal, because that's 5+ years (still no replacement in the next year or two) without having to spend a single penny on upgrades. If you ask me, consoles will be all anybody owns in the future. I've seen where this is going. Most people will have a console, a tablet, which can be hooked up to a monitor keyboard and must when you have some work to get done. Desktop PCs with crazy specs and prices to go along with it will be the territory of a small set of enthusiasts. And everyone else will be exteremely happy because they no longer have to worry about driver issues, upgrades, minimum requirements, and all that other stuff. Me, I'll still own a desktop PC for many years to come.
Reminds me of the Simpsons. "Let the bears pay the bear tax". Why should you have to walk your garbage out to the curb. They should come inside your house and pick it up for you. Seriously. Take some responsibility for the planet. It's not like you have to have a compost heap in your backyard. Just throw it in a different bin, and bring it out to the road every week.