I don't move a 23" monitor everywhere I go. Portablity means something. It's why I have a 13" MBP instead of a 17" MBP. If a phone won't easily slip into the jacket pocket of my sport coat or suit, I don't care what it does. I am not watching hollywood blockbusters on my phone.. I want my phone to be easily portable. To me the Galaxy S4 is a larger phone than I want to hold. But my clients are more likely to call than email or text me.
The future wife, she carries her phone in her purse mainly. And she uses it far more for social media and texts than phone calls. She can get away with having a larger phone.
I built an online shopping cart once that was originally 42k of javascript. Handled all the tracking of items, tax, and shipping in a variety of ways and even developed a multi-vendor capable version that was still under 55k. It powered an online ordering system for restaurants and coffee shops and it worked amazingly fast. All the server had to do was render pages from the products database in HTML. There weren't any writes to the database until the user clicked "order". It ran amazingly fast. Of course we still cared about those things as "broadband" was a 256k DSL line back then.
My dad was in charge of Payroll at Ft. Hood during the late 1960's while he was drafted. (he was a private with BA in Accounting and ran the department because the LT screwed up the Col's pay one too many times). They figured pay vouchers a lot by hand, but processed even back then via a Mainframe, usually at night. Then they would dispense the pay in cash those days. It was a nightmare even back then, often times requiring a lot of manual calculations.
Most the "Apps" I'm being hired to write are basically CRUD form apps that are designed to read info from tables in a database. Usually to take forms already in use by desktops written in Java or.Net or in some cases god only knows what and adapt them for use on mobile devices.
I've frankly found jQueryMobile + HTML5 + Phonegap/Cordova makes this task farily easy to undertake client side. Actuallly in most cases the cost is still developing and deploying the API side in your choice of server side scripting language. And often that's based upon a perl script that I wrote circa 2000 to take form input, validate, and then go fetch data from a database and return in XML, YAML, or JSON these days. Other projects, the server side is in PHP or C# or Java. Just depends on what the client already has.
Now I can see trying to buld other types of apps using HTML5/JS is asking for disaster.
Sorry, I'm an old perl guy who thinks use the right tool for the job and there is still more than one way to do it.
He'll if I knew what each of the major hospitals would charge for upcoming carpel tunnel surgery I could make a fair assement.
Compare that to some dental work, My dental insurance will cover 80% of the two crowns I need. Knowing that I could shop around and get estimates from two dentists. The one I chose for this work was almost 30% less.
My girlfriend got LASIK done a few years ago. It's now half what she paid with better lasers.
I'm in my early 30's and relatively healthy. Frankly I could get by with major medical and then even pay out of pocket for the carpel tunnel surgery if I could honestly shop around or even my yearly check up and occasional sinus infection if I could get a fair cash price.
But the fact hospitals will charge different amounts to different insurance companies hides what this stuff really costs
When we passed concealed carry here in Missouri, the Post Dispatch cried that the streets would run red with blood from conceal carry holders shooting everyone for every little offense.
A year or two later they ran a piece basically saying the paper's editors were wrong. Basically nothing changed. Crime rates didn't decrease overall nor were the streets running red with blood.
I keep an eye on the stories locally. I've read a few cases of where someone with a CCW was being robbed, pull the gun, and the robber ran away as they reported to the police. One case that sticks out in my mind was a group of 70 year olds who were mugged by an armed robber. They gave the robber their cash and he went on his way, but then turned and pointed the gun in their direction. That's when one of the men pulled out his revolver and shots went down range. Didn't hit the mugger, but the mugger didn't stick around either.
This is why I carry a $100 bill in my wallet. Most muggers are looking for a quick buck for a fix and will happily take the $100 and run.
But I also have a Walther PPS right above the wallet in case they don't.
And why can't snowmen be both/and instead of either/or? I know dualistic is lens most of the West uses, thanks Descartes, but this is a both/and. Snowden can very much be the hero for letting the public know about the various domestic and likely unconstitutional spy programs and a traitor for revealing certain details of foreign intelligence operations and at the same time.
Although at this point I'm pretty sure most people already knew or at least suspected that the government were doing such surveillance, we just didn't know the name of the program.
Furthermore I've yet to see anything really that damning that snowden released. We ease drop on the eu. File that udder shit they already knew. You really don't think the French try and acquire info on what kinds of deals Boeing is trying to make and give that info to Airbus?
It's amazing to watch just how quickly the story shifted from being the spy program to Snowden. It's been two weeks. Most people now are wondering, "oh yeah, what was that hubbaloo about spying or IRS targeting political group..."
I have a small business consulting/contracting and now upto 3 emplyees. I've been paying my own insurance out of pocket the past 6 years and has run me about $75 to now $87 a month for a decent plan that meets my needs well. (Nothing special, $2500 deductable, $35 doctor vists, prescription drug coverage) But again in the past 6 years I've been to my Doctor 7 times. 6 for annual check ups, free under my coverage, and once for a sinus infecction. I was young in my late 20's and now early 30's and single. I also pay for dental coverage.
The way my Dental works is pretty simple: they pay for twice a year cleanings, once a year x-rays, and then 80% of any non cosmetic proceedures. I don't have the best teeth in the world, and the solution is going to be a few crowns before things get worse. I was able to shop around and actually get prices from different dentists. I wish my health insurance could work much the same way. There would need to be emergancy coverage that is good anywhere: i.e. heart attack, etc.. But for a lot of other proceedures hospitals should have a 1 price policy, not this negioated rate mess where say a bypass is $18,000 for company A, $26000 for company B, and $50,000 if you come off the street. Hospitals should set the price: say $25,000 and then your insurance tell you if they cover 100%, 50%, 80% or whatever. And the prices should be upfront and on their websites in a PDF. An example for me personally is the fact that Carpel Tunnel surgery is in my future. Its not critical but I woud shop at the various hospitals around town to see where I felt I could get the best care for the $.
This issue was addressed a couple thousand years ago by a man name Plato. The work is called The Republic. You might want to consider reading it because it addresses this exact problem with direct democracy: it ends with the tyranny of the majority where minority opinions don't matter.
That's why we're a Constitutional Republic with checks and balances. At least on paper. That was the original intent of the Founders. What we are today is more or less an oligarchy. Politics here are controlled by a couple families, one Republican, one Democrat. One seems to hold one half of the state and federal offices, the other one holds the rest and occasionally job titles change as they reach term limits or get elected to a federal post.
I remember the failure rates for burning CD's early on was probably around 40%. Now if I burn a CD or DVD I don't think I've had a failure in a couple years now.
My building has a 5Gbs fibre connection, I spoke with the teleco service guy when they were out replacing the equipment a couple months ago. The limiting factor now is the fact the building was wired about 12 years ago with Cat 5. Overall I can't complain too much other than when it's bad weather out on the weekend and everyone seems to be home streaming Netflix. Usually it's throttling at the server I'm connected to that is my bottleneck.
More over I thought the largest problem today is the fact that our bodies are outliving our minds as more people develop diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.
Why? I'm really debating this coming generation of consoles. I'm partial to the PS4 because it's BSD based and I'm still a BSD geek at heart and at the moment the only title I'd miss are the future Halo installments and frankly Halo 4 just didn't seem like "Halo" to me. I don't know why, it's just sat collecting dust most of these past 6 months.
But I wouldn't put it past Sony to launch a patch this time next year that included some kind of "DRM". Hell if they removed OtherOS I don't put it past them to have an "Add DRM" patch.
I've tried BF3 on the PC when it was $5 the other day to compare it to the console versions, which I know multiplayer on console was seriously gimped. And I discovered why I stopped playing WSAD pc games: they hurt my wrist after a couple hours. I guess I'll have to look into an Xbox style controller for the PC if I elect to go that route.
I don't play many games. Last 2 years the regulars have been BF3 and then Battlestar Galactica Online or Star Trek Online. And both of those have seen seriously diminished playing times because of my wrist as well as the boredom of the grinds.
The game I'm looking forward too is Star Citizen presuming it's going to be in the cockpit space combat simulation that I can play with a joystick.
If he wanted to blame someone, I'd blame the folks at Wikileaks who advised him to travel from Hong Kong to Russia in the first place. Apparently they told him they'd find him a place for Asylum and it seems they couldn't deliver.
Sorry, but part of civil disobedience is a willingness to suffer the consequences as just or unjust as they maybe. That's what sets people like Gandhi, Mandela and MLKjr apart from this guy. They took their stands and paid the price of their stands.
Some want to lift this guy up as some kind of hero. Others a criminal and traitor. I've held the position that he's both. At least until he begins giving up operational tradecraft information then I start to lean more towards criminal. It's one thing to bring to light what is going on in generalities.
Although I'm getting a laugh at the coming out of the EU being up and arms about our spying on them, especially the French. After all the DGSE is the only intelligence service I know of that publically publishes the fact that 25% of their budget is spent on industrial espionage to help French businesses.
At any rate, glad we can all be focused on this little side drama as opposed to the meat of the story: mainly the spying programs that the NSA have been engaged in. Funny how just a week later that's been pushed from the news headlines. If this wasn't enough to get people into the streets with pitchforks and willing to tar and feather the lot of them in DC I guess nothing will. It was a nice republic, too bad we couldn't keep it.
I've heard this dreck for well over a decade now. Right up there with "year of desktop Linux" which really has never happened. Linux was never a threat to Microsoft and windows on the desktop. Linux killed the Unix venders.
Linux is not a threat to apple. Hell apple now maintains some key components that Linux widely uses (ever check and sees who owns and maintains CUPS these days).
And Linux is not dominating the mobile market. While android may use Linux underneath, when people by a droid phone, they think google and android os.
What keeps people like me using macs and windows are two factors. Ironically the same two factors to why I switched to osx over 10 years ago.
1) Lack of major software packages. For better or worse the business world runs on office. Personally at home I can get away with using OpenOffice or iWork. But for work, I've tried and always end up having to use office for some reason.
2) lack of quality hardware - on the server side Linux has this, not so much on the desktop and laptop side. Even windows now have this problem. I buy MacBook pros because I have yet to have one that has lasted under 4 years. Think pads used to have this level of quality, which you also paid for, but over the past 18 months I know a lot of people we work with are complaining that they are on their second or third think pad in that time.
Maybe as we get more cloud based apps this will change. I'm finding office 360 and skydive increasingly handy as I can now edit office docs online with either an iPad or android tablet easily. But seriously, Linux is still not a threat to either company.
So long as it works on Windows & MacOS as well as iOS, consoles, and most brand name Android devices that's enough to reach the overwhelming number of people on the planet. Most of whom don't care about DRM so long as it works on my X device.
It's what is happening. I had a professor in college who predicted by 2015 - 2020 the internet as we knew it then would be over. It would be controlled by corporate and governmental interests and that would be achieved through fragmentation and the fact that the backbone of the internet is owned by just a hand full of companies worldwide. While we've not yet seen the fragmentation yet, we've heard grumblings. I think what Iran is trying to do is similar to how the Great Firewall of China proved the internet could be tamed far easier than most around here thought. If Iran is even marginally successful in creating a Jihadnet or whatever, look for other other countries to try and do the same.
As long as it remains relatively unobtrusive. That was its problem in the early day, DRM was overly restrictive and made things a PITA for most ordinary users to use it. Apple figured out a way to do it where DRM was there, but was relatively unobtrusive. The studios et. al. learned. So long as it's easy to use and stays out of the way of what most people want to do, i.e. view content online easily, it will remain. When most people go to Netflix, so long as the movie they click on starts to play, they don't care if it has DRM or not.
There was a good article a couple days ago in the WSJ about the backlash against kickstarter. And it's frankly crowd funding I think has reached it's peak and now for the most part there is too much signal to noise ratio. That being said, but it can be used for is someone with a proven track record, or a good solid plan to get the cash they need to create a product.
I've donated to two Kickstarter projects: Star Citizen & Pressgram.
Star Citizen because it's Chris Roberts who created Wing Commander and probably my favourite computer game of all time: Wing Commander Privateer. To me it's what I always wanted, Privateer the MMO (I know there was EVE, but EVE wasn't exactly space combat simulation like WC, X-Wing, or FreeSpace).
Pressgram I donated to because I run a couple sites based on Wordpress including one with several contributors. I can see as we are out at events the allure of being able to post photos easily to the site using an instagram style app, especially for the less technical contributors. That developer had a very well thought out UI/UX model and how he planned to spend the money for development of the app. So i saw the value and chipped in a few dollars.
If you are an established name or have a well thought out plan/product I think Kickstarter can work. But with the deluge of everyone with the "Fund my trendy video/movie/book/whatever" is starting to get annoying. Case in point is a local fashion designer I know wanted to do Kickstarter to raise the funds for production. Even after articles in a couple local magazines and news paper raised $3,000 or $10,000. It was not a well organized campaign and more of a beg-a-thon. And that's what I see with a lot of these projects that have flooded those sites.
Take your own head out the sand and look around, most of the population, the 99.5% of people not on slashdot don't give a shit so long as the solution is unobtrusive. Back with iTunes were all DRMed, so long as they could copy to a couple iPods and burn to CD, people didn't care that there was DRM. It was there, but it didn't get in their way. When DRM was removed from most songs, guess what, none of my non-geek friends even noticed. To them there were no change.
Most people I know who aren't computer geeks really don't care. $8 a month to rent access to movies, TV shows, or Music? They shrug and say it's cheaper than buying it all off iTunes or on optical disc of your choice at the store.
So get used to it, DRM is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
This. I enjoy flying R/C airplanes. Loved them ever since I was a kid as one of our neighbors was real big into it. I've already noticed that model rocketry is about dead, although I admit I've not really looked in the past couple years at a proper hobby shop. Between the whole "Drones" and "Terrorists" things I've wondered how long R/C planes as a hobby would last.
We use HTML5/JS in conjunction with Apache Cordova to create Mobile Apps for iOS & Android. For most applications we're hired to do, mainly form apps really, this combo works well, we can build & deploy quickly. But everything we put into localstorage is encrypted using an AES library. User chooses a password as the key and have to reenter the password to retrieve the information. There is an option to wipe the database and clear all storage if you can't remember the password. It's simple and it keeps the data secure enough for our purposes. We're not storing credit card or other data usually. Is it foolproof, probably not, but better than nothing.
After 9/11 there were things done that made sense such as equipping airliners with armored cockpit doors, not allowing knives or axes or chainsaws in carry on, but collectively we should have kept a stiff upper lip, rebuilt the damn towers 1 story higher and said "It's going to take more than that to change us". Instead we went whining and cowering to the corner and those seeking more power ceased the opportunity telling us "they'd make us safe". I've read that line in enough history books to know whenever those in power start making that claim, bad things happen. Really bad things.
If you want to live in a free and open society the consequence of such is that sometimes people do bad things. That is the price of such a society. I think in my parents and certainly my grand parents generation they understood this. I put a lot of people off when I say this: but 3000 people die when bad guys crash planes into buildings. Well maybe we should look at things like the cockpit doors and explore air marshal programs. But the Patriot Act? No thanks. If it means 3000 people have to die now and then compared to having to live in a surveillance state, then so be it. 3000 people have to die. It's the price of the very freedoms we claim we so desire. So when bad guys do bad things, lets as a society help those directly effected the best ways we can, but we're never going to be safe. It's a dangerous world. And we as a society in the US don't seem to want to wake up to that reality.
Now I look around and wonder if Hobbes wasn't right: people are stupid and need to be ruled over by Kings. Because that what it seems like people have been "wanting" these past 12 years...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't move a 23" monitor everywhere I go. Portablity means something. It's why I have a 13" MBP instead of a 17" MBP. If a phone won't easily slip into the jacket pocket of my sport coat or suit, I don't care what it does. I am not watching hollywood blockbusters on my phone.. I want my phone to be easily portable. To me the Galaxy S4 is a larger phone than I want to hold. But my clients are more likely to call than email or text me.
The future wife, she carries her phone in her purse mainly. And she uses it far more for social media and texts than phone calls. She can get away with having a larger phone.
I built an online shopping cart once that was originally 42k of javascript. Handled all the tracking of items, tax, and shipping in a variety of ways and even developed a multi-vendor capable version that was still under 55k. It powered an online ordering system for restaurants and coffee shops and it worked amazingly fast. All the server had to do was render pages from the products database in HTML. There weren't any writes to the database until the user clicked "order". It ran amazingly fast. Of course we still cared about those things as "broadband" was a 256k DSL line back then.
My dad was in charge of Payroll at Ft. Hood during the late 1960's while he was drafted. (he was a private with BA in Accounting and ran the department because the LT screwed up the Col's pay one too many times). They figured pay vouchers a lot by hand, but processed even back then via a Mainframe, usually at night. Then they would dispense the pay in cash those days. It was a nightmare even back then, often times requiring a lot of manual calculations.
Most the "Apps" I'm being hired to write are basically CRUD form apps that are designed to read info from tables in a database. Usually to take forms already in use by desktops written in Java or .Net or in some cases god only knows what and adapt them for use on mobile devices.
I've frankly found jQueryMobile + HTML5 + Phonegap/Cordova makes this task farily easy to undertake client side. Actuallly in most cases the cost is still developing and deploying the API side in your choice of server side scripting language. And often that's based upon a perl script that I wrote circa 2000 to take form input, validate, and then go fetch data from a database and return in XML, YAML, or JSON these days. Other projects, the server side is in PHP or C# or Java. Just depends on what the client already has.
Now I can see trying to buld other types of apps using HTML5/JS is asking for disaster.
Sorry, I'm an old perl guy who thinks use the right tool for the job and there is still more than one way to do it.
He'll if I knew what each of the major hospitals would charge for upcoming carpel tunnel surgery I could make a fair assement.
Compare that to some dental work, My dental insurance will cover 80% of the two crowns I need. Knowing that I could shop around and get estimates from two dentists. The one I chose for this work was almost 30% less.
My girlfriend got LASIK done a few years ago. It's now half what she paid with better lasers.
I'm in my early 30's and relatively healthy. Frankly I could get by with major medical and then even pay out of pocket for the carpel tunnel surgery if I could honestly shop around or even my yearly check up and occasional sinus infection if I could get a fair cash price.
But the fact hospitals will charge different amounts to different insurance companies hides what this stuff really costs
We rot13 out keys, nothing could be safer I tell you!
When we passed concealed carry here in Missouri, the Post Dispatch cried that the streets would run red with blood from conceal carry holders shooting everyone for every little offense.
A year or two later they ran a piece basically saying the paper's editors were wrong. Basically nothing changed. Crime rates didn't decrease overall nor were the streets running red with blood.
I keep an eye on the stories locally. I've read a few cases of where someone with a CCW was being robbed, pull the gun, and the robber ran away as they reported to the police. One case that sticks out in my mind was a group of 70 year olds who were mugged by an armed robber. They gave the robber their cash and he went on his way, but then turned and pointed the gun in their direction. That's when one of the men pulled out his revolver and shots went down range. Didn't hit the mugger, but the mugger didn't stick around either.
This is why I carry a $100 bill in my wallet. Most muggers are looking for a quick buck for a fix and will happily take the $100 and run.
But I also have a Walther PPS right above the wallet in case they don't.
Oh I can think of a way of stopping them: libel lawsuits.
And why can't snowmen be both/and instead of either/or? I know dualistic is lens most of the West uses, thanks Descartes, but this is a both/and. Snowden can very much be the hero for letting the public know about the various domestic and likely unconstitutional spy programs and a traitor for revealing certain details of foreign intelligence operations and at the same time.
Although at this point I'm pretty sure most people already knew or at least suspected that the government were doing such surveillance, we just didn't know the name of the program.
Furthermore I've yet to see anything really that damning that snowden released. We ease drop on the eu. File that udder shit they already knew. You really don't think the French try and acquire info on what kinds of deals Boeing is trying to make and give that info to Airbus?
It's amazing to watch just how quickly the story shifted from being the spy program to Snowden. It's been two weeks. Most people now are wondering, "oh yeah, what was that hubbaloo about spying or IRS targeting political group..."
I have a small business consulting/contracting and now upto 3 emplyees. I've been paying my own insurance out of pocket the past 6 years and has run me about $75 to now $87 a month for a decent plan that meets my needs well. (Nothing special, $2500 deductable, $35 doctor vists, prescription drug coverage) But again in the past 6 years I've been to my Doctor 7 times. 6 for annual check ups, free under my coverage, and once for a sinus infecction. I was young in my late 20's and now early 30's and single. I also pay for dental coverage.
The way my Dental works is pretty simple: they pay for twice a year cleanings, once a year x-rays, and then 80% of any non cosmetic proceedures. I don't have the best teeth in the world, and the solution is going to be a few crowns before things get worse. I was able to shop around and actually get prices from different dentists. I wish my health insurance could work much the same way. There would need to be emergancy coverage that is good anywhere: i.e. heart attack, etc.. But for a lot of other proceedures hospitals should have a 1 price policy, not this negioated rate mess where say a bypass is $18,000 for company A, $26000 for company B, and $50,000 if you come off the street. Hospitals should set the price: say $25,000 and then your insurance tell you if they cover 100%, 50%, 80% or whatever. And the prices should be upfront and on their websites in a PDF. An example for me personally is the fact that Carpel Tunnel surgery is in my future. Its not critical but I woud shop at the various hospitals around town to see where I felt I could get the best care for the $.
This issue was addressed a couple thousand years ago by a man name Plato. The work is called The Republic. You might want to consider reading it because it addresses this exact problem with direct democracy: it ends with the tyranny of the majority where minority opinions don't matter.
That's why we're a Constitutional Republic with checks and balances. At least on paper. That was the original intent of the Founders. What we are today is more or less an oligarchy. Politics here are controlled by a couple families, one Republican, one Democrat. One seems to hold one half of the state and federal offices, the other one holds the rest and occasionally job titles change as they reach term limits or get elected to a federal post.
I remember the failure rates for burning CD's early on was probably around 40%. Now if I burn a CD or DVD I don't think I've had a failure in a couple years now.
My building has a 5Gbs fibre connection, I spoke with the teleco service guy when they were out replacing the equipment a couple months ago. The limiting factor now is the fact the building was wired about 12 years ago with Cat 5. Overall I can't complain too much other than when it's bad weather out on the weekend and everyone seems to be home streaming Netflix. Usually it's throttling at the server I'm connected to that is my bottleneck.
More over I thought the largest problem today is the fact that our bodies are outliving our minds as more people develop diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.
Why? I'm really debating this coming generation of consoles. I'm partial to the PS4 because it's BSD based and I'm still a BSD geek at heart and at the moment the only title I'd miss are the future Halo installments and frankly Halo 4 just didn't seem like "Halo" to me. I don't know why, it's just sat collecting dust most of these past 6 months.
But I wouldn't put it past Sony to launch a patch this time next year that included some kind of "DRM". Hell if they removed OtherOS I don't put it past them to have an "Add DRM" patch.
I've tried BF3 on the PC when it was $5 the other day to compare it to the console versions, which I know multiplayer on console was seriously gimped. And I discovered why I stopped playing WSAD pc games: they hurt my wrist after a couple hours. I guess I'll have to look into an Xbox style controller for the PC if I elect to go that route.
I don't play many games. Last 2 years the regulars have been BF3 and then Battlestar Galactica Online or Star Trek Online. And both of those have seen seriously diminished playing times because of my wrist as well as the boredom of the grinds.
The game I'm looking forward too is Star Citizen presuming it's going to be in the cockpit space combat simulation that I can play with a joystick.
If he wanted to blame someone, I'd blame the folks at Wikileaks who advised him to travel from Hong Kong to Russia in the first place. Apparently they told him they'd find him a place for Asylum and it seems they couldn't deliver.
Sorry, but part of civil disobedience is a willingness to suffer the consequences as just or unjust as they maybe. That's what sets people like Gandhi, Mandela and MLKjr apart from this guy. They took their stands and paid the price of their stands.
Some want to lift this guy up as some kind of hero. Others a criminal and traitor. I've held the position that he's both. At least until he begins giving up operational tradecraft information then I start to lean more towards criminal. It's one thing to bring to light what is going on in generalities.
Although I'm getting a laugh at the coming out of the EU being up and arms about our spying on them, especially the French. After all the DGSE is the only intelligence service I know of that publically publishes the fact that 25% of their budget is spent on industrial espionage to help French businesses.
At any rate, glad we can all be focused on this little side drama as opposed to the meat of the story: mainly the spying programs that the NSA have been engaged in. Funny how just a week later that's been pushed from the news headlines. If this wasn't enough to get people into the streets with pitchforks and willing to tar and feather the lot of them in DC I guess nothing will. It was a nice republic, too bad we couldn't keep it.
I've heard this dreck for well over a decade now. Right up there with "year of desktop Linux" which really has never happened. Linux was never a threat to Microsoft and windows on the desktop. Linux killed the Unix venders.
Linux is not a threat to apple. Hell apple now maintains some key components that Linux widely uses (ever check and sees who owns and maintains CUPS these days).
And Linux is not dominating the mobile market. While android may use Linux underneath, when people by a droid phone, they think google and android os.
What keeps people like me using macs and windows are two factors. Ironically the same two factors to why I switched to osx over 10 years ago.
1) Lack of major software packages. For better or worse the business world runs on office. Personally at home I can get away with using OpenOffice or iWork. But for work, I've tried and always end up having to use office for some reason.
2) lack of quality hardware - on the server side Linux has this, not so much on the desktop and laptop side. Even windows now have this problem. I buy MacBook pros because I have yet to have one that has lasted under 4 years. Think pads used to have this level of quality, which you also paid for, but over the past 18 months I know a lot of people we work with are complaining that they are on their second or third think pad in that time.
Maybe as we get more cloud based apps this will change. I'm finding office 360 and skydive increasingly handy as I can now edit office docs online with either an iPad or android tablet easily. But seriously, Linux is still not a threat to either company.
Unfortunately, you don't matter.
So long as it works on Windows & MacOS as well as iOS, consoles, and most brand name Android devices that's enough to reach the overwhelming number of people on the planet. Most of whom don't care about DRM so long as it works on my X device.
It's what is happening. I had a professor in college who predicted by 2015 - 2020 the internet as we knew it then would be over. It would be controlled by corporate and governmental interests and that would be achieved through fragmentation and the fact that the backbone of the internet is owned by just a hand full of companies worldwide. While we've not yet seen the fragmentation yet, we've heard grumblings. I think what Iran is trying to do is similar to how the Great Firewall of China proved the internet could be tamed far easier than most around here thought. If Iran is even marginally successful in creating a Jihadnet or whatever, look for other other countries to try and do the same.
As long as it remains relatively unobtrusive. That was its problem in the early day, DRM was overly restrictive and made things a PITA for most ordinary users to use it. Apple figured out a way to do it where DRM was there, but was relatively unobtrusive. The studios et. al. learned. So long as it's easy to use and stays out of the way of what most people want to do, i.e. view content online easily, it will remain. When most people go to Netflix, so long as the movie they click on starts to play, they don't care if it has DRM or not.
There was a good article a couple days ago in the WSJ about the backlash against kickstarter. And it's frankly crowd funding I think has reached it's peak and now for the most part there is too much signal to noise ratio. That being said, but it can be used for is someone with a proven track record, or a good solid plan to get the cash they need to create a product.
I've donated to two Kickstarter projects: Star Citizen & Pressgram.
Star Citizen because it's Chris Roberts who created Wing Commander and probably my favourite computer game of all time: Wing Commander Privateer. To me it's what I always wanted, Privateer the MMO (I know there was EVE, but EVE wasn't exactly space combat simulation like WC, X-Wing, or FreeSpace).
Pressgram I donated to because I run a couple sites based on Wordpress including one with several contributors. I can see as we are out at events the allure of being able to post photos easily to the site using an instagram style app, especially for the less technical contributors. That developer had a very well thought out UI/UX model and how he planned to spend the money for development of the app. So i saw the value and chipped in a few dollars.
If you are an established name or have a well thought out plan/product I think Kickstarter can work. But with the deluge of everyone with the "Fund my trendy video/movie/book/whatever" is starting to get annoying. Case in point is a local fashion designer I know wanted to do Kickstarter to raise the funds for production. Even after articles in a couple local magazines and news paper raised $3,000 or $10,000. It was not a well organized campaign and more of a beg-a-thon. And that's what I see with a lot of these projects that have flooded those sites.
Take your own head out the sand and look around, most of the population, the 99.5% of people not on slashdot don't give a shit so long as the solution is unobtrusive. Back with iTunes were all DRMed, so long as they could copy to a couple iPods and burn to CD, people didn't care that there was DRM. It was there, but it didn't get in their way. When DRM was removed from most songs, guess what, none of my non-geek friends even noticed. To them there were no change.
Most people I know who aren't computer geeks really don't care. $8 a month to rent access to movies, TV shows, or Music? They shrug and say it's cheaper than buying it all off iTunes or on optical disc of your choice at the store.
So get used to it, DRM is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
This. I enjoy flying R/C airplanes. Loved them ever since I was a kid as one of our neighbors was real big into it. I've already noticed that model rocketry is about dead, although I admit I've not really looked in the past couple years at a proper hobby shop. Between the whole "Drones" and "Terrorists" things I've wondered how long R/C planes as a hobby would last.
We use HTML5/JS in conjunction with Apache Cordova to create Mobile Apps for iOS & Android. For most applications we're hired to do, mainly form apps really, this combo works well, we can build & deploy quickly. But everything we put into localstorage is encrypted using an AES library. User chooses a password as the key and have to reenter the password to retrieve the information. There is an option to wipe the database and clear all storage if you can't remember the password. It's simple and it keeps the data secure enough for our purposes. We're not storing credit card or other data usually. Is it foolproof, probably not, but better than nothing.
After 9/11 there were things done that made sense such as equipping airliners with armored cockpit doors, not allowing knives or axes or chainsaws in carry on, but collectively we should have kept a stiff upper lip, rebuilt the damn towers 1 story higher and said "It's going to take more than that to change us". Instead we went whining and cowering to the corner and those seeking more power ceased the opportunity telling us "they'd make us safe". I've read that line in enough history books to know whenever those in power start making that claim, bad things happen. Really bad things.
If you want to live in a free and open society the consequence of such is that sometimes people do bad things. That is the price of such a society. I think in my parents and certainly my grand parents generation they understood this. I put a lot of people off when I say this: but 3000 people die when bad guys crash planes into buildings. Well maybe we should look at things like the cockpit doors and explore air marshal programs. But the Patriot Act? No thanks. If it means 3000 people have to die now and then compared to having to live in a surveillance state, then so be it. 3000 people have to die. It's the price of the very freedoms we claim we so desire. So when bad guys do bad things, lets as a society help those directly effected the best ways we can, but we're never going to be safe. It's a dangerous world. And we as a society in the US don't seem to want to wake up to that reality.
Now I look around and wonder if Hobbes wasn't right: people are stupid and need to be ruled over by Kings. Because that what it seems like people have been "wanting" these past 12 years...