There is a level of debatable difference between previous iterations of car modding (more power, better/worse handling, appearance, sound) and modifying software that has the ability to fully drive a car. Sure, adding a supercharger and 200 HP to a car could make it more dangerous in the hands of an average driver, or potentially push the physics of the car to the point where it's no longer 100% safe on the road, but that's still in a different realm than messing with the brain of a car that you didn't design, that perhaps isn't even fully understood by the hackers, and could, in theory, drive the car by itself in any way that it wants.
The key difference here is the previous modding still left the driver in control, this modding could (maybe not in its current iteration but future iterations) put the control in something else's hands.
And the geniuses at the state level have or have not considered donating this to other public entities in the state, e.g., the public school systems, state universities, etc. that probably all receive some level of state funding?
I didn't mean for that to come off as an "advertisement" (it's not like I even posted contact information), but I think any person is motivated to justify their value (either to potential or existing customers or to their employer). I also don't think you're a "sucker" for trying to do it on your own. I just don't agree with articles and the following discussion that attempt to speak for everyone when it comes to fees for service. Does it make sense to pay an accountant to do your taxes? How about paying the dealership to fix your car? After all, with access to the internet you've basically got all of the information you need to be able to solve any problem you might encounter.
You do, however, have limited time in the day and need to prioritize and assign a value to that time. Is it best spent researching the best fund providers or calculating the savings rate necessary to retire at 65? Is hunting down your replacement car part online and then spending two hours in the garage with bloody knuckles worth saving $100 at the dealership? Can the tax accountant find an extra deduction for you to justify their fee in filling out a 1040 form? The answers to these questions are not universal, they are different for everyone.
As someone who just recently switched careers to be a financial advisor, I find your experience to be disheartening. I spent twenty years as an engineer but didn't feel fulfilled because I couldn't see a direct impact of my labor improving the lives of the people around me, so I wanted a way to more directly benefit those around me. I agree with the general sentiment in this thread that it's hard for the average investor to quantify the financial benefit of working with an advisor on an account with fee-based billing.
Vanguard (and others) have done research on this (https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/advisorsec/researchcommentary/article/IWE_ResPuttingAValueOnValue) and have quantified the value of an advisor at somewhere between 1.5 and 3.0% on average (and this is Vanguard saying this). Many people are somewhat short-sighted by the decade long bull market in US equities where it's been hard for any active strategy to outperform, but a lot of value from working with a professional comes from behavioral coaching during long bear markets, as well as tax strategies closer to retirement.
I sympathize with not wanting to pay someone else for something I feel capable of doing on my own. I hate paying an electrician when I can do basic electrical work, despise hiring a painter or dry-wall installer to little repairs here and there, and don't even get me started on paying for insurance. The true value you get from any professional isn't the daily value they add to your life, it's the way they swoop in to save you during an emergency. The story I like to tell is about (of all things) my insurance agent (and I'm not here to ding or promote anyone specifically so I'll leave names out), but you could show me all the commercials in the world about how I could save 15% by switching to some online insurance company with no local office, and nothing you could say would motivate me to switch. I have a personal relationship with my agent, and I can say with 100% certainty that if I were on my lawn watching my house burn down at 2 AM, my agent would be there as fast as he could to put his arm around my family and me to say "I know this looks bad, but I'm going to take care of it, let's get you to a hotel and don't worry about a thing." That's where professionals are worth every dime, but you have to work with someone who genuinely cares about you and not their take home pay.
So if you want to go it alone, you certainly can (I send many people that direction if it's best for them), but if you find a good professional and give them a chance, there are many ways they can add value to what you're doing. Financial Advisors (and CFP's in particular) are there to help with all aspects of your financial life, including tax planning, estate planning, risk management, education funding, charitable giving, etc.
It's funny to me that on a site like Slashdot, we can have a confluence of the raging "I hate Windows", the blind recommendations of "everyone should switch to Linux" and at the same time admit that we are subject to ISP's where a 100 MB download is something we need to be concerned about.
If technology is your true obsession in traditional Slashdot sense, then you could really care less about people running Windows because it's not you. You're already running Linux and think the rest of the world should just give up, and you're paying for gigabit fiber because #fiber.
If you're anyone else, Windows gets the job done, you don't notice or don't care that 6 stupid games appeared minutes after installing your computer and quickly figured out you could right-click and uninstall them and go about your business. You'll not even be aware that the ISP's covering the majority of the population have either eliminated data caps (Comcast) or have caps so reasonably high (>350 GB) that a few hundred MB on a wasted game download is inconsequential (CenturyLink, AT&T, Cox) or you'll be thankful that in Windows you can set a connection as Metered to limit background downloads.
MS charges $60/yr for Gold, not $120. Most of the time you can find discounted codes that are closer to $45 / yr. You get 4 games / month with Gold (2 for 360, 2 for Xbox One), but I agree that usually they aren't the best or newest games (but neither are 30-year old Nintendo games).
Have to agree with you there. Had Android phones (Motorola and HTC) and Windows phones (Nokia), both struggled to maintain support even at 1 year old. Google and Microsoft would push the updates out to vendors but then the vendors would sit on it for months, if they even released it at all. At least in Apple's universe you never feel like you're losing out to someone else. Yes, you still get dropped due to old age at some point, but iOS 12 supports the 5s that was released in 2013, so that's a pretty good run of support (5 years!). And you know that you're getting the update at the same time on your phone as everyone else.
Actually, short term capital gains and unqualified dividends are taxed at ordinary income rates. Long term capital gains (stocks held longer than 1 year) and qualified dividends (stocks held for more than 60 days in a 121 day window around the dividend distribution) are taxed at preferential rates, as low as 0% depending on your income bracket but at 15% for a good portion of the population.
Not sure how anyone could be surprised about this. If you're an investor, you damn well better be paying attention to what the company is doing, and in April when Mark Zuckerberg delivered his prepared testimony to Congress, he laid it all out:
"I've directed our teams to invest so much in security — on top of the other investments we're making — that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward. But I want to be clear about what our priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits."
It's not a debate tactic, it's a factual reference to the cost of enterprise level OS installations/support. OpenSUSE is about the same cost so there isn't any cherry picking of the most expensive solution. You're taking this whole debate out of context. We're talking about a government purchasing an operating system for tens of thousands of workstations. They will NOT support those all internally, they most likely WANT it to be certified on their hardware, and none of their employees are going to put their necks on the line and say "I'll support this internally." Even to hire the dedicated staff to do so would be expensive (remember that employees cost you in salary, benefits, pensions, or whatever the German equivalent is).
If cost were the primary motivator they would just take the default Windows install that comes with the hardware they could buy in bulk from someone like Dell. The 20+ year hatred of Microsoft on this website doesn't excuse anyone from trying to understand how big businesses that use machines "just to get things done" don't care about the 0.5% performance gain you got from compiling your own distro or the $49 you saved by using your open-source office app that struggles to interchange recent file formats.
And yes, I'm sure that Microsoft has a much better understanding of international data privacy laws and has no problem tailoring their OS to support a government's specific needs. They've been doing it for decades. But *surprise*, for basic home users they're going to try and scrape some information they deem useful that, at the end of the day, likely isn't going to affect you one iota. And now everyone else will jump on me for that in between checking their Gmail account and Facebook feed, but I'm the loose-lipped liberal;-)
You must not be using an enterprise version then. RedHat charges $299 per workstation license, per year, if you want support, $179 if you want to do it yourself. You can get the desktop version with no support, but you're still going to pay $49 / yr. Windows 10 is $84 / yr in comparison. So if you're going to compare apples to apples by comparing the pricing of enterprise licensing with support, then you're not really any better off in either camp.
Ummm... since you referenced "iphone", I'll use that in my rebuttal.
> File Transfer - iPhones can easily transfer most file types wirelessly using AirDrop, you don't even need to know the other person's email address, phone number, ip address, etc. > Screen size - you can wirelessly project to a screen of any size using an AppleTV > Keyboard - you can connect any bluetooth keyboard you want or use voice dictation > Boot time - no comment, but are you including the time to get to a usable GUI, or just to a command prompt > Durability - I'm pretty sure my phone would survive a 4 foot drop better than my monitor or tower desktop would, but I'm unwilling to verify > Office - my iPhone will run Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a slew of competing Apple Office apps > Multitask - the most debatable, there are multitasking options as far as video overlay, or split screen apps on the iPad, but the state of your app is also saved so switching between apps isn't really an issue in most cases > Exclusivity - huh?
Oh, yes, that makes more sense. My guess, and I stress that it's a guess, is that MS makes far more money on the recurring revenue from licensing to game publishers and Xbox Live subscriptions, and from their standpoint would prefer to bring that model to the PC market as well. If they can just charge you as a "gamer" to support their Xbox ecosystem, then they shouldn't care whether you're playing on a "console" or a PC. They benefit from increased revenue from PC gamers, and people like me benefit from the flexibility of playing at the PC when I want to and playing on the console when I want to (with all of my saved games following me no matter where I play in the world).
I agree with most of your points. After getting burned by potential customer backlash over their original Xbox One reveal (more specifically over the game licensing changes, which I was in favor of), they probably prefer to see Sony make the first move and then respond in kind. I also agree that the One X is a nicer piece of hardware and I think they've done an excellent job of soliciting user feedback through their online portal (https://xboxideas.uservoice.com/) and have continued to enhance the product with monthly feature / bug fix updates.
The only point I disagree on is the Windows 10 / Xbox cross-play and licensing. I love the idea of buying a game and getting the option to play it on my console or my PC and have the same online experience and I suspect this will only continue as the Xbox turns into more and more of a PC-based hardware solution. I prefer playing on the computer but many of my favorite games started off as Xbox only or I have to play on the Xbox if I want to play with my friends. As soon as that barrier is made completely transparent and I can just enjoy the game regardless of which Microsoft product I'm playing it on, the better.
I went from the 360 to the Xbox One and don't have any complaints. Fantastic piece of hardware and an enjoyable user experience. Also love the integration with Windows 10, allowing me to access the console, stream games, interact with parties, etc. without leaving my desktop.
Where do you see 3-year life cycle? I have an Xbox One that I bought in 2013. It still does and will always play every Xbox One game released. A new hardware platform in 2020 would be a 7 year life cycle for a console which is completely reasonable. Remember that the Xbox One S and Xbox One X are effectively mid-cycle refreshes that just try and keep the platform viable until the next generation. They didn't drastically alter anything other than supporting some higher resolution needs of a subset of users.
I disagree. A console existed to deliver a high quality and consistent experience based on specialized hardware and input interfaces at a time when the general consumer couldn't be bothered to labor through the complexities of building a computer, adding an appropriate graphic and sound card (yes, you used to have to do that), and then attaching an input peripheral (do I have a free serial port?). Eventually it evolved to extract the most amount of performance out of the lowest cost hardware and, with the internet, evolved to create the online multiplayer ecosystem which sought to deliver a balanced (read fair) competitive landscape where nobody had a real hardware advantage. In the years since the first consoles debuted, we have come a long way on the PC side of things, both from a device capability standpoint as well as a end-user knowledge standpoint. Most PCs can now play a variety of games, have access to a wide range of input peripherals, and are supported by robust development platforms. With content delivery moving online, there is less worry as well about whether your game needs to be delivered on 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, etc.
Consoles over the last two generations have consistently moved closer and closer to being general computing platforms (remember that the PS3 could run Linux and the Xbox One is effectively running Windows with an Xbox virtual machine). This trend will only continue until the gaming platform is no more than a gaming-focused UI on top of a general purpose OS backend. At that point, PlayStation vs. Xbox isn't so much about the hardware, but the ecosystem that comes with it. I'd argue that Microsoft has made far better progress with that than Sony has to date.
Seems irrelevant, but yes, I do own Intel stock (it has more than doubled the performance of AMD's stock over 10 years, but again I fail the see the relevance of that to this conversation). I also own Intel processors and have owned processors from Apple (iPhone), Digital (DEC Alpha), AMD (Opteron), IBM (PowerPC), and I'm sure others I can't remember right now. And the funny thing is... they all worked and probably would still today if all of the supporting hardware was still around. I'm also pretty sure that if we found a flaw (and I'm sure we could) in any of those processors, the manufacturer would tell me where I could put it if the product was more than 10 years old.
Flaws have existed in nearly every product ever released since the beginning of time, there is little expectation that anything is perfect and companies that support their products well are rewarded, but there is a limit to the amount of support people should expect or demand, in my opinion. This is not a situation unique to Intel, and AMD is nearly as culpable for the same activities, just like the performance hit they took with the Phenom when their "flaw" was patched through a BIOS modification that affected performance (https://www.anandtech.com/show/2477/2).
Intel's design was not garbage, it just swung farther toward optimizing for performance than it did for security (and they weren't alone as most chip designers did the same thing). This is a learning curve that everyone is going through and at some point we will have to decided whether we value an extra 5% performance or protection against specific forms of security threats. As a home user you may opt for the security protection, an airgapped data center may prefer the extra performance shortcuts that sacrifice some security.
We, as consumers, drove the market to this place, by constantly demanding additional performance from hardware vendors. Now we're realizing maybe we went too far and we'll see that probably scale back and be rethought as a result. But let's stop pretending that Intel has to be the scapegoat and let's stop blaming them for not supporting 10-year-old hardware when nobody else is doing that either.
The sheer number of insults being thrown at Intel over this issue is pure amazement. Comparisons to cars (#causeSlashdot) and of course to AMD (#flameon), but it seems to me that there are far too great of expectations for the level of support a company should provide, especially given the sheer complexity of a processor and how it relates to security threats. To expect the design of something like a general purpose CPU to be perfect out of the door and error-free for the next several decades seems ridiculous to me. The claims that people now have to throw away their hardware because of this seem equally ridiculous.
At some point, ANY for-profit company is going to stop supporting an old product, especially in a low-margin environment. The sheer rate of technological advancement almost necessitates that. Let's stop blaming Intel for what is effectively an industry-normal rate of support. Consider that 10 years ago:
We were on the 2.4 Linux Kernel (no longer supported with updates) Intel Processors were running on LGA775 sockets (NewEgg sells only 2 compatible motherboards directly, both from ASRock. ASUS/Gigabyte/ETC all don't sell compatible motherboards anymore) We were running RHEL 2/3/4, all of which are no longer supported
But I don't see anyone griping that these other entities are engaged in the practice of forced upgrades, leaving their trusted and loyal customers hanging in the face of growing security concerns. So maybe all the Intel bashing should either subside or should be expanded to the entire industry, but I think the latter is a bit naive. Security threats evolve, new ones are created, old ones forgotten or mitigated. If it were easy, there wouldn't be a dozen new packages to update my OS every day. Remember that Intel can't just push all updates to these older architectures by themselves either, some require BIOS updates and now you're expecting motherboard companies to update a product they haven't touched in a decade as well.
I'll avoid most of the careless flamebait in that message since you know nothing about me, my history, or the district, children and tax payers I volunteer my time for and instead merely point to one of the most public instances of a school district deploying iPads (LA) and the fact that even they didn't repair them, they had it in the contract that Apple would: http://laschoolreport.com/ipad...
Are there large districts that can support hiring a staff of IT people competent enough to repair and support a $200-$400 device? I'm sure there probably are. Is that the norm? You're right, I don't have a large sample size to draw from, but my gut tells me that it's not cost-effective for anything but the very largest institutions who probably have the pricing power to negotiate support when they purchase them anyway.
I'd argue that contrary to your inflammatory comment, it's most responsible for us "idiots" to look at the cost analysis of failure rate x cost to repair + training vs. service contract and choose the lowest cost option. In my district's case, we look at each situation and decide on the most appropriate tool for the job and ensure that our stuff has the proper training to use said devices. That meant a slow rollout of Chromebooks to select classrooms with qualified staff who tested and implemented curriculum supported by those devices, and then they trained their peers and the rollout continued. For the youngest students, iPads made the most sense as they are more comfortable with the touch interface, but I suspect most future devices in the district will be Chromebooks (but that decision also has nothing to do with repairability). By the way, the keyboards on those (Lenovo) devices are the highest point of failure and, yes, we can fix that ourselves.
3-year-olds may not value their tablets in the way you're intending, but I can tell you that most grade school kids do. Most districts can barely afford a few of these for each classroom, and you can bet that when 4 kids have to share 1 tablet, there's going to be some long standing embarrassment if you're the kid that breaks that. Some districts have gone 1:1, usually by leasing the tablet to the child through a series of payments, and those all have (or at least offer) insurance plans to cover them against accidental damage.
Thank you for this. I sit on a Board of Education for a 5,000+ student district and talk to many other districts. NOBODY is repairing their own tablets. most can't even be bothered to reload toner.
There's a service contract for everything and there isn't enough money in the budget to hire someone to work on this. Most districts I know struggle to keep their networks up and have technicians running at breakneck speed just to fix wireless connections and printer drivers. Repairability may be something a single home user with a tech background cares about, but it's not something that large institutions do.
Firstly, I don't particularly care whether the whole of the internet knows my shopping / browsing history, likes and dislikes. I'll enable some basic privacy measures mostly to limit ads because I dislike those resource hogs, but by and large I don't consider myself to be interesting enough for others to give a damn. But from a rhetorical standpoint, how does one truly eliminate their exposure to this while still interacting with others who don't?
Take email for example, I could set up my own email server and avoid Google cataloging every email I've ever sent or received, but it won't protect me from them gathering that information from other Google users I send emails to or receive emails from...
You have very little control over the collection / creation of your credit history and it's essential for most basic aspects of living, so going to a cash-only state of being likely isn't realistic.
I just don't see how we can truly eliminate the threat. People are so accustomed to the services we enjoy and are certainly accustomed to not paying much for them. If every site wanted to exist without being a surveillance threat, you'd have to pay to keep each site online, and most people won't do that.
I'm not sure why anyone cares. Apple is clearly marketing this against products like those from Bose and Sonos, not a sub-$100 echo / echo dot / google home. They clearly spent time on a product that they thought would have great sound quality to compliment their Amazon Music service. Sure, it will probably connect to more services over time and become more useful for the home automation / information services that many have come to respect the Echo / Google Home products for, but I don't think that's their short game. Apple's products have always been about the not-so-subtle-hand-in-your-back push toward using only their services, so I'm not surprised they don't integrate well with Pandora/Spotify, etc. However, it also doesn't do it any worse than their current system (start playback -> set playback to airplay compatible device -> done). They will sell plenty of these, don't waste your time comparing it to products half its price, and don't buy one if it doesn't suit your needs.
I have 5 Echo products and love them, but they could still sound way better than they currently do, but I've also spent less than $500 to have devices throughout my house, so I can't complain about what I've achieved for the price.
And really, who asks their smart device about their calendar?
Slashdot Mirror
There is a level of debatable difference between previous iterations of car modding (more power, better/worse handling, appearance, sound) and modifying software that has the ability to fully drive a car. Sure, adding a supercharger and 200 HP to a car could make it more dangerous in the hands of an average driver, or potentially push the physics of the car to the point where it's no longer 100% safe on the road, but that's still in a different realm than messing with the brain of a car that you didn't design, that perhaps isn't even fully understood by the hackers, and could, in theory, drive the car by itself in any way that it wants.
The key difference here is the previous modding still left the driver in control, this modding could (maybe not in its current iteration but future iterations) put the control in something else's hands.
No, but you can pay someone else to do it for you, not much different.
And the geniuses at the state level have or have not considered donating this to other public entities in the state, e.g., the public school systems, state universities, etc. that probably all receive some level of state funding?
I didn't mean for that to come off as an "advertisement" (it's not like I even posted contact information), but I think any person is motivated to justify their value (either to potential or existing customers or to their employer). I also don't think you're a "sucker" for trying to do it on your own. I just don't agree with articles and the following discussion that attempt to speak for everyone when it comes to fees for service. Does it make sense to pay an accountant to do your taxes? How about paying the dealership to fix your car? After all, with access to the internet you've basically got all of the information you need to be able to solve any problem you might encounter.
You do, however, have limited time in the day and need to prioritize and assign a value to that time. Is it best spent researching the best fund providers or calculating the savings rate necessary to retire at 65? Is hunting down your replacement car part online and then spending two hours in the garage with bloody knuckles worth saving $100 at the dealership? Can the tax accountant find an extra deduction for you to justify their fee in filling out a 1040 form? The answers to these questions are not universal, they are different for everyone.
As someone who just recently switched careers to be a financial advisor, I find your experience to be disheartening. I spent twenty years as an engineer but didn't feel fulfilled because I couldn't see a direct impact of my labor improving the lives of the people around me, so I wanted a way to more directly benefit those around me. I agree with the general sentiment in this thread that it's hard for the average investor to quantify the financial benefit of working with an advisor on an account with fee-based billing.
Vanguard (and others) have done research on this (https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/advisorsec/researchcommentary/article/IWE_ResPuttingAValueOnValue) and have quantified the value of an advisor at somewhere between 1.5 and 3.0% on average (and this is Vanguard saying this). Many people are somewhat short-sighted by the decade long bull market in US equities where it's been hard for any active strategy to outperform, but a lot of value from working with a professional comes from behavioral coaching during long bear markets, as well as tax strategies closer to retirement.
I sympathize with not wanting to pay someone else for something I feel capable of doing on my own. I hate paying an electrician when I can do basic electrical work, despise hiring a painter or dry-wall installer to little repairs here and there, and don't even get me started on paying for insurance. The true value you get from any professional isn't the daily value they add to your life, it's the way they swoop in to save you during an emergency. The story I like to tell is about (of all things) my insurance agent (and I'm not here to ding or promote anyone specifically so I'll leave names out), but you could show me all the commercials in the world about how I could save 15% by switching to some online insurance company with no local office, and nothing you could say would motivate me to switch. I have a personal relationship with my agent, and I can say with 100% certainty that if I were on my lawn watching my house burn down at 2 AM, my agent would be there as fast as he could to put his arm around my family and me to say "I know this looks bad, but I'm going to take care of it, let's get you to a hotel and don't worry about a thing." That's where professionals are worth every dime, but you have to work with someone who genuinely cares about you and not their take home pay.
So if you want to go it alone, you certainly can (I send many people that direction if it's best for them), but if you find a good professional and give them a chance, there are many ways they can add value to what you're doing. Financial Advisors (and CFP's in particular) are there to help with all aspects of your financial life, including tax planning, estate planning, risk management, education funding, charitable giving, etc.
It's funny to me that on a site like Slashdot, we can have a confluence of the raging "I hate Windows", the blind recommendations of "everyone should switch to Linux" and at the same time admit that we are subject to ISP's where a 100 MB download is something we need to be concerned about.
If technology is your true obsession in traditional Slashdot sense, then you could really care less about people running Windows because it's not you. You're already running Linux and think the rest of the world should just give up, and you're paying for gigabit fiber because #fiber.
If you're anyone else, Windows gets the job done, you don't notice or don't care that 6 stupid games appeared minutes after installing your computer and quickly figured out you could right-click and uninstall them and go about your business. You'll not even be aware that the ISP's covering the majority of the population have either eliminated data caps (Comcast) or have caps so reasonably high (>350 GB) that a few hundred MB on a wasted game download is inconsequential (CenturyLink, AT&T, Cox) or you'll be thankful that in Windows you can set a connection as Metered to limit background downloads.
https://broadbandnow.com/inter...
MS charges $60/yr for Gold, not $120. Most of the time you can find discounted codes that are closer to $45 / yr. You get 4 games / month with Gold (2 for 360, 2 for Xbox One), but I agree that usually they aren't the best or newest games (but neither are 30-year old Nintendo games).
Have to agree with you there. Had Android phones (Motorola and HTC) and Windows phones (Nokia), both struggled to maintain support even at 1 year old. Google and Microsoft would push the updates out to vendors but then the vendors would sit on it for months, if they even released it at all. At least in Apple's universe you never feel like you're losing out to someone else. Yes, you still get dropped due to old age at some point, but iOS 12 supports the 5s that was released in 2013, so that's a pretty good run of support (5 years!). And you know that you're getting the update at the same time on your phone as everyone else.
Actually, short term capital gains and unqualified dividends are taxed at ordinary income rates. Long term capital gains (stocks held longer than 1 year) and qualified dividends (stocks held for more than 60 days in a 121 day window around the dividend distribution) are taxed at preferential rates, as low as 0% depending on your income bracket but at 15% for a good portion of the population.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news...
Not sure how anyone could be surprised about this. If you're an investor, you damn well better be paying attention to what the company is doing, and in April when Mark Zuckerberg delivered his prepared testimony to Congress, he laid it all out:
"I've directed our teams to invest so much in security — on top of the other investments we're making — that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward. But I want to be clear about what our priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits."
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/0...
It's not a debate tactic, it's a factual reference to the cost of enterprise level OS installations/support. OpenSUSE is about the same cost so there isn't any cherry picking of the most expensive solution. You're taking this whole debate out of context. We're talking about a government purchasing an operating system for tens of thousands of workstations. They will NOT support those all internally, they most likely WANT it to be certified on their hardware, and none of their employees are going to put their necks on the line and say "I'll support this internally." Even to hire the dedicated staff to do so would be expensive (remember that employees cost you in salary, benefits, pensions, or whatever the German equivalent is).
If cost were the primary motivator they would just take the default Windows install that comes with the hardware they could buy in bulk from someone like Dell. The 20+ year hatred of Microsoft on this website doesn't excuse anyone from trying to understand how big businesses that use machines "just to get things done" don't care about the 0.5% performance gain you got from compiling your own distro or the $49 you saved by using your open-source office app that struggles to interchange recent file formats.
And yes, I'm sure that Microsoft has a much better understanding of international data privacy laws and has no problem tailoring their OS to support a government's specific needs. They've been doing it for decades. But *surprise*, for basic home users they're going to try and scrape some information they deem useful that, at the end of the day, likely isn't going to affect you one iota. And now everyone else will jump on me for that in between checking their Gmail account and Facebook feed, but I'm the loose-lipped liberal ;-)
You must not be using an enterprise version then. RedHat charges $299 per workstation license, per year, if you want support, $179 if you want to do it yourself. You can get the desktop version with no support, but you're still going to pay $49 / yr. Windows 10 is $84 / yr in comparison. So if you're going to compare apples to apples by comparing the pricing of enterprise licensing with support, then you're not really any better off in either camp.
Ummm ... since you referenced "iphone", I'll use that in my rebuttal.
> File Transfer - iPhones can easily transfer most file types wirelessly using AirDrop, you don't even need to know the other person's email address, phone number, ip address, etc.
> Screen size - you can wirelessly project to a screen of any size using an AppleTV
> Keyboard - you can connect any bluetooth keyboard you want or use voice dictation
> Boot time - no comment, but are you including the time to get to a usable GUI, or just to a command prompt
> Durability - I'm pretty sure my phone would survive a 4 foot drop better than my monitor or tower desktop would, but I'm unwilling to verify
> Office - my iPhone will run Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a slew of competing Apple Office apps
> Multitask - the most debatable, there are multitasking options as far as video overlay, or split screen apps on the iPad, but the state of your app is also saved so switching between apps isn't really an issue in most cases
> Exclusivity - huh?
Oh, yes, that makes more sense. My guess, and I stress that it's a guess, is that MS makes far more money on the recurring revenue from licensing to game publishers and Xbox Live subscriptions, and from their standpoint would prefer to bring that model to the PC market as well. If they can just charge you as a "gamer" to support their Xbox ecosystem, then they shouldn't care whether you're playing on a "console" or a PC. They benefit from increased revenue from PC gamers, and people like me benefit from the flexibility of playing at the PC when I want to and playing on the console when I want to (with all of my saved games following me no matter where I play in the world).
I agree with most of your points. After getting burned by potential customer backlash over their original Xbox One reveal (more specifically over the game licensing changes, which I was in favor of), they probably prefer to see Sony make the first move and then respond in kind. I also agree that the One X is a nicer piece of hardware and I think they've done an excellent job of soliciting user feedback through their online portal (https://xboxideas.uservoice.com/) and have continued to enhance the product with monthly feature / bug fix updates.
The only point I disagree on is the Windows 10 / Xbox cross-play and licensing. I love the idea of buying a game and getting the option to play it on my console or my PC and have the same online experience and I suspect this will only continue as the Xbox turns into more and more of a PC-based hardware solution. I prefer playing on the computer but many of my favorite games started off as Xbox only or I have to play on the Xbox if I want to play with my friends. As soon as that barrier is made completely transparent and I can just enjoy the game regardless of which Microsoft product I'm playing it on, the better.
I went from the 360 to the Xbox One and don't have any complaints. Fantastic piece of hardware and an enjoyable user experience. Also love the integration with Windows 10, allowing me to access the console, stream games, interact with parties, etc. without leaving my desktop.
Where do you see 3-year life cycle? I have an Xbox One that I bought in 2013. It still does and will always play every Xbox One game released. A new hardware platform in 2020 would be a 7 year life cycle for a console which is completely reasonable. Remember that the Xbox One S and Xbox One X are effectively mid-cycle refreshes that just try and keep the platform viable until the next generation. They didn't drastically alter anything other than supporting some higher resolution needs of a subset of users.
I disagree. A console existed to deliver a high quality and consistent experience based on specialized hardware and input interfaces at a time when the general consumer couldn't be bothered to labor through the complexities of building a computer, adding an appropriate graphic and sound card (yes, you used to have to do that), and then attaching an input peripheral (do I have a free serial port?). Eventually it evolved to extract the most amount of performance out of the lowest cost hardware and, with the internet, evolved to create the online multiplayer ecosystem which sought to deliver a balanced (read fair) competitive landscape where nobody had a real hardware advantage. In the years since the first consoles debuted, we have come a long way on the PC side of things, both from a device capability standpoint as well as a end-user knowledge standpoint. Most PCs can now play a variety of games, have access to a wide range of input peripherals, and are supported by robust development platforms. With content delivery moving online, there is less worry as well about whether your game needs to be delivered on 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, etc.
Consoles over the last two generations have consistently moved closer and closer to being general computing platforms (remember that the PS3 could run Linux and the Xbox One is effectively running Windows with an Xbox virtual machine). This trend will only continue until the gaming platform is no more than a gaming-focused UI on top of a general purpose OS backend. At that point, PlayStation vs. Xbox isn't so much about the hardware, but the ecosystem that comes with it. I'd argue that Microsoft has made far better progress with that than Sony has to date.
Seems irrelevant, but yes, I do own Intel stock (it has more than doubled the performance of AMD's stock over 10 years, but again I fail the see the relevance of that to this conversation). I also own Intel processors and have owned processors from Apple (iPhone), Digital (DEC Alpha), AMD (Opteron), IBM (PowerPC), and I'm sure others I can't remember right now. And the funny thing is ... they all worked and probably would still today if all of the supporting hardware was still around. I'm also pretty sure that if we found a flaw (and I'm sure we could) in any of those processors, the manufacturer would tell me where I could put it if the product was more than 10 years old.
Flaws have existed in nearly every product ever released since the beginning of time, there is little expectation that anything is perfect and companies that support their products well are rewarded, but there is a limit to the amount of support people should expect or demand, in my opinion. This is not a situation unique to Intel, and AMD is nearly as culpable for the same activities, just like the performance hit they took with the Phenom when their "flaw" was patched through a BIOS modification that affected performance (https://www.anandtech.com/show/2477/2).
Intel's design was not garbage, it just swung farther toward optimizing for performance than it did for security (and they weren't alone as most chip designers did the same thing). This is a learning curve that everyone is going through and at some point we will have to decided whether we value an extra 5% performance or protection against specific forms of security threats. As a home user you may opt for the security protection, an airgapped data center may prefer the extra performance shortcuts that sacrifice some security.
We, as consumers, drove the market to this place, by constantly demanding additional performance from hardware vendors. Now we're realizing maybe we went too far and we'll see that probably scale back and be rethought as a result. But let's stop pretending that Intel has to be the scapegoat and let's stop blaming them for not supporting 10-year-old hardware when nobody else is doing that either.
The sheer number of insults being thrown at Intel over this issue is pure amazement. Comparisons to cars (#causeSlashdot) and of course to AMD (#flameon), but it seems to me that there are far too great of expectations for the level of support a company should provide, especially given the sheer complexity of a processor and how it relates to security threats. To expect the design of something like a general purpose CPU to be perfect out of the door and error-free for the next several decades seems ridiculous to me. The claims that people now have to throw away their hardware because of this seem equally ridiculous.
At some point, ANY for-profit company is going to stop supporting an old product, especially in a low-margin environment. The sheer rate of technological advancement almost necessitates that. Let's stop blaming Intel for what is effectively an industry-normal rate of support. Consider that 10 years ago:
We were on the 2.4 Linux Kernel (no longer supported with updates)
Intel Processors were running on LGA775 sockets (NewEgg sells only 2 compatible motherboards directly, both from ASRock. ASUS/Gigabyte/ETC all don't sell compatible motherboards anymore)
We were running RHEL 2/3/4, all of which are no longer supported
But I don't see anyone griping that these other entities are engaged in the practice of forced upgrades, leaving their trusted and loyal customers hanging in the face of growing security concerns. So maybe all the Intel bashing should either subside or should be expanded to the entire industry, but I think the latter is a bit naive. Security threats evolve, new ones are created, old ones forgotten or mitigated. If it were easy, there wouldn't be a dozen new packages to update my OS every day. Remember that Intel can't just push all updates to these older architectures by themselves either, some require BIOS updates and now you're expecting motherboard companies to update a product they haven't touched in a decade as well.
I'll avoid most of the careless flamebait in that message since you know nothing about me, my history, or the district, children and tax payers I volunteer my time for and instead merely point to one of the most public instances of a school district deploying iPads (LA) and the fact that even they didn't repair them, they had it in the contract that Apple would: http://laschoolreport.com/ipad...
Are there large districts that can support hiring a staff of IT people competent enough to repair and support a $200-$400 device? I'm sure there probably are. Is that the norm? You're right, I don't have a large sample size to draw from, but my gut tells me that it's not cost-effective for anything but the very largest institutions who probably have the pricing power to negotiate support when they purchase them anyway.
I'd argue that contrary to your inflammatory comment, it's most responsible for us "idiots" to look at the cost analysis of failure rate x cost to repair + training vs. service contract and choose the lowest cost option. In my district's case, we look at each situation and decide on the most appropriate tool for the job and ensure that our stuff has the proper training to use said devices. That meant a slow rollout of Chromebooks to select classrooms with qualified staff who tested and implemented curriculum supported by those devices, and then they trained their peers and the rollout continued. For the youngest students, iPads made the most sense as they are more comfortable with the touch interface, but I suspect most future devices in the district will be Chromebooks (but that decision also has nothing to do with repairability). By the way, the keyboards on those (Lenovo) devices are the highest point of failure and, yes, we can fix that ourselves.
3-year-olds may not value their tablets in the way you're intending, but I can tell you that most grade school kids do. Most districts can barely afford a few of these for each classroom, and you can bet that when 4 kids have to share 1 tablet, there's going to be some long standing embarrassment if you're the kid that breaks that. Some districts have gone 1:1, usually by leasing the tablet to the child through a series of payments, and those all have (or at least offer) insurance plans to cover them against accidental damage.
Thank you for this. I sit on a Board of Education for a 5,000+ student district and talk to many other districts. NOBODY is repairing their own tablets. most can't even be bothered to reload toner.
There's a service contract for everything and there isn't enough money in the budget to hire someone to work on this. Most districts I know struggle to keep their networks up and have technicians running at breakneck speed just to fix wireless connections and printer drivers. Repairability may be something a single home user with a tech background cares about, but it's not something that large institutions do.
Firstly, I don't particularly care whether the whole of the internet knows my shopping / browsing history, likes and dislikes. I'll enable some basic privacy measures mostly to limit ads because I dislike those resource hogs, but by and large I don't consider myself to be interesting enough for others to give a damn. But from a rhetorical standpoint, how does one truly eliminate their exposure to this while still interacting with others who don't?
Take email for example, I could set up my own email server and avoid Google cataloging every email I've ever sent or received, but it won't protect me from them gathering that information from other Google users I send emails to or receive emails from ...
You have very little control over the collection / creation of your credit history and it's essential for most basic aspects of living, so going to a cash-only state of being likely isn't realistic.
I just don't see how we can truly eliminate the threat. People are so accustomed to the services we enjoy and are certainly accustomed to not paying much for them. If every site wanted to exist without being a surveillance threat, you'd have to pay to keep each site online, and most people won't do that.
I'm not sure why anyone cares. Apple is clearly marketing this against products like those from Bose and Sonos, not a sub-$100 echo / echo dot / google home. They clearly spent time on a product that they thought would have great sound quality to compliment their Amazon Music service. Sure, it will probably connect to more services over time and become more useful for the home automation / information services that many have come to respect the Echo / Google Home products for, but I don't think that's their short game. Apple's products have always been about the not-so-subtle-hand-in-your-back push toward using only their services, so I'm not surprised they don't integrate well with Pandora/Spotify, etc. However, it also doesn't do it any worse than their current system (start playback -> set playback to airplay compatible device -> done). They will sell plenty of these, don't waste your time comparing it to products half its price, and don't buy one if it doesn't suit your needs.
I have 5 Echo products and love them, but they could still sound way better than they currently do, but I've also spent less than $500 to have devices throughout my house, so I can't complain about what I've achieved for the price.
And really, who asks their smart device about their calendar?