Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop/laptop market, in the sense that they can charge noncompetitive pricing and can produce whatever they want and people will buy it.
That particular market has shrunk. Lots of people who really didn't want the complication of an actual desktop or laptop went to tablets, which are much easier to use and have sufficient functionality for a large number of use cases. In addition, it's practical to keep older computers in service longer than it was twenty years ago. Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft.
Also, Windows 10 was never free. It was a pushed update to people who had paid for 7 and 8 and 8.1. If you bought a new computer with it installed, you paid for it. The free upgrade was to reduce the number of computers running older versions of Windows, and to get more people on W10.
My first iPhone had touchscreen problems after three years, so my wife and I each got a 4, in 2011. The battery on mine wore down, and after three years we decided to upgrade to the 5S. We gave my wife's 4 to her sister, who used it until late last year, when it was six years old, and she decided she wanted a newer phone. Our 5Ss are still functioning, four and a half years after we bought them. My wife's battery probably needs replacing, but I had mine checked out and it's doing fine. I'd be happy to swap out for something better, but Apple decided to make phones that wouldn't fit in my shirt pocket for the most part, and the SE doesn't seem like enough of an improvement.
Sounds to me like you dislike mathematicians in general and are willing to make sweeping negative generalizations about them. The ones I've known have been academic, and good at their jobs.
There are lots of stupid-looking things that most people don't like that some people really like. If someone claims to like the touchscreen bar, I'd assume that it happens to work for that person rather than that that person had gone totally irrational.
You seem to think that companies should produce what you want, rather than what's best for them. We have a lot of competition in computer manufacture and phone manufacture. There are barriers to entry, sure, but there's still plenty of manufacturers from a variety of countries. (This does not apply to desktop and laptop operating systems. There isn't a free market there, which leads to many of your complaints in your final paragraph. If there were a free market, someone would be selling and maintaining some version of Windows 7.)
If you want to buy a computer, you can buy one from Apple, if you think what you get is worth the price. Two of the things Mac does special are OSX and iOS. Sufficiently many people want those to keep Apple raking in the gigabucks.
In your price comment, you seem to be saying that an Apple computer with X basic stats is much more expensive than a computer from another manufacturer with the same basic stats, and that's true. If that's what you care about, then obviously you shouldn't buy Apple. Apple has been known for making things nicer to use. Suppose you can get a $600 laptop with certain specs, and a nicer Apple for $1200. That's $600 difference. If you're going to use the laptop pretty much daily for a few years, that's under $1/day for what many people think is a more pleasant experience. That's the rough equivalent of buying a fancy coffee at Starbuck's weekly. To use a car analogy, I spent something like $30K on my current car. I could have gotten reliable transportation for at least $5K less. Figuring a ten-year lifespan, that's $500/year I'm spending for a more pleasant experience, and I doubt I use my car more than two hours a day on the average.
I don't know why you think corporate oligarchs wiped out Blackberry and similar systems. People could buy iPhones at first, provided they would put up with AT&T as the carrier in the US (all US carriers are frustrating). People could buy Blackberries. People bought more iPhones, and when Android phones came out to fill in the lower end, more Androids. Businesses didn't dictate the downfall of RIM. In fact, the Blackberries were more business-friendly than iPhones and Android phones, and RIM tried to market on that basis. iOS and Android showed up and, commercially speaking, kicked the crap out of the older players. (It's arguable that Nokia's systems were sacrificed in an attempt to make Windows Phone possible, but WP went nowhere anyway. Some of it was Microsoft mistakes, like shafting their early WP7 adopters on upgrades they'd promised, but it was mostly that people didn't want it. In any case, Microsoft also marketed WP as good for business, and the corporate oligarchs just watched it fail.)
Lots of people have different opinions than I do. Some of them are frequent Slashdot posters. These are people who seem to show up just to make really lame arguments (lamer than most of the people who disagree with me) that just don't have the right style.
Westerners are exposed constantly to the most sophisticated mind-influencing material ever, largely in the form of advertisements. We've developed a limited amount of immunity to it. There's a difference in style that people who are either Westerners or have contact with a lot of them have that these shills don't. Keep a careful eye on them.
As far as your digression into current politics, we don't know what the Russians have been doing in the top levels of government, only that some people are trying to suppress the Mueller investigation. We know they were somewhat active on Facebook. Russia is not our friend, and hasn't been for a long time, and Putin is trying aggrandizement.
I'm not convinced Putin is a fool, but whenever topics related to Russia come up we see lots of people with high user IDs making lame pro-Russian arguments.
I hope as many people as possible will help Apple be a better company by PUNISHING rather than rewarding misbehavior of this kind, by refusing to buy their products
We have a distributed method to determine the desirability of various products, in which no one asshole dictates what everyone should buy. It turns out that Apple does very well according to that method, sometimes called the "free market". If people didn't like what Apple products did for them, they wouldn't buy them.
In other words, you have prejudices, and are willing to make any stupid assumption to maintain them. You didn't really listen to your friend talking about the possibilities of the touchscreen bar, you just jumped to conclusions.
If you're unable to identify the best, then you're a failure at managing your team.
In many fields, it's hard to rate people. Consider software developers. While it's usually possible to pick out good people, it can be hard to rate them.
Now, consider a software team with the best people at turning specs into code. Consider a team with a couple of those, a guy who knows the environment and language(s) well, someone who's got attention to detail, and a person who's good at debugging. Which team is likely to do best?
I've been in academic situations where there are highly intelligent people of at least two genders, with all sorts of skin colors and ethnic backgrounds, and people seemed to be thinking in the same ways. Diversity of thought is good.
There was no implication that competence is bad. There was an attitude that diversity of thinking is good. This isn't ethnic or religious diversity, which doesn't guarantee diversity of thinking.
When forming a team for a big and complicated problem, you don't know what you're going to need, and diversity increases the chance that, if you need some sort of perspective or knowledge or whatever, your team will have it. Having people who excel but tend to think alike increases the chance that they'll all miss something.
I passed a Micro Center on my way to a medical appointment today. Walk in, and they'll be happy to sell you what you need to build your own computer the way you want it. Tinker all you want. As far as software goes, it's easy to put together a high quality system with source, so you can change and rebuild whatever you want.
Part of what happened is that, in 1977, Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack came out with affordable home computers that people could just buy and take home and plug in. Ever since then, the number of people who don't want to tinker with the damn thing has gone up. Also, stuff has gotten increasingly fiddly. Anyone who's significantly less of a klutz than I am (and that's a low bar) can buy components from NewEgg and put together a desktop. It's a LOT harder to do that with a laptop, and smaller devices usually require specialized equipment. If you want to play with phones, get a development system (it's cheaper to go Android), because you aren't doing too much with the hardware.
1. Software correctness is a difficult field. For one thing, it's not possible to formally prove adherence to an informal specification. For proofs to mean anything, somebody's going to have to turn an informal spec into something formal.
2. In other words, you want strong AI, because nothing short of that is going to be able to handle what you want. Syntax is syntax because it's part of a formal language. Computer languages differ in more than syntax, so a converter from idiomatic C to idiomatic Lisp is going to have to have a deep understanding of idiomatic C, idiomatic Lisp, and the program. Security? Without actual creativity in building security, it's going to be breakable. Different platforms do different things in different ways, and again the environment you want will need deep understanding.
Several reasons. First, software is the most complex thing we do. Second, it's expected to run in a great variety of conditions. (Ever looked at some deck stain? The instructions tell you to try it on a small inconspicuous spot of your deck to see how it looks.) Third, who absolutely doesn't need flawless operation as a matter of life or death is going to pay what such software would cost.
What are you missing durability in? Computers can certainly last that long. I suspect smartphones can; mine is now four and a half and doing just fine (I was just told that the battery was fine, which surprised me). The reason we tend to swap out equipment faster than that is that newer and better stuff keeps coming around. Our current refrigerator is 19 years old, and a tremendous amount has improved in tech since.
We'd have privacy by now but consumers wanted IPv4 rather than IPv6. We lost Mandatory IPSec across the Internet as a result.
I doubt 2% of consumers could tell you significant differences between IPv4 and IPv6. They use what they're given by their ISP.
We'd have privacy, but American voters chose not to have EU privacy laws and EU data protection laws, thus defiling the globe.
Probably correct.
We'd have privacy, but users chose AOL.
As opposed to the myriads of privacy-friendly sites when AOL was big? For most people, it was AOL or Compuserve or nothing.
We'd have privacy, but users chose Microsoft's email clients over ones that supported PGP/GPG.
Last time I tried using GPG, it turned into a pain, and nobody I knew had public keys published anyway. We'd need a considerably amount of progress on making it easy to use to even turn it into a choice for most people.
We'd have privacy, but users chose Microsoft. (Windows 95 stored passwords in plain text. And users felt this was much safer than the encrypted stuff Linux and BSD were using.)
Users chose Microsoft because that's what was there. If you go out and buy a computer without giving it much thought, you'll get a Windows or Apple machine. You're not getting any other OS unless you know what you want and why. When W95 was out, it was considerably better than the contemporary MacOS. I can provide some historical background on why Microsoft won, but whether passwords were in plain text or encrypted had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for a society that feels deprived of privacy when they have actively chosen to throw it away.
No, people in general did not actively choose to disregard privacy. For the most part, you're talking about decisions at a level of technical understanding that I doubt more than 2% of the population really understands, and you're showing no awareness of the context some of these decisions were made in.
* Standard form factor for making upgrade-able smartphones-esq devices. (oh capitalism)
Um, why? I understand the other items on your list (whether or not they're practical), but this puzzles me.
There aren't a lot of distinct modules in a smartphone. They tend to be tightly integrated systems, as compact as possible, to get as much battery in as possible. What would you like to be able to replace separately, and why would it be that much better than replacing the whole thing?
This would also freeze some smartphone designs as they are now, and I don't see that the field is mature enough for that.
This isn't a developers issue. This is a managers issue. Managers decide the tradeoffs. If they can get a bloated and slow product to market before the competition, they'll likely sell more. Alternatively, it's a customers issue, because customers buy inefficient programs that are out first with the features they want rather than efficient ones that are less feature-rich. Or you could blame it on reviewers who go by feature checklists.
Just leave the developers out of this. Developers are very good at optimizing what they're paid to optimize and letting things they are told as less important go.
Laws are written by politicians, and have to be approved by a majority of one or more groups. Sometimes putting a little ambiguity into the law makes it easier to find votes to pass it. Faction A might want a certain provision in, and faction B might oppose it, so actually saying one or another might be enough to sink the bill.
Did you read your cite? It applies to physical places like restaurants and theaters. Nor does it require everyone to get the same treatment no matter what, but discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin is forbidden. It does not cover websites, and it does not forbid discrimination on other bases.
I am narrowing the group so that it can be clearly seen to be monopoly pricing, and hence a monopoly according to the definition we're using. The monopoly extends further, but I'm just establishing that there is one.
Monopoly pricing doesn't mean that the monopolist can force the customers to pay anything. If you study basic micro, there's the supply-demand curves for competitive pricing and monopolistic pricing. Again, as it's not necessary to have 100% market share to be a monopoly, it's not necessary to have absolutely no alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop/laptop market, in the sense that they can charge noncompetitive pricing and can produce whatever they want and people will buy it.
That particular market has shrunk. Lots of people who really didn't want the complication of an actual desktop or laptop went to tablets, which are much easier to use and have sufficient functionality for a large number of use cases. In addition, it's practical to keep older computers in service longer than it was twenty years ago. Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft.
Also, Windows 10 was never free. It was a pushed update to people who had paid for 7 and 8 and 8.1. If you bought a new computer with it installed, you paid for it. The free upgrade was to reduce the number of computers running older versions of Windows, and to get more people on W10.
My first iPhone had touchscreen problems after three years, so my wife and I each got a 4, in 2011. The battery on mine wore down, and after three years we decided to upgrade to the 5S. We gave my wife's 4 to her sister, who used it until late last year, when it was six years old, and she decided she wanted a newer phone. Our 5Ss are still functioning, four and a half years after we bought them. My wife's battery probably needs replacing, but I had mine checked out and it's doing fine. I'd be happy to swap out for something better, but Apple decided to make phones that wouldn't fit in my shirt pocket for the most part, and the SE doesn't seem like enough of an improvement.
That's my anecdotal evidence, anyway.
Sounds to me like you dislike mathematicians in general and are willing to make sweeping negative generalizations about them. The ones I've known have been academic, and good at their jobs.
There are lots of stupid-looking things that most people don't like that some people really like. If someone claims to like the touchscreen bar, I'd assume that it happens to work for that person rather than that that person had gone totally irrational.
You seem to think that companies should produce what you want, rather than what's best for them. We have a lot of competition in computer manufacture and phone manufacture. There are barriers to entry, sure, but there's still plenty of manufacturers from a variety of countries. (This does not apply to desktop and laptop operating systems. There isn't a free market there, which leads to many of your complaints in your final paragraph. If there were a free market, someone would be selling and maintaining some version of Windows 7.)
If you want to buy a computer, you can buy one from Apple, if you think what you get is worth the price. Two of the things Mac does special are OSX and iOS. Sufficiently many people want those to keep Apple raking in the gigabucks.
In your price comment, you seem to be saying that an Apple computer with X basic stats is much more expensive than a computer from another manufacturer with the same basic stats, and that's true. If that's what you care about, then obviously you shouldn't buy Apple. Apple has been known for making things nicer to use. Suppose you can get a $600 laptop with certain specs, and a nicer Apple for $1200. That's $600 difference. If you're going to use the laptop pretty much daily for a few years, that's under $1/day for what many people think is a more pleasant experience. That's the rough equivalent of buying a fancy coffee at Starbuck's weekly. To use a car analogy, I spent something like $30K on my current car. I could have gotten reliable transportation for at least $5K less. Figuring a ten-year lifespan, that's $500/year I'm spending for a more pleasant experience, and I doubt I use my car more than two hours a day on the average.
I don't know why you think corporate oligarchs wiped out Blackberry and similar systems. People could buy iPhones at first, provided they would put up with AT&T as the carrier in the US (all US carriers are frustrating). People could buy Blackberries. People bought more iPhones, and when Android phones came out to fill in the lower end, more Androids. Businesses didn't dictate the downfall of RIM. In fact, the Blackberries were more business-friendly than iPhones and Android phones, and RIM tried to market on that basis. iOS and Android showed up and, commercially speaking, kicked the crap out of the older players. (It's arguable that Nokia's systems were sacrificed in an attempt to make Windows Phone possible, but WP went nowhere anyway. Some of it was Microsoft mistakes, like shafting their early WP7 adopters on upgrades they'd promised, but it was mostly that people didn't want it. In any case, Microsoft also marketed WP as good for business, and the corporate oligarchs just watched it fail.)
Lots of people have different opinions than I do. Some of them are frequent Slashdot posters. These are people who seem to show up just to make really lame arguments (lamer than most of the people who disagree with me) that just don't have the right style.
Westerners are exposed constantly to the most sophisticated mind-influencing material ever, largely in the form of advertisements. We've developed a limited amount of immunity to it. There's a difference in style that people who are either Westerners or have contact with a lot of them have that these shills don't. Keep a careful eye on them.
As far as your digression into current politics, we don't know what the Russians have been doing in the top levels of government, only that some people are trying to suppress the Mueller investigation. We know they were somewhat active on Facebook. Russia is not our friend, and hasn't been for a long time, and Putin is trying aggrandizement.
I'm not convinced Putin is a fool, but whenever topics related to Russia come up we see lots of people with high user IDs making lame pro-Russian arguments.
In the US, Trump lost the popular vote by millions. He was less popular than Clinton.
We have a distributed method to determine the desirability of various products, in which no one asshole dictates what everyone should buy. It turns out that Apple does very well according to that method, sometimes called the "free market". If people didn't like what Apple products did for them, they wouldn't buy them.
In other words, you have prejudices, and are willing to make any stupid assumption to maintain them. You didn't really listen to your friend talking about the possibilities of the touchscreen bar, you just jumped to conclusions.
In many fields, it's hard to rate people. Consider software developers. While it's usually possible to pick out good people, it can be hard to rate them.
Now, consider a software team with the best people at turning specs into code. Consider a team with a couple of those, a guy who knows the environment and language(s) well, someone who's got attention to detail, and a person who's good at debugging. Which team is likely to do best?
It is a really good thing. Diverse viewpoints are normally a good thing also, and may conflict to some extent.
I've been in academic situations where there are highly intelligent people of at least two genders, with all sorts of skin colors and ethnic backgrounds, and people seemed to be thinking in the same ways. Diversity of thought is good.
There was no implication that competence is bad. There was an attitude that diversity of thinking is good. This isn't ethnic or religious diversity, which doesn't guarantee diversity of thinking.
When forming a team for a big and complicated problem, you don't know what you're going to need, and diversity increases the chance that, if you need some sort of perspective or knowledge or whatever, your team will have it. Having people who excel but tend to think alike increases the chance that they'll all miss something.
Exactly what are mathematicians employed to do? Without knowing that, we can't know what sorts of optimizations are important.
I passed a Micro Center on my way to a medical appointment today. Walk in, and they'll be happy to sell you what you need to build your own computer the way you want it. Tinker all you want. As far as software goes, it's easy to put together a high quality system with source, so you can change and rebuild whatever you want.
Part of what happened is that, in 1977, Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack came out with affordable home computers that people could just buy and take home and plug in. Ever since then, the number of people who don't want to tinker with the damn thing has gone up. Also, stuff has gotten increasingly fiddly. Anyone who's significantly less of a klutz than I am (and that's a low bar) can buy components from NewEgg and put together a desktop. It's a LOT harder to do that with a laptop, and smaller devices usually require specialized equipment. If you want to play with phones, get a development system (it's cheaper to go Android), because you aren't doing too much with the hardware.
1. Software correctness is a difficult field. For one thing, it's not possible to formally prove adherence to an informal specification. For proofs to mean anything, somebody's going to have to turn an informal spec into something formal.
2. In other words, you want strong AI, because nothing short of that is going to be able to handle what you want. Syntax is syntax because it's part of a formal language. Computer languages differ in more than syntax, so a converter from idiomatic C to idiomatic Lisp is going to have to have a deep understanding of idiomatic C, idiomatic Lisp, and the program. Security? Without actual creativity in building security, it's going to be breakable. Different platforms do different things in different ways, and again the environment you want will need deep understanding.
Several reasons. First, software is the most complex thing we do. Second, it's expected to run in a great variety of conditions. (Ever looked at some deck stain? The instructions tell you to try it on a small inconspicuous spot of your deck to see how it looks.) Third, who absolutely doesn't need flawless operation as a matter of life or death is going to pay what such software would cost.
What are you missing durability in? Computers can certainly last that long. I suspect smartphones can; mine is now four and a half and doing just fine (I was just told that the battery was fine, which surprised me). The reason we tend to swap out equipment faster than that is that newer and better stuff keeps coming around. Our current refrigerator is 19 years old, and a tremendous amount has improved in tech since.
I doubt 2% of consumers could tell you significant differences between IPv4 and IPv6. They use what they're given by their ISP.
Probably correct.
As opposed to the myriads of privacy-friendly sites when AOL was big? For most people, it was AOL or Compuserve or nothing.
Last time I tried using GPG, it turned into a pain, and nobody I knew had public keys published anyway. We'd need a considerably amount of progress on making it easy to use to even turn it into a choice for most people.
Users chose Microsoft because that's what was there. If you go out and buy a computer without giving it much thought, you'll get a Windows or Apple machine. You're not getting any other OS unless you know what you want and why. When W95 was out, it was considerably better than the contemporary MacOS. I can provide some historical background on why Microsoft won, but whether passwords were in plain text or encrypted had absolutely nothing to do with it.
No, people in general did not actively choose to disregard privacy. For the most part, you're talking about decisions at a level of technical understanding that I doubt more than 2% of the population really understands, and you're showing no awareness of the context some of these decisions were made in.
Um, why? I understand the other items on your list (whether or not they're practical), but this puzzles me.
There aren't a lot of distinct modules in a smartphone. They tend to be tightly integrated systems, as compact as possible, to get as much battery in as possible. What would you like to be able to replace separately, and why would it be that much better than replacing the whole thing?
This would also freeze some smartphone designs as they are now, and I don't see that the field is mature enough for that.
This isn't a developers issue. This is a managers issue. Managers decide the tradeoffs. If they can get a bloated and slow product to market before the competition, they'll likely sell more. Alternatively, it's a customers issue, because customers buy inefficient programs that are out first with the features they want rather than efficient ones that are less feature-rich. Or you could blame it on reviewers who go by feature checklists.
Just leave the developers out of this. Developers are very good at optimizing what they're paid to optimize and letting things they are told as less important go.
Laws are written by politicians, and have to be approved by a majority of one or more groups. Sometimes putting a little ambiguity into the law makes it easier to find votes to pass it. Faction A might want a certain provision in, and faction B might oppose it, so actually saying one or another might be enough to sink the bill.
Did you read your cite? It applies to physical places like restaurants and theaters. Nor does it require everyone to get the same treatment no matter what, but discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin is forbidden. It does not cover websites, and it does not forbid discrimination on other bases.
I am narrowing the group so that it can be clearly seen to be monopoly pricing, and hence a monopoly according to the definition we're using. The monopoly extends further, but I'm just establishing that there is one.
Monopoly pricing doesn't mean that the monopolist can force the customers to pay anything. If you study basic micro, there's the supply-demand curves for competitive pricing and monopolistic pricing. Again, as it's not necessary to have 100% market share to be a monopoly, it's not necessary to have absolutely no alternatives.
You have a very strange mirror.