1) Microsoft has backstabbed almost every "partner" it has had, which means it only gets voluntary partners that are: a) stupid, or b) greedy.
2) Microsoft could go over the heads of the carriers, just like Apple, if it actually had something compelling for consumers. Instead, they used their default strategy of pushing carriers around while assuming that consumers would be drawn in by the fact that "It's Windows!". They didn't want to stand on the boat, and they didn't want to stand on the dock, so they ended up in the water. Windows 8 may be an attempt to get on the (consumer) boat, or it might turn out to be an attempt to stand on both the boat and dock in which case they will also end up in the water again.
"... theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."
Yeah, that would sell so many more packages. Reminds me of the friends who decided to raise their own Thanksgiving Turkey. (Who did not get eaten at Thanksgiving, and is now spending its retirement years in the country, at the friends' expense.)
Apple does exactly the same thing with iPad and iPhone prices, but doesnt let you swap the mysteriously expensive memory "cards". Clearly it's all about the value to the consumer, not the cost of manufacture.
Huh? The iPhone and iPad have been competitive on the price front, and in fact it's taken two generations of the iPad for a viable challenger to emerge based on cost. Heck, Apple's the only manufacturer to stand up to the carriers and demand a better experience for users. All the other manufacturers -- including Google -- treat the carriers as the customers and please them first.
I fear for the level of self-loathing that Anyone-but-Apple fanboys will be subjected to as a result of this. The desire to be cool is strong... will it overcome the desire to hate Apple?
As others have said, if you're mainly doing reports, stick with Excel or a database solution. Excel lets you look at your data from a variety of angles (pivot tables, etc), and has usable graphs. As usual, Microsoft has numerical issues, so you may get wrong answers under certain conditions, but hey, it's Excel.
What is it that "anything complicated" means? Fancy graphs? Fancy partitioning/aggregation of data? Modeling and forecasting? Summary statistics? Graphs that aren't fancy, but Excel doesn't provide?
An open source option that I haven't seen mentioned is gretl. It has a reasonable GUI and can make nice graphs (though not terribly customizable), give summary statistics, sample data in various ways, and do basic modeling. (It comes from an econometric world, so has quite a few time series capabilities.) If you need to do some things with time series, it would be helpful. (Though if you don't know what you're doing, it simply makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.)
Insightful? Seriously? I think if your store were looted and trashed, you might be singing a different tune. Or if you lived across the street from a car that was set on fire. Or if one of your family needed emergency medical service and ambulances were held off because of the rioting.
Your comparison to Farenheit 451 is ridiculous. The book had people looking for someone whose "crime" was to read, not for someone who stole and vandalized property.
But Newell was talking about games, not... Oh... I see... some people consider Farmville a game... Nevermind.
(On a more serious note, I assume that Farmville "players" who get unfriended because they bug people would be penalized, just as Team Fortress players who harass other players off of a server would be penalized.)
I was also a CS major, and I did in fact take Diff Eq and Partial Diff Eq, and I'd have to say that other than recognizing the symbols I haven't really retained much... or needed it. On the other hand, I did poorly in Probability & Statistics -- pretty counter-intuitive stuff in many ways -- and I've been painfully whacked by that deficit multiple times in graduate studies. I finally feel like I'm getting it, but much of what I know now is self-taught so I have blind spots in my knowledge that will still embarrass me.
In fact, I'm using statistics more and more, and wish I'd been a statistician. Of course, if I were a statistician, I'd say that so much of advanced statistics is MCMC and other techniques require programming to be tractable, not just running single commands in R.
And under the GPLv3, you can still do whatever YOU want. The exception comes when you redistribute, because at that point it's not YOU using it, it's SOMEONE ELSE.
In the end, you are thus depriving that SOMEONE ELSE the ability to use the software at all. You're defending "their" rights by denying them the access they need. Sort of destroying the city in order to save it.
As far as I can tell, there are two different classes of "SOMEONE ELSE": average users and programmer geeks. In order to preserve the rights of the programmer geeks, you are denying access to average users. Just like Gnu GO on the iPhone. I can't have it at all because a "freedom" advocate believes allowing me to have it would cause them some kind of harm... sounds suspiciously like proprietary software, really. They think they're different because their demands don't involve money.
Some people see cheap laptops as bicycles with their wheels and seat removed and a higher price. Makes about as much sense as the OP.
No one thinks tablets will replace laptops for things that laptops do well. Especially not quality laptops. However, cheap, tiny laptops -- many of which were purchased to essentially do tablet activities -- will be replaced. The laptop form facto is essentially a clever way to attach the traditional desktop keyboard to the monitor, making it nicely portable. You get a larger screen, more CPU power, and a physical keyboard, but trade off battery life, form factor, and a free-form interface that allows you to interact and share it more like paper or a book. Tablets (so far) are the reverse, and for many people they are superior.
Nokia has 32% of the cellphone market (down from 36% the year before), which is not bad. Unless you consider that at the same rate of decline, they'll be at less than 25% of the market in two years. Which would not be so bad, if their share of the market were highly profitable. But Apple -- which currently owns only 4% of the overall cellphone market -- currently earns over 50% of the profits, and Nokia earns less than 30%, so Nokia doesn't really have a profitable niche into which it can retreat. Android and Apple look like they'll continue to siphon up most of the high-end profits, and the Chinese will make the low-end untenable, so exactly where will Nokia survive?
I got a Marware cover for my iPad and love it. One issue it had though, was that the iPad's compass simply never worked. It always gave me the Figure-8 Shake warning, and I eventually thought that perhaps my iPad was defective... Then one day I noticed that the flip out "foot" in the cover is held in place by two magnets. Whoops. Really only an issue if you use a compass app or if you want to figure out directions while not moving, but an interesting design issue none-the-less.
This reminds me of the Madoff clients who didn't make money ("victims"), who are now going after Madoff clients who did make money ("co-conspirators") in order to get back money -- and perhaps "profits", too. Greed is still evidently good, for those who can afford the lawyers... or at least for the lawyers.
"The new law will require them all to comply with standards approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. Those standards have, up to this point, been characterized as mere 'recommended practices'; once the President signs the CALM Act, those standards will be The Law."
That article then links to "ATSC Recommended Practice: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television", which is Document A/85:2009, 4 November 2009. Lots of observations and experiments, and not having the time to read through in detail yet, I'm not sure if it will fix the problem or if it will give ammunition to the FCC to rap knuckles when they get complaints.
Still, the good news is that the politicians aren't making their own standards up, but rather elevating a document done by people who understand the topic.
I think La Hood's idea is whacko. However, on the phone you are at a disadvantage versus talking to someone (adult) in the car: the person in the car is also probably aware of traffic. I know I've certainly had a passenger call out something I didn't see, though I'm nearly certain that if they had not been in the car in the first place, I would've seen the same thing: the distraction of the passenger was, to some extent, cancelled out by their extra set of eyes.
I followed the link and your risk of accident increases 4x while TEXTING. That's a lot more involved than merely talking. I didn't click on that link to watch that video, but my first question would be, "4x more likely than what?" I could easily say that you're 1000x more likely to get into an accident while on the cellphone compared to me (sitting in my car in my parking space).
I have made two or three 911 calls from my car over the years. Would I have had to pull over -- if that's even possible -- and turn off my car to call now? Would someone on the sidewalk nearby be able to make calls with nearby cars streaming by at rush hour?
If we could just send our criminals there... or maybe not.
(On a more serious note, I still think it makes more sense to colonize the Moon, where we can actually learn from our mistakes, rather than shoot off one-shot trips to Mars where we may end up with a black screen and wonder what went wrong. Colonize the moon, then harvest minerals from asteroids, then, once we can do most everything in space that we need to do to settle somewhere, head off to Mars.)
"Overseer of Android" aside, one question: what versions of Android, and with what phones can one follow those instructions? Not Google's development version, I gather. And you will brick some phones if you attempt to install your own compile on them. Are the skins that most manufacturers stick onto Android also open source? And how about the apps? Surely the ones from Google itself are open source, right?
As far as I can tell, Android is not open source in the same sense as I usually use the word (and the software, ironically on a Mac). And Android's customers are not us paying customers, but rather the manufacturers and carriers, anyhow.
Funny how we forget all of these nameless Overseers at the manufacturers and carriers who, for decades, have decided what consumers should want. Engineers designing our phones and telling us we should love the crap for so long, but now all of slashdot's wrath focuses on Overlord Steve Jobs. At least he has a sense of design, a concern for end user experience, and some restraint.
... oops, I guess that "jailbreak" is evil, while "root" is good. Among Android phone purchasers.
Among Android customers (i.e. manufacturers and carriers), "rooting" is evil (along with "upgrading" and "non-bloatware").
[Android fans are just now realizing that Google's customers are the manufacturers and carriers, not end users. You may not agree with Apple's conception of an end user, and their conception may not fit you at all, but at least they are conceiving of the end user as their customer, not manufacturers or carriers. Not so for Android.]
Google saw that the loudest blogs ripped Apple for having a closed system. So they developed a system that is the polar opposite...
Knowing that eventually things would get so badly messed up by The Carriers that these same blogs would cry out for Google to take over and straighten the mess out. Which they would step in and do, becoming the new Carrier Overlord who reigns over carriers and manufacturers (who have become dependent on Google because all the other alternatives except the iPhone got killed off). Google could thus become Apple and Microsoft combined and have people begging them to do it.
Why are you waiting for your carrier to upgrade your phone OS? Root the damn thing and upgrade it yourself.
Used to be that people in these here parts made fun of Apple (where "fun" is a euphemism) because you had to root the iPhone in order to customize it. Now it's become a *positive* thing? I must've missed something on teh twitter.
And this makes total sense. Google's end customers are phone manufacturers, whose end customers are carriers. Apple's end customers are... customers. That's why Apple is stuck with AT&T in the US, because AT&T was the only carrier that would agree to let Apple make the iPhone for customers.
You may disagree wether Apple's concept of the customer is a good one, but carriers and phone manufacturers have a long and inglorious track record of not having a concept of their customers at all. The iPhone scared some of them straight for a while, but with increasing Android Arrogance, they're reverting to form and are even starting to put crapware on phones.
I remember vividly a phone that I used on one carrier, where the Internet Access button was the same (soft menu) button you used to end a call. So if the other party hung up a fraction of a second before you did, you ended up using some data. This was not the way that the phone worked on other carriers, but it sure made this carrier a lot of money.
As mentioned above, Apple has patented (I believe) the idea, and evidently intended it for exactly what the parent thought. Perhaps they were only concerned with silhouettes and it was speculation that they meant photos, but so far Apple's concentrated on multi-touch and not gestures.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Microsoft has backstabbed almost every "partner" it has had, which means it only gets voluntary partners that are: a) stupid, or b) greedy.
2) Microsoft could go over the heads of the carriers, just like Apple, if it actually had something compelling for consumers. Instead, they used their default strategy of pushing carriers around while assuming that consumers would be drawn in by the fact that "It's Windows!". They didn't want to stand on the boat, and they didn't want to stand on the dock, so they ended up in the water. Windows 8 may be an attempt to get on the (consumer) boat, or it might turn out to be an attempt to stand on both the boat and dock in which case they will also end up in the water again.
"... theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."
Yeah, that would sell so many more packages. Reminds me of the friends who decided to raise their own Thanksgiving Turkey. (Who did not get eaten at Thanksgiving, and is now spending its retirement years in the country, at the friends' expense.)
Sounds like the famous Yogi-ism: "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
Apple does exactly the same thing with iPad and iPhone prices, but doesnt let you swap the mysteriously expensive memory "cards". Clearly it's all about the value to the consumer, not the cost of manufacture.
Huh? The iPhone and iPad have been competitive on the price front, and in fact it's taken two generations of the iPad for a viable challenger to emerge based on cost. Heck, Apple's the only manufacturer to stand up to the carriers and demand a better experience for users. All the other manufacturers -- including Google -- treat the carriers as the customers and please them first.
I fear for the level of self-loathing that Anyone-but-Apple fanboys will be subjected to as a result of this. The desire to be cool is strong... will it overcome the desire to hate Apple?
As others have said, if you're mainly doing reports, stick with Excel or a database solution. Excel lets you look at your data from a variety of angles (pivot tables, etc), and has usable graphs. As usual, Microsoft has numerical issues, so you may get wrong answers under certain conditions, but hey, it's Excel.
What is it that "anything complicated" means? Fancy graphs? Fancy partitioning/aggregation of data? Modeling and forecasting? Summary statistics? Graphs that aren't fancy, but Excel doesn't provide?
An open source option that I haven't seen mentioned is gretl. It has a reasonable GUI and can make nice graphs (though not terribly customizable), give summary statistics, sample data in various ways, and do basic modeling. (It comes from an econometric world, so has quite a few time series capabilities.) If you need to do some things with time series, it would be helpful. (Though if you don't know what you're doing, it simply makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.)
Insightful? Seriously? I think if your store were looted and trashed, you might be singing a different tune. Or if you lived across the street from a car that was set on fire. Or if one of your family needed emergency medical service and ambulances were held off because of the rioting.
Your comparison to Farenheit 451 is ridiculous. The book had people looking for someone whose "crime" was to read, not for someone who stole and vandalized property.
But Newell was talking about games, not... Oh... I see... some people consider Farmville a game... Nevermind.
(On a more serious note, I assume that Farmville "players" who get unfriended because they bug people would be penalized, just as Team Fortress players who harass other players off of a server would be penalized.)
I was also a CS major, and I did in fact take Diff Eq and Partial Diff Eq, and I'd have to say that other than recognizing the symbols I haven't really retained much... or needed it. On the other hand, I did poorly in Probability & Statistics -- pretty counter-intuitive stuff in many ways -- and I've been painfully whacked by that deficit multiple times in graduate studies. I finally feel like I'm getting it, but much of what I know now is self-taught so I have blind spots in my knowledge that will still embarrass me.
In fact, I'm using statistics more and more, and wish I'd been a statistician. Of course, if I were a statistician, I'd say that so much of advanced statistics is MCMC and other techniques require programming to be tractable, not just running single commands in R.
And under the GPLv3, you can still do whatever YOU want. The exception comes when you redistribute, because at that point it's not YOU using it, it's SOMEONE ELSE.
In the end, you are thus depriving that SOMEONE ELSE the ability to use the software at all. You're defending "their" rights by denying them the access they need. Sort of destroying the city in order to save it.
As far as I can tell, there are two different classes of "SOMEONE ELSE": average users and programmer geeks. In order to preserve the rights of the programmer geeks, you are denying access to average users. Just like Gnu GO on the iPhone. I can't have it at all because a "freedom" advocate believes allowing me to have it would cause them some kind of harm... sounds suspiciously like proprietary software, really. They think they're different because their demands don't involve money.
Some people see cheap laptops as bicycles with their wheels and seat removed and a higher price. Makes about as much sense as the OP.
No one thinks tablets will replace laptops for things that laptops do well. Especially not quality laptops. However, cheap, tiny laptops -- many of which were purchased to essentially do tablet activities -- will be replaced. The laptop form facto is essentially a clever way to attach the traditional desktop keyboard to the monitor, making it nicely portable. You get a larger screen, more CPU power, and a physical keyboard, but trade off battery life, form factor, and a free-form interface that allows you to interact and share it more like paper or a book. Tablets (so far) are the reverse, and for many people they are superior.
Nokia has 32% of the cellphone market (down from 36% the year before), which is not bad. Unless you consider that at the same rate of decline, they'll be at less than 25% of the market in two years. Which would not be so bad, if their share of the market were highly profitable. But Apple -- which currently owns only 4% of the overall cellphone market -- currently earns over 50% of the profits, and Nokia earns less than 30%, so Nokia doesn't really have a profitable niche into which it can retreat. Android and Apple look like they'll continue to siphon up most of the high-end profits, and the Chinese will make the low-end untenable, so exactly where will Nokia survive?
I got a Marware cover for my iPad and love it. One issue it had though, was that the iPad's compass simply never worked. It always gave me the Figure-8 Shake warning, and I eventually thought that perhaps my iPad was defective... Then one day I noticed that the flip out "foot" in the cover is held in place by two magnets. Whoops. Really only an issue if you use a compass app or if you want to figure out directions while not moving, but an interesting design issue none-the-less.
This reminds me of the Madoff clients who didn't make money ("victims"), who are now going after Madoff clients who did make money ("co-conspirators") in order to get back money -- and perhaps "profits", too. Greed is still evidently good, for those who can afford the lawyers... or at least for the lawyers.
One of the OP links summarizes the law thus:
"The new law will require them all to comply with standards approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. Those standards have, up to this point, been characterized as mere 'recommended practices'; once the President signs the CALM Act, those standards will be The Law."
That article then links to "ATSC Recommended Practice: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television", which is Document A/85:2009, 4 November 2009. Lots of observations and experiments, and not having the time to read through in detail yet, I'm not sure if it will fix the problem or if it will give ammunition to the FCC to rap knuckles when they get complaints.
Still, the good news is that the politicians aren't making their own standards up, but rather elevating a document done by people who understand the topic.
I think La Hood's idea is whacko. However, on the phone you are at a disadvantage versus talking to someone (adult) in the car: the person in the car is also probably aware of traffic. I know I've certainly had a passenger call out something I didn't see, though I'm nearly certain that if they had not been in the car in the first place, I would've seen the same thing: the distraction of the passenger was, to some extent, cancelled out by their extra set of eyes.
I followed the link and your risk of accident increases 4x while TEXTING. That's a lot more involved than merely talking. I didn't click on that link to watch that video, but my first question would be, "4x more likely than what?" I could easily say that you're 1000x more likely to get into an accident while on the cellphone compared to me (sitting in my car in my parking space).
I have made two or three 911 calls from my car over the years. Would I have had to pull over -- if that's even possible -- and turn off my car to call now? Would someone on the sidewalk nearby be able to make calls with nearby cars streaming by at rush hour?
If we could just send our criminals there... or maybe not.
(On a more serious note, I still think it makes more sense to colonize the Moon, where we can actually learn from our mistakes, rather than shoot off one-shot trips to Mars where we may end up with a black screen and wonder what went wrong. Colonize the moon, then harvest minerals from asteroids, then, once we can do most everything in space that we need to do to settle somewhere, head off to Mars.)
"Overseer of Android" aside, one question: what versions of Android, and with what phones can one follow those instructions? Not Google's development version, I gather. And you will brick some phones if you attempt to install your own compile on them. Are the skins that most manufacturers stick onto Android also open source? And how about the apps? Surely the ones from Google itself are open source, right?
As far as I can tell, Android is not open source in the same sense as I usually use the word (and the software, ironically on a Mac). And Android's customers are not us paying customers, but rather the manufacturers and carriers, anyhow.
Funny how we forget all of these nameless Overseers at the manufacturers and carriers who, for decades, have decided what consumers should want. Engineers designing our phones and telling us we should love the crap for so long, but now all of slashdot's wrath focuses on Overlord Steve Jobs. At least he has a sense of design, a concern for end user experience, and some restraint.
... oops, I guess that "jailbreak" is evil, while "root" is good. Among Android phone purchasers.
Among Android customers (i.e. manufacturers and carriers), "rooting" is evil (along with "upgrading" and "non-bloatware").
[Android fans are just now realizing that Google's customers are the manufacturers and carriers, not end users. You may not agree with Apple's conception of an end user, and their conception may not fit you at all, but at least they are conceiving of the end user as their customer, not manufacturers or carriers. Not so for Android.]
Google saw that the loudest blogs ripped Apple for having a closed system. So they developed a system that is the polar opposite...
Knowing that eventually things would get so badly messed up by The Carriers that these same blogs would cry out for Google to take over and straighten the mess out. Which they would step in and do, becoming the new Carrier Overlord who reigns over carriers and manufacturers (who have become dependent on Google because all the other alternatives except the iPhone got killed off). Google could thus become Apple and Microsoft combined and have people begging them to do it.
Why are you waiting for your carrier to upgrade your phone OS? Root the damn thing and upgrade it yourself.
Used to be that people in these here parts made fun of Apple (where "fun" is a euphemism) because you had to root the iPhone in order to customize it. Now it's become a *positive* thing? I must've missed something on teh twitter.
Android *is* open. Open for the carriers.
The users, not so much.
And this makes total sense. Google's end customers are phone manufacturers, whose end customers are carriers. Apple's end customers are... customers. That's why Apple is stuck with AT&T in the US, because AT&T was the only carrier that would agree to let Apple make the iPhone for customers.
You may disagree wether Apple's concept of the customer is a good one, but carriers and phone manufacturers have a long and inglorious track record of not having a concept of their customers at all. The iPhone scared some of them straight for a while, but with increasing Android Arrogance, they're reverting to form and are even starting to put crapware on phones.
I remember vividly a phone that I used on one carrier, where the Internet Access button was the same (soft menu) button you used to end a call. So if the other party hung up a fraction of a second before you did, you ended up using some data. This was not the way that the phone worked on other carriers, but it sure made this carrier a lot of money.
As mentioned above, Apple has patented (I believe) the idea, and evidently intended it for exactly what the parent thought. Perhaps they were only concerned with silhouettes and it was speculation that they meant photos, but so far Apple's concentrated on multi-touch and not gestures.
I know of other MS products that resemble a (fragile) sheet of glass. Windows, anyone?
So you're saying that he was actually saying that the device would be Windows-based and the interviewer perhaps misunderstood the quote? ;-)