The app has the ability to sign up for a free account; Microsoft either never had or offered to remove (I've seen different stories on different sites) the ability to elect to subscribe to additional storage from the app.
The Skydrive app that Apple refused to approve doesn't allow in-app sign-up/purchase of subscriptions. It's a free app that works with a service that has an optional subscription component (you can pay for additional storage)... but you can only buy the subscription through the website, not the iOS app. Apple wanted a 30% cut on those subscription revenues anyway and Microsoft told them to go take a hike. The same concern applies to Microsoft's plan to release Office apps for iOS: Apple wants a cut of Office365 subscriptions just because the apps will work with that service, even though users aren't subscribing or making a purchase through the app.
OP has a point though. While you don't explicitly try to extend your control beyond your jurisdiction, when it comes to privacy protection on major websites, we all benefit from Europe's oversight, even here in the US, because it's much easier for sites to just make their whole system work in a way that satisfies European regulations rather than fragmenting into different sub-sites for each jurisdiction.
But Windows Phone does have apps. It has lots of apps, actually. Not the sheer numbers of iOS and Android just yet, though Microsoft's outreach efforts to developers, or their view of the strength of the platform, is such that the selection has been growing at the same rate Apple's did after their launch and faster than Androids. But I can't remember the last time I went to look for something in the Marketplace and came up empty.
You could add to that the issue of integrated features being good enough to make apps redundant (e.g. Bing Local Scout > Yelp!; Bing Music Search > Shazaam!; Bing Vison > tag reader apps; etc.), but all those apps are available regardless, along with all the other big names, and several have better UI experiences on WP than on iOS.
Really, the idea that there aren't apps available is FUD these days. That hasn't been a serious roadblock for a year or more, and the situation is improving all the time. And the presumptive ease of porting apps between WP8 and Win8 can only help in the future.
What Windows Phone really still lacks is consumer awareness, retail sales support, and marketing.
Perhaps this approach by OEMs is why Microsoft felt the need to produce its own Surface line. It'll be interesting to see how the pricing compares once they announce it.
They don't need to lock out non-Windows phones. They just need to have better integration/features on Windows Phone than on the competition. Office, SkyDrive, and SharePoint integration is a big start in that direction for business needs. Xbox, music, etc. integration and common cross-form-factor UI experience is the direction they're starting in for consumer needs. We'll see how the market responds, but it definitely has potential.
According to this study, 8% of all accidents (12% of those on limited-access highways) are attributed to insufficient visibility in rearview mirrors when changing lanes. If it weren't a major problem, they wouldn't mandate side mirrors on cars. There are a significant number of collisions caused by tractor-trailer trucks changing lanes into cars too, in the US. I don't know the frequency of other accident types (running off the road/into guardrails, etc.) on such highways, but lane-change maneuvers are statistically one of the most dangerous things you regularly do in a car.
While I agree with your overall point that speed alone doesn't increase the likelihood of a collision, it does undoubtedly increase the severity of a collision. I'm all for higher speed limits, and wish that we'd have a more autobahn-like system, where there are simply no rural speed limits at all in stretches where the interstates are sufficiently safe to justify that. But I do want to point out a few factual issues here:
Even the article summary has to grasp for straws in trying to provide a "balanced" summary.... this 85 MPH divided highway is apparently unsafe because.... driving fast on country roads increases fatalities!
The writers of the article may not have picked up on it yet, but Iowa has recently reported an increase in interstate highway fatalities since raising their speed limit from 65 to 70. (On the other hand, several of the western states saw declines in accident rates back when they raised speed limits due to the reduction of the speed differential between vehicles, since many people were driving that fast already and the change was that the slowpokes were no longer driving quite so much slower than everyone else.)
Accidents between two cars going in the same direction at relatively the same speed (+/- 10-15 mph) are rare.
On the contrary, lane-change accidents are among the most common. They're just almost never fatal.
One more point to note... if you're going to get in a single-car accident at 65 MPH and hit a pylon or something, you're dead. If you do it at 85 or 90 MPH, you're just REALLY dead. Same difference.
Generally true. And as other commenters have said, you might as well go for REALLY dead rather than maimed and brain-damaged if you survive.
The real problem with comments isn't their color, it's when they AREN'T THERE AT ALL.
I think that's the whole point of the color/collapse discussion, though, right? Without the ability to collapse comments, there's a real disincentive to including them, as they clutter the code and can make it difficult to read/follow directly. If you can collapse/hide them so that they don't obscure the code, then there's no longer a need to declutter by leaving them out, and hopefully more will be included. That argument, however, presupposes an intentional, aesthetic decision behind the lack of comments, while your point on lazy coders leaving sparse or cryptic comments is entirely valid. It's sloppy and lazy programmers that are the problem.
They've been closing some facilities and going through layoffs, but they do still make their flagship products themselves rather than outsourcing. A new Lumia 920 or the like will still be made in a Nokia facility, not by Chinese kids.
Unibody vehicles still have "subframes" consisting of structural steel reinforcing parts of the chassis. The front suspension (everything the wheel mounts to) and the engine/transmission bolt to the front subframe, which handles all the loads of cornering, acceleration, braking, etc. and distributes them to the unibody structure of the main vehicle cabin. The subframe is welded to the unibody, and integral to the structure of the vehicle chassis. It's probably entirely accurate to say that the frame rusted, given that if the wheel was no longer securely held in position due to structural rust on the chassis, it would have to be the front subframe that was faulty.
Apple fighting samsung completely legally within the confines of the system (and trouncing them because Samsung is a shit company that can't create anything in the consumer space worth owning) is not what is wrong with intellectual property.
So how does that align with the fact that Samsung sells twice as many phones as Apple? Or that they're pretty much the premier display provider, and also make memory and other components that other companies - including Apple - use in their own products?
In other words, you can't be bothered to worry about whether you're actually communicating effectively; you just broadcast a message and ignore the results. You may as well just stand on a street corner with a megaphone for all the good that'll do. I'm glad you're not responsible for designing network protocols. We'd have no parity, check bits, etc.
The sender is responsible for ensuring that the message is clear to the recipient, and if it is not, should rephrase or retransmit accordingly.
You can't get high enough yields to produce any quantity without using modern agricultural methods (and associated machinery). US corn yield, on average, was around 29 bushels per acre in 1900, and is approaching 200 bushels per acre now. Some of the recent increase has been due to rapid biotechnological advances, but even in the 1990s, yields were around 130-140 bushels per acre. That increase over the decades was due to mechanization, fertilizer technology, etc. If you want corn ethanol production without fuel use, you'll drop back to a 20-40 bushel per acre yield and not be able to produce enough feedstock for your fuel production.
Iranians are Persian, not Arab. And we've killed plenty of Europeans and East Asians in various conflicts without it leading to jihadism. It's not an issue of ethnicity, but one of an extremist religious cult amongst various Muslim peoples that teaches that terrorism is a desirable means of spreading Sharia Law throughout the world. That's not to say our meddling really endears us to the people in Arab states, but it's not sufficient to explain the level of hatred that exists.
From a current user, updates on the status of those specific issues, for those who care:
Yelp:Available on Windows Phone, but irrelevant on the platform from my perspective, since Local Scout function of integrated Bing/Map does it faster and better. Seems unlikely they wouldn't have updated their app to make it multitask properly, but I haven't checked.
Evernote: available on Windows Phone, but I've never seen the point of downloading it, since OneNote is already included and saves right to SkyDrive... can't speak to whether the functionality has been updated or not there.
GV: That one's definitely still a lot better on Android. There are some third-party apps, but they're limited. Users of that service have a good reason to stick with Google's platform.
Maps:Lack of public transit issue is still valid; voice-navigation only partially so - the platform has had voice-directions built-in for a while now, but due to map licensing restrictions, you have to tap the screen when it dings in order for it to read the next step to you. A step above Apple, but below Google there. Third-party, of course, suffers no such restriction, if you pay for it.
Zune to sync: still true... rumor has it they'll be changing that with a new sync app for Windows 8 at least in the fall. No word yet on whether that'll add the ability to back up SMS messages.
The fixed display resolution is a plausibly valid complaint, though honestly the OLEDs on Nokia and Samsung models are beautiful enough that it really doesn't matter; the single-core complaint is meaningless though, in practice. The performance is more than satisfactory, as the OS is well-optimized for the processors they use. Pick one up and play with it, and it's just as responsive as a beast of an Android phone with a quad-core processor, but the battery won't drain as quickly. Processor compatibility is a spec-sheet complaint, not a real-world use one.
Actually, I'm a tech savvy user, and I own and use a Samsung Focus and like it enough to recommend the platform to friends. Until my fiancee got a Focus S around Christmas, everyone else I knew who used one was also very tech savvy (mostly professional software developers, actually - they'd get one out of curiosity or to test their own apps, and end up liking it enough to use it daily).
One aspect of the appeal, odd as it is for me to say it, is that the UI is so good that I don't feel the need to customize the heck out of it like I've done on other platforms - it actually does what I want it to do quite efficiently as it is. That's not to say there aren't still some annoyances, or that I haven't developer-unlocked my own to run homebrew apps, etc. but it's really quite nice overall. Vastly preferable to the sea-of-icons UI of Apple & Google. If I were buying a new phone right now, it'd probably be the Lumia 900...
For a car analogy, it's kind of like the difference between the new, reliable car that you can just drive every day and the old classic you've got in the garage that you're always working on restoring. You may not be able to as easily customize the engine tuning on the modern, efficient, fuel-injected vehicle as easily as you could fiddle around with the carb on the old one, but it's also kind of nice not to have to fiddle with it all the time just to keep it running.
Actually, given the age of the platform, Microsoft's Marketplace app selection has grown almost as fast as Apple's and significantly faster than Android's. There are over 100,000 entries to date, and it's quickly catching up - still behind for now, but growing quickly. Ad payment rates are actually pretty good on the platform, and users seem to be willing to spend slightly more on paid apps when necessary (perhaps due in part to lower selection for now). The platform is certainly younger, but it does seem to be growing pretty nicely, and Microsoft is pretty aggressive about encouraging developers to write for it. As for the $10 monthly credit idea, they did do a $25 one-time credit towards WP apps back around the holidays for people who bought Windows Phones - my fiancee got it with her phone. Not sure if they've repeated the promotion or not, but they did run it at least once.
But if you leave out the JWs (and maybe the 7DAs), whose beliefs are rather heterodox, the rest that you mentioned (as well as the Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and any number of other denominational or nondenominational classifications you could use to categorize Christians) absolutely share a core belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith: e.g. essentially all Christians would agree with both the content of the three major ecumenical creeds and the centrality and importance of that content, even amidst whatever real differences they may have on other matters. C.S. Lewis popularized the term "mere Christianity" (after Baxter), and it's quite fitting here. He describes the concept in the preface of his book by that title:
The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian "denominations." You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic.
This omission is intentional (even in the list I have just given the order is alphabetical). There is no mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially "high," nor especially "low," nor especially anything else. But in this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times. I had more than one reason for thinking this. In the first place, the questions which divide Christians from one another often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical history which ought never to be treated except by real experts.
...
I hope no reader will suppose that "mere" Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions-as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.
The authority on who is part of a religion must be the people who are themselves of that religion. If Christians consider all of these groups to comprise the Church, as distinct from other groups, we should consider the distinction they make to carry a great deal of weight.
Slashdot Mirror
The app has the ability to sign up for a free account; Microsoft either never had or offered to remove (I've seen different stories on different sites) the ability to elect to subscribe to additional storage from the app.
The Skydrive app that Apple refused to approve doesn't allow in-app sign-up/purchase of subscriptions. It's a free app that works with a service that has an optional subscription component (you can pay for additional storage) ... but you can only buy the subscription through the website, not the iOS app. Apple wanted a 30% cut on those subscription revenues anyway and Microsoft told them to go take a hike. The same concern applies to Microsoft's plan to release Office apps for iOS: Apple wants a cut of Office365 subscriptions just because the apps will work with that service, even though users aren't subscribing or making a purchase through the app.
OP has a point though. While you don't explicitly try to extend your control beyond your jurisdiction, when it comes to privacy protection on major websites, we all benefit from Europe's oversight, even here in the US, because it's much easier for sites to just make their whole system work in a way that satisfies European regulations rather than fragmenting into different sub-sites for each jurisdiction.
But Windows Phone does have apps. It has lots of apps, actually. Not the sheer numbers of iOS and Android just yet, though Microsoft's outreach efforts to developers, or their view of the strength of the platform, is such that the selection has been growing at the same rate Apple's did after their launch and faster than Androids. But I can't remember the last time I went to look for something in the Marketplace and came up empty.
You could add to that the issue of integrated features being good enough to make apps redundant (e.g. Bing Local Scout > Yelp!; Bing Music Search > Shazaam!; Bing Vison > tag reader apps; etc.), but all those apps are available regardless, along with all the other big names, and several have better UI experiences on WP than on iOS.
Really, the idea that there aren't apps available is FUD these days. That hasn't been a serious roadblock for a year or more, and the situation is improving all the time. And the presumptive ease of porting apps between WP8 and Win8 can only help in the future.
What Windows Phone really still lacks is consumer awareness, retail sales support, and marketing.
Yeah, he's just gonna take it lying down.
Perhaps this approach by OEMs is why Microsoft felt the need to produce its own Surface line. It'll be interesting to see how the pricing compares once they announce it.
They don't need to lock out non-Windows phones. They just need to have better integration/features on Windows Phone than on the competition. Office, SkyDrive, and SharePoint integration is a big start in that direction for business needs. Xbox, music, etc. integration and common cross-form-factor UI experience is the direction they're starting in for consumer needs. We'll see how the market responds, but it definitely has potential.
So, about as much electricity as a few houses, distributed nationwide. Yep, that's in the noise.
Well, except for all that's involved in manufacturing the new fridge, discharging the refrigerant, disposing of the old one, etc. ...
Apparently you coffee test all the electronics in your house before use.
Clearly his keyboard failed the test:
But is is coffee proof? ... Tht may burn thrpung seals and gaskets.
According to this study, 8% of all accidents (12% of those on limited-access highways) are attributed to insufficient visibility in rearview mirrors when changing lanes. If it weren't a major problem, they wouldn't mandate side mirrors on cars. There are a significant number of collisions caused by tractor-trailer trucks changing lanes into cars too, in the US. I don't know the frequency of other accident types (running off the road/into guardrails, etc.) on such highways, but lane-change maneuvers are statistically one of the most dangerous things you regularly do in a car.
While I agree with your overall point that speed alone doesn't increase the likelihood of a collision, it does undoubtedly increase the severity of a collision. I'm all for higher speed limits, and wish that we'd have a more autobahn-like system, where there are simply no rural speed limits at all in stretches where the interstates are sufficiently safe to justify that. But I do want to point out a few factual issues here:
Even the article summary has to grasp for straws in trying to provide a "balanced" summary.... this 85 MPH divided highway is apparently unsafe because.... driving fast on country roads increases fatalities!
The writers of the article may not have picked up on it yet, but Iowa has recently reported an increase in interstate highway fatalities since raising their speed limit from 65 to 70. (On the other hand, several of the western states saw declines in accident rates back when they raised speed limits due to the reduction of the speed differential between vehicles, since many people were driving that fast already and the change was that the slowpokes were no longer driving quite so much slower than everyone else.)
Accidents between two cars going in the same direction at relatively the same speed (+/- 10-15 mph) are rare.
On the contrary, lane-change accidents are among the most common. They're just almost never fatal.
One more point to note ... if you're going to get in a single-car accident at 65 MPH and hit a pylon or something, you're dead. If you do it at 85 or 90 MPH, you're just REALLY dead. Same difference.
Generally true. And as other commenters have said, you might as well go for REALLY dead rather than maimed and brain-damaged if you survive.
The real problem with comments isn't their color, it's when they AREN'T THERE AT ALL.
I think that's the whole point of the color/collapse discussion, though, right? Without the ability to collapse comments, there's a real disincentive to including them, as they clutter the code and can make it difficult to read/follow directly. If you can collapse/hide them so that they don't obscure the code, then there's no longer a need to declutter by leaving them out, and hopefully more will be included. That argument, however, presupposes an intentional, aesthetic decision behind the lack of comments, while your point on lazy coders leaving sparse or cryptic comments is entirely valid. It's sloppy and lazy programmers that are the problem.
They've been closing some facilities and going through layoffs, but they do still make their flagship products themselves rather than outsourcing. A new Lumia 920 or the like will still be made in a Nokia facility, not by Chinese kids.
Unibody vehicles still have "subframes" consisting of structural steel reinforcing parts of the chassis. The front suspension (everything the wheel mounts to) and the engine/transmission bolt to the front subframe, which handles all the loads of cornering, acceleration, braking, etc. and distributes them to the unibody structure of the main vehicle cabin. The subframe is welded to the unibody, and integral to the structure of the vehicle chassis. It's probably entirely accurate to say that the frame rusted, given that if the wheel was no longer securely held in position due to structural rust on the chassis, it would have to be the front subframe that was faulty.
Apple fighting samsung completely legally within the confines of the system (and trouncing them because Samsung is a shit company that can't create anything in the consumer space worth owning) is not what is wrong with intellectual property.
So how does that align with the fact that Samsung sells twice as many phones as Apple? Or that they're pretty much the premier display provider, and also make memory and other components that other companies - including Apple - use in their own products?
In other words, you can't be bothered to worry about whether you're actually communicating effectively; you just broadcast a message and ignore the results. You may as well just stand on a street corner with a megaphone for all the good that'll do. I'm glad you're not responsible for designing network protocols. We'd have no parity, check bits, etc.
The sender is responsible for ensuring that the message is clear to the recipient, and if it is not, should rephrase or retransmit accordingly.
(See Figure 3 here for historical trends.)
You can't get high enough yields to produce any quantity without using modern agricultural methods (and associated machinery). US corn yield, on average, was around 29 bushels per acre in 1900, and is approaching 200 bushels per acre now. Some of the recent increase has been due to rapid biotechnological advances, but even in the 1990s, yields were around 130-140 bushels per acre. That increase over the decades was due to mechanization, fertilizer technology, etc. If you want corn ethanol production without fuel use, you'll drop back to a 20-40 bushel per acre yield and not be able to produce enough feedstock for your fuel production.
Iranians are Persian, not Arab. And we've killed plenty of Europeans and East Asians in various conflicts without it leading to jihadism. It's not an issue of ethnicity, but one of an extremist religious cult amongst various Muslim peoples that teaches that terrorism is a desirable means of spreading Sharia Law throughout the world. That's not to say our meddling really endears us to the people in Arab states, but it's not sufficient to explain the level of hatred that exists.
From a current user, updates on the status of those specific issues, for those who care:
Yelp:Available on Windows Phone, but irrelevant on the platform from my perspective, since Local Scout function of integrated Bing/Map does it faster and better. Seems unlikely they wouldn't have updated their app to make it multitask properly, but I haven't checked.
Evernote: available on Windows Phone, but I've never seen the point of downloading it, since OneNote is already included and saves right to SkyDrive... can't speak to whether the functionality has been updated or not there.
GV: That one's definitely still a lot better on Android. There are some third-party apps, but they're limited. Users of that service have a good reason to stick with Google's platform.
Maps:Lack of public transit issue is still valid; voice-navigation only partially so - the platform has had voice-directions built-in for a while now, but due to map licensing restrictions, you have to tap the screen when it dings in order for it to read the next step to you. A step above Apple, but below Google there. Third-party, of course, suffers no such restriction, if you pay for it.
Zune to sync: still true ... rumor has it they'll be changing that with a new sync app for Windows 8 at least in the fall. No word yet on whether that'll add the ability to back up SMS messages.
The fixed display resolution is a plausibly valid complaint, though honestly the OLEDs on Nokia and Samsung models are beautiful enough that it really doesn't matter; the single-core complaint is meaningless though, in practice. The performance is more than satisfactory, as the OS is well-optimized for the processors they use. Pick one up and play with it, and it's just as responsive as a beast of an Android phone with a quad-core processor, but the battery won't drain as quickly. Processor compatibility is a spec-sheet complaint, not a real-world use one.
Actually, I'm a tech savvy user, and I own and use a Samsung Focus and like it enough to recommend the platform to friends. Until my fiancee got a Focus S around Christmas, everyone else I knew who used one was also very tech savvy (mostly professional software developers, actually - they'd get one out of curiosity or to test their own apps, and end up liking it enough to use it daily).
One aspect of the appeal, odd as it is for me to say it, is that the UI is so good that I don't feel the need to customize the heck out of it like I've done on other platforms - it actually does what I want it to do quite efficiently as it is. That's not to say there aren't still some annoyances, or that I haven't developer-unlocked my own to run homebrew apps, etc. but it's really quite nice overall. Vastly preferable to the sea-of-icons UI of Apple & Google. If I were buying a new phone right now, it'd probably be the Lumia 900...
For a car analogy, it's kind of like the difference between the new, reliable car that you can just drive every day and the old classic you've got in the garage that you're always working on restoring. You may not be able to as easily customize the engine tuning on the modern, efficient, fuel-injected vehicle as easily as you could fiddle around with the carb on the old one, but it's also kind of nice not to have to fiddle with it all the time just to keep it running.
Actually, given the age of the platform, Microsoft's Marketplace app selection has grown almost as fast as Apple's and significantly faster than Android's. There are over 100,000 entries to date, and it's quickly catching up - still behind for now, but growing quickly. Ad payment rates are actually pretty good on the platform, and users seem to be willing to spend slightly more on paid apps when necessary (perhaps due in part to lower selection for now). The platform is certainly younger, but it does seem to be growing pretty nicely, and Microsoft is pretty aggressive about encouraging developers to write for it. As for the $10 monthly credit idea, they did do a $25 one-time credit towards WP apps back around the holidays for people who bought Windows Phones - my fiancee got it with her phone. Not sure if they've repeated the promotion or not, but they did run it at least once.
But if you leave out the JWs (and maybe the 7DAs), whose beliefs are rather heterodox, the rest that you mentioned (as well as the Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and any number of other denominational or nondenominational classifications you could use to categorize Christians) absolutely share a core belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith: e.g. essentially all Christians would agree with both the content of the three major ecumenical creeds and the centrality and importance of that content, even amidst whatever real differences they may have on other matters. C.S. Lewis popularized the term "mere Christianity" (after Baxter), and it's quite fitting here. He describes the concept in the preface of his book by that title:
The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian "denominations." You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic.
This omission is intentional (even in the list I have just given the order is alphabetical). There is no mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially "high," nor especially "low," nor especially anything else. But in this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times. I had more than one reason for thinking this. In the first place, the questions which divide Christians from one another often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical history which ought never to be treated except by real experts.
...
I hope no reader will suppose that "mere" Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions-as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.
The authority on who is part of a religion must be the people who are themselves of that religion. If Christians consider all of these groups to comprise the Church, as distinct from other groups, we should consider the distinction they make to carry a great deal of weight.