If my son is any gauge, the reason they don't drive is because it would require them to leave the house. Whenever we go anywhere, he is always concerned with how far he will be from his computer. The iPad and 3DS will only hold off the DTs for so long...
Yes I drive a lot less than I used to 10 years ago, but it less to do with the Internet and more to do with the price of gas....
I'm not sure why your comment and link to an ancient article on gas prices (2004?!) got modded insightful, but when you factor in inflation, gas prices aren't particularly high. They're at a pretty normal level compared to historical prices (again, inflation adjusted).
That being said, the inflation adjusted income of the middle class has been going down for decades. That's more likely to be your culprit.
The way netbooks were killed was always sort of fishy.
Microsoft killed netbooks by only licensing Windows 7 Starter on netbooks that were underpowered to run Windows 7 well. Thus, people ended up having a lousy user experience.
Google revived netbooks in the form of Chromebooks by ensuring that Microsoft could not sabotage them.
People never really stopped liking netbooks -- what people didn't like was underpowered netbooks (which was Microsoft's fault) running Windows 7.
Everyone else kinda stopped selling netbooks didn't they? I would have preferred a netbook with roughly the same specs as a Chromebook and for roughly the same price, but such a thing didn't exist. Just a few years back there seemed to be plenty of different options.
Microsoft knowingly, willingly, and successfully killed netbooks, by only allowing Windows 7 Starter on netbooks that didn't have enough resources (primarily memory and CPU speed) to perform well.
So the people that got them had a bad user experience, bad mouthed them to everyone they knew, and never bought one again. Those people should have blamed the true guilty party -- Microsoft -- but they blamed netbooks in general instead. Thus, Microsoft successfully killed off netbooks.
The original idea of netbooks was something closer to what Chromebooks are... and they are very successful. Google was smart enough to rename them (netbooks -> Chromebooks) and smart enough to include an OS and browser that Microsoft can't sabotage.
And now we see that netbooks are actually a success, because Google went back to the original successful formula (no fat and slow Windows, no asinine limitations on hardware). Oh, and renamed them from netbooks to Chromebooks since Microsoft's anti-netbook campaign was so successful that everyone hates "netbooks" now... even if they actually do love them in the form of Chromebooks.
Again it is going to do all they need to do and at the same time require a lot less maintenance than Windows.
Maintenance is the primary problem with Windows. It's just too much work to keep a Windows system running well and safe.
In the last few years, my father has spent more money on Windows maintenance -- paid a company to wipe and reinstall his PC due to viruses, and then paid a pretty penny for antivirus software -- than he would have spent on an entire Chromebook.
And in the end, what does he do on his PC? Web browsing.
Not to mention the fact that his data is way safer on Google than local. Okay, so can Google and the NSA see pictures of his grandchildren if it's stored on Google? Probably.
But that's not important to him. What's important to him is not losing those pictures in the first place. And those pictures are way safer on Google's servers than on his local computer.
Chrome OS isn't really a desktop OS either. Chrome OS is the current incarnation of the dumb terminal (I know that there is local processing but the purpose is locking you up to Googles servers and services). Chrome OS is a tool for locking your data in with Google. That is even worse than MS locking in your desktop - at least you control your data there. In Chrome OS you control neither. They have to pay ME for get me to use one.
I've been in the computer field for more decades than I care to remember, and I couldn't count the number of times I've seen people lose priceless data (because it happens so often).
They get viruses that eat their data; they don't backup their data; they backup their data incorrectly; their data and backup gets destroyed (e.g., house fires); etc.
For average people, having a company like Google hold onto your data is a good idea. Google will do a much better job keeping it safe than your average person.
Also, Google does a great job making it easy to make a local copy of all your stuff stored on Google (email, docs, spreadsheets, etc.) so I don't think your lock in comment is entirely fair.
Not to mention the care and feeding Windows requires, it's insane. It's ridiculously easy to get viruses and malware, it's ridiculously easy for your system to start running unbearably slow. It's because Windows is far too hard for average people to understand and administer properly. And it's not the average person's fault, they shouldn't have to be computer geniuses to use a computer.
Chromebooks are an absolutely fantastic solution for lots of people.
Nope, I just grew up enough to stop looking down my nose at the way everyone else lives their life, how they spend their money, how they spend their free time, how they raise their kids, etc.
I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to reply. You don't even have kids. You're clueless.
Young people are the poorest age group. Middle aged and older people are the wealthiest age groups. Why should relatively poor young folks continue to pay more and more and more to subsidize their relatively rich elders?
So a lot of people heat their homes in the winter with natural gas. In the summer, natural gas bills are low. In the winter, they can be very high.
You can sign up for a payment plan that evens out the costs. You pay more than you normally would in the summer, and less than you normally would in the winter. The monthly charge doesn't change much all year long.
This plan makes it much easier to budget for expenses.
It turns out this approach works well for health care, too. Pay about the same in the summer (when you're young) and in the winter (when you're old).
You see, many young people just aren't very good at planning for the future. For example, many old people would be homeless, and starve on the streets (and die) when they got old, without something like Social Security. The system actually works very well, despite right-wing lies that it doesn't (the only problems are congress borrowing money from Social Security for non Social Security related things).
So the same proven approach is being applied to health care. This is a good idea.
Personally, I think that pro sports players and coaches, and top hip-hop musicians, all make "too much" money. But so what?
I'm not sure how I could explain the "so what" part to you any more clearly: in a democracy, if there is too much wealth pooling (or the perception thereof), the people will take your money from you, by force, if necessary.
Thus, it's in the enlightened self interest of the wealthy not to get too wealthy (or perceived to be too wealthy).
How about a law that says movie stars can only make 100 times what the lowest wage guy on the movie set makes? Perhaps recording artists should only make some multiple of what some guy in the studio does? Maybe authors can only make some multiple of what the editors at their publishing houses make?
You can argue until the cows come home how fair or not fair it is for so much wealth to pool to the top. But at the end of the day, if you live in a democracy, and it is the people's perception that the wealthy have gone too far, the people will say Enough Is Enough, and take the wealth from the wealthy, by force, if necessary.
It's in the enlightened self interest of the super wealthy (this includes CEOs) to not allow their massive wealth accumulation to become so severe that The People rise up and take their wealth from them. CEO compensation has pretty obviously crossed the line to the point where the vast majority of people think they are dirty rotten overly greedy bastards.
Wealthy people should consider this sooner rather than later.
The fastest way to get me to uninstall an app is in-game purchases (other than a one-time payment to purchase the full version straight up, with no further fees).
Give me a lite version to evaluate it, then let me buy it straight up. I loathe and detest in-game purchases for gold, gems, or anything else necessary to continue a game, or to speed it up.
Also how are companies supposed to effectively web filter if everything is HTTPS. DNS filtering is, in general, too broad as brush. We may not like our web filtered, but companies have a legal duty that employees shouldn't be see questionable material, even if on someone else's computer. Companies have been sued for allowing this to happen.
Companies can and already do install trusted certs on the browsers of their computers, and then MITM the traffic. In other words, https would not stop them from doing any filtering they care to do.
A good thing to start doing right now would be to educate people to use end-to-end encryption for all their communications (or as much as they can).
End-to-end encryption is a great idea, but technical people need to make this as simple and idiot proof as possible to maximize adoption. Let me repeat that: it needs to be simple and idiot proof. I know it's popular around here to accuse everyone in the world of being a drooling dolt, especially where technical matters are concerned, but the fact is, people are busy living their lives, working hard, spending time with their family, etc., and have little time left over for technical geekery. A ten page guide that walks you through all kinds of technical jargon and details is not going to cut the mustard. It must be nearly "click, click, click, done" simple.
HTTPS, IMAPS, etc. It's not the ultimate solution but will make a good portion of MiTM attacks conducted by spying agencies useless.
https is broken by design: it trusts anything the root CAs trust, and you can be sure most or all the CAs around the world are in bed with all the big intelligence agencies.
After that I realized that maybe moving to Java is not such a good idea after all. I think the popularity of C#/Haskell/Scala/C++11/Python are a result of this realization.
Yeah, good call there, Alomex. Java's been a real failure and programming languages like Haskell have taken off like a rocket.
oh, totes. if the nsa gave you a router with a 100% backdoor for them, then you would be golden against all other threats. except... obv the nsa can be infiltrated cf snowden. and others could engineer your router backdoor. and if the nsa has a router backdoor they could potentially get access to your computer and all your bizness, not to mention the computers and bizness of everybody you communicate with.
I would trust the NSA's security guys to get security better than any for-profit company with strong economic incentive to cut corners.
And I realize I'd be handing the NSA the keys to get inside my network -- that's the trade-off I think many people would find worthwhile -- giving the NSA access in exchange for them writing the most secure firmware they possibly could.
The effect of this is to remove secure competitors from the market and force users onto pre-compromised services.
I know this is going to sound mighty odd, but hear me out...
I kind of wish the NSA sold things like consumer routers, for which they wrote all the firmware, user interface, etc.
The NSA employs Really Ridiculously Smart People, so then I could count on my router being really, really secure against everyone and everything... except the NSA.
Which would be an OK trade-off for me, and I think would be an OK trade-off for a lot of people...
You know C. C is simple, as fast as any alternative, it's straightforward to optimize (aside from pointer abuse), and you always know what the compiler/runtime is doing. And threading libraries like pthreads or CUDA are best served via C/C++. Why use anything else?
This is just nonsense, and to see it constantly repeated and modded up is just sad.
C is only simple in the same way a written alphabet with only two letters is simple: sure, you only have to remember the letters A and B (simple!), but actually using it is not simple.
For crying out loud, in C, you can't even do A = B + C; without having a very good chance of invoking undefined behavior. Why? Because in C, overflow or underflow on signed values has undefined behavior!
Access beyond the end of an array and damage data elsewhere in the system (making it often really hard to find)? No problem!
Laboriously managing your own memory (and probably leaking it)? No problem!
What, real strings? Heck no, real men like to take the risk of overflowing the strings and their buffers!
C is filled with literally hundreds of mine fields just waiting to trap the unwary, and often forces you to write a lot of code that would only be a few lines in a higher level language.
Slashdot Mirror
If my son is any gauge, the reason they don't drive is because it would require them to leave the house. Whenever we go anywhere, he is always concerned with how far he will be from his computer. The iPad and 3DS will only hold off the DTs for so long...
Get him a smartphone?
Yes I drive a lot less than I used to 10 years ago, but it less to do with the Internet and more to do with the price of gas....
I'm not sure why your comment and link to an ancient article on gas prices (2004?!) got modded insightful, but when you factor in inflation, gas prices aren't particularly high. They're at a pretty normal level compared to historical prices (again, inflation adjusted).
That being said, the inflation adjusted income of the middle class has been going down for decades. That's more likely to be your culprit.
It does well for on-screen benchmarks, because of the low resolution of 1280x720.
The submitter got the resolution wrong. It's 1280x800, which is actually a quite nice DPI for a 7" device that's only $200.
The submitter got the resolution wrong. It's 1280x800, which is actually a quite nice DPI for a 7" device that's only $200.
The way netbooks were killed was always sort of fishy.
Microsoft killed netbooks by only licensing Windows 7 Starter on netbooks that were underpowered to run Windows 7 well. Thus, people ended up having a lousy user experience.
Google revived netbooks in the form of Chromebooks by ensuring that Microsoft could not sabotage them.
People never really stopped liking netbooks -- what people didn't like was underpowered netbooks (which was Microsoft's fault) running Windows 7.
Everyone else kinda stopped selling netbooks didn't they? I would have preferred a netbook with roughly the same specs as a Chromebook and for roughly the same price, but such a thing didn't exist. Just a few years back there seemed to be plenty of different options.
Microsoft knowingly, willingly, and successfully killed netbooks, by only allowing Windows 7 Starter on netbooks that didn't have enough resources (primarily memory and CPU speed) to perform well.
So the people that got them had a bad user experience, bad mouthed them to everyone they knew, and never bought one again. Those people should have blamed the true guilty party -- Microsoft -- but they blamed netbooks in general instead. Thus, Microsoft successfully killed off netbooks.
The original idea of netbooks was something closer to what Chromebooks are... and they are very successful. Google was smart enough to rename them (netbooks -> Chromebooks) and smart enough to include an OS and browser that Microsoft can't sabotage.
And now we see that netbooks are actually a success, because Google went back to the original successful formula (no fat and slow Windows, no asinine limitations on hardware). Oh, and renamed them from netbooks to Chromebooks since Microsoft's anti-netbook campaign was so successful that everyone hates "netbooks" now... even if they actually do love them in the form of Chromebooks.
You are using an OS specifically designed as spyware and you are using it for online banking and other financial activities?? Seriously??
Are you actually suggesting it's safer to do online banking with your typical malware ridden Windows system than with a Chromebook?? Seriously??
Again it is going to do all they need to do and at the same time require a lot less maintenance than Windows.
Maintenance is the primary problem with Windows. It's just too much work to keep a Windows system running well and safe.
In the last few years, my father has spent more money on Windows maintenance -- paid a company to wipe and reinstall his PC due to viruses, and then paid a pretty penny for antivirus software -- than he would have spent on an entire Chromebook.
And in the end, what does he do on his PC? Web browsing.
Not to mention the fact that his data is way safer on Google than local. Okay, so can Google and the NSA see pictures of his grandchildren if it's stored on Google? Probably.
But that's not important to him. What's important to him is not losing those pictures in the first place. And those pictures are way safer on Google's servers than on his local computer.
Chrome OS isn't really a desktop OS either. Chrome OS is the current incarnation of the dumb terminal (I know that there is local processing but the purpose is locking you up to Googles servers and services). Chrome OS is a tool for locking your data in with Google. That is even worse than MS locking in your desktop - at least you control your data there. In Chrome OS you control neither. They have to pay ME for get me to use one.
I've been in the computer field for more decades than I care to remember, and I couldn't count the number of times I've seen people lose priceless data (because it happens so often).
They get viruses that eat their data; they don't backup their data; they backup their data incorrectly; their data and backup gets destroyed (e.g., house fires); etc.
For average people, having a company like Google hold onto your data is a good idea. Google will do a much better job keeping it safe than your average person.
Also, Google does a great job making it easy to make a local copy of all your stuff stored on Google (email, docs, spreadsheets, etc.) so I don't think your lock in comment is entirely fair.
Not to mention the care and feeding Windows requires, it's insane. It's ridiculously easy to get viruses and malware, it's ridiculously easy for your system to start running unbearably slow. It's because Windows is far too hard for average people to understand and administer properly. And it's not the average person's fault, they shouldn't have to be computer geniuses to use a computer.
Chromebooks are an absolutely fantastic solution for lots of people.
Sounds like I hit a little too close to home. :P
Nope, I just grew up enough to stop looking down my nose at the way everyone else lives their life, how they spend their money, how they spend their free time, how they raise their kids, etc.
I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to reply. You don't even have kids. You're clueless.
Yeah. Should I ever have kids, the first version of Pong we're playing is "catch". I've seen kids raised by video games. No thanks.
I bet you don't even own a TV.
You're awesome.
Young people are the poorest age group. Middle aged and older people are the wealthiest age groups. Why should relatively poor young folks continue to pay more and more and more to subsidize their relatively rich elders?
So a lot of people heat their homes in the winter with natural gas. In the summer, natural gas bills are low. In the winter, they can be very high.
You can sign up for a payment plan that evens out the costs. You pay more than you normally would in the summer, and less than you normally would in the winter. The monthly charge doesn't change much all year long.
This plan makes it much easier to budget for expenses.
It turns out this approach works well for health care, too. Pay about the same in the summer (when you're young) and in the winter (when you're old).
You see, many young people just aren't very good at planning for the future. For example, many old people would be homeless, and starve on the streets (and die) when they got old, without something like Social Security. The system actually works very well, despite right-wing lies that it doesn't (the only problems are congress borrowing money from Social Security for non Social Security related things).
So the same proven approach is being applied to health care. This is a good idea.
Personally, I think that pro sports players and coaches, and top hip-hop musicians, all make "too much" money. But so what?
I'm not sure how I could explain the "so what" part to you any more clearly: in a democracy, if there is too much wealth pooling (or the perception thereof), the people will take your money from you, by force, if necessary.
Thus, it's in the enlightened self interest of the wealthy not to get too wealthy (or perceived to be too wealthy).
How about a law that says movie stars can only make 100 times what the lowest wage guy on the movie set makes? Perhaps recording artists should only make some multiple of what some guy in the studio does? Maybe authors can only make some multiple of what the editors at their publishing houses make?
You can argue until the cows come home how fair or not fair it is for so much wealth to pool to the top. But at the end of the day, if you live in a democracy, and it is the people's perception that the wealthy have gone too far, the people will say Enough Is Enough, and take the wealth from the wealthy, by force, if necessary.
It's in the enlightened self interest of the super wealthy (this includes CEOs) to not allow their massive wealth accumulation to become so severe that The People rise up and take their wealth from them. CEO compensation has pretty obviously crossed the line to the point where the vast majority of people think they are dirty rotten overly greedy bastards.
Wealthy people should consider this sooner rather than later.
The fastest way to get me to uninstall an app is in-game purchases (other than a one-time payment to purchase the full version straight up, with no further fees).
Give me a lite version to evaluate it, then let me buy it straight up. I loathe and detest in-game purchases for gold, gems, or anything else necessary to continue a game, or to speed it up.
Also how are companies supposed to effectively web filter if everything is HTTPS. DNS filtering is, in general, too broad as brush. We may not like our web filtered, but companies have a legal duty that employees shouldn't be see questionable material, even if on someone else's computer. Companies have been sued for allowing this to happen.
Companies can and already do install trusted certs on the browsers of their computers, and then MITM the traffic. In other words, https would not stop them from doing any filtering they care to do.
A good thing to start doing right now would be to educate people to use end-to-end encryption for all their communications (or as much as they can).
End-to-end encryption is a great idea, but technical people need to make this as simple and idiot proof as possible to maximize adoption. Let me repeat that: it needs to be simple and idiot proof. I know it's popular around here to accuse everyone in the world of being a drooling dolt, especially where technical matters are concerned, but the fact is, people are busy living their lives, working hard, spending time with their family, etc., and have little time left over for technical geekery. A ten page guide that walks you through all kinds of technical jargon and details is not going to cut the mustard. It must be nearly "click, click, click, done" simple.
HTTPS, IMAPS, etc. It's not the ultimate solution but will make a good portion of MiTM attacks conducted by spying agencies useless.
https is broken by design: it trusts anything the root CAs trust, and you can be sure most or all the CAs around the world are in bed with all the big intelligence agencies.
If you prefer crashy and insecure, you know where to find it.
After that I realized that maybe moving to Java is not such a good idea after all. I think the popularity of C#/Haskell/Scala/C++11/Python are a result of this realization.
Yeah, good call there, Alomex. Java's been a real failure and programming languages like Haskell have taken off like a rocket.
<rolls eyes>
Maybe the DarkMail folks will create some cool icons, mascots, advertisements, etc. and label them all "Made in the GIMP."
It does the same thing on Mobile Safari.
It's somewhat baffling that anyone these days would want an iPad 2. The Mini outstrips it in every area but screen size, at the same price.
Eventually, you'll know why some people might choose the larger but lower spec iPad 2 over the iPad mini.
You'll also learn why people like the zoom button on browsers, why people like smartphones with large screens, etc.
Everyone figures it out eventually...
oh, totes. if the nsa gave you a router with a 100% backdoor for them, then you would be golden against all other threats. except... obv the nsa can be infiltrated cf snowden. and others could engineer your router backdoor. and if the nsa has a router backdoor they could potentially get access to your computer and all your bizness, not to mention the computers and bizness of everybody you communicate with.
I would trust the NSA's security guys to get security better than any for-profit company with strong economic incentive to cut corners.
And I realize I'd be handing the NSA the keys to get inside my network -- that's the trade-off I think many people would find worthwhile -- giving the NSA access in exchange for them writing the most secure firmware they possibly could.
The effect of this is to remove secure competitors from the market and force users onto pre-compromised services.
I know this is going to sound mighty odd, but hear me out...
I kind of wish the NSA sold things like consumer routers, for which they wrote all the firmware, user interface, etc.
The NSA employs Really Ridiculously Smart People, so then I could count on my router being really, really secure against everyone and everything... except the NSA.
Which would be an OK trade-off for me, and I think would be an OK trade-off for a lot of people...
You know C. C is simple, as fast as any alternative, it's straightforward to optimize (aside from pointer abuse), and you always know what the compiler/runtime is doing. And threading libraries like pthreads or CUDA are best served via C/C++. Why use anything else?
This is just nonsense, and to see it constantly repeated and modded up is just sad.
C is only simple in the same way a written alphabet with only two letters is simple: sure, you only have to remember the letters A and B (simple!), but actually using it is not simple.
For crying out loud, in C, you can't even do A = B + C; without having a very good chance of invoking undefined behavior. Why? Because in C, overflow or underflow on signed values has undefined behavior!
Access beyond the end of an array and damage data elsewhere in the system (making it often really hard to find)? No problem!
Laboriously managing your own memory (and probably leaking it)? No problem!
What, real strings? Heck no, real men like to take the risk of overflowing the strings and their buffers!
C is filled with literally hundreds of mine fields just waiting to trap the unwary, and often forces you to write a lot of code that would only be a few lines in a higher level language.
C is not simple to use. C is not simple to use.