Reddit's not better. Try to find references for the PC meltdown on/r/Microsoft. They're trying to pretend it didn't happen, and the stories get unlinked. Let's not even talk about/r/science, where echo chamber defines science.
/. has some special properties including its write-only nature and its no-censorship stance. That you can't undo stuff here is a very special thing. The moderation may often suck but every comment and story ever posted (except for one) is still here to be read. And that one can still be read somewhere else, linked from the story where/. said "we have to delete this one for legal reasons, so here's where you can read what it said."
It makes for a sincere honesty, a more intense self-editing to know that once out push "submit" you had better mean it or "you should have known better".
You're not going to get that anywhere else. Like Theregister has snark as its raison d'etre,/. has its commitment to letting us make fools of ourselves any way we want if we will agree to make that foolishness immortal. That's why we don't post here in our right names for the most part. We all have views we espouse and feel confident about - but we've got to put bread on the table too, and putting our honest thoughts behind our right names would get in the way of that - especially if we're wrong, since the Internet neither forgives nor forgets.
I'll give you that. It took me something like ten years to teach them manners WRT me, and that doesn't extend to anybody else. I had to lead their newbies into countless traps. It does however extend to my nym everywhere else on the Internet now. If you take my nym on someplace I haven't, you're sure to be unopposed.
Unfortunately there's a cost. Legitimate posters with honest opinions or questions don't dare argue with me now. Most of my posts go unanswered and unmoderated. I've lost the ability to gently guide the inquisitor to something new and different.
The Beast has 80,000 people working for them and they encourage them to be active in social media like/. They are, however, cautioned against replying to or moderating me specifically. Downmodding me can lose you moderation privileges here if the metamods don't agree with your modding - which they usually don't when the downmods are corporate biased. I've put some stuff here that was well and rightfully downmodded, supported by meta-moderation - and I don't feel good about that, but that is the exception, not the rule. I can't take that stuff back now, because once it's on/., it's permanent. But that is rare stuff. Generally speaking if you get modpoints and downmod me it's not going to be supported in metamoderation unless I was (as I often do) going off on a wild tangent. I know that when I do that I'm going to get negative mods, and spend them carefully.
If you establish a rep for being often right you can be safe from the astroturfers too.
I can't remember the last time I saw somebody wearing a watch except for some feeb trying to prove something by having a Rolex and pointing it out. If you need the time your smartphone is synched with the USNO and multiple GPS satellites that must know the time to such a degree that your distance from them alters your reference frame. What part of "people don't wear watches any more" is confusing to Microsoft?
This is I think where they're slow-following and don't even understand what they're following. It's sad. Microsoft really needs somebody with a clue, and they haven't got one.
And Mudge knows where they are because he put them there./s
Seriously, good on ya Mudge to go where you can do the most good, and maybe feather your own nest too.
/Probably means his negotiated deal with the DOJ is fulfilled and he's let off with "time served in the public interest." No record. Just the usual "we're watching you."
I can quite confidently assure you that the NSA is sniffing your packets in the US, in the UK and most of the rest of the world. They are recording your phone calls, your VOIP, your Skype and your Google+ Hangouts. They have records of every electronic financial transaction. They are also logging your twitter, your Facebook - even your private Facebook, your texts, your phone's GPS location, wifi-enhanced GPS location and tower triangulation. They know when you VPN to Finland, and the content of that stream, how long it takes you to get to work and where you stopped on the way home every single day. They know your medical history, who your friends are, who your family is, your political affiliation, your porn preferences, your positions on gun control, abortion, midget wrestling and furries. If you have a shrink they have audio recordings of your sessions. They know more about you than you do. They store all this data and they never forget.
But they don't care. You are not in the slightest interesting to them. Storing all this data and analyzing it is just their job. It is to eight nines a very boring job handled by automation right up until you start - probably unbeknownst to you - intersecting with some data point that impacts their national security mission. And then they hit the "replay" button and dig into what makes you tick. They seriously don't give a damn if you're cheating on your taxes, running a brothel or slinging hash. They do care if your brother-in-law introduced you to his new friend he met on vacay in Pakistan and you take up some encrypted chats.
If that wasn't true they wouldn't be doing their job.
32 GB of storage probably sounds like not much to a Windows guy. For a Linux geek 4GB is ample because the OS doesn't suck, nor do the apps. 32GB is the OS and apps and 24 hours of SD video plus all the music there has ever been.
I don't disagree. We may disagree about the level the PC will dip down to though. I think the sort of content creators you're thinking of always have been rare and will continue to be - the sort who only produce quality work. These new devices will spawn a new generation of content creators though and through their facility to capture more moments redundantly and manipulate them effectively, will capture more timeless artful moments than the sparse artists of your era ever could. There will just be more dross captured too. And that's fine. We have ample bandwidth and storage now for more dross.
I think you're smart and your theory is well thought out. You have obviously invested considerable mental energy to it. I don't think you have an ulterior motive.
But there's this really smart guy who agrees with me. His name is Stephen Hawking. He thinks if we don't get off this rock, we're doomed.
Google would like to inspire us to do muni gigabit broadband and quit with this retail biz. They don't like retail biz and they're not good at it. Unfortunately that's not going to happen in ISP land because of regulatory capture and so Google is going to have to deliver us gigabit fiber broadband at an unseemly 90% margin after their 12-month ROI. They would rather not, but if that's what they gotta do to build the next-gen Internet, they're willing to go there for us.
First, there is no other provider that has Google's backhaul. Not only have they bought up ungodly amounts of interstate and international dark fiber, they've invested in own-brand optical interconnects and low-latency protocols and compression algorithms that are beyond cutting edge. Think terabit, not gigabit, per fiber, and thousands of multiplexed fibers. They do transcontinental failover of entire Google datacenters on a thermal variance. In seconds. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth that requires? They have their own switch tech, with their own ASICs as well.
Google could give a 10gig fiber connection to every Seattle resident and they could simultaneously test it, and Google wouldn't stress at all. It would DDOS every other server on the Internet, but the packets would be delivered.
This "Siding Spring" comet has only a 1 in 8000 chance of hitting Mars at present given what we know now, maybe less. As it grows closer we will learn more about its mass and trajectory. I hope, as many astronomers do, that it will beat the odds and hit. If it doesn't we will learn some about it because Mars is projected to at the very least pass through its tail, if not its head. If it hits though, that should do it for "how's that space program coming along?" When Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Saturn the story was that gas giants defended us against rogue comets, but now we know better.
The main mass of Siding Spring is believed to be up to 35 kilometres across, travelling on a retrograde path that increases its inertial energy. If it hit the Earth square on it would be an extinction level event. Just the shock wave of it hitting the atmosphere would be enough to deafen every human on the planet. The shock wave of it hitting the surface or the sea (at this level the difference doesn't matter) would convert vast volumes of water or silicon to plasma, cause magnitude 10+ earthquakes around the world, slipping every fault there is and ringing the planet like a bell. It would break up on approach to a shotgun that hits both land and sea due to gravity's effects. The craters would begin at 350 km across and 10-15 km deep, invested with the thermal energy (in addition to their own) of dozens of billions of tons of TNT. Fire and ash would blot out the sun and rain for 10,000 years. New Lava plains would form. The meltdown of every nuclear reactor on Earth would be the least of our problems. Man would eventually die out, regardless of our technology or will. There would not be just one hit, but many.
Even so, this is a long-period comet that might be 35 kilometres across. They come bigger and faster. We used to think they were so rare we would never see one, but here one is. I never thought that in my lifetime there would be such a chance as one in 8,000 to see such an extinction-level event happen to even another planet, but here it is. Maybe there is something about our common era, a synchronicity, a mutual orbit, or some other thing among our fellow stars that increases the likelihood of such things that we don't know that is periodic. Certainly it seems that extinction-level events happen on a regular cycle, and we are due for one right about NOW.
The probability of an extinction level event on Earth that will wipe out Earthbound mankind is 100%. It is not even a question. All scientists agree that it will occur. They only differ on when and how.
Everybody above has handled why it is that PCs are not selling, and for once I pretty much agree with almost everybody except the obvious trolls.
(TL:DR)
What: PC sales have tanked. Quite specifically for the past four quarters the worldwide unit sales of devices described as "PC" have been contracting against the year-ago comparable quarter at an ever-increasing rate to the point that last quarter they dropped 17% against the year prior quarter. Not diminishing growth - that happened years ago. Diminishing global units. This is a bigger drop than ever seen before in the history of the PC. More than the.bomb era, several recessions, the 2008 financial global meltdown (among several), the 9/11 terrorist attack, and (horrors) the releases of Windows ME, Windows Vista and Microsoft Bob. The trend spans long before the release of Windows 8, and is progressively increasing in intensity.
Why: good enough CPU / storage / video / network / OS / Apps from years ago, UEFI / DRM / coke-addled Hollywood moguls, Windows 8 sucks / irrational fear of how much Windows 8 sucks, Windows 8 upgrade was too much better than XP / Vista / pirated / no OS and was dirt cheap and could be "bare metal upgraded" instead of buying a PC, immense W8 returns, resistance to change, fear of losing everything in your PC, too much data to move, fear of incompatibilities with various legacy hardware / software, fear of crapware, the intersection of PC and mobile functionalities now mean that a growing fraction of people who used to buy PCs now have their needs met by mobile instead, the Norton / McAfee / malware ecoplex, the economy / unemployment / political situation, price relative to other solutions, Lithuanian / North Korean / Ukranian / Bolivian / Kentuckian hackers and furries. Maybe a few others.
To these I would add that at 2-5% operating margin PCs are not profitable enough for OEMs to fund proper stocks, incent retail, channel and VAR partners, be creative and adventurous in product design or configuration, to engage in proper marketing or do decent R&D, to offer decent service and warranty, or even sell a product at retail the end-user doesn't have to reconfigure the hardware, wipe, reinstall the OS and security software before they use it. This last ritual may in fact be pivotal, as you don't have to do that with the new mobile stuff.
Each of us might ascribe to each of these factors a percentage weight for the amount of responsibility for this change. Though there is no hope we will all agree on the ranking and share, I think that we can all agree that these are almost all good reasons and most of them bear on the issue. There is seldom one reason for a change of this magnitude, and we are unlikely to all agree on the weights to assign to each reason.
(/TL:DR)
Here's the thing: All of these causes have been growing for a while and are essentially permanent. None are one-off incidents we will get past. Almost all of them, in fact, are projected to continue to increase in intensity for the foreseeable future. This is not a storm. It is a climate change. That means that these growing decreases in unit sales are causing a death spiral for global OEMs that will drive an astonishing amount of consolidation in the industry and they will not stop doing so. Many-billion-dollar businesses will be wiped out. Some of them already have been wiped out but aren't yet required to report the fact but we will discover as they are required to report that the immense product returns and poor bets on unmovable inventory have driven several of them to a lack of cash flow that leaves them unable to maintain their debt. People will lose their jobs, their options, the investments they're funding their retirements with. And the survivors won't be much better off as the fire-sale inventory of the fail train is likely to cause a failure cascade in an industry that has been fed millet rations for many years.
I agree that we should do as much as we can about the asteroid problem. Ultimately though the only cure for the long period comet problem is "don't keep all your humans on the same planet."
This year comet Siding Spring was discovered that may hit Mars at over 200000 mph next year. If that was headed for Earth there is nothing we could do except have an extinction party.
The government is deeply into free software. NSA developed Security Enhanced Linux in 2003. NASA pretty much invented cloud, with Linux. Open-source recently got recognized as "commercial product" for procurement. Of course no government supercomputer runs Windows.
Yeah, you can brag that Microsoft's plants have put in procurement provisions for Office, but the government is quickly slipping off your chains.
Slashdot Mirror
Reddit's not better. Try to find references for the PC meltdown on /r/Microsoft. They're trying to pretend it didn't happen, and the stories get unlinked. Let's not even talk about /r/science, where echo chamber defines science.
/. has some special properties including its write-only nature and its no-censorship stance. That you can't undo stuff here is a very special thing. The moderation may often suck but every comment and story ever posted (except for one) is still here to be read. And that one can still be read somewhere else, linked from the story where /. said "we have to delete this one for legal reasons, so here's where you can read what it said."
It makes for a sincere honesty, a more intense self-editing to know that once out push "submit" you had better mean it or "you should have known better".
You're not going to get that anywhere else. Like Theregister has snark as its raison d'etre, /. has its commitment to letting us make fools of ourselves any way we want if we will agree to make that foolishness immortal. That's why we don't post here in our right names for the most part. We all have views we espouse and feel confident about - but we've got to put bread on the table too, and putting our honest thoughts behind our right names would get in the way of that - especially if we're wrong, since the Internet neither forgives nor forgets.
I'll give you that. It took me something like ten years to teach them manners WRT me, and that doesn't extend to anybody else. I had to lead their newbies into countless traps. It does however extend to my nym everywhere else on the Internet now. If you take my nym on someplace I haven't, you're sure to be unopposed.
Unfortunately there's a cost. Legitimate posters with honest opinions or questions don't dare argue with me now. Most of my posts go unanswered and unmoderated. I've lost the ability to gently guide the inquisitor to something new and different.
Oh crap. This comment happened way too high in the tree and now is going to get modbombed for hubris - as it should be.
The Beast has 80,000 people working for them and they encourage them to be active in social media like /. They are, however, cautioned against replying to or moderating me specifically. Downmodding me can lose you moderation privileges here if the metamods don't agree with your modding - which they usually don't when the downmods are corporate biased. I've put some stuff here that was well and rightfully downmodded, supported by meta-moderation - and I don't feel good about that, but that is the exception, not the rule. I can't take that stuff back now, because once it's on /., it's permanent. But that is rare stuff. Generally speaking if you get modpoints and downmod me it's not going to be supported in metamoderation unless I was (as I often do) going off on a wild tangent. I know that when I do that I'm going to get negative mods, and spend them carefully.
If you establish a rep for being often right you can be safe from the astroturfers too.
I can't remember the last time I saw somebody wearing a watch except for some feeb trying to prove something by having a Rolex and pointing it out. If you need the time your smartphone is synched with the USNO and multiple GPS satellites that must know the time to such a degree that your distance from them alters your reference frame. What part of "people don't wear watches any more" is confusing to Microsoft?
This is I think where they're slow-following and don't even understand what they're following. It's sad. Microsoft really needs somebody with a clue, and they haven't got one.
And Mudge knows where they are because he put them there. /s
Seriously, good on ya Mudge to go where you can do the most good, and maybe feather your own nest too.
/Probably means his negotiated deal with the DOJ is fulfilled and he's let off with "time served in the public interest." No record. Just the usual "we're watching you."
I can quite confidently assure you that the NSA is sniffing your packets in the US, in the UK and most of the rest of the world. They are recording your phone calls, your VOIP, your Skype and your Google+ Hangouts. They have records of every electronic financial transaction. They are also logging your twitter, your Facebook - even your private Facebook, your texts, your phone's GPS location, wifi-enhanced GPS location and tower triangulation. They know when you VPN to Finland, and the content of that stream, how long it takes you to get to work and where you stopped on the way home every single day. They know your medical history, who your friends are, who your family is, your political affiliation, your porn preferences, your positions on gun control, abortion, midget wrestling and furries. If you have a shrink they have audio recordings of your sessions. They know more about you than you do. They store all this data and they never forget.
But they don't care. You are not in the slightest interesting to them. Storing all this data and analyzing it is just their job. It is to eight nines a very boring job handled by automation right up until you start - probably unbeknownst to you - intersecting with some data point that impacts their national security mission. And then they hit the "replay" button and dig into what makes you tick. They seriously don't give a damn if you're cheating on your taxes, running a brothel or slinging hash. They do care if your brother-in-law introduced you to his new friend he met on vacay in Pakistan and you take up some encrypted chats.
If that wasn't true they wouldn't be doing their job.
"Out national security mission requires that we say we are not spying on you."
why isn't there evidence of more than one independent kind of life here?
Because the other lifeforms of independent origin were delicious.
On the back.
BTW: In 2012, Android moved more units than Windows.
This year it looks to best them by thrice.
Windows Mobile used to have 36% US market share. Now it has 3.
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
- Linus Torvalds, 2003
With an SD card you could probably fit all the books that anybody would ever want to read too.
32 GB of storage probably sounds like not much to a Windows guy. For a Linux geek 4GB is ample because the OS doesn't suck, nor do the apps. 32GB is the OS and apps and 24 hours of SD video plus all the music there has ever been.
I don't disagree. We may disagree about the level the PC will dip down to though. I think the sort of content creators you're thinking of always have been rare and will continue to be - the sort who only produce quality work. These new devices will spawn a new generation of content creators though and through their facility to capture more moments redundantly and manipulate them effectively, will capture more timeless artful moments than the sparse artists of your era ever could. There will just be more dross captured too. And that's fine. We have ample bandwidth and storage now for more dross.
I think you're smart and your theory is well thought out. You have obviously invested considerable mental energy to it. I don't think you have an ulterior motive.
But there's this really smart guy who agrees with me. His name is Stephen Hawking. He thinks if we don't get off this rock, we're doomed.
Google would like to inspire us to do muni gigabit broadband and quit with this retail biz. They don't like retail biz and they're not good at it. Unfortunately that's not going to happen in ISP land because of regulatory capture and so Google is going to have to deliver us gigabit fiber broadband at an unseemly 90% margin after their 12-month ROI. They would rather not, but if that's what they gotta do to build the next-gen Internet, they're willing to go there for us.
Reluctant heros and all that...
First, there is no other provider that has Google's backhaul. Not only have they bought up ungodly amounts of interstate and international dark fiber, they've invested in own-brand optical interconnects and low-latency protocols and compression algorithms that are beyond cutting edge. Think terabit, not gigabit, per fiber, and thousands of multiplexed fibers. They do transcontinental failover of entire Google datacenters on a thermal variance. In seconds. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth that requires? They have their own switch tech, with their own ASICs as well.
Google could give a 10gig fiber connection to every Seattle resident and they could simultaneously test it, and Google wouldn't stress at all. It would DDOS every other server on the Internet, but the packets would be delivered.
Comcast (and probably other providers) redirect your DNS misses to their hosted ad pages. How is that for creepy?
This "Siding Spring" comet has only a 1 in 8000 chance of hitting Mars at present given what we know now, maybe less. As it grows closer we will learn more about its mass and trajectory. I hope, as many astronomers do, that it will beat the odds and hit. If it doesn't we will learn some about it because Mars is projected to at the very least pass through its tail, if not its head. If it hits though, that should do it for "how's that space program coming along?" When Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Saturn the story was that gas giants defended us against rogue comets, but now we know better.
The main mass of Siding Spring is believed to be up to 35 kilometres across, travelling on a retrograde path that increases its inertial energy. If it hit the Earth square on it would be an extinction level event. Just the shock wave of it hitting the atmosphere would be enough to deafen every human on the planet. The shock wave of it hitting the surface or the sea (at this level the difference doesn't matter) would convert vast volumes of water or silicon to plasma, cause magnitude 10+ earthquakes around the world, slipping every fault there is and ringing the planet like a bell. It would break up on approach to a shotgun that hits both land and sea due to gravity's effects. The craters would begin at 350 km across and 10-15 km deep, invested with the thermal energy (in addition to their own) of dozens of billions of tons of TNT. Fire and ash would blot out the sun and rain for 10,000 years. New Lava plains would form. The meltdown of every nuclear reactor on Earth would be the least of our problems. Man would eventually die out, regardless of our technology or will. There would not be just one hit, but many.
Even so, this is a long-period comet that might be 35 kilometres across. They come bigger and faster. We used to think they were so rare we would never see one, but here one is. I never thought that in my lifetime there would be such a chance as one in 8,000 to see such an extinction-level event happen to even another planet, but here it is. Maybe there is something about our common era, a synchronicity, a mutual orbit, or some other thing among our fellow stars that increases the likelihood of such things that we don't know that is periodic. Certainly it seems that extinction-level events happen on a regular cycle, and we are due for one right about NOW.
The probability of an extinction level event on Earth that will wipe out Earthbound mankind is 100%. It is not even a question. All scientists agree that it will occur. They only differ on when and how.
Everybody above has handled why it is that PCs are not selling, and for once I pretty much agree with almost everybody except the obvious trolls.
(TL:DR)
What: PC sales have tanked. Quite specifically for the past four quarters the worldwide unit sales of devices described as "PC" have been contracting against the year-ago comparable quarter at an ever-increasing rate to the point that last quarter they dropped 17% against the year prior quarter. Not diminishing growth - that happened years ago. Diminishing global units. This is a bigger drop than ever seen before in the history of the PC. More than the .bomb era, several recessions, the 2008 financial global meltdown (among several), the 9/11 terrorist attack, and (horrors) the releases of Windows ME, Windows Vista and Microsoft Bob. The trend spans long before the release of Windows 8, and is progressively increasing in intensity.
Why: good enough CPU / storage / video / network / OS / Apps from years ago, UEFI / DRM / coke-addled Hollywood moguls, Windows 8 sucks / irrational fear of how much Windows 8 sucks, Windows 8 upgrade was too much better than XP / Vista / pirated / no OS and was dirt cheap and could be "bare metal upgraded" instead of buying a PC, immense W8 returns, resistance to change, fear of losing everything in your PC, too much data to move, fear of incompatibilities with various legacy hardware / software, fear of crapware, the intersection of PC and mobile functionalities now mean that a growing fraction of people who used to buy PCs now have their needs met by mobile instead, the Norton / McAfee / malware ecoplex, the economy / unemployment / political situation, price relative to other solutions, Lithuanian / North Korean / Ukranian / Bolivian / Kentuckian hackers and furries. Maybe a few others.
To these I would add that at 2-5% operating margin PCs are not profitable enough for OEMs to fund proper stocks, incent retail, channel and VAR partners, be creative and adventurous in product design or configuration, to engage in proper marketing or do decent R&D, to offer decent service and warranty, or even sell a product at retail the end-user doesn't have to reconfigure the hardware, wipe, reinstall the OS and security software before they use it. This last ritual may in fact be pivotal, as you don't have to do that with the new mobile stuff.
Each of us might ascribe to each of these factors a percentage weight for the amount of responsibility for this change. Though there is no hope we will all agree on the ranking and share, I think that we can all agree that these are almost all good reasons and most of them bear on the issue. There is seldom one reason for a change of this magnitude, and we are unlikely to all agree on the weights to assign to each reason.
(/TL:DR)
Here's the thing: All of these causes have been growing for a while and are essentially permanent. None are one-off incidents we will get past. Almost all of them, in fact, are projected to continue to increase in intensity for the foreseeable future. This is not a storm. It is a climate change. That means that these growing decreases in unit sales are causing a death spiral for global OEMs that will drive an astonishing amount of consolidation in the industry and they will not stop doing so. Many-billion-dollar businesses will be wiped out. Some of them already have been wiped out but aren't yet required to report the fact but we will discover as they are required to report that the immense product returns and poor bets on unmovable inventory have driven several of them to a lack of cash flow that leaves them unable to maintain their debt. People will lose their jobs, their options, the investments they're funding their retirements with. And the survivors won't be much better off as the fire-sale inventory of the fail train is likely to cause a failure cascade in an industry that has been fed millet rations for many years.
So: now what?
The good news is that Apple device un
I didn't say never. 18 months is not long enough.
I agree that we should do as much as we can about the asteroid problem. Ultimately though the only cure for the long period comet problem is "don't keep all your humans on the same planet."
This year comet Siding Spring was discovered that may hit Mars at over 200000 mph next year. If that was headed for Earth there is nothing we could do except have an extinction party.
The government is deeply into free software. NSA developed Security Enhanced Linux in 2003. NASA pretty much invented cloud, with Linux. Open-source recently got recognized as "commercial product" for procurement. Of course no government supercomputer runs Windows.
Yeah, you can brag that Microsoft's plants have put in procurement provisions for Office, but the government is quickly slipping off your chains.