It looks like you were calling them insane theories to me.
No, I said I was playing devil's advocate. I simply took the parent's argument and replaced his belief system with the opposing belief system to demonstrate that the same argument works for both sides. Personally, I hold neither beliefs.
The problem with invoking a creator is that it appears to explain things at first glance, but doesn't provide any more information.
I agree with you here, but that is largely irrelevant. You can't say "this doesn't exist because it doesn't provide me with any useful information" - rather, "I don't care if this exists or not because it doesn't provide me with any useful information" is more accurate.
You seem to be presenting the "I don't believe either way" agnosticism. However, unless you believe in God, you are an atheist. Do you believe in God?
I don't know whether there is a god or not, nor do I particularly care.
On the other hand, an atheist believes that there is no god - again, I don't know whether there is a god or not, I don't particularly care either way, so I'm not an atheist.
So you are a lazy, spineless pompous atheist. "I don't believe in God, but I don't care enough to actually say that because it would be takings sides in a battle I don't care to associate with."
No, I don't hold a position at all on the existence/non-existence of a god. It is something I don't believe is knowable, and I have no faith either way.
If you think that you determine people what they believe, even when you've never met that person, then that's up to you. Doesn't make your determination correct though.
I cannot prove there is no creator, but why should I believe in one?
There's no reason why you should - as you say, there is no evidence. But equally, there is no evidence to say there isn't a creator so other people who believe in one are equally "right". People having faith one way or the other isn't a problem at all - people believing that their faith is more "right" than someone else's, even though there is an equal absence of evidence supporting either, is the problem. You only have to look at this thread to see people suggesting that anyone believing in a creator is insane.
the claim that unicorns do exist is not equally meritorious to the claim that unicorns do not exist.
This is a false analogy. A unicorn, if it were to exist, would be observable to someone. It would seem reasonable to suggest that something as large as a unicorn would probably have been observed at some point by a reliable person in recent times. On the other hand, a creator that exists outside of our universe and does not want to be observed is inherently unobservable, so it is unreasonable to suggest that if one existed it would probably have been observed.
If you replace your unicorn with something small - say, a small bird in the rainforest, a bacterium somewhere, etc. then it probably isn't so unreasonable to suggest they might exist since we are constantly discovering new species of birds, bateria, etc.
There is plenty of evidence supporting the big bang and evolution, so they aren't "insane" theories.
I never said they were. But we don't know why the big bang happened, why the universal constants are the way they are (which produced a universe friendly to our type of life). You could easily say that a creator set all the constants to the correct values and fired off the big bang - there is as much evidence to support this as there is to say it all happened spontaneously by itself (i.e. no evidence either way).
If we're allowed to just make stuff up as we go along there's still no reason to prefer one fairy story over another.
That was exactly my point that you seem to have missed. There is _no evidence_, nor can there be any evidence as to whether or not there is a creator. Whether you believe there is one or you believe there isn't one, you're still "making stuff up as you go along". Instead, the scientific thing to do is accept that you just don't know, stop worrying about it and move along.
I don't care which you believe - what I do care about is people pushing their beliefs upon other people. This applies equally whether you're going around telling people they are going to hell because they don't believe in a god or telling people they are idiots because they do.
Stephen Hawking has devoted his life to figuring out if the universal constants have to be 'just right' for the Universe to exist. So far the answer is "no".
Which goes no where to answering the unanswerable question as to whether the universe was designed or not. A house can be built in a great many ways, but proving that does nothing to prove that it wasn't originally designed - indeed, most houses are designed, but simply examining the constants inherent in a design and saying "we could have a house with different constants and it'd still stand up" doesn't really tell you anything about its creation.
No, but an industry that is limited by public hysteria are only shooting themselves in the foot if they allow even a small scale accident to occur. This isn't even about safety - its about public perception of safety.
Except that those who say the Universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago and that life evolved naturally over the period of approx. 4 billion years have literally mountains of evidence to back up their claims.
And no evidence to suggest that a god didn't do this. Creationism and science *can* be compatible - if you believe that a creator figured what she wanted, set all the universal constants to the right values so that the universe evolved to the creator's design over billions of years and then turned the universe on then this fits with all scientific evidence. Indeed, in this case there can be no evidence supporting the existence of the creator since the universe is behaving according to all the rules we can observe. Science has yet to explain *why* the big bang happened and *why* various universal constants are the values they are - saying that some creator set the constants to those values and lit the blue touch paper is as good a hypothesis as any.
Um, this thing you call "belief"? Science doesn't use it.
Of course it does. There are frequently no absolute answers (especially at the leading edge of science) and scientists base their work on what they believe to be true. Occasionally, someone comes up with a new hypothesis and gets hell from the other scientists for their crazy theories. Sometimes those crazy ideas are shown to work better than the established theories and everyone has to shift their belief. Scientific belief is a lot more fluid than religious belief, but don't kid yourself - it is a fundamental part of science and there is always a lot of resistance to changing it.
You talk of proof. If you tell me something insane (my imaginary friend created the universe), the burden is absolutely NOT upon ME to prove it correct. That's on YOU. Otherwise, YOU are the one who is insane. Not me.
Playing devil's advocate for a minute:
If you tell me something insane (the universe popped into being all by its self and life evolved through no external design), the burden is absolutely NOT upon ME to prove it correct. That's on YOU. Otherwise, YOU are the one who is insane. Not me.
Note: I'm actually an agnostic, but I can easily see how someone who has faith in a god can use *exactly* the same argument as someone who has faith in there being no god.
As an agnostic, I don't really have any faith either way. But to me, the existence of a god doesn't actually answer any meaningful questions (i.e. if we decide that intelligence couldn't possibly come about without design then how did the designer come into existence? It just pushes all the questions back a level). Also, by definition, there can be no evidence either for the existence or nonexistence. So since the whole thing is a fundamentally unprovable question that doesn't meaningfully answer any questions, I don't really worry about it.
I can only think of one incident when it could have happened, I walked out of my office in a large open plan lab and walked into what I thought was just a He-Ne beam that someone had 'diverted' from the optical bench at the far end of the lab down to another bench at the other end, by the looks of it now there was (probably) an IR laser down the same path.
Shouldn't you be wearing goggles if you are in a line of sight of anywhere a high power laser is being used?
Thing is, Apple and everyone else want you to buy a new phone from them every few years.
Well yes, but a phone that I can use for the next 6 years has considerably more value to me (and hence will encourage me to spend more in the first place) than one that is going to be dead in a year.
That said, I think having the latest OS is largely overrated - when I bought my Android phone (HTC Dream) I did so on the premise that I would be able to update it, and this desire was borne out of the fact that my previous phone had been running Symbian UIQ and it was the worst most buggy pile of crap you've ever seen. But actually, I found that Android was largely ok... I did update as far as Android 1.6 (via Cyanogenmod), but didn't bother to go any further, and frankly I'm pretty happy to leave it as it is for now. The reasons why I might upgrade my phone are currently that wifi has broken (probably cracked solder) and that it is a bit slow because it doesn't really have enough RAM - neither of these are things that can be fixed with software.
My fiancee just had to replace her phone (iPhone 3GS). This was a phone that had received no software update since it was originally purchased. She *wanted* to replace it with another iPhone 3GS because she had been happy with it. As it turned out, the 3GS isn't available at a sensible price (the iPhone 4 is cheaper) and she decided to save her money and get a Nexus-S instead (200 quid cheaper than the iPhone 4 for basically the same hardware, and she is very happy with it). The point is that she was very happy with a phone that by all accounts was running old software - there was no motivation to upgrade. If it works, don't fix it.
BTW how long do you think handset makers and carriers should be forced to update phone software for?
They should commit to a support period when they produce the phone so that you know what you're getting.
Although what I'd love to see (but pigs will fly sooner) is open hardware (so no farting about with binary blobs) and some generic android distributions with a nice shiny installer that will install on *any* device, much like I can install popular Linux distros on any computer. Obviously this is subject to hardware limitations - i.e. I wouldn't really expect (or want) to be able to install the latest Android on my HTC Dream with its 96MB of RAM, just as I wouldn't expect to install a desktop OS on an ancient PC.
Then TFA is definitely informative, because it points out that Android phones don't get the bonuses that iPhones do. It's valuable information.
I don't find the article that informative because I have no clue what is contained within the updates. It really needs a feature-by-feature comparison. I.e. if iOS has had several years of updates which have only added minor features then it is no surprise that it would work on older hardware. Whereas if Android has had lots of major features in the updates then it is reasonably understandable that it might need more beefy hardware to run them. I'm not saying this is the case, but without that information the article isn't especially informative.
I do know that I wouldn't *want* the latest Android on my phone (HTC Dream) because the hardware just isn't up to running it in a usable way. However, Android 1.6 works on it just fine and I'm happy to stick with that.
Riiiight, because the average users writes scripts and uses ssh clients oh and by the way giant bat wings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter, did you know that?
It is THIS, this kind of delusional dumbshit right here, that has kept Linux in last place, even when the sweaty monkey was practically committing corporate suicide with dead ducks like Vista.
Err, ok, I'll bite. Why is it a bad thing to make functionality available that non-technical users aren't going to want to use but technical users will find incredibly powerful?
It isn't like you *have* to use the CLI on any modern Linux (well, you do when things go badly wrong, but when things go *that* wrong under Windows you're even more screwed anyway so it's reinstalley-time for anyone non-technical in either case). The CLI isn't shoved in your face any more, but it is still there if you want it - you don't see the fact that there is a CLI *available* harming the Mac do you?
you have at last count something like 200 MILLION PLUS late model P4s and early dual cores that are gonna go EOL and will be just begging for an easy to use free OS, because lets face it Farmville and Facebook?
Ok, and now you're contradicting your own argument. The "normal people" you are referring to do not, as a rule, go and install new operating systems on their existing hardware. They see their computer with its OS as a single device and if they want to change OS they will go to PC World and but a new computer with it preinstalled.
Linux has been "ready for the desktop" for some time (in that if a hardware vendor were interested and supplied a preinstalled system where they had certified that all the hardware in it worked with the OS, etc. then it would be fine for most home users). Unfortunately, none of the hardware vendors, except Apple, are interested in pushing a non-windows OS to general consumers (the offerings from the likes of Dell are very half-arsed and not really marketed well).
The only hardware vendor who is pushing preinstalled non-Windows OSes is Apple, and they are doing pretty well for themselves so it demonstrates that the public are often very happy to run something other than Windows, even though their Windows software won't run on it. However, Apple are only interested in their own OS, not Linux.
I'm afraid that the "customers only want Windows" mentality prevalent in the PC industry isn't going to go away any time soon, even though it is demonstrably incorrect, so even though Windows 8 is a complete crock I'm not expecting to see any mass migration to Linux. We'll see people upgrading to Windows 8 and cursing it, we'll see people sticking with Windows 7 as long as possible and we'll see people migrating to Apple Macs.
As a anecdotal example of Linux's readyness for the desktop, my fiancee isn't really that technical when it comes to computers - she can use them just fine, but I guess she would fall into the "normal user" category and will never start poking at them under the hood. Several years ago she chose to switch from Windows to OS X and did so without any real problems. She regularly uses my Gnome 3 laptop and has no problems with it. In fact, for the most part she's pretty blissfully unaware that it is running Linux.
Just give the consumer what they want, that's all.
The customer wants some hardware with an OS preinstalled on it. It doesn't matter whether that OS is Windows, OS X, Linux or something else so long as it is easy to use for "normal stuff" (word processing, web browsing, listening to music, watching videos). There is nothing more Linux software developers can do in this regard - a preinstalled Linux *does* do what the consumer wants. For what normal consumers want, there is no CLI fiddling required to make a preinstalled Linux work. It is now down to the hardware vendors - if the hardware vendors start pushing preinstalled Linux systems in a serious way then Linux is in a good position to take off. However, I have no faith that any large hardware vendor is going to do this.
Isn't that exactly what Microsoft does with Android? They offer a license for a reasonable fee. And then everyone screams bloody murder. I guess they should do it the Apple way. And then everyone will scream bloody murder. It's hard to take Slashdot complaints seriously sometimes when the standards seem so different for each company involved.
People probably wouldn't scream if MS actually explained what patents are being infringed by Linux (and by extension, Android). But at the moment its basically a protection racket - they won't tell you what you might be infringing so you can avoid it, but instead force everyone into licensing for unknown (possibly invalid) patents.
I think you're misunderstanding the function of advertising. Advertising is used to promote a product or service that can't promote itself on its own merits.
Some advertising does as you say. But a lot of advertising is actually just about making people aware of a product so that it can promote itself on its own merits. It doesn't matter how good the merits are of your product if no one knows about it in the first place.
Every single time, "organic" search results will be better than ads.
Untrue. If I search for a piece of hardware, a lot of the search results are going to be people discussing how to make some software work with that hardware, reporting problems with the hardware, praising the hardware, etc. Whilst I might find these things useful, they don't fundamentally answer the question of where to buy that hardware (at least, not without sorting though a miriad of crap first). A well targeted ad will do this.
If Google cared about search quality, they would ban advertisers who foist such ads onto users. Instead, they just charge them more and let them continue doing it.
Google has to make money from somewhere, an unlike other search engines of the past they have always done a pretty good job of making it visually obvious when something is an ad and keeping it separate from the impartial search results. This makes it easy for you to choose which you are interested in and ignore the rest.
Also, https prevents caching of objects such as images, css, javascript, which is a concern on large networks that routinely employ caching proxy servers to reduce uplink bandwidth requirements.
It also eats through Li-Ion batteries like nobody's business - I have to replace the battery about every 12-18 months. The battery calibration is also completely broken - I have to recalibrate every few weeks.
The TPM also appears to be broken and I have to pass workaround parameters on the kernel command line to even get a modern kernel to boot, otherwise it hangs up trying to initialise the busted TPM (even when the TPM is turned off in the BIOS).
Honest question: What can Android do that iOS and Windows Phone can't do?
I got an android phone, but I never really dove into it(yes, I'll be handing in my geek card on the way out)
I think the question is more "what can iOS/Windows do that Android can't" since iOS and Windows seem to demand a very high price compared to equivalent Android devices. For most people I doubt it matters a damn whether their phone runs Android or iOS (but the Windows Phone UI looks really horrible half-finished to me. When I first saw it I thought "it's only a preview release, I'm sure they'll fix the UI rendering" and then I was told it was _supposed_ to look like that...)
For me, I wouldn't buy iOS coz I don't like the idea of Apple telling me what I can and can't do with my own hardware - an Android phone lets me install whatever apps I please and use it how I like. I imagine I'm in the minority and most people don't care though, which is why I wonder why so many people go for the more expensive iOS options.
As far as interface icons are concerned, I'm not sure what the law says, but from a practical point of view I think it's best to encourage companies to imitate each others' interfaces whenever possible: it makes it easier for consumers to switch from using one to another.
Well yes and no. Yes it makes it easier for customers to switch between devices, but it also limits their choice because maybe the customer doesn't _want_ the interface to look like that.
As an example, several years ago I was looking around for a new phone. I was considering an HTC Dream (which I did buy in the end), but the salesman at the Carphone Warehouse was doing his level best to tell me that I didn't want an HTC Dream because it wasn't very iphone-like (it had a hard keyboard rather than an on-screen keyboard) and kept directing me to various other phones because they were "more iphone-like". He didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept that I didn't *want* an iPhone clone, I was specifically looking for a phone with a hard keypad and if I wanted something like the iPhone I'd probably have just damned well bought an iPhone!
Whilst I will accept that having the same interface everywhere is good in environments where you are constantly switching between several devices that do essentially the same job, in an environment where you own and use a single device for this job (which is usually the case with phones) then it would seem more sensible to give the user a UI that they find pleasant and efficient to work with rather than forcing everyone to use the same interface that may well not work for them. This applies equally to other devices, such as desktop PCs - as another example, I find having my PC set to do sloppy-focus so that I can rapidly switch between and work on half-hidden windows. It is a minor inconvenience when I have to use someone else's PC that isn't set up like this, but it would seriously harm my working efficiency if I was unable to set my own workstation how I wanted. Since 99% of my time is spent working on my own workstation, it makes the most sense to have it configured in the best way for *me* (and then having to deal with some inconvenience on the 1% of the time I use a different machine) than it would be to have a lowest-common-denominator setup where everything is identical(ly crap).
By plugging it into mains power... Every desktop PC, laptop, printer, monitor, etc. I've purchased in about the past 10 years has had a multivoltage PSU (plug it in to pretty much anything between 100-250vac at 50-60Hz and it Just Works). Most desktop PCs purchased over 10 years ago had a manually switchable PSU (little voltage selector switch on the back) although admittedly monitors and laptops frequently didn't.
Don't you also have an issue with incompatible power supplies? Australian supply is typically around 240V/50Hz, same as the UK, whereas I understand power in the US is supplied at 120V/60Hz.
If there's any electronic kit around that still doesn't have multi-voltage power supplies, I really don't want it...
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It looks like you were calling them insane theories to me.
No, I said I was playing devil's advocate. I simply took the parent's argument and replaced his belief system with the opposing belief system to demonstrate that the same argument works for both sides. Personally, I hold neither beliefs.
The problem with invoking a creator is that it appears to explain things at first glance, but doesn't provide any more information.
I agree with you here, but that is largely irrelevant. You can't say "this doesn't exist because it doesn't provide me with any useful information" - rather, "I don't care if this exists or not because it doesn't provide me with any useful information" is more accurate.
You seem to be presenting the "I don't believe either way" agnosticism. However, unless you believe in God, you are an atheist. Do you believe in God?
I don't know whether there is a god or not, nor do I particularly care.
On the other hand, an atheist believes that there is no god - again, I don't know whether there is a god or not, I don't particularly care either way, so I'm not an atheist.
So you are a lazy, spineless pompous atheist. "I don't believe in God, but I don't care enough to actually say that because it would be takings sides in a battle I don't care to associate with."
No, I don't hold a position at all on the existence/non-existence of a god. It is something I don't believe is knowable, and I have no faith either way.
If you think that you determine people what they believe, even when you've never met that person, then that's up to you. Doesn't make your determination correct though.
I cannot prove there is no creator, but why should I believe in one?
There's no reason why you should - as you say, there is no evidence. But equally, there is no evidence to say there isn't a creator so other people who believe in one are equally "right". People having faith one way or the other isn't a problem at all - people believing that their faith is more "right" than someone else's, even though there is an equal absence of evidence supporting either, is the problem. You only have to look at this thread to see people suggesting that anyone believing in a creator is insane.
the claim that unicorns do exist is not equally meritorious to the claim that unicorns do not exist.
This is a false analogy. A unicorn, if it were to exist, would be observable to someone. It would seem reasonable to suggest that something as large as a unicorn would probably have been observed at some point by a reliable person in recent times. On the other hand, a creator that exists outside of our universe and does not want to be observed is inherently unobservable, so it is unreasonable to suggest that if one existed it would probably have been observed.
If you replace your unicorn with something small - say, a small bird in the rainforest, a bacterium somewhere, etc. then it probably isn't so unreasonable to suggest they might exist since we are constantly discovering new species of birds, bateria, etc.
There is plenty of evidence supporting the big bang and evolution, so they aren't "insane" theories.
I never said they were. But we don't know why the big bang happened, why the universal constants are the way they are (which produced a universe friendly to our type of life). You could easily say that a creator set all the constants to the correct values and fired off the big bang - there is as much evidence to support this as there is to say it all happened spontaneously by itself (i.e. no evidence either way).
If we're allowed to just make stuff up as we go along there's still no reason to prefer one fairy story over another.
That was exactly my point that you seem to have missed. There is _no evidence_, nor can there be any evidence as to whether or not there is a creator. Whether you believe there is one or you believe there isn't one, you're still "making stuff up as you go along". Instead, the scientific thing to do is accept that you just don't know, stop worrying about it and move along.
I don't care which you believe - what I do care about is people pushing their beliefs upon other people. This applies equally whether you're going around telling people they are going to hell because they don't believe in a god or telling people they are idiots because they do.
Stephen Hawking has devoted his life to figuring out if the universal constants have to be 'just right' for the Universe to exist. So far the answer is "no".
Which goes no where to answering the unanswerable question as to whether the universe was designed or not. A house can be built in a great many ways, but proving that does nothing to prove that it wasn't originally designed - indeed, most houses are designed, but simply examining the constants inherent in a design and saying "we could have a house with different constants and it'd still stand up" doesn't really tell you anything about its creation.
Safety and Success aren't synonymous.
No, but an industry that is limited by public hysteria are only shooting themselves in the foot if they allow even a small scale accident to occur. This isn't even about safety - its about public perception of safety.
Except that those who say the Universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago and that life evolved naturally over the period of approx. 4 billion years have literally mountains of evidence to back up their claims.
And no evidence to suggest that a god didn't do this. Creationism and science *can* be compatible - if you believe that a creator figured what she wanted, set all the universal constants to the right values so that the universe evolved to the creator's design over billions of years and then turned the universe on then this fits with all scientific evidence. Indeed, in this case there can be no evidence supporting the existence of the creator since the universe is behaving according to all the rules we can observe. Science has yet to explain *why* the big bang happened and *why* various universal constants are the values they are - saying that some creator set the constants to those values and lit the blue touch paper is as good a hypothesis as any.
Um, this thing you call "belief"? Science doesn't use it.
Of course it does. There are frequently no absolute answers (especially at the leading edge of science) and scientists base their work on what they believe to be true. Occasionally, someone comes up with a new hypothesis and gets hell from the other scientists for their crazy theories. Sometimes those crazy ideas are shown to work better than the established theories and everyone has to shift their belief. Scientific belief is a lot more fluid than religious belief, but don't kid yourself - it is a fundamental part of science and there is always a lot of resistance to changing it.
You talk of proof. If you tell me something insane (my imaginary friend created the universe), the burden is absolutely NOT upon ME to prove it correct. That's on YOU. Otherwise, YOU are the one who is insane. Not me.
Playing devil's advocate for a minute:
If you tell me something insane (the universe popped into being all by its self and life evolved through no external design), the burden is absolutely NOT upon ME to prove it correct. That's on YOU. Otherwise, YOU are the one who is insane. Not me.
Note: I'm actually an agnostic, but I can easily see how someone who has faith in a god can use *exactly* the same argument as someone who has faith in there being no god.
As an agnostic, I don't really have any faith either way. But to me, the existence of a god doesn't actually answer any meaningful questions (i.e. if we decide that intelligence couldn't possibly come about without design then how did the designer come into existence? It just pushes all the questions back a level). Also, by definition, there can be no evidence either for the existence or nonexistence. So since the whole thing is a fundamentally unprovable question that doesn't meaningfully answer any questions, I don't really worry about it.
I can only think of one incident when it could have happened, I walked out of my office in a large open plan lab and walked into what I thought was just a He-Ne beam that someone had 'diverted' from the optical bench at the far end of the lab down to another bench at the other end, by the looks of it now there was (probably) an IR laser down the same path.
Shouldn't you be wearing goggles if you are in a line of sight of anywhere a high power laser is being used?
Google Earth scares the shit out of me b/c I cannot imagine WTF the government has with their technology.
Google Earth uses aerial photography (i.e. taken from planes) rather than satellite photos in all the interesting places.
Thing is, Apple and everyone else want you to buy a new phone from them every few years.
Well yes, but a phone that I can use for the next 6 years has considerably more value to me (and hence will encourage me to spend more in the first place) than one that is going to be dead in a year.
That said, I think having the latest OS is largely overrated - when I bought my Android phone (HTC Dream) I did so on the premise that I would be able to update it, and this desire was borne out of the fact that my previous phone had been running Symbian UIQ and it was the worst most buggy pile of crap you've ever seen. But actually, I found that Android was largely ok... I did update as far as Android 1.6 (via Cyanogenmod), but didn't bother to go any further, and frankly I'm pretty happy to leave it as it is for now. The reasons why I might upgrade my phone are currently that wifi has broken (probably cracked solder) and that it is a bit slow because it doesn't really have enough RAM - neither of these are things that can be fixed with software.
My fiancee just had to replace her phone (iPhone 3GS). This was a phone that had received no software update since it was originally purchased. She *wanted* to replace it with another iPhone 3GS because she had been happy with it. As it turned out, the 3GS isn't available at a sensible price (the iPhone 4 is cheaper) and she decided to save her money and get a Nexus-S instead (200 quid cheaper than the iPhone 4 for basically the same hardware, and she is very happy with it). The point is that she was very happy with a phone that by all accounts was running old software - there was no motivation to upgrade. If it works, don't fix it.
BTW how long do you think handset makers and carriers should be forced to update phone software for?
They should commit to a support period when they produce the phone so that you know what you're getting.
Although what I'd love to see (but pigs will fly sooner) is open hardware (so no farting about with binary blobs) and some generic android distributions with a nice shiny installer that will install on *any* device, much like I can install popular Linux distros on any computer. Obviously this is subject to hardware limitations - i.e. I wouldn't really expect (or want) to be able to install the latest Android on my HTC Dream with its 96MB of RAM, just as I wouldn't expect to install a desktop OS on an ancient PC.
Then TFA is definitely informative, because it points out that Android phones don't get the bonuses that iPhones do. It's valuable information.
I don't find the article that informative because I have no clue what is contained within the updates. It really needs a feature-by-feature comparison. I.e. if iOS has had several years of updates which have only added minor features then it is no surprise that it would work on older hardware. Whereas if Android has had lots of major features in the updates then it is reasonably understandable that it might need more beefy hardware to run them. I'm not saying this is the case, but without that information the article isn't especially informative.
I do know that I wouldn't *want* the latest Android on my phone (HTC Dream) because the hardware just isn't up to running it in a usable way. However, Android 1.6 works on it just fine and I'm happy to stick with that.
Riiiight, because the average users writes scripts and uses ssh clients oh and by the way giant bat wings pop out of my ass and I fly south for the winter, did you know that?
It is THIS, this kind of delusional dumbshit right here, that has kept Linux in last place, even when the sweaty monkey was practically committing corporate suicide with dead ducks like Vista.
Err, ok, I'll bite. Why is it a bad thing to make functionality available that non-technical users aren't going to want to use but technical users will find incredibly powerful?
It isn't like you *have* to use the CLI on any modern Linux (well, you do when things go badly wrong, but when things go *that* wrong under Windows you're even more screwed anyway so it's reinstalley-time for anyone non-technical in either case). The CLI isn't shoved in your face any more, but it is still there if you want it - you don't see the fact that there is a CLI *available* harming the Mac do you?
you have at last count something like 200 MILLION PLUS late model P4s and early dual cores that are gonna go EOL and will be just begging for an easy to use free OS, because lets face it Farmville and Facebook?
Ok, and now you're contradicting your own argument. The "normal people" you are referring to do not, as a rule, go and install new operating systems on their existing hardware. They see their computer with its OS as a single device and if they want to change OS they will go to PC World and but a new computer with it preinstalled.
Linux has been "ready for the desktop" for some time (in that if a hardware vendor were interested and supplied a preinstalled system where they had certified that all the hardware in it worked with the OS, etc. then it would be fine for most home users). Unfortunately, none of the hardware vendors, except Apple, are interested in pushing a non-windows OS to general consumers (the offerings from the likes of Dell are very half-arsed and not really marketed well).
The only hardware vendor who is pushing preinstalled non-Windows OSes is Apple, and they are doing pretty well for themselves so it demonstrates that the public are often very happy to run something other than Windows, even though their Windows software won't run on it. However, Apple are only interested in their own OS, not Linux.
I'm afraid that the "customers only want Windows" mentality prevalent in the PC industry isn't going to go away any time soon, even though it is demonstrably incorrect, so even though Windows 8 is a complete crock I'm not expecting to see any mass migration to Linux. We'll see people upgrading to Windows 8 and cursing it, we'll see people sticking with Windows 7 as long as possible and we'll see people migrating to Apple Macs.
As a anecdotal example of Linux's readyness for the desktop, my fiancee isn't really that technical when it comes to computers - she can use them just fine, but I guess she would fall into the "normal user" category and will never start poking at them under the hood. Several years ago she chose to switch from Windows to OS X and did so without any real problems. She regularly uses my Gnome 3 laptop and has no problems with it. In fact, for the most part she's pretty blissfully unaware that it is running Linux.
Just give the consumer what they want, that's all.
The customer wants some hardware with an OS preinstalled on it. It doesn't matter whether that OS is Windows, OS X, Linux or something else so long as it is easy to use for "normal stuff" (word processing, web browsing, listening to music, watching videos). There is nothing more Linux software developers can do in this regard - a preinstalled Linux *does* do what the consumer wants. For what normal consumers want, there is no CLI fiddling required to make a preinstalled Linux work. It is now down to the hardware vendors - if the hardware vendors start pushing preinstalled Linux systems in a serious way then Linux is in a good position to take off. However, I have no faith that any large hardware vendor is going to do this.
Isn't that exactly what Microsoft does with Android? They offer a license for a reasonable fee. And then everyone screams bloody murder. I guess they should do it the Apple way. And then everyone will scream bloody murder. It's hard to take Slashdot complaints seriously sometimes when the standards seem so different for each company involved.
People probably wouldn't scream if MS actually explained what patents are being infringed by Linux (and by extension, Android). But at the moment its basically a protection racket - they won't tell you what you might be infringing so you can avoid it, but instead force everyone into licensing for unknown (possibly invalid) patents.
I think you're misunderstanding the function of advertising.
Advertising is used to promote a product or service that can't promote itself on its own merits.
Some advertising does as you say. But a lot of advertising is actually just about making people aware of a product so that it can promote itself on its own merits. It doesn't matter how good the merits are of your product if no one knows about it in the first place.
Every single time, "organic" search results will be better than ads.
Untrue. If I search for a piece of hardware, a lot of the search results are going to be people discussing how to make some software work with that hardware, reporting problems with the hardware, praising the hardware, etc. Whilst I might find these things useful, they don't fundamentally answer the question of where to buy that hardware (at least, not without sorting though a miriad of crap first). A well targeted ad will do this.
If Google cared about search quality, they would ban advertisers who foist such ads onto users. Instead, they just charge them more and let them continue doing it.
Google has to make money from somewhere, an unlike other search engines of the past they have always done a pretty good job of making it visually obvious when something is an ad and keeping it separate from the impartial search results. This makes it easy for you to choose which you are interested in and ignore the rest.
Also, https prevents caching of objects such as images, css, javascript, which is a concern on large networks that routinely employ caching proxy servers to reduce uplink bandwidth requirements.
I would say avoid Acer like the plague. I've got an Acer TravelMate 6413 and the whole experience of owning it has been repeated kicks in the teeth.
It shipped with Windows (for which I have no use) and they refused to honour the refund clause in the Windows EULA.
It has a BIOS bug that they refuse to acknowledge or fix, even though I engineered and sent them a fix for the broken DSDT.
It also eats through Li-Ion batteries like nobody's business - I have to replace the battery about every 12-18 months. The battery calibration is also completely broken - I have to recalibrate every few weeks.
The TPM also appears to be broken and I have to pass workaround parameters on the kernel command line to even get a modern kernel to boot, otherwise it hangs up trying to initialise the busted TPM (even when the TPM is turned off in the BIOS).
Honest question: What can Android do that iOS and Windows Phone can't do?
I got an android phone, but I never really dove into it(yes, I'll be handing in my geek card on the way out)
I think the question is more "what can iOS/Windows do that Android can't" since iOS and Windows seem to demand a very high price compared to equivalent Android devices. For most people I doubt it matters a damn whether their phone runs Android or iOS (but the Windows Phone UI looks really horrible half-finished to me. When I first saw it I thought "it's only a preview release, I'm sure they'll fix the UI rendering" and then I was told it was _supposed_ to look like that...)
For me, I wouldn't buy iOS coz I don't like the idea of Apple telling me what I can and can't do with my own hardware - an Android phone lets me install whatever apps I please and use it how I like. I imagine I'm in the minority and most people don't care though, which is why I wonder why so many people go for the more expensive iOS options.
Except that iPhones are not that expensive
I dunno.. iPhone 4 £500, Nexus-S £300, essentially identical hardware inside.
and they do more than Android-based phones do
Yusss... whatever you say.
Well, it said about providing an early warning, so I guess the data must be analysed somewhere in real-ish time.
Of course, it might just be that he's a politician, has no idea how stuff works and thinks the internet runs on magic.
As far as interface icons are concerned, I'm not sure what the law says, but from a practical point of view I think it's best to encourage companies to imitate each others' interfaces whenever possible: it makes it easier for consumers to switch from using one to another.
Well yes and no. Yes it makes it easier for customers to switch between devices, but it also limits their choice because maybe the customer doesn't _want_ the interface to look like that.
As an example, several years ago I was looking around for a new phone. I was considering an HTC Dream (which I did buy in the end), but the salesman at the Carphone Warehouse was doing his level best to tell me that I didn't want an HTC Dream because it wasn't very iphone-like (it had a hard keyboard rather than an on-screen keyboard) and kept directing me to various other phones because they were "more iphone-like". He didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept that I didn't *want* an iPhone clone, I was specifically looking for a phone with a hard keypad and if I wanted something like the iPhone I'd probably have just damned well bought an iPhone!
Whilst I will accept that having the same interface everywhere is good in environments where you are constantly switching between several devices that do essentially the same job, in an environment where you own and use a single device for this job (which is usually the case with phones) then it would seem more sensible to give the user a UI that they find pleasant and efficient to work with rather than forcing everyone to use the same interface that may well not work for them. This applies equally to other devices, such as desktop PCs - as another example, I find having my PC set to do sloppy-focus so that I can rapidly switch between and work on half-hidden windows. It is a minor inconvenience when I have to use someone else's PC that isn't set up like this, but it would seriously harm my working efficiency if I was unable to set my own workstation how I wanted. Since 99% of my time is spent working on my own workstation, it makes the most sense to have it configured in the best way for *me* (and then having to deal with some inconvenience on the 1% of the time I use a different machine) than it would be to have a lowest-common-denominator setup where everything is identical(ly crap).
So how do you power your desktop PC?
By plugging it into mains power... Every desktop PC, laptop, printer, monitor, etc. I've purchased in about the past 10 years has had a multivoltage PSU (plug it in to pretty much anything between 100-250vac at 50-60Hz and it Just Works). Most desktop PCs purchased over 10 years ago had a manually switchable PSU (little voltage selector switch on the back) although admittedly monitors and laptops frequently didn't.
Don't you also have an issue with incompatible power supplies? Australian supply is typically around 240V/50Hz, same as the UK, whereas I understand power in the US is supplied at 120V/60Hz.
If there's any electronic kit around that still doesn't have multi-voltage power supplies, I really don't want it...