But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!").
I am one of those people and such a belief is based on an in-depth analysis of what is "private property" and what are its characteristics and how they are utterly incompatible with the characteristics of information. Note that the objection is not to "services" - which are indeed quite subject to commercial exchange and are in fact one of the pillars of economy - but to the idea of "ownership" of particular patterns of information.
But that does not mean that I am against artists making a living, and I have to say that you appear to be a genuine artist, unlike a lot of the "properties" (their term) of the RIAA behemoths who purport to be "artists".
Our objection is to the corrupt, and inadequate for the modern age, method of being paid, i.e. a pig-headed, arrogant attempt to go against the very laws of physics in order to pretend that information can be someone's private property, an attempt that is extremely dangerous to our future because it ultimately requires a draconian police-state regime to sustain - it has, after all, laws of physics to deny - and as if that was not enough, it can (and will) be used as means of creating a neo-feudal "landed gentry" system in the area of human knowledge akin to the one that once governed real lands before the age of enlightenment and rural reforms.
Fortunately, many other ways exist. One of them being direct audience patronage, which is what you yourself are doing, and at which I wish you great luck and much income.
As to the rest of your post, it has always been my belief that ultimately the point of art is for the artist to share his ideas and thoughts with the audience and that financial aspects of art were always, to true artists, far secondary. That is what makes them distinct from kitsch peddlers whose whole idea is to "get rich quick and be famous", irrespective of what they supposedly "create" as a tool to achieve that goal. And it is my belief that those who are dedicated to their art sooner or later find financial success without having to resort to outright legal thuggery, which is again quite different from the depths of filthy lies backed by brutal force to which kitsch peddlers must descend to make their wares "financially viable".
The web is HTML, which is a mark-up language, which can be displayed any way you like. I can squeeze it onto a 2-line LCD watch and not lose anything.
I pretty much have to ignore the rest of your post from this point on as a discussion of usability with someone who thinks that he "did not lose anything" by taking, say, a National Geographic Magazine or even the Amazon.com web site and putting it on a 2-line 0.1" monochrome LCD screen of a watch is rather pointless. Unless of course you've been frequenting only the Fox News site or something. In which case I must point out that you would "not lose anything" by sending the whole thing to/dev/null either...
Subsequently, I am sure there more fruitful things for you to do than to try to sway me to your view of the world, like watching your neighbour's TV via the "no loss of anything" telescope made out of beer bottle bottoms... or something involving a pair of cans and a string.
If you had merely stated that it was a "compromise", you would of course be correct, as we already agreed. However, describing it as a "kludge compromise" carries a negative implication, which is not merely an "objective truth" nor representative of a general consensus- it's your opinion.
No, it is merely an emphasis. A matter of degree. I could have said a very, very, very poor compromise to the same effect and just used more words to do it.
The glass-front phones are not just a compromise, they are a very, very, very poor compromise (i.e "kludge") for a long list of reasons, including diametrically opposed requirements of a touch screen interface and a device that can be held to one's face and talked into, thus putting that very touch interface in one's face, literally.
Again, its objective truth. It's physics. No glass-front brick format touch phone manufacturer can somehow magically escape this obvious reality, all they can do is come up with various unreliable methods of trying to disable the interface whenever they detect (or so they hope) the phone being used as a phone and not a smudgy underpowered computer with an imprecise interface that features 70% error rate for anyone with fingers thicker than a toothpick who is trying to type on its "virtual keyboard".
Kludge. Objective truth.
No, I didn't. The way that you said it I interpreted as either (a) you implying that many people held similar opinions...
They do. I personally know many who are tired of the lack of choice in this matter.
or (b) that many people's usage patterns backed up your assertion, even if they didn't realise it.
Again true, a lot of people (if not a majority) are trend followers and are easily swayed by marketing and in fact never actually needed "smart phones" to begin with...
If you do not believe me, take some time to look at how average people around you use their iPhones and what not. Their typical usage pattern involves loading a lot of free apps and some commercial trendy apps, all within a month of purchase after which time none of these apps are ever opened again and the phone is used again only as a phone or a texting device. Many don't even have email set up on their "smart phones".
So clearly marketing and telco's need for extra income from "smart phone plans" is a major driving force here and the usage patterns would be quite different without the multi-billion dollar sales push by gizmo peddlers.
This is somewhat disingenuous. You claim that you are posting your personal opinion, but you phrase such things as if they are representative of generally-accepted consensus and/or trend, or "objective" truth (see above).
No, it is you who are getting all mixed up. I simply stated the truth, which has many aspects. There is the objective truth, as in the compromise aspects of the touch screen phones. There is the subjective truth as to my personal preferences. And then there is the high probability of the truth in the optimal patterns of usage for many phone users, many of whom do not even realize it, but the exact numerical breakdown of which is unknown.
It is the fact that I did all three in one post is what seems to bother you so greatly.
This is because with the advent of tablets the concept of a "smart phone" has become quite exposed for a kludge-compromise that it is.
as intended to be representative of a consensus rather than personal opinion because of the way it was phrased.
It was phrased that way because it is the objective truth. But that does not negate the fact that for many people (in fact probably most) the kludgy compromise is still the most convenient.
You interpreted my pointing out the obvious technical problems with glass-front "smart phones" as a condemnation of all the users of the phones. The fact that something is a kuldgy compromise does not mean that people will shy away from it. To the contrary, the reason such compromises are made because the public clamours for them.
I pointed out that from my perspective, based on my usage patterns the compromise is no longer acceptable and an increase in performance of the phone part as a communication device and the increase of performance of the data part in form of a tablet are in order.
Many will find that instead of usability gains they prefer for the thing to fit in their back jeans pocket. So I stated: "to each their own". Repeatedly.
The rest of your post is based on this misconception.
They are insignificant in historical perspective. If every country's populace was as spoiled, narcissistic and cowardly as that of the modern US, "global wars" with "anything goes" rules would be erupting for every few citizens that get killed by some wacko cult or a fringe political nut, pretty much every other week.
Far more people (per capita) got killed in terrorist attacks in countries all over the globe conducted by far-out-leftists, lunatic "separatist" movements, religious cults and what not.
In real wars the death toll was in hundreds of millions not in numbers measured in fractions of a percentile.
20 times more people get killed in car accidents in US every year but fighting "war on cars" does not offer the same kinds of opportunities for dictatorial power, national supremacism and profit as a bullshit "global war on terror" does.
9/11 was actually very educational for the world because the US was exposed, for all to see - on live TV - as a bunch of cowardly, whiny, self-absorbed, supremacist hypocrites whose whole pretense of "democracy and rule of law" fell apart like a cheap paper screen the very moment they took just one, tiny by historical standards, hit on the chin from a wacko religious cult and which resulted in a bout of mindless, screaming, incoherent, violent, murderous national hysteria that is getting ever worse as time goes on.
The one bright ray of hope is that the US will ruin itself financially in this insanity as its instigators gorge themselves on "war" profits and power while the populace slides ever closer to mindless police-state dystopia where summary executions of "enemies of the state" are quite acceptable, which also can't be too good for economy.
It does only one thing but it does it great. It makes calls.
Well, I wish for a modern clam-shell to expand that definition to "it transmits/receives voice and data" so that it can become the go-between for any data device I fancy, be it my tablet or a laptop.
Other than that, you are right indeed, clam-shell phones come with what is in effect a self-contained protective hard-case. Another reason why I think an updated, data-capable model would sell well.
You seem (here and elsewhere) to use "flip phone" as synonymous with "solid, traditional, non-smart mobile phone". Which obviously misses out the "bar" format of phones like the once ubiquitous Nokia 3310.
No, I specifically mean the mechanical format of a flip phone combined with good voice/data communication capabilities, yet with no emphasis on the "smart phone" functionality. Of course it is possible to produce a bar-format phone with these same capabilities but it was not what I meant.
It is also possible to construct a flip-phone format "smart phone" but such a device would also be undesirable by me because it would, by necessity, entail unneeded by me compromises and cost.
The flip-phone, clam-shell design offers to me most useful mechanical properties for a phone from all the form-factors I tried over the years.
Virtually all the non-smart phones seem to have gone back to the "bar" form factor, or perhaps it's that the people who once bought clamshells are now buying smartphones, and the people who just wanted simple functionality always preferred the "bar" phones.
Actually this is more likely a sign of cost cutting and shuffling of limited resources into the "high end- high margin" i.e. "smart phone" products.
The bar format is simply far cheaper to manufacture and the unholy marriage of telcos and phone manufacturers is simply unwilling to offer their audience much in a way of choice in most countries. So where the clam-shells were once the "high end" phones (I remember a super-thin Motorola clam-shell once sold at US$2.5k here) that niche was taken over by the glass-front "smart phones" (which incidentally are also mechanically much simpler to manufacture than the clam-shells and their costs lies mostly in price of components).
Your argument is apparently(?) that now tablets are here smartphones are no longer needed as we can use a non-smart phone for the "phone" bit and a tablet for the "smart" bit. Missing the point that this isn't much good if you want the "smart" bit on the go and don't have iPad-sized pockets(!) (Or were you saying something else?)
No, what I am saying that for many people, myself included, the usage patterns of the phone/tablet are such that we no longer need the functionality of the "smart phone" because that part has been transferred to the tablet and what remains is the functionality of a wireless voice/data communication device.
Obviously this usage pattern is not universal and for some the compromise of a "smart phone" is the only useful option.
So in my case, I always carry a light backpack (before I used to carry briefcases and what not) that provides for a permanent place for a tablet. Some people insist on carrying only the phone in their pant pocket. Obviously to each their own.
But for people like me who decided on separation of functions along the line of phone/tablet, a different arrangement is optimal then for those who need "all in one" small factor device and who therefore must put up with all the short-comings of such a device.
I am simply no longer willing to pay for and accept all of the desperate compromises that such an all-in-one device entails and wish to return to a good quality, convenient communication-only device supplemented by a separate, specialized data processing device.
You prefer a solid traditional phone? That's fine, I can understand that. But others might not, and a tablet certainly isn't a replacement for a smartphone. Personally, I have a smartphone, but little interest in tablets as they currently are- I'd rather just use my computer if I didn't want to use something that fitted in my pocket!
As I said, to each their own. I, apparently unlike some "smart phone" fanatics out here, do not propsose that all phones become flip phones or that the marketplace abandons "smart phones". I merely point out that there is a (possibly sizeable) audience out there who have different priorities and require a different device and that the seeming progression of all phones to an iPhone "me-too" format that utterly disregards this audience is not dictated by reason or market demand but by something akin to mass hysteria.
Flip is a must for me. I had literally upward of 40 phones over the years, starting with a lead-acid battery analog cell phone in the "purse" format, and I find the flip phone format far superior for normal phone use, hands down.
When I look at how I use the phone, 90% of the time I will be talking after answering an incoming call on it and for that a flip phone is, to me, the most convenient because I can operate it one handed without looking at it and hold it up by tilting my head when I need two hands without compromising communication quality. No modern brick phone can do that well, especially the glass-front, all-touch phones that go positively nuts due to the pathetic "face proximity sensor" compromises that had to be made to make the device fullfil mutually-contradictory requirements.
As to the E72, I had a chance to try the E61 which was the older generation equivalent and even though I found its build quality very good, the form factor was actually quite cumbersome in my daily use.
This format would be however a good fit for someone used to keyboard-primary rather then voice-primary communication, i.e. someone looking for a Blackberry replacement.
Have fun pushing those virtual buttons on that touch screen with your face when the "face proximity" sensor steams up.
Not all "new" tech is superior to the "old" tech just because its shiny or because some fashionistas think it ups their snob factor a few times. Everything has its place and its worth is measured by many different factors, some of them purely subjective from the user's perspective. This is why there is no "one-size-fits-all", "my-way-or-everyone-else-is-an-idiot" approach, although it appears to be the very delusion under which you seem to labour.
Tactile feedback for example is something brick-format, all-touchscreen "smart phones" can only dream of, despite all sorts of desperate kludges like wobbly, rickety slide-out keyboards.
Their screen size is too small for many people for comfortable web browsing and increasing it renders the whole phone an unwieldy, inconvenient gimmick, still too small to be useful as a web platform and too big to be a phone.
Compromising one outstanding feature so that many mediocre features can be included is also why many people used to "obsolete" RIM products refuse to "upgrade" to the new no-keyboard "cool" format. They simply do not care for "apps", they instead care for an ability to communicate via text efficiently.
This is also why many prefer the flip-phone format, despite the fashionistas trying to ram the glass-front brick down everyone's throats.
There will still be a market for "feature phones".
In fact I would have given up any of my "smart phones" that I had over the years for a flip-phone that supported all the 3g bands globally, had bluetooth and wi-fi hotspot capability and tethering that is not controlled by a telco, a magnetic charger cradle, good case with belt attachment, etc, all the basic standbys of a good phone.
This is because with the advent of tablets the concept of a "smart phone" has become quite exposed for a kludge-compromise that it is. A tablet is very good at web browsing, email, apps etc but a phone is a communication device and mostly sucks at those things due to its restrictive form factor. Worse, "smart phones" also suck at being phones, again due to the kludge-compromises required. Wireless tethering of a good phone and a lightweight tablet is an optimal approach in my opinion.
And if you added some limited "bonus" functions to the phone such as simple web access and email functionality, camera and a basic music player to act as a backup should you leave the tablet at home, many would choose such a phone over an overpriced everything-and-a-kitchen-sink-3hrs-battery-life "smart phone".
And nothing beats being able to answer a call by simply flipping a flip-phone open with one hand, not to mention that its microphone is naturally placed in front of your mouth. Close it and the call ends, protecting its screen and keyboard from mishaps.
Sooner or later someone is bound to realize this. And if Nokia puts out a flip phone like this, I won't care if the thing runs some Hell-spawned Windows Nightmare because the OS will be quite irrelevant to me as long as it does not compromise the phone's communication performance or its general usability. Unfortunately for Nokia, with Windows these very things naturally become somewhat of a challenge.
While you do bring up another aspect of the insanity that is the patent system which involves patenting common standards, I would have to disagree here as to the argument of uniqueness.
A particular, unique sequence of bytes is no different here then a particular, unique sequence of mop swipes of that janitor I mentioned above. No two janitors will mop that floor in the exact same way. In fact they are pretty much guaranteed to do it with completely unique sequences of motions.
The fact that something is unique is not an automatic exception from the "obvious application of the art" rule.
The test is somewhat different: would a significant portion of experts in the field trained in the art come up with a functionally equivalent solution when asked? In case of VFAT the answer is not only a resounding "yes" but as an insult added to injury, Computer Science course students of the time were routinely asked to design file systems far exceeding the capabilities of VFAT as part their semester test material (I have first hand knowledge of this).
In order for something to be an invention worthy of the draconian provisions of the patent law, its originality must go well beyond the routine abilities of an expert in the field, never you mind a mere student's test sheet!
The fact that every student would have picked a different arrangement of bit-fields in his file system is completely irrelevant to this.
This is actually quite obvious consequence of the whole trend into which most industrial nations have been purposefully egged on, bullied and downright terrorized if need be, by the very people who now fight amongst each other.
One can think of this in a very simple way that explains the whole thing: feudalism and thievery. In a feudal system, the "landed gentry" i.e. land owners, rule a nation and all others, i.e. peons, are forced - by virtue of geography - to rent their places to live from these land-lords (hence the name), usually at ruinous rates that make them eventually into indentured slaves and finally outright property. This scheme is being presently imposed slowly onto the industrialized nations, and eventually the whole world. Note that as the end result, the land-owners (or knowledge owners in this new version of the idea) will be eventually more powerful than nations and will dictate all policy to them, instead of just some policy as it is now.
The natural consequence of such a system is that greedy land owners constantly war (usually by expending lives of the peons) between each other trying to expand their empires by consuming others. This is what you are seeing the companies (as proxies of their owners) doing now, trying to establish the boundaries of their holdings and in effect their feudal ranking in their rule over the future generations.
Sometimes however a new landmass is discovered and this is where outright thievery comes in: the "settlers" move in, usually murdering whomever happened to live there already and establish new branches of aristocracy, shamelessly announcing that "we stole it fair and square" or (for the more bothered by their conscience) "the land was unused!", etc. Soon after a free-for-all period hoever, the old rules reassert themselves and the progress towards de-facto feudal order resumes apace.
Note that most de-facto feudal societies are calling themselves anything but: People's Republics, Constitutional Democracies etc abound amongst them - after all the peons love to have their precious illusions.
The drive to enshrine "intellectual property" as actual property in human societies is a direct parallel to the formation of "landed gentry" of the old-fashioned, real dirt kind. That is why, for example, seemingly illogical steps are taken, such as the ever expanding durations of patents and copyrights that are in direct conflict with the "official" reasoning for both patent and copyright systems. Naturally the official version is one of those "War is Peace" things Orwell was so fond of, the real reason is establishment of a rent-seeking system on all human progress and the civilization as a whole, in which context endless extensions (up to infinity eventually) make perfect sense.
And the Constitution says you are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Do you recommend we scrap that old rag?
Yes he does. But only for "those", you know, "other", dangerous people with dangerous ideas, who dress differently. And smell funny. Or speak some suspicious language. Actually, many like him believe that "those people" should be all in camps, or at least deported to Africa somewhere, for their own safety, naturally!
Not like you and I, true Patriots.
I mean you are a white, Christian or Jewish, Fox-watching on your 60" TV, American Football fanatic, NRA member, filled with awe of winners at Capitalism, owner (with mere 53 years on your 60 year mortgage left) of a McMansion in suburbia who does not leave that house without 5 credit cards, because you never know which one just might raise your limit some more! Are you not?
So you have nothing to worry about! Nothing at all!
No. Richelieu meant that his Inquisition was capable of finding "heresy" within any six lines of any man's speech. They did not have to forge anything, merely "see" what they read with a sufficient fervor via a sufficiently fanatical eye of a religious zealot. The torture of the suspect, or his family, was guaranteed extract a signed "confession" later.
It is no coincidence that the main villain in Dumas' books is an evil religious nut, supported by a blood-thirsty, nearly all-powerful (at the time) fanatical religious cult with a prominent sadistic streak and a healthy apetite for yet more power and wealth, at all costs.
No, they did not. There are very, very few real inventions that can be attributed to Microsoft. This is not one of them. VFAT is an "invention" in the same vain as a janitor is "inventing clean" via an application of a mop and a bucket of soapy water to a floor. The term, now apparently forgotten, that once used to describe why such things are not patentable is "an obvious application of the art"
So, as many people pointed out thousands of times:
1. FAT is a copy of the earlier CP/M file system mixed with some bastard, half-assed ports of some features of UNIX file systems of the time.
2. VFAT is an "obvious application of the art" and any patents on it are pure insanity that violates even the most basic premise of the whole idea of patents. But insane is what the US Patent system has become.
3. The very idea of patenting software is another form of demonstrable mental retardation, a part of larger, even more dangerous to the progress of civilization and personal liberties, raving lunacy called "intellectual property".
I can't believe that all of you missed the one obvious military application: concealment of nuclear submarines.
Presently nuclear subs are detectable by planes (like the P3 etc.) via use of magnetometers.
A sub, being a very large metal object, interferes with the Earth magnetosphere (which is for the purpose of detection a constant magnetic field) and thus can be detected an "anomaly" in the magnetic field, far above their actual location deep underwater.
This is one major weakness of modern subs that makes them detectable.
This discovery is practically custom made as a solution to this problem: to hide an object that affects a constant magnetic field.
And.cn all ready has more USD than it realy wants. Right now it's your best bet for not caring what the US wants.
And then the only thing you have to worry about is what.cn wants! A mere humble requirement of photo ID, address, bank account numbers and a pledge of eternal obedience(1) of everyone who wants a.cn domain...
(1) so far only they got as far as photo ID and address (which caused nearly all non-Chinese registrars to stop selling.cn domains) but the hour is young yet.
I am sure all those factory slaves living in company barracks and being paid in company scrip that is only valid in the company store - a common enough occurrence throughout the world today - but particularly in the "enlightened" states at the time of Wilberforce's "victory" - would quibble somewhat.
You seem not to understand that the point of slavery is not the "master" being able to whip someone within the inch of their lives for the sadistic pleasure of it and with impunity, the main point is economic servitude. Slaves were - even back then - seen as not merely toys, they were seen as revenue-generating property. And that hasn't changed one iota.
So while true, the iron collar and the whip have gone (mostly) it was only because the "ownership class" realized that they could be replaced by means far more effective and insidious. As to throwing sick slaves who died in horrible conditions in transit overboard or burying them by the dozen right outside their slums - the practice goes merrily on. Daily.
So you can take off those rosy-colored glasses through which most of the very well-off, upper middle class denizens of the West seem to find necessary to view the world (and their own "achievements" in particular while all the while feeling guilty about their insane consumption that requires outright slavery to sustain - hence your guilt about being "self-absorbed" and your attempts at its projection) and stop pretending that anything of substance has changed for the vast majority of the teeming billions of disposable humanity out there.
Also, the "iron collar and whip" type of slavery will be back, even in the so-called "enlightened" states, because that is how fucked-up human "societies" work. They are cyclical and every vicious excess of the past comes back, sooner or later, over and over and over.....
Take a look around the "everything changed on 911" US of A and compare the goings on with some of the measures implemented by the Nazis or the Soviets for a bit of a crash course in how this thing called "history" works.
Then get back to me on being "divorced from reality".
No, it is not "you are willing to work as hard and long as it takes to make the change, or you have to live with the world created by those who are." it is "you are willing to live with the world that is the random result of the collision of millions of mutually contradictory ideas and objectives". You are under some wacky illusion that anything we actually do as individuals counts in the big picture. It does not, unless random chance makes it so.
The very popular and utterly laughable delusion of "control of one's own destiny" or its even more grandiose variant "working for societal change" is what lies at the difference of the world-views here.
Case in point: Wilberforce lost. Slavery never actually left, it merely got "updated". In the past the slaves had iron collars on, today they have invisible, electronic ones and believe themselves "free", which strengthens their slavery by orders of magnitude since slaves who think they are "free" never try to break their chains. Instead they work 6 jobs in order to enrich their masters more diligently. But everything important in their lives is controlled by someone else, just like in the old days.
Changing things takes time and commitment, not just showing up at the ballot box every four years.
That is why most people see a 60-year "investment" to change things "within the system" (with less than 10% chance for positive outcome) to be more like something a desperate gambler-junkie with uncontrollable withdrawal shakes would do, rather then a rational being capable of calculating of effort/risk/reward ratios.
This is also why "participation" in this so-called "democracy" declines year after year.
I don't know what the solution to this problem is but clearly neither voting for Bought-and-paid-for Stooge A versus Bought-and-paid-for Stooge B nor "working for change against all odds to die just before anything comes out of it (or not)" for 60 years seem very logical to me.
LOL. Yes, I am sure all holier-than-thou ACs like you are 100% typo-free by definition and never rush or post on Slashdot from a tablet with an auto-correct on...
That is probably why ACs are so famous on Slashdot for being the source of reliable, sage advice! No?
If you mean my comment about the ability to run the Parallels Bare Metal VMs in the Parallels Desktop, that is just a bonus feature that would allow you to experiment on VMs locally or perform all sorts of maintenance tasks away from the main server. It does not mean that you would be forced to run them there. You can still do all the work the same way you operate now, except with Parallels Bare Metal you get a native Mac client console to remotely control the Parallels host with, very much like the one VMWare used to do for Linux in the early days before they went "mainstream" and started to piss on all non-Windows users.
Slashdot Mirror
I am one of those people and such a belief is based on an in-depth analysis of what is "private property" and what are its characteristics and how they are utterly incompatible with the characteristics of information. Note that the objection is not to "services" - which are indeed quite subject to commercial exchange and are in fact one of the pillars of economy - but to the idea of "ownership" of particular patterns of information.
But that does not mean that I am against artists making a living, and I have to say that you appear to be a genuine artist, unlike a lot of the "properties" (their term) of the RIAA behemoths who purport to be "artists".
Our objection is to the corrupt, and inadequate for the modern age, method of being paid, i.e. a pig-headed, arrogant attempt to go against the very laws of physics in order to pretend that information can be someone's private property, an attempt that is extremely dangerous to our future because it ultimately requires a draconian police-state regime to sustain - it has, after all, laws of physics to deny - and as if that was not enough, it can (and will) be used as means of creating a neo-feudal "landed gentry" system in the area of human knowledge akin to the one that once governed real lands before the age of enlightenment and rural reforms.
Fortunately, many other ways exist. One of them being direct audience patronage, which is what you yourself are doing, and at which I wish you great luck and much income.
As to the rest of your post, it has always been my belief that ultimately the point of art is for the artist to share his ideas and thoughts with the audience and that financial aspects of art were always, to true artists, far secondary. That is what makes them distinct from kitsch peddlers whose whole idea is to "get rich quick and be famous", irrespective of what they supposedly "create" as a tool to achieve that goal. And it is my belief that those who are dedicated to their art sooner or later find financial success without having to resort to outright legal thuggery, which is again quite different from the depths of filthy lies backed by brutal force to which kitsch peddlers must descend to make their wares "financially viable".
I pretty much have to ignore the rest of your post from this point on as a discussion of usability with someone who thinks that he "did not lose anything" by taking, say, a National Geographic Magazine or even the Amazon.com web site and putting it on a 2-line 0.1" monochrome LCD screen of a watch is rather pointless. Unless of course you've been frequenting only the Fox News site or something. In which case I must point out that you would "not lose anything" by sending the whole thing to /dev/null either...
Subsequently, I am sure there more fruitful things for you to do than to try to sway me to your view of the world, like watching your neighbour's TV via the "no loss of anything" telescope made out of beer bottle bottoms ... or something involving a pair of cans and a string.
No, it is merely an emphasis. A matter of degree. I could have said a very, very, very poor compromise to the same effect and just used more words to do it.
The glass-front phones are not just a compromise, they are a very, very, very poor compromise (i.e "kludge") for a long list of reasons, including diametrically opposed requirements of a touch screen interface and a device that can be held to one's face and talked into, thus putting that very touch interface in one's face, literally.
Again, its objective truth. It's physics. No glass-front brick format touch phone manufacturer can somehow magically escape this obvious reality, all they can do is come up with various unreliable methods of trying to disable the interface whenever they detect (or so they hope) the phone being used as a phone and not a smudgy underpowered computer with an imprecise interface that features 70% error rate for anyone with fingers thicker than a toothpick who is trying to type on its "virtual keyboard".
Kludge. Objective truth.
They do. I personally know many who are tired of the lack of choice in this matter.
Again true, a lot of people (if not a majority) are trend followers and are easily swayed by marketing and in fact never actually needed "smart phones" to begin with...
If you do not believe me, take some time to look at how average people around you use their iPhones and what not. Their typical usage pattern involves loading a lot of free apps and some commercial trendy apps, all within a month of purchase after which time none of these apps are ever opened again and the phone is used again only as a phone or a texting device. Many don't even have email set up on their "smart phones".
So clearly marketing and telco's need for extra income from "smart phone plans" is a major driving force here and the usage patterns would be quite different without the multi-billion dollar sales push by gizmo peddlers.
No, it is you who are getting all mixed up. I simply stated the truth, which has many aspects. There is the objective truth, as in the compromise aspects of the touch screen phones. There is the subjective truth as to my personal preferences. And then there is the high probability of the truth in the optimal patterns of usage for many phone users, many of whom do not even realize it, but the exact numerical breakdown of which is unknown.
It is the fact that I did all three in one post is what seems to bother you so greatly.
It was phrased that way because it is the objective truth. But that does not negate the fact that for many people (in fact probably most) the kludgy compromise is still the most convenient.
You interpreted my pointing out the obvious technical problems with glass-front "smart phones" as a condemnation of all the users of the phones. The fact that something is a kuldgy compromise does not mean that people will shy away from it. To the contrary, the reason such compromises are made because the public clamours for them.
I pointed out that from my perspective, based on my usage patterns the compromise is no longer acceptable and an increase in performance of the phone part as a communication device and the increase of performance of the data part in form of a tablet are in order.
Many will find that instead of usability gains they prefer for the thing to fit in their back jeans pocket. So I stated: "to each their own". Repeatedly.
The rest of your post is based on this misconception.
They are insignificant in historical perspective. If every country's populace was as spoiled, narcissistic and cowardly as that of the modern US, "global wars" with "anything goes" rules would be erupting for every few citizens that get killed by some wacko cult or a fringe political nut, pretty much every other week.
Far more people (per capita) got killed in terrorist attacks in countries all over the globe conducted by far-out-leftists, lunatic "separatist" movements, religious cults and what not.
In real wars the death toll was in hundreds of millions not in numbers measured in fractions of a percentile.
20 times more people get killed in car accidents in US every year but fighting "war on cars" does not offer the same kinds of opportunities for dictatorial power, national supremacism and profit as a bullshit "global war on terror" does.
9/11 was actually very educational for the world because the US was exposed, for all to see - on live TV - as a bunch of cowardly, whiny, self-absorbed, supremacist hypocrites whose whole pretense of "democracy and rule of law" fell apart like a cheap paper screen the very moment they took just one, tiny by historical standards, hit on the chin from a wacko religious cult and which resulted in a bout of mindless, screaming, incoherent, violent, murderous national hysteria that is getting ever worse as time goes on.
The one bright ray of hope is that the US will ruin itself financially in this insanity as its instigators gorge themselves on "war" profits and power while the populace slides ever closer to mindless police-state dystopia where summary executions of "enemies of the state" are quite acceptable, which also can't be too good for economy.
Well, I wish for a modern clam-shell to expand that definition to "it transmits/receives voice and data" so that it can become the go-between for any data device I fancy, be it my tablet or a laptop.
Other than that, you are right indeed, clam-shell phones come with what is in effect a self-contained protective hard-case. Another reason why I think an updated, data-capable model would sell well.
No, I specifically mean the mechanical format of a flip phone combined with good voice/data communication capabilities, yet with no emphasis on the "smart phone" functionality. Of course it is possible to produce a bar-format phone with these same capabilities but it was not what I meant.
It is also possible to construct a flip-phone format "smart phone" but such a device would also be undesirable by me because it would, by necessity, entail unneeded by me compromises and cost.
The flip-phone, clam-shell design offers to me most useful mechanical properties for a phone from all the form-factors I tried over the years.
Actually this is more likely a sign of cost cutting and shuffling of limited resources into the "high end- high margin" i.e. "smart phone" products.
The bar format is simply far cheaper to manufacture and the unholy marriage of telcos and phone manufacturers is simply unwilling to offer their audience much in a way of choice in most countries. So where the clam-shells were once the "high end" phones (I remember a super-thin Motorola clam-shell once sold at US$2.5k here) that niche was taken over by the glass-front "smart phones" (which incidentally are also mechanically much simpler to manufacture than the clam-shells and their costs lies mostly in price of components).
No, what I am saying that for many people, myself included, the usage patterns of the phone/tablet are such that we no longer need the functionality of the "smart phone" because that part has been transferred to the tablet and what remains is the functionality of a wireless voice/data communication device.
Obviously this usage pattern is not universal and for some the compromise of a "smart phone" is the only useful option.
So in my case, I always carry a light backpack (before I used to carry briefcases and what not) that provides for a permanent place for a tablet. Some people insist on carrying only the phone in their pant pocket. Obviously to each their own.
But for people like me who decided on separation of functions along the line of phone/tablet, a different arrangement is optimal then for those who need "all in one" small factor device and who therefore must put up with all the short-comings of such a device.
I am simply no longer willing to pay for and accept all of the desperate compromises that such an all-in-one device entails and wish to return to a good quality, convenient communication-only device supplemented by a separate, specialized data processing device.
As I said, to each their own. I, apparently unlike some "smart phone" fanatics out here, do not propsose that all phones become flip phones or that the marketplace abandons "smart phones". I merely point out that there is a (possibly sizeable) audience out there who have different priorities and require a different device and that the seeming progression of all phones to an iPhone "me-too" format that utterly disregards this audience is not dictated by reason or market demand but by something akin to mass hysteria.
Flip is a must for me. I had literally upward of 40 phones over the years, starting with a lead-acid battery analog cell phone in the "purse" format, and I find the flip phone format far superior for normal phone use, hands down.
When I look at how I use the phone, 90% of the time I will be talking after answering an incoming call on it and for that a flip phone is, to me, the most convenient because I can operate it one handed without looking at it and hold it up by tilting my head when I need two hands without compromising communication quality. No modern brick phone can do that well, especially the glass-front, all-touch phones that go positively nuts due to the pathetic "face proximity sensor" compromises that had to be made to make the device fullfil mutually-contradictory requirements.
As to the E72, I had a chance to try the E61 which was the older generation equivalent and even though I found its build quality very good, the form factor was actually quite cumbersome in my daily use.
This format would be however a good fit for someone used to keyboard-primary rather then voice-primary communication, i.e. someone looking for a Blackberry replacement.
Have fun pushing those virtual buttons on that touch screen with your face when the "face proximity" sensor steams up.
Not all "new" tech is superior to the "old" tech just because its shiny or because some fashionistas think it ups their snob factor a few times. Everything has its place and its worth is measured by many different factors, some of them purely subjective from the user's perspective. This is why there is no "one-size-fits-all", "my-way-or-everyone-else-is-an-idiot" approach, although it appears to be the very delusion under which you seem to labour.
Tactile feedback for example is something brick-format, all-touchscreen "smart phones" can only dream of, despite all sorts of desperate kludges like wobbly, rickety slide-out keyboards.
Their screen size is too small for many people for comfortable web browsing and increasing it renders the whole phone an unwieldy, inconvenient gimmick, still too small to be useful as a web platform and too big to be a phone.
Compromising one outstanding feature so that many mediocre features can be included is also why many people used to "obsolete" RIM products refuse to "upgrade" to the new no-keyboard "cool" format. They simply do not care for "apps", they instead care for an ability to communicate via text efficiently.
This is also why many prefer the flip-phone format, despite the fashionistas trying to ram the glass-front brick down everyone's throats.
There will still be a market for "feature phones".
In fact I would have given up any of my "smart phones" that I had over the years for a flip-phone that supported all the 3g bands globally, had bluetooth and wi-fi hotspot capability and tethering that is not controlled by a telco, a magnetic charger cradle, good case with belt attachment, etc, all the basic standbys of a good phone.
This is because with the advent of tablets the concept of a "smart phone" has become quite exposed for a kludge-compromise that it is. A tablet is very good at web browsing, email, apps etc but a phone is a communication device and mostly sucks at those things due to its restrictive form factor. Worse, "smart phones" also suck at being phones, again due to the kludge-compromises required. Wireless tethering of a good phone and a lightweight tablet is an optimal approach in my opinion.
And if you added some limited "bonus" functions to the phone such as simple web access and email functionality, camera and a basic music player to act as a backup should you leave the tablet at home, many would choose such a phone over an overpriced everything-and-a-kitchen-sink-3hrs-battery-life "smart phone".
And nothing beats being able to answer a call by simply flipping a flip-phone open with one hand, not to mention that its microphone is naturally placed in front of your mouth. Close it and the call ends, protecting its screen and keyboard from mishaps.
Sooner or later someone is bound to realize this. And if Nokia puts out a flip phone like this, I won't care if the thing runs some Hell-spawned Windows Nightmare because the OS will be quite irrelevant to me as long as it does not compromise the phone's communication performance or its general usability. Unfortunately for Nokia, with Windows these very things naturally become somewhat of a challenge.
While you do bring up another aspect of the insanity that is the patent system which involves patenting common standards, I would have to disagree here as to the argument of uniqueness.
A particular, unique sequence of bytes is no different here then a particular, unique sequence of mop swipes of that janitor I mentioned above. No two janitors will mop that floor in the exact same way. In fact they are pretty much guaranteed to do it with completely unique sequences of motions.
The fact that something is unique is not an automatic exception from the "obvious application of the art" rule.
The test is somewhat different: would a significant portion of experts in the field trained in the art come up with a functionally equivalent solution when asked? In case of VFAT the answer is not only a resounding "yes" but as an insult added to injury, Computer Science course students of the time were routinely asked to design file systems far exceeding the capabilities of VFAT as part their semester test material (I have first hand knowledge of this).
In order for something to be an invention worthy of the draconian provisions of the patent law, its originality must go well beyond the routine abilities of an expert in the field, never you mind a mere student's test sheet!
The fact that every student would have picked a different arrangement of bit-fields in his file system is completely irrelevant to this.
This is actually quite obvious consequence of the whole trend into which most industrial nations have been purposefully egged on, bullied and downright terrorized if need be, by the very people who now fight amongst each other.
One can think of this in a very simple way that explains the whole thing: feudalism and thievery. In a feudal system, the "landed gentry" i.e. land owners, rule a nation and all others, i.e. peons, are forced - by virtue of geography - to rent their places to live from these land-lords (hence the name), usually at ruinous rates that make them eventually into indentured slaves and finally outright property. This scheme is being presently imposed slowly onto the industrialized nations, and eventually the whole world. Note that as the end result, the land-owners (or knowledge owners in this new version of the idea) will be eventually more powerful than nations and will dictate all policy to them, instead of just some policy as it is now.
The natural consequence of such a system is that greedy land owners constantly war (usually by expending lives of the peons) between each other trying to expand their empires by consuming others. This is what you are seeing the companies (as proxies of their owners) doing now, trying to establish the boundaries of their holdings and in effect their feudal ranking in their rule over the future generations.
Sometimes however a new landmass is discovered and this is where outright thievery comes in: the "settlers" move in, usually murdering whomever happened to live there already and establish new branches of aristocracy, shamelessly announcing that "we stole it fair and square" or (for the more bothered by their conscience) "the land was unused!", etc. Soon after a free-for-all period hoever, the old rules reassert themselves and the progress towards de-facto feudal order resumes apace.
Note that most de-facto feudal societies are calling themselves anything but: People's Republics, Constitutional Democracies etc abound amongst them - after all the peons love to have their precious illusions.
The drive to enshrine "intellectual property" as actual property in human societies is a direct parallel to the formation of "landed gentry" of the old-fashioned, real dirt kind. That is why, for example, seemingly illogical steps are taken, such as the ever expanding durations of patents and copyrights that are in direct conflict with the "official" reasoning for both patent and copyright systems. Naturally the official version is one of those "War is Peace" things Orwell was so fond of, the real reason is establishment of a rent-seeking system on all human progress and the civilization as a whole, in which context endless extensions (up to infinity eventually) make perfect sense.
Yes he does. But only for "those", you know, "other", dangerous people with dangerous ideas, who dress differently. And smell funny. Or speak some suspicious language. Actually, many like him believe that "those people" should be all in camps, or at least deported to Africa somewhere, for their own safety, naturally!
Not like you and I, true Patriots.
I mean you are a white, Christian or Jewish, Fox-watching on your 60" TV, American Football fanatic, NRA member, filled with awe of winners at Capitalism, owner (with mere 53 years on your 60 year mortgage left) of a McMansion in suburbia who does not leave that house without 5 credit cards, because you never know which one just might raise your limit some more! Are you not?
So you have nothing to worry about! Nothing at all!
No. Richelieu meant that his Inquisition was capable of finding "heresy" within any six lines of any man's speech. They did not have to forge anything, merely "see" what they read with a sufficient fervor via a sufficiently fanatical eye of a religious zealot. The torture of the suspect, or his family, was guaranteed extract a signed "confession" later.
It is no coincidence that the main villain in Dumas' books is an evil religious nut, supported by a blood-thirsty, nearly all-powerful (at the time) fanatical religious cult with a prominent sadistic streak and a healthy apetite for yet more power and wealth, at all costs.
No, they did not. There are very, very few real inventions that can be attributed to Microsoft. This is not one of them. VFAT is an "invention" in the same vain as a janitor is "inventing clean" via an application of a mop and a bucket of soapy water to a floor. The term, now apparently forgotten, that once used to describe why such things are not patentable is "an obvious application of the art"
So, as many people pointed out thousands of times:
I can't believe that all of you missed the one obvious military application: concealment of nuclear submarines.
Presently nuclear subs are detectable by planes (like the P3 etc.) via use of magnetometers.
A sub, being a very large metal object, interferes with the Earth magnetosphere (which is for the purpose of detection a constant magnetic field) and thus can be detected an "anomaly" in the magnetic field, far above their actual location deep underwater.
This is one major weakness of modern subs that makes them detectable.
This discovery is practically custom made as a solution to this problem: to hide an object that affects a constant magnetic field.
And then the only thing you have to worry about is what .cn wants! A mere humble requirement of photo ID, address, bank account numbers and a pledge of eternal obedience(1) of everyone who wants a .cn domain...
(1) so far only they got as far as photo ID and address (which caused nearly all non-Chinese registrars to stop selling .cn domains) but the hour is young yet.
So your solution is to go suck up to the competing runner-up schoolyard bully?
I am sure all those factory slaves living in company barracks and being paid in company scrip that is only valid in the company store - a common enough occurrence throughout the world today - but particularly in the "enlightened" states at the time of Wilberforce's "victory" - would quibble somewhat.
You seem not to understand that the point of slavery is not the "master" being able to whip someone within the inch of their lives for the sadistic pleasure of it and with impunity, the main point is economic servitude. Slaves were - even back then - seen as not merely toys, they were seen as revenue-generating property. And that hasn't changed one iota.
So while true, the iron collar and the whip have gone (mostly) it was only because the "ownership class" realized that they could be replaced by means far more effective and insidious. As to throwing sick slaves who died in horrible conditions in transit overboard or burying them by the dozen right outside their slums - the practice goes merrily on. Daily.
So you can take off those rosy-colored glasses through which most of the very well-off, upper middle class denizens of the West seem to find necessary to view the world (and their own "achievements" in particular while all the while feeling guilty about their insane consumption that requires outright slavery to sustain - hence your guilt about being "self-absorbed" and your attempts at its projection) and stop pretending that anything of substance has changed for the vast majority of the teeming billions of disposable humanity out there.
Also, the "iron collar and whip" type of slavery will be back, even in the so-called "enlightened" states, because that is how fucked-up human "societies" work. They are cyclical and every vicious excess of the past comes back, sooner or later, over and over and over .....
Take a look around the "everything changed on 911" US of A and compare the goings on with some of the measures implemented by the Nazis or the Soviets for a bit of a crash course in how this thing called "history" works.
Then get back to me on being "divorced from reality".
No, it is not "you are willing to work as hard and long as it takes to make the change, or you have to live with the world created by those who are." it is "you are willing to live with the world that is the random result of the collision of millions of mutually contradictory ideas and objectives". You are under some wacky illusion that anything we actually do as individuals counts in the big picture. It does not, unless random chance makes it so.
The very popular and utterly laughable delusion of "control of one's own destiny" or its even more grandiose variant "working for societal change" is what lies at the difference of the world-views here.
Case in point: Wilberforce lost. Slavery never actually left, it merely got "updated". In the past the slaves had iron collars on, today they have invisible, electronic ones and believe themselves "free", which strengthens their slavery by orders of magnitude since slaves who think they are "free" never try to break their chains. Instead they work 6 jobs in order to enrich their masters more diligently. But everything important in their lives is controlled by someone else, just like in the old days.
That is why most people see a 60-year "investment" to change things "within the system" (with less than 10% chance for positive outcome) to be more like something a desperate gambler-junkie with uncontrollable withdrawal shakes would do, rather then a rational being capable of calculating of effort/risk/reward ratios.
This is also why "participation" in this so-called "democracy" declines year after year.
I don't know what the solution to this problem is but clearly neither voting for Bought-and-paid-for Stooge A versus Bought-and-paid-for Stooge B nor "working for change against all odds to die just before anything comes out of it (or not)" for 60 years seem very logical to me.
Ridiculous AC troll nonsense.
I have thousands of posts here and if they were all consistently having "then" instead of "than" ... then you'd have a point.
As it is you are just another attention-starved nitpicking jackass.
Be gone.
LOL. Yes, I am sure all holier-than-thou ACs like you are 100% typo-free by definition and never rush or post on Slashdot from a tablet with an auto-correct on ...
That is probably why ACs are so famous on Slashdot for being the source of reliable, sage advice! No?
If you mean my comment about the ability to run the Parallels Bare Metal VMs in the Parallels Desktop, that is just a bonus feature that would allow you to experiment on VMs locally or perform all sorts of maintenance tasks away from the main server. It does not mean that you would be forced to run them there. You can still do all the work the same way you operate now, except with Parallels Bare Metal you get a native Mac client console to remotely control the Parallels host with, very much like the one VMWare used to do for Linux in the early days before they went "mainstream" and started to piss on all non-Windows users.