1. Deactivate all your social media accounts. You won't miss them.
2. a Report them - it's consumer fraud
b. Get fired
c. Whistleblower lawsuit - PROFIT!
3. Create a new account called "$nameofapp.sux" and post stuff like
You know, this is TEH MOSTEST AWESOMEST APP EVAH!
Not only will it enlarge your man's mandrake r00t, but it will also make you BIG BUX.
I downloaded this 100%-sypware-free app, and within just days I was receiving so many offers of money from nigerian princes, lotteries I had never even entered, and inheritances from dead relatives that I never heard of.
And it also gives so many nice offers for penny stocks that are sure to go to TEH MOON, so when I get me my lottery winnings, I know where to invest it all!
And the best part - it automatically spreads the lucky offers to all my friends and other contacts so that we can ALL get rich together. It must be working - they must be so busy with their new riches that none of them are taking my calls any more, the ungrateful b*tches.
Really, just report them (#2). There's nothing they can do in retaliation without it costing them $$$.
You don't drink the slush - it's only in the neck of the bottle - the ice-cold beer filters through the slush in the neck. On a really hot summer day, it's... well, just try it.
Why not just stick the bottle in the freezer for a bit - you know you've timed it just right when you open it and the release in pressure causes the beer in the neck to turn into slush.
Mostly it doesn't run at all - if you had bothered reading the article, it's buggy, crashes a lot, and the big deal is a web app that runs "almost like wordpad".
In other words, it's not even up to the level Win3x and Write. The only "Aura" around this is the smell of a dying project.
For $120 less than the current samsung, you can buy an iPad2. Or for $30 more, the new iPad. Better battery life, more portable, weighs less than half as much, way way more apps, touch screen, better build quality...
Remember how everyone was so excited when they first came out? Predicting that if they were sold for $200, they'd have an impact? Well, 2 years later, they're still twice the price or more, while all the competition has gotten cheaper and more capable.
The decision not to buy one of these crapbooks is a no-brainer. People will buy an iPad2 for the same price instead.
Only instead of VT102 escape codes we are using HTML5 on much more capable terminals
Awesome false analogy...comparing a terminal to a web browser experience.
True... the terminal just works, while the "web browser experience" breaks something on updates, breaks in different ways on different browsers, and gave us the endless suck known as Facebook and Twitter and Google+.
Nobody's buying these PoS boxes when they can get an iPad2 for $20 more ($420 vs $400), and iPad3 with 4G for $70 more than the $450 4G chromebook, or a real computer for much less.
Even at $250, they'd be overpriced. $100, they might compete with the $100 android tablets out there...
troll-o-matic:-) Because when you identify and point out a real problem, people are going to call you a troll anyway... just witness the +2 Flamebait for pointing out that 15 years later not one web browser can get css right, because the original css 2.1 spec was, and continues to be, ambiguous in many areas, and forgot others.
We're still building the web with what can only be called pre-Model-T artisan methods. "Every nut and bolt lovingly shaped by hand". That's full-on retarded.
A couple of decades ago, Delphi was letting people build self-contained, extensible, exchangeable components that, using the underlying framework, were often literally drag-n-drop. Java was supposed to extend that to the network, but it failed because it was slowwwwwww. And then they drank the kool-aid - "java applets". Combining the worst of both worlds - fragile web browsers and limited functionality.
Way to go, people. So we continue to make our nuts and bolts by hand, and wonder why things break? Or why a word processing program from 20 years ago, running on 1/1,000 the cpu cycles and 1/1,000 the ram, still outperforms any "web document editor" on the web in terms of both speed and features?
Web browsers - we're really into denial about just how badly they've impacted the development of better alternatives. If anyone invents a time machine, please go back to 1989 and knee-cap Tim Berners-Lee.
Steve Jobs didn't get any money from the purchase - that went to the investors (people like Ross Perot and Canon Corp.) He did get 1.5 million shares, the sort of performance-based incentive plan that's quite common. Grow the business, your shares grow, tank it, your shares tank.
Not even close. Not only did they have a lot more than $150 million in the bank, they had already returned to making a profit the year before Gates investment. Profitable companies with money in the bank can afford to do things like buy NeXT for $429 million + 1.5 million shares. Companies that are "nearly bankrupt", not so much, hmm:-)
"It was the iMac and iPod that brought them out of bankruptcy"
Apple never went bankrupt. And no, Bill Gates' $150 million investment didn't amount to more than a month or so of working capital - they had enough to last, but they needed the public assurance that Microsoft would continue to make Office for the Mac.
"People want something that is easy to use and just works."
Which is why they want Apple. And why, given a choice, they'll take an iPad and an app as opposed the the crapfest of browser-world on a chromebook.
It has nothing to do with wanting to look hip, and everything to do with it actually working as expected. Some people are actually embarrassed to be seen with an Apple device, because they don't want others to assume they're a poseur.
It's not a "moving target" - it's a badly written specification. Pick a change at random - a lot of them are mistakes - whoever wrote the spec left too much as either ambiguous or "assumed."
So you can have perfectly-formed html and css, and it will still break. It's "broken by design" - just like we used to say about Windows. Also, no amount of back-filling is going to change the fundamental problems - html and css and javascript are not a good way to build programs, and never will be.
Go into fallback mode - much more usable. So much more that when I dropped opensuse I also found myself switching from KDE because it works so well and uses fewer resources.
The spec for CSS 2.1 was laid down in 1997 - 15 years ago. Today, you're STILL lucky if you can get non-trivial pages to render the same on different browsers without all sorts of tricks and tweaks.
This is ridiculous. 15 years, and CSS 2.1 is still broken. At this rate, it's a safe bet that you won't see CSS 3x implemented properly in your lifetime.
People want new features, but more importantly, they want stuff that works. Web browsers are not application platforms, and the whole DOM tree concept is part of the problem. Sure, for a text document, but NOT for a "real program."
Apple has it right - people want apps, not web (cr)apps. Real programs.
We were stupid. Instead of a browser and its dependencies on servers, we could have spent the last 15 years building untold numbers of real internetworked applications. No worrying about facebook or google nosing around with your privacy... but no, we listened to the "experts" at CERN rather than the people building graphical BBS systems complete with virtual worlds, animations, and sharable graphics, like 17-year-old Seth Hamilton back in 1993.
So go ahead and waste more time on Chrome and all that other crap - if a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the whole web "experience" is a turd that continues to be polished by committees of committees.
Apple will continue to make hundreds of billions, because we are too stupid to admit that the underlying design is really, really amateur hour, and that even a 17-year-old kid could (and did) do better.
Nobody works for $4 an hour - I used that figure to show how ridiculous the scenario was.
The "fully burdened" cost of a worker (including vacation pay, employer's share of taxes, benefits, office space, heating, parking, etc., is more in the realm of $30-$40 an hour for take-home pay of $15-$25 an hour. So, using a cost of $35/hr, if the new box saves them even 1 minute a day, it more than pays for the entire 28 cents a day it costs in just under 6 years.
If it saves them 5 minutes a day, it saves the employer a net of $2000.00 over 6 years, over and above the original cost.
it's really not worth keeping 10-year-old hardware.
Cost of new desktop PC with warranty, dual core 2.7ghz cpu, 4 gigs ram (upgradeable to 8 gigs), 1tb hard drive, gigabit ethernet + wireless b/g/n, card reader, Windows - $399 retail, no favours.
Cost of upgrading a 10-year-old box to those specs - forget it.
The new hardware will be amortized over 6 years, so you're talking less than $6/month. With 20 working days in the month, if the new machine saves a user a grand total of 5 minutes a day because it's faster, even if you're only paying the worker $4 an hour, you're still ahead of the game. At $20/hour, if it only saves them a minute a day, you're still ahead by replacing the entire machine.
Also, those older machines ran HOT. Newer machines have much better power management, so you're going to save on both power and office ac.
These workers aren't doing that, and they also don't need to convert documents, since they need to stay interoperable with other branches/gov't. So no, they will not be running oo on a server. The only real case for that is bulk format conversion, and that's rare (and there are dedicated tools for much of that which are quicker). So, who's actually running oo on a server? Pretty much nobody.
In a new development to this story, a new series of tests run after acquiring new testing equipment (from China) and new software (from China) determined that the parts previously identified as counterfeit were in fact genuine.
A lot of those 10-year-old machines are AMD semprons, under 1.5 ghz. Also, the fastest P4 on the market 10 years ago (Norwood - October 2001) was 1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz, 2 GHz and 2.2 GHz - so the vast majority of 10-year-old P4s would be the slower, cheaper 1.6 GHZ machines.
And good luck changing your network "card" in a laptop (many of the Munich machines are laptops). Or finding a PCMCIA card for an old obsolete laptop. Or even an IDE laptop hard drive.
Try running Gnome 3 in fallback mode. Works great in Fedora 16 (I switched after the last opensuse kde upgrade fiasco), gets rid of all the resource suckage as long as you remember to not enable selinux (selinux=0 at the prompt during install).
It's cheaper to throw out a 10-year-old PC than it is to update the ram, hard drive, and cpu. Those obsolete components cost a lot more than newer ones.
With old laptops, you often don't even have a choice. Want to change that ethernet port from 10mpbs to 1gig? Update the cpu? Good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Report it to your attorney-general, to the blogs you're being asked to astroturf, and to the app store in question. It's consumer fraud.
1. Deactivate all your social media accounts. You won't miss them.
2. a Report them - it's consumer fraud
b. Get fired
c. Whistleblower lawsuit - PROFIT!
3. Create a new account called "$nameofapp.sux" and post stuff like
Really, just report them (#2). There's nothing they can do in retaliation without it costing them $$$.
You don't drink the slush - it's only in the neck of the bottle - the ice-cold beer filters through the slush in the neck. On a really hot summer day, it's ... well, just try it.
Why not just stick the bottle in the freezer for a bit - you know you've timed it just right when you open it and the release in pressure causes the beer in the neck to turn into slush.
NO, not when you can buy tablets for $100 that would fit your use case perfectly. Unless you got your chromebook for free, you overpaid.
In other words, it's not even up to the level Win3x and Write. The only "Aura" around this is the smell of a dying project.
For $120 less than the current samsung, you can buy an iPad2. Or for $30 more, the new iPad. Better battery life, more portable, weighs less than half as much, way way more apps, touch screen, better build quality ...
Actually, don't bother answering - nobody's buying chromebooks anyway. They're way over-priced, under-powered, extremely limited devices.
Remember how everyone was so excited when they first came out? Predicting that if they were sold for $200, they'd have an impact? Well, 2 years later, they're still twice the price or more, while all the competition has gotten cheaper and more capable.
The decision not to buy one of these crapbooks is a no-brainer. People will buy an iPad2 for the same price instead.
True ... the terminal just works, while the "web browser experience" breaks something on updates, breaks in different ways on different browsers, and gave us the endless suck known as Facebook and Twitter and Google+.
Nobody's buying these PoS boxes when they can get an iPad2 for $20 more ($420 vs $400), and iPad3 with 4G for $70 more than the $450 4G chromebook, or a real computer for much less.
Even at $250, they'd be overpriced. $100, they might compete with the $100 android tablets out there ...
We're still building the web with what can only be called pre-Model-T artisan methods. "Every nut and bolt lovingly shaped by hand". That's full-on retarded.
A couple of decades ago, Delphi was letting people build self-contained, extensible, exchangeable components that, using the underlying framework, were often literally drag-n-drop. Java was supposed to extend that to the network, but it failed because it was slowwwwwww. And then they drank the kool-aid - "java applets". Combining the worst of both worlds - fragile web browsers and limited functionality.
Way to go, people. So we continue to make our nuts and bolts by hand, and wonder why things break? Or why a word processing program from 20 years ago, running on 1/1,000 the cpu cycles and 1/1,000 the ram, still outperforms any "web document editor" on the web in terms of both speed and features?
Web browsers - we're really into denial about just how badly they've impacted the development of better alternatives. If anyone invents a time machine, please go back to 1989 and knee-cap Tim Berners-Lee.
Steve Jobs didn't get any money from the purchase - that went to the investors (people like Ross Perot and Canon Corp.) He did get 1.5 million shares, the sort of performance-based incentive plan that's quite common. Grow the business, your shares grow, tank it, your shares tank.
Not even close. Not only did they have a lot more than $150 million in the bank, they had already returned to making a profit the year before Gates investment. Profitable companies with money in the bank can afford to do things like buy NeXT for $429 million + 1.5 million shares. Companies that are "nearly bankrupt", not so much, hmm :-)
"It was the iMac and iPod that brought them out of bankruptcy"
Apple never went bankrupt. And no, Bill Gates' $150 million investment didn't amount to more than a month or so of working capital - they had enough to last, but they needed the public assurance that Microsoft would continue to make Office for the Mac.
"People want something that is easy to use and just works."
Which is why they want Apple. And why, given a choice, they'll take an iPad and an app as opposed the the crapfest of browser-world on a chromebook.
It has nothing to do with wanting to look hip, and everything to do with it actually working as expected. Some people are actually embarrassed to be seen with an Apple device, because they don't want others to assume they're a poseur.
So you can have perfectly-formed html and css, and it will still break. It's "broken by design" - just like we used to say about Windows. Also, no amount of back-filling is going to change the fundamental problems - html and css and javascript are not a good way to build programs, and never will be.
Go into fallback mode - much more usable. So much more that when I dropped opensuse I also found myself switching from KDE because it works so well and uses fewer resources.
The spec for CSS 2.1 was laid down in 1997 - 15 years ago. Today, you're STILL lucky if you can get non-trivial pages to render the same on different browsers without all sorts of tricks and tweaks.
This is ridiculous. 15 years, and CSS 2.1 is still broken. At this rate, it's a safe bet that you won't see CSS 3x implemented properly in your lifetime.
People want new features, but more importantly, they want stuff that works. Web browsers are not application platforms, and the whole DOM tree concept is part of the problem. Sure, for a text document, but NOT for a "real program."
Apple has it right - people want apps, not web (cr)apps. Real programs.
We were stupid. Instead of a browser and its dependencies on servers, we could have spent the last 15 years building untold numbers of real internetworked applications. No worrying about facebook or google nosing around with your privacy ... but no, we listened to the "experts" at CERN rather than the people building graphical BBS systems complete with virtual worlds, animations, and sharable graphics, like 17-year-old Seth Hamilton back in 1993.
So go ahead and waste more time on Chrome and all that other crap - if a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the whole web "experience" is a turd that continues to be polished by committees of committees.
Apple will continue to make hundreds of billions, because we are too stupid to admit that the underlying design is really, really amateur hour, and that even a 17-year-old kid could (and did) do better.
Ironically, it's possible for DOS programs on a 386 to address up to 4 gigabytes per process using unreal mode.
That's all fine and good, but remember, this is Canada we're talking about. How many pine cones does that translate into?
The "fully burdened" cost of a worker (including vacation pay, employer's share of taxes, benefits, office space, heating, parking, etc., is more in the realm of $30-$40 an hour for take-home pay of $15-$25 an hour. So, using a cost of $35/hr, if the new box saves them even 1 minute a day, it more than pays for the entire 28 cents a day it costs in just under 6 years.
If it saves them 5 minutes a day, it saves the employer a net of $2000.00 over 6 years, over and above the original cost.
it's really not worth keeping 10-year-old hardware.
Cost of upgrading a 10-year-old box to those specs - forget it.
The new hardware will be amortized over 6 years, so you're talking less than $6/month. With 20 working days in the month, if the new machine saves a user a grand total of 5 minutes a day because it's faster, even if you're only paying the worker $4 an hour, you're still ahead of the game. At $20/hour, if it only saves them a minute a day, you're still ahead by replacing the entire machine.
Also, those older machines ran HOT. Newer machines have much better power management, so you're going to save on both power and office ac.
These workers aren't doing that, and they also don't need to convert documents, since they need to stay interoperable with other branches/gov't. So no, they will not be running oo on a server. The only real case for that is bulk format conversion, and that's rare (and there are dedicated tools for much of that which are quicker). So, who's actually running oo on a server? Pretty much nobody.
They weren't running thin clients, so don't be silly, mkay?
In a new development to this story, a new series of tests run after acquiring new testing equipment (from China) and new software (from China) determined that the parts previously identified as counterfeit were in fact genuine.
Scared yet? You should be.
And good luck changing your network "card" in a laptop (many of the Munich machines are laptops). Or finding a PCMCIA card for an old obsolete laptop. Or even an IDE laptop hard drive.
Try running Gnome 3 in fallback mode. Works great in Fedora 16 (I switched after the last opensuse kde upgrade fiasco), gets rid of all the resource suckage as long as you remember to not enable selinux (selinux=0 at the prompt during install).
With old laptops, you often don't even have a choice. Want to change that ethernet port from 10mpbs to 1gig? Update the cpu? Good luck with that.