Soon it won't be profitable to sell any Android handsets cheaper than an iPhone.
What are they (Motorola) thinking of? Do you ever want to sell another handset or are you transitioning into a patent Troll?
Actually, I think most of the mobile phone industry is in a similar position.
They're trying desperately to avoid phone handsets becoming a commodity. Historically, this has been fairly easy because every manufacturer had their strengths and their weaknesses. Software was often a weakness, hence why they frequently bring it in from outside (cf. Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian).
The problem with Android is that it's a game changer. Already we see companies that produce mobile phones have stepped up their development pace pretty drastically - once a few Chinese companies start punting reference designs the amount of work for any old fred to enter the phone industry is drastically reduced. This is going to hammer the profit-per-phone - and when you've got a $multi-billion global company, you can't really restructure it to account for such a sea change.
So you don't. You look for a way to stop Android from being such a destructive technology - and that's what we're seeing Motorola do. Make no mistake, they won't be the last.
Usually, the way it works is that where company A sues company B for violating their patents, company B digs around to see if that violation works both ways. More often than not it does, so company B says "Look, you're violating our patents as well - so why don't we cross-license these patents and put this lawsuit to bed?".
Where it's been awkward with Android is that Oracle don't make phones, and phone manufacturers don't usually make databases or operating systems. So the likelihood of patent infringement working both ways is pretty slim.
Motorola's a bit different here - there's a good chance that exactly this will happen if Motorola sue the likes of HTC or Sony Ericsson.
It's about trying to reduce traffic queues by making it more expensive to drive at peak times.
Cobblers. Look at why there's a lot of traffic on the roads at peak times:
1. People getting to/from work. 2. People getting the kids to/from school.
This accounts for a huge amount of peak-time traffic - and neither employers nor schools care if it costs a bit more to be on the road at 08:30 instead of 10:00, that's the driver's problem. This is revenue raising, pure and simple.
IMV, Apple products/features over the course of the last 5-8 years follow a fairly straightforward model which can be broken down into a few steps.
1. Release Not-Terribly-Shiny Version 1.0. It may not be the most sophisticated in the world, it may have a whole heap of issues. But it will be released. The rest of the world says "ho-hum". It probably won't sell spectacularly, but it won't be an abject failure. (See also: First generation iPod. First generation iPhone. OS X when first released.) 2. Release Shiny Version n+1. It fixes most of the issues of the previous version. Technologically it's unusual for it to do anything new, anything that the competition doesn't already do. But what it does it executes with so much style, so much polish that the rest of the industry is left looking rather pathetic and scrabbling to catch up. It sells spectacularly. (See also iPhone 3G) 3. Apple will rest on its laurels. There will be updates to their products, but by and large they'll be relatively minor increments rather than ground-breaking "my God that's amazing" ideas. These will be released as Shiny Version 3.0 and 4.0. (See also iPhone 3GS, OS X versions 10.3-10.4). 4. The rest of the industry will catch up. Products will appear that compete with Apple's equivalent on features, price and polish. Then, just as people are starting to seriously question Apple and wonder what they're doing... 5. Repeat steps 2-4.
If I'm right, the iPhone 5 won't be a huge breakthrough over the iPhone 4. It may have a few tweaks here and there, but it won't be "Steve, take me now!" fantastic. The iPhone 6, however, will probably be leaps and bounds ahead of the 5.
The popularity of Windows - and, for that matter, Windows' own admin tools - demonstrates that the world does not want a choice of a dozen different window managers, toolkits and widget libraries. The world wants one that works well, that most applications integrate with.
Right now, it would not be unreasonable to describe the process of a project as:
1. A commercial software firm comes up with an idea. At this point, we are at year one. 2. They demonstrate that the idea is a good one (by getting lots of customers). This takes them a while; let's say it takes us up to year three. 3. Microsoft spot this and either buy them or copy the idea and integrate it with an existing product. This process takes a year or two, so we're now about halfway through year 4. 3. Another few years pass; the product goes through an iteration or two and becomes reasonably well-known (Year 7). A number of F/OSS projects are started, attempting to emulate it - either from scratch or by taking an existing codebase. Most die on the vine; a few don't.
The complete product is quite complicated to replicate, so the F/OSS product starts out with a more reasonable target of replicating the functionality of an earlier version to what is current at this point - let's say they try to replicate the product as it was in year 4. 4. It's damn hard to attract developers to a fledgling F/OSS project. So development is slow; meanwhile Microsoft are ploughing on with more and more new features. The first RC of the F/OSS project is released some time in year 8 or 9. Note that at this point, the F/OSS product is five years behind the state of the art. 5. More time passes. The next version of the F/OSS project aims to iron out the biggest bugs and bring it a little more up to date - but it typically takes 2 or more years for the F/OSS project to catch up 1 year's worth of progress from the commercial product(s) it apes. Before long, the F/OSS product is ten years behind its closest commercial competitor.
We're seeing exactly this happen with Office and Windows vs. LibreOffice and Linux. By the time Samba actually releases version 4, I bet you anything you like the majority of Microsoft shops won't be using a traditional fileserver at all - they'll be storing everything on Sharepoint because a properly implemented Sharepoint installation gives you a complete, searchable document management system.
It's still a good deal whatever you study, considering that you need a degree to hand out the towels on the reception desk at the gym I used to belong to.
This would suggest that if that's the sort of qualification required to hand out towels, most who can't get into university (and don't already have some experience) are more-or-less unemployable.
Most of the targets which have been successfully hit have been organisations where "... on the Internet" is either not particularly crucial to their business or security is not something they'd have had to consider from a corporate culture perspective.
Take the Sony attacks - now while most people on/. would, if setting up some sort of Internet-based gaming platform that consoles can hook into would go to all sorts of lengths to make sure that everything is as nailed down as is humanly possible, Sony haven't historically had to worry about that as a company. And it doesn't look like they did.
But you look at, say, Amazon, who would have had to worry Internet security since day 1, and it's a different matter altogether. Similarly payment processing companies - nobody's saying they're infallible, they're probably not, but there's a much better chance that they've put some real effort into security compared to the Sonys of this world.
I don't think Facebook have anything to worry about.
We've already seen from China and many Arabic countries that contrary to popular belief, the Internet can be controlled - and it's not all that difficult. All you need to do is legislate that all major Internet providers in the country do X, where X is one or more of:
- Block access to (list of IP addresses). - Implement HTTP filtering of (list of URLs). - Block outbound traffic on all ports except (list of whitelisted ports). - Block inbound traffic except for (list of whitelisted inbound traffic). - Agree to extend these blocks to cover any arbitrary thing on short notice.
This is an extreme dystopian scenario, and isn't one I see happening any time soon. What I do see happening is that the UK already has an Internet blacklist of sorts managed by a quango called the Internet Watch Foundation, which is nominally there to block child porn. You can't easily avoid this in the UK unless you explicitly seek out a very small ISP which openly admits to not using the IWF list or anything like it.
I can easily see the IWF mandate being extended to cover anything which promotes terrorism or civil unrest.
As for auditing, uptime, and legal consequences, you've apparently never dealt with a service contract. If the contract mandates five nines of uptime, and includes a clause making them liable for all damages and loss, that's a pretty hefty legal comeback.
I agree with you entirely, it's an absolutely beautiful piece of legal comeback. But every service contract I've ever seen is so full of ifs, buts and other assorted get-outs that it's very rare to actually be able to hold someone to it.
The one time I have seen an SLA that was actually quite good, the company in question didn't refuse to honour it. Oh no. They went one better - they hadn't even told their staff that it existed, so if you asked about it you'd get a response along the lines of "What's an SLA, then?" The only way you'll get an SLA honoured in those circumstances is to take your provider to court, and you can bet that if you do they'll drop you like a hot potato. So you probably wouldn't bother in any but the most egregious of circumstances.
Cloud computing is a buzzword meaning "don't run your own hardware, run your business on someone elses". Which might mean anything from a virtual server that you manage at one end of the sophistication scale to a SaaS product at the other.
All sorts of aspects of this are optional. Including:
1. Whether or not you manage the underlying operating system - including things like security patches and hardening. You can choose a cloud computing provider that has sysadmins deal with that for you and just run the application yourself; they are a LOT more expensive than Amazon.
2. How much effort your provider puts into making their systems geographically redundant. Few will talk openly about this; I'm prepared to bet hard cash this is because the vast majority that offer you a virtualised server are just using a web interface to expose a fairly vanilla Xen-with-a-SAN infrastructure to the world with everything sat in one place. Providers that will run the OS for you and can honestly say their infrastructure accounts for complete data centre loss are like hen's teeth.
3. If you've gone for a SaaS provider - how much effort their developers went to to ensure their application can stand up to everything up to and including total loss of a data centre. And whether or not they test for such an occurrence.
Wouldn't do you much good anyway, not unless it includes compatibility with Office VB apps.
Interoperability with existing applications (both those written in-house as spreadsheets and third-party apps that somehow plug into Office) and outside entities are far and away the biggest thing keeping people on Office. The closest you'll get to a migration in most businesses today is "drop office except for a select few" approach.
I'd go a step further and say that every business over a particular size is guaranteed to have at least one such application - and if it's not written in Excel, it'll be written in Access.
The application is practically guaranteed to be a horrendous mess, but it's almost certainly become business-critical.
And the good people behind LibreOffice still can't figure out why anyone wouldn't want a free office suite.
Without looking too hard, I've found a car that gets 60MPG (Imperial - so about 50MPG US gallons) and will get you from 0 to 60 in 9 seconds witha top speed of around 130 mph. Seems like a long list of safety kit too.
You wouldn't have to look hard - that's a smidge on the large side but otherwise it's not at all unusual for a European car. By no means is it an outlier.
Frankly, I have no idea what Americans are doing to make their cars so fantastically inefficient - is the petrol not as rich?
The problem is that Obama tried to get a roofer in but caved into pressure to not pay him enough to fix the problem. So now we've got a huge hole in our roof, no more spending on buckets and water damage being done everywhere.
Arguably, US politics didn't give him much of a choice.
If the Republicans had caved first, they'd have campaigned on a platform of "Look who raised taxes!". Had neither party caved and the US defaulted, they'd have used a campaign platform of "Look who was in power when we defaulted on our debts!".
As it stands, I don't really blame S&P for reducing the US's credit rating - the last couple of months have sent a powerful message to the world: "If you lend money to the US, there's a good chance the US politics will lead to them bickering internally over whether or not they're going to pay you back".
You know what this means, of course? Next year's Republican platform will be "Look who was in power when our credit rating was reduced!"
Ireland is also insane. In cities like Dublin, it's a free for all with Bus drivers that have long since stopped caring if they run someone off the road and coked up taxi drivers popping up on the curbs when needed to clear traffic.
Ireland doesn't stop being insane when you leave Dublin - in fact, it's somewhere about a third of the way from safest in terms of "road deaths per 100,000 population in Europe"
Having said that, I'd describe even that as a minor miracle. They only instigated a penalty points system in 2002 and waiting lists to take your driving test are so long that a lot of people are reported to be driving illegally for years. Every winter there's terrible weather - maybe heavy snow, maybe fog - and the resulting pile-ups are the stuff of legend. A couple of years ago there was something like 100 accidents in the course of a couple of hours - ISTR it was on the M50 heading south out of Dublin - the cause was a combination of heavy fog and drivers who decided that it was still perfectly safe to drive at 70mph in heavy fog with visibility reduced to about 50 yards.
You have a half a point, and that's exactly what Microsoft was counting on when they built.NET. That enough people would think 'cross-platform within the Windows family' was essentially the same thing as cross-platform.
Thing is, we talk on/. as if Microsoft were some tightly-controlled empire whereby the emperor knows exactly what's going on and even if the empire itself appears to be making the most absurd choices there is actually some method behind them that may not become apparent until some time later.
That may well have been the case back when Bill Gates was running the show; I'm not convinced it is today. I think that when Microsoft describe "cross-platform" as meaning "cross-platform within the Windows family", all the senior decision-makers honestly believe that's genuinely cross-platform.
Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.
(For those unfamiliar with RISC OS: icons on the left represent storage media, the two icons on the far right control graphics mode and some aspects of memory management. Running applications appear on the right hand side; non-running applications appear only in the storage media that holds them. You can see some in the window labelled "Resources:$.Apps". Note these applications all start with an ! - there's a good reason for that. Each "application" is actually a plain boring directory; the ! signals to the operating system that the directory should be treated as an application; in most cases you can copy an application from one place to another simply by dragging & dropping it. When you double-click on an application, the OS will look for a file in the directory called !Run and execute it. This desktop dates from 1992, though the ideas I've described were more-or-less the same in an earlier version that dates from 1988.)
I don't think it's the contract they're complaining about so much - they knew they were signing up to get zero when they agreed.
What they're complaining about is:
- Amazon proudly advertise that you still get 20% of the usual price even when they discount it to zero. - Except if they plan to discount it to zero, the first thing they'll do is send you an email offering a "revised" agreement - they'll discount it to zero and you get zero. This email contains a note saying "Oh BTW the contents of this email are confidential". - A developer may think "You know what? I'll accept that and chance that it'll work out in the long term, because it's good advertising". Which is exactly what these guys did. - Lo and behold, when discounted to zero the app sold like hot cakes. 100,000 copies in one day. - They now have 100,000 users to support. Furthermore, if the app phones home (which many do), they need the server capacity to handle 100,000 copies of the app phoning home. None of these 100,000 users have paid. This is the law of unintended consequences, and it'd seem they didn't really think about this. Nevertheless, it may not be the end of the world - after all, if it improved paid-for sales enough they could afford to deal with that.... - It didn't make the slightest difference to paid sales.
And you should have a lawyer when doing that. Obviously, they did not understand what they were signing when the partnered with Amazon.
If I were to consult with a lawyer as much as a typical "speak to a lawyer" poster on/. recommends, I'd have a crack legal team advising me whether or not I should get out of bed in the morning.
This is just it; people look at the retail price of a boxed copy of Windows and Office and think that's how much it costs.
I don't believe anybody pays that. I think that headline price is there purely as something to point at and say "Look how much you're saving!". 40-60% is not unusual, and that's for a small business licensing for maybe 40-50 people.
If we take a number out of thin air at £200 per person per year including CALs - that sounds like a lot of money but when you consider how much you pay each person each year it rapidly pales into insignificance.
Windows XP pre-SP2 didn't have any sort of firewall and opened up all sorts of things by default; most ISPs shipped you a USB ADSL/cable modem and explicitly told you not to use a firewall or they wouldn't support you. Lots of things at the time therefore did spread in exactly that fashion; the only sensible option was to tell your ISP to go to hell and install a router with a firewall or a third-party software firewall.
That said, I'd be surprised if any common malware written in the last 5 years had that as its only infection vector.
Slashdot Mirror
Soon it won't be profitable to sell any Android handsets cheaper than an iPhone.
What are they (Motorola) thinking of? Do you ever want to sell another handset or are you transitioning into a patent Troll?
Actually, I think most of the mobile phone industry is in a similar position.
They're trying desperately to avoid phone handsets becoming a commodity. Historically, this has been fairly easy because every manufacturer had their strengths and their weaknesses. Software was often a weakness, hence why they frequently bring it in from outside (cf. Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian).
The problem with Android is that it's a game changer. Already we see companies that produce mobile phones have stepped up their development pace pretty drastically - once a few Chinese companies start punting reference designs the amount of work for any old fred to enter the phone industry is drastically reduced. This is going to hammer the profit-per-phone - and when you've got a $multi-billion global company, you can't really restructure it to account for such a sea change.
So you don't. You look for a way to stop Android from being such a destructive technology - and that's what we're seeing Motorola do. Make no mistake, they won't be the last.
Usually, the way it works is that where company A sues company B for violating their patents, company B digs around to see if that violation works both ways. More often than not it does, so company B says "Look, you're violating our patents as well - so why don't we cross-license these patents and put this lawsuit to bed?".
Where it's been awkward with Android is that Oracle don't make phones, and phone manufacturers don't usually make databases or operating systems. So the likelihood of patent infringement working both ways is pretty slim.
Motorola's a bit different here - there's a good chance that exactly this will happen if Motorola sue the likes of HTC or Sony Ericsson.
I can always disconnect the odometer, and this new device is not going to be connected either.
Or, if you prefer, you can attach a big sign to your vehicle saying "Attention everyone! I am attempting to dodge taxes!"
It's about trying to reduce traffic queues by making it more expensive to drive at peak times.
Cobblers. Look at why there's a lot of traffic on the roads at peak times:
1. People getting to/from work.
2. People getting the kids to/from school.
This accounts for a huge amount of peak-time traffic - and neither employers nor schools care if it costs a bit more to be on the road at 08:30 instead of 10:00, that's the driver's problem. This is revenue raising, pure and simple.
IMV, Apple products/features over the course of the last 5-8 years follow a fairly straightforward model which can be broken down into a few steps.
1. Release Not-Terribly-Shiny Version 1.0. It may not be the most sophisticated in the world, it may have a whole heap of issues. But it will be released. The rest of the world says "ho-hum". It probably won't sell spectacularly, but it won't be an abject failure. (See also: First generation iPod. First generation iPhone. OS X when first released.)
2. Release Shiny Version n+1. It fixes most of the issues of the previous version. Technologically it's unusual for it to do anything new, anything that the competition doesn't already do. But what it does it executes with so much style, so much polish that the rest of the industry is left looking rather pathetic and scrabbling to catch up. It sells spectacularly. (See also iPhone 3G)
3. Apple will rest on its laurels. There will be updates to their products, but by and large they'll be relatively minor increments rather than ground-breaking "my God that's amazing" ideas. These will be released as Shiny Version 3.0 and 4.0. (See also iPhone 3GS, OS X versions 10.3-10.4).
4. The rest of the industry will catch up. Products will appear that compete with Apple's equivalent on features, price and polish. Then, just as people are starting to seriously question Apple and wonder what they're doing...
5. Repeat steps 2-4.
If I'm right, the iPhone 5 won't be a huge breakthrough over the iPhone 4. It may have a few tweaks here and there, but it won't be "Steve, take me now!" fantastic. The iPhone 6, however, will probably be leaps and bounds ahead of the 5.
The popularity of Windows - and, for that matter, Windows' own admin tools - demonstrates that the world does not want a choice of a dozen different window managers, toolkits and widget libraries. The world wants one that works well, that most applications integrate with.
Right now, it would not be unreasonable to describe the process of a project as:
1. A commercial software firm comes up with an idea. At this point, we are at year one.
2. They demonstrate that the idea is a good one (by getting lots of customers). This takes them a while; let's say it takes us up to year three.
3. Microsoft spot this and either buy them or copy the idea and integrate it with an existing product. This process takes a year or two, so we're now about halfway through year 4.
3. Another few years pass; the product goes through an iteration or two and becomes reasonably well-known (Year 7). A number of F/OSS projects are started, attempting to emulate it - either from scratch or by taking an existing codebase. Most die on the vine; a few don't.
The complete product is quite complicated to replicate, so the F/OSS product starts out with a more reasonable target of replicating the functionality of an earlier version to what is current at this point - let's say they try to replicate the product as it was in year 4.
4. It's damn hard to attract developers to a fledgling F/OSS project. So development is slow; meanwhile Microsoft are ploughing on with more and more new features. The first RC of the F/OSS project is released some time in year 8 or 9. Note that at this point, the F/OSS product is five years behind the state of the art.
5. More time passes. The next version of the F/OSS project aims to iron out the biggest bugs and bring it a little more up to date - but it typically takes 2 or more years for the F/OSS project to catch up 1 year's worth of progress from the commercial product(s) it apes. Before long, the F/OSS product is ten years behind its closest commercial competitor.
We're seeing exactly this happen with Office and Windows vs. LibreOffice and Linux. By the time Samba actually releases version 4, I bet you anything you like the majority of Microsoft shops won't be using a traditional fileserver at all - they'll be storing everything on Sharepoint because a properly implemented Sharepoint installation gives you a complete, searchable document management system.
It's still a good deal whatever you study, considering that you need a degree to hand out the towels on the reception desk at the gym I used to belong to.
This would suggest that if that's the sort of qualification required to hand out towels, most who can't get into university (and don't already have some experience) are more-or-less unemployable.
Most of the targets which have been successfully hit have been organisations where "... on the Internet" is either not particularly crucial to their business or security is not something they'd have had to consider from a corporate culture perspective.
Take the Sony attacks - now while most people on /. would, if setting up some sort of Internet-based gaming platform that consoles can hook into would go to all sorts of lengths to make sure that everything is as nailed down as is humanly possible, Sony haven't historically had to worry about that as a company. And it doesn't look like they did.
But you look at, say, Amazon, who would have had to worry Internet security since day 1, and it's a different matter altogether. Similarly payment processing companies - nobody's saying they're infallible, they're probably not, but there's a much better chance that they've put some real effort into security compared to the Sonys of this world.
I don't think Facebook have anything to worry about.
Halle-freaking-lujah, someone else who gets it.
We've already seen from China and many Arabic countries that contrary to popular belief, the Internet can be controlled - and it's not all that difficult. All you need to do is legislate that all major Internet providers in the country do X, where X is one or more of:
- Block access to (list of IP addresses).
- Implement HTTP filtering of (list of URLs).
- Block outbound traffic on all ports except (list of whitelisted ports).
- Block inbound traffic except for (list of whitelisted inbound traffic).
- Agree to extend these blocks to cover any arbitrary thing on short notice.
This is an extreme dystopian scenario, and isn't one I see happening any time soon. What I do see happening is that the UK already has an Internet blacklist of sorts managed by a quango called the Internet Watch Foundation, which is nominally there to block child porn. You can't easily avoid this in the UK unless you explicitly seek out a very small ISP which openly admits to not using the IWF list or anything like it.
I can easily see the IWF mandate being extended to cover anything which promotes terrorism or civil unrest.
Not to mention apps for business, which is growing at a rate of knots.
As for auditing, uptime, and legal consequences, you've apparently never dealt with a service contract. If the contract mandates five nines of uptime, and includes a clause making them liable for all damages and loss, that's a pretty hefty legal comeback.
I agree with you entirely, it's an absolutely beautiful piece of legal comeback. But every service contract I've ever seen is so full of ifs, buts and other assorted get-outs that it's very rare to actually be able to hold someone to it.
The one time I have seen an SLA that was actually quite good, the company in question didn't refuse to honour it. Oh no. They went one better - they hadn't even told their staff that it existed, so if you asked about it you'd get a response along the lines of "What's an SLA, then?" The only way you'll get an SLA honoured in those circumstances is to take your provider to court, and you can bet that if you do they'll drop you like a hot potato. So you probably wouldn't bother in any but the most egregious of circumstances.
Cloud computing is a buzzword meaning "don't run your own hardware, run your business on someone elses". Which might mean anything from a virtual server that you manage at one end of the sophistication scale to a SaaS product at the other.
All sorts of aspects of this are optional. Including:
1. Whether or not you manage the underlying operating system - including things like security patches and hardening. You can choose a cloud computing provider that has sysadmins deal with that for you and just run the application yourself; they are a LOT more expensive than Amazon.
2. How much effort your provider puts into making their systems geographically redundant. Few will talk openly about this; I'm prepared to bet hard cash this is because the vast majority that offer you a virtualised server are just using a web interface to expose a fairly vanilla Xen-with-a-SAN infrastructure to the world with everything sat in one place. Providers that will run the OS for you and can honestly say their infrastructure accounts for complete data centre loss are like hen's teeth.
3. If you've gone for a SaaS provider - how much effort their developers went to to ensure their application can stand up to everything up to and including total loss of a data centre. And whether or not they test for such an occurrence.
Looks like the old "Good, fast, cheap: pick two" adage might need a little rewording. How about "Fast, reliable, cheap: pick two"?
That would be an Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator, not a lightning strike.
Wouldn't do you much good anyway, not unless it includes compatibility with Office VB apps.
Interoperability with existing applications (both those written in-house as spreadsheets and third-party apps that somehow plug into Office) and outside entities are far and away the biggest thing keeping people on Office. The closest you'll get to a migration in most businesses today is "drop office except for a select few" approach.
I'd go a step further and say that every business over a particular size is guaranteed to have at least one such application - and if it's not written in Excel, it'll be written in Access.
The application is practically guaranteed to be a horrendous mess, but it's almost certainly become business-critical.
And the good people behind LibreOffice still can't figure out why anyone wouldn't want a free office suite.
Without looking too hard, I've found a car that gets 60MPG (Imperial - so about 50MPG US gallons) and will get you from 0 to 60 in 9 seconds witha top speed of around 130 mph. Seems like a long list of safety kit too.
http://www.whatcar.com/car-reviews/alfa-romeo/giulietta-hatchback/2-0-jtdm-140-lusso-5dr/specifications/62201
You wouldn't have to look hard - that's a smidge on the large side but otherwise it's not at all unusual for a European car. By no means is it an outlier.
Frankly, I have no idea what Americans are doing to make their cars so fantastically inefficient - is the petrol not as rich?
The problem is that Obama tried to get a roofer in but caved into pressure to not pay him enough to fix the problem. So now we've got a huge hole in our roof, no more spending on buckets and water damage being done everywhere.
Arguably, US politics didn't give him much of a choice.
If the Republicans had caved first, they'd have campaigned on a platform of "Look who raised taxes!". Had neither party caved and the US defaulted, they'd have used a campaign platform of "Look who was in power when we defaulted on our debts!".
As it stands, I don't really blame S&P for reducing the US's credit rating - the last couple of months have sent a powerful message to the world: "If you lend money to the US, there's a good chance the US politics will lead to them bickering internally over whether or not they're going to pay you back".
You know what this means, of course? Next year's Republican platform will be "Look who was in power when our credit rating was reduced!"
Ireland is also insane. In cities like Dublin, it's a free for all with Bus drivers that have long since stopped caring if they run someone off the road and coked up taxi drivers popping up on the curbs when needed to clear traffic.
Ireland doesn't stop being insane when you leave Dublin - in fact, it's somewhere about a third of the way from safest in terms of "road deaths per 100,000 population in Europe"
Having said that, I'd describe even that as a minor miracle. They only instigated a penalty points system in 2002 and waiting lists to take your driving test are so long that a lot of people are reported to be driving illegally for years. Every winter there's terrible weather - maybe heavy snow, maybe fog - and the resulting pile-ups are the stuff of legend. A couple of years ago there was something like 100 accidents in the course of a couple of hours - ISTR it was on the M50 heading south out of Dublin - the cause was a combination of heavy fog and drivers who decided that it was still perfectly safe to drive at 70mph in heavy fog with visibility reduced to about 50 yards.
You have a half a point, and that's exactly what Microsoft was counting on when they built .NET. That enough people would think 'cross-platform within the Windows family' was essentially the same thing as cross-platform.
Thing is, we talk on /. as if Microsoft were some tightly-controlled empire whereby the emperor knows exactly what's going on and even if the empire itself appears to be making the most absurd choices there is actually some method behind them that may not become apparent until some time later.
That may well have been the case back when Bill Gates was running the show; I'm not convinced it is today. I think that when Microsoft describe "cross-platform" as meaning "cross-platform within the Windows family", all the senior decision-makers honestly believe that's genuinely cross-platform.
Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.
Oooh, where have I seen that idea before?
(For those unfamiliar with RISC OS: icons on the left represent storage media, the two icons on the far right control graphics mode and some aspects of memory management. Running applications appear on the right hand side; non-running applications appear only in the storage media that holds them. You can see some in the window labelled "Resources:$.Apps". Note these applications all start with an ! - there's a good reason for that. Each "application" is actually a plain boring directory; the ! signals to the operating system that the directory should be treated as an application; in most cases you can copy an application from one place to another simply by dragging & dropping it. When you double-click on an application, the OS will look for a file in the directory called !Run and execute it. This desktop dates from 1992, though the ideas I've described were more-or-less the same in an earlier version that dates from 1988.)
I don't think it's the contract they're complaining about so much - they knew they were signing up to get zero when they agreed.
What they're complaining about is:
- Amazon proudly advertise that you still get 20% of the usual price even when they discount it to zero.
- Except if they plan to discount it to zero, the first thing they'll do is send you an email offering a "revised" agreement - they'll discount it to zero and you get zero. This email contains a note saying "Oh BTW the contents of this email are confidential".
- A developer may think "You know what? I'll accept that and chance that it'll work out in the long term, because it's good advertising". Which is exactly what these guys did.
- Lo and behold, when discounted to zero the app sold like hot cakes. 100,000 copies in one day.
- They now have 100,000 users to support. Furthermore, if the app phones home (which many do), they need the server capacity to handle 100,000 copies of the app phoning home. None of these 100,000 users have paid. This is the law of unintended consequences, and it'd seem they didn't really think about this. Nevertheless, it may not be the end of the world - after all, if it improved paid-for sales enough they could afford to deal with that....
- It didn't make the slightest difference to paid sales.
And you should have a lawyer when doing that. Obviously, they did not understand what they were signing when the partnered with Amazon.
If I were to consult with a lawyer as much as a typical "speak to a lawyer" poster on /. recommends, I'd have a crack legal team advising me whether or not I should get out of bed in the morning.
This is just it; people look at the retail price of a boxed copy of Windows and Office and think that's how much it costs.
I don't believe anybody pays that. I think that headline price is there purely as something to point at and say "Look how much you're saving!". 40-60% is not unusual, and that's for a small business licensing for maybe 40-50 people.
If we take a number out of thin air at £200 per person per year including CALs - that sounds like a lot of money but when you consider how much you pay each person each year it rapidly pales into insignificance.
Windows XP pre-SP2 didn't have any sort of firewall and opened up all sorts of things by default; most ISPs shipped you a USB ADSL/cable modem and explicitly told you not to use a firewall or they wouldn't support you. Lots of things at the time therefore did spread in exactly that fashion; the only sensible option was to tell your ISP to go to hell and install a router with a firewall or a third-party software firewall.
That said, I'd be surprised if any common malware written in the last 5 years had that as its only infection vector.