It could be worse. Italian's public broadcaster (http://www.rai.it) switched to Silverlight a long time ago, both for live streaming (all broadcast channels are replicated on the web) and for archives. I fire up one of those Windows VM I use for testing with IE when I really need to see something there. What would you say if BBC switched to Silverlight too?
The problem is that somebody will be lured by Amazon brand, their shop will become big and drive prices down toward zero. Economics always win and this is probably a necessary consequence of the very nature of computer programs. I explain:
1. We know that software can be copied at almost no cost, just like digitalized music, books and movies.
2. We also know that digitalization made music prices plummet and that artists are looking for new business models (maybe they should learn from their grand-grandparents 100+ years ago, before recorded music).
3. That's going to happen to books and movies (majors are trying to save themselves with 3D and other stuff difficult to reproduce at home).
4. It is only natural that it happens to computer programs.
We should prepare for a world where our products will be exchanged for free or a price near to zero. So how are we going to pay our bills? The only answers for most of us is custom software development. Luckily this is what I did for the last 18 years so I'm in a good position. You're also in a good position for some time if you sell Photoshop or Excel, but they have already lowly priced competitors that are good for many people. Even Windows will suffer: people will progressively move from the desktop to the mobile and desktop OSes will share the same fate with mainframe OSes, still alive but interesting only for some professionals (and the day will come that even Apple will stop tying its phones to a desktop OS).
It means that if you want to use that code in a closed source program you can do it if you buy a license from him. He owns the copyright so he can multiple-license the code. GPL doesn't prevent that and it is quite common.
3. Either way, the tablet is becoming the vehicle (or the substitute) of the dream about the future of our society: less work, more free time. I remember several articles/books of the past decades predicting that in the future (meaning the 21st century), technology will change the way we work, resulting in e.g. a 3 hours per day work, leaving the the rest of the day free for recreation/family/self fulfillment. Thus, the tablet presently materializes The Imaginary function of technology according to Lacan's point of view - living in a future, better, merrier world now and not later (this after all is the Desire driving all early adopters).
What do you think?
Those kind of dreams may be selling tablets and other technologies but I think that if you work 3 hours per day you'll be paid about half of what you get if you work full time. If that pays your bills it's OK otherwise it's not good for you even if you've got a tablet in your hands.
We'll be able to work little only when food, health and housing will be cheap but people providing those facilities will always try to get as much money as they can so I don't see this coming anytime soon and especially not in the USA. It seems very unamerican (a masochist country?). We'd need a global agreement on those issues but I bet I'll die much before that time.
I thought that the main use for tablets would be programming, blogging and writting books.
Maybe parent wanted to be modded funny but...
Programming?!
Blogging, yes.
Writing books: fingers don't last much if they hit a hard surface all the day. Keyboards give way not only to activate a sensor but also to attenuate the hits.
A friend of mine was playing chess on an iPad while walking with me on a street last Saturday night and yes, he didn't play more than an hours. The AI took about 15 minutes to crush him. Luckily he didn't got crushed by cars too because I was looking more at the road than at the screen:-)
I'm pretty sure he's in that 84% of people playing games but not in that 82% that use tablets primarily at home, but my opinion is that a 10" device is too big to be carried around on a regular basis. The same applies to my 9" netbook (1.1 kg). Size matters.
The choices are jailbreaking (which is something Apple doesn't appreciate) or paying a $99 yearly fee to use your device almost as if it were really yours. Both choices are bad. When you face only bad options you know that something wrong already happened and somebody (maybe even yourself) put you into an undesirable position. In this case the only good choice is not to buy that device. A better choice would be Apple removing those limitations but that's wishful thinking.
I've got a Playstation to play games and that provides a common ground for developers, which I understand is good. I also understand that there is generally little need to upgrade one of today's tablets but I don't agree that the openness of PCs hurts experience.
In the last 3 years I upgraded gradually my PC from WinXP to Ubuntu, from 2 GB RAM to 4 GB, from 80 GB HD to a 500 GB HD and customized my desktop away from the default Ubuntu one, which is getting constantly worse release after release IMHO (they're doing a decently good job but in a direction opposite to my needs). Every single change improved my experience and I had no problem finding good applications that would run on every different setup. I wouldn't buy a console-like computer (iPad-like should I say?), something I cannot tweak into a tool I can use in the way I want.
Consoles and iPads are good for consuming contents (games or throw-away apps or even showing documents to customers), general purpose computers are good for programming. As there are many more consumers than programmers I bet that the market for general purpose computer will shrink and OSes will make more devices look like consoles. But I'll always want a real computer under my fingers, even if I might use other devices most of my time.
Actually if it's a network game it must go on even if he switches to the browser or answers a call. He might get killed but that happens even on a pc if you don't pay attention to the game for a while. I concede that auto-disconnecting would be a more sensible design choice, but that might still have bad consequences in the game. That's a price to pay for having a single device for playing games and answering calls. How about a "don't answer calls" mode?
Let's go sci-fi and think about this in another way.
Computers will shrink to the point of having the same size of today's smarphones so it will be convenient to put phone circuitry into them so you can carry around only one device.
If you want to use it as a proper computer you'll need to connect it to a keyboard, mouse and monitor (bluetooth?) and you'll get your usual desktop OS running. If you use it from the embedded small screen you're going to use a mobile OS running on other cores (concurrent dual OS, why not?) or a different GUI for the same OS. After all OSX and Linux seems to already have a kernel that runs both on desktops and on mobiles.
Yes, and we shouldn't forget the rolling resistance of those four cores. A perfect example of yet another misleading car analogy. The AC above didn't read the other threads explaining what impacts the power consumption of a CPU.
I'm uploading 3-4 videos per week and often it says 100% complete but doesn't stop processing. Nevertheless the video is ready and I can see it in my channel's page. That's the only problem I'm having with youtube. No problems with speed but maybe we're served by different encoding machines. Did you try sending a note to them? (I don't know if it's possibile).
I bet that it's a misunderstanding. If liking or thumbs up are the only ways to express appreciation for reporting the crime, people will use them even if they might be misunderstood as liking the crime itself. Unfortunately FB doesn't have a "Thank you for reporting" button. That's what Infomative is about here on/.
Some (most?) of the people working there know they are not working on this +1 thing. Maybe they can make it somewhat relevant to their job, maybe not. I don't want to make guesses about Google's case but that very thing happened to me in a company I was working for years ago. The bonuses were linked to 3 or 4 goals that made sense for the long term success of the company but that were under the control of very different subsets of the employees. One of them could be somewhat linked to what I was doing but there was no chance I could help at achieving the other ones. It was demotivational and it didn't benefit our appreciation of the management and of the company. Furthermore, if one of those goals looks difficult to achieve employees get the impression that is a way for the company to save money at the end of the year. That's also very demotivational.
By the way, everybody understands what a Like is but with +1... I'm adding 1 unit of what? They could have reused the thumbs up and down of youtube or copied the rating system of Slashdot. I'm looking forward to a -5 Spamindexing, on a scale from -5 to -1.
Wait, I did it months ago when I installed 10.04 from scratch on a new HD and I wrote down all the installation procedure. This is the excerpt about fixing the panels:
Add to the bottom panel:
Main Menu (the custom one)
Notification area
Clock
Indicator Applet Session
Indicator Applet
Right click on top panel: delete panel
I don't think it will make you switch back from KDE (not now with Gnome 3 lurking over our heads) but it might help someone else. I considered KDE time ago but it looks too much like Windows. I was coming from years on XP and a properly fixed Gnome looked so much closer to what I consider to be a well behaving desktop.
Thank you for the links. I added the first one to the bug fix folder of my bookmarks.
As an Ubuntu user I'll have to try both Unity and Gnome3 before I decide which one to use. Basically all I want is a desktop that works much like the one I have now but which is compatible with the new releases of the applications I have to use. Tweakability is going to be the most important requirement.
About Gnome 3 I'll google for way to:
get a taskbar at the bottom
move everything from the panel at the top to the one at the bottom (this is how I like to work and I'm not letting Gnome designers tell me what's best for me) and remove the top panel
remove the popup application menu at the left (I hate things that appear and move my windows)
get back the Applications menu (Win95, Gnome 2)
get back the minimize button (I don't care for maximizing, I double click on the title)
use compiz instead of gnome shell (that's another thing that seems to popup and move my windows)
If Gnome won't let me do that I'll try to tweak Unity. If I won't be able to tweak it I'll investigate some alternatives like Xfce. All considered this unwanted and unnecessary evolution of window managers will cost me time and won't make me work any better.
That said, Gnome 3 seems great for the small screen of my 9" netbook but totally out of place on anything bigger that 14". Sadly to say the same seems to apply to Unity. Is that another nasty effect of the new short 1366x768 px notebook displays?
PS: my wish list would end with having notifications in the bottom right corner but that's the least problem and I'll happily trade it for any of the other points.
Tomcat wouldn't be a problem: you could make it serve requests through a reverse proxy that understands SNI (i.e. Apache). The show stopper is IE on Windows XP.
Maybe. Only a few geeks and nerds care about bootloaders but they can tell friends "don't buy that because you won't be able to install that app that requires rooting/jailbreaking". Chances are that locked down phones will sale some units less than non locked down ones. But manufacturers might get more than that money back if locking down is appreciated by phone operators. If that's the case, locking down might make the difference between having a phone subsidized by an operator or not and that impacts heavily the number of sold units and manufacturer's revenues.
That said, I'll buy only a phone that I can unlock.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. The minds that gave us AdBlock outdid the ones in the click ads industry. And don't forget NoScript and Flashblock.
It could be worse. Italian's public broadcaster (http://www.rai.it) switched to Silverlight a long time ago, both for live streaming (all broadcast channels are replicated on the web) and for archives. I fire up one of those Windows VM I use for testing with IE when I really need to see something there. What would you say if BBC switched to Silverlight too?
The problem is that somebody will be lured by Amazon brand, their shop will become big and drive prices down toward zero. Economics always win and this is probably a necessary consequence of the very nature of computer programs. I explain:
1. We know that software can be copied at almost no cost, just like digitalized music, books and movies.
2. We also know that digitalization made music prices plummet and that artists are looking for new business models (maybe they should learn from their grand-grandparents 100+ years ago, before recorded music).
3. That's going to happen to books and movies (majors are trying to save themselves with 3D and other stuff difficult to reproduce at home).
4. It is only natural that it happens to computer programs.
We should prepare for a world where our products will be exchanged for free or a price near to zero. So how are we going to pay our bills? The only answers for most of us is custom software development. Luckily this is what I did for the last 18 years so I'm in a good position. You're also in a good position for some time if you sell Photoshop or Excel, but they have already lowly priced competitors that are good for many people. Even Windows will suffer: people will progressively move from the desktop to the mobile and desktop OSes will share the same fate with mainframe OSes, still alive but interesting only for some professionals (and the day will come that even Apple will stop tying its phones to a desktop OS) .
It means that if you want to use that code in a closed source program you can do it if you buy a license from him. He owns the copyright so he can multiple-license the code. GPL doesn't prevent that and it is quite common.
3. Either way, the tablet is becoming the vehicle (or the substitute) of the dream about the future of our society: less work, more free time. I remember several articles/books of the past decades predicting that in the future (meaning the 21st century), technology will change the way we work, resulting in e.g. a 3 hours per day work, leaving the the rest of the day free for recreation/family/self fulfillment. Thus, the tablet presently materializes The Imaginary function of technology according to Lacan's point of view - living in a future, better, merrier world now and not later (this after all is the Desire driving all early adopters).
What do you think?
Those kind of dreams may be selling tablets and other technologies but I think that if you work 3 hours per day you'll be paid about half of what you get if you work full time. If that pays your bills it's OK otherwise it's not good for you even if you've got a tablet in your hands.
We'll be able to work little only when food, health and housing will be cheap but people providing those facilities will always try to get as much money as they can so I don't see this coming anytime soon and especially not in the USA. It seems very unamerican (a masochist country?). We'd need a global agreement on those issues but I bet I'll die much before that time.
Now here is a question, if you write a hit game on Android and sell it for $0.99 in their ap store, what would you make in profits?
Something proportional to the amount of time and money you invest in advertising. Tablets may have changed the market but not the rules.
I thought that the main use for tablets would be programming, blogging and writting books.
Maybe parent wanted to be modded funny but...
Programming?!
Blogging, yes.
Writing books: fingers don't last much if they hit a hard surface all the day. Keyboards give way not only to activate a sensor but also to attenuate the hits.
A friend of mine was playing chess on an iPad while walking with me on a street last Saturday night and yes, he didn't play more than an hours. The AI took about 15 minutes to crush him. Luckily he didn't got crushed by cars too because I was looking more at the road than at the screen :-)
I'm pretty sure he's in that 84% of people playing games but not in that 82% that use tablets primarily at home, but my opinion is that a 10" device is too big to be carried around on a regular basis. The same applies to my 9" netbook (1.1 kg). Size matters.
The choices are jailbreaking (which is something Apple doesn't appreciate) or paying a $99 yearly fee to use your device almost as if it were really yours. Both choices are bad. When you face only bad options you know that something wrong already happened and somebody (maybe even yourself) put you into an undesirable position. In this case the only good choice is not to buy that device. A better choice would be Apple removing those limitations but that's wishful thinking.
I've got a Playstation to play games and that provides a common ground for developers, which I understand is good. I also understand that there is generally little need to upgrade one of today's tablets but I don't agree that the openness of PCs hurts experience.
In the last 3 years I upgraded gradually my PC from WinXP to Ubuntu, from 2 GB RAM to 4 GB, from 80 GB HD to a 500 GB HD and customized my desktop away from the default Ubuntu one, which is getting constantly worse release after release IMHO (they're doing a decently good job but in a direction opposite to my needs). Every single change improved my experience and I had no problem finding good applications that would run on every different setup. I wouldn't buy a console-like computer (iPad-like should I say?), something I cannot tweak into a tool I can use in the way I want.
Consoles and iPads are good for consuming contents (games or throw-away apps or even showing documents to customers), general purpose computers are good for programming. As there are many more consumers than programmers I bet that the market for general purpose computer will shrink and OSes will make more devices look like consoles. But I'll always want a real computer under my fingers, even if I might use other devices most of my time.
Actually if it's a network game it must go on even if he switches to the browser or answers a call. He might get killed but that happens even on a pc if you don't pay attention to the game for a while. I concede that auto-disconnecting would be a more sensible design choice, but that might still have bad consequences in the game. That's a price to pay for having a single device for playing games and answering calls. How about a "don't answer calls" mode?
Some job is being done to fix that http://dev.w3.org/html5/workers/
Let's go sci-fi and think about this in another way. Computers will shrink to the point of having the same size of today's smarphones so it will be convenient to put phone circuitry into them so you can carry around only one device. If you want to use it as a proper computer you'll need to connect it to a keyboard, mouse and monitor (bluetooth?) and you'll get your usual desktop OS running. If you use it from the embedded small screen you're going to use a mobile OS running on other cores (concurrent dual OS, why not?) or a different GUI for the same OS. After all OSX and Linux seems to already have a kernel that runs both on desktops and on mobiles.
Yes, and we shouldn't forget the rolling resistance of those four cores. A perfect example of yet another misleading car analogy. The AC above didn't read the other threads explaining what impacts the power consumption of a CPU.
I'm uploading 3-4 videos per week and often it says 100% complete but doesn't stop processing. Nevertheless the video is ready and I can see it in my channel's page. That's the only problem I'm having with youtube. No problems with speed but maybe we're served by different encoding machines. Did you try sending a note to them? (I don't know if it's possibile).
I bet that it's a misunderstanding. If liking or thumbs up are the only ways to express appreciation for reporting the crime, people will use them even if they might be misunderstood as liking the crime itself. Unfortunately FB doesn't have a "Thank you for reporting" button. That's what Infomative is about here on /.
Some (most?) of the people working there know they are not working on this +1 thing. Maybe they can make it somewhat relevant to their job, maybe not. I don't want to make guesses about Google's case but that very thing happened to me in a company I was working for years ago. The bonuses were linked to 3 or 4 goals that made sense for the long term success of the company but that were under the control of very different subsets of the employees. One of them could be somewhat linked to what I was doing but there was no chance I could help at achieving the other ones. It was demotivational and it didn't benefit our appreciation of the management and of the company. Furthermore, if one of those goals looks difficult to achieve employees get the impression that is a way for the company to save money at the end of the year. That's also very demotivational.
By the way, everybody understands what a Like is but with +1... I'm adding 1 unit of what? They could have reused the thumbs up and down of youtube or copied the rating system of Slashdot. I'm looking forward to a -5 Spamindexing, on a scale from -5 to -1.
Wait, I did it months ago when I installed 10.04 from scratch on a new HD and I wrote down all the installation procedure. This is the excerpt about fixing the panels:
Add to the bottom panel:
Main Menu (the custom one)
Notification area
Clock
Indicator Applet Session
Indicator Applet
Right click on top panel: delete panel
I don't think it will make you switch back from KDE (not now with Gnome 3 lurking over our heads) but it might help someone else. I considered KDE time ago but it looks too much like Windows. I was coming from years on XP and a properly fixed Gnome looked so much closer to what I consider to be a well behaving desktop.
As an Ubuntu user I'll have to try both Unity and Gnome3 before I decide which one to use. Basically all I want is a desktop that works much like the one I have now but which is compatible with the new releases of the applications I have to use. Tweakability is going to be the most important requirement.
About Gnome 3 I'll google for way to:
If Gnome won't let me do that I'll try to tweak Unity. If I won't be able to tweak it I'll investigate some alternatives like Xfce. All considered this unwanted and unnecessary evolution of window managers will cost me time and won't make me work any better. That said, Gnome 3 seems great for the small screen of my 9" netbook but totally out of place on anything bigger that 14". Sadly to say the same seems to apply to Unity. Is that another nasty effect of the new short 1366x768 px notebook displays?
PS: my wish list would end with having notifications in the bottom right corner but that's the least problem and I'll happily trade it for any of the other points.
You got your +5 Funny. Can I get a +5 April Fool? Thanks!
Obligatory pun: This is what happens when you store data into the cloud. It evaporates!
What's the Chinese translation of "1 pr0t3st 4g41nst th3 g0v3rnm3nt"?
Tomcat wouldn't be a problem: you could make it serve requests through a reverse proxy that understands SNI (i.e. Apache). The show stopper is IE on Windows XP.
No SNI for IE on XP? So we say good bye to SNI. We'll try again in 2015 or something :-(
Another reason to thank Microsoft for.
Maybe. Only a few geeks and nerds care about bootloaders but they can tell friends "don't buy that because you won't be able to install that app that requires rooting/jailbreaking". Chances are that locked down phones will sale some units less than non locked down ones. But manufacturers might get more than that money back if locking down is appreciated by phone operators. If that's the case, locking down might make the difference between having a phone subsidized by an operator or not and that impacts heavily the number of sold units and manufacturer's revenues.
That said, I'll buy only a phone that I can unlock.