This is not yet the case on iOS7, which currently seems to only enable it for SIRI
If it's just for Siri, then at this point, it's still a highly technical feature that the user won't be able to see obvious benefits from. Apple generally won't present technical features in their Keynote unless they can explain how users will benefit.
Sadly, I don't see Linux Gaming replacing Windows anytime soon -- its pretty much the only reason I use Win7 anymore.:-( Carmack has said Linux sales have been abysmal. (Of course the Windows, Mac, and Linux ports) haven't always come out at the same time, but still that doesn't the bottom line. i.e. Witness the sales figures of the crappy Diablo 3 for consoles.
I don't think you can simply extrapolate from past data. One of the big issues is that there's a self-reinforcing cycle at work-- a sort of catch-22. Developers won't develop for Linux because people won't buy for Linux. On the other hand, people won't install Linux on their game machine because developers aren't developing for Linux. It seems inescapable, but there may be some tipping point at which the cycle reverses itself.
For example, if WINE or something similar reached the point of enabling enough compatibility to allow many Windows games to play seamlessly, that might make a big difference. Or if there were new frameworks and engines that made it much easier to develop cross-platform, that might be enough. Though this catch-22 currently keeps people on Windows, you could reach a tipping point where there are either enough Linux gamers or enough Linux developers that things start flowing the other way.
And I think it's worth citing myself as an example of how a migration to Linux might be closer than the data would suggest. I have ditched consoles completely, and I have been buying games almost exclusively on Windows lately, so the data would suggest that I'm firmly in the Windows camp. *However*, I've been buying games on Windows because I've been buying them on Steam. I've been buying them on Steam because it seems like the safest path to keeping my older games accessible, since Steam has been supporting older games-- as well as they can, anyway-- and making games available cross-platform-- again, as well as they can. So my plan for a few years now has been to keep buying on Steam specifically so that when Mac or Linux gaming becomes more feasible, I can switch over without losing my library of games. Contrary to what the data would suggest, I'm anticipating the migration to Linux. It won't take convincing or marketing. It'll just require that enough of my games have ports available on Linux that I can reformat my gaming rig and make the move without losing too many games.
Agreed. What I find worrisome about this is not the money. It's more about the tone and implications of basing the design on Star Trek.
It's disturbing enough to learn that the NSA is spying on US citizens, pulling private emails and phone logs from anyone and everything with minimal oversight, but if they're going to do that, you kind of hope that they're taking the whole thing seriously. You'd like to imagine that it's a bunch of very serious people who view the whole project as a solemn duty, a necessary evil, to be carried out under the most rigorous discipline and restraint.
If there's some reason why all this must happen, if we must have a domestic spy program potentially collecting and reading all of my emails, then it makes it that much worse to imagine that it's run by a bunch of weirdo nerdy frat-boys working from a high-tech version of a blanket fort. You don't want them treating this whole thing like a game of Cowboys and Indians. This is the sort of thing that you expect from a crazy dictator like Kim Jong-il.
I'm sure that's where Roddenberry got the idea of colored uniforms to designate branch (ops blue and engineering red).
Not to be pedantic, but I believe ops was gold, science/medical were blue, engineering and security were red. That's why red shirts kept getting killed-- it was the color worn by the security personnel who were assigned to protect the rest of the crew.
Given that the government has taken to classifying just about everything it does...
That's a clever way to try to get around the first amendment. Make everything classified, and then no one can criticize you without being prosecuted for espionage.
the next step is to go to the person responsible for that part of the business.
And what if the offender is the CEO? Ah, see, there's the big problem you're failing to account for. Sometimes it's the big muckety muck head-hancho who just doesn't seem to care, and you have no one to appeal to. Or even if it's not the CEO, do you really want to try going over the head of some executive to a higher-level executive?
The thing is, I think your example shows that *you* don't understand business. Lots of this stuff is about politics more than it is about technology or security. If you want to succeed (or at least avoid getting fired), you'd better learn to pick your battles.
True. And even in the best case scenario, you've only managed to create more work for yourself on a hypothetical/speculative issue, when you're already overloaded with more immediate problems.
As someone who has been working in IT for almost two decades, I'm not the least bit surprised. There are all kinds of things that we've given up on trying to communicate. People don't want to hear it. They don't understand what you're saying, they don't want to figure it out, and if you can get them to understand, they still don't care.
In the case of security, it falls into this classification of 'technical things nobody even wants to understand' and also into the classification of 'preventative measures that people will not recognize the importance of, until after it bites them in the ass.' You tell people that it's a bad idea to use "password" as your password, and they'll blow you off. The more you stress the point, the more annoyed the'll become-- all the way up until someone malicious gains access to their accounts. Once they've been hacked, they'll come back angry, demanding, "Why didn't anyone tell me it was a bad idea."
Until there's an actual security breach, people think you're chicken little. They'll tell you, "I've been using 'password' for my password for 10 years and I've never had a problem."
Face that kind of attitude for a several years, and you get awfully tired of warning people.
No, no, it makes sense. If Microsoft can just get to version 4, then they'll start to have a halfway decent product. Of course, somewhere around version 6, it'll become a bloated piece of crap. Then around version 8, they'll force 'features' down your throat that you don't want.
It's not as simple as diminishing returns, because sometimes the elimination of risks carries with it different hidden risks. There are indications that raising kids in nearly sterile environments may actually cause health problems later in life. You might buy a gun to protect yourself from burglars, but now you've brought a dangerous weapon into your home. If we sacrifice our political power and privacy to the Federal government so that they can protect us from terrorists, we increase our risk of being oppressed by a tyrannical government.
You aren't just seeing a diminishing return. We're seeing that you're really trading one risk for another, and we should be asking whether it's a good trade.
I think your analysis is a little misleading. It's not like they were doing great, they suddenly switched to Windows out of nowhere, and then everything fell apart. For those with short memories:
The iPhone really shook up with mobile phone market, and most phone manufacturers fought back by making Android phones. Most of the market became iPhone vs. Android, and there wasn't much room for anything else. Companies like Microsoft, Nokia, RIM took a huge hit, not so much because they did any particular thing wrong, but because they missed the starting gun, and didn't start running until Apple and Samsung had lapped them twice.
The Xbox did ok but they took an awful hit to get it where it is today.
Has the XBox reached a profitable point yet? Last I heard, it was still a huge money loser. Sure, it managed to get some of the market, but that's not quite a huge success if it doesn't make money.
I don't think that's in any way unique to IT. In all the jobs in all the industries that I've worked, I've become convinced that 80% of people are virtually incompetent. If you're actually any good at your job, you'll quickly realize that most of your peers are not. The whole thing is made even worse because managers and business owners have silly expectations these days. It's like they've all gone to the same terrible management seminar, and so they expect you to work excessive hours under hostile circumstances, and then they still get upset if you don't act like it's your dream job.
There's always going to be a shortage of above-average performers and brilliant people, because you can never have too many. And if everyone were suddenly above average, then it would just raise the bar for 'average' and we'd be back where we started: a lack of people who are above average.
"I keep hiring 23 year-olds fresh out of college so I can pay them pennies on the dollar, but they're all lacking in experience. Our schools must be doing a terrible job!"
To flip it around, I think what you're saying could be used to present an argument that it's silly to be talking about a lack of qualified STEM workers in the first place. I'd agree that STEM degrees, and therefor workers with STEM degrees, are not interchangeable, so we therefore should not be grouping them all together as 'something we need more of'.
Why are we all using this 'STEM' acronym now anyway? All of the sudden we're all using a new acronym that doesn't serve to make the discussion any more clear, which to me is a clear indication that the discussion is being manipulated by someone. So what are we really talking about here? When we're talking about the need for more 'STEM workers', we're just talking about engineers, right? Most likely software engineers, I'm guessing, since I only hear about it in reference to Facebook and Microsoft complaining that it's too hard to hire programmers.
I'll tell you, there are plenty of programmers out there. There's not a shortage. You might respond by claiming that most of those programmers aren't too brilliant, but the truth is, there's always a shortage of brilliant people in any field. So what, exactly, are we talking about here? As far as I can understand, we're talking about software developers complaining that there's a shortage of a glut of programmers that would allow them to treat programmers as minimum-wage interchangeable cogs in a machine.
So you're right, 'STEM' is too broad a term and is insufficient to describe the issues we're facing, so let's just not use that term. It's a term that was most likely invented to obscure what the discussion is actually about, so let's try to be more descriptive.
I keep trying to tell people: Companies don't just look at how much available money they have and say, "Hey, we can hire more people!" They look at the base minimum of people they need to employe before they can't provide their service (or manufacture their product), and they hire that many people. They make their profits by *not* hiring more than they need to.
And I don't point this out to defend the behavior of businesses. I point this out so that people understand the fault in the logic when they're told, "The best way to boost the economy is to give tax breaks to 'job creators'." You give more money to 'job creators' and they pocket that money. They don't suddenly hire more people because they have money.
I'll give you my 2-second review: Right now, it's still buggy. It crashes. In fairness, it's a beta. Aside from that, if you like flat design and dislike skeuomorphism, you'll probably be pleased with some of the design changes. The improvements in multi-monitor support are kind of good, but still problematic. If you use the new setup, you can't have one window overlap with multiple monitors. Each window will only appear on on monitor at a time. I didn't really like that, but at least they let you change back to the old way of working. It's nice that they have a new "iBooks" app, since the lack of one always seemed like a glaring oversight. I could see the new interface for labels being useful for a lot of people, though I keep forgetting that I have the option of using tabs in Finder.
Overall, not that different. Small incremental improvements. I don't like the design of their updated multi-monitor interface.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO
on
Inside OS X Mavericks
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· Score: 1
I'm with you, and my only solace is that I believe Apple is less stupid than Microsoft. If they pull something comparable to the Windows 8 "Start Screen", I don't know how I'm going to cope. I guess I'll have to move to Linux, even if I lose a lot of applications.
Yes, the transition happened fairly slowly. Cell phones had roaming charges, so people would generally avoid using their cell outside of their home area, which is part of the reason why it made sense to give them a geographic area code. They also had long-distance charges. people moved to a new area, they got a new cell phone number to avoid roaming/long-distance charges. SMS messages were also free then. Not many people had cell phones, relative to now. Landlines also had long-distance charges which could be pretty expensive.
Then, competing with each other, cell phone carriers extended the roaming areas, and then dropped the roaming and long-distance charges nationwide. Around that time (I think a few years after), you became able to transfer your cell phone number between carriers. These two things together meant that it was increasingly practical to keep the same phone number year after year, even when you moved or changed your cell phone plan. The carriers also started allowing you to transfer your landline number to a cell phone, which increased the frequency with which people would drop their landline entirely-- which was a more attractive option because long-distance phone calls were free on cell phones, so cell phones were becoming cheaper than landlines.
In competition with cell phones and VoIP (which also didn't charge for long-distance), most carriers started dropping or eliminating long-distance charges.
In my memory, it all started much earlier than 5 years ago. Remember, "5 years ago" is late 2008. A lot of these transitions started in the early 2000s.
Your mobile numbers have geographic area based prefixes?...what part of "mobile" did you guys not understand?
People in the US generally aren't getting charged for calling different area codes. I suppose some people still get "long distance charges", but most people are in a plan where they only get charged for calling a different country, and even then sometimes they can call Canada for free or something. To a large degree, the "area codes" are being used now just to allow for more numbers.
In fact, lots of younger people don't have landlines, and only have mobile phones, and they try to keep their number throughout their lives. If you live in a major city, a lot of people you meet will have phone numbers from all over the country. The "area code" is no longer a good indicator of where you actually live.
Or transfer them to a recording of you saying, "Ok, I'm back!" followed by silence interspersed with an occasional "Ah" or "uh-huh" or "yes, I see...."
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because:
This is not yet the case on iOS7, which currently seems to only enable it for SIRI
If it's just for Siri, then at this point, it's still a highly technical feature that the user won't be able to see obvious benefits from. Apple generally won't present technical features in their Keynote unless they can explain how users will benefit.
Sadly, I don't see Linux Gaming replacing Windows anytime soon -- its pretty much the only reason I use Win7 anymore. :-( Carmack has said Linux sales have been abysmal. (Of course the Windows, Mac, and Linux ports) haven't always come out at the same time, but still that doesn't the bottom line. i.e. Witness the sales figures of the crappy Diablo 3 for consoles.
I don't think you can simply extrapolate from past data. One of the big issues is that there's a self-reinforcing cycle at work-- a sort of catch-22. Developers won't develop for Linux because people won't buy for Linux. On the other hand, people won't install Linux on their game machine because developers aren't developing for Linux. It seems inescapable, but there may be some tipping point at which the cycle reverses itself.
For example, if WINE or something similar reached the point of enabling enough compatibility to allow many Windows games to play seamlessly, that might make a big difference. Or if there were new frameworks and engines that made it much easier to develop cross-platform, that might be enough. Though this catch-22 currently keeps people on Windows, you could reach a tipping point where there are either enough Linux gamers or enough Linux developers that things start flowing the other way.
And I think it's worth citing myself as an example of how a migration to Linux might be closer than the data would suggest. I have ditched consoles completely, and I have been buying games almost exclusively on Windows lately, so the data would suggest that I'm firmly in the Windows camp. *However*, I've been buying games on Windows because I've been buying them on Steam. I've been buying them on Steam because it seems like the safest path to keeping my older games accessible, since Steam has been supporting older games-- as well as they can, anyway-- and making games available cross-platform-- again, as well as they can. So my plan for a few years now has been to keep buying on Steam specifically so that when Mac or Linux gaming becomes more feasible, I can switch over without losing my library of games. Contrary to what the data would suggest, I'm anticipating the migration to Linux. It won't take convincing or marketing. It'll just require that enough of my games have ports available on Linux that I can reformat my gaming rig and make the move without losing too many games.
Agreed. What I find worrisome about this is not the money. It's more about the tone and implications of basing the design on Star Trek.
It's disturbing enough to learn that the NSA is spying on US citizens, pulling private emails and phone logs from anyone and everything with minimal oversight, but if they're going to do that, you kind of hope that they're taking the whole thing seriously. You'd like to imagine that it's a bunch of very serious people who view the whole project as a solemn duty, a necessary evil, to be carried out under the most rigorous discipline and restraint.
If there's some reason why all this must happen, if we must have a domestic spy program potentially collecting and reading all of my emails, then it makes it that much worse to imagine that it's run by a bunch of weirdo nerdy frat-boys working from a high-tech version of a blanket fort. You don't want them treating this whole thing like a game of Cowboys and Indians. This is the sort of thing that you expect from a crazy dictator like Kim Jong-il.
I'm sure that's where Roddenberry got the idea of colored uniforms to designate branch (ops blue and engineering red).
Not to be pedantic, but I believe ops was gold, science/medical were blue, engineering and security were red. That's why red shirts kept getting killed-- it was the color worn by the security personnel who were assigned to protect the rest of the crew.
Given that the government has taken to classifying just about everything it does...
That's a clever way to try to get around the first amendment. Make everything classified, and then no one can criticize you without being prosecuted for espionage.
the next step is to go to the person responsible for that part of the business.
And what if the offender is the CEO? Ah, see, there's the big problem you're failing to account for. Sometimes it's the big muckety muck head-hancho who just doesn't seem to care, and you have no one to appeal to. Or even if it's not the CEO, do you really want to try going over the head of some executive to a higher-level executive?
The thing is, I think your example shows that *you* don't understand business. Lots of this stuff is about politics more than it is about technology or security. If you want to succeed (or at least avoid getting fired), you'd better learn to pick your battles.
True. And even in the best case scenario, you've only managed to create more work for yourself on a hypothetical/speculative issue, when you're already overloaded with more immediate problems.
As someone who has been working in IT for almost two decades, I'm not the least bit surprised. There are all kinds of things that we've given up on trying to communicate. People don't want to hear it. They don't understand what you're saying, they don't want to figure it out, and if you can get them to understand, they still don't care.
In the case of security, it falls into this classification of 'technical things nobody even wants to understand' and also into the classification of 'preventative measures that people will not recognize the importance of, until after it bites them in the ass.' You tell people that it's a bad idea to use "password" as your password, and they'll blow you off. The more you stress the point, the more annoyed the'll become-- all the way up until someone malicious gains access to their accounts. Once they've been hacked, they'll come back angry, demanding, "Why didn't anyone tell me it was a bad idea."
Until there's an actual security breach, people think you're chicken little. They'll tell you, "I've been using 'password' for my password for 10 years and I've never had a problem."
Face that kind of attitude for a several years, and you get awfully tired of warning people.
Also, was Nokia ever really 'innovative'? I don't really remember that.
No, no, it makes sense. If Microsoft can just get to version 4, then they'll start to have a halfway decent product. Of course, somewhere around version 6, it'll become a bloated piece of crap. Then around version 8, they'll force 'features' down your throat that you don't want.
That's how it always works.
It's not as simple as diminishing returns, because sometimes the elimination of risks carries with it different hidden risks. There are indications that raising kids in nearly sterile environments may actually cause health problems later in life. You might buy a gun to protect yourself from burglars, but now you've brought a dangerous weapon into your home. If we sacrifice our political power and privacy to the Federal government so that they can protect us from terrorists, we increase our risk of being oppressed by a tyrannical government.
You aren't just seeing a diminishing return. We're seeing that you're really trading one risk for another, and we should be asking whether it's a good trade.
How many items different does my grocery list need to be to keep it from being considered a derivative work?
I think your analysis is a little misleading. It's not like they were doing great, they suddenly switched to Windows out of nowhere, and then everything fell apart. For those with short memories:
The iPhone really shook up with mobile phone market, and most phone manufacturers fought back by making Android phones. Most of the market became iPhone vs. Android, and there wasn't much room for anything else. Companies like Microsoft, Nokia, RIM took a huge hit, not so much because they did any particular thing wrong, but because they missed the starting gun, and didn't start running until Apple and Samsung had lapped them twice.
The Xbox did ok but they took an awful hit to get it where it is today.
Has the XBox reached a profitable point yet? Last I heard, it was still a huge money loser. Sure, it managed to get some of the market, but that's not quite a huge success if it doesn't make money.
I don't think that's in any way unique to IT. In all the jobs in all the industries that I've worked, I've become convinced that 80% of people are virtually incompetent. If you're actually any good at your job, you'll quickly realize that most of your peers are not. The whole thing is made even worse because managers and business owners have silly expectations these days. It's like they've all gone to the same terrible management seminar, and so they expect you to work excessive hours under hostile circumstances, and then they still get upset if you don't act like it's your dream job.
There's always going to be a shortage of above-average performers and brilliant people, because you can never have too many. And if everyone were suddenly above average, then it would just raise the bar for 'average' and we'd be back where we started: a lack of people who are above average.
"I keep hiring 23 year-olds fresh out of college so I can pay them pennies on the dollar, but they're all lacking in experience. Our schools must be doing a terrible job!"
To flip it around, I think what you're saying could be used to present an argument that it's silly to be talking about a lack of qualified STEM workers in the first place. I'd agree that STEM degrees, and therefor workers with STEM degrees, are not interchangeable, so we therefore should not be grouping them all together as 'something we need more of'.
Why are we all using this 'STEM' acronym now anyway? All of the sudden we're all using a new acronym that doesn't serve to make the discussion any more clear, which to me is a clear indication that the discussion is being manipulated by someone. So what are we really talking about here? When we're talking about the need for more 'STEM workers', we're just talking about engineers, right? Most likely software engineers, I'm guessing, since I only hear about it in reference to Facebook and Microsoft complaining that it's too hard to hire programmers.
I'll tell you, there are plenty of programmers out there. There's not a shortage. You might respond by claiming that most of those programmers aren't too brilliant, but the truth is, there's always a shortage of brilliant people in any field. So what, exactly, are we talking about here? As far as I can understand, we're talking about software developers complaining that there's a shortage of a glut of programmers that would allow them to treat programmers as minimum-wage interchangeable cogs in a machine.
So you're right, 'STEM' is too broad a term and is insufficient to describe the issues we're facing, so let's just not use that term. It's a term that was most likely invented to obscure what the discussion is actually about, so let's try to be more descriptive.
When they say it "connects directly into Office 365", they're talking about the service that includes email hosting, chat, etc.
I keep trying to tell people: Companies don't just look at how much available money they have and say, "Hey, we can hire more people!" They look at the base minimum of people they need to employe before they can't provide their service (or manufacture their product), and they hire that many people. They make their profits by *not* hiring more than they need to.
And I don't point this out to defend the behavior of businesses. I point this out so that people understand the fault in the logic when they're told, "The best way to boost the economy is to give tax breaks to 'job creators'." You give more money to 'job creators' and they pocket that money. They don't suddenly hire more people because they have money.
I'll give you my 2-second review: Right now, it's still buggy. It crashes. In fairness, it's a beta. Aside from that, if you like flat design and dislike skeuomorphism, you'll probably be pleased with some of the design changes. The improvements in multi-monitor support are kind of good, but still problematic. If you use the new setup, you can't have one window overlap with multiple monitors. Each window will only appear on on monitor at a time. I didn't really like that, but at least they let you change back to the old way of working. It's nice that they have a new "iBooks" app, since the lack of one always seemed like a glaring oversight. I could see the new interface for labels being useful for a lot of people, though I keep forgetting that I have the option of using tabs in Finder.
Overall, not that different. Small incremental improvements. I don't like the design of their updated multi-monitor interface.
I'm with you, and my only solace is that I believe Apple is less stupid than Microsoft. If they pull something comparable to the Windows 8 "Start Screen", I don't know how I'm going to cope. I guess I'll have to move to Linux, even if I lose a lot of applications.
Well that would explain why it got noticeably slower.
Yes, the transition happened fairly slowly. Cell phones had roaming charges, so people would generally avoid using their cell outside of their home area, which is part of the reason why it made sense to give them a geographic area code. They also had long-distance charges. people moved to a new area, they got a new cell phone number to avoid roaming/long-distance charges. SMS messages were also free then. Not many people had cell phones, relative to now. Landlines also had long-distance charges which could be pretty expensive.
Then, competing with each other, cell phone carriers extended the roaming areas, and then dropped the roaming and long-distance charges nationwide. Around that time (I think a few years after), you became able to transfer your cell phone number between carriers. These two things together meant that it was increasingly practical to keep the same phone number year after year, even when you moved or changed your cell phone plan. The carriers also started allowing you to transfer your landline number to a cell phone, which increased the frequency with which people would drop their landline entirely-- which was a more attractive option because long-distance phone calls were free on cell phones, so cell phones were becoming cheaper than landlines.
In competition with cell phones and VoIP (which also didn't charge for long-distance), most carriers started dropping or eliminating long-distance charges.
In my memory, it all started much earlier than 5 years ago. Remember, "5 years ago" is late 2008. A lot of these transitions started in the early 2000s.
Your mobile numbers have geographic area based prefixes?...what part of "mobile" did you guys not understand?
People in the US generally aren't getting charged for calling different area codes. I suppose some people still get "long distance charges", but most people are in a plan where they only get charged for calling a different country, and even then sometimes they can call Canada for free or something. To a large degree, the "area codes" are being used now just to allow for more numbers.
In fact, lots of younger people don't have landlines, and only have mobile phones, and they try to keep their number throughout their lives. If you live in a major city, a lot of people you meet will have phone numbers from all over the country. The "area code" is no longer a good indicator of where you actually live.
Or transfer them to a recording of you saying, "Ok, I'm back!" followed by silence interspersed with an occasional "Ah" or "uh-huh" or "yes, I see...."