From a young "I need to have every crap" he went to understanding he does not need every crap.
Yes, some of it is probably that he's gotten older, and some of it is a cultural/technological shift that is probably going unnoticed by a lot of people. A decade or two ago, technology was such that you knew you'd "have to buy a new one" within a couple years, because the old one just wouldn't work anymore.
In the 80s and 90s, a computer from a few years ago wouldn't just be slow, it would be absolutely obsolete. It wouldn't even run new software. And not just "I bought a new game, and I had to turn down all the graphical settings to get decent frame rates," but "I bought a new word processor, and it won't run." As a result, there was a high focus on getting the latest-and-greatest with every possible feature, so as to delay the obsolescence for a few months or a year.
We may all still like having the latest-and-greatest now, but its far less necessary. You can still use your iPhone 3GS and your Core2Duo laptop. They still work. Now, the focus is less on staving off obsolescence, and more on having the most convenient thinnest/lightest integrates-into-my-lifestyle and simplifies-my-life devices.
And partially because of improved technology, but partially because there's a demand for it, you've seen more and more functionality pushed into fewer and fewer devices. You don't necessarily need a laptop and desktop and PDA and phone. You have a laptop that can run everything handily, and a phone that includes the PDA.
Doomed to mediocrity too, given that a multi-function device is always a jack of all trades, master of none.
Part of the difficulty is that they're really a jack of all trades, master of many. I gave away my old point-and-shoot camera, that cost me a few hundred dollars a just few years ago, because the camera on the iPhone gave better results. Not only do the pictures look better, but it automatically tags the photo with positional data, which is something that I specifically want.
My iPhone is also a great at other things, and I don't think that it's limited to Apple. Modern cell phones do a lot of things incredibly well. Yes, you're forced to do business with a big corporation to have them, but really, what's the alternative that you would advocate? Building your own computers out of sticks and dirt?
I agree. I've been doing IT for a while now, and this is the kind of thing that *sounds* good, but generally won't work out very well.
Tell me if I'm wrong here, but the thought process behind this is something like, "well we have all this hardware, so we may as well make good use out of it!" So you'll save a few hundred (or even a few thousand!) dollars by building a cluster of old machines instead of buying a server appropriate for your needs.
But let's look at the actual costs. First, let's take the costs of the additional racks, and any additional parts you'll need to buy to put things together. Then there's the work put into implementation. How much time have you spent trying to figure this out already? How many hours will you put into building it? Then troubleshooting the setup, and tweaking the cluster for performance? Now double the amount of time you expect to spend, since nothing ever works as smoothly as you'd like, and it'll take at least twice as long as you expect.
That's just startup costs. Now factor in the regular costs of additional power and AC. Then there's the additional support costs from running a complex unsupported system, which is constructed out of old unsupported computer parts with an increased chance of failure. This thing is going to break. How much time will you spend fixing it? What additional parts will you buy? Will there be any loss of productivity when you experience down-time that could have been avoided by using a new, simple, supported system? What's the cost of that lost productivity?
That's just off the top of my head. There are probably more costs than that.
So honestly, if you're doing this for fun, so that you can learn things and experiment, then by all means have at it. But if you are looking for a cost-effective solution to a real problem, try to take an expansive view of all the costs involved, and compare *all* of the costs of using old hardware vs. new hardware. Often, it's cheaper to use new hardware.
I think for the retina display Macs, there are 2 Thunderbolt ports and an HDMI port, so you can go to 3 monitors without doing anything fancy with daisy-chaining thunderbolt.
I was going to say, "if the problem is that the main screen is your laptop screen, then don't have that be your main screen. If you can't figure out how to do that, then you might want to rethink your vocation."
If you need me screen real estate, buy another screen. This ain't hard
I'm not even sure what you're trying to compare. If Microsoft made a new OS and got a tiny adoption rate, yes, we'd be making fun of them. But we're not talking about an OS here. We're talking about an alternative distribution channel that doesn't have much content yet for a platform that currently has a small user base. All things considered, the numbers aren't bad.
But either way, the numbers aren't important this early on. The real question is this: If Valve can somehow port over the bulk of their catalog to run on a free OS that runs on commodity hardware, do we have any doubt that it would make an impact?
I think that it will at least change the console market. Even if you we're to suppose that Linux is not suitable for the desktop, you would still see vendors competing over making SteamBox consoles. You'd see the console market blown open, and it might spell the end of the Playstation and the XBox.
But I don't think that's a bold enough prediction. I think that if Valve could allow platform independence for games, Microsoft would lose a huge chunk of their current market. There are a lot of people (myself included) who have Windows installed on a computer for the sole purpose of playing games. Speaking as an IT pro who is comfortable on a wide variety of platforms, there are 2 main things that keep me using Windows on my own computers: at home, games; at work, Outlook. If you let me play all my games on Linux, I'll probably never run Windows at home again.
It's one thing to say, "Some level of income inequality is inevitable, and in fact, some level is economically advantageous." There are very few people arguing in favor of equal distribution of wealth. But it's a very different thing to argue in favor of continually redistributing wealth upwards, i.e. "Whenever you want the economy to grow, we need to throw more and more money at the richest people in the country. No matter how great the disparity in wealth distribution grows, keep taking money from the middle class and giving it to rich people."
The big problem with your argument is that the lawmakers aren't clueless. This isn't an accident. These laws are crafted specifically to allow rich people to avoid paying taxes. The problem isn't clueless lawmakers who are getting hoodwinked, but more greedy lawmakers taking kick-backs. But even that isn't the real problem. The *real* problem is a set of beliefs, including that rich people are better than everyone else, that giving more and more money to rich people will help the economy grow, and that money is the only effective motivator of human behavior.
Well I'm sure part of the issue here isn't whether it's technically "part of the OS", but rather a question of the repositories. Since Linux distros these days generally include a package manager linked to a set of official/supported repositories, anything in those repositories becomes, in a sense, part of the operating system that they're distributing.
Fedora has to decide what they'll include in their repositories, what they'll treat as "supported", and what they'll list as "deprecated". Sure, you can go along afterwards and install all kinds of other things from source, but most people will use the repositories if they can, so what Fedora decides to include is an important issue.
It is bullshit. The real reason why they want to have data caps and usage-based pricing is that it's a way that they can drive up prices without incurring a huge backlash.
Their marketing psychologists have told them, if you simply raise prices without improving services, then you'll anger your customer base. It's safer to maintain the same price while lowering the standard of service, and then offer to restore the standard of service at an increased premium price. It's just convoluted enough to confuse a lot of people and keep them from being outraged.
I'm a rather hardcore liberal, and I believe that the focus should in fact be on "personal responsibility" and "willpower".
Why do you think I care whether you're a hardcore liberal. Your statements seem to fit rather nicely with this:
...people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior...
The technological version of "it moved, I swear, I saw it move, don't unplug the machines just yet!"
I don't think that's it. I think it's more like, "God dammit, you assholes, get moving or you're going to fuck us all over!" Or what, really, do you suppose our other option is? We're running out of addresses. NAT isn't an alternative.
It's funny that he compares it to evolution, and yet still describes it as "The good ideas/products will stay, the bad ones will die away."
In biological evolution, it's not that "good" organisms live and reproduce and "bad" ones die off. There's nothing about evolution that makes it tend towards some kind of absolute improvement.
It seems to me a general truth that people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior by way of their own good fortune. The line your advocating is equivalent to "Just say no to drugs" or abstinence-only sex education. You're burying your head in the sand.
It's not like people who are thin and in good shape aren't generally walking around hungry, feeling bad. People who are thin and healthy aren't starving themselves, or at least they shouldn't be. If you're walking around hungry and feeling bad, you're doing it wrong.
And aside from the list of factors that bzipitidoo gave, your talk about willpower ignored a pretty important factor: the phenomenon of "willpower" is a biological activity that has its limits. There have been a few studies that suggest that your decision-making process and ability to exercise self-control is dependent on blood sugar levels, which creates a nice little catch-22 for dieters. You don't eat, your blood sugar drops, your self-control weakens. I good way to reinforce your self-control is to have a snack to boost your blood sugar levels, but then you'd be breaking your diet.
Anyway, it's not about making excuses. It's about understanding the nature of the problem. I'm skinny, but it's not a function of discipline, self-control, or moral superiority. I eat whatever I want, as much as I want, and somehow I'm still skinny. Lucky me. I don't go around trying to pretend I'm some kind of hero, and I don't belittle people who are less lucky, who want to understand why.
The thing about tests like this is they tend to be pretty good at measuring the exact thing they're measuring. Giving someone an easy coding task to complete in a tight deadline might be very good at measuring performance for a job that requires coders to complete relatively easy work under pressure with extremely tight deadlines.
But if you're looking to hire someone to complete more difficult tasks with more relaxed deadlines, then such a test might not serve you very well.
I realise my Cintiq is damned expensive so the criticism above might not apply fully, but I don't feel I'm losing out on accuracy with my non-"Active Stylus" device.
Really? I see lots of ways that my current non-"Active Stylus" could be improved, though I'm not sure if this "Active stylus" addresses them all. Being able to measure pressure angle would be helpful. I suppose "pressure" could be measured by having a smooshable tip and having the touchscreen be able to measure the surface area of contact, but that could still run into problems if you're using fingers/styluses of varying sizes and smooshiness.
I've been thinking, though, that there's potential in even getting the touchpad to tell the difference between a finger and the stylus. For painting/drawing applications, you could set them so that the stylus draws a line, and then you can use your fingers to smudge the line, without stopping to change settings in the program. The program could just know, the stylus draws while non-stylus touches smudge. I'm sure that's not the only neat thing that could be done by distinguishing what device is entering the touch input, but it's the first that comes to mind for me.
You might say that new viruses go unnoticed, but even if they have infected a computer, shouldn't an antivirus scanner detect it later?
Often enough, no. One of the things that malware will do is subvert the ability of AV to detect it. Sometimes they'll disable the antivirus entirely. Sometimes they'll just break it and make it so the AV software won't download updates. It's also common for malware to break Windows updates for similar reasons.
And part of what ends up being the problem is that it's very difficult to know for sure that you don't have a virus. It could be that you don't have a virus, or it could be that you have one that's doing a better job of hiding than you have expertise to find it.
I'm not too thrilled with most of these ideas. Full-sized USB? That would require it to be awfully thick. I could see some kind of micro-usb port, and if you want you can use and adapter, but I don't mind going over wifi if I need to tranfer data. HDMI? I don't really care. If I want something on my TV, I'm fine with having a set-top box. Stereo recording? I mean... I have a microphone on my tablet. I'm not sure the value in recording in stereo when the two mics are right next to each other, but maybe I'm just ignorant there.
Mostly, I'd like to see more open platforms for phones and tablets. The fact that I can't just install whatever software I want grates on me a little. I'd like to be able to buy a piece of hardware based on its value, and then install the OS and apps based on their value, instead of buying into a unified platform and being stuck. Though, I can also see the value in having a unified platform. Apple provides great products across the board largely because they're able to control the whole stack. But it'd be nice if I could easily install the latest stock Android on my iPad to check it out, and continue using it if I prefer it.
Basically yes. You shouldn't trust a single unknown wireless router more than you would trust unencrypted public airspace. The two have comparable levels of security, which is to say "none at all".
I don't personally worry too much about companies like Facebook or Twitter replacing websites. There's nothing stopping me from creating my own website. I can even link to it from Facebook, and link to Facebook from it. There's nothing to stop another company from creating a better Facebook, except in the problem of luring users away from Facebook.
Nope, that's not the real problem. Let's keep our eyes on the ball, here. The real threat to our freedom are the ISPs and the media companies. The there's so much lock-in and DRM is because the media companies want to restrict when and how you can access their content. The real threat to "Well I can always set up my own website on my own web server" is ISPs that provide crappy speeds and exorbitant price, who block port 80, and who refuse to provide static IP addresses. ISPs and media companies conspire to control the Internet, to prevent sharing, and to force you to come to them for content. They lobby to have laws that would potentially make it a crime to run your own website without their permission.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't think this is an imminent danger, or that all the employees of Verizon are currently rubbing their hands together, cackling. They're just some businesses pursing their own best interests. However, with the way things are currently set up, our freedom to communicate as we please and share things in private run contrary to their interests. They're the danger, not Facebook. If I don't like Facebook, I can cancel my account.
Names or brands mean very little in the eventual success and adoption of a product. What matters more is performance, quality and reputation.
My turn to call bullshit. Good branding can't make a terrible product into a highly successful one, but terrible branding and marketing can keep a good product from being recognized as such. If you make a great tool but nobody knows about it, it won't sell. If people are aware of it, but they can't figure out what the product is supposed to be, they won't buy it. If people don't believe that the tool works well, they often won't give it a chance.
And Microsoft's marketing isn't great. They tend to go through periods where they reuse the same name for disparate products and services. How many different things have been labelled ".Net" over the years? How many different products have had the "Live" moniker applied to them? There have been a couple very different products called "Surface". And look how inconsistent their product names are: 3, 95, 4, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. And Windows 7 isn't even version 7, it's officially v6.1!
Now I briefly used the Expression Suite a few years ago, and I can't tell you what any of these products are. Blend? No clue. Is that the one that was trying to be like Photoshop? And what market were they going after? Business? Consumer? Design? I have no idea. I thought it had been discontinued years ago, since I haven't heard anything about it.
You don't need to "expect the community to fix it." Just make the source code available.
The bigger problem is the potential for legal/PR problems. Before Microsoft open sourced something like this, I'd expect they'd want to go through the code and comments making sure there's nothing problematic.
I'd also doubt it factors in the people who have upgraded to Windows 8, used it for a couple weeks, and downgraded back to Windows 7, or those who refused to upgrade int the first place.
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From a young "I need to have every crap" he went to understanding he does not need every crap.
Yes, some of it is probably that he's gotten older, and some of it is a cultural/technological shift that is probably going unnoticed by a lot of people. A decade or two ago, technology was such that you knew you'd "have to buy a new one" within a couple years, because the old one just wouldn't work anymore.
In the 80s and 90s, a computer from a few years ago wouldn't just be slow, it would be absolutely obsolete. It wouldn't even run new software. And not just "I bought a new game, and I had to turn down all the graphical settings to get decent frame rates," but "I bought a new word processor, and it won't run." As a result, there was a high focus on getting the latest-and-greatest with every possible feature, so as to delay the obsolescence for a few months or a year.
We may all still like having the latest-and-greatest now, but its far less necessary. You can still use your iPhone 3GS and your Core2Duo laptop. They still work. Now, the focus is less on staving off obsolescence, and more on having the most convenient thinnest/lightest integrates-into-my-lifestyle and simplifies-my-life devices.
And partially because of improved technology, but partially because there's a demand for it, you've seen more and more functionality pushed into fewer and fewer devices. You don't necessarily need a laptop and desktop and PDA and phone. You have a laptop that can run everything handily, and a phone that includes the PDA.
Doomed to mediocrity too, given that a multi-function device is always a jack of all trades, master of none.
Part of the difficulty is that they're really a jack of all trades, master of many. I gave away my old point-and-shoot camera, that cost me a few hundred dollars a just few years ago, because the camera on the iPhone gave better results. Not only do the pictures look better, but it automatically tags the photo with positional data, which is something that I specifically want.
My iPhone is also a great at other things, and I don't think that it's limited to Apple. Modern cell phones do a lot of things incredibly well. Yes, you're forced to do business with a big corporation to have them, but really, what's the alternative that you would advocate? Building your own computers out of sticks and dirt?
I agree. I've been doing IT for a while now, and this is the kind of thing that *sounds* good, but generally won't work out very well.
Tell me if I'm wrong here, but the thought process behind this is something like, "well we have all this hardware, so we may as well make good use out of it!" So you'll save a few hundred (or even a few thousand!) dollars by building a cluster of old machines instead of buying a server appropriate for your needs.
But let's look at the actual costs. First, let's take the costs of the additional racks, and any additional parts you'll need to buy to put things together. Then there's the work put into implementation. How much time have you spent trying to figure this out already? How many hours will you put into building it? Then troubleshooting the setup, and tweaking the cluster for performance? Now double the amount of time you expect to spend, since nothing ever works as smoothly as you'd like, and it'll take at least twice as long as you expect.
That's just startup costs. Now factor in the regular costs of additional power and AC. Then there's the additional support costs from running a complex unsupported system, which is constructed out of old unsupported computer parts with an increased chance of failure. This thing is going to break. How much time will you spend fixing it? What additional parts will you buy? Will there be any loss of productivity when you experience down-time that could have been avoided by using a new, simple, supported system? What's the cost of that lost productivity?
That's just off the top of my head. There are probably more costs than that.
So honestly, if you're doing this for fun, so that you can learn things and experiment, then by all means have at it. But if you are looking for a cost-effective solution to a real problem, try to take an expansive view of all the costs involved, and compare *all* of the costs of using old hardware vs. new hardware. Often, it's cheaper to use new hardware.
I think for the retina display Macs, there are 2 Thunderbolt ports and an HDMI port, so you can go to 3 monitors without doing anything fancy with daisy-chaining thunderbolt.
I was going to say, "if the problem is that the main screen is your laptop screen, then don't have that be your main screen. If you can't figure out how to do that, then you might want to rethink your vocation."
If you need me screen real estate, buy another screen. This ain't hard
I'm not even sure what you're trying to compare. If Microsoft made a new OS and got a tiny adoption rate, yes, we'd be making fun of them. But we're not talking about an OS here. We're talking about an alternative distribution channel that doesn't have much content yet for a platform that currently has a small user base. All things considered, the numbers aren't bad.
But either way, the numbers aren't important this early on. The real question is this: If Valve can somehow port over the bulk of their catalog to run on a free OS that runs on commodity hardware, do we have any doubt that it would make an impact?
I think that it will at least change the console market. Even if you we're to suppose that Linux is not suitable for the desktop, you would still see vendors competing over making SteamBox consoles. You'd see the console market blown open, and it might spell the end of the Playstation and the XBox.
But I don't think that's a bold enough prediction. I think that if Valve could allow platform independence for games, Microsoft would lose a huge chunk of their current market. There are a lot of people (myself included) who have Windows installed on a computer for the sole purpose of playing games. Speaking as an IT pro who is comfortable on a wide variety of platforms, there are 2 main things that keep me using Windows on my own computers: at home, games; at work, Outlook. If you let me play all my games on Linux, I'll probably never run Windows at home again.
It's one thing to say, "Some level of income inequality is inevitable, and in fact, some level is economically advantageous." There are very few people arguing in favor of equal distribution of wealth. But it's a very different thing to argue in favor of continually redistributing wealth upwards, i.e. "Whenever you want the economy to grow, we need to throw more and more money at the richest people in the country. No matter how great the disparity in wealth distribution grows, keep taking money from the middle class and giving it to rich people."
The big problem with your argument is that the lawmakers aren't clueless. This isn't an accident. These laws are crafted specifically to allow rich people to avoid paying taxes. The problem isn't clueless lawmakers who are getting hoodwinked, but more greedy lawmakers taking kick-backs. But even that isn't the real problem. The *real* problem is a set of beliefs, including that rich people are better than everyone else, that giving more and more money to rich people will help the economy grow, and that money is the only effective motivator of human behavior.
Well I'm sure part of the issue here isn't whether it's technically "part of the OS", but rather a question of the repositories. Since Linux distros these days generally include a package manager linked to a set of official/supported repositories, anything in those repositories becomes, in a sense, part of the operating system that they're distributing.
Fedora has to decide what they'll include in their repositories, what they'll treat as "supported", and what they'll list as "deprecated". Sure, you can go along afterwards and install all kinds of other things from source, but most people will use the repositories if they can, so what Fedora decides to include is an important issue.
It is bullshit. The real reason why they want to have data caps and usage-based pricing is that it's a way that they can drive up prices without incurring a huge backlash.
Their marketing psychologists have told them, if you simply raise prices without improving services, then you'll anger your customer base. It's safer to maintain the same price while lowering the standard of service, and then offer to restore the standard of service at an increased premium price. It's just convoluted enough to confuse a lot of people and keep them from being outraged.
I'm a rather hardcore liberal, and I believe that the focus should in fact be on "personal responsibility" and "willpower".
Why do you think I care whether you're a hardcore liberal. Your statements seem to fit rather nicely with this:
...people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior...
The technological version of "it moved, I swear, I saw it move, don't unplug the machines just yet!"
I don't think that's it. I think it's more like, "God dammit, you assholes, get moving or you're going to fuck us all over!" Or what, really, do you suppose our other option is? We're running out of addresses. NAT isn't an alternative.
It's funny that he compares it to evolution, and yet still describes it as "The good ideas/products will stay, the bad ones will die away."
In biological evolution, it's not that "good" organisms live and reproduce and "bad" ones die off. There's nothing about evolution that makes it tend towards some kind of absolute improvement.
It seems to me a general truth that people who focus so much on "personal responsibility" and "willpower" are people who are much less interested in solving problems, and much more interested in making themselves feel superior by way of their own good fortune. The line your advocating is equivalent to "Just say no to drugs" or abstinence-only sex education. You're burying your head in the sand.
It's not like people who are thin and in good shape aren't generally walking around hungry, feeling bad. People who are thin and healthy aren't starving themselves, or at least they shouldn't be. If you're walking around hungry and feeling bad, you're doing it wrong.
And aside from the list of factors that bzipitidoo gave, your talk about willpower ignored a pretty important factor: the phenomenon of "willpower" is a biological activity that has its limits. There have been a few studies that suggest that your decision-making process and ability to exercise self-control is dependent on blood sugar levels, which creates a nice little catch-22 for dieters. You don't eat, your blood sugar drops, your self-control weakens. I good way to reinforce your self-control is to have a snack to boost your blood sugar levels, but then you'd be breaking your diet.
Anyway, it's not about making excuses. It's about understanding the nature of the problem. I'm skinny, but it's not a function of discipline, self-control, or moral superiority. I eat whatever I want, as much as I want, and somehow I'm still skinny. Lucky me. I don't go around trying to pretend I'm some kind of hero, and I don't belittle people who are less lucky, who want to understand why.
The thing about tests like this is they tend to be pretty good at measuring the exact thing they're measuring. Giving someone an easy coding task to complete in a tight deadline might be very good at measuring performance for a job that requires coders to complete relatively easy work under pressure with extremely tight deadlines.
But if you're looking to hire someone to complete more difficult tasks with more relaxed deadlines, then such a test might not serve you very well.
Whether you think Apple products are "better", they're certainly functionally *different* from the generic counterparts.
I realise my Cintiq is damned expensive so the criticism above might not apply fully, but I don't feel I'm losing out on accuracy with my non-"Active Stylus" device.
Really? I see lots of ways that my current non-"Active Stylus" could be improved, though I'm not sure if this "Active stylus" addresses them all. Being able to measure pressure angle would be helpful. I suppose "pressure" could be measured by having a smooshable tip and having the touchscreen be able to measure the surface area of contact, but that could still run into problems if you're using fingers/styluses of varying sizes and smooshiness.
I've been thinking, though, that there's potential in even getting the touchpad to tell the difference between a finger and the stylus. For painting/drawing applications, you could set them so that the stylus draws a line, and then you can use your fingers to smudge the line, without stopping to change settings in the program. The program could just know, the stylus draws while non-stylus touches smudge. I'm sure that's not the only neat thing that could be done by distinguishing what device is entering the touch input, but it's the first that comes to mind for me.
Even whitelisting isn't perfect-- some of these viruses that evaded detection for years did so by using digital signatures that made it look legit.
You might say that new viruses go unnoticed, but even if they have infected a computer, shouldn't an antivirus scanner detect it later?
Often enough, no. One of the things that malware will do is subvert the ability of AV to detect it. Sometimes they'll disable the antivirus entirely. Sometimes they'll just break it and make it so the AV software won't download updates. It's also common for malware to break Windows updates for similar reasons.
And part of what ends up being the problem is that it's very difficult to know for sure that you don't have a virus. It could be that you don't have a virus, or it could be that you have one that's doing a better job of hiding than you have expertise to find it.
I'm not too thrilled with most of these ideas. Full-sized USB? That would require it to be awfully thick. I could see some kind of micro-usb port, and if you want you can use and adapter, but I don't mind going over wifi if I need to tranfer data. HDMI? I don't really care. If I want something on my TV, I'm fine with having a set-top box. Stereo recording? I mean... I have a microphone on my tablet. I'm not sure the value in recording in stereo when the two mics are right next to each other, but maybe I'm just ignorant there.
Mostly, I'd like to see more open platforms for phones and tablets. The fact that I can't just install whatever software I want grates on me a little. I'd like to be able to buy a piece of hardware based on its value, and then install the OS and apps based on their value, instead of buying into a unified platform and being stuck. Though, I can also see the value in having a unified platform. Apple provides great products across the board largely because they're able to control the whole stack. But it'd be nice if I could easily install the latest stock Android on my iPad to check it out, and continue using it if I prefer it.
Basically yes. You shouldn't trust a single unknown wireless router more than you would trust unencrypted public airspace. The two have comparable levels of security, which is to say "none at all".
I don't personally worry too much about companies like Facebook or Twitter replacing websites. There's nothing stopping me from creating my own website. I can even link to it from Facebook, and link to Facebook from it. There's nothing to stop another company from creating a better Facebook, except in the problem of luring users away from Facebook.
Nope, that's not the real problem. Let's keep our eyes on the ball, here. The real threat to our freedom are the ISPs and the media companies. The there's so much lock-in and DRM is because the media companies want to restrict when and how you can access their content. The real threat to "Well I can always set up my own website on my own web server" is ISPs that provide crappy speeds and exorbitant price, who block port 80, and who refuse to provide static IP addresses. ISPs and media companies conspire to control the Internet, to prevent sharing, and to force you to come to them for content. They lobby to have laws that would potentially make it a crime to run your own website without their permission.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't think this is an imminent danger, or that all the employees of Verizon are currently rubbing their hands together, cackling. They're just some businesses pursing their own best interests. However, with the way things are currently set up, our freedom to communicate as we please and share things in private run contrary to their interests. They're the danger, not Facebook. If I don't like Facebook, I can cancel my account.
Names or brands mean very little in the eventual success and adoption of a product. What matters more is performance, quality and reputation.
My turn to call bullshit. Good branding can't make a terrible product into a highly successful one, but terrible branding and marketing can keep a good product from being recognized as such. If you make a great tool but nobody knows about it, it won't sell. If people are aware of it, but they can't figure out what the product is supposed to be, they won't buy it. If people don't believe that the tool works well, they often won't give it a chance.
And Microsoft's marketing isn't great. They tend to go through periods where they reuse the same name for disparate products and services. How many different things have been labelled ".Net" over the years? How many different products have had the "Live" moniker applied to them? There have been a couple very different products called "Surface". And look how inconsistent their product names are: 3, 95, 4, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. And Windows 7 isn't even version 7, it's officially v6.1!
Now I briefly used the Expression Suite a few years ago, and I can't tell you what any of these products are. Blend? No clue. Is that the one that was trying to be like Photoshop? And what market were they going after? Business? Consumer? Design? I have no idea. I thought it had been discontinued years ago, since I haven't heard anything about it.
You don't need to "expect the community to fix it." Just make the source code available.
The bigger problem is the potential for legal/PR problems. Before Microsoft open sourced something like this, I'd expect they'd want to go through the code and comments making sure there's nothing problematic.
I'd also doubt it factors in the people who have upgraded to Windows 8, used it for a couple weeks, and downgraded back to Windows 7, or those who refused to upgrade int the first place.