You may be right. At the same time, it's really no different than hysterical claims that Clinton must have been committing crimes because some messages were deleted from her mail server. Because sure, there's no evidence, or even any real reason to think, that anyone did anything wrong. Still, if you're wiping data coincidentally right after you find out you're being investigated, it's suspicious.
Second, the city pays the private ISP's to build the network--in other words, a giant handout.
Right. This is sort of what happened in NYC. They paid Verizon to put FiOS everywhere. Verizon took the money and didn't fully deliver. They greatly expanded their FiOS coverage, but not to the extent they were supposed to.
To be honest, I've always been in the Gnome camp, but it's not for a particularly good reason. I realized recently, after giving KDE another try, that it's mostly that there's something weird about the look and feel of KDE.
I can't quite put my finger on what it is. There might be something about the design, or the individual elements, that just don't seem to fit together. Maybe the way everything is so customizable that it doesn't feel like all the different elements were designed together to look and work in a specific particular way. There's definitely something about the animations that seem... I don't know if it's too fast or not fast enough, too smooth or not smooth enough... but it gives a feel like things are too floaty, not enough like real objects. I'm really not sure, but something about it strongly reminds me of using Linux in the 90s, with Desktop Environments that felt terribly unfinished.
And I don't say all that to be dismissive of KDE. Part of my point here is to acknowledge that the objections are petty and unsubstantial. But it's something that has made me avoid KDE, and I'd bet that other people feel it too, and it's part of the reason GNOME people bash KDE.
On a side note, part of the reason I was looking into KDE again is that I just can't get behind GNOME 3. I've been using Cinnamon instead, which is totally fine and not really interesting at all-- which in my book is a good thing.
Really? I had a webcam that did it 10 years ago, and so did my old Windows Phone.
I believe you when you say you had a webcam that did it 10 years ago. I'll even believe that it kind of mostly did an ok job of recognizing that there was a face in the image. Maybe it even could identify people and tell one person from another... kind of... maybe if they looked very different from each other, and looked very much the same from one day to the next. If you changed your hair or grew a beard, it probably wouldn't be able to figure out who you were. If you had a family member with a strong resemblance, it probably mixed the two of you up fairly often.
My point is, yes, it existed. It didn't work well. It was a gimmick, and any attempt to use it for a practical application would have immediately revealed that it didn't work.
It's like many years ago, there were speech recognition programs. They were kind of almost useful if you trained them a lot, and even then there were limited applications of the technology, and they still didn't work well. There were a lot of improvements in recent years that allowed for all of these virtual assistants, but they're still a bit gimmicky and error prone. A lot of this technology is only now becoming genuinely practical.
I think Face ID is interesting tech, and potentially makes sense as a piece of the puzzle of authentication. I imagine that eventually there might be a variety of authentication factors that are weighted and considered together, intelligently, to verify a person's identity. For example, your phone could look at:
* Your fingerprint
* Your face
* Whether you're wearing your smart watch
* Location information (whether you're at home or at work)
... and perhaps some other things that I'm not thinking of, and then it could decide how to deal with security based on the context. Maybe if you're at home, and the phone sees your face and reads your fingerprint, it just unlocks. If you're in a place that you've never been before and it sees your face and reads your fingerprint, it still asks for a short PIN to unlock. If you're in a weird place and it reads your fingerprint but can't see your face, then it requires a different long complex password to unlock. Maybe it could bet that the phone won't unlock from FaceID itself, but it will show some limited information that it wouldn't show if your face were not identifiable.
I'm just making that up on the spot, but my point is that, as these sensors get better and AI gets better, we might be able to train computers to really know whether you are who you say you are, and maybe even whether you're acting under duress.
And that brings me to my second point: the value isn't just in authentication. If the camera can identify specific people better, and maybe eventually facial expressions, their may be other purposes it could be put to. Imagine you have a phone, tablet, computer, car, or home automation system that can easily identify the members of your family on sight, and adjust its behavior and preferences based on that. Just as an example: Put this system in your car, and then whenever you sit down in the driver's seat, it automatically adjusts the seat and pre-programmed radio stations the way you like it. Your wife sits down in the driver's seat, and the settings automatically adjust to her preferences.
I, myself, have comfortable lifestyle that puts me in the top 1% of people in the world with very little effort.
What is to be distressed about?
Lots of things. The plight of people who aren't you, and aren't in the top 1% of people in the world, for example. Or the widespread destruction of the ecosystem and the waste of a lot of natural resources, risking the long-term future of the human race. Or the fact that the guy who's currently the most powerful person in the world is a complete imbecile, and we have no idea what damage he might cause. The possible end to the world's most peaceful, prosperous, free, and equal era of human history? (And then, there's always the failure to use the oxford comma.)
Or on a basic level of the angst of being human. The inevitability of your own demise or that your loved ones might be terribly injured at any moment. The very real possibility that no one has ever truly known or loved you. Even if the whole world is in its most safe and benevolent state, there are plenty of things that any smart person should find distressing. Sure, it's healthy to avoid dwelling on those things, but at a
I can't tell how much you're joking, but outside of roll playing games, wisdom and intelligence aren't "rolled separately". Intelligence is the ability to detect and recognize patterns, and wisdom comes when you've learned a lot of the world's patterns.
That's a terrible oversimplification, of course, but true enough for what we're talking about here. You can have intelligence without wisdom, but you can't have much wisdom without intelligence, and intelligence + experience will tend toward wisdom.
Also, bright people might realize that the world has problems.
There's not an objective measure of "mental illness", and determining whether you're suffering from mental illness has a lot to do with how well you fit into your role in society. A big part of the definition of mental illness is that it has to cause distress. When a person looks around at this world and their place in it, they should be distressed. If you're not suffering in some way that could be labelled "mental illness", there's probably wrong with you.
Also, the longer you go without learning how it works, the more information about it will be lost. Documents will get lost, and memories will fade.
If something has been working for years and you don't know what it does, dig into it in as unintrusively and non-destructively as you can, figure out how it works, and document it. Then see if you can re-create it in a lab environment.
This is more or less what I was going to say. If you were to compare the price of buying and running a simple server vs. the cost of running it in the cloud, then in many cases, yes, running it in-house might still be cheaper. I think that often, the real value of cloud services is the expertise that comes along with it.
In my mind, Exchange is a great example of why cloud services are good. There's a lot involved in running and maintaining an Exchange server, backing it up, and troubleshooting if something goes wrong. You have to make sure you deploy it in a secure and sensible way. If you want it to be a robust solution, you'll want to make sure there are redundancies. There are a lot of areas of expertise that may come into play.
So yes, it's relatively cheap to buy an Exchange server, but it'd be extreme overkill for a small business to hire Exchange experts to build out all the redundant infrastructure to make it secure and robust, and then to maintain the whole setup, upgrading everything every few years. When you add in all the associated costs, Office 365 ends up looking like a steal.
And I know, someone will say, "I don't trust my email to a cloud provider." If you don't trust Microsoft with your data, then you should get off of Windows and Exchange anyway.
Do you really think it's so handy to let you know that person A you seem to meet up with regularly is also on Facebook?... It's not cool - it's creepy.
It sounds like you think you're arguing with me, but my point is that I think they're doing something creepier than facial recognition of photos. Doing facial recognition on photos at least requires that someone is intentionally interacting with Facebook and posting personal information (in photographic form), which Facebook is then just analyzing. I'm suggesting that Facebook is spying on your location without notifying you, perhaps even when not posting, perhaps even when the Facebook app isn't open. That's way worse.
Even if prostitution were legal (and it is in some places), the prostitute may still not want their personal information spread around. Regardless of your job, you may not want your personal information made public.
I think Facebook also uses location information essentially tracking your movements and suggesting people that you cross paths with on multiple occasions.
I'm not sure about that. That was my conclusion a while back when Facebook suggested that I friend a bunch of people that I didn't know. Then I realized that a number of the people it was suggesting were people who lived in my apartment building or worked in the same building, or even people who work on the same block as I do. It was a bunch of people that I didn't know and had nothing in common with, and the only link that I could think of is physical proximity.
Maybe I came to the wrong conclusion and there was some other link that Facebook was operating on, but the link was certainly something non-obvious and covert.
So they tried something, and it didn't work out for them. What's the big deal?... How many people even knew Microsoft was in the music business?
I know what you're saying, and I agree in theory, but I think Microsoft does have a problem here. It's not just "they tried something and it didn't work out". It's more like, "They've tried a lot of things, and almost none of it has worked out". They've spent decades relying on Windows and Office licensing, but the dominance of Windows is flagging. The Xbox has made a nice place for itself in the console market, but game consoles aren't what they once were.
They have Office 365 and Azure, but those services also cut into Microsoft's perpetual licensing. Also, to the point of the OP, it puts them at risk of retreating from the consumer market and being relegated to a waning player in the enterprise market.
I don't see people lining up to bash Apple over the Newton.
That's not the example you think it is. Apple was failing when the Newton was released.
Well that raises a question for me: If her job was to kill Yahoo in a profitable manner, and she killed Yahoo in a profitable manner, then was she a bad CEO?
Yahoo was a failing company before Mayer got anywhere near it. She failed to save it. At worst, maybe you could make an argument that she hastened its demise.
At the same time, when a company is on its last leg like that, you only really have two choices:
1) Accept that it's going to fail and try to stretch things out as long as possible.
2) Take a gamble and try to rescue it. If it doesn't work, you may be hastening its demise.
I don't know all the details, so I'm not going to try to argue whether she was a good CEO or bad one, but it's not like Yahoo was a thriving company with a bright future.
Not completely and unquestioningly, but certainly there are some companies I trust more than others.
For Microsoft, it's worse than most. It's not just that I don't happen to trust them, I actively distrust them Or rather, I trust them to do bad things. They have a history of being hostile, controlling, and even abusive toward their own customers and partners. They've had a long-standing culture of being stagnant, and relying on market dominance and vendor lock-in to maintain their relevance. Their older solutions tended to be insecure by design. Currently, their solutions tend to have a design-by-committee feel as well as being overly elaborate.
There are some bright spots, but, they've generally been a bad company making bad products. Instead of using their resources to build better products that you want to use, they focus their energies on leveraging their market position to force you to use their bad products.
I think you're missing my larger point, which is that this isn't just about making more money. Netflix could offer them more money than they currently make from all distribution channels, and a lot of content owners probably still wouldn't go for it.
This is about control. When everyone watched cable, the networks and cable companies had control. You only had one choice in cable companies, and that cable company had to deal with the content owners. The cable company controlled what you saw, and the content owners controlled the cable companies. Now Netflix comes along to disrupt that, but if Netflix wins and gets access to everything, then both the cable companies and content owners lose control. Cable companies become dumb pipe ISPs (at best), and content becomes a commodity.
In response, the cables companies are fighting net neutrality, so they can once again control what you can access. The content owners are playing games with distribution, propping up a bunch of competitors who only get partial libraries, because then they can exercise the control over Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/whatever the same way they used to control the cable companies. Meanwhile, some of the content owners are trying to have their own streaming service (Hulu itself was started by some of the major networks), so that they can retain control that way.
Part of the problem with viewing the world through capitalist eyes is you start thinking it's all about money. It's not all about money. It's all about control. Money is just one way to control people.
My guess is yes. But I suspect Netflix would be more successful if they added as much content as possible and doubled their prices
It's not clear that they have that option. Content owners have been playing games with licensing for years, and if one thing is clear, it's that they don't want you to be able to subscribe to one service where you can get all (or "enough") of the content you want under one roof.
This is what's going on:
Company #1 has 5 pieces of content, which are A, B, C, D, and E. Company #2 have 5 pieces of content, which are V, W, X, Y, and Z. So Amazon licenses A, B, V, W, and X. Netflix licenses A, C, D, V, and X. Hulu licenses A, B, E, W, and Y. Everyone involved knows that you, the consumer, want all 10 pieces of content, so they're trying to get you to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Plus, you'll notice that only gets you A, B, C, D, E, V, W, and X. To get Z, you still have to buy it or pay for cable.
And part of this whole scheme is that they're intentionally getting you to pay for each piece of content several times over. They justify their pricing because of all the content they have, even though there's an awful lot of overlap.
And that's why content owners are never going to let Netflix have anything resembling a "complete library" of content. If they do that, then you'll only pay for that content once, and you'll be paying Netflix. Netflix will set the price and the terms. If they play a lot of games with exclusivity, then they can play the distribution channels off of each other, and get consumers to pay for most shows several times.
I think that, most likely, this is a sign that Microsoft is planning to push an Android phone that will come with a lot of the components replaced by Microsoft equivalents.
Yeah, it's 8am to 5pm, or 9am to 6pm. And they still call it an "8 hour work day", because they don't count your lunch hour. But then they get angry at you if you actually take a full hour for lunch.
The MP3 player I had at the time was superior to the iPod in every single way. It just wasn't marketed as well. It was far easier to use, easier to move music on to and off of, and had a larger capacity.
I don't believe you. I was around at the time. I saw the other MP3 players and how they worked, and there were reasons why it was so much more successful. Competitors of the time were cheap quality, poorly designed, and needlessly complex. You might have thought it was "easier" in some sense like, "I can sync music to it by writing my own scripts!" or something, but Apple made a design for how the thing functioned that most people could use without even thinking about it.
And in a sense, you're right. It was about marketing. But not in the sense of "it's all hype", but that it's wasn't about having powerful technical specs or having the longest feature list. It was about designing a device for which there is a market. MP3 players were gimmicky toys for early adopters until Apple found a design that was useable.
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You may be right. At the same time, it's really no different than hysterical claims that Clinton must have been committing crimes because some messages were deleted from her mail server. Because sure, there's no evidence, or even any real reason to think, that anyone did anything wrong. Still, if you're wiping data coincidentally right after you find out you're being investigated, it's suspicious.
Second, the city pays the private ISP's to build the network--in other words, a giant handout.
Right. This is sort of what happened in NYC. They paid Verizon to put FiOS everywhere. Verizon took the money and didn't fully deliver. They greatly expanded their FiOS coverage, but not to the extent they were supposed to.
To be honest, I've always been in the Gnome camp, but it's not for a particularly good reason. I realized recently, after giving KDE another try, that it's mostly that there's something weird about the look and feel of KDE.
I can't quite put my finger on what it is. There might be something about the design, or the individual elements, that just don't seem to fit together. Maybe the way everything is so customizable that it doesn't feel like all the different elements were designed together to look and work in a specific particular way. There's definitely something about the animations that seem... I don't know if it's too fast or not fast enough, too smooth or not smooth enough... but it gives a feel like things are too floaty, not enough like real objects. I'm really not sure, but something about it strongly reminds me of using Linux in the 90s, with Desktop Environments that felt terribly unfinished.
And I don't say all that to be dismissive of KDE. Part of my point here is to acknowledge that the objections are petty and unsubstantial. But it's something that has made me avoid KDE, and I'd bet that other people feel it too, and it's part of the reason GNOME people bash KDE.
On a side note, part of the reason I was looking into KDE again is that I just can't get behind GNOME 3. I've been using Cinnamon instead, which is totally fine and not really interesting at all-- which in my book is a good thing.
Really? I had a webcam that did it 10 years ago, and so did my old Windows Phone.
I believe you when you say you had a webcam that did it 10 years ago. I'll even believe that it kind of mostly did an ok job of recognizing that there was a face in the image. Maybe it even could identify people and tell one person from another... kind of... maybe if they looked very different from each other, and looked very much the same from one day to the next. If you changed your hair or grew a beard, it probably wouldn't be able to figure out who you were. If you had a family member with a strong resemblance, it probably mixed the two of you up fairly often.
My point is, yes, it existed. It didn't work well. It was a gimmick, and any attempt to use it for a practical application would have immediately revealed that it didn't work.
It's like many years ago, there were speech recognition programs. They were kind of almost useful if you trained them a lot, and even then there were limited applications of the technology, and they still didn't work well. There were a lot of improvements in recent years that allowed for all of these virtual assistants, but they're still a bit gimmicky and error prone. A lot of this technology is only now becoming genuinely practical.
We've had facial recognition for a long time. We haven't had a lot of compact, practical, and reliable consumer implementations.
I think Face ID is interesting tech, and potentially makes sense as a piece of the puzzle of authentication. I imagine that eventually there might be a variety of authentication factors that are weighted and considered together, intelligently, to verify a person's identity. For example, your phone could look at:
* Your fingerprint
* Your face
* Whether you're wearing your smart watch
* Location information (whether you're at home or at work)
... and perhaps some other things that I'm not thinking of, and then it could decide how to deal with security based on the context. Maybe if you're at home, and the phone sees your face and reads your fingerprint, it just unlocks. If you're in a place that you've never been before and it sees your face and reads your fingerprint, it still asks for a short PIN to unlock. If you're in a weird place and it reads your fingerprint but can't see your face, then it requires a different long complex password to unlock. Maybe it could bet that the phone won't unlock from FaceID itself, but it will show some limited information that it wouldn't show if your face were not identifiable.
I'm just making that up on the spot, but my point is that, as these sensors get better and AI gets better, we might be able to train computers to really know whether you are who you say you are, and maybe even whether you're acting under duress.
And that brings me to my second point: the value isn't just in authentication. If the camera can identify specific people better, and maybe eventually facial expressions, their may be other purposes it could be put to. Imagine you have a phone, tablet, computer, car, or home automation system that can easily identify the members of your family on sight, and adjust its behavior and preferences based on that. Just as an example: Put this system in your car, and then whenever you sit down in the driver's seat, it automatically adjusts the seat and pre-programmed radio stations the way you like it. Your wife sits down in the driver's seat, and the settings automatically adjust to her preferences.
I, myself, have comfortable lifestyle that puts me in the top 1% of people in the world with very little effort.
What is to be distressed about?
Lots of things. The plight of people who aren't you, and aren't in the top 1% of people in the world, for example. Or the widespread destruction of the ecosystem and the waste of a lot of natural resources, risking the long-term future of the human race. Or the fact that the guy who's currently the most powerful person in the world is a complete imbecile, and we have no idea what damage he might cause. The possible end to the world's most peaceful, prosperous, free, and equal era of human history? (And then, there's always the failure to use the oxford comma.)
Or on a basic level of the angst of being human. The inevitability of your own demise or that your loved ones might be terribly injured at any moment. The very real possibility that no one has ever truly known or loved you. Even if the whole world is in its most safe and benevolent state, there are plenty of things that any smart person should find distressing. Sure, it's healthy to avoid dwelling on those things, but at a
I can't tell how much you're joking, but outside of roll playing games, wisdom and intelligence aren't "rolled separately". Intelligence is the ability to detect and recognize patterns, and wisdom comes when you've learned a lot of the world's patterns.
That's a terrible oversimplification, of course, but true enough for what we're talking about here. You can have intelligence without wisdom, but you can't have much wisdom without intelligence, and intelligence + experience will tend toward wisdom.
Also, bright people might realize that the world has problems.
There's not an objective measure of "mental illness", and determining whether you're suffering from mental illness has a lot to do with how well you fit into your role in society. A big part of the definition of mental illness is that it has to cause distress. When a person looks around at this world and their place in it, they should be distressed. If you're not suffering in some way that could be labelled "mental illness", there's probably wrong with you.
Is that a quote from the Joker?
Also, the longer you go without learning how it works, the more information about it will be lost. Documents will get lost, and memories will fade.
If something has been working for years and you don't know what it does, dig into it in as unintrusively and non-destructively as you can, figure out how it works, and document it. Then see if you can re-create it in a lab environment.
This is more or less what I was going to say. If you were to compare the price of buying and running a simple server vs. the cost of running it in the cloud, then in many cases, yes, running it in-house might still be cheaper. I think that often, the real value of cloud services is the expertise that comes along with it.
In my mind, Exchange is a great example of why cloud services are good. There's a lot involved in running and maintaining an Exchange server, backing it up, and troubleshooting if something goes wrong. You have to make sure you deploy it in a secure and sensible way. If you want it to be a robust solution, you'll want to make sure there are redundancies. There are a lot of areas of expertise that may come into play.
So yes, it's relatively cheap to buy an Exchange server, but it'd be extreme overkill for a small business to hire Exchange experts to build out all the redundant infrastructure to make it secure and robust, and then to maintain the whole setup, upgrading everything every few years. When you add in all the associated costs, Office 365 ends up looking like a steal.
And I know, someone will say, "I don't trust my email to a cloud provider." If you don't trust Microsoft with your data, then you should get off of Windows and Exchange anyway.
Do you really think it's so handy to let you know that person A you seem to meet up with regularly is also on Facebook? ... It's not cool - it's creepy.
It sounds like you think you're arguing with me, but my point is that I think they're doing something creepier than facial recognition of photos. Doing facial recognition on photos at least requires that someone is intentionally interacting with Facebook and posting personal information (in photographic form), which Facebook is then just analyzing. I'm suggesting that Facebook is spying on your location without notifying you, perhaps even when not posting, perhaps even when the Facebook app isn't open. That's way worse.
Even if prostitution were legal (and it is in some places), the prostitute may still not want their personal information spread around. Regardless of your job, you may not want your personal information made public.
I think Facebook also uses location information essentially tracking your movements and suggesting people that you cross paths with on multiple occasions.
I'm not sure about that. That was my conclusion a while back when Facebook suggested that I friend a bunch of people that I didn't know. Then I realized that a number of the people it was suggesting were people who lived in my apartment building or worked in the same building, or even people who work on the same block as I do. It was a bunch of people that I didn't know and had nothing in common with, and the only link that I could think of is physical proximity.
Maybe I came to the wrong conclusion and there was some other link that Facebook was operating on, but the link was certainly something non-obvious and covert.
So they tried something, and it didn't work out for them. What's the big deal?... How many people even knew Microsoft was in the music business?
I know what you're saying, and I agree in theory, but I think Microsoft does have a problem here. It's not just "they tried something and it didn't work out". It's more like, "They've tried a lot of things, and almost none of it has worked out". They've spent decades relying on Windows and Office licensing, but the dominance of Windows is flagging. The Xbox has made a nice place for itself in the console market, but game consoles aren't what they once were.
They have Office 365 and Azure, but those services also cut into Microsoft's perpetual licensing. Also, to the point of the OP, it puts them at risk of retreating from the consumer market and being relegated to a waning player in the enterprise market.
I don't see people lining up to bash Apple over the Newton.
That's not the example you think it is. Apple was failing when the Newton was released.
Well that raises a question for me: If her job was to kill Yahoo in a profitable manner, and she killed Yahoo in a profitable manner, then was she a bad CEO?
Yahoo was a failing company before Mayer got anywhere near it. She failed to save it. At worst, maybe you could make an argument that she hastened its demise.
At the same time, when a company is on its last leg like that, you only really have two choices:
1) Accept that it's going to fail and try to stretch things out as long as possible.
2) Take a gamble and try to rescue it. If it doesn't work, you may be hastening its demise.
I don't know all the details, so I'm not going to try to argue whether she was a good CEO or bad one, but it's not like Yahoo was a thriving company with a bright future.
What security updates from Apple are you paying for?
Not completely and unquestioningly, but certainly there are some companies I trust more than others.
For Microsoft, it's worse than most. It's not just that I don't happen to trust them, I actively distrust them Or rather, I trust them to do bad things. They have a history of being hostile, controlling, and even abusive toward their own customers and partners. They've had a long-standing culture of being stagnant, and relying on market dominance and vendor lock-in to maintain their relevance. Their older solutions tended to be insecure by design. Currently, their solutions tend to have a design-by-committee feel as well as being overly elaborate.
There are some bright spots, but, they've generally been a bad company making bad products. Instead of using their resources to build better products that you want to use, they focus their energies on leveraging their market position to force you to use their bad products.
I think you're missing my larger point, which is that this isn't just about making more money. Netflix could offer them more money than they currently make from all distribution channels, and a lot of content owners probably still wouldn't go for it.
This is about control. When everyone watched cable, the networks and cable companies had control. You only had one choice in cable companies, and that cable company had to deal with the content owners. The cable company controlled what you saw, and the content owners controlled the cable companies. Now Netflix comes along to disrupt that, but if Netflix wins and gets access to everything, then both the cable companies and content owners lose control. Cable companies become dumb pipe ISPs (at best), and content becomes a commodity.
In response, the cables companies are fighting net neutrality, so they can once again control what you can access. The content owners are playing games with distribution, propping up a bunch of competitors who only get partial libraries, because then they can exercise the control over Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/whatever the same way they used to control the cable companies. Meanwhile, some of the content owners are trying to have their own streaming service (Hulu itself was started by some of the major networks), so that they can retain control that way.
Part of the problem with viewing the world through capitalist eyes is you start thinking it's all about money. It's not all about money. It's all about control. Money is just one way to control people.
My guess is yes. But I suspect Netflix would be more successful if they added as much content as possible and doubled their prices
It's not clear that they have that option. Content owners have been playing games with licensing for years, and if one thing is clear, it's that they don't want you to be able to subscribe to one service where you can get all (or "enough") of the content you want under one roof.
This is what's going on:
Company #1 has 5 pieces of content, which are A, B, C, D, and E. Company #2 have 5 pieces of content, which are V, W, X, Y, and Z. So Amazon licenses A, B, V, W, and X. Netflix licenses A, C, D, V, and X. Hulu licenses A, B, E, W, and Y. Everyone involved knows that you, the consumer, want all 10 pieces of content, so they're trying to get you to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Plus, you'll notice that only gets you A, B, C, D, E, V, W, and X. To get Z, you still have to buy it or pay for cable.
And part of this whole scheme is that they're intentionally getting you to pay for each piece of content several times over. They justify their pricing because of all the content they have, even though there's an awful lot of overlap.
And that's why content owners are never going to let Netflix have anything resembling a "complete library" of content. If they do that, then you'll only pay for that content once, and you'll be paying Netflix. Netflix will set the price and the terms. If they play a lot of games with exclusivity, then they can play the distribution channels off of each other, and get consumers to pay for most shows several times.
I think that, most likely, this is a sign that Microsoft is planning to push an Android phone that will come with a lot of the components replaced by Microsoft equivalents.
Yeah, it's 8am to 5pm, or 9am to 6pm. And they still call it an "8 hour work day", because they don't count your lunch hour. But then they get angry at you if you actually take a full hour for lunch.
The MP3 player I had at the time was superior to the iPod in every single way. It just wasn't marketed as well. It was far easier to use, easier to move music on to and off of, and had a larger capacity.
I don't believe you. I was around at the time. I saw the other MP3 players and how they worked, and there were reasons why it was so much more successful. Competitors of the time were cheap quality, poorly designed, and needlessly complex. You might have thought it was "easier" in some sense like, "I can sync music to it by writing my own scripts!" or something, but Apple made a design for how the thing functioned that most people could use without even thinking about it.
And in a sense, you're right. It was about marketing. But not in the sense of "it's all hype", but that it's wasn't about having powerful technical specs or having the longest feature list. It was about designing a device for which there is a market. MP3 players were gimmicky toys for early adopters until Apple found a design that was useable.