He seems pissed, not unintelligent. Can't say I blame him.
I can.
The complainer is a lowlife. The lowlife is pissed because someone has more than he does. The lowlife thinks that he is entitled to take other people's money. The lowlife thinks that people who spend their time trolling Slashdot (yes, I am aware of the irony) instead of learning how financial markets work, upgrading his skills, and in general developing a fucking work ethic, should get free money from people who... you know... work for a living, who build things instead of parasitize them, and who don't spend every last penny on Starbucks swill, glowy fans for their PCs, and beer. Here we have a lowlife who does not know that Gates has already transferred most of his wealth to his philanthropic foundation, and that he has already announced that his children will get "only" about ten million each... but hey! Who cares about truth when you can have outrage instead? Who cares about earning a living when you can just have the tax man take it from someone else and give it to you?
Yes, I'd say I can blame him. Or to paraphrase someone else, "read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book, buy some land, buy some land, buy some goddamned land, fuck spinning rims". It's not Bill Gates' job or obligation to subsidize stupidity or to sponsor the race to abandon all personal responsibility.
This is what happens when you compete on the basis of cost.
When it comes right down to it, there's not a lot to differentiate one Android phone from another. It's becoming a commodity market, and a phone buyer would be satisfied with any of several options. What would make someone choose one phone over another? Leaving out the fucktards who reflexively hate on Apple just because Apple doesn't place virgin tech-nerds on a pedestal, someone will choose one phone over another based upon:
Price
Specific features
Carrier
That's about all there is.
If you have two phones with similar features, and one is cheaper than the other, you buy the cheaper phone. If you, the seller, want to not go out of business by losing money on every sale you have to reduce your cost of goods. Therefore, your build quality will suffer, and you end up with the situation the article describes.
If you have two phones with the same price, you'll buy the one with a better feature set. If you're packing more features into the same sale price, you're spending less on each feature. Therefore, to meet the price point, you're sacrificing quality. Once again, you end up with the described situation.
If you're choosing based upon carrier, and you're not buying the phone outright (i.e. you have a contract and a subsidized phone price) you have a limited selection. Since the carrier wants to maximize profit on a phone, they'll offer the models with the lowest wholesale cost. To meet that lower cost, the phone makers will cut corners. And... surprise, reliability suffers.
Therefore, as long as the phones are pretty much interchangeable from the user's point of view, price will loom large... and the price-race to the bottom will dominate everything else. Phone manufacturers aren't charities; they have to show a profit to stay in business. Therefore to meet lower prices, cost cutting must occur. This is what it means to exist in a commodity market with paper-thin margins, and to operate in a market where people are willing to buy crap.
Premium Android phones are just fine. The problem is that there are a lot of non-premium Android phones, and they get lumped in with the Nexus and Droid product lines. There's a bunch of no-name crap out there that is being pushed solely on the basis of the Android name, and it's ruining things for everybody involved.
Does everyone understand now why Apple doesn't participate in the market segments dominated by commodity items? Does everybody understand now why cheap Android phones break? Does everybody understand now why cheap Android phones exist at all? If you want quality, you MUST open your wallet. It costs money to make a good phone, and therefore it costs money to buy a good phone. Complaining at the top of your lungs doesn't make a good phone cheaper or a cheap phone better.
...isn't this EXACTLY what people have been saying for years is the proper way to ensure application security?
Why is it bad just because Apple is doing it?...oh wait. Apple. I forgot, anything they do is bad just because they're Apple. Turn off the brain, because AppleHate doesn't require the overhead of... y'know... thought, truth, consistency.
God help anyone who has one of you people on a jury, because there is no way they would be judged fairly or on facts.
Critics and global warning denialists have been arguing for years...
"Denialist"? That's... inventive.
Look, there's no need to invent words when we have perfectly reasonable, time-honored words that convey the same intent. I think the one you're looking for is "heretic".
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
on
The RMS Tour Rider
·
· Score: 1
I worked my way through college. I did so by making photocopies at the local Kinko's, using community college for all general ed and lower-division courses, and not insisting that Little Princess Me wasn't ENTITLED to go to an Ivy-league-grade (and Ivy-league-expense) college; state university was fine. I drove a P.O.S. VW instead of a new car, I ate rice and beans and frozen vegetables, I shared a small apartment with a roommate instead of having my own place, and we didn't have cable TV. I rode a bike whenever the weather was good, and didn't spend on unnecessary crap. And I emerged debt-free. All it took was realization that it was 5 years not 4, and that I didn't get to live to the same standard that I would be living immediately after graduating. "Living like a student" does not mean "living in luxury", but it's not like living in a third-world shantytown either. People need to have their senses of entitlement recalibrated.
Why the hell can't anyone else? It wasn't that hard!
And if you get a student loan, you're taking other people's money. You've already SPENT other people's money. Why should someone be let off the hook for taking money and not repaying it?
I read it as "people are lazy motherfuckers who, as soon as they realize they can force someone else to subsidize them through the ballot box, will take-take-take-take. People don't want Fair, they want Free Stuff, and to hell with who has to pay for it or whether it bankrupts your society."
Forcing others to subsidize you is not noble just because the force is applied through the ballot box.
"Get your hand out of my pocket." "If you want to force me to give you money, do it the honest way and try to mug me, instead of hiding behind the badges of the police and the power of the tax collector." "Why is it one "man one vote", but it's "fair" that I pay tens of thousands in income tax every year while half of all "taxpayers" don't pay income tax, and you're howling that I should pay even MORE?" "Stop demanding that I subsidize you in the same breath that you demonize me." "Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book, buy some land, buy some land, buy some goddamned land, FUCK SPINNING RIMS." "If you dropped out of high school to push drugs, or majored in Underwater Basket Weaving/Humanities/Latin Left-Handed Shaman Women's Studies, it's YOUR fault you're poor, and you have no right to demand I support you."
VOTE: Shall the US Government give you free money, taken from anybody except yourself without consideration for law, fairness, effort, contribution, or the damage done to the economy and future generations?
[ ] Yes [ ] Gimme! [ ] I'm entitled! [ ] Anybody who earns more money than me must have cheated, so yeah [ ] Hanging chad
I think that sums it up nicely. Or, to quote someone a hell of a lot smarter than most people:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. --Alexander Tytler
It's a stunt to APPEAR to be "doing something about black market transactions", in the same way that the TSA is a security-theater stunt to APPEAR to be doing something about terrorism. This is political Phariseeism; a theatrical exhibition of insincere public morality. They know very well it will go down in flames; that's not the point. If it gets a District Attorney reelected on a "law and order" platform (even though the DA as often as not IS the problem), it "worked".
In the intervening period, until the law is shot down, data is flowing. Court order or not, once the data is collected, it is there forever, and will be used forever. If it yields information that can be used to the personal or political advantage of the people who passed the law, it "worked".
Louisiana. Government. Corruption. The three are tied together in a manner that Russian crime bosses and Federales on the take can only dream about. This is one of those laws that can be used to threaten small businesses which are not paying protection money to the local corrupt police or planning commission or whatever. If the threat of the application of the law (and the expense of fighting it) results in a fatter wallet for a cop or a bureaucrat, it "worked".
Louisiana is a place where their "elected" representatives ("elected" in the sense that Chicago "elections" are) think they can get away with things like keeping bribe money in a freezer. What's this think word you're using? Louisiana: they don't know thought, they only know authori-tay. If it results in increased personal power, it "worked".
I have family in New Orleans. They have horror stories about the pervasive, persistent abuses of power by the police and the gatekeepers of government. At times it seems to me that there is more in common between Louisiana and Haiti than between Louisiana and the United States. If it wasn't for the fact that New Orleans is the export point for all bulk goods from the Mississippi River and Ohio River basins, and where the Mississippi and the Intercoastal Waterway meet, it would be far more trouble than it is worth. But then, that positioning is exactly why Louisiana gets away with what it does.
We will have interstellar travel when we decide that interstellar travel is more important than bread-and-circuses, that personal responsibility is more rewarding than entitlements, and that "long term investing" involves a time period greater than one fiscal quarter.
In today's news, the nation which sent a man to the moon, but can no longer put a man into orbit, is buying tickets on stunt-planes to recreate the Mercury suborbital missions.
Apparently, we're back in 1961. 50 years of "progress".
Give to a friend to make sure you're seen somewhere else while I'm in ur kitchen takin ur cookies
Put on a dummy to make sure you're seen somewhere else while I'm in ur kitchen takin ur cookies
Hold your mask in front of a facial recognition camera so I can be takin ur cookies
Back up my face before my horrible scarification ritual. Ur cookies aren't involved in this one.
You don't need a book for some of the most basic, important advice for usability... but a large number of developers seem to never have heard it.
Ready?
Do not look upon your users/customers with contempt.
This is a serious, widespread issue; just read the comments that techies have about people who are not themselves on places like ohhhh, say, Slashdot. Without sympathy for your customers, without a sense of humility in yourself, without the realization that people can be worthwhile, talented, productive and smart (yes, even smarter than YOU) yet not have the time or training or inclination to recompile their own Linux kernel or root their phone, you're going to produce awful user interfaces and workflows. You're going to amass a terrible reputation for bad customer support. You're going to have buggy software because you spend more time blaming the user than wondering if maybe your code isn't perfect.
And then you'll blame anyone except yourself.
All of the studies about icon size, color schemes, human motion studies, and cognitive science will be meaningless if you believe you need it "just because my customers are idiots".
The Santa Clara sheriff department shot and killed the guy that shot up the quarry in Cupertino yesterday. Couldn't they wait until he had shot the Westboro people too?
On my Vista/64 box, I'm running F-Prot and SpyBot Search&Destroy. I just plain don't have problems with malware OR with security software bogging me down. I used to run AdAware also, but it started randomly jumping to 50% CPU usage and staying there, so that's off the list. Sorry, LavaSoft, your current quality sucks. In any event, it doesn't seem to have been necessary given the presence of the other two.
Mind you, I also patch.
IE9 is actually pretty good. Security-wise, it's currently doing better than FireFox. Where FFox has the advantage is plugins, but certainly not security or stability. I can't remember the last time I had IE9 crash on me. With FireFox, it's about once every 3-4 days, and IE9 also has the advantage in memory usage. I like FireFox's UI a bit better, but if they don't stop with the BS behavior and poor quality I'm dumping it altogether.
When I'm on my Mac, I run Safari and have no problems whatsoever. If you run Windows, avoid Safari like the plague; it's slow, unstable, memory-hogging and in general a piss-poor port. Certainly NOT the equal of Safari/OSX.
Getting back to your original question... it all depends upon how comfortable you are with minimal/obviously-designed-by-a-coder-not-a-UI-designer user interfaces. Clam AV seems to be fine for folks who found OpenWindows to be "easy and intuitive". Personally, I think that the 29 bucks per year I spend on F-Prot is money well spent, plus it covers all of my Windows boxes with the one fee (I think you're allowed up to five machines).
Oh you mean "Americans other than myself". Those OTHERS. Those "everybody except superior, smug me".
Funny how all the expert economists hold jobs in IT that let them troll Slashdot, and all the "idiots" are the ones who are running the country. Funny how all those superior Europeans (you know, the ones who have spent the Eurozone into oblivion through entitlements and bread-and-circuses and the alleged "superior math education") are now facing waves of national debt defaults and bank failures. How could that possibly have happened? I mean... they're not stupid Americans, they're SUPERIOR!
Let's see how everyone does when the flow of stupid-American money stops and they realize just how much of the Socialist Paradise floated on the not-so-endless stream of greenbacks.
Eighth circle, second bolgia for operating system fanboys, phone/computer platform fanboys, operating system haters, and phone/computer platform haters. Regardless of which platform and operating system the fanboys and haters hold forth upon, it's all lies and shit.
Double depth for falsely accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a fanboy. Though there's certainly applicability of the sixth, eighth, ninth (especially forum trolls) and tenth.
Amazon sells books and rice-steamers and USB cables.
Facebook and Google sell YOU. They sell your eyes and your habits and your desires and your prejudices to anyone and everyone to do with as they please.
One is more nefarious and subject to abuse than the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhh, you're interrupting the synthetic reflexive outrage.
Or you found a LoJack box. Which is more likely?
wah wah someone else has more than I do
He seems pissed, not unintelligent. Can't say I blame him.
I can.
The complainer is a lowlife. The lowlife is pissed because someone has more than he does. The lowlife thinks that he is entitled to take other people's money. The lowlife thinks that people who spend their time trolling Slashdot (yes, I am aware of the irony) instead of learning how financial markets work, upgrading his skills, and in general developing a fucking work ethic, should get free money from people who... you know... work for a living, who build things instead of parasitize them, and who don't spend every last penny on Starbucks swill, glowy fans for their PCs, and beer. Here we have a lowlife who does not know that Gates has already transferred most of his wealth to his philanthropic foundation, and that he has already announced that his children will get "only" about ten million each... but hey! Who cares about truth when you can have outrage instead? Who cares about earning a living when you can just have the tax man take it from someone else and give it to you?
Yes, I'd say I can blame him. Or to paraphrase someone else, "read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book, buy some land, buy some land, buy some goddamned land, fuck spinning rims". It's not Bill Gates' job or obligation to subsidize stupidity or to sponsor the race to abandon all personal responsibility.
This is what happens when you compete on the basis of cost.
When it comes right down to it, there's not a lot to differentiate one Android phone from another. It's becoming a commodity market, and a phone buyer would be satisfied with any of several options. What would make someone choose one phone over another? Leaving out the fucktards who reflexively hate on Apple just because Apple doesn't place virgin tech-nerds on a pedestal, someone will choose one phone over another based upon:
That's about all there is.
If you have two phones with similar features, and one is cheaper than the other, you buy the cheaper phone. If you, the seller, want to not go out of business by losing money on every sale you have to reduce your cost of goods. Therefore, your build quality will suffer, and you end up with the situation the article describes.
If you have two phones with the same price, you'll buy the one with a better feature set. If you're packing more features into the same sale price, you're spending less on each feature. Therefore, to meet the price point, you're sacrificing quality. Once again, you end up with the described situation.
If you're choosing based upon carrier, and you're not buying the phone outright (i.e. you have a contract and a subsidized phone price) you have a limited selection. Since the carrier wants to maximize profit on a phone, they'll offer the models with the lowest wholesale cost. To meet that lower cost, the phone makers will cut corners. And... surprise, reliability suffers.
Therefore, as long as the phones are pretty much interchangeable from the user's point of view, price will loom large... and the price-race to the bottom will dominate everything else. Phone manufacturers aren't charities; they have to show a profit to stay in business. Therefore to meet lower prices, cost cutting must occur. This is what it means to exist in a commodity market with paper-thin margins, and to operate in a market where people are willing to buy crap.
Premium Android phones are just fine. The problem is that there are a lot of non-premium Android phones, and they get lumped in with the Nexus and Droid product lines. There's a bunch of no-name crap out there that is being pushed solely on the basis of the Android name, and it's ruining things for everybody involved.
Does everyone understand now why Apple doesn't participate in the market segments dominated by commodity items? Does everybody understand now why cheap Android phones break? Does everybody understand now why cheap Android phones exist at all? If you want quality, you MUST open your wallet. It costs money to make a good phone, and therefore it costs money to buy a good phone. Complaining at the top of your lungs doesn't make a good phone cheaper or a cheap phone better.
...isn't this EXACTLY what people have been saying for years is the proper way to ensure application security?
Why is it bad just because Apple is doing it? ...oh wait. Apple. I forgot, anything they do is bad just because they're Apple. Turn off the brain, because AppleHate doesn't require the overhead of... y'know... thought, truth, consistency.
God help anyone who has one of you people on a jury, because there is no way they would be judged fairly or on facts.
Critics and global warning denialists have been arguing for years...
"Denialist"? That's... inventive.
Look, there's no need to invent words when we have perfectly reasonable, time-honored words that convey the same intent. I think the one you're looking for is "heretic".
"green"
I worked my way through college. I did so by making photocopies at the local Kinko's, using community college for all general ed and lower-division courses, and not insisting that Little Princess Me wasn't ENTITLED to go to an Ivy-league-grade (and Ivy-league-expense) college; state university was fine. I drove a P.O.S. VW instead of a new car, I ate rice and beans and frozen vegetables, I shared a small apartment with a roommate instead of having my own place, and we didn't have cable TV. I rode a bike whenever the weather was good, and didn't spend on unnecessary crap. And I emerged debt-free. All it took was realization that it was 5 years not 4, and that I didn't get to live to the same standard that I would be living immediately after graduating. "Living like a student" does not mean "living in luxury", but it's not like living in a third-world shantytown either. People need to have their senses of entitlement recalibrated.
Why the hell can't anyone else? It wasn't that hard!
And if you get a student loan, you're taking other people's money. You've already SPENT other people's money. Why should someone be let off the hook for taking money and not repaying it?
I read it as "people are lazy motherfuckers who, as soon as they realize they can force someone else to subsidize them through the ballot box, will take-take-take-take. People don't want Fair, they want Free Stuff, and to hell with who has to pay for it or whether it bankrupts your society."
Forcing others to subsidize you is not noble just because the force is applied through the ballot box.
Okay.
"Get your hand out of my pocket."
"If you want to force me to give you money, do it the honest way and try to mug me, instead of hiding behind the badges of the police and the power of the tax collector."
"Why is it one "man one vote", but it's "fair" that I pay tens of thousands in income tax every year while half of all "taxpayers" don't pay income tax, and you're howling that I should pay even MORE?"
"Stop demanding that I subsidize you in the same breath that you demonize me."
"Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book, buy some land, buy some land, buy some goddamned land, FUCK SPINNING RIMS."
"If you dropped out of high school to push drugs, or majored in Underwater Basket Weaving/Humanities/Latin Left-Handed Shaman Women's Studies, it's YOUR fault you're poor, and you have no right to demand I support you."
Clear enough?
Allow me to summarize how this works:
[ ] Gimme!
[ ] I'm entitled!
[ ] Anybody who earns more money than me must have cheated, so yeah
[ ] Hanging chad
I think that sums it up nicely. Or, to quote someone a hell of a lot smarter than most people:
--Alexander Tytler
How the hell did they even think this would work?
I have family in New Orleans. They have horror stories about the pervasive, persistent abuses of power by the police and the gatekeepers of government. At times it seems to me that there is more in common between Louisiana and Haiti than between Louisiana and the United States. If it wasn't for the fact that New Orleans is the export point for all bulk goods from the Mississippi River and Ohio River basins, and where the Mississippi and the Intercoastal Waterway meet, it would be far more trouble than it is worth. But then, that positioning is exactly why Louisiana gets away with what it does.
We will have interstellar travel when we decide that interstellar travel is more important than bread-and-circuses, that personal responsibility is more rewarding than entitlements, and that "long term investing" involves a time period greater than one fiscal quarter.
...yeah. I'll get back to you on that.
That's the genius of ANY successful company. Wasting money and time is not the hallmark of a winner.
In today's news, the nation which sent a man to the moon, but can no longer put a man into orbit, is buying tickets on stunt-planes to recreate the Mercury suborbital missions.
Apparently, we're back in 1961. 50 years of "progress".
Hey, there are some good uses for this:
Put on a dummy to make sure you're seen somewhere else while I'm in ur kitchen takin ur cookies
Hold your mask in front of a facial recognition camera so I can be takin ur cookies
Back up my face before my horrible scarification ritual. Ur cookies aren't involved in this one.
You don't need a book for some of the most basic, important advice for usability... but a large number of developers seem to never have heard it.
Ready?
Do not look upon your users/customers with contempt.
This is a serious, widespread issue; just read the comments that techies have about people who are not themselves on places like ohhhh, say, Slashdot. Without sympathy for your customers, without a sense of humility in yourself, without the realization that people can be worthwhile, talented, productive and smart (yes, even smarter than YOU) yet not have the time or training or inclination to recompile their own Linux kernel or root their phone, you're going to produce awful user interfaces and workflows. You're going to amass a terrible reputation for bad customer support. You're going to have buggy software because you spend more time blaming the user than wondering if maybe your code isn't perfect.
And then you'll blame anyone except yourself.
All of the studies about icon size, color schemes, human motion studies, and cognitive science will be meaningless if you believe you need it "just because my customers are idiots".
The Santa Clara sheriff department shot and killed the guy that shot up the quarry in Cupertino yesterday. Couldn't they wait until he had shot the Westboro people too?
...what, do you think I'm joking?
Seriously.
On my Vista/64 box, I'm running F-Prot and SpyBot Search&Destroy. I just plain don't have problems with malware OR with security software bogging me down. I used to run AdAware also, but it started randomly jumping to 50% CPU usage and staying there, so that's off the list. Sorry, LavaSoft, your current quality sucks. In any event, it doesn't seem to have been necessary given the presence of the other two.
Mind you, I also patch.
IE9 is actually pretty good. Security-wise, it's currently doing better than FireFox. Where FFox has the advantage is plugins, but certainly not security or stability. I can't remember the last time I had IE9 crash on me. With FireFox, it's about once every 3-4 days, and IE9 also has the advantage in memory usage. I like FireFox's UI a bit better, but if they don't stop with the BS behavior and poor quality I'm dumping it altogether.
When I'm on my Mac, I run Safari and have no problems whatsoever. If you run Windows, avoid Safari like the plague; it's slow, unstable, memory-hogging and in general a piss-poor port. Certainly NOT the equal of Safari/OSX.
Getting back to your original question... it all depends upon how comfortable you are with minimal/obviously-designed-by-a-coder-not-a-UI-designer user interfaces. Clam AV seems to be fine for folks who found OpenWindows to be "easy and intuitive". Personally, I think that the 29 bucks per year I spend on F-Prot is money well spent, plus it covers all of my Windows boxes with the one fee (I think you're allowed up to five machines).
But FireFox is a 32-bit application...
Oh you mean "Americans other than myself". Those OTHERS. Those "everybody except superior, smug me".
Funny how all the expert economists hold jobs in IT that let them troll Slashdot, and all the "idiots" are the ones who are running the country. Funny how all those superior Europeans (you know, the ones who have spent the Eurozone into oblivion through entitlements and bread-and-circuses and the alleged "superior math education") are now facing waves of national debt defaults and bank failures. How could that possibly have happened? I mean... they're not stupid Americans, they're SUPERIOR!
Let's see how everyone does when the flow of stupid-American money stops and they realize just how much of the Socialist Paradise floated on the not-so-endless stream of greenbacks.
Fifth circle. Bureaucracy, deflection of responsibility. Alternatively, eighth circle sixth bolgia (hypocrites)
Eighth circle, second bolgia for operating system fanboys, phone/computer platform fanboys, operating system haters, and phone/computer platform haters. Regardless of which platform and operating system the fanboys and haters hold forth upon, it's all lies and shit.
Double depth for falsely accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a fanboy. Though there's certainly applicability of the sixth, eighth, ninth (especially forum trolls) and tenth.
Amazon sells books and rice-steamers and USB cables.
Facebook and Google sell YOU. They sell your eyes and your habits and your desires and your prejudices to anyone and everyone to do with as they please.
One is more nefarious and subject to abuse than the other.