"Free" software is irrelevant when you have to spend about $2000 per seat to train your users to use the new software because it's not backwards compatible with what they are used to dealing with. Hence the still small adoption rate by business, most of which is still running fine on Win7... even companies like HP.
But then Microsoft bought Nokia so it could take over the phone business... hey, how did that work out for them, anyway? (Intel also tried and failed to get into the mobile phone business).
WIMP will soon be irrelevant, the newer generation has all been trained to use multitouch. Microsoft tried to build an operating system that supported both, and failed miserably at doing both well.
For those of us that were _used_ to using Win7, it's not that much of an improvement. One of the flaws in Microsoft's strategy is that if you're going to force business to retrain all there computer users every couple years because the user interface in the latest incarnation of Windows is so different from the previous version... then it's really a lot cheaper to switch to Linux and only have to retrain your users once! The other problem is the Microsoft, like Sun before it, is now struggling to find a business model that works for them, ignoring the fact that it would be better for stockholders to split the company so that the applications division could work on cross-platform applications instead of promoting Microsoft lock-in.
It's kind of a silly business model. You should either pay for shrink-wrapped software and get free server access, or get the software for free and pay for server time. Paying for software, then having to pay a monthly fee to actually USE that software, seems kind of dishonest to me. People should just pay for server time to cover the recurring costs of running the servers, and software should be given away for free to leverage server time sales, just like software used to be given away for free to leverage hardware sales.
Currently, the price of the best PC gaming video card (GTX 1080) is more than twice the price of a new Xbox One... do the math. I would like to see PS4 and Xbox come out with VR goggle support, however.
Xbox One was a decent platform for Grand Theft auto, although it could have used better antialiasing. The benefit of a console is that they are not obsolete a year later, unlike high end PC GPU cards that cost more than a console to begin with.
The assertion that "crimes aren't being solved because we can't hack suspects phones" is based on the unproven assumption that the suspects were stupid enough to leave information that could convict them on their phones in the first place. Until you actually access all the data on the phone, you don't know whether or not that is true, do you? For all the DA knows, all these people he wants to crack the phones of are innocent!
That's pretty much my take on it as well. Yes, at some point even Hillary would have to admit that mistakes were made (by her), which may cast doubt on her judgement. But nothing she has done that we actually have any credible evidence of rises to the level of justifying time in a federal prison. Probably something closer to fines for mishandling of classified material. As far as Benghazi, I don't follow the logic of holding one person solely responsible for the safety of all State Department staff, and giving everyone else a complete pass. Could she have done better? Yes. Does this disqualify her to be president? No, no more than Trump's draft dodging disqualifies him to be president.
Reminds me of the time the IOC sued "The Gay Olympics" and made them change their name to "The Gay Games". Apparently it IS possible to own the rights to a word that has been in common use for thousands of years. And apparently you can pick and choose what organizations can use that word (e.g. how much does the Special Olympics pay for the use of the trademark?)
Other than Trademark law, how exactly is this ban enforceable? I suspect legally companies are free to tweet anything they want as long as they don't include terms specifically trademarked by the IOC, much as advertisers referred to the Superbowl as "the big game" instead of the trademarked "Superbowl" term.
Yes, the statistics are misleading because it is much easier for a startup to double their market cap than for a long-established company in a mature industry to do so. IBM and HP have seen declining revenues every year for several years now... it doesn't mean they are badly run, it just means you can't continue to make 40% margins forever in the same industry. Amazon and Google avoid the mature technology trap by CONSTANTLY starting experimental new businesses, then liberally tossing out the ones that don't work out.
CEOs should be paid minimum wage + stock options, meaning if they don't increase shareholder value, they are the lowest paid people in the company. If you're promising to put money in shareholder's pockets, shouldn't you be willing to put your money where your mouth is? How much money did Marissa Mayer walk away with in exchange for her ineffective leadership of Yahoo? Whatever amount it was, it was way too much!
I watched surveyors yesterday carrying around a portable plastic antenna; they said it was a GPS "rover". Which begs the question, how accurate is GPS? Do surveyors have access to the non-dithered GPS signal? Or are they only using it for relative positioning from a marked location, which is probably a lot more accurate than using it for absolute position?
I'm less concerned about my exact location being sent in emergencies than by the fact that my phone can now be hacked to provide by exact location AT ALL TIMES. Do I now need to carry my phone around in a Faraday cage? (By the way, my phone was able to "see" WiFi routers at work even inside the very expensive Faraday cage that HP had built, although I was told that was only because the door wasn't sealed properly.)
You have 10 fingers. Use any finger except for the obvious one (right index finger), and you can pretty much guarantee the fingerprint scan will fail. Of course, you have to have the foresight to not use the obvious finger to program the fingerprint scanner BEFORE the court demands you unlock the phone, so this helps actual criminals a lot more than innocent civilians, but still... I need to redo my fingerprint scanner data.
And that, my friends, is why I also use my middle finger instead of my index finger as input to my phone's fingerprint scanner.! How many times does it need to fail before the phone locks you out? My phone requires a PIN code, not a fingerprint, every time it gets turned back on, and after updating software as well. Seems like a court order to "put your finger on the fingerprint scanner" would be VERY easy to make fail to actually unlock the phone, and charging with contempt of court for the phone not recognizing your fingerprint seems pretty shaky to me.
The use they actually used it for sounds legitimate: somebody tells you "I have explosives!", you send in a robot with C4 to trigger the explosives when nobody else is around. I'm sure there are many other legitimate law enforcement uses of explosives (Fairly Honest Dan's Machine Gun Parlor used to specialize in providing explosives to law enforcement), but not being in law enforcement myself, I can't think of them all.
Slightly different case. They didn't charge her because there was no INTENT to violate the law, not because she was ignorant of the law. Other secretaries of state have also set up their own email servers, which may have led her to believe it was legal to do so. I would have checked first, but I'm not really sure who you're supposed to ask about things like this. Also, not really sure her private email server was any less secure than the State Department's email server, but I would have kept State Department and private emails separate regardless.
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"Free" software is irrelevant when you have to spend about $2000 per seat to train your users to use the new software because it's not backwards compatible with what they are used to dealing with. Hence the still small adoption rate by business, most of which is still running fine on Win7... even companies like HP.
But then Microsoft bought Nokia so it could take over the phone business... hey, how did that work out for them, anyway? (Intel also tried and failed to get into the mobile phone business). WIMP will soon be irrelevant, the newer generation has all been trained to use multitouch. Microsoft tried to build an operating system that supported both, and failed miserably at doing both well.
For those of us that were _used_ to using Win7, it's not that much of an improvement. One of the flaws in Microsoft's strategy is that if you're going to force business to retrain all there computer users every couple years because the user interface in the latest incarnation of Windows is so different from the previous version... then it's really a lot cheaper to switch to Linux and only have to retrain your users once! The other problem is the Microsoft, like Sun before it, is now struggling to find a business model that works for them, ignoring the fact that it would be better for stockholders to split the company so that the applications division could work on cross-platform applications instead of promoting Microsoft lock-in.
Internet Explorer is STILL the worlds most widely used browser used for installing better browsers!
Not so much "runs" as "limps"...
I'm having problems passing the 4K video through my RF modulator... please help!
It's kind of a silly business model. You should either pay for shrink-wrapped software and get free server access, or get the software for free and pay for server time. Paying for software, then having to pay a monthly fee to actually USE that software, seems kind of dishonest to me. People should just pay for server time to cover the recurring costs of running the servers, and software should be given away for free to leverage server time sales, just like software used to be given away for free to leverage hardware sales.
Currently, the price of the best PC gaming video card (GTX 1080) is more than twice the price of a new Xbox One... do the math. I would like to see PS4 and Xbox come out with VR goggle support, however.
Thanks for dropping the price of the original Xbox One to $249, right after I bought a used Xbox One... for $249!
Some people can do math, and some people just do meth...
Xbox One was a decent platform for Grand Theft auto, although it could have used better antialiasing. The benefit of a console is that they are not obsolete a year later, unlike high end PC GPU cards that cost more than a console to begin with.
Be sure to tip your waitress! I'll be here all week!
The assertion that "crimes aren't being solved because we can't hack suspects phones" is based on the unproven assumption that the suspects were stupid enough to leave information that could convict them on their phones in the first place. Until you actually access all the data on the phone, you don't know whether or not that is true, do you? For all the DA knows, all these people he wants to crack the phones of are innocent!
That's pretty much my take on it as well. Yes, at some point even Hillary would have to admit that mistakes were made (by her), which may cast doubt on her judgement. But nothing she has done that we actually have any credible evidence of rises to the level of justifying time in a federal prison. Probably something closer to fines for mishandling of classified material. As far as Benghazi, I don't follow the logic of holding one person solely responsible for the safety of all State Department staff, and giving everyone else a complete pass. Could she have done better? Yes. Does this disqualify her to be president? No, no more than Trump's draft dodging disqualifies him to be president.
And yet Olympic Paint is still in business (www.olympic.com). I wonder for how much longer?
Reminds me of the time the IOC sued "The Gay Olympics" and made them change their name to "The Gay Games". Apparently it IS possible to own the rights to a word that has been in common use for thousands of years. And apparently you can pick and choose what organizations can use that word (e.g. how much does the Special Olympics pay for the use of the trademark?)
Other than Trademark law, how exactly is this ban enforceable? I suspect legally companies are free to tweet anything they want as long as they don't include terms specifically trademarked by the IOC, much as advertisers referred to the Superbowl as "the big game" instead of the trademarked "Superbowl" term.
Yes, the statistics are misleading because it is much easier for a startup to double their market cap than for a long-established company in a mature industry to do so. IBM and HP have seen declining revenues every year for several years now... it doesn't mean they are badly run, it just means you can't continue to make 40% margins forever in the same industry. Amazon and Google avoid the mature technology trap by CONSTANTLY starting experimental new businesses, then liberally tossing out the ones that don't work out.
CEOs should be paid minimum wage + stock options, meaning if they don't increase shareholder value, they are the lowest paid people in the company. If you're promising to put money in shareholder's pockets, shouldn't you be willing to put your money where your mouth is? How much money did Marissa Mayer walk away with in exchange for her ineffective leadership of Yahoo? Whatever amount it was, it was way too much!
I watched surveyors yesterday carrying around a portable plastic antenna; they said it was a GPS "rover". Which begs the question, how accurate is GPS? Do surveyors have access to the non-dithered GPS signal? Or are they only using it for relative positioning from a marked location, which is probably a lot more accurate than using it for absolute position?
I'm less concerned about my exact location being sent in emergencies than by the fact that my phone can now be hacked to provide by exact location AT ALL TIMES. Do I now need to carry my phone around in a Faraday cage? (By the way, my phone was able to "see" WiFi routers at work even inside the very expensive Faraday cage that HP had built, although I was told that was only because the door wasn't sealed properly.)
You have 10 fingers. Use any finger except for the obvious one (right index finger), and you can pretty much guarantee the fingerprint scan will fail. Of course, you have to have the foresight to not use the obvious finger to program the fingerprint scanner BEFORE the court demands you unlock the phone, so this helps actual criminals a lot more than innocent civilians, but still... I need to redo my fingerprint scanner data.
And that, my friends, is why I also use my middle finger instead of my index finger as input to my phone's fingerprint scanner.! How many times does it need to fail before the phone locks you out? My phone requires a PIN code, not a fingerprint, every time it gets turned back on, and after updating software as well. Seems like a court order to "put your finger on the fingerprint scanner" would be VERY easy to make fail to actually unlock the phone, and charging with contempt of court for the phone not recognizing your fingerprint seems pretty shaky to me.
The use they actually used it for sounds legitimate: somebody tells you "I have explosives!", you send in a robot with C4 to trigger the explosives when nobody else is around. I'm sure there are many other legitimate law enforcement uses of explosives (Fairly Honest Dan's Machine Gun Parlor used to specialize in providing explosives to law enforcement), but not being in law enforcement myself, I can't think of them all.
Slightly different case. They didn't charge her because there was no INTENT to violate the law, not because she was ignorant of the law. Other secretaries of state have also set up their own email servers, which may have led her to believe it was legal to do so. I would have checked first, but I'm not really sure who you're supposed to ask about things like this. Also, not really sure her private email server was any less secure than the State Department's email server, but I would have kept State Department and private emails separate regardless.