I can understand why YouTube feels it needs to take these legal actions... but in the end, it's just symbolic gesturing.
In the "real world", the very fact you've allowed a video clip to be transmitted from YouTube's server to a client on the other end in a viewable format means the receiver has the technical ability to save a copy of it.
The "low hanging fruit" for their legal team to go after are the web based services offering to make this process easy, since they're effectively advertising to the whole world that they're enabling an illegal activity. Sitting on branches just a little further up are the folks writing plug-ins or extensions for browsers advertising the same functionality. (In those cases, I think we'll wind up with a legal battle, as soon as one of those developers wants to fight rather than give in. If nothing else, I think that's because there's a subtle difference between distributing code that *allows* someone to download/save the video content, and hosting a server that's actually DOING it for users.)
Personally, I think that YouTube will have to move to some sort of encrypted video transmission method if they want to get serious about preventing people from saving videos to redistribute. (EG. You have to install a YouTube app in order to look at videos on the site.) Even with THAT, it only gives the level of copy protection used by services such as AT&T U-Verse with its Cisco set-top boxes. (You won't be able to dump the data saved in its DVR's hard drive to any other device and watch it. But it can't stop something like a VCR or DVD recorder from copying the video and audio coming out of the box, headed for your television.)
Anyone can write software that acts as a "middle man" (similar to the VCR concept) that grabs each frame of video from the video card as it's displaying it on your screen and saved it to a new video file, while doing the same with the audio headed to the sound card output.
The majority of American libertarians have what I'd call "a couple BIG gripes", actually. Among them is the idea that we need to get rid of the Federal Reserve as manager/manipulator of our currency. I don't think there's almost anyone on the Republican ticket who is really ready to fight that battle.
Until it's taken serious though, it allows Federal government to print more currency "on demand", to cover expenses for initiatives it can't actually afford -- and THAT means there's no real possibility for a small, limited central government that isn't overstepping its boundaries.
Do I think it really makes any sense forcing all kids to "learn to code" in grade school? No. But this is really just a sign of the bigger, looming problem. As technology progresses, we're going to start losing a whole lot of low to middle income jobs to automation. (The ZeroHedge web site just published an article a few days ago where they claim in something like 47 of the 50 states in the U.S., the most popular career is "truck driver". Imagine all of those jobs disappearing as self-driving 18-wheelers and delivery vans/trucks start hitting the roads. And with the big push for "cleaner/greener energy", we're killing off the coal companies. But what many people haven't really considered is that as coal production dies out in America, it doesn't just mean a loss of jobs for the coal miners. It means a few big nails in the coffin for freight rail too. The rail system does a LOT of coal delivery right now, and I don't know of any other product of the same size/volume that would start traveling by rail to replace it? And none of this even touches the "hot topic" of automating all the fast food jobs.)
Meanwhile, about the only "replacement career" I've heard mentioned for all of this is software coding. (Slashdot just recently had an article talking about a former coal miner who became a software developer, in fact.) Everyone in business or politics is grasping at coding as the "savior" for all of these other jobs going by the wayside. I guess it makes sense to an extent. If you're going to automate everything from vehicles driving themselves to robots serving up your food orders, you're going to need people writing and maintaining all the code that makes those things function. But how much continuous employment will it really create?! We all know already from decades of people learning to code that many people who voluntarily chose to do aren't very good at it. Lots of "spaghetti code" and poorly documented code to go around out there.... If you try to make everyone "fluent" in software languages, that doesn't mean the majority of them will actually put in the time and effort required to be really good at it. They'll just know enough to write pretty inefficient, buggy code.
In fact, I think the comparison between learning to speak and write in a second language and learning to code in a computer language isn't even a very good one. If you want to be really successful as a software developer, it's about more than knowing the mechanics of the language. You have to have imagination and vision too. Otherwise, you might be able to change existing code to do specific things someone requests of you, and you might be able to write something new that meets a list of requirements -- but you won't rise above mediocrity. (That's why so much of that kind of coding is outsourced to cheap H1B labor to begin with.) The software devs who really "matter" are the men and women who created something unique that many, many people saw in action and said "Hey... I want to run that on MY computer!" They pushed the limits of what a computer could do within a set of hardware parameters and made people think more highly of the hardware itself. Or sometimes, they just made something that was beautiful in its simplicity. They took things a direction people didn't expect and impressed the users. Learning to master additional human languages has automatic value, simply because it increases your pool of other human beings you can communicate with. It's not the same when you learn to speak the computer's language, because the computer is a "one way street". It only follows your instructions. It doesn't give automatic benefits by way of carrying on a 2 way conversation with you as humans can do.
I never even knew that existed before. Will check it out. But does OpenStreetMap have an iOS app like Google Maps does? That's kind of important, IMO -- as I"m usually out and about already when I need to look up a location.
Not disagreeing, but it does seem like a case of "pot, meet kettle" when you start pointing fingers about the inefficiency of one of these technologies vs the other.
If you're going to charge your electric car from solar panels on the roof of your house, you're talking about panels that are only 20% efficient or so at converting sunlight into power. Then you take that power through an inverter (because you want household AC current from them, not the DC they original output), causing further losses. Then you feed the power into a battery, creating more losses. The only reason people don't seem to mind is because the sun's energy is free to begin with. (But you spent quite a bit on the infrastructure allowing you to harness it, so you've really got to factor that into the equation.)
All in all, I think it's pretty obvious that we'd have an easier transition to electric vehicles than hydrogen powered ones -- but that comes down to the fact that we're already using electricity for lots of other things. I don't know anyone using hydrogen to power their home or what-not.
Yeah.... makes perfect sense. One thing even my own daughter noticed in middle school though is, all Chromebooks are far from equal. One district she attended school in for a while had really flimsy, cheap Chromebooks that were often breaking down. Another had very nice, solid feeling variants. The main difference between those districts was the tax base in each. The wealthier district had the higher-end Chromebooks in use.
With a Macbook Air, at least you know pretty much what you're getting. Very arguably more than what's needed in a school setting these days -- but it "is what it is". (For our medium sized business, it's a pretty solid all around notebook option for our staff. But we're using Office/Outlook all day long, among other things. Not just web based apps.)
I have to admit that I haven't really spent a lot of time delving into the details... but I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 9350 (Skylake core i7 CPU) with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Got a really good deal on it during a sale for Costco members and couldn't turn it down.
I'm wondering if there's a Linux distro that really works well with this yet, or do I need to give it more time?
I assume this new kernel was a piece of the puzzle for it, but I also heard there were issues with support for some of the features on the laptop. Is the built-in webcam working yet? Any audio issues? How is the 4K display w/touchscreen support?
The reason I moved away from Linux on any of my laptops was the common situation where "It works great except X, Y, and Z are broken." I don't want surprises like it not waking from sleep properly or the wi-fi not working or what have you. To me, those are deal-breakers vs. just using Windows on it instead and having everything function as intended.
And wow.... I expected more from the Slashdot crowd than dismissing these ideas out of hand. (I'm glad I'm part of a "Technolibertarians" group on Facebook where there's much more thought-provoking discussion on this topic than anything found here.)
How did colonization work in the past, when people were still figuring out what was out there in other parts of our own planet? Did only the "best and brightest" board ships to take that journey? No! It was the domain of risk-takers and people who felt they had little to lose. It was generally the wealthy who sat at home, in their status quo existence, and FUNDED the explorers in the hopes of a potentially big financial return.
With all of the research on space travel trapped inside the domain of NASA, everything creeped along at the pace of approved funding by politicians (who generally couldn't excite the public enough to agree to pay higher taxes for it). The lunar missions were the highlight of the whole thing, and they only happened because of the motivation to outshine the enemy (Communist Russia) in the "space race".
I think privatized space travel is ABSOLUTELY the right answer for things to move forward today. Initially, sure... only the wealthy will be able to afford it. But that's how ALL new technology works. Early-adopters pay premium prices to have or do things first, paving the way for mainstream acceptance.
And colonization of a new planet doesn't mean launching little shuttles carrying 200-250 people or so at a time, over and over again, to get a decent number of them to the destination. (Someone above claimed the whole thing was unworkable for that reason.) What you'd probably do is establish a large space station in orbit at a launching point, first. It would probably be tethered to the Earth via a "space elevator" technology. Without the huge fuel costs of trying to make relatively large craft break through Earth's atmosphere, you could easily have transport ships leave and dock with the station in orbit on a regular basis.
There would be plenty of good paying jobs created by this whole new space travel industry, just as the airline industry created MANY new jobs or the railroads before that. I don't really see A.I. and robotics taking over ALL jobs. Rather, it will take over all of them that don't require a lot of thought and subjective considerations when making choices. Self piloting spacecraft still require humans to program the code that makes them go, for example. And I doubt the whole transportation scheme would be thought up and implemented by robots with no human intervention....
I totally agree, except I think many of the people trying to hang on out there are still living the dream / fantasy that they've got a shot at being one of the tech "elite".
It's not unlike Hollywood. If you're an aspiring actor, actress or filmmaker, you can practice your craft ANYWHERE in the country, and nearly anywhere for less money than it would cost you to try to live near or in Hollywood. But chances are, you'll need to get out there to meet face-to-face with other big players you need to know in order to make it onto the big screen via any of the major production companies.
(If you just want to do independent film? Then yeah, who cares? You'll have a less stress-filled life doing that elsewhere.)
Personally, I quit aspiring to be the next mover and shaker of the tech world sometime in my late 20's. I still love doing I.T. but I prefer my current situation where I live in a small town where you get a 2,200 sq. foot house for a little over $200,000, there's beautiful scenery, historical places to see nearby, and a sub 6-figure salary as a network/system admin. is enough to get by and raise a family. No prestige of working for a Google, an Apple or a Facebook -- but the job is stable and I even wound up working with a couple of long-time friends.
That *is* the usual pattern I've found. Take high level position and mismanage business into the ground. Get hired someplace else to rinse and repeat, because your connections at that level "look out for each other".
The core problem with "wealth redistribution" is it's an idea that's inherently unfair to those who work to earn their money under a system that exchanges currency for labor.
In a true "post capitalist" economy, where the need for labor has largely been eliminated? Sure, it becomes an obsolete concern. But there sure are a lot of socialists out there trying to pretend we're actually IN this post-capitalist economy today, in an attempt to use FUD to tear countries like the United States away from Capitalism prematurely.
LONG before "the machines take all our jobs", we're going to see raised expectations of what a human being should do to earn pay. Automation will slowly weed out the "mindless work" that pays you to use your body but not your brain. And as I commented in an earlier post? I think technological advances that enable this robotic and A.I. takeover of jobs will also enable space exploration/travel. It should become a very real option to "move to Mars" or some other planet we've picked to colonize - and there will be PLENTY of new jobs created by such an undertaking.
I actually look forward to a world with raised expectations about the level of thought/education people are expected to have to do something constructive in society for pay! If you can't function at a higher level than a machine designed to repetitively do a limited set of tasks, you probably need to challenge yourself to aspire to more.
You know? As clever as people can be, we're still amazingly bad at "thinking outside the box" at times.
There's this entire universe out there, yet we're all assuming we have no way to ever go anyplace but this one planet we're on.
For the first time in history, we've privatized space travel and we have multiple competing businesses working on the problem. By the time we've developed enough A.I. and robotics to "take most of our jobs away", I'd sure hope we also figured out how to colonize at least one other planet. That sounds like a rather big project to me, creating a LOT of new job opportunities and eliminating "overcrowding" on the current planet.
I agree that a poor economy is a big part of the problem. They said the lower income people are deciding they "don't need a tablet" in droves. (This was absolutely NOT the case when the iPad was a new product and cheaper Android tablets were first hitting the scene.) I think this is largely because these people tried buying the devices in the hopes they'd be a worthy substitute for buying a more costly computer system. And after trying that out for a while? They realized that Android or iOS just isn't the same thing as Windows or Mac OS X. Tablets are basically just cellphones without the cellular radio but with oversized display screens. And sure, you can buy bluetooth keyboard cases for them and pens for some of them, but that's even more money to spend to still have something that's "nice, but not quite equivalent to a full blown PC or Mac" - and runs all the same software your smartphone can run. When money is really tight, you're likely to say "Hey... I get the most use out of my smartphone. Let's sell off that used iPad and forget about that thing moving forward. The smartphone has cellular data everywhere I go without paying more for a second data plan (if the tablet is even equipped with cellular) and I'll live with the small screen."
At the same time, my experience has been the people with less money are still looking for computers (laptops for the kids for school, or maybe even a gaming PC for home) - but they're serving as the "used computer recyclers", taking what's discarded by the middle to upper class people as they upgrade. It's a whole demographic soaking up some of the excess "old but still serviceable" gear and not contributing to new PC sales. I just sold a Windows gaming PC to a family like that last week. The kid really wanted a PC at home to use for school and gaming. Dad was too broke to afford anything suitable, but between him and grandma/grandpa, they came up with $350 to put towards something. Obviously, this wasn't happening with anything being sold new.... a good 3D graphics card can set you back that much, by itself! Since I'd already re-purposed a former Litecoin mining rig as a gaming PC for one of our kids, and she wasn't using it much anymore? I told the guy I'd let him have it for $350, complete with the 24" LCD monitor I had attached to it. (I figure hey... it made me a few hundred bucks as a coin miner a couple years ago. And my kid got some use out of it. Why not take the $350 and help pass it on to the next kid who will really enjoy and appreciate it?)
But the other part of the problem is a lack of innovation by the manufacturers. The people who DO have disposable income are only going to get motivated to spend it if you show them something cool and new they didn't think they wanted/needed until they saw it in action. They're all quite familiar with what a Windows PC or a Mac does, and such things as more hard drive space and a faster CPU are meaningless when there's no amazing software out that demands those things as minimum requirements. Apple got a little bit of traction with the whole "Retina display" thing (which the general PC market now hawks as 4K displays). But ultimately? A lot of people just recently bought a 27" screen when prices fell enough so it was a "no brainer" to buy and upgrade from something smaller. They're not chomping at the bit to upgrade displays yet again, in most cases. And on laptops, the super high resolution causes new issues. (My Dell XPS 13's high res display with Win 10 has all sorts of problems displaying older Java apps with fonts too small to read because the JRE didn't know how to scale up. The Surface Pro 4's I've seen require you log off and back on again whenever docking or undocking, so the screen will scale appropriately for the external or built-in display as you switch between them. It's not handled gracefully, "on the fly".)
I feel like GPUs are still weak link with everything. Any mobile graphics processor is slow and weak compared to a desktop counterpart -- mainly because of thermal challenge
Another Mac user here (and I really enjoyed CoD 4 on the Mac as well as Modern Warfare 2). I agree though... the whole CoD franchise was about paying enough homage to real warfare so people appreciated it for the elements of realism. Not saying they didn't bend some rules about how easy it was to run with a particular weapon or what-not, for the sake of keeping the game fun to play. But yes, it was good enough so folks who served in the military could play them and feel like it respected what they did and had to work with.
I know a guy over on a Jeep Wrangler forum who bought the "Call of Duty" special edition of the Wrangler. He talked about how much the game meant to him, because as he played through the campaign, he saw missions playing out that were dead-on accurate recreations of situations his friends actually encountered and recounted to him when he served in the military. He could relate to some of the characters in the game and so forth. When he completed the game, he admitted to it making him cry a little bit. That's when he knew he had to own the version of the Jeep that went with the game.
Is the new Battlefield still going to use a web UI as the "main control panel / console" like they've done with the others?
For some reason, I really dislike that. I know you can play the game itself full-screen so it shouldn't really matter, but there's just something about it I find jarring? I guess I'm used to 2+ decades of games designed so everything having to do with the program is part of the program. Feels like they took shortcuts just launching my browser and doing some of the stuff in there.
Our family is pretty much all on Apple products. We have 3 kids who use iPads or iPhones regularly and my wife and I work in I.T. and both own Mac desktops and laptops. We're also all into music and my wife and I both have large music collections in iTunes on our primary computers.
So when Apple Music was first released with the 3 month free trial, we jumped at the chance. BIG mistake! We set up the "family account" pretty quickly, realizing that would be a better value. Problem was, soon afterwards, my wife's iCloud account essentially locked her out of all of her purchased content of ALL types. On any given Apple device, if she signed in with it, it would work (at most) for a few seconds, and then cancel any updates that were downloading and/or freeze up.
That became a nightmare of putting in multiple support tickets with Apple and not getting any resolution or promised callbacks. Meanwhile, it meant that 10+ years worth of applications, movies and music content she'd paid for was rendered useless. The obvious culprit was Apple Music. The problem only happened after she enabled it on her account and it started trying to sync all of her music content.
At the Genius Bar, a tech spent over an hour trying to help with the issue. He gave her a brand new iPhone 6 AND a brand new iPad, insisting it HAD to be some sort of hardware malfunction or glitch. But nope... same issue crept up on the new devices shortly after she signed in to them.
At that point, someone in Engineering finally called us back (guess they got irritated the store was giving us thousands of dollars of unnecessary new hardware and not getting anywhere). They promised they were "working on it" and "had an idea where something was wrong". All of a sudden, her ID just started working properly again. No explanation was ever given.
No.... So far, nobody has ever come to us asking about a Linux PC (or any other Unix flavor).
We do, however, run Linux in "virtual appliance" form for several things, including the central administration console for our ESET anti-virus solution on the Windows computers. (ESET primarily supports a Windows Server based application for that, but they also offer it as a Linux VM image -- which we decided made more sense for us to run.)
I doubt we would formally/officially support Linux on an employee's PC though, simply because of the lack of native support for things like Microsoft Office. (We use hosted Exchange email and with all of the meeting scheduling, calendar sharing, contacts published from Public Folders, delegates handling things on behalf of others, etc. -- we can't really trust 3rd. party mail clients that claim to be "Exchange compatible" to behave 100% correctly in all of those scenarios.) Also, I don't think Adobe Illustrator runs natively in Linux and that's needed by at least some of our staff.
Yes, but ultimately, what's the use? If I keep running hacks or disabling all critical updates in an attempt to keep MS from upgrading me off of Windows 7? I'm still quickly reaching the point where I'm running an OS that's 2 versions old and Microsoft will end support for.
Some people will be ok with this, I guess --- just like a certain percentage of people still run Windows XP. But you're on borrowed time ANY time you decide to get off the moving "Microsoft upgrade train" and stay put at one "station". Eventually, the train leaves you in the dust and you have to fend for yourself with dwindling driver support for peripherals, no security patches, and new software that hasn't been designed or tested to run properly on your OS.
I sure can't buy any brand new PC that still ships with Windows 7 on it, either. (Well, not without going to extremes and buying "old stock" from some small company that has some left or what-not.) So while I might just employ some of these hacking tactics to prevent a forced Win 10 upgrade today - my long-term goal becomes looking at alternatives. (For me, that's generally been Apple Mac, but Linux fill the bill in some cases too.)
I work in I.T. for a company that does marketing and corporate events.
We've long held a policy that we're "platform agnostic". If you start work with us, we give you your choice of a Mac or a Windows laptop as your machine. (We also had a policy of issuing people an iPad when they started, but that really came about because we had a division writing a few custom iOS apps for our clients. It made sense for our people to be familiar with what we were selling. Moving forward, I see the company issued iPad possibly going away, because we no longer do the custom app coding, and most people seem to own one already anyway.)
For 90% of the software our employees use, it really makes little difference which system they choose. So much is cloud-based or web-based these days, and you can run Microsoft Office or any of Adobe's products on either platform. The Mac users have a built-in advantage that they can edit PDF documents without the need of additional software. ("Preview" that comes with OS X as the default PDF viewer supports re-ordering pages in a PDF, deleting pages from one, and annotating or adding a digital signature.) In I.T., we've grown to like OmniGraffle Pro and standardized on it to do all of our network diagrams. (Although, if we decided to use Windows for that task, we could do the same thing in Visio Pro.)
As is so often pointed out, the Macs are far less vulnerable to malware/spyware - so that's a plus for us too. (Yes, I know... Someone who hates the Mac will pull out a list of the viruses and spyware designed for OS X. It does exist. But it's just not something we have to deal with much. On Windows, the battle is real. Out of all of the crypto-locker issues you've heard of in the news recently, how many of those happened to Mac users? As far as I know, zero.)
If you're arguing about the cost of a Mac vs. a Windows machine? I think for corporate use, you're really looking at it wrong from the get-go. Realistically, how purchasing happens in our company and every company I've worked for is like this: A certain budget is approved for I.T. to spend on equipment for users. The only "goal" is to get the employees the tech tools they need within that budget. The fact we could buy Dell laptop X for several hundred bucks less than Apple laptop Y is immaterial, as long as we have a way to juggle everything around so it all comes in under the budget total. When we look at things like the lack of a need for an anti-virus license for the Mac laptop and a lack of a need for a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro to edit PDFs, the Mac is already looking like a wash vs. the cost of the Window alternative. Even if that weren't the case, though? I.T. would have to look at the big picture and decide which computers cost the company more in total hours of support needed as people used them. That's a *really* tough thing to nail down because so much goes into it that often is ignored. EG. How long does someone in I.T. have to spend on hold on the phone getting a warranty repair going for something that broke on a given computer? (That's one area where we do generally spend less time getting a broken Mac serviced than we do a broken Windows PC. Especially when we had HP, the hold times were awful!)
As a brand new product category for the company and a revision A product, nobody buying the Apple Watch on launch day *really* knew what they were getting. Sure, we saw the Keynote presentation and the marketing material. But there's no substitute for actually using a product yourself for a while on a daily basis, to form an educated opinion.
Like a lot of people, I think I primarily wanted the watch because I realized Apple had a long track record of selling products that wound up being real game-changers. (When the first iPod classic came out, I didn't see why I cared that much about it either. But when I got my hands on one, it was interesting enough that I wanted to own one. And eventually, it became the definitive mobile music playing device. To this day, I still use one in my Jeep because the factory stereo has nice support for it.)
In reality? Yeah, it's maddening when you flick your wrist to look at the time and the watch doesn't light up. I've learned I can almost always get it to "wake up" and show me the display if I tap on the screen though -- and that's becoming second-nature now. It pretty much stinks when it comes to running 3rd. party apps. They're too slow and usually too clumsy to get around in. There are a FEW exceptions (usually programs where the watch app is appropriately used as a remote control with just 1, 2 or maybe 3 buttons for options you want easy access to toggle). But as a rule? If they expect you to scroll around the watch face and/or manipulate the "crown" -- it's just not worth bothering with. It's not THAT tough to just take your phone out of your pocket and go to it for the better user experience.
It's pretty decent at things like taking my pulse and doing basic fitness tracking. It's great at showing me the next thing coming up on my calendar, every time I check the time. It's handy when I need to see a text message without touching the phone (like when driving).
So all in all? I can justify wearing and keeping it. But it's not that amazing. Just ok.
The stats on hardware sales for the last couple years kept indicating slumps in most Windows PC maker's sales, with Apple the only hardware manufacturer still reporting good sales figures.
At some point, if more people keep buying new Macs instead of new Windows machines, we should see the OS usage stats changing for Windows too.
I don't doubt a number of people also went to Linux when they got frustrated with things about Windows 10. But statistically, I doubt it made the dent that OS X did. (One of my friends just dumped Win 10 in favor of the latest Ubuntu, but he's already angry with some issues he ran into with it. So not sure he'll keep it....)
Unfortunately, Apple seem to be its own worst enemy right now, since it's more interested in converting people to iOS on iPads than convincing them to get new Mac desktops or laptops. I guess anything's possible, but I truly think the idea that tablets will replace PCs for people is a big mistake. Think of corporate America, where people spend most of the day using a computer from a desk. Why compromise with some sort of tablet in that scenario? People want multiple, large monitors for better productivity and less eye-strain. That, in turn, requires more powerful graphics cards to push all of the pixels needed to run at those screen resolutions at a good speed. That winds up the weak spot for a tablet form-factor machine. Fast graphics cards require lots of power and give off lots of heat. They don't cram well into flat tablets.
It's too bad, in hindsight, we didn't have one of the Kardashian's or maybe Snookie from Jersey Shore revealing the govt. spying. Then, MUCH more of America would feel a vested interest in the situation.:(
Some tablet users buy keyboard cases for "occasional bulk typing needs", but just from my daily commute to/from the office, I see plenty of people on the train who whip out their tablet w/keyboard case and use it the same way a traditional laptop would be used in their lap.
Yes, they have the ability to use the touchscreen, but there are plenty of laptops today with touchscreens as well.
My point is, the lines have become blurred. A lot of people bought tablets thinking they were going to be lighter weight and have better battery life than a notebook computer, and would be "powerful enough" for whatever they envisioned doing. Once they owned them a little while, they saw the shortcomings and tried to compensate with accessories like bluetooth keyboard cases. Some of them will go back to a more traditional notebook, next time they make another purchase (especially with slim notebooks weighing about the same as a tablet with keyboard case and also having touchscreen functionality).
I think "Corporatism" was a word invented recently to protest the corruption of Capitalism -- mainly popularized because the word sounds enough like Capitalism so it implies a twisted variant of it.
Perhaps Mercantilism is really what it's referred to, all along, though?
On the other hand, I'm not sure if Mercantilism encompassed other situations we have in government today, such as the Federal Reserve keeping a fiat currency afloat despite unsustainable debt? (I forget the exact percentages but I believe it was recently calculated that if government was able to seize ALL of the assets of every single billionaire in America today to put towards our national debt, it would only cover less than.3% of the total.) We truly are living in a system of "debt dollars" today, where the value of the currency is backed by nothing but faith that central government can keep up the charade a wihle longer.
As a long time Mac user, I completely agree. Don't get me wrong. I do own an iPhone 6s and I've owned pretty much every revision since the first one. I happen to think it's a great smartphone that does everything I need from one. I've also tried Android phones a few time and they're ok too, but I prefer the iOS UI. (Less confusing to me and feels more polished.)
But I still like the "Apple Computer" company much more than the new "Apple" that wants to build all sorts of consumer electronics gadgets. Everyone's talking about the decline of the personal computer market, but I think part of that is an overall dissatisfaction with it. It's not because the idea of a desktop or even portable PC is obsolete. Half the people buying tablets are turning around and buying keyboards for them, so they can emulate traditional laptops!
Collectively? I think people are just not seeing anything in the personal computer world that "wows" them. Dell started to get back on track with Michael Dell taking the company private again. (That got us the XPS 13 and 15... both award winning notebooks with some style, substance and value to them.) But overall, it's a see of mediocrity. Lots of "me too" products copy-catting original ideas that are still only half-baked. (Surface Pro 4? Looking right at you here.)
Apple keeps putzing around with the "new Macbook" -- a gimped ultrabook with a sluggish Core-M Intel CPU in it and only one USB-C port on it. Sure, it looks great and it's sleek. But performance-wise? It's equivalent to a Macbook Air from 2011 or 2012!
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand why YouTube feels it needs to take these legal actions ... but in the end, it's just symbolic gesturing.
In the "real world", the very fact you've allowed a video clip to be transmitted from YouTube's server to a client on the other end in a viewable format means the receiver has the technical ability to save a copy of it.
The "low hanging fruit" for their legal team to go after are the web based services offering to make this process easy, since they're effectively advertising to the whole world that they're enabling an illegal activity. Sitting on branches just a little further up are the folks writing plug-ins or extensions for browsers advertising the same functionality. (In those cases, I think we'll wind up with a legal battle, as soon as one of those developers wants to fight rather than give in. If nothing else, I think that's because there's a subtle difference between distributing code that *allows* someone to download/save the video content, and hosting a server that's actually DOING it for users.)
Personally, I think that YouTube will have to move to some sort of encrypted video transmission method if they want to get serious about preventing people from saving videos to redistribute. (EG. You have to install a YouTube app in order to look at videos on the site.) Even with THAT, it only gives the level of copy protection used by services such as AT&T U-Verse with its Cisco set-top boxes. (You won't be able to dump the data saved in its DVR's hard drive to any other device and watch it. But it can't stop something like a VCR or DVD recorder from copying the video and audio coming out of the box, headed for your television.)
Anyone can write software that acts as a "middle man" (similar to the VCR concept) that grabs each frame of video from the video card as it's displaying it on your screen and saved it to a new video file, while doing the same with the audio headed to the sound card output.
The majority of American libertarians have what I'd call "a couple BIG gripes", actually. Among them is the idea that we need to get rid of the Federal Reserve as manager/manipulator of our currency. I don't think there's almost anyone on the Republican ticket who is really ready to fight that battle.
Until it's taken serious though, it allows Federal government to print more currency "on demand", to cover expenses for initiatives it can't actually afford -- and THAT means there's no real possibility for a small, limited central government that isn't overstepping its boundaries.
Do I think it really makes any sense forcing all kids to "learn to code" in grade school? No. But this is really just a sign of the bigger, looming problem. As technology progresses, we're going to start losing a whole lot of low to middle income jobs to automation. (The ZeroHedge web site just published an article a few days ago where they claim in something like 47 of the 50 states in the U.S., the most popular career is "truck driver". Imagine all of those jobs disappearing as self-driving 18-wheelers and delivery vans/trucks start hitting the roads. And with the big push for "cleaner/greener energy", we're killing off the coal companies. But what many people haven't really considered is that as coal production dies out in America, it doesn't just mean a loss of jobs for the coal miners. It means a few big nails in the coffin for freight rail too. The rail system does a LOT of coal delivery right now, and I don't know of any other product of the same size/volume that would start traveling by rail to replace it? And none of this even touches the "hot topic" of automating all the fast food jobs.)
Meanwhile, about the only "replacement career" I've heard mentioned for all of this is software coding. (Slashdot just recently had an article talking about a former coal miner who became a software developer, in fact.) Everyone in business or politics is grasping at coding as the "savior" for all of these other jobs going by the wayside. I guess it makes sense to an extent. If you're going to automate everything from vehicles driving themselves to robots serving up your food orders, you're going to need people writing and maintaining all the code that makes those things function. But how much continuous employment will it really create?! We all know already from decades of people learning to code that many people who voluntarily chose to do aren't very good at it. Lots of "spaghetti code" and poorly documented code to go around out there.... If you try to make everyone "fluent" in software languages, that doesn't mean the majority of them will actually put in the time and effort required to be really good at it. They'll just know enough to write pretty inefficient, buggy code.
In fact, I think the comparison between learning to speak and write in a second language and learning to code in a computer language isn't even a very good one. If you want to be really successful as a software developer, it's about more than knowing the mechanics of the language. You have to have imagination and vision too. Otherwise, you might be able to change existing code to do specific things someone requests of you, and you might be able to write something new that meets a list of requirements -- but you won't rise above mediocrity. (That's why so much of that kind of coding is outsourced to cheap H1B labor to begin with.) The software devs who really "matter" are the men and women who created something unique that many, many people saw in action and said "Hey... I want to run that on MY computer!" They pushed the limits of what a computer could do within a set of hardware parameters and made people think more highly of the hardware itself. Or sometimes, they just made something that was beautiful in its simplicity. They took things a direction people didn't expect and impressed the users. Learning to master additional human languages has automatic value, simply because it increases your pool of other human beings you can communicate with. It's not the same when you learn to speak the computer's language, because the computer is a "one way street". It only follows your instructions. It doesn't give automatic benefits by way of carrying on a 2 way conversation with you as humans can do.
I never even knew that existed before. Will check it out. But does OpenStreetMap have an iOS app like Google Maps does? That's kind of important, IMO -- as I"m usually out and about already when I need to look up a location.
Not disagreeing, but it does seem like a case of "pot, meet kettle" when you start pointing fingers about the inefficiency of one of these technologies vs the other.
If you're going to charge your electric car from solar panels on the roof of your house, you're talking about panels that are only 20% efficient or so at converting sunlight into power. Then you take that power through an inverter (because you want household AC current from them, not the DC they original output), causing further losses. Then you feed the power into a battery, creating more losses. The only reason people don't seem to mind is because the sun's energy is free to begin with. (But you spent quite a bit on the infrastructure allowing you to harness it, so you've really got to factor that into the equation.)
All in all, I think it's pretty obvious that we'd have an easier transition to electric vehicles than hydrogen powered ones -- but that comes down to the fact that we're already using electricity for lots of other things. I don't know anyone using hydrogen to power their home or what-not.
Yeah.... makes perfect sense. One thing even my own daughter noticed in middle school though is, all Chromebooks are far from equal. One district she attended school in for a while had really flimsy, cheap Chromebooks that were often breaking down. Another had very nice, solid feeling variants. The main difference between those districts was the tax base in each. The wealthier district had the higher-end Chromebooks in use.
With a Macbook Air, at least you know pretty much what you're getting. Very arguably more than what's needed in a school setting these days -- but it "is what it is". (For our medium sized business, it's a pretty solid all around notebook option for our staff. But we're using Office/Outlook all day long, among other things. Not just web based apps.)
I have to admit that I haven't really spent a lot of time delving into the details ... but I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 9350 (Skylake core i7 CPU) with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Got a really good deal on it during a sale for Costco members and couldn't turn it down.
I'm wondering if there's a Linux distro that really works well with this yet, or do I need to give it more time?
I assume this new kernel was a piece of the puzzle for it, but I also heard there were issues with support for some of the features on the laptop. Is the built-in webcam working yet? Any audio issues? How is the 4K display w/touchscreen support?
The reason I moved away from Linux on any of my laptops was the common situation where "It works great except X, Y, and Z are broken." I don't want surprises like it not waking from sleep properly or the wi-fi not working or what have you. To me, those are deal-breakers vs. just using Windows on it instead and having everything function as intended.
And wow.... I expected more from the Slashdot crowd than dismissing these ideas out of hand. (I'm glad I'm part of a "Technolibertarians" group on Facebook where there's much more thought-provoking discussion on this topic than anything found here.)
How did colonization work in the past, when people were still figuring out what was out there in other parts of our own planet? Did only the "best and brightest" board ships to take that journey? No! It was the domain of risk-takers and people who felt they had little to lose. It was generally the wealthy who sat at home, in their status quo existence, and FUNDED the explorers in the hopes of a potentially big financial return.
With all of the research on space travel trapped inside the domain of NASA, everything creeped along at the pace of approved funding by politicians (who generally couldn't excite the public enough to agree to pay higher taxes for it). The lunar missions were the highlight of the whole thing, and they only happened because of the motivation to outshine the enemy (Communist Russia) in the "space race".
I think privatized space travel is ABSOLUTELY the right answer for things to move forward today. Initially, sure ... only the wealthy will be able to afford it. But that's how ALL new technology works. Early-adopters pay premium prices to have or do things first, paving the way for mainstream acceptance.
And colonization of a new planet doesn't mean launching little shuttles carrying 200-250 people or so at a time, over and over again, to get a decent number of them to the destination. (Someone above claimed the whole thing was unworkable for that reason.) What you'd probably do is establish a large space station in orbit at a launching point, first. It would probably be tethered to the Earth via a "space elevator" technology. Without the huge fuel costs of trying to make relatively large craft break through Earth's atmosphere, you could easily have transport ships leave and dock with the station in orbit on a regular basis.
There would be plenty of good paying jobs created by this whole new space travel industry, just as the airline industry created MANY new jobs or the railroads before that. I don't really see A.I. and robotics taking over ALL jobs. Rather, it will take over all of them that don't require a lot of thought and subjective considerations when making choices. Self piloting spacecraft still require humans to program the code that makes them go, for example. And I doubt the whole transportation scheme would be thought up and implemented by robots with no human intervention....
I totally agree, except I think many of the people trying to hang on out there are still living the dream / fantasy that they've got a shot at being one of the tech "elite".
It's not unlike Hollywood. If you're an aspiring actor, actress or filmmaker, you can practice your craft ANYWHERE in the country, and nearly anywhere for less money than it would cost you to try to live near or in Hollywood. But chances are, you'll need to get out there to meet face-to-face with other big players you need to know in order to make it onto the big screen via any of the major production companies.
(If you just want to do independent film? Then yeah, who cares? You'll have a less stress-filled life doing that elsewhere.)
Personally, I quit aspiring to be the next mover and shaker of the tech world sometime in my late 20's. I still love doing I.T. but I prefer my current situation where I live in a small town where you get a 2,200 sq. foot house for a little over $200,000, there's beautiful scenery, historical places to see nearby, and a sub 6-figure salary as a network/system admin. is enough to get by and raise a family. No prestige of working for a Google, an Apple or a Facebook -- but the job is stable and I even wound up working with a couple of long-time friends.
So which "lucky" company hired him after that?
That *is* the usual pattern I've found. Take high level position and mismanage business into the ground. Get hired someplace else to rinse and repeat, because your connections at that level "look out for each other".
The core problem with "wealth redistribution" is it's an idea that's inherently unfair to those who work to earn their money under a system that exchanges currency for labor.
In a true "post capitalist" economy, where the need for labor has largely been eliminated? Sure, it becomes an obsolete concern. But there sure are a lot of socialists out there trying to pretend we're actually IN this post-capitalist economy today, in an attempt to use FUD to tear countries like the United States away from Capitalism prematurely.
LONG before "the machines take all our jobs", we're going to see raised expectations of what a human being should do to earn pay. Automation will slowly weed out the "mindless work" that pays you to use your body but not your brain. And as I commented in an earlier post? I think technological advances that enable this robotic and A.I. takeover of jobs will also enable space exploration/travel. It should become a very real option to "move to Mars" or some other planet we've picked to colonize - and there will be PLENTY of new jobs created by such an undertaking.
I actually look forward to a world with raised expectations about the level of thought/education people are expected to have to do something constructive in society for pay! If you can't function at a higher level than a machine designed to repetitively do a limited set of tasks, you probably need to challenge yourself to aspire to more.
You know? As clever as people can be, we're still amazingly bad at "thinking outside the box" at times.
There's this entire universe out there, yet we're all assuming we have no way to ever go anyplace but this one planet we're on.
For the first time in history, we've privatized space travel and we have multiple competing businesses working on the problem. By the time we've developed enough A.I. and robotics to "take most of our jobs away", I'd sure hope we also figured out how to colonize at least one other planet. That sounds like a rather big project to me, creating a LOT of new job opportunities and eliminating "overcrowding" on the current planet.
I agree that a poor economy is a big part of the problem. They said the lower income people are deciding they "don't need a tablet" in droves. (This was absolutely NOT the case when the iPad was a new product and cheaper Android tablets were first hitting the scene.) I think this is largely because these people tried buying the devices in the hopes they'd be a worthy substitute for buying a more costly computer system. And after trying that out for a while? They realized that Android or iOS just isn't the same thing as Windows or Mac OS X. Tablets are basically just cellphones without the cellular radio but with oversized display screens. And sure, you can buy bluetooth keyboard cases for them and pens for some of them, but that's even more money to spend to still have something that's "nice, but not quite equivalent to a full blown PC or Mac" - and runs all the same software your smartphone can run. When money is really tight, you're likely to say "Hey... I get the most use out of my smartphone. Let's sell off that used iPad and forget about that thing moving forward. The smartphone has cellular data everywhere I go without paying more for a second data plan (if the tablet is even equipped with cellular) and I'll live with the small screen."
At the same time, my experience has been the people with less money are still looking for computers (laptops for the kids for school, or maybe even a gaming PC for home) - but they're serving as the "used computer recyclers", taking what's discarded by the middle to upper class people as they upgrade. It's a whole demographic soaking up some of the excess "old but still serviceable" gear and not contributing to new PC sales. I just sold a Windows gaming PC to a family like that last week. The kid really wanted a PC at home to use for school and gaming. Dad was too broke to afford anything suitable, but between him and grandma/grandpa, they came up with $350 to put towards something. Obviously, this wasn't happening with anything being sold new .... a good 3D graphics card can set you back that much, by itself! Since I'd already re-purposed a former Litecoin mining rig as a gaming PC for one of our kids, and she wasn't using it much anymore? I told the guy I'd let him have it for $350, complete with the 24" LCD monitor I had attached to it. (I figure hey... it made me a few hundred bucks as a coin miner a couple years ago. And my kid got some use out of it. Why not take the $350 and help pass it on to the next kid who will really enjoy and appreciate it?)
But the other part of the problem is a lack of innovation by the manufacturers. The people who DO have disposable income are only going to get motivated to spend it if you show them something cool and new they didn't think they wanted/needed until they saw it in action. They're all quite familiar with what a Windows PC or a Mac does, and such things as more hard drive space and a faster CPU are meaningless when there's no amazing software out that demands those things as minimum requirements. Apple got a little bit of traction with the whole "Retina display" thing (which the general PC market now hawks as 4K displays). But ultimately? A lot of people just recently bought a 27" screen when prices fell enough so it was a "no brainer" to buy and upgrade from something smaller. They're not chomping at the bit to upgrade displays yet again, in most cases. And on laptops, the super high resolution causes new issues. (My Dell XPS 13's high res display with Win 10 has all sorts of problems displaying older Java apps with fonts too small to read because the JRE didn't know how to scale up. The Surface Pro 4's I've seen require you log off and back on again whenever docking or undocking, so the screen will scale appropriately for the external or built-in display as you switch between them. It's not handled gracefully, "on the fly".)
I feel like GPUs are still weak link with everything. Any mobile graphics processor is slow and weak compared to a desktop counterpart -- mainly because of thermal challenge
Another Mac user here (and I really enjoyed CoD 4 on the Mac as well as Modern Warfare 2). I agree though... the whole CoD franchise was about paying enough homage to real warfare so people appreciated it for the elements of realism. Not saying they didn't bend some rules about how easy it was to run with a particular weapon or what-not, for the sake of keeping the game fun to play. But yes, it was good enough so folks who served in the military could play them and feel like it respected what they did and had to work with.
I know a guy over on a Jeep Wrangler forum who bought the "Call of Duty" special edition of the Wrangler. He talked about how much the game meant to him, because as he played through the campaign, he saw missions playing out that were dead-on accurate recreations of situations his friends actually encountered and recounted to him when he served in the military. He could relate to some of the characters in the game and so forth. When he completed the game, he admitted to it making him cry a little bit. That's when he knew he had to own the version of the Jeep that went with the game.
Is the new Battlefield still going to use a web UI as the "main control panel / console" like they've done with the others?
For some reason, I really dislike that. I know you can play the game itself full-screen so it shouldn't really matter, but there's just something about it I find jarring? I guess I'm used to 2+ decades of games designed so everything having to do with the program is part of the program. Feels like they took shortcuts just launching my browser and doing some of the stuff in there.
Our family is pretty much all on Apple products. We have 3 kids who use iPads or iPhones regularly and my wife and I work in I.T. and both own Mac desktops and laptops. We're also all into music and my wife and I both have large music collections in iTunes on our primary computers.
So when Apple Music was first released with the 3 month free trial, we jumped at the chance. BIG mistake! We set up the "family account" pretty quickly, realizing that would be a better value. Problem was, soon afterwards, my wife's iCloud account essentially locked her out of all of her purchased content of ALL types. On any given Apple device, if she signed in with it, it would work (at most) for a few seconds, and then cancel any updates that were downloading and/or freeze up.
That became a nightmare of putting in multiple support tickets with Apple and not getting any resolution or promised callbacks. Meanwhile, it meant that 10+ years worth of applications, movies and music content she'd paid for was rendered useless. The obvious culprit was Apple Music. The problem only happened after she enabled it on her account and it started trying to sync all of her music content.
At the Genius Bar, a tech spent over an hour trying to help with the issue. He gave her a brand new iPhone 6 AND a brand new iPad, insisting it HAD to be some sort of hardware malfunction or glitch. But nope ... same issue crept up on the new devices shortly after she signed in to them.
At that point, someone in Engineering finally called us back (guess they got irritated the store was giving us thousands of dollars of unnecessary new hardware and not getting anywhere). They promised they were "working on it" and "had an idea where something was wrong". All of a sudden, her ID just started working properly again. No explanation was ever given.
No.... So far, nobody has ever come to us asking about a Linux PC (or any other Unix flavor).
We do, however, run Linux in "virtual appliance" form for several things, including the central administration console for our ESET anti-virus solution on the Windows computers. (ESET primarily supports a Windows Server based application for that, but they also offer it as a Linux VM image -- which we decided made more sense for us to run.)
I doubt we would formally/officially support Linux on an employee's PC though, simply because of the lack of native support for things like Microsoft Office. (We use hosted Exchange email and with all of the meeting scheduling, calendar sharing, contacts published from Public Folders, delegates handling things on behalf of others, etc. -- we can't really trust 3rd. party mail clients that claim to be "Exchange compatible" to behave 100% correctly in all of those scenarios.) Also, I don't think Adobe Illustrator runs natively in Linux and that's needed by at least some of our staff.
Yes, but ultimately, what's the use? If I keep running hacks or disabling all critical updates in an attempt to keep MS from upgrading me off of Windows 7? I'm still quickly reaching the point where I'm running an OS that's 2 versions old and Microsoft will end support for.
Some people will be ok with this, I guess --- just like a certain percentage of people still run Windows XP. But you're on borrowed time ANY time you decide to get off the moving "Microsoft upgrade train" and stay put at one "station". Eventually, the train leaves you in the dust and you have to fend for yourself with dwindling driver support for peripherals, no security patches, and new software that hasn't been designed or tested to run properly on your OS.
I sure can't buy any brand new PC that still ships with Windows 7 on it, either. (Well, not without going to extremes and buying "old stock" from some small company that has some left or what-not.) So while I might just employ some of these hacking tactics to prevent a forced Win 10 upgrade today - my long-term goal becomes looking at alternatives. (For me, that's generally been Apple Mac, but Linux fill the bill in some cases too.)
I work in I.T. for a company that does marketing and corporate events.
We've long held a policy that we're "platform agnostic". If you start work with us, we give you your choice of a Mac or a Windows laptop as your machine. (We also had a policy of issuing people an iPad when they started, but that really came about because we had a division writing a few custom iOS apps for our clients. It made sense for our people to be familiar with what we were selling. Moving forward, I see the company issued iPad possibly going away, because we no longer do the custom app coding, and most people seem to own one already anyway.)
For 90% of the software our employees use, it really makes little difference which system they choose. So much is cloud-based or web-based these days, and you can run Microsoft Office or any of Adobe's products on either platform. The Mac users have a built-in advantage that they can edit PDF documents without the need of additional software. ("Preview" that comes with OS X as the default PDF viewer supports re-ordering pages in a PDF, deleting pages from one, and annotating or adding a digital signature.) In I.T., we've grown to like OmniGraffle Pro and standardized on it to do all of our network diagrams. (Although, if we decided to use Windows for that task, we could do the same thing in Visio Pro.)
As is so often pointed out, the Macs are far less vulnerable to malware/spyware - so that's a plus for us too. (Yes, I know... Someone who hates the Mac will pull out a list of the viruses and spyware designed for OS X. It does exist. But it's just not something we have to deal with much. On Windows, the battle is real. Out of all of the crypto-locker issues you've heard of in the news recently, how many of those happened to Mac users? As far as I know, zero.)
If you're arguing about the cost of a Mac vs. a Windows machine? I think for corporate use, you're really looking at it wrong from the get-go. Realistically, how purchasing happens in our company and every company I've worked for is like this: A certain budget is approved for I.T. to spend on equipment for users. The only "goal" is to get the employees the tech tools they need within that budget. The fact we could buy Dell laptop X for several hundred bucks less than Apple laptop Y is immaterial, as long as we have a way to juggle everything around so it all comes in under the budget total. When we look at things like the lack of a need for an anti-virus license for the Mac laptop and a lack of a need for a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro to edit PDFs, the Mac is already looking like a wash vs. the cost of the Window alternative. Even if that weren't the case, though? I.T. would have to look at the big picture and decide which computers cost the company more in total hours of support needed as people used them. That's a *really* tough thing to nail down because so much goes into it that often is ignored. EG. How long does someone in I.T. have to spend on hold on the phone getting a warranty repair going for something that broke on a given computer? (That's one area where we do generally spend less time getting a broken Mac serviced than we do a broken Windows PC. Especially when we had HP, the hold times were awful!)
As a brand new product category for the company and a revision A product, nobody buying the Apple Watch on launch day *really* knew what they were getting. Sure, we saw the Keynote presentation and the marketing material. But there's no substitute for actually using a product yourself for a while on a daily basis, to form an educated opinion.
Like a lot of people, I think I primarily wanted the watch because I realized Apple had a long track record of selling products that wound up being real game-changers. (When the first iPod classic came out, I didn't see why I cared that much about it either. But when I got my hands on one, it was interesting enough that I wanted to own one. And eventually, it became the definitive mobile music playing device. To this day, I still use one in my Jeep because the factory stereo has nice support for it.)
In reality? Yeah, it's maddening when you flick your wrist to look at the time and the watch doesn't light up. I've learned I can almost always get it to "wake up" and show me the display if I tap on the screen though -- and that's becoming second-nature now. It pretty much stinks when it comes to running 3rd. party apps. They're too slow and usually too clumsy to get around in. There are a FEW exceptions (usually programs where the watch app is appropriately used as a remote control with just 1, 2 or maybe 3 buttons for options you want easy access to toggle). But as a rule? If they expect you to scroll around the watch face and/or manipulate the "crown" -- it's just not worth bothering with. It's not THAT tough to just take your phone out of your pocket and go to it for the better user experience.
It's pretty decent at things like taking my pulse and doing basic fitness tracking. It's great at showing me the next thing coming up on my calendar, every time I check the time. It's handy when I need to see a text message without touching the phone (like when driving).
So all in all? I can justify wearing and keeping it. But it's not that amazing. Just ok.
The stats on hardware sales for the last couple years kept indicating slumps in most Windows PC maker's sales, with Apple the only hardware manufacturer still reporting good sales figures.
At some point, if more people keep buying new Macs instead of new Windows machines, we should see the OS usage stats changing for Windows too.
I don't doubt a number of people also went to Linux when they got frustrated with things about Windows 10. But statistically, I doubt it made the dent that OS X did. (One of my friends just dumped Win 10 in favor of the latest Ubuntu, but he's already angry with some issues he ran into with it. So not sure he'll keep it....)
Unfortunately, Apple seem to be its own worst enemy right now, since it's more interested in converting people to iOS on iPads than convincing them to get new Mac desktops or laptops. I guess anything's possible, but I truly think the idea that tablets will replace PCs for people is a big mistake. Think of corporate America, where people spend most of the day using a computer from a desk. Why compromise with some sort of tablet in that scenario? People want multiple, large monitors for better productivity and less eye-strain. That, in turn, requires more powerful graphics cards to push all of the pixels needed to run at those screen resolutions at a good speed. That winds up the weak spot for a tablet form-factor machine. Fast graphics cards require lots of power and give off lots of heat. They don't cram well into flat tablets.
It's too bad, in hindsight, we didn't have one of the Kardashian's or maybe Snookie from Jersey Shore revealing the govt. spying. Then, MUCH more of America would feel a vested interest in the situation. :(
Some tablet users buy keyboard cases for "occasional bulk typing needs", but just from my daily commute to/from the office, I see plenty of people on the train who whip out their tablet w/keyboard case and use it the same way a traditional laptop would be used in their lap.
Yes, they have the ability to use the touchscreen, but there are plenty of laptops today with touchscreens as well.
My point is, the lines have become blurred. A lot of people bought tablets thinking they were going to be lighter weight and have better battery life than a notebook computer, and would be "powerful enough" for whatever they envisioned doing. Once they owned them a little while, they saw the shortcomings and tried to compensate with accessories like bluetooth keyboard cases. Some of them will go back to a more traditional notebook, next time they make another purchase (especially with slim notebooks weighing about the same as a tablet with keyboard case and also having touchscreen functionality).
Good point!
I think "Corporatism" was a word invented recently to protest the corruption of Capitalism -- mainly popularized because the word sounds enough like Capitalism so it implies a twisted variant of it.
Perhaps Mercantilism is really what it's referred to, all along, though?
On the other hand, I'm not sure if Mercantilism encompassed other situations we have in government today, such as the Federal Reserve keeping a fiat currency afloat despite unsustainable debt? (I forget the exact percentages but I believe it was recently calculated that if government was able to seize ALL of the assets of every single billionaire in America today to put towards our national debt, it would only cover less than .3% of the total.) We truly are living in a system of "debt dollars" today, where the value of the currency is backed by nothing but faith that central government can keep up the charade a wihle longer.
As a long time Mac user, I completely agree. Don't get me wrong. I do own an iPhone 6s and I've owned pretty much every revision since the first one. I happen to think it's a great smartphone that does everything I need from one. I've also tried Android phones a few time and they're ok too, but I prefer the iOS UI. (Less confusing to me and feels more polished.)
But I still like the "Apple Computer" company much more than the new "Apple" that wants to build all sorts of consumer electronics gadgets. Everyone's talking about the decline of the personal computer market, but I think part of that is an overall dissatisfaction with it. It's not because the idea of a desktop or even portable PC is obsolete. Half the people buying tablets are turning around and buying keyboards for them, so they can emulate traditional laptops!
Collectively? I think people are just not seeing anything in the personal computer world that "wows" them. Dell started to get back on track with Michael Dell taking the company private again. (That got us the XPS 13 and 15 ... both award winning notebooks with some style, substance and value to them.) But overall, it's a see of mediocrity. Lots of "me too" products copy-catting original ideas that are still only half-baked. (Surface Pro 4? Looking right at you here.)
Apple keeps putzing around with the "new Macbook" -- a gimped ultrabook with a sluggish Core-M Intel CPU in it and only one USB-C port on it. Sure, it looks great and it's sleek. But performance-wise? It's equivalent to a Macbook Air from 2011 or 2012!