While there are free alternatives for a lot of software available on Linux, the simple fact is that there is a lot thatt is Windows, or Windows/Mac, only.
Games are a great example. While you could screw around with WINE and get World of Warcraft running, it's never going to run as well as it would in its intended environment, and there's every possibility thatt an update to the game that works fine on Windows will not work on Linux with WINE.
There are, however, many use cases for Linux where it can work quite well. For instance, if you're using Chrome to browse the web, Thunderbird to check email, LibreOffice to edit documents, you might do great on Linux. Just be sure it works with all your hardware (printers especially) before making the switch.
I have a laptop which runs Linux (Ubuntu Mate to be precise), and it's great as far as it goes. Getting my printer working with it (an older Canon multi function) was much more annoying than on Windows, particularly when I decided to use it with my Windows box and share it from there. It was doable, but very annoying figuring itt out. I still couldn't use it full time, however. I enjoy playing games on my computer, and not many of them come with Linux support.
Even when you are connected to the internet, the vast majority of land area in the United States lacks the level of connectivity needed to support something like the article implies things are going to. It's already annoying enough that games are no longer shipping on discs (a 24-hour download is not uncommon here) and I bet if they tried to do away with the desktop, the torches and pitchforks would come out extremely quickly.
Speaking of which, I have a few extra pitchforks in the barn if anyone needs to borrow one.
For me, the client was using 8x more bandwidth than my pathetic internet connection was even capable of. I can only assume it was pounding my router trying to connect instead of having some sensible method of downloading. Needless to say, internet was impossible to use for anything else. I had to download a traffic shaping program from my motherboard manufacturer's website and throttle it to get things under control. And even at half my connection's bandwidth, it still downloaded faster than it was while hogging every bit of it. No clue why they can't do what every other game store does and have some method of limiting bandwidth built in.
At current time, all-electric is out for me. Considering that I live about an hour from the nearest decent-sized city, and regularly take a 3 hour drive to my vacation property, where there simply isn't the infrastructure for quickly recharging, I'd probably inevitably wind up stranded eventually. Just last week I had to drive 5 hours to get to my dying aunt, and at the other end, guess what, there wasn't anywhere I could have recharged. Certainly not at the hotel I stayed at, at least.
A hybrid would be better simply because of the distances I have to drive, however there's another proglem - I have other criteria that need to be satisfied, and don't have the money to buy an extra vehicle just for the times I don't need those things. Going to my vacation property I generally haul so much stuff that it fills up the back of my Ford Explorer easily, and sometimes will fill up the back of my F-150 (and sometimes I have to tow a trailer to carry it all, too). So until there's a solution that will serve my cargo, towing, and range needs, I guess I'll have to stick with gasoline.
Without those of us in rural communities, people like you would not eat. You would get no steaks, no burgers, no grains, no vegetables, not even a can of beer to drown your sorrows as you starved to death. 99.999% of food production isn't done in the cities. Who'd have thought, right? Those "taxpayer checks" also tend to average vastly less than we pay in every year. The check I got to compensate for Trump's tariffs amounted to under 30 bucks, an order of magnitude less than the amount lost. Bright side, could have been worse with more land in soybeans.
We already do pay more for pretty much everything. Expensive internet (I'm lucky to have 10mbps dsl here, but I could get fiber for what I'm paying if it existed here), expensive satellite TV, long drives to get to a decent-sized city, etc.
Seems to me the ultimate problem is the limited available space. 14 comparison shopping sites all want that space. There's only, what, 5 slots in that all-important shopping bar at the top of the page? There's simply no way even a majority of them are going to get a spot on it in a given search. There is no solution to this problem that will satisfy these comparison shopping services, since Google would have to ruin the search experience by adding a godawful wall of shopping results before you even get to search.
And as far as search results go, when shopping for a product, you want a link to purchase the product. Search results SHOULD point you to retailers carrying such a product - not comparison shopping sites that refer you back to a retailer for an affiliate kickback.
I have about that same speed at my vacation home. Actually the upstream is lower I think. However, the local electric cooperative is working on installing fiber, so maybe in a few years I'll either have fiber there, or CenturyLink will upgrade its network.
My home connection is 10 megabit DSL. I'd love more, but I consider myself lucky to have that.
Where I live, there isn't a repair shop within 100 miles, here in northeast Arkansas. I could never recommend a Mac to anyone I know, even someone heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, because of this. It's the same story with their phones. Both of my parents have iPhones, and without an authorized repair shop anywhere nearby, not even within a 100 mile radius, I can't get them fixed without shipping them off somewhere, and being without the device for God knows how long. Meanwhile, there's an independent repair shop that will happily repair my Android phone same day within 10 miles.
Simple fact is, computers break eventually. Nothing runs forever. Apple's insistence that we use their repair shops, which for me might as well be on the moon, is just crazy. If you can't get the thing fixed when something goes wrong, be it a cracked screen or bad keyboard or whatever, it's just disposable. And Apple products are just too expensive to be disposable.
Huh, I coulda sworn they were on the Play Store a few months back, linked from the official F-Droid website, when I installed F-Droid on my old tablet. Either it was removed, or my memory's not what it used to be.
F-Droid, which is a fork of Aptoide that uses a single repository instead of publishing other third-party repositories, is available on the Google Play Store, so I don't think Google has a problem with rival app stores. I'd bet money that Google's actions against Aptoide have more to do with the repositories of pirated apps that are published through Aptoide, since if you get a paid app for free through Aptoide, Google doesn't get their cut.
Aptoide has long provided access to repositories of pirated apps, and has been less than willing to remove them at the request of app developers. Anyone can create a repository, load it with pirated apps, and publish it through Aptoide. That's probably what got Google to blacklist them.
It's worth noting that Aptoide's own repository is clean, but with their linking to other repositories that they have zero control over, there's going to be plenty out there for Google to want to blacklist them for.
At this point I'd settle for CenturyLink improving its own network. Right now they have so many subscribers that they aren't accepting more, and aren't upgrading existing customers. That's the sort of situation where, if there weren't a monopoly in the region, that a company would actually invest to fill the void. But there is a monopoly in the region and the company has done the math. It's more cost-effective to invest nothing (beyond occasional maintenance when something breaks) than to put in the money to improve the network for existing customers, even when improving the network might result in 200 or so new customers.
The problem is an utter lack of competition. There's no need to improve the service, because consumers have no other options. Even in the towns around here, there are only two options - DSL and cable. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one thing is clear - letting these big corporations have their monopolies on service leads only to consumers getting screwed.
The vast majority of the countty (land-wise, not necessarily population-wise) only has DSL, if there is even that available. Indeed, where I live I only have CenturyLink DSL available. My vacation home also has CenturyLink DSL available, and the network there is oversaturated, leaving me with sub-1.5-megabit service with no other options. And guess what? The 10-megabit service and the service below 1.5 megabit cost the same.
This will hit old people with flip phones the hardest. My dad uses one of these, he has one particular model he likes, and it naturally is not a 4g phone. He doesn't need a smart phone, given his tendency to leave it unplugged for days and the fact that he is so computer illiterate that he has trouble with digital gas pumps (he's bought a few car washes that he didn't want trying to get it to print a receipt). And I have an elderly friend who has an earlier version of the same phone, probably over 10 years old and still going. But I guess they aren't profitable enough to care about, compared to those on the smartphone upgrade treadmill.
The biggest area of concern that would need to be broken up is the Facebook social network, and I fail to see any meaningful way of breaking that part up. Sure, you could make Facebook spin off some of its other brands, but Facebook itself would still likely be intact and a problem.
However, I'm not sure that Facebook even is such a great problem. Stupid people who believe everything they read on the internet are a much bigger problem. Facebook just provides a platform for sharing such junk, and I'd say any platform that allows stupid people will suffer from similar problems. Speaking of which, I just got a Facebook notification from a stupid friend that cars will explode if the fuel tanks are filled completely in the summer heat. I need smarter friends.
It offered a new system that was just as buggy as the old system, but the beauty is that it worked for me when the old system didn't. Now without it I was forced to actually fix the problem that was making my systems undiscoverable to one another, despite all settings being correct. Apparently a necessary service to make them discoverable wasn't firing on any of my 3 Windows 10 computers Fixed that and now it works just as well as it ever did.
I have a DVD Netflix subscription for one simple reason - streaming Netflix is enough to saturate my home internet, resulting in lots and lots of buffering. I'm currently looking to move, but haven't found the right house yet.
I get placed all over the country with my IP address. Depending on the day, I can be anywhere from Chicago, IL to Houston, TX. Today, I'm apparently in Ash Flat, AR. Given that I'm not anywhere near any of those places, I wonder if I could bill my ISP for travel expenses...
This. I live in a rural area, and I'm fairly well-off, but there are people out here who are far less fortunate. But this isn't really an issue of rich vs. poor. This is an issue of everyone needing access to essential services. Land lines remain an essential service in rural areas, especially since there are areas out here that do not have any cell phone coverage at all. Land lines are also often the only source of internet access besides satellite - I'm fortunate enough to have DSL, but I know people still on 56k who just can't afford the high cost of a satellite ISP, and who have no cell network coverage.
The big problem I have with Google Talk is the lack of a simple image sharing function. In WLM it's really easy, and appears in-line and in a picture sharing window off to the side of your contact's IM window. You can view the images together so you know you're looking at the same thing.
This is particularly useful for sharing and discussing interesting pornography. Something that I do quite often.
I have yet to find a solution that is the equal of WLM for this function.
In order to save money, I don't have a text messaging plan on my phone. Generally this works fine - I barely use the cell phone for calls, and never for texting (this has more to do with my lack of good friends than my use of technology). But I do have to pay money every time one of these jerks sends me a text message. I think if I have to pay to get their spam messages, I should be paid the cost of the message, plus a small fee, say $5 per message, in order to cover my trouble and any bank fees associated with cashing a $0.10 check. If he were willing to pay, it might have the advantage of making the language I use as I delete the thing without reading it a bit less foul.
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While there are free alternatives for a lot of software available on Linux, the simple fact is that there is a lot thatt is Windows, or Windows/Mac, only.
Games are a great example. While you could screw around with WINE and get World of Warcraft running, it's never going to run as well as it would in its intended environment, and there's every possibility thatt an update to the game that works fine on Windows will not work on Linux with WINE.
There are, however, many use cases for Linux where it can work quite well. For instance, if you're using Chrome to browse the web, Thunderbird to check email, LibreOffice to edit documents, you might do great on Linux. Just be sure it works with all your hardware (printers especially) before making the switch.
I have a laptop which runs Linux (Ubuntu Mate to be precise), and it's great as far as it goes. Getting my printer working with it (an older Canon multi function) was much more annoying than on Windows, particularly when I decided to use it with my Windows box and share it from there. It was doable, but very annoying figuring itt out. I still couldn't use it full time, however. I enjoy playing games on my computer, and not many of them come with Linux support.
Even when you are connected to the internet, the vast majority of land area in the United States lacks the level of connectivity needed to support something like the article implies things are going to. It's already annoying enough that games are no longer shipping on discs (a 24-hour download is not uncommon here) and I bet if they tried to do away with the desktop, the torches and pitchforks would come out extremely quickly.
Speaking of which, I have a few extra pitchforks in the barn if anyone needs to borrow one.
But wait, there's more!
For me, the client was using 8x more bandwidth than my pathetic internet connection was even capable of. I can only assume it was pounding my router trying to connect instead of having some sensible method of downloading. Needless to say, internet was impossible to use for anything else. I had to download a traffic shaping program from my motherboard manufacturer's website and throttle it to get things under control. And even at half my connection's bandwidth, it still downloaded faster than it was while hogging every bit of it. No clue why they can't do what every other game store does and have some method of limiting bandwidth built in.
At current time, all-electric is out for me. Considering that I live about an hour from the nearest decent-sized city, and regularly take a 3 hour drive to my vacation property, where there simply isn't the infrastructure for quickly recharging, I'd probably inevitably wind up stranded eventually. Just last week I had to drive 5 hours to get to my dying aunt, and at the other end, guess what, there wasn't anywhere I could have recharged. Certainly not at the hotel I stayed at, at least.
A hybrid would be better simply because of the distances I have to drive, however there's another proglem - I have other criteria that need to be satisfied, and don't have the money to buy an extra vehicle just for the times I don't need those things. Going to my vacation property I generally haul so much stuff that it fills up the back of my Ford Explorer easily, and sometimes will fill up the back of my F-150 (and sometimes I have to tow a trailer to carry it all, too). So until there's a solution that will serve my cargo, towing, and range needs, I guess I'll have to stick with gasoline.
Until it's as cheap as beef and as tasty as beef, I'll remain a member of PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals.
Without those of us in rural communities, people like you would not eat. You would get no steaks, no burgers, no grains, no vegetables, not even a can of beer to drown your sorrows as you starved to death. 99.999% of food production isn't done in the cities. Who'd have thought, right? Those "taxpayer checks" also tend to average vastly less than we pay in every year. The check I got to compensate for Trump's tariffs amounted to under 30 bucks, an order of magnitude less than the amount lost. Bright side, could have been worse with more land in soybeans.
We already do pay more for pretty much everything. Expensive internet (I'm lucky to have 10mbps dsl here, but I could get fiber for what I'm paying if it existed here), expensive satellite TV, long drives to get to a decent-sized city, etc.
Seems to me the ultimate problem is the limited available space. 14 comparison shopping sites all want that space. There's only, what, 5 slots in that all-important shopping bar at the top of the page? There's simply no way even a majority of them are going to get a spot on it in a given search. There is no solution to this problem that will satisfy these comparison shopping services, since Google would have to ruin the search experience by adding a godawful wall of shopping results before you even get to search.
And as far as search results go, when shopping for a product, you want a link to purchase the product. Search results SHOULD point you to retailers carrying such a product - not comparison shopping sites that refer you back to a retailer for an affiliate kickback.
I have about that same speed at my vacation home. Actually the upstream is lower I think. However, the local electric cooperative is working on installing fiber, so maybe in a few years I'll either have fiber there, or CenturyLink will upgrade its network.
My home connection is 10 megabit DSL. I'd love more, but I consider myself lucky to have that.
Where I live, there isn't a repair shop within 100 miles, here in northeast Arkansas. I could never recommend a Mac to anyone I know, even someone heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, because of this. It's the same story with their phones. Both of my parents have iPhones, and without an authorized repair shop anywhere nearby, not even within a 100 mile radius, I can't get them fixed without shipping them off somewhere, and being without the device for God knows how long. Meanwhile, there's an independent repair shop that will happily repair my Android phone same day within 10 miles.
Simple fact is, computers break eventually. Nothing runs forever. Apple's insistence that we use their repair shops, which for me might as well be on the moon, is just crazy. If you can't get the thing fixed when something goes wrong, be it a cracked screen or bad keyboard or whatever, it's just disposable. And Apple products are just too expensive to be disposable.
Huh, I coulda sworn they were on the Play Store a few months back, linked from the official F-Droid website, when I installed F-Droid on my old tablet. Either it was removed, or my memory's not what it used to be.
F-Droid, which is a fork of Aptoide that uses a single repository instead of publishing other third-party repositories, is available on the Google Play Store, so I don't think Google has a problem with rival app stores. I'd bet money that Google's actions against Aptoide have more to do with the repositories of pirated apps that are published through Aptoide, since if you get a paid app for free through Aptoide, Google doesn't get their cut.
Aptoide has long provided access to repositories of pirated apps, and has been less than willing to remove them at the request of app developers. Anyone can create a repository, load it with pirated apps, and publish it through Aptoide. That's probably what got Google to blacklist them.
It's worth noting that Aptoide's own repository is clean, but with their linking to other repositories that they have zero control over, there's going to be plenty out there for Google to want to blacklist them for.
At this point I'd settle for CenturyLink improving its own network. Right now they have so many subscribers that they aren't accepting more, and aren't upgrading existing customers. That's the sort of situation where, if there weren't a monopoly in the region, that a company would actually invest to fill the void. But there is a monopoly in the region and the company has done the math. It's more cost-effective to invest nothing (beyond occasional maintenance when something breaks) than to put in the money to improve the network for existing customers, even when improving the network might result in 200 or so new customers.
The problem is an utter lack of competition. There's no need to improve the service, because consumers have no other options. Even in the towns around here, there are only two options - DSL and cable. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one thing is clear - letting these big corporations have their monopolies on service leads only to consumers getting screwed.
The vast majority of the countty (land-wise, not necessarily population-wise) only has DSL, if there is even that available. Indeed, where I live I only have CenturyLink DSL available. My vacation home also has CenturyLink DSL available, and the network there is oversaturated, leaving me with sub-1.5-megabit service with no other options. And guess what? The 10-megabit service and the service below 1.5 megabit cost the same.
This will hit old people with flip phones the hardest. My dad uses one of these, he has one particular model he likes, and it naturally is not a 4g phone. He doesn't need a smart phone, given his tendency to leave it unplugged for days and the fact that he is so computer illiterate that he has trouble with digital gas pumps (he's bought a few car washes that he didn't want trying to get it to print a receipt). And I have an elderly friend who has an earlier version of the same phone, probably over 10 years old and still going. But I guess they aren't profitable enough to care about, compared to those on the smartphone upgrade treadmill.
The biggest area of concern that would need to be broken up is the Facebook social network, and I fail to see any meaningful way of breaking that part up. Sure, you could make Facebook spin off some of its other brands, but Facebook itself would still likely be intact and a problem.
However, I'm not sure that Facebook even is such a great problem. Stupid people who believe everything they read on the internet are a much bigger problem. Facebook just provides a platform for sharing such junk, and I'd say any platform that allows stupid people will suffer from similar problems. Speaking of which, I just got a Facebook notification from a stupid friend that cars will explode if the fuel tanks are filled completely in the summer heat. I need smarter friends.
It offered a new system that was just as buggy as the old system, but the beauty is that it worked for me when the old system didn't. Now without it I was forced to actually fix the problem that was making my systems undiscoverable to one another, despite all settings being correct. Apparently a necessary service to make them discoverable wasn't firing on any of my 3 Windows 10 computers Fixed that and now it works just as well as it ever did.
This happened to me too, and I wound up doing the same thing.
The only other thing was the removal of HomeGroup, which forced me to finish fixing my home network just to get printer sharing working again.
I have a DVD Netflix subscription for one simple reason - streaming Netflix is enough to saturate my home internet, resulting in lots and lots of buffering. I'm currently looking to move, but haven't found the right house yet.
I get placed all over the country with my IP address. Depending on the day, I can be anywhere from Chicago, IL to Houston, TX. Today, I'm apparently in Ash Flat, AR. Given that I'm not anywhere near any of those places, I wonder if I could bill my ISP for travel expenses...
I'd say this is pretty weird. Had to shoot it in the head to turn it off though.
http://www.strangehorizons.com...
This. I live in a rural area, and I'm fairly well-off, but there are people out here who are far less fortunate. But this isn't really an issue of rich vs. poor. This is an issue of everyone needing access to essential services. Land lines remain an essential service in rural areas, especially since there are areas out here that do not have any cell phone coverage at all. Land lines are also often the only source of internet access besides satellite - I'm fortunate enough to have DSL, but I know people still on 56k who just can't afford the high cost of a satellite ISP, and who have no cell network coverage.
I don't.
The big problem I have with Google Talk is the lack of a simple image sharing function. In WLM it's really easy, and appears in-line and in a picture sharing window off to the side of your contact's IM window. You can view the images together so you know you're looking at the same thing.
This is particularly useful for sharing and discussing interesting pornography. Something that I do quite often.
I have yet to find a solution that is the equal of WLM for this function.
In order to save money, I don't have a text messaging plan on my phone. Generally this works fine - I barely use the cell phone for calls, and never for texting (this has more to do with my lack of good friends than my use of technology). But I do have to pay money every time one of these jerks sends me a text message. I think if I have to pay to get their spam messages, I should be paid the cost of the message, plus a small fee, say $5 per message, in order to cover my trouble and any bank fees associated with cashing a $0.10 check. If he were willing to pay, it might have the advantage of making the language I use as I delete the thing without reading it a bit less foul.