Apple and Google have decided to throw away any compatibility with computers when they developed their mobile OS. You can't run the same application on your iPhone or an Android phone and on your computer.
Microsoft has decided to go the other way, sacrifice usability but maintain the compatibility. You could technically take an application from your computer and run it on your tablet or phone. They own most of the desktop OS market, so why throw it all away and make a completely incompatible device? Let's make the desktop OS more mobile-like and the phone OS more desktop-like, and we will meet in the middle and end up with just one OS to rule them all.
And then they found out that this does not make much sense. You don't need the application that's optimized for a 24" screen with a mouse and a keyboard to run on your phone. You also don't need the application that's optimized for a 7" touch screen to run on your desktop. So they disabled the support for Win32 on Windows RT, never even supported Win32 on mobiles, and the Metro applications for Windows 8 never really took off.
They ended up with a less usable mobile OS that is theoretically able to run desktop apps but nobody cares, and a less usable Windows 8 that is theoretically able to run mobile apps but also nobody cares. To save their business, they had to step back with Windows 10 because people did not want to upgrade from Windows 7, and they seem to have completely abandoned the idea of Windows running on phones.
And Steve Ballmer is proud of his achievements. LOL.
Would you buy a gun that is as reliable as the fingerprint unlock on your phone? I don't know about you, but I have like 1 in 3 chance of not unlocking at first try. That's a gun that will not fire 1 out of 3 times when you need it.
And have you ever tried to unlock your phone while being just a bit nervous? And can you imagine how nervous you will be if you are in a life-or-death situation?
The Stable Workers of America (SWA) union asked the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to put a stop to the forced horse-to-car conversions. The motorized transportation service is not a proper replacement for horse transport because it does not work with grass and water. In addition, it cannot be bred at home and instead has to be bought in dealerships, which gives the dealerships too much power over human transportation.
Let's write software in some esoteric language that nobody is using. There are less than 10 applications written in it in productive use, and they were all written by the same people who wrote the compiler, but SURELY it will be better than C which is used in everything from your watch to the space probes we send to Jupiter.
You can't fix bad programming by tools. You can only fix bad programming by not hiring bad programmers.
Oxygen levels can't go up, where would the oxygen come from? It's very improbable that oxygen levels stay the same, over time nothing stays the same in nature. The only remaining option is that oxygen levels go down. Problem solved.
That's just showing a complete lack of understanding how Uber works. In case of emergency like this one, would you rather pay more for your fare, or wait indefinitely because there are not enough drivers? Those are the only two options. I personally would prefer pay more.
The way of getting more Uber drivers is to pay them more to incentivize them to come to work. If there is a sudden rise in demand, there will be a sudden increase in price.
This whole discussion is absurd for someone who has lived in a socialist country. If you keep the prices constant no matter what is the demand, it only results in empty shops. You can't cheat the market forces.
There are multiple reasons why I wouldn't want to use my phone to pay for stuff. The three most important ones for me are: 1. Paying with the phone is cumbersome when compared to paying with a contactless card 2. My phone battery sometimes dies, and I would hate to lose access to my money when it happens. 3. I use my phone for two factor authentication with my bank, and having the phone also have access to my bank account defeats the purpose of two factor authentication.
Of course, if I lived in the States, where they are just now implementing chip-and-pin and don't have contactless cards at all, paying by phone might look like an improvement. But it's just not the way to go. If you insist on paying with your phone, you can just get a contactless card in the form of a small sticker that you can stick on your phone or on anything else that you carry with you always. It will never run out of battery, and a hacker will never be able to access it through your phone.
What TF has this got to do with capitalism? If it happens, it will be a huge regulatory intervention, done by governments and inter-governmental organizations. It will not be done for profit. That's like the exact opposite of capitalism.
Do you realize how much testing must go in to checking that all possible combinations of patches work correctly together? This is clearly just cutting the costs of supporting older systems. Now there are no combinations, since each patch gets Windows to the same state, so they only have to test one thing a month. This also means they can test it properly, so you have lower probability that installing a patch breaks your system, which means lower support costs as well.
This is consistent with their effort to move everyone to the latest Windows version, so they don't have to support Windows 7 for 15 years like they had to with Windows XP. They have clearly checked their accounting and found how much money is being spent because of the complicated way they support old versions, and now they are decreasing those costs.
Also, this is the exact same way most other companies release updates. You don't see Adobe giving you the option of selecting which individual DLLs you want to patch in Photoshop. Microsoft is just moving towards the same patching plan other companies already use.
Sometimes I wonder if any Slashdot readers work in actual software companies. Because if you have real world experience with software development, you understand why this is done.
It's the same shit all over again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And it will be just as funny in 50 years as the flag laws are today. People seem to never learn. You can't stop progress, the "best" you can do is to postpone it.
In a country where a limited number of internet providers have a virtual monopoly? How well did it work when it was tried with the phone companies in last century? I'm all for free market, when it works, but in this case it clearly does not. Just look at the prices and compare them with any country with a real internet provider competition if you don't believe.
The next step: Customers don't own the connectors on their phone. Apple retains the ownership, and rents out the connectors. Every time you connect something to your phone, you pay 1 cent to Apple via Apple Store.
I just can't find any picture of the Cykelslangen with more than a few cyclist on it. For a route that relieves congestion in a busy area, you would expect it is full all the time, and that it looks busy on most pictures. But it doesn't. Strange.
Ok, I could have made the time to read the article carefully. On the other hand, you also could have been less of an ass when telling me about my mistake.
If you get a surgery on a weekend, likely there was a reason why it could not be postponed to Monday. No wonder that many of the surgeries that could not be postponed end badly.
And maybe the same thing applies to Fridays to some degree. Less critical surgeries are probably pushed to Monday, to avoid post-op care during the weekend if possible.
Dear Sirs, While we do not plan any monetary compensation for the outgoing links to your website, we would be partial to a barter deal. In compensation to our linking of your web site, you may publish any number of full page ads for our web site in your newspaper, free of charge. ----- Dear Sirs, Thank you for your kind offer to pay us for linking to your web site. While we often get requests from various parties to link to their web site, and while we understand that such links are valuable to you and help you increase your advertising revenue, we do not accept compensation for it as a matter of policy. Therefore we are happy to assure you we will continue to link you your site free of charge. We would however accept a token gift of appreciation, like a cake or flowers for our staff, if you wish to share a small part of the revenue you earned thanks to us. ----- Dear Sirs, We have noted that you no longer wish to be linked from our web site. While we do not understand why you would want to decrease the number of visitors to your web site, it's your tree and feel free to hang yourself on it. We have removed all links in question and set up a filter to make sure we never link you again, and will recommend our business partners to do the same. ----- The only problem is, which approach to choose:) (not native speaker, sorry for clumsy english while trying to sound official)
There is a difference between being *called* windows and *having* windows. Yes, of course window-based system existed before microsoft copied them. But here we are concerned only with the name. (And no, if one says "windows" he never means the x-window system, and it never was so. It was "X" or "X-Windows" or "X-Window", never "windows".)
Nonsense, when you say "windows" in the OS context, you always mean Microsoft Windows. The term has not become generic, that would mean that people use "windows" to refer to OS that is not in fact Microsoft Windows. On the other hand, you could easily say "app store" and mean the android application repository. The term has not even become generic, it has always been generic. It never exclusively referred to Apple app store.
As someone who does not live in USA, I have to ask: Can you still call this "democracy"? I thought the point of elections was people choosing the candidate who they think is best. Now you are voting for the worst candidate in order to get one of the better candidates out of the way. A few years ago you had the candidate who most people voted for lose the elections. And even if everything works fine, you still choose from a very limited set of candidates, offered by two major parties.
As a programmer, I see the specification is "choose the person wanted by most citizens for president", but the algorithm is a bit too complicated and obviously does not work according to the specification.
(preemptive comment; Yeah, who am I to talk, I am probably some European commie anyway.)
Then TFA is talking nonsense, sugar contains glucose and fructose in similar ratio as HFCS, the difference is that they are bonded into sucrose molecules by a weak bond. Sucrose is broken down to fructose and glucose in your digestive system and from that point there is really little difference between digesting sugar or HFCS.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple and Google have decided to throw away any compatibility with computers when they developed their mobile OS. You can't run the same application on your iPhone or an Android phone and on your computer.
Microsoft has decided to go the other way, sacrifice usability but maintain the compatibility. You could technically take an application from your computer and run it on your tablet or phone. They own most of the desktop OS market, so why throw it all away and make a completely incompatible device? Let's make the desktop OS more mobile-like and the phone OS more desktop-like, and we will meet in the middle and end up with just one OS to rule them all.
And then they found out that this does not make much sense. You don't need the application that's optimized for a 24" screen with a mouse and a keyboard to run on your phone. You also don't need the application that's optimized for a 7" touch screen to run on your desktop. So they disabled the support for Win32 on Windows RT, never even supported Win32 on mobiles, and the Metro applications for Windows 8 never really took off.
They ended up with a less usable mobile OS that is theoretically able to run desktop apps but nobody cares, and a less usable Windows 8 that is theoretically able to run mobile apps but also nobody cares. To save their business, they had to step back with Windows 10 because people did not want to upgrade from Windows 7, and they seem to have completely abandoned the idea of Windows running on phones.
And Steve Ballmer is proud of his achievements. LOL.
Would you buy a gun that is as reliable as the fingerprint unlock on your phone? I don't know about you, but I have like 1 in 3 chance of not unlocking at first try. That's a gun that will not fire 1 out of 3 times when you need it.
And have you ever tried to unlock your phone while being just a bit nervous? And can you imagine how nervous you will be if you are in a life-or-death situation?
The Stable Workers of America (SWA) union asked the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to put a stop to the forced horse-to-car conversions. The motorized transportation service is not a proper replacement for horse transport because it does not work with grass and water. In addition, it cannot be bred at home and instead has to be bought in dealerships, which gives the dealerships too much power over human transportation.
Let's write software in some esoteric language that nobody is using. There are less than 10 applications written in it in productive use, and they were all written by the same people who wrote the compiler, but SURELY it will be better than C which is used in everything from your watch to the space probes we send to Jupiter.
You can't fix bad programming by tools. You can only fix bad programming by not hiring bad programmers.
Oxygen levels can't go up, where would the oxygen come from? It's very improbable that oxygen levels stay the same, over time nothing stays the same in nature. The only remaining option is that oxygen levels go down. Problem solved.
That's just showing a complete lack of understanding how Uber works. In case of emergency like this one, would you rather pay more for your fare, or wait indefinitely because there are not enough drivers? Those are the only two options. I personally would prefer pay more.
The way of getting more Uber drivers is to pay them more to incentivize them to come to work. If there is a sudden rise in demand, there will be a sudden increase in price.
This whole discussion is absurd for someone who has lived in a socialist country. If you keep the prices constant no matter what is the demand, it only results in empty shops. You can't cheat the market forces.
There are multiple reasons why I wouldn't want to use my phone to pay for stuff. The three most important ones for me are:
1. Paying with the phone is cumbersome when compared to paying with a contactless card
2. My phone battery sometimes dies, and I would hate to lose access to my money when it happens.
3. I use my phone for two factor authentication with my bank, and having the phone also have access to my bank account defeats the purpose of two factor authentication.
Of course, if I lived in the States, where they are just now implementing chip-and-pin and don't have contactless cards at all, paying by phone might look like an improvement. But it's just not the way to go. If you insist on paying with your phone, you can just get a contactless card in the form of a small sticker that you can stick on your phone or on anything else that you carry with you always. It will never run out of battery, and a hacker will never be able to access it through your phone.
Government contracts are still the opposite of capitalism, even if the government orders services from a private company. It's still public spending.
What TF has this got to do with capitalism? If it happens, it will be a huge regulatory intervention, done by governments and inter-governmental organizations. It will not be done for profit. That's like the exact opposite of capitalism.
Do you realize how much testing must go in to checking that all possible combinations of patches work correctly together? This is clearly just cutting the costs of supporting older systems. Now there are no combinations, since each patch gets Windows to the same state, so they only have to test one thing a month. This also means they can test it properly, so you have lower probability that installing a patch breaks your system, which means lower support costs as well.
This is consistent with their effort to move everyone to the latest Windows version, so they don't have to support Windows 7 for 15 years like they had to with Windows XP. They have clearly checked their accounting and found how much money is being spent because of the complicated way they support old versions, and now they are decreasing those costs.
Also, this is the exact same way most other companies release updates. You don't see Adobe giving you the option of selecting which individual DLLs you want to patch in Photoshop. Microsoft is just moving towards the same patching plan other companies already use.
Sometimes I wonder if any Slashdot readers work in actual software companies. Because if you have real world experience with software development, you understand why this is done.
(I am not assiciated with Microsoft in any way)
It's the same shit all over again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And it will be just as funny in 50 years as the flag laws are today. People seem to never learn. You can't stop progress, the "best" you can do is to postpone it.
I am not really sure, but I think it's a small off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden.
Ah, Wayland. The Hurd of windowing systems. I'm sure it will be amazing once finished.
"consumers should be driving the market"
In a country where a limited number of internet providers have a virtual monopoly? How well did it work when it was tried with the phone companies in last century? I'm all for free market, when it works, but in this case it clearly does not. Just look at the prices and compare them with any country with a real internet provider competition if you don't believe.
The next step: Customers don't own the connectors on their phone. Apple retains the ownership, and rents out the connectors. Every time you connect something to your phone, you pay 1 cent to Apple via Apple Store.
Apple is slowly but surely becoming a parody of itself.
I just can't find any picture of the Cykelslangen with more than a few cyclist on it. For a route that relieves congestion in a busy area, you would expect it is full all the time, and that it looks busy on most pictures. But it doesn't. Strange.
Ok, I could have made the time to read the article carefully. On the other hand, you also could have been less of an ass when telling me about my mistake.
If you get a surgery on a weekend, likely there was a reason why it could not be postponed to Monday. No wonder that many of the surgeries that could not be postponed end badly.
And maybe the same thing applies to Fridays to some degree. Less critical surgeries are probably pushed to Monday, to avoid post-op care during the weekend if possible.
Dear Sirs, While we do not plan any monetary compensation for the outgoing links to your website, we would be partial to a barter deal. In compensation to our linking of your web site, you may publish any number of full page ads for our web site in your newspaper, free of charge. :)
-----
Dear Sirs, Thank you for your kind offer to pay us for linking to your web site. While we often get requests from various parties to link to their web site, and while we understand that such links are valuable to you and help you increase your advertising revenue, we do not accept compensation for it as a matter of policy. Therefore we are happy to assure you we will continue to link you your site free of charge. We would however accept a token gift of appreciation, like a cake or flowers for our staff, if you wish to share a small part of the revenue you earned thanks to us.
-----
Dear Sirs, We have noted that you no longer wish to be linked from our web site. While we do not understand why you would want to decrease the number of visitors to your web site, it's your tree and feel free to hang yourself on it. We have removed all links in question and set up a filter to make sure we never link you again, and will recommend our business partners to do the same.
-----
The only problem is, which approach to choose
(not native speaker, sorry for clumsy english while trying to sound official)
There is a difference between being *called* windows and *having* windows. Yes, of course window-based system existed before microsoft copied them. But here we are concerned only with the name. (And no, if one says "windows" he never means the x-window system, and it never was so. It was "X" or "X-Windows" or "X-Window", never "windows".)
Nonsense, when you say "windows" in the OS context, you always mean Microsoft Windows. The term has not become generic, that would mean that people use "windows" to refer to OS that is not in fact Microsoft Windows. On the other hand, you could easily say "app store" and mean the android application repository. The term has not even become generic, it has always been generic. It never exclusively referred to Apple app store.
As someone who does not live in USA, I have to ask: Can you still call this "democracy"? I thought the point of elections was people choosing the candidate who they think is best. Now you are voting for the worst candidate in order to get one of the better candidates out of the way. A few years ago you had the candidate who most people voted for lose the elections. And even if everything works fine, you still choose from a very limited set of candidates, offered by two major parties.
As a programmer, I see the specification is "choose the person wanted by most citizens for president", but the algorithm is a bit too complicated and obviously does not work according to the specification.
(preemptive comment; Yeah, who am I to talk, I am probably some European commie anyway.)
Ah, the ultimate free speech test. Can you talk about things that government does not like? Will SA pass? Stay tuned.
Then TFA is talking nonsense, sugar contains glucose and fructose in similar ratio as HFCS, the difference is that they are bonded into sucrose molecules by a weak bond. Sucrose is broken down to fructose and glucose in your digestive system and from that point there is really little difference between digesting sugar or HFCS.