Microsoft failed because they had few developers for either the desktop or mobile version of the framework. The countless Windows apps did not become buildable on mobile. If Apple makes it easy to add OSX support to existing iOS apps, they will have a lot of success.
That, and the fact the new XAML UX framework can only be used by AppX apps that run in the sandbox. “Normal”, otherwise unconstrained Win32 programs can’t use it.
What are some alternatives to Mac App Store that give the developer the same services, like handling payment, including subscriptions, downloads, some DRM to prevent casual copying and updates, for less than 30%?
Last I checked, I had to assemble the above from disparate services, investigating each, integrating them, and paying for each, which doesn't seem like a productive use of my time or money.
The "buy once update forever" business model of the Mac App Store is the real financial burden, not the ~30% tariff. Dev houses need some residual income, esp in the relatively small Mac market.
My guess is this could be driving the divide between semantic and vanity versions. If a developer has a big new update that's fully backward compatible they'll still be tempted to bump the major version of it means they can justify selling it separately. (Assuming stores allow names with a numeric bump.)
This is so true. A friend on Medicaid needed some medical care which the state was legally obligated to provide him. He was told by his primary care physician that the care was not available at all in the system, full stop. I helped him request the care through official channels. I then helped him initiate the process of filing a formal complaint when his requests were ignored for months.
He got a date at a sort of administrative court. The people from the local Medicaid program tried to trick him into dropping the complaint by promising that they would provide care - but only if he dropped his complaint before the court date. They said it looked bad for them if anyone filed a complaint. But nobody in the system could fit him in for an appointment until after the court date, he was told.
A game of chicken ensued. When my friend told the administrators he would only drop his complaint after receiving care, an appointment before the court date mysteriously appeared.
I felt like I had to use all of the skills I developed from debugging systems and negotiating exploding offers just to get my friend what he was legally supposed to get automatically. It was quite clear to me that the Medicaid program was using this formal complaint system as a form of triage, to reduce costs by weeding out the people who can't work the system well enough to hold the program to its obligations.
In addition, the price of insulin is sky high, despite being non-patented, because of exploitation of a different set of arcane government policies by pharma companies that roll out slight modifications of insulin that they claim are more effective, and subsequently get everyone to prescribe those despite only marginal benefits at best... while the previous generations quickly fall off the market, as soon as their patents expire.
Ugg... that looks like a ripe market for some Indian company to sell the older versions of insulin. (Of course, there will be legal hurdles and hoops to jump through, but it seems like it'll be bringing competition to the US companies better).
I for one, am tempted to just ignore the legal aspects and start a market on tor or something like that. sigh..
If that sort of commute becomes popular, it'll just lead even more massive congestion around job centers. In the limit, you'll reach your destination halfway through the workday and immediately turn around to go home.
It's not legal to camp in your car in a parking place but with a self-driving car, people can just sleep in the back while the vehicle drives aimlessly around.
If this process makes traffic go very slowly, so much the better - less gas spent and a gentler ride.
I don't think our roads have the capacity to allow everyone to be sitting on them in their own personal automobiles all day. And even if they do, the roads won't actually function as transportation infrastructure.
I was being a bit facetious above and aiming to show the multiple contradictions that seem to be in play in the idea that self-driving cars could solve the interlocked high-rent/absurd-commute problems.
I mean, sure, maybe the final absurdity is going to be a mass of people telecomuting from the back of their self-driving RVs as these inch along in some random location but maybe the complex will fall to pieces before this.
Believe it or not, I experienced the non-self-driving version of that scene. It was the mass of vehicles heading from the eclipse festival to Burning Man a few months ago, a block of traffic puttering along at 30 mph all day while passengers sat on their laptops.
If all cars were self driving, road capacity could be optimized by 2-3X, at least (they could move smoothly bumper to bumper). It won’t happen in the states first, but highly contested Asian cities in autocratic countries sure.
A. References for a claim a self-driving car could navigate that much more efficiently. As far as I know, current self-driving cars drive more conservatively than humans.
B. Such a claim would require all current cars off the road. How well do you think anyone could manage that? In any car-using nation, including Asia, there's a huge investment in current cars and ending that would be harder than simply introducing self-driving carts.
C. Even 2-3x the capacity can be used up quickly if people are willing to waste it and self-driving cars have much less incentive for not sitting in rush hour traffic than regular cars - which already spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic.
A. Today is definitely not tomorrow. Self driving cars also don’t have any network advantages atm.
B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.
C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.
Sure, a sufficiently strong state could impose a sane and efficient commuting system in some fashion if it chose to.
That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).
Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.
That is incredibly American centric. There is plenty of diversity in the way things work in the world. It will only take one country to use self driving cars as an economic advantage (by optimizing infrastructure investments) for the other countries to follow to keep up their competitiveness.
It would not be very comfortable to sleep strapped to the bed in a strange position. Sleeping in sitting position does not count as comfortable. At most you can count on sleeping like in an airplane.
Self-driving car can't beat physics. In case of an accident everything inside will fly continuing direction of movement. Including the passenger. There will be no two couches facing a table. Because in case of an accident the face of a passenger sitting facing the back of the car will be hit with: his book, his hot coffee and opposite sitting passenger's laptop.
Immediately? Surely the reason you trekked all the way in (while actually working remotely) was to have that one-hour, face-to-face meeting insisted upon by some manager.
I think you are ignoring the main financial motive for this change - ISPs want to shake down Google, Facebook, and other successful internet companies. Customers won't see this directly. It will have indirect effects by increasing costs for the companies they use, but not in an obvious way that will cause a revolt. In financial terms, this dispute is mainly about these giant companies battling over who gets the fat profits Google and Facebook are currently taking home.
Can you explain your last paragraph further? Obviously saying you agree with something you never read is a bad idea. Since you haven't read it, you don't know how bad it is, right? For all you know it could be Mein Kampf. Or it could just say your boss is an idiot, or that working at your company is a waste of time, etc. Especially as a knowledge worker, ideas you espouse at work could affect your employability, so you should know what they are before espousing them. We aren't a bunch of robots - our productivity is influenced by what our colleagues say.
A part of me is uninterested in reading it because I find other topics way more interesting. But a part of me also feels I can't read it. Because if I read it and I agree with it, I will have to balance honesty and integrity with oppression.
All my life I held all my controversial opinions quite openly, but this was the first time I actually fear being controversial.
I'm with Voltaire on this one: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". A coworker can say something I disagree terribly with, that even could impact my life personally, and would consider it just the way people relate to each other, sometimes its not nice and thats it.
"Moral outrage" on twitter is a ridiculous measure for progress or improvement over people's lifes. It does terrible damage in so many levels. And companies listening to that are just succumbing to their PR and legal department, not striving to an idealistic work environment. Google can be sued for not firing Damore!
Godwin's law exists because "something we both agree is wrong" is a useful north star in an argument.
Edit: If someone makes a general claim like "nobody should be fired for agreeing with any text x", it makes sense to test that claim by putting an extreme value in for x.
Im not criticizing, if there is one thing the nazis did right was being a never ending example of what not to be/do.
That said, I have not read Mein Kampf and its a similar situation. Is everything in that book ideological garbage? Maybe, maybe not. I actually dont know what its about!
But trying to find that out in public can get you beat and people will clap in encouragement if that happened.
Hell, I would be even afraid to google that book in amazon.
> We aren't a bunch of robots - our productivity is influenced by what our colleagues say.
Indeed!
That's why it's so concerning to some of us that our colleagues are apparently children who blindly parrot misinterpretations of source material and call for blood over their own fabricated outrage.
It's simple to explain in the context of this discussion. But probably doesn't seem as simple to the average user, who wants to donate $1 to a creator, and will feel like some kind of scam is going on if they are asked to add $10 to their Patreon balance first.
Thinking about it some more, Patreon may end up eating the additional fees for the first payment (for CUF posts), increasing their cut a bit on other posts to make up for that, then aggregating the recurring charges.
They key thing about pyramids/MLM is that the growth is based entirely on getting more investors i.e. people who are putting money in with the intention of getting money out later (this also included MLM sellers who have to buy product upfront). Whereas a non-pyramid grows because it has more non-investor users, or some other source of revenue from people who don't plan to take that money out later.
