231–240 of 345 posts
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A niche that appeals to almost no one and alienates the telcos that manufacturers partner with. So it looks like the free market is working in this case.
>So it looks like the free market is working in this case. That is not necessarily a good thing.
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It does when the replacements make life appreciably worse or more complicated, and it matters even more when the old ways are deprecated, made unfashionable, or just flat-out unavailable. Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have…
> the replacements make life ... more complicated It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity aw…
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/07/25/farmers-fight-for-rig...
https://www.law360.com/articles/830803/farm-tool-dealer-can-...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/08/17/432...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/09/523...
This looks a lot like the relationship between Apple or Google and their customers.
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> This is exactly the problem with technology. This is YOUR problem with the technology. Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. They like that the dialer provides fancy stuff like visual voicemail, automatic transcription, phone-number-to-business-name mapping, etc. Most people don't care about trying to avoid Google Services, in fact mo…
> Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere? A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these…
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> the replacements make life ... more complicated It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity aw…
But the farmer is purchasing physical property with a software component. John Deere is abusing the software industry's history of license agreements to further its business objectives of controlling repair revenue. While many here seem to take the notion of ownership for granted we forget that it is one of the few things that elevate us above modern feudalism. An attack on ownership is an attack on many of the freed…
More likely, I think driverless cars will just be rented to people. And most of them won't even be that; the manufacturers will just build pools of them and hire them out, in the mode of taxis. The owner and "driver" will be the manufacturer; the people benefitting will be purely passengers.
I don't see what invalidates that logic when translated over to agro-tech: there's no reason John Deere will end up selling tractors, when they could instead contract them out, just as a temp agency contracts out their employees. They'd be the owner and the operator, insofar as they programmed the things and they're mostly running on automatic. The control buttons on such robots would just be for making "requests", and the owner would be free to ignore them. ("Don't like it? Hire someone else!")
Of course, for now, they're trying to get the benefits of being in that hypothetical world, while still existing in our own, which seems a bit silly. :)
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> Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere? A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these…
It sounds like you have a really slow smartphone.
I have run all kinds of app loads, with stock and hacked operating systems, and things ALWAYS end up this way. The only way to avoid it seems to be to install barely anything.
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So when Google updated the Nexus dialer to include search-based "Caller ID" that was a bad thing? Or when Google upgraded Messenger to include RCS support?
It is worth noting how we got here: - Someone said having multiple options for a phone dialer is a wonderful thing. - Someone else pointed out that the article isn't about a choice, the dialer was forced on the user. - The parent asks if it is bad that Google updates apps in a tone that strongly hints that they can't imagine how the answer could be yes. Far too many conversations go like this here. To (try to) get ba…
If you want the phone to come with a dialer (I think most people do), then some dialer will inevitably be forced on people. And unless you think phone calls are an optional feature, it makes perfect sense that the dialer cannot be deleted.
The only complaint I can see here is that phone manufacturers can make bad choices for their default, undeleteable dialers. Well, yes, just like they can make bad choices for other software on the phone. The only reasonable remedy for that is to buy a phone from a manufacturer that makes software choices you like.
That phone manufacturers can make bad software choices is not an argument against having replaceable dialers. Quite the opposite. A manufacturer can make the exact same bad dialer choice if the dialer isn't replaceable. The only difference is that if the dialer is replaceable you might be able to do something about their bad choice some of the time.
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I like how minicomputer used to mean "computer that's only as big as a chest freezer." Every now and then I hear laypeople use the term "mini-computer" to mean a computer that's really small by their standards, like a raspberry Pi.
And then we had "microcomputers" (desktop PC sized). Rather disappointed we didn't call laptops "nanocomputers" and phones "picocomputers" :)
I really like your idea of nano and picocomputers. It's consistent, and really reflects on the miniaturisation that we have seen since since the invention of the computer.
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But the farmer is purchasing physical property with a software component. John Deere is abusing the software industry's history of license agreements to further its business objectives of controlling repair revenue. While many here seem to take the notion of ownership for granted we forget that it is one of the few things that elevate us above modern feudalism. An attack on ownership is an attack on many of the freed…
Like I said, totally uninformed—but I can see the analogy to, say, driverless cars. I don't expect that, in the long term, people will really "own" driverless cars—they require too much dealer-side maintenance, and Bad Things can happen if the "owner" of a driverless car prevents a software update from happening (things that can take the car from road-legal to not, where the law would place the blame for that status…
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This is exactly the problem with technology. Asshole companies have to productify everything . It's not about being paranoid, it's about operational simplicity. Dialing a phone is dialing a phone; not everyone wants Google to think for them The act of punching in a number should not require any outside services or assistance or requirements. If there are value-added components to add then they can manifest as modular…
> This is exactly the problem with technology. This is YOUR problem with the technology. Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. They like that the dialer provides fancy stuff like visual voicemail, automatic transcription, phone-number-to-business-name mapping, etc. Most people don't care about trying to avoid Google Services, in fact mo…
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I think everyone here calls them cellphones. I call them mobiles and everyone gets it. Handy... wouldn't work in Canada, and I suspect not in the U.S. either.
Handy (CA, US etc) == handjob (GB etc). Presumably handy is an abbreviation of handjob. I know blowjob is in common parlance at least on both sides of the pond. Perhaps it is just as well DE didn't pick blowey or blowie (those are in use over here in a similar way to handy on the left edge of the pond.) Handy could work in the UK except that it is extensively used already as an adjective eg: "that's a bit handy" or "…