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Comment Re:Blackberry won't disappear completely (Score 1) 89

BYOD is a nice idea, but even from an employee's perspective, it doesn't make much sense.

Do you really want IT reading / archiving all non-work related emails and texts on your phone? No, you don't. Even if they're the most benign messages ever.

I get that the company may take a peek at my computer screen at work, or MITM my gChats or quick "Do you want to meet for lunch?" emails I send out on company time on company machines, but I don't want them downloading the entirety of my private mail account, backing it up and perusing it.

Comment Re:Competition (Score 1) 89

And no, GIMP is not competition (and I have been using that, since the late-90s).

The fact that I use it instead of Photoshop shows it is. I suspect that as Photoshop start moving more and more to the cloud and users have to pay a subscription, more people will suddenly find Gimp very competitive.

I've never seen GIMP used in a production environment. It's just not really there yet.

(Disclaimer: I've worked for a fair number of TV networks and on several features you've probably seen.)

Comment Re:Adobe lost my upgrade Dollars (Score 1) 89

If your intent is to move into professional production, learn Avid, FCP and Premiere - in that order. Though, truth be told, Premiere comes in a distant third. It's been gaining ground since the FCP X disaster, but doesn't quite have the same market penetration.

Honestly, almost no one is going to care about the content of your student projects. But they will care that you used them to learn how to work with different editing platforms.

Comment Re:Rule of thumb (Score 1) 274

This.

It annoys me to no end when people respond to those critiquing the nuclear power industry with childish replies like "OMG ATOMS!!!!" and the like.

I trust the science, but I sure as hell don't trust the public or private institutions involved.

How many times have we heard "Oh yeah, this terrible thing happened, and it nearly became this horrific thing, but it got covered-up"?

Comment Re:very unfeasible (Score 1) 533

Amtrak spent $80 million back in the 1980s on a plan to build a high speed rail from LA to San Diego. Every little burg between the two cities sued to stop it. They finally sold the plans to somebody for $5 million.

If it had been a freeway, the property owners would have been told to take a walk.

Comment Re:reliability (Score 1) 139

I'll respectfully disagree, as I think the shift had more to do with the fact for most users, everything changed at home.

For years, most people had a cheap candy bar / flip phone, or at most, an expensive candy bar / flip phone. All phones were pretty dumb and very similar. Remember the RAZR? It was The Thing for a while, but looking back, it wasn't really that much different from everything else.

The hardware was sexy, but the software was horrible. Nobody liked the OS, nobody thought the phones were responsive, etc. It's essentially what the more vitriolic anti-Apple folks claim to be true with the iOS ecosystem. Except that in this case, it was true. There wasn't much to redeem the phones beyond the case. It was exactly the same garbage people had been force-fed for years.

At the same time, millions of people had BlackBerry phones provided by their employers. They offered email that worked and calendaring that wasn't a step below some CP/M program from 1980. (Seriously, did anyone actually use the calendar applications on those old consumer phones?)

While it was great to have email anywhere, it wasn't enough to shift the market away from the run-of-the-mill consumer devices and over to smartphones. At least not en masse.

Then the iPhone arrived. Suddenly people had phones that did a whole bunch of things people wanted to do and did them a whole lot better than their corporate-provided devices. While it had weak support for the features corporate IT demanded, it was immensely popular on the home front. The candy bars and flip phones got wiped out.

Customers went from owning a terrible phone for personal use and a fancy phone for the office, to owning a fancy phone at home and one at the office that seemed - quite suddenly - rather archaic. Rock solid, but... quaint.

Then Android hit the market. The iOS app store opened. The momentum had firmly shifted to the consumer side of things.

BlackBerry was lethargic in responding. Famously, they reacted to the iPhone launch with disbelief. They literally believed the feature list was a lie, so they didn't worry about it.

Even after reality hit them, BlackBerry's handsets were just more of the same. They admitted to not even knowing how many models they were making. Their tablet didn't even have email. In 2010. It made them look ridiculous. Especially in light of the fact email has always been BB's bread and butter.

Meanwhile, iOS and Android kept improving their corporate IT support and allowing third parties to rollout all kinds of management solutions without interference.

Executives carried iPhones and Androids and started wondering why they had to carry two phones.

Corporate IT people did the same. Sure, they were annoyed that they couldn't get the same crazy granularity in security on non-BB devices, but BlackBerries were looking more and more like the typewriter stuck in the corner of the office. It worked, but you didn't use it unless you needed to... and why was that thing still even around anyway?

BYOD was the final nail in the coffin. Penny-pinching execs eyes lit up when they saw the possibilities of not having to buy handsets anymore. Their iPhone and Android using employees could simply buy their own phone, with their own money!

BlackBerry's decline was due to a fundamental shift in the way people use phones and the failure of the market leader to recognize that fact until it was far too late. Had they mobilized on Day 1, I think they could have rolled-out BlackBerry 10 by the end of 2009. In which case, things probably would have been far, far different.

Honestly, it kind of reminds me of the home computing wars. The IBM PC arrived in 1981 and wiped out the entrenched CP/M market within a couple of years. Apple showed up in 1984 with an entirely different approach and snatched-up its own sizable segment. Commodore and Atari rolled out their own new platforms with strong niche appeal a bit later.

For years, Microsoft and Apple jostled for double-digit marketshare, while Commodore and Atari scrambled to claim whatever was left in their wake.

The smartphone market we ended up with Apple > Android > BlackBerry > Microsoft. The first two being incredibly strong, while the latter are struggling to justify their own existence.

The big difference here is that in the home computing wars, what people used at work eventually ended up being what they used at home. Here, it's the opposite.

Comment Re: How is this news? (Score 1) 176

But this is like telling you: "Since a lot of parents fail to account for the true cost of raising their future children, you have ten years to come up with every penny you'll spend for the first 18 years of their lives, their college tuition and their retirement. Anyway, congratulations on graduating high school!"

Comment Re:How is this news? (Score 2) 176

Every business should be required to actually fund their pension plans instead of whining to the government for bailouts later. See countless examples of companies going bankrupt over union demands and the unions whining about their pensions they're "owed"

By forcing the USPS to actually be accountable for it's promises to the unions, they can deal with the problem now rather than later.

I have absolutely zero problem with forcing institutions to pre-fund their pension plans.

But Congress gave the USPS entirely unreasonable demands in an entirely unreasonable timeframe. Even 40 or 50 years in 10 would be far too much.

But all of this is beside the point and not the real issue here, as the whole purpose of the stipulation is to trigger the financial collapse of the USPS.

Comment Re:How is this news? (Score 5, Informative) 176

Because unlike every other business on the planet Dubya passed a law that says the USPS has to have the ENTIRE retirement plan, to the very last penny for every single employee, funded for something like 40 years?

It's worse than that. The law gives the USPS 10 years to come up with 100% of the money needed to fund all of its pension requirements for the next 75 years.

It's designed to destroy the USPS so Republican lawmakers can bemoan how government has once again failed to deliver. Except that they're the ones who have failed us.

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