Playing Music? No iTunes, but otherwise works.
Unless you're buying music and you can't find a particular track on Google or Amazon.
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You forgot watching Hollywood movies (lawful DVD player, lawful BD player, clients for each country's DRM'd streaming services) and preparing tax returns.
You can just decline to do business with "robber barons".
Unless a service provided only by said "robber barons" is required to get and keep a source of income to keep a roof over your head.
There are whole huge swathes of blogspot.com that are tranny porn
So
Many (but not all) can choose another locality.
So why over the past decade and a half hasn't Microsoft added additional support in Windows Notepad for LF, on which every other major platform has since standardized?
That sign in at a Google search screen bothers me, at which point is one going to be required to use it.
Last time I checked (which was today), creating a Gmail account required a mobile phone number. So for someone buying a mobile phone in order to have a mobile phone number in order to create a Google account, where is one supposed to search for reviews of mobile phones? If a different web search engine, then why not just stick with that instead of using Google Search?
I was building up to that. An oligopoly can have the same negative effect on buyers as a monopoly.
Let's just say that curation helps keep a flood of amateurish games from cluttering the list of new releases presented to prospective game buyers.
And MS has a government granted monopoly on Windows due to copyright.
The relevant market here is not Windows but operating systems compatible with widely used applications. And at the time, enough of those were exclusive to for Windows that Microsoft was using its monopoly in one area (copyright in Windows) to secure or strengthen market power in other areas.
Given how much people apparently hate cable companies and their municipal monopolies, perhaps we should revisit the assumption that "natural monopolies" are best served with an actual monopoly.
I agree. Access to rights of way is a natural monopoly that has been allocated inefficiently in the past, and I presented an alternative to this inefficiency in another post.
At some point we need to just say, 'stop!', and write the code ourselves.
I wonder how much of "invented here" syndrome is related with frustration with curation on the popular curated platforms (iOS, Windows Phone, Windows RT, and game consoles). Cryptographic lockdown applied by the operating system publisher blocks end users from writing their own applications or writing a mod for an existing application. Because people are unwilling to go through the organizational overhead of becoming a licensed developer, they stick with the vanilla version of whatever they can get from the platform's official app store.
And Windows monopolizes the users of Windows PCs.
In a broader sense, Windows monopolizes the users of the large set of applications that are exclusive to Win32. The findings of fact in United States v. Microsoft spelled out the "applications barrier to entry" responsible for Windows market share.
Your point
Phrasing my point in a manner that you will most readily understand depends on your answer to the following question: If cellular weren't a cartel, then how could all four cellular carriers get away with raising pay-as-you-go texting rates at the same time?
[Someone who needs a PC to game on while another family member is using another PC] can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.
Just to be sure: You mean keep the gaming PC and run the non-gaming stuff on the $199 PC, right? Then the question for households that currently have a $199 PC becomes whether to buy the expensive gaming PC or to buy one of the consoles.
I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks
Don't worry; I agree that PC users are masters of their own respective experiences.
but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated.
Some other Slashdot users would argue that this curation serves a purpose, namely saving people's time from having to wade through the crappiest of the crap, which is 90% according to Theodore Sturgeon, and that the profitable majority of people have been Stockholmed into not "feel[ing] hampered by that. Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?
With Jerry, Fievel Mousekewitz, Elizabeth Brisby, and others, who needs Mickey Mouse?
There aren't too many enthusiasts out there rooting their phones to be able to use f-droid, and the other stores are useless.
F-Droid does not require root. It requires "Unknown sources", a checkbox that appears in the "Security" or "Apps" settings of virtually all Android-powered phones and tablets except about the first year of AT&T phones. And in what way is Amazon Appstore useless?
That's why I can get an update for the OS direct from Apple but I'm at the mercy of a carrier for Android?
I have an ASUS Nexus 7 (2012) tablet computer with Wi-Fi. My aunt has an iPad 2, also with Wi-Fi. Both get updates straight from the manufacturer. What "carrier" are you talking about? Do you mean an ISP?
One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis
