They need to improve the software, not the hardware. Pushing the hardware for profit is going to undermine the brand. The existing hardware is powerful enough to run a well written mobile OS. The only half way good mobile OS appears to be Windows 10 or perhaps some version of Linux. Android and iOS are horrible. They are operating systems made to sell apps and mine people's data. On top of all that the mobile platforms are too immature to trust with personal data and they are being stuffed with personal data. You have an entertainment toy/phone being sold as a personal computer and the software is not robust enough to offer either the value or the security. If you weigh the costs and benefits, smartphones are a net loss other than to the companies who got rich selling them.For users, they really don't offer much more than a flip phone and are way easier to break and half like 1/3 the battery life. Flip phones also did not mine your personal data nearly as much. Studies show smartphones lowers productivity and with the huge costs and the horrible, malware filled app stores. I see a trend, not a solid industry with any real vision or direction. They are just scrambling to make the fast money while they can and offering very little value for our dollar. The cheap 100-200 dollar smartphones can offer decent value, but for the key uses of being a phone and texting they are probably a net loss due to the unreliable battery levels. (texting may be faster, but the phone being off for periods fo time offsets most benefits), but there is nothing a 600 dollar smartphone can do that warrants 3 times the cost of the 200 dollar one. The premium phones offer almost nothing for the money other than silly features that come and go. What they really need is better software across the board. Android and iOS could go back to the drawling board and reinvent the UI and really no be doing any worse then ever.. that's how generally undeveloped their UIs really are.. they may as well all be viewed as beta operating systems at this point. A good phone MUST be able to be controlled by one hand. That's how we've used phones for a long time. Large phones you can't hold right or interfaces that don;t adjust automatically are just not acceptable or well thought out. These companies are experimenting with customers necessary infrastructure and they are not being careful at all. They don't care about our personal data. They pile it up and sell it, that's how little they care about your security. If they cared they would not be mining your data because they would realize the liability is not worth the risk when you are still building and secure the basic mobile platform. So.. who cares how fast yet another overpriced and under conceived smartphone happens to be. What is it that we are really supposed to do with these things? They aren't better phones, they basically refuse to finish voice commands, the music apps are all horrible scams designed to sign you up for their services now. The best parts of the platforms are being all tied directly in profit motives. The three major features of a smartphone beside being a phone are supposed to be to get email, to take pictures and to play music. The scan ALL out email to sell us adds, they broke all the music apps unless you pay 10+ a month to get all the features. Whats next? Are they going to make us pay 10 bucks a month to use the camera too?

Bad IT Directors like that screwed it up for everyone after them by bringing down upper management on IT. Now a lot of upper management doesn't trust or want to fund IT because they let IT Directors just run wild. It's a mutual mistake, but the IT Directors knew they were not being cost effective and that's their job. IT needs to think it itself as amp or turbo booster for business profits. Good IT brings massively increased production and automation. Good IT raises revenue so much more than it costs that nobody complains. A great IT Director is mostly doing research, accounting, delegation and people management. Too often we elevate the actual IT experts to the level of Director and they don't have the proper skillset at all.

High School is not to train kids. If it were then McDonalds, Walmart and AppleBees would be the top classes. That's not the proper way to educate the future of your nation.. stop being so stupid and argumentative just to be stupid and argumentative. One thing we don't need is more angry little trolls who want to hate on everything and be critical without taking the time to think or knowing how to use words well. We should have more coding and computer classes, which I think most people would call an IT class. IT is not just about configuring switches, most people would consider that coding. I think we have a coding class because coding is a field that will grow and grow. We should ALSO have a class for compouter and office apps use, just like most high schools have had for years now. I had a coding class in BASIC in elementary school. I think most average or better schools have IT classes now, they just aren't standardized. Lets get MS and Cisco to give billions more to schools to get kids interested.. whats wrong with that? You think GYM is a class, but not programming? WTF peopel

Do you guys not remember High School? GYM is a fucking class. You're sitting here, like argumentative clowns, telling people we don't need more computers classes in high school because that's not real education or that's not going to payoff? Yeah but Home Economics, Gym, Cheerleading, Marching Band, shop class are all totally practical. If you want to TRAIN people to fill a role instead of educating them to live up to their potential, you have a serious lack of understand of how society really works and that masses of stupid people are dangerous and costly. I guess we will be importing yet more college educated people if more American are thinking public education is yet another bloated government program they can cut. Why not just like McDonalds and Walmart make their own classes if you're going to do that?

We should be teaching coding, especially scripting and automation in school. They are universally useful in all fields. Many fields WISH they had more field specific coders.. aka engineers who are also coders or scientists who are also coders. These people can help you build better apps faster than most anyone else. Since most of the important professions use computers we want to train kids to be good at computers and coding. Robotics, Automation and Coding is the future. Business and management is still an awesome field too. Accounting and Business Math have been part of High School educations for awhile. Chemist and Physics are as well. Do we expect kids to come out of school and solve chemistry problems? NO.I don't see where you really have a point in the words you've put together. We can offer kids more vocational options, but High School itself should continue to have classes that 'only a fraction of students will eventually do'. Dumbing down high school even more is a very bad idea. I don't know how any American could suggest we don't need computer training in high schools. It's been in high schools for 30 years now. We need IT and Coding, we need Chemist and Biology and Calculus even though 'only a fraction of students will eventually do'. Can we not have a bit better computers classes with more serious coding as standard in all high schools? Whats wrong with that? Stop being so narrow minded or you will live in a society of narrow minded people and you will no like it one bit.

We really just need more coders and engineers, for now. AI will replace a lot of coders too. The continued move to the cloud will replace a lot IT personal. We always need good managers and customer relations/sales if you prefer more stable fields. Coding can be hard work for the money. I don't think people get that. Most IT is a lot of ass sitting waiting for something to happen. Coding is more like real work unless you own the product and can mostly do bug and feature requests. If you planned to work for a corporation, the Network and Server Administrator jobs are FAR FAR less work than coding. Coders should probably be paid 50-100% more than they are and you'd have a lot more ppl want to be and STAY coders.

Places like Slashdot and Reddit are basically known suckers for anything that says open source. There is no government where they force all government workers to use open source software. The fact is, lots of countries need lots of proprietary software and have for decades and will continue for decades.Good luck nationalizing your software and writing a competing product to AutoCAD. It's just you know.. engineering software right. Nothing government would need. It's a nice idea, but most software is not grossly overpriced for the amount of man hours that it will process, not the time it saves, but rather the YEARS of operation that software gives you at the rate of many hours per day with minimal downtime. For a immature industry it does well, but for an immature industry pushing for end game solutions like open source just doesn't make as much sense as many of you pretend it does. First off, lets loo at the real open source world, not the ideal one in your utopian shared code dreams. Without the standard for hire management hierarchy who controls an opensource project in the long run? If this is non profit are we to assume many of it's members make 250k or less? Ok, well, how hard is it to bride a loosely knit organization of people getting average pay, often volunteering their time while working 40 hours a week. Where is the physical security? Where is the notion that this project has enough value to resist the corruption that billion dollar markets can put on it? I' just supposed to take all that on faith and then embrace a project that almost always has less features and isn't compatible with the industry standard. Ok, so how many hours of conversion or lost jobs do I factor in for using open source office software? How much loss do I factor in for having to force people to learn two entirely different platforms and different apps on those platforms?What happens when a new architecture comes out and my slow moving open source community can't rapidly adapt OR get forced out by ever specializing hardware? Did you guys not see that coming/ How are you doing to maintain Linux on specialized hardware when it's splintered so much? .NET makes the portability of Linux look stupid, like a person with a pile of books vs one using a nice organized library with a system made to organize books. Open source is going to fall behind as more and more new hardware comes out, specialized hardware made for exact purposes. You can eventually get all that working, but it's going to take years behind what the people who own the hardware will be able to do AND at some point they will purposely push you out as competition. Linux and open source have a rough future ahead of them, not the bright world domination that everyone thinks. Platforms change and computing is still very immature. It's only been around 20-30 years in any meaningful mass market way. Opensource has a long history of exploiting hardware to get the most out of it, but it does so 5 years after the hardware comes out usually, not when it the hardware is new and has market appeal. For mission critical security devices opensource makes sense, but you can't have the best software and have it be open source because you don't live in a social utopia where people just do what's best for humanity without a compelling reward. You can't maintain the pace of companies like Microsoft just via open source. You need alliances with the hardware companies and there isn't much guarantee that random opensource projects with minimal leadership and little to no funding will get that. None of this makes any sense anyway. All that we should care about is that the best apps have reasonably high availability to most of the people who could use them. This should be like any market where the best app wins and the victory gets money. If you don't want the best apps, then go open source, but when it comes to complex apps that require millions of lines of code and constant upkeep, open source has a very hard time keeping up. Linux is not catching up to windows when all is said and done. The only think happening is people are becoming more web centric. There is no feature of open source drawling them. It's just the natural progress to centralizing management for cost reduction and ease of use. The same CENTRAL management which leads to market consolidation because uts convenient and practical. That same reason so many people go to Walmart. There is no track record of rock solid security from open source software. All software models have been exploited multiple times and continue to be. Nothing is secure, so where are you basing your belief that opensource is even the end of answer to things? It's silly really. It's a bunch of reactionary BS. Governments don't require opensource technology from any other market. Governments most often buy into contractors like any corporation would. Government don't make their roads, they hire or create industries that build roads. Those industries go on to do public and private jobs. If you invest all this money into switching to and customizing opensource for your needs, you're not investing in redundant and almost certainly inferior and well behind the time code.You're paying coders to code things that were coded 20 years ago in order to create an illusion of security through open source. Because you can SEE the code man.. OK.. what you see? OH you can't read code? Ok.. then programmers.. what do you see? OH you can't read millions of lines of code in any meaningful way? WELL I sure hope we have an Open Source auditing branch that works automatically and not just on request. If I was a spy.. how hard would it be to get into an open source project and plant just the right code? Consider my coding team would have the source code to review for months or years before hand. Seems fairly trivial giving one side has lots of resources and the other has almost none. How do you stop bribery when you're that poor compared to the competition and this is not a static product you sell once and you're good.

It's seems more likely that life spread TO earth than it originated from Earth, but we do currently see ourselves as an early galaxy and that could present some unique problems to humans. Most likely things are just as we've assumed and life is common enough, but it most often gets destroyed before it becomes sentient. That doesn't mean there are not millions of intelligent lifeforms in the universe, the universe is just easily that big. Europeans had no idea North and South America existed and those places are infinitely closer and smaller than just our galaxy, not less the universe. If you really appreciate the scale of the universe it becomes hard to see how long distance space travel is possible. Sad, but true. Even with huge gains we'd have to make a machine that could run for thousands of years to get to Alpha Century, longer that human civilization has been around... and that's with exponential jumps in speed. You have the mechanical and behavioral issues there. As well as funding something that takes thousands of years to get results from. I don't see the whole warp speed dream coming true. Humans are trapped on this solar system. The only way out with today's tech is to seed another planet with human DNA and ideally knowledge.The universe is big, you may as well seed many places. The best method is to have autonomous robots do those jobs. You send various robots to target planets or even program roaming colony ships and they go to the planet and setup a human clone station. You can clone to the age you want. You should be able to transfer intelligence from digital storage to a human brain. That is how we will travel the universe and preserve human knowledge and DNA. For now we could shoot life building blocks at planets with human knowledge capsules and hope for the best. We don't have any of the other technology yet, but those are all ENTIRELY practical ideas. Cloning is not that hard, we could be cloning humans now and likely be starting to get pretty good at it. We are close to having pretty smart robots. We lack machines that can last tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to travel to these target planets as well as any confidence that we can even get there. The upside is that Alpha Century is moving toward us, the downside is galactic collisions probably destroy more life than they cause and our goal is preservation. Chances are we can just secure humanity here on Earth deep underground and save money while working on technologies we need most. The resources, gravity and water content make Earth more ideal than anything else even if you burn the atmosphere off it. Even if you mutilate the crust of the planet, your still at the right distance to the sun, you have the ideal gravity, you have tons of resources in the surface and mantle. You would not flee Earth to another world if Earth was threatened by anything other than an impact so massive that it would liquify most of the crust. How large or powerful of an impact would that take.. who knows, but way larger than anything we have record on since perhaps the early formation of Earth, billions of years ago. The point is we should do what our ancestors did and look to subterranean life as the protector of our species. In our case we don't have to adapt to such life. Something like the UN should have a network of deep underground sustainable dwellings, seedbanks, mining equipment, human knowledge. That, not a Mars colony is the best way to preserve humanity. A Mars colony would just die on Mars most likely. A purposely built human fallout NETWORK could live underground for hundreds of maybe thousands of years and build humanity back when conditions allowed. More likely than not modern human society would survive the known disasters just the way it is (with vastly lower numbers of course), but the nations who rebound the fastest will dominate that new landscape. Humanity is already living underground all over the world, but having a place made for disaster recovery would be far more ideal. It might also clam some people. We can burrow and we can spread the building blocks of life. We cannot get to another solar system, not even with a probe and that will not change for at least hundreds of years. A trip to another solar system is science fiction for now.

The project managers who choose excel to enter the data are at fault here. They picked the app AND they did not do the proper quality control. How else can you really see it? It would be obvious at 20%, if that is true, that there were significant errors and the process itself needed to be changed. Instead of you have untold tens of thousands of lost labor hours of data collection for unreliable data in an industry where you certainly cannot settle for data variation. Blaming Excel is entirely lame and it's the same BS lack of accountability that everyone has these days, the same they complain about in their politicians and corporations, while offering none themselves. I see TONS of people use spreadsheets because it formats the data for them. They use it as Word Processor template more than a spreadsheet. This may not be the case here, but the point is you have to use the app within the limits of the app, not expect your needs to magically define the app without an investment of developer time and money to make that happen. I'm sure MS would be happy to work with the needs of an industry that large, wealthy and holding so much potential. Staring the conversation out by blaming their product seems lame. This is what happens when news is all for profit... the comment become the only thing worth read.. and then you realize half of them are just witty bots..........crapception complete

That seems more accurate. It's not worth starting your own market place, your own coding department for the marketplace AND then having to maintain all that while companies with vast coding experience blow by your teams. App market places and authentication frameworks should NEVER be from the OS maker, as Apple, Google and MS have all done. App market places should be third party market places who's profit are hopefully linked to providing well tested and somewhat supported apps. Basically nothing more than Steam for apps, but likely with better support.Instead of charging for support, you should be charging for "a one on one tutorial" on how to get the most out of apps. Instead of basing so much on ads and data mining a quality app market would be based on well reviewed app and all the tips and tricks you could want. App markets are markets and all the fun of advertising and lying that comes with advertising comes to those markets. As silly as it sounds.. Facebook is what we need. A third party app and authentication platform that is not tied to any OS. This way the OS makers can just make the secure framework we need them to make. Linux suffers from a ridiculous amount of developer splintering, which while may seem good at first, it makes it rather easy for organized corporations to take advantage of open source, throw a few million into development and steal the user base from the coders who did the work. Opensource is nice for things that don't change often, but when things do change often opensource is less secure, slower and vastly less efficient at the goal of making great apps. It's great at the goal of using people's free time for a attempted good cause. I'd argue most open source coding time is entirely lost other than to help further educate the coders involved in the project.

Like back in the good days before the lie that is easy cross platform compatibility made developer stop working toward meaningful goals and instead endlessly try to reinvent the wheel... the open source wheel.. because everything open source is better.... RITE. Even when the codebase is inferior, it's still better because OPENSOURCE!

Intel has your markets in their crosshairs now and they have a track record of awesome when it comes to commercial chip success.

Consider there is no specially made internet infrastructure to the users door and this is all a retrofit. Of course the guy with the most copper in the cable is going to do the best. When there are more options, users will jump ship rapidly.. if only just to try them out. That is the problem with abusing your customer base for marginal profit increases. You do make a lot of money over a long period of time, but when a new technologies comes out you risk have a mass market exodus from your produt, even as you lower prices to keep users, they have labeled you a bad deal and will avoid your brand. Verizon and Comcast come to mind. Comcast because of TV cable price gouging and Verizon because they are the worst company ever. Comcast has always provided me with fast and reliable internet. Verizon has always tried to screw me on my phone bill every time I wasn't looking. Hundreds of dollars for text and data because ppl did not sign up in advance. Yeah.. I'll leave verizon and never look back as soon as local coverage allows. I'll pay more to not use Verizon in fact.

Who writes articles like this? Why would Snowden be making such statements. What did he mean when they say "NSA data was likely obtained by someone with physical access to an NSA secure area who managed to walk out with a USB stick loaded with secrets." "calling itself Shadow Brokers is in response to growing tensions between the U.S. and Russia over the hacks on the Democratic groups" It reads like propaganda to me. I don't believe Snowden is in Russia and also still a reliable source of information, especially on matters to do with Russia... a nation with the potential to take over the media and even explode journalists. You can believe what you like about Snowden and the NSA, but trusting the info stream from Snowden inside of Russia is stupid.

Windows phone will just become Surface Phone. They are jumping off ARM. It's too expensive to keep the phone platform alive for so few users. As a mobile patform windows 10 is way better than android. As a phone platform it will have power consumption challenges. As batteries allow x86 with displace general computer ARM soutions like tablets, phones and eventually set top boxes. We are going right back to where we came. Intel is in the low power market and MS has the only x86 mobile OS. I've never seen Intel fail at making and selling computer chips. I bet they don't start now. The cost of finishing the exist crap mobile platforms is still billions of dollars and time that they just don't have. MS has the better OS and better platform, porting apps to a new UI is a lot easier than making ARM apps and maintaining them. You can see in the Linux platform that supporting ARM is not fun and just not getting done. Developers don't want to write for two platforms like that. Apple boxed themselves in with iOS. Google has no desktop os. MS has a unified x86 and ARM platform AND if you don't know if you build your frameworks on ,NET you prepare yourself for any new chipsets that might swoop in a and change things. Maybe VR and IoT will need a new chipset. Linux is great for that if your needs are specific. If you need general computing Windows is going to be easier to port the OS and a functional and expansive library, especially as more Universal apps get written. MS is a lot closer to having a good unified desktop and mobile than anyone else and that's going to be the future of computing because things like clloud drives are just not good enough. Having storage for mobile apps that can hardly do anything doesn't help as much in real life as it does while we are obsessively download free data mining apps from the Google store.