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Low-Cost Indian Tablet Project Falls To Corruption
symbolset writes "The first Aakash tablet proposed for India schools has failed. Datawind managed to deliver the $45 Android tablet as reported here previously, but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold. Facing a loss in revenue it's turning into a disaster for the small Canadian company as they are now proving unable to deliver both the Aakash tablet and the parallel retail product. Senior executives have begun to flee. The company has presold a great many tablets, and delivery failure reports are beginning to mount. Is this the Phantom console of this decade?"
incomeptent contracts != corruption
India? Corruption? You don't say...
What? Google had nothing to do with this failure other than making the OS. Just because they make Android doesn't mean they are responsible for every android device that is made. That is like saying Microsoft is at fault if the motherboard of your new computer fails.
Wtf does Google have anything to do with manufacturing and government requirements issues? Android is software, all the problem are hardware. If you are gonna blindly bash Google, at least keep it relevant unless this is an attempt to troll.
For those of you who are to lazy to RTFA.
1) Government wants $45 laptop to have military grade ruggedness (of which was not stated until late into the game). Quote from the article, ' The criteria included being able to withstand four inches of rain, enduring shock tests when “mounted in a vehicle,” and when subject to “sudden acceleration, braking, or turning while transporting the units.” ' Normally I wouldn't consider this that bad but for a $45 laptop, I can definitely see an issue.
2) The manufacturer "signed an agreement with I.I.T. Rajasthan to manufacture what Mr. Tuli said he believes is a rival low-cost tablet." This side seems to be a mess of Corporate political issues. You can read the article for more on this yourself.
I don't know what town you live in (or who is paying you to live there), but to most people, Google and Android stand for options. If you want to save money, you can get a cheap Android device. If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device. You can put whatever you want on your own device. And I don't think any reasonable person would expect a $45 Android tablet to have the same capabilities or quality as an iPad, and it doesn't need to if you look at what it's designed for: to make technology available in a non-1st world state.
Of course, the nature of your post and the fact that your ID is almost as high as the National Debt show you are nothing more than a paid (at least I hope you are at least getting paid) astroturfer trying to make Google look bad. The truth is that Google is nowhere near the "bad joke around town". People like you are, though. Subtlety, try it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This is the worst fucking troll on Slashdot since "think about your breathing."
From what I can tell, they got the tender, did all the groundwork, then the group they were collaborating with came out with new impossible to achieve specs, backed up by the government, and their subcontractor wandered off to create a competing product.
What a pity, but it looks like they've been had.
I don't know if it's fair to still call DataWind a Canadian company. Yes, it was founded in Montreal, but ... R&D is in Montreal.. management is in the UK.
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Bad analogy. BSOD is a software issue because the OS didn't trap the hardware failure and crashed.
The same thing happens on Linux but at a MUCH smaller frequecy. Bad hardware (except for the processor which runs the show) shouldn't crash your system.
You clearly haven't done business in India. "Manufacture the product" is where things went off the rails here, even as stated by the summary: "but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold." Corruption is most often found in the implementation phase of things, because at that point you're committed to the bridge/road/product/building/whatever and the person demanding a bribe understands this. It's far easier to simply give back money during a fundraising period than it is to cancel a project halfway through. And when you really think about it, this is a manifestation of 'taking the high road,' by not doing whatever you can to come up with extra cash to pay off the corrupt, but instead canceling the project. Not the nicest high road to take, but such is life.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Hate to tell you. Linux doesn't have a microkernel. Hardware/driver failures crash the system (Kernel panic).
Correct attribution of failures is a major feature of microkernels.
That said hybrid kernels (including windows) do OK except the components that run in kernel (mostly video). Blue screens are much less frequent then they used to be.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
By now we all know that the editors don't do a lot of editing. I suggest that people start submitting summaries without spelling errors.
Answer? Make it in China and don't tell them about any deals! From the looks of it it was the Indian government with its head up its ass, it kept changing the specs with finally asking for specs similar to USA milspec (which as anybody knows costs thousands per unit because of how much abuse they can take. They ARE built for the battlefield after all) while still expecting them to keep the price low enough you could practically give them away...ohh AND they wanted double the battery AND a doubling of speed on the CPU! Hell why not ask for a pony to bring the stars of the last porn convention to blow you while you are at it?
The moral of this story is FUCK THE GOVERNMENTS and instead simply make as good a product as you can to fit a price point. if this guy can crank out sub $80 pads that are actually pleasant to use? Then he WILL find a market for them. Hell if it'll play SD video at whatever resolution the screen is I'll take 4 please. But by dealing with governments unless you are a "good old boy" that knows their games and whom to slip the envelope of money to you aren't gonna win friend, that is just the way it is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It can't, not anymore. Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it. And while your experience may vary I had a HELL of a lot bigger time with crashing X Server than I ever did with BSODs. it especially didn't seem to like having a video playing while surfing to pages that may have an embedded video or surfing pages with possible embedded video while playing tunes in the background. Hell Firefox won't allow hardware acceleration in Linux because X Drivers are buggy and they don't want to be blamed for X crashes.
As for TFA it has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with shitty governments wanting a pie in the sky. A $45 tablet and they want milspec? yeah and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed, while certain things ARE inflated one thing that isn't is how damned expensive it is to make electronics that can take milspec abuse. The reason a toughbook is so damned expensive is because of the amount of abuse it can take and you just can't get the materials to absorb that much punishment for $50, just not gonna happen. And they want double battery life and double CPU for the same price? Again the reason the price was so low was precisely BECAUSE it was using chips not in high demand such as its ARM 11 366MHz CPU. You want something that is going in more high dollar cell phones you have to pay a more high dollar price, that's reality. What it sounds like they are wanting is a milspec iPad for $50 and are using that as an excuse to give one of their buddies the contract who will of course probably come out with something worse than what this guy is offering so they can pocket more profit after bribing officials.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
CEOs don't care one bit about the cost of business.
Either you raise the price of the finished product and make the customer pay for the inefficiency, or you claim a business loss, and use tax loopholes to make the government pay for the inefficiency.
If that all fails, you can fire enough low-level employees to cover the inefficiency. and if THAT fails, you max out the corporate loans, write yourself a nice fat severance check, and disappear into South America.
The only thing a CEO cares about is whether or not his new Tesla Roadster will be delivered on time
My Transformer TF101 at $400 is really nice. It has ICS, and you can buy them now for $350 even though there's a new model out that has quad core. The iPad2 can be had for $350 as an Apple refurb. But those are 10" tablets, and the one we're talking about is half that size.
They don't need to make a ton of money on each one. India was looking to buy a half-billion of these tablets. And the maker would get to have the brand recognition as provider of tablets to all the students in India - and so sell their retail tablets at more of a markup.
I know it seems unlikely, but it does appear they were going to make it happen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Everyone touts it as the second coming, some great breakthrough etc. Well here's one for $55. $10 more? Yes. But with free worldwide shipping included.
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/454240700-7-Inch-Android-2-2-Tablet-PC-support-WIFI-3G-Android-MID-with-retail-package-8121-wholesalers.html
+ thousands of other models.
People thinking a tablet is called an iPad and costs $500 or whatever and you can get nothing cheaper, should get a reality (or an Aliexpress) check.
It doesn't sound as bad when people call it Kickstarter.
Actually, Android recently surpassed iOS as the primary(most popular) cell phone platform(I had no idea Symbian was on top prior to this)..
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/14693_Q1_2012_Android_OS_installed_b.php
So technically, it's the Android phone which is really popular. I suppose it doesn't hurt that there are a bazillion different staged versions of Android out there on all sorts of devices, versus ~5 versions of iOS on a very limited range of products.
Also, as MacOS is still ~27% behind Windows as the most popular OS, and only 7% above Linux OS popularity, they really aren't as ubiquitous as people make them seem. There is a lot of hype, but significantly less actual progress for the OS/equipment beyond standard-use consumers.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Coming from a third world country I can tell:
The more poorer a country more corruption it has.
And please do not refute using 'per capita' income (the arabs country have higher 'per capita' but it seems only for the 'choosen ones')
Sad but true...
"and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed"
Too greedy. I'd be willing to forego the cigarettes.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I shouldn't answer an AC but since I actually know the answer to that one WTF I'll go ahead. the reason a certain ATI driver shits itself on Windows is a royally fucked .NET update put out by MSFT. It doesn't seem to affect other software but the ATI driver expects .NET to behave a certain way and when that update is applied it don't so ur fucked.
The way to fix this is with Revo Uninstaller since MSFT thinks .NET is so damned wonderful they never bothered coming up with a way to cleanly uninstall the bitch. remove ALL patches related to .NET followed by .NET itself and then install the latest version ONLY, don't take some old version and patch up to current. Finally remove and re-install the ATI driver and it will behave itself. Even better once you have removed .NET install the latest AMD driver (unless you are stuck with some legacy cards, then follow the first suggestion) which thankfully they removed all the .NET dependencies and went with Visual C++ instead.
But this is a classic example of what happens when a company bases a core component of one of their major pieces of software on something they have ZERO control over. I only hope the moron that decided to base the drivers on .NET of all things got himself a pink slip when they were bought by AMD because that was a seriously dumbass move.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When the customer starts changing the contract, the proper answer is always "No". It's tempting to think that they can only change their minds once. They can change their minds over and over until you get driven out of business, especially if they think they can buy your product directly from the manufacturer, which is now a local company. If your only contribution is capital and an idea, you've made yourself irrelevant once the product hits the production stage. Especially if the buyer and the manufacturer are in the same place, while you are on the other side of the world. This is something anyone could have told them, if they'd bothered to ask around. It's not like this sort of thing never happens, in China it's considered fairly common.
They would have been much better off doing the production and development locally, where they can have constant dialogue with a manufacturer that they trust. Preferably because someone on their team had worked with them before. It would then be much easier for them to say "No" to a changed contract, and sell their product directly to their targets, either to private schools in India or to other places worldwide.
How do you kill that which has no life?
Or are you just that MS shill?
Hard to say who's a shill and who's just trolling these days. Whatever this one's motivation, between shills and trolls, they've just about managed to kill Slashdot as a worthwhile site to discuss interesting topics.
In this instance, the shills probably had good motivation to prevent open discussion. Datawind may have succeeded in making a cheap tablet, but they were by no means the only one. Indian (and other buyers) are spoilt for choice at the bottom of the market, with dozens of vendors selling tablets at or below the $45 mark http://www.aliexpress.com/category/100005062/tablet-pcs.html?pvId=48-350286%2C200000563-200002770&SortType=price_asc&SortType=y.
I've obtained a few of these, and they're actually quite usable. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see something similar in blister-packs on supermarket shelves soon.
Handheld computing is VERY rapidly becoming a commodity, with competition driving prices down and features up. Companies who've bet heavily on it remaining a premium/luxury market must hate that.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."