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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?"
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
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.
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'
incomeptent contracts != corruption
Breach of faith means that somebody failed to meet their commitments. That can mean that they signed up to do things that they later found out were harder than they thought. That's incompetence. Or more often it means that they knew they wouldn't come through and took your money anyway.
The fact that they were paid in advance for hardware tells me it's more likely corruption/fraud than plain incompetence, but often you get the incompetence rolled into a fraudulent deal.
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.
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