Google certainly is a big player in all of this, but nothing I've seen from them leads me to believe that they are capable of taking over flash. They can write all of the specs that they want, but as long as Adobe has the best flash IDE, they'll have all the sway over the standard. All the various other flash environments and players that exist are a result of flash's popularity, not the cause of it.
Maybe I'm missing something that they've done, but I haven't seen anything from Google that would lead me to believe that they have any experience in building interfaces for the sort of creative design type work that Flash is geared towards. Maybe they could surprise us, or buy out a company that could do it, but if they're going to go to all that trouble to develop said software, why don't they just direct that effort towards an HTML 5 development environment, and not have to worry about Adobe at all?
Performance aside, why would anyone want there to be a dominate web platform that's controlled by a single company, unless you happen to work for that single company?
Flash has basically been, for the past 5+ years at least, the Windows of interactive/animated/etc. web content. It's a platform that was in the right place at the right time, and was just barely good enough to become a major standard. All this despite the fact that everyone is constantly complaining about how much it sucks, and nobody likes it. And there's not much anybody can do to truly fix it, except for Adobe, and it's taken them years to get it to work decently on any mobile device.
Seriously, does anybody besides Adobe want Flash to become the dominate platform for anything other than little browser games? Sure, Apple and MS are fighting against it for self-interested reasons, but those reasons seem to align rather nicely with what is good for the internet as a whole, which is to have as much be open standards as is possible.
That's one of the coolest things about the various software industries, if you're willing to work at it, it's very straightforward to start a project or contribute to a project and start building a portfolio. The barrier to entry is really low now that computers are everywhere and the internet makes distribution so easy. You can actually make something from start to finish, and a potential employer can download it and really put it through its paces if they want to see what you've done. That's not nearly as easily done in most other fields, and is pretty amazing if you think about it.
That's a pretty stupid argument. If your company cans you then it doesn't mean you get to keep your company car just because they didn't ask for the keys back before they told you you were fired.
He's not blasting Adobe for being closed, he's blasting them for going around telling everyone how open they are when that's not true.
He fully admits that Apple has lots of proprietary stuff. In that same letter. Whatever merits that Flash might have that would warrant Apple supporting it on the iPhone, it being an open system is not one of them, and so Adobe should try to make more useful arguments.
I think there's two possibilities. Either way, HP's management sees that there's a serious shift to mobile computing happening, and that they really need to get in on it if they want to remain a big player. But the big question is whether or not they have a plan to do this.
Possibility #1: HP wants to try to make decent mobile computing devices, and they think that they've got the best chance to be successful if they can control both the hardware and the software. That's Apple's strategy, and it seems to be working well for them. While I understand the benefits of what Google's trying to do with Android, the ability to fully control both the hardware and the software and fine tune how they interact makes a lot of sense. The WebOS seems like a pretty decent pile of software, so why not use that as a starting point?
Possibility #2: HP has no idea how to effectively compete in the mobile market, so they're just buying something that at least at one point had some hype and potential, and hoping that someone comes over in the deal that can give them a clue.
Either way, with the aforementioned shift to mobile computing definitely occurring, 1.2 billion dollars for Palm seems to make some decent sense for HP.
I'm thinking that $16M does seem rather low, but I would expect the cost to be significantly less than a shuttle launch. The shuttle is pretty big, very heavy, and also has to carry and keep alive a bunch of people through launch, orbit, and return. This solar sail is designed for a much simpler set of tasks, and likely weighs in at a small fraction of what a shuttle orbiter does.
The fact that they paid 5 grand for it sure makes me think they were reasonably confident that it was legit. And not being 100% certain that you're making an illegal purchase doesn't make it legal.
Paying someone for something that you know they don't own is not legal either. Are you going to argue that gizmodo didn't know that this phone was Apple's property?
A journalist purchased what he knew to be someone else's property, took it apart, and only gave it back a week later after the owner found out who had it because the journalist posted pictures of it on their website.
Losing something in a bar does not mean you abandoned it. Gizmodo certainly knew that Apple would want their phone back immediately, and yet they still purchased it from someone with the intention of disassembling it and publishing information about it. And didn't attempt to return it until they started to realize what sort of trouble they were in.
Apple certainly does make some dickhead moves, but the Gizmodo people are just as big a bunch of assholes in the case, and I don't know how you can honestly argue that they didn't knowingly purchase something that they shouldn't have had access to. They may have thrown together some twisted logic to convince themselves that it wasn't shady and most likely illegal, but apparently that logic hasn't worked so well on the cops.
Fair enough, but here's a good instance where technology could help solve this problem if applied correctly and honestly. The dashboard cameras that most cops have in their cars is a great start. But that's not taking it far enough. Ideally, the police are on the side of justice, and real justice requires truth. While on duty, police should use easily available technology to record everything they do. They should carry cameras as much as possible, they should all carry microphones that record everything when they're involved in an altercation or arrest or whatever.
They should be required by law to record all of this, and required by law to save the recordings for a particular amount of time, and provide it to relevant parties on both sides of any court proceedings,etc. that may occur.
This would help protect the police from false charges from criminals, as well as help protect citizens from abuse by the police. The technology certainly exists, and is getting cheaper by the day.
Apple, at various times throughout its existence, has dabbled in the lower level aspects of computer design, including processor design. I would argue that in terms of a business strategy, Apple's all about controlling as many steps of their product design as possible. They want to be dependent only on themselves when it comes to moving their products forwards.
Looking through this prism, their hostility towards Flash makes plenty of business sense. Why would they want to take the chance of some third party development environment becoming a standard for their devices? Then every time they wanted to change the capabilities of the hardware, they'd have to convince that third party that it's valuable, and to support it along Apple's hardware schedule.
Anyways, I don't think the term "conglomeration" is an accurate term were this deal to happen. A conglomeration is more like wholly separate things that just happen to get stuck next to each other. It's not like Apple's buying a financial firm that's wholly secondary to what they do and just hoping to add to their bottom line. Bringing ARM in-house wouldn't really be a conglomeration as much as just moving part of their product design closer. Apple is already ARM's biggest customer, I'm sure they're already working together plenty.
It's important to understand that no matter what they tell others or tell themselves, for just about everyone in an authoritarian position, the main goal becomes to try and retain their power.
The people running various theocracies in the middle east don't care about whether the muslim world is advancing or not, they're personally living large over their own little patch of the world, and that's what matters the most to them. Islam is only important to them in as much as it helps them retain their position. If Islam isn't helping, then they'll use their influence to bend people's perception of it so that it does help.
Incidentally this is why all the fear-mongering about Iran and North Korea (and previously Iraq) is so silly. No matter how much the people running those countries might hate the western world or hate America, they hate the idea of losing power even more. Nuking the US or Israel or somewhere in Europe is pretty much the quickest way they could guarantee to lose their life of luxury.
None of this is particularly specific to the middle east or Islam, or even governments. A great example of a similar mindset is all this mess on Wall Street. As badly as those assholes screwed up everything, the big shots in charge are almost entirely unable to agree to any sort of restrictions on their industry. These people already have more money than they know what to do with, they aren't trying to protect the livelyhood of their employees, and they aren't defending capitalism out of some sort of ideological purpose. They've gotten used to being in positions of such wealth and influence and they don't want to lose that. They would rather burn down the whole economy around them than willingly give up any power.
Because it allows the user to explore more of what their device is capable of without fear of destroying it. My mom had gotten so sick and tired of having to have someone come clean all the malware crap off her windows machine that she basically stopped downloading anything, didn't want to play videos that her friends emailed her, would call me and ask if I though random websites were safe to visit, etc. The fear of having the same problems with her phone (which she considers pretty much vital to her life) would make all the "openness" in the world completely useless to her.
Apple's closed marketplace isn't a 100% foolproof solution, but it's certainly a much safer option, and someone like my mom can freely download whatever the hell she wants from the App store and be pretty comfortable that it's not going to result in her having to pay someone a hundred bucks to clean out all the malware.
These people don't feel like Apple is controlling them. Apple is protecting them. They are not only willing to deal with that, they appreciate it. That's what the walled garden provides. Some people definitely don't need or want that sort of protection/control. Good for them, there's lots of companies out there who'd love to sell them a phone.
The first automobiles could easily be outrun by a horse. I guess we're fortunate that no one noticed that or else they would've all agreed that automobile technology was a waste of time and should be abandoned.
Fair enough, except that it's important to realize that it's not quite as simple as sticking you in the basement and leaving the radio on. Somebody has to take care of you, feed you, clean you, etc. You're creating a burden, financial and otherwise, whether it be on family,friends,doctors, or society as a whole.
I would think that were I in that situation, I'd be willing to give up my curiosity about the future to allow my wife and family to get on with their own lives without having to worry about me.
Because some times people with disposable income are willing to pay extra for a product that does particular things well. I could cook my dinner every night on piece of plate steel over a firepit, but I still thought it made sense to buy some nice pots and pans, and a slow cooker, and a microwave, etc.
yeah yeah, and there were a million mobile phones out there before the Apple got into that market, yet for some reason now anytime you read an article about a new phone it's always compared to the iPhone.
Isn't creating a platform and letting people develop for it pretty much the definition of a computer company? Or do you only use programs that are made by microsoft on your Windows computer?
I'd argue that there is no good way to enter do serious text entry on a tablet computer. I think some people were expecting Apple to magically come up with a way to make it work, and they're disappointed that it didn't happen. If there was a way, Apple or someone else would've found it.
Software keyboards are only going to be so good. At the end of the day, the buttons have no feel, not to mention that typing on the same plane as the screen is a little awkward. A hardware keyboard has to be reasonably big to really be nice, and so you're either making your device bigger to the point where it's not really a good tablet, or you're shrinking your screen down a lot.
Handwriting recognition is ok if it works well, but not having to deal with a stylus is nice in a lot of ways. If I'm holding the pad in one hand, holding the stylus in the other, all those cool multi-touch gestures become harder to do. The gesture creates a whole other set of interface standards, and while that certainly adds to capabilities, it also adds a lot of complexity. It's a trade-off.
Voice recognition and dictation will never work as a primary input method, it's just way too unworkable in so many situations. You can't take notes by voice during a meeting or class, you'll piss off everyone else on the airplane if you keep talking to your computer, etc.
I guess if someone figures out a way to plug it directly into your brain so you can just think what you want and have it appear, that might work well. Maybe we'll see that on version two.
A flatscreen TV is basically just an iMac with a bunch of features removed. You trade off a lot of features and capability for a larger screen and reduced complexity.
The iPad is trading features and complexity for portability, a purely touch screen interface, and reduced complexity.
The solution for the text-entry issue is to accept the fact that the tablet form will never be good for text entry. Which is one of the reasons why Apple isn't positioning the iPad as a replacement for a full-function computer, and instead is thinking of it more as an appliance.
Handwriting recognition will be nice for some stuff, but we're never going to see offices replacing desktops with tablets and having workers deal with spreadsheets all day on them. Same goes with voice recognition. The tablet form is not going to replace regular computers. It'll do some stuff basically the same as a desktop/laptop, it'll do some stuff better, and it'll be terrible at some stuff that we're used to. Apple's attitude is generally that if it's terrible at doing something, we won't try to make it do it.
You don't have to "win" to make a profit and stay in business.
If everyone always did exactly what the market leader was doing, then back in the 90's Apple would've stopped making computers and just shipped an OS like Microsoft does. Of course, then Apple would've gone out of business and we wouldn't be talking about iphones today.
The hardest issue with fission nuclear waste is that it stays dangerous for thousands of years. We don't have much experience with storing things for that long, and you can't reuse any of the storage facility space because once you pack it full, it's full for a long time. And over those thousands of years time span, issues like seismic activity and ground water get way more complicated.
It's not really a big deal to build a giant underground warehouse and store radioactive stuff in it for a few years. If you've got more stuff, then build a few more underground warehouses. Mildly expensive, but really not all that difficult. With fusion-based nuclear waste the radioactivity fades pretty quickly, then the waste ceases to be dangerous, you take it out and throw it in a more regular landfill (maybe even recycle it I dunno). Then you've got a bunch more space in your warehouse. It's a whole lot simpler.
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Google certainly is a big player in all of this, but nothing I've seen from them leads me to believe that they are capable of taking over flash. They can write all of the specs that they want, but as long as Adobe has the best flash IDE, they'll have all the sway over the standard. All the various other flash environments and players that exist are a result of flash's popularity, not the cause of it.
Maybe I'm missing something that they've done, but I haven't seen anything from Google that would lead me to believe that they have any experience in building interfaces for the sort of creative design type work that Flash is geared towards. Maybe they could surprise us, or buy out a company that could do it, but if they're going to go to all that trouble to develop said software, why don't they just direct that effort towards an HTML 5 development environment, and not have to worry about Adobe at all?
Performance aside, why would anyone want there to be a dominate web platform that's controlled by a single company, unless you happen to work for that single company?
Flash has basically been, for the past 5+ years at least, the Windows of interactive/animated/etc. web content. It's a platform that was in the right place at the right time, and was just barely good enough to become a major standard. All this despite the fact that everyone is constantly complaining about how much it sucks, and nobody likes it. And there's not much anybody can do to truly fix it, except for Adobe, and it's taken them years to get it to work decently on any mobile device.
Seriously, does anybody besides Adobe want Flash to become the dominate platform for anything other than little browser games? Sure, Apple and MS are fighting against it for self-interested reasons, but those reasons seem to align rather nicely with what is good for the internet as a whole, which is to have as much be open standards as is possible.
That's one of the coolest things about the various software industries, if you're willing to work at it, it's very straightforward to start a project or contribute to a project and start building a portfolio. The barrier to entry is really low now that computers are everywhere and the internet makes distribution so easy. You can actually make something from start to finish, and a potential employer can download it and really put it through its paces if they want to see what you've done. That's not nearly as easily done in most other fields, and is pretty amazing if you think about it.
That's a pretty stupid argument. If your company cans you then it doesn't mean you get to keep your company car just because they didn't ask for the keys back before they told you you were fired.
He's not blasting Adobe for being closed, he's blasting them for going around telling everyone how open they are when that's not true.
He fully admits that Apple has lots of proprietary stuff. In that same letter. Whatever merits that Flash might have that would warrant Apple supporting it on the iPhone, it being an open system is not one of them, and so Adobe should try to make more useful arguments.
Not that it'll matter to Jobs.
I think there's two possibilities. Either way, HP's management sees that there's a serious shift to mobile computing happening, and that they really need to get in on it if they want to remain a big player. But the big question is whether or not they have a plan to do this.
Possibility #1: HP wants to try to make decent mobile computing devices, and they think that they've got the best chance to be successful if they can control both the hardware and the software. That's Apple's strategy, and it seems to be working well for them. While I understand the benefits of what Google's trying to do with Android, the ability to fully control both the hardware and the software and fine tune how they interact makes a lot of sense. The WebOS seems like a pretty decent pile of software, so why not use that as a starting point?
Possibility #2: HP has no idea how to effectively compete in the mobile market, so they're just buying something that at least at one point had some hype and potential, and hoping that someone comes over in the deal that can give them a clue.
Either way, with the aforementioned shift to mobile computing definitely occurring, 1.2 billion dollars for Palm seems to make some decent sense for HP.
I'm thinking that $16M does seem rather low, but I would expect the cost to be significantly less than a shuttle launch. The shuttle is pretty big, very heavy, and also has to carry and keep alive a bunch of people through launch, orbit, and return. This solar sail is designed for a much simpler set of tasks, and likely weighs in at a small fraction of what a shuttle orbiter does.
Are you suggesting that he purposely left it there, hoping that someone would find it, and that it would find its way to a popular gadget website?
If not, then what the hell is your point? Leaving something somewhere accidently is a very common way of losing things.
The fact that they paid 5 grand for it sure makes me think they were reasonably confident that it was legit. And not being 100% certain that you're making an illegal purchase doesn't make it legal.
Paying someone for something that you know they don't own is not legal either. Are you going to argue that gizmodo didn't know that this phone was Apple's property?
A journalist purchased what he knew to be someone else's property, took it apart, and only gave it back a week later after the owner found out who had it because the journalist posted pictures of it on their website.
Losing something in a bar does not mean you abandoned it. Gizmodo certainly knew that Apple would want their phone back immediately, and yet they still purchased it from someone with the intention of disassembling it and publishing information about it. And didn't attempt to return it until they started to realize what sort of trouble they were in.
Apple certainly does make some dickhead moves, but the Gizmodo people are just as big a bunch of assholes in the case, and I don't know how you can honestly argue that they didn't knowingly purchase something that they shouldn't have had access to. They may have thrown together some twisted logic to convince themselves that it wasn't shady and most likely illegal, but apparently that logic hasn't worked so well on the cops.
Fair enough, but here's a good instance where technology could help solve this problem if applied correctly and honestly. The dashboard cameras that most cops have in their cars is a great start. But that's not taking it far enough. Ideally, the police are on the side of justice, and real justice requires truth. While on duty, police should use easily available technology to record everything they do. They should carry cameras as much as possible, they should all carry microphones that record everything when they're involved in an altercation or arrest or whatever.
They should be required by law to record all of this, and required by law to save the recordings for a particular amount of time, and provide it to relevant parties on both sides of any court proceedings,etc. that may occur.
This would help protect the police from false charges from criminals, as well as help protect citizens from abuse by the police. The technology certainly exists, and is getting cheaper by the day.
Apple, at various times throughout its existence, has dabbled in the lower level aspects of computer design, including processor design. I would argue that in terms of a business strategy, Apple's all about controlling as many steps of their product design as possible. They want to be dependent only on themselves when it comes to moving their products forwards.
Looking through this prism, their hostility towards Flash makes plenty of business sense. Why would they want to take the chance of some third party development environment becoming a standard for their devices? Then every time they wanted to change the capabilities of the hardware, they'd have to convince that third party that it's valuable, and to support it along Apple's hardware schedule.
Anyways, I don't think the term "conglomeration" is an accurate term were this deal to happen. A conglomeration is more like wholly separate things that just happen to get stuck next to each other. It's not like Apple's buying a financial firm that's wholly secondary to what they do and just hoping to add to their bottom line. Bringing ARM in-house wouldn't really be a conglomeration as much as just moving part of their product design closer. Apple is already ARM's biggest customer, I'm sure they're already working together plenty.
It's important to understand that no matter what they tell others or tell themselves, for just about everyone in an authoritarian position, the main goal becomes to try and retain their power.
The people running various theocracies in the middle east don't care about whether the muslim world is advancing or not, they're personally living large over their own little patch of the world, and that's what matters the most to them. Islam is only important to them in as much as it helps them retain their position. If Islam isn't helping, then they'll use their influence to bend people's perception of it so that it does help.
Incidentally this is why all the fear-mongering about Iran and North Korea (and previously Iraq) is so silly. No matter how much the people running those countries might hate the western world or hate America, they hate the idea of losing power even more. Nuking the US or Israel or somewhere in Europe is pretty much the quickest way they could guarantee to lose their life of luxury.
None of this is particularly specific to the middle east or Islam, or even governments. A great example of a similar mindset is all this mess on Wall Street. As badly as those assholes screwed up everything, the big shots in charge are almost entirely unable to agree to any sort of restrictions on their industry. These people already have more money than they know what to do with, they aren't trying to protect the livelyhood of their employees, and they aren't defending capitalism out of some sort of ideological purpose. They've gotten used to being in positions of such wealth and influence and they don't want to lose that. They would rather burn down the whole economy around them than willingly give up any power.
Because it allows the user to explore more of what their device is capable of without fear of destroying it. My mom had gotten so sick and tired of having to have someone come clean all the malware crap off her windows machine that she basically stopped downloading anything, didn't want to play videos that her friends emailed her, would call me and ask if I though random websites were safe to visit, etc. The fear of having the same problems with her phone (which she considers pretty much vital to her life) would make all the "openness" in the world completely useless to her.
Apple's closed marketplace isn't a 100% foolproof solution, but it's certainly a much safer option, and someone like my mom can freely download whatever the hell she wants from the App store and be pretty comfortable that it's not going to result in her having to pay someone a hundred bucks to clean out all the malware.
These people don't feel like Apple is controlling them. Apple is protecting them. They are not only willing to deal with that, they appreciate it. That's what the walled garden provides. Some people definitely don't need or want that sort of protection/control. Good for them, there's lots of companies out there who'd love to sell them a phone.
The first automobiles could easily be outrun by a horse. I guess we're fortunate that no one noticed that or else they would've all agreed that automobile technology was a waste of time and should be abandoned.
Fair enough, except that it's important to realize that it's not quite as simple as sticking you in the basement and leaving the radio on. Somebody has to take care of you, feed you, clean you, etc. You're creating a burden, financial and otherwise, whether it be on family,friends,doctors, or society as a whole.
I would think that were I in that situation, I'd be willing to give up my curiosity about the future to allow my wife and family to get on with their own lives without having to worry about me.
Because some times people with disposable income are willing to pay extra for a product that does particular things well. I could cook my dinner every night on piece of plate steel over a firepit, but I still thought it made sense to buy some nice pots and pans, and a slow cooker, and a microwave, etc.
yeah yeah, and there were a million mobile phones out there before the Apple got into that market, yet for some reason now anytime you read an article about a new phone it's always compared to the iPhone.
Isn't creating a platform and letting people develop for it pretty much the definition of a computer company? Or do you only use programs that are made by microsoft on your Windows computer?
I'd argue that there is no good way to enter do serious text entry on a tablet computer. I think some people were expecting Apple to magically come up with a way to make it work, and they're disappointed that it didn't happen. If there was a way, Apple or someone else would've found it.
Software keyboards are only going to be so good. At the end of the day, the buttons have no feel, not to mention that typing on the same plane as the screen is a little awkward. A hardware keyboard has to be reasonably big to really be nice, and so you're either making your device bigger to the point where it's not really a good tablet, or you're shrinking your screen down a lot.
Handwriting recognition is ok if it works well, but not having to deal with a stylus is nice in a lot of ways. If I'm holding the pad in one hand, holding the stylus in the other, all those cool multi-touch gestures become harder to do. The gesture creates a whole other set of interface standards, and while that certainly adds to capabilities, it also adds a lot of complexity. It's a trade-off.
Voice recognition and dictation will never work as a primary input method, it's just way too unworkable in so many situations. You can't take notes by voice during a meeting or class, you'll piss off everyone else on the airplane if you keep talking to your computer, etc.
I guess if someone figures out a way to plug it directly into your brain so you can just think what you want and have it appear, that might work well. Maybe we'll see that on version two.
A flatscreen TV is basically just an iMac with a bunch of features removed. You trade off a lot of features and capability for a larger screen and reduced complexity.
The iPad is trading features and complexity for portability, a purely touch screen interface, and reduced complexity.
The solution for the text-entry issue is to accept the fact that the tablet form will never be good for text entry. Which is one of the reasons why Apple isn't positioning the iPad as a replacement for a full-function computer, and instead is thinking of it more as an appliance.
Handwriting recognition will be nice for some stuff, but we're never going to see offices replacing desktops with tablets and having workers deal with spreadsheets all day on them. Same goes with voice recognition. The tablet form is not going to replace regular computers. It'll do some stuff basically the same as a desktop/laptop, it'll do some stuff better, and it'll be terrible at some stuff that we're used to. Apple's attitude is generally that if it's terrible at doing something, we won't try to make it do it.
You don't have to "win" to make a profit and stay in business.
If everyone always did exactly what the market leader was doing, then back in the 90's Apple would've stopped making computers and just shipped an OS like Microsoft does. Of course, then Apple would've gone out of business and we wouldn't be talking about iphones today.
The hardest issue with fission nuclear waste is that it stays dangerous for thousands of years. We don't have much experience with storing things for that long, and you can't reuse any of the storage facility space because once you pack it full, it's full for a long time. And over those thousands of years time span, issues like seismic activity and ground water get way more complicated.
It's not really a big deal to build a giant underground warehouse and store radioactive stuff in it for a few years. If you've got more stuff, then build a few more underground warehouses. Mildly expensive, but really not all that difficult. With fusion-based nuclear waste the radioactivity fades pretty quickly, then the waste ceases to be dangerous, you take it out and throw it in a more regular landfill (maybe even recycle it I dunno). Then you've got a bunch more space in your warehouse. It's a whole lot simpler.