There are a number of solutions, and I'm not one to call somebody an idiot for using one over the other if it works best for them. But as a fellow Mac user (oftentimes) I guess it depends on size and complexity. That said, even the big bad slow Excel can at times to the job better than QuickBooks. I think for the very small Excel can be enough, but for larger, even entry level "enterprise solutions" are often a better fit. It just sounds like you are comfortable with QB, and that's fine. I'm not so high and mighty to think I can dictate to others. I just feel like it hasn't gone anywhere, and the company behind it seems to be stuck in the past just like Quicken demonstrates. But either way this whole article is pretty much an ad, praising codebloat nonetheless and seems out of place on a news site.
Oh and as most anybody who uses QB often knows- it does suck quite mighty and gets slower even as PCs get faster. Piles of code isn't always a good thing, sometimes it just means you have a bloated heifer with lazy programming and no real improvements in half a decade or more.
On one hand you have evil out in the open with visible court cases (Apple) on the other hand you have back door patent threats which make more money through settlement than their own Windows Phone OS (MS). Evil is equal on both ends, but one is more devious and MS is far more successful is their scam. But hey Apple gets more press for their bad deeds so they must be worse.
Love MS or hate them this guy must be either the best guy to work with imaginable, or he has some dirt on the board. I just can't comprehend how else he has be allowed to do so much damage, and put MS behind so many rivals who nobody ever thought would ever actually be worth more on paper than the mighty MS. As a shareholder he needs to be buried, and MS needs to admit his tenure was a mistake and work to make amends for the damage he has done to the brand, the value, and yes even the innovation he seems bent on extinguishing with his every breath. Competitors must love him though.
Welcome to the more intense forced migration by MS after their unexpectedly well made and uncharacteristically blunder-free XP release that they are having trouble killing.The fact that customers haven't felt the desperate or willingness to take a leap of faith to escape is a rare compliment to the engineers and shows that underneath the out of touch managers, and brain dead Uncle Fester CEO there is actually some real talent, but against actually empowering those people with every release is against the core principle of overpromising and under delivering which has sold billions of PCs and is the devil's pact that binds OEM to MS in way where neither has to explain why your new PC kind of sucks, and always promises a bright future with distant upgrades at which point most people just replace their PC and the cycle starts over again. Meanwhile MS would do just fine if they let the smart people they hire run the show, instead of Bean Counter Ballmer who is the epitome of the guys who is willing to knowingly ship crap, because unlike anybody with a brain who has dealt with the smart people MS often hires, he honestly can't imagine that shipping consistant decent software is possible and might even redeem the image of his company. People like Ballmer think they just because they have not an ounce of innovation or foresight, that new concepts are just flukes and pixie dust to be kept locked away and dolled out only in case the software ends up more displeasing than his accountants had predicted. Smart companies know innovation breeds innovation, and lends to even better new hires and partners. All of that scares the shit out of a man whose only real talent is dismissing the next big thing years before he attempts to emulate it forgetting that unlike on the desktop, you can't just sell something well below your capabilities and say" tough shit , but hey the next version will fix all that"
As a Lg Quantum WP7 owner I actually learned a bit from both of those lists. Nothing that impacts me much, since the irritations or omitted features that I actually use didn't take long to discover especially from a multi-OS background. That said many of those rebuttals if accurate help clarify or correct and I don't think of anybody who honestly offers a counterpoint is a shill. It almost seems like perhaps the original list is detailing the first release of WP7 which I think only the most mindless fanboy would say shipped with rough or even distant feature parity with it's competitors at the time. A mistake that may have led to marginalization of the OS in the eyes of many, or perhaps just nerd fodder for arguments. Can't say for sure if I'm right about it being outdated, since I got my phone less than a year ago used to play around and learn and it already had an upgrade OS.
Having experience with the the 4 major mobile OS's (sorry WebOS wish things had been different) helps me avoid the rabid fanboism I see whenever a competing OS is brought up in tech circles such as Nerddot. It kills discussion like we see in this thread.
Half the people refuse to even consider that maybe MS got a few things right, the other half can somehow seemly straight faced defend a missing feature or 2 by reminding us that 5 years ago the competition had even worse issues. As if time and technology, and keeping up with at least the expected feature set hasn't ever impacted an aware consumer's buying choices especially in the face of reasonable alternatives. Ironic especially coming from people who labor over every tech purchase and weight every pro to con. Maybe they aren't important features at all, or just not to you,or maybe they are not worth the time to implement, or cause too much clutter. That's a fair stance, but pointing to the first releases of 5 year old OS's and arguing that should be relevant at all is just (likely unintentionally) dishonest and is like saying my niche operating system is better in every way than any version Windows, while at the same time defending the fact that it doesn't support modern hardware, but neither does Windows 3.1 so who cares right? Companies prioritize certain features they think their OS needs based on their view of the market. Apple like MS didn't think cut and paste were essential features at least at launch, and I imagine they defended their choice as a means of reducing clutter. Totally reasonable, I think hindsight proved them wrong, but at least their excuse is grounded in a semblance reality as opposed to mental and logical gymnastics.
With two intellectually dishonest stances between the lovers and the haters it is no wonder people never get a chance to have honest dialogue about what does and doesn't work without it becoming a fingerpointing flamefest. Politics seems measured and dispasionate by comparison. It seems mobile OS choice has become so balkanized even the suggestion of certain well done elements of a competing OS makes you a shill, or just another one of those people who didn't realize the divine and everlasting superiority of the inevitable defender's OS of choice. In their mind there is simply no conceivable reason to not have needs that match theirs. Of course at times mods seem to punish those of us who really try and be honest about their opinion, because the suspect many of them can't imagine how anybody could not have a cult-like worship for whatever OS is on their plastic pocket warmer.
So long story short, if you are right, and I don't have the energy to check and compare the lists right now, then I thank you for contributing and say ignore the accusations. By extension if you are one of those unquestioning fans and just concocted a deceptive/dishonest list, then you are a shill. The exact statement applies to the original poster as well.
Or by the same logic, perhaps these items are part of the reason for the stagnant sales of WP7 despite some compelling ideas in the design. Sure most of that shit won't matter to most individuals, but when competing against mature half decade old OS's you can't get off by just claiming that in 2007 your competitors were in the same boat. 7.5 got rid of most of the really irritating ones, but a few persist.
At the same time as others have pointed out Android and iOS also have a long list of issues. Only the buyer can decide whose feature-set works best for them. For me on my LG Quantum which I bought used to play around with WP7 when I broke my old phone, most of that list isn't an issue. But a few things are, especially the surprisingly bad way in which multitasking is achieved. It makes the iOS method seem elegant and powerful by comparison.
I've ended up liking WP7 a lot more than I expected after previous experience with it's relative Windows Mobile, but it has it share of faults, including a terrible selection of decent apps, where you often pay for apps you can get elsewhere for free or find they simply don't exist. When I'm looking to upgrade in the next year I will give WP8 a good look, I like it. But in my case I also don't mind iOS or Android either.
In my opinion they should all look quite a bit at the WebOS interface, and in the case of WP7 specifically at the "card" multitasking, of which their current program selection screen in an almost comically weak and neutered replication. On the other hand Live tiles are great, and Apple should be embarrassed they haven't bothered to at least have the weather icon update instead of showing a canned image. It looked a little lame even in 2007, but now it just seems like a stubborn unwillingness to accept any innovation outside the company's walls. Another major point in WP7's favor is battery life. It is up there with the best of them even on first gen phones like mine. While seemingly simple, it's something even a company with the resources of HP couldn't get out of WebOS and unlike many of the items on this list it really is a deal breaker for most people. Even the original battery in my Quantum makes it well past a day with regular use no problem.
In the end for whatever the reason WP7 isn't taking off the way MS intended it to, and to point fingers at other companies for their specific faults ignores the fact that as you argue in your post- not all limitations are really that important to many people. It certainly can be argued based on sales data alone that perhaps the ones facing WP7 are of the variety that people might actually be bothered by, especially if they are not a new smartphone buyer. Or it could be one of a myriad of other reasons. That being said, MS isn't exactly beleaguered Palm, and they know how to sell things as well as Apple does (just to different markets). So if their crack sales people can't get companies who used WinMo, have their entire company on Windows PCs, and spend tons on MS products annually to support them, clearly something is wrong. I'm not a typical MS customer though, so I have not a clue what it is. But companies don't just ditch a long term vendor, for a new entrant (applies to both Apple and Google in mobile) unless they are really confident in the switch.
Listen I don't buy Apple's inventing the smartphone patent BS, but at the same time ignoring how the iPhone impacted the industry as a whole is pretty strange too. Apple took a lot of ideas for the iPhone from others, but the combination proved the smartphone to be a mass market item (not just suit and ties and geeks). Apple invented very little, but they found a good mix for a mass market product. That doesn't give them the right to claim to own this lose mixture, but I still think credit is due if for no other reason than that it mustn't have been so obvious is Palm, RIM, and MS couldn't figure it out over a decade+.The fact that others looked at design, just as Apple had looked at other designs, and then went on to incorporate new ideas for competing products is good for the market. Android and WP7 for that matter both have some nice features over iOS for this exact reason. On the other hand Apple has some stuff the other guys don't. The original Android looked a heck of a lot like a Blackberry, but when they saw a better more user-friendly mass-marketable and way to do it Google changed some things and had the foresight to reconsidered the future landscape. This is in striking contrast to MS, Nokia, and RIM, who all laughed it off. Interested how they are the ones now struggling. If you ask me their willingness to take what they thought at the time were the best parts of iOS, and then mesh them with their own ideas is the reason Android is what it is today. If they had gone the Blackberry route would we even remember or care about Android at this point? "Me-too product" is a needlessly harsh and unreasonable assertion- most all products are at their core "me-too", but Metro for all it's differentiation is far more similar to Android and iOS than it is to classic WinMo. The same can be said about WP7 when compared to the OS's and devices that it's forefathers competed against.
Most American bars were also heavily financed by the beer companies before the advent of prohibition. It wasn't uncommon to a have a Miller only bar right across from a Budweiser bar, with furnishing (even entire bars, seats, spittoons, and memorabilia) and advertising/store signage (not the cheap paper or laminate kind, but like outdoor permanent kind) provided for free to the owner of the establishment. I believe the reason this practice has since been reduced from what in many cases was almost split ownership between brewer and proprietor has to do with quelling the concerns of some prohibition supporters who were weary of the return to the pre prohibition times. Many were especially concerned by what they saw as too much power concentrated in one industry. While I tend to think of them as religious nutjobs and nannystaters, it is a fact that for many years prior to the slow expansion of prohibition through city councils and state legislatures that the main source of revenue for the federal government came from the sale of beer. That is pretty amazing to consider, and would suggest that the federal government may have been a little too cozy with beer companies. Even defense and energy today can't possibly be so enmeshed in Washington that a single industry that basically bankrolled the feds. Another similar post-prohibition law aimed at the same type of concerns was making it illegal for the producer (Bud, Miller, etc.) to also be/own the distributor. This law is still enforced today for better or worse. Anybody curious for more info on this strange time in American history should check out the Ken Burns' documentary "Prohibition"; it is also my source for the information. I even think it can be watched on PBS's website for free (in the US only). I think the whole thing, while still a major blunder makes a lot more sense after seeing it.
I'm a little out of the loop on MeeGo development, but with the recent patent trolling and Microsoft loving from Nokia what makes Jolla think that even previous MeeGo agreements will be honored? If they are even enforceable Nokia has chosen a side in the free vs non-free, and just like any sinking ship honesty and goodwill are the first to go. It's not like a major corporation has ever crushed a smaller one just to be mean... Elop is did learn from the best on that one.
As a current AT&T LTE phone owner living in a major city without LTE I wouldn't say Sprint is too far behind. I check weekly At&t's LTE rollout page, and just like usually they just don't seem to have any interest in even trying to compete with Verizon even in major metro areas. I stay with them solely because of company discount, but this waiting game is just a joke. If Sprint has any interest they can match or exceed AT&T's presence very quickly. Just like T-mobile, AT&T seems happy just to confuse customers with their their barely/almost/not quite 4G HSPA network, which sounds great on TV but in reality is just barely faster than the "old" 3G. I really thought the iPad LTE would encourage AT&T to get their shit together, but as usually they seem happy to drag their feet in coverage despite having piles of money and a competitor who seems to care about their rollout. I just wish I didn't hate Verizon for other reasons.
Despite the insane bugs in Tell Tales' Walking Dead (WTF does this happen with every one of their releases? On every platform?) I find it true to the feeling of the comics and also the TV series. I like FPS games, I'm balls deep in Spec Ops: The Line right now; but not every story is best told with bang bang killstreak. Walking Dead is about suspense, and looking at humans as the problem. Not sure how Activision can translate that into a shooter. But I'm also not an asshole who pretends to know what the final product will look like. But I just can't see how this will fit with the narrative.
MS has always hired some of the best and brightest, but for years the output has been unable to match. So if you have top people, but you can't produce stuff people want than what is the issue? Management. Duh. I know, and I'm sure many others do too plenty of smart people in the biz. The difference between the Apple, Google, and MS guys is slim at best. But what gets produced is obviously not favorable to MS in quality or innovation. Innovation to Balmer seems too "out of box" and scary to be worth it, so instead he comes late to every. single. party. in the last 10 years.
On PC (x86) you can run the free Android SDK which includes an emulator, or use Bluestacks which is an easy to run environment and supports most non graphically intensive apps. A word of warning with both is don't expect native high-end speed. Bluestacks is my recommendation, but even on a nice high end PC things like Netflix are just high speed slideshows. On PPC you can find a few VM's of older versions but they will be running via emulation an x86 option. I know for a fact that I once was able to get a few running on a G5 Quad, but they were very slow and relied on the outdated VirtualPC for Mac edition.
It seems Jelly is exactly what it should be; a refinement on ICS. I must say as a mixed mobile OS user (Touchpad ICS+ Nexus, iPhone 4, Sammy Wp7) that it is really nice to hear Google is going after lag issues. If I didn't use iOS or WP7 I likely wouldn't notice, but despite some real solid improvement since Honeycomb Android has to me never felt quite as swift. To me it was really the only thing left that Google was notably behind on and especially frustrating on high end hardware, and makes me even more secure in my Nexus 7 pre-order. I'm really glad to see that unlike fans on all sides of the issue Google is able to identify concerns and kick them fast. Bodes very well for their new tablet focus.
But I can't help but revel in the growth and extension of public domain engines and assets by willing companies. As a dum-dum, I still see a lot of value in Q3 based projects. They really look good enough(for me), and I hear good things about the netcode. It isn't the end-all-be-all of engines, but it really is one of the first modern commercially sold engines available to the rest of us. If I may be so bold; gentlemen start your engines. I can't wait to see what you come up with.
His totally valid point likely references the 2 sentence uninformative summary. His point is far more insightful than yours frankly. Somebody has to call out extremely lazy "news" posts which give next to no info, and would be a joke as a random blog post by a tween.
To be fair you also have Windows Phone which is debatable better positioned in the future (not by much but MS will spend lots) than RIM, and also WebOS which is looking like where BB will be in 3 years unless RIM gets their shit together.
RIM can't afford a billion models and feature sets. They tried that, it led them here. They need a hero phone or 2 and to avoid another expensive PlayBook like flop- despite how nice the device itself is.
True even the current apps are pretty weak, RIM needs a compatibility layer with older OS's bad otherwise lots of these companies who were only willing to support updates to the dwindling BB base will just say screw it to a full rewrite. And the Android apps on BB10 doesn't cut it.
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There are a number of solutions, and I'm not one to call somebody an idiot for using one over the other if it works best for them. But as a fellow Mac user (oftentimes) I guess it depends on size and complexity. That said, even the big bad slow Excel can at times to the job better than QuickBooks. I think for the very small Excel can be enough, but for larger, even entry level "enterprise solutions" are often a better fit. It just sounds like you are comfortable with QB, and that's fine. I'm not so high and mighty to think I can dictate to others. I just feel like it hasn't gone anywhere, and the company behind it seems to be stuck in the past just like Quicken demonstrates. But either way this whole article is pretty much an ad, praising codebloat nonetheless and seems out of place on a news site.
Oh and as most anybody who uses QB often knows- it does suck quite mighty and gets slower even as PCs get faster. Piles of code isn't always a good thing, sometimes it just means you have a bloated heifer with lazy programming and no real improvements in half a decade or more.
Good point, and I think in-line with my suggestion that MS is just better at extortion than Apple.
On one hand you have evil out in the open with visible court cases (Apple) on the other hand you have back door patent threats which make more money through settlement than their own Windows Phone OS (MS). Evil is equal on both ends, but one is more devious and MS is far more successful is their scam. But hey Apple gets more press for their bad deeds so they must be worse.
Love MS or hate them this guy must be either the best guy to work with imaginable, or he has some dirt on the board. I just can't comprehend how else he has be allowed to do so much damage, and put MS behind so many rivals who nobody ever thought would ever actually be worth more on paper than the mighty MS. As a shareholder he needs to be buried, and MS needs to admit his tenure was a mistake and work to make amends for the damage he has done to the brand, the value, and yes even the innovation he seems bent on extinguishing with his every breath. Competitors must love him though.
Welcome to the more intense forced migration by MS after their unexpectedly well made and uncharacteristically blunder-free XP release that they are having trouble killing.The fact that customers haven't felt the desperate or willingness to take a leap of faith to escape is a rare compliment to the engineers and shows that underneath the out of touch managers, and brain dead Uncle Fester CEO there is actually some real talent, but against actually empowering those people with every release is against the core principle of overpromising and under delivering which has sold billions of PCs and is the devil's pact that binds OEM to MS in way where neither has to explain why your new PC kind of sucks, and always promises a bright future with distant upgrades at which point most people just replace their PC and the cycle starts over again. Meanwhile MS would do just fine if they let the smart people they hire run the show, instead of Bean Counter Ballmer who is the epitome of the guys who is willing to knowingly ship crap, because unlike anybody with a brain who has dealt with the smart people MS often hires, he honestly can't imagine that shipping consistant decent software is possible and might even redeem the image of his company. People like Ballmer think they just because they have not an ounce of innovation or foresight, that new concepts are just flukes and pixie dust to be kept locked away and dolled out only in case the software ends up more displeasing than his accountants had predicted. Smart companies know innovation breeds innovation, and lends to even better new hires and partners. All of that scares the shit out of a man whose only real talent is dismissing the next big thing years before he attempts to emulate it forgetting that unlike on the desktop, you can't just sell something well below your capabilities and say" tough shit , but hey the next version will fix all that"
As a Lg Quantum WP7 owner I actually learned a bit from both of those lists. Nothing that impacts me much, since the irritations or omitted features that I actually use didn't take long to discover especially from a multi-OS background. That said many of those rebuttals if accurate help clarify or correct and I don't think of anybody who honestly offers a counterpoint is a shill. It almost seems like perhaps the original list is detailing the first release of WP7 which I think only the most mindless fanboy would say shipped with rough or even distant feature parity with it's competitors at the time. A mistake that may have led to marginalization of the OS in the eyes of many, or perhaps just nerd fodder for arguments. Can't say for sure if I'm right about it being outdated, since I got my phone less than a year ago used to play around and learn and it already had an upgrade OS.
Having experience with the the 4 major mobile OS's (sorry WebOS wish things had been different) helps me avoid the rabid fanboism I see whenever a competing OS is brought up in tech circles such as Nerddot. It kills discussion like we see in this thread.
Half the people refuse to even consider that maybe MS got a few things right, the other half can somehow seemly straight faced defend a missing feature or 2 by reminding us that 5 years ago the competition had even worse issues. As if time and technology, and keeping up with at least the expected feature set hasn't ever impacted an aware consumer's buying choices especially in the face of reasonable alternatives. Ironic especially coming from people who labor over every tech purchase and weight every pro to con. Maybe they aren't important features at all, or just not to you,or maybe they are not worth the time to implement, or cause too much clutter. That's a fair stance, but pointing to the first releases of 5 year old OS's and arguing that should be relevant at all is just (likely unintentionally) dishonest and is like saying my niche operating system is better in every way than any version Windows, while at the same time defending the fact that it doesn't support modern hardware, but neither does Windows 3.1 so who cares right? Companies prioritize certain features they think their OS needs based on their view of the market. Apple like MS didn't think cut and paste were essential features at least at launch, and I imagine they defended their choice as a means of reducing clutter. Totally reasonable, I think hindsight proved them wrong, but at least their excuse is grounded in a semblance reality as opposed to mental and logical gymnastics.
With two intellectually dishonest stances between the lovers and the haters it is no wonder people never get a chance to have honest dialogue about what does and doesn't work without it becoming a fingerpointing flamefest. Politics seems measured and dispasionate by comparison. It seems mobile OS choice has become so balkanized even the suggestion of certain well done elements of a competing OS makes you a shill, or just another one of those people who didn't realize the divine and everlasting superiority of the inevitable defender's OS of choice. In their mind there is simply no conceivable reason to not have needs that match theirs. Of course at times mods seem to punish those of us who really try and be honest about their opinion, because the suspect many of them can't imagine how anybody could not have a cult-like worship for whatever OS is on their plastic pocket warmer.
So long story short, if you are right, and I don't have the energy to check and compare the lists right now, then I thank you for contributing and say ignore the accusations. By extension if you are one of those unquestioning fans and just concocted a deceptive/dishonest list, then you are a shill. The exact statement applies to the original poster as well.
Or by the same logic, perhaps these items are part of the reason for the stagnant sales of WP7 despite some compelling ideas in the design. Sure most of that shit won't matter to most individuals, but when competing against mature half decade old OS's you can't get off by just claiming that in 2007 your competitors were in the same boat. 7.5 got rid of most of the really irritating ones, but a few persist.
At the same time as others have pointed out Android and iOS also have a long list of issues. Only the buyer can decide whose feature-set works best for them. For me on my LG Quantum which I bought used to play around with WP7 when I broke my old phone, most of that list isn't an issue. But a few things are, especially the surprisingly bad way in which multitasking is achieved. It makes the iOS method seem elegant and powerful by comparison.
I've ended up liking WP7 a lot more than I expected after previous experience with it's relative Windows Mobile, but it has it share of faults, including a terrible selection of decent apps, where you often pay for apps you can get elsewhere for free or find they simply don't exist. When I'm looking to upgrade in the next year I will give WP8 a good look, I like it. But in my case I also don't mind iOS or Android either.
In my opinion they should all look quite a bit at the WebOS interface, and in the case of WP7 specifically at the "card" multitasking, of which their current program selection screen in an almost comically weak and neutered replication. On the other hand Live tiles are great, and Apple should be embarrassed they haven't bothered to at least have the weather icon update instead of showing a canned image. It looked a little lame even in 2007, but now it just seems like a stubborn unwillingness to accept any innovation outside the company's walls. Another major point in WP7's favor is battery life. It is up there with the best of them even on first gen phones like mine. While seemingly simple, it's something even a company with the resources of HP couldn't get out of WebOS and unlike many of the items on this list it really is a deal breaker for most people. Even the original battery in my Quantum makes it well past a day with regular use no problem.
In the end for whatever the reason WP7 isn't taking off the way MS intended it to, and to point fingers at other companies for their specific faults ignores the fact that as you argue in your post- not all limitations are really that important to many people. It certainly can be argued based on sales data alone that perhaps the ones facing WP7 are of the variety that people might actually be bothered by, especially if they are not a new smartphone buyer. Or it could be one of a myriad of other reasons. That being said, MS isn't exactly beleaguered Palm, and they know how to sell things as well as Apple does (just to different markets). So if their crack sales people can't get companies who used WinMo, have their entire company on Windows PCs, and spend tons on MS products annually to support them, clearly something is wrong. I'm not a typical MS customer though, so I have not a clue what it is. But companies don't just ditch a long term vendor, for a new entrant (applies to both Apple and Google in mobile) unless they are really confident in the switch.
Listen I don't buy Apple's inventing the smartphone patent BS, but at the same time ignoring how the iPhone impacted the industry as a whole is pretty strange too. Apple took a lot of ideas for the iPhone from others, but the combination proved the smartphone to be a mass market item (not just suit and ties and geeks). Apple invented very little, but they found a good mix for a mass market product. That doesn't give them the right to claim to own this lose mixture, but I still think credit is due if for no other reason than that it mustn't have been so obvious is Palm, RIM, and MS couldn't figure it out over a decade+.The fact that others looked at design, just as Apple had looked at other designs, and then went on to incorporate new ideas for competing products is good for the market. Android and WP7 for that matter both have some nice features over iOS for this exact reason. On the other hand Apple has some stuff the other guys don't. The original Android looked a heck of a lot like a Blackberry, but when they saw a better more user-friendly mass-marketable and way to do it Google changed some things and had the foresight to reconsidered the future landscape. This is in striking contrast to MS, Nokia, and RIM, who all laughed it off. Interested how they are the ones now struggling. If you ask me their willingness to take what they thought at the time were the best parts of iOS, and then mesh them with their own ideas is the reason Android is what it is today. If they had gone the Blackberry route would we even remember or care about Android at this point? "Me-too product" is a needlessly harsh and unreasonable assertion- most all products are at their core "me-too", but Metro for all it's differentiation is far more similar to Android and iOS than it is to classic WinMo. The same can be said about WP7 when compared to the OS's and devices that it's forefathers competed against.
Most American bars were also heavily financed by the beer companies before the advent of prohibition. It wasn't uncommon to a have a Miller only bar right across from a Budweiser bar, with furnishing (even entire bars, seats, spittoons, and memorabilia) and advertising/store signage (not the cheap paper or laminate kind, but like outdoor permanent kind) provided for free to the owner of the establishment. I believe the reason this practice has since been reduced from what in many cases was almost split ownership between brewer and proprietor has to do with quelling the concerns of some prohibition supporters who were weary of the return to the pre prohibition times. Many were especially concerned by what they saw as too much power concentrated in one industry. While I tend to think of them as religious nutjobs and nannystaters, it is a fact that for many years prior to the slow expansion of prohibition through city councils and state legislatures that the main source of revenue for the federal government came from the sale of beer. That is pretty amazing to consider, and would suggest that the federal government may have been a little too cozy with beer companies. Even defense and energy today can't possibly be so enmeshed in Washington that a single industry that basically bankrolled the feds. Another similar post-prohibition law aimed at the same type of concerns was making it illegal for the producer (Bud, Miller, etc.) to also be/own the distributor. This law is still enforced today for better or worse. Anybody curious for more info on this strange time in American history should check out the Ken Burns' documentary "Prohibition"; it is also my source for the information. I even think it can be watched on PBS's website for free (in the US only). I think the whole thing, while still a major blunder makes a lot more sense after seeing it.
I'm a little out of the loop on MeeGo development, but with the recent patent trolling and Microsoft loving from Nokia what makes Jolla think that even previous MeeGo agreements will be honored? If they are even enforceable Nokia has chosen a side in the free vs non-free, and just like any sinking ship honesty and goodwill are the first to go. It's not like a major corporation has ever crushed a smaller one just to be mean... Elop is did learn from the best on that one.
As a current AT&T LTE phone owner living in a major city without LTE I wouldn't say Sprint is too far behind. I check weekly At&t's LTE rollout page, and just like usually they just don't seem to have any interest in even trying to compete with Verizon even in major metro areas. I stay with them solely because of company discount, but this waiting game is just a joke. If Sprint has any interest they can match or exceed AT&T's presence very quickly. Just like T-mobile, AT&T seems happy just to confuse customers with their their barely/almost/not quite 4G HSPA network, which sounds great on TV but in reality is just barely faster than the "old" 3G. I really thought the iPad LTE would encourage AT&T to get their shit together, but as usually they seem happy to drag their feet in coverage despite having piles of money and a competitor who seems to care about their rollout. I just wish I didn't hate Verizon for other reasons.
Bravo sir.
Yeah I'm that dick who responds to himself. But before the hate hits me, yes I know Spec Ops is TPS, but my point still stands.
Despite the insane bugs in Tell Tales' Walking Dead (WTF does this happen with every one of their releases? On every platform?) I find it true to the feeling of the comics and also the TV series. I like FPS games, I'm balls deep in Spec Ops: The Line right now; but not every story is best told with bang bang killstreak. Walking Dead is about suspense, and looking at humans as the problem. Not sure how Activision can translate that into a shooter. But I'm also not an asshole who pretends to know what the final product will look like. But I just can't see how this will fit with the narrative.
MS has always hired some of the best and brightest, but for years the output has been unable to match. So if you have top people, but you can't produce stuff people want than what is the issue? Management. Duh. I know, and I'm sure many others do too plenty of smart people in the biz. The difference between the Apple, Google, and MS guys is slim at best. But what gets produced is obviously not favorable to MS in quality or innovation. Innovation to Balmer seems too "out of box" and scary to be worth it, so instead he comes late to every. single. party. in the last 10 years.
Um... no. Buy an iOS device if you want that. Nothing wrong with choice-either way.
On PC (x86) you can run the free Android SDK which includes an emulator, or use Bluestacks which is an easy to run environment and supports most non graphically intensive apps. A word of warning with both is don't expect native high-end speed. Bluestacks is my recommendation, but even on a nice high end PC things like Netflix are just high speed slideshows.
On PPC you can find a few VM's of older versions but they will be running via emulation an x86 option. I know for a fact that I once was able to get a few running on a G5 Quad, but they were very slow and relied on the outdated VirtualPC for Mac edition.
It seems Jelly is exactly what it should be; a refinement on ICS. I must say as a mixed mobile OS user (Touchpad ICS+ Nexus, iPhone 4, Sammy Wp7) that it is really nice to hear Google is going after lag issues. If I didn't use iOS or WP7 I likely wouldn't notice, but despite some real solid improvement since Honeycomb Android has to me never felt quite as swift. To me it was really the only thing left that Google was notably behind on and especially frustrating on high end hardware, and makes me even more secure in my Nexus 7 pre-order. I'm really glad to see that unlike fans on all sides of the issue Google is able to identify concerns and kick them fast. Bodes very well for their new tablet focus.
But I can't help but revel in the growth and extension of public domain engines and assets by willing companies. As a dum-dum, I still see a lot of value in Q3 based projects. They really look good enough(for me), and I hear good things about the netcode. It isn't the end-all-be-all of engines, but it really is one of the first modern commercially sold engines available to the rest of us. If I may be so bold; gentlemen start your engines. I can't wait to see what you come up with.
His totally valid point likely references the 2 sentence uninformative summary. His point is far more insightful than yours frankly. Somebody has to call out extremely lazy "news" posts which give next to no info, and would be a joke as a random blog post by a tween.
Most worthless uninformative summary ever. Thank god Slashdot has hired editors like Timothy. Nice job dude.
To be fair you also have Windows Phone which is debatable better positioned in the future (not by much but MS will spend lots) than RIM, and also WebOS which is looking like where BB will be in 3 years unless RIM gets their shit together.
RIM can't afford a billion models and feature sets. They tried that, it led them here. They need a hero phone or 2 and to avoid another expensive PlayBook like flop- despite how nice the device itself is.
True even the current apps are pretty weak, RIM needs a compatibility layer with older OS's bad otherwise lots of these companies who were only willing to support updates to the dwindling BB base will just say screw it to a full rewrite. And the Android apps on BB10 doesn't cut it.