You forgot C) reap the benefits of the original wifi research that CSIRO did, and all the future research too, and D) when CSIRO collects, we can put our taxpayer dollars to better use than funding the CEO salaries and shareholder dividends of international companies that just want to rip us off.
I wouldn't mind if CSIRO made it royalty-free for Australian companies, since their taxes helped fund it, but I'm quite comfortable with CSIRO collecting a billion or so from overseas companies that didn't contribute, even if it means slightly higher costs for me. Still a total net gain for Australians.
Silly question I know, but reading your post just makes its title look all the more ironic.
Hardware and legacy-OS "fragmentation" exists today in the iPhone ecosystem - nearly half of iPod Touches are running older systems, and there are already iPhone owners who will never be able to upgrade to OS 4 (even the beta). It's obviously greater in Android due to the larger choice of hardware and more rapid OS releases. Some may prefer a slower-moving target, but the monolithic, our-way-or-the-highway approach that's required to achieve this has too many well-documenteddisadvantages to be suitable for everyone.
[Backwards compatibility] sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world
That's just plain uninformed. No APIs have been revoked or broken; the only 1.0 apps that don't work today are the ones that did naughty, undocumented things - like any other platform. In fact, Android's VM model, excellent API version management and Marketplace manifest model make it easy to allow apps to run on any version of Android they can manage, or to target the app at whatever specific set of hardware features are required, making forward compatibility far less of an issue that for e.g. Linux or Windows (can't speak for iPhone OS personally). And Rubin points this out.
The Flash version on the Marketplace is still in beta and is entirely software-rendered, so expect some skippiness, heat and battery drain. The final release in June/July will do hardware acceleration, and should improve all of those things..
The carrier I use (Exetel) also has a "data only" plan, where you pay only for what you use (1.5c/MB). No restrictions of course; great for voip or tethering. Voice calls/texts are also possible, though relatively expensive.
Yep. US buyers have to pay $200 + $60-$100/month for a decent phone, for "unlimited" voice & data, whether you want it or not. I'm amazed you haven't invoked your right to use those arms you bear yet.
Here (AU) I imported my Nexus One at full price, but I pay only $10/month for voice, texts & data, plus I added $5 for extra data, which (with wifi and voip) more than covers my needs. On contract I'd pay $0 + $60/m, so I'm saving nearly $500 and I can change plans or carriers or sell my phone for a new one at any time.
I'm sorry, but I cannot blame Sony for removing the feature.
Then blame them for putting it in there in the first place.
Any vendor that sells loss-leading goods like that has to be careful not to make their products too useful in ways that don't earn them back their loss (see: CueCat, among others). Free OtherOS support is fundamentally a feature that undermined their own business model and was obviously going to bite them, all the more so when they lost so much on each unit.
They crippled it somewhat (e.g. no access to GPU) to reduce the attractiveness, but they should have simply charged a little extra to unlock the feature (to cover the loss plus a modest profit), like they did with the PS2's Linux HDD add-on. Less security concerns, and less money lost inadvertently subsidising universities and the military.
Doubtless the whole thing was one of Krazy Ken Kutaragi's brilliant ideas; engineering for engineering's sake.
Surprising? No, though catching up to Apple's commanding lead in little more than a year is noteworthy.
But yeah, that an open platform should lead to a greater choice of hardware and carriers and thus greater sales than a closed platform, is hardly a shock.
If they could upgrade to higher quality screens with sharper text and less eyestrain for next to nothing, why wouln't they?
Because they think (incorrectly), not that 1280x1024 is "good enough", but that a higher resolution will be somehow worse, and make their text too small (or they're just using desktop monitors, where you simply can't buy higher dpi screens, only larger ones).
Many monitors come with a rotatable stand, and most graphics drivers can rotate their displays. Have you tried a 9:16 portrait view yet? If you work on portrait-aspect documents, it really works well.
Except for ClearType - that doesn't work quite so well when rotated. Of course, at a higher resolution, ClearType wouldn't be necessary...
between a 300dpi printed sheet of paper, and a 1200dpi glossy magazine page? Most people can, pretty easily. By comparison, the standard 24" WUXGA monitor is a pathetic 94dpi.
The IBM T220 (22" @ 3840 x 2400, released 2001) was 204 dpi, and looked glorious. Modern phone screens are 250-270dpi, so we can potentially manufacture a 24" 5230 x 2940 screen, and it would look amazing, like a quality printed brochure but with full interaction, though still less than anyone with 20/20 vision can perceive.
This would be hugely useful for any number of visual-oriented industries (pre-press, photography, cinema, medical, data exploration etc), and a pretty large number of geeks too. What's stopping us? (Hint: it's not graphics cards - even cheap cards can manage 3840x2400 these days. It's idiot consumers who say "I want low & chunky resolution, otherwise my text is too small to see").
Your own country's consumer law will tell you if you (as a PS3 owner) are entitled to any form of compensation for this, regardless of Sony's opinion, or the retailer's. But you can't sue Sony over it AFAIK, since you have no contract with them directly.
However, retailers do have a contract with Sony - and many countries also have some statutory laws regarding contracts between corporations. Thus there may be grounds for retailers to claim compensation, or even sue for breach.
Of course, this might be a great way to piss off a major supplier, so I'm betting most retailers won't go after Sony, and will either write off a few customer claims or do their best to deny them.
Well what on earth are you buying the new cards for? Last year's mid-range cards are far cheaper and perfectly adequate for any game around (especially if you run at console-standard 720p). Also, if you last upgraded in 2004 - you'd be needing a new console by now anyways. Not many games released for the PS2 or Xbox lately.
On-Live will be ok for slower-paced games (latency kills any FPS playing), but you'll need a fairly beefy connection if you want even console-level resolutions, let alone PC-level. Plus, the larger the frame size, the greater the transmit time and the larger the latency.
It hides the increased complexity from the programmer.
This way, the machine spends an extra millisecond or two executing unnecessary code, which temporarily wastes 0.0005% of its RAM, and the programmer saves a good 15 minutes or more of his/her time.
Which resources do you think are the most valuable?
A smart high school student will tell you that you can only calculate the wavelength from the frequency if you already know the speed of light (the formula is C = Wavelength x Frequency).
GPS tracking apps? Like Latitude, or apps that record your movements in a datastream. They need to keep running in the background or they miss stuff.
Background music syncing? Well, if Apple allowed it at all, you'd have to sit there and wait while your modal app finished all its data transfers. Example: Updating a bunch of apps from the App store - it does them one at a time, and afaik I can't do anything else without interrupting it.
Custom alarm apps? If the built-in alarms aren't sufficient (e.g. insufficient scheduling flexibility, or you want a playlist for your alarm), you can get an app for that - but you have to leave it running.
Event-driven apps? Want an app that e.g. enables wifi when you come in range of your home cell ID? Perhaps, but again, only if you leave it running.
These are a handful of examples I've run into recently with my wife's iPhone, none of which were a problem on my WM and Android phones. I'm sure there's many others.
It's selection bias - you probably can't think of any examples requiring multitasking because you've never been allowed to try. The few examples mentioned by the OP had to be specifically catered for by Apple, case-by-case. For those of us that have become used to any old app having these capabilities if they want them, a non-multitasking phone is really limiting.
AMOLED screens (like on the Nexus One) are great for indoor reading, particularly at night. Small, very good contrast, comfortable to hold, no external lightsource needed.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot C) reap the benefits of the original wifi research that CSIRO did, and all the future research too, and D) when CSIRO collects, we can put our taxpayer dollars to better use than funding the CEO salaries and shareholder dividends of international companies that just want to rip us off.
I wouldn't mind if CSIRO made it royalty-free for Australian companies, since their taxes helped fund it, but I'm quite comfortable with CSIRO collecting a billion or so from overseas companies that didn't contribute, even if it means slightly higher costs for me. Still a total net gain for Australians.
How much of our collective lives did that piss away?
Silly question I know, but reading your post just makes its title look all the more ironic.
Hardware and legacy-OS "fragmentation" exists today in the iPhone ecosystem - nearly half of iPod Touches are running older systems, and there are already iPhone owners who will never be able to upgrade to OS 4 (even the beta). It's obviously greater in Android due to the larger choice of hardware and more rapid OS releases. Some may prefer a slower-moving target, but the monolithic, our-way-or-the-highway approach that's required to achieve this has too many well-documented disadvantages to be suitable for everyone.
[Backwards compatibility] sounds like an unlikely situation in the android world
That's just plain uninformed. No APIs have been revoked or broken; the only 1.0 apps that don't work today are the ones that did naughty, undocumented things - like any other platform. In fact, Android's VM model, excellent API version management and Marketplace manifest model make it easy to allow apps to run on any version of Android they can manage, or to target the app at whatever specific set of hardware features are required, making forward compatibility far less of an issue that for e.g. Linux or Windows (can't speak for iPhone OS personally). And Rubin points this out.
The Flash version on the Marketplace is still in beta and is entirely software-rendered, so expect some skippiness, heat and battery drain. The final release in June/July will do hardware acceleration, and should improve all of those things..
There's just not enough room in the flash rom. Sorry.
The carrier I use (Exetel) also has a "data only" plan, where you pay only for what you use (1.5c/MB). No restrictions of course; great for voip or tethering. Voice calls/texts are also possible, though relatively expensive.
Yep. US buyers have to pay $200 + $60-$100/month for a decent phone, for "unlimited" voice & data, whether you want it or not. I'm amazed you haven't invoked your right to use those arms you bear yet.
Here (AU) I imported my Nexus One at full price, but I pay only $10/month for voice, texts & data, plus I added $5 for extra data, which (with wifi and voip) more than covers my needs. On contract I'd pay $0 + $60/m, so I'm saving nearly $500 and I can change plans or carriers or sell my phone for a new one at any time.
I'm sorry, but I cannot blame Sony for removing the feature.
Then blame them for putting it in there in the first place.
Any vendor that sells loss-leading goods like that has to be careful not to make their products too useful in ways that don't earn them back their loss (see: CueCat, among others). Free OtherOS support is fundamentally a feature that undermined their own business model and was obviously going to bite them, all the more so when they lost so much on each unit.
They crippled it somewhat (e.g. no access to GPU) to reduce the attractiveness, but they should have simply charged a little extra to unlock the feature (to cover the loss plus a modest profit), like they did with the PS2's Linux HDD add-on. Less security concerns, and less money lost inadvertently subsidising universities and the military.
Doubtless the whole thing was one of Krazy Ken Kutaragi's brilliant ideas; engineering for engineering's sake.
Surprising? No, though catching up to Apple's commanding lead in little more than a year is noteworthy.
But yeah, that an open platform should lead to a greater choice of hardware and carriers and thus greater sales than a closed platform, is hardly a shock.
If they could upgrade to higher quality screens with sharper text and less eyestrain for next to nothing, why wouln't they?
Because they think (incorrectly), not that 1280x1024 is "good enough", but that a higher resolution will be somehow worse, and make their text too small (or they're just using desktop monitors, where you simply can't buy higher dpi screens, only larger ones).
That's why the iPhone as a ~200 DPI screen.
Sorry, the iPhone is only 165dpi. Next theory.
Windows 7 only allow system fonts to be enlarged by 150%
Not true. The Set Custom Text Size setting allows up to 500%, i.e. 480dpi.
Many monitors come with a rotatable stand, and most graphics drivers can rotate their displays. Have you tried a 9:16 portrait view yet? If you work on portrait-aspect documents, it really works well.
Except for ClearType - that doesn't work quite so well when rotated. Of course, at a higher resolution, ClearType wouldn't be necessary...
between a 300dpi printed sheet of paper, and a 1200dpi glossy magazine page? Most people can, pretty easily. By comparison, the standard 24" WUXGA monitor is a pathetic 94dpi.
The IBM T220 (22" @ 3840 x 2400, released 2001) was 204 dpi, and looked glorious. Modern phone screens are 250-270dpi, so we can potentially manufacture a 24" 5230 x 2940 screen, and it would look amazing, like a quality printed brochure but with full interaction, though still less than anyone with 20/20 vision can perceive.
This would be hugely useful for any number of visual-oriented industries (pre-press, photography, cinema, medical, data exploration etc), and a pretty large number of geeks too. What's stopping us? (Hint: it's not graphics cards - even cheap cards can manage 3840x2400 these days. It's idiot consumers who say "I want low & chunky resolution, otherwise my text is too small to see").
it depends whether the feature was actually advertised, or just happened to be there.
I believe it was written on the box.
Your own country's consumer law will tell you if you (as a PS3 owner) are entitled to any form of compensation for this, regardless of Sony's opinion, or the retailer's. But you can't sue Sony over it AFAIK, since you have no contract with them directly.
However, retailers do have a contract with Sony - and many countries also have some statutory laws regarding contracts between corporations. Thus there may be grounds for retailers to claim compensation, or even sue for breach.
Of course, this might be a great way to piss off a major supplier, so I'm betting most retailers won't go after Sony, and will either write off a few customer claims or do their best to deny them.
On one hand we have content providers like Murdoch saying Google should pay them for the content Google is providing access to.
And on the other hand we have telcos saying Google should pay them because they're providing access to Google's content.
It's the fate of any success story; Google has money, they want it for themselves, and they think it's easier to get Google's than to earn their own.
Well what on earth are you buying the new cards for? Last year's mid-range cards are far cheaper and perfectly adequate for any game around (especially if you run at console-standard 720p). Also, if you last upgraded in 2004 - you'd be needing a new console by now anyways. Not many games released for the PS2 or Xbox lately.
On-Live will be ok for slower-paced games (latency kills any FPS playing), but you'll need a fairly beefy connection if you want even console-level resolutions, let alone PC-level. Plus, the larger the frame size, the greater the transmit time and the larger the latency.
Chrome (on Windows) came out of beta back in 2008.
It hides the increased complexity from the programmer.
This way, the machine spends an extra millisecond or two executing unnecessary code, which temporarily wastes 0.0005% of its RAM, and the programmer saves a good 15 minutes or more of his/her time.
Which resources do you think are the most valuable?
It means the future looks like an Inbox, with RSS, Wave & Buzz thrown in.
A smart high school student will tell you that you can only calculate the wavelength from the frequency if you already know the speed of light (the formula is C = Wavelength x Frequency).
These are a handful of examples I've run into recently with my wife's iPhone, none of which were a problem on my WM and Android phones. I'm sure there's many others.
It's selection bias - you probably can't think of any examples requiring multitasking because you've never been allowed to try. The few examples mentioned by the OP had to be specifically catered for by Apple, case-by-case. For those of us that have become used to any old app having these capabilities if they want them, a non-multitasking phone is really limiting.
Sure. There's these things called BOOKMARKS.
AMOLED screens (like on the Nexus One) are great for indoor reading, particularly at night. Small, very good contrast, comfortable to hold, no external lightsource needed.
OTOH they're kinda crap outdoors.