I think that statement is probably correct, if you're measuring by "number of units sold" rather than "total money extracted from 'consumers'."
Something that is more expensive and less "common" is more hip and cool and therefore seem more valuable to people with more disposable income, which seems to be Apple corporation's target market (and as much as I despise the Apple environment personally, I can't argue that this isn't a very good business plan. It's much more profitable to sell only half as many units as the market leader, but at double the markup, for example.)
The same sort of confusion seems to go around reports of "market share" in server sales, which usually seem to be reported in terms of dollars spent rather than "actual pieces of hardware shipped", which inflates the "market share" of devices with more expensive hardware and higher license fees.
I've been meaning to dig into this in my "Copious Free Time®" - I've noticed this too. The one factor seems to be that there is a bunch of disk access going on while the "freeze" takes place. I have no idea yet what firefox is grovelling over on my disk when it does this (it's not swap - I don't have swap, and I have plenty of RAM, even for Firefox...).
"I'll never get another Motorola phone based on my own experience."
Ah - another victim of the "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR"?
Motorola Mobile Corporation seems to have the WORST "consume-only" attitude of the current phone manufacturers as far as I can tell. When they're spending extra money to develop use-prevention features (preventing custom ROM usage, etc) that might be better spent on useful features I can't imagine the "user experience" with their products is really as good as it should be. Certainly the CLIQ didn't impress me.
"You bought it with a given set of features. If you don't like the features, DON'T BUY IT."
It's kind of tangential to your point (which I actually tend to agree with, personally), but people keep forgetting that "upgradeability" IS one of the features we are (supposedly) paying for.
This is more of an issue over the aggravatingly long delays and outright cancellations of official upgrades from the manufacturer than with installing custom ROMs, but I see the same kind of "you shouldn't have bought it if it didn't have the features you wanted" argument used to claim nobody should be allowed to be upset over crappy lack of effort to upgrade existing phones by the phone manufacturer. Since nearly all Android phones are MARKETED to some degree as being "upgradeable", that's one of the features people are paying for and expecting to receive.
You need to have "root" access to replace the factory OS with Cyanogenmod or other custom ROM, and getting "root" can reasonably be considered "hacking or jailbreaking". I don't know (unfortunately) of any android phone that ships with a built in "give yourself root access" function (though I think I heard that the Nexus One did - I may be mistaken about that. The Nokia N900 did, but that's Maemo).
On the other hand, with the possible exception of a mind-bogglingly-locked-down model or two on AT&T, all Android phones should, "out of the box", optionally allow "Install applications from non-market sources" at least, which does make Android phones substantially "more free" than iPhones®, even if they're still not quite as "free" as they really should be.
On yet another hand, "rooting" most android phones seems to be a pretty simple process for those that have the option these days, and I found upgrading to Cyanogenmod 6.1.1 on my "MyTouch 3G Slide" quite painless and well worth it.
That they still had 500 employees was surprising enough, but this part of the statement is downright unbelievable:
"[...]the performance of the new product." [emphasis added]
"MySpace" and "new product" just plain don't seem like they go together...
Same setup (CyanogenMod+3G Slide) on my phone, plus I've noticed that there's ssh/scp (from dropbear, I think) pre-installed and available from within the terminal, along with netcat, which is nice when I'm more worried about performance than privacy/security (e.g. transferring files between a computer on my LAN and my phone).
The keyboard's a little awkward (requiring a couple of extra clicks to get to "|" and so on) but otherwise I'm pretty pleased.
I heard rumors that Gingerbread would support bluetooth keyboards. If that's true (I've seen no confirmation) that would be a nice option.
I'm lusting after a small MeeGo-based device myself, but am rapidly losing hope that Nokia can be convinced to loosen their desperate clinging grip on Symbian long enough to put some actual effort into getting it into actual devices.
Android's okay (especially if one has a phone for which CyanogenMod is available and can get full root access), but I also would rather have a more traditional and complete Linux environment to play in on my portable devices.
Despite the fact that for some reason the hardware marketers nearly always leave it out of the list of "supported media", as far as I know all Android implementations support Ogg Vorbis audio natively.
Doesn't really change the basic premise that for virtually any piece of modern software out there, some idiotically-broad should-never-have-granted patent somewhere can probably be found and stretched to make an infringement claim against it (including Ogg Vorbis audio)
I'm guessing ("I Am Not A Lawyer", etc.) that the fact that Ogg Vorbis has been around for so long, openly declaring their intent specifically to be a project for avoiding patent problems might factor into any such lawsuit. There are apparently some semi-sane rules about not intentionally sitting around waiting for something to get popular before suing, and I'm having trouble believing any "serious" audio-patent-holding company hasn't at least heard of Vorbis by now.
SOME of them actually ARE. "Link-local" addresses (roughly equivalent to the "169.*" ipv4 addresses that most people only see when you get stuck with them when the DHCP server isn't working...) are by default based on MAC address (though like the MAC address itself, you can change them). I seem to recall that there was at least one other class of IPv6 address that is commonly generated from the MAC address, but can't say for sure (I'm only just now finally getting around to playing with IPv6).
That's the main problem (I believe) that webm has right now. The most popular browser "brand" (Mozilla Firefox) that will support it easily out of the virtual box has been mired in an ever-slower beta cycle for quite some time now, at least by internet standards, and will take probably another 3-6 months to finally hit release.
If Android "Gingerbread" really does have support for webm when it comes out, that will help. Until then, it seems only the about 5%-8% of the internet running a current Google Chrome/Chromium or the beta of Firefox 4 can actually use webm on the web.
I don't disagree at all with the general thesis here, but where do you get the "Democrats are anti-1st-amendment"? Is this a campaign finance reform thing?
(I usually think of it more in terms of which kinds of corporations you want your rights sold to: If you want your rights sold off to old-school industries [oil and power, banking, manufacturing], vote Republican. If you want them sold off to more modern industries ["Intellectual Property"/media/telecommunications], vote Democrat. If you want them sold off directly to lawyers and lobbyists in general, flip a coin.)
Actually, I think the previous post is probably right, at least in the long run.
If there's one thing the popularity of iPhone/iPad had demonstrated, it's that most people don't really use their computers much. They have a hugely capable desktop machine that they use for "facebook", email, and "youtube", and that's about it for most of them.
I'm a pretty hardcore penguinista myself, but even I doubt that a standard full-service (by today's "PC" standards) Linux desktop will ever conquer the market, or even a large minority of it. However, I think the current "desktop" market is mostly doomed outside of "enterprise" and hardcore power-user settings. Now that "consumer" gadgets have gotten cheap and powerful enough to do what the great majority of "users" seem to do with their computers, there's no need for it any more. All those people who are "completely befuddled when they don't see the start button" will be migrating their way over to even-simpler environments like Android and iOS and perhaps Windows 7 Series 7 Phone 7 Series (or whatever they were calling it), which I actually kind of expect will cannibalize BlackBerry for corporate users.
My personal prediction: Microsoft is busy fossilizing into the New IBM (firmly embedded in many "corporate" environments but fading out of the "consumer" market), while Apple clamps down on its users and gets increasingly ruthless with its market control to become the New Microsoft. I expect Linux to grow solidly on the internet server side and on corporate servers.
I actually expect the Android/Apple landscape in the "consumer" side to end up looking a lot like the Microsoft/Apple market now - I'm guessing we'll end up with a solid majority made up of various Android devices, with Apple being a minority (but a relatively large and reliable one).
There, a free wild prediction, and you didn't even have to look at ads on ZDNet or some other commercial publication to get it.
tl;dr: Yes, I agree that Microsoft will likely hold onto the "traditional desktop" market for as long as that market stays around, but I don't think that market is going to exist for that much longer now.
Well, since the alternative is to wait another half-decade for W3C's glacial pace to finally (maybe) get to a finished standard, I think most people prefer to start in on it now, rather than continue being stuck on the now decade-old HTML4.01/XHTML 1.1 combo.
A whole collection of other things, at least as far as Android is concerned.
From what I remember seeing pop up so far since this started, Android actually is not really "Java® based". It looks like the Java® programming language was chosen for writing Android applications initially just because "mobile" developers would be used to it.
Android's "Dalvik" interpreter is apparently not actually a Java® interpreter at all. There's a translation that takes place when preparing and Android package that converts the Java-language code to the native Dalvik stuff.
The point is that there's no reason other languages can't have their own converters, allowing someone to write Dalvik-based applications in just about any language you might want.
If I were Supreme Emperor of Google, I'd be looking at the possibility of Python and their own "Go" language, at least.
(This is just my understanding of the situation - corrections are welcome.)
I'm not personally heavily into GIS except as a (very) casual hobby, but I get the impression from my Geologist Significant Other that ESRI started stagnating pretty badly when they went "Windows Only".
That's actually one of the main features I'm looking forward to in "Gingerbread": bluetooth keyboard support.
Touchscreen seems to be good enough for basic usage, but a real keyboard (for me) is necessary to do any substantial amount of text input in any form. Being able to pull out a "real" (small) keyboard when necessary will be nice.
Something interesting I've learned since the lawsuit though, is that Dalvik is NOT actually a Java virtual machine. The "Java" code is converted to the native Dalvik bytecode rather than into Java bytecode. Hypothetically, Android could run ANY languages that had a converter, and I think the only reason Java was chosen as the first language to use was to tap the large population of people who are already used to programming for mobile devices running Java ME.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see, for example, a converter for Googles "Go", or maybe even something that can handle a subset of Python or similarly popular interpreted language popping up as an alternative to writing in Java.
As a "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR" victim, I also have a bunch of non-removable shovelware on this thing - plus Motorola appears to have removed certain basic functionality from the stock Android.
And don't get me started on their indefinitely delaying the long-promised update out of the Android 1.5 pit in order to "optimize the user experience in some key areas".
Thanks for that link, with not only pictures, but some useful specs: "According to the details,the tablet will come in three versions of 5, 7, and 9 inches display. It will be packed with 2 GB RAM memory, wi-fi connectivity, USB port and powered by a 2-watt system to suit poor power supply areas. It will laso have apps like internet browser, PDF reader, video conferencing facilities, open office, sci-lab, media player, remote device management capability, multimedia input-output interface option, and multiple content viewer."
2-watt, wifi, 2GB RAM? 5-9 inch screens? For US$35? SOLD. I'll take two. Even if the processor turns out to be the equivalent of a Pentium Classic (but I'd guess a-few-hundred-Mhz ARM or equivalent i.e. at least as fast as the overpriced and still-out-of-date Motorola® CLIQ with MOTOBLUR (as they insist on calling it in print). Definitely a bargain if one will be able to actually get them outside of India)...
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I think that statement is probably correct, if you're measuring by "number of units sold" rather than "total money extracted from 'consumers'."
Something that is more expensive and less "common" is more hip and cool and therefore seem more valuable to people with more disposable income, which seems to be Apple corporation's target market (and as much as I despise the Apple environment personally, I can't argue that this isn't a very good business plan. It's much more profitable to sell only half as many units as the market leader, but at double the markup, for example.)
The same sort of confusion seems to go around reports of "market share" in server sales, which usually seem to be reported in terms of dollars spent rather than "actual pieces of hardware shipped", which inflates the "market share" of devices with more expensive hardware and higher license fees.
I've been meaning to dig into this in my "Copious Free Time®" - I've noticed this too. The one factor seems to be that there is a bunch of disk access going on while the "freeze" takes place. I have no idea yet what firefox is grovelling over on my disk when it does this (it's not swap - I don't have swap, and I have plenty of RAM, even for Firefox...).
Ah - another victim of the "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR"?
Motorola Mobile Corporation seems to have the WORST "consume-only" attitude of the current phone manufacturers as far as I can tell. When they're spending extra money to develop use-prevention features (preventing custom ROM usage, etc) that might be better spent on useful features I can't imagine the "user experience" with their products is really as good as it should be. Certainly the CLIQ didn't impress me.
It's kind of tangential to your point (which I actually tend to agree with, personally), but people keep forgetting that "upgradeability" IS one of the features we are (supposedly) paying for.
This is more of an issue over the aggravatingly long delays and outright cancellations of official upgrades from the manufacturer than with installing custom ROMs, but I see the same kind of "you shouldn't have bought it if it didn't have the features you wanted" argument used to claim nobody should be allowed to be upset over crappy lack of effort to upgrade existing phones by the phone manufacturer. Since nearly all Android phones are MARKETED to some degree as being "upgradeable", that's one of the features people are paying for and expecting to receive.
You need to have "root" access to replace the factory OS with Cyanogenmod or other custom ROM, and getting "root" can reasonably be considered "hacking or jailbreaking". I don't know (unfortunately) of any android phone that ships with a built in "give yourself root access" function (though I think I heard that the Nexus One did - I may be mistaken about that. The Nokia N900 did, but that's Maemo).
On the other hand, with the possible exception of a mind-bogglingly-locked-down model or two on AT&T, all Android phones should, "out of the box", optionally allow "Install applications from non-market sources" at least, which does make Android phones substantially "more free" than iPhones®, even if they're still not quite as "free" as they really should be.
On yet another hand, "rooting" most android phones seems to be a pretty simple process for those that have the option these days, and I found upgrading to Cyanogenmod 6.1.1 on my "MyTouch 3G Slide" quite painless and well worth it.
That they still had 500 employees was surprising enough, but this part of the statement is downright unbelievable: "[...]the performance of the new product." [emphasis added]
"MySpace" and "new product" just plain don't seem like they go together...
Same setup (CyanogenMod+3G Slide) on my phone, plus I've noticed that there's ssh/scp (from dropbear, I think) pre-installed and available from within the terminal, along with netcat, which is nice when I'm more worried about performance than privacy/security (e.g. transferring files between a computer on my LAN and my phone).
The keyboard's a little awkward (requiring a couple of extra clicks to get to "|" and so on) but otherwise I'm pretty pleased.
I heard rumors that Gingerbread would support bluetooth keyboards. If that's true (I've seen no confirmation) that would be a nice option.
I'm lusting after a small MeeGo-based device myself, but am rapidly losing hope that Nokia can be convinced to loosen their desperate clinging grip on Symbian long enough to put some actual effort into getting it into actual devices.
Android's okay (especially if one has a phone for which CyanogenMod is available and can get full root access), but I also would rather have a more traditional and complete Linux environment to play in on my portable devices.
Despite the fact that for some reason the hardware marketers nearly always leave it out of the list of "supported media", as far as I know all Android implementations support Ogg Vorbis audio natively.
Doesn't really change the basic premise that for virtually any piece of modern software out there, some idiotically-broad should-never-have-granted patent somewhere can probably be found and stretched to make an infringement claim against it (including Ogg Vorbis audio)
I'm guessing ("I Am Not A Lawyer", etc.) that the fact that Ogg Vorbis has been around for so long, openly declaring their intent specifically to be a project for avoiding patent problems might factor into any such lawsuit. There are apparently some semi-sane rules about not intentionally sitting around waiting for something to get popular before suing, and I'm having trouble believing any "serious" audio-patent-holding company hasn't at least heard of Vorbis by now.
SOME of them actually ARE. "Link-local" addresses (roughly equivalent to the "169.*" ipv4 addresses that most people only see when you get stuck with them when the DHCP server isn't working...) are by default based on MAC address (though like the MAC address itself, you can change them). I seem to recall that there was at least one other class of IPv6 address that is commonly generated from the MAC address, but can't say for sure (I'm only just now finally getting around to playing with IPv6).
There are also variants of the "Tomato" firmware with IPv6 support as well, which some people might find simpler to deal with.
Me too. Glad I'm not the only one.
Congress and Lobbyists Organizing Asinine Copyright Abuse?
That's the main problem (I believe) that webm has right now. The most popular browser "brand" (Mozilla Firefox) that will support it easily out of the virtual box has been mired in an ever-slower beta cycle for quite some time now, at least by internet standards, and will take probably another 3-6 months to finally hit release.
If Android "Gingerbread" really does have support for webm when it comes out, that will help. Until then, it seems only the about 5%-8% of the internet running a current Google Chrome/Chromium or the beta of Firefox 4 can actually use webm on the web.
I don't disagree at all with the general thesis here, but where do you get the "Democrats are anti-1st-amendment"? Is this a campaign finance reform thing?
(I usually think of it more in terms of which kinds of corporations you want your rights sold to: If you want your rights sold off to old-school industries [oil and power, banking, manufacturing], vote Republican. If you want them sold off to more modern industries ["Intellectual Property"/media/telecommunications], vote Democrat. If you want them sold off directly to lawyers and lobbyists in general, flip a coin.)
Actually, I think the previous post is probably right, at least in the long run.
If there's one thing the popularity of iPhone/iPad had demonstrated, it's that most people don't really use their computers much. They have a hugely capable desktop machine that they use for "facebook", email, and "youtube", and that's about it for most of them.
I'm a pretty hardcore penguinista myself, but even I doubt that a standard full-service (by today's "PC" standards) Linux desktop will ever conquer the market, or even a large minority of it. However, I think the current "desktop" market is mostly doomed outside of "enterprise" and hardcore power-user settings. Now that "consumer" gadgets have gotten cheap and powerful enough to do what the great majority of "users" seem to do with their computers, there's no need for it any more. All those people who are "completely befuddled when they don't see the start button" will be migrating their way over to even-simpler environments like Android and iOS and perhaps Windows 7 Series 7 Phone 7 Series (or whatever they were calling it), which I actually kind of expect will cannibalize BlackBerry for corporate users.
My personal prediction: Microsoft is busy fossilizing into the New IBM (firmly embedded in many "corporate" environments but fading out of the "consumer" market), while Apple clamps down on its users and gets increasingly ruthless with its market control to become the New Microsoft. I expect Linux to grow solidly on the internet server side and on corporate servers.
I actually expect the Android/Apple landscape in the "consumer" side to end up looking a lot like the Microsoft/Apple market now - I'm guessing we'll end up with a solid majority made up of various Android devices, with Apple being a minority (but a relatively large and reliable one).
There, a free wild prediction, and you didn't even have to look at ads on ZDNet or some other commercial publication to get it.
tl;dr: Yes, I agree that Microsoft will likely hold onto the "traditional desktop" market for as long as that market stays around, but I don't think that market is going to exist for that much longer now.
Well, since the alternative is to wait another half-decade for W3C's glacial pace to finally (maybe) get to a finished standard, I think most people prefer to start in on it now, rather than continue being stuck on the now decade-old HTML4.01/XHTML 1.1 combo.
A whole collection of other things, at least as far as Android is concerned.
From what I remember seeing pop up so far since this started, Android actually is not really "Java® based". It looks like the Java® programming language was chosen for writing Android applications initially just because "mobile" developers would be used to it.
Android's "Dalvik" interpreter is apparently not actually a Java® interpreter at all. There's a translation that takes place when preparing and Android package that converts the Java-language code to the native Dalvik stuff.
The point is that there's no reason other languages can't have their own converters, allowing someone to write Dalvik-based applications in just about any language you might want.
If I were Supreme Emperor of Google, I'd be looking at the possibility of Python and their own "Go" language, at least.
(This is just my understanding of the situation - corrections are welcome.)
I thought they were called "Snorks". (Dang, I'm old...)
I'm not personally heavily into GIS except as a (very) casual hobby, but I get the impression from my Geologist Significant Other that ESRI started stagnating pretty badly when they went "Windows Only".
That's actually one of the main features I'm looking forward to in "Gingerbread": bluetooth keyboard support. Touchscreen seems to be good enough for basic usage, but a real keyboard (for me) is necessary to do any substantial amount of text input in any form. Being able to pull out a "real" (small) keyboard when necessary will be nice.
Something interesting I've learned since the lawsuit though, is that Dalvik is NOT actually a Java virtual machine. The "Java" code is converted to the native Dalvik bytecode rather than into Java bytecode. Hypothetically, Android could run ANY languages that had a converter, and I think the only reason Java was chosen as the first language to use was to tap the large population of people who are already used to programming for mobile devices running Java ME.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see, for example, a converter for Googles "Go", or maybe even something that can handle a subset of Python or similarly popular interpreted language popping up as an alternative to writing in Java.
Well, no - but you could fit enough of the tiny SSD's into a hard-drive-sized case to make a decent-sized SSD-based RAID array.
Maybe only Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, and Steve Jobs could afford to buy such a thing right now, but the concept is valid...
As a "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR" victim, I also have a bunch of non-removable shovelware on this thing - plus Motorola appears to have removed certain basic functionality from the stock Android.
And don't get me started on their indefinitely delaying the long-promised update out of the Android 1.5 pit in order to "optimize the user experience in some key areas".
"According to the details,the tablet will come in three versions of 5, 7, and 9 inches display. It will be packed with 2 GB RAM memory, wi-fi connectivity, USB port and powered by a 2-watt system to suit poor power supply areas. It will laso have apps like internet browser, PDF reader, video conferencing facilities, open office, sci-lab, media player, remote device management capability, multimedia input-output interface option, and multiple content viewer."
2-watt, wifi, 2GB RAM? 5-9 inch screens? For US$35? SOLD. I'll take two. Even if the processor turns out to be the equivalent of a Pentium Classic (but I'd guess a-few-hundred-Mhz ARM or equivalent i.e. at least as fast as the overpriced and still-out-of-date Motorola® CLIQ with MOTOBLUR (as they insist on calling it in print). Definitely a bargain if one will be able to actually get them outside of India)...
A hackable linux-based Etch-a-Sketch® would still be a good deal at $35.00US...