Seriously - Jobs suddenly realized that his Flash hatred had put him out on a limb and every single other mobile platform was going to support AIR within months. Already the Android market is awash with new games all developed using Flash and AIR. These things are actually cross platform - build once, deploy to WP7 (when AIR arrives, soon), Android, Blackberry...
Apple was facing losing it's premium position in the App market and seeing apps get developed first for all their competitors and only coming to iOS later. They had to loosen their restrictions and let AIR apps in or see themselves relegated to second place.
Steve Jobs made a stupid decision, a bad gamble which he lost. Now he's trying to make up for lost ground.
Notice how clever they are being with language though - the applications are written in the Java programming language, not executed. Look around - no where will you find that Google says Android executes the Java code!
Now - I have a feeling this may yet run into trouble in court. The primary legal support for Oracle here is trademarks and the test for a trademark is whether it creates confusion in the eyes of a consumer. So if you ask it from the point of view : "Would an ordinary reasonable developer, after reading parts of the Android SDK potentially be under the impression that Android is performing the function of a JVM?". Then I think the answer is very likely yes. Note that there just has to be potential for confusion. You don't have to prove that every developer would be confused. As long as it is reasonably possible that a subset of developers could be confused then there is a problem. So I think there may well be a problem.
Well, they're kind of caught in a pincer move here. If Google admits Dalvik is a JVM then they get sued for breaking Java the same way Microsoft did. If they claim it isn't a JVM then they have no patent protection since the patent licenses covering the JVM only protect JVM implementors. So Google has to pick one of these evils. It turns out the first one is a non starter because there is all kinds of stuff they don't implement in Dalvik to make it a real JVM so they are stuck defending patents.
However I am sure the court will still have a close and sceptical look at Dalvik nonetheless. Google is going to have to go to court and argue that they have this virtual machine which accepts no other language than JVM bytecode as its source input - and yet, this virtual machine is not a JVM! And then their reward for succeeding with this is to get sued for patent infringement which I think they will defend. At least half the patents will fall over, several more are nearly expired (FAT) so there are really only a couple of ones that are in play. Perhaps Google will just cop it and give Oracle some licensing money, hoping that the court will set a low value on these.
To be honest, if I was Google I'd be implementing an alternative language that compiles directly to the dex format as fast as possible - partly to convince the court that Dalvik is not a JVM but also partly as a stick to wave at Oracle and tell them - even if you win you will LOSE because we will move Android away from Java and you'll be left with a few billion $ one time payout but a huge black eye and Java developers fleeing the platform to Google's new language.
The puzzling thing about that is it actually depends on Android's success. So while attacking Google in court might be necessary, undermining Android in other ways would make no sense at all until Oracle knows if it is a beneficiary from Android or not.
Unless, of course, you put your tin foil hat on and give credence to the commonly cited "strong friendship" between Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs - then simply trying to destroy Android for the fun of it makes total sense.
You're right, it doesn't help them with patents, but patents are not the only thing Oracle is contesting here. What it does do is it helps them avoid being sued for the same problem Microsoft was (successfully) sued for. If Google claimed Android was real Java then they would be in trouble because Oracle owns the Java trademark and use that ownership to ensure that anybody claiming to run Java must be running "real" Java.
If Google really did implement full Java then they could potentially claim they are covered by Sun's patent grant for JVM implementors - however that seems to depend on passing the compatibility test kit which they don't have access to and which only Oracle can give them access to. So even if they claimed they implemented Java it really wouldn't help, and since they don't it would just get them into a lot of hot water in other areas.
Google's defense against patents is simply that they are not violating them. It will be interesting to see if they are or not - it's entirely possible that Google did in fact work around the patents in their VM. Some of the patents are fairly fundamental in terms of how any VM would be implemented so it seems unlikely they can be completely clear (and neither can any other VM implementation).
I think that Microsoft have screwed themselves in the business market by locking down the handset. Android is the only platform that is business friendly since it is the only platform where a business can be in total control of the phone.
I've yet to notice any standard SDK libraries missing
All of AWT and Swing are missing. That counts for a lot, especially since those APIs extend into a lot of third party libraries that have nothing to do with UI or even graphics (eg: the Rect2D class is commonly used for doing geometry calculations).
Actually the main plank of Google's defence is that Android does *not* run Java. The test of whether they succeed or fail is largely whether they can convince the court that Dalvik is *not* a Java VM. And sure enough if you scan the Android SDK you'll find just about nowhere that it says you are programming in Java. It's pretty weird and interesting.
Yep, I was going to say the same thing. It hasn't shut down, it's been built in and made exclusive to Android. Smart move of Google - they are differentiating Android by making their services just too good to live without.
Ok, it's not under $300, but it plays back 1080p just fine, runs Windows MCE nicely and for your little extra money you get a real home server that uses less power than a fridge light bulb when not in use but plays back any conceivable current or future format and is always available as for backups, central media hub, home automation, print server, etc.
The one thing it does beyond the others is put 3rd party apps on the TV. It's an open question whether this turns out to be useful, but it does open the way for, for example, content producers to make apps which they control to give you content on demand. We'll see.
Yeah, this is what I don't get about all these streaming based services from netflix to roku to Apple TV to Google TV, or even Pandora for that matter. They are all based on unlimited bandwidth which is really just a temporary abberation of the broadband market in the US where for a short time it made sense to offer people "all you can eat" plans on basis that almost nobody would use it. The minute even 10 per cent of people start using more than a 20GB / month you're going to see caps all over the place and every one of these boxes will make no economic sense any more. When you consider that mostly the people controlling the bandwidth caps are also running the very cable services that these boxes are bypassing it seems incredibly optimistic to think they are just gonna let this happen and not impose any caps and watch their content empires crumble.
Sadly Skype has now crossed the divide and joined the establishment (evil telco's). Try using Skype on just about any cell phone and you'll find that they've done deals to force you onto 3G, voice minutes or some other evil trick to make sure they don't undermine telco profits - even on supposedly free platforms like Android where they have absolutely no obligation to do that. Why have they done it? Simple: they've sold their soul to deprive you of freedom and make a few cheap bucks for themselves. So yes, they deserve to be trashed by any self respecting geek.
What I don't understand about the NDK is how it works across phone architectures. Do all these phones run the same basic instruction set such that you can actually compile a native executable that works across all of them? If not, what happens in the future when new phones with different CPUs come out and there are thousands of apps not working on them?
Except he didn't even discover it. This story is basically a fabrication. He was one person in a long chain who happened to play with it after it was discovered.
This often occurs in the australian media - any time an Australian is remotely involved in something no matter how obscure their role they run it as "An Australian Did Something And Somebody Noticed" which seems to appeal to the masses here.
What rock have you been under? Twitter are famous for total technical incompetence. They could barely keep their site up for years. People used it anyway. Sadly they are now a case study in how technical competence doesn't matter.
You forgot one other huge reason to use Postgres that for me blows away all others: MySQL's owners (now Oracle) still consider that the client drivers are GPL and if you link to or ship the client drivers with your application you must either GPL your application OR purchase proprietary licenses from them.
For the life of me I cannot understand why any company that builds any software that they may one day wish to sell or distribute in any form (even for free) would use MySQL over Postgres. The unknown future liability of having to pay license fees for MySQL (or do whatever other bidding Oracle tells you) are enough to keep me well away.
Hey, they came up with a whole marketing campaign based around the notion that information on their internet service travels faster than the speed of sound - these people aren't high on the evolutionary tree as far as frontal lobes go.
Yep, I did. On mobile platforms iOS (particularly the iPod Touch) is huge and growing rapidly. It's an awesome gaming platform with major studios now investing heavily in big titles. It will be interesting to see if they do the same for WP7.
No mod points today - but I totally agree. Google has done something very clever which the other vendors have not - they have not tried to take Apple head on, but instead they've picked a bunch of different areas where the iPhone is weak and made Android strong in those areas. They are moving into heavily differentiating Android based on advanced features integrated with Google services (integrated voice recognition / control that is ubiquitous, for example). These are things that are *really*, *really* hard for competitors to reproduce. So you can't go into a store and look at an Android phone next to an iPhone and do a direct comparison - "this one has better graphics, this one has a nicer contacts list, this one has better facebook integration,... " etc. You have to make a choice between a completely different paradigm. This means that despite the hype, Android is not really competing with iPhone directly, rather only in a secondary sense. Compare with WP7 where it seems that Microsoft is very much going down the line of out-Apple-ing Apple. There are some differentiators but mainly they seem like they plan to take on Apple where Apple is strong - super smooth UI, great gaming, controlled experience. I wish them luck but I strongly doubt anybody can out-Apple Apple. You don't fight an enemy on their home turf, you make them fight you where they are not comfortable.
It'll be an interesting 12 months, that's for sure.
pay you to build an app for my API, which is documented to 96% accuracy?
Please, please, give me a contract where the documentation is 96% accurate. That would be a dream. The typical state for most contracts is some wishy washy thoughts about what would be nice that then turn out to have been a hallucination one of the managers had the previous night after too much LSD.
Yep. They did come out against the filter fairly definitively in the end, however I still would not put it past them to have a "conscience vote" on it when it comes to the crunch - in which case even if less than 1/3 of them supported it it would still fly through the senate. Which is to say, it still entirely possible that this will happen.
My biggest concern about the NBN is that it will make it extremely simple for a future government to implement such a policy, possibly without putting it through parliament. Heck, they would barely even need to tell anyone - just build it into the infrastructure of the NBN and nobody will notice until it gets turned on. The only reason there has been any debate about this at all is that the government had to get the ISPs on board who kicked up a fuss and leaked information about it all over the place.
> giving the option to disable, would be a decent solution.
Not really, because presumably it relies on you being logged in or at least maintaining a persistent cookie from Google. So it won't work the minute I search from another computer or device and it also prevents me blocking cookies from google.com which means I can't secure my privacy from being tracked by them and also have my preference saved at the same time (perhaps I can with a sophisticated enough cookie blocker, but I think most are just all or nothing).
I find the negative reactions to people exposing their children to technology among nerds fascinating. The minute you mention giving just about anything with electricity in to a small child a mountain of geeks will fire up and explaining how they would be better off with blocks or some paper and a crayon. Meanwhile when non-geeks see my daughter using the iPad they are overwhelmed with how wonderful it is and the things she is able to do - draw pictures that could not be drawn other ways, make music, learn to draw letters (games that show you how to trace your finger around shapes). Touching the screen directly is an order of magnitude more intuitive than trying to use a mouse. They just get it instantly while the mouse requires a huge amount of practice and cognitive learning to associate your the mouse pointer to the remote mouse.
And why on earth do you immediately assume people are just handing these things to their children to use unsupervised? I always sit next to my daughter using our iPad and also my Nexus One. She can't get it an inch off the table without me stopping her. What's more, I often join her in activities on them - things we can do together.
I think they thought that it would create buzz like Gmail did.
I remember it having huge buzz - people were desperate for invites. The problem was that when the invite arrived it was a huge let down - you just sat there looking at a blank screen thinking, "Umm, what do I do now?". With no other friends and no integration with email you were basically dead in the water. Google managed it incredibly badly. For example, there was a thriving community of public waves that anybody could look at - but to find them you had to type in some cryptic text in the search box. Why these weren't made front and center for new users I have no idea - it was the one useful thing you could do upon activating your invite.
Slashdot Mirror
s/WM7/Android/g
Seriously - Jobs suddenly realized that his Flash hatred had put him out on a limb and every single other mobile platform was going to support AIR within months. Already the Android market is awash with new games all developed using Flash and AIR. These things are actually cross platform - build once, deploy to WP7 (when AIR arrives, soon), Android, Blackberry ...
Apple was facing losing it's premium position in the App market and seeing apps get developed first for all their competitors and only coming to iOS later. They had to loosen their restrictions and let AIR apps in or see themselves relegated to second place.
Steve Jobs made a stupid decision, a bad gamble which he lost. Now he's trying to make up for lost ground.
Notice how clever they are being with language though - the applications are written in the Java programming language, not executed. Look around - no where will you find that Google says Android executes the Java code!
Now - I have a feeling this may yet run into trouble in court. The primary legal support for Oracle here is trademarks and the test for a trademark is whether it creates confusion in the eyes of a consumer. So if you ask it from the point of view : "Would an ordinary reasonable developer, after reading parts of the Android SDK potentially be under the impression that Android is performing the function of a JVM?". Then I think the answer is very likely yes. Note that there just has to be potential for confusion. You don't have to prove that every developer would be confused. As long as it is reasonably possible that a subset of developers could be confused then there is a problem. So I think there may well be a problem.
Well, they're kind of caught in a pincer move here. If Google admits Dalvik is a JVM then they get sued for breaking Java the same way Microsoft did. If they claim it isn't a JVM then they have no patent protection since the patent licenses covering the JVM only protect JVM implementors. So Google has to pick one of these evils. It turns out the first one is a non starter because there is all kinds of stuff they don't implement in Dalvik to make it a real JVM so they are stuck defending patents.
However I am sure the court will still have a close and sceptical look at Dalvik nonetheless. Google is going to have to go to court and argue that they have this virtual machine which accepts no other language than JVM bytecode as its source input - and yet, this virtual machine is not a JVM! And then their reward for succeeding with this is to get sued for patent infringement which I think they will defend. At least half the patents will fall over, several more are nearly expired (FAT) so there are really only a couple of ones that are in play. Perhaps Google will just cop it and give Oracle some licensing money, hoping that the court will set a low value on these.
To be honest, if I was Google I'd be implementing an alternative language that compiles directly to the dex format as fast as possible - partly to convince the court that Dalvik is not a JVM but also partly as a stick to wave at Oracle and tell them - even if you win you will LOSE because we will move Android away from Java and you'll be left with a few billion $ one time payout but a huge black eye and Java developers fleeing the platform to Google's new language.
The puzzling thing about that is it actually depends on Android's success. So while attacking Google in court might be necessary, undermining Android in other ways would make no sense at all until Oracle knows if it is a beneficiary from Android or not.
Unless, of course, you put your tin foil hat on and give credence to the commonly cited "strong friendship" between Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs - then simply trying to destroy Android for the fun of it makes total sense.
You're right, it doesn't help them with patents, but patents are not the only thing Oracle is contesting here. What it does do is it helps them avoid being sued for the same problem Microsoft was (successfully) sued for. If Google claimed Android was real Java then they would be in trouble because Oracle owns the Java trademark and use that ownership to ensure that anybody claiming to run Java must be running "real" Java.
If Google really did implement full Java then they could potentially claim they are covered by Sun's patent grant for JVM implementors - however that seems to depend on passing the compatibility test kit which they don't have access to and which only Oracle can give them access to. So even if they claimed they implemented Java it really wouldn't help, and since they don't it would just get them into a lot of hot water in other areas.
Google's defense against patents is simply that they are not violating them. It will be interesting to see if they are or not - it's entirely possible that Google did in fact work around the patents in their VM. Some of the patents are fairly fundamental in terms of how any VM would be implemented so it seems unlikely they can be completely clear (and neither can any other VM implementation).
I think that Microsoft have screwed themselves in the business market by locking down the handset. Android is the only platform that is business friendly since it is the only platform where a business can be in total control of the phone.
I've yet to notice any standard SDK libraries missing
All of AWT and Swing are missing. That counts for a lot, especially since those APIs extend into a lot of third party libraries that have nothing to do with UI or even graphics (eg: the Rect2D class is commonly used for doing geometry calculations).
They claimed to be using the Java language
Actually the main plank of Google's defence is that Android does *not* run Java. The test of whether they succeed or fail is largely whether they can convince the court that Dalvik is *not* a Java VM. And sure enough if you scan the Android SDK you'll find just about nowhere that it says you are programming in Java. It's pretty weird and interesting.
Yep, I was going to say the same thing. It hasn't shut down, it's been built in and made exclusive to Android. Smart move of Google - they are differentiating Android by making their services just too good to live without.
I bought one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-VOT132-Mini-Desktop-PC/dp/B002RL8VE2
Ok, it's not under $300, but it plays back 1080p just fine, runs Windows MCE nicely and for your little extra money you get a real home server that uses less power than a fridge light bulb when not in use but plays back any conceivable current or future format and is always available as for backups, central media hub, home automation, print server, etc.
The one thing it does beyond the others is put 3rd party apps on the TV. It's an open question whether this turns out to be useful, but it does open the way for, for example, content producers to make apps which they control to give you content on demand. We'll see.
Yeah, this is what I don't get about all these streaming based services from netflix to roku to Apple TV to Google TV, or even Pandora for that matter. They are all based on unlimited bandwidth which is really just a temporary abberation of the broadband market in the US where for a short time it made sense to offer people "all you can eat" plans on basis that almost nobody would use it. The minute even 10 per cent of people start using more than a 20GB / month you're going to see caps all over the place and every one of these boxes will make no economic sense any more. When you consider that mostly the people controlling the bandwidth caps are also running the very cable services that these boxes are bypassing it seems incredibly optimistic to think they are just gonna let this happen and not impose any caps and watch their content empires crumble.
Sadly Skype has now crossed the divide and joined the establishment (evil telco's). Try using Skype on just about any cell phone and you'll find that they've done deals to force you onto 3G, voice minutes or some other evil trick to make sure they don't undermine telco profits - even on supposedly free platforms like Android where they have absolutely no obligation to do that. Why have they done it? Simple: they've sold their soul to deprive you of freedom and make a few cheap bucks for themselves. So yes, they deserve to be trashed by any self respecting geek.
What I don't understand about the NDK is how it works across phone architectures. Do all these phones run the same basic instruction set such that you can actually compile a native executable that works across all of them? If not, what happens in the future when new phones with different CPUs come out and there are thousands of apps not working on them?
Except he didn't even discover it. This story is basically a fabrication. He was one person in a long chain who happened to play with it after it was discovered.
This often occurs in the australian media - any time an Australian is remotely involved in something no matter how obscure their role they run it as "An Australian Did Something And Somebody Noticed" which seems to appeal to the masses here.
What rock have you been under? Twitter are famous for total technical incompetence. They could barely keep their site up for years. People used it anyway. Sadly they are now a case study in how technical competence doesn't matter.
You forgot one other huge reason to use Postgres that for me blows away all others: MySQL's owners (now Oracle) still consider that the client drivers are GPL and if you link to or ship the client drivers with your application you must either GPL your application OR purchase proprietary licenses from them.
For the life of me I cannot understand why any company that builds any software that they may one day wish to sell or distribute in any form (even for free) would use MySQL over Postgres. The unknown future liability of having to pay license fees for MySQL (or do whatever other bidding Oracle tells you) are enough to keep me well away.
Hey, they came up with a whole marketing campaign based around the notion that information on their internet service travels faster than the speed of sound - these people aren't high on the evolutionary tree as far as frontal lobes go.
Yep, I did. On mobile platforms iOS (particularly the iPod Touch) is huge and growing rapidly. It's an awesome gaming platform with major studios now investing heavily in big titles. It will be interesting to see if they do the same for WP7.
No mod points today - but I totally agree. Google has done something very clever which the other vendors have not - they have not tried to take Apple head on, but instead they've picked a bunch of different areas where the iPhone is weak and made Android strong in those areas. They are moving into heavily differentiating Android based on advanced features integrated with Google services (integrated voice recognition / control that is ubiquitous, for example). These are things that are *really*, *really* hard for competitors to reproduce. So you can't go into a store and look at an Android phone next to an iPhone and do a direct comparison - "this one has better graphics, this one has a nicer contacts list, this one has better facebook integration, ... " etc. You have to make a choice between a completely different paradigm. This means that despite the hype, Android is not really competing with iPhone directly, rather only in a secondary sense. Compare with WP7 where it seems that Microsoft is very much going down the line of out-Apple-ing Apple. There are some differentiators but mainly they seem like they plan to take on Apple where Apple is strong - super smooth UI, great gaming, controlled experience. I wish them luck but I strongly doubt anybody can out-Apple Apple. You don't fight an enemy on their home turf, you make them fight you where they are not comfortable.
It'll be an interesting 12 months, that's for sure.
pay you to build an app for my API, which is documented to 96% accuracy?
Please, please, give me a contract where the documentation is 96% accurate. That would be a dream. The typical state for most contracts is some wishy washy thoughts about what would be nice that then turn out to have been a hallucination one of the managers had the previous night after too much LSD.
Yep. They did come out against the filter fairly definitively in the end, however I still would not put it past them to have a "conscience vote" on it when it comes to the crunch - in which case even if less than 1/3 of them supported it it would still fly through the senate. Which is to say, it still entirely possible that this will happen.
My biggest concern about the NBN is that it will make it extremely simple for a future government to implement such a policy, possibly without putting it through parliament. Heck, they would barely even need to tell anyone - just build it into the infrastructure of the NBN and nobody will notice until it gets turned on. The only reason there has been any debate about this at all is that the government had to get the ISPs on board who kicked up a fuss and leaked information about it all over the place.
> giving the option to disable, would be a decent solution.
Not really, because presumably it relies on you being logged in or at least maintaining a persistent cookie from Google. So it won't work the minute I search from another computer or device and it also prevents me blocking cookies from google.com which means I can't secure my privacy from being tracked by them and also have my preference saved at the same time (perhaps I can with a sophisticated enough cookie blocker, but I think most are just all or nothing).
I find the negative reactions to people exposing their children to technology among nerds fascinating. The minute you mention giving just about anything with electricity in to a small child a mountain of geeks will fire up and explaining how they would be better off with blocks or some paper and a crayon. Meanwhile when non-geeks see my daughter using the iPad they are overwhelmed with how wonderful it is and the things she is able to do - draw pictures that could not be drawn other ways, make music, learn to draw letters (games that show you how to trace your finger around shapes). Touching the screen directly is an order of magnitude more intuitive than trying to use a mouse. They just get it instantly while the mouse requires a huge amount of practice and cognitive learning to associate your the mouse pointer to the remote mouse.
And why on earth do you immediately assume people are just handing these things to their children to use unsupervised? I always sit next to my daughter using our iPad and also my Nexus One. She can't get it an inch off the table without me stopping her. What's more, I often join her in activities on them - things we can do together.
I think they thought that it would create buzz like Gmail did.
I remember it having huge buzz - people were desperate for invites. The problem was that when the invite arrived it was a huge let down - you just sat there looking at a blank screen thinking, "Umm, what do I do now?". With no other friends and no integration with email you were basically dead in the water. Google managed it incredibly badly. For example, there was a thriving community of public waves that anybody could look at - but to find them you had to type in some cryptic text in the search box. Why these weren't made front and center for new users I have no idea - it was the one useful thing you could do upon activating your invite.