Of course there is leadership. Just because they hide behind aliases does not mean they're anonymous. These ringleaders are the inner circle of people who develop the tools, run the chat sites, conspire to attack particular sites, incite others to do likewise, release stolen data and so on. It may be harder to identify these people but it only takes authorities to "turn" one or two of this inner circle to grab the rest.
Of course you can and for many people this is the exact right thing to do. Stands are cheap, bluetooth keyboards are cheap. But nobody can seriously suggest that carrying around both (+ some kind of screen protector and / or bag to hold all the bits) is elegant.
It's certainly not as elegant as a keyboard which doubles up as a stand, port replicator, extra battery and folds flat to become a clamshell screen protector.
A better question is why would they go out of their way to stop it? Let's face it, locking down a tablet is a huge amount of effort, usually in vain so why bother? Let people root the damn thing. Most people, the large majority never will so why bother fighting a small % of people who want that freedom.
Well you just said it - custom rom but also the possibility of porting things other than android to the device. And not just this device either but any using the same chipset. I'm sure there is information in the driver which is pertinent to people with older Tegra chipsets.
While I wouldn't be militant about the source being there or not, there is no denying that a tablet which has it stands a far greater chance of becoming community supported when the official support goes than one which doesn't.
The Playbook is actually a quality piece of kit. The hardware is top notch, truly high qualilty, the software is slick if a little feature lite in places. The main failing of the device is it's not Android. It's too bad you can't root these things and flash android on. I suspect if devices could be flashed to Android that people would buy them up without a discount just for that purpose.
Going Android basically makes you dependent on Google, and no one really wants that. Nokia, for what it's worth, effectively got taken over from the inside.
Tell that to Baidu and Amazon who've basically forked Android. Or for that matter RIM who stuck an Android runtime in the Playbook without Google's permission. Nokia could have done the same if they so wished, or gone with Google's version and stuck their own QT runtime in there as a migration path for developers.
There are some pretty decent Chinese Android tablets coming out now for less than $100. There will be numerous branded 7" tablets under $200 before long probably including the one Google is launching soon. Microsoft's problem is the bottom and medium tier will be filled with Android devices and not many people are going to pay iPad prices for something which isn't iPad. At least not for crappy Win RT devices. Microsoft may have better luck with proper Windows 8 devices providing they're not too expensive.
I update because the distribution tells me to update and invariably updates occur to fix security, stability and performance. It's good practice to update.
My natural inclination is for an OS that works and continues to work as I install updates to it. I couldn't care less or not if the graphics driver was a binary or not. Really I couldn't and I'm not advocating an open source driver because I'm some kind of GPL Nazi. I just know from bitter experience that 3rd party drivers are fragile and if the choice is between an OS that works after an update applies and one that flips a coin and dumps me in the console to fix this shit then I'd prefer the former over the latter.
Maintaining an ABI is incredibly difficult. The question in an open source setup is why bother at all as 99% of the drivers are source code. If the kernel changes, the modules will change and recompile with it. Therefore why should kernel developers who want to spend their time developing be concerned for the likes of NVidia who only release binaries? Look at how much change went into the 2.6.x kernel during its lifetime. Imagine an ABI over all that and the effort involved in supporting it.
That is not to say an ABI is a bad idea. It's a good idea, at least if you're not a kernel developer. I just believe users would be better served if it is was maintained separately to the kernel with all the necessary shims were done in userland as much as possible or thin kernel modules. It also makes more sense that the maintainers for this ABI would be NVidia, AMD and distributors like Ubuntu and Red Hat since they would be the ones who benefit most from it.
Most people don't compile the kernel. The system tells them their kernel has an update and they click the update button. Then it turns their desktop to crap because it won't even start because the graphics configuration is bolloxed and they end up spending half an hour screwing around reinstalling the graphics driver or hunting the NVidia site for a replacement. Some distributions might help reinstall the driver but it might not necessarily integrated into their package management system.
This has nothing to do with privacy or altruism. The real reason for the opt-out is to screw over Google. By denying them the data they deny them the revenue for selling the data. No one in their right mind would ever disable opt-out and Microsoft is stopping people installing rival browsers too. So they're as good as shutting Google out of the Windows ecosystem entirely.
Want to bet that this opt-out doesn't apply to any of the apps Microsoft bundles with Windows RT / 8?
They could keep their low level optimizations and simply release the technical specs to their hardware. Then the nouveau people can program the driver without even seeing NVidia do or do not do in their own code.
Keeping the source closed might mean they have some secret tricks but at what cost? At the end of the day updating a binary driver is a pain in the arse. Every time the kernel changes, the video driver must be updated. The natural inclination for Linux users is to favour AMD or Intel products and forget about NVidia completely. And yet NVidia is stuck with testing and develop a driver that runs across an eclectic range of kernels and distributions. If they opened the source, or assisted nouveau by releasing the tech specs they could turn over a lot of support and maintenance to the distributions themselves.
They could even implement some reasonable and sane end of life policy where once a GPU is more than 2 years old they turn over the specs or some reference driver so the hardware can be community supported. It would gain them a lot of kudos and alleviate them from a lot of the hassle of maintaining drivers.
I have an Allwinner tablet, capacitive, 1GB ram, 8GB flash, 1.2Ghz ARM processor, Mali 400 GPU. It's actually pretty good quality, lasts about 3 or 4 hours. The flash is slow, the screen is a bit washed out and there are few touch glitches in ICS. But it works and it cost me 80 euros. They wholesale for $50 up.
To me it demonstrates that Google should be able to comfortably producing something for under $200 with a better screen and support and still make a lot of money from it. Even if they don't make a lot of money it still seeds the market and stimulates other tablet manufacturers to bring their prices down to the level they should have been at for a long time.
Bigger tablets cost more money. The reasoning is probably to get a good quality 7" tablet out there and sell it as cheaply as possible. Not only does it undercut the iPad but it diverts sales away from Amazon too.
Nokia is just learning a hard lesson that other companies like Toshiba did before. Becoming a Microsoft "partner" out of desperation is a terrible idea. Microsoft money hats the company but it is mainly the "partner" who carries nearly all of the risks. If the venture fails they'll be cut loose and left to fend for themselves.
It's getting that way already. Nokia is burning through money and isn't enjoying the sales to assure its own survival. Supposedly the Lumia 800 & 900 didn't sell very well at all and new cut price phones like the 610 (which runs a gimped Windows Phone 7) will sell even worse. If they had a tablet planned they can kiss goodbye to strong sales now they're competing with their own new best friend with deeper pockets. Analysts are already bandying words about like "death watch". I can't see them lasting another year in this state. Someone has to buy them out.
Perhaps MS are using Nokia as the OEM - stranger things have happened, but if they're not then Nokia are fucked. If they were intending to release a tablet of their own then good luck trying to sell it when Microsoft have sucked up all the oxygen out of the room.
I have a WP7 phone and an Android phone. There is no denying how slick the WP7 phone looks but it's also brain damaged in numerous simple ways.
Lack of multitasking is the most obvious one in apps but it goes through the whole system. Actions that you might easily accomplish in Android like setting a custom ring tone, or sharing a contact number from a web page to someone via text are just a pain in the ass or not possible at all. Metro's tiles look nice until you release you have exactly one list of tiles stacked 2 across. It becomes almost unusable once it goes beyond a couple of screen heights and customisation is practically non existent - a wallpaper screensaver and that's it.
One "feature" that drives me mad is that Windows Phone has a single APN for MMS and 3G and a single switch which turns ALL data on or off. So if you get an MMS you must turn on data, but if I turn on data I might inadvertently hit the net and incur a PAYG daily data charge. On Android I can have more than one APN and I can toggle 3G off without affecting MMS. Even Nokia recognize how shit this is since they've written a Network Setup app to try and paper the cracks around the APN stuff but it still doesn't fix my problem.
It's this sort of immaturity which makes Windows Phone so frustrating. It's superficially pretty but it's a deeply immature OS. Meanwhile Android 4.0 looks great and is extremely feature rich. I really do not see the point of buying a Windows Phone until it improves substantially.
Nokia was definitely ailing. It spent a decade fighting itself with various divisions duplicating effort, pursuing lame duck projects, fighting amongst itself, wasting piles of money. It definitely needed to revise it's strategy in numerous ways and it would have meant job losses and most likely the death of Meego and ultimately Symbian.
But the way they've gone about it is pure suicide. They killed Symbian when it still had life in it, burned any possibility of a migration path and went with the worst smart OS at this present time. Consequently developer confidence has collapsed, consumer sales have collapsed and their entire future relies on their relationship (or not) with Microsoft. They are literally Microsoft's bitch. At the present rate of losses they'll be sold and asset stripped within 18 months. If they're lucky they'll limp along in some form as Microsoft's mobile hardware division. If not, they'll be worth as much as their patents and will be quietly dispatched.
No doubt Elop will award himself an enormous bonus and finding himself back as a senior VP within Microsoft when it's all done but Nokia is fucked and it's hard to believe that this wasn't all planned from the moment that he was put in charge. Seriously what the hell were they thinking when they hired this guy.
I don't think it would have been easy if they'd chosen Android for example, but it's also clear how they could have produced a product which would have appealed to existing Symbian users while benefiting from the large Android ecosystem. Hell, they could have even shoved a Symbian or QT runtime on there so that porting apps to the new phone OS was relatively straightforward.
We all know tablets are coming for Windows 8. This is a Windows 8 tablet. The principle innovation here seems to be the cover / keyboard. It is neat alright but I suppose it all depends on a) how much it costs and b) if its any good. I suspect given the way peripherals are these days that the cover will be optional and it will cost a stupid amount of money.
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Well not kool aid, but fine wines.
Or rather, normal wine with a fancy label and sold at a large markup.
Of course there is leadership. Just because they hide behind aliases does not mean they're anonymous. These ringleaders are the inner circle of people who develop the tools, run the chat sites, conspire to attack particular sites, incite others to do likewise, release stolen data and so on. It may be harder to identify these people but it only takes authorities to "turn" one or two of this inner circle to grab the rest.
Of course you can and for many people this is the exact right thing to do. Stands are cheap, bluetooth keyboards are cheap. But nobody can seriously suggest that carrying around both (+ some kind of screen protector and / or bag to hold all the bits) is elegant.
It's certainly not as elegant as a keyboard which doubles up as a stand, port replicator, extra battery and folds flat to become a clamshell screen protector.
A better question is why would they go out of their way to stop it? Let's face it, locking down a tablet is a huge amount of effort, usually in vain so why bother? Let people root the damn thing. Most people, the large majority never will so why bother fighting a small % of people who want that freedom.
While I wouldn't be militant about the source being there or not, there is no denying that a tablet which has it stands a far greater chance of becoming community supported when the official support goes than one which doesn't.
The Playbook is actually a quality piece of kit. The hardware is top notch, truly high qualilty, the software is slick if a little feature lite in places. The main failing of the device is it's not Android. It's too bad you can't root these things and flash android on. I suspect if devices could be flashed to Android that people would buy them up without a discount just for that purpose.
Going Android basically makes you dependent on Google, and no one really wants that. Nokia, for what it's worth, effectively got taken over from the inside.
Tell that to Baidu and Amazon who've basically forked Android. Or for that matter RIM who stuck an Android runtime in the Playbook without Google's permission. Nokia could have done the same if they so wished, or gone with Google's version and stuck their own QT runtime in there as a migration path for developers.
There are some pretty decent Chinese Android tablets coming out now for less than $100. There will be numerous branded 7" tablets under $200 before long probably including the one Google is launching soon. Microsoft's problem is the bottom and medium tier will be filled with Android devices and not many people are going to pay iPad prices for something which isn't iPad. At least not for crappy Win RT devices. Microsoft may have better luck with proper Windows 8 devices providing they're not too expensive.
Way to entirely miss the point.
I update because the distribution tells me to update and invariably updates occur to fix security, stability and performance. It's good practice to update.
My natural inclination is for an OS that works and continues to work as I install updates to it. I couldn't care less or not if the graphics driver was a binary or not. Really I couldn't and I'm not advocating an open source driver because I'm some kind of GPL Nazi. I just know from bitter experience that 3rd party drivers are fragile and if the choice is between an OS that works after an update applies and one that flips a coin and dumps me in the console to fix this shit then I'd prefer the former over the latter.
That is not to say an ABI is a bad idea. It's a good idea, at least if you're not a kernel developer. I just believe users would be better served if it is was maintained separately to the kernel with all the necessary shims were done in userland as much as possible or thin kernel modules. It also makes more sense that the maintainers for this ABI would be NVidia, AMD and distributors like Ubuntu and Red Hat since they would be the ones who benefit most from it.
Most people don't compile the kernel. The system tells them their kernel has an update and they click the update button. Then it turns their desktop to crap because it won't even start because the graphics configuration is bolloxed and they end up spending half an hour screwing around reinstalling the graphics driver or hunting the NVidia site for a replacement. Some distributions might help reinstall the driver but it might not necessarily integrated into their package management system.
Want to bet that this opt-out doesn't apply to any of the apps Microsoft bundles with Windows RT / 8?
Keeping the source closed might mean they have some secret tricks but at what cost? At the end of the day updating a binary driver is a pain in the arse. Every time the kernel changes, the video driver must be updated. The natural inclination for Linux users is to favour AMD or Intel products and forget about NVidia completely. And yet NVidia is stuck with testing and develop a driver that runs across an eclectic range of kernels and distributions. If they opened the source, or assisted nouveau by releasing the tech specs they could turn over a lot of support and maintenance to the distributions themselves.
They could even implement some reasonable and sane end of life policy where once a GPU is more than 2 years old they turn over the specs or some reference driver so the hardware can be community supported. It would gain them a lot of kudos and alleviate them from a lot of the hassle of maintaining drivers.
To me it demonstrates that Google should be able to comfortably producing something for under $200 with a better screen and support and still make a lot of money from it. Even if they don't make a lot of money it still seeds the market and stimulates other tablet manufacturers to bring their prices down to the level they should have been at for a long time.
Bigger tablets cost more money. The reasoning is probably to get a good quality 7" tablet out there and sell it as cheaply as possible. Not only does it undercut the iPad but it diverts sales away from Amazon too.
Nokia is just learning a hard lesson that other companies like Toshiba did before. Becoming a Microsoft "partner" out of desperation is a terrible idea. Microsoft money hats the company but it is mainly the "partner" who carries nearly all of the risks. If the venture fails they'll be cut loose and left to fend for themselves.
It's getting that way already. Nokia is burning through money and isn't enjoying the sales to assure its own survival. Supposedly the Lumia 800 & 900 didn't sell very well at all and new cut price phones like the 610 (which runs a gimped Windows Phone 7) will sell even worse. If they had a tablet planned they can kiss goodbye to strong sales now they're competing with their own new best friend with deeper pockets. Analysts are already bandying words about like "death watch". I can't see them lasting another year in this state. Someone has to buy them out.
Perhaps MS are using Nokia as the OEM - stranger things have happened, but if they're not then Nokia are fucked. If they were intending to release a tablet of their own then good luck trying to sell it when Microsoft have sucked up all the oxygen out of the room.
Lack of multitasking is the most obvious one in apps but it goes through the whole system. Actions that you might easily accomplish in Android like setting a custom ring tone, or sharing a contact number from a web page to someone via text are just a pain in the ass or not possible at all. Metro's tiles look nice until you release you have exactly one list of tiles stacked 2 across. It becomes almost unusable once it goes beyond a couple of screen heights and customisation is practically non existent - a wallpaper screensaver and that's it.
One "feature" that drives me mad is that Windows Phone has a single APN for MMS and 3G and a single switch which turns ALL data on or off. So if you get an MMS you must turn on data, but if I turn on data I might inadvertently hit the net and incur a PAYG daily data charge. On Android I can have more than one APN and I can toggle 3G off without affecting MMS. Even Nokia recognize how shit this is since they've written a Network Setup app to try and paper the cracks around the APN stuff but it still doesn't fix my problem.
It's this sort of immaturity which makes Windows Phone so frustrating. It's superficially pretty but it's a deeply immature OS. Meanwhile Android 4.0 looks great and is extremely feature rich. I really do not see the point of buying a Windows Phone until it improves substantially.
But the way they've gone about it is pure suicide. They killed Symbian when it still had life in it, burned any possibility of a migration path and went with the worst smart OS at this present time. Consequently developer confidence has collapsed, consumer sales have collapsed and their entire future relies on their relationship (or not) with Microsoft. They are literally Microsoft's bitch. At the present rate of losses they'll be sold and asset stripped within 18 months. If they're lucky they'll limp along in some form as Microsoft's mobile hardware division. If not, they'll be worth as much as their patents and will be quietly dispatched.
No doubt Elop will award himself an enormous bonus and finding himself back as a senior VP within Microsoft when it's all done but Nokia is fucked and it's hard to believe that this wasn't all planned from the moment that he was put in charge. Seriously what the hell were they thinking when they hired this guy.
I don't think it would have been easy if they'd chosen Android for example, but it's also clear how they could have produced a product which would have appealed to existing Symbian users while benefiting from the large Android ecosystem. Hell, they could have even shoved a Symbian or QT runtime on there so that porting apps to the new phone OS was relatively straightforward.
It's a tablet with an optional accessory which is a combination cover and keyboard. That's a neat idea but it's still a tablet that it attaches to.
We all know tablets are coming for Windows 8. This is a Windows 8 tablet. The principle innovation here seems to be the cover / keyboard. It is neat alright but I suppose it all depends on a) how much it costs and b) if its any good. I suspect given the way peripherals are these days that the cover will be optional and it will cost a stupid amount of money.