No, get your facts right, WP7 has not had a decline like Symbian.
Nobody talked about decline for WP7. Of course WP7 isn't declining, it's new, so when compared to zero, any sale would be better than that. However, if you compare its sales to Windows Mobile, then it's more than a decline, it's a crash. And by the way, Windows Mobile is still selling more than WP7.
My facts are, that a lot less people buy Symbian than in the past, and almost nobody buys WP7.
A hell of a lot less users found Maemo to be worth using, so by your logic WP7 is miles in front of Maemo.
And it would be entertaining if it wasn't so, given the difference in the amount of resources thrown behind the two projects.
You clearly haven't looked through the Mango update changes.
Yes I did, they're the bare minimum to call an OS "smartphone" in 2011. HTM5? Multitasking? Threaded messages? Podcasts? I would be surprised if they sold "smart" phones in 2010/2011 without them. And in fact, they didn't sell many.
The fact is the features in nokia's smartphones clearly aren't enough to attract users away from platforms like Android and iOS even though Nokia had over a decade headstart in the market.
The fact is that today, after almost five years of decline, Nokia still sells more smartphones than Apple. I'll repeat it, Nokia still sells more smartphones than Apple. So whatever they had done wrong in the past, they still had margins to fix it.
The only people that bought them were geeks, it has never been a consumer-level platform.
That's because Nokia relegated it in that position with their stupid internal competition. This was going to change when Maemo became Nokia's flagship platform. We'll see what the potential results could have been when the N950 is out.
They aren't killing all their current products though, all their low-end phones will still exist.
S40 tough. They've been very clear about canceling their plans to move Symbian to low-end phones (and I don't understand why - such an announcement unnecessarily damaged Symbian and was only advantageous to Microsoft).
Show me where they've said that, AFAIK they are integrating features from their Ovi services (particularly maps) into MS's offerings.
Go to ovi.com and see what's remaining - only music, store (soon to become only a "channel" in WP7 store or something like that) and maps (soon to become the mapping provider for WP7).
Of course not, they aren't compatible platforms.
A migration path was still possible. I'm not talking about binary compatibility.
If Nokia had focussed on Maemo in the early days of the project it could have been a viable competitor by now, but it never progressed enough to appeal to the general consumers and it's too late now.
Then it would be too late for WP7 too, since on the market it's almost non-existent now, and Mango won't be here before autumn.
The truth is that it's impossible to develop a competitive mobile OS in a little more than a year. Apple took much longer than that, and Google took much, much longer than that. It wasn't too late when Apple kicked in, and likewise it wasn't too late when Android arrived.
I don't see how you can question the factual consistence of the rapid decline of Symbian, it's all blindingly obvious.
decline != death. If you put things this way, the commercial failure (in the same time span) of WP7 is even more obvious.
Given that WP has a good user experience
Subjective. So far very few users found that interface worth of being bought.
and rapidly growing app store
Its growth was "doped" by microsoft funding applications development, and letting developers post more than 20 "applications" per day. Nokia already had an app store up and running, with a bigger, and growing, download count. But they announced overnight they'd be closing it. This is what I call "burning bridges".
coupled with an announced update bringing it to general feature-parity with iOS and Android means it certainly is a viable competitor and thus has potential for growth in the market.
I don't know about iOS, but certainly it's not even remotely on feature parity with Android. If we look at features, WP7 is the most disadvantaged OS, missing some features which can be found on Nokia's S40 featurephones.
Probably the fact that it was completely uncompetitive in terms of user experience.
There were plans to fix that using Qt, which is perfectly competitive in terms of development experience. Nokia failed to execute those plans in a reasonable amount of time, but much smaller companies (e.g. Opera) managed to obtain much better results on the very same platform. This means that the problem was more within Nokia than in the OS.
Maemo just wasn't successful (great for hackers, not so much for the general populace), so they merged with Moblin for Meego, but even then the versions that were available and progress being made were painful, who knows how long it would take to get it working much less have a competitive user experience.
That's why they were developing Maemo 6, which is in a much more advanced state of completion than Meego.
The few ones who knew about Maemo, could afford it, and bought the N900, were satisfied with the product (not so much with the support that Nokia gave to the platform...).
They aren't killing all of their current projects, not sure where you got that from.
They are ditching Symbian in one year, with no future plans for it. This means that nobody wise will develop anything for it. This means in turn that nobody wise will buy Symbian handsets (if not for the "Nokia" brand printed on them). They are ditching Meego as well, and before launching their first handset they announced that they won't release any more phones running it. Does that bode well for future sales of those products?
They aren't destroying their services ecosystem, again not sure where you got that from. Irreversibly burn all bridges? I don't see any evidence to support that either.
They're dropping the Ovi services (while Apple announces similar services for the iPhone as the "big new feature" of iOS 5). They're dismantling their development network. They provide no migration path from Qt to Windows Phone 7 after they had been telling all of their developers to invest in Qt training. They're killing all their development tools to adopt Microsoft's ones. I call this "burning bridges" because in the future people will think twice before investing again in development for Nokia platforms, imho.
But with potential to grow, unlike Symbian that is rapidly dying.
But I question the factual consistence of both of these statements: what theoretical suppositions support WP's hope of growth, and what pratical facts confirm them?
What made it impractical to keep the declining Symbian alive, while the switch to Maemo was being completed?
The question is would you rather jump on board an existing established OS (Android) where you bring little to the market or be responsible for bringing marketshare to a fledgling operating system?
If I was to launch a new product line to suit the specific taste of the USA market, while keeping alive the products that are successful in the rest of the world, then I could think about betting on an emerging operating system, yes.
On the other hand, if I was to kill all of my current products, destroy my development and services ecosystem, irreversibly burn all bridges toward any "plan b", then of course I would make sure to choose a successful OS instead of an unproven one.
And moreover, I wouldn't have done it one year before the new products are ready; but that's another story.
Actually, I think that at least some of them can bootstrap themselves, but it takes hours until their turbines get to spin at full speed.
We have a small basin which is used to produce hydroelectric power during the day, and is actively refilled (consuming power) during the night, when the power demand is lower. The local grid relied on it to help restart the power production, but just that day it happened not to work.
Now the question is WHY such an old plant was still running in 2011. If nuclear power is so cheap, then why do they keep the plants working for so long instead of building new ones?
we already do. I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france: the total represents about 7% of energy consumption;
The article you linked, which, I'm saying it for non-italian readers, compares the referendum promoters to "Nazi hierarchs", is in conflict with the state Manager of Energetic Services, which says that only 1.5% of our energy consumption comes from nuclear sources (link).
and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.
We have something called "the Alps" between us and them;) . And even if they weren't there, as Fukushima teaches, the distance from the "ground zero" is important. It's easier to evacuate Bardonecchia rather than half of the Po valley.
i.e. the part that I pay ENEL to compensate it for the added costs of dismantling the reactors that were stopped after Chernobil, plus the lost income due to fossil fuel use.
In other words, we still pay for the disastrous italian nuclear program even 20 years after the plants have been closed. Good reason not to build more of them.
And by the way, half of those nuclear power plants were already closed when the referendum was held, so Chernobyl obviously had no influence on their decommissioning. For example, the Garigliano power station was closed by Enel themselves, because it broke down and reparing it would have costed more money than it could produce in its remaining life.
For all it's worth, two other referenda were worse still; we voted out compensation for capital expenses incurred in mantaining and building water infrastructure, which call the question of who will put up the money required to reduce the water losses that the acqueduct has (about 20~25% here).
The market will decide. When the leaked water will be worth more than the expenses required to fix the pipes, the managers of the water infrastructure (public or private) will invest in fixing them. Keeping the price of water artificially high is not an answer: we're seeing how well it is working with the highway system.
the incumbent italian operator gets a sizable part of its energy production from fully or partly owned and operated nuclear plants, but all of them are abroad
And yet, in their advertising, they only show happy people watching eolic mills and running next to solar panels. Looks like they're not proud of their nuclear side.
To add insult to injury, many people said "we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of nuclear plants".
Perhaps they're impressed by the track record of our nuclear power plants before they were closed for good. Anyway, since I live next to an oil power plant, I have a different opinion: we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of any power plant. Just kidding, of course.
Nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy besides solar. So looking at alternatives to handle future power demands might be idiotic, but does make sense.
Remember this one? A storm felled a tree that cut one of the power lines transporting power to Italy - this tripped of a cascading effect cutting off all of mainland Italy:
During that blackout, the southern parts of Italy remained without any power for almost a day because no power plant was able to bootstrap itself and the hydroelectric ones "experienced technical problems". I wonder what could have cooled an hypotetical nuclear reactor if it happened to be shut down during that time.
We are potentially self-sufficient. For convenience, we import an average of 10% of our energy from France and Switzerland.
According to the national grid manager, only 1.5 % of the power used by Italy comes from nuclear sources. Therefore, the argument that Italy buys nuclear power from its wise neighbours is 98.5 % bullshit.
Revealing details of confidential information can give undue advantage to their competitors, which of course would be against the interest of their investors.
Their deal with MSFT is probably good for them because Nokia was in a death spiral, without any kind of a mobile OS that could compete in this market. Selling their soul to MSFT gets them the OS, and it might get them back into retail here in the US.
In Q1 2011, even after Elop killed it at the beginning of the year, Symbian's worldwide marketshare was 24%.
Apple was five points lower, at 19%.
The sales of Windows Phone, the supposed saviour of Nokia, sum up to 2.5%, ten times lower than the dead Symbian.
I don't know if WP7 will bring Nokia into retail in the US (I don't know that market, but if the numbers are those, there's not much to hope for); but what is certain is that Elop's announcement destroyed their sales outside the USA, which is where they actually did sell phones.
Except that they were making profits, until their ex-Microsoft CEO declared all their smartphones and development ecosystem obsolete one year before having a replacement, and in contradiction with previous announcements. To the only advantage of Microsoft. Why didn't they wait to have WP phones ready before killing all the others?
I've always bought Nokia phones, but now I wouldn't touch a Symbian phone with a ten foot pole (nor would I suggest anybody to buy one, a role that geeks often play). I frankly can't figure out how they expected anyone buying them under these conditions.
Fortunately I can get one last Maemo/Meego phone before they fade into irrelevance trying to compete with ZTE or Huawei over WP7 phones.
- history should really be learned, it's important to have perspective.
I agree, I didn't mean to say that the past isn't relevant, just that it wasn't what I was referring to.
Of-course they don't teach real history in government paid for schools
Well, you can consider yourself lucky if they teach some history at least. Where I live, there's a push to change public schools into some kind of "introduction to labour" courses, and humanistic subjects such as history are no longer first class citizens.
FDA is a huge reason why prices for medical equipment and medications and procedures are so high. Proving efficacy as well as safety is unnecessarily expensive.
Do you mean that it could be less expensive, or that it is unnecessary at all? Pharmaceutical industries are known for having abused of their position in the past.
- I still don't understand what you are saying here.
You don't have a right to employment, to a car, etc. What rights do individuals in China lack today, that make them more competitive than the US citizens are in USA?
My confusion comes out of your way to define what a right is, because in USA there are no positive rights, there are only negative rights, and those rights all have to do with the relationship between the individual and the government (collective).
Wait, how is the particular form chosen by the founders of the USA to protect your rights relevant to this matter? I don't really know if your Constitution explicitly enumerates all of your rights, or instead it "punches holes" into what your government might do to restrict them. But I am deeply convinced that the final result of the whole body of laws, regulations, customs of your country is such that currently, across the whole territory of the States, you have right to personal physical integrity, against both the government and private persons. Likewise, you have right to private property, it doesn't matter if it's the government taking your stuff or a thief breaking in your house. I suppose that's the reason why the government manages the police and the armed forces who, unlike doctors or engineers, won't ask for your credit card before helping you.
The rights to have a house, a job, transportation, healthcare etc. are sometimes called "socialist rights" and as such they are probably recognized by China, on paper. But I wasn't referring to them, let's stick to the basic ones. For instance, the right to physical integrity means that you can't operate a factory that harms the health of the people living in its surroundings; and the difference between western countries and developing countries, is that in our case this right is actually enforced by passing laws that uphold it, and administering penalties to those who don't observe them. This becomes an handicap for our companies because the "proper way" to behave is usually not the "cheapest way".
Good luck having your cancer cured when you earn $600 per month.
- pre-1965 USA health care was cheap,
I'm too young to remember 1965 - I'm talking about the present time, especially in developing countries which seem to get to do all the manufacturing these days.
So if a person lived at the time, had that insurance and got cancer, he'd have to pay 500 deductible, which was less than your proposed 600/month, and then he'd be able to have the most expensive year of treatment, and there was enough money left for another 1.5 treatments of the same type.
And then pay the power, gas, water, telephone bills? Buy food and clothes for the kids? Pay fuel, maintenance and insurance for the cars (assuming no public transportation in this scenario)? Housing? And education for the children?
As to 'rights' being 'universal' - what is that all about?
Our industries cannot compete if they have to pay the cost of individual rights which are not recognised overseas.
For example, the right for labourers not to be fried while working in a factory, which translates to more expensive security systems. Or the right for the population not to fall ill because of living near a factory, which translates to more expensive disposal procedures for noxious waste.
Can we keep the life style we've got used to if our whole manufacturing industry walks away towards developing countries? In this scenario, what should we base our economy on, tertiary only?
RMS is probably ignorant of the way economy functions, but you're definitely ignorant about the meaning of the word "marxism".
Low wages are a good thing? Good luck having your cancer cured when you earn $600 per month.
Freedom needs to be universal? Good luck making lower prices than your overseas competitors when they have the freedom to kill their employees and you haven't.
Rights need to be universal (and they have a price). Under that condition, we can have fair competition.
Well, they did the same thing for the PS2, which too was a very exotic design for the time, and the investment did return in that case, as the PS2 is still today the best-selling game console of all the time.
Moreover, the Cell *was* meant to be used in high-end systems, too: remember the Cell blade servers? It just didn't succeed.
Even the august Intel failed their attempt at a highly parallelized, general purpose CPU chip, with Larrabee. I remember that many people here on/. supposed that the next-generation playstation console would be powered by Larrabee, back in the days.
That's the main reason why unlike apperently everyone else on/. , I do *want* a physical medium.
I don't know about the USA, but where I live, new games for the PS3 cost as much as 2 days of work at the average wage - and games are meant for young people, who usually earn much less than the average. Moreover, there's no competition between different shops, as the prices are pretty much standard.
A couple of things you've forgotten in your comparison:
1) SPUs are not FPUs. They're full-fledged CPUs with limited local memory.
2) The PPE is double-threaded.
3) The PS3 has bluetooth connectivity.
4) The PS3 has wifi connectivity.
5) The PS3 has a built-in hard disk.
6) The PS3 has a blu-ray drive.
7) The PS3 has a web browser.
8) The PS3 can use off-the-shelf accessories.
9) The PS3 controllers recharge themselves while you use them.
10) The PS3 has a built-in power supply, and is still slimmer and more quiet than the matching Xbox 360 models.
11) The PS3 can play back most kinds of media without requiring PSN access or special-purpose storage devices.
12) The PS3 doesn't have the Xbox 360 reliability problems.
Kinect is definitely cooler than the Move, but having no buttons, it's more useful for "social" games than traditional ones.
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No, get your facts right, WP7 has not had a decline like Symbian.
Nobody talked about decline for WP7. Of course WP7 isn't declining, it's new, so when compared to zero, any sale would be better than that. However, if you compare its sales to Windows Mobile, then it's more than a decline, it's a crash. And by the way, Windows Mobile is still selling more than WP7.
My facts are, that a lot less people buy Symbian than in the past, and almost nobody buys WP7.
A hell of a lot less users found Maemo to be worth using, so by your logic WP7 is miles in front of Maemo.
And it would be entertaining if it wasn't so, given the difference in the amount of resources thrown behind the two projects.
You clearly haven't looked through the Mango update changes.
Yes I did, they're the bare minimum to call an OS "smartphone" in 2011. HTM5? Multitasking? Threaded messages? Podcasts? I would be surprised if they sold "smart" phones in 2010/2011 without them. And in fact, they didn't sell many.
The fact is the features in nokia's smartphones clearly aren't enough to attract users away from platforms like Android and iOS even though Nokia had over a decade headstart in the market.
The fact is that today, after almost five years of decline, Nokia still sells more smartphones than Apple. I'll repeat it, Nokia still sells more smartphones than Apple. So whatever they had done wrong in the past, they still had margins to fix it.
The only people that bought them were geeks, it has never been a consumer-level platform.
That's because Nokia relegated it in that position with their stupid internal competition. This was going to change when Maemo became Nokia's flagship platform. We'll see what the potential results could have been when the N950 is out.
They aren't killing all their current products though, all their low-end phones will still exist.
S40 tough. They've been very clear about canceling their plans to move Symbian to low-end phones (and I don't understand why - such an announcement unnecessarily damaged Symbian and was only advantageous to Microsoft).
Show me where they've said that, AFAIK they are integrating features from their Ovi services (particularly maps) into MS's offerings.
Go to ovi.com and see what's remaining - only music, store (soon to become only a "channel" in WP7 store or something like that) and maps (soon to become the mapping provider for WP7).
Of course not, they aren't compatible platforms.
A migration path was still possible. I'm not talking about binary compatibility.
If Nokia had focussed on Maemo in the early days of the project it could have been a viable competitor by now, but it never progressed enough to appeal to the general consumers and it's too late now.
Then it would be too late for WP7 too, since on the market it's almost non-existent now, and Mango won't be here before autumn.
The truth is that it's impossible to develop a competitive mobile OS in a little more than a year. Apple took much longer than that, and Google took much, much longer than that. It wasn't too late when Apple kicked in, and likewise it wasn't too late when Android arrived.
I don't see how you can question the factual consistence of the rapid decline of Symbian, it's all blindingly obvious.
decline != death. If you put things this way, the commercial failure (in the same time span) of WP7 is even more obvious.
Given that WP has a good user experience
Subjective. So far very few users found that interface worth of being bought.
and rapidly growing app store
Its growth was "doped" by microsoft funding applications development, and letting developers post more than 20 "applications" per day. Nokia already had an app store up and running, with a bigger, and growing, download count. But they announced overnight they'd be closing it. This is what I call "burning bridges".
coupled with an announced update bringing it to general feature-parity with iOS and Android means it certainly is a viable competitor and thus has potential for growth in the market.
I don't know about iOS, but certainly it's not even remotely on feature parity with Android. If we look at features, WP7 is the most disadvantaged OS, missing some features which can be found on Nokia's S40 featurephones.
Probably the fact that it was completely uncompetitive in terms of user experience.
There were plans to fix that using Qt, which is perfectly competitive in terms of development experience. Nokia failed to execute those plans in a reasonable amount of time, but much smaller companies (e.g. Opera) managed to obtain much better results on the very same platform. This means that the problem was more within Nokia than in the OS.
Maemo just wasn't successful (great for hackers, not so much for the general populace), so they merged with Moblin for Meego, but even then the versions that were available and progress being made were painful, who knows how long it would take to get it working much less have a competitive user experience.
That's why they were developing Maemo 6, which is in a much more advanced state of completion than Meego. The few ones who knew about Maemo, could afford it, and bought the N900, were satisfied with the product (not so much with the support that Nokia gave to the platform...).
They aren't killing all of their current projects, not sure where you got that from.
They are ditching Symbian in one year, with no future plans for it. This means that nobody wise will develop anything for it. This means in turn that nobody wise will buy Symbian handsets (if not for the "Nokia" brand printed on them). They are ditching Meego as well, and before launching their first handset they announced that they won't release any more phones running it. Does that bode well for future sales of those products?
They aren't destroying their services ecosystem, again not sure where you got that from. Irreversibly burn all bridges? I don't see any evidence to support that either.
They're dropping the Ovi services (while Apple announces similar services for the iPhone as the "big new feature" of iOS 5). They're dismantling their development network. They provide no migration path from Qt to Windows Phone 7 after they had been telling all of their developers to invest in Qt training. They're killing all their development tools to adopt Microsoft's ones. I call this "burning bridges" because in the future people will think twice before investing again in development for Nokia platforms, imho.
But with potential to grow, unlike Symbian that is rapidly dying.
But I question the factual consistence of both of these statements: what theoretical suppositions support WP's hope of growth, and what pratical facts confirm them?
What made it impractical to keep the declining Symbian alive, while the switch to Maemo was being completed?
The question is would you rather jump on board an existing established OS (Android) where you bring little to the market or be responsible for bringing marketshare to a fledgling operating system?
If I was to launch a new product line to suit the specific taste of the USA market, while keeping alive the products that are successful in the rest of the world, then I could think about betting on an emerging operating system, yes.
On the other hand, if I was to kill all of my current products, destroy my development and services ecosystem, irreversibly burn all bridges toward any "plan b", then of course I would make sure to choose a successful OS instead of an unproven one.
And moreover, I wouldn't have done it one year before the new products are ready; but that's another story.
We have a small basin which is used to produce hydroelectric power during the day, and is actively refilled (consuming power) during the night, when the power demand is lower. The local grid relied on it to help restart the power production, but just that day it happened not to work.
Now the question is WHY such an old plant was still running in 2011. If nuclear power is so cheap, then why do they keep the plants working for so long instead of building new ones?
We don't need to. We'be been doing perfectly fine without nuclear power since 1990.
They're the same bunch of morons that put those politicians at the government in the first place.
Fourth, it assumes Italy actually makes any "progress" in anything nuclear related. I mean, seriously? Italy?
Yeah, those italians, what do they know about the atom. Let them make pasta.
we already do. I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france: the total represents about 7% of energy consumption;
The article you linked, which, I'm saying it for non-italian readers, compares the referendum promoters to "Nazi hierarchs", is in conflict with the state Manager of Energetic Services, which says that only 1.5% of our energy consumption comes from nuclear sources (link).
and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.
We have something called "the Alps" between us and them ;) . And even if they weren't there, as Fukushima teaches, the distance from the "ground zero" is important. It's easier to evacuate Bardonecchia rather than half of the Po valley.
i.e. the part that I pay ENEL to compensate it for the added costs of dismantling the reactors that were stopped after Chernobil, plus the lost income due to fossil fuel use.
In other words, we still pay for the disastrous italian nuclear program even 20 years after the plants have been closed. Good reason not to build more of them.
And by the way, half of those nuclear power plants were already closed when the referendum was held, so Chernobyl obviously had no influence on their decommissioning. For example, the Garigliano power station was closed by Enel themselves, because it broke down and reparing it would have costed more money than it could produce in its remaining life.
For all it's worth, two other referenda were worse still; we voted out compensation for capital expenses incurred in mantaining and building water infrastructure, which call the question of who will put up the money required to reduce the water losses that the acqueduct has (about 20~25% here).
The market will decide. When the leaked water will be worth more than the expenses required to fix the pipes, the managers of the water infrastructure (public or private) will invest in fixing them. Keeping the price of water artificially high is not an answer: we're seeing how well it is working with the highway system.
the incumbent italian operator gets a sizable part of its energy production from fully or partly owned and operated nuclear plants, but all of them are abroad
And yet, in their advertising, they only show happy people watching eolic mills and running next to solar panels. Looks like they're not proud of their nuclear side.
To add insult to injury, many people said "we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of nuclear plants".
Perhaps they're impressed by the track record of our nuclear power plants before they were closed for good. Anyway, since I live next to an oil power plant, I have a different opinion: we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of any power plant. Just kidding, of course.
Nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy besides solar. So looking at alternatives to handle future power demands might be idiotic, but does make sense.
Remember this one? A storm felled a tree that cut one of the power lines transporting power to Italy - this tripped of a cascading effect cutting off all of mainland Italy:
During that blackout, the southern parts of Italy remained without any power for almost a day because no power plant was able to bootstrap itself and the hydroelectric ones "experienced technical problems". I wonder what could have cooled an hypotetical nuclear reactor if it happened to be shut down during that time.
According to the national grid manager, only 1.5 % of the power used by Italy comes from nuclear sources. Therefore, the argument that Italy buys nuclear power from its wise neighbours is 98.5 % bullshit.
Revealing details of confidential information can give undue advantage to their competitors, which of course would be against the interest of their investors.
Their deal with MSFT is probably good for them because Nokia was in a death spiral, without any kind of a mobile OS that could compete in this market. Selling their soul to MSFT gets them the OS, and it might get them back into retail here in the US.
In Q1 2011, even after Elop killed it at the beginning of the year, Symbian's worldwide marketshare was 24% .
Apple was five points lower, at 19%.
The sales of Windows Phone, the supposed saviour of Nokia, sum up to 2.5%, ten times lower than the dead Symbian.
I don't know if WP7 will bring Nokia into retail in the US (I don't know that market, but if the numbers are those, there's not much to hope for); but what is certain is that Elop's announcement destroyed their sales outside the USA, which is where they actually did sell phones.
Once again, hackers got their lulz, and we'll enjoy the consequences, i.e. the "patriot act"-like laws for the Internet which are sure to follow.
But IIRC MS gave Nokia big cash for the Nokia-MS deal of 2/11 anyway.
I've always bought Nokia phones, but now I wouldn't touch a Symbian phone with a ten foot pole (nor would I suggest anybody to buy one, a role that geeks often play). I frankly can't figure out how they expected anyone buying them under these conditions.
Fortunately I can get one last Maemo/Meego phone before they fade into irrelevance trying to compete with ZTE or Huawei over WP7 phones.
And still, even if unused, my Android phone doesn't last two days.
- history should really be learned, it's important to have perspective.
I agree, I didn't mean to say that the past isn't relevant, just that it wasn't what I was referring to.
Of-course they don't teach real history in government paid for schools
Well, you can consider yourself lucky if they teach some history at least. Where I live, there's a push to change public schools into some kind of "introduction to labour" courses, and humanistic subjects such as history are no longer first class citizens.
FDA is a huge reason why prices for medical equipment and medications and procedures are so high. Proving efficacy as well as safety is unnecessarily expensive.
Do you mean that it could be less expensive, or that it is unnecessary at all? Pharmaceutical industries are known for having abused of their position in the past.
- I still don't understand what you are saying here.
You don't have a right to employment, to a car, etc. What rights do individuals in China lack today, that make them more competitive than the US citizens are in USA?
My confusion comes out of your way to define what a right is, because in USA there are no positive rights, there are only negative rights, and those rights all have to do with the relationship between the individual and the government (collective).
Wait, how is the particular form chosen by the founders of the USA to protect your rights relevant to this matter? I don't really know if your Constitution explicitly enumerates all of your rights, or instead it "punches holes" into what your government might do to restrict them. But I am deeply convinced that the final result of the whole body of laws, regulations, customs of your country is such that currently, across the whole territory of the States, you have right to personal physical integrity, against both the government and private persons. Likewise, you have right to private property, it doesn't matter if it's the government taking your stuff or a thief breaking in your house. I suppose that's the reason why the government manages the police and the armed forces who, unlike doctors or engineers, won't ask for your credit card before helping you.
The rights to have a house, a job, transportation, healthcare etc. are sometimes called "socialist rights" and as such they are probably recognized by China, on paper. But I wasn't referring to them, let's stick to the basic ones. For instance, the right to physical integrity means that you can't operate a factory that harms the health of the people living in its surroundings; and the difference between western countries and developing countries, is that in our case this right is actually enforced by passing laws that uphold it, and administering penalties to those who don't observe them. This becomes an handicap for our companies because the "proper way" to behave is usually not the "cheapest way".
Good luck having your cancer cured when you earn $600 per month.
- pre-1965 USA health care was cheap,
I'm too young to remember 1965 - I'm talking about the present time, especially in developing countries which seem to get to do all the manufacturing these days.
So if a person lived at the time, had that insurance and got cancer, he'd have to pay 500 deductible, which was less than your proposed 600/month, and then he'd be able to have the most expensive year of treatment, and there was enough money left for another 1.5 treatments of the same type.
And then pay the power, gas, water, telephone bills? Buy food and clothes for the kids? Pay fuel, maintenance and insurance for the cars (assuming no public transportation in this scenario)? Housing? And education for the children?
As to 'rights' being 'universal' - what is that all about?
Our industries cannot compete if they have to pay the cost of individual rights which are not recognised overseas.
For example, the right for labourers not to be fried while working in a factory, which translates to more expensive security systems. Or the right for the population not to fall ill because of living near a factory, which translates to more expensive disposal procedures for noxious waste.
Can we keep the life style we've got used to if our whole manufacturing industry walks away towards developing countries? In this scenario, what should we base our economy on, tertiary only?
Low wages are a good thing? Good luck having your cancer cured when you earn $600 per month.
Freedom needs to be universal? Good luck making lower prices than your overseas competitors when they have the freedom to kill their employees and you haven't.
Rights need to be universal (and they have a price). Under that condition, we can have fair competition.
Apparently they gave a fake moon rock to the prime minister of the Netherlands a couple of years ago.
Moreover, the Cell *was* meant to be used in high-end systems, too: remember the Cell blade servers? It just didn't succeed.
Even the august Intel failed their attempt at a highly parallelized, general purpose CPU chip, with Larrabee. I remember that many people here on /. supposed that the next-generation playstation console would be powered by Larrabee, back in the days.
I don't know about the USA, but where I live, new games for the PS3 cost as much as 2 days of work at the average wage - and games are meant for young people, who usually earn much less than the average. Moreover, there's no competition between different shops, as the prices are pretty much standard.
1) SPUs are not FPUs. They're full-fledged CPUs with limited local memory.
2) The PPE is double-threaded.
3) The PS3 has bluetooth connectivity.
4) The PS3 has wifi connectivity.
5) The PS3 has a built-in hard disk.
6) The PS3 has a blu-ray drive.
7) The PS3 has a web browser.
8) The PS3 can use off-the-shelf accessories.
9) The PS3 controllers recharge themselves while you use them.
10) The PS3 has a built-in power supply, and is still slimmer and more quiet than the matching Xbox 360 models.
11) The PS3 can play back most kinds of media without requiring PSN access or special-purpose storage devices.
12) The PS3 doesn't have the Xbox 360 reliability problems.
Kinect is definitely cooler than the Move, but having no buttons, it's more useful for "social" games than traditional ones.