"There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple's success."
There is that little annoying thing called "you don't rule the world" that will get in the way of those rock stars. The problem isn't that you can't build an awesome UI experience on top of Android. No, the problem is that you dont HAVE to build an awesome UI experience on top of android. And with that, anyone selling apps has to cater to all the dirt cheap handsets (that sell in droves) and at the same time work with the high end handsets with "rock star" UIs.
And as we all know by now, a UI gets kind of boring without a slew of cool new apps to run on it. I am not saying there wont be cool apps for Android phones, nor am I saying there wont be cool android phones for years to come. But the notion that anyone working on Android phones should bother building a "rock star" UI is, at face value, pretty stupid.
p.s. to any Android apologists who want to come by and snipe at me for being an apple fanboy: I dont like apple products, and I own an android phone.
Though I bet their new plan includes automatic spawning of nodes on EC2 or some other distributed CDN.
BIN. GO.
It's almost hard to fathom the thought that their entire network relies on "volunteered" supernodes, and that those nodes are allowed to run something besides the latest software rev (another mistake) and that supernodes can be easily overloaded and "die off", and that a lack of volunteers doesn't have some sort of action plan... How did they not see this coming? They created a tipping point in the system, and then stood back and waited for it to tip with no plan on what to do to fix it besides wait a day and nurse the network back to health?
Net Neutrality - when done right - is an assertation that nobody owns or controls 'the internet'. 'Net Neutrality' - when done the way the government wants - is the government taking control. A lack of Net Neutrality is TELECOMS taking over the internet.
The problem is that the government has co-opted the term to mean something it wasn't supposed to - which serves to confuse the argument. We could try to raise true NN under a new name, but the governments likely to try the same thing there as well, so it'd need a fast and hard blitz to get the real meaning embedded in the public consciousness before they manage that. Unfortunately, there isn't the will at the moment.
Thinking that something should be "uncontrolled an unowned" in order for it to prosper sounds like the viewpoint of someone who never worked in a sufficiently large organization. If no one has an interest in controlling and owning something, that thing DIES. A commune of hippies can't keep the internet alive with a love-in, it takes the concerted effort and great expense of a lot of organizations. If those organizations aren't getting what they want out of it, they will walk away.
The Internet has worked so far since generally everyone has been getting what they want. Innovation, god bless it, has come marching in giving visibility to where the actual revenues and expenses are incurred on the 'net, and thanks to that just about every organization with a stake in the 'net has been scurrying to shore up their own interests. Times are changing, there is no law that can be passed to make the internet feel like the "good old days", and we have to accept that.
The best thing that could happen is for a mutual agreement between business and government (possibly in the form of a law) that still keeps giving each side some of what they want. The worst thing that can happen is for business, or the government, to do whatever they want in spite of the other. Make no mistake, control WILL be had, the question is how visible and balanced will that control be?
Embedding it into a monitor (or having a small remote pickup) would solve that... Maybe shoot holes in the low speed, and need for the lights to be on for the network to be up?
Quit doing it wrong. I had a storm for a year and a half and aside from the time it took to perform routine software updates it was hassle-free as a phone, media player, and everything else.
Do you actually believe that one communications and data processing vendor with packet-grained control is a good model for a free society?
Your entire argument is based on the premise that Apple is the sole communications company in existence in the world... This is demonstrably false. There is this little thing that I like to practice, called "don't own an iphone." It helps me sleep at night. You just keep panicking though, it's good for your metabolism.
Where is the line for bashing the "expert" at Connectify who in the same sentence derides anyone who doesn't know what an ohm is, and demonstrates that he doesn't know how to use a multimeter... That's the line *I* want!
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
That was the first thing I thought of when seeing the picture as well... Thank goodness he posted the full res version of that so we can very clearly see the M on the meter. What a maroon.
1: those are old numbers. 2: I didn't say it was dead/dying. As an active member of the android community (yes I am above all else an android fanboy, not an apple fanboy despite my criticism and the ability of many a ignorant slashdotter to stereotype me as such) I want android to do well, but they are failing at their mission and will continue to do so as long as the rifts between google, vendors, and carriers continues to grow. It is becoming a problem for people stuck with 6 month old hardware, if they are sitting on a 2 year contract and have to put up with an "old" phone for 18 months, do you think they will jump on buying another one? Google is entering the critical point of Android's development, if they (and the vendors/carriers) continue to screw this up, 2 years from now Anrdoid *will* be relegated to the technology dustbin, Apple will still be gaining users, and some hotshot new technology will come along and try to fill Androids place.
Dangers? What, that they don't like porn, apps about android, or wikileaks? Oh and they only sell their phones to work on networks they choose! Noes!!! Our society is in peril!!!!1111
Please do not respond again if you are just here to spout ideology.
really, you had to throw the fragmentation argument again? is that the best you can do?
android is nothing like windows. it's everything like linux, because it is linux. Linux doesn't have fragmentation issues either, unless you're goin for the fud route.
way to troll there.
Yeah Linux also doesnt have the "brand new version x won't ever run on hardware y because maker of hardware y neglects to give a shit about now six month old hardware y anymore now that hardware z is out."
Honestly, take a look around the Android developer community and for every 1 person happy making games or fart apps there are 10 user/developers trying in vain to hack new open source code onto new-ish handsets, because the hardware manufacturers don't give a shit about fragmentation either... They only work on one handset at a time, their *newest* one.
All these complaints are really about fragmentation. Your criticism is not about Android, but about whether we should have more than a handful of different phones to develop on. I say we should. Apple is showing us very clearly what the alternative is.
Yes, curse Apple. Curse them for their mass appeal and constantly growing popularity. How dare they be successful in the midst of people who don't like their development process...
Android is withering on the vine. Sure there are new handsets coming out all the time, but anyone with a handset from just six months ago is lumped in with the "legacy old-timers" and they get infrequent/unstable software updates while the handset makers and carriers chase new customers with brand new handsets. This business model is headed for mediocrity. Apples business model (as painful as it is to admit) of presenting one front end, one platform to develop for, and stable, reliable legacy updates is only getting stronger.
The real problem (lol, "listen to me", right?) is that handset makers and carriers have no motivation to improve the situation. People don't buy more of an old phone because the software got revved and has new features. They buy *brand*new*phones* so the handset makers and carriers are constantly chasing the bleeding edge and if your handset is just SIX MONTHS OLD you can count on infrequent or non-existent updates.
Google will lose to Apple in this space because they have the reins on the software/hardware process (since they do it all) and they have a tight leash on their carrier of choice. This means that while the hardware may not be at the cutting edge (with the exception of the very first iPhone and the iPhone 4) they can maintain a VERY stable app market.
Google needs to start charging for Android OS development, and they need to take the money and take over the dev role from the handset makers. Then they need to start pushing hard on the carriers to standardize on the bloat they will push to their customers. Then, and only then, will we see a mature Android market (and the whole android experience for that matter) appear.
Depends on if you are/were a Nazi/Soviet Communist/ Maoist/Khmer Rougeian... Not many of those people went into it thinking "i sure want to be fundamentally evil". While I am absolutely NOT justifying what they did, the point is that it is very easy to *talk* about drawing an absolute moral line in the sand and much harder to accomplish in practice.
Going through the world thinking you can/should judge everything as "fundamentally evil" or not is pretty damn naive. If there IS fundamental evil, it is in no way quantifiable by mere mortals such as ourselves. We need to be more diligent than thinking it will be obvious at first sight. How do you think all those atrocities got off the ground in the first place? Someone said "Hey, *I* would know fundamental evil if I saw it... and this? Meh, it is what it is. I have bigger problems to worry about."
I would certainly expect space travel (barring an unforeseen disaster that returns us to living in caves) to improve on a nonlinear scale. The probe, being subject to the sun's gravity, will have a decreasing velocity and therefore be a consistently easier target to reach as time marches on.
So to me this raises a fundamental philosophical question: why keep secrets at all, as a government? Unless of course what "we" do as a government is fundamentally evil to begin with? Should government be open-sourced in the sense that it should be fully (100%) transparent? If full transparency works wonderfully in the coding world, why would it not work in the realm of the government...unless again, the things we wish to keep secret are things we are fundamentally evil and immoral, like WikiLeaks had repeatedly proven already?
-1, "begging the question". There is no such thing as fundamental evil. What is evil to someone else (such as eating cows, or men and women with visible faces working in the close quarters of a 2000 sq. ft. open office) might not be evil to us... And keeping secrets away from the people who find you evil when you know in your heart of hearts you aren't evil is exactly why these agencies exist. Sure, it would be nice to not have anyone think you're evil, but I don't really see the USA going 100% vegan, 100% sex-segregated (and probably several other types of segregation too) and giving away all our "capitalist excesses" just to appease our critics.
What about a computer on a space probe that doesn't have transmitting equipment? Getting it back or even sending something to catch it would be near impossible.
The justice system is not a joke. If I was on trial I sure as hell wouldn't want the jury looking things up on wikipedia. As accurate as wikipedia is as a whole, there are still articles that are biased, incomplete, lack citations or any combination of those.
Yeah, better the jury simply apply its own beautiful collection of inaccuracies, willful ignorance, and bias to the trial. The activity of the jury is largely kept secret for the simple reason that if you were on trial for rape, found guilty, and then heard that the jury was going your way until Juror #5 shared a heart-wrenching but irrelevant story about what happened to her roommate this one time at a frat party, you would probably be PISSED.
The juror is supposed to bring up these questions to the bailiff so they can be asked of the judge. Wikipedia is a stupid source for this anyway, as these kinds of laws vary greatly on the state and local levels.
What law? It was an article about the condition, and apparently a thorough and well-cited one at that. While it might not have been legal for her to do the research, the information she found was universal and accurate.
Sorry, no, the topic was *dial-up*. DSL != Dial-up.
DSL and other broadband mediums were never competitive at the local level, they require far too much specialization for a mom-n-pop to compete. What you thought was competition early on was just the RBOCs getting their feet wet seeing if they could extract extra revenue from reselling DSL to a middleman. Once they saw the middlemen were doing them no good, of course they cut them out of the picture. What we now know is that you can't run a telecom company on "good customer service"... If the product is good the customer service is insignificant. If the product is shit all the customer service in the world won't get a customer back online faster.
I am having a hard time with this, too. In a sense, everyone will just tick the non-free repos back into existence after installing so this is really just the introduction of extra nuisance to the users (which linux sure does need... NOT.)
Thinking a little longer about it, maybe this has implications in shipping/selling truly unencumbered pre-loaded hardware/virtual platforms based on Linux? Thanks to the lack of fear that some evil megacorp will come hunt you down for including a copyrighted wifi firmware in your seemingly harmless mini-firewall gadget. Maybe this has positive implications (although i am still not 100% convinced that it's just a show of idealism that will hurt Joe user.)
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My gaming buddies
Enough said right there, chief.
"There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple's success."
There is that little annoying thing called "you don't rule the world" that will get in the way of those rock stars. The problem isn't that you can't build an awesome UI experience on top of Android. No, the problem is that you dont HAVE to build an awesome UI experience on top of android. And with that, anyone selling apps has to cater to all the dirt cheap handsets (that sell in droves) and at the same time work with the high end handsets with "rock star" UIs.
And as we all know by now, a UI gets kind of boring without a slew of cool new apps to run on it. I am not saying there wont be cool apps for Android phones, nor am I saying there wont be cool android phones for years to come. But the notion that anyone working on Android phones should bother building a "rock star" UI is, at face value, pretty stupid.
p.s. to any Android apologists who want to come by and snipe at me for being an apple fanboy: I dont like apple products, and I own an android phone.
Though I bet their new plan includes automatic spawning of nodes on EC2 or some other distributed CDN.
BIN. GO.
It's almost hard to fathom the thought that their entire network relies on "volunteered" supernodes, and that those nodes are allowed to run something besides the latest software rev (another mistake) and that supernodes can be easily overloaded and "die off", and that a lack of volunteers doesn't have some sort of action plan... How did they not see this coming? They created a tipping point in the system, and then stood back and waited for it to tip with no plan on what to do to fix it besides wait a day and nurse the network back to health?
Uh... no?
Net Neutrality - when done right - is an assertation that nobody owns or controls 'the internet'.
'Net Neutrality' - when done the way the government wants - is the government taking control.
A lack of Net Neutrality is TELECOMS taking over the internet.
The problem is that the government has co-opted the term to mean something it wasn't supposed to - which serves to confuse the argument. We could try to raise true NN under a new name, but the governments likely to try the same thing there as well, so it'd need a fast and hard blitz to get the real meaning embedded in the public consciousness before they manage that. Unfortunately, there isn't the will at the moment.
Thinking that something should be "uncontrolled an unowned" in order for it to prosper sounds like the viewpoint of someone who never worked in a sufficiently large organization. If no one has an interest in controlling and owning something, that thing DIES. A commune of hippies can't keep the internet alive with a love-in, it takes the concerted effort and great expense of a lot of organizations. If those organizations aren't getting what they want out of it, they will walk away.
The Internet has worked so far since generally everyone has been getting what they want. Innovation, god bless it, has come marching in giving visibility to where the actual revenues and expenses are incurred on the 'net, and thanks to that just about every organization with a stake in the 'net has been scurrying to shore up their own interests. Times are changing, there is no law that can be passed to make the internet feel like the "good old days", and we have to accept that.
The best thing that could happen is for a mutual agreement between business and government (possibly in the form of a law) that still keeps giving each side some of what they want. The worst thing that can happen is for business, or the government, to do whatever they want in spite of the other. Make no mistake, control WILL be had, the question is how visible and balanced will that control be?
Google wants to help (although they dont take credit for the kohls devices) http://www.altierre.com/index.html
Embedding it into a monitor (or having a small remote pickup) would solve that... Maybe shoot holes in the low speed, and need for the lights to be on for the network to be up?
Quit doing it wrong. I had a storm for a year and a half and aside from the time it took to perform routine software updates it was hassle-free as a phone, media player, and everything else.
What we don't have is people focused on finding, removing, and spouting a product yet like Norton/McAffee/AVG/whatever.
Oh we don't, do we?
Do you actually believe that one communications and data processing vendor with packet-grained control is a good model for a free society?
Your entire argument is based on the premise that Apple is the sole communications company in existence in the world... This is demonstrably false. There is this little thing that I like to practice, called "don't own an iphone." It helps me sleep at night. You just keep panicking though, it's good for your metabolism.
Where is the line for bashing the "expert" at Connectify who in the same sentence derides anyone who doesn't know what an ohm is, and demonstrates that he doesn't know how to use a multimeter... That's the line *I* want!
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
That was the first thing I thought of when seeing the picture as well... Thank goodness he posted the full res version of that so we can very clearly see the M on the meter. What a maroon.
1: those are old numbers. 2: I didn't say it was dead/dying. As an active member of the android community (yes I am above all else an android fanboy, not an apple fanboy despite my criticism and the ability of many a ignorant slashdotter to stereotype me as such) I want android to do well, but they are failing at their mission and will continue to do so as long as the rifts between google, vendors, and carriers continues to grow. It is becoming a problem for people stuck with 6 month old hardware, if they are sitting on a 2 year contract and have to put up with an "old" phone for 18 months, do you think they will jump on buying another one? Google is entering the critical point of Android's development, if they (and the vendors/carriers) continue to screw this up, 2 years from now Anrdoid *will* be relegated to the technology dustbin, Apple will still be gaining users, and some hotshot new technology will come along and try to fill Androids place.
Dangers? What, that they don't like porn, apps about android, or wikileaks? Oh and they only sell their phones to work on networks they choose! Noes!!! Our society is in peril!!!!1111
Please do not respond again if you are just here to spout ideology.
really, you had to throw the fragmentation argument again? is that the best you can do?
android is nothing like windows. it's everything like linux, because it is linux. Linux doesn't have fragmentation issues either, unless you're goin for the fud route.
way to troll there.
Yeah Linux also doesnt have the "brand new version x won't ever run on hardware y because maker of hardware y neglects to give a shit about now six month old hardware y anymore now that hardware z is out."
Honestly, take a look around the Android developer community and for every 1 person happy making games or fart apps there are 10 user/developers trying in vain to hack new open source code onto new-ish handsets, because the hardware manufacturers don't give a shit about fragmentation either... They only work on one handset at a time, their *newest* one.
All these complaints are really about fragmentation. Your criticism is not about Android, but about whether we should have more than a handful of different phones to develop on. I say we should. Apple is showing us very clearly what the alternative is.
Yes, curse Apple. Curse them for their mass appeal and constantly growing popularity. How dare they be successful in the midst of people who don't like their development process...
Android is withering on the vine. Sure there are new handsets coming out all the time, but anyone with a handset from just six months ago is lumped in with the "legacy old-timers" and they get infrequent/unstable software updates while the handset makers and carriers chase new customers with brand new handsets. This business model is headed for mediocrity. Apples business model (as painful as it is to admit) of presenting one front end, one platform to develop for, and stable, reliable legacy updates is only getting stronger.
The real problem (lol, "listen to me", right?) is that handset makers and carriers have no motivation to improve the situation. People don't buy more of an old phone because the software got revved and has new features. They buy *brand*new*phones* so the handset makers and carriers are constantly chasing the bleeding edge and if your handset is just SIX MONTHS OLD you can count on infrequent or non-existent updates.
Google will lose to Apple in this space because they have the reins on the software/hardware process (since they do it all) and they have a tight leash on their carrier of choice. This means that while the hardware may not be at the cutting edge (with the exception of the very first iPhone and the iPhone 4) they can maintain a VERY stable app market.
Google needs to start charging for Android OS development, and they need to take the money and take over the dev role from the handset makers. Then they need to start pushing hard on the carriers to standardize on the bloat they will push to their customers. Then, and only then, will we see a mature Android market (and the whole android experience for that matter) appear.
See here: http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1919386&cid=34630114
This.
Depends on if you are/were a Nazi/Soviet Communist/ Maoist/Khmer Rougeian... Not many of those people went into it thinking "i sure want to be fundamentally evil". While I am absolutely NOT justifying what they did, the point is that it is very easy to *talk* about drawing an absolute moral line in the sand and much harder to accomplish in practice.
Going through the world thinking you can/should judge everything as "fundamentally evil" or not is pretty damn naive. If there IS fundamental evil, it is in no way quantifiable by mere mortals such as ourselves. We need to be more diligent than thinking it will be obvious at first sight. How do you think all those atrocities got off the ground in the first place? Someone said "Hey, *I* would know fundamental evil if I saw it... and this? Meh, it is what it is. I have bigger problems to worry about."
I would certainly expect space travel (barring an unforeseen disaster that returns us to living in caves) to improve on a nonlinear scale. The probe, being subject to the sun's gravity, will have a decreasing velocity and therefore be a consistently easier target to reach as time marches on.
So to me this raises a fundamental philosophical question: why keep secrets at all, as a government? Unless of course what "we" do as a government is fundamentally evil to begin with? Should government be open-sourced in the sense that it should be fully (100%) transparent? If full transparency works wonderfully in the coding world, why would it not work in the realm of the government...unless again, the things we wish to keep secret are things we are fundamentally evil and immoral, like WikiLeaks had repeatedly proven already?
-1, "begging the question". There is no such thing as fundamental evil. What is evil to someone else (such as eating cows, or men and women with visible faces working in the close quarters of a 2000 sq. ft. open office) might not be evil to us... And keeping secrets away from the people who find you evil when you know in your heart of hearts you aren't evil is exactly why these agencies exist. Sure, it would be nice to not have anyone think you're evil, but I don't really see the USA going 100% vegan, 100% sex-segregated (and probably several other types of segregation too) and giving away all our "capitalist excesses" just to appease our critics.
What about a computer on a space probe that doesn't have transmitting equipment? Getting it back or even sending something to catch it would be near impossible.
For now. What's the future value of that system?
So only an ignorant Jury is a fair one?
The justice system is not a joke. If I was on trial I sure as hell wouldn't want the jury looking things up on wikipedia. As accurate as wikipedia is as a whole, there are still articles that are biased, incomplete, lack citations or any combination of those.
Yeah, better the jury simply apply its own beautiful collection of inaccuracies, willful ignorance, and bias to the trial. The activity of the jury is largely kept secret for the simple reason that if you were on trial for rape, found guilty, and then heard that the jury was going your way until Juror #5 shared a heart-wrenching but irrelevant story about what happened to her roommate this one time at a frat party, you would probably be PISSED.
The juror is supposed to bring up these questions to the bailiff so they can be asked of the judge. Wikipedia is a stupid source for this anyway, as these kinds of laws vary greatly on the state and local levels.
What law? It was an article about the condition, and apparently a thorough and well-cited one at that. While it might not have been legal for her to do the research, the information she found was universal and accurate.
Sorry, no, the topic was *dial-up*. DSL != Dial-up.
DSL and other broadband mediums were never competitive at the local level, they require far too much specialization for a mom-n-pop to compete. What you thought was competition early on was just the RBOCs getting their feet wet seeing if they could extract extra revenue from reselling DSL to a middleman. Once they saw the middlemen were doing them no good, of course they cut them out of the picture. What we now know is that you can't run a telecom company on "good customer service"... If the product is good the customer service is insignificant. If the product is shit all the customer service in the world won't get a customer back online faster.
I am having a hard time with this, too. In a sense, everyone will just tick the non-free repos back into existence after installing so this is really just the introduction of extra nuisance to the users (which linux sure does need... NOT.)
Thinking a little longer about it, maybe this has implications in shipping/selling truly unencumbered pre-loaded hardware/virtual platforms based on Linux? Thanks to the lack of fear that some evil megacorp will come hunt you down for including a copyrighted wifi firmware in your seemingly harmless mini-firewall gadget. Maybe this has positive implications (although i am still not 100% convinced that it's just a show of idealism that will hurt Joe user.)