That still wouldn't tell you anything vis a vis Android vs Apple. Android is a lot more flexible WITHOUT having to jail break. So for a comparison, you'd need to establish a baseline of functionality, and if one platform requires 3rd party app stores and jail breaking, while the other does not, so be it.
Larger software companies hate them (because of patent trolls), smaller software companies hate them (because it allows larger companies to crush them), individual software engineers hate them (because it's all a giant waste of time). The only people who want them are patent lawyers and patent trolling companies that are full of patent lawyers.
This is not true at all. I work for a medium-sized company. We make lots of real hardware, and lots of real software... we are not a patent troll. However, the top executives love software patents, because they are about 90% profit. We make a lot of money on them, because we're often the first into new fields, and the first to develop solutions to problems everyone else will run into later. They're important to keeping the company going, because they take the edge off the first-mover disadvantage, giving more incentive to develop something in the first place.
For the record, I was at a software patent supporter long before I started working at my current company. Everything is moving out of hardware, and into software. We're somehow fine with the extensive R&D that has gone into mechanical engineering being patentable, but as soon as you can replace these with digital systems, the same R&D effort is no longer protected in many countries. It makes no sense, and it's just going to drive us back to a proprietary world, where everything is fiercly protected as trade secrets, and anything open is a thing of the past.
The most "pure" use case for software patents is MPEG. They wouldn't represent the best technology companies around the world have to offer, if software implementations could not be capitalized upon. And don't tell me about free software... Theora and WebM were both developed by On2, which made its money with proprietary codecs which could be licensed for less than patent licenses for the MPEG technologies. If not for software patents, we probably wouldn't have made it past Cinepak, or MPEG-1 at best, before falling back into proprietary-only solutions.
As with Free Software, if you don't like it, go develop an alternative yourself, and release it for free. On2 & Google did exactly that.
That's not to say software patents don't have problems, as do all patents, but that's no reason to eliminate them entirely./.ers love to hate on patents, in the same breath that they complain there isn't enough research going on these days... Most people don't care. It's just "gimme gimme gimme."
American network operators picked CDMA partly because it's American, and partly because it was slightly better than GSM in rural areas, where you have large areas with very low population density. Cost cutting, basically - it allowed them to have better coverage while having fewer towers. Not a problem in Europe, though.
CDMA was indeed superior, and not just in the narrow case you outlined. It was considerably ahead in general, allowing a backwards compatible transition to 3G, which GSM didn't have (requiring separate radios). CDMA providers were easily first to deploy 3G.
However, DVB systems were deployed long before equivalent ATSC systems. [...] in practice DVB systems were in use before ATSC was even finalized.
These statements are complete crap, with no factual basis at all.
ATSC was at least a couple years ahead of DVB-T in every benchmark you can pick... Development, standardization by authorities, test broadcasts, large scale broadcasts, etc. DVB only ever lead in analog shutoff, and that's only because they opted to stay with low-res broadcasts, rather than switching to highdef at the same time as the US did with ATSC. This of course is actually a mis-feature, putting the US far ahead today.
Motorola was going down the tube until they went all in with Android and manage to land the first Droid phone for Verizon.
No. Motorolla has simply been around so long that they've gone up and down many times. Go back to the Startac and Razr and Motorolla was absolutely on top. They'd had a lull until they jumped onto Android, but hell, Motorolla on Verizon practically MADE Android, it was just an also-ran until then, and might still be if not for them.
It was only really the touch interface that was anything new, and i suspect Nokia had passed on that because it is hard to operate such a interface at -20C (much easier in +20C).
The "interface" happens to be EVERYTHING. And saying Nokia had their heads so far up their asses that they couldn't see where technology was going doesn't make a very good excuse. It just shows massive myoptia.
Most people in the US don't. I do actually travel frequently outside the US
Perfect. So you're directly admitting that your requirement for GSM is one that "most people" don't have. You also implicitly admit that you know there are alternatives to that would eliminate that need. So basically you're ranting about nothing but the fact that the US market isn't designed the way you'd most like it to be.
For example if you were forced to take a completely FOSS replacement for the integration of WinDesktop plus AD, GPOs, Exchange, and Sharepoint what you'd get is a big fucking mess of software that was frankly never designed to work together and written by different teams with different goals.
There are perfectly good Exchange & Groupware replacements. As a starting point, I'd suggest you go ask Novell... They have the money to really sell you on their solution. They also completely predate Microsoft in this space, and Microsoft's tools are basically cheap knockoffs of Novell's solutions, anyhow.
I really don't see the reasons behind the rest of your list... It's like you're listing the symptoms of a disease. I guess it's no wonder you're such a fan of Microsoft, you've learned their ineffecient methods, and are upset that you can't find open source options that verbatim copy those exact, inefficient workarounds to their own design flaws.
Windows Remote Desktop is a ripoff of features Unix systems have had forever. X11 forwarding is ancient, Citrix exists for Unix, and NX is a superior option anyhow.
Active directory is a very direct ripoff of Kerberos and LDAP. You can certainly get open source alternatives, and not only that, they're fully interoperable with Windows, and have superior designs and features.
Frankly i'm starting to believe that is the whole fucking point of FOSS, its to make UIs that are as painful as possible,
You could have made that argument right up until Vista came out. These days the popular proprietary options are the UI nightmares from hell so horrible that it takes the resources of the world's largest monopoly to force people to use it (and the continued dominance of XP says that's still not enough).
You actually tout Windows 7 as a wonderful UI? Clearly, there's just something massively wrong with you. Have you visited the control panel lately? Now THAT I couldn't figure out without months of studying. And the RIBBON interface on everything Microsoft is the worst UI decision in the history of software.
OS X is no prize either. It makes it easy to work a specific way, and do some specific things, but once you step out of that 90% use case, you'll find it crippling and painful.
It is really tiring to watch this day-in and day-out when you come from the business world or a non-profit where you had to make choices based solely on efficiency or merit.
Are you kidding? The amount of politics and bureauocracy in a large (private) company is staggering. Where the hell did you work that there's none of that?
Virgin Mobile USA won't activate a voice-only plan on an Android phone, even if I have Wi-Fi everywhere I plan to use the data features.
But you WANT data service on your smart phone. Being able to look-up something when you're in the absolute middle of nowhere is the killer app of smart phones. As a single example, practically all the driving-direction apps on smart phones are ONLINE apps, so when you take a detour, it needs to hit the servers for a new route.
As someone who uses almost no data, I don't see why I should subsidize your mobile internet usage.
I'm sure the early adopters feel the same way about you...
Cellular bandwidth is ephemeral... Pumping a GByte of data costs next to nothing. It's expanding the network to handle a large number of people doing that at the same time, which is expensive. And in that case, a technological solution is desirable and workable.. If a certain cell tower is maxed-out, throttle the highest bandwidth users until there's excess capacity. Then add more cells only when even the low bandwidth users are being throttled. Problem solved forever. Heavy users get all the excess capacity they want without insane charges, and light users get fast speeds and aren't negatively impacted at all.
I find it extremely odd that the US does not have this... it's like hearing they don't have wheels, or fire.
It's not "fire" it's "sub-prime mortgages"... This isn't some fundamental feature, it's a billing gimmick.
Read TFA... You'd probably get a BETTER deal going with Virgin Mobile's normal (unlimited) plan, unless you have several devices you use, but barely ever.
Then how do I run smartphone apps that aren't ported to Windows or Linux without a smartphone?
Android has been ported to x86 (90%+ of Android apps are java-derivative based, and so, architecture agnostic), and the Android emulator runs on Linux and Windows.
Sprint does (free) roaming on Verizon, and they have cheaper plans.
I'm thinking of going prepay which actually seems to offer the better pricing model.
Of course it does. Contracts have always been scams, hide the up-front cost, and charge 2-4X as much per month, oh yeah, and throw in taxes and hidden fees.
It's used in the US, where they are 20 years behind the rest of the world in mobile phones.
Yeah, US mobile phone companies like Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Palm are just decades behind European mobile phone companies, like Nokia, and... umm...
Come on, America, at least move onto GSM.
It's funny how the US takes so much crap for being incompatible, when really, the US is usually the first-mover, and it's the "rest of the world" that decides to develop something intentionally incompatible, for no good reason. Witness ATSC versus DVB.
Oh, and did I mention Vodaphone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, which is the major CDMA carrier? If CDMA is a liability, then it's a British plot to keep the US down...
Different types of spending have different multipliers. Each of them has consistent andvery much accepted figures. And NASA spending in particular has gotten plenty of study, hence the figure.
I should also throw in Republic Wireless for honorable mention, as the cheapest option at about $20, accomplished by trying to push folks to use wifi as much a possible.
Then winter is so dry that your lips skin and hands dry and crack (...) The fire warning signs read something like (This is not a joke) Normal, High, Dangerous, Extremely dangerous, catastrophic.
Sounds like an improvement over Southern California.
Got to go, my neighbor's house just got burried by a mudslide...
What I've been wondering for about 15 years is why the heck doesn't Intel buy Arm? It's the no-brainer way to protect your #1 status - buy out all competitors that show any signs of being a threat
First off, Intel was selling ARM chips up until a few years ago. They snagged the famous "StrongArm" series off of DEC and rebranded it "XScale".
Second, ARM only recently established itself as THE x86 competitor. Go look up all the RISC architectures out there which were competing for dominance. If you needed high performance embedded, PowerPC has long been the way to go. SPARC has been competing in the embedded space. Hitachi made a go of it with their SuperH chips (eg. SH3).
Last but not least, MIPS is the old man of the bunch, and the one with the most fight left in it... It was always faster than ARM, even powering high-end (SGI) workstations and supercomputers in the past, while still competitive on the low-end. With China throwing it's weight behind MIPS as the basis of their domestic CPU development effort (Loongsoon/Dragon Chip), it's both advancing nicely, and being produced extremely inexpensively, which gives us things like the infamous $100 ICS Android tablet running on MIPS.
But more than that, ARM doesn't fit Intel's model... ARM just licenses the IP/Cores, and let's others fab them. Intel wants the whole pie. Even if they bought ARM, they couldn't stop existing licensees from continuing as before, and if they didn't keep ARM producing what customers wanted, switching over to MIPS wouldn't be that hard.
I figured FTP servers and such would use these "lower end" processors simply because they only need to perform minimal computation to validate users and serve files.
ARM NAS boxes are a nightmare. Slow as all hell. That's not the kind of performance you want from your FTP server. And FTP servers have generally been replaced by HTTP servers, and a lot of dynamic pages which use up lots of CPU time. But even if that wasn't the case, it's only in Windows that there's a drive to single-task. On any Unix server, you'd just keep throwing more functions on the box if it has spare resources. No reason your FTP server can't be doing the job of SMTP server, running spamassassin, etc.
I currently have an android tablet running a MIPs processor. There is a severe shortage of apps available to use.
What the hell are you talking about? Android is a slightly modified java based platform. 95% of the Android apps out there are completely CPU-agnostic, because that's just the default state of affairs.
The exceptions are the CPU-intensive multimedia apps... Adobe Flash, video players, and some games. Actually Firefox is on the list as well for no good reason.
You can't get Flash for any other mobile platform, and it hasn't been ported to ICS even, so it's almost a niche product...
Android comes with built-in audio and video players, which support a decent number of formats. They're not polished, but it's not like you're left without a music/video player. They're part of the base system and will be ported to your MIPS chip with the rest of it.
So it looks like you're JUST talking about (high-end) games, really...
That's the entire argument for the GPL. Basically, if some simple conditions aren't met, you don't get to take advantage of all the work that's been put into it. The idea being that you'd rather they not use your code at all if they're going to be dicks about it.
You're missing a big, big issue... Network effects.
If a freer version of XYZ comes out, and people get onboard, pretty quickly people that prefer the GPL will use and develop for the less-free version, because it has features the GPL'd software doesn't, or is supported more widely, etc. Sure, people aren't forced to release their changes, but odds are that not forcing them to release ALL their change will result in it getting much more use, and those same groups will release SOME of their changes anyhow, perhaps contributing more in the end...
There's no question that internet protocols are all BSD/MIT licensed, and NONE are GPL licensed. TCP/IP came out of BSD and got used everywhere. NFS was opened by Sun. Telnet / Rsh stayed around far longer than they should have, up until OpenBSD project developed OpenSSH (how much market-share does FreSSH have, now?). Sendmail, Bind, FTP, apache, X11, not a one of them was released GPL'd. Which makes you think, maybe if rsync was BSD licensed the otherwise impressive protocol wouldn't be such a tiny niche use, and maybe we would have replaced FTP long, long ago.
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That still wouldn't tell you anything vis a vis Android vs Apple. Android is a lot more flexible WITHOUT having to jail break. So for a comparison, you'd need to establish a baseline of functionality, and if one platform requires 3rd party app stores and jail breaking, while the other does not, so be it.
This is not true at all. I work for a medium-sized company. We make lots of real hardware, and lots of real software... we are not a patent troll. However, the top executives love software patents, because they are about 90% profit. We make a lot of money on them, because we're often the first into new fields, and the first to develop solutions to problems everyone else will run into later. They're important to keeping the company going, because they take the edge off the first-mover disadvantage, giving more incentive to develop something in the first place.
For the record, I was at a software patent supporter long before I started working at my current company. Everything is moving out of hardware, and into software. We're somehow fine with the extensive R&D that has gone into mechanical engineering being patentable, but as soon as you can replace these with digital systems, the same R&D effort is no longer protected in many countries. It makes no sense, and it's just going to drive us back to a proprietary world, where everything is fiercly protected as trade secrets, and anything open is a thing of the past.
The most "pure" use case for software patents is MPEG. They wouldn't represent the best technology companies around the world have to offer, if software implementations could not be capitalized upon. And don't tell me about free software... Theora and WebM were both developed by On2, which made its money with proprietary codecs which could be licensed for less than patent licenses for the MPEG technologies. If not for software patents, we probably wouldn't have made it past Cinepak, or MPEG-1 at best, before falling back into proprietary-only solutions.
As with Free Software, if you don't like it, go develop an alternative yourself, and release it for free. On2 & Google did exactly that.
That's not to say software patents don't have problems, as do all patents, but that's no reason to eliminate them entirely. /.ers love to hate on patents, in the same breath that they complain there isn't enough research going on these days... Most people don't care. It's just "gimme gimme gimme."
CDMA was indeed superior, and not just in the narrow case you outlined. It was considerably ahead in general, allowing a backwards compatible transition to 3G, which GSM didn't have (requiring separate radios). CDMA providers were easily first to deploy 3G.
These statements are complete crap, with no factual basis at all.
ATSC was at least a couple years ahead of DVB-T in every benchmark you can pick... Development, standardization by authorities, test broadcasts, large scale broadcasts, etc. DVB only ever lead in analog shutoff, and that's only because they opted to stay with low-res broadcasts, rather than switching to highdef at the same time as the US did with ATSC. This of course is actually a mis-feature, putting the US far ahead today.
No. Motorolla has simply been around so long that they've gone up and down many times. Go back to the Startac and Razr and Motorolla was absolutely on top. They'd had a lull until they jumped onto Android, but hell, Motorolla on Verizon practically MADE Android, it was just an also-ran until then, and might still be if not for them.
The "interface" happens to be EVERYTHING. And saying Nokia had their heads so far up their asses that they couldn't see where technology was going doesn't make a very good excuse. It just shows massive myoptia.
Perfect. So you're directly admitting that your requirement for GSM is one that "most people" don't have. You also implicitly admit that you know there are alternatives to that would eliminate that need. So basically you're ranting about nothing but the fact that the US market isn't designed the way you'd most like it to be.
There are perfectly good Exchange & Groupware replacements. As a starting point, I'd suggest you go ask Novell... They have the money to really sell you on their solution. They also completely predate Microsoft in this space, and Microsoft's tools are basically cheap knockoffs of Novell's solutions, anyhow.
I really don't see the reasons behind the rest of your list... It's like you're listing the symptoms of a disease. I guess it's no wonder you're such a fan of Microsoft, you've learned their ineffecient methods, and are upset that you can't find open source options that verbatim copy those exact, inefficient workarounds to their own design flaws.
Windows Remote Desktop is a ripoff of features Unix systems have had forever. X11 forwarding is ancient, Citrix exists for Unix, and NX is a superior option anyhow.
Active directory is a very direct ripoff of Kerberos and LDAP. You can certainly get open source alternatives, and not only that, they're fully interoperable with Windows, and have superior designs and features.
You could have made that argument right up until Vista came out. These days the popular proprietary options are the UI nightmares from hell so horrible that it takes the resources of the world's largest monopoly to force people to use it (and the continued dominance of XP says that's still not enough).
You actually tout Windows 7 as a wonderful UI? Clearly, there's just something massively wrong with you. Have you visited the control panel lately? Now THAT I couldn't figure out without months of studying. And the RIBBON interface on everything Microsoft is the worst UI decision in the history of software.
OS X is no prize either. It makes it easy to work a specific way, and do some specific things, but once you step out of that 90% use case, you'll find it crippling and painful.
Are you kidding? The amount of politics and bureauocracy in a large (private) company is staggering. Where the hell did you work that there's none of that?
But you WANT data service on your smart phone. Being able to look-up something when you're in the absolute middle of nowhere is the killer app of smart phones. As a single example, practically all the driving-direction apps on smart phones are ONLINE apps, so when you take a detour, it needs to hit the servers for a new route.
I'm sure the early adopters feel the same way about you...
Cellular bandwidth is ephemeral... Pumping a GByte of data costs next to nothing. It's expanding the network to handle a large number of people doing that at the same time, which is expensive. And in that case, a technological solution is desirable and workable.. If a certain cell tower is maxed-out, throttle the highest bandwidth users until there's excess capacity. Then add more cells only when even the low bandwidth users are being throttled. Problem solved forever. Heavy users get all the excess capacity they want without insane charges, and light users get fast speeds and aren't negatively impacted at all.
There are several more companies. Why aren't you using them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_the_Americas#United_States
What's so compelling about GSM? Is it really so crucial to you to be able to use the same phone when traveling across continents?
It's not "fire" it's "sub-prime mortgages"... This isn't some fundamental feature, it's a billing gimmick.
Read TFA... You'd probably get a BETTER deal going with Virgin Mobile's normal (unlimited) plan, unless you have several devices you use, but barely ever.
Android has been ported to x86 (90%+ of Android apps are java-derivative based, and so, architecture agnostic), and the Android emulator runs on Linux and Windows.
Sprint does (free) roaming on Verizon, and they have cheaper plans.
Of course it does. Contracts have always been scams, hide the up-front cost, and charge 2-4X as much per month, oh yeah, and throw in taxes and hidden fees.
Yeah, US mobile phone companies like Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Palm are just decades behind European mobile phone companies, like Nokia, and... umm...
It's funny how the US takes so much crap for being incompatible, when really, the US is usually the first-mover, and it's the "rest of the world" that decides to develop something intentionally incompatible, for no good reason. Witness ATSC versus DVB.
Oh, and did I mention Vodaphone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, which is the major CDMA carrier? If CDMA is a liability, then it's a British plot to keep the US down...
Different types of spending have different multipliers. Each of them has consistent andvery much accepted figures. And NASA spending in particular has gotten plenty of study, hence the figure.
I should also throw in Republic Wireless for honorable mention, as the cheapest option at about $20, accomplished by trying to push folks to use wifi as much a possible.
http://republicwireless.com/
Physics doesn't apply to GDP & tax rates. What I've said is extensively accepted economic theory. Playing dumb (or are you) won't change it.
Sounds like an improvement over Southern California.
Got to go, my neighbor's house just got burried by a mudslide...
Well, at 1/10th the price, that still sounds like it's half the cost.
First off, Intel was selling ARM chips up until a few years ago. They snagged the famous "StrongArm" series off of DEC and rebranded it "XScale".
Second, ARM only recently established itself as THE x86 competitor. Go look up all the RISC architectures out there which were competing for dominance. If you needed high performance embedded, PowerPC has long been the way to go. SPARC has been competing in the embedded space. Hitachi made a go of it with their SuperH chips (eg. SH3).
Last but not least, MIPS is the old man of the bunch, and the one with the most fight left in it... It was always faster than ARM, even powering high-end (SGI) workstations and supercomputers in the past, while still competitive on the low-end. With China throwing it's weight behind MIPS as the basis of their domestic CPU development effort (Loongsoon/Dragon Chip), it's both advancing nicely, and being produced extremely inexpensively, which gives us things like the infamous $100 ICS Android tablet running on MIPS.
But more than that, ARM doesn't fit Intel's model... ARM just licenses the IP/Cores, and let's others fab them. Intel wants the whole pie. Even if they bought ARM, they couldn't stop existing licensees from continuing as before, and if they didn't keep ARM producing what customers wanted, switching over to MIPS wouldn't be that hard.
ARM NAS boxes are a nightmare. Slow as all hell. That's not the kind of performance you want from your FTP server. And FTP servers have generally been replaced by HTTP servers, and a lot of dynamic pages which use up lots of CPU time. But even if that wasn't the case, it's only in Windows that there's a drive to single-task. On any Unix server, you'd just keep throwing more functions on the box if it has spare resources. No reason your FTP server can't be doing the job of SMTP server, running spamassassin, etc.
What the hell are you talking about? Android is a slightly modified java based platform. 95% of the Android apps out there are completely CPU-agnostic, because that's just the default state of affairs.
The exceptions are the CPU-intensive multimedia apps... Adobe Flash, video players, and some games. Actually Firefox is on the list as well for no good reason.
You can't get Flash for any other mobile platform, and it hasn't been ported to ICS even, so it's almost a niche product...
Android comes with built-in audio and video players, which support a decent number of formats. They're not polished, but it's not like you're left without a music/video player. They're part of the base system and will be ported to your MIPS chip with the rest of it.
So it looks like you're JUST talking about (high-end) games, really...
You're missing a big, big issue... Network effects.
If a freer version of XYZ comes out, and people get onboard, pretty quickly people that prefer the GPL will use and develop for the less-free version, because it has features the GPL'd software doesn't, or is supported more widely, etc. Sure, people aren't forced to release their changes, but odds are that not forcing them to release ALL their change will result in it getting much more use, and those same groups will release SOME of their changes anyhow, perhaps contributing more in the end...
There's no question that internet protocols are all BSD/MIT licensed, and NONE are GPL licensed. TCP/IP came out of BSD and got used everywhere. NFS was opened by Sun. Telnet / Rsh stayed around far longer than they should have, up until OpenBSD project developed OpenSSH (how much market-share does FreSSH have, now?). Sendmail, Bind, FTP, apache, X11, not a one of them was released GPL'd. Which makes you think, maybe if rsync was BSD licensed the otherwise impressive protocol wouldn't be such a tiny niche use, and maybe we would have replaced FTP long, long ago.