I don't see what's "bad" about this. It's inconvenient, I'll grant you, it would be nice if the iTunes store acted as a backup for all my purchased music, but the idea makes sense when you consider the former paradigm. If you bought a CD in the past and lost, broke or damaged it, you went and bought a new CD. Was one of the ways the music companies kept making money on old stuff. This simply extended that concept to non-physical music purchases. If you "lose" them, you have to rebuy them. Since Apple's music has been DRM free for years and it's extremely trivial to backup the music, the risk of loss actually seems much lower to me that the risk of loss for a physical CD.
I'll be happy if they change this, it will be nice to know that I have yet another layer of backup in addition to the copies on my phone, computer, laptop, and backup disk, but realistically I'm not exactly worried as things are. Anything that wipes out every copy I have of most of my music has probably destroyed a lot more valuable things as well (not to mention the music I still do have on CD).
I dunno if it's changed, but it used to be possible to completely wipe a Linux system this way. Everything important: the kernel, the SATA drivers, and the rm command, are loaded into memory so even as you delete the copies on disk they continue to merrily do what you told them too. New commands quickly cease to function, and this can be a clue that you've done something wrong. As I recall the time I accidentally did this it was on a system without X, so possibly X stuff would start to fail and prevent it from completing (i.e. if your terminal committed suicide it might kill your rm command too).
From the sounds of things you're unlikely to able to get either the copy or the checksum done before it's problem. At least not on a drive with any appreciable amount of data. You have a matter of a few minutes before the drive image is altering itself.
It's not a matter of speed, the checksum is done immediately so there's a baseline for comparison. You checksum the drive (The whole drive image, garbage and all), then make a complete copy of the drive image. Assuming the checksum of the copy matches the original, you store the original and never touch it again (unless there's a problem). Now you can make copies of the copy and do all the analysis you want. You've go the original sealed, the clean copy, and copies that you can hack around on. If you accidentally screw one of those copies up, you make a new one from the "clean" copy. As long as the evidence you gather comes from a copy with a checksum that matches the original you can "prove" that is was on an original unmodified piece of evidence.
If the defendant (or litigant, I've never been involved in this for a criminal case, but I have some very limited experience working with it for a civil case) claims you changed something or planted evidence you can go step by step: Here's the record where the evidence guy bagged your drive from your computer, and here's a witness that he followed procedure. Here's where the lab tech broke the seal on the evidence bag and here's the witness that *he* followed procedure. Here's the checksum he got from your drive image, and here's the checksum taken from the image which matches. Cops and lawyers are really serious about chain of evidence, anywhere you can provide near perfect proof that you did what you said you did, they are thrilled.
With Civil cases it's even easier, since the litigant or their lawyer can watch you remove the drive and get the checksum if they want. Removes the possibility that the cop, evidence guys and tech are in cahoots to frame you. The NCIS bit where Abby pulls the original drive out of evidence is pretty much bullshit.
I'm just saying how they do it now. It presents an extremely easy and traceable method for maintaining chain of custody. If it turns out to no longer be reliable, they'll have to come up with something else. That's all I'm saying, and as far as I can see that's all the article is saying.
Well to be fair, that's only part of the problem. Say you're a stupid criminal. You store all your records of your criminal acts on your computer which happens to have an SSD drive. You've never deleted your records of your criminal acts, but just before the police busted through the door you were deleting some old pictures of your cat, Fluffy. So in order to maintain evidence chain of custody, the police immediately turn off you computer and turn it over to a tech. The tech's first two actions should always be the same. He should plug your drive into a a special read only device that will first do an MD5sum or other fingerprint of the whole contents of the drive, and then do a bit for bit copy of the drive.
The idea here is that the police can prove that nothing was done to alter the data present at the time of seizure. Power was removed from the system and the drive was immediately fingerprinted and copied. Assuming the fingerprints match, there should be no question that the copy on which the actual analysis is done is identical to the original drive. The problem is that you were deleting pictures of Fluffy when the Police came in. It's highly likely that as the drive does its self cleaning routine the fingerprint of the data will change. They fingerprint, get a value, but while they're copying the drive self cleans the bits associated with your cat pics. Bam, the copy has a different fingerprint. Now there's reasonable doubt about the usefulness of the evidence you stupidly left unencrypted in your desktop folder.
Now I'm not saying this is a problem, and that they need to modify the design of SSDs. I didn't get the impression that article said that either. What they are saying is "Hey, we need to come up with another way to do this, becasue what we've been doing will no longer stand up in court."
It's not hard really. The drives autoclean themselves. So when you delete the inode reference to a given data file, it will be completely much more quickly that on a normal magnetic drive (which won't reclaim the space till it's needed). On the other hand it won't respond to commands that would FORCE a magnetic drive to completely wipe the file.
So if you're in your secret lab and you hear that the evil enemy is an hour away, you just type "rm/*" and wander off to escape. By the time they get there all your data will be completely wiped. On the other hand if they are breaking down the door to your secret lab and you have only seconds left you can't type "shred/home/joeari/secretfile" and expect it to be perma-deleted like you could with a magnetic drive.
They recover deleted sectors more quickly, but can't be forced to do so in a controlled manner.
You aren't reading. A company with 25 computer isn't a large company, they probably don't need a full time person to handle those things. If the router shits itself at 2:am you reset it in the morning when anyone might use it. You probably already outsource your mail and web service so no great loss. If that fails, you call the contract people I mentioned (or more likely just call the cable company, you probably just have Comcast business service with a router built into the modem). Your server backups likely fit on an external hard drive or smallish NAS device. Again, an IT servicing company can likely handle that for you as part of a package much cheaper than a full time employee.
A 250 computer business is large enough that they probably have a small IT department.. I didn't say you could get rid of them, just that you probably needed one or two fewer of them.
As to the reliable and sustainability of the cloud... I rather specifically say that I don't particularly trust this service, just that cost isn't the major factor in why you wouldn't choose it. You probably could save money using it... until it blew up.
Not that I think this is a great idea or anything, but you're looking at it all wrong. This is an enterprise thing, not a home user thing. For one PC, owned and operated by a knowledgeable user, it's clearly inappropriate. Assuming it works however, it's a much better idea at scale:
For 25 PCs it may save you the cost of a full time systems person. You'll still need to contract people for problems or projects, but saving a full time employee is a big deal for a business that sized. For $3500 a year, not a bad deal.
For 250 PCs it could save you one or two member of the IT staff. For $35000 a year, not a bad deal.
For a bigger company, probably the cost is lost in the noise, but they could potentially see a savings too.
Again, I'm sure as Hell not going to be the first one to run out and sign up. For one thing I can manage my own systems, for another I don't trust Microsoft to release something that actually works first time out. None the less, cost is not the reason that this is a potentially bad idea. You have a strong tendency to look at everything from the point of view of "This costs more than I would spend" rather than looking at the big picture. People have different amounts of money they are willing to spend for different things, and businesses have a completely different cost structure than households. Once a business gets larger than "I can do this all myself", head count becomes one of the biggest if not *the* biggest factor in expenses.
I believe the person above you is correct, MS is just taking the normal 30% listing fee. A more interesting question is: You do everything above and then think "This is huge" and try to port the app Android and/or iPhone... You're fired? In theory MS can't claim to own the work, because they already waived their claim to the original work, and this is just a "copy" (it's much more of course, but the essential algorithms, models, etc are all the same). It'd be interesting to see how they word the contract to prevent this, if they do.
Again, the "things Apple forbids" which are often hinted at but rarely expressed. To my knowledge there are three things that either Apple or AT&T forbid you do on the iPhone:
1) Tether: I covered this. I don't personally consider it a great loss. If you need it, the iPhone isn't for you, but the lack is hardly killing puppies or anything.
2) Install apps other than the tens of thousands on the App Store: This has yet to be a problem for me. I've yet to look for an app to do something I needed or wanted and been unable to find one on the app store. I'm not saying it will never be a problem, but it hasn't been yet. I have SSH, VNC, a scientific calculator, a bar tending database, a jogging routing and logging system, turn by turn GPS, tour guides for cities I've visited... That's not even half of my apps and I don't have even a fraction of the available apps.
3) Video chats outside of wifi areas: Not really an issue in my mind.
I simply don't see the big evil here. I don't see what secret awesome things people are doing on their MeeGo phones that I can't do. I used to jailbreak my iPhone, these days I can't even see the point.
Announce that. Tomorrow it'll be on Slashdot. The third comment in will be from the guy that figured out how to bypass your ads. On principle mind you, not becasue you had that many or they were really burdensome. You presented him challenge, you dared to advertise to him. So he figured out how to get around it, and announced the method to 10 million of his closest friends. He also wants you to know that you show is terrible, with a complete lack of real understanding of science, or character, or both... Not that it'll stop him watching every episode (without ads).
A nice to have, but not something I miss. I stopped carrying my laptop with me becasue I can do almost everything I need to on my phone.
Out-of-the-box root access
I see this offered as something iOS and many Android phones lack, but really why do I per se want it? Root access is a tool, not a feature in an of itself. If I can do sufficient customization and installation without it to make me happy, it's a tool I don't need. All root access gives me intrinsically is the ability to look at a # prompt instead of a $ prompt. Otherwise it's just a method for doing other things, many of which I can do without it. So far the limitation hasn't proven a problem. If it does I'll reevaluate.
A mature, true-to-form Linux stack
Instead it has a "mature, true-to-form" iOs stack... What's the point in this one? I like Linux. I like MacOS. I can even tolerate Windows if it does what I need it too.
OS upgrades that dont obliterate your personal data
Never had this happen. Not saying it can't, anything can bug out and do damage, but I haven't ever had it happen. Since I've been using iPhone I've upgraded the OS at least a dozen times. I've changed computers twice (once going from a Mac to a PC). I've changed phones once (from a first gen to a 3GS). I've never lost data.
Integrated QWERTY keyboard
I don't really like them. I like my virtual keyboard. You don't, I get it, but this is a purely aesthetic choice. I could just as easily make a list of thing I like about the iPhone and say "No clumsy physical keyboard" and you could just as easily disagree.
Removable / expandable internal batteries
When I expect to need more than a battery worth of charge I carry a speed charger. It's not really any bigger or more clumsy than carrying a second battery. This is hardly a major issue.
A standard USB connector
Yeah, becasue there's not like a billion devices with iDevice connectors out there. I'm constantly in the store thinking how sad it is that I can't find accessories for my phone.
Non-proprietary screws
Again, I often think about how annoying it is that I can't take apart my expensive millimeters tolerance electronic device and poke around the insides.
Other than the tethering thing you don't actually list anything that the phone won't do. Just parts of the design you don't like (keyboard, battery, screws), things you want becasue they make you feel good (root access, Linux), or random crap that doesn't makes sense (data loss).
Elop came into to an already sinking ship. You can dislike his solution, but blaming him for the problem is just dumb. At this point I think the solutions boiled down to:
1)Use Android 2) Use WP7
And Microsoft offered to pay them to use option 2. Had management buttoned down and organized things years ago Meego might still be a valid option, but at some point it just became throwing good money after bad.
Is HP Licensing WebOS? I go the impression they wanted it internally so they could make iPhonesqe, "we control the software and the hardware" devices. At the very least I'd expect HP to charge licensing fees for WebOS; as opposed to MS who were willing to go the other way and pay Nokia, or Android which would have been free.
I don't per se think it's "falling for the PR" so much as natural evolution of expectations as you learn what you want, what you need, and what you like or dislike. When I bought my Palm Treo I had an image of a device that "worked the way I liked". It was a phone and it could surf the web and check my e-mail. That was what I wanted when I bought it, and for three years it gave good service. It even, in the end, did some unexpected things like running a (really awful) SSH client and playing a few games that I enjoyed for short amounts of time. When the time came to replace it (I used it till it pretty much stopped functioning) I had new expectations.
I wanted something that could surf the web and check my e-mail *better* than my old Palm did. I'd honestly not really liked or used the applications I'd downloaded for it much, so that didn't seem nearly as important. I got a first generation iPhone. The ability to realistically display full web pages as they were meant to be displayed and zoom in and out easily was a huge improvement, and e-mail was also nicer. On top of that it had a pretty decent media player and I didn't need an MP3 player anymore (Somehow I never liked the way the RealPlayer app for PalmOS was setup, and the stupid thing needed an adapter for standard headphones). I didn't really miss the application that I'd never much liked anyway. Then the app store came out. The apps I could get on it were generally much nicer than most of what I had on my Palm. Around the same time, my wife bought a portable GPS for her car, and I got to thinking that would be a nice addition to a portable device.
When I went to replace the first gen, I had new expectations. Apps and good Internet tools were now a given in my mind, but I also wanted a GPS. Each time I've replaced my current device, the new device has worked "as I like it", but as time goes on my "likes" have changed. There's nothing hugely compelling for me in the iPhone4, my 3GS works "as I like it". On the other hand, if I *had* an iPhone4 I bet I'd use Facetime, and the fancy new screen *does* look pretty good. My wants are evolving again. By the time iPhone5 is out the combination of the new features from the 4 and whatever they add for 5 (G4 wireless?) will probably have evolved them enough that I'll want the new one.
That's one reason I like the Apple ecosystem for phones. They keep adding stuff, but they don't really force you upgrade to every new model. Unless you're a real "Must have the new shiny!" type of person every other iteration is sufficient to keep you mostly up to date.
I think the point trying to be made here is that for most of the purposes you're quoting, a phone would be a more practical size than a tablet. Tablets are rather large and bulky, my phone is small and light, and none of the uses you point out are terribly computationally intensive. While tablet are *more* portable than laptops and even netbooks, they are not as portable as phones. My vision of uses for tablet is more along the lines of: I'm flying and want to read on something book sized, I'm sitting at the pub and want to check something on Wikipedia, I'm sitting at home and want to watch a different movie than my wife or read a book, I want to video conference with someone from a hotel room... For those purposes, most of the "extras" (GPS, rear facing camera, 3G) are probably superfluous (3G might be useful if I'm in one of the three restaurants left in the country without wifi). I see a tablet as a replacement for my laptop rather than my smartphone.
Now certainly I'm not going to argue that there are no possible uses for those extras, or that no tablet should ever contain them. Certainly they make for good options. I could see, say, a GPS enabled inventory app for use in large ports. Port authority people are typically carrying clipboards, so a tablet sized device would be about perfect for them. if you'd rather carry a tablet than a phone, I certainly see not reason why they shouldn't offer options that allow you to do so. In general though, for most consumers, I think a cheaper model without all the "extras" would do better.
I think this was actually more informative than the article. Let alone the summary. "People in Egypt are not naming their babies "Google" therefore it is dying." ?!?
Whatever next? Microsoft sucks? Nah. They know who pays them bar bills.
And man can Microsoft pay a bar bill. Went to Supercomputing06 in Tampa. Microsoft rented an entire (small, but upscale) *mall* for their show party. Everything was free: live music all night, open bar (and not just well stuff, Bombay Sapphire and tonic? Sure!)... It was awesome. Of course, I still didn't want to buy their cluster computing OS, but it was a Hell of a party.
I'm not an expert on the GPL, but according to people who are (or claim to be) the license puts obligations on distributors. Indeed, this story from Slashdot not to long ago talks about an Australian ISP being liable for providing the GPL and source code on an OEM device that they resell. The prevailing decision seemed to be that since Telstra was unaware of the FOSS software, it wasn't a blatant violation of the GPL, but since they now were aware they needed to comply. Apparently even Telstra agreed since they gave up without a fight and started providing the required information.
I think a strong argument can be made that the app stores are not distributors, in addition to being retailers. There's no middle man here, the app store is the primary distribution method for the app. It's not like they're just selling a DVD, or a product that comes preinstalled with a piece of software. There's just he developer and the distributor. Since I believe that like iPhones, WP7 phones can *only* install app store apps, there is no other possible means for distribution.
I can think of one thing that I really want a tablet for: E-reading. I could get an e-reader of course, but they're limited devices and I can't help feeling that an iPad or Xoom would probably be a nice compromise between "I can only use this to read books" and "This is basically a small version of my desktop". On the other hand, I have my phone and an e-reader is loads cheaper than a tablet. So I'm basically on the fence and haven't bought anything yet. If something with the rough power and usability of the iPad was $350-400 (Whether it actually was an iPad or an Android of approximately the same power level) I'd probably buy one. $100-150 dollars cheaper would put it close enough to a pure e-reader to make it a more obvious "bang for the buck" choice.
That's probably part of it as well. I personally read the "and similar licenses" part of the rules as implicitly banning earlier GPL licenses. I'd be curious to see if they accepted a GPL v2 app.
I don't think it's a large technical overhead. More a monitoring overhead as the two replies previously to state. They could easily host the data, hell they probably host the GPL *somewhere* already, in our interconnected world I can't believe they don't use and GPLed software anywhere. They could also require devs to host the source code so there'd be no no actual storage or bandwidth hit on them at all. The problem would be making sure that people are following the rules. They'd be responsible for monitoring compliance. Easy to do for a couple apps, but progressively harder as more come in. The question then becomes "is it worth the trouble". They won't make anything off FOSS apps, which are nearly always free in the monetary sense as well as the speech sense. What's the value for them is taking the time and trouble to make sure they don't get sued? It's a lot easier to just make a rule that says "no".
Again, I'm necessarily saying I agree with them here, but I can see their thought process and understand why they'd do it this way.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see what's "bad" about this. It's inconvenient, I'll grant you, it would be nice if the iTunes store acted as a backup for all my purchased music, but the idea makes sense when you consider the former paradigm. If you bought a CD in the past and lost, broke or damaged it, you went and bought a new CD. Was one of the ways the music companies kept making money on old stuff. This simply extended that concept to non-physical music purchases. If you "lose" them, you have to rebuy them. Since Apple's music has been DRM free for years and it's extremely trivial to backup the music, the risk of loss actually seems much lower to me that the risk of loss for a physical CD.
I'll be happy if they change this, it will be nice to know that I have yet another layer of backup in addition to the copies on my phone, computer, laptop, and backup disk, but realistically I'm not exactly worried as things are. Anything that wipes out every copy I have of most of my music has probably destroyed a lot more valuable things as well (not to mention the music I still do have on CD).
I dunno if it's changed, but it used to be possible to completely wipe a Linux system this way. Everything important: the kernel, the SATA drivers, and the rm command, are loaded into memory so even as you delete the copies on disk they continue to merrily do what you told them too. New commands quickly cease to function, and this can be a clue that you've done something wrong. As I recall the time I accidentally did this it was on a system without X, so possibly X stuff would start to fail and prevent it from completing (i.e. if your terminal committed suicide it might kill your rm command too).
From the sounds of things you're unlikely to able to get either the copy or the checksum done before it's problem. At least not on a drive with any appreciable amount of data. You have a matter of a few minutes before the drive image is altering itself.
It's not a matter of speed, the checksum is done immediately so there's a baseline for comparison. You checksum the drive (The whole drive image, garbage and all), then make a complete copy of the drive image. Assuming the checksum of the copy matches the original, you store the original and never touch it again (unless there's a problem). Now you can make copies of the copy and do all the analysis you want. You've go the original sealed, the clean copy, and copies that you can hack around on. If you accidentally screw one of those copies up, you make a new one from the "clean" copy. As long as the evidence you gather comes from a copy with a checksum that matches the original you can "prove" that is was on an original unmodified piece of evidence.
If the defendant (or litigant, I've never been involved in this for a criminal case, but I have some very limited experience working with it for a civil case) claims you changed something or planted evidence you can go step by step: Here's the record where the evidence guy bagged your drive from your computer, and here's a witness that he followed procedure. Here's where the lab tech broke the seal on the evidence bag and here's the witness that *he* followed procedure. Here's the checksum he got from your drive image, and here's the checksum taken from the image which matches. Cops and lawyers are really serious about chain of evidence, anywhere you can provide near perfect proof that you did what you said you did, they are thrilled.
With Civil cases it's even easier, since the litigant or their lawyer can watch you remove the drive and get the checksum if they want. Removes the possibility that the cop, evidence guys and tech are in cahoots to frame you. The NCIS bit where Abby pulls the original drive out of evidence is pretty much bullshit.
I'm just saying how they do it now. It presents an extremely easy and traceable method for maintaining chain of custody. If it turns out to no longer be reliable, they'll have to come up with something else. That's all I'm saying, and as far as I can see that's all the article is saying.
Well to be fair, that's only part of the problem. Say you're a stupid criminal. You store all your records of your criminal acts on your computer which happens to have an SSD drive. You've never deleted your records of your criminal acts, but just before the police busted through the door you were deleting some old pictures of your cat, Fluffy. So in order to maintain evidence chain of custody, the police immediately turn off you computer and turn it over to a tech. The tech's first two actions should always be the same. He should plug your drive into a a special read only device that will first do an MD5sum or other fingerprint of the whole contents of the drive, and then do a bit for bit copy of the drive.
The idea here is that the police can prove that nothing was done to alter the data present at the time of seizure. Power was removed from the system and the drive was immediately fingerprinted and copied. Assuming the fingerprints match, there should be no question that the copy on which the actual analysis is done is identical to the original drive. The problem is that you were deleting pictures of Fluffy when the Police came in. It's highly likely that as the drive does its self cleaning routine the fingerprint of the data will change. They fingerprint, get a value, but while they're copying the drive self cleans the bits associated with your cat pics. Bam, the copy has a different fingerprint. Now there's reasonable doubt about the usefulness of the evidence you stupidly left unencrypted in your desktop folder.
Now I'm not saying this is a problem, and that they need to modify the design of SSDs. I didn't get the impression that article said that either. What they are saying is "Hey, we need to come up with another way to do this, becasue what we've been doing will no longer stand up in court."
It's not hard really. The drives autoclean themselves. So when you delete the inode reference to a given data file, it will be completely much more quickly that on a normal magnetic drive (which won't reclaim the space till it's needed). On the other hand it won't respond to commands that would FORCE a magnetic drive to completely wipe the file.
So if you're in your secret lab and you hear that the evil enemy is an hour away, you just type "rm /*" and wander off to escape. By the time they get there all your data will be completely wiped. On the other hand if they are breaking down the door to your secret lab and you have only seconds left you can't type "shred /home/joeari/secretfile" and expect it to be perma-deleted like you could with a magnetic drive.
They recover deleted sectors more quickly, but can't be forced to do so in a controlled manner.
You aren't reading. A company with 25 computer isn't a large company, they probably don't need a full time person to handle those things. If the router shits itself at 2:am you reset it in the morning when anyone might use it. You probably already outsource your mail and web service so no great loss. If that fails, you call the contract people I mentioned (or more likely just call the cable company, you probably just have Comcast business service with a router built into the modem). Your server backups likely fit on an external hard drive or smallish NAS device. Again, an IT servicing company can likely handle that for you as part of a package much cheaper than a full time employee.
A 250 computer business is large enough that they probably have a small IT department.. I didn't say you could get rid of them, just that you probably needed one or two fewer of them.
As to the reliable and sustainability of the cloud... I rather specifically say that I don't particularly trust this service, just that cost isn't the major factor in why you wouldn't choose it. You probably could save money using it... until it blew up.
Not that I think this is a great idea or anything, but you're looking at it all wrong. This is an enterprise thing, not a home user thing. For one PC, owned and operated by a knowledgeable user, it's clearly inappropriate. Assuming it works however, it's a much better idea at scale:
For 25 PCs it may save you the cost of a full time systems person. You'll still need to contract people for problems or projects, but saving a full time employee is a big deal for a business that sized. For $3500 a year, not a bad deal.
For 250 PCs it could save you one or two member of the IT staff. For $35000 a year, not a bad deal.
For a bigger company, probably the cost is lost in the noise, but they could potentially see a savings too.
Again, I'm sure as Hell not going to be the first one to run out and sign up. For one thing I can manage my own systems, for another I don't trust Microsoft to release something that actually works first time out. None the less, cost is not the reason that this is a potentially bad idea. You have a strong tendency to look at everything from the point of view of "This costs more than I would spend" rather than looking at the big picture. People have different amounts of money they are willing to spend for different things, and businesses have a completely different cost structure than households. Once a business gets larger than "I can do this all myself", head count becomes one of the biggest if not *the* biggest factor in expenses.
I believe the person above you is correct, MS is just taking the normal 30% listing fee. A more interesting question is: You do everything above and then think "This is huge" and try to port the app Android and/or iPhone... You're fired? In theory MS can't claim to own the work, because they already waived their claim to the original work, and this is just a "copy" (it's much more of course, but the essential algorithms, models, etc are all the same). It'd be interesting to see how they word the contract to prevent this, if they do.
Again, the "things Apple forbids" which are often hinted at but rarely expressed. To my knowledge there are three things that either Apple or AT&T forbid you do on the iPhone:
1) Tether: I covered this. I don't personally consider it a great loss. If you need it, the iPhone isn't for you, but the lack is hardly killing puppies or anything.
2) Install apps other than the tens of thousands on the App Store: This has yet to be a problem for me. I've yet to look for an app to do something I needed or wanted and been unable to find one on the app store. I'm not saying it will never be a problem, but it hasn't been yet. I have SSH, VNC, a scientific calculator, a bar tending database, a jogging routing and logging system, turn by turn GPS, tour guides for cities I've visited... That's not even half of my apps and I don't have even a fraction of the available apps.
3) Video chats outside of wifi areas: Not really an issue in my mind.
I simply don't see the big evil here. I don't see what secret awesome things people are doing on their MeeGo phones that I can't do. I used to jailbreak my iPhone, these days I can't even see the point.
Announce that. Tomorrow it'll be on Slashdot. The third comment in will be from the guy that figured out how to bypass your ads. On principle mind you, not becasue you had that many or they were really burdensome. You presented him challenge, you dared to advertise to him. So he figured out how to get around it, and announced the method to 10 million of his closest friends. He also wants you to know that you show is terrible, with a complete lack of real understanding of science, or character, or both... Not that it'll stop him watching every episode (without ads).
Non-carrier dependent tethering
A nice to have, but not something I miss. I stopped carrying my laptop with me becasue I can do almost everything I need to on my phone.
Out-of-the-box root access
I see this offered as something iOS and many Android phones lack, but really why do I per se want it? Root access is a tool, not a feature in an of itself. If I can do sufficient customization and installation without it to make me happy, it's a tool I don't need. All root access gives me intrinsically is the ability to look at a # prompt instead of a $ prompt. Otherwise it's just a method for doing other things, many of which I can do without it. So far the limitation hasn't proven a problem. If it does I'll reevaluate.
A mature, true-to-form Linux stack
Instead it has a "mature, true-to-form" iOs stack... What's the point in this one? I like Linux. I like MacOS. I can even tolerate Windows if it does what I need it too.
OS upgrades that dont obliterate your personal data
Never had this happen. Not saying it can't, anything can bug out and do damage, but I haven't ever had it happen. Since I've been using iPhone I've upgraded the OS at least a dozen times. I've changed computers twice (once going from a Mac to a PC). I've changed phones once (from a first gen to a 3GS). I've never lost data.
Integrated QWERTY keyboard
I don't really like them. I like my virtual keyboard. You don't, I get it, but this is a purely aesthetic choice. I could just as easily make a list of thing I like about the iPhone and say "No clumsy physical keyboard" and you could just as easily disagree.
Removable / expandable internal batteries
When I expect to need more than a battery worth of charge I carry a speed charger. It's not really any bigger or more clumsy than carrying a second battery. This is hardly a major issue.
A standard USB connector
Yeah, becasue there's not like a billion devices with iDevice connectors out there. I'm constantly in the store thinking how sad it is that I can't find accessories for my phone.
Non-proprietary screws
Again, I often think about how annoying it is that I can't take apart my expensive millimeters tolerance electronic device and poke around the insides.
Other than the tethering thing you don't actually list anything that the phone won't do. Just parts of the design you don't like (keyboard, battery, screws), things you want becasue they make you feel good (root access, Linux), or random crap that doesn't makes sense (data loss).
Elop came into to an already sinking ship. You can dislike his solution, but blaming him for the problem is just dumb. At this point I think the solutions boiled down to:
1)Use Android
2) Use WP7
And Microsoft offered to pay them to use option 2. Had management buttoned down and organized things years ago Meego might still be a valid option, but at some point it just became throwing good money after bad.
Make that one option becasue option one was clearly not working. That's what put them in this position to begin with.
Is HP Licensing WebOS? I go the impression they wanted it internally so they could make iPhonesqe, "we control the software and the hardware" devices. At the very least I'd expect HP to charge licensing fees for WebOS; as opposed to MS who were willing to go the other way and pay Nokia, or Android which would have been free.
I don't per se think it's "falling for the PR" so much as natural evolution of expectations as you learn what you want, what you need, and what you like or dislike. When I bought my Palm Treo I had an image of a device that "worked the way I liked". It was a phone and it could surf the web and check my e-mail. That was what I wanted when I bought it, and for three years it gave good service. It even, in the end, did some unexpected things like running a (really awful) SSH client and playing a few games that I enjoyed for short amounts of time. When the time came to replace it (I used it till it pretty much stopped functioning) I had new expectations.
I wanted something that could surf the web and check my e-mail *better* than my old Palm did. I'd honestly not really liked or used the applications I'd downloaded for it much, so that didn't seem nearly as important. I got a first generation iPhone. The ability to realistically display full web pages as they were meant to be displayed and zoom in and out easily was a huge improvement, and e-mail was also nicer. On top of that it had a pretty decent media player and I didn't need an MP3 player anymore (Somehow I never liked the way the RealPlayer app for PalmOS was setup, and the stupid thing needed an adapter for standard headphones). I didn't really miss the application that I'd never much liked anyway. Then the app store came out. The apps I could get on it were generally much nicer than most of what I had on my Palm. Around the same time, my wife bought a portable GPS for her car, and I got to thinking that would be a nice addition to a portable device.
When I went to replace the first gen, I had new expectations. Apps and good Internet tools were now a given in my mind, but I also wanted a GPS. Each time I've replaced my current device, the new device has worked "as I like it", but as time goes on my "likes" have changed. There's nothing hugely compelling for me in the iPhone4, my 3GS works "as I like it". On the other hand, if I *had* an iPhone4 I bet I'd use Facetime, and the fancy new screen *does* look pretty good. My wants are evolving again. By the time iPhone5 is out the combination of the new features from the 4 and whatever they add for 5 (G4 wireless?) will probably have evolved them enough that I'll want the new one.
That's one reason I like the Apple ecosystem for phones. They keep adding stuff, but they don't really force you upgrade to every new model. Unless you're a real "Must have the new shiny!" type of person every other iteration is sufficient to keep you mostly up to date.
I think the point trying to be made here is that for most of the purposes you're quoting, a phone would be a more practical size than a tablet. Tablets are rather large and bulky, my phone is small and light, and none of the uses you point out are terribly computationally intensive. While tablet are *more* portable than laptops and even netbooks, they are not as portable as phones. My vision of uses for tablet is more along the lines of: I'm flying and want to read on something book sized, I'm sitting at the pub and want to check something on Wikipedia, I'm sitting at home and want to watch a different movie than my wife or read a book, I want to video conference with someone from a hotel room... For those purposes, most of the "extras" (GPS, rear facing camera, 3G) are probably superfluous (3G might be useful if I'm in one of the three restaurants left in the country without wifi). I see a tablet as a replacement for my laptop rather than my smartphone.
Now certainly I'm not going to argue that there are no possible uses for those extras, or that no tablet should ever contain them. Certainly they make for good options. I could see, say, a GPS enabled inventory app for use in large ports. Port authority people are typically carrying clipboards, so a tablet sized device would be about perfect for them. if you'd rather carry a tablet than a phone, I certainly see not reason why they shouldn't offer options that allow you to do so. In general though, for most consumers, I think a cheaper model without all the "extras" would do better.
I think this was actually more informative than the article. Let alone the summary. "People in Egypt are not naming their babies "Google" therefore it is dying." ?!?
Whatever next? Microsoft sucks? Nah. They know who pays them bar bills.
And man can Microsoft pay a bar bill. Went to Supercomputing06 in Tampa. Microsoft rented an entire (small, but upscale) *mall* for their show party. Everything was free: live music all night, open bar (and not just well stuff, Bombay Sapphire and tonic? Sure!)... It was awesome. Of course, I still didn't want to buy their cluster computing OS, but it was a Hell of a party.
I'm not an expert on the GPL, but according to people who are (or claim to be) the license puts obligations on distributors. Indeed, this story from Slashdot not to long ago talks about an Australian ISP being liable for providing the GPL and source code on an OEM device that they resell. The prevailing decision seemed to be that since Telstra was unaware of the FOSS software, it wasn't a blatant violation of the GPL, but since they now were aware they needed to comply. Apparently even Telstra agreed since they gave up without a fight and started providing the required information.
I think a strong argument can be made that the app stores are not distributors, in addition to being retailers. There's no middle man here, the app store is the primary distribution method for the app. It's not like they're just selling a DVD, or a product that comes preinstalled with a piece of software. There's just he developer and the distributor. Since I believe that like iPhones, WP7 phones can *only* install app store apps, there is no other possible means for distribution.
I can think of one thing that I really want a tablet for: E-reading. I could get an e-reader of course, but they're limited devices and I can't help feeling that an iPad or Xoom would probably be a nice compromise between "I can only use this to read books" and "This is basically a small version of my desktop". On the other hand, I have my phone and an e-reader is loads cheaper than a tablet. So I'm basically on the fence and haven't bought anything yet. If something with the rough power and usability of the iPad was $350-400 (Whether it actually was an iPad or an Android of approximately the same power level) I'd probably buy one. $100-150 dollars cheaper would put it close enough to a pure e-reader to make it a more obvious "bang for the buck" choice.
That's probably part of it as well. I personally read the "and similar licenses" part of the rules as implicitly banning earlier GPL licenses. I'd be curious to see if they accepted a GPL v2 app.
I don't think it's a large technical overhead. More a monitoring overhead as the two replies previously to state. They could easily host the data, hell they probably host the GPL *somewhere* already, in our interconnected world I can't believe they don't use and GPLed software anywhere. They could also require devs to host the source code so there'd be no no actual storage or bandwidth hit on them at all. The problem would be making sure that people are following the rules. They'd be responsible for monitoring compliance. Easy to do for a couple apps, but progressively harder as more come in. The question then becomes "is it worth the trouble". They won't make anything off FOSS apps, which are nearly always free in the monetary sense as well as the speech sense. What's the value for them is taking the time and trouble to make sure they don't get sued? It's a lot easier to just make a rule that says "no".
Again, I'm necessarily saying I agree with them here, but I can see their thought process and understand why they'd do it this way.