And there is precedent for this specific case. Ford was fined millions for selling Econoline vans that disabled emissions controls at highway speeds, leading to excessive nitrogen oxide emissions. If anything this seems a more egregious violation. See: http://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-06/documents/defeat.pdf
One platform might draw developers. The other has a base of twenty years worth of applications for the leading desktop platform. I think it's safe to say the latter has the advantage here.
Battery life remains to be seen. Apple claims ten hours, which is not "much better" than the nine hours that Microsoft claims. But more importantly, you're comparing a brand new product with a brand new processor (and presumably newer display and battery technology) with a fifteen month old product with a completely different processor architecture.
Performance claims are hard to evaluate on an unreleased product, but if we take the claim of being 70% faster than the A8X at face value, and look at the Geekbench scores of 1812 and 4477 that Engadget got for single and multi-threader performance respectively, that would suggest the A9X would get in the neighborhood of 3080 and 7610. That/is/ faster than the i5 version of the Surface Pro 3 (~2700 and ~ 5300) but the Surface 4 is expected to launch soon using the new Skylake processors.
Ultimately, I still think the Apple MacBook is still a more obvious competitor to the Surface Pro than the iPad Pro. The devices may be more physically similar, it's still a desktop platform scaling down to a mobile device versus a mobile platform trying to scale up to desktop tasks. Aside from the application base, there are aspects of the platform itself; e.g. fully windowed multi-tasking versus the slide-over split screen mode they added to iOS 9.
(And of course you can install Linux or whatever else you want on a Microsoft Surface, if you're really that worried about their nefarious fart-tracking. With the Apple product, on the other hand, you're stuck with what they ship, and their record of sending data "back to the mothership" is hardly sterling either. Remember when iOS was caught sending location data back to Apple? Or the revelation that Siri retains search data for two years? Or how Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found that a third of the apps they tested perform undisclosed sharing of health data (which in recent releases can include details like sexual activity and ovulation) to third parties?)
Agreed. I bought one to use temporarily until I fixed my Moto G. I haven't bothered fixing the Moto G yet, and I'm unlikely to use it as a daily driver again.
That's ridiculous. A manufacturer paying a consumer for a product they buy willfully and enjoy using more than a competitor's product that cost almost four times more?
You base your assumption on what? The BOM for this phone is not substantially different than what was discussed in TFA. The Qualcomm 400 is possibly a bit more expensive (estimated wholesale costs are in the $10-15) range, but that is offset by having half the memory and only one camera.
Microsoft certainly isn't making a bundle on these things, but I seriously doubt it costs "significantly more" than $50 to manufacture.
This is an off-contract phone that I'm using with a $30/mo plan. Not much room for a hardware subsidy.
Entirely possible there is some subsidy, but given that the components in this phone are largely similar to the ones in TFA, I would be surprised if it was much. This is very firmly a budget handset.
I'm actually using a $50 smart phone right now. A Microsoft Lumia 635 that I picked up on Amazon for $49.99 off-contract. Specs are about right - 4.5" 854x480 screen, 512MB ram, 8GB storage, no front camera, 5MP rear camera. It does have a quad-core Snapdragon instead of a Mediatek or Allwinner, but clocked at 1.2GHz, and actually does have an LTE radio and Gorilla glass (the two reasons I bought this instead of the 535, which is newer and has 1GB of RAM).
Know what? It's a perfectly serviceable phone. I bought it as a spare to use while I get the screen on my Moto G replaced, and in a lot of ways I actually like it better. Windows Phone actually runs surprisingly well on modest hardware.
"a landscape which has been little changed since the 1990s."
What? Did the author miss the birth and ascent of C# and subsequent waning popularity of C++? A little something called Go, which just broke into the top 20 languages in the RedMonk index. The crawl from obscurity of Objective C after the release of MacOS X, and later iOS? The evolution of Javascript from a way to make rollover buttons to an application and backend platform? The collapse of perl and the rise of Python and Perl? The emergence of functional languages like Scala, Erlang and Haskell as viable platforms? The growth of R for statistical analysis? Lua for extension? New data query languages like SPARQL, Gremlin and CQL?
As usual, Apple is not the pioneer here. They are treading a path broken by many others.
I found the Palm solution for this elegant enough - provide gestures for both behaviours. You could either flick a "card" away (swipe up) to close it or catapult it (drag down and release) to kill the app.
Also, server is not their cash cow. Between desktop Windows, consumer hardware (including the Surface, mice, keyboards, etc) and business software they pull in about $44B. Their server products, including Azure, MS SQL, consulting services, and development tools only bring in about $20B. Entertainment and mobile bring in another $10B.
Microsoft benefits from having a broad, comprehensive product line, whether the divisions themselves are necessarily profitable. Just like Apple, Google, and Amazon, they benefit from getting people to buy into their ecosystem.
They have struggled in recent years, not just because Apple's resurgence has eroded their dominance in the PC market, but because the market has shifted away from the PC model. More people are using tablets or even phones as their primary device, which means more people using iOS, Android or Amazon devices, and their associated app, content and services ecosystems.
Their response seems to be increased openness (see: open sourced.NET releases, patent pledges), interoperability (see: JUniversal, AllJoyn contributions), convergence (see: Windows 10, from mobile to server), and free stuff (see: Windows for small devices, hobbyist platforms; Visual Studio Community Edition etc). I find it hard to fault that.
Lumia ring a bell? Windows 10 is their convergence release, with mobile being just one more edition. Plenty of phones with far less horsepower are running Windows. Plenty of tablets with similar horsepower are running Windows.
I picked up a couple of Stream 7's, which also sport only 1GB of memory, a modest low power processor and a full copy of Windows - as stocking stuffers this year. They work fine for what they are. Especially since I paid $74 for one and $49 for the other, thanks to in-store "shopping events".
This strikes me more about the hobbyist community and pervasive computer than the "internet of things". This board is not suitable for those applications, regardless of what platform it is running. But this has potential for more demanding embedded applications, internet kiosks, network terminals, or even starter computers for kids (which is what I'm considering getting a Pi 2 for).
I probably won't land on Windows 10 as the final operating system; I haven't used Windows as a desktop in about twenty years now. But I'll certainly play with it.
But as many free software advocates point out, copying software IS as close to free as it gets. There is no opportunity cost to Microsoft, since the chance that people would otherwise pay for a copy of Windows to run on a Pi is essentially nil. There is little opportunity cost to the user, since they would otherwise be installing and configuring an operating system anyway. Even if they ultimately choose not to keep it, the time and effort involved is fairly negligible and there is arguably value in the experience. (At least to that individual, since they freely chose to engage in it.)
Really? If an afternoon trying out a new platform represents a significant investment to you, your time is far more valuable than mine. Most people I know spend more time dicking around with the lastest MMORG on a regular basis.
As for programming, Windows remains a highly lucrative development platform, regardless of your personal opinion. Even in the mobile space, targeting a platform without a saturated ecosystem may ultimately yield better results. Easier for an app to stand out if it is one of a dozen instead of one of a thousand.
You assume that maintaining another ARM port takes an appreciable number of developer hours, that code quality isn't generally improved by maintaining ports on disparate architectures, that community goodwill has no value, that community testing and input has no value, that this is an "unsuitable platform" in the first place (the Pi 2 is more powerful than a lot of phones they run on, for example), that it won't net any new customers from people who are curious to see how Windows 10 is, etc.
As initiatives go, this is doubtless cheap and has plenty of positive externalities. And from a user perspective, trying it out is a throwaway afternoon at worst.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is. See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/7522.
And there is precedent for this specific case. Ford was fined millions for selling Econoline vans that disabled emissions controls at highway speeds, leading to excessive nitrogen oxide emissions. If anything this seems a more egregious violation. See: http://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-06/documents/defeat.pdf
Microsoft had the most popular version of UNIX on the market once. Xenix ran on a variety of platforms, even the Apple Lisa.
One platform might draw developers. The other has a base of twenty years worth of applications for the leading desktop platform. I think it's safe to say the latter has the advantage here.
Battery life remains to be seen. Apple claims ten hours, which is not "much better" than the nine hours that Microsoft claims. But more importantly, you're comparing a brand new product with a brand new processor (and presumably newer display and battery technology) with a fifteen month old product with a completely different processor architecture.
Performance claims are hard to evaluate on an unreleased product, but if we take the claim of being 70% faster than the A8X at face value, and look at the Geekbench scores of 1812 and 4477 that Engadget got for single and multi-threader performance respectively, that would suggest the A9X would get in the neighborhood of 3080 and 7610. That /is/ faster than the i5 version of the Surface Pro 3 (~2700 and ~ 5300) but the Surface 4 is expected to launch soon using the new Skylake processors.
Ultimately, I still think the Apple MacBook is still a more obvious competitor to the Surface Pro than the iPad Pro. The devices may be more physically similar, it's still a desktop platform scaling down to a mobile device versus a mobile platform trying to scale up to desktop tasks. Aside from the application base, there are aspects of the platform itself; e.g. fully windowed multi-tasking versus the slide-over split screen mode they added to iOS 9.
(And of course you can install Linux or whatever else you want on a Microsoft Surface, if you're really that worried about their nefarious fart-tracking. With the Apple product, on the other hand, you're stuck with what they ship, and their record of sending data "back to the mothership" is hardly sterling either. Remember when iOS was caught sending location data back to Apple? Or the revelation that Siri retains search data for two years? Or how Privacy Rights Clearinghouse found that a third of the apps they tested perform undisclosed sharing of health data (which in recent releases can include details like sexual activity and ovulation) to third parties?)
Nonsense. Unix was neither the first nor the last "real" operating system.
Agreed. I bought one to use temporarily until I fixed my Moto G. I haven't bothered fixing the Moto G yet, and I'm unlikely to use it as a daily driver again.
That's ridiculous. A manufacturer paying a consumer for a product they buy willfully and enjoy using more than a competitor's product that cost almost four times more?
Go away, troll.
You base your assumption on what? The BOM for this phone is not substantially different than what was discussed in TFA. The Qualcomm 400 is possibly a bit more expensive (estimated wholesale costs are in the $10-15) range, but that is offset by having half the memory and only one camera.
Microsoft certainly isn't making a bundle on these things, but I seriously doubt it costs "significantly more" than $50 to manufacture.
This is an off-contract phone that I'm using with a $30/mo plan. Not much room for a hardware subsidy.
Entirely possible there is some subsidy, but given that the components in this phone are largely similar to the ones in TFA, I would be surprised if it was much. This is very firmly a budget handset.
I'm actually using a $50 smart phone right now. A Microsoft Lumia 635 that I picked up on Amazon for $49.99 off-contract. Specs are about right - 4.5" 854x480 screen, 512MB ram, 8GB storage, no front camera, 5MP rear camera. It does have a quad-core Snapdragon instead of a Mediatek or Allwinner, but clocked at 1.2GHz, and actually does have an LTE radio and Gorilla glass (the two reasons I bought this instead of the 535, which is newer and has 1GB of RAM).
Know what? It's a perfectly serviceable phone. I bought it as a spare to use while I get the screen on my Moto G replaced, and in a lot of ways I actually like it better. Windows Phone actually runs surprisingly well on modest hardware.
Well, yes, annoyed is an alternative to bored.
You make a compelling argument. For what, I have no idea.
"a landscape which has been little changed since the 1990s."
What? Did the author miss the birth and ascent of C# and subsequent waning popularity of C++? A little something called Go, which just broke into the top 20 languages in the RedMonk index. The crawl from obscurity of Objective C after the release of MacOS X, and later iOS? The evolution of Javascript from a way to make rollover buttons to an application and backend platform? The collapse of perl and the rise of Python and Perl? The emergence of functional languages like Scala, Erlang and Haskell as viable platforms? The growth of R for statistical analysis? Lua for extension? New data query languages like SPARQL, Gremlin and CQL?
As usual, Apple is not the pioneer here. They are treading a path broken by many others.
I work in a code base of about 475k lines of java (not counting comments, annotations of black lines) with vim as my typical environment.
"The short version is that Minecraft is now bundling a standalone version of Java into their installation."
So dead we're distributing it as part of the product!
Yeah, we want a handful of incumbent players deliberately stymieing competition! That's awesome for consumers.
I'll take it. Want me to send you my address? :)
I found the Palm solution for this elegant enough - provide gestures for both behaviours. You could either flick a "card" away (swipe up) to close it or catapult it (drag down and release) to kill the app.
Singular they and their goes back hundreds of years, even though there have been periods where it was not the recommended or common generic pronoun.
Also, server is not their cash cow. Between desktop Windows, consumer hardware (including the Surface, mice, keyboards, etc) and business software they pull in about $44B. Their server products, including Azure, MS SQL, consulting services, and development tools only bring in about $20B. Entertainment and mobile bring in another $10B.
Microsoft benefits from having a broad, comprehensive product line, whether the divisions themselves are necessarily profitable. Just like Apple, Google, and Amazon, they benefit from getting people to buy into their ecosystem.
They have struggled in recent years, not just because Apple's resurgence has eroded their dominance in the PC market, but because the market has shifted away from the PC model. More people are using tablets or even phones as their primary device, which means more people using iOS, Android or Amazon devices, and their associated app, content and services ecosystems.
Their response seems to be increased openness (see: open sourced .NET releases, patent pledges), interoperability (see: JUniversal, AllJoyn contributions), convergence (see: Windows 10, from mobile to server), and free stuff (see: Windows for small devices, hobbyist platforms; Visual Studio Community Edition etc). I find it hard to fault that.
Lumia ring a bell? Windows 10 is their convergence release, with mobile being just one more edition. Plenty of phones with far less horsepower are running Windows. Plenty of tablets with similar horsepower are running Windows.
I picked up a couple of Stream 7's, which also sport only 1GB of memory, a modest low power processor and a full copy of Windows - as stocking stuffers this year. They work fine for what they are. Especially since I paid $74 for one and $49 for the other, thanks to in-store "shopping events".
This strikes me more about the hobbyist community and pervasive computer than the "internet of things". This board is not suitable for those applications, regardless of what platform it is running. But this has potential for more demanding embedded applications, internet kiosks, network terminals, or even starter computers for kids (which is what I'm considering getting a Pi 2 for).
I probably won't land on Windows 10 as the final operating system; I haven't used Windows as a desktop in about twenty years now. But I'll certainly play with it.
Whatever you think of his ethics or achievements, it's hard to argue that Bill Gates was not (or is not) a nerd.
Yes, yes, TANSTAAFL.
But as many free software advocates point out, copying software IS as close to free as it gets. There is no opportunity cost to Microsoft, since the chance that people would otherwise pay for a copy of Windows to run on a Pi is essentially nil. There is little opportunity cost to the user, since they would otherwise be installing and configuring an operating system anyway. Even if they ultimately choose not to keep it, the time and effort involved is fairly negligible and there is arguably value in the experience. (At least to that individual, since they freely chose to engage in it.)
Really? If an afternoon trying out a new platform represents a significant investment to you, your time is far more valuable than mine. Most people I know spend more time dicking around with the lastest MMORG on a regular basis.
As for programming, Windows remains a highly lucrative development platform, regardless of your personal opinion. Even in the mobile space, targeting a platform without a saturated ecosystem may ultimately yield better results. Easier for an app to stand out if it is one of a dozen instead of one of a thousand.
You assume that maintaining another ARM port takes an appreciable number of developer hours, that code quality isn't generally improved by maintaining ports on disparate architectures, that community goodwill has no value, that community testing and input has no value, that this is an "unsuitable platform" in the first place (the Pi 2 is more powerful than a lot of phones they run on, for example), that it won't net any new customers from people who are curious to see how Windows 10 is, etc.
As initiatives go, this is doubtless cheap and has plenty of positive externalities. And from a user perspective, trying it out is a throwaway afternoon at worst.
So installing a free copy of an operating system will make you lose money or give you a disease? Didn't think so. Grow up.