I like the idea of simply having an installment plan (including borrowing interest/markup) for the phone cost on the bill. One aspect of the 24 month forced contract in the UK is that you will continue to pay that amount even once the 24 month period is over unless you re-negotiate a new plan. Of course you can take a place handset free that is cheaper.
Of course there is nothing stopping anyone from sourcing "alternative financing" to achieve just that. You can buy the phone outright on a credit card, for example. Assuming the credit card has a decent rate (lets say 15%), this would probably still work out cheaper than the subsidized model (which can easily charge 20% above the cost of the phone per year). Factor in a "pay no interest for 12 months" introductory deal (which all the banks like to offer) and you're laughing.
There are also personal loan providers, although for small balances the market is dominated by rip-off-merchants ("Wonga" etc.). A bank might be accommodating if you ask nicely, though, and personal loan rates can be as low as 6% these days.
That is a wholly different situation. When you mortgage a home, you have a loan secured against the value of your house. The rules the bank asks you to obey are basically there to stop you devaluing the house. You must have insurance, for example, so that if the house is destroyed you have a payout large enough to repay your loan.
Completely different with phones. your contract isn't "secured against the value of the handset". It's not like if you don't pay, they take your iPhone off you to recoup the lost money on eBay (they can't even if they want to- it's not that sort of arrangement). There's no reason why you couldn't take the phone out of the shop and immediately throw it in the nearest river- as long as you make your contractual payments, it should matter a jot to the company.
My tablet only has a 7 hour battery life. My netbook has about the same. Not much good to me as an always-on communications device. My smartphone still has about 36 hours battery life, and the battery is a few years old now.
How long does your tablet last? (If it's a long time, what's the model? I'm genuinely interested).
The GPLv3 is a non starter in the enterprise world.
That must be why Android is such a commercial failure, eh?
In market share terms, GPL-based Linux (in the form of Android) is dominating the market with something like 75% of sales, with BSD-based iOS only having about 15%.
And on the desktop, proprietary still reigns supreme (in the form of Windows), with both open source options languishing in single-digit percentages. And while Apple may be more popular than Linux in this market, it would take a very brave man to declare that Apple is successful in the enterprise market...
Especially considering that the latest MS Windows has taken a big step towards non-windowing UIs. I know Windows 8 still does windowing in the "desktop" mode, but the flagship Metro mode (with all the shiny apps and widgets) deliberately prevents it.
That means that Apple Mac OSX (not to mention KDE, Unity, XFCE, etc.) are now more purely "window" based than Windows. Which in Apple's case is a nice return to history.
MS-hating aside, multiple window viewing and management on a physically small device like a tablet or phablet is just a bad UI idea, even if the screen resolution is high.
Android runs on relatively large screened devices. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 has got a 10 inch screen. An Asus Zenbook (an ultrabook- expensive portable laptop) has an 11 inch screen. There's no reason why the 10 inch tablet should be limited to "one full screen programme at a time", while the 11 inch is perfectly suited to full window computing.
I agree that multi-windowing would be pretty silly on a 4 inch phone, but that's not exactly the extent of it.
Google isn't in competition with Samsung. Google wants Android-branded devices (with all the services that entails) in as many pockets and in front of as many eyes as possible. If Samsung find a way of selling more phones (without breaking Android), all the better.
I don't know what the licensing situation is with Samsung Multi-Window, but assuming that it is open-source then there's no reason why Google couldn't accept it upstream, or their rivals couldn't adopt it as a sideways patch. And no reason Google couldn't implement their own official version in the future- there's no great benefit to being first to market in this situation.
That's the point- they're all as bad as each other. Why should I distrust a Chinese product any more than an American one? Neither government has exactly got a rosy reputation for due process in cyberspace. The answer, by the way, is that I don't automatically distrust either; I keep my sensible hat on when installing new software and hardware on my network, and that's it. Any other mindset can only lead to paranoia and madness.
This is just the usual US xenophobia against all things Chinese. If this were any other country of origin, from Russia to Nigeria, Algeria to Zanzibar, you wouldn't hear a peep. Sour grapes about someone else being a superpower, I guess.
If that were true, then why is the cell phone contract not lower if I bring my own phone, since there is no subsidy?
"Because they can". Because they do not make it clear that x proportion of your bill is hardware finance, and y proportion is service, it means they feel they can get away with charging you both in the hope that you wont object.
In the UK (and to be honest, I suspect in the US too if you look hard enough), most carriers offer "SIM Only" contracts for people who do not need a new phone. These are also usually the deal you will be moved to once your fixed month contract expires if you decline to receive an "upgrade" phone. You can do the maths between a SIM Only contract and a With-Phone contract, and the price difference works out at usually something like the price of the phone plus an extra 20% (compared with buying the phone outright). This, by the by, means that it is often cheaper to buy the phone outright on a good credit card than it is to buy it as part of a contract.
Personally, I always buy my phones outright and take out Sim Only contracts. I'm not short of a few hundred pounds in the bank, it works out cheaper in the long run, and it means I'm not tied down for 24 months...
Exactly the opposite is true. They are popular, because people like deals where they can have the shiniest of high-tech gadgets at only a few dollars a month. It appeals greatly to people who do not have the required sum up front, and essentially require a loan/financing deal.
It is, however, not viable; or at least not viable without laws being passed to protect it. Without this enforcement, it is trivial for people to game the system- getting cheap phones on contract, and then switching to a different network before the company has had a chance to make their expected profit out of you. They could get around this problem by changing their business model (for example, making it a real official loan which you pay off regardless, and with an interest rate fixed at the level they deem an appropriate level of profit), but that is unpalatable; it breaks the illusion of a cheap deal to the consumer, and makes it clearer how they are making their money.
This is government intervention to protect an otherwise flawed business model.
"New physics" is shorthand for "changes to our theories of physics and/or understanding of the universe". Not new laws of physics magically appearing into existence.
The summary shows that new observations of protons show them to bea different size to what we were expecting based on current theories and models. Now lots of scientists have checked and replicated it, and the difference is still there. That means our old theories must have been wrong, and the universe must work differently than we though. And when you change on part of a theory, that often has consequences for other parts of the theory.
So if we have to come up with new/altered theories to match with observed reality, that means "new physics" has been discovered.
Their ability to sell Andorid users' eyeballs is directly realted to how many Android users there are. The number of Android users is dictated by how well OEMs adopt the system and are able to sell it. The OEM's enthusiasm for Android is partly driven by the fact that they like the source model- it allows them to have freedom to muck with the OS however they like (within Google's framework).
Selling FOSS for money seems like a pretty niche business model in the FOSS world. Selling support for FOSS is only marginally more popular. Most FOSS is created by companies as a means to an end.
Congratulations on doing an excellent job restating the title of this story. Have a cookie.
Open Source developers know exactly what they want to do- open source it. They're acting completely in line with their beliefs/philosophy. Partisan politicians know exactly what they want to do too- they want to keep it closed in order to keep it out of the hands of the "bad people".
This isn't some internal morale debate. This is two camps of people working together, but then arguing about what to do next.
What I really like is the twitch-based combat. A feature I always missed in EVE.
That's always been the thing that has put me off trying Vendetta- I always find twitch gaming frustrating. I'm much more of a strategy man than a who-can-move-their-mouse-cursor-the-fastest one.
Still, any game with Linux support from day 1 deserves praise.
Actually, Wikipedia says that they survived until somewhere around 2000-2500 BCE, about 4000-4500 years ago. Still, cloning a mammoth does sound interesting. What could possibly go wrong?
For one we might have to deal with a mammoth infestation obscuring the view to the screen.
But then we could always clone sabre-tooth cats to deal with the mammoths. Problem solved.
We've driven them to exctinction once already, I'm sure it wouldn't be too tricky to do it again.
I've not tried Gnome 3 on a touchscreen, so I'll take your word for that. But when I tried it on a conventional keyboard & mouse desktop, my immediate impressions were: - Why is it trying to hide everything from me when it's not in use? - The bash-up-against-the-side paradigm is surely the mouse equivalent of the touchscreen side-swipe gesture (something which the MS Windows Team appear to agree with) - Why is everything a "gesture" rather than a button?
My conclusion was that the only reason anyone would make something like this would be because they were aiming for touch. Why else would you wreck the US so much for mouse users? Essentially, it was giving them the benefit of the doubt- if they didn't break it to appeal to touchscreens, then that means they must have just broken it...
What Unity broke for me was the ability to have multiple terminals open at once,
You can have multiple Terminals open at once. I've got one open right now. Let me press ctrl+T- yep, another one has opened. Let's try it with the mouse- right-click the icon in the task bar, click "New Terminal", and...yep there's window number three. I can flip between them by either alt-tabbing, or by clicking the taskbar icon and then making my selection from the three thumbnails. Not the best taskbar-window-switcher I've ever seen, but it's there where it always is.
or if Chome was minimized, it had to completely reload every web page that was opened when it was maximized.
I've got Firefox, not Chrome, but I don't see anything like that. I've got 7 tabs open on this window (including this one with my half-written comment)- minimize and reopen...no reloading. Let me try resizing the window, going fullscreen...nope, no reloading. Maybe Chrome has got a bug running under Unity, but I've never tried it so I couldn't say. Unity's been around for a couple of years now, so I'd be surprised if a bug like that hadn't been long since fixed.
I found the first iteration of Unity pretty sluggish, but the version I'm on now (whatever ships with 12.04 LTS) seems snappy enough. Not much lag on my Atom-powered Eee PC netbook; notably better than the netbook performs with Windows 7 (which is still installed on a dual boot partition) and no worse than Android (it came with an "instant on" Android dual boot, which is no-longer resident on my hard disk). On my full desktop it runs smooth as butter, although that's not saying much (it's a quad core brute).
I think Unity suffered from all around shoddiness in its first launch. Canonical have done a good job getting it polished up and matured. Although the UI is still the same as it always was- and that's still a big turn off.
Articles like this make me sad. They remind me that Nokia is still that great, innovative company that they've always been, knocking out great hardware and accomodating every niche.
And yet they insist on loading their devices with the still-born Windows Phone.
I'm posting this from a 1.5 year old EEE PC, which replaced my previous EEE PC of 4 years ago (which met an unfortunate end).
I say this to highlight that not only are we netbook users still happily out here, but they're still available in the shops and we're still buying them. I have a Kindle Fire tablet, and I barely use it compared to my trusty netbook; there's no contest between a flippy laptop form factor with real buttons and a little slate which I need to jab at the screen with my finger. I also have "real" full-sized laptops, and my netbook still comfortably fills the niche it was bought for- light, portable, long battery life, low cost so I don't worry about it being lost or broken.
We have a lot Debian desktops deployed in our organization; currently running on the latest stable release, squeeze from about two years ago. It's actually a problem for us when we want to buy new hardware because the squeeze kernel may not completely support it, and we don't really want to run testing in a production environment.
Just out of interest, but why use Debian on a desktop if those are your problems? Ubuntu LTS is Debian derived (obviously) and fully supported, but is based on (I believe) a mix of Debian Testing and Unstable packages. More or less every Debian compatible package is also ported to Ubuntu.
Debian Stable is great for long-term investment server and terminal hardware precisely because it's stable and doesn't change- you know if it worked when you installed it, it'll work forever. For top user experience on end user desktops, either it's got to be one of the non-Stable releases or a distro with a different philosophy.
Never, I think. I have a Kindle Fire, and was astonished to find that the default colour scheme for reading books was black-text-on-white. It can be changed to white-on-black, but I just can't fathom why anyone would choose the default option if they knew to change it. Surely Amazon employ UI designers?
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I like the idea of simply having an installment plan (including borrowing interest/markup) for the phone cost on the bill. One aspect of the 24 month forced contract in the UK is that you will continue to pay that amount even once the 24 month period is over unless you re-negotiate a new plan. Of course you can take a place handset free that is cheaper.
Of course there is nothing stopping anyone from sourcing "alternative financing" to achieve just that. You can buy the phone outright on a credit card, for example. Assuming the credit card has a decent rate (lets say 15%), this would probably still work out cheaper than the subsidized model (which can easily charge 20% above the cost of the phone per year). Factor in a "pay no interest for 12 months" introductory deal (which all the banks like to offer) and you're laughing.
There are also personal loan providers, although for small balances the market is dominated by rip-off-merchants ("Wonga" etc.). A bank might be accommodating if you ask nicely, though, and personal loan rates can be as low as 6% these days.
That is a wholly different situation. When you mortgage a home, you have a loan secured against the value of your house. The rules the bank asks you to obey are basically there to stop you devaluing the house. You must have insurance, for example, so that if the house is destroyed you have a payout large enough to repay your loan.
Completely different with phones. your contract isn't "secured against the value of the handset". It's not like if you don't pay, they take your iPhone off you to recoup the lost money on eBay (they can't even if they want to- it's not that sort of arrangement). There's no reason why you couldn't take the phone out of the shop and immediately throw it in the nearest river- as long as you make your contractual payments, it should matter a jot to the company.
My tablet only has a 7 hour battery life. My netbook has about the same. Not much good to me as an always-on communications device. My smartphone still has about 36 hours battery life, and the battery is a few years old now.
How long does your tablet last? (If it's a long time, what's the model? I'm genuinely interested).
The GPLv3 is a non starter in the enterprise world.
That must be why Android is such a commercial failure, eh?
In market share terms, GPL-based Linux (in the form of Android) is dominating the market with something like 75% of sales, with BSD-based iOS only having about 15%.
And on the desktop, proprietary still reigns supreme (in the form of Windows), with both open source options languishing in single-digit percentages. And while Apple may be more popular than Linux in this market, it would take a very brave man to declare that Apple is successful in the enterprise market...
Especially considering that the latest MS Windows has taken a big step towards non-windowing UIs. I know Windows 8 still does windowing in the "desktop" mode, but the flagship Metro mode (with all the shiny apps and widgets) deliberately prevents it.
That means that Apple Mac OSX (not to mention KDE, Unity, XFCE, etc.) are now more purely "window" based than Windows. Which in Apple's case is a nice return to history.
MS-hating aside, multiple window viewing and management on a physically small device like a tablet or phablet is just a bad UI idea, even if the screen resolution is high.
Android runs on relatively large screened devices. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 has got a 10 inch screen. An Asus Zenbook (an ultrabook- expensive portable laptop) has an 11 inch screen. There's no reason why the 10 inch tablet should be limited to "one full screen programme at a time", while the 11 inch is perfectly suited to full window computing.
I agree that multi-windowing would be pretty silly on a 4 inch phone, but that's not exactly the extent of it.
Google isn't in competition with Samsung. Google wants Android-branded devices (with all the services that entails) in as many pockets and in front of as many eyes as possible. If Samsung find a way of selling more phones (without breaking Android), all the better.
I don't know what the licensing situation is with Samsung Multi-Window, but assuming that it is open-source then there's no reason why Google couldn't accept it upstream, or their rivals couldn't adopt it as a sideways patch. And no reason Google couldn't implement their own official version in the future- there's no great benefit to being first to market in this situation.
Sounds win win to me. Get to look smart in the eyes of the world, without ever actually having to wear a tie; that's living the dream!
That's the point- they're all as bad as each other. Why should I distrust a Chinese product any more than an American one? Neither government has exactly got a rosy reputation for due process in cyberspace. The answer, by the way, is that I don't automatically distrust either; I keep my sensible hat on when installing new software and hardware on my network, and that's it. Any other mindset can only lead to paranoia and madness.
This is just the usual US xenophobia against all things Chinese. If this were any other country of origin, from Russia to Nigeria, Algeria to Zanzibar, you wouldn't hear a peep. Sour grapes about someone else being a superpower, I guess.
If that were true, then why is the cell phone contract not lower if I bring my own phone, since there is no subsidy?
"Because they can". Because they do not make it clear that x proportion of your bill is hardware finance, and y proportion is service, it means they feel they can get away with charging you both in the hope that you wont object.
In the UK (and to be honest, I suspect in the US too if you look hard enough), most carriers offer "SIM Only" contracts for people who do not need a new phone. These are also usually the deal you will be moved to once your fixed month contract expires if you decline to receive an "upgrade" phone. You can do the maths between a SIM Only contract and a With-Phone contract, and the price difference works out at usually something like the price of the phone plus an extra 20% (compared with buying the phone outright). This, by the by, means that it is often cheaper to buy the phone outright on a good credit card than it is to buy it as part of a contract.
Personally, I always buy my phones outright and take out Sim Only contracts. I'm not short of a few hundred pounds in the bank, it works out cheaper in the long run, and it means I'm not tied down for 24 months...
Exactly the opposite is true. They are popular, because people like deals where they can have the shiniest of high-tech gadgets at only a few dollars a month. It appeals greatly to people who do not have the required sum up front, and essentially require a loan/financing deal.
It is, however, not viable; or at least not viable without laws being passed to protect it. Without this enforcement, it is trivial for people to game the system- getting cheap phones on contract, and then switching to a different network before the company has had a chance to make their expected profit out of you. They could get around this problem by changing their business model (for example, making it a real official loan which you pay off regardless, and with an interest rate fixed at the level they deem an appropriate level of profit), but that is unpalatable; it breaks the illusion of a cheap deal to the consumer, and makes it clearer how they are making their money.
This is government intervention to protect an otherwise flawed business model.
"New physics" is shorthand for "changes to our theories of physics and/or understanding of the universe". Not new laws of physics magically appearing into existence.
The summary shows that new observations of protons show them to bea different size to what we were expecting based on current theories and models. Now lots of scientists have checked and replicated it, and the difference is still there. That means our old theories must have been wrong, and the universe must work differently than we though. And when you change on part of a theory, that often has consequences for other parts of the theory.
So if we have to come up with new/altered theories to match with observed reality, that means "new physics" has been discovered.
In what way is that not a business model?
Their ability to sell Andorid users' eyeballs is directly realted to how many Android users there are. The number of Android users is dictated by how well OEMs adopt the system and are able to sell it. The OEM's enthusiasm for Android is partly driven by the fact that they like the source model- it allows them to have freedom to muck with the OS however they like (within Google's framework).
Selling FOSS for money seems like a pretty niche business model in the FOSS world. Selling support for FOSS is only marginally more popular. Most FOSS is created by companies as a means to an end.
It was a failure because it didn't sell very well. Whether it was deserving of failure is a different matter entirely
Congratulations on doing an excellent job restating the title of this story. Have a cookie.
Open Source developers know exactly what they want to do- open source it. They're acting completely in line with their beliefs/philosophy. Partisan politicians know exactly what they want to do too- they want to keep it closed in order to keep it out of the hands of the "bad people".
This isn't some internal morale debate. This is two camps of people working together, but then arguing about what to do next.
What I really like is the twitch-based combat. A feature I always missed in EVE.
That's always been the thing that has put me off trying Vendetta- I always find twitch gaming frustrating. I'm much more of a strategy man than a who-can-move-their-mouse-cursor-the-fastest one.
Still, any game with Linux support from day 1 deserves praise.
Actually, Wikipedia says that they survived until somewhere around 2000-2500 BCE, about 4000-4500 years ago. Still, cloning a mammoth does sound interesting. What could possibly go wrong?
For one we might have to deal with a mammoth infestation obscuring the view to the screen.
But then we could always clone sabre-tooth cats to deal with the mammoths. Problem solved.
We've driven them to exctinction once already, I'm sure it wouldn't be too tricky to do it again.
I've not tried Gnome 3 on a touchscreen, so I'll take your word for that. But when I tried it on a conventional keyboard & mouse desktop, my immediate impressions were:
- Why is it trying to hide everything from me when it's not in use?
- The bash-up-against-the-side paradigm is surely the mouse equivalent of the touchscreen side-swipe gesture (something which the MS Windows Team appear to agree with)
- Why is everything a "gesture" rather than a button?
My conclusion was that the only reason anyone would make something like this would be because they were aiming for touch. Why else would you wreck the US so much for mouse users? Essentially, it was giving them the benefit of the doubt- if they didn't break it to appeal to touchscreens, then that means they must have just broken it...
Let me press ctrl+T- yep, another one has opened.
Apologies for the self-reply, but- ctrl-alt-T. Oh. to read the Preview before submitting...
What Unity broke for me was the ability to have multiple terminals open at once,
You can have multiple Terminals open at once. I've got one open right now. Let me press ctrl+T- yep, another one has opened. Let's try it with the mouse- right-click the icon in the task bar, click "New Terminal", and...yep there's window number three. I can flip between them by either alt-tabbing, or by clicking the taskbar icon and then making my selection from the three thumbnails. Not the best taskbar-window-switcher I've ever seen, but it's there where it always is.
or if Chome was minimized, it had to completely reload every web page that was opened when it was maximized.
I've got Firefox, not Chrome, but I don't see anything like that. I've got 7 tabs open on this window (including this one with my half-written comment)- minimize and reopen...no reloading. Let me try resizing the window, going fullscreen...nope, no reloading. Maybe Chrome has got a bug running under Unity, but I've never tried it so I couldn't say. Unity's been around for a couple of years now, so I'd be surprised if a bug like that hadn't been long since fixed.
I found the first iteration of Unity pretty sluggish, but the version I'm on now (whatever ships with 12.04 LTS) seems snappy enough. Not much lag on my Atom-powered Eee PC netbook; notably better than the netbook performs with Windows 7 (which is still installed on a dual boot partition) and no worse than Android (it came with an "instant on" Android dual boot, which is no-longer resident on my hard disk). On my full desktop it runs smooth as butter, although that's not saying much (it's a quad core brute).
I think Unity suffered from all around shoddiness in its first launch. Canonical have done a good job getting it polished up and matured. Although the UI is still the same as it always was- and that's still a big turn off.
Articles like this make me sad. They remind me that Nokia is still that great, innovative company that they've always been, knocking out great hardware and accomodating every niche.
And yet they insist on loading their devices with the still-born Windows Phone.
What an utter waste of a great company.
I'm posting this from a 1.5 year old EEE PC, which replaced my previous EEE PC of 4 years ago (which met an unfortunate end).
I say this to highlight that not only are we netbook users still happily out here, but they're still available in the shops and we're still buying them. I have a Kindle Fire tablet, and I barely use it compared to my trusty netbook; there's no contest between a flippy laptop form factor with real buttons and a little slate which I need to jab at the screen with my finger. I also have "real" full-sized laptops, and my netbook still comfortably fills the niche it was bought for- light, portable, long battery life, low cost so I don't worry about it being lost or broken.
We have a lot Debian desktops deployed in our organization; currently running on the latest stable release, squeeze from about two years ago. It's actually a problem for us when we want to buy new hardware because the squeeze kernel may not completely support it, and we don't really want to run testing in a production environment.
Just out of interest, but why use Debian on a desktop if those are your problems? Ubuntu LTS is Debian derived (obviously) and fully supported, but is based on (I believe) a mix of Debian Testing and Unstable packages. More or less every Debian compatible package is also ported to Ubuntu.
Debian Stable is great for long-term investment server and terminal hardware precisely because it's stable and doesn't change- you know if it worked when you installed it, it'll work forever. For top user experience on end user desktops, either it's got to be one of the non-Stable releases or a distro with a different philosophy.
Never, I think. I have a Kindle Fire, and was astonished to find that the default colour scheme for reading books was black-text-on-white. It can be changed to white-on-black, but I just can't fathom why anyone would choose the default option if they knew to change it. Surely Amazon employ UI designers?