First, I'd point that for many quite common names, you may find several people with same Name+Surname in Europe... sometimes hundred of people sharing the same name. So, what if John Doe A ask to remove some fact about John Doe B ? That's clearly impossible to google to judge about it.
I think that a quick "fix" to the problem would be Right to be cast in oblivion... Google just has to keep (in addition to removal of a specific link) a list of the people who asked to have their name removed and simply refuse any search with these names (no result, people cast into oblivion) with a big message "John Doe asked that links about him were removed from search results".
This would someone backfire to people asking such removal... You want to get a job ? recruiter try to look you up in Google and find that you asked to be removed from search results... and get told about it... that open any awful reason (sex offender ? serious misbehaviour ? other ?) and is likely to rule you out. You're a politician ? no publicity about you (except that "asked to be removed") is clearly worse that one or two old pages on the web about you... and so on...
And, somehow, google is complying : people want info about them removed... and that info is removed... And people get to know about who asked it (to be sure that's it's not an arbitraty removal).
IMHO, list of people who asked some removal SHOULD be public...
We are talking about a terrorism trial... There are more than only the defendants at stake.
Invalid passport, copy of a booklet or even possession of illegal weapon are insufficient to prove that someone is a terrorist. There probably need some witnesses. And thoses are at a great risk if their identity goes public... Some may be as good as dead !!!
So, yes, it's not nice, there may be doubt about what really happened behind those closed doors... But in this specific situation, it may be needed.
And it's quite better than to have these "potential terrorists" brought to court than to have then killed^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave an accident during their arrest.
As long as the page still exists, the index points to relevant information : a web page with the given keywords. IMHO, the most important problem is about the "view page in cache" function which could show the information even after the web page has been removed.
If you take recent studies done to correct population sampling (more than 100000 people, randomly selected), you fall under 5% for LGBT (some studies made on more than 500000 people lead to less than 3%)
In most of these studies, Bisexual account usually for half of the people which leads to 1-2% homosexuals...
They HAD to program that test, excluding same-sex marriages, because such marriages are illegal in Japan (and in many countries).
Allowing it would have have to be on a country basis... and that'd have required much more work than a single test. Don't forget that english-localized games are send in many more countries than only USA.
And I don't even talk about the nightmare if the two protagonist don't live in the same country and are playing through internet, one in a country where same-sex marriage is allowed and one where it's illegal.
Nintendo choice was the one requiring the less work and presenting the less legal risk.
LGBT is 1% of Nintendo Buyers. And most LGBT people won't care/complain...
So, it'll be 1/10000, 1/20000 or even less (don't forget that Nintendo primary commercial targets are children and Japan where same sex union is illegal) who could decide to not buy the game... unlikely to have any impact to Nintendo profitability...
And if Nintendo decides to implement it, it'll require lots of extra-development as they'll have to comply with local laws of some countries (including their own) where same sex union is forbidden. which means lots of extra costs...
And maybe as many (or more) people *not* buying the game because same sex union is allowed in it and they are strongly opposed to it...
There is another reason why majority of players is older gamers : in EVE, your character skill is directly linked to real-life time.
To equip the best ships, to be able to make the best items, to get the most from what you mine,... you need skills... And skills are trained in real-time with ridiculous long training times...
x1 means 4 days for level 5... and it go up to x14 or such which means something like 2 month for the level 5 (and you need to train lower level too... and prerequisite skills...) So, before your character has some decent skill, you need several months (5-6 month at least) and before having serious skills, you need 1 or 2 years of game...
Your activity in game has very little influence on your character development... well, you have to raise your standings by doing some missions, that'll lower taxes and allow you to create jumpclones (unless one of your corp members has a clone vat in his capital ship)... You'll be able to make money... But CCP has formalized the "gold farming" by selling PLEX which can then be traded for 1/2 billion ISK in game...
So, unless you're playing with real life friends, EVE is a very frustrating game...
The only thing found on objective testing is in execution of java based benchmarks within browsers. There is nothing comparing it in any meaningful way beyond that.
There are standard phone benchmarks.
Benchmark suppose comparing two phones doing the same thing in same conditions.
I suppose OpenGL rendering from native code could apply... Executing native code on one side and Dalvik code on the other is not.
Camera quality is just like audiophile equipment, entirely subjective. No one can agree on what makes a camera good.
There are measures of camera quality. More importantly things like "do pictures blur under situation x" aren't subjective.
Camera quality... like having saphire glass tainting the picture (errrhmmm)... Or good camera resolution (hmmmm)... or good sensor sensitivity accompagned by a good flash system... Saying that the iPhone has a superior camera is a bold affirmation... and probably false.
. Being able to wait two days between charges is not fantastic.
It is for a smartphone
Samsung Galaxy SII, brand new battery, not rooted (so no CPU speed trick), with a power-manager (which turns on/off wifi/2G/3G according to the situation) can last nearly one week before having to be charged... two days you say ???
As long as the criteria is only comparing walled gardens.
Yeah.
Humble Bundle... OK for Android, forget it for iPhone (and other)
Most major application exist on both platform... some are specific on ONE... and it happens both way. For example, as a Go Player, I can only play on KGS with an Android Phone... No port to iPhone... (and KGS is probable THE reference for serious Go players, IGS is going junk, Yahoo is a joke,...)
What does that even mean?
It means it has productivity apps designed for the form factor (phone or tablet) people use with it.
Stop with that non-sense... If you want to do serious productivity work, forget about the phones and even about the tablets... You really need some computer. You can't replace mouse/keyboard and lots of RAM... The smartphones and tablets are meant to CONSUME data, not to create it... The only tablet that comes near to a productivity-ready is the Galaxy Note 10.1 with it's stylus (same technology than Wacom drawing tablets... well... stylus made by Wacom so it's normal)... And even so, it's far from a REAL computer.
There are many free cloud services that don't require you to buy something in order to get it.
For applications. No there aren't. Name 2.
Cloud for application is a joke... you are only meant to CONSUME data so you only have to have a way to DOWNLOAD data... so Dropbox and other are more than enough... and are way more compatible with other equipment (including sharing with people in Windows/Linux world).
Cloud without data-sharing is a joke... Even more when you can plug a 32-64Gb SD-card in your phone which exceed whatever cloudstorage that you can have.
Your analysis is based on some false premices like "an iPhone is made for productivity"... A smartphone is about being able to read mail (and write SHORT answers), using apps to CONSUME data, having a nice shared calendar (and on that point, Google with it's Google Calendar is way more useful than iPhone) and some little things like that... Try to write a 10-15 pages report on your phone so we can have a good laugh at you !!!
And the number are lessened by the number of OLDER iPhone sold (like the iPhone 5 or the 4S) which are more than probably included in the stats to inflate them...
Google HAS a running HTML5 implementation of Youtube... it's called www.youtube.com !!! An it has a running Android/iPhone implementation of Youtube, it's called m.youtube.com !!!
Is the metadata hidden by Google a metadata like "this ad is from content owner" or "this ad is from us", preventing MS to replace Google's ads by their own ads as they don't know which ads can be removed without getting content owners angry ?
Google already made an HTML5 version of his youtube app... it's called the web version of youtube... With full Youtube experience...
Also, I understand that Google is picky about Ad in it's content... First, it's his (only ?) source of income and second, it's part of the restriction that content-owners putt with their app and if Google don't manage it reliably, the content owners will deny access to their content to whole Youtube community !
That's why there is the second option : a fully-insulated enclosure (like you have in nearly all the phones... or is it all the phones except apple's ?)
In Belgium, we have another thing that makes things secure : the whole electrical installation in houses has to go through a 300mA differential switch (and lines to water rooms an additionnal 30mA) which means that if there is a leak to the ground, the whole circuit will shut down.
You can't be sure that every computer USB socket, every wall-mounted USB-socket, every "public phone charge booth" and so on will be secure... so, common sense would be to be sure that the phone is secure.
The cheap adapter may have sent big voltage to the phone connecteor... But IT'S THE APPLE DESIGN that bring that voltage outside the phone...
If the two leads of the charger are (relative to ground) 220V and (220+5)V, the phone should charge just fine and the user would still be fine... If the charger send a rogue voltage (like 0V and 220V), the phone internals should get fried... but the user should still be fine...
But some retard thought it'd be cool to use the metal frame of the phone as an antenna... This lead to the "antenna-gate" with people losing their phone signal when holding the phone the wrong way, but that part is more funny than other. But this also mean that any invalid voltage sent to the phone connector may also reach that metallic frame and the user... With the sad consequences that you've seen here !!!
When you see electrical recommendation for electric appliances, you see that the box of an electric device should be grounded or completely insulated... Apple failed that basic recommendation... and THEY are responsible for that part.
Any phone charger can go rogue... this is even true for Apple's "official" chargers (even if risks are lower).
This meant much... A good part of the strength of the dollar as money is linked from his status as "reference currency", including for Oil trading.
If Oil producers begin to make trasactions in Euro, it means that Euro get more momentum and dollar less, which could be very bad for US economy...
Irak was the first country to accept such trasactions, attacking (and ruining) Irak on false account of mass destruction weapons was also giving a strong message to other countries : don't mess with us and our "supremacy"...
Can you give any other plausible reason ? there are many other Oil producing dictatures... So, why Irak and not another one ?
Like the US attacked the Irak when it began to accept payument for Petroleum in Euro instead of dollars, it's attacking Bitcoin as it becomes a viable alternative to dollar...
I have 4 different "compact" camera (no-name,Olympus, Fujifilm and Samsung), I've taken pictures from several phones (dumb nokia, HTC and Galaxy S2 (with a 8MP sensor)... but I will never return to these now that I've my DSLR... And if I had bought one from the start, I'd never had to buy the other one.
- less noise on low light conditions - much better lenses which allow real zoom (not digital zoom) and such - Much faster to take pictures (no delay which means that you take the precise image that you want) - good continuous mode (several pictures in a row, at less than 1 sec interval which allow to pick up the best one) - faster exposures (needed when you take picture of things which are moving, no more motion blur) - much better battery capacity - better sensivity on low light condition (due to larger lens opening) and so on...
When I compage Galaxy S2 and Samsung camera (both having 8MP sensor), there is already a big difference thanks to the lens of the camera... and they both come from same manufacturer (camera is older than S2 and gives better pictures)
My guess is that they'll revert quickly to DSLR... journalism photographers have to take picture of things that are moving most of the time... that's definitively NOT the best use case for phone's cameras.
Imap and CalDAV exists for a long time... long before Google began to make Android... CardDAV is also a recognized standard. These are well known, stable and we can expect them to keep working the same way in 10 years
Exchange Active Sync is *not* a standard... it's a liability... Everyone knows that Microsoft is prone to *not* follow it's own standard... We've seen it with bad backward compatibility in the Office suite (sometimes, 3rd party word processors were doing a better job at converting Microsoft files from older to newer formats). We've seen it with ooxml (although it has been pushed through the troat of ISO, Microsoft DON'T follow it in it's office suite). Now that Microsoft has it's own smartphone environment, we see the risk of seeing some changes in EAS in order to give an advantage to WP8 over iOS and Android.
The move away from EAS and towards open standard is a good move, let's expect that Apple will do the good thing and go in the same direction... And, if everyone starts to use IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV instead of EAS, Microsoft *will* have to support them on it's outlook.com service if he don't want to become irrelevant. Eventually, it'll also help all Open Source projects who wil only have to support recognized open standard and not EAS.
About the changes in Calendar (reservable times on the calendar through appointment slots)... Well, I didn't even know these did exist... As most Google Calendar users... I guess that they had a good trace about which feature are in use and which are not in use and that they saw that nearly noone was using it...
Calendar via SMS in this time of smartphones is not a big loss... It's an US-only feature and I guess that those who were tech savvy (or addict) enough to have used that switched to a smartphone long ago...
I'm quite sure that Google knew what it was doing when he decided to axe these feature... And keep in mind that each extra (unused) feature is a potential source of bugs, takes time so slows down the development of other features and slows down the system running it... We see often people complaining about programs (or OS) who are slow, need insane computer power for what it do,... Here, Google is taking the step needed to avoid that !!!
If your bricks are too expensive, I can still look at another breick manufacture to buy the bricks that I need to build my House... This is the difference...
"they test and validate"... This leads to poor security updates for applications in apple store because of the delays introduced byt the "testing and validation" procedure.
And that test is more about censorship (banning apps doing things THEY don't want to be done... like 3rd party in-app store, emulation or other 3rd langage interpreter to avoid "data as programs" which would bypass the Apple-Tax,...). It's not about the good of the customers, it's only about their own good !!!
Tell me where I had to give 30% to Google when I bought my last Humble Bundle for Android... I downloaded an APK, installed it and it took care of downloading the other files and installing them on both my phone and my tablet.
On Google, the use of Google Play is not mandatory... And In-App buys can be done by either Google Play or other ways, your choice (well, the developper's choice). The 30% cut only apply to things bought through Google Play.
On iOS and Apple iDevices, you're FORCED to install (and buy) your app through the Apple Store and your app can olny do in-app buys through the Apple Store...
The potential price would be little over the cost of raw material in a perfect world. Automation has always been pushed forward as a way to lower manufacturing costs AND product cost.
Except that we are talking about Apple which is known to charge much more than needed and it's unlikely that the price will lower... In fact, the price may even increase as "it's made in US" with fallacies as "greater quality", "higher production costs",...
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'd point that for many quite common names, you may find several people with same Name+Surname in Europe... sometimes hundred of people sharing the same name. So, what if John Doe A ask to remove some fact about John Doe B ? That's clearly impossible to google to judge about it.
I think that a quick "fix" to the problem would be Right to be cast in oblivion... Google just has to keep (in addition to removal of a specific link) a list of the people who asked to have their name removed and simply refuse any search with these names (no result, people cast into oblivion) with a big message "John Doe asked that links about him were removed from search results".
This would someone backfire to people asking such removal... You want to get a job ? recruiter try to look you up in Google and find that you asked to be removed from search results... and get told about it... that open any awful reason (sex offender ? serious misbehaviour ? other ?) and is likely to rule you out. You're a politician ? no publicity about you (except that "asked to be removed") is clearly worse that one or two old pages on the web about you... and so on...
And, somehow, google is complying : people want info about them removed... and that info is removed... And people get to know about who asked it (to be sure that's it's not an arbitraty removal).
IMHO, list of people who asked some removal SHOULD be public...
We are talking about a terrorism trial... There are more than only the defendants at stake.
Invalid passport, copy of a booklet or even possession of illegal weapon are insufficient to prove that someone is a terrorist. There probably need some witnesses. And thoses are at a great risk if their identity goes public... Some may be as good as dead !!!
So, yes, it's not nice, there may be doubt about what really happened behind those closed doors... But in this specific situation, it may be needed.
And it's quite better than to have these "potential terrorists" brought to court than to have then killed^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave an accident during their arrest.
As long as the page still exists, the index points to relevant information : a web page with the given keywords.
IMHO, the most important problem is about the "view page in cache" function which could show the information even after the web page has been removed.
If you take recent studies done to correct population sampling (more than 100000 people, randomly selected), you fall under 5% for LGBT (some studies made on more than 500000 people lead to less than 3%)
In most of these studies, Bisexual account usually for half of the people which leads to 1-2% homosexuals...
Can 1-2% be called an anomaly ?
They HAD to program that test, excluding same-sex marriages, because such marriages are illegal in Japan (and in many countries).
Allowing it would have have to be on a country basis... and that'd have required much more work than a single test. Don't forget that english-localized games are send in many more countries than only USA.
And I don't even talk about the nightmare if the two protagonist don't live in the same country and are playing through internet, one in a country where same-sex marriage is allowed and one where it's illegal.
Nintendo choice was the one requiring the less work and presenting the less legal risk.
LGBT is 1% of Nintendo Buyers.
And most LGBT people won't care/complain...
So, it'll be 1/10000, 1/20000 or even less (don't forget that Nintendo primary commercial targets are children and Japan where same sex union is illegal) who could decide to not buy the game... unlikely to have any impact to Nintendo profitability...
And if Nintendo decides to implement it, it'll require lots of extra-development as they'll have to comply with local laws of some countries (including their own) where same sex union is forbidden. which means lots of extra costs...
And maybe as many (or more) people *not* buying the game because same sex union is allowed in it and they are strongly opposed to it...
The problem is the Ireland tax loophole. It's abused by Google, Apple, Microsoft and many other.
Politician need to fix it... because the same happen in Belgium, Germany, ...
There is another reason why majority of players is older gamers : in EVE, your character skill is directly linked to real-life time.
To equip the best ships, to be able to make the best items, to get the most from what you mine, ... you need skills... And skills are trained in real-time with ridiculous long training times...
x1 means 4 days for level 5... and it go up to x14 or such which means something like 2 month for the level 5 (and you need to train lower level too... and prerequisite skills...) So, before your character has some decent skill, you need several months (5-6 month at least) and before having serious skills, you need 1 or 2 years of game...
Your activity in game has very little influence on your character development... well, you have to raise your standings by doing some missions, that'll lower taxes and allow you to create jumpclones (unless one of your corp members has a clone vat in his capital ship)... You'll be able to make money... But CCP has formalized the "gold farming" by selling PLEX which can then be traded for 1/2 billion ISK in game...
So, unless you're playing with real life friends, EVE is a very frustrating game...
There are standard phone benchmarks.
Benchmark suppose comparing two phones doing the same thing in same conditions. I suppose OpenGL rendering from native code could apply... Executing native code on one side and Dalvik code on the other is not.
There are measures of camera quality. More importantly things like "do pictures blur under situation x" aren't subjective.
Camera quality... like having saphire glass tainting the picture (errrhmmm)... Or good camera resolution (hmmmm)... or good sensor sensitivity accompagned by a good flash system... Saying that the iPhone has a superior camera is a bold affirmation... and probably false.
It is for a smartphone
Samsung Galaxy SII, brand new battery, not rooted (so no CPU speed trick), with a power-manager (which turns on/off wifi/2G/3G according to the situation) can last nearly one week before having to be charged... two days you say ???
Yeah.
Humble Bundle... OK for Android, forget it for iPhone (and other) Most major application exist on both platform... some are specific on ONE... and it happens both way. For example, as a Go Player, I can only play on KGS with an Android Phone... No port to iPhone... (and KGS is probable THE reference for serious Go players, IGS is going junk, Yahoo is a joke, ...)
It means it has productivity apps designed for the form factor (phone or tablet) people use with it.
Stop with that non-sense... If you want to do serious productivity work, forget about the phones and even about the tablets... You really need some computer. You can't replace mouse/keyboard and lots of RAM... The smartphones and tablets are meant to CONSUME data, not to create it... The only tablet that comes near to a productivity-ready is the Galaxy Note 10.1 with it's stylus (same technology than Wacom drawing tablets... well... stylus made by Wacom so it's normal)... And even so, it's far from a REAL computer.
For applications. No there aren't. Name 2.
Cloud for application is a joke... you are only meant to CONSUME data so you only have to have a way to DOWNLOAD data... so Dropbox and other are more than enough... and are way more compatible with other equipment (including sharing with people in Windows/Linux world). Cloud without data-sharing is a joke... Even more when you can plug a 32-64Gb SD-card in your phone which exceed whatever cloudstorage that you can have. Your analysis is based on some false premices like "an iPhone is made for productivity"... A smartphone is about being able to read mail (and write SHORT answers), using apps to CONSUME data, having a nice shared calendar (and on that point, Google with it's Google Calendar is way more useful than iPhone) and some little things like that... Try to write a 10-15 pages report on your phone so we can have a good laugh at you !!!
And the number are lessened by the number of OLDER iPhone sold (like the iPhone 5 or the 4S) which are more than probably included in the stats to inflate them...
Google HAS a running HTML5 implementation of Youtube... it's called www.youtube.com !!!
An it has a running Android/iPhone implementation of Youtube, it's called m.youtube.com !!!
Is the metadata hidden by Google a metadata like "this ad is from content owner" or "this ad is from us", preventing MS to replace Google's ads by their own ads as they don't know which ads can be removed without getting content owners angry ?
Google already made an HTML5 version of his youtube app... it's called the web version of youtube... With full Youtube experience...
Also, I understand that Google is picky about Ad in it's content... First, it's his (only ?) source of income and second, it's part of the restriction that content-owners putt with their app and if Google don't manage it reliably, the content owners will deny access to their content to whole Youtube community !
That's why there is the second option : a fully-insulated enclosure (like you have in nearly all the phones... or is it all the phones except apple's ?)
In Belgium, we have another thing that makes things secure : the whole electrical installation in houses has to go through a 300mA differential switch (and lines to water rooms an additionnal 30mA) which means that if there is a leak to the ground, the whole circuit will shut down.
You can't be sure that every computer USB socket, every wall-mounted USB-socket, every "public phone charge booth" and so on will be secure... so, common sense would be to be sure that the phone is secure.
The cheap adapter may have sent big voltage to the phone connecteor... But IT'S THE APPLE DESIGN that bring that voltage outside the phone...
If the two leads of the charger are (relative to ground) 220V and (220+5)V, the phone should charge just fine and the user would still be fine...
If the charger send a rogue voltage (like 0V and 220V), the phone internals should get fried... but the user should still be fine...
But some retard thought it'd be cool to use the metal frame of the phone as an antenna... This lead to the "antenna-gate" with people losing their phone signal when holding the phone the wrong way, but that part is more funny than other. But this also mean that any invalid voltage sent to the phone connector may also reach that metallic frame and the user... With the sad consequences that you've seen here !!!
When you see electrical recommendation for electric appliances, you see that the box of an electric device should be grounded or completely insulated... Apple failed that basic recommendation... and THEY are responsible for that part.
Any phone charger can go rogue... this is even true for Apple's "official" chargers (even if risks are lower).
This meant much... A good part of the strength of the dollar as money is linked from his status as "reference currency", including for Oil trading.
If Oil producers begin to make trasactions in Euro, it means that Euro get more momentum and dollar less, which could be very bad for US economy...
Irak was the first country to accept such trasactions, attacking (and ruining) Irak on false account of mass destruction weapons was also giving a strong message to other countries : don't mess with us and our "supremacy"...
Can you give any other plausible reason ? there are many other Oil producing dictatures... So, why Irak and not another one ?
Like the US attacked the Irak when it began to accept payument for Petroleum in Euro instead of dollars, it's attacking Bitcoin as it becomes a viable alternative to dollar...
I have 4 different "compact" camera (no-name,Olympus, Fujifilm and Samsung), I've taken pictures from several phones (dumb nokia, HTC and Galaxy S2 (with a 8MP sensor)... but I will never return to these now that I've my DSLR... And if I had bought one from the start, I'd never had to buy the other one.
- less noise on low light conditions
- much better lenses which allow real zoom (not digital zoom) and such
- Much faster to take pictures (no delay which means that you take the precise image that you want)
- good continuous mode (several pictures in a row, at less than 1 sec interval which allow to pick up the best one)
- faster exposures (needed when you take picture of things which are moving, no more motion blur)
- much better battery capacity
- better sensivity on low light condition (due to larger lens opening)
and so on...
When I compage Galaxy S2 and Samsung camera (both having 8MP sensor), there is already a big difference thanks to the lens of the camera... and they both come from same manufacturer (camera is older than S2 and gives better pictures)
My guess is that they'll revert quickly to DSLR... journalism photographers have to take picture of things that are moving most of the time... that's definitively NOT the best use case for phone's cameras.
I use Torrent for many legal uses :
- Blizzard downloader (WoW, Starcraft2, Diablo 3)
- Humble Bundle
- Linux Distributions
But also, from time to time, some free tools, some F2P games that use BitTorrent for distribution, ...
Imap and CalDAV exists for a long time... long before Google began to make Android... CardDAV is also a recognized standard. These are well known, stable and we can expect them to keep working the same way in 10 years
Exchange Active Sync is *not* a standard... it's a liability... Everyone knows that Microsoft is prone to *not* follow it's own standard... We've seen it with bad backward compatibility in the Office suite (sometimes, 3rd party word processors were doing a better job at converting Microsoft files from older to newer formats). We've seen it with ooxml (although it has been pushed through the troat of ISO, Microsoft DON'T follow it in it's office suite). Now that Microsoft has it's own smartphone environment, we see the risk of seeing some changes in EAS in order to give an advantage to WP8 over iOS and Android.
The move away from EAS and towards open standard is a good move, let's expect that Apple will do the good thing and go in the same direction... And, if everyone starts to use IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV instead of EAS, Microsoft *will* have to support them on it's outlook.com service if he don't want to become irrelevant. Eventually, it'll also help all Open Source projects who wil only have to support recognized open standard and not EAS.
About the changes in Calendar (reservable times on the calendar through appointment slots)... Well, I didn't even know these did exist... As most Google Calendar users... I guess that they had a good trace about which feature are in use and which are not in use and that they saw that nearly noone was using it...
Calendar via SMS in this time of smartphones is not a big loss... It's an US-only feature and I guess that those who were tech savvy (or addict) enough to have used that switched to a smartphone long ago...
I'm quite sure that Google knew what it was doing when he decided to axe these feature... And keep in mind that each extra (unused) feature is a potential source of bugs, takes time so slows down the development of other features and slows down the system running it... We see often people complaining about programs (or OS) who are slow, need insane computer power for what it do, ... Here, Google is taking the step needed to avoid that !!!
If your bricks are too expensive, I can still look at another breick manufacture to buy the bricks that I need to build my House...
This is the difference...
"they test and validate"...
This leads to poor security updates for applications in apple store because of the delays introduced byt the "testing and validation" procedure.
And that test is more about censorship (banning apps doing things THEY don't want to be done... like 3rd party in-app store, emulation or other 3rd langage interpreter to avoid "data as programs" which would bypass the Apple-Tax, ...). It's not about the good of the customers, it's only about their own good !!!
Tell me where I had to give 30% to Google when I bought my last Humble Bundle for Android...
I downloaded an APK, installed it and it took care of downloading the other files and installing them on both my phone and my tablet.
On Google, the use of Google Play is not mandatory... And In-App buys can be done by either Google Play or other ways, your choice (well, the developper's choice). The 30% cut only apply to things bought through Google Play.
On iOS and Apple iDevices, you're FORCED to install (and buy) your app through the Apple Store and your app can olny do in-app buys through the Apple Store...
That's a huge difference...
The potential price would be little over the cost of raw material in a perfect world. Automation has always been pushed forward as a way to lower manufacturing costs AND product cost.
Except that we are talking about Apple which is known to charge much more than needed and it's unlikely that the price will lower... In fact, the price may even increase as "it's made in US" with fallacies as "greater quality", "higher production costs", ...
And, if I remind well, Samsung is/was also a major supplier for LCD screens for Apple... Which are much more expensive than the processor...
And LG (one of the Apple suppliers) is not feeling well...