Either advertise it and let people do it, or don't advertise it. And especially do not advertise it if you know from the start that it is not technically possible for lots of people to use these options because your network is not good enough.
No, see you aren't supposed to do that *all the time*!
You're just supposed to watch Youtube videos while riding on horseback with your girlfriend on the beach, or while at work as a bellboy at a nice hotel. The commercial was pretty clear on this.
So here you have the largest stadium network, and they put business information on the same network as the unwashed public?
I've configured numerous networks involving business data and customer access, and I'uine *never* put them on the same network - that's just stupid and invites the bored hacker to penetrate your network and disable and/or sniff the network for juicy details.
Nothing in the article shows how it couldn't have been the phone itself doing it, not AT&T doing it.
I'm guessing you haven't done much business with AT&T? Because this is AT&T that we're talking about. Making up random crap to put on the invoice and then sending you to collections seems to me to be what they're all about!
My daughter was a foreign exchange student in Germany. I signed up for an international calling plan ($5/month, $0.10/min) before calling her. AT&T was nice enough to charge me the $5/month, and then $4.00 per minute, making my $90 bill closer to $4,000.000. (Yes, that's right!) I spent HOURS on the phone with their support reps, with names like "Mike" and "Sally" with barely comprehensible Indian accents and horrid call quality, none of whom seemed able to do anything at all to correct the bill.
After 4 months of angry-looking bills and threats to send to collections, I called AT&T and threatened to quit their service. Guess what? I ended up talking to somebody named "Sally" with an AMERICAN accent who corrected the $4,000 bill in 10 minutes! Thinking balance had been restored to the Universe, I decided to leave it be.
The next month, they overcharged me $20. If you've read this far, you're probably thinking: "Oh, this guy just had a bad experience... this isn't usual"..
There's more!
A few months after all this, my son wanted an iPhone and wanted me to co-sign. So I showed up at the AT&T store to find out that their "co-sign" is better read as "it's my contract". Smarting from the previous experience, I refused to sign, and left the store.
A year later, they sent me to collections for $150 for breach of contract. AT&T sent me to collections for a contract I never even signed. It took another two hours and 6 call transfers to clear this up.
Do you think I *ever* want to do business with AT&T?
Yeah, Kinect is cool. No doubt there. But it's not cool in an "iphone" sort of way. It's a game controller that, BTW, makes the game player move around alot. Ever see gamers?
Moving around alot is the definition of what they try to avoid! So I'm guessing it'll be something like Wii fit - popular for a while until people realize that the image of who they want to be doesn't fit the reality of who they are willing to be.
But in other fronts, they seem to be blowing their load hard in the wrong direction!
They predicted that mobile computing would be a big, big deal, some 10 years ago. Windows CE/mobile spent 10 years trying to find its home, making tiny, incremental improvements, only to be spanked robustly by a Unix derivative (iOS) and then spanked again by another (Android) in short order with 1/10th the resources spent on Windows Mobile. Their recent Windows 7 Phone launch was almost exactly 18 months too late, so Android continues to rapidly ratchet up to market dominance after iOS proved the market for mobile devices really exists, just like Bill predicted 10 years ago.
Then, there's Windows Vista. No need to discuss what a train wreck that was! Windows 7 is actually a relatively decent O/S (if you ignore its many, flagrant security holes due to fundamental architecture limitations) but now, after years of trying to convince people that the turd of Vista was chocolate flavored, nobody trusts them anymore!
After spending billions upon billions and 5 years of losing money, they've finally managed to make XBox profitable. (as long as you ignore interest on the billions already spent)
You really think a multi-billion coming up with a game controller is remarkable?
64 bit Fedora Core Linux 13, Quad-core i7 laptop, 8 GB RAM.
Scrolling the screen continuously in Chrome 8 makes it take up about 10% of CPU. (that's 10% of *one* of the 8 virtual cores available) Doing the same thing in FF 3.6 takes up about 80% on one of the cores.
And, in my experience, the latest Chrome is significantly faster than FF 3.6 on *any* platform, enough that we've started recommending it for our web-based application.
Sure, reality isn't quite "what the headline states". But the reality is actually stronger than what's stated, not weaker!
Because companies far and wide are building their business on Android! LG is betting heavily on it. So is Samsung. Perhaps more importantly, so are the clone phones - companies too small to have names we'd recognize, but who make phones nonetheless.
Ever hear of "Huawei"? (How do you even pronounce it"?) Yet at the local store for the regional low-cost cell company, it sells for just $129. With a few rebates, the offer comes in at just $99 and includes the first month of service, bringing its real cost to under $50. (data plans w/call service come in around 50-75/month, a $15-$40 month premium over voice alone)
Yes, that's less than $50 for a relatively full-feature Smart Phone!
At this price, Android brings the Smart phone market within the reach of the folks who live from month to month and raid the napkins at the local McDonalds when they run out of money to buy toilet paper at the end of the month!
If you think Android's sales are great now, just wait until the unwashed masses of the poor discover that they, too, can have a high-tech fancy-pants smartphone!
Overall, Android is more of a flash in the pan than anything else. Once developers realize there is no future with the platform, they will focus on iOS or platforms that matter.
I'd be curious to see just how much money you'd be willing to wager that this is so...
I spent several hours this last weekend trying to get Android running on my old WinMo phone. An HTC Titan, it sports dual 400 Mhz PPC CPUs and 64 MB of RAM. WinMo 6.1 is so broken, Android is its only hope! Because Android, with its Linux foundations, is the new "make it work" platform! it's lightweight, powerful, and provides a standard, hardware-independent platform that provides positive network effects! (such as the Android marketplace)
I didn't buy a Nook, I downloaded the Nook app for my Android phone. Whether or not you download the Nook app for my Android phone, or upgrade a Nook with Android, you end up with a device that is not only an e-book reader, but many other things!
Who wants a single-function device? Not me! My Android phone is:
1) Phone. 2) Newspaper 3) A whole library of books. (!) 4) A map of every country, city, and state in the world 5) Web Browser 6) Email, 7) MP3 player! 8) Driving directions when I want them 9) Hotline to my friends and family (Facebook!) 10) Radio, but one that plays virtually any station I want from anywhere in the world. (TuneIn Radio) 11) Microportable television.
Should I go on? Who wants to carry an ebook reader when you could be carrying so much more without any additional weight?
It's important to accept the actions that people do that benefit you regardless of their motivations. Understanding their motivations is only useful in predicting future behavior, and perhaps to judge the veracity with which they pursue your common interest.
Never, ever decry an action that benefits you or a cause you believe in because the actor's motivations aren't the same as yours!
Well I can't upvote the article, but I can't say strongly enough: network neutrality is a big, big BIG issue!
Although, in practice, it's not much different than various consumer protection laws. When I buy an Internet connection from Comcast, Verizon, or a regional carrier, I'm buying a connection to the Internet. It's usually rated at an expected throughput, and I should expect that throughput barring some limitation at some other point on the Internet, but these are technical limits and not artificially imposed. (Slashdot effect, anyone?)
(WARNING: Bad Car Analogy ahead)
Not having network neutrality is somewhat like buying a car that will arbitrarily slow down on certain roads for no particular reason. I don't expect the manufacturer of the car to get a kickback from the most popular highways. And I don't expect my county or region to expect a kickback from the auto manufacturers, either.
But I expect my car to behave within its physical limitations on every road I drive. Sure, it will drive slower on a dirt road than a paved Interstate, but I don't expect it to suddenly slow down when I transition from I5 to I80 because it's (gasp!) I80, even though everything else is similar.
So, when I buy an Internet connection, they tell me what the speed of the connection is. I have about 6 Mbits right now from Comcast. That's what they sold me. 6 Mbits. I don't expect it to suddenly slow down to.75 Mbit just because I went to netflix.com in my browser! Comcast isn't giving me what they sold me. And selling somebody something and giving them something else is fraud. It's a simple consumer protection idea and it's always been there.
Network neutrality is just an extension of this simple, very basic idea.
AT&T managed to screw up my billing on International calls, (over) charging me almost $5,000 on what should have been about $100 in charges. After more than 6 months of calls to customer service, deferrals, and notices, I finally called them to disconnect my phone. Suddenly, the $4,000 was taken care of in 10 minutes, by somebody who spoke with an American accent!
I waited long enough to get the next bill (so that I'd have proof that the bill had been discharged) only to find that they over-charged me $25 on the very next bill and that's when I cancelled my service for good.
Some months later, my son just *had* to have an iPhone and wanted me to "co-sign". I went to the AT&T store, and after reading the terms, found that they were basically that this was MY contract and that I was on the hook for the bill. So I refused to sign.
Guess what? A year later, I got a notice of a pending suit against me for breach of contract! Yes! AT&T tried to sue me for breaking a contract I had never signed.
I wish I were exaggerating! But friends: Don't let your friends get screwed by AT&T!
Rather than the "open" platform resulting in widespread standardization, we only see more fragmentation as each vendor implements their own locked-down flavor of it.
You're kidding, right?
Because Angry Birds works just as well on my Droid2 as it does on my wifes LG Optimus. So does Tune-In Radio, (must have!) and EzTether. (another must-have)
In other words, I have yet to notice any significant "fragmentation" between my phone and my wife's, despite being on different networks and being different phones at different pricepoints.
Yes there are differences, pretty much akin to the differences when running Windows 7 on a Dell vs running Windows 7 on a Gateway... pretty comparable. The default icons are different, and the "desktop" is arranged slightly differently. (OMG!)
I read, today, yet another article about "Linux fragmentation"....something I've been reading about for over TEN YEARS. Somehow, it hasn't really happened, despite Linux running on everything from a low-end ARM CPU all the way up to 128-core SMP/NUMA servers.
Are there differences in Linux compiles? Sure! That's sorta the point! A 200 Mhz ARM core with 4 MB of RAM has quite different needs than a 32-core database server with 192 GB of RAM. One size does NOT fit all!
Are there GPL violations? Well, yeah, but they do tend to not be all that major, because major violations tend to cause problems for companies that perform them.
Yeah, but let's be honest for a moment, shall we? The worst case is that they'll be sued and will have to disclose the source. And when all is said and done, some drivers for some variations of ARM CPUs we be contributed to the Linux Kernel.
Perhaps the almost-fatal flaw of the GPL is that there is really no penalty for violation other than the obligation to disclose. I give considerable doubt that any importer is giving more than a half-excited yawn about GPL issues.
As far as Google being complaint with the GPL source disclosure rule, you might try doing a simple Google search for something related, perhaps download Android source and see what comes up at the top?
You didn't bother to hit the scroll key on your keyboard or flick the roller on your mouse to notice that Slashdot is similarly unencrypted before posting this?
When I say commercially viable I don't mean with a $4 a gallon subsidy. Those yield figures are going to be wildly optimistic.
Few people realize just how subsidized fossil fuel production actually is. From tax deductions to income deferments to outright subsidies, the fossil fuel industry is extremely subsidized In a recent study, they found that if we simply eliminated taxes and subsidies for all fuel production, solar energy (one of the more expensive technologies) would be financially viable in every state in the United States!
Forget subsidies for alternative energies. I want *all* subsidies for *all* energy production in the United States ended!
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate.
Whoah there Sally! I can accept the idea that upgrading to IPv6 would be expensive, but.... Trillions? Upon Trillions? That's, eh, 4 Trillion dollars at the minimum.... really? (cough) To give you some idea, the global economy is right now hovering around $74 Trillion per year.
Switching to IPv6 is mostly annoyance factor; Operating Systems have been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Most routers have also been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Mostly it's about the human cost of "turning in on" and working out the kinks. It's just a change in protocol. No wires need to be re-run, no servers need to be replaced, and most routers won't even need to be replaced. Even a cheap Cisco 2600 series router can handle IPv6 with an O/S upgrade and sufficient RAM! Mostly, it's the owners of cheap-ass consumer routers that will have to actually replace any hardware, and hardware in this market space usually costs less than $100.
I'm in the industry; as a hosting provider this speaks very directly to my needs. And our estimated material cost of switching to IPv6 is something less, probably considerably less, than $500. For a small niche hosting company doing about 1.5 million annually. So why haven't we turned it on? Haven't needed to. The benefit of turning it on is currently negligible. It's not a matter of "dragging our feet", it's more a matter of deciding to go through the annoyance of doing so and getting nothing out of it.
MORE: What's interesting to me isn't my $600 Droid II as much as my *wife's* phone. She loved my Android phone so much that we went out and got an LG Optimus Android phone for her, costing HALF as much as my (business-subsidized) Droid2. It does basically everything that my Droid II at HALF the price!
The truth is that there isn't a big benefit in buying the Droid2 vs the LG Optimus at half the price! Yes, the Droid is nicer, has a keyboard, and a sharper screen. None of which really makes much of a difference. The LG Optimus' driving directions are just as useful as the Droid's. It's maps function works just as well, the EzTether app works the same, the games play just as well (Angry Birds and Spider Solitaire!) and the only meaningful difference that we have seen so far is that videos load faster on my phone than hers at home. (Different cell network)
Even with the business subsidy, I'm going to be a bit more conservative with my next phone, and so will everybody else as they commodity effect kicks in on the smartphone market!
Same phone, didn't root it, don't really care to. I got the nice tethering app without rooting it - EzTether is your buddy!
Truth is, I want a phone that does stuff I like, at a price I can afford, without compromising my personal security. And for now, it works! The percentage of people who want to root their phones is somewhere less than 1% or so, so Moto can more or less ignore those of us who want a more "hands on" approach to their phones. Mostly it's about reducing tech support calls.
But over time, markets tend to either open up and/or commoditize, or disappear. Android is a market, one with openness built into its foundation. Moto can ignore us geeks for now, but once Android becomes commonplace and/or boring, the more locked-in approaches will tend to become disfavored over more open choices that will also be generally cheaper due to their commodity/open status.
Microsoft has almost lost the mobile phone market - I give it less than 20% chance of existing in 5 years, because a cheaper/more open and viable option already exists. I predict that iPhone will get a short term boost lasting somewhere between 6 months and 2 years as it becomes available on other networks, and then will slowly lose share to Android as its more open approach leads to a death by a thousand cuts by the iPhone.
Windows/Office itself remains because it's a commodity - despite the slow rise in price, it's still cheaper than any viable alternative.
I must be getting old. The first time I saw Angry Birds, I thought of gorilla.bas, the now-ancient basic game I played back when MS-DOS 5.0 was cutting edge. Did you notice the name of the "department" this article was filed in?
iPhone is only sold on a single provider (AT&T) which has perhaps the most sucktastic customer service ever attributed to a company that still managed to stay in business. Expect iPhone sales to jump sharply when available on other platforms.
My prediction: iPhone and Android might trade places a few times, but Android will take the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
Either advertise it and let people do it, or don't advertise it. And especially do not advertise it if you know from the start that it is not technically possible for lots of people to use these options because your network is not good enough.
No, see you aren't supposed to do that *all the time*!
You're just supposed to watch Youtube videos while riding on horseback with your girlfriend on the beach, or while at work as a bellboy at a nice hotel. The commercial was pretty clear on this.
So here you have the largest stadium network, and they put business information on the same network as the unwashed public?
I've configured numerous networks involving business data and customer access, and I'uine *never* put them on the same network - that's just stupid and invites the bored hacker to penetrate your network and disable and/or sniff the network for juicy details.
I like Apple, but these kinds of capitalist 'let's invent more ways to take money' motives really rile me.
There. Fixed that for you.
Nothing in the article shows how it couldn't have been the phone itself doing it, not AT&T doing it.
I'm guessing you haven't done much business with AT&T? Because this is AT&T that we're talking about. Making up random crap to put on the invoice and then sending you to collections seems to me to be what they're all about!
My daughter was a foreign exchange student in Germany. I signed up for an international calling plan ($5/month, $0.10/min) before calling her. AT&T was nice enough to charge me the $5/month, and then $4.00 per minute, making my $90 bill closer to $4,000.000. (Yes, that's right!) I spent HOURS on the phone with their support reps, with names like "Mike" and "Sally" with barely comprehensible Indian accents and horrid call quality, none of whom seemed able to do anything at all to correct the bill.
After 4 months of angry-looking bills and threats to send to collections, I called AT&T and threatened to quit their service. Guess what? I ended up talking to somebody named "Sally" with an AMERICAN accent who corrected the $4,000 bill in 10 minutes! Thinking balance had been restored to the Universe, I decided to leave it be.
The next month, they overcharged me $20. If you've read this far, you're probably thinking: "Oh, this guy just had a bad experience... this isn't usual"..
There's more!
A few months after all this, my son wanted an iPhone and wanted me to co-sign. So I showed up at the AT&T store to find out that their "co-sign" is better read as "it's my contract". Smarting from the previous experience, I refused to sign, and left the store.
A year later, they sent me to collections for $150 for breach of contract. AT&T sent me to collections for a contract I never even signed. It took another two hours and 6 call transfers to clear this up.
Do you think I *ever* want to do business with AT&T?
Yeah, Kinect is cool. No doubt there. But it's not cool in an "iphone" sort of way. It's a game controller that, BTW, makes the game player move around alot. Ever see gamers?
Moving around alot is the definition of what they try to avoid! So I'm guessing it'll be something like Wii fit - popular for a while until people realize that the image of who they want to be doesn't fit the reality of who they are willing to be.
But in other fronts, they seem to be blowing their load hard in the wrong direction!
They predicted that mobile computing would be a big, big deal, some 10 years ago. Windows CE/mobile spent 10 years trying to find its home, making tiny, incremental improvements, only to be spanked robustly by a Unix derivative (iOS) and then spanked again by another (Android) in short order with 1/10th the resources spent on Windows Mobile. Their recent Windows 7 Phone launch was almost exactly 18 months too late, so Android continues to rapidly ratchet up to market dominance after iOS proved the market for mobile devices really exists, just like Bill predicted 10 years ago.
Then, there's Windows Vista. No need to discuss what a train wreck that was! Windows 7 is actually a relatively decent O/S (if you ignore its many, flagrant security holes due to fundamental architecture limitations) but now, after years of trying to convince people that the turd of Vista was chocolate flavored, nobody trusts them anymore!
After spending billions upon billions and 5 years of losing money, they've finally managed to make XBox profitable. (as long as you ignore interest on the billions already spent)
You really think a multi-billion coming up with a game controller is remarkable?
64 bit Fedora Core Linux 13, Quad-core i7 laptop, 8 GB RAM.
Scrolling the screen continuously in Chrome 8 makes it take up about 10% of CPU. (that's 10% of *one* of the 8 virtual cores available) Doing the same thing in FF 3.6 takes up about 80% on one of the cores.
And, in my experience, the latest Chrome is significantly faster than FF 3.6 on *any* platform, enough that we've started recommending it for our web-based application.
Sure, reality isn't quite "what the headline states". But the reality is actually stronger than what's stated, not weaker!
Because companies far and wide are building their business on Android! LG is betting heavily on it. So is Samsung. Perhaps more importantly, so are the clone phones - companies too small to have names we'd recognize, but who make phones nonetheless.
Ever hear of "Huawei"? (How do you even pronounce it"?) Yet at the local store for the regional low-cost cell company, it sells for just $129. With a few rebates, the offer comes in at just $99 and includes the first month of service, bringing its real cost to under $50. (data plans w/call service come in around 50-75/month, a $15-$40 month premium over voice alone)
Yes, that's less than $50 for a relatively full-feature Smart Phone!
At this price, Android brings the Smart phone market within the reach of the folks who live from month to month and raid the napkins at the local McDonalds when they run out of money to buy toilet paper at the end of the month!
If you think Android's sales are great now, just wait until the unwashed masses of the poor discover that they, too, can have a high-tech fancy-pants smartphone!
Overall, Android is more of a flash in the pan than anything else. Once developers realize there is no future with the platform, they will focus on iOS or platforms that matter.
I'd be curious to see just how much money you'd be willing to wager that this is so...
I want Netflix and Hulu+ and for these, the platform must have some kind of DRM subsystem, which Android doesn't have.
Google? You listening?
I spent several hours this last weekend trying to get Android running on my old WinMo phone. An HTC Titan, it sports dual 400 Mhz PPC CPUs and 64 MB of RAM. WinMo 6.1 is so broken, Android is its only hope! Because Android, with its Linux foundations, is the new "make it work" platform! it's lightweight, powerful, and provides a standard, hardware-independent platform that provides positive network effects! (such as the Android marketplace)
I didn't buy a Nook, I downloaded the Nook app for my Android phone. Whether or not you download the Nook app for my Android phone, or upgrade a Nook with Android, you end up with a device that is not only an e-book reader, but many other things!
Who wants a single-function device? Not me! My Android phone is:
1) Phone.
2) Newspaper
3) A whole library of books. (!)
4) A map of every country, city, and state in the world
5) Web Browser
6) Email,
7) MP3 player!
8) Driving directions when I want them
9) Hotline to my friends and family (Facebook!)
10) Radio, but one that plays virtually any station I want from anywhere in the world. (TuneIn Radio)
11) Microportable television.
Should I go on? Who wants to carry an ebook reader when you could be carrying so much more without any additional weight?
It's important to accept the actions that people do that benefit you regardless of their motivations. Understanding their motivations is only useful in predicting future behavior, and perhaps to judge the veracity with which they pursue your common interest.
Never, ever decry an action that benefits you or a cause you believe in because the actor's motivations aren't the same as yours!
Well I can't upvote the article, but I can't say strongly enough: network neutrality is a big, big BIG issue!
Although, in practice, it's not much different than various consumer protection laws. When I buy an Internet connection from Comcast, Verizon, or a regional carrier, I'm buying a connection to the Internet. It's usually rated at an expected throughput, and I should expect that throughput barring some limitation at some other point on the Internet, but these are technical limits and not artificially imposed. (Slashdot effect, anyone?)
(WARNING: Bad Car Analogy ahead)
Not having network neutrality is somewhat like buying a car that will arbitrarily slow down on certain roads for no particular reason. I don't expect the manufacturer of the car to get a kickback from the most popular highways. And I don't expect my county or region to expect a kickback from the auto manufacturers, either.
But I expect my car to behave within its physical limitations on every road I drive. Sure, it will drive slower on a dirt road than a paved Interstate, but I don't expect it to suddenly slow down when I transition from I5 to I80 because it's (gasp!) I80, even though everything else is similar.
So, when I buy an Internet connection, they tell me what the speed of the connection is. I have about 6 Mbits right now from Comcast. That's what they sold me. 6 Mbits. I don't expect it to suddenly slow down to .75 Mbit just because I went to netflix.com in my browser! Comcast isn't giving me what they sold me. And selling somebody something and giving them something else is fraud. It's a simple consumer protection idea and it's always been there.
Network neutrality is just an extension of this simple, very basic idea.
AT&T screws more than just cellular customers!
AT&T managed to screw up my billing on International calls, (over) charging me almost $5,000 on what should have been about $100 in charges. After more than 6 months of calls to customer service, deferrals, and notices, I finally called them to disconnect my phone. Suddenly, the $4,000 was taken care of in 10 minutes, by somebody who spoke with an American accent!
I waited long enough to get the next bill (so that I'd have proof that the bill had been discharged) only to find that they over-charged me $25 on the very next bill and that's when I cancelled my service for good.
Some months later, my son just *had* to have an iPhone and wanted me to "co-sign". I went to the AT&T store, and after reading the terms, found that they were basically that this was MY contract and that I was on the hook for the bill. So I refused to sign.
Guess what? A year later, I got a notice of a pending suit against me for breach of contract! Yes! AT&T tried to sue me for breaking a contract I had never signed.
I wish I were exaggerating! But friends: Don't let your friends get screwed by AT&T!
Rather than the "open" platform resulting in widespread standardization, we only see more fragmentation as each vendor implements their own locked-down flavor of it.
You're kidding, right?
Because Angry Birds works just as well on my Droid2 as it does on my wifes LG Optimus. So does Tune-In Radio, (must have!) and EzTether. (another must-have)
In other words, I have yet to notice any significant "fragmentation" between my phone and my wife's, despite being on different networks and being different phones at different pricepoints.
Yes there are differences, pretty much akin to the differences when running Windows 7 on a Dell vs running Windows 7 on a Gateway... pretty comparable. The default icons are different, and the "desktop" is arranged slightly differently. (OMG!)
I read, today, yet another article about "Linux fragmentation"... .something I've been reading about for over TEN YEARS. Somehow, it hasn't really happened, despite Linux running on everything from a low-end ARM CPU all the way up to 128-core SMP/NUMA servers.
Are there differences in Linux compiles? Sure! That's sorta the point! A 200 Mhz ARM core with 4 MB of RAM has quite different needs than a 32-core database server with 192 GB of RAM. One size does NOT fit all!
Are there GPL violations? Well, yeah, but they do tend to not be all that major, because major violations tend to cause problems for companies that perform them.
Yeah, but let's be honest for a moment, shall we? The worst case is that they'll be sued and will have to disclose the source. And when all is said and done, some drivers for some variations of ARM CPUs we be contributed to the Linux Kernel.
Perhaps the almost-fatal flaw of the GPL is that there is really no penalty for violation other than the obligation to disclose. I give considerable doubt that any importer is giving more than a half-excited yawn about GPL issues.
As far as Google being complaint with the GPL source disclosure rule, you might try doing a simple Google search for something related, perhaps download Android source and see what comes up at the top?
You didn't bother to hit the scroll key on your keyboard or flick the roller on your mouse to notice that Slashdot is similarly unencrypted before posting this?
The "crazy fucker" who shot
Gabrielle Giffords strangely, wasn't Muslim.
(cough)
Speculation about Schmidt's change is pretty meaningless. He left Sun. He left Novell. Now he's in semi-retirement at Google.
Let's see....
Sun? (dead)
Novell? (dead)
Google? (....)
When I say commercially viable I don't mean with a $4 a gallon subsidy. Those yield figures are going to be wildly optimistic.
Few people realize just how subsidized fossil fuel production actually is. From tax deductions to income deferments to outright subsidies, the fossil fuel industry is extremely subsidized In a recent study, they found that if we simply eliminated taxes and subsidies for all fuel production, solar energy (one of the more expensive technologies) would be financially viable in every state in the United States!
Forget subsidies for alternative energies. I want *all* subsidies for *all* energy production in the United States ended!
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate.
Whoah there Sally! I can accept the idea that upgrading to IPv6 would be expensive, but.... Trillions? Upon Trillions? That's, eh, 4 Trillion dollars at the minimum.... really? (cough) To give you some idea, the global economy is right now hovering around $74 Trillion per year.
Switching to IPv6 is mostly annoyance factor; Operating Systems have been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Most routers have also been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Mostly it's about the human cost of "turning in on" and working out the kinks. It's just a change in protocol. No wires need to be re-run, no servers need to be replaced, and most routers won't even need to be replaced. Even a cheap Cisco 2600 series router can handle IPv6 with an O/S upgrade and sufficient RAM! Mostly, it's the owners of cheap-ass consumer routers that will have to actually replace any hardware, and hardware in this market space usually costs less than $100.
I'm in the industry; as a hosting provider this speaks very directly to my needs. And our estimated material cost of switching to IPv6 is something less, probably considerably less, than $500. For a small niche hosting company doing about 1.5 million annually. So why haven't we turned it on? Haven't needed to. The benefit of turning it on is currently negligible. It's not a matter of "dragging our feet", it's more a matter of deciding to go through the annoyance of doing so and getting nothing out of it.
MORE: What's interesting to me isn't my $600 Droid II as much as my *wife's* phone. She loved my Android phone so much that we went out and got an LG Optimus Android phone for her, costing HALF as much as my (business-subsidized) Droid2. It does basically everything that my Droid II at HALF the price!
The truth is that there isn't a big benefit in buying the Droid2 vs the LG Optimus at half the price! Yes, the Droid is nicer, has a keyboard, and a sharper screen. None of which really makes much of a difference. The LG Optimus' driving directions are just as useful as the Droid's. It's maps function works just as well, the EzTether app works the same, the games play just as well (Angry Birds and Spider Solitaire!) and the only meaningful difference that we have seen so far is that videos load faster on my phone than hers at home. (Different cell network)
Even with the business subsidy, I'm going to be a bit more conservative with my next phone, and so will everybody else as they commodity effect kicks in on the smartphone market!
Same phone, didn't root it, don't really care to. I got the nice tethering app without rooting it - EzTether is your buddy!
Truth is, I want a phone that does stuff I like, at a price I can afford, without compromising my personal security. And for now, it works! The percentage of people who want to root their phones is somewhere less than 1% or so, so Moto can more or less ignore those of us who want a more "hands on" approach to their phones. Mostly it's about reducing tech support calls.
But over time, markets tend to either open up and/or commoditize, or disappear. Android is a market, one with openness built into its foundation. Moto can ignore us geeks for now, but once Android becomes commonplace and/or boring, the more locked-in approaches will tend to become disfavored over more open choices that will also be generally cheaper due to their commodity/open status.
Microsoft has almost lost the mobile phone market - I give it less than 20% chance of existing in 5 years, because a cheaper/more open and viable option already exists. I predict that iPhone will get a short term boost lasting somewhere between 6 months and 2 years as it becomes available on other networks, and then will slowly lose share to Android as its more open approach leads to a death by a thousand cuts by the iPhone.
Windows/Office itself remains because it's a commodity - despite the slow rise in price, it's still cheaper than any viable alternative.
I must be getting old. The first time I saw Angry Birds, I thought of gorilla.bas, the now-ancient basic game I played back when MS-DOS 5.0 was cutting edge. Did you notice the name of the "department" this article was filed in?
Yeah. I'm not so young, anymore. =/
Vodaphone UK is NOT the same company as Vodaphone NL. Though it's still pretty lame that they haven't set up peering...
iPhone is only sold on a single provider (AT&T) which has perhaps the most sucktastic customer service ever attributed to a company that still managed to stay in business. Expect iPhone sales to jump sharply when available on other platforms.
My prediction: iPhone and Android might trade places a few times, but Android will take the long term.