Or rather, I can write that article in 5 words: "Dumbphones are cheaper. The end."
I just wish data were really, really cheap. Why is it I can talk for literally dozens of hours per month for free on nights and weekends but any amount of data costs a ton? (I know the answer to that one: "Because they can.") My wife will soon be getting an iPhone and she'll get a lot of use out of it overall (especially the camera and a calendar, to say nothing of whatever random apps she might get) but the minimum data plan ($15/mo for 200MB, aka $180/yr, on AT&T in the U.S.) is a bit much. Something like $5/mo for 50 MB would be perfect for her. I could get a used iPhone and just add it like a regular phone with no data plan but SOME data would be handy, i.e. for Maps and stuff. Grr...
I agree that the "old school" route is no longer a viable option and the progression of MSIE, from 6 to 7 to 8 to 9, shows that the IE team knows it and Corporate accepts this fate and allows the team to release decent browsers. To your question "why bother", that answer has two parts: one, because as a leading tech company with their own OS, they absolutely can't NOT make a browser (think of their image in the tech world if they didn't) and two, because of a slightly different kind of lock-in. If Windows ships with a decent browser, people will stick with it instead of moving to alternatives. This way MS can get a little bit (maybe a lot) of their browser share back--which, besides improving their image, leads to Bing revenue.
Think about it: why did technically-minded people start recommending Firefox to their friends and family? Not because it was more open or more standards-compliant, but because using FF instead of IE meant less calls to come help fix their computer. If Windows ships with a browser that is "good enough" and doesn't generate support calls from friends and family, there won't be nearly as many recommendations to switch. Seriously: if IE truly becomes a good, solid product, its market share (of desktop computers) could grow back to 75% in a few years.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how long traditional desktop computers will be the primary WWW browsing platform. MS is two solid years from having an as-good-as-an-iPad (or even Android) touch interface (if they EVER reach that goal), and that is a BIG head start to give to all their competitors in the modern tablet space.
Missing option: it doesn't fucking matter. They could do major releases, they could do point releases; hell, they could go the Microsoft route (kind of a Fibonacci/exponential hybrid) and make the next six versions be 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, and 2000. IT DOES NOT MATTER. They either have a culture that says "polish the product and fix bugs" or a culture that says "add features." We discovered less than three weeks ago what they care about. (See also this old piece.) All I see anymore is dick-waving about javascript speed and ACID performance.
So... you state that there's no way to know AND you go to explicitly state that the odds "might be less... or they might be more" and yet you insist I'm wrong? Interesting. You sound like my wife.:-)
Actually, it was five years ago, and it did go this way:
On the operational side of the house, as you probably remember, we've historically entered into certain agreements with different people to secure supply and other benefits. The largest one in the recent past has been, we signed a deal with several flash [memory] suppliers back in the end of 2005 that totaled over a billion dollars, because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for our company.
—Tim Cook, Apple COO
That's just one example. I'm pretty sure they did the same for screens and lots of other important bits. Steve Jobs gets all the press but Mr. Cook is definitely pulling his weight.
> Actually, Google purchased the Android OS project in 2005, two > years before Apple even announced they were working on the > iPhone. I highly doubt that the notification bar or the pop-ups > for text messages were added after the release of the iPhone.
> It is the result of the way the AppStore and basically the whole > Internet works. Some stuff gets to the top and then, by being > on the top it enters a feedback loop: more people see it, thus > more people buy and thus more people report about it, which > in turn means more people will see it and buy it.
Replace "the AppStore and basically the whole Internet" with "pretty much everything everywhere"--movies, TV shows, cars, songs, restaurants, nightclubs... does anything NOT work like this?
> *Now* can we admit PHP...... is perfectly suitable for literally thousands upon thousands of tasks?
In other news, Euclidian geometry cannot correctly describe Mercury's orbit. Therefore the value of everything ever done with this type of math, from the pyramids to Apollo 11, is negated.
THERE IS NO PERFECT LANGUAGE. PHP is 100% good enough for absolutely everything I do day to day, and has been a paying gig for nearly a decade. My job does not require me to perform calculations on very large numbers. If PHP becomes unable to pull names and phone numbers from a database, THEN I'l consider using something else.
PS: did you miss the part of the summary where it said this was patched in a day? Please share with us the name of your bug-free language of choice.
I'll go to my grave not knowing why people freak out so much about this. I have not heard of a single developer who has done WORSE in iOS than they did in Palm, WinCE, etc. Didn't anyone ever take Econ 1, or hell, 2nd grade math? Which would you rather have: 100% of a very small number, or 70% of a much, much larger number?
Hell, Apple could take 99% of my money if it meant I'd sell 1000x more copies of my app, because (0.01 x 1000) > (1 x 1).
Does the word "slave" appear in the book anywhere? Will they change that to "unpaid worker" or something? I'm sure there's a line like "Old slave Jim was a slave..." which will now make no sense.
So we've had datacenters in shipping containers, and floating at sea, and now in a barn. Is this just large-scale case-modding for CIO's at rich companies?:-)
"Now, though they've given in to the Man, and the likes of Money, Shine on you Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb will soon no doubt be available as 99p downloads on iTunes."
Erm, I've been hearing those songs individually on the RADIO for DECADES.
If I get in line early for concert tickets, then I fall asleep in line and everyone else gets ahead of me, do I deserve to be called "proactive"? MS might have done some work in this area but they never enthusiastically pursued it.
Florida resident here. On the front of my license, in little letters at the bottom, it says "Operation of a motor vehicle constitutes consent to any sobriety test required by law." I don't know all the implications (starting with, what does the law require?) but that's what it says.
Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.
Interesting, so it's like that thing... what's it called? Oh yeah: EVERYTHING, EVER.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear you've got to kiss a lot of ass to get one.
Oh, it's been much more than just one partner. And that's not even a list of everyone they've ever screwed--just smartphone makers. Unbelievable.
Or rather, I can write that article in 5 words: "Dumbphones are cheaper. The end."
I just wish data were really, really cheap. Why is it I can talk for literally dozens of hours per month for free on nights and weekends but any amount of data costs a ton? (I know the answer to that one: "Because they can.") My wife will soon be getting an iPhone and she'll get a lot of use out of it overall (especially the camera and a calendar, to say nothing of whatever random apps she might get) but the minimum data plan ($15/mo for 200MB, aka $180/yr, on AT&T in the U.S.) is a bit much. Something like $5/mo for 50 MB would be perfect for her. I could get a used iPhone and just add it like a regular phone with no data plan but SOME data would be handy, i.e. for Maps and stuff. Grr...
Pfft, you just posted because you wanted to brag that you spend lots of time in exotic places like Switzerland and Nebraska. ;-)
I agree that the "old school" route is no longer a viable option and the progression of MSIE, from 6 to 7 to 8 to 9, shows that the IE team knows it and Corporate accepts this fate and allows the team to release decent browsers. To your question "why bother", that answer has two parts: one, because as a leading tech company with their own OS, they absolutely can't NOT make a browser (think of their image in the tech world if they didn't) and two, because of a slightly different kind of lock-in. If Windows ships with a decent browser, people will stick with it instead of moving to alternatives. This way MS can get a little bit (maybe a lot) of their browser share back--which, besides improving their image, leads to Bing revenue.
Think about it: why did technically-minded people start recommending Firefox to their friends and family? Not because it was more open or more standards-compliant, but because using FF instead of IE meant less calls to come help fix their computer. If Windows ships with a browser that is "good enough" and doesn't generate support calls from friends and family, there won't be nearly as many recommendations to switch. Seriously: if IE truly becomes a good, solid product, its market share (of desktop computers) could grow back to 75% in a few years.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how long traditional desktop computers will be the primary WWW browsing platform. MS is two solid years from having an as-good-as-an-iPad (or even Android) touch interface (if they EVER reach that goal), and that is a BIG head start to give to all their competitors in the modern tablet space.
Missing option: it doesn't fucking matter. They could do major releases, they could do point releases; hell, they could go the Microsoft route (kind of a Fibonacci/exponential hybrid) and make the next six versions be 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, and 2000. IT DOES NOT MATTER. They either have a culture that says "polish the product and fix bugs" or a culture that says "add features." We discovered less than three weeks ago what they care about. (See also this old piece.) All I see anymore is dick-waving about javascript speed and ACID performance.
So... you state that there's no way to know AND you go to explicitly state that the odds "might be less... or they might be more" and yet you insist I'm wrong? Interesting. You sound like my wife. :-)
Actually, it was five years ago, and it did go this way:
On the operational side of the house, as you probably remember, we've historically entered into certain agreements with different people to secure supply and other benefits. The largest one in the recent past has been, we signed a deal with several flash [memory] suppliers back in the end of 2005 that totaled over a billion dollars, because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for our company.
—Tim Cook, Apple COO
That's just one example. I'm pretty sure they did the same for screens and lots of other important bits. Steve Jobs gets all the press but Mr. Cook is definitely pulling his weight.
Full disclosure for those who are getting ready to part with their money: Current odds of catastrophic vehicle loss are roughly 1 in 66.
... as long as at least one of those releases fixes some of the decade-old bugs discussed here just a couple weeks ago.
The new design sucks out loud. (Sorry guys.) But I read Slashdot a lot and this will finally force me to learn how to use local CSS.
One of my favorite quotes of all time summed it up nicely. I forgot it exactly and I can't find it now, but it was something along the lines of
If they're going to put scare quotes around "free" they should do the same for commercial software because you don't really "own" it.
Google shows about 30k results for 'dogfooding'. Not common, but not unheard of either. Popular among people who verb nouns. :-)
> Actually, Google purchased the Android OS project in 2005, two
> years before Apple even announced they were working on the
> iPhone. I highly doubt that the notification bar or the pop-ups
> for text messages were added after the release of the iPhone.
Ah, you do not know your history. Yes, Android had been around for a while, but before January 2007, it was nothing more than a BlackBerry clone.
http://www.google.com/images?q=android+prototypes
Granted, that page will have some new models mixed in, but for the most part, this is what Android was before the iPhone. They weren't even touch-based at all.
> It is the result of the way the AppStore and basically the whole
> Internet works. Some stuff gets to the top and then, by being
> on the top it enters a feedback loop: more people see it, thus
> more people buy and thus more people report about it, which
> in turn means more people will see it and buy it.
Replace "the AppStore and basically the whole Internet" with "pretty much everything everywhere"--movies, TV shows, cars, songs, restaurants, nightclubs... does anything NOT work like this?
> *Now* can we admit PHP... ... is perfectly suitable for literally thousands upon thousands of tasks?
In other news, Euclidian geometry cannot correctly describe Mercury's orbit. Therefore the value of everything ever done with this type of math, from the pyramids to Apollo 11, is negated.
THERE IS NO PERFECT LANGUAGE. PHP is 100% good enough for absolutely everything I do day to day, and has been a paying gig for nearly a decade. My job does not require me to perform calculations on very large numbers. If PHP becomes unable to pull names and phone numbers from a database, THEN I'l consider using something else.
PS: did you miss the part of the summary where it said this was patched in a day? Please share with us the name of your bug-free language of choice.
I'll go to my grave not knowing why people freak out so much about this. I have not heard of a single developer who has done WORSE in iOS than they did in Palm, WinCE, etc. Didn't anyone ever take Econ 1, or hell, 2nd grade math? Which would you rather have: 100% of a very small number, or 70% of a much, much larger number?
Hell, Apple could take 99% of my money if it meant I'd sell 1000x more copies of my app, because (0.01 x 1000) > (1 x 1).
Does the word "slave" appear in the book anywhere? Will they change that to "unpaid worker" or something? I'm sure there's a line like "Old slave Jim was a slave..." which will now make no sense.
Ooh! Idea! Slave -> Marklar. Or maybe Smurf.
Plus, it has that cool palindrome URL! :-)
So we've had datacenters in shipping containers, and floating at sea, and now in a barn. Is this just large-scale case-modding for CIO's at rich companies? :-)
"Now, though they've given in to the Man, and the likes of Money, Shine on you Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb will soon no doubt be available as 99p downloads on iTunes."
Erm, I've been hearing those songs individually on the RADIO for DECADES.
If I get in line early for concert tickets, then I fall asleep in line and everyone else gets ahead of me, do I deserve to be called "proactive"? MS might have done some work in this area but they never enthusiastically pursued it.
Florida resident here. On the front of my license, in little letters at the bottom, it says "Operation of a motor vehicle constitutes consent to any sobriety test required by law." I don't know all the implications (starting with, what does the law require?) but that's what it says.
> Y'know, there's a lot more to movies than Star Wars:
Yeah, and if the charter of this site weren't ``Linux, Open Source Software, Legos, Games, Star Wars, Science, Technology and pretty much anything else that falls into the "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" umbrella'' they might have been mentioned. For example, if this were a site run by dance fans, the headline might have been "Saturday Night Fever Added To National Film Registry."
Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default.
Interesting, so it's like that thing... what's it called? Oh yeah: EVERYTHING, EVER.