Well, they didn't do as well as MS--nobody did--and while they don't have that high of a market share, they're ridiculously profitable. Compared to Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, and everyone else who was involved in or "won" the race to the bottom, they've done quite well. Not everyone who "loses" is a loser and not everyone who wins is a winner.
I mean, I'm all for choice, but why so many? Why, in particular, are a few manufacturers in particular releasing so many models? Half of the phones (25 out of 51) come from just three companies--HTC (9), Motorola (9), and Samsung (7). I can see why a manufacturer would want some variety in general--slider, bar, flip; big with good battery life or small and thin and light--but aren't all Android phones big, touchscreen smartphones? I don't want to start googling every name (hasn't wiseandroid.com ever heard of links?) so can anyone clue me in on the differences?
I like Apple's stuff and you might call me a "fanboi" but you have to admit they've made some good decisions in the past decade, especially with regard to simplifying their product lines. The stereotypical Slashdotter hates having their choices limited but everyone in sales, marketing, and product development should know about the disadvantages to offering too many options. Make one phone with as many or as few features as you care to cram into it and the choice becomes a simple one--take it or leave it. Start offering them with minor differences--this one has WiFi but no GPS, this one has GPS but no WiFi, etc.--and people will start to say "screw it, what else is there?" Plus every time you offer more models you're increasing the cost of your R&D but with less and less improvement in sales.
If anything, we should see more Android devices--Android technology without the phone, like the iPod touch. Clearly there's a market there, and you get around the whole pesky "tied to the carrier you hate" issue.
<plug mode="shameless"> I couldn't agree more. Slashdot on mobile devices mostly sucks. I (and others, apparently) have written systems to scrape Slashdot and turn it into something vaguely usable. Here is a really stripped-down version for BlackBerry and here is a slightly spiffier one for iPhone/Pre/Android/etc. Here is a description of what I did, how, why, and source. Only works for the front page but that's enough to get me my "fix" while standing in line at the store.:-) </plug>
... he's saying that you've got to be creative, work your ass off, make something remarkably good, and then market the hell out of it in order to be successful, just like any other product?!?!? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
I *like* unique, easily-visually-identifiable structures. a@b.c is an email address. If you're in the U.S. you know that XXX-XXX-XXXX is a phone number and that XXX-XX-XXXX is a social security number. You know that X/Y/Z is a date, even if it's not always clear if it's M/D/Y or D/M/Y.
"://", while verbose, is very clear and you always know EXACTLY what it is and what it means--that it's the START of a COMPLETE Web address. If it would have been just a : or a / it wouldn't always be clear because those symbols, by themselves, are often used elsewhere and it would lead to confusion.
Now if we could just teach a planet full of lusers the difference between "slash" and "backslash." People always say "backslash" because they've heard computer guys say it every so often when talking about logging onto MS servers so they call EVERY slash a backslash. Damn you Paul Allen!!!
And where are they claiming that its lost sales? They've just saying that 41% of software on personal computers is pirated. There's no talk about lost sales. Stop making stuff up.
How else are we supposed to interpret "harming the economy"?
I rather see real Coca-Cola cans coming from the vending machine than some made up or close so "Joca Jola" name. It breaks the illusion... Even if the gameworld doesn't take place in real world, but lets say future, it can still count for the user experience.
So it's a bit like the Facebook platform only less social, fewer eyes, and years late?
Well, the good news is, at least it's ugly as fuck.
Seriously, I went to my yahoo mail today (yes, I use it, and I prefer it to gmail) and not only was all this shit on by default (quick! options -> mail options -> uncheck "Enable Connection-related features") but its styling came straight out of 1996. If you're going to jump on social networking this late, at least make it look like all the other Web-2.0 sites currently out there.
I imagine they also want some time to see if the discoveries prove to be truly useful in the long term. I'm sure there was plenty of neat stuff being done in the 60s/70s that was neat at the time but how much of it are we still using? (I know there's plenty, my point is there's also plenty that we aren't.) Also, they want to make sure they don't wind up giving the prize to the inventors of Thalidomide or anything.
Do they? You've got to use iPhone APIs, but that's not the same thing as saying you've got to use Apple's SDK. We saw this also with last month's announcement of using.Net to build apps. As long as you wind up producing code that runs naively on the iPhone, I don't think it matters how you generate the code.
HanClinto was among a number of readers to send word that Adobe has worked around the inability to run Flash on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Adobe has been trying to work with Apple for more than a year to get its Flash Player software running on Apple's products, but has said it needs more cooperation from Apple to get it done. Now Adobe has come up with a work-around.
This does NOT let Flash content, as we know it, run on iPhone! For once in your miserable lives, editors, (and maybe submitters, too), READ THE DAMN ARTICLE! Last line of the first paragraph, IN BOLD: These aren't Flash SWF files, they're native iPhone apps.
Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.
And I HATE this whiny editorializing BULLSHIT! Again from TFA, THIRD FUCKING PARAGRAPH, first sentence: As of today, participants in the Adobe pre-release program have submitted 8 applications and all of them have been accepted into the App Store.
Slashdot eds, this is the worst submission I've seen in a while. kdawson, do you know how to read, or click on a link?
For anyone who actually cares to know details, there's more info here.
Counter-opinion: the new taskbar is a HUGE step BACKWARDS. You can no longer have "quick launch" buttons, you can only "pin" items to the taskbar (and they're HUGE), and then they slide around like crazy depending on the order in which you launch things. You can drag them around after launching, but why is it a "feature" that I can drag something back into position that shouldn't have moved in the first place? After using 7 for a few days I was thanking God that I was only testing and didn't have to use this giant steaming pile of crap.
I started using both Windows and Mac OS heavily in 1995 and I preferred Windows for a long time because it was more responsive, multitasked better (than classic Mac OS), and ran on cheaper hardware. Windows 2000 was my favorite OS - it ran my few favorite games just fine, was totally stable, I could strip out the few effects I didn't want (fading menus, etc.) and it ran like a champ for YEARS on a 1 GHz Pentium III. I never liked XP (used it at work for years) as much as I like W2K and my experiences with Vista were very much like the stereotypical complaints. Windows 7 is slightly better than Vista in some ways but worse in others, like the taskbar and the fact that you can't use the 'classic' themes. Luckily for me, Mac OS X came out right around when Windows XP did, and it's been getting better and better and better (mostly) over the years while Windows has been getting worse and worse and worse. Mac OS X is the only OS I use for personal reasons and I'm lucky enough to be able to use it at work.
Do I need to? There are still MILLIONS of unpatched (legit and not) XP pre-SP2 boxes out there causing LOTS of trouble, and plenty of malware out there still works on XP SP2, 3, and Vista. My one and only point is, MS should make up for all the years that they sat on their hands, ignoring obvious good (not even "best") practices.
Wow, I went from a +3, informative, down to 0, flamebait. Nice. Despite the swearing, everything I said was true, and you are wrong. LOTS of Windows malware has spread WITHOUT user interaction, thanks to a slew of MS apps that execute code willy-nilly, for example Klez ("The text portion [of the email] consists of either an HTML internal frame tag which causes buggy e-mail clients to automatically execute the worm...") and Sasser ("Sasser spreads by exploiting the system through a vulnerable network port...") and the Kak worm ("...a VBScript worm that uses a bug in Outlook Express to spread itself.")
Your argument about administering Linux and Windows boils down to "Neither Linux nor Windows can be secured 100%, therefore they're equally bad" and that is NOT the case. If Linux or Mac OS X were dominant they'd have SOME problems, but not the amount that Windows has.
That aside, I agree with you when you say security is not an easy thing. However, security comes in layers, and having an OS that's not equal parts mashed potatoes and swiss cheese is a good start. LOTS of the technologies that could have stopped the spread of MOST malware were WELL KNOWN and EASILY IMPLEMENTED at the time needed but MS just sat on their hands and did NOTHING for YEARS. Buffer overflows can take some work to find but MS has made COUNTLESS stupid decisions over the years, like having Outlook Express automatically execute code sent IN ATTACHMENTS (besides displaying/executing bad HTML/JS/etc in EMAIL CLIENTS) and having lots of services OPEN BY DEFAULT.
Botnets are an example of how MS's shoddy code has made everyone's--not just Windows users--lives worse. So, like I said, MS owes it to the world. Again, the guy in the article is saying "I can't see any justification for making Microsoft give away Security Essentials [to counterfeit Windows users]..." but MS is already giving it away for free to registered users so it's not like they're losing sales. All they'd had to pay for would be bandwidth, and there are already a zillion sites that give away bandwidth to deserving downloads--universities, ISPs, etc. Don't you think every single school in the world would host a copy (AT LEAST for their internal users) to keep their own networks safe? Same for every ISP. Large companies would also distribute it internally. There is NO WEIGHT WHATSOEVER to this inconsiderate asshole's* argument. (-1, here I come!)
* just to be clear that I'm not flaming the wrong person: "this inconsiderate asshole" refers to John Pescatore as quoted in the summary, not the poster to whom I'm replying.
'I can't see any justification for making Microsoft give away Security Essentials [to counterfeit Windows users],' said John Pescatore
How about this: MS owes it to the world for putting out such a shitty, vulnerable operating system for so many years. Since 80% of spam comes from botnets, maybe, just maybe there would be less spam in the world if there weren't so many shitty, easily-exploited Windows boxes out there. Not only should MS give this away, they should make it available for all XP users as well, legit or not.Bill Gates said in 2004 that spam wouldn't be a problem in two years. He had the power to do so all along, he just never did. I'm sure he thought it would be an interesting solution, involving artificial intelligence and cool 3D worlds like in Hackers and Swordfish and Johnny Mnemonic, and lasers and magnets and sharks and God knows what else... not something boring like cleaning up the mess made by his own shitty products.
In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages...
So that's a ratio of 1 MMS to 39 SMSs. BUT... I'll be willing to bet that the average MMS is more than 39x larger than the typical SMS. Just to be nice, let's say that the average text message is the full 160 characters (160 bytes) allowed. (Ignoring overhead, compression, concatenated messages, etc.) 39x160/1024 = about 6 kilobytes. And let's be REALLY nice and pretend the average MMS is 6kb. (That's probably low by a factor of at least 10.) If that's the case then the amount of data sent via SMS is the same as the amount sent by MMS, even if one outnumbers the other 39 to 1.
So if a bunch of iPhone owners are SO HAPPY to finally have MMS and send one as a celebratory test and the number of messages momentarily doubles, then that would add 50% to the usage of their network. (At least as far as SMS/MMS traffic goes.) Going with more realistic numbers means that AT&T could easily be experiencing 10x or maybe 100x the amount of SMS/MMS data that they're used to.
I'm not saying that there aren't a million other issues at hand, just pointing out that a bunch of people sending an SMS all of a sudden could indeed put a strain on their network.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly how Apple lost the PC war
Well, they didn't do as well as MS--nobody did--and while they don't have that high of a market share, they're ridiculously profitable. Compared to Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, and everyone else who was involved in or "won" the race to the bottom, they've done quite well. Not everyone who "loses" is a loser and not everyone who wins is a winner.
Happy Slashdot pageviews:Angry Slashdot pageviews::Money in Taco's pocket:Money in Taco's pocket :-)
I mean, I'm all for choice, but why so many? Why, in particular, are a few manufacturers in particular releasing so many models? Half of the phones (25 out of 51) come from just three companies--HTC (9), Motorola (9), and Samsung (7). I can see why a manufacturer would want some variety in general--slider, bar, flip; big with good battery life or small and thin and light--but aren't all Android phones big, touchscreen smartphones? I don't want to start googling every name (hasn't wiseandroid.com ever heard of links?) so can anyone clue me in on the differences?
I like Apple's stuff and you might call me a "fanboi" but you have to admit they've made some good decisions in the past decade, especially with regard to simplifying their product lines. The stereotypical Slashdotter hates having their choices limited but everyone in sales, marketing, and product development should know about the disadvantages to offering too many options. Make one phone with as many or as few features as you care to cram into it and the choice becomes a simple one--take it or leave it. Start offering them with minor differences--this one has WiFi but no GPS, this one has GPS but no WiFi, etc.--and people will start to say "screw it, what else is there?" Plus every time you offer more models you're increasing the cost of your R&D but with less and less improvement in sales.
If anything, we should see more Android devices--Android technology without the phone, like the iPod touch. Clearly there's a market there, and you get around the whole pesky "tied to the carrier you hate" issue.
BTW, since hard drive is cheap this days, I go for FLAC for everything.
And as soon as the hard drives in iPods and the flash memory in iPhones are big enough, I will too. (Well, technically, I guess I'll go ALAC.)
1. Glad to see I'm not the only math geek on /. who had that thought. :-)
2. Clearly, X=i. Though I myself would be perfectly happy with a $5 plane that could carry 5 pounds of bombs 5 miles.
Reference for the non-math-inclined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number
It's just the bad 99% giving the other 1% a bad name. ;-)
<plug mode="shameless"> :-)
I couldn't agree more. Slashdot on mobile devices mostly sucks. I (and others, apparently) have written systems to scrape Slashdot and turn it into something vaguely usable. Here is a really stripped-down version for BlackBerry and here is a slightly spiffier one for iPhone/Pre/Android/etc. Here is a description of what I did, how, why, and source. Only works for the front page but that's enough to get me my "fix" while standing in line at the store.
</plug>
... he's saying that you've got to be creative, work your ass off, make something remarkably good, and then market the hell out of it in order to be successful, just like any other product?!?!? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
I *like* unique, easily-visually-identifiable structures. a@b.c is an email address. If you're in the U.S. you know that XXX-XXX-XXXX is a phone number and that XXX-XX-XXXX is a social security number. You know that X/Y/Z is a date, even if it's not always clear if it's M/D/Y or D/M/Y.
"://", while verbose, is very clear and you always know EXACTLY what it is and what it means--that it's the START of a COMPLETE Web address. If it would have been just a : or a / it wouldn't always be clear because those symbols, by themselves, are often used elsewhere and it would lead to confusion.
Now if we could just teach a planet full of lusers the difference between "slash" and "backslash." People always say "backslash" because they've heard computer guys say it every so often when talking about logging onto MS servers so they call EVERY slash a backslash. Damn you Paul Allen!!!
And where are they claiming that its lost sales? They've just saying that 41% of software on personal computers is pirated. There's no talk about lost sales. Stop making stuff up.
How else are we supposed to interpret "harming the economy"?
I rather see real Coca-Cola cans coming from the vending machine than some made up or close so "Joca Jola" name. It breaks the illusion... Even if the gameworld doesn't take place in real world, but lets say future, it can still count for the user experience.
I agree. Just make sure your game isn't cursed!
So it's a bit like the Facebook platform only less social, fewer eyes, and years late?
Well, the good news is, at least it's ugly as fuck.
Seriously, I went to my yahoo mail today (yes, I use it, and I prefer it to gmail) and not only was all this shit on by default (quick! options -> mail options -> uncheck "Enable Connection-related features") but its styling came straight out of 1996. If you're going to jump on social networking this late, at least make it look like all the other Web-2.0 sites currently out there.
And maybe time will prove it useful. For now, it's better known as "the biggest medical tragedy of modern times."
I imagine they also want some time to see if the discoveries prove to be truly useful in the long term. I'm sure there was plenty of neat stuff being done in the 60s/70s that was neat at the time but how much of it are we still using? (I know there's plenty, my point is there's also plenty that we aren't.) Also, they want to make sure they don't wind up giving the prize to the inventors of Thalidomide or anything.
Do they? You've got to use iPhone APIs, but that's not the same thing as saying you've got to use Apple's SDK. We saw this also with last month's announcement of using .Net to build apps. As long as you wind up producing code that runs naively on the iPhone, I don't think it matters how you generate the code.
HanClinto was among a number of readers to send word that Adobe has worked around the inability to run Flash on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Adobe has been trying to work with Apple for more than a year to get its Flash Player software running on Apple's products, but has said it needs more cooperation from Apple to get it done. Now Adobe has come up with a work-around.
This does NOT let Flash content, as we know it, run on iPhone! For once in your miserable lives, editors, (and maybe submitters, too), READ THE DAMN ARTICLE! Last line of the first paragraph, IN BOLD: These aren't Flash SWF files, they're native iPhone apps.
Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.
And I HATE this whiny editorializing BULLSHIT! Again from TFA, THIRD FUCKING PARAGRAPH, first sentence: As of today, participants in the Adobe pre-release program have submitted 8 applications and all of them have been accepted into the App Store.
Slashdot eds, this is the worst submission I've seen in a while. kdawson, do you know how to read, or click on a link?
For anyone who actually cares to know details, there's more info here.
Read some short stories by Asimov...
Or better yet, his limericks. ;-)
Counter-opinion: the new taskbar is a HUGE step BACKWARDS. You can no longer have "quick launch" buttons, you can only "pin" items to the taskbar (and they're HUGE), and then they slide around like crazy depending on the order in which you launch things. You can drag them around after launching, but why is it a "feature" that I can drag something back into position that shouldn't have moved in the first place? After using 7 for a few days I was thanking God that I was only testing and didn't have to use this giant steaming pile of crap.
I started using both Windows and Mac OS heavily in 1995 and I preferred Windows for a long time because it was more responsive, multitasked better (than classic Mac OS), and ran on cheaper hardware. Windows 2000 was my favorite OS - it ran my few favorite games just fine, was totally stable, I could strip out the few effects I didn't want (fading menus, etc.) and it ran like a champ for YEARS on a 1 GHz Pentium III. I never liked XP (used it at work for years) as much as I like W2K and my experiences with Vista were very much like the stereotypical complaints. Windows 7 is slightly better than Vista in some ways but worse in others, like the taskbar and the fact that you can't use the 'classic' themes. Luckily for me, Mac OS X came out right around when Windows XP did, and it's been getting better and better and better (mostly) over the years while Windows has been getting worse and worse and worse. Mac OS X is the only OS I use for personal reasons and I'm lucky enough to be able to use it at work.
Another good one was "Two," with Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery.
And great though it is, it's hard to imagine a stranger pairing than the guy from Death Wish and the chick from Bewitched.
Nothing I want more than a device where core functionality comes and goes week to week. Way to go, Palm! You guys are &#$% GENIUSES!
... it's time for a new version of Wernstrom's killbot.
Do I need to? There are still MILLIONS of unpatched (legit and not) XP pre-SP2 boxes out there causing LOTS of trouble, and plenty of malware out there still works on XP SP2, 3, and Vista. My one and only point is, MS should make up for all the years that they sat on their hands, ignoring obvious good (not even "best") practices.
Wow, I went from a +3, informative, down to 0, flamebait. Nice. Despite the swearing, everything I said was true, and you are wrong. LOTS of Windows malware has spread WITHOUT user interaction, thanks to a slew of MS apps that execute code willy-nilly, for example Klez ("The text portion [of the email] consists of either an HTML internal frame tag which causes buggy e-mail clients to automatically execute the worm...") and Sasser ("Sasser spreads by exploiting the system through a vulnerable network port...") and the Kak worm ("...a VBScript worm that uses a bug in Outlook Express to spread itself.")
Your argument about administering Linux and Windows boils down to "Neither Linux nor Windows can be secured 100%, therefore they're equally bad" and that is NOT the case. If Linux or Mac OS X were dominant they'd have SOME problems, but not the amount that Windows has.
That aside, I agree with you when you say security is not an easy thing. However, security comes in layers, and having an OS that's not equal parts mashed potatoes and swiss cheese is a good start. LOTS of the technologies that could have stopped the spread of MOST malware were WELL KNOWN and EASILY IMPLEMENTED at the time needed but MS just sat on their hands and did NOTHING for YEARS. Buffer overflows can take some work to find but MS has made COUNTLESS stupid decisions over the years, like having Outlook Express automatically execute code sent IN ATTACHMENTS (besides displaying/executing bad HTML/JS/etc in EMAIL CLIENTS) and having lots of services OPEN BY DEFAULT.
Botnets are an example of how MS's shoddy code has made everyone's--not just Windows users--lives worse. So, like I said, MS owes it to the world. Again, the guy in the article is saying "I can't see any justification for making Microsoft give away Security Essentials [to counterfeit Windows users]..." but MS is already giving it away for free to registered users so it's not like they're losing sales. All they'd had to pay for would be bandwidth, and there are already a zillion sites that give away bandwidth to deserving downloads--universities, ISPs, etc. Don't you think every single school in the world would host a copy (AT LEAST for their internal users) to keep their own networks safe? Same for every ISP. Large companies would also distribute it internally. There is NO WEIGHT WHATSOEVER to this inconsiderate asshole's* argument. (-1, here I come!)
* just to be clear that I'm not flaming the wrong person: "this inconsiderate asshole" refers to John Pescatore as quoted in the summary, not the poster to whom I'm replying.
'I can't see any justification for making Microsoft give away Security Essentials [to counterfeit Windows users],' said John Pescatore
How about this: MS owes it to the world for putting out such a shitty, vulnerable operating system for so many years. Since 80% of spam comes from botnets, maybe, just maybe there would be less spam in the world if there weren't so many shitty, easily-exploited Windows boxes out there. Not only should MS give this away, they should make it available for all XP users as well, legit or not. Bill Gates said in 2004 that spam wouldn't be a problem in two years. He had the power to do so all along, he just never did. I'm sure he thought it would be an interesting solution, involving artificial intelligence and cool 3D worlds like in Hackers and Swordfish and Johnny Mnemonic, and lasers and magnets and sharks and God knows what else... not something boring like cleaning up the mess made by his own shitty products.
In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages...
So that's a ratio of 1 MMS to 39 SMSs. BUT... I'll be willing to bet that the average MMS is more than 39x larger than the typical SMS. Just to be nice, let's say that the average text message is the full 160 characters (160 bytes) allowed. (Ignoring overhead, compression, concatenated messages, etc.) 39x160/1024 = about 6 kilobytes. And let's be REALLY nice and pretend the average MMS is 6kb. (That's probably low by a factor of at least 10.) If that's the case then the amount of data sent via SMS is the same as the amount sent by MMS, even if one outnumbers the other 39 to 1.
So if a bunch of iPhone owners are SO HAPPY to finally have MMS and send one as a celebratory test and the number of messages momentarily doubles, then that would add 50% to the usage of their network. (At least as far as SMS/MMS traffic goes.) Going with more realistic numbers means that AT&T could easily be experiencing 10x or maybe 100x the amount of SMS/MMS data that they're used to.
I'm not saying that there aren't a million other issues at hand, just pointing out that a bunch of people sending an SMS all of a sudden could indeed put a strain on their network.