A good parallel to this would be the Belgian draft horse. They once were one of our most important exports and used literally everywhere. Then after WW2 they were supplanted by tractors and other motorized vehicles and the population in Belgium collapsed from 200.000 in 1950 to 6.000 in 1980. Now there's concern there might be to few foals born to preserve the breed.
I'm sure there were people bitching about it then: "Man, that Ford looks great but it only comes in black. When will this idiot learn that he'll never succeed unless he gives customers what they want ? I give them 5 years before they're forced out of the market."
Anecdotal, but a lot of my friends put on some tunes on the TV when we visit. They don't even have AppleTV's or GoogleTV's, they'll just pop in a music DVD or a DVD video of a concert. Because it's easy, it's already in the living room, you have the remote right there and you have a large display (obviously) you can use to change the music.
With the amount of people that have smartphones now, the should just build WiFi into the TV and build an app to control it if you need typing (maybe with a fallback browser interface.) Like the AppleTV does with the Apple Remote app. It's not perfect but it works remarkably well.
Jobs supposedly said that he had "cracked" the TV problem so there's a lot of speculation about AppleTV at the moment but it's safe to say it wouldn't be like a DVR. It would have to be something with direct content deals that cut out the middlemen and allow it to actually work better and simpler than today's DVRs.
Yes, because their customers want it. Plus they don't actually have to do anything to support it, that is all down to Google, and historically they have been excellent when it comes to maintaining browser APIs.
This isn't a browser API, this is a binary blob. Backwards compatibility isn't free it takes work, work that won't help Google sell ads. I don't buy it but time will tell.
Who said anything about unstable or development versions? 2.3 is a full retail release, nice and stable. It is interesting that you mention Linux because a lot of people here got pretty upset when it looked like OEMs might lock out non-Microsoft operating systems by requiring the bootloader to be cryptographically signed. I'll decide what I run on my hardware, thanks.
You did (I was talking about apps): "I installed the development version of RMaps because there are some handy new features that have not reached the stable version on the market yet." When it comes to deciding what you run on your hardware there is no good choice in the mobile market, there's no open hardware platform. You can't assemble your choice of hardware and then run your choice of OS on it, it simply doesn't exist. Doing things like putting Android on a TouchPad or iPhone requires a lot of hacking, reverse engineering and redevelopment of missing parts.
Try calling Apple to see if they will offer you some support for a 1998 Power PC Mac. See how useful it is as a general purpose computer these days. Then install Linux or a hacked MacOS update that bypasses the arbitrary lock-out on older systems and see how much better it is. Then appreciate that you saved a perfectly good computer from landfill and can maybe give it to someone who doesn't want to invest a lot of money in a new one.
Actually a late 90's G3 Powermac can run OSX up to Tiger (slowly, Panther would be a better choice) Personally I'd take Panther or Tiger over Linux every day. I've tried running Linux on "exotic" (i.e. non-x86) hardware, like my old RS/6000 (also a PowerPC), I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than try that again. Even it were easy modern distros don't care about old hardware, so you'd have to go with a specialized cut down one or roll your own, either way it's not going to look anywhere near as nice as an older version of OSX.
My friend is like that, he had a basic dumb Nokia but was interested in Android, just not willing to plump down the cash for a new phone or long term contract. Now he has a 1 month rolling contract SIM in an old but good phone which runs up to date software with excellent stability. HTC's support for shite anyway, especially since they apparently didn't update the manuals when the 2.1 update came around.
Good for him (no sarcasm intended.) Personally I'd rather spend the money on an iPhone and get decent support and don't have to worry about his sort of thing but to each his own.
You're paying the people who developed the standard. R&D isn't free you know. I find it hard to believe all the patents in that pool are frivolous. Also worth noting: I count 8 Android vendors among the AVC licensors, it's a veritable who's who list of software and electronics. Some also use Linux extensively like Sony (eg. my Sony TV runs on an embedded Linux.) This isn't some shell company set up to make a quick buck.
There also isn't a real alternative. Notable for its absence from the AVC licensors list is Google, the ones who are trying to disrupt the system by offering a "free" codec. Free is in quotation marks there because the hidden cost is the uncertainty of you being sued for patent infringement at some point in the future if you use WebM because it may or may not infringe on patents depending on who you ask. Putting your fate in the hands of a single company instead of a consortium that basically represents the entire sector isn't an improvement, no matter how much you believe their "don't be evil" motto.
The very best way open software can avoid this kind of trap is to be on the forefront of technology instead of just recreating free versions of things others have done. But then that takes us back to where we started... R&D isn't free and some people see a non-zero cost as a problem.
No, the reason for that is that pirates don't pay licensing fees for using codecs. The rest of us ultimately do pay for licensing those codecs or we do without.
As for why, the reason why is that h.264 isn't free for use, which means that Linux and Firefox and all the other free software out there would have to either start charging or nudge people to a pirate codec package.
Firefox should just use codecs provided by the OS. And the licensing costs for OS's are really small :
"royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15."
Linux users couldn't stomp up $0.20 for a commercial codec add-on ?
Flash would still be the de-facto standard if they hadn't self destructed by making performance really lousy and completely missing the boat on mobile touch screen devices. The fact that the most popular touch screen device was based on a platform Adobe had been neglecting (and antagonizing) for years didn't help either. Of course it's possible that the MPEG-LA self destructs in some way too but it doesn't seem as likely.
Please point me towards the Cyanogen mod versions based on Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich. Companies like Red Hat deserve praise for "openness" because they actually deliver it with their Fedora project, Google doesn't. Heck, even Apple has a better track record with releasing the OSX Darwin sources than Google has with Android.
They come to some arrangement, which looks like it's really a fake agreement (e.g. you pay us $45 million, and we pay you $45 million back in marketing and discounts - which is what the Samsung deal is rumoured to be)
That's not a fake agreement. Sounds like they are using their patents to increase those companies dependance on Microsoft by making sure they buy Microsoft products with their "discount." From Microsofts standpoint that's a bigger win than collecting a cheque because they sure don't need the money.
Android's support is only likely to last five or ten more years the urgency is clear.
Android is not Windows. You think this plugin will keep working for another 5 years based on what exactly ? Android vendors can't even be bothered pushing the latest version of the OS to their customers, you think they're going to spend time making sure a dead technology works ?
I don't know what you mean about openness, it is still awesome.
The whole "You can just compile Android from source. Oh nvm, we're not going to give you the latest sources" thing.
I loaded up a hacked version of BBC iPlayer (which uses Flash, at least until tomorrow's update) that works over mobile networks (normally it is limited to wifi), and then I installed the development version of RMaps because there are some handy new features that have not reached the stable version on the market yet.
"You can hack applications!" Developers are just going to love that argument. "You can install the latest unstable develoment versions!" Because that's the feature that has drawn the multitudes to desktop Linux.
Best of all my friend is able to have my old HTC Hero as a going concern because Cyanogen is better than the official HTC ROM and up to date, rather than it becoming next to worthless.
The ultimate Android argument: it's better because a team of volunteers has to spend their time hacking it into an actual non-sucking version which the customer then ultimately has to support themselves instead of their phone manufacturer. Relying on a third party version of an OS when Google has demonstrated that they have no problem keeping the source to themselves to provide their partners and themselves with a competitive advantage is building your house on quicksand.
You know what's a good way of confirming this ? Go on your favorite torrent site and try to find some video encoded in WebM or Theora. You can't, it's all x264 and xvid and the x264 stuff is both higher quality and becoming ever more popular. It perfectly mirrors what happened with mp3, no way h.264 is going away. So why spend precious developer time in an ultra competitive industry building support for another codec that you'll just have to support on top of the de-facto standard for which you'll be paying and developing anyway ? That fight is over, geeks are just in denial.
Can't believe they would actually hold out until it was certain Steve Jobs couldn't say, "I told you so!"
Yep. So on behalf of iOS users everywhere: we told you so. Let's see, that's it for "openness" and "flash" so far as arguments for Android that have turned out to be colossal bullshit. What's next ?
You don't have to love it. i'm just saying that if you use it and you're content then how is it a piece of crap ? You've obviously considered the pro's and cons and decided that this is the best phone for you at this time. That doesn't have to mean "best phone evar !!!!" and you can certainly criticize it but if it's really a piece of crap to you then surely you would have bought anther one ?
Car analogy: if you drive a family car daily and it takes you where you want to go in comfort it is not a piece of crap though some people might call it that if they compare it to some supercar they could never conceivably own, like say a Lamborghini.
I guess I could fall in love with an Android, but it would have to be Cherry 2000. Unfortunately those are limited edition and hard to find.
God, I have very vague recollections of that movie, I'm going to have to legally acquire it through the proper channels and watch it again.
The story is 6 months old and there have been no updates from Appleaday since though there's been plenty of news stories about it. A good advertisement you say, hmmm.
Orignal story dates from the 5th of may (6 month old stories now Slashdot, really ?) There was a flurry of news reporting and no updates since then, not even on their Facebook page where the restaurant gleefully displayed its new found notoriety. So I'm guessing it turned out to be very much a non-story played up for advertising value.
Well as long as I'm modded troll for that comment I might as well add that that fix, the 2.3.4 update for the Samsung Galaxy S2 which hasn't been released for belgian users for months now, includes a fix for poor battery life for a small number of users. Yet no uproar for that on Slashdot.
"Battery life: some users let us know that their batteries didn’t seem to be lasting as long; battery life should be improved for these folks."
So you think the antenna is a piece of crap, yet you didn't return the phone and you describe yourself in another comment as "a happy iPhone 4 owner" ? I don't get that, is it some weird love/hate thing ?
Seriously man it's been two weeks. There are Android updates you can't even get in Belgium because the operators don't give a shit. Now that's problematic. Waiting a couple of weeks ? Not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Also meat from the largest potential exporter, China, is likely contaminated with heavy metals.
I see I threw a hyperbolic "literally" in there. Just ignore that please, they were widely used.
A good parallel to this would be the Belgian draft horse. They once were one of our most important exports and used literally everywhere. Then after WW2 they were supplanted by tractors and other motorized vehicles and the population in Belgium collapsed from 200.000 in 1950 to 6.000 in 1980. Now there's concern there might be to few foals born to preserve the breed.
If it's tasty and has lived alongside us humans have eaten it, no exceptions. Dogs, rats, cats, bugs, other people, etc...
I'm sure there were people bitching about it then: "Man, that Ford looks great but it only comes in black. When will this idiot learn that he'll never succeed unless he gives customers what they want ? I give them 5 years before they're forced out of the market."
Anecdotal, but a lot of my friends put on some tunes on the TV when we visit. They don't even have AppleTV's or GoogleTV's, they'll just pop in a music DVD or a DVD video of a concert. Because it's easy, it's already in the living room, you have the remote right there and you have a large display (obviously) you can use to change the music.
With the amount of people that have smartphones now, the should just build WiFi into the TV and build an app to control it if you need typing (maybe with a fallback browser interface.) Like the AppleTV does with the Apple Remote app. It's not perfect but it works remarkably well.
Jobs supposedly said that he had "cracked" the TV problem so there's a lot of speculation about AppleTV at the moment but it's safe to say it wouldn't be like a DVR. It would have to be something with direct content deals that cut out the middlemen and allow it to actually work better and simpler than today's DVRs.
Yes, because their customers want it. Plus they don't actually have to do anything to support it, that is all down to Google, and historically they have been excellent when it comes to maintaining browser APIs.
This isn't a browser API, this is a binary blob. Backwards compatibility isn't free it takes work, work that won't help Google sell ads. I don't buy it but time will tell.
Who said anything about unstable or development versions? 2.3 is a full retail release, nice and stable. It is interesting that you mention Linux because a lot of people here got pretty upset when it looked like OEMs might lock out non-Microsoft operating systems by requiring the bootloader to be cryptographically signed. I'll decide what I run on my hardware, thanks.
You did (I was talking about apps): "I installed the development version of RMaps because there are some handy new features that have not reached the stable version on the market yet."
When it comes to deciding what you run on your hardware there is no good choice in the mobile market, there's no open hardware platform. You can't assemble your choice of hardware and then run your choice of OS on it, it simply doesn't exist. Doing things like putting Android on a TouchPad or iPhone requires a lot of hacking, reverse engineering and redevelopment of missing parts.
Try calling Apple to see if they will offer you some support for a 1998 Power PC Mac. See how useful it is as a general purpose computer these days. Then install Linux or a hacked MacOS update that bypasses the arbitrary lock-out on older systems and see how much better it is. Then appreciate that you saved a perfectly good computer from landfill and can maybe give it to someone who doesn't want to invest a lot of money in a new one.
Actually a late 90's G3 Powermac can run OSX up to Tiger (slowly, Panther would be a better choice) Personally I'd take Panther or Tiger over Linux every day. I've tried running Linux on "exotic" (i.e. non-x86) hardware, like my old RS/6000 (also a PowerPC), I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than try that again. Even it were easy modern distros don't care about old hardware, so you'd have to go with a specialized cut down one or roll your own, either way it's not going to look anywhere near as nice as an older version of OSX.
My friend is like that, he had a basic dumb Nokia but was interested in Android, just not willing to plump down the cash for a new phone or long term contract. Now he has a 1 month rolling contract SIM in an old but good phone which runs up to date software with excellent stability. HTC's support for shite anyway, especially since they apparently didn't update the manuals when the 2.1 update came around.
Good for him (no sarcasm intended.) Personally I'd rather spend the money on an iPhone and get decent support and don't have to worry about his sort of thing but to each his own.
You're paying the people who developed the standard. R&D isn't free you know. I find it hard to believe all the patents in that pool are frivolous.
Also worth noting: I count 8 Android vendors among the AVC licensors, it's a veritable who's who list of software and electronics. Some also use Linux extensively like Sony (eg. my Sony TV runs on an embedded Linux.) This isn't some shell company set up to make a quick buck.
There also isn't a real alternative. Notable for its absence from the AVC licensors list is Google, the ones who are trying to disrupt the system by offering a "free" codec. Free is in quotation marks there because the hidden cost is the uncertainty of you being sued for patent infringement at some point in the future if you use WebM because it may or may not infringe on patents depending on who you ask. Putting your fate in the hands of a single company instead of a consortium that basically represents the entire sector isn't an improvement, no matter how much you believe their "don't be evil" motto.
The very best way open software can avoid this kind of trap is to be on the forefront of technology instead of just recreating free versions of things others have done. But then that takes us back to where we started ... R&D isn't free and some people see a non-zero cost as a problem.
No, the reason for that is that pirates don't pay licensing fees for using codecs. The rest of us ultimately do pay for licensing those codecs or we do without.
As for why, the reason why is that h.264 isn't free for use, which means that Linux and Firefox and all the other free software out there would have to either start charging or nudge people to a pirate codec package.
Firefox should just use codecs provided by the OS. And the licensing costs for OS's are really small :
"royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15."
Linux users couldn't stomp up $0.20 for a commercial codec add-on ?
Flash would still be the de-facto standard if they hadn't self destructed by making performance really lousy and completely missing the boat on mobile touch screen devices. The fact that the most popular touch screen device was based on a platform Adobe had been neglecting (and antagonizing) for years didn't help either. Of course it's possible that the MPEG-LA self destructs in some way too but it doesn't seem as likely.
Please point me towards the Cyanogen mod versions based on Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich. Companies like Red Hat deserve praise for "openness" because they actually deliver it with their Fedora project, Google doesn't. Heck, even Apple has a better track record with releasing the OSX Darwin sources than Google has with Android.
They come to some arrangement, which looks like it's really a fake agreement (e.g. you pay us $45 million, and we pay you $45 million back in marketing and discounts - which is what the Samsung deal is rumoured to be)
That's not a fake agreement. Sounds like they are using their patents to increase those companies dependance on Microsoft by making sure they buy Microsoft products with their "discount." From Microsofts standpoint that's a bigger win than collecting a cheque because they sure don't need the money.
Android's support is only likely to last five or ten more years the urgency is clear.
Android is not Windows. You think this plugin will keep working for another 5 years based on what exactly ? Android vendors can't even be bothered pushing the latest version of the OS to their customers, you think they're going to spend time making sure a dead technology works ?
I don't know what you mean about openness, it is still awesome.
The whole "You can just compile Android from source. Oh nvm, we're not going to give you the latest sources" thing.
I loaded up a hacked version of BBC iPlayer (which uses Flash, at least until tomorrow's update) that works over mobile networks (normally it is limited to wifi), and then I installed the development version of RMaps because there are some handy new features that have not reached the stable version on the market yet.
"You can hack applications!" Developers are just going to love that argument.
"You can install the latest unstable develoment versions!" Because that's the feature that has drawn the multitudes to desktop Linux.
Best of all my friend is able to have my old HTC Hero as a going concern because Cyanogen is better than the official HTC ROM and up to date, rather than it becoming next to worthless.
The ultimate Android argument: it's better because a team of volunteers has to spend their time hacking it into an actual non-sucking version which the customer then ultimately has to support themselves instead of their phone manufacturer. Relying on a third party version of an OS when Google has demonstrated that they have no problem keeping the source to themselves to provide their partners and themselves with a competitive advantage is building your house on quicksand.
Hello, de-facto standard.
You know what's a good way of confirming this ? Go on your favorite torrent site and try to find some video encoded in WebM or Theora. You can't, it's all x264 and xvid and the x264 stuff is both higher quality and becoming ever more popular. It perfectly mirrors what happened with mp3, no way h.264 is going away. So why spend precious developer time in an ultra competitive industry building support for another codec that you'll just have to support on top of the de-facto standard for which you'll be paying and developing anyway ? That fight is over, geeks are just in denial.
Can't believe they would actually hold out until it was certain Steve Jobs couldn't say, "I told you so!"
Yep. So on behalf of iOS users everywhere: we told you so.
Let's see, that's it for "openness" and "flash" so far as arguments for Android that have turned out to be colossal bullshit. What's next ?
You don't have to love it. i'm just saying that if you use it and you're content then how is it a piece of crap ? You've obviously considered the pro's and cons and decided that this is the best phone for you at this time. That doesn't have to mean "best phone evar !!!!" and you can certainly criticize it but if it's really a piece of crap to you then surely you would have bought anther one ?
Car analogy: if you drive a family car daily and it takes you where you want to go in comfort it is not a piece of crap though some people might call it that if they compare it to some supercar they could never conceivably own, like say a Lamborghini.
I guess I could fall in love with an Android, but it would have to be Cherry 2000. Unfortunately those are limited edition and hard to find.
God, I have very vague recollections of that movie, I'm going to have to legally acquire it through the proper channels and watch it again.
No kidding- if we could just stop the US from starting all those World Wars, we could finally get some peace.
We're on the wagon now, pray we don't fall off.
Belgium actually, but it just took about 2 minutes and some basic knowledge of french and german to look this up. Journalism is dead.
The story is 6 months old and there have been no updates from Appleaday since though there's been plenty of news stories about it. A good advertisement you say, hmmm.
Orignal story dates from the 5th of may (6 month old stories now Slashdot, really ?) There was a flurry of news reporting and no updates since then, not even on their Facebook page where the restaurant gleefully displayed its new found notoriety. So I'm guessing it turned out to be very much a non-story played up for advertising value.
Well as long as I'm modded troll for that comment I might as well add that that fix, the 2.3.4 update for the Samsung Galaxy S2 which hasn't been released for belgian users for months now, includes a fix for poor battery life for a small number of users. Yet no uproar for that on Slashdot.
"Battery life: some users let us know that their batteries didn’t seem to be lasting as long; battery life should be improved for these folks."
So you think the antenna is a piece of crap, yet you didn't return the phone and you describe yourself in another comment as "a happy iPhone 4 owner" ? I don't get that, is it some weird love/hate thing ?
Seriously man it's been two weeks. There are Android updates you can't even get in Belgium because the operators don't give a shit. Now that's problematic. Waiting a couple of weeks ? Not so much.