Maybe they'll change their terms, and I'll reconsider. But the terms they're offering now are simply a bad deal for developers, and I doubt many will bite.
Seems fair enough. You'd probably also reconsider if (IF) the Amazon app store becomes a success, such that a huge chunk of consumers make it their first port of call. If consumers are buying someone else's app instead of yours, because they find it in the app store they prefer using, you're going to want in.
Possible reasons this might happen include: hardware vendors installing the Amazon store as standard; the Amazon version offering a better app discovery experience.
doesn't have Android Market because it lacks 3G data
What am I missing? Why would Android Market require 3G data? On my HTC desire I can buy/install apps while connected to WiFi (and therefore not connected to mobile data).
My guess is there's some other, non-technical, reason for the Archos not having Market.
33 That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
34 The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.” 35 So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
See, that was two short verses. The problematic books in question would have stretched each one out to 50 pages of fine detail.
Give me a break. Apple sells a streamlined user experience to people who want exactly that.
That's fine. But we should shout a bit every time Apple rejects a significant app, just so that the people buying iPhones/iPads are reminded what it is they've bought.
Then they can make an informed decision next time they're buying a phone/tablet/whatever.
It seems to me that ordinary users are bumping up against the walls of the garden more and more often now.
Whether you use a browser to go to the Facebook homepage, or an http library to make REST queries to the Facebook API, by the time you've been through Geolocation-aware DNS lookup and their load balancers, you've no way of knowing which of their thousands of hosts is handling your request. And that's what makes it a cloud.
People will be using the "cloud" when these and other companies start hosting on the cloud rather than self-hosting.
The companies mentioned - Facebook, Flickr, Gmail - along with Amazon - run their own clouds. There's no formal definition, but my own is that there's vast clusters of servers with tasks distributed among them with mapreduce or something similar, such that node failures are routed around, and scaling is just a matter of adding more hardware.
So if you're using GMail, or Google Docs, you're using "the cloud". Or at least "a cloud".
The problem with ChromeOS is it is trying to solve a problem them doesn't exist.
The problem that exists is that a fat OS with local apps is a bugger to maintain and keep up to date. Conceptually at least, the beauty of something like Chrome is that the footprint of what needs to ever be updated can be much, much smaller -- and hence, hopefully, need updating less frequently. Everything else is maintained remotely, so the user doesn't have to worry about it.
Application software upgrades "just happen" without the user having to do anything. (How many times have you performed a GMail upgrade install? And Thunderbird?). Users can treat storage as if it's limitless, because it's remote and the provider is always adding capacity.
I like these features.
By contrast; I'm prompted to update Android apps more than weekly, and I keep having to move apps around to make space. Windows and Linux, similarly.
Consumer action is another tactic. Here's the letter I sent my bank:
Dear Smile.co.uk,
One of the reasons I am a customer of Smile Banking is your commitment to ethical banking.
I do not believe that Visa's recent decision to block payments to Wikileaks is consistent with that ethical stance.
I understand that due to Visa's near-monopoly on card payments and online payments, it is not really practical for either Smile Banking or myself personally to discontinue our use of Visa debit card facilities. However I would like to send a message to Visa that this decision has weakened, not strengthened, their brand reputation to me and, I would assume, others.
To this end:
1. Please would you forward this message to Smile Banking's board of directors 2. Please would Smile Banking collate any similar messages of disapproval regarding Visa's actions from other Smile customers, should they be received, and communicate the aggregate message to Visa 3. Please, so that I can modify my behaviour where possible, would you advise me to what extent the following activities result in income to Visa
a: A debit card payment where I the cardholder am present
b: A cash withdrawal at a high street ATM
c: An online/telephone debit card payment
Note that the latest leaks show that the US Govt put pressure on Russia, to avoid legislation that would level the field for Visa/Mastercard competitors:
We're talking about transferring photos from cameras. It's obviously an attractive use case: go on holiday with your camera and iPad. The existence of the $30 Apple camera dongle demonstrates that it's a use case Apple recognised.
And we know that's true because Assange's lawyers said it!
I think it's reasonable to treat what Assange's lawyers state as fact, at least until the point where someone (not counting internet blowhards) contradicts them.
Legal professionals are generally rather cautious about explicit lies.
Wikileaks is more than just Assange. He could disappear and the organisation would keep going. So the insurance file key isn't required just yet.
Indeed, initially there was to be no figurehead for the organisation -- but they found that world media wanted there to be one, so Assange stepped up to the task.
a touch screen is not a good interface for Doom 3 for example.
... but it's the perfect interface for Angry Birds, or Slitherlink, or Small World.
I'm sure someone could conceive of a game that's graphically demanding and suits touch screens. Whether it would be more compelling than the existing, less graphically intensive offerings, is another matter.
As a side note, I've never seen an iPhone user change their mind about their purchase. Ever.
My mate's wife got a refund on her iPhone.
She is partially sighted, and had been told that the iPhone had good accessibility features. This it did.
However, the iPhone was severely crippled if it couldn't be synced to iTunes, and iTunes for Windows wouldn't play nicely with the accessibility software on her PC -- so she got her money back.
There seems to be something terribly wrong with the US ISP market (I am not American), such that consumers can't/won't leave Comcast for another ISP, because they want Netflix.
If the market was free, wouldn't this problem fix itself?
(OTOH, I do think regulation mandating net neutrality would be a good thing, for other issues)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they'll change their terms, and I'll reconsider. But the terms they're offering now are simply a bad deal for developers, and I doubt many will bite.
Seems fair enough. You'd probably also reconsider if (IF) the Amazon app store becomes a success, such that a huge chunk of consumers make it their first port of call. If consumers are buying someone else's app instead of yours, because they find it in the app store they prefer using, you're going to want in.
Possible reasons this might happen include: hardware vendors installing the Amazon store as standard; the Amazon version offering a better app discovery experience.
doesn't have Android Market because it lacks 3G data
What am I missing? Why would Android Market require 3G data?
On my HTC desire I can buy/install apps while connected to WiFi (and therefore not connected to mobile data).
My guess is there's some other, non-technical, reason for the Archos not having Market.
Sell? Not exactly. Google doesn't make money selling/licensing an OS or selling apps, they make money selling ads.
I assume they get a cut if you buy an app from Android Market, since the transaction goes through Google Checkout.
plus you have crackdowns on bandwidth at the end-user level. Give it a couple more years and we won't hear any more from OnLive.
Maybe they should take their technology to a country with a decent broadband infrastructure?
33 That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
34 The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.” 35 So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
See, that was two short verses. The problematic books in question would have stretched each one out to 50 pages of fine detail.
I might want to buy an ebook fairly soon. Can anybody recommend a good ebook reader where this kind of crap isn't possible?
I'd like: no DRM, standard USB connector, possibility of uploading anything I want from USB, and open source firmware.
A Kindle addresses all of those except the OSS firmware, insofar as it won't refuse to display non-DRM'd files.
Epub support would certainly be nice though.
Give me a break. Apple sells a streamlined user experience to people who want exactly that.
That's fine. But we should shout a bit every time Apple rejects a significant app, just so that the people buying iPhones/iPads are reminded what it is they've bought.
Then they can make an informed decision next time they're buying a phone/tablet/whatever.
It seems to me that ordinary users are bumping up against the walls of the garden more and more often now.
They are clouds with websites on top.
More: they are websites hosted on clouds.
Whether you use a browser to go to the Facebook homepage, or an http library to make REST queries to the Facebook API, by the time you've been through Geolocation-aware DNS lookup and their load balancers, you've no way of knowing which of their thousands of hosts is handling your request. And that's what makes it a cloud.
People will be using the "cloud" when these and other companies start hosting on the cloud rather than self-hosting.
The companies mentioned - Facebook, Flickr, Gmail - along with Amazon - run their own clouds. There's no formal definition, but my own is that there's vast clusters of servers with tasks distributed among them with mapreduce or something similar, such that node failures are routed around, and scaling is just a matter of adding more hardware.
So if you're using GMail, or Google Docs, you're using "the cloud". Or at least "a cloud".
The problem with ChromeOS is it is trying to solve a problem them doesn't exist.
The problem that exists is that a fat OS with local apps is a bugger to maintain and keep up to date. Conceptually at least, the beauty of something like Chrome is that the footprint of what needs to ever be updated can be much, much smaller -- and hence, hopefully, need updating less frequently. Everything else is maintained remotely, so the user doesn't have to worry about it.
Application software upgrades "just happen" without the user having to do anything. (How many times have you performed a GMail upgrade install? And Thunderbird?). Users can treat storage as if it's limitless, because it's remote and the provider is always adding capacity.
I like these features.
By contrast; I'm prompted to update Android apps more than weekly, and I keep having to move apps around to make space. Windows and Linux, similarly.
DDoS != modern sit-in
Voluntary Botnet == modern sit-in
See the difference?
Where does this leave a DDoS implemented using a voluntary botnet?
Consumer action is another tactic. Here's the letter I sent my bank:
Dear Smile.co.uk,
One of the reasons I am a customer of Smile Banking is your commitment to ethical banking.
I do not believe that Visa's recent decision to block payments to Wikileaks is consistent with that ethical stance.
I understand that due to Visa's near-monopoly on card payments and online payments, it is not really practical for either Smile Banking or myself personally to discontinue our use of Visa debit card facilities. However I would like to send a message to Visa that this decision has weakened, not strengthened, their brand reputation to me and, I would assume, others.
To this end:
1. Please would you forward this message to Smile Banking's board of directors
2. Please would Smile Banking collate any similar messages of disapproval regarding Visa's actions from other Smile customers, should they be received, and communicate the aggregate message to Visa
3. Please, so that I can modify my behaviour where possible, would you advise me to what extent the following activities result in income to Visa
a: A debit card payment where I the cardholder am present
b: A cash withdrawal at a high street ATM
c: An online/telephone debit card payment
Many thanks,
Note that the latest leaks show that the US Govt put pressure on Russia, to avoid legislation that would level the field for Visa/Mastercard competitors:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-us-russia-visa-mastercard
... they are offering me the opportunity to buy a device that doesn't have a caps-lock key.
We're talking about transferring photos from cameras. It's obviously an attractive use case: go on holiday with your camera and iPad. The existence of the $30 Apple camera dongle demonstrates that it's a use case Apple recognised.
Apple sells a camera kit [...] for thirty bucks
Of course if it had a USB socket in the first place -- and some very standard drivers -- you could use a generic MicroSD adapter for $5.
And we know that's true because Assange's lawyers said it!
I think it's reasonable to treat what Assange's lawyers state as fact, at least until the point where someone (not counting internet blowhards) contradicts them.
Legal professionals are generally rather cautious about explicit lies.
You do realise that we burn Guy Fawkes' effigy annually? By convention, he is a villain not a martyr.
Were it not for the British establishment encouraging bonfire night celebrations, he probably would have been "forgot".
If the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded, of course, it would have done as much good for Catholics in Britain as 9/11 did for Muslims in the US.
Wikileaks is more than just Assange. He could disappear and the organisation would keep going. So the insurance file key isn't required just yet.
Indeed, initially there was to be no figurehead for the organisation -- but they found that world media wanted there to be one, so Assange stepped up to the task.
a touch screen is not a good interface for Doom 3 for example.
... but it's the perfect interface for Angry Birds, or Slitherlink, or Small World.
I'm sure someone could conceive of a game that's graphically demanding and suits touch screens. Whether it would be more compelling than the existing, less graphically intensive offerings, is another matter.
Er, Android phones vary in size, from much smaller than an iPhone (Xperia Mini) to a bit bigger (Desire HD).
As far as I know, iPhone is one size fits all, and that's about the same size as the original HTC Desire.
Show me a phone that will let me run make install on the Android OS code and I might be impressed with its open-source capabilities.
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/about -- pretty much equivalent.
The Nexus 1 didn't even need any hacking to root it, as I understand it.
As a side note, I've never seen an iPhone user change their mind about their purchase. Ever.
My mate's wife got a refund on her iPhone.
She is partially sighted, and had been told that the iPhone had good accessibility features. This it did.
However, the iPhone was severely crippled if it couldn't be synced to iTunes, and iTunes for Windows wouldn't play nicely with the accessibility software on her PC -- so she got her money back.
There seems to be something terribly wrong with the US ISP market (I am not American), such that consumers can't/won't leave Comcast for another ISP, because they want Netflix.
If the market was free, wouldn't this problem fix itself?
(OTOH, I do think regulation mandating net neutrality would be a good thing, for other issues)
PDF is documented by ISO http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51502
I'm not particularly happy about standards where you have to pay for the spec, but it's better than having a completely secret standard.
ePub is open: http://www.daisy.org/epub/
Mobi, I'll take your word for. It's proprietary but (unfortunately) a defacto standard of sorts.