Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Funnily enough, my house has a market value, and I have to pay a property tax every year based on that market value. And when it goes up in value, my property tax increases.
I think I incorrectly inferred "criminals" to mean "Apple, and other corporations who tacitly allow slave labor." In that case, everyone who buys a computer from one of those companies would be pretty unethical.
That said, the relatively unregulated market in the US (compared to e.g. other western countries) promotes profit above almost everything else, and supposes that companies will fail if enough people boycott them due to their unethical actions. It's really hard to fault a company which operates most efficiently in that environment when you as an individual are buying their products, or supporting those who do.
Companies don't act ethically unless it helps their bottom line to do so.
But then, as an individual that work with technology I don't have any choice
No, but then one could say that you (and I, for that matter) work in corrupt, unethical industries.
China takes the opposite approach--criminalizing workers forming or joining a union.
But as DogDude says, absent regulation, companies and people don't tend to act ethically. Hell, nearly every regulation on the books is the result of a real problem. Look at labor in the industrial revolution. That's how companies act when there is no regulation.
Of course, they'll still get a huge amount of information on you from your friends which use Google, and from any presence you have on the web at all. I eventually decided that the information they could get from my e-mail was minor compared to the benefits of Gmail. This is particularly true since they already got most of my e-mails since my friends used Google.
Why? Because my phone was crappy? I'm not sure why that's so inconceivable to you--it certainly happened, and a quick Google search shows that it happened to others. For the other guy who suggested that I should have bought a Nexus (on a crappy carrier, no less) the Nexus One also has reports of locking up.
At the time, the Droid was one of the most highly regarded Android phones, and Google itself promoted it on its home page--an extreme rarity now, and a first for its time. If any phone other than a Nexus was endorsed by Google, the Droid was.
I bought a Droid shortly after they came out. My wife bought an iphone right around the same time.
I was cursing the Droid probably 6 months after I got it. The thing was just slow, unresponsive, and sucked.
Fast forward last fall. The Droid was locking up constantly, while the iPhone was still quite responsive and felt like new (almost--two major OS revisions had slowed it down a bit.) I couldn't ditch Android fast enough.
The thread to which you replied wasn't talking much about this particular case, but rather about copyright infringement in general. Indeed, some people try very hard to equate copyright infringement with theft, including the writers of the PROTECT-IP act. (The second "T" in the title of that act stands for "theft.")
I think the "failure" is that the shutdown and arrest couldn't be done without due process. SOPA/PIPA eliminates a great deal of due process for the initial shutdown.
Just consider how long megaupload's been around. If one could just mail a letter to their DNS provider to get it shut down, you can bet it would have happened long ago.
I think at this point we're just arguing to argue, and there's not going to be much point to further discussion. We both have our opinions, and it's clear to me that they aren't going to change.
However, I did want to clarify one thing:
I don't know if that is true or not (can apps really not make data available to Siri?) but if so it sounds like Apple deliberately retarded it. I'd hardly call that a good thing, especially when Android does a good job of allowing apps to make data searchable via standard APIs and thus available for voice access.
Siri is considered to be in beta. There aren't APIs for third-party apps to access it, however the pure voice recognition portion is available to any text-input just like it is on Android. It's the NLP that's not exposed--something which I don't think Google had before Apple bought Siri, anyway.
Well Samba runs over IP, which means that you have to have the device connected to the computer via IP, and without NAT between them (not something you can guarantee if you don't own the network.) Otherwise, you need to be doing IP over USB, which again would require a driver.
It's not out of the ordinary. I use 2 wireless networks regularly that don't allow communication between wireless devices.
Now requiring a driver is fine, but again, if you have to install software on the computer anyway, you could obviously and easily devise a solution which wasn't patent encumbered.
Fair enough, but since it mounts in Windows, it has to present something that Windows can read. Regardless of whether or not the underlying filesystem is e.g. Fat32, it would probably present as Fat32 using some sort of translation layer, which might mean it was infringing on patents.
They could also require software to read the card, but that's less user-friendly. Might as well just add an ext2 driver and require that the user install that.
And if you never need to remove it, more power to you. But it stands that it can be pulled out and placed in a PC, and if a user goes and does this and windows offers to format it (and erases all their data) then the vendor will be in a world of hurt.
"It can be done" is a far cry from "many people do."
And the/vendor/ would be in a world of hurt? I guess maybe in today's litigious society, but the blame rests completely on the user and Microsoft.
Do they really? On Android, you can just plug it in and enable USB sharing. This still requires that the desktop be able to read the filesystem on the SD card (so I'm just being a little pedantic), but to remove the SD card would be pretty bad, since apps can run from it. I've even seen phones where the battery completely covered the card, meaning you'd have to disable your phone in order to pop it out.
It has two potential effects: 1) Faster data speeds. 2) Faster battery drain.
For Verizon customers, it has a third effect: 3) Multiple outages.
But what I said was that hardware alone doesn't create an experience. For the sake of argument, 4G LTE without a processor capable of rendering pages as fast as they can be downloaded may not contribute as much to the experience as the specs alone would imply.
While I don't know of any direct examples of that, there is a relevant example in the tablet space. Not long ago, there was a kerfluffle over tablet (I think) makers advertising that their devices could play HD video, despite the fact that the tablet resolution was lower than HD. Now we can wax intellectual about the meaning of "plays HD video" (decodes? displays? downloads?) but it points out something obvious. The chips in most of these tablets are technically capable (by spec) of decoding 1080p video. But that spec is (almost*) completely meaningless on a tablet which has 768 lines. The spec looks pretty good, but does not actually imply much about the user experience.
Then there's this post https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS which discusses some of the software reasons behind different scrolling speeds on iOS and Android. Slower (by spec) iPhone devices can beat faster (by spec) Android devices on scrolling due to software decisions. To create a really degenerate case, I could write a display driver which spins 50% of the time, and one which doesn't. If I run the former on a 1ghz processor, and the latter on a 700mhz processor, the latter will actually operate faster, despite being on a slower processor.
If this sounds like the old megahertz myth--that's because it's quite similar. Only it's shifting the "blame" from CPU instruction set to the place where it actually belongs--operating system design. And before this starts coming off as a pro-Apple or pro-iOS post, it's not. The responsiveness issue is only one metric. Another is security, which I'm not addressing here. Another is feature set, where I'll mention text reflow--one of the hardest things to give up if you're switching from Android to iOS. Because that's one place where Android nailed usability.
And that's why specs alone are not meaningful.
* Almost, because most of these devices can output to an external display, where the extra lines might be there and could then be used.
First it was the fact that different devices existed though they were generally running the same Android version. Everyone complained "oh, fragmentation." Jobs and company went out and told the world you can't build a high quality product if you don't control the entire market vertically. That was fragmentation.
I never heard that definition, so I can't really speak to that. I'll say that it doesn't make any damned sense, unless hardware vastly differed. Then you're having to optimize to particular amounts of RAM or processor speeds. The iPhone has had this particular issue ever since the 3G was released, of course.
Of course many developers came out and said it wasn't really a problem. You simply target a lower API level and develop from that.
Weellll, yes, but that's part of the fragmentation. There's the nice, shiny, easy-to-use APIs, but you can't use them if you want to target all devices. That right there is the definitive fragmentation that most people mean when they use the word.
Nevermind that iOS has similar fragmentation issues. The screen on an iphone 3gs is not the same resolution as an iphone 4 which is not the same as an ipad. Fragmentation?
Most people, when referring to Android fragmentation, are referring to phones. Tablets didn't even run the same OS until very recently (except for a few that ran older OS.)
Apple segmented their app store into iPad and iPhone sections, and while you can run the phone apps on the tablet, it's clearly not the optimal use.
As for the 3gs vs the 4's resolution, it's an even multiple, which means that the phone can use scaling to abstract 99% of problems away.
Now you say, "OMG, you can buy a phone with an old version of android!" Well no shit. The idea wasn't to pigeon hole everyone into something.
Yup. Android lets you buy a new phone with existing, in-the-wild exploits. Awesome!
But the point of the whole discussion is fragmentation, and lots of different OS versions is just that. Either devs write for the older OS or they leave it behind.
For example let's talk about Siri. Siri is perfectly capable of running on EXISTING iphone 4 devices. It was shown to be possible by some hackers. Hell, Siri itself was running on iphone 3gs when Siri was an independent company. Then Apple came in and bought Siri, dropped the Siri app from the app store, and re-released it as part of iOS 5 and RESTRICTED it to iphone 4s. How is that not fragmentation? How is that not FORCED product obsolescence?
If an APIs existed which took advantage of Siri, that would be the fragmentation that everyone talks about.
I think it's telling that Galestar said "Android is better" and not "This particular phone is better." Because ultimately, that's what it comes down to. Almost no Android phone even comes close to any currently sold iPhone when it comes to UI responsiveness (particularly, but not limited to, scrolling in the default browser.)
The Galaxy S II is the exception. From what I've seen, has as smooth scrolling for most tasks as the iPhone 4/4s. You can find degenerate cases where scrolling is worse on the GS2 (a page with lots of images, which isn't images.google.com, will usually fair pretty badly, as will sites with huge numbers of elements.)
I wonder what the battery life comparison is like. Everyone wants LTE, but my friends with LTE have to carry chargers everywhere. I can make it two days on my 4s--about as long as I could make it on my Droid when it was new.
This isn't meant to construe one phone as better or worse than the other. It's just a comparison of performance. As someone else pointed out above, reflowing text is an immensely useful feature that the iPhone lacks.
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Funnily enough, my house has a market value, and I have to pay a property tax every year based on that market value. And when it goes up in value, my property tax increases.
I'm not entirely sure why stock is different.
I think I incorrectly inferred "criminals" to mean "Apple, and other corporations who tacitly allow slave labor." In that case, everyone who buys a computer from one of those companies would be pretty unethical.
That said, the relatively unregulated market in the US (compared to e.g. other western countries) promotes profit above almost everything else, and supposes that companies will fail if enough people boycott them due to their unethical actions. It's really hard to fault a company which operates most efficiently in that environment when you as an individual are buying their products, or supporting those who do.
Companies don't act ethically unless it helps their bottom line to do so.
But then, as an individual that work with technology I don't have any choice
No, but then one could say that you (and I, for that matter) work in corrupt, unethical industries.
But it's clustered at Foxconn.
The computer you typed that comment on was almost certainly produced in those conditions.
China takes the opposite approach--criminalizing workers forming or joining a union.
But as DogDude says, absent regulation, companies and people don't tend to act ethically. Hell, nearly every regulation on the books is the result of a real problem. Look at labor in the industrial revolution. That's how companies act when there is no regulation.
Weirdly, they are:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mobiledia/2012/01/18/apple-audits-factories-to-improve-working-conditions/
Of course, no one wants to talk about that, because it's fun to hate Apple.
Of course, they'll still get a huge amount of information on you from your friends which use Google, and from any presence you have on the web at all. I eventually decided that the information they could get from my e-mail was minor compared to the benefits of Gmail. This is particularly true since they already got most of my e-mails since my friends used Google.
Why? Because my phone was crappy? I'm not sure why that's so inconceivable to you--it certainly happened, and a quick Google search shows that it happened to others. For the other guy who suggested that I should have bought a Nexus (on a crappy carrier, no less) the Nexus One also has reports of locking up.
At the time, the Droid was one of the most highly regarded Android phones, and Google itself promoted it on its home page--an extreme rarity now, and a first for its time. If any phone other than a Nexus was endorsed by Google, the Droid was.
I bought a Droid shortly after they came out. My wife bought an iphone right around the same time.
I was cursing the Droid probably 6 months after I got it. The thing was just slow, unresponsive, and sucked.
Fast forward last fall. The Droid was locking up constantly, while the iPhone was still quite responsive and felt like new (almost--two major OS revisions had slowed it down a bit.) I couldn't ditch Android fast enough.
It's not just the low end phones.
The thread to which you replied wasn't talking much about this particular case, but rather about copyright infringement in general. Indeed, some people try very hard to equate copyright infringement with theft, including the writers of the PROTECT-IP act. (The second "T" in the title of that act stands for "theft.")
http://www.dontcensorthenet.com/full-text-of-the-protect-ip-act-of-2011
I think the "failure" is that the shutdown and arrest couldn't be done without due process. SOPA/PIPA eliminates a great deal of due process for the initial shutdown.
Just consider how long megaupload's been around. If one could just mail a letter to their DNS provider to get it shut down, you can bet it would have happened long ago.
I think at this point we're just arguing to argue, and there's not going to be much point to further discussion. We both have our opinions, and it's clear to me that they aren't going to change.
However, I did want to clarify one thing:
I don't know if that is true or not (can apps really not make data available to Siri?) but if so it sounds like Apple deliberately retarded it. I'd hardly call that a good thing, especially when Android does a good job of allowing apps to make data searchable via standard APIs and thus available for voice access.
Siri is considered to be in beta. There aren't APIs for third-party apps to access it, however the pure voice recognition portion is available to any text-input just like it is on Android. It's the NLP that's not exposed--something which I don't think Google had before Apple bought Siri, anyway.
And the rather unfortunate part is that I can buy an Android phone today that is not on 2.3, and which probably never will be.
If I buy an iOS phone today, I get the most recent version of the OS, and history suggests that I will get an upgrade in the future.
why would you care that people without SIP-capable android phones cant use your app
I haven't seen any Android phones advertised as SIP-capable--are there any? SIP should run on anything with IP.
There are new APIs but I cant think of why you'd want to use them to develop for older phones...
Obviously you wouldn't. And when your app doesn't work on that other phone, you get fragmentation.
I'm confused as to where the confusion is coming from.
Well Samba runs over IP, which means that you have to have the device connected to the computer via IP, and without NAT between them (not something you can guarantee if you don't own the network.) Otherwise, you need to be doing IP over USB, which again would require a driver.
It's not out of the ordinary. I use 2 wireless networks regularly that don't allow communication between wireless devices.
Now requiring a driver is fine, but again, if you have to install software on the computer anyway, you could obviously and easily devise a solution which wasn't patent encumbered.
Fair enough, but since it mounts in Windows, it has to present something that Windows can read. Regardless of whether or not the underlying filesystem is e.g. Fat32, it would probably present as Fat32 using some sort of translation layer, which might mean it was infringing on patents.
They could also require software to read the card, but that's less user-friendly. Might as well just add an ext2 driver and require that the user install that.
And if you never need to remove it, more power to you. But it stands that it can be pulled out and placed in a PC, and if a user goes and does this and windows offers to format it (and erases all their data) then the vendor will be in a world of hurt.
"It can be done" is a far cry from "many people do."
And the /vendor/ would be in a world of hurt? I guess maybe in today's litigious society, but the blame rests completely on the user and Microsoft.
I love FreeBSD, but there's one aspect that is pretty bloated: ZFS.
The recommendation is on the order of 2GB RAM for every 1TB of ZFS disk.
Do they really? On Android, you can just plug it in and enable USB sharing. This still requires that the desktop be able to read the filesystem on the SD card (so I'm just being a little pedantic), but to remove the SD card would be pretty bad, since apps can run from it. I've even seen phones where the battery completely covered the card, meaning you'd have to disable your phone in order to pop it out.
It has two potential effects:
1) Faster data speeds.
2) Faster battery drain.
For Verizon customers, it has a third effect:
3) Multiple outages.
But what I said was that hardware alone doesn't create an experience. For the sake of argument, 4G LTE without a processor capable of rendering pages as fast as they can be downloaded may not contribute as much to the experience as the specs alone would imply.
While I don't know of any direct examples of that, there is a relevant example in the tablet space. Not long ago, there was a kerfluffle over tablet (I think) makers advertising that their devices could play HD video, despite the fact that the tablet resolution was lower than HD. Now we can wax intellectual about the meaning of "plays HD video" (decodes? displays? downloads?) but it points out something obvious. The chips in most of these tablets are technically capable (by spec) of decoding 1080p video. But that spec is (almost*) completely meaningless on a tablet which has 768 lines. The spec looks pretty good, but does not actually imply much about the user experience.
Then there's this post https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS which discusses some of the software reasons behind different scrolling speeds on iOS and Android. Slower (by spec) iPhone devices can beat faster (by spec) Android devices on scrolling due to software decisions. To create a really degenerate case, I could write a display driver which spins 50% of the time, and one which doesn't. If I run the former on a 1ghz processor, and the latter on a 700mhz processor, the latter will actually operate faster, despite being on a slower processor.
If this sounds like the old megahertz myth--that's because it's quite similar. Only it's shifting the "blame" from CPU instruction set to the place where it actually belongs--operating system design. And before this starts coming off as a pro-Apple or pro-iOS post, it's not. The responsiveness issue is only one metric. Another is security, which I'm not addressing here. Another is feature set, where I'll mention text reflow--one of the hardest things to give up if you're switching from Android to iOS. Because that's one place where Android nailed usability.
And that's why specs alone are not meaningful.
* Almost, because most of these devices can output to an external display, where the extra lines might be there and could then be used.
First it was the fact that different devices existed though they were generally running the same Android version. Everyone complained "oh, fragmentation." Jobs and company went out and told the world you can't build a high quality product if you don't control the entire market vertically. That was fragmentation.
I never heard that definition, so I can't really speak to that. I'll say that it doesn't make any damned sense, unless hardware vastly differed. Then you're having to optimize to particular amounts of RAM or processor speeds. The iPhone has had this particular issue ever since the 3G was released, of course.
Of course many developers came out and said it wasn't really a problem. You simply target a lower API level and develop from that.
Weellll, yes, but that's part of the fragmentation. There's the nice, shiny, easy-to-use APIs, but you can't use them if you want to target all devices. That right there is the definitive fragmentation that most people mean when they use the word.
Nevermind that iOS has similar fragmentation issues. The screen on an iphone 3gs is not the same resolution as an iphone 4 which is not the same as an ipad. Fragmentation?
Most people, when referring to Android fragmentation, are referring to phones. Tablets didn't even run the same OS until very recently (except for a few that ran older OS.)
Apple segmented their app store into iPad and iPhone sections, and while you can run the phone apps on the tablet, it's clearly not the optimal use.
As for the 3gs vs the 4's resolution, it's an even multiple, which means that the phone can use scaling to abstract 99% of problems away.
Now you say, "OMG, you can buy a phone with an old version of android!" Well no shit. The idea wasn't to pigeon hole everyone into something.
Yup. Android lets you buy a new phone with existing, in-the-wild exploits. Awesome!
But the point of the whole discussion is fragmentation, and lots of different OS versions is just that. Either devs write for the older OS or they leave it behind.
For example let's talk about Siri. Siri is perfectly capable of running on EXISTING iphone 4 devices. It was shown to be possible by some hackers. Hell, Siri itself was running on iphone 3gs when Siri was an independent company. Then Apple came in and bought Siri, dropped the Siri app from the app store, and re-released it as part of iOS 5 and RESTRICTED it to iphone 4s. How is that not fragmentation? How is that not FORCED product obsolescence?
If an APIs existed which took advantage of Siri, that would be the fragmentation that everyone talks about.
I think it's telling that Galestar said "Android is better" and not "This particular phone is better." Because ultimately, that's what it comes down to. Almost no Android phone even comes close to any currently sold iPhone when it comes to UI responsiveness (particularly, but not limited to, scrolling in the default browser.)
The Galaxy S II is the exception. From what I've seen, has as smooth scrolling for most tasks as the iPhone 4/4s. You can find degenerate cases where scrolling is worse on the GS2 (a page with lots of images, which isn't images.google.com, will usually fair pretty badly, as will sites with huge numbers of elements.)
I wonder what the battery life comparison is like. Everyone wants LTE, but my friends with LTE have to carry chargers everywhere. I can make it two days on my 4s--about as long as I could make it on my Droid when it was new.
This isn't meant to construe one phone as better or worse than the other. It's just a comparison of performance. As someone else pointed out above, reflowing text is an immensely useful feature that the iPhone lacks.
Nah, it's just that hardware specs alone do not constitute a user experience.
That's one of the two features I hated to lose when switching. Reflow was fantastic.
On the other hand, I suspect it's also why scrolling in the browser was like trying to drive a car by gesturing at the steering wheel.