They spend all their time and money on ways to keep people locked into their products.
How are you 'locked in'? That's just an excuse not to change. I use Windows, OSX and Linux and don't find myself 'locked in' to Windows at all. I also use MS Office and Google Docs and don't find myself 'locked in' to MS Office.
If that weren't the case Microsoft Office would support ODF.
It does, and ODF has been supported in it through 3rd party plugins for years.
You're comparing Microsoft Windows to iOS? Why aren't you comparing Windows to OSX?
Because the traditional PC is in decline, people are using other devices for more of their personal computing and as a personal computing platform iOS is much more of a competitor to Windows than OSX is.
How locked down was Zune, how locked down is RT
Very, but who cares? Nobody uses them, whereas hundreds of millions of people use iOS devices for personal computing.
What about IBM? They locked down their BIOS to prevent clones from coming in to existence and it wasn't until clean-room reverse engineered solutions came about that anybody could even make a compatible system.
The interesting thing is that Microsoft's 'lock-in' was less obtrusive than that of the devices of today. Do you really expect somebody who buys a PC on which they can install whatever they want - including competing products like LibreOffice or Chrome - and even remove all the Microsoft stuff and put Linux on it if they want or run it in dual-boot configuration or in a VM without having to jump through any hoops to consider that particularly locked down compared to today's iOS and Android smartphones and tablets?
You might consider their use of proprietary document formats to be that 'lock-in' but considering every now and then a case of some slightly malformed formatting opening your word document in another office suite to be lock-in is pretty defeatist.
Microsoft rose to power on a bunch of bad to middling products that they locked people into. Can anyone name an MS product from the 90s that was better than its competitors?
Their Office suite was better than their competitors, did you ever have the displeasure of using Lotus Notes? IE and Netscape jostled for position version by version too - even if neither was particularly good by today's standards - and by Netscape Navigator 4 the only way to go was IE. Exchange Server was a damn good product at that time too as was Windows NT4.
Ultimately you were never locked in, you could install whatever you wanted and even replace the entire OS if you wanted to but these days the far worse situation is with locked down tablets and smartphones. The one thing Microsoft did that really benefited the industry of personal computing was to standardize PC hardware and decouple the hardware from the software - a situation that mobile vendors are going to great pains to reverse in the smartphone market.
Microsoft have engineered a situation where the majority of people have little chance of finding a PC without Windows
That may have been the case 5 years ago but not anymore. These days there are a myriad of alternatives with various Macs, Chromebooks and Android convertibles, not mention the proliferation of iOS and Android tablets.
Right, because huge photo editors are the only useful things that have ever been written in GTK or QT...
That's just one example, there's programs like OpenShot, LibreOffice, Ardour, Blender, Handbrake, Inkscape, etc... and they are all designed for desktops and don't work on a phone. Being able to run GTK/Qt/TK applications on a phone without a chroot to leverage existing applications doesn't really provide any benefit.
Thankfully, not everyone in the world is as eager as you to accept the status quo and discourage progress.
I'm not discouraging progress at all, I'm saying that sitting around just wishing for the phone nobody else wants isn't going to get you anywhere. Unless you are actually doing something then you are just accepting the status quo too.
Imagine your Mac with only apple made programs, and maybe some adobe. That's what Mac used to be. No one cared to rewrite software for less than 10% of the computer market.
It still is only about 10% of the market and the vendor (Apple) was there to push developers to write software for it, its not like the users just sat there saying "sell me some software". Software companies did write software for less than 10% of the market. So Mac users had Apple pushing the software vendors on behalf of the Mac users, who is doing something meaningful to push this device with compact, reasonably lightweight, open source phone with a good web browser, a good offline sat-nav app, and regular security updates on behalf of those people just sitting around wishing for it? Nobody.
I thought GMS was introduced to address this issue (among other reasons) so that any bugs in new features could be fixed by sending out a GMS update, of course that doesn't solve the issue of not being able to push fixes for AOSP bugs directly to handsets.
Well they "patched" - or more accurately "fixed" - it in 4.2 but they can't really patch the older versions because they can't get the updates to the devices whereas with Play Services that is piece of software that they do control and can update on any device regardless of the underlying Android version.
What about it? The argument still stands that second hand PCs are dirt cheap and if you can't afford one then more clearly advertising the capabilities of tablets won't help you anyway.
But if schools are in fact willing to help "sort out alternative arrangements"
It's not even just that, if you jump on ebay (or just about any classifieds websites) you can find whole systems for next to nothing so there really is no excuse.
Regarding the debian chroot. Yes it gives you most of what you want, but it screws with your warranty and STILL there's stuff I'd like to be able to do that I cant. One example is to have every phone incoming or outgoing automatically recorded, and I get the option to permanently save afterwords. Mainly for dealing with calls from companies. Debian chroot doesn't give me enough access to the kernel to do that, at least I can't figure it out.
There are many call recording apps on Android as it is, but what exactly is it in the kernel that you can't get access to with a debian chroot that would somehow become accessible if you had a GNU userspace?
Or making my tablet make a phone call, despite the fact the phone app is banned from use on the tablet.
Banned by who? Could you just use a 3rd party app store?
I've never seen anyone get anything resembling a repository working on an android device that would allow the installation of native code (read: not the java BS the "apps" have to use).
Well even on Google Play you can get UltiServer which includes things like lighttpd and various other servers that you can run on your Android device and I don't believe they were ported to Java.
With then n900 you can run GTK, QT and (I believe) TK natively without needing to use an entire debian chroot to do it.
I that even really that necessary though? Sure I could run the GIMP on my N900 and that was a neat trick but it wasn't particularly useful, most of the existing programs don't work in that context on a phone anyway, that's why I have a phone and a laptop because it's too clunky and fiddly to use most desktop applications on the N900.
How would I go about asking "the general populace" how they qualified for a work permit during high school without either A. receiving outdated information from people who received a work permit over a decade ago before lawmakers and school officials might have changed the requirements or B. interfering with customers waiting in line to be served?
Given that most supermarkets, fast food stores, etc... are predominantly manned by casual highschool-aged staff on weekends it is clear that with a bit of initiative they are managing to work it out without needing their hand held through it.
I did research that; I even cited sources. But I appear to have missed something in my research. What steps should I have taken in my research to uncover what I had missed?
I don't know, all I can tell you - and what you have also seen - is clearly there are plenty of high school students with jobs so when you have distilled your argument so far along to the point where you want the entire tablet industry to change their marketing for no reason other than because you cannot figure out how high school students get jobs I think it's pretty clear the problem is on your end. Other people manage just fine.
How does this work? The gift-giving schedule commonly used throughout the United States means that someone starting a programming class in 2015 would have to ask for a full-size computer in December 2014.
Yes. What's wrong with that? Smart people don't leave things to the last minute. In any case even if tablets were marketed such that it was made clear that they couldn't be used for software development how exactly is the gift-giving relative supposed to know that matters?
How would that work? School buses to get the student between home and work don't run earlier or later, as far as I can tell.
Then perhaps you need to find an alternative rather than having such a defeatist attitude and if you have that sort of attitude then clearly you aren't that interested and marketing tablets as not being software development machines wouldn't have helped you anyway.
I'm not concerned about "somewhere, somebody" as much as what I estimate to be a substantial number of high school students who never get the opportunity to learn to code because locked-down tablets and locked-down video game consoles are so attractive to gift-giving relatives who happen not to be computer savvy enough to tell the difference.
But that simply isn't going to happen to any measurable effect, even in the likely non-existent case where a student has no access to a computer at home or a relative or friends' place, cannot sell his/her tablet to buy a desktop, cannot get a desktop as a gift, cannot work to earn money to buy one, cannot access school resources after hours and has not bothered to sort out alternative arrangements with the school then they could still use the school resources during school hours and if they aren't willing to do any of those things then i think it's safe to say they aren't interested.
That's pretty much what people used to say about Mac users.
Mac users were catered to by Apple who provided them with the Mac. So I'm not sure which people you think were saying that about Mac users or why Mac users would care.
What isn't what? That doesn't really make sense as a reply to anything in that post.
And of course not everyone wants an n900 clone. Grandma, your cousin, your coworker will never use that command line app so it's a bit of a straw man to bring it up.
How exactly is that a strawman? I'm saying the reason we don't have a successor to the N900 is that it isn't commercially viable for 2 reasons, one is because the market is niche and the other is because the things that this successor would have are already available in Android.
What we are looking for is a phone that gives control back to users. If i can't root it then there's probably something someone doesn't want me to be able to get rid of.
In that case the obvious answer is one of the many phones that you can root that have been available for years.
No, I do not believe that. I just happen not to have seen anybody under 18 with a job in my own family.
Well that's hardly representative of the general populace.
Yes, I have. But I don't know how the situation that I see came about.
Then perhaps you need to research that.
That means four months between the start of the school year and gift-giving season during which time the student lacks the means to complete his homework at home.
Then they should have gotten prepared earlier or use school resources by starting school earlier or leaving school later or working through lunch or discussing options with the school.
Now i get that you seem to be more about making excuses than solving problems but you cannot expect the industry to change just because of the possibility that somewhere, somebody may be affected negatively in some way and that said person lacks resourcefulness or any ability to go to effort to work around their problem. Not everything must be handed to everybody on a silver platter, that just produces a population of idiots who cannot do anything for themselves.
That's all well and good but you can do all those things on an Android phone too, your point of differentiation isn't a limitation of the platform, it is that it doesn't do that out of the box which frankly - given the things you listed - I don't think is really going to limit the appeal to many people. It's going to be geeks that want to do those things and not being in the default repositories isn't going to make it end up in the "too hard" basket.
You could spend a week rooting, customizing and overhauling the best android phone out there and still not come close to what the n900 would do out of the box.
Really? OpenVPN, terminal, chroot debian, VNC, lighttpd and torrent trackers are all available in various repositories (in fact most are in the official Google one) for Android, I'm not sure why you need so long to root it and add non-default repos.
Most high school students don't turn 18 until sometime in their senior year. Some, based on how their birthdays aligned with kindergarten cutoffs 13 years ago, expect to graduate a few weeks or months before they turn 18.
So you actually believe nobody who is under 18 works? Have you ever been to a supermarket or fast food restaurant?
Gift from parent or other relative, who may either A. have since fallen on hard times or B. not understand why a PC is necessary after having "already bought you an iPad; do I look made of money?"
So sell the iPad or - when asked about a gift - suggest a desktop PC instead.
I checked Gazelle for the trade-in price of an iPad 2 in "good" condition: $125. How much desktop PC will that buy, including a compatible keyboard, mouse, and monitor?
Why would you do a trade-in? Just privately sell it. But check out ebay, there are thousands of complete desktop systems shipped for less than a couple hundred dollars.
How can a high school student afford that under present child labor law?
What child labor law? High school students are allowed to work you know. But more to the point how did they afford a tablet if they cannot afford a desktop? Desktops are dirt cheap and if you want one just for a programming class you can pick them up second hand for next to nothing. Also AC above makes a good point: If they have a tablet then sell that and buy a desktop.
Hey, go double click on a JPG and see what happens after you "boot to desktop."
It opens in Photoshop, though presumably if you haven't got another viewer installed or associated then it will open in the metro viewer...but why did you double click it if you didn't want to view it?
Can't you get most of that with a debian chroot on Android? And you've kind of hit the nail on the head with the N900 comparison, while that is great for geeks to have a GNU userspace and a terminal and re-compiling desktop apps for the phone to use with a slide-out keyboard that sort of thing isn't at all appealing to the broader user base, just to a geek niche.
VNC to your desktop running LibreOffice from an Android phone with a bluetooth keyboard (or even debian chroot with LibreOffice) to see how crappy an experience a port of LibreOffice to Android would really be.
If we want Freedom on the mobile OS we're going to need Free back-ends to go with it (i.e. if you store private data on the web/internet, you should have the option of doing it on your own server, like installing the back-end software easily on a small VM that you pay a couple dollars per month for).
You can already do that on existing platforms, in fact depending on what you are doing you could build and host a web app that connects to your VM and then you can be platform-agnostic.
We need more chat apps, sharing apps etc. using open and universal protocols (like e-mail, IRC, XMPP) rather than made solely to be one customer of a single one company.
Why do we need more of them? There are already open source mail apps like K9 Mail and plenty of open and closed source IRC clients, what's wrong with these?
Slashdot Mirror
They spend all their time and money on ways to keep people locked into their products.
How are you 'locked in'? That's just an excuse not to change. I use Windows, OSX and Linux and don't find myself 'locked in' to Windows at all. I also use MS Office and Google Docs and don't find myself 'locked in' to MS Office.
If that weren't the case Microsoft Office would support ODF.
It does, and ODF has been supported in it through 3rd party plugins for years.
You're comparing Microsoft Windows to iOS? Why aren't you comparing Windows to OSX?
Because the traditional PC is in decline, people are using other devices for more of their personal computing and as a personal computing platform iOS is much more of a competitor to Windows than OSX is.
How locked down was Zune, how locked down is RT
Very, but who cares? Nobody uses them, whereas hundreds of millions of people use iOS devices for personal computing.
What about IBM? They locked down their BIOS to prevent clones from coming in to existence and it wasn't until clean-room reverse engineered solutions came about that anybody could even make a compatible system.
The interesting thing is that Microsoft's 'lock-in' was less obtrusive than that of the devices of today. Do you really expect somebody who buys a PC on which they can install whatever they want - including competing products like LibreOffice or Chrome - and even remove all the Microsoft stuff and put Linux on it if they want or run it in dual-boot configuration or in a VM without having to jump through any hoops to consider that particularly locked down compared to today's iOS and Android smartphones and tablets?
You might consider their use of proprietary document formats to be that 'lock-in' but considering every now and then a case of some slightly malformed formatting opening your word document in another office suite to be lock-in is pretty defeatist.
Microsoft rose to power on a bunch of bad to middling products that they locked people into. Can anyone name an MS product from the 90s that was better than its competitors?
Their Office suite was better than their competitors, did you ever have the displeasure of using Lotus Notes? IE and Netscape jostled for position version by version too - even if neither was particularly good by today's standards - and by Netscape Navigator 4 the only way to go was IE. Exchange Server was a damn good product at that time too as was Windows NT4.
Ultimately you were never locked in, you could install whatever you wanted and even replace the entire OS if you wanted to but these days the far worse situation is with locked down tablets and smartphones. The one thing Microsoft did that really benefited the industry of personal computing was to standardize PC hardware and decouple the hardware from the software - a situation that mobile vendors are going to great pains to reverse in the smartphone market.
Microsoft have engineered a situation where the majority of people have little chance of finding a PC without Windows
That may have been the case 5 years ago but not anymore. These days there are a myriad of alternatives with various Macs, Chromebooks and Android convertibles, not mention the proliferation of iOS and Android tablets.
Right, because huge photo editors are the only useful things that have ever been written in GTK or QT...
That's just one example, there's programs like OpenShot, LibreOffice, Ardour, Blender, Handbrake, Inkscape, etc... and they are all designed for desktops and don't work on a phone. Being able to run GTK/Qt/TK applications on a phone without a chroot to leverage existing applications doesn't really provide any benefit.
Thankfully, not everyone in the world is as eager as you to accept the status quo and discourage progress.
I'm not discouraging progress at all, I'm saying that sitting around just wishing for the phone nobody else wants isn't going to get you anywhere. Unless you are actually doing something then you are just accepting the status quo too.
Imagine your Mac with only apple made programs, and maybe some adobe. That's what Mac used to be. No one cared to rewrite software for less than 10% of the computer market.
It still is only about 10% of the market and the vendor (Apple) was there to push developers to write software for it, its not like the users just sat there saying "sell me some software". Software companies did write software for less than 10% of the market.
So Mac users had Apple pushing the software vendors on behalf of the Mac users, who is doing something meaningful to push this device with compact, reasonably lightweight, open source phone with a good web browser, a good offline sat-nav app, and regular security updates on behalf of those people just sitting around wishing for it? Nobody.
I thought GMS was introduced to address this issue (among other reasons) so that any bugs in new features could be fixed by sending out a GMS update, of course that doesn't solve the issue of not being able to push fixes for AOSP bugs directly to handsets.
Well they "patched" - or more accurately "fixed" - it in 4.2 but they can't really patch the older versions because they can't get the updates to the devices whereas with Play Services that is piece of software that they do control and can update on any device regardless of the underlying Android version.
it was fixed in v 4.2 so it is patchable
There's no patch for the vulnerable versions though.
See betterunixthanunix's comment.
What about it? The argument still stands that second hand PCs are dirt cheap and if you can't afford one then more clearly advertising the capabilities of tablets won't help you anyway.
But if schools are in fact willing to help "sort out alternative arrangements"
It's not even just that, if you jump on ebay (or just about any classifieds websites) you can find whole systems for next to nothing so there really is no excuse.
Regarding the debian chroot. Yes it gives you most of what you want, but it screws with your warranty and STILL there's stuff I'd like to be able to do that I cant. One example is to have every phone incoming or outgoing automatically recorded, and I get the option to permanently save afterwords. Mainly for dealing with calls from companies. Debian chroot doesn't give me enough access to the kernel to do that, at least I can't figure it out.
There are many call recording apps on Android as it is, but what exactly is it in the kernel that you can't get access to with a debian chroot that would somehow become accessible if you had a GNU userspace?
Or making my tablet make a phone call, despite the fact the phone app is banned from use on the tablet.
Banned by who? Could you just use a 3rd party app store?
I've never seen anyone get anything resembling a repository working on an android device that would allow the installation of native code (read: not the java BS the "apps" have to use).
Well even on Google Play you can get UltiServer which includes things like lighttpd and various other servers that you can run on your Android device and I don't believe they were ported to Java.
With then n900 you can run GTK, QT and (I believe) TK natively without needing to use an entire debian chroot to do it.
I that even really that necessary though? Sure I could run the GIMP on my N900 and that was a neat trick but it wasn't particularly useful, most of the existing programs don't work in that context on a phone anyway, that's why I have a phone and a laptop because it's too clunky and fiddly to use most desktop applications on the N900.
How would I go about asking "the general populace" how they qualified for a work permit during high school without either A. receiving outdated information from people who received a work permit over a decade ago before lawmakers and school officials might have changed the requirements or B. interfering with customers waiting in line to be served?
Given that most supermarkets, fast food stores, etc... are predominantly manned by casual highschool-aged staff on weekends it is clear that with a bit of initiative they are managing to work it out without needing their hand held through it.
I did research that; I even cited sources. But I appear to have missed something in my research. What steps should I have taken in my research to uncover what I had missed?
I don't know, all I can tell you - and what you have also seen - is clearly there are plenty of high school students with jobs so when you have distilled your argument so far along to the point where you want the entire tablet industry to change their marketing for no reason other than because you cannot figure out how high school students get jobs I think it's pretty clear the problem is on your end. Other people manage just fine.
How does this work? The gift-giving schedule commonly used throughout the United States means that someone starting a programming class in 2015 would have to ask for a full-size computer in December 2014.
Yes. What's wrong with that? Smart people don't leave things to the last minute. In any case even if tablets were marketed such that it was made clear that they couldn't be used for software development how exactly is the gift-giving relative supposed to know that matters?
How would that work? School buses to get the student between home and work don't run earlier or later, as far as I can tell.
Then perhaps you need to find an alternative rather than having such a defeatist attitude and if you have that sort of attitude then clearly you aren't that interested and marketing tablets as not being software development machines wouldn't have helped you anyway.
I'm not concerned about "somewhere, somebody" as much as what I estimate to be a substantial number of high school students who never get the opportunity to learn to code because locked-down tablets and locked-down video game consoles are so attractive to gift-giving relatives who happen not to be computer savvy enough to tell the difference.
But that simply isn't going to happen to any measurable effect, even in the likely non-existent case where a student has no access to a computer at home or a relative or friends' place, cannot sell his/her tablet to buy a desktop, cannot get a desktop as a gift, cannot work to earn money to buy one, cannot access school resources after hours and has not bothered to sort out alternative arrangements with the school then they could still use the school resources during school hours and if they aren't willing to do any of those things then i think it's safe to say they aren't interested.
That's pretty much what people used to say about Mac users.
Mac users were catered to by Apple who provided them with the Mac. So I'm not sure which people you think were saying that about Mac users or why Mac users would care.
No. No it isn't.
What isn't what? That doesn't really make sense as a reply to anything in that post.
And of course not everyone wants an n900 clone. Grandma, your cousin, your coworker will never use that command line app so it's a bit of a straw man to bring it up.
How exactly is that a strawman? I'm saying the reason we don't have a successor to the N900 is that it isn't commercially viable for 2 reasons, one is because the market is niche and the other is because the things that this successor would have are already available in Android.
What we are looking for is a phone that gives control back to users. If i can't root it then there's probably something someone doesn't want me to be able to get rid of.
In that case the obvious answer is one of the many phones that you can root that have been available for years.
No, I do not believe that. I just happen not to have seen anybody under 18 with a job in my own family.
Well that's hardly representative of the general populace.
Yes, I have. But I don't know how the situation that I see came about.
Then perhaps you need to research that.
That means four months between the start of the school year and gift-giving season during which time the student lacks the means to complete his homework at home.
Then they should have gotten prepared earlier or use school resources by starting school earlier or leaving school later or working through lunch or discussing options with the school.
Now i get that you seem to be more about making excuses than solving problems but you cannot expect the industry to change just because of the possibility that somewhere, somebody may be affected negatively in some way and that said person lacks resourcefulness or any ability to go to effort to work around their problem. Not everything must be handed to everybody on a silver platter, that just produces a population of idiots who cannot do anything for themselves.
That's all well and good but you can do all those things on an Android phone too, your point of differentiation isn't a limitation of the platform, it is that it doesn't do that out of the box which frankly - given the things you listed - I don't think is really going to limit the appeal to many people. It's going to be geeks that want to do those things and not being in the default repositories isn't going to make it end up in the "too hard" basket.
You could spend a week rooting, customizing and overhauling the best android phone out there and still not come close to what the n900 would do out of the box.
Really? OpenVPN, terminal, chroot debian, VNC, lighttpd and torrent trackers are all available in various repositories (in fact most are in the official Google one) for Android, I'm not sure why you need so long to root it and add non-default repos.
Most high school students don't turn 18 until sometime in their senior year. Some, based on how their birthdays aligned with kindergarten cutoffs 13 years ago, expect to graduate a few weeks or months before they turn 18.
So you actually believe nobody who is under 18 works? Have you ever been to a supermarket or fast food restaurant?
Gift from parent or other relative, who may either A. have since fallen on hard times or B. not understand why a PC is necessary after having "already bought you an iPad; do I look made of money?"
So sell the iPad or - when asked about a gift - suggest a desktop PC instead.
I checked Gazelle for the trade-in price of an iPad 2 in "good" condition: $125. How much desktop PC will that buy, including a compatible keyboard, mouse, and monitor?
Why would you do a trade-in? Just privately sell it. But check out ebay, there are thousands of complete desktop systems shipped for less than a couple hundred dollars.
How can a high school student afford that under present child labor law?
What child labor law? High school students are allowed to work you know.
But more to the point how did they afford a tablet if they cannot afford a desktop? Desktops are dirt cheap and if you want one just for a programming class you can pick them up second hand for next to nothing. Also AC above makes a good point: If they have a tablet then sell that and buy a desktop.
Hey, go double click on a JPG and see what happens after you "boot to desktop."
It opens in Photoshop, though presumably if you haven't got another viewer installed or associated then it will open in the metro viewer...but why did you double click it if you didn't want to view it?
Can't you get most of that with a debian chroot on Android? And you've kind of hit the nail on the head with the N900 comparison, while that is great for geeks to have a GNU userspace and a terminal and re-compiling desktop apps for the phone to use with a slide-out keyboard that sort of thing isn't at all appealing to the broader user base, just to a geek niche.
VNC to your desktop running LibreOffice from an Android phone with a bluetooth keyboard (or even debian chroot with LibreOffice) to see how crappy an experience a port of LibreOffice to Android would really be.
If we want Freedom on the mobile OS we're going to need Free back-ends to go with it (i.e. if you store private data on the web/internet, you should have the option of doing it on your own server, like installing the back-end software easily on a small VM that you pay a couple dollars per month for).
You can already do that on existing platforms, in fact depending on what you are doing you could build and host a web app that connects to your VM and then you can be platform-agnostic.
We need more chat apps, sharing apps etc. using open and universal protocols (like e-mail, IRC, XMPP) rather than made solely to be one customer of a single one company.
Why do we need more of them? There are already open source mail apps like K9 Mail and plenty of open and closed source IRC clients, what's wrong with these?