And you really think that, given our racial history, the ultimate 'use' of Psyche 16 would NOT wind up with some part of it effectively covering much of Earth's surface with a layer many meters deep?
Or to put it a different way, extinction due to transitory stupidity is no different from any other extinction in the end, but probably much quicker and probably more positive.
I'd like to think that the human race would grow up and use space technology selflessly and effectively. Bellamy thought the same thing about society. Look how far THAT got...;-}
I think the 'real' issue here is that 'some' carriers have decided to provide what they considered a bottom-end option for potential Android customers -- and, reading between the lines, they're going to suffer disproportionately for it.
By analogy, I remember when one of the major companies making bicycles decided to get into the exercise treadmill business in the '90s. They, too, decided to develop a feature-rich, but very cost-limited design (one of the interesting parts of which was making a recognizably well-designed PWM motor controller out of the sort of electronic components, and with the sort of build 'quality', you'd see in those old transistor radios!). The chief cause of their subsequent disaster was that they decided that offering a 7-year guarantee would be a desirable competitive advantage.
Well, the treadmills began to fail just as you'd think they might -- little vacuum motors burning up and taking "power" transistors (snarky sarcasm here) with them; bearings and shafts in rollers going bad; frames racking, and so forth. Their problem was that each warranty complaint required either a service call or an outright machine replacement (with the recovered machine then requiring someone to perform shop repairs on it). To make a long story short, the warranty costs ate up all the (relatively meager of course at 'bottom end') profits on the treadmills... and then the profits from their 'Body by Jake' exercise equipment, and eventually the profits from the bicycle sales. They had to file for bankruptcy...
Now here, the point of the 'white boxes' is the same as the Gillette model; you intend to make your profits on the contract and associated services/product. But if the phone goes down (especially if it proves tedious or impossible to recover content on it) those profit streams are interrupted. And I wonder just how many dead phones you have to replace, or take a bath on trying to 'fix' only to see the common-mode problems recur and recur, before the analysts start to grumble at quarterly time...
I concur that it is critical to recognize this isn't an "Android fails more often than iOS" kind of issue in this particular case. (I'd be interested in seeing data on whether Android OS has greater or less propensity to suffer autogenous failure than iOS does in real-world operation... but that isn't the focus of the present report, I think...)
Slashdot Mirror
And you really think that, given our racial history, the ultimate 'use' of Psyche 16 would NOT wind up with some part of it effectively covering much of Earth's surface with a layer many meters deep?
Or to put it a different way, extinction due to transitory stupidity is no different from any other extinction in the end, but probably much quicker and probably more positive.
I'd like to think that the human race would grow up and use space technology selflessly and effectively. Bellamy thought the same thing about society. Look how far THAT got... ;-}
I think the 'real' issue here is that 'some' carriers have decided to provide what they considered a bottom-end option for potential Android customers -- and, reading between the lines, they're going to suffer disproportionately for it.
By analogy, I remember when one of the major companies making bicycles decided to get into the exercise treadmill business in the '90s. They, too, decided to develop a feature-rich, but very cost-limited design (one of the interesting parts of which was making a recognizably well-designed PWM motor controller out of the sort of electronic components, and with the sort of build 'quality', you'd see in those old transistor radios!). The chief cause of their subsequent disaster was that they decided that offering a 7-year guarantee would be a desirable competitive advantage.
Well, the treadmills began to fail just as you'd think they might -- little vacuum motors burning up and taking "power" transistors (snarky sarcasm here) with them; bearings and shafts in rollers going bad; frames racking, and so forth. Their problem was that each warranty complaint required either a service call or an outright machine replacement (with the recovered machine then requiring someone to perform shop repairs on it). To make a long story short, the warranty costs ate up all the (relatively meager of course at 'bottom end') profits on the treadmills... and then the profits from their 'Body by Jake' exercise equipment, and eventually the profits from the bicycle sales. They had to file for bankruptcy...
Now here, the point of the 'white boxes' is the same as the Gillette model; you intend to make your profits on the contract and associated services/product. But if the phone goes down (especially if it proves tedious or impossible to recover content on it) those profit streams are interrupted. And I wonder just how many dead phones you have to replace, or take a bath on trying to 'fix' only to see the common-mode problems recur and recur, before the analysts start to grumble at quarterly time...
I concur that it is critical to recognize this isn't an "Android fails more often than iOS" kind of issue in this particular case. (I'd be interested in seeing data on whether Android OS has greater or less propensity to suffer autogenous failure than iOS does in real-world operation... but that isn't the focus of the present report, I think...)