Those are reasonable observations (although I'd love to have a small fraction of the "almost nothing" they've made in profits from their 30% cut). I don't know how well Win8 will perform on tablets. And even if MS is somehow able to offer the full Win8 on lightweight slates with a smooth experience (e.g. not killing batteries), that doesn't mean consumers will flock to the OS+form factor like they have with the iPad. Regardless, it should be a fascinating fight to watch, especially due to MS and Apple taking such dramatically different approaches.
I'm a cynic. I think they decided it would be more profitable in the long run. Android is growing like a weed on phones, and at least has some nifty tablets, even if those sales stink. Windows Phone is getting all the bells and whistles in the fall (even though their sales numbers stink too), and next year Windows 8 will attempt to take on iPad and OS X at the same time with a unified platform.
Apple has made tons of money already from their mandated royalties, and I think they are just feeling worried and trying to assuage old grudges of their partners in preparation for the next waves of real competition.
I think you are purposely missing GP's point. A nice thing about Android development is that you can install the SDK and develop and test your apps in the emulator on any of the major operating systems out there -- use the computer you like best instead of the computer somebody else tells you to use.
Microsoft comes in second here, because you can at least dual boot any Mac or Linux machine to a Windows installation in order to run the Windows Phone emulator (sadly, due to technical limitations the emulator doesn't work in a VM; though all the rest of the MSFT OS and dev tools do).
And finally, coming in at pathetic last place we have Apple's dev tools and emulator, which legally can only be run on Apple's hardware (and no legal VM use, either).
Of course mechanoid cosmic caprines have been an area of intense ongoing research at NASA and complementary foreign agencies over the years. But just because an entire nation wills something to happen doesn't mean it is likely, or even possible. We'll have to wait and see if these advances in material science hold promise for this most urgent of potential breakthroughs.
Yeah, absolutely -- it lets you change the UI color to pink or purple.
the problem for Microsoft is that new developments in hardware start low and build up - thus the PC grew out of the enthusiast market and came to replace the minicomputer, and the smartphone replaced the phone. AFAIK nobody has successfully done the reverse - i.e. started big and made it small.
I'm not really following you here. But regardless, Microsoft has some points going for it: (a) it's imitating very successful products like iOS while giving their own spin on it, and (b) Microsoft has mountains of cash to sink into this until it becomes profitable, as happened with the Xbox. Don't know if they'll be successful, but I do like to see competition.
Microsoft's phones have been failures. Why should a tablet be any different? They will simply be unable to leave out all the stuff that makes Windows what it is, so it will always be more bloated, slower and less tablet like than the competition.
That is an intriguing point, and I'd say the jury's still out on what they can do and will do. Should they imitate the iPad and create a dedicated device with limited app support, or can they get away with porting the full Windows operating system to ARM, with a sophisticated touch UI layer mainly used when a keyboard isn't connected? I'll be interested to see what they come up with.
It is pretty clear from various leaks that Microsoft is working furiously to release an iPad competitor. It will apparently run Windows 8 on ARM CPUs, and include some kind of WP7-esque Metro style of user interface.
...but the performance demos in the MIX conference were entertaining, as all such demos are. I liked the one where the Windows Phone browser smoked Android, which in turn smoked iPhone 4. But contrived demos and marketing aside, it's nice to see Microsoft join the party in pushing the performance envelope on HTML and javascript.
This guy should just meekly accept that his girlfriend's expensive gadgets don't work for her anymore. How dare he tinker around and fix things. (At least I think they imported some flavor of the DMCA down under.)
If nuclear power plants are used to power cities, why can't they power their own cooling? Seems like keeping the darn thing running would be safer than watching it sit there unpowered and on the verge of blowing up. (Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there's a good reason. I'm just curious.)
Hey, you've finally picked an example that includes actual theft (assuming you are the same AC). If the money disappears from my account as a result of your actions in copying my passwords, then yes, Virginia, you were accessory to theft. But merely knowing my passwords or telling other people my passwords is not theft per se.
Some copyright violations result in more financial harm to the copyright owner than others, and I never said we should abolish copyright law. But in your scenario, Google wasn't actually dispossessed of any of their property. So I'd prefer to avoid using the word "stealing" to describe making a virtual copy of their data. I am aware that the law is happy to refer to copyright violations as theft, but the case is not hard to make that lawmakers haven't elegantly tracked with the progress of technology over past decades (in fact, they could usually be described as clueless).
How about if you sneak into someone's house, find a patent application, memorize it, and then file the patent yourself?
Well, if the only thing you take with you when you leave the house is the knowledge stored in your head, you still haven't "stolen" anything in the way I prefer to use the word. The original owner still possesses all the property he did before you entered his house -- you haven't deprived him of any of it.
Now, if you rush to beat him to filing the patent application, then you are certainly guilty of fraud. You're probably also guilty of trespassing in his house. He could make a great case for a civil lawsuit against you on many grounds, including making the case that any financial benefits you reap were both unfair and a result of malicious action against him, and that he therefore deserves to collect some amount of damages. But I don't see how you have "stolen" anything from him, except in a metaphorical sense, or if you prefer in an "indeterminate" sense, based on theoretical future benefits which the law has no business presuming to guarantee.
I wish we could get away from using the words "steal" and "theft" to describe making a copy of somebody's data. You could call it a copyright violation, or a violation of a legally-enforced monopoly. Both of those descriptions create a more accurate understanding for the public of what's going on than the word "stealing" does.
If you sneak into a library, take a book, and never return it, everybody would agree that you "stole" the book. But if you take home a library book, type up a copy for yourself, then return the original book to the library, would most people describe that as "stealing"? More to the point, should you go to prison for 8 years?
I didn't say that owning two computers made me a geek. My point was that being a geek is not mutually exclusive with making different technology choices than many of my peers.
And if you count virtualization, I guess I run a lot of computers; I develop and test kernel drivers on VMware Workstation.
I always have at least two computers in front of me on my desk; I use FireFox and Google on my primary browsing/reading laptop, and IE and Bing on the workhorse desktop. So I like variety. I'm keeping a tight grip on my geek card, thank you very much.
To put it another way, for a lot of Nokia engineers it's not like, "Wow, Microsoft is giving our company a billion dollars. I will get to do a lot of cool things." But more like, "Wow, a billion dollars of Nokia R&D is going to be done by Microsoft instead for free -- my job is doomed."
My understanding is that Microsoft is going to be providing one billion dollars' worth of development services and infrastructure to Nokia, allowing Nokia to focus on hardware and cut their R&D costs accordingly. They're not actually writing them a check or anything.
In return, Nokia is choosing Windows Phone as their primary smartphone OS (for which they'll pay a license fee per handset), and also licensing Nokia's map products to the other Windows Phone OEMs. There's going to be money moving both ways.
How much crime has resulted from newspaper classifies, from all papers in all cities? Craigslists' goal is to replace all of them, and it's not unreasonable to expect the bad to scale along with the good.
If an outside law firm established some kind of quid-pro-quo relationship with jury members I have a feeling any such arrangement would be smacked down by a presiding judge. I can't imagine they will allow this to go forward with the district attorney. The jury should be impartial, and not have any appearance of favoritism of one side over the other. "Friend" the prosecution? I don't think so!
The great thing about a free and open blog conversation is that inaccuracies can be corrected on the record. Of course, that's also what's great about open source development. Ergo, I have no plans to stay quiet.:)
I guess to be fair, there are a lot of people who ought to be paying off their high interest credit cards instead of buying a tablet. On the other hand, they're adults; they make the lifestyle choices and they accept the consequences.
The other critique I think is valid is that a tablet is likely to be worthless in just a few years due to the cruelly crossed streams of obsolescence and failing electronics. So it will boil down to how much of a gadget lover you are. I myself am pretty much of a gadget lover, but haven't sprung for one just yet.
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Those are reasonable observations (although I'd love to have a small fraction of the "almost nothing" they've made in profits from their 30% cut). I don't know how well Win8 will perform on tablets. And even if MS is somehow able to offer the full Win8 on lightweight slates with a smooth experience (e.g. not killing batteries), that doesn't mean consumers will flock to the OS+form factor like they have with the iPad. Regardless, it should be a fascinating fight to watch, especially due to MS and Apple taking such dramatically different approaches.
I'm a cynic. I think they decided it would be more profitable in the long run. Android is growing like a weed on phones, and at least has some nifty tablets, even if those sales stink. Windows Phone is getting all the bells and whistles in the fall (even though their sales numbers stink too), and next year Windows 8 will attempt to take on iPad and OS X at the same time with a unified platform.
Apple has made tons of money already from their mandated royalties, and I think they are just feeling worried and trying to assuage old grudges of their partners in preparation for the next waves of real competition.
I think you are purposely missing GP's point. A nice thing about Android development is that you can install the SDK and develop and test your apps in the emulator on any of the major operating systems out there -- use the computer you like best instead of the computer somebody else tells you to use.
Microsoft comes in second here, because you can at least dual boot any Mac or Linux machine to a Windows installation in order to run the Windows Phone emulator (sadly, due to technical limitations the emulator doesn't work in a VM; though all the rest of the MSFT OS and dev tools do).
And finally, coming in at pathetic last place we have Apple's dev tools and emulator, which legally can only be run on Apple's hardware (and no legal VM use, either).
Troll? Tough crowd. At least _I_ thought it was funny (though I had and still have no idea where GP came up with it).
Of course mechanoid cosmic caprines have been an area of intense ongoing research at NASA and complementary foreign agencies over the years. But just because an entire nation wills something to happen doesn't mean it is likely, or even possible. We'll have to wait and see if these advances in material science hold promise for this most urgent of potential breakthroughs.
Does the UI feature OMG ponies?
Yeah, absolutely -- it lets you change the UI color to pink or purple.
the problem for Microsoft is that new developments in hardware start low and build up - thus the PC grew out of the enthusiast market and came to replace the minicomputer, and the smartphone replaced the phone. AFAIK nobody has successfully done the reverse - i.e. started big and made it small.
I'm not really following you here. But regardless, Microsoft has some points going for it: (a) it's imitating very successful products like iOS while giving their own spin on it, and (b) Microsoft has mountains of cash to sink into this until it becomes profitable, as happened with the Xbox. Don't know if they'll be successful, but I do like to see competition.
Microsoft's phones have been failures. Why should a tablet be any different? They will simply be unable to leave out all the stuff that makes Windows what it is, so it will always be more bloated, slower and less tablet like than the competition.
That is an intriguing point, and I'd say the jury's still out on what they can do and will do. Should they imitate the iPad and create a dedicated device with limited app support, or can they get away with porting the full Windows operating system to ARM, with a sophisticated touch UI layer mainly used when a keyboard isn't connected? I'll be interested to see what they come up with.
It is pretty clear from various leaks that Microsoft is working furiously to release an iPad competitor. It will apparently run Windows 8 on ARM CPUs, and include some kind of WP7-esque Metro style of user interface.
...but the performance demos in the MIX conference were entertaining, as all such demos are. I liked the one where the Windows Phone browser smoked Android, which in turn smoked iPhone 4. But contrived demos and marketing aside, it's nice to see Microsoft join the party in pushing the performance envelope on HTML and javascript.
This guy should just meekly accept that his girlfriend's expensive gadgets don't work for her anymore. How dare he tinker around and fix things. (At least I think they imported some flavor of the DMCA down under.)
Mod down, please.
If nuclear power plants are used to power cities, why can't they power their own cooling? Seems like keeping the darn thing running would be safer than watching it sit there unpowered and on the verge of blowing up. (Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there's a good reason. I'm just curious.)
Hey, you've finally picked an example that includes actual theft (assuming you are the same AC). If the money disappears from my account as a result of your actions in copying my passwords, then yes, Virginia, you were accessory to theft. But merely knowing my passwords or telling other people my passwords is not theft per se.
Some copyright violations result in more financial harm to the copyright owner than others, and I never said we should abolish copyright law. But in your scenario, Google wasn't actually dispossessed of any of their property. So I'd prefer to avoid using the word "stealing" to describe making a virtual copy of their data. I am aware that the law is happy to refer to copyright violations as theft, but the case is not hard to make that lawmakers haven't elegantly tracked with the progress of technology over past decades (in fact, they could usually be described as clueless).
How about if you sneak into someone's house, find a patent application, memorize it, and then file the patent yourself?
Well, if the only thing you take with you when you leave the house is the knowledge stored in your head, you still haven't "stolen" anything in the way I prefer to use the word. The original owner still possesses all the property he did before you entered his house -- you haven't deprived him of any of it.
Now, if you rush to beat him to filing the patent application, then you are certainly guilty of fraud. You're probably also guilty of trespassing in his house. He could make a great case for a civil lawsuit against you on many grounds, including making the case that any financial benefits you reap were both unfair and a result of malicious action against him, and that he therefore deserves to collect some amount of damages. But I don't see how you have "stolen" anything from him, except in a metaphorical sense, or if you prefer in an "indeterminate" sense, based on theoretical future benefits which the law has no business presuming to guarantee.
I wish we could get away from using the words "steal" and "theft" to describe making a copy of somebody's data. You could call it a copyright violation, or a violation of a legally-enforced monopoly. Both of those descriptions create a more accurate understanding for the public of what's going on than the word "stealing" does.
If you sneak into a library, take a book, and never return it, everybody would agree that you "stole" the book. But if you take home a library book, type up a copy for yourself, then return the original book to the library, would most people describe that as "stealing"? More to the point, should you go to prison for 8 years?
Are the majority of the American public going to be considered felons?
I didn't say that owning two computers made me a geek. My point was that being a geek is not mutually exclusive with making different technology choices than many of my peers.
And if you count virtualization, I guess I run a lot of computers; I develop and test kernel drivers on VMware Workstation.
I always have at least two computers in front of me on my desk; I use FireFox and Google on my primary browsing/reading laptop, and IE and Bing on the workhorse desktop. So I like variety. I'm keeping a tight grip on my geek card, thank you very much.
Thanks, that did more to set a positive mood for my morning than the entire last year of Idle.
To put it another way, for a lot of Nokia engineers it's not like, "Wow, Microsoft is giving our company a billion dollars. I will get to do a lot of cool things." But more like, "Wow, a billion dollars of Nokia R&D is going to be done by Microsoft instead for free -- my job is doomed."
My understanding is that Microsoft is going to be providing one billion dollars' worth of development services and infrastructure to Nokia, allowing Nokia to focus on hardware and cut their R&D costs accordingly. They're not actually writing them a check or anything.
In return, Nokia is choosing Windows Phone as their primary smartphone OS (for which they'll pay a license fee per handset), and also licensing Nokia's map products to the other Windows Phone OEMs. There's going to be money moving both ways.
How much crime has resulted from newspaper classifies, from all papers in all cities? Craigslists' goal is to replace all of them, and it's not unreasonable to expect the bad to scale along with the good.
If an outside law firm established some kind of quid-pro-quo relationship with jury members I have a feeling any such arrangement would be smacked down by a presiding judge. I can't imagine they will allow this to go forward with the district attorney. The jury should be impartial, and not have any appearance of favoritism of one side over the other. "Friend" the prosecution? I don't think so!
The great thing about a free and open blog conversation is that inaccuracies can be corrected on the record. Of course, that's also what's great about open source development. Ergo, I have no plans to stay quiet. :)
I guess to be fair, there are a lot of people who ought to be paying off their high interest credit cards instead of buying a tablet. On the other hand, they're adults; they make the lifestyle choices and they accept the consequences.
The other critique I think is valid is that a tablet is likely to be worthless in just a few years due to the cruelly crossed streams of obsolescence and failing electronics. So it will boil down to how much of a gadget lover you are. I myself am pretty much of a gadget lover, but haven't sprung for one just yet.