My apologies, I was confusing your method of keeping us on foreign oil with an alternative method.
There are two ways to get off of fossil fuels and both of them are economic. First, you heavily tax fossil fuels so that other energy sources become cost-competitive. This is the single most effective way to do it, but everybody hates taxes and the fossil fuel producers will lobby strongly against it. Second, you subsidize the alternatives. This has the benefit of getting the lobbyists in favor of the alternatives on your side so that it can pass.
The problem is that what happens, every time, is that the oil industry splits the alternatives and pits them against each other. We can't build nuclear because you say "Nukes are bad so we shouldn't build them" -- never mind what kind of nukes or whether any particular identifiable problem can be solved or mitigated. We can't build solar because the other side says it's too intermittent -- we don't want brown outs on every cloudy day. We can't build geothermal because it isn't proven at large scales and it may cause earthquakes. So we don't build any of it.
Fuck. That. Shit.
Stop spending your efforts trying to condemn the other guy's ideas and spend them instead on implementing your own.
Somebody explain this to me. Every time people start talking about nuclear power, a thousand people come out of the woodwork to say how we shouldn't be building nuclear plants because we need to build a bunch of their favored alternative. Geothermal, solar thermal, wind turbines, whatever.
Do we not like diversity anymore? Build all of them. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Stop fighting and start building.
All non-fossil power generation is "hooked on subsidies" -- until we internalize the environmental costs of fossil fuels, nothing else is competitive and so everything else has to be subsidized.
Microsoft doesn't have market dominance. Google does. That's the important distinction.
Microsoft doesn't have market dominance in operating systems where they make Bing the default?
How is that any different from returning Youtube videos as all of the top results, and pushing Metacafe or whatever down the list?
Putting YouTube first doesn't stop people who are looking for Metacafe from finding it easily. The cliche about everyone clicking on the first result is backwards -- the first result is listed first because it's the one that everybody clicks on. Being in the number three spot does not make you invisible. Being in the number 2500 spot does. And on top of that, product search doesn't put Google in the top slot for everything -- search for "camera" and I get Ritz Camera, followed by the Wikipedia entry for Camera, followed by Google products. So it isn't at all clear that they're actually altering the algorithmic search results.
And even if they were, putting your own results at the top is just promotion, which doesn't significantly alter the order of your competitors' results and is therefore only anti-competitive in the same way that all advertising is. Putting your competitors' results last when they should have been third or fifth is anti-competitive because you're punishing them as a competitor, rather than merely bumping them a single space along with all of the other results that aren't competitors -- i.e. it's a question of whether you're treating competitors the same way you treat everybody else who isn't a competitor.
I have Quake *. He has Unreal *. How do we play together?
Planning. You run into the same situation where you have an xbox and your friend has a Wii -- you can't play together over the internet, and he can't bring his Wii controller to your house and use it on your xbox. So either you plan ahead and both get the same game, or you spend more money buying another copy. Also, you can play one of the games like Starcraft that has a spawn edition for specifically this reason.
Or how does mom afford two to four copies of each game, one for each gamer in the household? A console game costing 1*$60 is cheaper than a PC game costing 4*$30.
You're assuming the console-optimized household. Most people don't have exactly four kids. If you have two then the PC game is the same cost and you save the price of buying the console. If you have more than four (or whatever the single console max is) then you need two consoles with two televisions etc. which tacks on hundreds of dollars, which would have to be amortized over a large number of games and you don't get to count the ones that have a spawn edition or that benefit from hiding information from all the other players or that not everyone likes and so you don't have to buy a copy for everyone.
I'm not saying a console is never more cost effective if all you care about is money or if you always have exactly four players, but it's hardly the only viable alternative.
In a game that does not rely on hiding information from the other player, such as a fighting game as opposed to an RTS, what is the tangible benefit of one PC for each player?
Turn it around: Other than the cost considerations above, what does it harm, if you already have the PCs?
Even if the laptop comes with Intel GMA graphics?
You can still play a lot of older games. And going forward the cost-conscious parent is going to be picking up Bobcat-based laptops with AMD/ATI graphics anyway. Plus, it's a simple fact that people who don't plan end up spending more money -- if you want to play games on your laptop, buy one with a GPU capable of playing them.
Haven't been following that story, then? Microsoft now has to offer a choice of browsers in the EU.
Not the browser thing, the search engine thing. You go to Bing and you search for 'maps' and the top of the page is Bing Maps. And Bing Maps is the default mapping service in Internet Explorer too, if you want to argue about Bing's lack of market share. So either Microsoft is breaking the law or Google isn't.
They can run ads, but they can't prioritize WSJ ads over any other.
What does that mean? There are only so many time slots. There is only so much space on the first screen full of search results. If Google wants to put Google Maps as the first thing under "maps" on Google search, that means they have to forgo all the money Microsoft or anyone else would have paid them to put the competing mapping service there instead. They're in effect paying for that placement through the opportunity cost. Advertising space is sold to the highest bidder. In this case Google is the highest bidder.
I could see the problem if they were manually altering the algorithmic search results so that a competitor that should have been result number 3 by algorithm is instead result number 2500, but I don't understand that to be the case. Are they even altering their own position? They have the most popular services, it makes sense that they would be the most relevant result -- especially because the people who prefer Bing or Yahoo or some other competitor are more likely to use that competitor's search engine as well, so those people don't get counted by Google when they do statistics on which links get clicked the most, and conversely the people who prefer Google services are more likely to use Google search.
So I guess what I'm asking is, what do you expect them to do? Not list their own services when people search for them? Give themselves an artificial handicap? I don't think they ought to have any obligation to do that.
OK, but so what? Android is just the UI and some libraries, it's still Linux underneath and it's all open source. You don't really have to re-implement anything -- if you need some library from desktop Linux that isn't in Android, you don't have to rewrite it, you just have to statically link it. There is obviously some work to be done to e.g. get gtk and qt working with the Android UI, but they already work with OS X and win32 and I'll eat my hat if they can't reuse a large majority of the OS-dependent code from desktop Linux. To say nothing of the possibility of just running x.org alongside Android as a stopgap measure in much the same way x.org runs on OS X.
I though you could build a fully open source Android? The Cyanogen wiki says it is GPL and Apache licensed (which I assume means that some bits are GPL and others are Apache).
Right, but that's not what you get on your phone when you go to Verizon and ask them for a Droid, because Motorola has made changes (presumably to the Apache licensed bits) which they don't publish, and have everything set up to prevent you from changing things as you like.
I think what I'd really like to see is something like the Nexus line, but available on all carriers and capable of running apt-get and anything else in the GNU userland.
It is my understanding that if you think of it in those terms, the numbers of total iOS devices when you include iPad and Touch units have Apple still leading in marketshare.
I guess you're right, apparently when these companies publish market share they're comparing Android to iPhone rather than iOS. But the trend lines are still clear.
Also until this year the iPhone was carrier limited in the US so the device marketshare may change somewhat this year.
I'm sure it won't hurt them, but it's going to make the numbers hard to compare in the short term. There will be a lot of people who have been waiting to replace their AT&T iPhone 3 with a Verizon iPhone 4, which will cause a temporary spike in sales, but that just results in more iPhones in landfills rather than increasing the number in the hands of people, so it's going to be hard to disambiguate that from the number of customers who wouldn't have an iPhone if it wasn't available on Verizon.
What's really interesting is that if you look at the numbers, both iOS and Android have been gaining ground, iOS slowly and Android quickly, but at the expense of RIM and WM rather than each other. And that trend is likely to continue, i.e. Android is going to keep growing but (for now) not really at the expense of iOS.
In any event, the implication that nobody is buying Android devices is demonstrably false -- depending how you measure they're either only slightly behind Apple or are already the market leader.
I'm not seeing why that is the sticking point, when you have to buy a computer at all to compile anything.
It's a sticking point because it adds a major unnecessary restriction. 90% computers aren't Macs, and you're excluding all those people even though they meet all of the inherent requirements for compiling the code.
And jailbreaking doesn't count because it's not formally permitted so you can't get it past the lawyers. It would be a different story if Apple officially accepted it as a method for installing software.
Even if a game supports WLAN play, is the host expected to buy phones and copies of each game for players 2, 3, and 4 to use?
Of course not. Each player can supply their own device and copy of the game like any other LAN party.
That's actually a pretty good idea: Using a touchscreen phone as a game controller and then hooking one of the phones up to a TV, with multiplayer over 802.11. I hope that catches on.
But most developers of PC games appear to be under the impression that the PC is single-player, ignoring the possibility of four gamepads and an HDTV monitor.
That's because it mostly is, or at least the usual model is that each player has their own PC. But what's wrong with that? It's easier than ever because modern laptops are fast enough to play almost all PC games, so you don't even have to lug a bunch of desktops and CRTs into the same room if everybody has their own laptop.
With the recent story about infected apps on the Android Market, I am having second thoughts about switching at all.
I guess FUD works.
You know you could get an Android phone and just not install shady apps.
Incidentally, has someone ported Synaptic or the like to Android yet? It would be incredibly convenient to have an "app store" app which is full of free software. Especially because then you could have repositories run by people you trust who make sure nothing in them is malicious. And get all the advantages of the walled garden, but without the walls -- because hey, if I want to install the app my college buddy wrote, I still can.
It doesn't matter that the shelves are filled if the store is empty.
No customers.
Android market share now exceeds iOS market share. And that's with Apple still riding the first to market advantage on the iPad, so we'll see if that lasts once there are a few dozen Android tablet models on the market.
Since there is no way in hell... and nor should there be, anyone who is sane enough to recognize security concerns attendant on any responsible smartphone provider will accept... that Apple will ever allow unsigned binaries access to their devices, this issue is effectively unresolvable until the FSF pulls its head out and accepts that the general public really, truly, should have code signing protection, remote malware killswitch, etc. for their smartphone devices; there's just too much personal and financial information available there for any responsible company to not do their best to lock down the platform.
There is nothing preventing the GPL from being compatible with those things if implemented properly. The key is that you have to make installing unsigned software obnoxious but not impossible, so that anybody who wants to can do it but at the same time nobody will do it lightly or by accident. The developer option would probably be fine if you didn't have to pay anything or buy a Mac to exercise it.
'Tis strange indeed that whilst the TOS of Android Market are similarly infringing in all the ways that are alleged to matter wrt remote kill and so forth, the Apple-bad crowd never seem to notice...
Because you can install Android apps that aren't from the Android Market?
And I don't at all count Google as the savior here, since going with them basically means you're throwing the existing world of open source and Free Software on a bonfire (which is expected, when you're conforming to design decisions made for what was supposed to be closed source software.)
I don't know... Android is clearly not the supreme platform for open source software, but it's still the best of all the viable alternatives. And if it wins in the marketplace then we're on much stronger footing because getting a fully-open solution working which is compatible with the dominant platform is much easier when the dominant platform is mostly open and Linux-based.
You should read up on antitrust laws. This was exactly what got Microsoft in hot water during the 90s.
Microsoft is still doing it today. Are their lawyers incompetent?
Or read about how American Airlines manipulated airline search results from their dominance via owning the Sabre reservation system (the first real online ticketing system):
From the link it seems that American was artificially putting its main competitors in the back of the search results or removed them entirely. Removing discount flights was especially blatant. But I don't believe there is any allegation that Google is doing any of that. Likewise, I don't think American offered its competitors the chance to buy advertising at market rates in order to have flights that would not normally appear on the first page do so, thereby allowing the competitors to buy for market rates the advantage of being in the first page.
You can't use market domination in one segment to gain domination in another.
Taken literally this means that Fox News can't run ads for the Wall Street Journal because they're the same company and Fox has market domination in the conservative TV news market. Is that what you're arguing?
We already know that their acquisition of Doubleclick violated Clayton
Do you have a cite for the court case where this was proved?
And taking on a Wall Street darling would definitely send a message to corporate America, that this could happen to you.
From where I'm sitting the message is that antitrust enforcement is arbitrary and capricious, having everything to do with political advantage, and that therefore companies should make sure their Congress is well-oiled with campaign contributions so that they can keep on doing all of the odious things that aren't being prosecuted while the government does the bidding of AT&T and Microsoft.
Incidentally, isn't antitrust supposed to be enforced by the DOJ or the FTC or something? Why, other than for political gain, is Congress getting involved here?
Just because there are other offenders or worse offenders doesn't make Google's violation any less significant
Meaningless. The point is that taking action against Google in lieu of the litany of more serious offenders reveals where priorities lie, and the result is not encouraging.
If you read the article, they want to investigate if Google's domination over the search business gives them an unfair advantage in other areas by prioritizing their own companies in search results.
Which is an entirely reasonable thing to investigate./shrug
I don't see the reasonable. Anybody can buy advertising on Google's search engine and have their site listed on the first page. It isn't like Google is charging higher than market rates for ads to their competitors. Any kind of argument that Google would have to charge itself for the placement, assuming the accounting doesn't already work that way, is just silly. It makes no difference to anyone if they move some money from the left pocket to the right pocket in exchange for the advertising. So the only possible "solution" to the "problem" is to prevent Google from advertising its own services -- which is plainly nonsensical.
On top of all that, they aren't doing anything Microsoft or their other competitors aren't doing. You use Bing, you get Bing Maps etc. So if there is any sort of investigation then why does Microsoft get a free pass?
Ok, so maybe gmail may pay for itself by now (this definitely has not been the case when they started), youtube certainly is operating at a loss.
YouTube has been operating at a loss since before Google bought them, and they're in the process of slowly turning that around. This is the normal way industries work -- you have to make an initial investment to create the infrastructure necessary to enter the market and the returns don't come until some time down the road.
If you're still not convinced, let's assume that you are the owner of a game development studio. Suddenly, microsoft comes along, and with the money they earned on OSes and office software, they can afford to give away games on a large scale. And suddenly you are out of business. Under normal circumstances, when a corporation pushes another corporation out of business, this can be viewed as ''evolutionary forces at work''. But here this is definitely not the case, because these divisions of microsoft are clearly unrelated. It is an anomaly in the system, and this is exactly what governments should protect against.
The logic doesn't really work for digital goods. The idea with dumping is that you sell for less than the reproduction cost. With digital goods the reproduction cost is effectively zero. It's not like Google is paying people to use its products (unlike, say, Microsoft).
If you want to call every act of giving away software dumping then you're going to have to condemn the entire industry. Microsoft is destroying the market for Windows security updates by distributing them for free. Canonical is wrongfully giving away Ubuntu. How dare Apple contribute back its improvements to Webkit and allow just anyone to run Darwin? And those guys at the FSF, it's practically a criminal enterprise! Not to mention the people at Berkeley and the NSF -- both the states and the feds are in on it. And the shareware people on top of it all.
Calling it dumping makes no sense. Especially when it's open source, because the whole problem with dumping is that when all the competitors go out of business then the last man standing has a monopoly. But if the software is open source then there is no "monopoly" -- anybody who doesn't like what you're doing can fork it and do something else and the original developer has no opportunity to charge monopoly prices because anyone can redistribute the software for free.
The harm only comes if the software is free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-speech and once it becomes dominant the controlling developer does the sort of things Microsoft did with Internet Explorer, like discontinuing all the editions other than those that run on Windows and making it incompatible with industry standards so that people would have to use Windows to visit most websites as was the case in the early 2000s. Can you point to anything Google does along these lines? If anything they're doing the opposite, with efforts like this.
Herb is kind of above reproach. Having grown up in Wisconsin and actually met the man once, I can say comfortably that he isn't some kind of fundraising whore; he's a principled legislator who will probably get swept out in the next tide of teabagging. So I would be very careful in ascribing any kind of sinister motive to his investigation, or in drawing any conclusions about what the committee's findings will be.
I'm going to quote the AC from above because it has a good list of examples:
Yes, when I think of out-of-control industries that are stamping on the rights of ordinary people, colluding to price-gouge us and passing legislation harmful to American interests, I think Google. Not the RIAA or MPAA or union-busting industries or economy-wrecking fraudulent financial groups or small-business-annihilating megamarts or the military-industrial complex or cable and phone companies. Definitely Google.
Can you address this point? If this guy is such a goody-goody, why is he going after Google, who as far as anyone can tell hasn't hurt anybody and whose major offense seems to have been making its competitors butthurt that they have to compete with a company that makes good products available in exchange for nothing more than viewing little text adverts? Instead of going after Comcast, Sony, bankers, etc.?
For example, their free gmail service is subsidized by their search products, and these products are largely unrelated.
What are you talking about? It pays for itself the same way every other free email service does, by having ads on it.
And I hope you're not suggesting that running a division at a loss is somehow unlawful, because otherwise Microsoft's xbox and online services divisions are in deep trouble.
Very interesting comment. One thing though: While in an imaginary communist fairyland all labour could be replaced by machines that work at almost zero cost of production, the raw resources being fed into this process are not infinite -- that's the real bottleneck.
Theoretically. But zero cost labor does strange things. You stick one self-replicating machine on a rocket to Mars and in under a decade you have a convoy of automated interplanetary freighters hauling in whatever raw materials you can imagine from anywhere in the solar system, and a good start on the construction of a Dyson sphere.
I don't think there will ever be a point when scarcity is literally absent, but I think we can get close enough that nobody will really notice the difference.
I'm not suggesting eugenics or cullings or anything like that. Just limiting the number of children every couple can have (like they do in China)...
That hasn't worked out very well for them. Something about parents wanting sons rather than daughters.
And anyway, look at the population replacement rates in first world countries. Their populations would be shrinking if it weren't for immigration. No one child policy required.
Solar thermal is great -- in Arizona. Wind power is great -- in wide open spaces. If you can make it work where you are, go for it.
But areas with a high population density require a high density energy source. You can't run New York City from just wind turbines without stringing them all the way to Boston -- and then what do you use to power Boston? Major cities need nuclear reactors.
Those same companies, or new ones with a similar mentality, are not going to build new nuclear plants when safer designs are developed.
Of course, companies do what's profitable. So all you have to do is make it more profitable to build newer designs, i.e. offer tax incentives and subsidies for new construction.
What's the alternative? You can't shut down the existing plants without replacing them with anything, and the primary baseload alternative to nuclear is coal. We have to replace old nuclear with new nuclear.
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I said not to build nukes.
My apologies, I was confusing your method of keeping us on foreign oil with an alternative method.
There are two ways to get off of fossil fuels and both of them are economic. First, you heavily tax fossil fuels so that other energy sources become cost-competitive. This is the single most effective way to do it, but everybody hates taxes and the fossil fuel producers will lobby strongly against it. Second, you subsidize the alternatives. This has the benefit of getting the lobbyists in favor of the alternatives on your side so that it can pass.
The problem is that what happens, every time, is that the oil industry splits the alternatives and pits them against each other. We can't build nuclear because you say "Nukes are bad so we shouldn't build them" -- never mind what kind of nukes or whether any particular identifiable problem can be solved or mitigated. We can't build solar because the other side says it's too intermittent -- we don't want brown outs on every cloudy day. We can't build geothermal because it isn't proven at large scales and it may cause earthquakes. So we don't build any of it.
Fuck. That. Shit.
Stop spending your efforts trying to condemn the other guy's ideas and spend them instead on implementing your own.
Somebody explain this to me. Every time people start talking about nuclear power, a thousand people come out of the woodwork to say how we shouldn't be building nuclear plants because we need to build a bunch of their favored alternative. Geothermal, solar thermal, wind turbines, whatever.
Do we not like diversity anymore? Build all of them. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Stop fighting and start building.
All non-fossil power generation is "hooked on subsidies" -- until we internalize the environmental costs of fossil fuels, nothing else is competitive and so everything else has to be subsidized.
Microsoft doesn't have market dominance. Google does. That's the important distinction.
Microsoft doesn't have market dominance in operating systems where they make Bing the default?
How is that any different from returning Youtube videos as all of the top results, and pushing Metacafe or whatever down the list?
Putting YouTube first doesn't stop people who are looking for Metacafe from finding it easily. The cliche about everyone clicking on the first result is backwards -- the first result is listed first because it's the one that everybody clicks on. Being in the number three spot does not make you invisible. Being in the number 2500 spot does. And on top of that, product search doesn't put Google in the top slot for everything -- search for "camera" and I get Ritz Camera, followed by the Wikipedia entry for Camera, followed by Google products. So it isn't at all clear that they're actually altering the algorithmic search results.
And even if they were, putting your own results at the top is just promotion, which doesn't significantly alter the order of your competitors' results and is therefore only anti-competitive in the same way that all advertising is. Putting your competitors' results last when they should have been third or fifth is anti-competitive because you're punishing them as a competitor, rather than merely bumping them a single space along with all of the other results that aren't competitors -- i.e. it's a question of whether you're treating competitors the same way you treat everybody else who isn't a competitor.
I have Quake *. He has Unreal *. How do we play together?
Planning. You run into the same situation where you have an xbox and your friend has a Wii -- you can't play together over the internet, and he can't bring his Wii controller to your house and use it on your xbox. So either you plan ahead and both get the same game, or you spend more money buying another copy. Also, you can play one of the games like Starcraft that has a spawn edition for specifically this reason.
Or how does mom afford two to four copies of each game, one for each gamer in the household? A console game costing 1*$60 is cheaper than a PC game costing 4*$30.
You're assuming the console-optimized household. Most people don't have exactly four kids. If you have two then the PC game is the same cost and you save the price of buying the console. If you have more than four (or whatever the single console max is) then you need two consoles with two televisions etc. which tacks on hundreds of dollars, which would have to be amortized over a large number of games and you don't get to count the ones that have a spawn edition or that benefit from hiding information from all the other players or that not everyone likes and so you don't have to buy a copy for everyone.
I'm not saying a console is never more cost effective if all you care about is money or if you always have exactly four players, but it's hardly the only viable alternative.
In a game that does not rely on hiding information from the other player, such as a fighting game as opposed to an RTS, what is the tangible benefit of one PC for each player?
Turn it around: Other than the cost considerations above, what does it harm, if you already have the PCs?
Even if the laptop comes with Intel GMA graphics?
You can still play a lot of older games. And going forward the cost-conscious parent is going to be picking up Bobcat-based laptops with AMD/ATI graphics anyway. Plus, it's a simple fact that people who don't plan end up spending more money -- if you want to play games on your laptop, buy one with a GPU capable of playing them.
Haven't been following that story, then? Microsoft now has to offer a choice of browsers in the EU.
Not the browser thing, the search engine thing. You go to Bing and you search for 'maps' and the top of the page is Bing Maps. And Bing Maps is the default mapping service in Internet Explorer too, if you want to argue about Bing's lack of market share. So either Microsoft is breaking the law or Google isn't.
They can run ads, but they can't prioritize WSJ ads over any other.
What does that mean? There are only so many time slots. There is only so much space on the first screen full of search results. If Google wants to put Google Maps as the first thing under "maps" on Google search, that means they have to forgo all the money Microsoft or anyone else would have paid them to put the competing mapping service there instead. They're in effect paying for that placement through the opportunity cost. Advertising space is sold to the highest bidder. In this case Google is the highest bidder.
I could see the problem if they were manually altering the algorithmic search results so that a competitor that should have been result number 3 by algorithm is instead result number 2500, but I don't understand that to be the case. Are they even altering their own position? They have the most popular services, it makes sense that they would be the most relevant result -- especially because the people who prefer Bing or Yahoo or some other competitor are more likely to use that competitor's search engine as well, so those people don't get counted by Google when they do statistics on which links get clicked the most, and conversely the people who prefer Google services are more likely to use Google search.
So I guess what I'm asking is, what do you expect them to do? Not list their own services when people search for them? Give themselves an artificial handicap? I don't think they ought to have any obligation to do that.
OK, but so what? Android is just the UI and some libraries, it's still Linux underneath and it's all open source. You don't really have to re-implement anything -- if you need some library from desktop Linux that isn't in Android, you don't have to rewrite it, you just have to statically link it. There is obviously some work to be done to e.g. get gtk and qt working with the Android UI, but they already work with OS X and win32 and I'll eat my hat if they can't reuse a large majority of the OS-dependent code from desktop Linux. To say nothing of the possibility of just running x.org alongside Android as a stopgap measure in much the same way x.org runs on OS X.
I though you could build a fully open source Android? The Cyanogen wiki says it is GPL and Apache licensed (which I assume means that some bits are GPL and others are Apache).
Right, but that's not what you get on your phone when you go to Verizon and ask them for a Droid, because Motorola has made changes (presumably to the Apache licensed bits) which they don't publish, and have everything set up to prevent you from changing things as you like.
I think what I'd really like to see is something like the Nexus line, but available on all carriers and capable of running apt-get and anything else in the GNU userland.
It is my understanding that if you think of it in those terms, the numbers of total iOS devices when you include iPad and Touch units have Apple still leading in marketshare.
I guess you're right, apparently when these companies publish market share they're comparing Android to iPhone rather than iOS. But the trend lines are still clear.
Also until this year the iPhone was carrier limited in the US so the device marketshare may change somewhat this year.
I'm sure it won't hurt them, but it's going to make the numbers hard to compare in the short term. There will be a lot of people who have been waiting to replace their AT&T iPhone 3 with a Verizon iPhone 4, which will cause a temporary spike in sales, but that just results in more iPhones in landfills rather than increasing the number in the hands of people, so it's going to be hard to disambiguate that from the number of customers who wouldn't have an iPhone if it wasn't available on Verizon.
What's really interesting is that if you look at the numbers, both iOS and Android have been gaining ground, iOS slowly and Android quickly, but at the expense of RIM and WM rather than each other. And that trend is likely to continue, i.e. Android is going to keep growing but (for now) not really at the expense of iOS.
In any event, the implication that nobody is buying Android devices is demonstrably false -- depending how you measure they're either only slightly behind Apple or are already the market leader.
I'm not seeing why that is the sticking point, when you have to buy a computer at all to compile anything.
It's a sticking point because it adds a major unnecessary restriction. 90% computers aren't Macs, and you're excluding all those people even though they meet all of the inherent requirements for compiling the code.
And jailbreaking doesn't count because it's not formally permitted so you can't get it past the lawyers. It would be a different story if Apple officially accepted it as a method for installing software.
Even if a game supports WLAN play, is the host expected to buy phones and copies of each game for players 2, 3, and 4 to use?
Of course not. Each player can supply their own device and copy of the game like any other LAN party.
That's actually a pretty good idea: Using a touchscreen phone as a game controller and then hooking one of the phones up to a TV, with multiplayer over 802.11. I hope that catches on.
But most developers of PC games appear to be under the impression that the PC is single-player, ignoring the possibility of four gamepads and an HDTV monitor.
That's because it mostly is, or at least the usual model is that each player has their own PC. But what's wrong with that? It's easier than ever because modern laptops are fast enough to play almost all PC games, so you don't even have to lug a bunch of desktops and CRTs into the same room if everybody has their own laptop.
With the recent story about infected apps on the Android Market, I am having second thoughts about switching at all.
I guess FUD works.
You know you could get an Android phone and just not install shady apps.
Incidentally, has someone ported Synaptic or the like to Android yet? It would be incredibly convenient to have an "app store" app which is full of free software. Especially because then you could have repositories run by people you trust who make sure nothing in them is malicious. And get all the advantages of the walled garden, but without the walls -- because hey, if I want to install the app my college buddy wrote, I still can.
A) You can still buy an Android phone even if you buy a Wii.
B) They have a device called a "PC" which is mostly open and runs a lot of video games.
It doesn't matter that the shelves are filled if the store is empty.
No customers.
Android market share now exceeds iOS market share. And that's with Apple still riding the first to market advantage on the iPad, so we'll see if that lasts once there are a few dozen Android tablet models on the market.
Since there is no way in hell ... and nor should there be, anyone who is sane enough to recognize security concerns attendant on any responsible smartphone provider will accept ... that Apple will ever allow unsigned binaries access to their devices, this issue is effectively unresolvable until the FSF pulls its head out and accepts that the general public really, truly, should have code signing protection, remote malware killswitch, etc. for their smartphone devices; there's just too much personal and financial information available there for any responsible company to not do their best to lock down the platform.
There is nothing preventing the GPL from being compatible with those things if implemented properly. The key is that you have to make installing unsigned software obnoxious but not impossible, so that anybody who wants to can do it but at the same time nobody will do it lightly or by accident. The developer option would probably be fine if you didn't have to pay anything or buy a Mac to exercise it.
'Tis strange indeed that whilst the TOS of Android Market are similarly infringing in all the ways that are alleged to matter wrt remote kill and so forth, the Apple-bad crowd never seem to notice...
Because you can install Android apps that aren't from the Android Market?
And I don't at all count Google as the savior here, since going with them basically means you're throwing the existing world of open source and Free Software on a bonfire (which is expected, when you're conforming to design decisions made for what was supposed to be closed source software.)
I don't know... Android is clearly not the supreme platform for open source software, but it's still the best of all the viable alternatives. And if it wins in the marketplace then we're on much stronger footing because getting a fully-open solution working which is compatible with the dominant platform is much easier when the dominant platform is mostly open and Linux-based.
You should read up on antitrust laws. This was exactly what got Microsoft in hot water during the 90s.
Microsoft is still doing it today. Are their lawyers incompetent?
Or read about how American Airlines manipulated airline search results from their dominance via owning the Sabre reservation system (the first real online ticketing system):
From the link it seems that American was artificially putting its main competitors in the back of the search results or removed them entirely. Removing discount flights was especially blatant. But I don't believe there is any allegation that Google is doing any of that. Likewise, I don't think American offered its competitors the chance to buy advertising at market rates in order to have flights that would not normally appear on the first page do so, thereby allowing the competitors to buy for market rates the advantage of being in the first page.
You can't use market domination in one segment to gain domination in another.
Taken literally this means that Fox News can't run ads for the Wall Street Journal because they're the same company and Fox has market domination in the conservative TV news market. Is that what you're arguing?
We already know that their acquisition of Doubleclick violated Clayton
Do you have a cite for the court case where this was proved?
And taking on a Wall Street darling would definitely send a message to corporate America, that this could happen to you.
From where I'm sitting the message is that antitrust enforcement is arbitrary and capricious, having everything to do with political advantage, and that therefore companies should make sure their Congress is well-oiled with campaign contributions so that they can keep on doing all of the odious things that aren't being prosecuted while the government does the bidding of AT&T and Microsoft.
Incidentally, isn't antitrust supposed to be enforced by the DOJ or the FTC or something? Why, other than for political gain, is Congress getting involved here?
Just because there are other offenders or worse offenders doesn't make Google's violation any less significant
Meaningless. The point is that taking action against Google in lieu of the litany of more serious offenders reveals where priorities lie, and the result is not encouraging.
If you read the article, they want to investigate if Google's domination over the search business gives them an unfair advantage in other areas by prioritizing their own companies in search results.
Which is an entirely reasonable thing to investigate. /shrug
I don't see the reasonable. Anybody can buy advertising on Google's search engine and have their site listed on the first page. It isn't like Google is charging higher than market rates for ads to their competitors. Any kind of argument that Google would have to charge itself for the placement, assuming the accounting doesn't already work that way, is just silly. It makes no difference to anyone if they move some money from the left pocket to the right pocket in exchange for the advertising. So the only possible "solution" to the "problem" is to prevent Google from advertising its own services -- which is plainly nonsensical.
On top of all that, they aren't doing anything Microsoft or their other competitors aren't doing. You use Bing, you get Bing Maps etc. So if there is any sort of investigation then why does Microsoft get a free pass?
Ok, so maybe gmail may pay for itself by now (this definitely has not been the case when they started), youtube certainly is operating at a loss.
YouTube has been operating at a loss since before Google bought them, and they're in the process of slowly turning that around. This is the normal way industries work -- you have to make an initial investment to create the infrastructure necessary to enter the market and the returns don't come until some time down the road.
If you're still not convinced, let's assume that you are the owner of a game development studio. Suddenly, microsoft comes along, and with the money they earned on OSes and office software, they can afford to give away games on a large scale. And suddenly you are out of business. Under normal circumstances, when a corporation pushes another corporation out of business, this can be viewed as ''evolutionary forces at work''. But here this is definitely not the case, because these divisions of microsoft are clearly unrelated. It is an anomaly in the system, and this is exactly what governments should protect against.
The logic doesn't really work for digital goods. The idea with dumping is that you sell for less than the reproduction cost. With digital goods the reproduction cost is effectively zero. It's not like Google is paying people to use its products (unlike, say, Microsoft).
If you want to call every act of giving away software dumping then you're going to have to condemn the entire industry. Microsoft is destroying the market for Windows security updates by distributing them for free. Canonical is wrongfully giving away Ubuntu. How dare Apple contribute back its improvements to Webkit and allow just anyone to run Darwin? And those guys at the FSF, it's practically a criminal enterprise! Not to mention the people at Berkeley and the NSF -- both the states and the feds are in on it. And the shareware people on top of it all.
Calling it dumping makes no sense. Especially when it's open source, because the whole problem with dumping is that when all the competitors go out of business then the last man standing has a monopoly. But if the software is open source then there is no "monopoly" -- anybody who doesn't like what you're doing can fork it and do something else and the original developer has no opportunity to charge monopoly prices because anyone can redistribute the software for free.
The harm only comes if the software is free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-speech and once it becomes dominant the controlling developer does the sort of things Microsoft did with Internet Explorer, like discontinuing all the editions other than those that run on Windows and making it incompatible with industry standards so that people would have to use Windows to visit most websites as was the case in the early 2000s. Can you point to anything Google does along these lines? If anything they're doing the opposite, with efforts like this.
Herb is kind of above reproach. Having grown up in Wisconsin and actually met the man once, I can say comfortably that he isn't some kind of fundraising whore; he's a principled legislator who will probably get swept out in the next tide of teabagging. So I would be very careful in ascribing any kind of sinister motive to his investigation, or in drawing any conclusions about what the committee's findings will be.
I'm going to quote the AC from above because it has a good list of examples:
Yes, when I think of out-of-control industries that are stamping on the rights of ordinary people, colluding to price-gouge us and passing legislation harmful to American interests, I think Google. Not the RIAA or MPAA or union-busting industries or economy-wrecking fraudulent financial groups or small-business-annihilating megamarts or the military-industrial complex or cable and phone companies. Definitely Google.
Can you address this point? If this guy is such a goody-goody, why is he going after Google, who as far as anyone can tell hasn't hurt anybody and whose major offense seems to have been making its competitors butthurt that they have to compete with a company that makes good products available in exchange for nothing more than viewing little text adverts? Instead of going after Comcast, Sony, bankers, etc.?
For example, their free gmail service is subsidized by their search products, and these products are largely unrelated.
What are you talking about? It pays for itself the same way every other free email service does, by having ads on it.
And I hope you're not suggesting that running a division at a loss is somehow unlawful, because otherwise Microsoft's xbox and online services divisions are in deep trouble.
Very interesting comment. One thing though: While in an imaginary communist fairyland all labour could be replaced by machines that work at almost zero cost of production, the raw resources being fed into this process are not infinite -- that's the real bottleneck.
Theoretically. But zero cost labor does strange things. You stick one self-replicating machine on a rocket to Mars and in under a decade you have a convoy of automated interplanetary freighters hauling in whatever raw materials you can imagine from anywhere in the solar system, and a good start on the construction of a Dyson sphere.
I don't think there will ever be a point when scarcity is literally absent, but I think we can get close enough that nobody will really notice the difference.
I'm not suggesting eugenics or cullings or anything like that. Just limiting the number of children every couple can have (like they do in China)...
That hasn't worked out very well for them. Something about parents wanting sons rather than daughters.
And anyway, look at the population replacement rates in first world countries. Their populations would be shrinking if it weren't for immigration. No one child policy required.
Solar thermal is great -- in Arizona. Wind power is great -- in wide open spaces. If you can make it work where you are, go for it.
But areas with a high population density require a high density energy source. You can't run New York City from just wind turbines without stringing them all the way to Boston -- and then what do you use to power Boston? Major cities need nuclear reactors.
Those same companies, or new ones with a similar mentality, are not going to build new nuclear plants when safer designs are developed.
Of course, companies do what's profitable. So all you have to do is make it more profitable to build newer designs, i.e. offer tax incentives and subsidies for new construction.
What's the alternative? You can't shut down the existing plants without replacing them with anything, and the primary baseload alternative to nuclear is coal. We have to replace old nuclear with new nuclear.