This "sub-$100 Android 4.0 tablet" is kind of like saying you can run Windows 7 on a 600mhz Pentium 3 with 512mb of Ram. Yes, it actually boots and runs, and you can get Aero working on an old ATI card, but that doesn't mean it's a pleasant experience. If you were to sell such a PC with the headline "Windows 7 PC, runs great", you would be one hell of a scumbag and the potential buyer just might swing that heavy dinosaur upside your head.
The chinese love cheap gadgets, because often times it's cheap gadget or no gadget. For us here in the western world, we tend to want un-crap gadgets, perhaps because we have better things to do than staring at "busy" spinners. Maybe if I lived in the 3rd world, my opinion would be different, but I don't.
God, yes. They are very much the mafia, but instead of thugs and guns, they have lawyers wielding pens.
Now what boggles my mind is if a BSA employee shows up at your front desk, can you legally throw them out for trespassing or something ? They're not from the government, so in my mind they should not have any right to invade your space and rifle through your files, digital or paper. Or did some goddamned senile senator pass a bill granting them super powers ?
This extremely common practice of bundling garbage with every download is the cancer that is killing Windows freeware, and no, it's not limited to Download.com.
A while ago, when I was in-between jobs and looking for some freelance work, I stumbled upon an entire "community" of scammers known as PPI : Pay-Pay-Install. This forum was all about participating in these shady bundling practices, discussing the advertisers that were most tolerant to things like silent installs, home page swaps, BHO's that redirect your Google searches through a proxy (to hijack ad revenue), Vista sidebar widgets, toolbars, bookmarks, and start-up items, along with uploading deceptively named and heavily trojaned stuff via P2P. This is why, with every goddamned Windows utility you get these days, you get prompted to installt he Ask.com toolbar, BonziBuddy, free trials for McAfee's swiss cheese, and a laundry list of other standards.
CNet should indeed be made an example of, and burned to the ground, but they didn't start this gangbang, the advertisers did. Follow the money... There is no reason why users should tolerate this aberrant behaviour.
Y'know, back in the day, we didn't call them "frameworks", we called them libraries, and rather than replacing one bad scripting language with another, which is effectively an interpreted language running inside another interpreted language, well we just had these library functions to tackle common problems.
I think that instead of slowing down the scripts even more with pattern glut and reinterpretation, these people should just invent a brand new language that incorporates all these practices as first-level citizens. I don't want Symfony: the pile of slow PHP indirections running on top of PHP itself... I want mod_symfony.so. Ultimately that's what they end up doing.
Or better yet: write a damn visual designer that spits out XML or binary blobs that tell the module what to do. After all, these frameworks are so damned restrictive they might as well dumb the whole process down to a glorified form designer. Oh wait, that's VB.Net...
"Thieving" consultants are a product of their environment. The GP described a workaround, which given the restrictive legal issues, is perfectly valid and avoids funning that same money to a bunch of dirty rotten IP lawyers.
I agree whole-heartedly with you that AD is overcomplicated and, for perhaps 99% of users, a solution to a non-existent problem, but don't go bashing Exchange just because it's MS. It's a lot more than just a mail server, it is a collaboration suite, and the people who buy it, buy it for all those non-mail extras that are very tightly integrated.
To recreate the same with open-source, most of us are forced to use webmail, as there is no standardized mail client that can handle all the extra stuff. You could probably stuff Thunderbird full of plugins and end up somewhere close, but the maintenance nightmare means it's still probably cheaper to just buy Exchange and Outlook for everyone.
Postfix and Courier/Dovecot may be good enough for us minimalist geeks, but it's like comparing a tricked-out Honda Goldwing to a home-built fixed-gear bicycle. Both will get you there, but the expensive one is a lot more comfortable.
I've got the WHR-HP-G300N with DD-WRT, and yeah, support has been kind of nonexistent in the last year. That's always been the problem with DD-WRT though, it's kind of half-assed, presumably to create a market for the Pro edition. QoS is still very hit-or-miss.
Dude, you can't even see through your Apple bashing reflex.
I'm an app developer. I work with all four major platforms: IOS, Android, Blackberry and Win7. Hands-down, IOS wins. Better device, better OS, better dev tools, better sales, better everything. Any time a client asks for an app, they want it for the iPhone, and I usually have to cross-sell them on the other platforms, or their customers complain about not supporting their preferred platform. There is a reason why IOS is on top, despite the lack of 3rd party manufacturers and distributors.
It is the best goddamned phone out there for the great majority of people. Yes, it's a walled garden. Yes, it's dumbed down. Those are good things. It's a fucking phone that plays Angry Birds: that's what people want! If you offer some random person the choice between a free iPhone, or a free Android, they will pick the iPhone unless they're some attention-starved Apple hater.
The "Apple phenomenon", as you so disdainfully call it, is simply people willing to pay a little more for a better product. It works, it's well-designed, it has lots of compatible accessories, it has real in-person after-sales support. These features are worth money to a lot of people. Not all of us have the time or desire to mess with our gadgets, a lot of us just want to get it, use it, and get on with our lives.
As the saying goes, only the rich can afford to buy cheap things.
I'd rather buy something nice that will last, than keep buying cheap crap that breaks and fails and makes my pressure rise every time I look at it. Just the few hours I've wasted fussing with my wife's Android have exceeded the small difference in sticker price vs my iPhone. You can buy more gadgets, but you can't buy time.
This is my experience as well. I always build the IOS version first, then port to Android and BB if the client explicitly requests it. It usually ends up costing twice as much for the ports, because it's Java and while Eclipse is quite excellent, it's no XCode. What XCode lacks in stability, it more than makes up for in convenience. And Blackberry, well as far as I'm concerned, they don't even have a valid IDE. The Eclipse plugin is horribly broken and platform-dependent. The JDE is stuck in the 90's and is actually worse than plain old Notepad.
Now, if Android could get their shit together and release something XCode-like, or even a Visual Studio plugin, that could cut my development time in half, and result in more Android apps being released in tandem with thier IOS progenitors.
You're going to have to show proof, because in my environment it's the exact opposite. In the entire software company, we all hate Android and BB with a passion, and no, we're not a design shop. We're a Linux-centric web shop that's branched out into mobile apps and sites. IOS isn't without its flaws, but overall it gives us one tenth the headaches of any other platform. On average I've needed twice as much time to port apps over to Android and BB (each), than to build the the original version for IOS. This is despite the fact that I have far more experience with Java than Objective-C, and yet I consider myself far more proficient in the latter after only 6 months since using XCode for the first time ever.
So, I say, after all of us have had plenty of hands-on experience with all 4 major mobile platforms, IOS is the unanimous winner. Did I mention we're Linux geeks ? Yeah, I did. We like the walled garden, because despite being a walled garden, it is still 10 times more pleasant to work with than the slack-jawed harlot that is Android.
I'm a 99-percenter, and even *I* think you're just spouting bizarro communist tripe. You say that profit is irrelevant, but then go into some masturbatory rant about how screwing the company into taking a loss equates to a "better deal" for you. It's not a better deal if you drive that company into bankruptcy and your device becomes unsupported 6 months down the road.
There is a very important distinction between profit and greed. Deriving pleasure from screwing someone over the deal, that's greed. I don't consider Apple a greedy company. They sell products people want, so they charge a premium for premium products. You get what you pay for. I think that's quite fair. Sure, the iPhone costs a bit more than an Android phone... so what ? If you're broke or cheap, get the Android. If instead, you're the type of person who doesn't mind spending a little more for something better, get the iPhone. End of story. It's not a political debate, it's a value dilemma.
I like my $1000 LCDs with retina-frying intensity and color fidelity. You might be perfectly content with the $199 LCDs that I gave away, because to me they were eyesores. I know their new owner is super happy with them. You have the freedom of choice, use it. And for the love of jebus, respect other people's freedom of choice too.
As for your second argument, WP7 and WebOS are doomed because everyone already knows they suck even worse than Blackberry. Android sucks less, which is why it's sticking around. It's close enough to IOS (relatively speaking), to justify its own existence. And frankly, a lot of people don't care about thier phone's OS, they just want a phone that can play Angry Birds.
To further your argument, there's this surplus/clearance store in my city that's been trying to flog $79 Android devices for months. I've seen one of them, it has something like a 75mhz processor. People use it as an e-reader because it's too slow for anything else.
Is that what Google had in mind when they published the Android OS ? Because I know, the day I get a bug report from someone with that shitty $79 device, my reply will consist of "Fuck Android, Fuck your shitty phone, and Fuck You!" repeated over 9000 times, followed by a picture of me taking a dump on said device.
You can't call it a smartphone if it's dumber than Sarah Palin.
Apple chooses to do neither, not only because it's profitable, but because it would kill their brand overnight.
The day you can install IOS on a piece of shit Huawei phone, is the day Apple's stock drops by half, because every inbred reality-show watching sack of parasitic shit on this dirt mount is going to buy the cheapest phone they can find on eBay, then complain that IOS runs slower than Chris Christie's metabolism.
I like the fact that when I sell an IOS app, it just works. I don't get hundreds of strange bug reports and crash logs from as many different devices. I don't have to own ten different phones just to test things on the most popular devices. I don't even need to look up the device specs, because there's only two Apple devices: iPhone, and iPad. If Apple starts licensing IOS to third parties, the platform will become irreversibly fractured, and I will have yet another reason to kill people.
Scratch that, it's times like this I wish I ran my own Slash site so I could invite you over.
It's not just about accessories. The Android software platform is as fractured as it gets, with a bazillion different versions, different hardware that simply cannot be trusted or relied upon. Some are great phones like the Samsung Galaxy line, and then a neverending stream of shit phones like, well, Huawei, Motorola, Alcatel... half-assed sweatshop garbage.
As a developer, even though Apple's walled garden is quite frustrating to navigate, I have less to worry about when developing iPhone apps vs Android or Blackberry, as if an app works on my iPhone, it's a pretty safe bet that it'll work on all of them. It's much like writing for a gaming console. There are only a few minor gotchas, that are trivially resolved during testing with the various simulators.
With Android, about half of my the bug reports I get must be replied with "I'm sorry, but your phone does not support rotation. Yes, the epileptic shimmering is normal on a Motorola. No, our app isn't slow, it's your goddamned korean knockoff phone. Congratulations, your device supports flash. Too bad it only has a 2.77 mhz processor without H.264 acceleration."
The fundamental difference is that economy and business class seating both arrive at the same destination, at the same time. I couldn't care less about the cheap seat, as long as I get there in one piece. A high-end GPU runs a lot faster than the low-end variants, which for some of us is all that matters.
I like to run my games at 2560x1440. Why ? Because that's my native resolution on these 27" LCDs. Sure, I could use 1920x1080, or even 1280x720, but I like the higher res. If I can spend a little more on GPUs to push those extra pixels and be wowed by the graphics once in a while, to me it's well worth it.
Or, to be perfectly frank, if the cheaper GPU can't handle the raw graphics bandwidth to run my racing games at a smooth 60fps 2560x1440 times 3 displays for the surround view, well that GPU is worth exactly $0 to me, because I'm a big baby and I like my big shiny toys. And then I do batty stuff like Cuda-assisted raytracing, which turns GPU clusters into happy faces. Wackos like myself are only interested in the $500+ GPUs, and thumb our noses at anything less than 2 of whatever card is the newest hotness. You could not sell me a $100 GPU if it came with a lifetime supply of maple-roasted bacon. So no, I don't think the low-end cards are hurting high-end sales much at all. The sweet spot is in the $150 to $225 range, where the great majority of gamers lurk, and that segment is quite safely isolated from the high and low extremes.
No, what killed Cyrix is system builders passing those chips off as "real" Intels, and charging full price for a cheap knockoff. Then, when someone knowledgeable would come by to fix or upgrade that machine, we'd see the Cyrix logo and blame every single problem on that dumb sticker.
Even today, few people know what's inside their own PC. Given how confusing it can be for people who actually sell machines for a living, sucha s myself, there really is little hope for the average user to make sense of all the different product lines and competing brands. I would say that 9 out of 10 clients of mine are completely at my mercy. If I were crooked, I could stick a $90 AMD chip in there, charge them for a $350 Intel i7, and they would never know. And I'm not just talking about residential clients, no... corporate sales too! I'm usually called in AFTER they get fleeced by a big name dealer, and AFTER I point out that they paid ten times too much for a basic server with previous-generation components. I had one office get quoted $1600 per workstation, for basic office machines with a 19" LCD. I got them something faster and quieter for half the price, with a larger LCD and enough profit to cover my time building, ghosting and unpacking them on-site. Don't even get me started on the servers, that's the low-hanging fruit...
Yes, it "requires" HDCP all the way because that's how they wrote the spec. In practice, the only thing preventing a device from decrypting the stream and forwarding the result to an arbitrary number of devices, is the licensing agreement. God forbid people would use it to make digital copies of Blu-Ray movies, when it is far quicker and more convenient to decrypt the files right off the disc...
You seriously think that big companies don't have folks with spreadsheets who work all this shit out?
You put too much faith in the developing world. Here's how it usually goes:
1. Units are manufactured to fill the order. 2. Any leftover time and materials go to manufacture black-market units 3. If black-market demand exceeds supply, the "official" order gets delayed
Money is king over there, and law enforcement is virtually non-existent. What is the buyer going to do, stop employing cheap asian labour ? No. So they put up with it. The asians know they are too cheap to replace, and they exploit that position whenever they can. Can't really blame them, we gave them that power in the first place.
How does that explain the rapidly plummeting prices then?
If they were barely covering demand, they probably wouldn't have been running weekly discounts on their most popular products all the goddamned time. The last two years of hard drive sales have been a pure dumping operation. To then lose a quarter of your manufacturing ability, and triple prices overnight, I'm no economist but that seems very disproportionate to me.
They drove consumption with absurdly low prices for a very long time, and now that everyone's hooked on their raid arrays of 2TB drives, they jack them back up to gouge the client. This is my interpretation. A 25% drop in manufacturing, when everything was running smoothly a month ago, should not result in immediate panic and skyrocketing prices. If I were to lose a quarter of my work hours, I would not suddenly shit the bed, default on all my bills, set my hair on fire and blame it all on supply and demand. Sane business owners don't run their business without some sort of contingency plan, whether that's excess capacity/inventory, or a partner that can help with overload, maybe even a redundant site to cope with natural disasters. I mean, these guys sell hard drives - what do you do with a hard drive ? You back it up.
When unemployment is ridiculously high, people should be thinking hard about freelancing, or starting a home-based company. There is no such thing as a shortage of work, only a shortage of companies seeking employees. People's needs don't go on pause just because wall street says we're broke.
Your colleagues will expect that you would at least read and respond to email outside of normal work hours.
If that is true, then you need to educate your colleagues. I've never even met most of the people I work with, and most of us work flexible hours. It is very simple: if I'm online (IM), I'm online and available immediately. If I'm not online, and someone sends me email, it will get addressed when I next go online, which might be 12 to 24 hours on a weekday, or on monday if it's the weekend. Same as any physical job. Anything beyond that is a favour because I chose to make myself available (boredom), and I get paid for that time. 15 minutes reading email ? 15 minutes billed. We're all teleworkers, so we all value each other's personal time. If there is an emergency, where something can't wait until Monday or "the morning" (which for me is 2pm), then exceptionally a phone may ring, though often times we just grab someone else who is online, who can help out. If the network guy is at a concert or dragging his kids to the amusement park, I'm the backup network guy. Likewise, if a PHP site needs some real-time lovin' and the original developer is on vacation (or sleeping), any one of us can jump in and figure it out.
Only rarely is there an urgent need for any one person. It is a matter of managing client expectations, and respecting your colleagues.
Well, why is it so expensive and long to develop ? Is it because the tools suck ?
I'll be perfectly frank: in 2011, I would have expected software development to be a heck of a lot easier than it is. I'm having to deal with a sore lack of RAD tools for most languages and platforms. Does it make me a weenie, the fact that I'd like a nice visual design tool for my GUI-driven apps ? I'm looking at you, Java. Fuck you, Java!
I'm goign to take a wild educated guess, and state that a very large number of us real programmers are stuck writing business apps 40 hours a week. Business apps that, for the most part, do the exact same things: input data, store data, retrieve data, and run reports on said data. Glorified MS Access. So then, why is it that a clever non-programmer can create a fairly complex Access "application" in a half hour, but to recreate that in a proper language takes at least an afternoon, if not a whole day ?
Even Apple with their XCode only do it kind-of half-assed. You get to draw the GUI, but then you have to do all this weird connector-outlet nonsense and a bunch of boilerplate preprocessor declarations to tie it into your code. What ever happed to drawing a freaking button, then double-clicking said button to create its onClick event or choosing from a list of available events ? Yes, I'm talking about VB / Delphi and ther ilk.
Just because we're brilliant programmers doesn't mean we should still be doing everything the hard way. Likewise, just because someone is a non-programmer doesn't mean they should never be creative with their technology.
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This "sub-$100 Android 4.0 tablet" is kind of like saying you can run Windows 7 on a 600mhz Pentium 3 with 512mb of Ram. Yes, it actually boots and runs, and you can get Aero working on an old ATI card, but that doesn't mean it's a pleasant experience. If you were to sell such a PC with the headline "Windows 7 PC, runs great", you would be one hell of a scumbag and the potential buyer just might swing that heavy dinosaur upside your head.
The chinese love cheap gadgets, because often times it's cheap gadget or no gadget. For us here in the western world, we tend to want un-crap gadgets, perhaps because we have better things to do than staring at "busy" spinners. Maybe if I lived in the 3rd world, my opinion would be different, but I don't.
God, yes. They are very much the mafia, but instead of thugs and guns, they have lawyers wielding pens.
Now what boggles my mind is if a BSA employee shows up at your front desk, can you legally throw them out for trespassing or something ? They're not from the government, so in my mind they should not have any right to invade your space and rifle through your files, digital or paper. Or did some goddamned senile senator pass a bill granting them super powers ?
This extremely common practice of bundling garbage with every download is the cancer that is killing Windows freeware, and no, it's not limited to Download.com.
A while ago, when I was in-between jobs and looking for some freelance work, I stumbled upon an entire "community" of scammers known as PPI : Pay-Pay-Install. This forum was all about participating in these shady bundling practices, discussing the advertisers that were most tolerant to things like silent installs, home page swaps, BHO's that redirect your Google searches through a proxy (to hijack ad revenue), Vista sidebar widgets, toolbars, bookmarks, and start-up items, along with uploading deceptively named and heavily trojaned stuff via P2P. This is why, with every goddamned Windows utility you get these days, you get prompted to installt he Ask.com toolbar, BonziBuddy, free trials for McAfee's swiss cheese, and a laundry list of other standards.
CNet should indeed be made an example of, and burned to the ground, but they didn't start this gangbang, the advertisers did. Follow the money... There is no reason why users should tolerate this aberrant behaviour.
Y'know, back in the day, we didn't call them "frameworks", we called them libraries, and rather than replacing one bad scripting language with another, which is effectively an interpreted language running inside another interpreted language, well we just had these library functions to tackle common problems.
I think that instead of slowing down the scripts even more with pattern glut and reinterpretation, these people should just invent a brand new language that incorporates all these practices as first-level citizens. I don't want Symfony: the pile of slow PHP indirections running on top of PHP itself... I want mod_symfony.so. Ultimately that's what they end up doing.
Or better yet: write a damn visual designer that spits out XML or binary blobs that tell the module what to do. After all, these frameworks are so damned restrictive they might as well dumb the whole process down to a glorified form designer. Oh wait, that's VB.Net...
I wouldn't mind compiling all my production PHP code, if it means it will run an order of magnitude faster.
"Thieving" consultants are a product of their environment. The GP described a workaround, which given the restrictive legal issues, is perfectly valid and avoids funning that same money to a bunch of dirty rotten IP lawyers.
Engineers > lawyers. S'all I'm sayin...
I agree whole-heartedly with you that AD is overcomplicated and, for perhaps 99% of users, a solution to a non-existent problem, but don't go bashing Exchange just because it's MS. It's a lot more than just a mail server, it is a collaboration suite, and the people who buy it, buy it for all those non-mail extras that are very tightly integrated.
To recreate the same with open-source, most of us are forced to use webmail, as there is no standardized mail client that can handle all the extra stuff. You could probably stuff Thunderbird full of plugins and end up somewhere close, but the maintenance nightmare means it's still probably cheaper to just buy Exchange and Outlook for everyone.
Postfix and Courier/Dovecot may be good enough for us minimalist geeks, but it's like comparing a tricked-out Honda Goldwing to a home-built fixed-gear bicycle. Both will get you there, but the expensive one is a lot more comfortable.
I've got the WHR-HP-G300N with DD-WRT, and yeah, support has been kind of nonexistent in the last year. That's always been the problem with DD-WRT though, it's kind of half-assed, presumably to create a market for the Pro edition. QoS is still very hit-or-miss.
Dude, you can't even see through your Apple bashing reflex.
I'm an app developer. I work with all four major platforms: IOS, Android, Blackberry and Win7. Hands-down, IOS wins. Better device, better OS, better dev tools, better sales, better everything. Any time a client asks for an app, they want it for the iPhone, and I usually have to cross-sell them on the other platforms, or their customers complain about not supporting their preferred platform. There is a reason why IOS is on top, despite the lack of 3rd party manufacturers and distributors.
It is the best goddamned phone out there for the great majority of people. Yes, it's a walled garden. Yes, it's dumbed down. Those are good things. It's a fucking phone that plays Angry Birds: that's what people want! If you offer some random person the choice between a free iPhone, or a free Android, they will pick the iPhone unless they're some attention-starved Apple hater.
The "Apple phenomenon", as you so disdainfully call it, is simply people willing to pay a little more for a better product. It works, it's well-designed, it has lots of compatible accessories, it has real in-person after-sales support. These features are worth money to a lot of people. Not all of us have the time or desire to mess with our gadgets, a lot of us just want to get it, use it, and get on with our lives.
As the saying goes, only the rich can afford to buy cheap things.
I'd rather buy something nice that will last, than keep buying cheap crap that breaks and fails and makes my pressure rise every time I look at it. Just the few hours I've wasted fussing with my wife's Android have exceeded the small difference in sticker price vs my iPhone. You can buy more gadgets, but you can't buy time.
This is my experience as well. I always build the IOS version first, then port to Android and BB if the client explicitly requests it. It usually ends up costing twice as much for the ports, because it's Java and while Eclipse is quite excellent, it's no XCode. What XCode lacks in stability, it more than makes up for in convenience. And Blackberry, well as far as I'm concerned, they don't even have a valid IDE. The Eclipse plugin is horribly broken and platform-dependent. The JDE is stuck in the 90's and is actually worse than plain old Notepad.
Now, if Android could get their shit together and release something XCode-like, or even a Visual Studio plugin, that could cut my development time in half, and result in more Android apps being released in tandem with thier IOS progenitors.
people prefer android to iOS
You're going to have to show proof, because in my environment it's the exact opposite. In the entire software company, we all hate Android and BB with a passion, and no, we're not a design shop. We're a Linux-centric web shop that's branched out into mobile apps and sites. IOS isn't without its flaws, but overall it gives us one tenth the headaches of any other platform. On average I've needed twice as much time to port apps over to Android and BB (each), than to build the the original version for IOS. This is despite the fact that I have far more experience with Java than Objective-C, and yet I consider myself far more proficient in the latter after only 6 months since using XCode for the first time ever.
So, I say, after all of us have had plenty of hands-on experience with all 4 major mobile platforms, IOS is the unanimous winner. Did I mention we're Linux geeks ? Yeah, I did. We like the walled garden, because despite being a walled garden, it is still 10 times more pleasant to work with than the slack-jawed harlot that is Android.
I'm a 99-percenter, and even *I* think you're just spouting bizarro communist tripe. You say that profit is irrelevant, but then go into some masturbatory rant about how screwing the company into taking a loss equates to a "better deal" for you. It's not a better deal if you drive that company into bankruptcy and your device becomes unsupported 6 months down the road.
There is a very important distinction between profit and greed. Deriving pleasure from screwing someone over the deal, that's greed. I don't consider Apple a greedy company. They sell products people want, so they charge a premium for premium products. You get what you pay for. I think that's quite fair. Sure, the iPhone costs a bit more than an Android phone... so what ? If you're broke or cheap, get the Android. If instead, you're the type of person who doesn't mind spending a little more for something better, get the iPhone. End of story. It's not a political debate, it's a value dilemma.
I like my $1000 LCDs with retina-frying intensity and color fidelity. You might be perfectly content with the $199 LCDs that I gave away, because to me they were eyesores. I know their new owner is super happy with them. You have the freedom of choice, use it. And for the love of jebus, respect other people's freedom of choice too.
As for your second argument, WP7 and WebOS are doomed because everyone already knows they suck even worse than Blackberry. Android sucks less, which is why it's sticking around. It's close enough to IOS (relatively speaking), to justify its own existence. And frankly, a lot of people don't care about thier phone's OS, they just want a phone that can play Angry Birds.
To further your argument, there's this surplus/clearance store in my city that's been trying to flog $79 Android devices for months. I've seen one of them, it has something like a 75mhz processor. People use it as an e-reader because it's too slow for anything else.
Is that what Google had in mind when they published the Android OS ? Because I know, the day I get a bug report from someone with that shitty $79 device, my reply will consist of "Fuck Android, Fuck your shitty phone, and Fuck You!" repeated over 9000 times, followed by a picture of me taking a dump on said device.
You can't call it a smartphone if it's dumber than Sarah Palin.
Apple chooses to do neither, not only because it's profitable, but because it would kill their brand overnight.
The day you can install IOS on a piece of shit Huawei phone, is the day Apple's stock drops by half, because every inbred reality-show watching sack of parasitic shit on this dirt mount is going to buy the cheapest phone they can find on eBay, then complain that IOS runs slower than Chris Christie's metabolism.
I like the fact that when I sell an IOS app, it just works. I don't get hundreds of strange bug reports and crash logs from as many different devices. I don't have to own ten different phones just to test things on the most popular devices. I don't even need to look up the device specs, because there's only two Apple devices: iPhone, and iPad. If Apple starts licensing IOS to third parties, the platform will become irreversibly fractured, and I will have yet another reason to kill people.
It's times like this I wish I had mod points.
Scratch that, it's times like this I wish I ran my own Slash site so I could invite you over.
It's not just about accessories. The Android software platform is as fractured as it gets, with a bazillion different versions, different hardware that simply cannot be trusted or relied upon. Some are great phones like the Samsung Galaxy line, and then a neverending stream of shit phones like, well, Huawei, Motorola, Alcatel... half-assed sweatshop garbage.
As a developer, even though Apple's walled garden is quite frustrating to navigate, I have less to worry about when developing iPhone apps vs Android or Blackberry, as if an app works on my iPhone, it's a pretty safe bet that it'll work on all of them. It's much like writing for a gaming console. There are only a few minor gotchas, that are trivially resolved during testing with the various simulators.
With Android, about half of my the bug reports I get must be replied with "I'm sorry, but your phone does not support rotation. Yes, the epileptic shimmering is normal on a Motorola. No, our app isn't slow, it's your goddamned korean knockoff phone. Congratulations, your device supports flash. Too bad it only has a 2.77 mhz processor without H.264 acceleration."
The fundamental difference is that economy and business class seating both arrive at the same destination, at the same time. I couldn't care less about the cheap seat, as long as I get there in one piece. A high-end GPU runs a lot faster than the low-end variants, which for some of us is all that matters.
I like to run my games at 2560x1440. Why ? Because that's my native resolution on these 27" LCDs. Sure, I could use 1920x1080, or even 1280x720, but I like the higher res. If I can spend a little more on GPUs to push those extra pixels and be wowed by the graphics once in a while, to me it's well worth it.
Or, to be perfectly frank, if the cheaper GPU can't handle the raw graphics bandwidth to run my racing games at a smooth 60fps 2560x1440 times 3 displays for the surround view, well that GPU is worth exactly $0 to me, because I'm a big baby and I like my big shiny toys. And then I do batty stuff like Cuda-assisted raytracing, which turns GPU clusters into happy faces. Wackos like myself are only interested in the $500+ GPUs, and thumb our noses at anything less than 2 of whatever card is the newest hotness. You could not sell me a $100 GPU if it came with a lifetime supply of maple-roasted bacon. So no, I don't think the low-end cards are hurting high-end sales much at all. The sweet spot is in the $150 to $225 range, where the great majority of gamers lurk, and that segment is quite safely isolated from the high and low extremes.
No, what killed Cyrix is system builders passing those chips off as "real" Intels, and charging full price for a cheap knockoff. Then, when someone knowledgeable would come by to fix or upgrade that machine, we'd see the Cyrix logo and blame every single problem on that dumb sticker.
Even today, few people know what's inside their own PC. Given how confusing it can be for people who actually sell machines for a living, sucha s myself, there really is little hope for the average user to make sense of all the different product lines and competing brands. I would say that 9 out of 10 clients of mine are completely at my mercy. If I were crooked, I could stick a $90 AMD chip in there, charge them for a $350 Intel i7, and they would never know. And I'm not just talking about residential clients, no... corporate sales too! I'm usually called in AFTER they get fleeced by a big name dealer, and AFTER I point out that they paid ten times too much for a basic server with previous-generation components. I had one office get quoted $1600 per workstation, for basic office machines with a 19" LCD. I got them something faster and quieter for half the price, with a larger LCD and enough profit to cover my time building, ghosting and unpacking them on-site. Don't even get me started on the servers, that's the low-hanging fruit...
Yes, it "requires" HDCP all the way because that's how they wrote the spec. In practice, the only thing preventing a device from decrypting the stream and forwarding the result to an arbitrary number of devices, is the licensing agreement. God forbid people would use it to make digital copies of Blu-Ray movies, when it is far quicker and more convenient to decrypt the files right off the disc...
Hollywood stupidity at its finest, as usual.
You seriously think that big companies don't have folks with spreadsheets who work all this shit out?
You put too much faith in the developing world. Here's how it usually goes:
1. Units are manufactured to fill the order.
2. Any leftover time and materials go to manufacture black-market units
3. If black-market demand exceeds supply, the "official" order gets delayed
Money is king over there, and law enforcement is virtually non-existent. What is the buyer going to do, stop employing cheap asian labour ? No. So they put up with it. The asians know they are too cheap to replace, and they exploit that position whenever they can. Can't really blame them, we gave them that power in the first place.
How does that explain the rapidly plummeting prices then?
If they were barely covering demand, they probably wouldn't have been running weekly discounts on their most popular products all the goddamned time. The last two years of hard drive sales have been a pure dumping operation. To then lose a quarter of your manufacturing ability, and triple prices overnight, I'm no economist but that seems very disproportionate to me.
They drove consumption with absurdly low prices for a very long time, and now that everyone's hooked on their raid arrays of 2TB drives, they jack them back up to gouge the client. This is my interpretation. A 25% drop in manufacturing, when everything was running smoothly a month ago, should not result in immediate panic and skyrocketing prices. If I were to lose a quarter of my work hours, I would not suddenly shit the bed, default on all my bills, set my hair on fire and blame it all on supply and demand. Sane business owners don't run their business without some sort of contingency plan, whether that's excess capacity/inventory, or a partner that can help with overload, maybe even a redundant site to cope with natural disasters. I mean, these guys sell hard drives - what do you do with a hard drive ? You back it up.
When unemployment is ridiculously high, people should be thinking hard about freelancing, or starting a home-based company. There is no such thing as a shortage of work, only a shortage of companies seeking employees. People's needs don't go on pause just because wall street says we're broke.
Your colleagues will expect that you would at least read and respond to email outside of normal work hours.
If that is true, then you need to educate your colleagues. I've never even met most of the people I work with, and most of us work flexible hours. It is very simple: if I'm online (IM), I'm online and available immediately. If I'm not online, and someone sends me email, it will get addressed when I next go online, which might be 12 to 24 hours on a weekday, or on monday if it's the weekend. Same as any physical job. Anything beyond that is a favour because I chose to make myself available (boredom), and I get paid for that time. 15 minutes reading email ? 15 minutes billed. We're all teleworkers, so we all value each other's personal time. If there is an emergency, where something can't wait until Monday or "the morning" (which for me is 2pm), then exceptionally a phone may ring, though often times we just grab someone else who is online, who can help out. If the network guy is at a concert or dragging his kids to the amusement park, I'm the backup network guy. Likewise, if a PHP site needs some real-time lovin' and the original developer is on vacation (or sleeping), any one of us can jump in and figure it out.
Only rarely is there an urgent need for any one person. It is a matter of managing client expectations, and respecting your colleagues.
People who call themselves Anonymous Coward should be shot.
(come on, you know you wanna +5 me)
Well, why is it so expensive and long to develop ? Is it because the tools suck ?
I'll be perfectly frank: in 2011, I would have expected software development to be a heck of a lot easier than it is. I'm having to deal with a sore lack of RAD tools for most languages and platforms. Does it make me a weenie, the fact that I'd like a nice visual design tool for my GUI-driven apps ? I'm looking at you, Java. Fuck you, Java!
I'm goign to take a wild educated guess, and state that a very large number of us real programmers are stuck writing business apps 40 hours a week. Business apps that, for the most part, do the exact same things: input data, store data, retrieve data, and run reports on said data. Glorified MS Access. So then, why is it that a clever non-programmer can create a fairly complex Access "application" in a half hour, but to recreate that in a proper language takes at least an afternoon, if not a whole day ?
Even Apple with their XCode only do it kind-of half-assed. You get to draw the GUI, but then you have to do all this weird connector-outlet nonsense and a bunch of boilerplate preprocessor declarations to tie it into your code. What ever happed to drawing a freaking button, then double-clicking said button to create its onClick event or choosing from a list of available events ? Yes, I'm talking about VB / Delphi and ther ilk.
Just because we're brilliant programmers doesn't mean we should still be doing everything the hard way. Likewise, just because someone is a non-programmer doesn't mean they should never be creative with their technology.