I'm pretty happy with the G2 but I'm not happy with HTC for trying to lock it down. Probably Samsung for me next time round. My choices are a little limited because I want a physical qwerty if the phone is going to be big and bulky anyway. Maybe Samsung will wake up to the Blackberry replacement market.
The backlash against a locked down Android tablet will be much stronger than a locked down phone because if it looks like a computer people will expect it to act like a computer with all the freedoms that entails, not like a phone. The target market is not Apple customers, who are highly unlikely to give up their brand loyalty, but those who otherwise would buy a netbook or laptop.
Google created Android to make sure they have a presence in the lucrative mobile market and could care less about "open" and "free."
Speaking as someone who would know, there is a significant faction at Google that actually cares about open and free. Larry and Eric sometimes lose the plot, but they get reminded.
The reason why they buy these phones is that they work better than windows mobile or blackberry. Basically. They're good enough. Openness has nothing to do with it.
Incorrect. The reason these phones are good enough - and cheap - is that they are running Linux. Linux only got good enough because it is open. Also, a lot of the best apps are open in my experience. And who wants stacks of shovelware and adware applications running on their phone that they can't get rid of, which is exactly where locked down phones are headed. Open matters, even to people who don't know what it is.
Apple have this exact attitude and they just posted a record revenue of $26bn for this quarter, beating Wall St estimates by $2bn.
And despite that AAPL is off 2% today. One word: Android. You could also say it is about Steve booking out sick but the subtext is obviously "how is Cook going to handle Android?"
Most consumers don't even have a clue what is being discussed, or care. As long as they can make calls, surf and buy stuff they wont know the difference.
So they let others make their decisions for them, and if most of the comments are "Motorola isn't the slimmest, fastest or most open phone and misses a bunch of cools apps" then they will buy a different one.
Could be useful for producing fuel and possibly oxygen at the same time on Mars. While the sunlight intensity is about 43% vs earth, atmospheric diffusion is less so the solar energy arriving at the surface is about 59% of earth. The effect of much lower gas pressure is beyond my powers of deduction. One thing the article glosses over is whether the process produces free oxygen during the heating phase, which would be very useful on Mars.
Windows 98 was also a COMPLETE OPERATING SYSTEM with far more complexity than a web browser.
32,000 is also a lot of bugs, even divided by the number of components. And few components are as complex as the browser. Probably only the kernel is in the same ballpark.
If you were a follower of Oblivion/Fallout games you would have noticed how dated the engine is in New Vegas. The bugs and issues in the engine keep getting compounded every time they release a new one.
Gamebryo paid the death penalty for that. Though they were reportedly making money off the engine, it wasn't enough to offset wastage on their other adventures.
Gamebryo looks to me like a project that started strong but lacked regular housecleaning so eventually the code base became a fragile, unmaintainable mess and they lost the ability to rapidly incorporate new developments in engine technology. It worked well for Oblivion with its effective terrain geometry hacks, and the shadow mapping and parallax mapping really worked well. It had rather extreme architectural geometry popping but you could almost ignore that. The separate models for inside and outside geometry were less easy to ignore. Opaque windows anyone? But in general, extremely effective for the purpose at hand. Much of the world is actually beautiful. Example: sunset looking out over the lighthouse at Anvil.
For all its failings, Gamebryo did manage to grow Bethesda big enough to buy id. Funny that.
I still think Kingdom Hearts 2 was the best game ever released for that platform
Close to it, but Shadow of the Collossus was better, with a far smaller team too.
The most amazing aspect of Kingdom Hearts 2 in my opinion was the rather full featured 3D constructive geometry editor for the gummi ships. Imagine a 3 year old doing constructive geometry. I saw this with my own eyes.
Well. Now everybody agrees about that. But at release time last year the player community seemed to be split with most commentators giving Squeenix a pass (Famitsu: 39 out of 40) and only a small minority flatly blow raspberries.
I got the message with FF XIII. Squeenix thinks that painful linear grinding is something gamers must subjugate themselves to in order to earn a steady drip feed of treacly cutscenes. No thanks. If I want to watch prerenders I will watch a movie. If I ever hear the term "battle system" again I will just say no. I put FF XIII on the shelf to gather dust forever about 12 boring hours in. I couldn't stand it any more.
I seem to recall that Windows 98 had something on the order of 32,000 bugs a few months before release. Most were fixed, the release date slipped a little but not too much and it was finally released still with thousands of known bugs (and many more thousands of unknown ones no doubt). This did little to reduce its popularity.
No kidding, without Jobs' brilliance, Apple might start shipping phones that lose signal if held wrong. They might ship products without cut and paste. They might ship an OS that sometimes shrinks the window when you press a green plus. They might even lose the ability to engineer a battery door in their battery operated products.
And they might start kicking in the front doors of journalists.
Had the old engineers said, "OK, Fortran is dead, let's just keep a legacy compiler to run old code" everything would have been fine. But no, they insist on "improving" Fortran by putting C language features, e.g. pointers, into it. Why can't they just learn to program in C and let the old compilers do what they are good for, which is running legacy code?
C does not have true multidimensional arrays. Fortran has also historically produced faster numerical binaries than C.
If your boss came to you and said "We're working on a new project and I want you to learn how to program for the iPhone" would you argue with him for an hour on how the iPhone sucks, or would you embrace it as a new opportunity to learn something new?
I'd embrace it as an opportunity to learn how much the iPhone sucks.
The next generation (A5 chip) will probably have some major modifications and energy saving enhancements for which PA Semi and Intrinsity are renowned.
Jobs was unable to explain how his A4 is significantly different from a stock Arm A8 and micrographs support the position that it is not. Only a small leap of logic is required to conclude that the next generation will also be differentiated more by its PR spin than by its transistor arrangement.
If one was to only read Slashdot they would think Bill Gates is an evil borg that has caused untold misery on millions and millions of people because of his monopolistic ways.
It would seem then that Slashdot has a pretty accurate picture of the situation. With the understanding that we all know he was not actually decanted in a borg cube.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardware lock down, not software. Pretty big distinction.
To you maybe, but you're the only one.
I'm pretty happy with the G2 but I'm not happy with HTC for trying to lock it down. Probably Samsung for me next time round. My choices are a little limited because I want a physical qwerty if the phone is going to be big and bulky anyway. Maybe Samsung will wake up to the Blackberry replacement market.
The backlash against a locked down Android tablet will be much stronger than a locked down phone because if it looks like a computer people will expect it to act like a computer with all the freedoms that entails, not like a phone. The target market is not Apple customers, who are highly unlikely to give up their brand loyalty, but those who otherwise would buy a netbook or laptop.
He says he can't. Different thing entirely.
Google created Android to make sure they have a presence in the lucrative mobile market and could care less about "open" and "free."
Speaking as someone who would know, there is a significant faction at Google that actually cares about open and free. Larry and Eric sometimes lose the plot, but they get reminded.
The reason why they buy these phones is that they work better than windows mobile or blackberry. Basically. They're good enough. Openness has nothing to do with it.
Incorrect. The reason these phones are good enough - and cheap - is that they are running Linux. Linux only got good enough because it is open. Also, a lot of the best apps are open in my experience. And who wants stacks of shovelware and adware applications running on their phone that they can't get rid of, which is exactly where locked down phones are headed. Open matters, even to people who don't know what it is.
Apple have this exact attitude and they just posted a record revenue of $26bn for this quarter, beating Wall St estimates by $2bn.
And despite that AAPL is off 2% today. One word: Android. You could also say it is about Steve booking out sick but the subtext is obviously "how is Cook going to handle Android?"
Most consumers don't even have a clue what is being discussed, or care. As long as they can make calls, surf and buy stuff they wont know the difference.
So they let others make their decisions for them, and if most of the comments are "Motorola isn't the slimmest, fastest or most open phone and misses a bunch of cools apps" then they will buy a different one.
In other words, a manufacturer is selling a product that does exactly what the vast majority of it's customers want.
I'm curious how you know what Motorola's customers want. Or are you leaving ex-customers out it?
And I go to all my friends "Samsung".
Could be useful for producing fuel and possibly oxygen at the same time on Mars. While the sunlight intensity is about 43% vs earth, atmospheric diffusion is less so the solar energy arriving at the surface is about 59% of earth. The effect of much lower gas pressure is beyond my powers of deduction. One thing the article glosses over is whether the process produces free oxygen during the heating phase, which would be very useful on Mars.
Windows 98 was also a COMPLETE OPERATING SYSTEM with far more complexity than a web browser.
32,000 is also a lot of bugs, even divided by the number of components. And few components are as complex as the browser. Probably only the kernel is in the same ballpark.
Really funny. Wish I hadn't already commented.
If you were a follower of Oblivion/Fallout games you would have noticed how dated the engine is in New Vegas. The bugs and issues in the engine keep getting compounded every time they release a new one.
Gamebryo paid the death penalty for that. Though they were reportedly making money off the engine, it wasn't enough to offset wastage on their other adventures.
Gamebryo looks to me like a project that started strong but lacked regular housecleaning so eventually the code base became a fragile, unmaintainable mess and they lost the ability to rapidly incorporate new developments in engine technology. It worked well for Oblivion with its effective terrain geometry hacks, and the shadow mapping and parallax mapping really worked well. It had rather extreme architectural geometry popping but you could almost ignore that. The separate models for inside and outside geometry were less easy to ignore. Opaque windows anyone? But in general, extremely effective for the purpose at hand. Much of the world is actually beautiful. Example: sunset looking out over the lighthouse at Anvil.
For all its failings, Gamebryo did manage to grow Bethesda big enough to buy id. Funny that.
I still think Kingdom Hearts 2 was the best game ever released for that platform
Close to it, but Shadow of the Collossus was better, with a far smaller team too.
The most amazing aspect of Kingdom Hearts 2 in my opinion was the rather full featured 3D constructive geometry editor for the gummi ships. Imagine a 3 year old doing constructive geometry. I saw this with my own eyes.
The linear gameplay in XIII was AWFUL.
Well. Now everybody agrees about that. But at release time last year the player community seemed to be split with most commentators giving Squeenix a pass (Famitsu: 39 out of 40) and only a small minority flatly blow raspberries.
I got the message with FF XIII. Squeenix thinks that painful linear grinding is something gamers must subjugate themselves to in order to earn a steady drip feed of treacly cutscenes. No thanks. If I want to watch prerenders I will watch a movie. If I ever hear the term "battle system" again I will just say no. I put FF XIII on the shelf to gather dust forever about 12 boring hours in. I couldn't stand it any more.
I seem to recall that Windows 98 had something on the order of 32,000 bugs a few months before release. Most were fixed, the release date slipped a little but not too much and it was finally released still with thousands of known bugs (and many more thousands of unknown ones no doubt). This did little to reduce its popularity.
No kidding, without Jobs' brilliance, Apple might start shipping phones that lose signal if held wrong. They might ship products without cut and paste. They might ship an OS that sometimes shrinks the window when you press a green plus. They might even lose the ability to engineer a battery door in their battery operated products.
And they might start kicking in the front doors of journalists.
Had the old engineers said, "OK, Fortran is dead, let's just keep a legacy compiler to run old code" everything would have been fine. But no, they insist on "improving" Fortran by putting C language features, e.g. pointers, into it. Why can't they just learn to program in C and let the old compilers do what they are good for, which is running legacy code?
C does not have true multidimensional arrays. Fortran has also historically produced faster numerical binaries than C.
If your boss came to you and said "We're working on a new project and I want you to learn how to program for the iPhone" would you argue with him for an hour on how the iPhone sucks, or would you embrace it as a new opportunity to learn something new?
I'd embrace it as an opportunity to learn how much the iPhone sucks.
The next generation (A5 chip) will probably have some major modifications and energy saving enhancements for which PA Semi and Intrinsity are renowned.
Jobs was unable to explain how his A4 is significantly different from a stock Arm A8 and micrographs support the position that it is not. Only a small leap of logic is required to conclude that the next generation will also be differentiated more by its PR spin than by its transistor arrangement.
Yeah, then everyone can see just how stupid it is to compare him with a drug lord.
Right, because as everybody knows, Bill Gates never thinks like that.
Yeah, why should anyone admire a man who donated enormous amounts of money to charity?
Because of the shady way he got it?
If one was to only read Slashdot they would think Bill Gates is an evil borg that has caused untold misery on millions and millions of people because of his monopolistic ways.
It would seem then that Slashdot has a pretty accurate picture of the situation. With the understanding that we all know he was not actually decanted in a borg cube.