Two phones, the N900 and N9, and four tablets. N770, N800, N810, and N810+WiMax. That's if you're being fair by saying "Six years" in which case you have to include Maemo. If you're limiting yourself to Meego(tm), and not including Maemo, then they certainly weren't working on it for six years.
It's also worth pointing out that the entire point of Meego (as opposed to Maemo) was to get management behind what until then had been virtually a skunkworks project. Nokia's management more or less refused to give Maemo any backing initially because they were too committed to Symbian. It's an interesting question what would have happened had the N810, as originally intended, been released as a phone rather than cut down at the last minute and released as a tablet.
BTW Firefox is built upon that XML-based GUI thing (XUL), that was one apparently bloated thing that apparently the Netscape people got right.
I rather liked the original Windows installs of Phoenix too. You just unzipped it to whereever you wanted it. Want to uninstall it? Delete the directory. That was it. Nicely minimal. Wish more applications were like that.
Public service announcement: can people who don't use Bluetooth please refrain from telling those of us who do how to use it. We know how to use it, and you obviously don't, or you wouldn't make silly comments like "Put a widget on the screen to turn it on" (presumably next to the widget that predicts to the second when the next incoming call will come in.)
Ah, but you're wrong. 7" FWIW is just small enough to fit in your (trouser) pocket, and once you use it you'll realize that it doesn't really have any less screen real estate in practice than the bigger tablets.
Moreover, 10" tablets are designed to be the same size as "a sheet of paper" because someone who should have known better (I'm looking at you corpse of Steve Jobs) thought that was a good idea, given that's something people feel comfortable holding.
But he's wrong. But nobody holds a full sized, unfolded, sheet of paper for any length of time. As a portability metric, it's a mistake. The 7" tablets are roughly the size as "a sheet of paper" folded in half, which is something people are willing to hold for an extended period of time.
This is something I learned the hard way. My first tablet was a 10" one, intentionally, because I didn't think a 7" was "big enough". I then got a Kindle Fire, and realized I'd been utterly, utterly, wrong the first time. The Fire was small enough that I actually took it with me, while the 10" was something I rarely look anywhere because it was too big. 10" just isn't portable - well, it's portable in the sense that your laptop is portable, but if you're going to carry around something like that, well, why not carry around the more powerful, open, and capable device?
Either way, Apple doesn't "get it". Or maybe someone there belatedly does, but enough people at Apple don't that - if the current rumors are true - they're going to handicap the 7-8".
Which is a shame - for Apple - because the likely benefit of producing a sub-par 7"-8" tablet will be to simultaneously bless the form factor, while undermining the iPad brand, driving people to Android. As a fan of the latter, and critic of Apple's recent turn to the dark side, I'm "happy" about this, but I think it's bad for them.
I agree there's no chance it'll come out at $250, but that's because of marketing, not anything else.
Apple can sell hardware at cost and make profits if they control the ecosystem which delivers content to the hardware, and they do indeed do that.
The rumors say this'll be more than $300. Of course it will be. The price is always a good way to say "This is better", and adding 20-30% to the price of something doesn't price it out of the ballpark but it does make it appear, to many people, to be a better quality product, regardless of whether it is or not. But Apple could, at least in theory, back that up by actually making a better tablet. It doesn't look like they've done that (Apple fanbois will claim it is merely because it has iOS on it, but in hardware terms the specs aren't rumored to be anything to write home about), but they could do that, and make nothing on the hardware, knowing they're raking it in on the Apple's app store.
Apple, and many iPad owners, have for years not really understood why people buy smaller tablets, with Steve Jobs openly mocking them and commiting to never producing one.
It's not exactly surprising that the specs of a tablet Apple doesn't want to make, intended for a market it just doesn't understand the existence of, might be underwhelming.
I suppose this text didn't appear in the summary then:
Second, a cheaper and smaller iPad could impact the market for e-readers and 'price-sensitive users,' according to J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz, which in turn could mean a challenging future for Amazon, Google, and other IT vendors marketing cheaper tablets.
I think we can safely suggest that the GP was on-topic given his comments clearly related to TFS.
FWIW, I don't know what the GP meant by blocking, but I myself have an Asterisk rule that rejects incoming 800 numbers sending them to voicemail. A driver saying "I'm here" is going to get the message across just fine, especially as an actual message from a rejected number is relatively rare.
I agree you're doing the right thing, sending the recognizable number (and actually I'd myself likely to ignore an income call from a random number in my area code anyway); the problem we have is that too many telemarketers are of the opinion its OK to telemarket if you send a valid callback number, and send an 800 number as a result. So I block 'em. Actually, I'm pretty close right now to just implementing a whitelist with every unrecognized number going to voicemail.
I'm also skeptical - holding just about anything to your ear for an extended period of time will result in that area warming, if only because your hand's bodyheat will warm the area. Considering we're talking about a device that generates a fraction of watt when on full power, and where that energy will dissipate in all directions, not just towards the head, I find it improbable, to say the least, that the energy from the phone itself will do anything of significance.
Or maybe that's it. Maybe people are getting tumors from mobile phones, but indirectly - from the heat of their hands holding the things!
Should we be forbidden to talk about any of these because someone doesn't like the incitements to hatred?
No, because that's not what the GP was talking about. You simply took a common shorthand phrase with a particular meaning, took each word literally, came up with an obviously different definition to the phrase to that intended (even to someone unfamiliar with the original phrase - as context makes it obvious what the GP meant), and pretended he was arguing that.
I assume your next argument will be "what's so wrong with National Socialism? Plenty of countries have had Socialism across an entire Nation!"
OK, even if you accept the wages arguement, the Chinese will accept pay far below US minimum wage (around $8/hour in most states, last time I looked, although that was a while ago.)
But to be honest, the major reason is that companies like Foxconn are extremely good at getting an assembly line for a new product set up in a very short space of time. This was the reason the Raspberry Pi, for example, was outsourced to a non-Western country - Western manufacturers could match the price, but would take months to set up their production lines. Non-Western manufacturers could get everything set up in weeks.
Well, OK, the multiprocessor array drive server didn't really exist at the time, but the entire point of CP/M was that it'd run on everything - an S100 based system soldered together by a nerd, a co-processor card on an Apple II, a Z-80 based home computer made by Radio Shack or Amstrad...
Of course, the problem with Windows (and DOS before that, and CP/M before that) is it works the way it does, which isn't necessary optimal for the intended use of such a computer system. I'm not sure what the situation is today, but I know one reason why developers have practically begged management to "Look at this Linux thingie" for the last decade, and made inroads doing so has been the bizarre complexity at every level that's involved in putting a non-trivial server application on a Windows server. It's been Java and.NET that have only saved Windows from being 100% relegated to running office AD and Exchange servers.
Nothing except to other phone users, and as phone users benefit from network effects, arguably it's a "cost of doing business" rather than a subsidy. The so-called Obamaphones are funded from the USF (a portion of telecommunications profits), which has been around for decades, and which started funding cellphones as well as regular landlines during the Bush administration (Why? Competition. Why should your landline company be the only company that gets to spend the money on universal service?)
OK, but at least in theory the site that attracts the most visitors (that you want to advertise on) is also the one that's the easiest to compete with.
Search itself isn't hard. That is to say someone with a VPS can probably build and run an Altavista clone and make a profit from ads if they want to. Not enough to give up the day job, but enough to cover the running costs.
Good search of course is harder, but Google's search has gone through phases where it's very good, followed by very awful, followed by OK, followed by (... etc, you get the idea), enough times.
Why does Google have a "monopoly" on search, and does it have a monopoly on search? The nearest I can think of, to be honest, is that they own the word "Google". People go to Google because it's good enough and they know it's good enough, and don't know enough about Bing or Yahoo search to feel that'd be less of a waste of their time. So Google has immense market share, but it's hard to believe it has market power - if it was signficantly worse than its rivals, people would get frustrated and switch, they would lose their trust in "Google" pretty quickly and have no reason to stay.
And I know that because I've done the same thing. I've switched from Google when it's been awful - when it's gone over the top in ignoring words in my search criteria and bringing up useless results, or when clicking in the wrong place causes my browser to hang for five seconds because Google's JS has decided to load an entirely unnecessary preview of a search result's color scheme (WTF? I'm glad they fixed that.) I've generally switched back because its competitors are for the most part lousy clones of Google that aren't better.
This is not like Windows, where people went to Windows because Microsoft was able to control the DOS market from 1981 onwards, and used its power as the controller of the "standard platform" to make it expensive for OEMs to bundle competitor's products. (This is not to say early Windows wasn't an improvement on, say, GEM, but the reason why we have Windows on home computers in 2012 is not because Windows 1.x or 2.x was a more sophisticated, powerful, system in 1987 than GEM or DesqView.)
Disclaimer: I don't actually have a disclaimer. Last month I sold my sole share in GOOG because my new kid means I need the cash right now.;-) Boy did I pick the right time, I can't imagine this announcement is going to help the stock price...
Or, you know, birth control could be an important women's health issue. Women generally seem to think so. Perhaps women's bodies work differently and have different roles in the reproductive process to men or something?
Yes, I met people who would have voted Republican but for Palin, but the odd thing is it's obviously an exception. Terrible VPs seems to be a thing, Dan Quayle being another classic example. On the other hand, a smart VP can make a bad candidate palatable - I'm sure Cheney helped Bush in a way that a Quayle-Palin wouldn't have done.
Congress kicked and screamed. They, at one point, threatened to withhold funding for moving the prisoners (which would have meant a group of people currently charged with no actual crimes whatsoever would have had to be released and sent back to their home countries. Oh boo-hoo.)
But Obama made the decision to keep it open, and was the only one with executive authority to do so.
Let's be straight here. The GP was right on the money. Any liberal who votes for Obama without holding their nose at this election is a fucking tool.
A client will drop you like a hot potato and switch to another call center if your quality of service is not good enough, and nowadays most good call center contractors have penalization clauses that fine them for every BBB complaint or even for every lost customer.
It's a great idea, because then you have all the cost and expense of maintaining a call center, but you still manage to alienate your customers who cotton-on pretty quickly that the "call center" they're calling doesn't really give a f--- about whatever it is you need and is unable to help you except for a subset of common problems some engineer had an opportunity to create scripts for.
Wait.
Did I say it was a great idea? Sorry, I meant stupid idea. I _always_ get those two words mixed up.
That's a good argument, although Sony and Ericsson were competitors until the two decided to join forces. Additionally, this argument generally becomes weaker (albeit not irrelevent) when the take-over target is clearly on death's door, which Nokia appears to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Two phones, the N900 and N9, and four tablets. N770, N800, N810, and N810+WiMax. That's if you're being fair by saying "Six years" in which case you have to include Maemo. If you're limiting yourself to Meego(tm), and not including Maemo, then they certainly weren't working on it for six years.
It's also worth pointing out that the entire point of Meego (as opposed to Maemo) was to get management behind what until then had been virtually a skunkworks project. Nokia's management more or less refused to give Maemo any backing initially because they were too committed to Symbian. It's an interesting question what would have happened had the N810, as originally intended, been released as a phone rather than cut down at the last minute and released as a tablet.
Mod up informative.
BTW Firefox is built upon that XML-based GUI thing (XUL), that was one apparently bloated thing that apparently the Netscape people got right.
I rather liked the original Windows installs of Phoenix too. You just unzipped it to whereever you wanted it. Want to uninstall it? Delete the directory. That was it. Nicely minimal. Wish more applications were like that.
Public service announcement: can people who don't use Bluetooth please refrain from telling those of us who do how to use it. We know how to use it, and you obviously don't, or you wouldn't make silly comments like "Put a widget on the screen to turn it on" (presumably next to the widget that predicts to the second when the next incoming call will come in.)
Thank you.
Ah, but you're wrong. 7" FWIW is just small enough to fit in your (trouser) pocket, and once you use it you'll realize that it doesn't really have any less screen real estate in practice than the bigger tablets.
Moreover, 10" tablets are designed to be the same size as "a sheet of paper" because someone who should have known better (I'm looking at you corpse of Steve Jobs) thought that was a good idea, given that's something people feel comfortable holding.
But he's wrong. But nobody holds a full sized, unfolded, sheet of paper for any length of time. As a portability metric, it's a mistake. The 7" tablets are roughly the size as "a sheet of paper" folded in half, which is something people are willing to hold for an extended period of time.
This is something I learned the hard way. My first tablet was a 10" one, intentionally, because I didn't think a 7" was "big enough". I then got a Kindle Fire, and realized I'd been utterly, utterly, wrong the first time. The Fire was small enough that I actually took it with me, while the 10" was something I rarely look anywhere because it was too big. 10" just isn't portable - well, it's portable in the sense that your laptop is portable, but if you're going to carry around something like that, well, why not carry around the more powerful, open, and capable device?
Either way, Apple doesn't "get it". Or maybe someone there belatedly does, but enough people at Apple don't that - if the current rumors are true - they're going to handicap the 7-8".
Which is a shame - for Apple - because the likely benefit of producing a sub-par 7"-8" tablet will be to simultaneously bless the form factor, while undermining the iPad brand, driving people to Android. As a fan of the latter, and critic of Apple's recent turn to the dark side, I'm "happy" about this, but I think it's bad for them.
I agree there's no chance it'll come out at $250, but that's because of marketing, not anything else.
Apple can sell hardware at cost and make profits if they control the ecosystem which delivers content to the hardware, and they do indeed do that.
The rumors say this'll be more than $300. Of course it will be. The price is always a good way to say "This is better", and adding 20-30% to the price of something doesn't price it out of the ballpark but it does make it appear, to many people, to be a better quality product, regardless of whether it is or not. But Apple could, at least in theory, back that up by actually making a better tablet. It doesn't look like they've done that (Apple fanbois will claim it is merely because it has iOS on it, but in hardware terms the specs aren't rumored to be anything to write home about), but they could do that, and make nothing on the hardware, knowing they're raking it in on the Apple's app store.
No no no, you just print them out, and then rescan them ;-)
Apple, and many iPad owners, have for years not really understood why people buy smaller tablets, with Steve Jobs openly mocking them and commiting to never producing one.
It's not exactly surprising that the specs of a tablet Apple doesn't want to make, intended for a market it just doesn't understand the existence of, might be underwhelming.
I suppose this text didn't appear in the summary then:
I think we can safely suggest that the GP was on-topic given his comments clearly related to TFS.
FWIW, I don't know what the GP meant by blocking, but I myself have an Asterisk rule that rejects incoming 800 numbers sending them to voicemail. A driver saying "I'm here" is going to get the message across just fine, especially as an actual message from a rejected number is relatively rare.
I agree you're doing the right thing, sending the recognizable number (and actually I'd myself likely to ignore an income call from a random number in my area code anyway); the problem we have is that too many telemarketers are of the opinion its OK to telemarket if you send a valid callback number, and send an 800 number as a result. So I block 'em. Actually, I'm pretty close right now to just implementing a whitelist with every unrecognized number going to voicemail.
I'm also skeptical - holding just about anything to your ear for an extended period of time will result in that area warming, if only because your hand's bodyheat will warm the area. Considering we're talking about a device that generates a fraction of watt when on full power, and where that energy will dissipate in all directions, not just towards the head, I find it improbable, to say the least, that the energy from the phone itself will do anything of significance.
Or maybe that's it. Maybe people are getting tumors from mobile phones, but indirectly - from the heat of their hands holding the things!
Ah, a fellow Galaxy Nexus owner I see!
No, because that's not what the GP was talking about. You simply took a common shorthand phrase with a particular meaning, took each word literally, came up with an obviously different definition to the phrase to that intended (even to someone unfamiliar with the original phrase - as context makes it obvious what the GP meant), and pretended he was arguing that.
I assume your next argument will be "what's so wrong with National Socialism? Plenty of countries have had Socialism across an entire Nation!"
OK, even if you accept the wages arguement, the Chinese will accept pay far below US minimum wage (around $8/hour in most states, last time I looked, although that was a while ago.)
But to be honest, the major reason is that companies like Foxconn are extremely good at getting an assembly line for a new product set up in a very short space of time. This was the reason the Raspberry Pi, for example, was outsourced to a non-Western country - Western manufacturers could match the price, but would take months to set up their production lines. Non-Western manufacturers could get everything set up in weeks.
They probably have a roaming agreement, but no, MetroPCS is an independent company with its own spectrum and network.
As far as the effect on the T-Metro merger goes, I doubt it'll have any impact whatsoever. Unfortunately.
I believe Gary Kildall did that one first!
Well, OK, the multiprocessor array drive server didn't really exist at the time, but the entire point of CP/M was that it'd run on everything - an S100 based system soldered together by a nerd, a co-processor card on an Apple II, a Z-80 based home computer made by Radio Shack or Amstrad...
Of course, the problem with Windows (and DOS before that, and CP/M before that) is it works the way it does, which isn't necessary optimal for the intended use of such a computer system. I'm not sure what the situation is today, but I know one reason why developers have practically begged management to "Look at this Linux thingie" for the last decade, and made inroads doing so has been the bizarre complexity at every level that's involved in putting a non-trivial server application on a Windows server. It's been Java and .NET that have only saved Windows from being 100% relegated to running office AD and Exchange servers.
Nothing except to other phone users, and as phone users benefit from network effects, arguably it's a "cost of doing business" rather than a subsidy. The so-called Obamaphones are funded from the USF (a portion of telecommunications profits), which has been around for decades, and which started funding cellphones as well as regular landlines during the Bush administration (Why? Competition. Why should your landline company be the only company that gets to spend the money on universal service?)
Make sure Romney gets it during a day he's in favor of government spending.
OK, but at least in theory the site that attracts the most visitors (that you want to advertise on) is also the one that's the easiest to compete with.
Search itself isn't hard. That is to say someone with a VPS can probably build and run an Altavista clone and make a profit from ads if they want to. Not enough to give up the day job, but enough to cover the running costs.
Good search of course is harder, but Google's search has gone through phases where it's very good, followed by very awful, followed by OK, followed by (... etc, you get the idea), enough times.
Why does Google have a "monopoly" on search, and does it have a monopoly on search? The nearest I can think of, to be honest, is that they own the word "Google". People go to Google because it's good enough and they know it's good enough, and don't know enough about Bing or Yahoo search to feel that'd be less of a waste of their time. So Google has immense market share, but it's hard to believe it has market power - if it was signficantly worse than its rivals, people would get frustrated and switch, they would lose their trust in "Google" pretty quickly and have no reason to stay.
And I know that because I've done the same thing. I've switched from Google when it's been awful - when it's gone over the top in ignoring words in my search criteria and bringing up useless results, or when clicking in the wrong place causes my browser to hang for five seconds because Google's JS has decided to load an entirely unnecessary preview of a search result's color scheme (WTF? I'm glad they fixed that.) I've generally switched back because its competitors are for the most part lousy clones of Google that aren't better.
This is not like Windows, where people went to Windows because Microsoft was able to control the DOS market from 1981 onwards, and used its power as the controller of the "standard platform" to make it expensive for OEMs to bundle competitor's products. (This is not to say early Windows wasn't an improvement on, say, GEM, but the reason why we have Windows on home computers in 2012 is not because Windows 1.x or 2.x was a more sophisticated, powerful, system in 1987 than GEM or DesqView.)
Disclaimer: I don't actually have a disclaimer. Last month I sold my sole share in GOOG because my new kid means I need the cash right now. ;-) Boy did I pick the right time, I can't imagine this announcement is going to help the stock price...
Or, you know, birth control could be an important women's health issue. Women generally seem to think so. Perhaps women's bodies work differently and have different roles in the reproductive process to men or something?
When you have herpes, do you benefit from giving other people herpes?
If not, it's a stupid analog, and you are a stupid person.
Yes, I met people who would have voted Republican but for Palin, but the odd thing is it's obviously an exception. Terrible VPs seems to be a thing, Dan Quayle being another classic example. On the other hand, a smart VP can make a bad candidate palatable - I'm sure Cheney helped Bush in a way that a Quayle-Palin wouldn't have done.
Congress kicked and screamed. They, at one point, threatened to withhold funding for moving the prisoners (which would have meant a group of people currently charged with no actual crimes whatsoever would have had to be released and sent back to their home countries. Oh boo-hoo.)
But Obama made the decision to keep it open, and was the only one with executive authority to do so.
Let's be straight here. The GP was right on the money. Any liberal who votes for Obama without holding their nose at this election is a fucking tool.
So why do they continue to suck then?
It's a great idea, because then you have all the cost and expense of maintaining a call center, but you still manage to alienate your customers who cotton-on pretty quickly that the "call center" they're calling doesn't really give a f--- about whatever it is you need and is unable to help you except for a subset of common problems some engineer had an opportunity to create scripts for.
Wait.
Did I say it was a great idea? Sorry, I meant stupid idea. I _always_ get those two words mixed up.
That's a good argument, although Sony and Ericsson were competitors until the two decided to join forces. Additionally, this argument generally becomes weaker (albeit not irrelevent) when the take-over target is clearly on death's door, which Nokia appears to be.