Buying a tablet is an additional cost on top of the phone. It's not like just because I'm willing to pay 200 + contract for a phone I'd be willing to pay the same amount for a tablet, because I actually "need" the phone. I'm not going to decide whether to buy a tablet or a phone, because the phone is much more necessary. Since their functions overlap, the tablet is a completely extra luxury device.
Yes, very much like an extra pair of shoes.
The reason this doesn't effect Apple is... well do I really have to say it? Apple users are used to overpaying for stuff.
Like people owning more than one pair of shoes? Or a car *and* a bike?
Of course a tablet is luxury. But then even a smartphone is luxury and most other things you buy anyway.
In operating systems there tends to be a natural monopoly and natural duopolies because of the scales involved and because people really don't crave that much choice. This is yet another example of this reality.
There is no "natural monopoly" or "natural duopoly" in the OS space. There is monopolistic and anti-competitive actions that make it very hard for 3rd party options to survive. Which is the goal of Apple and MS, since they have the desktop space to themselves and they want the exact same situation in the mobile space. This is not an example of a "natural duopoly" coming to fruition, but rather that HP could not compete on the business end of things.
This is too simple. Of course only a limited number of different systems will gain broad third-party support, just because it's too expensive to support more than one or two systems. This tends to push under fringe systems and they drown very quickly then.
How many options should app developers have to support? Three, four, five versions of their apps? For systems that look very much as if they might vanish into nothing a year later?
And of course Apple (or MS or Google) try to be one of those you can't ignore. This isn't "anti-competitive", it's competitive.
I'm not saying that they don't try to lock you in (they do), but there's a very natural tendency of users and developers to flock to the one or two most common systems.
Who are as dedicated to android as the apple fanbois are to the shit that apple sells.
Yes, I'm an android fanboi and I don't even own one (yet). I do know that I will NEVER buy an apple product.
Most of the 200 million iOS users weren't Apple customers (or fanbois) before they bought an iPhone/iPad. What Android needs isn't more fanatic Android users, it's more Android users in the first place.
On the other hand it does exactly the same as any decent smartphone, but is much harder to put into most pockets. And you'll very probably need a phone anyway.
I usually take my iPhone, the Apple BT keyboard and a glif. The keyboard makes a world of a difference when writing more than just short texts, it's very light and small and you don't need to carry it all the time.
Bi-pedal robots aren't worth pursuing for anthropomorphism -- bi-pedal robots are worth pursuing because they could fit easily into our world and disappear into the background.
Wouldn't something like a dog do this much better?
But for some tasks things like this robot dog look much more capable and it's also a bit easier to do (obviously, this video is from 2008). For military purposes a big robot dog seems to be totally possible.
Google is not a search company, Google is an advertizing company. The rise of payed apps and content (as opposed to webapps and free, ad-backed content) was what Google did not like at all. Chromium demonstrates best what Google wants you to use: A hardware window into the web, which then is stuffed full of Google ads.
Android was (and is) nothing but an isurance against the good old web turning into nothing but a delivery mechanism for data and content displayed by apps and payed directly for to Apple (or others).
This doesn't mean Android is a bad idea, but this is just a side effect. Everything Google does can be explained by creating more and maintaining old ways of beaming ads at you.
"pay Apple $199 to repair the cracked screen of the $199 iPhone you dropped?" is utterly wrong. A new iPhone with no new contract attached to it costs much more than $199 -- $649 to be precise.
Paying $199 to have it replaced if totally destroyed is not that bad actually.
I was exactly referring to the lack of any *technological* reasoning in this thread and how is "Go back to crying over your Starbucks about how Android is destroying your precious Apple products in sales" anything like an "argument"? Really.
Sorry for intruding into your privacy, but you're in public here, not private.
It's actually quite simple: You need local infrastructure for almost everything people do. Live, work, shop, schools, everything. In old villages that grew before modern transportation showed up, you sometimes still have this. You need to drive long distances much more rarely then (even if you can, if you have to) and walking or cycling suddenly becomes not only an option but a natural choice.
The trick is not making transport faster or more efficient, but to make it unneccessary as often as possible. Of course this happens not by itself and is hard to plan for.
One important thing is that many people have learned to love driving their cars for thousands of reasons. It's often their only basically "free" time with nothing else to do but driving, listening to music or just dreaming. It's also a way to get far away from somewhere you don't like to be (often to somewhere else you don't like to be for different reasons, but, hey). You'd need to supply many things in the local environment (including the work environment) to make up for that.
Good thing the supreme court has ruled that the ability to speak anonymously is fundamental to freedom of speech, and represents an important protection against tyranny of the majority:
Yeah, but the ABILITY to speak anonymously is a very different thing from everyone speaking anonymously all the time.
I totally agree that there are things you'd better say anonymously but I also think that these are exceptions.
If you make anonymity the rule (either in real life or the net) the first and most visible thing you'll get are loads of cowards hiding behind their pseudonyms and playing experts and big-mouthed heroes. And then back in real life again are cowards who would rather keep silent about everything they see and know than risking their bloody job or whatever.
Sometimes I think we risk more by accepting anonymity than by going boldy with our names and faces everywhere. There's nothing easier to ignore than shouting cowards who are only brave when they're safe and don't even risk to have their names attached to the most unimportant things they say.
Saying that anonymity everywhere is a cornerstone of freedom is like saying that lynchmobs are a cornerstone of justice.
Anyway, hoping to find reason in anonymous masses is a silly thing to do.
They sure seem to be collecting a lot of data by accident...
My friends at Google swear up and down that every line of code in the Google codebase is reviewed several times before it is signed off and released for any purpose. Some would have caught this; it's obvious from the data what is happening. So, either my friends are liars, or Google is. I trust my friends more.
I'm sure they do this reviewing and testing for production code running on their servers. But for tools that will never run anywhere near the net and which are basically one-off affairs to gather data? I bet "seems to work so far" is all that's needed then.
I think you have this totally backwards. Anonymity means you don't dare to exercise your right. Freedom of speech means YOU can say what you want with YOUR name and face attached to it, not hiding behind a pseudonym while you say something. You only need anonymity when this right isn't guaranteed.
I still think there are good reasons for anonymity in certain situations, but nothing good comes out of people who insist in being anonymous all the time. You have to stand up with your name and face for your rights or you will lose them. If you can only say what you think is right behind a mask, this is not freedom.
Only works if you chose a pseudonym and then stick to it. In which case it just becomes another "real name" over time. But many people don't want to have a "real name" they can be recognized by. They want to be truly anonymous, just a bodyless voice spitting bile and hate without having to stand up for it. They change their pseudonymes more often than their fucking passwords.
I totally agree that this is becoming a problem. The right to be anonymous is in many cases very important, but these situations are exceptions, not the rule.
Perhaps anonymity just helps people act according to their true nature.
Of course. It lets them abandon all culture and just lets them act according to their nature.
This is not neccessarily a good thing, mind you. The "true" nature of man can be seen in all wars and everywhere where society and responsibility is suspended. Taming our true nature is civilisation.
I know that the/. pseudo-nerd crowd loves nothing more than an opportunity to bash Apple, but all what Apple did here was patching a remote root exploit out in the wild. There's nothing wrong with patching that. Really.
This exploit was also used for the last jailbreak, so this jailbreak is now broken. Tough luck, but a totally different thing. Complain about Apple as much as you want, but please don't complain about them patching such exploits.
Think about it: You only go there if there are people you know. Having users invite others works both for Google and for the users: Google has crowdsourced the marketing and the users can invite all those they want to see there.
Well done, Google.
I'm still waiting for a version that works with Google Apps.
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it. (I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
Hard to do keyboard shortcuts without a keyboard, but if you pair a BT-keyboard to it, the iPad can do shortcuts very well. Including Emacs shortcuts for cursor movement everywhere. Really.
I said so when the Kinect came out. It's an rather inexpensive thing to toy around with and such things suddently get possible with small means.
I'm wondering when Google will start to sell similar devices. Any AI and data mining software could really take off when it can know what you're doing, who's there and even what's being said. Sooner or later it should be possible to build a house (or a workplace) that is actually aware of you and what you're doing. In the long term we won't be using computers and networks, we will be just a part of a data collection and processing network.
RIM could have ported their software to iOS, Android, WebOS or WP7 and just stopped making their own hardware and OS. The real value of RIM is not in the phones -- it's the IP, the software and the customers they have. There's real value and money in the enterprise market but nobody really cares very strongly about which phone RIM sells. Having a choice of phones with a common software/apps/protocols stack for secure messaging would have been not a bad thing.
Now there's a chance that someone buys them or they having to do a Nokia sooner or later. Accepting the unavoidable earlier would have been better.
Or RIM is saved by the PlayBook. Even trying this is madness, I would say.
You're paying $70 a month for fees because at least half of this are installments for the price of the phone and the remaining fees for the actual service are artificially high because there's no real competition in the US.
$70 a month... Elsewhere in the developed world you can keep a whole family using smartphones including data and tethering for that kind of money. "Bring your own phone and pick one of half a dozen carriers with dozens of plans and switch to another one at will" is a market. What the US has isn't a market.
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Buying a tablet is an additional cost on top of the phone. It's not like just because I'm willing to pay 200 + contract for a phone I'd be willing to pay the same amount for a tablet, because I actually "need" the phone. I'm not going to decide whether to buy a tablet or a phone, because the phone is much more necessary. Since their functions overlap, the tablet is a completely extra luxury device.
Yes, very much like an extra pair of shoes.
The reason this doesn't effect Apple is... well do I really have to say it? Apple users are used to overpaying for stuff.
Like people owning more than one pair of shoes? Or a car *and* a bike?
Of course a tablet is luxury. But then even a smartphone is luxury and most other things you buy anyway.
In operating systems there tends to be a natural monopoly and natural duopolies because of the scales involved and because people really don't crave that much choice. This is yet another example of this reality.
There is no "natural monopoly" or "natural duopoly" in the OS space. There is monopolistic and anti-competitive actions that make it very hard for 3rd party options to survive. Which is the goal of Apple and MS, since they have the desktop space to themselves and they want the exact same situation in the mobile space. This is not an example of a "natural duopoly" coming to fruition, but rather that HP could not compete on the business end of things.
This is too simple. Of course only a limited number of different systems will gain broad third-party support, just because it's too expensive to support more than one or two systems. This tends to push under fringe systems and they drown very quickly then.
How many options should app developers have to support? Three, four, five versions of their apps? For systems that look very much as if they might vanish into nothing a year later?
And of course Apple (or MS or Google) try to be one of those you can't ignore. This isn't "anti-competitive", it's competitive.
I'm not saying that they don't try to lock you in (they do), but there's a very natural tendency of users and developers to flock to the one or two most common systems.
Who are as dedicated to android as the apple fanbois are to the shit that apple sells.
Yes, I'm an android fanboi and I don't even own one (yet). I do know that I will NEVER buy an apple product.
Most of the 200 million iOS users weren't Apple customers (or fanbois) before they bought an iPhone/iPad. What Android needs isn't more fanatic Android users, it's more Android users in the first place.
On the other hand it does exactly the same as any decent smartphone, but is much harder to put into most pockets. And you'll very probably need a phone anyway.
I usually take my iPhone, the Apple BT keyboard and a glif. The keyboard makes a world of a difference when writing more than just short texts, it's very light and small and you don't need to carry it all the time.
Bi-pedal robots aren't worth pursuing for anthropomorphism -- bi-pedal robots are worth pursuing because they could fit easily into our world and disappear into the background.
Wouldn't something like a dog do this much better?
But for some tasks things like this robot dog look much more capable and it's also a bit easier to do (obviously, this video is from 2008). For military purposes a big robot dog seems to be totally possible.
Google is not a search company, Google is an advertizing company. The rise of payed apps and content (as opposed to webapps and free, ad-backed content) was what Google did not like at all. Chromium demonstrates best what Google wants you to use: A hardware window into the web, which then is stuffed full of Google ads.
Android was (and is) nothing but an isurance against the good old web turning into nothing but a delivery mechanism for data and content displayed by apps and payed directly for to Apple (or others).
This doesn't mean Android is a bad idea, but this is just a side effect. Everything Google does can be explained by creating more and maintaining old ways of beaming ads at you.
"pay Apple $199 to repair the cracked screen of the $199 iPhone you dropped?" is utterly wrong. A new iPhone with no new contract attached to it costs much more than $199 -- $649 to be precise.
Paying $199 to have it replaced if totally destroyed is not that bad actually.
I was exactly referring to the lack of any *technological* reasoning in this thread and how is "Go back to crying over your Starbucks about how Android is destroying your precious Apple products in sales" anything like an "argument"? Really.
Sorry for intruding into your privacy, but you're in public here, not private.
It's actually quite simple: You need local infrastructure for almost everything people do. Live, work, shop, schools, everything. In old villages that grew before modern transportation showed up, you sometimes still have this. You need to drive long distances much more rarely then (even if you can, if you have to) and walking or cycling suddenly becomes not only an option but a natural choice.
The trick is not making transport faster or more efficient, but to make it unneccessary as often as possible. Of course this happens not by itself and is hard to plan for.
One important thing is that many people have learned to love driving their cars for thousands of reasons. It's often their only basically "free" time with nothing else to do but driving, listening to music or just dreaming. It's also a way to get far away from somewhere you don't like to be (often to somewhere else you don't like to be for different reasons, but, hey). You'd need to supply many things in the local environment (including the work environment) to make up for that.
Go back to crying over your Starbucks about how Android is destroying your precious Apple products in sales.
This site is for people interested in tech news, not Hipster Douchebags like you.
No, this site is for pseudo-geeky anonymous cowards talking themselves up into a rage.
Good thing the supreme court has ruled that the ability to speak anonymously is fundamental to freedom of speech, and represents an important protection against tyranny of the majority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_v._Ohio_Elections_Commission
Yeah, but the ABILITY to speak anonymously is a very different thing from everyone speaking anonymously all the time.
I totally agree that there are things you'd better say anonymously but I also think that these are exceptions.
If you make anonymity the rule (either in real life or the net) the first and most visible thing you'll get are loads of cowards hiding behind their pseudonyms and playing experts and big-mouthed heroes. And then back in real life again are cowards who would rather keep silent about everything they see and know than risking their bloody job or whatever.
Sometimes I think we risk more by accepting anonymity than by going boldy with our names and faces everywhere. There's nothing easier to ignore than shouting cowards who are only brave when they're safe and don't even risk to have their names attached to the most unimportant things they say.
Saying that anonymity everywhere is a cornerstone of freedom is like saying that lynchmobs are a cornerstone of justice.
Anyway, hoping to find reason in anonymous masses is a silly thing to do.
I still use it daily. Not much for actual editing, I'm running Gnus in it as my Usenet client...
Anyway, Emacs is absolutely great software. It may be arcane but it is great.
They sure seem to be collecting a lot of data by accident...
My friends at Google swear up and down that every line of code in the Google codebase is reviewed several times before it is signed off and released for any purpose. Some would have caught this; it's obvious from the data what is happening. So, either my friends are liars, or Google is. I trust my friends more.
I'm sure they do this reviewing and testing for production code running on their servers. But for tools that will never run anywhere near the net and which are basically one-off affairs to gather data? I bet "seems to work so far" is all that's needed then.
I think you have this totally backwards. Anonymity means you don't dare to exercise your right. Freedom of speech means YOU can say what you want with YOUR name and face attached to it, not hiding behind a pseudonym while you say something. You only need anonymity when this right isn't guaranteed.
I still think there are good reasons for anonymity in certain situations, but nothing good comes out of people who insist in being anonymous all the time. You have to stand up with your name and face for your rights or you will lose them. If you can only say what you think is right behind a mask, this is not freedom.
Only works if you chose a pseudonym and then stick to it. In which case it just becomes another "real name" over time. But many people don't want to have a "real name" they can be recognized by. They want to be truly anonymous, just a bodyless voice spitting bile and hate without having to stand up for it. They change their pseudonymes more often than their fucking passwords.
I totally agree that this is becoming a problem. The right to be anonymous is in many cases very important, but these situations are exceptions, not the rule.
Perhaps anonymity just helps people act according to their true nature.
Of course. It lets them abandon all culture and just lets them act according to their nature.
This is not neccessarily a good thing, mind you. The "true" nature of man can be seen in all wars and everywhere where society and responsibility is suspended. Taming our true nature is civilisation.
I know that the /. pseudo-nerd crowd loves nothing more than an opportunity to bash Apple, but all what Apple did here was patching a remote root exploit out in the wild. There's nothing wrong with patching that. Really.
This exploit was also used for the last jailbreak, so this jailbreak is now broken. Tough luck, but a totally different thing. Complain about Apple as much as you want, but please don't complain about them patching such exploits.
Think about it: You only go there if there are people you know. Having users invite others works both for Google and for the users: Google has crowdsourced the marketing and the users can invite all those they want to see there.
Well done, Google.
I'm still waiting for a version that works with Google Apps.
Do you need to know the time every few seconds and at every opportunity?
May be, may be. But what you're *actually* saying with all this is: "Don't buy a WebOS tablet right now! They will get better and cheaper soon!"
If this is what every thinking person thinks about a product, you've had a very bad start, believe me.
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it. (I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
Hard to do keyboard shortcuts without a keyboard, but if you pair a BT-keyboard to it, the iPad can do shortcuts very well. Including Emacs shortcuts for cursor movement everywhere. Really.
I said so when the Kinect came out. It's an rather inexpensive thing to toy around with and such things suddently get possible with small means.
I'm wondering when Google will start to sell similar devices. Any AI and data mining software could really take off when it can know what you're doing, who's there and even what's being said. Sooner or later it should be possible to build a house (or a workplace) that is actually aware of you and what you're doing. In the long term we won't be using computers and networks, we will be just a part of a data collection and processing network.
RIM could have ported their software to iOS, Android, WebOS or WP7 and just stopped making their own hardware and OS. The real value of RIM is not in the phones -- it's the IP, the software and the customers they have. There's real value and money in the enterprise market but nobody really cares very strongly about which phone RIM sells. Having a choice of phones with a common software/apps/protocols stack for secure messaging would have been not a bad thing.
Now there's a chance that someone buys them or they having to do a Nokia sooner or later. Accepting the unavoidable earlier would have been better.
Or RIM is saved by the PlayBook. Even trying this is madness, I would say.
You're paying $70 a month for fees because at least half of this are installments for the price of the phone and the remaining fees for the actual service are artificially high because there's no real competition in the US.
$70 a month... Elsewhere in the developed world you can keep a whole family using smartphones including data and tethering for that kind of money. "Bring your own phone and pick one of half a dozen carriers with dozens of plans and switch to another one at will" is a market. What the US has isn't a market.