Good software for the Kindle Fire already exists: they just need to ship standard Android 3.2 on it. With that, it would be a great device at a great price.
The only reason the Kindle Fire fails as a tablet is because of the effort Amazon invested in messing up the OS.
Until a few weeks ago, Amazon didn't have access to the 3.2 source. You see, Google never released the source code to honeycomb at all, at least until they released Ice Cream Sandwich and it came along for the ride. Even then it's not a tagged release in the tree, so you'd have to guess at where 3.2 existed.
Amazon, like B&N, is not a member of the OHA, and therefore the only Android they can ship is AOSP.
And Amazon has enough to not want the standard Android environment - they want you to use their App Store, their Music Store, and their Movie Store to do everything - tied into the Amazon cloud, not the Google one.
In fact, it's surprising they made it so easy to break into it - considering Amazon's business plan for the Fire is the opposite of Apple's. For Apple, it's the content that helps sell hardware - the content makes a tiny bit of money, but a pittance compared to the hardware (order of magnitude, at least). For Amazon, the hardware sells the content - the Fire is basically sold at cost and its goal is to sell into the Amazon ecosystem - Amazon makes no money on hardware, but lots of money on books, music, video, and apps.
And that's why they mess up the OS. Android's a platform they want to use to launch their business. And it includes the fact that the only way to sell apps for the Fire, well, you've gotta agree to Amazon's terms (see all those articles on why devs should never sell on Amazon).
Of course, if Amazon is even moderately successful, it could do a number on the Android ecosystem since the Amazon App Store's policies are like Apple's App Store.
I do. Actors that get $2.2mill per movie are going away. I see a LOT of indie films that are better than hollywood flicks made for far less and the actors not getting paid obscene amounts of money.
They're already gone. Very few people care about the big stars.
Check out the cast list sometimes of the big blockbusters. They almost always feature unknown people these days. Maybe one headliner, but that's it. Having a movie with more than one celebrity is getting rarer and rarer. Most sport several unknowns who only become celebrities because of one movie or a wildly popular series (think Transformers which probably raked in close to $3B across all films - the cast was basically all-new actors). And hell, a lot of movies have CG faces replacing the face of whatever actor is there, and it's happening more and more. Expensive actors are pricing themselves out and Hollywood's already saving expense with the vast field of no-names.
And consumer gear is cheap enough for movie filming - the same gear "the pros" use can be had off the shelf for a few thousand dollars (dSLRs are really popular). Hell, RED's got a $10,000 2K camera coming out soon. And their 4K with "120fps slo-mo" (RED Epic) is only $60k.
For indies being better - your selection might be the best movies in the lot, but as YouTube shows, there's a ton of crap out there as well. It's just like indie music and indie games - there's a lot of games out there better than the big studios, but there's even more crap. You can see this with the Apple App Store and the Google Marketplace as well - most of the indie stuff is crap, though there are plenty of gems as well.
I teach English, but I can readily understand why some faculty in math and the sciences would welcome the "churn" of frequent new editions. Changed problem sets really help cut down on cheating, which is rampant at universities these days. Online tools have made it very easy. It is time consuming to generate problem sets, and it's more time consuming to track down and "prosecute" cheaters.
95% of my university courses - it didn't matter. If they had a "homework" component to their course, it really only weighed in at around 5-10% of your final grade (the midterms were "heavily" weighted at 20-30%, with the finals being 50-90% of the final mark in the end). Cheat all you want - it ain't worth much and you're just screwing yourself during the finals. Heck, some assign homework that isn't even checked!
As for expensive textbooks - in the end a few friends of mine ended up committing copyright infringement at the just-off-campus copy store. We'd get a counter from the clerk, stick it int he copy machine and spend the afternoon copying. The first copy was hard, but the next generation (it didn't degrade significantly as a copy-of-a-copy is still quite readable) went quickly as all one needed was to use the document feeder. It turned a $150 textbook into something that was $15 for each person (we'd return the textbook afterwards). And it's only for a few courses - we'd lend and trade our copies about.
The iPad just makes it harder to do all those things, but easier to carry around all your books...
Claims are meaningless. Lets see them actually sue. Not a single company making such a claim has ever sued On2, Xiph or Google. They can't have much faith in their own claims.
You want to know why there's no lawsuits? There's no money in it.
Ever notice that all the lawsuits come out AFTER a product is launched and is successful? Patent trolls don't go after people when change is still possible. When someone is making money hand over fist, or when something is so entrenched that change isn't possible without screwing over the world, that's when they strike. The first is easy - if you're making a ton of money, you have a ton of money for licensing fees. The second is even easier - if it's a fundamental patent, it's too late to change.
Of the companies you mention, only Google has any money worth suing for. And they're not rolling out VP8 in any great haste. If they were super confident, they should roll it out everywhere and into their doubleclick ads as well to get the plugin installed everywhere.
A close look at history reveals this is the case. Creative suing Apple over the iPod hierarchical interface. Rambus suing RAM makers over DDR. And various other patent trolls. It always happens AFTER a product is successful and making lots of money.
Apple, TiVo, etc., are Doing It Wrong(tm) because they're going after products that are early in their life cycle to not make much money. I mean, if you want to sue Samsung over the Galaxy Tab, wait for Samsung to make healthy profits then sue for extra damages already. Injunctions against sales? Why do you want to reduce your patent infringement damage claims? Let them make money then sue for the treble damages post-sales.
The VP8 patent trolls will come out after hardware manufacturers start making the hardware to support it in droves and it's so widely used that changing it is impossible. There's no statute of limitations on when a patent infringement lawsuit may be launched (other than the patent has to be in effect).
The people using VP8 right now are tiny in numbers, very little money is being made, and the standard is volatile. Launching a lawsuit now just means they'll work around it - if something breaks, no big deal as few people were using it.
So your strategy for not getting sued by a patent troll is to hide behind the big guys? Then use WebM and hide behind Google. Either way, lying about the patent situation with VP8 is dishonest, and you should probably stop doing that.
Well, WebM has one advantage - it's small and the people using it aren't really that rich. No patent troll will sue now because there's no money to be made.
H.264 doesn't have that advantage, so if there really was a submarine patent someone's sitting on, they're losing a lot of life on that patent by waiting - it's been out for years, and used everywhere, compared to WebM's tiny userbase. Chances are, everyone would be violating your patent.
You start small, like a small company. They won't have the resources to overturn the patent, and it helps give legitimacy to your patent. You then use those judgments to go after bigger guys. And what's bigger than going after the entire video industry?
WebM? It's used by a few small places, and Google's probably arranged matters that YouTube's use would be some tiny payout in the end. However, when one of the big guys, like say Intel or Broadcom or Marvell with lots of money start baking WebM hardware into their chips, life gets more interesting as there's now real big money in there.
So it may be hiding behind big companies, but any patent troll would love to sue for someone so ubiquitous as h.264 - the millions of things that do h.264 and you can extract licensing fees for.
Suing for WebM right now? Silly if you want to make money. Wait for it to become highly popular and entrenched so switching away is difficult (like h.264 is right now), which guarantees money for a long while yet. WebM doesn't have it so if there was a violation, Google would just work around it because it's easy to make these changes when few use it than when practically the entire world is using it.
nd yet, I say it up and down, everywhere: I'll buy the first tablet that runs Debian natively (make that Ubuntu, or anything like that). I buy a tablet, price doesn't matter too much, the day I can install some Linux-Distro on it (please, spare all of the us the 'Android-is-Linux' nonsense comments). I don't need coolness, I am cool. I need OpenOffice on my tablet, no Google-Docs, and I need printing. Not a single Cent for some app, no new printer. CUPS is on any reasonable Linux-Distro, and that's what I am waiting for. Thanks to the original submitter. I was almost tempted to buy a tablet today, despite of all my good intentions as above. I didn't even consider I would not be able to print. Now I know that I am not going to buy a tablet for the time being.
You haven't looked very hard, have you? When I visit the big box electronics retailer, there's at least 1 tablet that meets your requirements. Maybe two.
The only problem is well, they require installing Debian, but if you have the skills, it's trivial.
Yes, Acer and Asus sell tablets that meet your needs. You may see them as running something called "Windows 7", but they are regular PCs and should run Linux just fine.
The reason they aren't popular are the same reason why Tablet PCs have remained niche objects for over 20 years - the UI just isn't touch-compatible. Right-clicks are an anachronism that's emulated, and don't get me started on trying to do a middle click.
It's why Android an iOS are more popular - they use a completely different UI paradigm that involves touch screen interactions from the beginning. In fact, you'll probably find your experience pretty damn lousy as the tedium of right-clicking on a touch screen gets old, fast, and many developers simply assume you have a three-button mouse.
It's also one of the reasons why Macs still ship with one-button mice - it forces developers to quit assuming right-clicking is easy and to quit hiding features only in a right-click menu.
you should rephrase it that piracy is easier on android since you don't have to pay the os provider to enable sideloading, as is with other some other platforms(ios, wp7, bb..).
Incorrect. Piracy is easier on Android because it's trivial to get APKs off the platform, and APKs are not DRM-encumbered (unlike say, Amazon APKs). Other platforms like this include WebOS.
iOS, WP7 DRM the files - that's why you can download apps via iTunes or Zune Market and install them on your phone from your PC (really useful for those big apps). Distributing the files does nothing unless you distribute the AppleID or Live ID used with that account.
Now, iOS makes it harder to pirate because to pirate reqiures jailbreaking (not all devices have the option yet), and installing a modified installer daemon (trivial) to allow unsigned binaries. In addition, a special flag inside Info.plist has to be set (something apps can actually check for) to tell the kernel that the app is unencrypted.
Of course, another reason for the piracy is Paid Android apps are not available everywhere. If you're not in a country where Google Wallet/Checkout is supported, then you're SOL. So if you are a dev, the only way to get your app "out there" is to make it free.
Apple has the same issue with the App Store, but they allow use of iTunes cards and such so it's possible to buy apps.
Of course, I made my first Android app purchase the other day. And given how terrible the experience was (I used the web interface but it probably won't make a difference) I can see why people pirate. I purchase apps on sale, then 24 hours later, when the apps weren't on sale, half the apps I bought were cancelled. The reason was "the transaction could not be completed in a timely manner". Bullcrap - I've never see this issue anywhere else.
I think the devs cancelled it on purpose so they won't have to give me cheap apps. because my only remedy is to "try the purchase again". Well, I can't, because it was cancelled after the sale is over, and I'm not paying full price.
In the end, I'll just pirate the damn apps I "bought". Try to do the right thing...
Perhaps an important point - the HP eBay store only ships within the US via UPS. So even if all you wanted was the accessory kit, if you're outside the US, you're SOL.
Those outside the US will just have to bid on them after arbitrage.
And the site's open to HP employees on the 11th. General public is on Monday,the 12th.
At the same time, I bought *HARDWARE*. Sony shouldn't be able to tell me that I can't load custom firmware on it with the ability to run Linux, for example. The PS3 would make a GREAT media center to stream from my TV recording box, save that I can't load a custom firmware package for Linux AND keep the ability to run current games.
Problem is, Joe Average doesn't know a thing.
It's why Apple has to resort to using crappy pentalobe screws - anyone with half a clue can easily get in, but Joe Average can't. And those with a clue don't ask for warranty support. But Joe Average will flub it up, and won't know better when they take the phone/computer back for warranty repair.
It's sad, but true.
And why is Joe Average doing this? Because his geek friend showed him something "cool" and told him it's easy. Joe Average googles and blindly follows the process to get the "cool" thing.
And people can be quite... creatively clumsy.
Hell, Joe Average can, with the proper instructions, install Linux and do all sorts of stuff. They won't understand what they're doing (they're just executing a set of steps), but they'll do it if in the end you get a "cool" result. Of course, then you or I will be called to fix their PC because they want to return to Windows and their HOWTO wiped their drive.
Yes, CANDU is actually very inefficient - it doesn't extract all the usable fuel as other reactors can.
However, it does have the advantage that it's impossible to have a meltdown - heavy water is a great moderator. In fact, it's required in order to have a reaction - if there's no heavy water, the fuel's inert. And normal water impedes the reaction as well, so if the cooling system leaks, the reaction stops as well.
Plus, the fuel that comes out needs even heavier processing to become weapons grade.
A lot of the tablets, etc. are coming out with eMMC type flash instead of raw flash for internal nonvolatile memory. How come?
I would think eMMC would be more expensive (has built-in controller) than raw flash chips. And slower, too, because eMMC has no concept of file-systems and therefore cannot do optimal space selection or wear-levelling. I'm sure the teeny, tiny controller in the eMMC does the best that it can, but I'm also sure that JFFS2 and YAFFS manage flash chips a lot better. The only savings I see are is that the device manufacturer has to layout and route a fewer traces on a circuit board when using eMMC.
Does anyone really know why eMMC is being used?
Many reasons.
First, managing the mapping between filesystem blocks and physical flash blocks is the job of the Flash Translation Layer (FTL). An FTL is an extremely heavily patented piece of software used to manage the logical-to-physical mappings, wear levelling, dirty page tracking, etc.
And yes, it's extremely heavily patented. A good FTL can provide significant speed improvements and longevity compared to a crappy one.
Second - eMMC makes development easy. eMMC is just MMC in a chip formfactor. It only requires a few lines (16 at most, compared to 24 or so for NAND), so it's easy to wire up on a PCB. And for early development, you won't believe how good it is to not populate the eMMC part, and stick in an SD/MMC socket instead. Then you can simply use a common SD card to store your filesystems and kernel/bootloader. Especially handy for Android where installing Android on an SD can be done in minutes, while doing it via JTAG or serial or USB download can take forever and take many more steps.
As for cost - eMMC may or may not cost more than raw NAND. Samsung/Toshiba/etc ship so many eMMC chips that the cost of the extra logic may be only a penny or so more. And if you ship enough stuff, they'll give killer discounts.
Finally, it also allows for easy componentization without extra work. Building one piece of software to handle 16 GB of NAND is easy. If you add a 32GB option, you have to modify the software to handle it. And if you switch flash vendors or the layout (page/block size) changes, you have to re-do the flash layer again with new timings and layout.
With eMMC, building a 32GB unit costs almost nothing in the software since it doesn't care about the lowlevel details. Just replace the 16GB part with a 32GB part, test, and ship. And if you switch eMMC vendors, same deal.
What the heck is Electronic Writing that it needs a course separate from "regular" writing?
"Regular" writing is the day to day stuff that people need to write - you know, memos, letters, that sort of thing.
"Electronic" writing is probably more known as Technical writing, which is a subfield to writing compliant papers (e.g., to submit to IEEE and other journals), as well as online documentation and printed technical documentation (user manuals, service manuals, etc).
Instructions are particularly important as well, and it can be tricky to get right (as anyone who has ever encountered poorly written instructions may attest to).
I was surprised to note that the OS version seemed to jump from the up-and-coming 7.1 to 10 next year
Well, Apple switched to '10' when they went UNIX. Perhaps RIM is just pedantically imitating their successful competition. Oh, right, now I see it: BBX = Black Berry X. So, not just '10', but 'X'.
Not really. The previous MacOS was 9.x (9.2.2 I think). 10.x logically follows from that. Though now they're not even calling it by version anymore, just cat names. (Snow Leopard is 10.6, Lion is 10.7, but the official documentation now just calls it "Snow Leopard" and "Lion").
Before that was MacOS 8. And before that was the famous System 7 (1990-1991), renamed MacOS 7 sometime around 7.5 or so. And there were Systems 6 through the original in 1984.
So Mac OS X (pronounced "ten") is following a logical progression of version numbers. At least, until that point.
If they were shooting off home made cannons at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb range, then they probably had the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb squad present to supervise.
I believe the bomb range supervisor's name is J. D. Morgan, aka "JD". And usually the one seen wiring up explosives and such during episodes. Usually with ex-FBI explosives expert Frank Doyle.
And Savage and Hyneman probably are experienced in pyro and explosives, but only in the small quantities they use on film. The stuff generally used to explode bigger items requires a lot more of everything.
There's plenty of power plants along the Japan sea as well. I strongly suspect the placement is dictated more by the availability of a good site and local political willingness to accept a nuclear power plant within the prefecture.
And the availability of water. Lots and lots of water.
Those towers we think of for nuclear power plants are cooling towers because fission produces a LOT of heat. So much that air cooling isn't enough. So nuclear plants have to be beside a body of water large enough to handle the heat output from the reaction.
This basically limits the placement of a nuclear plant to either on the coast or near a large inland body of water. Unfortunately, Japan doesn't have inland bodies of water, or large ones at that, so the only places to build are... along the coast.
I don't think that AT&T is taking a loss by waiving the ETF, more like they are not capitalizing on an undeserved profit. Kind of like the bank taking a loss on a foreclosed property. The bank still owns the property, they just didn't collect all of the investment income, but overall they still have the property.
In a foreclosure case, the bank just wants to recover the amount owed. If all you have left is $60K in your mortgage and the bank defaults, all they want is the $60k back from the sale. Even if the house is worth $500K - the bank is just recovering its principal. Any more is a bonus given back to the homeowner as equity earned, but that's it.
ETFs are basically a way to recoup profit that would've been lost from the contract. It's why mortgages often have penalties for early payment and excess payments - the carrier, like the bank, has counted on certain revenue from that contract, and the ETF is basically a buyout from that contract.
ETFs are usually waived during the contract cooling off period (usually first 7 days they give you a chance to cancel with no penalties), and at the discretion of the carrier (usually if you're willing to sign onto a new contract, e.g., phone upgrade) if they feel they can get back more money from you.
There's something wacky here. A thriving e-commerce company with one IT guy, newly hired. Let's think of some more similar situations.
Can happen. It may not be an Amazon, but you can have a thiriving e-commerce company that does basically "small business" type sales (maybe $1M/year is a good year?).
You can also have very technical people and engineers doing the software, so the IT guy's job is really just making sure things keep running. Hell, half the patches and bandaids may be there because some developer didn't want to bother it IT guy and worked around whatever issue they were having. Happens quite often, really - as developers push from development into QA and then production, they realize they need access to production data that won't be available until the updated system is pushed to production, so URLs and references are hacked around so it could be QA tested then pushed to production unmodified. The alternative is to have those resources pre-pushed to production ahead of QA testing but that's another whole can of worms involving production changes that can't be replicated outside of production.
There may be only one "IT guy" but 20 people who can also do the "IT work" if push came to shove.
Well, this pretty much indicates that, at least when it comes to tablets, you cannot make money off of the hardware alone. iPad is still the exception, because it literally defined the market. However, Apple makes so much money off of the App store that they could undoubtedly sell the hardware at a loss and still profit overall. They just don't need to - at least not at this point.
Amazon's Kindle Fire is the only real competition, the reason being that Amazon is an established content provider, and just like Apple, they have their own closed App marketplace that they also profit off of. How can Dell, HP, Motorola, HTC compete in this scenario, when the only thing they can make money off of is the hardware? Their only chance is to partner with someone who does have the content distribution infrastructure, but it seems that chance has already passed.
Apple's revenues from iTunes is far lower than the revenues from the hardware. Apple simply does not run iTunes for huge profits, and if it wasn't to sell hardware, would promptly abandon it.
I mean, 30% revenue means less than 30% profit margin after expenses (servers, hosting free content, iCloud, payment processing, etc). I think Apple only took around $1.5B profit from iTunes, and that includes apps, music, books and movies.
I believe the device (iPod, iOS) profit was 20 times that in the same period. Even Mac profit was an order of magnitude higher. than that. It's all in the Apple revenue filings. iTunes just doesn't make more than pocket change for Apple. There's not much of a loss Apple can take on hardware to be made up through iTunes.
Amazon's selling hardware to sell content. Apple's selling content in order to sell hardware (has been true since 2003 when the iTunes Music Store opened). The two can't have more opposite business models. (And Google's offering stuff for free to sell ads). You can see it in the device breakdowns - Apple's hardware really only costs $300 or less to make, while Amazon's basically selling at cost.
And HTC, Samsung, LG, etc seem to be doing fine selling hardware, as does Apple.
The only thing Apple and Amazon have in common is they sell "the whole experience" - devices with the ability to get content easily. Why they offer content may vary, but they know if they make it convenient, people will buy (it's how iTunes became the dominant force in music sales) and gives a lot of legitimacy to the stuff. (People back then accused Apple of enabling music piracy - Apple proved the music industry was Doing It Wrong(tm)).
The other content with hardware guys in the game are Barnes and Noble and Kobo. I don't think the Nook Color is sold at a loss given how B&N seems to let that tablet be hacked trivially.
And nevermind the "success" of such greats like RIM (Blackberry App World), HP (remember WebOS? They had an app store?) who also mixed the hardware-with-content offerings.
tl;dr - Apple doesn't make much money off iTunes - see their last earnings report and hardware sales consistently outdo iTunes sales by wide margins.
Yet for some reason, many items tend to cost the same in euros as they do in dollars. Taxes, customs and shipping, I suppose.
And differences in pricing.
You see, in North America, our prices are sans taxes. That $140 will be $155 after Canadian taxes, for example. Plus environmental fees and the like.
In Europe, you have stuff like 20% VAT and 20% duties and such, which are built into the price. Your EUR140 device, you pay EUR140.
And nevermind the various consumer protection laws (which are much stronger in Europe). 90 day warranties are common in North America, you'd have to buy extended warranties ($40+) to get to your 2 year guaranteed by EU laws and such.
How that is possible without putting down a signature and showing an ID document (if only at the receiving network!) I really can not understand. And I would think that this is a problem that goes much further than just allowing attackers to intercept banking details.
And besides, if they get the old network to give up the number, it has to go somewhere: attacker must have registered an account with the other network where the number can be ported to.
Simple, a case of identity theft. They get your name and fake your signature at the receiving network. Your original network won't care (well, they do care, but imagine the hue and cry from the crowd if they have to "get permission" from the old carrier - because no carrier wants to lose a customer and they'd love to hold you by the phone number by refusing to authorize the transfer.)
Doing this attack is just a bit more creative than the usualy identity theft cases where they just apply for loans and such in your name, at a fake address.
I mean, isn't that the whole point? It's a Google phone and supposed to get all the latest Android versions out there?
I understand the Galaxy Nexus was the launch phone, but I'd expect the year-old Nexus S to also get it. And the two-year-old Nexus One at that, too. They're the phones Google codes for and thus have the best support for. Which is the main reason to get those phones over the million that Samsung/HTC/LG/etc release every year with iffy support...
Transistor count means a lot to the future evolution of the product. If it's lower than the competitor, then that means that (on the same process technology) you can fit more onto a wafer and so they'll be cheaper. A low count means that you can easily fit extra cores on a die. The transistor count also implies the transistor count per core, so a lower number means that adding a couple of extra cores is less expensive that previously thought so it's likely to happen sooner. It may also mean that they're under the transistor budget and can add some extra execution units to the next version.
That would be a problem if it was transistor count that was the big issue on CPUs.
Chips are divided into two arenas - silicon area limited and pin limited. Silicon limited is basically the more area you have, the bigger the chip can be, and this applies mainly to memory chips. Double the area, double the storage (the addressing logic is such a small fraction of the area it's actually negligible). The problem is, the cost of additional silicon goes up exponentially as yields go down the larger the chip is (there's a certain amount of defects per area, and increasing the area per chip increases the chance of one defect ruining the entire chip).
Pin limited is where the limiting factor is the chip packaging - the number of pins on the device. CPUs are in this category - they just don't have enough pins to handle all the functions they need to do. SoCs have it worse as a higher pin/ball density automatically means a more expensive PCB process needs to be employed, which limits circuit size due to expense.
The big problem with pin-limited chips is their transitor density is quite low as it's filled with random logic. In fact, the reason why the density is low is because there's no order to the logic (unlike a memory cell array which is extremely regular). Thus what takes all the space on a pin-limited chip isn't transistors, but wires! The interconnections between transistors gets pretty tight that transistors have to be spaced out in order for them to fit. It's why we have 11+ metal layers per chip these days. And these wires also mean that sometimes, we have to add delays just to let signals propagate across the chip.
Transistor counts really haven't mattered too much - we can easily fit 8/16+ billion transistors on a memory chip, so 1.2 billion isn't anything. In fact, most of that is probably cache that occupies maybe 10-20% of the entire die.
I have also heard complaints on the responsiveness of the UI at times, is that still an issue?
Only to people who've never used one, and don't want anyone else to use one.
It depends. If you don't mind slight pauses in the UI, then it's fine. If you want silky-smooth "teh snappy", then you'll find it annoying.
About the biggest complaint I have with Android tablets, at least the ones I've played with in the stores is they seem to stutter a lot. I take the Galaxy tab, and after unlocking it, it's got screens to the left and right. Swipe left or right, and you can see it drop frames in the animation and be a bit herky-jerky.
Does it kill the device? Not really, but given it's specs and that lesser devices have gotten the swipe thing down pat, it seems disappointing. It's like we're back in the 486 days of computing where we saw graphics that tore and were jerky and were amazed at how "fluid" it all is.
Or, it's like only getting 10fps out of the device. Android doesn't appear to put the UI as a high priority - so the "apparent responsiveness" is down. (It may very well be faster than something that makes the UI snappier at the expense of throughput, though).
Personally, I would like to see google smack some bitches by demanding either open source drivers only, or supplying feature complete whitepapers for all devices released with closed drivers intended for the android platform.
This would create a permanent hole in the current software lockdowns carriers and handset makers use.
Won't work. If Google imposes it as part of "With Google", the only chips available would be ones with open-source drivers. And there's very few of those, even fewer with 3D accelleration (required for Android - if you think Android is sluggish now, try it with no accelleration). In the embedded world, there are very few GPUs - nVidia's GoForce (Tegra line), Imagination Technologies PowerVR, and a few others, none of which are open-source.
Everyone else will just continue as-is, using AOSP. Until that gets relicensed as say, GPLv3 or so, in which case no one would touch it. Part of the reason why AOSP works so well is because it's Apache licensed and not GPL.
Nevermind about tablets - we'd be left with the iPad, Kindle Fire, and Nook Tablet (it appears all Android tablets are based on nVidia Tegra).
Either way, it's lose-lose for Google.
Oh, and believe it or not, some manufacturers don't want people messing around. In my dealings, I've seen them say "We don't want another xda-developers sprouting up".
I don't understand why the environmentally-minded folks don't try to talk more about the costs. Basically, speak in a language that Conservatives/Republicans can understand, to get them to take actions in their own interest.
The problem is the costs to the environment are intangible. There's no easy way to say emitting a tonne of CO2 costs $X. Or that cutting down a tree or removing carbon from the ground and putting it in the air (fossil fuels) how much it will cost.
Because of this, it's usually taken as free. If you're paying and your neighbour is not, then you're seen as a chump. This is especially true since the effects are often not seen until many years later.
Really, the environment is a tragedy of the commons. It's too big for any one individual to have a large effect, and the effect of many individuals is seen only years later. It's why ecosystems are so diverse and why there seems to be an organism for every job (enough that disrupting one can have untold effects).
But even though humans are forward-looking people (generally), the environment is just something that's too big to comprehend, and our minds and models (including economic models) are incapable of understanding it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Until a few weeks ago, Amazon didn't have access to the 3.2 source. You see, Google never released the source code to honeycomb at all, at least until they released Ice Cream Sandwich and it came along for the ride. Even then it's not a tagged release in the tree, so you'd have to guess at where 3.2 existed.
Amazon, like B&N, is not a member of the OHA, and therefore the only Android they can ship is AOSP.
And Amazon has enough to not want the standard Android environment - they want you to use their App Store, their Music Store, and their Movie Store to do everything - tied into the Amazon cloud, not the Google one.
In fact, it's surprising they made it so easy to break into it - considering Amazon's business plan for the Fire is the opposite of Apple's. For Apple, it's the content that helps sell hardware - the content makes a tiny bit of money, but a pittance compared to the hardware (order of magnitude, at least). For Amazon, the hardware sells the content - the Fire is basically sold at cost and its goal is to sell into the Amazon ecosystem - Amazon makes no money on hardware, but lots of money on books, music, video, and apps.
And that's why they mess up the OS. Android's a platform they want to use to launch their business. And it includes the fact that the only way to sell apps for the Fire, well, you've gotta agree to Amazon's terms (see all those articles on why devs should never sell on Amazon).
Of course, if Amazon is even moderately successful, it could do a number on the Android ecosystem since the Amazon App Store's policies are like Apple's App Store.
They're already gone. Very few people care about the big stars.
Check out the cast list sometimes of the big blockbusters. They almost always feature unknown people these days. Maybe one headliner, but that's it. Having a movie with more than one celebrity is getting rarer and rarer. Most sport several unknowns who only become celebrities because of one movie or a wildly popular series (think Transformers which probably raked in close to $3B across all films - the cast was basically all-new actors). And hell, a lot of movies have CG faces replacing the face of whatever actor is there, and it's happening more and more. Expensive actors are pricing themselves out and Hollywood's already saving expense with the vast field of no-names.
And consumer gear is cheap enough for movie filming - the same gear "the pros" use can be had off the shelf for a few thousand dollars (dSLRs are really popular). Hell, RED's got a $10,000 2K camera coming out soon. And their 4K with "120fps slo-mo" (RED Epic) is only $60k.
For indies being better - your selection might be the best movies in the lot, but as YouTube shows, there's a ton of crap out there as well. It's just like indie music and indie games - there's a lot of games out there better than the big studios, but there's even more crap. You can see this with the Apple App Store and the Google Marketplace as well - most of the indie stuff is crap, though there are plenty of gems as well.
The real issue is filtering through the stuff.
95% of my university courses - it didn't matter. If they had a "homework" component to their course, it really only weighed in at around 5-10% of your final grade (the midterms were "heavily" weighted at 20-30%, with the finals being 50-90% of the final mark in the end). Cheat all you want - it ain't worth much and you're just screwing yourself during the finals. Heck, some assign homework that isn't even checked!
As for expensive textbooks - in the end a few friends of mine ended up committing copyright infringement at the just-off-campus copy store. We'd get a counter from the clerk, stick it int he copy machine and spend the afternoon copying. The first copy was hard, but the next generation (it didn't degrade significantly as a copy-of-a-copy is still quite readable) went quickly as all one needed was to use the document feeder. It turned a $150 textbook into something that was $15 for each person (we'd return the textbook afterwards). And it's only for a few courses - we'd lend and trade our copies about.
The iPad just makes it harder to do all those things, but easier to carry around all your books...
You want to know why there's no lawsuits? There's no money in it.
Ever notice that all the lawsuits come out AFTER a product is launched and is successful? Patent trolls don't go after people when change is still possible. When someone is making money hand over fist, or when something is so entrenched that change isn't possible without screwing over the world, that's when they strike. The first is easy - if you're making a ton of money, you have a ton of money for licensing fees. The second is even easier - if it's a fundamental patent, it's too late to change.
Of the companies you mention, only Google has any money worth suing for. And they're not rolling out VP8 in any great haste. If they were super confident, they should roll it out everywhere and into their doubleclick ads as well to get the plugin installed everywhere.
A close look at history reveals this is the case. Creative suing Apple over the iPod hierarchical interface. Rambus suing RAM makers over DDR. And various other patent trolls. It always happens AFTER a product is successful and making lots of money.
Apple, TiVo, etc., are Doing It Wrong(tm) because they're going after products that are early in their life cycle to not make much money. I mean, if you want to sue Samsung over the Galaxy Tab, wait for Samsung to make healthy profits then sue for extra damages already. Injunctions against sales? Why do you want to reduce your patent infringement damage claims? Let them make money then sue for the treble damages post-sales.
The VP8 patent trolls will come out after hardware manufacturers start making the hardware to support it in droves and it's so widely used that changing it is impossible. There's no statute of limitations on when a patent infringement lawsuit may be launched (other than the patent has to be in effect).
The people using VP8 right now are tiny in numbers, very little money is being made, and the standard is volatile. Launching a lawsuit now just means they'll work around it - if something breaks, no big deal as few people were using it.
Well, WebM has one advantage - it's small and the people using it aren't really that rich. No patent troll will sue now because there's no money to be made.
H.264 doesn't have that advantage, so if there really was a submarine patent someone's sitting on, they're losing a lot of life on that patent by waiting - it's been out for years, and used everywhere, compared to WebM's tiny userbase. Chances are, everyone would be violating your patent.
You start small, like a small company. They won't have the resources to overturn the patent, and it helps give legitimacy to your patent. You then use those judgments to go after bigger guys. And what's bigger than going after the entire video industry?
WebM? It's used by a few small places, and Google's probably arranged matters that YouTube's use would be some tiny payout in the end. However, when one of the big guys, like say Intel or Broadcom or Marvell with lots of money start baking WebM hardware into their chips, life gets more interesting as there's now real big money in there.
So it may be hiding behind big companies, but any patent troll would love to sue for someone so ubiquitous as h.264 - the millions of things that do h.264 and you can extract licensing fees for.
Suing for WebM right now? Silly if you want to make money. Wait for it to become highly popular and entrenched so switching away is difficult (like h.264 is right now), which guarantees money for a long while yet. WebM doesn't have it so if there was a violation, Google would just work around it because it's easy to make these changes when few use it than when practically the entire world is using it.
You haven't looked very hard, have you? When I visit the big box electronics retailer, there's at least 1 tablet that meets your requirements. Maybe two.
The only problem is well, they require installing Debian, but if you have the skills, it's trivial.
Yes, Acer and Asus sell tablets that meet your needs. You may see them as running something called "Windows 7", but they are regular PCs and should run Linux just fine.
The reason they aren't popular are the same reason why Tablet PCs have remained niche objects for over 20 years - the UI just isn't touch-compatible. Right-clicks are an anachronism that's emulated, and don't get me started on trying to do a middle click.
It's why Android an iOS are more popular - they use a completely different UI paradigm that involves touch screen interactions from the beginning. In fact, you'll probably find your experience pretty damn lousy as the tedium of right-clicking on a touch screen gets old, fast, and many developers simply assume you have a three-button mouse.
It's also one of the reasons why Macs still ship with one-button mice - it forces developers to quit assuming right-clicking is easy and to quit hiding features only in a right-click menu.
Incorrect. Piracy is easier on Android because it's trivial to get APKs off the platform, and APKs are not DRM-encumbered (unlike say, Amazon APKs). Other platforms like this include WebOS.
iOS, WP7 DRM the files - that's why you can download apps via iTunes or Zune Market and install them on your phone from your PC (really useful for those big apps). Distributing the files does nothing unless you distribute the AppleID or Live ID used with that account.
Now, iOS makes it harder to pirate because to pirate reqiures jailbreaking (not all devices have the option yet), and installing a modified installer daemon (trivial) to allow unsigned binaries. In addition, a special flag inside Info.plist has to be set (something apps can actually check for) to tell the kernel that the app is unencrypted.
Of course, another reason for the piracy is Paid Android apps are not available everywhere. If you're not in a country where Google Wallet/Checkout is supported, then you're SOL. So if you are a dev, the only way to get your app "out there" is to make it free.
Apple has the same issue with the App Store, but they allow use of iTunes cards and such so it's possible to buy apps.
Of course, I made my first Android app purchase the other day. And given how terrible the experience was (I used the web interface but it probably won't make a difference) I can see why people pirate. I purchase apps on sale, then 24 hours later, when the apps weren't on sale, half the apps I bought were cancelled. The reason was "the transaction could not be completed in a timely manner". Bullcrap - I've never see this issue anywhere else.
I think the devs cancelled it on purpose so they won't have to give me cheap apps. because my only remedy is to "try the purchase again". Well, I can't, because it was cancelled after the sale is over, and I'm not paying full price.
In the end, I'll just pirate the damn apps I "bought". Try to do the right thing...
Perhaps an important point - the HP eBay store only ships within the US via UPS. So even if all you wanted was the accessory kit, if you're outside the US, you're SOL.
Those outside the US will just have to bid on them after arbitrage.
And the site's open to HP employees on the 11th. General public is on Monday ,the 12th.
Only good part is it's 2 per customer.
Problem is, Joe Average doesn't know a thing.
It's why Apple has to resort to using crappy pentalobe screws - anyone with half a clue can easily get in, but Joe Average can't. And those with a clue don't ask for warranty support. But Joe Average will flub it up, and won't know better when they take the phone/computer back for warranty repair.
It's sad, but true.
And why is Joe Average doing this? Because his geek friend showed him something "cool" and told him it's easy. Joe Average googles and blindly follows the process to get the "cool" thing.
And people can be quite... creatively clumsy.
Hell, Joe Average can, with the proper instructions, install Linux and do all sorts of stuff. They won't understand what they're doing (they're just executing a set of steps), but they'll do it if in the end you get a "cool" result. Of course, then you or I will be called to fix their PC because they want to return to Windows and their HOWTO wiped their drive.
Yes, CANDU is actually very inefficient - it doesn't extract all the usable fuel as other reactors can.
However, it does have the advantage that it's impossible to have a meltdown - heavy water is a great moderator. In fact, it's required in order to have a reaction - if there's no heavy water, the fuel's inert. And normal water impedes the reaction as well, so if the cooling system leaks, the reaction stops as well.
Plus, the fuel that comes out needs even heavier processing to become weapons grade.
Many reasons.
First, managing the mapping between filesystem blocks and physical flash blocks is the job of the Flash Translation Layer (FTL). An FTL is an extremely heavily patented piece of software used to manage the logical-to-physical mappings, wear levelling, dirty page tracking, etc.
And yes, it's extremely heavily patented. A good FTL can provide significant speed improvements and longevity compared to a crappy one.
Second - eMMC makes development easy. eMMC is just MMC in a chip formfactor. It only requires a few lines (16 at most, compared to 24 or so for NAND), so it's easy to wire up on a PCB. And for early development, you won't believe how good it is to not populate the eMMC part, and stick in an SD/MMC socket instead. Then you can simply use a common SD card to store your filesystems and kernel/bootloader. Especially handy for Android where installing Android on an SD can be done in minutes, while doing it via JTAG or serial or USB download can take forever and take many more steps.
As for cost - eMMC may or may not cost more than raw NAND. Samsung/Toshiba/etc ship so many eMMC chips that the cost of the extra logic may be only a penny or so more. And if you ship enough stuff, they'll give killer discounts.
Finally, it also allows for easy componentization without extra work. Building one piece of software to handle 16 GB of NAND is easy. If you add a 32GB option, you have to modify the software to handle it. And if you switch flash vendors or the layout (page/block size) changes, you have to re-do the flash layer again with new timings and layout.
With eMMC, building a 32GB unit costs almost nothing in the software since it doesn't care about the lowlevel details. Just replace the 16GB part with a 32GB part, test, and ship. And if you switch eMMC vendors, same deal.
"Regular" writing is the day to day stuff that people need to write - you know, memos, letters, that sort of thing.
"Electronic" writing is probably more known as Technical writing, which is a subfield to writing compliant papers (e.g., to submit to IEEE and other journals), as well as online documentation and printed technical documentation (user manuals, service manuals, etc).
Instructions are particularly important as well, and it can be tricky to get right (as anyone who has ever encountered poorly written instructions may attest to).
Not really. The previous MacOS was 9.x (9.2.2 I think). 10.x logically follows from that. Though now they're not even calling it by version anymore, just cat names. (Snow Leopard is 10.6, Lion is 10.7, but the official documentation now just calls it "Snow Leopard" and "Lion").
Before that was MacOS 8. And before that was the famous System 7 (1990-1991), renamed MacOS 7 sometime around 7.5 or so. And there were Systems 6 through the original in 1984.
So Mac OS X (pronounced "ten") is following a logical progression of version numbers. At least, until that point.
I believe the bomb range supervisor's name is J. D. Morgan, aka "JD". And usually the one seen wiring up explosives and such during episodes. Usually with ex-FBI explosives expert Frank Doyle.
And Savage and Hyneman probably are experienced in pyro and explosives, but only in the small quantities they use on film. The stuff generally used to explode bigger items requires a lot more of everything.
And the availability of water. Lots and lots of water.
Those towers we think of for nuclear power plants are cooling towers because fission produces a LOT of heat. So much that air cooling isn't enough. So nuclear plants have to be beside a body of water large enough to handle the heat output from the reaction.
This basically limits the placement of a nuclear plant to either on the coast or near a large inland body of water. Unfortunately, Japan doesn't have inland bodies of water, or large ones at that, so the only places to build are... along the coast.
In a foreclosure case, the bank just wants to recover the amount owed. If all you have left is $60K in your mortgage and the bank defaults, all they want is the $60k back from the sale. Even if the house is worth $500K - the bank is just recovering its principal. Any more is a bonus given back to the homeowner as equity earned, but that's it.
ETFs are basically a way to recoup profit that would've been lost from the contract. It's why mortgages often have penalties for early payment and excess payments - the carrier, like the bank, has counted on certain revenue from that contract, and the ETF is basically a buyout from that contract.
ETFs are usually waived during the contract cooling off period (usually first 7 days they give you a chance to cancel with no penalties), and at the discretion of the carrier (usually if you're willing to sign onto a new contract, e.g., phone upgrade) if they feel they can get back more money from you.
Can happen. It may not be an Amazon, but you can have a thiriving e-commerce company that does basically "small business" type sales (maybe $1M/year is a good year?).
You can also have very technical people and engineers doing the software, so the IT guy's job is really just making sure things keep running. Hell, half the patches and bandaids may be there because some developer didn't want to bother it IT guy and worked around whatever issue they were having. Happens quite often, really - as developers push from development into QA and then production, they realize they need access to production data that won't be available until the updated system is pushed to production, so URLs and references are hacked around so it could be QA tested then pushed to production unmodified. The alternative is to have those resources pre-pushed to production ahead of QA testing but that's another whole can of worms involving production changes that can't be replicated outside of production.
There may be only one "IT guy" but 20 people who can also do the "IT work" if push came to shove.
Apple's revenues from iTunes is far lower than the revenues from the hardware. Apple simply does not run iTunes for huge profits, and if it wasn't to sell hardware, would promptly abandon it.
I mean, 30% revenue means less than 30% profit margin after expenses (servers, hosting free content, iCloud, payment processing, etc). I think Apple only took around $1.5B profit from iTunes, and that includes apps, music, books and movies.
I believe the device (iPod, iOS) profit was 20 times that in the same period. Even Mac profit was an order of magnitude higher. than that. It's all in the Apple revenue filings. iTunes just doesn't make more than pocket change for Apple. There's not much of a loss Apple can take on hardware to be made up through iTunes.
Amazon's selling hardware to sell content. Apple's selling content in order to sell hardware (has been true since 2003 when the iTunes Music Store opened). The two can't have more opposite business models. (And Google's offering stuff for free to sell ads). You can see it in the device breakdowns - Apple's hardware really only costs $300 or less to make, while Amazon's basically selling at cost.
And HTC, Samsung, LG, etc seem to be doing fine selling hardware, as does Apple.
The only thing Apple and Amazon have in common is they sell "the whole experience" - devices with the ability to get content easily. Why they offer content may vary, but they know if they make it convenient, people will buy (it's how iTunes became the dominant force in music sales) and gives a lot of legitimacy to the stuff. (People back then accused Apple of enabling music piracy - Apple proved the music industry was Doing It Wrong(tm)).
The other content with hardware guys in the game are Barnes and Noble and Kobo. I don't think the Nook Color is sold at a loss given how B&N seems to let that tablet be hacked trivially.
And nevermind the "success" of such greats like RIM (Blackberry App World), HP (remember WebOS? They had an app store?) who also mixed the hardware-with-content offerings.
tl;dr - Apple doesn't make much money off iTunes - see their last earnings report and hardware sales consistently outdo iTunes sales by wide margins.
And differences in pricing.
You see, in North America, our prices are sans taxes. That $140 will be $155 after Canadian taxes, for example. Plus environmental fees and the like.
In Europe, you have stuff like 20% VAT and 20% duties and such, which are built into the price. Your EUR140 device, you pay EUR140.
And nevermind the various consumer protection laws (which are much stronger in Europe). 90 day warranties are common in North America, you'd have to buy extended warranties ($40+) to get to your 2 year guaranteed by EU laws and such.
Simple, a case of identity theft. They get your name and fake your signature at the receiving network. Your original network won't care (well, they do care, but imagine the hue and cry from the crowd if they have to "get permission" from the old carrier - because no carrier wants to lose a customer and they'd love to hold you by the phone number by refusing to authorize the transfer.)
Doing this attack is just a bit more creative than the usualy identity theft cases where they just apply for loans and such in your name, at a fake address.
I mean, isn't that the whole point? It's a Google phone and supposed to get all the latest Android versions out there?
I understand the Galaxy Nexus was the launch phone, but I'd expect the year-old Nexus S to also get it. And the two-year-old Nexus One at that, too. They're the phones Google codes for and thus have the best support for. Which is the main reason to get those phones over the million that Samsung/HTC/LG/etc release every year with iffy support...
That would be a problem if it was transistor count that was the big issue on CPUs.
Chips are divided into two arenas - silicon area limited and pin limited. Silicon limited is basically the more area you have, the bigger the chip can be, and this applies mainly to memory chips. Double the area, double the storage (the addressing logic is such a small fraction of the area it's actually negligible). The problem is, the cost of additional silicon goes up exponentially as yields go down the larger the chip is (there's a certain amount of defects per area, and increasing the area per chip increases the chance of one defect ruining the entire chip).
Pin limited is where the limiting factor is the chip packaging - the number of pins on the device. CPUs are in this category - they just don't have enough pins to handle all the functions they need to do. SoCs have it worse as a higher pin/ball density automatically means a more expensive PCB process needs to be employed, which limits circuit size due to expense.
The big problem with pin-limited chips is their transitor density is quite low as it's filled with random logic. In fact, the reason why the density is low is because there's no order to the logic (unlike a memory cell array which is extremely regular). Thus what takes all the space on a pin-limited chip isn't transistors, but wires! The interconnections between transistors gets pretty tight that transistors have to be spaced out in order for them to fit. It's why we have 11+ metal layers per chip these days. And these wires also mean that sometimes, we have to add delays just to let signals propagate across the chip.
Transistor counts really haven't mattered too much - we can easily fit 8/16+ billion transistors on a memory chip, so 1.2 billion isn't anything. In fact, most of that is probably cache that occupies maybe 10-20% of the entire die.
It depends. If you don't mind slight pauses in the UI, then it's fine. If you want silky-smooth "teh snappy", then you'll find it annoying.
About the biggest complaint I have with Android tablets, at least the ones I've played with in the stores is they seem to stutter a lot. I take the Galaxy tab, and after unlocking it, it's got screens to the left and right. Swipe left or right, and you can see it drop frames in the animation and be a bit herky-jerky.
Does it kill the device? Not really, but given it's specs and that lesser devices have gotten the swipe thing down pat, it seems disappointing. It's like we're back in the 486 days of computing where we saw graphics that tore and were jerky and were amazed at how "fluid" it all is.
Or, it's like only getting 10fps out of the device. Android doesn't appear to put the UI as a high priority - so the "apparent responsiveness" is down. (It may very well be faster than something that makes the UI snappier at the expense of throughput, though).
Won't work. If Google imposes it as part of "With Google", the only chips available would be ones with open-source drivers. And there's very few of those, even fewer with 3D accelleration (required for Android - if you think Android is sluggish now, try it with no accelleration). In the embedded world, there are very few GPUs - nVidia's GoForce (Tegra line), Imagination Technologies PowerVR, and a few others, none of which are open-source.
Everyone else will just continue as-is, using AOSP. Until that gets relicensed as say, GPLv3 or so, in which case no one would touch it. Part of the reason why AOSP works so well is because it's Apache licensed and not GPL.
Nevermind about tablets - we'd be left with the iPad, Kindle Fire, and Nook Tablet (it appears all Android tablets are based on nVidia Tegra).
Either way, it's lose-lose for Google.
Oh, and believe it or not, some manufacturers don't want people messing around. In my dealings, I've seen them say "We don't want another xda-developers sprouting up".
The problem is the costs to the environment are intangible. There's no easy way to say emitting a tonne of CO2 costs $X. Or that cutting down a tree or removing carbon from the ground and putting it in the air (fossil fuels) how much it will cost.
Because of this, it's usually taken as free. If you're paying and your neighbour is not, then you're seen as a chump. This is especially true since the effects are often not seen until many years later.
Really, the environment is a tragedy of the commons. It's too big for any one individual to have a large effect, and the effect of many individuals is seen only years later. It's why ecosystems are so diverse and why there seems to be an organism for every job (enough that disrupting one can have untold effects).
But even though humans are forward-looking people (generally), the environment is just something that's too big to comprehend, and our minds and models (including economic models) are incapable of understanding it all.