I have to agree to an extent. Broadly speaking, there should be some sort of punitive component (or else everyone pirates knowing that if cost they just shell out the money they neglected to pay upfront). There should be a happy medium.
One counterpoint is that even if there are no material reparations, that doesn't preclude the possibility of an injunction, which even without money awarded would largely sate open source projects.
On the other hand, I presume without some sort of agreement from EA, Sony and Nintendo, that the ESA would not officially be able to support the bill. Those three probably comprise the vast bulk of the power of the ESA. Note that while several music companies are in the list as well, but the RIAA is not.
I would say omission from the list of supporters is a step in the right direction, but actively speaking out against the bill is what would really count. As it stands there is a lot of ambiguity in their position, with a strong lean toward "probably supports it, but less obviously so".
In the Apple case, iPods at the time were mostly straightforward devices (no 'apps' or other extensibility) that spent pretty much all their life offline. This meant music companies could only get into iPods by either giving a DRM-free MP3 or through the iTunes store, and had to provide for offline-playback case. If Apple is throwing its weight around, they *can't* go anywhere else and keep their DRM. At the same time, you know your sales through, say, MS DRM just pisses off your customer because they can't play on an iPod. Without other options, DRM-free is better than no business at all.
The state of video content today is different. First, between ubiquitous data plans and wifi, sheer size of content, and style of playback compared to iPods of yore, there is nearly no need for the industry to cater much to the offline playback case, therefore most everything is streaming-only (sadly). Second, presume Google puts its foot down and says "there shalt not be DRM on youtube (their only real video distribution channel of note)". Content providers say "ok" and put it on Netflix, Hulu, or their own internet presence (e.g. Sony and Crackle). If you want your users to play your content on their 'Google' device, you just publish your own app implementing your DRM. Google has pretty much zero leverage here to force the industry to stop doing DRM if they wanted and very little business motivation to bother as well.
The Raspberry Pi represents a vanishingly small proportion of the population. A Raspberry Pi platform probably can't even real-time decode some of the higher-end video files, and definitely won't be invited to the Netflix party and other platforms with DRM requirements that can't be bothered to provide for an open platform with nearly no users. In terms of content consumption, it won't make a blip and the only exciting bit about it really is the price. Orders of magnitude more people are going away from open PC to closed tablet/phone ecosystems, and MS is trying to make nearly all the 'open PC' population as locked down as those tablet/phone platforms with 'secure boot'. On the consumer side, not many voices meaningfully stand for opennes. Fortunately, most of the internet *server* infrastructure would crumble without it and already pretty deep pockets are fighting SOPA as an example.
With the music industry, Apple *forced* their hands. I generally don't like Apple, but that specific move I have to give them credit for. The amount of data constituting a music file was so trivial people naturally tried to fling it about and noticed how DRM fouled it up to the point it hindered Apple's business practices. With movie data, the trend is toward streaming, which is of great concern to me as the everyday consumer accepts the relatively poorer quality and higher network burden and never notices the DRM restrictions. I will say the music industry when *forced* mostly realized they could use business practices to fight copyright infringment more effectively than they could ever legistlate. I hope the movie industry will wise up too, but I'm not optimistic. People doing copyright infringement have a *much* easier time of getting superior functionality than those trying to play by the rules in video world, but with music you can now do everything trivially with legal purchases that you could do with illicit downloads.
I will revise my statement because someone else pointed out the theoretical answer. Services like Facebook would have to be federated, meaning Facebook would either have to die or change it's behavior, which is unlikely.
Of course, that's the social networking case, still no answer on things like most of Google's non-social capabilities.
I retract my criticism, I somehow completely missed the point about federation and assumed someone was oversimplifying the situation (as the original article did). Of course, open source is orthogonal to this (this thread hasn't brought it up, so I think that's well understood), you have to modify the behavior of Facebook, not have read access to their source.
My AP predates WPS, but after reading about it, I can't believe they designed it as an ongoing capability. Once used, it should have defaulted to disabling it until some factory reset button was pressed to resurrect it. When I first heard of it, I thought it would simply be an improvement over the old days of unprotected wifi to start, but clearly they messed up..
Most cases I see where a vendor is reliant upon a service they do not control, they make it clear in their branding message. If it should break, they say 'sorry, Google has discontinued this service'. It's not like they'll blame you and *not* your upstream provider. If facebook closed up shop today, no one would be blaming you that facebook doesn't work as the reason will be self-evident.
Either it is something that will be *very* obvious and ubiquitous (like facebook or google+ being shut down) or it's something like google translate, where you can have an alternative backend provider or two to swap in without the users realizing.
Programmers have to cope with this reality *all the time*. It's pretty well a hard requirement when the subject matter is data and userbase held by some entity like Google or Facebook.
Netscape was boned in part *because* of their crappy codebase. They had a hard time making it adapt to new capabilities and evolving standards. In the long run, that has worked well.
With KDE4, I get the feeling that adherents have *mostly* toughed it out and found the end product acceptable. Sometimes to pursue a vision there is a long painful transition, but the end result may be impossible without taking risk.
Assuming there *was* one universally accepted standard that Facebook embraced and was also implemented by MySpace. No one would still give a rat's ass about MySpace. The APIs in this case are trivial and you can make up your own or copy them as a de-facto standard, but the data and user connectedness that the service embodies is what matters.
There are two good reasons these companies don't go through RFC process for things like this. One, as above, the APIs are trivial and only of value to their data so an RFC process makes no sense. Secondly, if they were married to the RFC process, every little enhancement has the potential of taking months to over a year to ratify. Nothing is stopping a community for creating an RFC to compete with a proprietary API and if you push it through and are successful and create an ecosystem, then Facebook might implement it on top of their proprietary API.
Incidentally, the same phenomenon can be seen in the 'good old days' of the internet. Cisco frequently did (and still does) roll out a proprietary protocol and when the IETF finally ratifies a standard to do the same thing, Cisco implements the standard as well as their proprietary approach (ususally, some times Cisco ignores the standard, probably due to lack of explicit customer request). Also, at the upper layers, there is a large precedent for people not bothering with RFCs at all. As far as I know, there is still no IETF RFC covering bittorent. There we have a very popular, community driven technology that has been in use for years that doesn't bother with IETF RFC process.
For the *most* part, the technical capabilities of sites like Facebook isn't the impressive thing. At small scale, anyone can make code to function well in that capacity. If your endeavor grew to the point that facebook does, you'd have the resources to do the harder, but not impossible part of making that stuff scale. These sites are not succeeding because of inherently superior technology, they are succeeding by knowing exactly how to draw everyday users into a platform. What philosophy to embrace (e.g. enforced consistency upon the users compared to myspace I think plays no small part in their success).
Google has some interesting backend mechanics, but mostly in their case the bigger factor is the data they have accumulated and resources to acquire and store new data, with or without registered users. If you had software that could match Google Maps perfectly, it wouldn't matter if you don't have the maps, satellite, aerial photography, the street view, the ever-changing list of addresses and some meaning behind them (e.g. search for 'burgers' should include "McDonald's"). Some of this is big compute resources to crawl everything and drive cars around cities with cameras, in other cases they have business relationships to acquire data where millions of dollars changes hands.
As code-centric people, we fixate on the code that glues this together, but in the most 'dangerous' cases against a 'Free' world the code being released does nothing as the userbase and/or proprietary data that powers it matters and massive compute resources are required to actually deal with it even if you had magic free access. No matter how you slice it, it is a capital-intensive game to play. The best a distributed endeavor can realistically hope to do is to piggyback on one of the large companies infrastructure using published APIs.
One of MS's big problems is trying to be Blackberry is actually a fairly dire case to pursue. Blackberry's market is rapidly evaporating as Android and iOS evolve security capabilities and IT departments relent to allowing those devices instead of Blackberry (Blackberry's international multi-day BES outage a few weeks back certainly didn't help matters either).
A story speculating that devices may or may not exist that HP may or may not sell at a price which might or might not be $99, without so much as a hint that there is evidence suggesting they ever actually *made* any production-level product beyond pre-release testing and evaluation units. Given the Touchpad Go's schedule probably wouldn't have had it in mass production at the time HP killed the product line, it seems unlikely that they would have gone forward with production, unless their supply chain already had them over a barrel (which was allegedly the cause of the second wave of firesale, the third being to flush out returns). The problem is any thinking right now is merely speculation.
I'd probably take the plunge and get it if offered just for a WebOS device to play with (I have a few Palm Pres, but it's hard to justify playing with them when my Android phone has much better hardware in every way (bigger, higher resolution screen, faster processors, 4 times the ram, a camera that actually focuses, etc) and actually has support for things like Netflix.
You ignored the second part of that sentence, that each vendor has their own comparable ecosystem. I don't have a Windows Live account, but even among those that do, how many also have a Google account? How many of those tend to use Windows Live *over* Google? I suspect less, most people I know who speak of making a Windows Live Account was because some microsoft download they needed forced them, and then promptly ignored it. If you can access most of your MS services with an iPhone or Andoroid *anyway* (and mostly you should be able to), it's not such a big differentiator. Google has the edge between themselves, MS, and Apple in terms of exploitable ecosystem with their massive datacenters and userbase (the one exception being xbox, though I'm not sure how much of the population cares at all about their console gaming system being somehow linked to their mobile phone), but Apple is building up a lot of infrastructure, and frankly with an open ecosystem like Google, Apple can piggy back as much as they care to and I don't think anyone will ultimately consider it a differentiator *unless* WP goes out of its way to make Google access more difficult because of not-invented-here, but I haven't spent enough time with it to make that determination.
The things that influence people more are things intrinsic to the mobile platform itself. Application compatibility, features/functions of hardware and software, or just a single straightforward choice that doesn't require a lot of thought. Android and iOS have a huge advantage on the first, Android has a leg up on the second with hardware vendors able to cut loose and offer all sorts of things while MS vendors are limitedby spec in what they can do, and Apple has the third, since with WP you can buy the exact same phone from multiple vendors it is a bit more confusing than Apple's "just buy this" model. I think MS is investing more energy than ever trying to make WP take off (to the point of plastering that stupid metro crap on their desktop OS to convince people it isn't so stupid, which I think is horrible but MS knows they can do anything at all short of breaking backwards compatibility and never lose their share), but I just don't know if MS can really make headway against such competent competition.
(Just this past holiday break I was looking at a 45" tv from a couch from about 10-12 foot away and could readily tell that it was not 1080p. I ultimately asked what kind of set it was and it was indeed a 720p. You can tell the difference (a bit more jagged). With 'natural' footage, it's hard, but with more synthetic content (e.g menus, games, animeated content) it's pretty blatant.
Well, for one, they aren't an 'exception', they just don't do the distinct hardware and software vendor thing at all. It's an amazingly stragihtforward reality than MS can't seem to grasp. They aren't a company trying to serve the consumers needs in spite of the hardware vendor (incidentally that adversarial view of your 'partners' is probably a significant obstacle in your path), they are one company with any hardware/software disagreements settled behind closed doors.
MS wants to have the detached relationship that Google gets by not selling 'direct' (it probably thinks that is the only reason Zune failed, though Apple proves that model viable), but wants to dictate all of the experience like Apple (again, they presume the *only* reason predecessors failed was inconsistency, though Android has proven *that* model viable). They want to partner with handset vendors that are already successful (e.g. HTC, Samsung) but want to restrict what they do and keep them from doing anything that would strengthen their brand. They explicitly want to dilute the brand of the hardware vendors after these vendors have gotten a taste of how to build a name for themselves. Nokia got some Trojan horse executives to buy in and that seems MS' best bet. They also have to face the fact they just *aren't* that good and don't have much of interest to bring to the table and work on the quality of the product rather than keep assuming it's merely a matter of logistics as to why they can't beast competitor's at their respective games.
To flesh out c a bit, it also ties the manufacturer's hands. Android handsets are shipping with higher resolutions and higher speed processors than MS even *allows* at all.
In general, the phones don't add anything, cost the manufacturers more to put on devices, prevent manufacturers from differentiation.
Against Android, it's always seemed like a bad iOS clone to me
I don't get this at all. I will say when I played with a Samsung phone of a freind, the 'luancher' layout was a bit similar, but other than that, better multitasking and a home screen that for *most* vendors is more applet centered than luancher centered. Not my favorite platform, but serviceable and a bit more utilitarian than iOS.
Zune software is also a pleasure to use compared to iTunes, and doesn't install a ton of other services and applications on my computer.
I don't like iTunes either, but this is a bit unfair, MS doesn't need additional components because they made the OS. I'll bet on the flip side, Zune has to clutter up a Mac in a way similar to how Apple clutters up an MS box.
As someone who doesn't use Microsoft as my vendor for every little need they specifically could possibly fill, WP really has nothing of note to me. I haven't met that many people who are specifically invested in an all-MS ecosystem, apart from fanatic-level users, Apple has much the same situation but with a *lot* more fanatics. You say you like Microsoft phone because it integrates better with other micorosoft software, but Apple users can make the exact same claim, substituted iCloud for MyDrive, iTunes instead of Zune (Zune is probably the one current brand MS has with even less value than Windows Phone). Windows Live to me is not particularly interesting over anything else in the field, but less universal so I gravitate toward a Google account instead because of more people around.
I want a unified interface for everything. So far no winners.
For my PVR use (yes, some content is still only gettable that way *and* the quality is much better than even 'HD' streams from Netflix and such, while they may hit good resolution the more critical issue of bitrate is still necessarily low), Roku just does nothing for that at all. MythTV is about the best I've found for this, but does poor in all other areas. Xbmc Eden promises better support and I still need to try it. Plex does nothing for this use case too.
For downloaded media, Roku officially does nothing and the unofficial efforts are pretty inadequate when compared to the likes of Plex and XBMC.
For streaming, Roku is pretty much the best (Plex purports to be decent, but they just embed the video player from a browser and last I tried had *no* way of controlling)
His point being that game developers are conservative about pushing graphical complexity such that they don't even produce a workload that remotely challenges modern top-end cards. He attributes this to developers targeting weaker consoles. I think it's just because they want to perhaps have a slightly larger market than those willing to shell out $600 a year in graphics cards *alone*, regardless of game consoles. Now to push framerates down to a point where it looks like things matter, they have to turn up the complexity settings to max *and* break out three monitors at 1920x1080 a head *and* turn up things like AA to ludicrous values to show a meaningful difference for game playing.
I personally look forward to a 'midrange' Northern Islands card that can pull off the 1920x1080 with basically all the settings cranked up without AA or multihead. I know I could get one already with either southern islands or fermi, but holding out for one more generation for just that much less power draw. My 8800GT just can't keep up with some of the new releases without turning a lot of settings down, despite the GP post opinion.
When/if the Hitachi acquisition closes, you only have two vendors in the spinning magnetic disk market. Last time there was a large industry shift to shorter warranties, one or two companies did not and after a few months the rest of the industry moved back. With only two companies in play, it's far less likely someone will retain long warranty as a competitive advantage. Same reason why the flood was so devastating, one company consolidates so much in one location and a natural disaster wipes out half the manufacturing capacity of that industry.
They are implying on the marketer half of the equation, analytics will advance to the point where you more accurately target your demographic. It will still be unsolicited, but at least volume would go down as the marketer does not waste resources sending mail to people who will never care This may have merit in post, but not email since the former does carry non-trivial cost but the latter doesn't matter. They also explicitly referenced spam filter quality going up on the recipient side.
You'll have to cite specific examples to specific WWII assets they continue to hold onto relevant to the act and profit from, unless you are referring to the fact they had some assets then and therefore the assets they have now are all suspect. One, only part of 'IBM' at the time was under the control of the German government, therefore saying 'the assets' is disingenuous. Two, that sort of argument can be used for pretty much any 'organization' that existed anywhere in the world and even some that were not. For example, US military because they took in German scientists after the war to do things like advance our rocketry technology. Volkswagen's very *existence* happened specifically because Hitler explicitly made it happen, and yet you don't see any discussion referencing VW/Audi break out into 'but but they helped nazis!' You don't see people calling for the German rail system to be dismantled because once upon a time the same organization directly ran the trains responsible. Whatever advances/'wealth'/knowledge gained by Germany during WWII permeate all of society in all sorts of capacities, and I don't quite get the *specific* fascination with IBM.
Everyone know that the part of IBM operating in Germany worked with the government of the time helping with some of the most heinous institutionalized in human history. However, there is a good chance you can't find a single person currently in IBM's employ who was even *born* when that was happening. Implying that IBM continues to be a company worthy of scorn even now due to this is not that far off from calling Germany a despicable country. We must never forget and specific examples of how organizations were complicit in the whole thing helps to keep perspective, but in any way implying the IBM of *today* has any blame for what was done by people who have no invlovlement in IBM at all anymore is not productive.
My problem is the bait and switch. If I was going to *pay* for a domain, I sure as hell wouldn't have selected one as limited as a DynDNS subdomain, but I did because it *was* free. Paying to have a host record in one of their domain when for the same amount of money I can have my own domain seems ridiculous.
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I have to agree to an extent. Broadly speaking, there should be some sort of punitive component (or else everyone pirates knowing that if cost they just shell out the money they neglected to pay upfront). There should be a happy medium.
One counterpoint is that even if there are no material reparations, that doesn't preclude the possibility of an injunction, which even without money awarded would largely sate open source projects.
On the other hand, I presume without some sort of agreement from EA, Sony and Nintendo, that the ESA would not officially be able to support the bill. Those three probably comprise the vast bulk of the power of the ESA. Note that while several music companies are in the list as well, but the RIAA is not.
I would say omission from the list of supporters is a step in the right direction, but actively speaking out against the bill is what would really count. As it stands there is a lot of ambiguity in their position, with a strong lean toward "probably supports it, but less obviously so".
I doubt it. Totally different situation.
In the Apple case, iPods at the time were mostly straightforward devices (no 'apps' or other extensibility) that spent pretty much all their life offline. This meant music companies could only get into iPods by either giving a DRM-free MP3 or through the iTunes store, and had to provide for offline-playback case. If Apple is throwing its weight around, they *can't* go anywhere else and keep their DRM. At the same time, you know your sales through, say, MS DRM just pisses off your customer because they can't play on an iPod. Without other options, DRM-free is better than no business at all.
The state of video content today is different. First, between ubiquitous data plans and wifi, sheer size of content, and style of playback compared to iPods of yore, there is nearly no need for the industry to cater much to the offline playback case, therefore most everything is streaming-only (sadly). Second, presume Google puts its foot down and says "there shalt not be DRM on youtube (their only real video distribution channel of note)". Content providers say "ok" and put it on Netflix, Hulu, or their own internet presence (e.g. Sony and Crackle). If you want your users to play your content on their 'Google' device, you just publish your own app implementing your DRM. Google has pretty much zero leverage here to force the industry to stop doing DRM if they wanted and very little business motivation to bother as well.
The Raspberry Pi represents a vanishingly small proportion of the population. A Raspberry Pi platform probably can't even real-time decode some of the higher-end video files, and definitely won't be invited to the Netflix party and other platforms with DRM requirements that can't be bothered to provide for an open platform with nearly no users. In terms of content consumption, it won't make a blip and the only exciting bit about it really is the price. Orders of magnitude more people are going away from open PC to closed tablet/phone ecosystems, and MS is trying to make nearly all the 'open PC' population as locked down as those tablet/phone platforms with 'secure boot'. On the consumer side, not many voices meaningfully stand for opennes. Fortunately, most of the internet *server* infrastructure would crumble without it and already pretty deep pockets are fighting SOPA as an example.
With the music industry, Apple *forced* their hands. I generally don't like Apple, but that specific move I have to give them credit for. The amount of data constituting a music file was so trivial people naturally tried to fling it about and noticed how DRM fouled it up to the point it hindered Apple's business practices. With movie data, the trend is toward streaming, which is of great concern to me as the everyday consumer accepts the relatively poorer quality and higher network burden and never notices the DRM restrictions. I will say the music industry when *forced* mostly realized they could use business practices to fight copyright infringment more effectively than they could ever legistlate. I hope the movie industry will wise up too, but I'm not optimistic. People doing copyright infringement have a *much* easier time of getting superior functionality than those trying to play by the rules in video world, but with music you can now do everything trivially with legal purchases that you could do with illicit downloads.
I will revise my statement because someone else pointed out the theoretical answer. Services like Facebook would have to be federated, meaning Facebook would either have to die or change it's behavior, which is unlikely.
Of course, that's the social networking case, still no answer on things like most of Google's non-social capabilities.
I retract my criticism, I somehow completely missed the point about federation and assumed someone was oversimplifying the situation (as the original article did). Of course, open source is orthogonal to this (this thread hasn't brought it up, so I think that's well understood), you have to modify the behavior of Facebook, not have read access to their source.
My AP predates WPS, but after reading about it, I can't believe they designed it as an ongoing capability. Once used, it should have defaulted to disabling it until some factory reset button was pressed to resurrect it. When I first heard of it, I thought it would simply be an improvement over the old days of unprotected wifi to start, but clearly they messed up..
Most cases I see where a vendor is reliant upon a service they do not control, they make it clear in their branding message. If it should break, they say 'sorry, Google has discontinued this service'. It's not like they'll blame you and *not* your upstream provider. If facebook closed up shop today, no one would be blaming you that facebook doesn't work as the reason will be self-evident.
Either it is something that will be *very* obvious and ubiquitous (like facebook or google+ being shut down) or it's something like google translate, where you can have an alternative backend provider or two to swap in without the users realizing.
Programmers have to cope with this reality *all the time*. It's pretty well a hard requirement when the subject matter is data and userbase held by some entity like Google or Facebook.
Netscape was boned in part *because* of their crappy codebase. They had a hard time making it adapt to new capabilities and evolving standards. In the long run, that has worked well.
With KDE4, I get the feeling that adherents have *mostly* toughed it out and found the end product acceptable. Sometimes to pursue a vision there is a long painful transition, but the end result may be impossible without taking risk.
Assuming there *was* one universally accepted standard that Facebook embraced and was also implemented by MySpace. No one would still give a rat's ass about MySpace. The APIs in this case are trivial and you can make up your own or copy them as a de-facto standard, but the data and user connectedness that the service embodies is what matters.
There are two good reasons these companies don't go through RFC process for things like this. One, as above, the APIs are trivial and only of value to their data so an RFC process makes no sense. Secondly, if they were married to the RFC process, every little enhancement has the potential of taking months to over a year to ratify. Nothing is stopping a community for creating an RFC to compete with a proprietary API and if you push it through and are successful and create an ecosystem, then Facebook might implement it on top of their proprietary API.
Incidentally, the same phenomenon can be seen in the 'good old days' of the internet. Cisco frequently did (and still does) roll out a proprietary protocol and when the IETF finally ratifies a standard to do the same thing, Cisco implements the standard as well as their proprietary approach (ususally, some times Cisco ignores the standard, probably due to lack of explicit customer request). Also, at the upper layers, there is a large precedent for people not bothering with RFCs at all. As far as I know, there is still no IETF RFC covering bittorent. There we have a very popular, community driven technology that has been in use for years that doesn't bother with IETF RFC process.
For the *most* part, the technical capabilities of sites like Facebook isn't the impressive thing. At small scale, anyone can make code to function well in that capacity. If your endeavor grew to the point that facebook does, you'd have the resources to do the harder, but not impossible part of making that stuff scale. These sites are not succeeding because of inherently superior technology, they are succeeding by knowing exactly how to draw everyday users into a platform. What philosophy to embrace (e.g. enforced consistency upon the users compared to myspace I think plays no small part in their success).
Google has some interesting backend mechanics, but mostly in their case the bigger factor is the data they have accumulated and resources to acquire and store new data, with or without registered users. If you had software that could match Google Maps perfectly, it wouldn't matter if you don't have the maps, satellite, aerial photography, the street view, the ever-changing list of addresses and some meaning behind them (e.g. search for 'burgers' should include "McDonald's"). Some of this is big compute resources to crawl everything and drive cars around cities with cameras, in other cases they have business relationships to acquire data where millions of dollars changes hands.
As code-centric people, we fixate on the code that glues this together, but in the most 'dangerous' cases against a 'Free' world the code being released does nothing as the userbase and/or proprietary data that powers it matters and massive compute resources are required to actually deal with it even if you had magic free access. No matter how you slice it, it is a capital-intensive game to play. The best a distributed endeavor can realistically hope to do is to piggyback on one of the large companies infrastructure using published APIs.
One of MS's big problems is trying to be Blackberry is actually a fairly dire case to pursue. Blackberry's market is rapidly evaporating as Android and iOS evolve security capabilities and IT departments relent to allowing those devices instead of Blackberry (Blackberry's international multi-day BES outage a few weeks back certainly didn't help matters either).
A story speculating that devices may or may not exist that HP may or may not sell at a price which might or might not be $99, without so much as a hint that there is evidence suggesting they ever actually *made* any production-level product beyond pre-release testing and evaluation units. Given the Touchpad Go's schedule probably wouldn't have had it in mass production at the time HP killed the product line, it seems unlikely that they would have gone forward with production, unless their supply chain already had them over a barrel (which was allegedly the cause of the second wave of firesale, the third being to flush out returns). The problem is any thinking right now is merely speculation.
I'd probably take the plunge and get it if offered just for a WebOS device to play with (I have a few Palm Pres, but it's hard to justify playing with them when my Android phone has much better hardware in every way (bigger, higher resolution screen, faster processors, 4 times the ram, a camera that actually focuses, etc) and actually has support for things like Netflix.
You ignored the second part of that sentence, that each vendor has their own comparable ecosystem. I don't have a Windows Live account, but even among those that do, how many also have a Google account? How many of those tend to use Windows Live *over* Google? I suspect less, most people I know who speak of making a Windows Live Account was because some microsoft download they needed forced them, and then promptly ignored it. If you can access most of your MS services with an iPhone or Andoroid *anyway* (and mostly you should be able to), it's not such a big differentiator. Google has the edge between themselves, MS, and Apple in terms of exploitable ecosystem with their massive datacenters and userbase (the one exception being xbox, though I'm not sure how much of the population cares at all about their console gaming system being somehow linked to their mobile phone), but Apple is building up a lot of infrastructure, and frankly with an open ecosystem like Google, Apple can piggy back as much as they care to and I don't think anyone will ultimately consider it a differentiator *unless* WP goes out of its way to make Google access more difficult because of not-invented-here, but I haven't spent enough time with it to make that determination.
The things that influence people more are things intrinsic to the mobile platform itself. Application compatibility, features/functions of hardware and software, or just a single straightforward choice that doesn't require a lot of thought. Android and iOS have a huge advantage on the first, Android has a leg up on the second with hardware vendors able to cut loose and offer all sorts of things while MS vendors are limitedby spec in what they can do, and Apple has the third, since with WP you can buy the exact same phone from multiple vendors it is a bit more confusing than Apple's "just buy this" model. I think MS is investing more energy than ever trying to make WP take off (to the point of plastering that stupid metro crap on their desktop OS to convince people it isn't so stupid, which I think is horrible but MS knows they can do anything at all short of breaking backwards compatibility and never lose their share), but I just don't know if MS can really make headway against such competent competition.
Oh someone made a chart, it must be true!
(Just this past holiday break I was looking at a 45" tv from a couch from about 10-12 foot away and could readily tell that it was not 1080p. I ultimately asked what kind of set it was and it was indeed a 720p. You can tell the difference (a bit more jagged). With 'natural' footage, it's hard, but with more synthetic content (e.g menus, games, animeated content) it's pretty blatant.
Well, for one, they aren't an 'exception', they just don't do the distinct hardware and software vendor thing at all. It's an amazingly stragihtforward reality than MS can't seem to grasp. They aren't a company trying to serve the consumers needs in spite of the hardware vendor (incidentally that adversarial view of your 'partners' is probably a significant obstacle in your path), they are one company with any hardware/software disagreements settled behind closed doors.
MS wants to have the detached relationship that Google gets by not selling 'direct' (it probably thinks that is the only reason Zune failed, though Apple proves that model viable), but wants to dictate all of the experience like Apple (again, they presume the *only* reason predecessors failed was inconsistency, though Android has proven *that* model viable). They want to partner with handset vendors that are already successful (e.g. HTC, Samsung) but want to restrict what they do and keep them from doing anything that would strengthen their brand. They explicitly want to dilute the brand of the hardware vendors after these vendors have gotten a taste of how to build a name for themselves. Nokia got some Trojan horse executives to buy in and that seems MS' best bet. They also have to face the fact they just *aren't* that good and don't have much of interest to bring to the table and work on the quality of the product rather than keep assuming it's merely a matter of logistics as to why they can't beast competitor's at their respective games.
To flesh out c a bit, it also ties the manufacturer's hands. Android handsets are shipping with higher resolutions and higher speed processors than MS even *allows* at all.
In general, the phones don't add anything, cost the manufacturers more to put on devices, prevent manufacturers from differentiation.
Against Android, it's always seemed like a bad iOS clone to me
I don't get this at all. I will say when I played with a Samsung phone of a freind, the 'luancher' layout was a bit similar, but other than that, better multitasking and a home screen that for *most* vendors is more applet centered than luancher centered. Not my favorite platform, but serviceable and a bit more utilitarian than iOS.
Zune software is also a pleasure to use compared to iTunes, and doesn't install a ton of other services and applications on my computer.
I don't like iTunes either, but this is a bit unfair, MS doesn't need additional components because they made the OS. I'll bet on the flip side, Zune has to clutter up a Mac in a way similar to how Apple clutters up an MS box.
As someone who doesn't use Microsoft as my vendor for every little need they specifically could possibly fill, WP really has nothing of note to me. I haven't met that many people who are specifically invested in an all-MS ecosystem, apart from fanatic-level users, Apple has much the same situation but with a *lot* more fanatics. You say you like Microsoft phone because it integrates better with other micorosoft software, but Apple users can make the exact same claim, substituted iCloud for MyDrive, iTunes instead of Zune (Zune is probably the one current brand MS has with even less value than Windows Phone). Windows Live to me is not particularly interesting over anything else in the field, but less universal so I gravitate toward a Google account instead because of more people around.
I want a unified interface for everything. So far no winners.
For my PVR use (yes, some content is still only gettable that way *and* the quality is much better than even 'HD' streams from Netflix and such, while they may hit good resolution the more critical issue of bitrate is still necessarily low), Roku just does nothing for that at all. MythTV is about the best I've found for this, but does poor in all other areas. Xbmc Eden promises better support and I still need to try it. Plex does nothing for this use case too.
For downloaded media, Roku officially does nothing and the unofficial efforts are pretty inadequate when compared to the likes of Plex and XBMC.
For streaming, Roku is pretty much the best (Plex purports to be decent, but they just embed the video player from a browser and last I tried had *no* way of controlling)
His point being that game developers are conservative about pushing graphical complexity such that they don't even produce a workload that remotely challenges modern top-end cards. He attributes this to developers targeting weaker consoles. I think it's just because they want to perhaps have a slightly larger market than those willing to shell out $600 a year in graphics cards *alone*, regardless of game consoles. Now to push framerates down to a point where it looks like things matter, they have to turn up the complexity settings to max *and* break out three monitors at 1920x1080 a head *and* turn up things like AA to ludicrous values to show a meaningful difference for game playing.
I personally look forward to a 'midrange' Northern Islands card that can pull off the 1920x1080 with basically all the settings cranked up without AA or multihead. I know I could get one already with either southern islands or fermi, but holding out for one more generation for just that much less power draw. My 8800GT just can't keep up with some of the new releases without turning a lot of settings down, despite the GP post opinion.
Simple:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/seagate-samsung-acquisition/
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/western-digital-drops-4-3-billion-to-acquire-hitachi-gst-enter/
http://www.crn.com/news/storage/188100939/seagate-wraps-up-maxtor-acquisition.htm
When/if the Hitachi acquisition closes, you only have two vendors in the spinning magnetic disk market. Last time there was a large industry shift to shorter warranties, one or two companies did not and after a few months the rest of the industry moved back. With only two companies in play, it's far less likely someone will retain long warranty as a competitive advantage. Same reason why the flood was so devastating, one company consolidates so much in one location and a natural disaster wipes out half the manufacturing capacity of that industry.
They are implying on the marketer half of the equation, analytics will advance to the point where you more accurately target your demographic. It will still be unsolicited, but at least volume would go down as the marketer does not waste resources sending mail to people who will never care This may have merit in post, but not email since the former does carry non-trivial cost but the latter doesn't matter. They also explicitly referenced spam filter quality going up on the recipient side.
You'll have to cite specific examples to specific WWII assets they continue to hold onto relevant to the act and profit from, unless you are referring to the fact they had some assets then and therefore the assets they have now are all suspect. One, only part of 'IBM' at the time was under the control of the German government, therefore saying 'the assets' is disingenuous. Two, that sort of argument can be used for pretty much any 'organization' that existed anywhere in the world and even some that were not. For example, US military because they took in German scientists after the war to do things like advance our rocketry technology. Volkswagen's very *existence* happened specifically because Hitler explicitly made it happen, and yet you don't see any discussion referencing VW/Audi break out into 'but but they helped nazis!' You don't see people calling for the German rail system to be dismantled because once upon a time the same organization directly ran the trains responsible. Whatever advances/'wealth'/knowledge gained by Germany during WWII permeate all of society in all sorts of capacities, and I don't quite get the *specific* fascination with IBM.
Everyone know that the part of IBM operating in Germany worked with the government of the time helping with some of the most heinous institutionalized in human history. However, there is a good chance you can't find a single person currently in IBM's employ who was even *born* when that was happening. Implying that IBM continues to be a company worthy of scorn even now due to this is not that far off from calling Germany a despicable country. We must never forget and specific examples of how organizations were complicit in the whole thing helps to keep perspective, but in any way implying the IBM of *today* has any blame for what was done by people who have no invlovlement in IBM at all anymore is not productive.
My problem is the bait and switch. If I was going to *pay* for a domain, I sure as hell wouldn't have selected one as limited as a DynDNS subdomain, but I did because it *was* free. Paying to have a host record in one of their domain when for the same amount of money I can have my own domain seems ridiculous.