Since Android is open, the device manufacturers / Microsoft / South Korea / Anyone Else can modify it to not use Google for search results.
Sure, Android is open...when Google decides to stop withholding the source. Your statement is inaccurate, because Google has an approval process for Android licensees and has been accused of using that approval process to putt up roadblocks for phone vendors trying to ship Android phones with competing services like Bing. The source may (eventually) be open, but use of the Android trademark and other features requires playing ball with Google.
Your post is an example of what I predicted would happen, that certain posters would accuse the government of corruption and dismiss any idea that Google is a monopoly. The problem with your premise is one Korean device manufacturer is in a great position to abandon Google's version of Android--Samsung, which sells 55% of Android phones. With HTC and LG going down, that percentage is only going to increase. Samsung is in a position to not only threaten Google but to decide to pull an Amazon and make their own Android.
Do you have proof that Samsung, Hyundai, and LG run the South Korean government? I supposed it's possible there is an influence; Samsung is the number one Android handset maker, selling 55% of Android phones and putting them in a position to twist Google's arm, perhaps even forking Android. With Google purchasing Motorola, Samsung will view Google as a direct competitor.
That could be a reference to earlier accusations that Google used its Android approval process to throw up obstacles for phone vendors who chose to ship with Bing as the default service. Google is a business and isn't giving Android away out of the goodness of its heart; the intent is that people use its services through the platform.
The responses to these stories are always interesting. Because it's Google, there will be criticisms of the South Korean commission and questioning of their claims. If this was Microsoft, however, the accusations would be taken at face value as more proof of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Google is being investigated all over the world for anti-competitive behavior, but you can't even suggest that Google has a monopoly on web search around here without getting pounded with downmods. Even the lead counsel who prosecuted Microsoft in their antitrust case believes Google is a monopoly.
It seems as if some people just can't believe that Google would ever do anything wrong. This isn't the cute little search engine from 2000. They went public and became an ad company; 97% of their revenue comes from web advertising. But I think they're really good at appealing to tech communities, using feel-good phrases like "openness" to make themselves more endearing to those demographics.
If you really think that the only thing that makes it similar-looking to Apple products is "rounded rectangles," then you're intentionally being obtuse for whatever reason. There comes a point where it's obvious that other companies are liberally borrowing from Jonathan Ive's design shop at Apple.
Vizio's PC concept looks like this. The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad, and though it's less of a copy than the others, the screen is certainly reminiscent of an iMac, especially taken as a whole with the rest of the components.
I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs. Not only is this taking advantage of design work done at Apple, but if the products turn out to be low-quality or problematic, their resemblance to existing Apple products ends up damaging Apple's brand as well. I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.
I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything, and they hate when people do credit them, so when comparisons between designs are pointed out, it pisses them off and they make snarky remarks about "rounded rectangles."
Android is worse than Windows Phone about updates. And Microsoft doesn't even have a "Corporate Monopoly" on phones. With all due respect, your post is a bit of a karma whore.
According to the article, they occasionally appear naturally, particularly in well-nourished colonies, leaving open the possibility of nature reselecting it as an evolutionary advantage.
You're the same anonymous guy who replies to everything I post, even days after the discussion was active. Same writing style and everything. It's completely obvious, and it does work because look how upset you get. I bet you have to resort to open proxies just to keep posting.
I have to disagree. I think humanity is getting dumber both due to in increased dependence on technology for its collective intelligence as well an increase in the spread of lazy misinformation through that technology. Evolution doesn't necessarily favor intelligence; it just favors whatever survives.
Ants rule. This is the coolest article Slashdot has published all week. Just look at these things. They're oversized, phallic monsters of doom with giant fuck-off heads. Unfortunately, it's hard to find out more about this ancient caste of ant because all the Google results right now are about this story, and there's no "History of ants" article on Wikipedia. But check out Martialis heureka, a newly discovered species in the Amazon that may represent the oldest living lineage of ants today.
Why do you think being such a supporter implies primarily supporting the GPL? The term "FLOSS" was invented to include both free and open source license types.
By the way, Eric Raymond had this to say about the FLOSS acronym: "Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery."
I don't want to wear 3D glasses in front of the glasses I already wear to see things. It's uncomfortable for me and silly. Also, as TV viewing grows more prevalent on mobile devices, 3D becomes even less applicable.
This doesn't appear to address fragmentation at all. To the contrary, fragmentation will be even easier, according to the article:
To be clear, this doesn't mean the death of phone makers' user interface customizations, such as HTC's Sense or Samsung's TouchWiz. Far from it: Google is also making it easier for developers to accommodate these custom interfaces, with a bit of code that adopts whatever theme the device is using by default. Essentially, app developers will be able to choose whether their apps will look more like stock Android 4.0, or like the phone maker's customized interface.
Recall that TouchWiz is the reason the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't get Ice Cream Sandwich despite being only months old. Just look at this chart of the completely broken upgrade cycle for Android smartphones--and note the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest version of iOS. The problem is that the carrier's business model is to sell you a new phone every six months. It's not in their best interests to provide upgrades and support. As far as they're concerned, interaction with the customer is over the moment you purchase the phone, so they don't give a crap about trying to provide a cohesive platform that interoperates with competing Android phones.
Seamless experiences win out in the long term. We saw this when gaming moved from PCs to consoles in the 2000s, and it's happening now in the transition to the post-PC era. The previous mobile web OS usage article raised a lot of eyebrows, because despite the fact Android has greater volume, it's turns out that it's actually #3 in web use behind Java ME and iOS, which means the majority of Android users are not using their phones like smartphones, for whatever reason. On top of that, developer support for Android dropped by one-third over the course of 2011 despite an increase in activations.
The fragmentation issue is something Google desperately needs to solve if it wants to avoid the same fate that desktop Linux did. Throwing something out there, calling it open, and letting "choice" steer the ship isn't going to do it. Requiring support for a theme is a step in the right direction, but all it means is that there is a default theme, not a standardized one.
Well, NicknameOne, what Google shouldn't do, obviously, is "inadvertently" hire SEO companies that turn around and do the exact same things Google polices others for.
If Google is not to blame because it was all done by a company they contracted, then they also shouldn't get any credit when they try to fix the bad publicity. And they shouldn't have punished JC Penney for the exact same thing, because JC Penney also claimed it was the actions of a contractor that they knew nothing about.
How about they shouldn't do it in the first place, since they've attacked other companies over the exact same SEO tactics? If a company acts like a moral authority, does the very thing it preaches against, and then slaps itself on the wrist only after being exposed, that's not something worth getting credit for. That's something that should remain a black mark, if only to keep them more honest. It's like the stereotypical religious believer who sins all weekend and then asks for forgiveness on Sunday, as if that suddenly negates everything prior.
It's not even a punishment, because Chrome still has a sponsored link at the top of the results for the term "browser," which Google pays itself to place there! Google deserves to be held to an even higher standard not only because of its moral position as web curator but also the inherent conflicts of interest that come with it. This is nothing to cheer Google over, and the consensus on the search engine blogs yesterday was that this is barely a punishment at all, all things considered. Contrast to the hugely negative publicity given to JC Penney in early 2011, who gave the exact same excuse Google is giving today--that they had no idea what their outsourced SEO company was doing.
Unfortunately, this punishment--which isn't a punishment at all since paid Chrome links still appear at the top of the page for the search term they're demoting it for--is not as severe as it was for other companies whose SEO tactics Google has taken issue with, including JC Penney, who gave the exact same excuse that Google is giving! JC Penney also claimed they had no idea what their outsourced SEO company was doing.
So while I expect a bunch of comments praising Google for being so awesome because it demoted a result for the term "browser", they only did it after a big round of negative news yesterday, from SearchEngineLand to the Washington Times, and Chrome still appears at the top of the results anyway (a sponsored result that Google pays itself for!).
Of course, the "RIGHT THING" costs them nothing, as the search term that Chrome is being punished for--"browser"--shows a paid-for Chrome link right at the top of the page, which cost them nothing since they pay themselves!
I've gone to see plenty of big films whose ticket prices were higher than the other films playing at the same theater in my town. I get that this is supposed to be a ~Big Evil Movie Industry~ article, but the premise isn't true--especially with Avatar, which the article acknowledges as an "interesting exception."
Since when do Silicon Valley types "like to think that they're libertarians?" Going by the posters here, they are not libertarians at all as they vehemently hate corporations. Silicon Valley is known to lean left--Google's Marissa Mayer had Obama as an invited guest at her home for a fundraiser, for crying out loud. So on what is the article basing that claim?
We're long past the processor speed wars and knee-deep in appliance computing, but some people still cling to those halcyon days of hardware spec leapfrogging, when bigger numbers were always better. Partly out of a feeling of control, and partly out of nostalgia.
I directly addressed the message in the very first paragraph of my post: free software wouldn't have stopped the government behavior that's being criticized here.
The article is about the messenger. It's called "Why Richard Stallman Was Right All Along." I pointed out other beliefs of Stallman's that are not so obviously right to illustrate the fact that just because someone spends 30 years being paranoid about everything, and then an event occurs that justifies a portion of that paranoia, it doesn't automatically mean all of his philosophy is correct or that his solutions are the right ones. For crying out loud, the guy thinks possession of child pornography should be legal.
You're 100% wrong. Google's customers are advertisers, and in web advertising, they are most definitely a monopoly. The services are given away to attract the product--you.
The whole article is a complete non sequitar. Free software wouldn't prevent Obama from signing an indefinite detention bill, nor it would it stop government intrusion on ISPs. There's no relationship between government overstepping the mark and buying a proprietary product from a company you respect because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice unrestricted access to its innards.
A broken clock can be right some of the time. Claiming Stallman was right all along is like claiming the paranoid street preacher predicting natural disasters as God's judgement was right all along after a hurricane hits. He may have predicted something that ended up occurring, but that doesn't mean his approach to solving the issue nor his philosophy are in the same bucket.
The author of this piece, Thom Holwerda at OSNews, is becoming known over there as a pandering, flamebait author in the vein of Dvorak. His essays come off as if they're specifically designed to get posted on Slashdot. Because of that, I suspect there will be more submissions from him in the future, unfortunately.
Google tends to exploit positive feelings about open source to bring devoted techies to its defense. It uses Linux, gives away free services, and talks about openness and patents--all predictable, hot-button issues for a crowd like Slashdot's. Just look at the first comment to this very article, which is an angry defense of Google and a dismissal of the entire submission that ends with a demand to "put something else in the queue".
The problem is that Google doesn't follow its own words about openness, patents, or fairness, but there are posters here who do not want to see negative discussion of Google at all, and if there is bad news about them, they exaggerate the amount of it to make it sound like there's been too much of it posted. They want Slashdot to be the place they go to get good news about the companies they like and bad news about the companies they hate, like a virtual pat on the back for feeling a certain way.
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Sure, Android is open...when Google decides to stop withholding the source. Your statement is inaccurate, because Google has an approval process for Android licensees and has been accused of using that approval process to putt up roadblocks for phone vendors trying to ship Android phones with competing services like Bing. The source may (eventually) be open, but use of the Android trademark and other features requires playing ball with Google.
Your post is an example of what I predicted would happen, that certain posters would accuse the government of corruption and dismiss any idea that Google is a monopoly. The problem with your premise is one Korean device manufacturer is in a great position to abandon Google's version of Android--Samsung, which sells 55% of Android phones. With HTC and LG going down, that percentage is only going to increase. Samsung is in a position to not only threaten Google but to decide to pull an Amazon and make their own Android.
Do you have proof that Samsung, Hyundai, and LG run the South Korean government? I supposed it's possible there is an influence; Samsung is the number one Android handset maker, selling 55% of Android phones and putting them in a position to twist Google's arm, perhaps even forking Android. With Google purchasing Motorola, Samsung will view Google as a direct competitor.
That could be a reference to earlier accusations that Google used its Android approval process to throw up obstacles for phone vendors who chose to ship with Bing as the default service. Google is a business and isn't giving Android away out of the goodness of its heart; the intent is that people use its services through the platform.
The responses to these stories are always interesting. Because it's Google, there will be criticisms of the South Korean commission and questioning of their claims. If this was Microsoft, however, the accusations would be taken at face value as more proof of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Google is being investigated all over the world for anti-competitive behavior, but you can't even suggest that Google has a monopoly on web search around here without getting pounded with downmods. Even the lead counsel who prosecuted Microsoft in their antitrust case believes Google is a monopoly.
It seems as if some people just can't believe that Google would ever do anything wrong. This isn't the cute little search engine from 2000. They went public and became an ad company; 97% of their revenue comes from web advertising. But I think they're really good at appealing to tech communities, using feel-good phrases like "openness" to make themselves more endearing to those demographics.
If you really think that the only thing that makes it similar-looking to Apple products is "rounded rectangles," then you're intentionally being obtuse for whatever reason. There comes a point where it's obvious that other companies are liberally borrowing from Jonathan Ive's design shop at Apple.
Vizio's PC concept looks like this. The keyboard looks just like Apple's flat keyboard introduced a few years ago, the trackpad is a clone of the Apple Trackpad, and though it's less of a copy than the others, the screen is certainly reminiscent of an iMac, especially taken as a whole with the rest of the components.
I'm not surprised at all that, with all the design work Apple puts into its products, it is going to try to protect that work from knockoffs. Not only is this taking advantage of design work done at Apple, but if the products turn out to be low-quality or problematic, their resemblance to existing Apple products ends up damaging Apple's brand as well. I realize Slashdot comments tend to have an Apple slant (to put it mildly), but come on, this is completely obvious "inspiration" from Apple.
I think what really goes on here is that some people just don't want to give Apple credit for anything, and they hate when people do credit them, so when comparisons between designs are pointed out, it pisses them off and they make snarky remarks about "rounded rectangles."
Android is worse than Windows Phone about updates. And Microsoft doesn't even have a "Corporate Monopoly" on phones. With all due respect, your post is a bit of a karma whore.
Come on. And the fact that you're still replying to me means you're tracking my profile to see if I've posted anything new.
Next.
According to the article, they occasionally appear naturally, particularly in well-nourished colonies, leaving open the possibility of nature reselecting it as an evolutionary advantage.
You're the same anonymous guy who replies to everything I post, even days after the discussion was active. Same writing style and everything. It's completely obvious, and it does work because look how upset you get. I bet you have to resort to open proxies just to keep posting.
I have to disagree. I think humanity is getting dumber both due to in increased dependence on technology for its collective intelligence as well an increase in the spread of lazy misinformation through that technology. Evolution doesn't necessarily favor intelligence; it just favors whatever survives.
Ants rule. This is the coolest article Slashdot has published all week. Just look at these things. They're oversized, phallic monsters of doom with giant fuck-off heads. Unfortunately, it's hard to find out more about this ancient caste of ant because all the Google results right now are about this story, and there's no "History of ants" article on Wikipedia. But check out Martialis heureka, a newly discovered species in the Amazon that may represent the oldest living lineage of ants today.
Why do you think being such a supporter implies primarily supporting the GPL? The term "FLOSS" was invented to include both free and open source license types.
By the way, Eric Raymond had this to say about the FLOSS acronym: "Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery."
I don't want to wear 3D glasses in front of the glasses I already wear to see things. It's uncomfortable for me and silly. Also, as TV viewing grows more prevalent on mobile devices, 3D becomes even less applicable.
This doesn't appear to address fragmentation at all. To the contrary, fragmentation will be even easier, according to the article:
Recall that TouchWiz is the reason the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab won't get Ice Cream Sandwich despite being only months old. Just look at this chart of the completely broken upgrade cycle for Android smartphones--and note the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest version of iOS. The problem is that the carrier's business model is to sell you a new phone every six months. It's not in their best interests to provide upgrades and support. As far as they're concerned, interaction with the customer is over the moment you purchase the phone, so they don't give a crap about trying to provide a cohesive platform that interoperates with competing Android phones.
Seamless experiences win out in the long term. We saw this when gaming moved from PCs to consoles in the 2000s, and it's happening now in the transition to the post-PC era. The previous mobile web OS usage article raised a lot of eyebrows, because despite the fact Android has greater volume, it's turns out that it's actually #3 in web use behind Java ME and iOS, which means the majority of Android users are not using their phones like smartphones, for whatever reason. On top of that, developer support for Android dropped by one-third over the course of 2011 despite an increase in activations.
The fragmentation issue is something Google desperately needs to solve if it wants to avoid the same fate that desktop Linux did. Throwing something out there, calling it open, and letting "choice" steer the ship isn't going to do it. Requiring support for a theme is a step in the right direction, but all it means is that there is a default theme, not a standardized one.
Well, NicknameOne, what Google shouldn't do, obviously, is "inadvertently" hire SEO companies that turn around and do the exact same things Google polices others for.
If Google is not to blame because it was all done by a company they contracted, then they also shouldn't get any credit when they try to fix the bad publicity. And they shouldn't have punished JC Penney for the exact same thing, because JC Penney also claimed it was the actions of a contractor that they knew nothing about.
You can't have it all.
How about they shouldn't do it in the first place, since they've attacked other companies over the exact same SEO tactics? If a company acts like a moral authority, does the very thing it preaches against, and then slaps itself on the wrist only after being exposed, that's not something worth getting credit for. That's something that should remain a black mark, if only to keep them more honest. It's like the stereotypical religious believer who sins all weekend and then asks for forgiveness on Sunday, as if that suddenly negates everything prior.
It's not even a punishment, because Chrome still has a sponsored link at the top of the results for the term "browser," which Google pays itself to place there! Google deserves to be held to an even higher standard not only because of its moral position as web curator but also the inherent conflicts of interest that come with it. This is nothing to cheer Google over, and the consensus on the search engine blogs yesterday was that this is barely a punishment at all, all things considered. Contrast to the hugely negative publicity given to JC Penney in early 2011, who gave the exact same excuse Google is giving today--that they had no idea what their outsourced SEO company was doing.
Unfortunately, this punishment--which isn't a punishment at all since paid Chrome links still appear at the top of the page for the search term they're demoting it for--is not as severe as it was for other companies whose SEO tactics Google has taken issue with, including JC Penney, who gave the exact same excuse that Google is giving! JC Penney also claimed they had no idea what their outsourced SEO company was doing.
So while I expect a bunch of comments praising Google for being so awesome because it demoted a result for the term "browser", they only did it after a big round of negative news yesterday, from SearchEngineLand to the Washington Times, and Chrome still appears at the top of the results anyway (a sponsored result that Google pays itself for!).
Of course, the "RIGHT THING" costs them nothing, as the search term that Chrome is being punished for--"browser"--shows a paid-for Chrome link right at the top of the page, which cost them nothing since they pay themselves!
I've gone to see plenty of big films whose ticket prices were higher than the other films playing at the same theater in my town. I get that this is supposed to be a ~Big Evil Movie Industry~ article, but the premise isn't true--especially with Avatar, which the article acknowledges as an "interesting exception."
Since when do Silicon Valley types "like to think that they're libertarians?" Going by the posters here, they are not libertarians at all as they vehemently hate corporations. Silicon Valley is known to lean left--Google's Marissa Mayer had Obama as an invited guest at her home for a fundraiser, for crying out loud. So on what is the article basing that claim?
We're long past the processor speed wars and knee-deep in appliance computing, but some people still cling to those halcyon days of hardware spec leapfrogging, when bigger numbers were always better. Partly out of a feeling of control, and partly out of nostalgia.
I directly addressed the message in the very first paragraph of my post: free software wouldn't have stopped the government behavior that's being criticized here.
The article is about the messenger. It's called "Why Richard Stallman Was Right All Along." I pointed out other beliefs of Stallman's that are not so obviously right to illustrate the fact that just because someone spends 30 years being paranoid about everything, and then an event occurs that justifies a portion of that paranoia, it doesn't automatically mean all of his philosophy is correct or that his solutions are the right ones. For crying out loud, the guy thinks possession of child pornography should be legal.
You're 100% wrong. Google's customers are advertisers, and in web advertising, they are most definitely a monopoly. The services are given away to attract the product--you.
The whole article is a complete non sequitar. Free software wouldn't prevent Obama from signing an indefinite detention bill, nor it would it stop government intrusion on ISPs. There's no relationship between government overstepping the mark and buying a proprietary product from a company you respect because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice unrestricted access to its innards.
Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia" should be legal, including possession of child pornography. He doesn't visit web sites--instead, he sends email to a daemon that wgets the page and emails it back to him. Perhaps most infamously, he eats toe jam in public.
Perhaps not the best spokesperson to get behind.
A broken clock can be right some of the time. Claiming Stallman was right all along is like claiming the paranoid street preacher predicting natural disasters as God's judgement was right all along after a hurricane hits. He may have predicted something that ended up occurring, but that doesn't mean his approach to solving the issue nor his philosophy are in the same bucket.
The author of this piece, Thom Holwerda at OSNews, is becoming known over there as a pandering, flamebait author in the vein of Dvorak. His essays come off as if they're specifically designed to get posted on Slashdot. Because of that, I suspect there will be more submissions from him in the future, unfortunately.
Google tends to exploit positive feelings about open source to bring devoted techies to its defense. It uses Linux, gives away free services, and talks about openness and patents--all predictable, hot-button issues for a crowd like Slashdot's. Just look at the first comment to this very article, which is an angry defense of Google and a dismissal of the entire submission that ends with a demand to "put something else in the queue".
The problem is that Google doesn't follow its own words about openness, patents, or fairness, but there are posters here who do not want to see negative discussion of Google at all, and if there is bad news about them, they exaggerate the amount of it to make it sound like there's been too much of it posted. They want Slashdot to be the place they go to get good news about the companies they like and bad news about the companies they hate, like a virtual pat on the back for feeling a certain way.