I keep seeing this post in every article about tablets. So I have to ask, is this the best troll you could come up with?
Your question would have more credibility if it ended "Posted from my iPad" or "Posted from my Xoom!" or whatever.
I only know one person who's bought a tablet-style computer (a real computer, not a tablet, but a portable computer with a touch screen and detachable keyboard). It's not even on the radar for most people. They have a computer kicking around somewhere, and that's their version of "good enough 'puting". For anything else, they have a phone.
The people making all the hype are the web shops trying to sell customers on "increase your market penetration by developing for tablets!" It's replaced "let us optimize your site to game the search engines" SEO crap.
What people really want is a laptop-sized tablet with all the electronics built into the screen, a flip-down stand, a remote, a detachable or blutooth keyboard and mouse, a full operating system, and the ability to plug in a second display to stretch the desktop, so they can treat it like any other computer when they want to, or use the touch screen when that's all they need to use is a "tablet computer".
Or has everyone already forgotten the collective disappointment when they found out that the iPad ran IOS and not Darwin?
Think of what you could do with something like that with a 17" display that weighed less than a conventional 15" laptop and displayed full 1920 hd.
Hi squiggy! The real reason people buy them is because they imagine scenarios where they can use them, a sort of "wouldn't it be neat if..."
Just like all those people who bought computers in the beginning "to index their recipes."
"Wouldn't it be neat to surf the web while watching TV?" becomes "Gee, I'm not really enjoying either of them all that much now since they both compete for my attention."
I've seen exactly one person using one - and that was on the subway. He looked uncomfortable trying to balance it on his lap and type, and one good jolt would have sent it to the the floor. He would have been better off with a laptop.
It's like the Wii - a lot of people buy them, but don't use them all that much. The difference is, the Wii was targeted to the casual gamer, and casual gamers aren't going to use it every day, or even every week. And of course, it costs a lot less (down to $125 now) compared to a tablet, so expectations are lower in terms of utility for the buck. Oh, and it doesn't need any sort of network connection... and it can be used by more than one person at a time...
Funny how there was room for a number 'n' when Symbian, WM, iOS, whatever, was in the lead.
Symbian and WM were developed for the regular mobile phone market - before smartphones existed, and before IOS existed. Attempts to "bolt on" smartphone functionality have failed in the one place it counts - with the consumer, so there never was room for that big a number "n" in either the smartphone or tablet space.
Witness the failure, now going on 20 years, of Microsofts' tablets. Microsoft has been in the tablet biz since 1991, and STILL is saying "next year, next year..."
Even Microsofties are now saying "Wait for the unified world of WP8".
In the meantime, Apple continues to sell every tablet they can make, no discounting.
And Android smartphones outsell everyone else.
The "Unified world" will be a divided one - Android smartphones and tablets, and Apple smartphones and tablets. There is no room for a #3 (just like on the desktop, or we would have had a "year of the linux desktop" already) unless you consider < 1% to be "success".
So what you're saying is the only thing of value in WebOS and Android is the Linux kernel?
No, the patches to allow the linux kernel to run on a phone, for example, are of value - they're also available for download, as are all the other patches.
As far as the WebOS UI - UIs come, UIs go, and for many people a gesture-based interface doesn't work on a desktop (which is where HP wanted to extend it). Gesture-based interfaces that don't have non-gesture alternatives for all actions also violate both accessibility rules and the Americans with Disabilities Act. From my point of view, that makes them a non-starter, especially since gesture-based interfaces are not only not intuitive (each implementer has to do it differently or they'll get sued), but slow down productivity.
Sure, most of these devices will be used as consumers of content most of the time, not producers of content - but the simple fact is that having a different set of gestures to do the same thing on different platforms is going to be a problem. What am I saying - it already IS a problem. It will remain a problem until software patents die.
What next - Microsoft trying to claim that their "tiles" are innovative? Or that updating a grid of tiles in real time is innovative? Oh, wait - that's exactly what they blew half a billion (and counting - not counting the billion they gave Nokia) on trying to get the public to think... and it didn't work; and what's worse, according to some reports almost 2 out of every 3 of those WP7 phones that were stuffed into the channel at launch remain unsold.
As for Android, the dalvik runtime engine can be (and should be) replaced with something better. Preferably something that lets the original source code be converted directly to native binaries, perhaps with clib suitably patched to allow for more security checks. The benefits would include faster apps and longer battery life, as well as a big gesture (raised middle finger) to Oracle's claims that converting java class files to dalvik classes infringes, and that using the dalvik runtime also infringes. No java class files would ever be involved, not with the programmer, not with the compiler, and not with a runtime (neither a java nor a dalvik runtime would be required). Works for Apple IOS devs using c, c++, or objective c.
Davik is a stop-gap. You wouldn't want it for desktop apps, so why is it all the rage for tablets and smartphones running Android? Because it was a quick-and-dirty way to get people to write a lot of apps. It should eventually be dropped.
First, many (most?) newer airbags deploy by forcibly splitting the airbag cover on the steering wheel. The cover stays in place. example.
Second, the cover of the airbag is flexible. A steering-wheel-mounted LCD+touchscreen is not, and doesn't meet current safety requirements. Plus, having your hands fiddling around with a steering-wheel-mounted touch screen when the airbag explodes means you get to punch yourself in the face.
I guess that's one way to literally pound the message into people's heads that they shouldn't be texting when they're driving.
Are BlackBerry phones also headed toward rounding error?
Their manufacturer, RIM, is doing the Nortel thing, so quite possibly. More likely, they'll be bought out.
Flash and HTML5 JavaScript are managed environments; are they likewise headed toward rounding error?
What does that have to do with my observation that WP7, which is an operating system, not a programming language or environment, is already dead? We're already hearing the usual suspects chanting "just wait for Windows 8 on the smartphone!"
Considering that Nokia is now in death-spiral mode. They lost $692 million in the last 3 months alone. At that rate of cash burn, they are out of cash in another 6 quarters - and their cash requirements are only going to rise as they try to launch WP7 phones - it costs a lot to fill the channel, promote, etc.
The billion they got from Microsoft to go with WP7 instead of Android is gone, and they're still half a year away from selling a WP7 phone. Microsoft, having burned through several billion trying to get a foot in the smartphone ecosystem, is going to have to keep the cash flowing.
Considering that 2 out of 3 WP7 phones that were shipped are still sitting unsold on store shelves, it looks like there are now almost as many Android smartphone activations every day as all the WP7 phones ever sold - and Android daily activation rates are increasing by about 5.5% a month.
The only joke bigger than WP7 in the mobile space is Steve Ballmer and the Microsoft Board of Directors. WP7 isn't even on the radar in terms of being a threat to anyone.
What I would like to see, though, are touch screens in the middle of the steering wheel
I have one word for you - airbag. It's bad enough with people showing up in the ER with their finger shoved so far up their nose that their eyeball is displaced (stop picking your noses in traffic, people - it's not just gross, it can disfigure you for life)... you want to smack them in the face with a touch screen at 200 mph?
Actually, on second thought... if they're tweeting or facebooking at the time, smack away!
The Business Insider article is really stupid, not the least when it says HP needs to buy RIM - especially for this reason:
and it needs to buy scale and distribution and that's RIM.
RIM isn't a distributor - its' phones are distributed by the telcos and other mobile phone distributors. And RIM's tablet is as much of a non-seller as HP's - and the reason given - HP's mobile software would supposedly complement RIM's hardware - is completely bogus. They run on completely different operating systems. It would make more sense for HP to be bought up by Samsung or LG.
If anyone is going to buy RIM, it will be Google. They have enough cash on hand to pay the same 60% premium over current market that they paid for Motorola Mobile, and they'd not only get another juicy chunk of mobile and security patents, but also access to RIM's end-to-end encryption. Android already is the #1 smartphone OS with 48% of the market (compared to Apple at 19% - WP7 is a joke at 1% and declining) - imagine giving Android phones and tablets the end-to-end secure messaging that the Blackberry has? Business and government would be mandating Android as the preferred platform.
we're going to ask "how much energy can we save by converting [insert application of your choice] from a managed or interpreted language to a program compiled in c or c++?
Or maybe we're not. Maybe we'll end up with devices that can't run third-party native code, like BlackBerry phones, phones running Windows Phone 7,
However, I wasn't thinking of smartphones, but of server farms, desktops, and laptops. There are big energy savings to be had by making code faster, and native is the way to do it.
But you have a point - if your two-class divide comes about, people are going to shun the small guy or gal because his or her code will eat into their battery life.
c/c++ have always been perfectly useable for doing both system and application programming. And with the inevitable increased emphasis on energy efficiency, we're going to ask "how much energy can we save by converting [insert application of your choice] from a managed or interpreted language to a program compiled in c or c++?
For some large-scale applications, not only is it the best option, but the only option if you want to ever finish before the next [load of data/batch of requests] comes in.
Also, with Facebook you only get ads and targeting within Facebook. With Google+ they use that data all over the internet.
Totally wrong. See all those "like" buttons on all the sites? All those sites hit facebooks' servers every time you load a page, and facebook links each hit with your FB identity, so they are tracking you all over the internet.
If you're anonymous, and you then create a facebook account, facebook tries to match up your prior anonymous surfing with your newly-created account.
*cough* Zune *cough* The question isn't whether Microsoft will spend and spend to try to get market share, as they did with the xbox, but whether they have the ability to succeed.
In the case of phones, Windows Mobile (in its various incantations) had decent market share. Along came Apple and killed them. Then along came Google+Android and grabbed 48% of the smartphone market. Microsoft is #4 or #5, at 1% of the market, which is pretty bad considering they have now invested well over half a billion in marketing WP7. They can spend all they want - it's not going anywhere, and it's dragging their new BFF Nokia into the dustbin.
Ditto with tablets. Microsoft had a working tablet more than a decade ago. Along comes Apple, and they can't make them fast enough. And now Android gives Motorola Mobility a perceived value of over $12 billion (considering how a few years ago, people weren't sure Moto was going to survive since they couldn't duplicate the success of the Moto Razr... well, their current value is due in part to Android).
So where is Microsoft with its tablets? Waiting for new cpus from Intel that will help with Windows terrible power management. Oh, right, that didn't work out too well, seeing as everyone else continues to increase battery life, so now they have to do like the competition - ARM to the rescue - except it won't.
Nothing will change until they get rid of the last legacy of Bill Gates, and that would be Steve Ballmer. I'm hoping Ballmer stays a looooong time, and the way he basically showed the BoD that the day he's gone, he ready to cash out all his shares and tank the stock, he's in there thick as a bedbug.
Google and Sony are already part of the patent pool at the Open Invention Network - the patent pool set up to defend linux. So are other heavyweights such as IBM and HP.
Adding Motorola's patents, many of which are specific to mobile, will protect the core of Android. This is Apple's worst nightmare, since it means that now the shoe is on the other foot - the Android makers have at least as much, if not more, ammo in any patent war, and Android, already with 48% market share, is going to have what amounts to a name-brand reference implementer.
The other Android manufacturers will ultimately see this as Google saying "We're in this for the long haul, and we'll spend whatever it takes to defend Android, and coincidentally, you."
Bonus question: Since Moto will continue to operate as a separate business, will Google buy RIM at some point? After all, the company has a product with some desirable features, and a boatload of patents in wireless and security. Imagine a world where all Android devices can offer optional Blackberry-style message security. Now imagine all Apple and WP7 phones NOT having it. How many people would pay a premium (offering better margins to both the manufacturers and the telcos) for the superior Android product? They have enough cash on hand to do both deals, even if they offer a 50% premium for RIM.
WRT antitrust concerns, GOOG could argue that just as MMI will be run independently, they will do the same for RIMM. Also, that they continue to offer the Android system to everyone, including any newcomer, so it will continue to increase, not decrease, competition in the smartphone, tablet, and small-form-factor laptop spaces.
Except that what Microsoft got with the Nokia deal was a company whose products are now basically on hiatus, as it takes a year to transition to the already-failed WP7 platform (WP7 has 1/48 the smartphone market share of Android). In other words, a total waste of money.
Moto, on the other hand, sells Androids... and Android, at 48% market share, is 50% more than Apple, RIM and WP7 combined.
Over the long term, the acquisition should help grow Google's bottom line as both smartphones and tablets supplant "regular computers". And it's not like Moto isn't worth something right now, so the only "risk" is the premium over the stock price, which is worth it from a patents point of view, going forward.
Or you could pay for everything via either cheque, debit card, online bank payment, or email debit. This way, the only entity that has access to all your info is the bank you deal with. Paypal, the credit card companies, etc., are totally cut out.
Even my very dated copy of "The Joy of Cooking" makes fun of the U.S. Supreme Court trying to classify tomatoes as vegetables. BTW - they only classified them as vegetables for the purpose of taxation - they made it clear that they were still fruits for all other purposes. So, since we're talking about cooking and eating, and not taxes, your Supreme Court reference is yet another fail.
Read all the other comments by other posters under the original post that started it all - there are plenty of people who know that tomatoes are fruits, that good ones are in fact as sweet as other fruits, and that they can and are often treated as a fruit when preparing food.
The salad I'm currently eating consists mostly of fruits - grapes, tomatoes, green peppers, olives, hot red pepper rings (I skipped the cucumbers today)... the non-fruit parts are romaine lettuce and spanish onion, and bacon bits. Take the lettuce, onion, and bacon bits out and it is indeed a fruit salad.
Either way, it's an entire meal in itself, but the majority of the taste and nutritional value is provided by the fruits. Next time, maybe I'll include apple slices and orange chunks.
Your real mistake is being bound by "tradition" rather than by taste and nutritional value. Your loss.
See, I'm not the one who initially made the determination that tomatoes are not traditionally eaten with the dessert course and are rather served with the main course of a meal.
So by that logic, the local restaurant believes oranges and melons are vegetables because they serve them with eggs and bacon for breakfast.
Ditto for all those pineapples on the ham at thanksgiving and Christmas.
And the apples used in the turkey stuffing are also veggies?
And those olives in the before-supper cocktails or with the main course are now somehow veggies?
Or all those stuffed bell peppers are now veggies?
What course of the meal a fruit is served with has nothing to do with whether it's a vegetable or a fruit, and if we stopped trying to call fruits vegetables, we'd realize just how many different fruits we consume, and how we consume fewer real vegetables than we think. Fruits and vegetables can be mixed in the same dish without the world falling apart, same as vegetables and legumes.
Fruits are not all sweet, nor are they reserved just for dessert.
The fact is that tomatoes are fruits. Calling them vegetables is just spreading ignorance. Trying to detract from that by saying I have the reading skills of a 5-year-old was childish on your part. Trying to claim that precedent takes precedent over the facts, and accusing me of being the one pulling facts out of their rectum, was no better.
Botanically, as tomatoes are the ovary of the tomato plant, they are considered to be fruits. However, culinarily, as they are not sweet and are primarily used in savory dishes, tomatoes are considered to be vegetables. The upshot of this is that no matter what you call them, you are wrong. Thanks, science!
You invoked both a claim that tomatoes are not sweet (false), a claim that they are not considered fruits for culinary purposes (again false), and science (again, false).
You then go on about how tomatoes are never used in fruit salad (lame and false), and how they "taste fucking disgusting in a pie" (the Food Network disagrees), etc.
You then argued that if it goes into a salad, then it's a vegetable, which is obviously again false, since olives, macaroni, shrimp, octopus, crab, cucumbers, bacon bits, chicken breast chunks, cheese chunks, grapes, orange and apple slices, tuna fish, turkey, pineapple, salmon, salt, sausage slices, strawberries, cream cheese, croutons, and tomatoes are obviously not vegetables.
So when you write:
Maybe you, on the other hand, should consider why yours is so connected to putting on blinders and denying simple facts as they are.
... I have to wonder just how wilfully blind you are, to deny simple facts - tomatoes are used in fruit salads in some places, tomato pie exists and is not disgusting, salads contain non-vegetables, including vine fruits such as grapes and tomatoes, and that your trying to argue that precedent has to take precedence over the facts would have us all joining the flat earth society.
Lame, lame, lame. Typical male stupidity - you keep going down the same road rather than admit you're wrong, despite all the signs saying "you're going the wrong way."
Walk into any restaurant today and ask for a fruit salad. Tell me how many serve you one that contains tomatoes and cucumbers.
So only the fruits contained in a fruit salad are fruits? Your logic fail is astounding. Opening up a can of fruit salad, by your logic bananas are not a fruit. Apples are not a fruit. Mangoes are not a fruit. Raspberries and strawberries are not fruit. Neither are the vast majority of these fruits. (btw - notice the tomato is listed as a culinary fruit).
With your massive denial-of-reality and unwillingness to admit you got it wrong, you should be careful of who you call a terrible cook.
Culinarily speaking, nobody gives a shit what the biological function of an ingredient is.
Really? Tell that to the people who recommend foods because of their anti-oxidant properties, or because they include roughage that helps prevent colon cancer, or the people who drink coffee for the caffeine, or the people who have dietary restrictions (lactose intolerance, allergies, Crons disease, diabetes, etc) who have to be careful about the biological functions of ingredients.
If you feel you're an exception, feel free to drink a cup of hemlock and ignore the biological properties. Let us know how that works out.
The simple fact is that every living animal on this planet eats food primarily for its' biological properties - the supply of raw materials and energy - and not because of the taste. So you even got that assertion wrong.
Keep on - you're just further exposing your oh-so-easily-damaged ego for what it is, since you clearly can't admit you're wrong in the face of the facts, and have to keep making stupider and stupider excuses (like your "fruit salad" example, which a quick search of the internet will disprove - there are fruit salads that contain cherry tomatoes, among others).
Face it - you got caught being stupid, and I called you out on it, and your only argument is to ignore the facts. Abraham Lincoln once asked "If we call a tail to be a leg, how many legs does a cat have?" And when people answered "5", he said "Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
Similarly, calling a tomato a vegetable doesn't make it one, and trying to use the same culinary practices to preserve it as you would for vegetables, as opposed to fruits, will result in rotten tomatoes.
Tomatoes are sweet fruits - it's the cheap tomatoes that taste like veggies. Good home-grown tomatoes are easily more flavourful than, say, most apples. Like grapes (another vine-grown fruit), they're juicy and they make a great snack all by themselves.
Your opinion on this matter is irrelevant.
Except that your opinion on this matter is plain wrong, whereas mine is based on fact. Ignore the facts if you want, but don't try to rewrite them.
It's bad enough that the government does that all the time, with disastrous results, like trying to convince markets that a US deficit over 10 trillion would be sustainable instead of passing the tipping point and snowballing, as I predicted here when the deficit was under 10 trillion. So, while you say that my opinion is "irrelevant", it sometimes is pretty well aligned with the facts, same as my prediction in another journal entry that houses would drop by at least 20% while they were still rising.
One of my other predictions was that the US would try to "inflate the deficit away" - that's also coming to pass, with officials saying that the idea of a US default is ridiculous because "we can always print more money." So the greenback, which has already lost about 95% of it's value in 40 years, will continue its decline. But you're free to ignore reality and say that it's not a decline. Won't change the facts, just like calling a tomato a veggie doesn't make it one.
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Your question would have more credibility if it ended "Posted from my iPad" or "Posted from my Xoom!" or whatever.
I only know one person who's bought a tablet-style computer (a real computer, not a tablet, but a portable computer with a touch screen and detachable keyboard). It's not even on the radar for most people. They have a computer kicking around somewhere, and that's their version of "good enough 'puting". For anything else, they have a phone.
The people making all the hype are the web shops trying to sell customers on "increase your market penetration by developing for tablets!" It's replaced "let us optimize your site to game the search engines" SEO crap.
What people really want is a laptop-sized tablet with all the electronics built into the screen, a flip-down stand, a remote, a detachable or blutooth keyboard and mouse, a full operating system, and the ability to plug in a second display to stretch the desktop, so they can treat it like any other computer when they want to, or use the touch screen when that's all they need to use is a "tablet computer".
Or has everyone already forgotten the collective disappointment when they found out that the iPad ran IOS and not Darwin?
Think of what you could do with something like that with a 17" display that weighed less than a conventional 15" laptop and displayed full 1920 hd.
Just like all those people who bought computers in the beginning "to index their recipes."
"Wouldn't it be neat to surf the web while watching TV?" becomes "Gee, I'm not really enjoying either of them all that much now since they both compete for my attention."
I've seen exactly one person using one - and that was on the subway. He looked uncomfortable trying to balance it on his lap and type, and one good jolt would have sent it to the the floor. He would have been better off with a laptop.
It's like the Wii - a lot of people buy them, but don't use them all that much. The difference is, the Wii was targeted to the casual gamer, and casual gamers aren't going to use it every day, or even every week. And of course, it costs a lot less (down to $125 now) compared to a tablet, so expectations are lower in terms of utility for the buck. Oh, and it doesn't need any sort of network connection ... and it can be used by more than one person at a time ...
Symbian and WM were developed for the regular mobile phone market - before smartphones existed, and before IOS existed. Attempts to "bolt on" smartphone functionality have failed in the one place it counts - with the consumer, so there never was room for that big a number "n" in either the smartphone or tablet space.
Witness the failure, now going on 20 years, of Microsofts' tablets. Microsoft has been in the tablet biz since 1991, and STILL is saying "next year, next year ..."
Even Microsofties are now saying "Wait for the unified world of WP8".
In the meantime, Apple continues to sell every tablet they can make, no discounting.
And Android smartphones outsell everyone else.
The "Unified world" will be a divided one - Android smartphones and tablets, and Apple smartphones and tablets. There is no room for a #3 (just like on the desktop, or we would have had a "year of the linux desktop" already) unless you consider < 1% to be "success".
No, the patches to allow the linux kernel to run on a phone, for example, are of value - they're also available for download, as are all the other patches.
As far as the WebOS UI - UIs come, UIs go, and for many people a gesture-based interface doesn't work on a desktop (which is where HP wanted to extend it). Gesture-based interfaces that don't have non-gesture alternatives for all actions also violate both accessibility rules and the Americans with Disabilities Act. From my point of view, that makes them a non-starter, especially since gesture-based interfaces are not only not intuitive (each implementer has to do it differently or they'll get sued), but slow down productivity.
Sure, most of these devices will be used as consumers of content most of the time, not producers of content - but the simple fact is that having a different set of gestures to do the same thing on different platforms is going to be a problem. What am I saying - it already IS a problem. It will remain a problem until software patents die.
What next - Microsoft trying to claim that their "tiles" are innovative? Or that updating a grid of tiles in real time is innovative? Oh, wait - that's exactly what they blew half a billion (and counting - not counting the billion they gave Nokia) on trying to get the public to think ... and it didn't work; and what's worse, according to some reports almost 2 out of every 3 of those WP7 phones that were stuffed into the channel at launch remain unsold.
As for Android, the dalvik runtime engine can be (and should be) replaced with something better. Preferably something that lets the original source code be converted directly to native binaries, perhaps with clib suitably patched to allow for more security checks. The benefits would include faster apps and longer battery life, as well as a big gesture (raised middle finger) to Oracle's claims that converting java class files to dalvik classes infringes, and that using the dalvik runtime also infringes. No java class files would ever be involved, not with the programmer, not with the compiler, and not with a runtime (neither a java nor a dalvik runtime would be required). Works for Apple IOS devs using c, c++, or objective c.
Davik is a stop-gap. You wouldn't want it for desktop apps, so why is it all the rage for tablets and smartphones running Android? Because it was a quick-and-dirty way to get people to write a lot of apps. It should eventually be dropped.
linuxjournal is squatting linuxgazette.com. You may want to try the net domain for the real thing.
I stopped buying linux journal when the articles became too predictable - rehashes of the same articles from the same month the previous year. Boring!
WebOS, like Android, runs atop the linux kernel. You can download the source, plus the patches, from the palm website.
First, many (most?) newer airbags deploy by forcibly splitting the airbag cover on the steering wheel. The cover stays in place. example.
Second, the cover of the airbag is flexible. A steering-wheel-mounted LCD+touchscreen is not, and doesn't meet current safety requirements. Plus, having your hands fiddling around with a steering-wheel-mounted touch screen when the airbag explodes means you get to punch yourself in the face.
I guess that's one way to literally pound the message into people's heads that they shouldn't be texting when they're driving.
Their manufacturer, RIM, is doing the Nortel thing, so quite possibly. More likely, they'll be bought out.
What does that have to do with my observation that WP7, which is an operating system, not a programming language or environment, is already dead? We're already hearing the usual suspects chanting "just wait for Windows 8 on the smartphone!"
Considering that Nokia is now in death-spiral mode. They lost $692 million in the last 3 months alone. At that rate of cash burn, they are out of cash in another 6 quarters - and their cash requirements are only going to rise as they try to launch WP7 phones - it costs a lot to fill the channel, promote, etc.
The billion they got from Microsoft to go with WP7 instead of Android is gone, and they're still half a year away from selling a WP7 phone. Microsoft, having burned through several billion trying to get a foot in the smartphone ecosystem, is going to have to keep the cash flowing.
Considering that 2 out of 3 WP7 phones that were shipped are still sitting unsold on store shelves, it looks like there are now almost as many Android smartphone activations every day as all the WP7 phones ever sold - and Android daily activation rates are increasing by about 5.5% a month.
The only joke bigger than WP7 in the mobile space is Steve Ballmer and the Microsoft Board of Directors. WP7 isn't even on the radar in terms of being a threat to anyone.
They announce this right before the back-to-school season - the biggest time for laptop sales.
They just pulled a Nokia here - nobody is going to buy an HP laptop unless it is seriously discounted.
I have one word for you - airbag. It's bad enough with people showing up in the ER with their finger shoved so far up their nose that their eyeball is displaced (stop picking your noses in traffic, people - it's not just gross, it can disfigure you for life) ... you want to smack them in the face with a touch screen at 200 mph?
Actually, on second thought ... if they're tweeting or facebooking at the time, smack away!
The Business Insider article is really stupid, not the least when it says HP needs to buy RIM - especially for this reason:
RIM isn't a distributor - its' phones are distributed by the telcos and other mobile phone distributors. And RIM's tablet is as much of a non-seller as HP's - and the reason given - HP's mobile software would supposedly complement RIM's hardware - is completely bogus. They run on completely different operating systems. It would make more sense for HP to be bought up by Samsung or LG.
If anyone is going to buy RIM, it will be Google. They have enough cash on hand to pay the same 60% premium over current market that they paid for Motorola Mobile, and they'd not only get another juicy chunk of mobile and security patents, but also access to RIM's end-to-end encryption. Android already is the #1 smartphone OS with 48% of the market (compared to Apple at 19% - WP7 is a joke at 1% and declining) - imagine giving Android phones and tablets the end-to-end secure messaging that the Blackberry has? Business and government would be mandating Android as the preferred platform.
At the rate WP7 market share is declining, it will be a rounding error. It's already down to half what it was last year, now at 1%.
However, I wasn't thinking of smartphones, but of server farms, desktops, and laptops. There are big energy savings to be had by making code faster, and native is the way to do it.
But you have a point - if your two-class divide comes about, people are going to shun the small guy or gal because his or her code will eat into their battery life.
c/c++ have always been perfectly useable for doing both system and application programming. And with the inevitable increased emphasis on energy efficiency, we're going to ask "how much energy can we save by converting [insert application of your choice] from a managed or interpreted language to a program compiled in c or c++?
For some large-scale applications, not only is it the best option, but the only option if you want to ever finish before the next [load of data/batch of requests] comes in.
Totally wrong. See all those "like" buttons on all the sites? All those sites hit facebooks' servers every time you load a page, and facebook links each hit with your FB identity, so they are tracking you all over the internet.
If you're anonymous, and you then create a facebook account, facebook tries to match up your prior anonymous surfing with your newly-created account.
In the email following their "invoice", the sender (L. N. Roew - roewin5@gmail.com) claims to be a part-owner of Wikipedia:
Of course, Wikimedia denies all knowledge of this individual.
Tsk tsk tsk. If you're going to troll a troll, at least make it somewhat believable.
*cough* Zune *cough* The question isn't whether Microsoft will spend and spend to try to get market share, as they did with the xbox, but whether they have the ability to succeed.
In the case of phones, Windows Mobile (in its various incantations) had decent market share. Along came Apple and killed them. Then along came Google+Android and grabbed 48% of the smartphone market. Microsoft is #4 or #5, at 1% of the market, which is pretty bad considering they have now invested well over half a billion in marketing WP7. They can spend all they want - it's not going anywhere, and it's dragging their new BFF Nokia into the dustbin.
Ditto with tablets. Microsoft had a working tablet more than a decade ago. Along comes Apple, and they can't make them fast enough. And now Android gives Motorola Mobility a perceived value of over $12 billion (considering how a few years ago, people weren't sure Moto was going to survive since they couldn't duplicate the success of the Moto Razr ... well, their current value is due in part to Android).
So where is Microsoft with its tablets? Waiting for new cpus from Intel that will help with Windows terrible power management. Oh, right, that didn't work out too well, seeing as everyone else continues to increase battery life, so now they have to do like the competition - ARM to the rescue - except it won't.
Nothing will change until they get rid of the last legacy of Bill Gates, and that would be Steve Ballmer. I'm hoping Ballmer stays a looooong time, and the way he basically showed the BoD that the day he's gone, he ready to cash out all his shares and tank the stock, he's in there thick as a bedbug.
Google and Sony are already part of the patent pool at the Open Invention Network - the patent pool set up to defend linux. So are other heavyweights such as IBM and HP.
Adding Motorola's patents, many of which are specific to mobile, will protect the core of Android. This is Apple's worst nightmare, since it means that now the shoe is on the other foot - the Android makers have at least as much, if not more, ammo in any patent war, and Android, already with 48% market share, is going to have what amounts to a name-brand reference implementer.
The other Android manufacturers will ultimately see this as Google saying "We're in this for the long haul, and we'll spend whatever it takes to defend Android, and coincidentally, you."
Bonus question: Since Moto will continue to operate as a separate business, will Google buy RIM at some point? After all, the company has a product with some desirable features, and a boatload of patents in wireless and security. Imagine a world where all Android devices can offer optional Blackberry-style message security. Now imagine all Apple and WP7 phones NOT having it. How many people would pay a premium (offering better margins to both the manufacturers and the telcos) for the superior Android product? They have enough cash on hand to do both deals, even if they offer a 50% premium for RIM.
WRT antitrust concerns, GOOG could argue that just as MMI will be run independently, they will do the same for RIMM. Also, that they continue to offer the Android system to everyone, including any newcomer, so it will continue to increase, not decrease, competition in the smartphone, tablet, and small-form-factor laptop spaces.
Except that what Microsoft got with the Nokia deal was a company whose products are now basically on hiatus, as it takes a year to transition to the already-failed WP7 platform (WP7 has 1/48 the smartphone market share of Android). In other words, a total waste of money.
Moto, on the other hand, sells Androids ... and Android, at 48% market share, is 50% more than Apple, RIM and WP7 combined.
Over the long term, the acquisition should help grow Google's bottom line as both smartphones and tablets supplant "regular computers". And it's not like Moto isn't worth something right now, so the only "risk" is the premium over the stock price, which is worth it from a patents point of view, going forward.
Or you could pay for everything via either cheque, debit card, online bank payment, or email debit. This way, the only entity that has access to all your info is the bank you deal with. Paypal, the credit card companies, etc., are totally cut out.
Even my very dated copy of "The Joy of Cooking" makes fun of the U.S. Supreme Court trying to classify tomatoes as vegetables. BTW - they only classified them as vegetables for the purpose of taxation - they made it clear that they were still fruits for all other purposes. So, since we're talking about cooking and eating, and not taxes, your Supreme Court reference is yet another fail.
Read all the other comments by other posters under the original post that started it all - there are plenty of people who know that tomatoes are fruits, that good ones are in fact as sweet as other fruits, and that they can and are often treated as a fruit when preparing food.
The salad I'm currently eating consists mostly of fruits - grapes, tomatoes, green peppers, olives, hot red pepper rings (I skipped the cucumbers today) ... the non-fruit parts are romaine lettuce and spanish onion, and bacon bits. Take the lettuce, onion, and bacon bits out and it is indeed a fruit salad.
Either way, it's an entire meal in itself, but the majority of the taste and nutritional value is provided by the fruits. Next time, maybe I'll include apple slices and orange chunks.
Your real mistake is being bound by "tradition" rather than by taste and nutritional value. Your loss.
So by that logic, the local restaurant believes oranges and melons are vegetables because they serve them with eggs and bacon for breakfast.
Ditto for all those pineapples on the ham at thanksgiving and Christmas.
And the apples used in the turkey stuffing are also veggies?
And those olives in the before-supper cocktails or with the main course are now somehow veggies?
Or all those stuffed bell peppers are now veggies?
What course of the meal a fruit is served with has nothing to do with whether it's a vegetable or a fruit, and if we stopped trying to call fruits vegetables, we'd realize just how many different fruits we consume, and how we consume fewer real vegetables than we think. Fruits and vegetables can be mixed in the same dish without the world falling apart, same as vegetables and legumes.
Fruits are not all sweet, nor are they reserved just for dessert.
But lets look at your original assertion
You invoked both a claim that tomatoes are not sweet (false), a claim that they are not considered fruits for culinary purposes (again false), and science (again, false).
You then go on about how tomatoes are never used in fruit salad (lame and false), and how they "taste fucking disgusting in a pie" (the Food Network disagrees), etc.
You then argued that if it goes into a salad, then it's a vegetable, which is obviously again false, since olives, macaroni, shrimp, octopus, crab, cucumbers, bacon bits, chicken breast chunks, cheese chunks, grapes, orange and apple slices, tuna fish, turkey, pineapple, salmon, salt, sausage slices, strawberries, cream cheese, croutons, and tomatoes are obviously not vegetables.
So when you write:
Lame, lame, lame. Typical male stupidity - you keep going down the same road rather than admit you're wrong, despite all the signs saying "you're going the wrong way."
-- barbara
So only the fruits contained in a fruit salad are fruits? Your logic fail is astounding. Opening up a can of fruit salad, by your logic bananas are not a fruit. Apples are not a fruit. Mangoes are not a fruit. Raspberries and strawberries are not fruit. Neither are the vast majority of these fruits. (btw - notice the tomato is listed as a culinary fruit).
With your massive denial-of-reality and unwillingness to admit you got it wrong, you should be careful of who you call a terrible cook.
Really? Tell that to the people who recommend foods because of their anti-oxidant properties, or because they include roughage that helps prevent colon cancer, or the people who drink coffee for the caffeine, or the people who have dietary restrictions (lactose intolerance, allergies, Crons disease, diabetes, etc) who have to be careful about the biological functions of ingredients.
If you feel you're an exception, feel free to drink a cup of hemlock and ignore the biological properties. Let us know how that works out.
The simple fact is that every living animal on this planet eats food primarily for its' biological properties - the supply of raw materials and energy - and not because of the taste. So you even got that assertion wrong.
Keep on - you're just further exposing your oh-so-easily-damaged ego for what it is, since you clearly can't admit you're wrong in the face of the facts, and have to keep making stupider and stupider excuses (like your "fruit salad" example, which a quick search of the internet will disprove - there are fruit salads that contain cherry tomatoes, among others).
Face it - you got caught being stupid, and I called you out on it, and your only argument is to ignore the facts. Abraham Lincoln once asked "If we call a tail to be a leg, how many legs does a cat have?" And when people answered "5", he said "Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
Similarly, calling a tomato a vegetable doesn't make it one, and trying to use the same culinary practices to preserve it as you would for vegetables, as opposed to fruits, will result in rotten tomatoes.
Tomatoes are sweet fruits - it's the cheap tomatoes that taste like veggies. Good home-grown tomatoes are easily more flavourful than, say, most apples. Like grapes (another vine-grown fruit), they're juicy and they make a great snack all by themselves.
Except that your opinion on this matter is plain wrong, whereas mine is based on fact. Ignore the facts if you want, but don't try to rewrite them.
It's bad enough that the government does that all the time, with disastrous results, like trying to convince markets that a US deficit over 10 trillion would be sustainable instead of passing the tipping point and snowballing, as I predicted here when the deficit was under 10 trillion. So, while you say that my opinion is "irrelevant", it sometimes is pretty well aligned with the facts, same as my prediction in another journal entry that houses would drop by at least 20% while they were still rising.
One of my other predictions was that the US would try to "inflate the deficit away" - that's also coming to pass, with officials saying that the idea of a US default is ridiculous because "we can always print more money." So the greenback, which has already lost about 95% of it's value in 40 years, will continue its decline. But you're free to ignore reality and say that it's not a decline. Won't change the facts, just like calling a tomato a veggie doesn't make it one.