There was a long blog post by an Android developer about this problem a few years ago. In iOS, and in Windows Phone, the GUI was multi-threaded and the thread(s) related to drawing content on the screen had a higher priority than all other threads. In Android, either the GUI is not multi-threaded or it's multi-threaded by there is no priority given to screen drawing. So given a particular mobile processor running iOS, Windows Phone, or Android, the Android version will probably finish loading the data for an application first, or running the Javascript on a web page first, because it's giving all aspects of the application or web page equal processor time. But the iOS or Windows Phone version will respond to user input and actions more rapidly because it's handling GUI tasks first, and so it appears to be dramatically quicker.
If you get the latest mobile devices, in most cases there is sufficient RAM and processing power that there is no discernable difference between the major mobile operating system. But in some cases you can still see a difference - and if you're comparing, say, an iPhone 3 against a high end Android phone launched at the same time, the iPhone seems to be three times as fast.
Windows Phone is supposed to be an excellent operating system. I just dislike Microsoft more than I dislike Google at the moment. I really want to see Firefox OS take off, but that's a fantasy.
Right. Anything Nokia was going to do to save itself had to be started three or five years earlier. MeeGo was too late. The switch to Windows Phone (or if it had happened, Android) in 2010 would have been too late.
To me the real tragedy in all of this is the Nokia 808 PureView. Its camera is now more or less the one in the Lumia 1020. If that phone had launched with Android and wider carrier support (I think it's GSM-only, at least in the US), maybe Nokia would be limping along a little better than it is now. But it's too late now.
I think Microsoft is making their best possible move, given the situation. The future is mobile. There will always be servers, and there will always be desktops and laptops, but their share of the world market is diminishing. Phones are the future of computing, if Microsoft isn't a major player in that market in ten years they will be declining. They are a huge company with billions in the bank and billions in profit, they won't fall quickly. But if 90% of home users do most of their gaming on a tablet and most of their computing with a phone that uses MHL to plug into a monitor and bluetooth to connect the keyboard and mouse, then Microsoft will start to see its fortunes fade.
The advantage with Android is that it's open source. Amazon has their own flavor of Android. Vendors in China have their own flavors of it too. If Windows Phone is ever killed, Microsoft could put out an Android core, compatible with Android apps, but with Bing for search and Nokia's Navteq for maps. Instead of having multiple competing mobile operating systems, you have one dominant mobile operating system with multiple competing proprietary layers on top.
If Google's flavor of Android just becomes dominant, then I agree too that it's a serious problem. I think Google's behavior has shown that they're fundamentally no different from other big tech companies. They're open precisely until they get a dominant market position, and then they're closed in order to slam the door against the next set of innovators. Hence Google Plus has no open third party API - Google wants to suck users into their social network, not make it easier for Facebook (or the next Facebook, whatever that is) to suck users out.
Symbian was definitely dying. But would Nokia have fared as poorly if it had gone for Android and Meego? It's hard to say.
With Android, Nokia would have been competing against all of the other Android vendors. That's an extremely difficult thing to do - aside from Samsung, and Motorola which is bankrolled by Google, the other Android device vendors are struggling. But that way at least Nokia would have been using the most popular mobile operating system. By using Windows Phone, Nokia was still competing against all of the Android vendors and also was handicapped by having an unpopular mobile operating system. In return for that, they got more input on what Microsoft did with Windows Phone and a nice cash infusion.
It's possible the company was fucked regardless, and anything Nokia could have done to save itself should have been started three or five years before Stephen Elop took over.
Athletics does not have to be innately tied to abuse of less gifted kids. I have my kids in sports programs where the coaches work very hard to make sure everyone gets the same amount of attention, and they push everyone to the extent of their innate abilities without using verbal abuse or bullying of the weaker, slower, smaller kids by the larger, faster, stronger ones.
That's commonplace, but it's no more required by athletics than one-size-fits-none teaching is required by academics.
Usually the market leaders want to lock out the competition to maintain their position. But the upstarts want openness to encourage people to use the product instead of the market leaders.
Thus Twitter opened its API to third party app developers when it was small, but now that it's big they've slammed the door on everyone.
So DropBox and Bittorrent Sync won't open their protocols because they're the kings of cloud storage. But I bet there are dozens of lesser known cloud storage providers that do open their protocol or would if asked.
You're misreading, I think. When you run the software, it hashes your file into named blocks using some one-way algorithm with your password, and encrypts the files using your password. It then sends the encrypted blocks to the server with the hashed names. Later if you want to request a file "abc.txt", it uses the same hash locally to determine the hashed name, and requests the hashed named blocks from the server. SpiderOak has no idea what you're requesting, if you pull down 50 blocks they don't know if it's the components of 3 different files, of 1 file, or of 50 files, and it doesn't know the decrypted file names.
You can go right to their website and login with your username and password to access your files. If you do that, they of course get your password in plain text and hash it to understand the data they have on their servers. But they explicitly recommend against ever doing this in their user documentation, for the same reasons you think it's a very bad idea.
SpiderOak open sources most (but not all) of their code and works like CrashPlan. CrashPlan charges per device, SpiderOak charges per 100GB of space. I prefer SpiderOak, your mileage may vary.
Good point. My wife's computer has an AMD X2 processor that was first on sale in 2005. Mine has an AMD 1090t six core AMD process from 2010 or so. Her computer is faster, because I put an SSD in it. All of the time I'm not gaming and 90% of the time I am gaming, I don't even have one core running at 100% utilization - the computer spends most of its life waiting for IO.
So maybe that will keep Intel's prices low no matter what happens to AMD. If the latest and greatest Intel Core iWhatever costs too much, I can just get a used Intel chip that meets my needs.
Consoles still have better games, in my humble opinion. But tablets are portable, convenient, and many of the best games are $10 or less, or free.
A great tablet (Current generation iPad, Google Nexus 10, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity) and twenty of the best games and hundreds of other useful apps and a decent and very easy to use web browser and all sorts of video streaming services might cost you $600 total. A console and ten of the best games and few other apps and a web browser that's a pain to use and the same set of video streaming services might run $900. And you can take the tablet to Starbucks or your friend's house or on vacation.
To be fair, AMD has always been in a fundamentally tough position - for many years Intel has been able to spend more on research and development (R&D) than AMD made as gross income for the year. That's a David-And-Goliath position, except this Goliath is wearing a kick-ass helmet. I don't know if it was ever feasible for AMD to eat a big chunk of Intel's market.
Slashdot has linked articles discussing the events you mentioned. AMD's best products came when they used software to design CPUs, and then had their best engineers optimize and enhance those designs by hand. Now AMD is just using software, and judging by the performance of Bulldozer and Piledriver, the lack of the extra optimization step by their former team of engineers is killing them.
never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC.
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
But in any event, I think the really important point is in the end of this article - http://hothardware.com/News/Praying-For-Consoles-AMD-Details-2013-Game-Plan-Offers-Updates-on-New-APU-Performance/ - AMD is banking its future on the APUs in embedded applications, low end laptops, and consoles. Unless they get into tablets and mobile devices in big ways, I think they're planning to grow their share of a market that's shrinking rapidly. "King of console processors" is meaningless if 90% of the demographic that played Xbox360 in 2005 is playing on an iPad in 2020.
Right. Sometimes a company cuts needed staff because the executives, or the shareholders pulling the executives' strings, are putting short term profitability over long term sustainable income. And sometimes a company cuts staff because the staff are redundant.
And there's no simple rule of thumb for deciding which is the case for any given set of layoffs. I'm inclined to mistrust SalesForce.com's leadership because I'm one of those liberal hippie socialist types - but I prefer to see reasonable evidence before I start banging on my "corporate greed" war drum. I have a hard enough time getting taken seriously as it is.
Right. I can support one secular argument for giving marriage validity in civil law - we might as a society consider it be in the national interest for people raising children to have certain legal benefits.
But then of course the benefit should extend to any two people who are raising children and want the benefit. Restricting it to men and women is "respecting a religion".
Whoops, my first sentence should have been "Obviously the situation requires more nuance than we can express in a few hundred works on a Slashdot post."
Also, I had tried to change my wording to be neutral in most cases as to the sex of the victim. Aside from losing the average strength and size advantage, I would say the shape of human genitals also makes it easier for a man to rape another man. And the shape of human genitals also make it difficult for a woman to rape another woman. Far from impossible, but not as 'easy' (if you're pardon the uncomfortable term in this context) as a man can rape a woman.
Obviously the situation requires than we can express in a few hundred words on a Slashdot post.
Naturally forcing a person to say yes, blackmailing them to say yes, etc... still qualifies as rape.
I'm not sure what I think the ideal position is on the level of responsibility. While there are many exceptions, the fact is that biologically men on average are significantly larger and stronger than women, and in terms of the physical genitalia it's far easier for a man to engage in unwanted sexual contact with a woman than vice versa. We have an organ we can shove towards an orifice or easily rub against a woman, and fluid emissions we can put on a woman. Women have a more difficult time pushing their primary sexual organ into contact with a relevant partner body part, and regardless of whether you believe female ejaculation is even possible, it's certainly not as common as male ejaculation.
So while the sexes deserve equal treatment in social society and civil law, maybe men do deserve a higher level of responsibility with respect to preventing rape, because it's physically far easier for us to be rapists than it is for women to be rapists.
Naturally I'm only describing the most common cases. If a woman is much larger or stronger or both than her victim, or the victim is drugged (by their potential attacker or otherwise), then the woman is in effectively the same position of power as a male rapist and has the same responsibility.
I wrote "or was a secular conflict conducted by devoutly religious people". The slaughter by the Nazis was over money and land. The slaughter by Stalin was over money, land, and paranoia. Those are terrible events, led by atheists. But in the previous centuries terrible wars were conducted over money, land, and paranoia by people who had a strong faith in a benevolent god.
So the presence or absence of religion does not seem to impact this particular problem.
Oh, I agree with that. No dispute here. I just want to ensure the civil discussion does not begin and end with teaching women not to do anything that puts them at risk. That needs to be part of a more complex teaching.
Frankly, I blame religions for part of this problem. Since discussions of sex are so taboo in most US schools, many teachers can't get into an explicit discussion. "If you're hot and heavy, and her pants are off, and then she says 'no', you have to stop no matter how much you want to keep going and how good it feels. If you keep going and she doesn't say anything, that is not consent - she may be physically intimidated. You absolutely need express verbal consent, or it's rape. The movies that show you people meeting and having sex without saying a word to each other are fantasies. Real sex doesn't work that way, especially between two people who have never had sex with each other before."
Because before you know it the teacher will be placed on disciplinary leave for even broaching the subject.
Non-sexual violence is not a taboo subject, so even in kindergarten the teachers can do little classroom exercises about the implications of might-makes-right logic. Obviously that doesn't solve all of society's violence problems, but far more women are likely to be sexually assaulted at some point in their life than anyone in this country is likely to be the victim of a violent crime.
I'm not trying to ban anyone from being in office. I'm hoping that enough people will have skill in analytical thinking that religious people will cease to be elected.
But the same-sex marriage debate is a very serious issue, and one in which I adamantly disagree with the Christians. Nothing legalizing same-sex marriage forces Catholics or Mormons to recognize the validity of a same-sex marriage in their faith. But the Catholics and Mormons are attempting to prevent same-sex marriage from having any validity in civil law. That is a case of imposing your religious beliefs on others.
Imagine if God genuinely tried to inspire someone to start a new religion today. By your standards, that new religion would have no legal legitimacy because to start the number of followers would be too small.
I don't care about data, I almost never use it unless I'm on wifi anyway. But I do like to reliably send and receive phone calls, and my Ting.com phone, and my Virgin Mobile phone before it (Virgin Mobile also uses the Sprint network) have awful reception around my house. My wife's Verizon phone works flawlessly - at literally four times the monthly cost.
As anonymous coward said above, read the article. Some of the MVNOs DO offer the latest phones. The ting.com service uses Sprint's infrastructure - and in some places that sucks - but you can get a Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, or an HTC One. They don't have an iPhone yet, so Apple fans are out of luck. But otherwise, that's the best Android currently has to offer other than maybe the latest from LG.
You're assuming Ting is a net revenue drain on Sprint. Do you have evidence? I suspect the situation is like this: Sprint wants customers that bring in, say, a profit margin of $30 per customer per month. Ting resells Sprint's service and brings in customers at, say, a profit margin of $3 per customer per month to Sprint. Sprint would rather have the $30 than $3, but if not for Ting the customer would be using AT&T or Verizon, so Sprint would instead get $0 and in turn Sprint's two biggest competitors would have more revenue for widening their infrastructure advantage.
Yes, Ting is squeezing the margins down. I can't imagine it's eliminating margins entirely, they must have a profitability plan in place.
I've been a satisfied Ting customer for six months, I spend about $20 per month on the service and in two months I'm going to add a phone for my son. It will be $100 or so for a refurbished middle grade Android phone and then maybe $10 added per month for his usage.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a long blog post by an Android developer about this problem a few years ago. In iOS, and in Windows Phone, the GUI was multi-threaded and the thread(s) related to drawing content on the screen had a higher priority than all other threads. In Android, either the GUI is not multi-threaded or it's multi-threaded by there is no priority given to screen drawing. So given a particular mobile processor running iOS, Windows Phone, or Android, the Android version will probably finish loading the data for an application first, or running the Javascript on a web page first, because it's giving all aspects of the application or web page equal processor time. But the iOS or Windows Phone version will respond to user input and actions more rapidly because it's handling GUI tasks first, and so it appears to be dramatically quicker.
If you get the latest mobile devices, in most cases there is sufficient RAM and processing power that there is no discernable difference between the major mobile operating system. But in some cases you can still see a difference - and if you're comparing, say, an iPhone 3 against a high end Android phone launched at the same time, the iPhone seems to be three times as fast.
Windows Phone is supposed to be an excellent operating system. I just dislike Microsoft more than I dislike Google at the moment. I really want to see Firefox OS take off, but that's a fantasy.
Right. Anything Nokia was going to do to save itself had to be started three or five years earlier. MeeGo was too late. The switch to Windows Phone (or if it had happened, Android) in 2010 would have been too late.
To me the real tragedy in all of this is the Nokia 808 PureView. Its camera is now more or less the one in the Lumia 1020. If that phone had launched with Android and wider carrier support (I think it's GSM-only, at least in the US), maybe Nokia would be limping along a little better than it is now. But it's too late now.
I agree Nokia was already toast.
I think Microsoft is making their best possible move, given the situation. The future is mobile. There will always be servers, and there will always be desktops and laptops, but their share of the world market is diminishing. Phones are the future of computing, if Microsoft isn't a major player in that market in ten years they will be declining. They are a huge company with billions in the bank and billions in profit, they won't fall quickly. But if 90% of home users do most of their gaming on a tablet and most of their computing with a phone that uses MHL to plug into a monitor and bluetooth to connect the keyboard and mouse, then Microsoft will start to see its fortunes fade.
The advantage with Android is that it's open source. Amazon has their own flavor of Android. Vendors in China have their own flavors of it too. If Windows Phone is ever killed, Microsoft could put out an Android core, compatible with Android apps, but with Bing for search and Nokia's Navteq for maps. Instead of having multiple competing mobile operating systems, you have one dominant mobile operating system with multiple competing proprietary layers on top.
If Google's flavor of Android just becomes dominant, then I agree too that it's a serious problem. I think Google's behavior has shown that they're fundamentally no different from other big tech companies. They're open precisely until they get a dominant market position, and then they're closed in order to slam the door against the next set of innovators. Hence Google Plus has no open third party API - Google wants to suck users into their social network, not make it easier for Facebook (or the next Facebook, whatever that is) to suck users out.
Symbian was definitely dying. But would Nokia have fared as poorly if it had gone for Android and Meego? It's hard to say.
With Android, Nokia would have been competing against all of the other Android vendors. That's an extremely difficult thing to do - aside from Samsung, and Motorola which is bankrolled by Google, the other Android device vendors are struggling. But that way at least Nokia would have been using the most popular mobile operating system. By using Windows Phone, Nokia was still competing against all of the Android vendors and also was handicapped by having an unpopular mobile operating system. In return for that, they got more input on what Microsoft did with Windows Phone and a nice cash infusion.
It's possible the company was fucked regardless, and anything Nokia could have done to save itself should have been started three or five years before Stephen Elop took over.
Athletics does not have to be innately tied to abuse of less gifted kids. I have my kids in sports programs where the coaches work very hard to make sure everyone gets the same amount of attention, and they push everyone to the extent of their innate abilities without using verbal abuse or bullying of the weaker, slower, smaller kids by the larger, faster, stronger ones.
That's commonplace, but it's no more required by athletics than one-size-fits-none teaching is required by academics.
Usually the market leaders want to lock out the competition to maintain their position. But the upstarts want openness to encourage people to use the product instead of the market leaders.
Thus Twitter opened its API to third party app developers when it was small, but now that it's big they've slammed the door on everyone.
So DropBox and Bittorrent Sync won't open their protocols because they're the kings of cloud storage. But I bet there are dozens of lesser known cloud storage providers that do open their protocol or would if asked.
You're misreading, I think. When you run the software, it hashes your file into named blocks using some one-way algorithm with your password, and encrypts the files using your password. It then sends the encrypted blocks to the server with the hashed names. Later if you want to request a file "abc.txt", it uses the same hash locally to determine the hashed name, and requests the hashed named blocks from the server. SpiderOak has no idea what you're requesting, if you pull down 50 blocks they don't know if it's the components of 3 different files, of 1 file, or of 50 files, and it doesn't know the decrypted file names.
You can go right to their website and login with your username and password to access your files. If you do that, they of course get your password in plain text and hash it to understand the data they have on their servers. But they explicitly recommend against ever doing this in their user documentation, for the same reasons you think it's a very bad idea.
SpiderOak open sources most (but not all) of their code and works like CrashPlan. CrashPlan charges per device, SpiderOak charges per 100GB of space. I prefer SpiderOak, your mileage may vary.
Good point. My wife's computer has an AMD X2 processor that was first on sale in 2005. Mine has an AMD 1090t six core AMD process from 2010 or so. Her computer is faster, because I put an SSD in it. All of the time I'm not gaming and 90% of the time I am gaming, I don't even have one core running at 100% utilization - the computer spends most of its life waiting for IO.
So maybe that will keep Intel's prices low no matter what happens to AMD. If the latest and greatest Intel Core iWhatever costs too much, I can just get a used Intel chip that meets my needs.
Consoles still have better games, in my humble opinion. But tablets are portable, convenient, and many of the best games are $10 or less, or free.
A great tablet (Current generation iPad, Google Nexus 10, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity) and twenty of the best games and hundreds of other useful apps and a decent and very easy to use web browser and all sorts of video streaming services might cost you $600 total. A console and ten of the best games and few other apps and a web browser that's a pain to use and the same set of video streaming services might run $900. And you can take the tablet to Starbucks or your friend's house or on vacation.
Agreed.
To be fair, AMD has always been in a fundamentally tough position - for many years Intel has been able to spend more on research and development (R&D) than AMD made as gross income for the year. That's a David-And-Goliath position, except this Goliath is wearing a kick-ass helmet. I don't know if it was ever feasible for AMD to eat a big chunk of Intel's market.
Slashdot has linked articles discussing the events you mentioned. AMD's best products came when they used software to design CPUs, and then had their best engineers optimize and enhance those designs by hand. Now AMD is just using software, and judging by the performance of Bulldozer and Piledriver, the lack of the extra optimization step by their former team of engineers is killing them.
never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC.
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
But in any event, I think the really important point is in the end of this article - http://hothardware.com/News/Praying-For-Consoles-AMD-Details-2013-Game-Plan-Offers-Updates-on-New-APU-Performance/ - AMD is banking its future on the APUs in embedded applications, low end laptops, and consoles. Unless they get into tablets and mobile devices in big ways, I think they're planning to grow their share of a market that's shrinking rapidly. "King of console processors" is meaningless if 90% of the demographic that played Xbox360 in 2005 is playing on an iPad in 2020.
Right. Sometimes a company cuts needed staff because the executives, or the shareholders pulling the executives' strings, are putting short term profitability over long term sustainable income. And sometimes a company cuts staff because the staff are redundant.
And there's no simple rule of thumb for deciding which is the case for any given set of layoffs. I'm inclined to mistrust SalesForce.com's leadership because I'm one of those liberal hippie socialist types - but I prefer to see reasonable evidence before I start banging on my "corporate greed" war drum. I have a hard enough time getting taken seriously as it is.
Right. I can support one secular argument for giving marriage validity in civil law - we might as a society consider it be in the national interest for people raising children to have certain legal benefits.
But then of course the benefit should extend to any two people who are raising children and want the benefit. Restricting it to men and women is "respecting a religion".
At similar rates? Got a statistic for that? I have never heard anything of the sort.
Whoops, my first sentence should have been "Obviously the situation requires more nuance than we can express in a few hundred works on a Slashdot post."
Also, I had tried to change my wording to be neutral in most cases as to the sex of the victim. Aside from losing the average strength and size advantage, I would say the shape of human genitals also makes it easier for a man to rape another man. And the shape of human genitals also make it difficult for a woman to rape another woman. Far from impossible, but not as 'easy' (if you're pardon the uncomfortable term in this context) as a man can rape a woman.
Obviously the situation requires than we can express in a few hundred words on a Slashdot post.
Naturally forcing a person to say yes, blackmailing them to say yes, etc... still qualifies as rape.
I'm not sure what I think the ideal position is on the level of responsibility. While there are many exceptions, the fact is that biologically men on average are significantly larger and stronger than women, and in terms of the physical genitalia it's far easier for a man to engage in unwanted sexual contact with a woman than vice versa. We have an organ we can shove towards an orifice or easily rub against a woman, and fluid emissions we can put on a woman. Women have a more difficult time pushing their primary sexual organ into contact with a relevant partner body part, and regardless of whether you believe female ejaculation is even possible, it's certainly not as common as male ejaculation.
So while the sexes deserve equal treatment in social society and civil law, maybe men do deserve a higher level of responsibility with respect to preventing rape, because it's physically far easier for us to be rapists than it is for women to be rapists.
Naturally I'm only describing the most common cases. If a woman is much larger or stronger or both than her victim, or the victim is drugged (by their potential attacker or otherwise), then the woman is in effectively the same position of power as a male rapist and has the same responsibility.
I wrote "or was a secular conflict conducted by devoutly religious people". The slaughter by the Nazis was over money and land. The slaughter by Stalin was over money, land, and paranoia. Those are terrible events, led by atheists. But in the previous centuries terrible wars were conducted over money, land, and paranoia by people who had a strong faith in a benevolent god.
So the presence or absence of religion does not seem to impact this particular problem.
Oh, I agree with that. No dispute here. I just want to ensure the civil discussion does not begin and end with teaching women not to do anything that puts them at risk. That needs to be part of a more complex teaching.
Frankly, I blame religions for part of this problem. Since discussions of sex are so taboo in most US schools, many teachers can't get into an explicit discussion. "If you're hot and heavy, and her pants are off, and then she says 'no', you have to stop no matter how much you want to keep going and how good it feels. If you keep going and she doesn't say anything, that is not consent - she may be physically intimidated. You absolutely need express verbal consent, or it's rape. The movies that show you people meeting and having sex without saying a word to each other are fantasies. Real sex doesn't work that way, especially between two people who have never had sex with each other before."
Because before you know it the teacher will be placed on disciplinary leave for even broaching the subject.
Non-sexual violence is not a taboo subject, so even in kindergarten the teachers can do little classroom exercises about the implications of might-makes-right logic. Obviously that doesn't solve all of society's violence problems, but far more women are likely to be sexually assaulted at some point in their life than anyone in this country is likely to be the victim of a violent crime.
I'm not trying to ban anyone from being in office. I'm hoping that enough people will have skill in analytical thinking that religious people will cease to be elected.
But the same-sex marriage debate is a very serious issue, and one in which I adamantly disagree with the Christians. Nothing legalizing same-sex marriage forces Catholics or Mormons to recognize the validity of a same-sex marriage in their faith. But the Catholics and Mormons are attempting to prevent same-sex marriage from having any validity in civil law. That is a case of imposing your religious beliefs on others.
Imagine if God genuinely tried to inspire someone to start a new religion today. By your standards, that new religion would have no legal legitimacy because to start the number of followers would be too small.
I don't care about data, I almost never use it unless I'm on wifi anyway. But I do like to reliably send and receive phone calls, and my Ting.com phone, and my Virgin Mobile phone before it (Virgin Mobile also uses the Sprint network) have awful reception around my house. My wife's Verizon phone works flawlessly - at literally four times the monthly cost.
As anonymous coward said above, read the article. Some of the MVNOs DO offer the latest phones. The ting.com service uses Sprint's infrastructure - and in some places that sucks - but you can get a Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, or an HTC One. They don't have an iPhone yet, so Apple fans are out of luck. But otherwise, that's the best Android currently has to offer other than maybe the latest from LG.
You're assuming Ting is a net revenue drain on Sprint. Do you have evidence?
I suspect the situation is like this: Sprint wants customers that bring in, say, a profit margin of $30 per customer per month. Ting resells Sprint's service and brings in customers at, say, a profit margin of $3 per customer per month to Sprint. Sprint would rather have the $30 than $3, but if not for Ting the customer would be using AT&T or Verizon, so Sprint would instead get $0 and in turn Sprint's two biggest competitors would have more revenue for widening their infrastructure advantage.
Yes, Ting is squeezing the margins down. I can't imagine it's eliminating margins entirely, they must have a profitability plan in place.
I've been a satisfied Ting customer for six months, I spend about $20 per month on the service and in two months I'm going to add a phone for my son. It will be $100 or so for a refurbished middle grade Android phone and then maybe $10 added per month for his usage.