1. When WebOS launched it was proprietary, so despite the HTML5 and Javascript support it grabbed none of the geek market that went to Android because of its open source roots. Firefox OS is, of course open source.
2. WebOS was only available on HP products. Anyone can sell Firefox OS devices.
3. HP dropped WebOS before it had a chance to establish itself. In the US market, WebOS phones were only available on Sprint, a second-tier wireless carrier in much of the country. It remains to be seen what carriers, if any, offer Firefox OS phones in the US.
4. The WebOS phones in 2009 had acceptable hardware for the time, but with 256 MB of RAM and a single 600 MHz ARM chip browser performance was noticeably worse than on a half decent laptop. By the time Firefox OS devices are in stores, they'll probably be on phones with dual core 1.0 GHz processors or better, with 1 GB of RAM, and between that and the performance improvements in Firefox (check the Browser Grand Prix comparison's at Tom's Hardware - Firefox has gone from awful to awesome over the last year and a half), the browsing experience should be great.
5. Mobile websites have increased in number tremendously since 2009, and there are a lot more iOS and Android apps that are partly or totally written in HTML5. That's something WebOS could not use, and Firefox OS can.
Last but not least, Android may start losing support from some manufacturers. Samsung and Motorola own most of the Android market and most of the Android profits, at least in the US. This may be a way for HTC, LG, Huawei, etc... to differentiate themselves from Apple, Samsung, and Motorola without paying any licensing fees in the process.
Frankly I still think it's doomed to putter and fail, but I'm still foolishly optimistic.
I think this is going to happen, but it will start at the big companies first and reach low end consumer hardware later. From the OpenCompute project About page, http://opencompute.org/about/ "The result is that our Prineville data center uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as Facebook’s existing facilities, while costing 24 percent less."
Energy costs are a big concern at the major hosting, social networking, and search companies. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Ebay, etc... have millions of servers, so they can save at a minimum tens of millions of dollars in energy costs per year by switching their servers to more efficient designs. Eventually so many big companies will be buying this kind of hardware that it will show up on Amazon and Newegg and become the small business and home server norm too.
On the other hand, while I'm pleased about the entire development I think "open source hardware" is a misleading description. The external dimensions are open specifications, the component layouts are open, the power supply, the cooling system, etc... but I haven't seen anything from OpenCompute to indicate that the network cards, the processors, the graphics chips, the machine BIOS, etc... etc... is open source and free for anyone to reproduce at will. That's true open-source hardware, and at the rate things are going I would be surprised if I see an open source processor design that matches a 2010 Core i3 processor in my lifetime.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of establishing a charitable hub, running a website that can handle thousands of simultaneous page views, getting potential customers to trust you, and getting public awareness of your site so people know to check it for projects of interest for less than 5% of the overhead of the actual projects.
I don't like that Kickstarter itself and Amazon each take a percentage of the funds. But I think creating a successful alternative is very difficult.
I understand your point. I do. There's a reason the big, comparatively wealthy gaming companies all prefer to use Digital Rights Management. Some people who pirate games will not pay for a game under any circumstances, but others will pay if they have no other means to get the game. If that wasn't the case, the $50 PC game market would have imploded years ago because an awful lot of the people paying $50 for a game would pirate it if they could.
Unfortunately, there is no right solution to this. Requiring your customers to let you install or use previously installed rights management software on their devices is wrong, period. I should not have to put up with spyware, adware, or anything proprietary and beyond my control on my devices. So either you the developer get screwed by piracy or the customers have their rights infringed. Since you need to pay your rent, I understand why you might prefer the former.
I'll only buy a game console if the DRM is light or completely absent, so if the Ouya is truly open it is right up my alley. But as much as we at Slashdot love to rant and rage, we're the minority - most people will buy consoles with DRM without thinking twice. I know porting an application is a non-trivial thing, but you may want to consider porting your games to iOS, or Steam, or similar - or see if you can get in on the next Humble Indie Bundle or Indie Royale (better to get 5% of a million dollar Humble Indie Bundle sale at $0.03 per actual copy sold than 90% of $1000 in total sales on the Android Market).
On the other hand, maybe the Ouya people are going to put some kind of DRM in their game store. You might want to check into that - it could be your solution.
Thanks for that information, and nice user name. I haven't bought myself a tablet toy yet, and I'm trying to decide between a Nexus 7 and one of the top end Android tablets - Acer Iconia A700, Asus Transformer Infinity, etc...
Right. $99 starting price, $15 per month for two years. $459 total.
I'm on the fence over this thing - I haven't bought a console since the PS2 or more than two PC games over $20 in the past five years because I'm cheap, and because I dislike DRM. This thing solves both of those issues. But will they actually make production, will it not suck, will the games be good enough in variety and gameplay to outdo what I can get with a PS2 or a cheap PC and the occasional Humble Indie Bundle?
Low memory use has two advantages. First, it lets you recommend the browser to people in your social circle with weaker hardware than you. I have 12GB of RAM, I could use Firefox at its worst just fine - but I couldn't recommend it to friends and relatives who have 2GB of RAM or less. Now I can.
Second, we geeks get hung up on performance comparisons, just like a car shopper who gets a Mazdaspeed 3 over a Honda Civic SI when he has no intention of racing, just because the Mazdaspeed 3 is faster on paper. ( If you prefer the Mazdaspeed 3 because you tried them both and you found the Mazda to be more fun to drive, that's fine. Just don't make your choice just because racing comparisons between the two cars put the Mazda ahead. ) We like to know we're using the most resource efficient software that gets the job done - and until recently, Firefox was noticeably behind the other browsers for efficient use of memory. That was a psychological drawback, if not a real problem.
Right from the article, they estimate that 75% of the Android and iOS applications are HTML5 apps. And a lot of mobile websites work well on mobile phones if your internet connection is good enough - I don't bother to install the applications for booking movie times, checking the whether, or checking traffic on my Android phone, I just have bookmarks to the respective mobile websites. I suspect the websites for streaming music from Amazon MP3 or Google Play work just fine too on mobile browser, although I haven't tried it. And for the canonical example, the HTML5 version of Angry Birds plays well on desktop browsers so maybe it will work for Firefox OS too.
So right out of the gate Firefox OS will support a lot. On the other hand, the problem I see is the carriers and the manufacturers. Why would you use a new free operating system from Mozilla when the existing free Android operating system supports all of the same HTML5 apps and is already known to customers?
Thanks for the information. Since they're doing a lot of their development work on the Samsung Galaxy S2, I had presumed they expected equivalent or better hardware for their first production device. I have an LG Optimus V with a 600 MHz ARM processor and the Android App Store (/Google Play) won't even offer Firefox mobile for it, so I presume the performance is awful. I have no idea how much of that problem is the interplay between Android, Linux, and Firefox and would be improved if Android was removed from the picture.
Some European nations have workable solutions to that - universal health care, free tuition for university, and up to 16 months of paid parental leave between the last few months of the pregnancy and immediately after the child's birth. All three benefits vary depending upon the country, of course - Sweden gives the longest leave, Denmark gives 100% pay during the parental leave, others give less. Those benefits won't solve all of the financial burdens of parenting, but it makes it far less financially painful than in the US.
In an economy based on farming, the government doesn't need to provide financial incentives to make parenting more attractive. The value of children as laborers will lead couples to have more kids. But in modern first world countries, children are an incredible burden and the only possible form of repayment, [i]if you're very lucky[/i], is the care they may have the time and money to give you in your declining years. Any nation that wants its population levels not to decline needs some combination of good financial assistance to parents and lots of legal immigrants.
I'm not trying to assert that everyone who has children in their 40s instead of their 20s will have a worse experience as a result. I'm just repeating the trends I've heard reported. I'm glad parenting has been wonderful for you.
It's difficult to keep up with children even if you're athletic, healthy, and in your early 20s or late teenage years. The older you get, the harder it is. Plus, if you hunt around for statistics people who have children later in life are less likely to be happy parents than those who have children at a younger age. No causation link has been established, but the speculation is that people who have kids relatively soon after school only had a few years of freedom as an adult. People who have their first child in their late 30s or early 40s are more likely to have had fifteen or more years living on their own with relatively few responsibilities, and are more likely to resent the enormous added work parenthood brings.
So even with adoption, it might make sense to adopt when you are younger, rather than waiting until you have great financial security but fewer physical reserves for chasing an energetic kid.
The point is that for app upgrades, instead of going to an app store to get them, you go right to the website and the HTML 5 local storage gets updated by the site.
I suspect if this works at all, it will be because of the mobile phone hardware available in 2013 - multi-core processors, 2 GB of RAM, etc... might allow a completely HTML5 interface to perform well enough to satisfy users.
The HTML5 APIs that Mozilla is submitting to W3C include VOIP, accelerometer, GPS, taking pictures, taking video, etc... so the complete set of standard features you get from other mobile phones should be available.
I'm really excited by the project, but I can't imagine they'll get enough interest to dent the Apple and Android share of the smart device market.
Amazon Web Services charges $0.12 per GB of data transferred out, up to 10TB, and then $0.09 per GB up to 40TB (50TB total), then $0.07 per GB up to 100TB (150TB total). If the ship has a fast enough network connection and dozens of crew members are surfing Youtube and similar sites, that can run into the hundreds of dollars very quickly.
I'm assuming Microsoft is mostly buying an existing Yammer customer base. I didn't look at their revenue figures, but on the Yammer website they claim four million users at the end of 2011.
At this point, I think Microsoft is fighting a losing battle for users against iOS and Android. I think it will be years, maybe decades, before Microsoft software is not present in any form in most homes and businesses around the country. But it looks like the trend is in that direction. We already use tablets and phones for watching movies, reading news, sending email, posting to social networks, and gaming. How long will it be before our smart phones and tablets operating systems and hardware are so good that we just plug them into docks at the office and at home when we want a traditional desktop computing experience?
I think this is, relatively speaking, a smart move. If you can't figure out how to maintain and expand your user base with products, then use your war chest to buy a bigger user base. They grabbed a piece of Facebook and have an alliance with them, they bought Skype, now they're buying Yammer. Makes sense to me.
I'm speculating (then again, this is Slashdot, we're all speculating), but I suspect the problem may be related to the US focus on standardized tests. Comparatively speaking, it's easy to write test questions for memorization - multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc... it's also easy to generate course material for them, though it's difficult to convince children - or adults, for that matter - to be interested in memorizing large sets of data.
Generating good standardized tests for reasoning and good teaching material for reasoning is more challenging. The No Child Left Behind education law needs to be replaced or amended to account for this. Because if you can read, research, and reason, everything else in academics will fall into place and you can fill in gaps in your knowledge on your own.
I also do buy into the argument that reason is de-emphasized in a lot of classroom settings because focus on reason encourages students to question authority. That's a wonderful thing, we should want our kids not to take at face value anything they receive from advertising, news media, politicians, evangelists, and even their teachers and parents. But as a practical matter teaching reason makes teaching and parenting more difficult because the kids use their new ability to find logical flaws in our assertions. Then they start to challenge our instruction and our rules. So you get an unintentional and decentralized but nevertheless national sustained push-back against a focus on logic at school because everyone finds it easier to control students that are simply taught to shut up and follow directions.
I also agree. Microsoft wants to get Windows Phone 7 in front of more consumers. Most of the major wireless carriers offer it, but they don't promote it in the stores and people aren't buying. Owning RIM and Nokia won't help
iPhone and Android have proven that smart phones are the future of personal computing, they're linked to an enormous casual gaming market, and they're linked to a colossal amount of media consumption and advertising potential. And on top of that, people are using those devices for their work, too. Every big IT company in the world should be willing to invest billions to get a piece of that pie. I'm astonished Microsoft invested enough to make Windows Phone 7 as good as it is today but won't make the big steps needed to move it from less than 2% market share to 20%+.
I think that, if anything, they should seriously contemplate buying a few wireless carriers around the globe so they can change the company retail policy to only promote Windows Phone 7. That would be enormously expensive and put Microsoft into an industry where it has no expertise, but if they don't do this or something else really big to get Windows Phone sales higher I really think in less than twenty years they'll be a small player in the tech industry.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but the free version on Android is ad-supported. My toddler loves the game, but about every 90 seconds I have to close the app store for her because she accidentally touched an advertisement.
I'm sure the motorized height adjustment is nice, and it's definitely not something I would take the time to do. At best I would use spare blocks of wood under the legs to raise or lower the desk a few inches at a time.
$950 isn't terrible, don't get me wrong. But I don't have that kind of spare cash.
The standing and walking itself has benefits in terms of burning calories and circulation. There are a lot of articles now on studies that sitting for long periods has more health risks by itself than obesity or poor diet.
On the other hand, there were a lot of fitness articles five and ten years ago claiming that every pound of muscle you add to your body increases your resting metabolism by 50-100 Calories per day. That is a myth - the real number is closer to 6 calories per day. The mega-muscles guy who can eat and eat and eat without getting fatter are burning those calories with the exercise they do to stay hugely muscular - the change to resting metabolism is better than nothing, but unlikely to substantially affect your level of body fat.
Did you watch the videos? Some of the ideas presented seem genuinely innovative - like the ability to move blocks of code from within a single file to different portions of the screen. That's flexibility related to what code you have on screen that's a few steps past multiple tabs, split screens, and folding editors.
And Light Table will be open source, though I think the creator is considering the creation of some proprietary add-ons.
Slashdot Mirror
A few counters to that:
1. When WebOS launched it was proprietary, so despite the HTML5 and Javascript support it grabbed none of the geek market that went to Android because of its open source roots. Firefox OS is, of course open source.
2. WebOS was only available on HP products. Anyone can sell Firefox OS devices.
3. HP dropped WebOS before it had a chance to establish itself. In the US market, WebOS phones were only available on Sprint, a second-tier wireless carrier in much of the country. It remains to be seen what carriers, if any, offer Firefox OS phones in the US.
4. The WebOS phones in 2009 had acceptable hardware for the time, but with 256 MB of RAM and a single 600 MHz ARM chip browser performance was noticeably worse than on a half decent laptop. By the time Firefox OS devices are in stores, they'll probably be on phones with dual core 1.0 GHz processors or better, with 1 GB of RAM, and between that and the performance improvements in Firefox (check the Browser Grand Prix comparison's at Tom's Hardware - Firefox has gone from awful to awesome over the last year and a half), the browsing experience should be great.
5. Mobile websites have increased in number tremendously since 2009, and there are a lot more iOS and Android apps that are partly or totally written in HTML5. That's something WebOS could not use, and Firefox OS can.
Last but not least, Android may start losing support from some manufacturers. Samsung and Motorola own most of the Android market and most of the Android profits, at least in the US. This may be a way for HTC, LG, Huawei, etc... to differentiate themselves from Apple, Samsung, and Motorola without paying any licensing fees in the process.
Frankly I still think it's doomed to putter and fail, but I'm still foolishly optimistic.
I think this is going to happen, but it will start at the big companies first and reach low end consumer hardware later. From the OpenCompute project About page, http://opencompute.org/about/ "The result is that our Prineville data center uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as Facebook’s existing facilities, while costing 24 percent less."
Energy costs are a big concern at the major hosting, social networking, and search companies. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Ebay, etc... have millions of servers, so they can save at a minimum tens of millions of dollars in energy costs per year by switching their servers to more efficient designs. Eventually so many big companies will be buying this kind of hardware that it will show up on Amazon and Newegg and become the small business and home server norm too.
On the other hand, while I'm pleased about the entire development I think "open source hardware" is a misleading description. The external dimensions are open specifications, the component layouts are open, the power supply, the cooling system, etc... but I haven't seen anything from OpenCompute to indicate that the network cards, the processors, the graphics chips, the machine BIOS, etc... etc... is open source and free for anyone to reproduce at will. That's true open-source hardware, and at the rate things are going I would be surprised if I see an open source processor design that matches a 2010 Core i3 processor in my lifetime.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of establishing a charitable hub, running a website that can handle thousands of simultaneous page views, getting potential customers to trust you, and getting public awareness of your site so people know to check it for projects of interest for less than 5% of the overhead of the actual projects.
I don't like that Kickstarter itself and Amazon each take a percentage of the funds. But I think creating a successful alternative is very difficult.
I understand your point. I do. There's a reason the big, comparatively wealthy gaming companies all prefer to use Digital Rights Management. Some people who pirate games will not pay for a game under any circumstances, but others will pay if they have no other means to get the game. If that wasn't the case, the $50 PC game market would have imploded years ago because an awful lot of the people paying $50 for a game would pirate it if they could.
Unfortunately, there is no right solution to this. Requiring your customers to let you install or use previously installed rights management software on their devices is wrong, period. I should not have to put up with spyware, adware, or anything proprietary and beyond my control on my devices. So either you the developer get screwed by piracy or the customers have their rights infringed. Since you need to pay your rent, I understand why you might prefer the former.
I'll only buy a game console if the DRM is light or completely absent, so if the Ouya is truly open it is right up my alley. But as much as we at Slashdot love to rant and rage, we're the minority - most people will buy consoles with DRM without thinking twice. I know porting an application is a non-trivial thing, but you may want to consider porting your games to iOS, or Steam, or similar - or see if you can get in on the next Humble Indie Bundle or Indie Royale (better to get 5% of a million dollar Humble Indie Bundle sale at $0.03 per actual copy sold than 90% of $1000 in total sales on the Android Market).
On the other hand, maybe the Ouya people are going to put some kind of DRM in their game store. You might want to check into that - it could be your solution.
Good luck. Your game looks nice, nice work.
Thanks for that information, and nice user name. I haven't bought myself a tablet toy yet, and I'm trying to decide between a Nexus 7 and one of the top end Android tablets - Acer Iconia A700, Asus Transformer Infinity, etc...
Right. $99 starting price, $15 per month for two years. $459 total.
I'm on the fence over this thing - I haven't bought a console since the PS2 or more than two PC games over $20 in the past five years because I'm cheap, and because I dislike DRM. This thing solves both of those issues. But will they actually make production, will it not suck, will the games be good enough in variety and gameplay to outdo what I can get with a PS2 or a cheap PC and the occasional Humble Indie Bundle?
Low memory use has two advantages. First, it lets you recommend the browser to people in your social circle with weaker hardware than you. I have 12GB of RAM, I could use Firefox at its worst just fine - but I couldn't recommend it to friends and relatives who have 2GB of RAM or less. Now I can.
Second, we geeks get hung up on performance comparisons, just like a car shopper who gets a Mazdaspeed 3 over a Honda Civic SI when he has no intention of racing, just because the Mazdaspeed 3 is faster on paper. ( If you prefer the Mazdaspeed 3 because you tried them both and you found the Mazda to be more fun to drive, that's fine. Just don't make your choice just because racing comparisons between the two cars put the Mazda ahead. ) We like to know we're using the most resource efficient software that gets the job done - and until recently, Firefox was noticeably behind the other browsers for efficient use of memory. That was a psychological drawback, if not a real problem.
It's possible they're juggling figures to give Chrome the edge, but Firefox did win the last three browser Grand Prix competitions at the site.
Right from the article, they estimate that 75% of the Android and iOS applications are HTML5 apps. And a lot of mobile websites work well on mobile phones if your internet connection is good enough - I don't bother to install the applications for booking movie times, checking the whether, or checking traffic on my Android phone, I just have bookmarks to the respective mobile websites. I suspect the websites for streaming music from Amazon MP3 or Google Play work just fine too on mobile browser, although I haven't tried it. And for the canonical example, the HTML5 version of Angry Birds plays well on desktop browsers so maybe it will work for Firefox OS too.
So right out of the gate Firefox OS will support a lot. On the other hand, the problem I see is the carriers and the manufacturers. Why would you use a new free operating system from Mozilla when the existing free Android operating system supports all of the same HTML5 apps and is already known to customers?
Thanks for the information. Since they're doing a lot of their development work on the Samsung Galaxy S2, I had presumed they expected equivalent or better hardware for their first production device. I have an LG Optimus V with a 600 MHz ARM processor and the Android App Store (/Google Play) won't even offer Firefox mobile for it, so I presume the performance is awful. I have no idea how much of that problem is the interplay between Android, Linux, and Firefox and would be improved if Android was removed from the picture.
Some European nations have workable solutions to that - universal health care, free tuition for university, and up to 16 months of paid parental leave between the last few months of the pregnancy and immediately after the child's birth. All three benefits vary depending upon the country, of course - Sweden gives the longest leave, Denmark gives 100% pay during the parental leave, others give less. Those benefits won't solve all of the financial burdens of parenting, but it makes it far less financially painful than in the US.
In an economy based on farming, the government doesn't need to provide financial incentives to make parenting more attractive. The value of children as laborers will lead couples to have more kids. But in modern first world countries, children are an incredible burden and the only possible form of repayment, [i]if you're very lucky[/i], is the care they may have the time and money to give you in your declining years. Any nation that wants its population levels not to decline needs some combination of good financial assistance to parents and lots of legal immigrants.
I'm not trying to assert that everyone who has children in their 40s instead of their 20s will have a worse experience as a result. I'm just repeating the trends I've heard reported. I'm glad parenting has been wonderful for you.
It's difficult to keep up with children even if you're athletic, healthy, and in your early 20s or late teenage years. The older you get, the harder it is. Plus, if you hunt around for statistics people who have children later in life are less likely to be happy parents than those who have children at a younger age. No causation link has been established, but the speculation is that people who have kids relatively soon after school only had a few years of freedom as an adult. People who have their first child in their late 30s or early 40s are more likely to have had fifteen or more years living on their own with relatively few responsibilities, and are more likely to resent the enormous added work parenthood brings.
So even with adoption, it might make sense to adopt when you are younger, rather than waiting until you have great financial security but fewer physical reserves for chasing an energetic kid.
The point is that for app upgrades, instead of going to an app store to get them, you go right to the website and the HTML 5 local storage gets updated by the site.
I suspect if this works at all, it will be because of the mobile phone hardware available in 2013 - multi-core processors, 2 GB of RAM, etc... might allow a completely HTML5 interface to perform well enough to satisfy users.
The HTML5 APIs that Mozilla is submitting to W3C include VOIP, accelerometer, GPS, taking pictures, taking video, etc... so the complete set of standard features you get from other mobile phones should be available.
I'm really excited by the project, but I can't imagine they'll get enough interest to dent the Apple and Android share of the smart device market.
Amazon Web Services charges $0.12 per GB of data transferred out, up to 10TB, and then $0.09 per GB up to 40TB (50TB total), then $0.07 per GB up to 100TB (150TB total). If the ship has a fast enough network connection and dozens of crew members are surfing Youtube and similar sites, that can run into the hundreds of dollars very quickly.
I'm assuming Microsoft is mostly buying an existing Yammer customer base. I didn't look at their revenue figures, but on the Yammer website they claim four million users at the end of 2011.
At this point, I think Microsoft is fighting a losing battle for users against iOS and Android. I think it will be years, maybe decades, before Microsoft software is not present in any form in most homes and businesses around the country. But it looks like the trend is in that direction. We already use tablets and phones for watching movies, reading news, sending email, posting to social networks, and gaming. How long will it be before our smart phones and tablets operating systems and hardware are so good that we just plug them into docks at the office and at home when we want a traditional desktop computing experience?
I think this is, relatively speaking, a smart move. If you can't figure out how to maintain and expand your user base with products, then use your war chest to buy a bigger user base. They grabbed a piece of Facebook and have an alliance with them, they bought Skype, now they're buying Yammer. Makes sense to me.
To be clear, in the third paragraph second sentence I meant that questioning authority is a wonderful thing.
I'm speculating (then again, this is Slashdot, we're all speculating), but I suspect the problem may be related to the US focus on standardized tests. Comparatively speaking, it's easy to write test questions for memorization - multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc... it's also easy to generate course material for them, though it's difficult to convince children - or adults, for that matter - to be interested in memorizing large sets of data.
Generating good standardized tests for reasoning and good teaching material for reasoning is more challenging. The No Child Left Behind education law needs to be replaced or amended to account for this. Because if you can read, research, and reason, everything else in academics will fall into place and you can fill in gaps in your knowledge on your own.
I also do buy into the argument that reason is de-emphasized in a lot of classroom settings because focus on reason encourages students to question authority. That's a wonderful thing, we should want our kids not to take at face value anything they receive from advertising, news media, politicians, evangelists, and even their teachers and parents. But as a practical matter teaching reason makes teaching and parenting more difficult because the kids use their new ability to find logical flaws in our assertions. Then they start to challenge our instruction and our rules. So you get an unintentional and decentralized but nevertheless national sustained push-back against a focus on logic at school because everyone finds it easier to control students that are simply taught to shut up and follow directions.
I also agree. Microsoft wants to get Windows Phone 7 in front of more consumers. Most of the major wireless carriers offer it, but they don't promote it in the stores and people aren't buying. Owning RIM and Nokia won't help
iPhone and Android have proven that smart phones are the future of personal computing, they're linked to an enormous casual gaming market, and they're linked to a colossal amount of media consumption and advertising potential. And on top of that, people are using those devices for their work, too. Every big IT company in the world should be willing to invest billions to get a piece of that pie. I'm astonished Microsoft invested enough to make Windows Phone 7 as good as it is today but won't make the big steps needed to move it from less than 2% market share to 20%+.
I think that, if anything, they should seriously contemplate buying a few wireless carriers around the globe so they can change the company retail policy to only promote Windows Phone 7. That would be enormously expensive and put Microsoft into an industry where it has no expertise, but if they don't do this or something else really big to get Windows Phone sales higher I really think in less than twenty years they'll be a small player in the tech industry.
It's anti-Sun Java. Oracle Java is write once, sue everywhere.
(Stolen from a user comment on the This Week in Tech podcast network.)
I can't speak for elsewhere, but the free version on Android is ad-supported. My toddler loves the game, but about every 90 seconds I have to close the app store for her because she accidentally touched an advertisement.
I'm sure the motorized height adjustment is nice, and it's definitely not something I would take the time to do. At best I would use spare blocks of wood under the legs to raise or lower the desk a few inches at a time.
$950 isn't terrible, don't get me wrong. But I don't have that kind of spare cash.
That looks awesome, but $900? Holy hell. I would rather buy some lumber and assemble something than spend $900 on a desk that simple.
The standing and walking itself has benefits in terms of burning calories and circulation. There are a lot of articles now on studies that sitting for long periods has more health risks by itself than obesity or poor diet.
On the other hand, there were a lot of fitness articles five and ten years ago claiming that every pound of muscle you add to your body increases your resting metabolism by 50-100 Calories per day. That is a myth - the real number is closer to 6 calories per day. The mega-muscles guy who can eat and eat and eat without getting fatter are burning those calories with the exercise they do to stay hugely muscular - the change to resting metabolism is better than nothing, but unlikely to substantially affect your level of body fat.
Did you watch the videos? Some of the ideas presented seem genuinely innovative - like the ability to move blocks of code from within a single file to different portions of the screen. That's flexibility related to what code you have on screen that's a few steps past multiple tabs, split screens, and folding editors.
And Light Table will be open source, though I think the creator is considering the creation of some proprietary add-ons.